WELL, GOOD: Issa Introduces Bill To Wipe Out Last Minute Obama Regulations.

California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa re-introduced legislation Tuesday that would allow Congress to overturn executive branch regulations finalized in the last 60 legislative days of an outgoing presidential administration.

The bill amends the Congressional Review Act, which would allow Congress to recoup the ability to essentially curb numerous regulations rushed through the regulatory process in the last days of an outgoing administration at one time.

Issa’s office claims the bill is designed “to stem a growing trend by Presidents, of both parties, to use their last few months in office to rush in costly, expensive or controversial new regulations.”

The legislation, expected to be approved by the House Wednesday, was already introduced with support from the Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte and Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Tom Marino.

The way things are shaping up in the new Congress, President Trump is going to have a full inbox after his swearing-in.

WATCH A BUNCH OF JOURNALISTS FREAK OUT AFTER BEING ASKED IF THEY KNOW ANYBODY WHO DRIVES A TRUCK:

Which brings us to the simple question about truck ownership from John Ekdahl that drove Acela corridor progressive political journalists into a frenzy on Tuesday night: “The top 3 best selling vehicles in America are pick-ups. Question to reporters: do you personally know someone that owns one?”

Rather than answer with a simple “no,” the esteemed members of the most cloistered and provincial class in America–political journalists who live in New York City or Washington, D.C.–reacted by doing their best impersonation of a vampire who had just been dragged into the sunshine and presented with a garlic-adorned crucifix.

Just think of the MSM as (urban elitist) Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense. And that parochialism has been deeply entrenched for decades. The MSM’s reaction to Ekdahl’s simple query yesterday is yet another example of how spot-on Saul Steinberg’s classic 1975 New Yorker “View of the World from 9th Avenue” cover was, all the way to the present day, encapsulated in the theme of Dana Loesch’s recent book, Flyover Nation: You Can’t Run a Country You’ve Never Been To.

DAVID HARSANYI: Democrats are more likely to believe the Russians installed Donald Trump into the presidency than Republicans are to have ever believed Barack Obama was a Muslim.

Why are Democratic constituencies such cesspits of paranoia and outdated beliefs?

GOP ETHICS PANEL HIJINKS: Amateur Hour, Not Corruption.

RETAKING WILTZ: The latest in StrategyPage’s Battle of the Bulge photo series. If I had to guess I’d say the two American soldiers in the photo are on a recon mission. However, they are not wearing winter camouflage.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1336.

THAT VOW WAS JUST FOR THE RUBES: Whatever happened to that smooth presidential transition Obama vowed?

Andrew Malcolm:

Since Obama vowed to run a smooth presidential transition, what’s the real point of picking a tardy diplomatic scuffle with Putin? What’s the real point of setting Israel (and the annoying Netanyahu) adrift at the United Nations now?

Why issue all these offshore drilling bans and new federal regulations? Why commute more federal prison sentences than a dozen past presidents combined? Why keep releasing Guantanamo terrorists when so many return to their homicidal careers?

Might it be to plant political IEDs for his annoying successor, as Democrats seek to restore their party? For the first time in nearly a century a former president decided to reside in Washington. Obama has rented a mansion and office space where he’ll be easily accessible to media friends for, say, kibitzing his successor – unlike Obama’s predecessor, who went silent for more than a year.

Obama is the Loki of presidential politics.

POST-CALIPHATE COUNTER-TERRORISM CHALLENGE:From The Cyber Brief. An interview with former Acting Director of the CIA John McLaughlin.

Sample:

Another point to think about on Mosul and Raqqa is that these won’t be real victories unless we have a post-conflict stabilization plan. Stability operations are something that have acquired greater currency in the Pentagon in the aftermath of Iraq. So presumably someone is thinking about who moves into Mosul, how’s it governed, and how we suppress potential ethnic rivalries there that would turn it into yet another violent confrontation. All of that has to be thought through.

MY LATEST CREATORS SYNDICATE COLUMN: We ought to take North Korea’s threat to test an ICBM very seriously.

KURT SCHLICHTER: For Democrats, 2017 Will Be The Year of Living Stupidly.

So a lot like 2016 then.

THE INEQUALITY HYPE: The great devil of progressives turns out to be mainly a figment of accounting. Better data gives us a more heartening picture of American well-being.

