CHRISTIAN TOTO: 5 Ways ‘Rogue One’ Is Better Than Anyone Expected.

I trust Christian enough to go see it on his recommendation, but more importantly my sons will divorce me if I don’t take them.

ENFORCING A RED LINE:

So just what can stir our president from his “no drama Obama” cool indifference to aggression?

Russia invaded Georgia. After President Bush responded effectively to save Georgia from complete conquest, President Obama offered a “reset” to Russia.

Iran crushes a democracy movement in Iran. President Obama does nothing and says nothing.

Russian-backed Assad slaughters the Syrian people, including with the use of poison gas that was a “red line” for intervention. No American response.

Russia invaded Ukraine, including a shoot-down of a Malaysian airliner by Russian-backed separatist hand puppets. Little American response.

Iran tries to bomb a Saudi diplomat in Washington, D.C., with a bomb plot. There is no American response.

Chinese cyber-thefts of our economy and defenses rages. There is no apparent American response.

Russians violate nuclear arms agreement on theater nuclear weapons. Muted American response.

Russians hack Democratic emails when it looked like Hillary Clinton would win. No American response.

Trump wins election. Blood and Guts President Obama vows that this Russian cyber-aggression will not stand!

Heh.

YES, CALL PEOPLE STUPID MORE. THAT ALWAYS PERSUADES THEM. Late-night comics could have a real impact on climate change denial. Maybe not comparing skeptics to Holocaust deniers would be good, too.

ALLAN MELTZER: The Sullen Leftists. Sullen? They’ve gone barking-moonbat crazy. I was going to say that I’d prefer sullen, but actually the craziness is much more entertaining.

CYBER SECURITY: Russian hack almost brought the U.S. military to its knees.

Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey was alerted to the attack by an early-morning phone call from the Director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Mike Rogers.

Now retired, Dempsey told CBS News in an exclusive interview that the attack was proceeding at an alarming speed. Within an hour, hackers had seized control of the unclassified e-mail system used by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, the organization of some 3,500 military officers and civilians who work for the Chairman.

In that time, the hackers seized the computer credentials of Dempsey and hundreds of other senior officers — the passwords and electronic signatures they used to sign on to the network. The only way to stop the attack was to take the network down.

The attack, which officials now blame on Russia, began with 30,000 e-mails sent to a West Coast university. Of those 30,000, four were forwarded to members of the Joint Staff and one was opened — allowing the hackers in. Since it was an unclassified network, the attack had no real intelligence value.

It was not spying, but a full-on assault whose only apparent purpose was to cause damage and force the Pentagon to replace both hardware and software, which took about two weeks to accomplish.

Moscow has got to cut this out, and at this point maybe only a massive counterattack on Russian systems would get that message across.

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: 12-year-old suspected of nail bomb attempt in Germany.

Federal German prosecutors are investigating a 12-year-old boy who allegedly attempted to set off a nail bomb at a Christmas market in the southern city of Ludwigshafen, officials said Friday.

The German-born son of Iraqi parents is alleged to have tried to set off the device at the Christmas market on Nov. 26, and again outside city hall on Dec. 5, Focus magazine reported citing security sources.

In the second failed attempt, a passer-by spotted the backpack containing the device and reported it to authorities. Inside they found a glass jar packed with material from firecrackers and with nails taped to it, Focus reported.

Police said it would have burned but would not have exploded.

Stephan Meyer, parliamentary spokesman on security issues for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative bloc, confirmed the details of the report.

Good lord.

ANDY KESSLER: The president-elect should back a new GI bill for online courses.

How about a modern version of the GI Bill, but for everyone. I propose the Re-Hi Bill of 2017. If you’re unemployed, you get a voucher or tax credit for education. No, I’m not going all Bernie Sanders on you, with “free” public college adding billions to the national debt. Instead, there’s a twist: These programs would be online only, drastically lowering costs. . . .

No application essays. No Education Department messing with course selection. No teachers union. No degrees. Instead, only a computer or tablet—and successful completion produces a certificate. The right combination of certificates puts you on a list to be hired for all sorts of jobs: computer-support specialist, outside electrician, freight-stock worker, sonographer, radiation therapist, actuary. The list goes on.

