HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Massive Higher-Ed Scam You’ve Never Heard About.

CHANGE: Arab States Tiring Of Palestinian Overreaction To Trump’s Jerusalem Call.

More than anything, the unofficial rapprochement between Israel and the Arab states is a measure of growing Iranian power due to Obama’s empowerment policy towards Tehran.

ONE ORDER, ONE VOICE, ONE PEOPLE: The new Social Justice House, which is now accepting applications for the 2018-2019 academic year, “will be a community of unique and multi-faceted students from a variety of backgrounds, united into a singular voice of social activism and equality.”

PHOTO ESSAY: The haunting faces of prisoners worked to death in Stalin’s slave camps emerge as 100th anniversary of 1917 Bolshevik takeover approaches.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Under pressure, UVA agrees to recognize conservative group. You never seem to hear of lefty groups facing these problems.

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IT SEEMS TO ME THAT A MEMBER OF CONGRESS WITH HER RECORD SHOULDN’T BE SERVING ON HOMELAND SECURITY OR AS THE RANKING MEMBER ON TRANSPORTATION SECURITY: Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee: Terror of the skies since 1995.

Related: Rep. Jackson Lee suspects she was accused in United incident because she’s ‘an African American woman.’ Of course she does. (Bumped).

HEADLINE LONDON INDEPENDENT, IN 2000: Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Headline, London Times today: Travel Chaos Predicted As Temperatures Plunge To -6. “Snow and rain will continue to fall into this evening with temperatures forecast to plummet as low as -6C, bringing travel chaos to some of Britain’s busiest motorways, rail lines and airports.”

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Tweets About Bogus Dossier and Much, Much More.

JOSH BLACKMAN: The Ninth Circuit Previews Why Article II Will Save The Travel Ban.

MORE PROOF THAT LITTLE THINGS CAN HAVE HUGE CONSEQUENCES: A pay raise of 2.29 percent in 2018 might seem rather insignificant. But if you live in a county with a median household income of $125,900, it means you will have an additional $2,883 in your paycheck, starting New Year’s Day.

That 2.29 percent is the amount of the Locality Pay raise for federal workers living in the Washington, D.C. region.  Feds living in nearby Howard County, Md., Falls Church, Va., Fairfax, Va. and Arlington, Va., will also get that percentage. Washington, D.C., you will recall, is the ultimate company town and the company is “bureaucracy.”

Oh, there’s one more thing: Those four jurisdictions are, respectively, first, second, third, fourth and eighth among the top 10 U.S. richest counties, ranked according median household income. Bet you’ve never even heard of Locality Pay, even though you fund it with your taxes. Paying 2.1 million federal bureaucrats (not counting members of the U.S. military) cost you $276 billion last year.

21ST CENTURY CRIME: Topless protester tries to grab baby Jesus figure at Vatican.

MICHAEL BARONE: Republicans have reformed taxes — will they fix 1970s budget rules next?

The restrictions of the 1974 Budget Control Act and the cost estimates of the Congressional Budget Office it created were intended to provide clarity and restraints on presidents and Congresses. Ironically, we had mostly balanced budgets before 1974 and mostly budget deficits since.

Another 1970s reform that has proved counterproductive involved changes in Senate filibuster rules. The number of votes to end a filibuster was reduced from 67 to 60, and filibusterers were no longer required to hold the floor, speaking all night if need be, to block passage of legislation. The result: many more filibusters than before and an effective requirement — unimagined when I was writing the first edition of The Almanac of American Politics in 1970-71 — of a supermajority of 60 votes to pass major laws.

As any student of political behavior might have predicted, both parties have learned to game these systems.

Shocking.

I’VE SEEN THINGS YOU PEOPLE WOULDN’T BELIEVE: Ridley Scott Defends Trump’s Tax Reform.

OUCH:

UPDATE: Flashback: A former FBI agent battling Deputy Director McCabe said there is a ‘cancer’ inside the FBI. “They’ve poisoned the 7th floor.” (Bumped).

COULD I JUST SEE A (PRESUMABLY SHORT) LIST OF THINGS THE FBI DOES RIGHT? FBI fingerprint software could contain Russian code: report.

JULIETTE OCHIENG: The New Night-Riders are Just Like the Old Ones.

CHANGE: U.S. Retailers Feel Christmas Cheer After a Tough Year.

Sales, excluding automobiles, rose 4.9% from Nov. 1 through Christmas Eve, compared with a 3.7% gain in the same period last year, according to the Mastercard Inc. MA 0.29% unit, which tracks all forms of payment. E-commerce continued to drive the gains, rising 18.1%.

“It started with a bang in the week leading up to Black Friday,” said Sarah Quinlan, a senior vice president of marketing insights at Mastercard. She added that retailers benefited this year from Christmas Day falling on a Monday, giving shoppers a full weekend to scoop up last-minute purchases. Dec. 23 ranked next to Black Friday in terms of spending, according to Mastercard.

“Overall, this year was a big win for retail,” Ms. Quinlan said.

Nice.

THE WORLD IS NOT LIKE BAMBI: Coyotes Are Colonizing Cities. Step Forward the Urban Hunter.

Coyotes are largely associated with their ancestral bastions in the wild lands of the American West, but they are highly adaptable, and in recent years they have been colonizing large population centers throughout North America. The hunters have come after them, stalking the predators in settings like strip mall parking lots, housing tract cul-de-sacs, and plazas in the shadow of skyscrapers.

The growing popularity of urban hunting is igniting a fierce debate over the perils and benefits coyotes pose in populated areas, and whether city dwellers ought to adapt to living alongside a cunning predator that has thrived since one of its top adversaries, the gray wolf, has been all but wiped out in much of the continent.

We’re always being told to adapt to living alongside cunning predators. I say, make them adapt to us. Or just get rid of them.

SHARYL ATTKISSON: 10 times the intel community violated the trust of US citizens, lawmakers and allies.

Here are three:

Olympic spying

In 2002, the NSA reportedly engaged in “blanket surveillance” of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, collecting and storing “virtually all electronic communications going into or out of the Salt Lake City area, including … emails and text messages” to “experiment with and fine tune a new scale of mass surveillance.” NSA officials had denied such a program existed.

Spying on Congress

In 2005 intel officials intercepted and recorded phone conversations between then-Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and pro-Israel lobbyists who were under investigation for espionage. In 2009, someone — exactly who was never revealed — leaked Harman’s “unmasked” name to the press. In 2011, intel officials captured private communications between then-Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and a Libyan official. The wiretapped recordings were later leaked to the press — again, by unknown sources.

Journalist “witch hunts”

Internal emails from a “global intelligence company” executive in 2010 stated: “Brennan is behind the witch hunts of investigative journalists learning information from inside the beltway sources. Note — There is specific tasker from the [White House] to go after anyone printing materials negative to the Obama agenda (oh my.) Even the FBI is shocked.” The name “Brennan” appears to reference then-U.S. homeland security adviser John Brennan, who went on to become CIA director.

If we had a Congress that was worth a damn and a press corps that wasn’t wedded to Washington, this wouldn’t be a problem.

THIS KIND OF NEWS IS USEFUL EVEN A DAY LATE! Tell a liberal the feds have too much power and as often as not the response will include something about “so you don’t the FDA making sure your food is safe to eat?” Next time you get that, tell them about this report from the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General. Turns out FDA bureaucrats can be just as lazy, late and unconcerned as those anywhere else in the federal Leviathan. No, I’m not surprised, either.

WHY ARE BLUE STATES SUCH CESSPITS OF MISOGYNY AND ABUSE? Politico: California Dems face sexual-harassment meltdown. “Just how bad is this scandal, anyway? Bad enough for some progressive activists to claim that the Democrats are hiding rapists and molesters among their leaders:”

Among those who have been outspoken in their demands for more action is Christine Pelosi, chairwoman of the California Democratic Party Women’s Caucus and Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, who told lawmakers at the start of an Assembly hearing last month, “We have rapists in this building. We have molesters among us.” …

“It’s kind of a snowball effect, and every week seems to bring a new powerful man who is brought down by these accusations,” said Jessica Levinson, a Los Angeles-based political analyst. “And I don’t feel that we’ve totally cleaned house- and all the accusations are made and everybody else who remains in power has never conducted themselves in an inappropriate way before.”

I remember when Dems cheered the takedowns of Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes, and predicted that Trump would be next.

IMPORTANT REMINDER: Note that “decisions made at the end of the Cold War” means things that Bill Clinton did.

HERE IT IS, THE OPEN THREAD YOU’EVE BEEN WAITING FOR! Well, some of you, anyway.