LIFE UNDER THE “MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION” EVER: CIA Admits It Hasn’t Touched FOIA Request In Six Years… Says It Will Close Case If Requestor Doesn’t Reply.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 7 Foolproof Holiday Cocktails to Help You Ring in 2017.

I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW ROBOT EMPLOYEES: Mining 24 Hours a Day with Robots. “Each of these trucks is the size of a small two-story house. None has a driver or anyone else on board. Mining company Rio Tinto has 73 of these titans hauling iron ore 24 hours a day at four mines in Australia’s Mars-red northwest corner. At this one, known as West Angelas, the vehicles work alongside robotic rock drilling rigs. The company is also upgrading the locomotives that haul ore hundreds of miles to port—the upgrades will allow the trains to drive themselves, and be loaded and unloaded automatically.”

Related: Kent Brockman on Unemployment.

AT AMAZON, deals on bestsellers in Tools and Hardware.

WHY THE NEW YORK TIMES’ RESOLUTION FOR MORE ACCURATE REPORTING IS DOOMED:

The problem with these mea culpas and modified, limited hang-outs is that anyone familiar with the history of The New York Times has seen this movie before. Baquet may think putting people out on the road is the answer, but the paper has been there and done that in 2004. David Kirkpatrick spent a year in the field, covering mostly the socially conservative tribes of Jesusland. Yet here is the NYT, right back where it started.

The pre-election lack of balance Spayd identified continues in the paper’s current coverage. The NYT has visited flyover country from time to time after the election and occasionally included comments from Trump supporters in other pieces. But as before, such stories are drowned about by the flood tide of Times coverage serving progressives’ parochial appetites.

Immediately after every presidential election, the MSM promises to improve their coverage, even in November of 2008, when the DNC-MSM went all-in to successfully elect Obama.”Unexpectedly” though, it only gets worse during each successive presidential election. You almost wish they’d run an Onion-style headline instead: DON’T WORRY COCOONED READERS, WE’LL STILL BE TOTALLY IN THE TANK FOR THE NEXT DEM CANDIDATE AND WE’LL STILL HALF-ASS IT IN 2020. At least they’d get points for being honest Democrat operatives with bylines for a change.

IF YOU STRIKE ME DOWN, TWITTER, I SHALL BECOME MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE: Milo Yiannopoulos Strikes $250K Book Deal. “They said banning me from Twitter would finish me off. Just as I predicted, the opposite has happened.”

IT’S COME TO THIS: Jim Geraghty on Ariana Grande, the Objectification of Women, and Our Culture.

Read the whole thing.

SO YOU’RE SAYING THAT 2016 IS PRETTY MUCH A NORMAL YEAR:

2016 UNGA Resolutions Against
Israel: 20
Syria: 1
Iran: 1
N Korea: 1
Russia: 1

Seems imbalanced.

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) December 29, 2016

It’s almost as though the U.S. had some special role to play at the U.N., providing balance to an organization filled with oppressor-loving antisemites.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How we breathe could also affect how we think and feel. I wonder if this explains why people inhale sharply when they’re startled?

WITCHCRAFT: “When the last cellphone in the Caliphate is destroyed or worn out no one will know how to make another,” Richard Fernandez writes. “Their 8th century is capable of producing fanaticism but probably couldn’t make a ball point pen. Objects in the ISIS universe are ‘magical’ — put there by Allah in the possession of the infidel for holy warriors to plunder and enjoy until the power which inheres in them gradually fades away. Surprisingly much of the modern world is not very different.”

Read the whole thing.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: DC private schools giving Kellyanne Conway the brush-off.

That’s likely to end well.

GOOD GOVERNMENT: 3 Albanian elected officials terminated for criminal records.

It would be nice if our own Justice Department looked into criminal matters at least up to Albania’s standard.

CAMERA CONTEST: Mini-shootout: $900 smartphone vs. $3,000 DSLR. “It’s still not a match at the extremes, but it’s definitely ‘good enough.'”

KERRY ON ISRAEL: An Alternate Universe.

Amir Cohen:

Kerry’s speech was already going to be drowned out by the global din around United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which passed in recent days after the U.S. abstained, and which among other things lumped Judaism’s holiest sites in East Jerusalem together with the West Bank and declared all of them occupied Palestinian territory. It has been criticized first, as a diplomatic gambit that detonated the peace process and second, as an abandonment of Israel contrary to decades of U.S. diplomacy aimed at blocking international assaults on the Jewish state.

The resolution presented another rhetorical problem for Kerry: to even get to the parameters he was going to have to get past those two criticisms. He needed to paint a world in which the UNSCR built on the peace process rather than detonated it, and boosted Israel rather than abandoning it.

He did exactly that, but at the cost of whatever relevance the speech might have had left, because the world he painted has very little in common with the one we live in. He couldn’t even craft a single version where everything fell into place, but had to leap from one alternate reality to another. Those who work on the Middle East as it actually exists don’t have anything in the speech for them.

This is perhaps not unexpected from the man who invented huge swaths of his Vietnam service record, then gained domestic fame by comparing his fellow U.S. troops there to Ghenghis Khan.

EMERGING? DAN RATHER, BRIAN WILLIAMS, AND EASON JORDAN TO THE WHITE COURTESY PHONE, PLEASE: The left’s emerging ‘fake news’ problem.