And why not let private companies—think IBM, Ford, Pfizer, Amazon and others—come up with an online curriculum that they would hire from? Yes, the devil is in the details. Quality controls would help keep standards high. Fraud could be resolved using smartphone fingerprint recognition. LinkedIn would handle certificates and provide a searchable database for qualified workers.

The Trump administration has promised to spend billions on infrastructure, but that doesn’t provide new skills, and it takes forever to find the shovels. Online education for retraining skills can start tomorrow morning, and for relatively cheap. Even 15 million workers spending $500 a year on a few courses comes to less than $8 billion.

Somebody should write a book on this sort of thing.

SUSTAINABILITY: Hikes In Cost of Housing Now 40% Higher Than Pay Increases.

Washington has been juicing the housing market ever since the last Washington-juiced housing bubble popped.

OUCH:

2016, MAN: Posh cheese festival attacked by vegan protesters.

Sod off, swampy.

THROW THE BASTARDS OUT… WAIT, WHAT? Incumbent Reelection Rates Higher Than Average in 2016.

Looking over the down-ballot outcome, there’s one inescapable conclusion in a year that was defined by a political outsider, Donald Trump, winning the presidency: It was still a really good year to run as an incumbent in 2016, all things considered.

This election cycle, 393 of 435 House representatives, 29 of 34 senators, and five of 12 governors sought reelection (several of the governors were prohibited from seeking another term). Of those, 380 of 393 House members (97%), 27 of 29 senators (93%), and four of five governors (80%) won another term. These members of Congress and governors not only won renomination, but also won in November.

Those reelection rates are all a little bit better than the already impressive post-World War II averages.

One way to read this is that after throwing more than 900 Democrats out of office since 2010, the last place Americans really needed to clean up was the Oval Office.

But setting party aside, longterm incumbency has been a cancer on our body politic.

TESTING THE WATERS:

BREAKING: China's navy has seized an unmanned, underwater U.S. Navy vehicle in international waters of South China Sea.

— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) December 16, 2016

More:

A Chinese Navy warship has seized an underwater drone deployed by an American oceanographic vessel in international waters in the South China Sea, triggering a formal demarche from the United States and a demand for its return, a U.S. defense official told Reuters on Friday.

The incident — the first of its kind in recent memory — took place on Dec. 15 northwest of Subic Bay just as the USNS Bowditch, an oceanographic survey ship, was about to retrieve the unmanned, underwater vehicle (UUV), the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Payback for taking Taiwan’s call, or just seeing what the incoming Administration is made of?

U.S. ARMY RETURNS TANKS TO EUROPE: That’s the title of this NBC report.

Three years after the last American tank left Europe, they are being brought back “as part of our commitment to deterrence,” Gen. Frederick “Ben” Hodges told NBC News.

Hodges, who is commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, welcomed a batch of tracked and wheeled support vehicles to a depot in the Netherlands on Thursday.

For military history buffs, an ironic read on “Bulge” day. (See 8:57 a.m. post.)

Three years ago U.S. withdrew its last tank unit from Germany — soldiers and vehicles. Here’s The Stars and Stripes coverage of the 2013 withdrawal.

“There is no [U.S.] tank on German soil. It’s a historic moment,” said Lt. Col. Wayne Marotto, 21st TSC spokesman.

It was my understanding that we still pre-positioned a few tanks in European depots but there was indeed a hiatus.

In 2014 The Stars and Stripes reported:

GRAFENWÖHR, Germany — Less than a year after they left European soil, American tanks have returned to military bases in Germany where they had been a heavy presence since World War II.

In April last year, the last Abrams tanks left Germany, coinciding with a drawdown of U.S. forces that saw the inactivation of two infantry brigades — the 170th and 172nd.

When the 22 M1A1 Abrams departed the continent it was seen as the end of an era, as tanks had been a fixture on American bases in Europe since landing at Omaha Beach in 1944.

Now, it appears that chapter of history may have been closed a bit prematurely.

On Friday, the last of 29 M1A2 SEPv2 Abrams tanks were offloaded at the railhead at the Grafenwöhr training facilities. These heavily armored vehicles are upgraded versions of the older Abrams that left 10 months ago and will become part of what the Joint Multinational Training Command at Grafenwöhr is calling the European Activity Set.

