PROCUREMENT: Pentagon’s Inspector General Praises Secret $80 Billion Bomber.

While big-ticket weapons systems like the B-21 frequently end up with significant cost increases and production delays, in the initial stages the Air Force was cited for its “comprehensive acquisition strategy and risk-management process to support a cost-effective program,” according to the audit. The program had “clearly defined requirements to ensure” warfighter “needs are being met,” it added.

That initial assessment is no guarantee the B-21 won’t encounter serious cost, schedule and performance problems as system development continues, with the service seeking to declare an initial operating capability by the “mid to late 2020s,” Global Strike Command spokesman Joe Thomas said in an email. The aircraft’s first flight “along with specific details of the technical capability of this platform, is protected by enhanced security measures,” he added.

The CBO’s $97 billion estimate includes $69 billion in production costs, though the office says the program’s secrecy made it difficult “to generate an independent estimate of its costs.”

Don’t pop the champagne corks just yet.

IT’S A PERVALANCHE: Melissa Gilbert Accuses Oliver Stone Of Sexual Harassment: “It Was Humiliating And Horrid.”

HMM: North Korea punishes top military leaders, South Korea says.

Two key figures in the North Korean military have been punished for “impure behavior,” according to a South Korean lawmaker, a move analysts say is likely intended to help leader Kim Jong Un tighten his grip on power.

A closed-door briefing by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) identified the two officials as Hwang Pyong So, the director of North Korea’s General Political Bureau (GPB), and his deputy Kim Won Hong, said South Korean Rep. Kim Byung-kee after the meeting.

The General Political Bureau, which is also referred to as the General Political Department (GPD), is being audited for the first time in 20 years, Rep. Kim added, citing the NIS.

It’s unclear how exactly how Hwang and his deputy were disciplined, but one analyst told CNN they could have been required to undergo re-education, which is likely to include a period of re-indoctrination of North Korean ideology.

At least they weren’t executed by antiaircraft gun — yet.

IN MEMORIAM, BRUNO LEONI: It may seem odd that one of the greatest champions and defenders of Anglosphere common law tradition was an Italian academic, but that was the case with Bruno Leoni, who passed away 50 years ago today. My colleague Jim Harper remembers him, with an appropriate link to the work of Scalia Law School professor Todd Zywicki.

SALENA ZITO: Erie tells an ominous sign for Democrats.

SOME ACTUAL GOOD NEWS FROM CLEMSON: The Lyceum Scholars Program Is Changing Higher Education at Clemson. “Drawing inspiration from the Lyceum school founded by Aristotle, the Lyceum Scholars Program takes a Great Books approach to studying liberty, the American Founding, capitalism, and moral character.”

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, Updated Hourly.

Plus, new Kindle Daily Deals.

And, today’s Digital Deals.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Harassment Allegations Abound and Much, Much More.

NONSENSE, PRESIDENT OBAMA ASSURED ME THERE WAS NOT EVEN A SMIDGEN OF WRONGDOING: The IRS Scandal, Day 1657: Lois Lerner Fears Retaliation If Her Tea Party Targeting Deposition Is Made Public.

U.S. ARMY TRAINING EXERCISE AT GRAF: A late fall field exercise in Grafenwoehr, Germany. A fine photo that stirs many memories. However, memory conflicts with the photo: there’s too much sunlight, it isn’t drizzling and you can’t see the mud.

FASTER, PLEASE: Checks on Trump’s Court Picks Fall Away.

Last week, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) reined in a tradition that empowered senators to block federal appeals-court nominees from their home state. His decision came about four years after Democrats, citing Republican filibusters of President Barack Obama’s circuit-court nominees, eliminated a Senate rule that required the majority party to mount 60 votes to advance a nominee to a confirmation vote.

Together, the threat of a filibuster—or delaying tactic—and use of “blue slips”—so-named because senators indicate support or opposition to nominees on blue slips of paper—guarded against lifetime appointments for nominees deemed far outside the mainstream, court experts said. Getting rid of these checks could foment distrust in judges’ work if Mr. Trump and later presidents prioritize ideology over experience or legal talent, some of the experts said.

“When judges lose legitimacy in the public eye, they lose the ability to enforce unpopular decisions,” said Arthur Hellman, an expert on the federal judiciary and law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “And that’s when you see an unraveling in the rule of law.”

Others said the changes were part of a natural progression away from Senate traditions that allowed the minority party to stall nominations for partisan reasons.

“If you’re not a fan of the Senate-wide filibuster, you’re probably not a fan of a filibuster by one senator,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, referring to the practice of senators blocking nominees from their states.

Next up, abolish the Ninth?

BYRON YORK: FBI has — still — not verified Trump dossier. “FBI and Justice Department officials have told congressional investigators in recent days that they have not been able to verify or corroborate the substantive allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign outlined in the Trump dossier.”

ISN’T IT ALWAYS? The Climate Crisis? It’s Capitalism, Stupid.

The real culprit of the climate crisis is not any particular form of consumption, production or regulation but rather the very way in which we globally produce, which is for profit rather than for sustainability. So long as this order is in place, the crisis will continue and, given its progressive nature, worsen. This is a hard fact to confront. But averting our eyes from a seemingly intractable problem does not make it any less a problem. It should be stated plainly: It’s capitalism that is at fault.