Related: Taking stock: Top media mythbusting posts of 2016.

A LITTLE PIECE OF POLAND, A LITTLE PIECE OF FRANCE: Russia, Turkey, Iran are discussing chopping Syria into zones of influence.

Syria would be divided into informal zones of regional power influence and Bashar al-Assad would remain president for at least a few years under an outline deal between Russia, Turkey and Iran, sources say.

Such a deal, which would allow regional autonomy within a federal structure controlled by Assad’s Alawite sect, is in its infancy, subject to change and would need the buy-in of Assad and the rebels and, eventually, the Gulf states and the United States, sources familiar with Russia’s thinking say.

“There has been a move toward a compromise,” said Andrey Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a think tank close to the Russian Foreign Ministry.

“A final deal will be hard, but stances have shifted.”

Assad’s powers would be cut under a deal between the three nations, say several sources. Russia and Turkey would allow him to stay until the next presidential election when he would quit in favor of a less polarizing Alawite candidate.

Makes one think of the Russo-Austro-Prussian partitions of Poland, but without any outright annexations.

This next part is rich:

The talks would be distinct from intermittent U.N.-brokered negotiations and not initially involve the United States.

That has irritated some in Washington.

“So this country that essentially has an economy the size of Spain, that’s Russia, is strutting around and acting like they know what they are doing,” said one U.S. official, who declined to be named because of the subject’s sensitivity.

Well, whose feckless posturing over Syria made that possible, Mr. Anonymous?

FASTER, PLEASE: Donald Trump Considers Moving VA Toward Privatization.

YOU ALL KNOW WHO SHE IS: The 8 Most Memorable Debbie Reynolds Movies.

“THE PERFECT METAPHOR FOR THE MEDIA IN 2016:” Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold in the running for Darwin Award after shooting self in the eye with toy gun:

When I came home from my last TV hit [reporting on Trump], the kids, ages 4 and 5 months, were asleep. The house was quiet. I was still full of caffeine and do-gooder energy and decided to tidy up.

Among the clutter on the coffee table, I found my 4-year-old’s Party Popper, a bright yellow gun that fired confetti. For some reason, I held the gun up to my eye and looked down the barrel, the way Yosemite Sam always does.

It looked unloaded.

Then, for some reason, I pulled the trigger.

When I got to the ER, I had a swollen face, metal-foil confetti in my hair and a faint odor of gun smoke. Finally, the doctor could see me.

“I shot myself in the eye with a glitter gun,” I said. I showed him the Party Popper, which I had brought with me, in case he wanted to send it off to the National Institute of Morons for further study.

Florida Man has nothing on the supreme genius that is Beltway Man.

YA THINK? Relations Between Obama and Netanyahu Have Hit Rock Bottom.

Though they’ve clashed bitterly before, mostly notably over Iran, the two governments seemed farther apart than ever after a speech Wednesday by Secretary of State John Kerry and last week’s United Nations resolution.

The key question for the Obama administration, newly willing to air grievances with Israel on live television, is why now?

My colleague Bill Whittle has compared Obama to Tolkien’s Balrog, lashing its whip at Gandalf in one last act of murderous defiance while falling to its doom.

TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: Charlie Sheen tweets for God to ‘take’ Trump next.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1330: House Republicans And Democrats Forge Rare Bipartisan Agreement To Block Impeachment Of IRS Commissioner. Plenty of Republicans were happy to see the Tea Party killed off. Since it was a movement in favor of limited government and less spending, it was a threat to them in a way that even Donald Trump is not.

THE FIX WAS IN: White House On Defense After Being Exposed as Architect of Anti-Israel U.N. Action.

Senior Obama administration officials are scrambling to provide explanations after multiple reports, including in the Washington Free Beacon, identified the White House as being a chief architect of a recent United Nations resolution condemning the state of Israel, according to conversations with multiple former and current U.S. officials.

On the heels of the hotly contested resolution, which condemned Israel for building homes in its capital, Jerusalem, senior Obama administration officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden, have been identified as leading the charge to ensure the anti-Israel measure won approval by the U.N. Security Council.

The administration’s denials of this charge broke down during the past several days as multiple reporters confirmed the Obama administration worked behind-the-scenes to help shape and forward the resolution.

Read the whole thing.

TAKE OFF AND NUKE THE SITE FROM ORBIT: Abolish the Department of Energy.

Peter Grossman:

The DOE was conceived in dark and pessimistic beliefs and forecasts that have proven totally wrong. As Obama might say, the DOE is on the wrong side of history. As it stands the department needs to either be rethought or retired.

The original legislation justified a Department of Energy because, 1) we were rapidly running out of fossil fuels, especially oil and natural gas; 2) as a consequence of this we were becoming increasingly dependent on energy imports — dependence that made us vulnerable to embargoes and political blackmail; and 3) so therefore we needed “a strong national [read government-directed] energy program.”

Even before fracking proved the dire warnings to be utterly wrong, we had for the most part taken care of our energy dependence. We significantly reduced any possible vulnerability to an embargo by diversifying our suppliers; over sixty countries were supplying us with oil in the 2000s. Our No. 1 supplier? Canada. Mexico also has been in the top five. This information makes “foreign oil,” a bit less scary, no?

The Department of Energy was created to solve a problem that didn’t exist and protect us from a threat we didn’t need to worry about — so of course it can never be abolished.