Dig the Pentagonese “activity set.” Yeah, it’s activity.

“Closed a bit prematurely.” But Obama said the tide of war was receding…

This Defense News article says that in 2015 the Army had 90 Abrams tanks pre-positioned in Europe and was adding more.

The bottom line to the NBC News article: we’re adding even more Abrams and Bradleys to European stockpiles.

This NY Times article from 2015 mentioned the small-scale pre-positioned weapons sites with heavy weapons in Germany. The NYT article focused on pre-positioning equipment in the Baltics. Telling quote: “Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University who has written extensively on Russia’s military and security services, noted, “Tanks on the ground, even if they haven’t people in them, make for a significant marker.”

That’s right. With soldiers in’em the tanks become trip wires. Here’s the confession of a Cold War NATO trip wire.

You can see why the cheeky title of this Jim Dunnigan analysis, “Iron Curtain Replaced By Paper Wall,” struck me as a fine exercise in gallows humor.

April 11, 2016: While the armed forces available to NATO far outnumber those of Russia, there is a major impediment to assembling and moving those forces to the aid of NATO nations bordering Russia. That enemy is the ancient bureaucracy that controls the movement of foreign troops crossing borders, even those forces coming to your aid. This was demonstrated in early 2015 when an U.S. Army mechanized battalion made a very well publicized road march from Poland, Lithuania and Estonia back to its base in Germany. The American battalion required hundreds of hours of effort to complete the paperwork and get the permissions required to cross so many borders in military vehicles.

JOURNALISM: DUD: Kurt Eichenwald’s secret scoop accusing Trump of amphetamine use? Backfired. Horribly.

Related: Holy Cow: This journo’s flashback account about Kurt Eichenwald is ‘eye-opening.’

Then there’s Julia Ioffe’s Donald/Ivanka incest tweet, which reportedly has the Trump folks freezing out her new employer, The Atlantic.

Related: The People Running The Media Are The Problem. Well, they sure as hell aren’t the solution.

By the way, I had Tucker Carlson on DVR last night but I fast-forwarded through most of the Eichenwald bit, because I knew it was going to be bloody. But then they joined Trump’s Pennsylvania rally in progress, and I watched the speech. He’s still hammering the press for dishonesty, and who can blame him, really, after stuff like this? I also noticed a pretty diverse crowd, and even a lot of “Women For Trump” signs and even one “LGBT Hispanic For Trump.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Scott Pruitt Is The Ideal Nominee to Lead the EPA.

Secretary of the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality, Donald R. van der Vaart:

As the head of a state environmental department with two decades of experience enforcing environmental protection laws, I am disappointed by the attacks on Pruitt’s views. The extreme environmentalist left is distorting his mainstream views because they want to bully Americans into their job-killing climate change agenda. Americans overwhelmingly rejected this outlook in November.

Like President-elect Trump, Pruitt is committed to clean air and clean water, and to restoring EPA to its original mission of enforcing the environmental laws written by Congress. He has laid out a view that human activities do impact the climate, and we should be encouraging a healthy debate over the government’s proper role in addressing them rather than trying to shut down the discussion.

As a state attorney general, Pruitt has seen the real-world consequences of EPA’s unlawful regulations, and North Carolina was proud to join Oklahoma in taking on tough fights on behalf of states who are being overrun by federal overreach. Pruitt has been a national leader in fighting back against President Obama’s various job-killing and unconstitutional regulations including those related to the “War on Coal” and the Waters of the United States rule.

Or as John Galt put it, “Get the hell out of my way!”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1317.

PASS THE VEGAN ORGANIC FREE-RANGE POPCORN. California Governor Jerry Brown: ‘We’re Ready to Fight’ Trump on Climate Change.

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP: Group Using Celebrities to Urge Electors to Vote Against Trump Has Foreign-Registered Website.

An image on the Unite for America Facebook page shows the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin and asks, “Is this your president?”

The Unite for America website does not contain much information about the group or its members. It also does not list an address or phone number. In order to contact Unite for America, a form must be submitted through its site.