As an increasing number of environmental groups are emphasizing, it’s systemic change or bust. From a political standpoint, something interesting has occurred here: Climate change has made anticapitalist struggle, for the first time in history, a non-class-based issue.

If you want enough wealth, innovation, and technology to deal with any kind of serious problem, you’d better embrace free markets harder than Glenn Thrush embraces young female reporters.

DEMOCRATS HATE WHEN TRUMP ACTS LIKE A DEMOCRAT: White House Joins GOP Line That Keeping Alabama Seat Matters Most: Sanders: Trump wants candidates elected ‘who support his policies.’

BORDER INSECURITY: Border Patrol Agents Were Apparently Ambushed; Assailants Used Rocks to Bash Agents’ Heads.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Air Force aims for laser weapons on a fighter jet by 2021.

The Self-protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator program, or SHiELD, which launched this year, seeks to equip supersonic warplanes, such as the B-1 Lancer, F-35 Lightning and F-22 Raptor, with defensive lasers mounted in external pods.

The Air Force wants a high-energy laser system compact enough to complement the internal cannon and missiles equipped on its fighter jets.

The new system uses a type of optical fiber as the light-emitting material, instead of the neodymium-doped crystals used in conventional solid-state lasers. Since fiber can be coiled, more power can be packed into a compact system.

Difficult-to-detect supersonic jets armed with invisible weapons is exactly the 21st Century I was hoping for.

LET’S HOPE: Trump predicts unemployment rate below 4 percent.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: We Were Young.

Yglesias may have been a callow youth in 1998 rather than the callow adult he is today, but that excuse doesn’t go very far outside of Vox’s little orbit. James Carville wasn’t a kid when he dismissed one of Bill Clinton’s accusers as what you get when you “drag a $100 bill through a trailer park.” Paul Begala wasn’t a child when he defended Clinton and lambasted the man investigating him — not for adultery, but for perjury and obstruction of justice — as a sex-obsessed reincarnation of Roger Chillingsworth. Maureen Dowd wasn’t young when she lampooned Monica Lewinsky as “a ditsy, predatory White House intern who might have lied under oath for a job at Revlon” and suggested that the affair was the result of psychological problems rooted in Lewinsky’s being “too tubby to be in the high school ‘in’ crowd.” The men who awarded her the Pulitzer Prize for that work were not middle-schoolers. The editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post weren’t little ’uns. Hillary Rodham Clinton was a grown woman when she took charge of destroying the women caught up in her husband’s “bimbo eruptions.”

And Matthew Yglesias wasn’t a high-schooler in 2008 or 2016, either.

Juanita Broaddrick, who says she was violently raped by Bill Clinton, has been trying to tell her story since 1999. In 1999, Bill Clinton wasn’t the pathetic, used-up has-been he is today: He was, if memory serves, the president of the United States of America. As Mrs. Clinton’s political career advanced, Broaddrick continued trying to tell her story, to the general indifference and occasional hostility of the media and the self-satisfied progressives who advertise themselves as the champions of women. Why did no one listen? Yglesias credits Mrs. Clinton’s status as the presumptive first woman president with “creating a kind of reputational vortex that shielded her husband’s behavior from scrutiny.” If reputational vortices were named the way hurricanes are, the one surrounding the Clintons would be named “Matthew Yglesias.” It would have a few other names, too: Call it Legion, for they were — and are — many.

And they will remain legion. Today’s purge is just clearing the deck for tomorrow’s new generation of power users and abusers.

IT’S LIKE ALL THESE MINORITY-RIGHTS GROUPS ARE JUST SHILLS FOR THE DEMOCRATS OR SOMETHING: By rejecting GOP congressman, Hispanic Caucus rejects civility.

Stick to your own kind. On Thursday, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus voted against allowing Republican Congressman Carlos Curbelo of Florida to join their ranks. The all-Democratic group rejected Curbelo’s application for membership on the grounds that the positions held by the Cuban-American lawmaker were inconsistent with their values. In response, Curbelo took to Twitter to slam what he called the “pathetic attempt” by the Caucus to “justify discrimination, bigotry, and intolerance against a fellow Hispanic.”

This whole episode makes everyone involved look partisan and petty. By keeping Curbelo out, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus appears to be acting in its own interests, rather than those of Hispanic Americans. This is a sad example of how infighting among Latinos keeps our community from moving forward together.

Like I said.

FROM L. JAGI LAMPLIGHTER:  The Awful Truth About Forgetting.

SAN FRANCISCO OVERRUN WITH TURKEYS! WHO KNEW?  Wild turkeys test San Francisco’s tolerance.

THEM KIDS AND THEIR CRAZY MUSIC:  Fisking “Goth Music will Destroy Your Child”.

AND IN CASE YOU WONDERED, YEP, DEMOCRATS ARE STILL ACTING INSANE:  Newsweek: Charles Manson = Donald Trump.  I’m thinking when Newsweek sold for $1 it was wildly overpriced.

YOU HAVE TO HAVE A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH LIKE A HYENA:  Cry Me a River: Kathy Griffin Whines Because She Can’t Get Work.