Income inequality is at once a palpable and amorphous condition. That some people have more money than others is a tangible reality. But most people have no idea about the actual distribution of income and their position in the population. An analysis of several surveys of ordinary citizens in nearly forty countries reveals widespread misperceptions about the degree of inequality, how it is changing and where they fit in their country’s income distribution. For example, in the countries surveyed an average of 7 percent of respondents owned a car and a second home, yet on average 57 percent of this group thought they belonged in the bottom half of the income distribution. Among low-income respondents receiving public assistance, a majority placed themselves above the bottom 20 percent of their income distribution. These findings raise serious doubts about the extent to which the median voter knows how much she might lose or gain from redistribution. More important, it means that discontent with economic trends has a lot less to do with perceptions of material inequality than it does with a whole host of other factors that are, as it happens, a lot harder to quantify and therefore much less well appreciated by elites. . . .

Since the cost of living is usually higher in states and metropolitan areas where the average household income is above the U.S. median, the Gini coefficient tends to exaggerate differences in the levels of material comfort and well-being implied by economic inequality.

Moreover, despite the suitability of Gini coefficients for comparing levels of income inequality over time and among countries, the findings expressed by these comparisons can obscure their implications for economic well-being. For example, the .378 Gini coefficient for the United States represents a much higher degree of income inequality than the .257 computed for the Slovak Republic. As for economic well-being, a look at how much money is actually available reveals that the Slovak Republic’s median disposable household income amounts to 29 percent of that of the United States. Its middle-class would be on welfare here.

Next you’ll be telling me that Sweden is poorer than Alabama.

FOR THE WIN:

THE SAME WAY HE CAME IN: Obama is going out in a blaze of self-interest.

Creating national monuments in Utah and Nevada, banning offshore oil drilling in the Arctic and the Northeast, deleting the database of Muslim men at the Department of Homeland Security: All of these things will earn him toasts at all the right parties.

Despite a remarkable lack of evidence that the Russians “hacked” the election (as opposed to their more obvious complicity in the WikiLeaks shenanigans), the conviction that Hillary Clinton lost because of Putin’s skulduggery is rapidly gelling into liberal conventional wisdom. These sanctions give Obama yet another useful talking point in retirement.

They’re also having the desired effect on the Trump team, which for obvious reasons hates any suggestion that The Donald’s election was less than legitimate.

But will they actually “box in” a President Trump? It seems unlikely.

Obama plans to stick around in Washington past his sell-by date and has said he’ll break precedent by speaking out (lecturing? hectoring?) on policy issues after he’s left office.

In other words, he’s the gift that keeps on giving — to the GOP.

TRAVEL: What you should know about that dog flying in the seat behind you. “To meet the ADA’s definition, a dog must be individually trained to perform specific tasks that directly relate to a person’s disability. For instance, a service dog may be trained to assist with navigation or alert its handler to safety concerns. However, if a dog provides aid only by its natural behavior, then it lacks the individualized training necessary for ADA accommodation. This standard means that the ADA does not apply to many dogs that function as therapy, emotional-support and companion animals.”

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Russians! Under my bed! John Podesta fell for a phishing scam. Let’s not start another Cold War over that.

SUSTAINABILITY: Population Of Britain Will Outstrip France by 2050 Because Of… Migrants.

END OF AN ERA: JAMES TARANTO POSTS HIS FINAL “BEST OF THE WEB” COLUMN. And I appreciate this shoutout:

Whether you see Trump as a hero or a goat—or something in between, which is our still-tentative view—his unlikely ascension to the presidency was a hell of a story. Most journalists missed the story because they were too caught up in defending a system of cultural authority of which they had foolishly allowed themselves to become an integral part.

Speaking of missing stories, last month the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi reported that major newspapers “are facing a shortage of people able, or more likely willing, to write opinion columns supportive of the president-elect.” Even conservative columnists at places like the Post and the New York Times are generally hostile to Trump. Smaller newspapers like the Des Moines Register and the Arizona Republic, Farhi noted, have the same problem.

“USA Today may have been the only large newspaper to buck the general trend,” Farhi wrote. “It published Trump-supportive columns from law professor and Instapundit founder Glenn Reynolds and regular contributor James Robbins.” (As a point of personal privilege, we note that Reynolds was a Best of the Web contributor before he launched InstaPundit in August 2001.)

I was! Taranto is going on to run the OpEd page at the Journal, where I’m sure he’ll do well. But I’ll miss his daily voice, though I wish they hadn’t put him behind the paywall.

FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION: Liberals Panic as Trump Could Flip Left-Leaning Ninth Circuit.

THE 1980S CALLED… WELL, YOU KNOW THE REST: Russia Beefing up Military Ties With the Philippines.

Rear Adm. Eduard Mikhailov, deputy commander of Russia’s Pacific Fleet, led the five-day visit of vessels including an anti-submarine ship and showcased what his country can offer to a Southeast Asian nation that’s long been a staunch American treaty ally.

“You can choose … to cooperate with United States of America or to cooperate with Russia,” Mikhailov told reporters through an interpreter at the Manila harbor after a welcoming ceremony. “But from our side we can help you in every way that you need.”

“We are sure that in the future we’ll have exercises with you. Maybe, just maneuvering or maybe use of combat systems and so on,” he said.

The anti-submarine ship Admiral Tributs and sea tanker Boris Butoma have a wide range of combat features. Filipinos will be allowed to tour the huge ships and Russian marines will demonstrate their combat capability during the high-profile visit, according to the Philippine navy.

Years ago I wrote that in the face of growing Chinese power, the natural response of China’s neighbors would be to coalesce back around the United States and forge deeper ties than ever. I also noted that it would take unprecedented White House incompetence to screw up that natural response.

Well.

POLL: Most oppose ‘completely’ overturning Roe v. Wade.

I wonder how it would poll if you asked people about adopting France and Germany’s policies on abortion?

JUSTICE, DELAYED: Charles Manson reportedly seriously ill, taken to hospital.

AT THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN LAW SCHOOLS, IT’S “CONSERVATIVES NOT WELCOME.”

As appropriate to its quasi-governmental status, the AALS nods toward non-partisanship. Its by-laws state that it “expects its member schools to value . . . diversity of viewpoints.”[2] Unfortunately, this commitment has been pure window-dressing. In its law school inspections the AALS often criticizes schools for lack of racial or gender diversity, and it makes a big issue of sexual-orientation diversity, but it never criticizes schools for lack of political diversity.

This is not because law faculties reflect the political diversity of the nation. Empirical evidence confirms the obvious; law faculties tilt overwhelmingly to the left.[3] And in its own programs the AALS displays the same bias. An announcement about the 2016 annual meeting included a list of thirteen scheduled “Speakers of Note.” One or two of them might be considered moderate or non-political, but all others were liberals or radicals; not one was a conservative or libertarian.

Because of the dearth of conservatives and libertarians on law faculties and AALS programs, I have been involved for over four years with several other law professors in trying to get the AALS to take its commitment to viewpoint diversity seriously. The recent Presidents (a new president is chosen every year) and the Executive Director have met with some of us, and they have been models of cordiality and have discussed our issues seriously.

Until recently, however, the Executive Committee, which effectively controls the AALS, rejected every one of our requests, including one for the creation of a task force to look into viewpoint diversity and make recommendations. It refused even to meet with us.

Perhaps state legislators and the federal Department of Education should communicate concern on this issue. But maybe not:

One might think that conservative state lawmakers would oppose state law schools’ paying hefty fees to a partisan left-wing organization. But as a member of the NAS for thirty years, I have finally realized that conservative lawmakers either don’t care about academia or consider it a lost cause.

This is disastrously short-sighted. Most state colleges and universities now serve as political action committees for the left, and their political spending dwarfs that of all other PACs, but lawmakers remain passive.

Hmm. We’ll see if that passivity continues.

ALLIES: Turkey Makes Veiled Threat Over Incirlik.

In the past few weeks, Turkey has complained that the coalition forces aren’t providing air cover to Turkish troops trying to capture the key IS-held town of al-Bab.

Fikri Isik said Wednesday: “this is leading to serious disappointment in the Turkish public opinion.”

“We are telling our allies … that this is leading to questions over Incirlik.” He was referring to the air base in southern Turkey that is home to coalition planes involved in the anti-IS campaign. IS has claimed responsibility for the New Year’s Istanbul nightclub attack that killed 39 people.

Effectively peeling Turkey off of NATO would be Putin’s greatest coup to date — a goal the Erdogan regime seems willing to help along.