Despite the group’s reference to alleged foreign influence in the presidential election, a trace of the group’s URL shows that its website was registered in a foreign country.

According to a search on ICANN WHOIS, a website that provides public access to data on registered URL names, UniteForAmerica.org was created on Nov. 26 with internet service provider Tucows Inc., located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

“Canadians are attempting to subvert the results of our election” doesn’t actually sound any crazier than anything else I’ve read in the last five weeks or so.

FAKE NEWS AND FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS: Zuckerberg’s Gamble.

Facebook is taking a major step to appease its mostly liberal post-election critics, who charged that disinformation that proliferated on its platform affected the election outcome (read: helped elect a candidate they oppose). . . .

The company’s leadership is presenting this as a kind of technical tweak that will simply out transparent scams. Facebook already enforces various content standards for its site; it could be that the new protocol will affect ostentatiously fabricated items—”Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump,” for example—and nothing else. That kind of limited system could run into difficulties—what to do about parody sites, for example?—but would probably not be fatal to Facebook’s mission of free and open communication and debate.

But conservatives are already raising concerns that the new regime will go far beyond its stated aims, and for good reason. In the wake of the election, Clinton supporters eager to blame ostensibly less enlightened people for her loss and media mandarins distressed about the collapse of their authority expanded the definition of “fake news” to include any content they found politically objectionable. The Washington Post published a hysterical report decrying the supposedly vast influence of fake news that relied on a now-discredited report that used broad and opaque criteria to dismiss partisan news sites as “Russian propaganda.” The anti-fake news crusade, in other words, has gathered momentum in part by exploiting all of the same human impulses that can make actual propaganda so potent in the first place—tribalism, hysteria, and, as the New Yorker‘s Adrian Chen put it, “weav[ing] together truth and disinformation.”

And then there is the fact that some of the fact-checkers Facebook has enlisted to help with its effort—most notably, PolitiFact—have a clear record of bias against conservative viewpoints, rating as “true” or “false” statements that are essentially expressions of opinion and then casually mixing their own predispositions with objective facts in a way that tends to subject the Right to greater scrutiny.

I don’t trust them.

DIAL L FOR LOSER: Democratic donors call for Clinton campaign post-mortem.

“A lot of the bundlers and donors still are in shock and disbelief by what happened. They’re looking for some introspection and analysis about what really happened, what worked and what didn’t,” said Ken Martin, chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and a top campaign bundler himself. “It may take some time to do that, but people are still just scratching their heads.”

Or, in the words of a Midwestern fundraiser who’s kept in touch with fellow donors, “A lot of people are saying, ‘I’m not putting another fucking dime in until someone tells me what just happened.’”

Unless Democrats are willing to listen to advice from outside the echo chamber (Eric S Raymond and Scott Ott come to mind), their 2016 post-mortem won’t be any more effective than the one the GOP put together after 2012.

GENTRIFICATION AND GHOST TOWNS — Two types of losers in the white liberal world order:

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Everyone always talks about how the “white working class” votes against their best interests, but I often wonder, don’t people of color do this too? The democrats, have overseen a massive concentration of wealth into privileged hands, and are the driving force behind global community destruction via gentrification. This… doesn’t really seem good for POC who generally not in existing positions of privilege. However, the democrats can secure their vote by being overtly not racist (yet, it benefits them to provoke or exaggerate racism in republicans — so they’re likely to create conditions that increaseracism in conservative arenas if they can’t be caught doing it, or disproportionately highlight it when it does occur.)

The thing is, city gentrification and rural ghost towns are part of the same problem; more people are leaving the towns they grew up in to live in the city. So, the original towns suffer without enough people to keep them running, and the people already living in the city suffer as they are displaced with the recent migrants. Any effort to halt this drain would benefit both groups of people, yet people getting gentrified and people in ghost towns tend to be politically split. This ensures they don’t gang up against the ruling classes and cause real change.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

DO YOU OR SOMEONE YOU LOVE SUFFER FROM TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME? Doctors Whittle, Ott, and Green are here to help.

Full disclosure: I’m Green, but I’m not actually a doctor.

2016 HAS REALLY BEEN THE YEAR OF IOWAHAWK: