HOLIDAY NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Host a Toddler-Friendly Holiday Party for Grown-Ups.

Good advice, but I’ve never done anything more than make sure there’s plenty of Duplo for the kiddos and plenty of cocktails for the grownups.

HOW THE I-BEAM Got Its Iconic Shape.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: “Does the US Air Force or America’s intelligence agencies have a secret hypersonic aircraft capable of a Mach 6 performance?”

I would certainly hope so.

FAKE NEWS: Newsweek Writer Kurt Eichenwald Falsely Reports That Trump Supporters Booed John Glenn.

It was a tweet, since deleted, but the mainstream media would be wise to keep its reporters off of Twitter during work hours.

THE SOFT BIGOTRY OF LOW EXPECTATIONS: Obama hails Obama for his anti-terror work.

“He gave himself an A,” reports Andrew Malcolm — well of course he did.

More:

Obama has struggled to seem relevant in these waning 43 days of his lame-duckness. As Americans’ eyes turn hopefully toward a new presidential administration under construction in New York City, simple static shots of a Trump Tower elevator overwhelmed once must-see images of Obama greeting leaders and reviewing troops in foreign capitals.

Obama’s got one long Air Force One voyage left: An 18-hour round-trip vacation junket to Hawaii next week at $209,000 per flight hour. But before then, he flew down to Tampa to tell Special Ops troops what they’ve been doing these last long eight years under his command.

As usual, Obama’s report had a strong emphasis on Obama. “On January 20th,” he said, “I will become the first President of the United States to serve two full terms during a time of war.” An unexpected boast from a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

You may recall Obama has told the military the biggest threat to national security is global warming. You may also remember he’s often said that defeating ISIS is his No. 1 priority. Your choice.

It’s nice to have choices.

VOTE AS THOUGH YOUR LIFE DEPENDS UPON IT: Trump over performed the most in counties with the highest drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates.

The president-elect performed better than Mitt Romney in many places, but he fared best compared to the Republican nominee four years ago in the counties with the highest drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates.

Shannon M. Monnat, an assistant professor of rural sociology and demography, created a data set with numbers from 3,106 counties. She found this trend to be true nationally but especially so in two regions: In the industrial Midwest, which is how academics refer to the Rust Belt, Trump ran ahead of Romney by an average of 16.7 percent in the quarter of counties with the highest mortality, compared to 8.1 percent in the lowest quartile. In New England, Trump did worse than Romney by an average of 3.1 percent in the lowest mortality counties but better than the former Massachusetts governor by an average of 10 percent in the highest mortality counties.

Overdoses, alcoholism and suicide are known by experts collectively as “the diseases of despair.” People often (but not always) turn to pills, syringes, the bottle and other self-destructive behaviors when they lose hope, when they don’t have the means to live comfortably or when they don’t get the dignity that comes from work.

These findings could be taken as an indictment of Trump voters, but I don’t see it that way. This massive outbreak of “diseases of despair” — and the resulting turnaround in voter patterns — is instead a stunning rebuke by those left furthest behind by eight years of hopenchange.

RELATED: My previous lunch hour item.

AND THUS ENDETH THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE:

More people now die of heroin overdoses than gun homicides.https://t.co/CU6FXDY3Tb pic.twitter.com/fsgLaV866R

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) December 9, 2016

Take Chicago’s skyrocketing homicides off of the chart and it wouldn’t even be close.

THEY’RE NOT TAKING THIS WELL: Watch: Hillary Clinton greeted by sobbing women on Capitol Hill.

HMM:

BREAKING: President-elect Trump picks Goldman Sachs president & COO Gary Cohn to be National Economic Council Director – @NBCNews

— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) December 9, 2016

FORGET DRAINING THE SWAMP. MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Make D.C. a swamp again: Trump is scaring progressive hipsters away, he should send federal workers after them. “I propose that over the next several years, we transfer a lot of federal employees out of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, to parts of the country that aren’t doing so well economically. This would provide a boost to places like Buffalo, New York, or Quincy, Illinois, or Fresno, California, while getting federal bureaucrats out of the D.C. bubble.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1310.

GORGEOUS: This telltale tail shows dinosaur feathers in ‘exquisite detail’ after 99 million years.

The amber hunters who dug up the segment in Burma (Myanmar) assumed the encased remains were vegetation, making the amber valuable when carved into jewelry. It probably did not occur to them that their discovery could be a dinosaur tail with secrets to tell. But a Chinese paleontologist named Xing Lida, perusing a Burmese amber market in 2015 for objects of scientific interest, recognized the amber’s true value.

“With the new specimen from Myanmar, we finally get that association between identifiable bones and feathers preserved in exquisite detail,” said Ryan McKellar of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada, a paleontologist and an author of the study, in an email to The Washington Post. Lida, McKellar and their Chinese and Canadian colleagues published an analysis of the tail on Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

This was not the first time that paleontologists examined feathers trapped in Cretaceous amber. But without underlying body parts, doubt remained that the plumage once sprouted from dinosaurs. This amber held eight vertebral segments as well as soft tissues. Beneath the feathers were, McKellar and his co-authors wrote, “presumably muscles, ligaments, and skin” — rarities in a discipline historically reliant on fossilized bones. (Chemical analysis even found traces of iron oxides in the tail, suggesting dino blood contained hemoglobin.)

This is a stunning find — photos at the link.

UPDATE: More from Kruiser.

ED MORRISSEY: Trump’s Cabinet: A Conservative About Face Toward Growth and Change. “Trump seems intent on creating the most conservative and business-oriented Cabinet in decades.” Personnel is policy.

BLUE MODEL BLUES: Desperate Chicago School System Looks to Shield Debt from Potential Bankruptcy.

Facing junk-bond status as it drowns in underfunded pension obligations, the Chicago public school system is trying to induce investors to buy its debt through an accounting scheme that will (theoretically) allow the bonds to keep paying interest even if the system goes belly-up. . . .

Yields on ordinary debt from CPS have reached nine percent in recent months. The latest effort to market its debt reflects a new level of desperation on the part of the district, which has failed for years to put enough money aside to fund teacher pensions even though residents of the state of Illinois and the Windy City pay above-average tax burdens.

The presence of the term “hypothetical bankruptcy” in the bond prospectus also highlights the fact that the district’s policymakers have given more than idle thought to the possibility that the school system may be forced into Title IX proceedings. (There have also been rumblings about bankruptcy for the entire city).

A handful of local governments have been forced into bankruptcy in the wake of the financial downturn, including Detroit and San Bernardino. But if pension debt keeps accumulating unchecked, the next wave of bankruptcy might extend beyond post-industrial regions in persistent decline and sweep up our mightiest urban centers as well.

When it happens, the price for help should include an end to public-employee unions, and other political reforms.

FAKE NEWSKI: Census Bureau, IRS, And St. Louis Fed Added To Washington Post’s List Of “Russian Propaganda” Websites.

WELL, GOOD: Donald Trump’s Cabinet Selections Signal Deregulation Moves Are Coming.

Business leaders are predicting a dramatic unraveling of regulations on everything from overtime pay to power-plant emission rules as Donald Trump seeks to fill his cabinet with determined adversaries of the agencies they will lead.

The president-elect’s pick Thursday to head the Labor Department, fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, is an outspoken critic of the worker-pay policies advanced by the Obama administration. Mr. Trump’s choice for the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, is a primary architect of legal challenges on President Barack Obama’s environmental regulations.

Other cabinet nominees critical of regulations advanced under Mr. Obama include Rep. Tom Price to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, financier Wilbur Ross Jr. at the Commerce Department and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. All will require Senate confirmation.

Those picks suggest the Trump administration, backed by a Republican Congress, is determined to advance labor, environmental and financial regulatory policies more favorable to many American corporations, though not all will back his proposals.

President Obama engineered the largest increase in federal regulation in at least 40 years, when that progressive and self-described Keynesian, Richard Nixon, held office. There’s no reason to consider the results of just two years of Democratic legislative action and Obama’s “pen and phone” to be a new normal.

TO BE FAIR, EUROPE’S NEVER BEEN BIG ON FREE SPEECH: Geert Wilders is convicted of saying unpopular things. Actually, the things he’s saying are pretty popular with voters, and that’s the real worry for the Netherlands’ current rulers.

MICHAEL BARONE: The Global Collapse of the Political Left.

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FORGET DRAINING THE SWAMP. MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Make D.C. a swamp again: Trump is scaring progressive hipsters away, he should send federal workers after them. “I propose that over the next several years, we transfer a lot of federal employees out of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, to parts of the country that aren’t doing so well economically. This would provide a boost to places like Buffalo, New York, or Quincy, Illinois, or Fresno, California, while getting federal bureaucrats out of the D.C. bubble.”

HISTORY: My hunting trip with Yeltsin killed off the Soviet Union.

The Belavezha Accords, which were signed in Belarus on 8 December 1991, broke up the Soviet Union and launched its constituent republics on the path to statehood.

But Stanislav Shushkevich, then chairman of the Belarus supreme soviet, had no plans “to bring up the question about what the Soviet Union is and how it should exist” as he went to meet Russia’s Boris Yeltsin and President Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine at a state resort in the Belavezha forest, he told the Guardian.

He had invited Yeltsin to a hunting trip there to try to secure Russian oil and gas supplies for Belarus during the impending winter. In the end, both the hunting and the energy talks gave way to more serious matters.

As the delegations gathered, they realised the political crisis would have to be solved first. After the August 1991 hardliner coup against Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts at reform, the Soviet Union had become “essentially ungoverned”, Shushkevich said.

The agreement they signed started the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose alliance of 11 of 15 former Soviet republics. But its greatest achievement was dissolving the USSR after 70 years without large-scale violence, Shushkevich said. Western leaders had feared that a Soviet breakup would lead to civil war in the nuclear power.

Russian President Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the USSR “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” But in fact, the Soviet Union was a “prison house of nations,” and its peaceful dissolution was a modern miracle.

WHATEVER THE GOP IS PAYING JILL STEIN, THEY SHOULD DOUBLE IT: Thanks, Jill: Michigan House passes voter-ID bill after vote-fraud hyperbole.

FAKE NEWS: The Fact-Challenged Women of ‘The View’ Brag About Their High Fact-Checking Standards.

OUT: RUSSIAN ELECTION HACKING. IN: U.S. GOVERNMENT ELECTION HACKING. State of Georgia allegedly accusing Homeland Security of attempted hack.

The state of Georgia is accusing the Department of Homeland Security of trying to hack its voter registration database, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal says it has seen a copy of a letter to DHS making those allegations, wherein Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp writes “At no time has my office agreed to or permitted DHS to conduct penetration testing or security scans of our network. Moreover, your department has not contacted my office since this unsuccessful incident to alert us of any security event that would require testing or scanning of our network.”

Prediction: Now that there will be a Republican in the White House, calls to declare U.S. voting equipment “critical infrastructure” under Homeland Security supervision will dry up.