MAD DUCK: In final days, Obama administration signs law enforcement pact with Cuba.

The agreement outlines U.S.-Cuban cooperation on a wide range of criminal and security-related issues, including terrorism, narcotics, cyber-security, immigration, money laundering, smuggling and human trafficking.

Fausta Wertz has the whole story, but the short version is that we’re now stools for Castro’s guards.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1349: Peggy Noonan On The Obama Presidency And The IRS Scandal.

UH-HUH: The Most Successful Democrat Since F.D.R.

Most of FDR’s legacy — Social Security, American military primacy, the U.N., the permanent expansion of Washington’s size and scope — is still with us, for good and ill. Truman conceived of and built the postwar order which is shaken but still standing. LBJ’s legacy of civil rights legislation, welfare statism, Vietnam syndrome (and the Left’s resulting loss of sanity) lingers after 50 years.

What do you wager will be left of Obama’s legislative or foreign policy legacy by, say, the end of this summer?

If Obama has any lasting legacy at all, it will consist of little more than a mountain of debt and the ridiculous-ization of the Progressive Left.

GERMAN PANZER GRENADIERS IN THE BULGE: The latest in StrategyPage’s Battle of the Bulge commemorative photo series. This one looks a bit like a propaganda photo, but perhaps not.

I was late in posting yesterday’s photo so I’ll bump it. Combat in the snow. As several commenters noted, it’s a particularly fine example of combat photography. Definitely not a staged photo.

10,000 NEW JOBS THIS YEAR: Wal-Mart Touts Plan to Create U.S. Jobs, in Nod to Trump; Quantifying its earlier plan, retailer says store openings, e-commerce will add 10,000 positions this year. “On Tuesday, Wal-Mart is expected to announce a round of grants to six universities working on textile innovations aimed at bringing back U.S. manufacturing in that sector.”

IS THIS WHAT THE DONALD WANTED?: German leaders seek to forge ties with Team Trump. Source is the BBC.

The US president-elect has condemned Angela Merkel’s decision to let in 890,000 migrants as a “catastrophic mistake” and dismissed the European Union as “basically a vehicle for Germany”.

Trump has a knack for creating a favorable negotiating position. He’s demonstrated that in business. The New York Times and its echo chamber etceteras fail to understand this.

WHAT OTHER KIND IS THERE? A Defense of Obama That Cherry-Picks the Facts.

Peter Berkowitz:

Chait’s case for Obama largely ignores the case against. It is one thing to defend the utility of deficit spending in a recession; it is quite another to blink away doubling American debt in eight years to a staggering $20 trillion and growing. It is appropriate to credit Obama for expanding access to health care, but it is deceptive to gloss over his repeated deceptions concerning insurance cost, keeping one’s doctor, and keeping one’s insurance. The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is good, but no excuse for undermining constitutional government by extravagant exploitation of executive orders to skirt the people’s representatives in the legislative branch. And while the Middle East was unstable and dangerous before Obama, it is negligent to overlook how his determination to circumscribe America’s international role has emancipated the forces of chaos and destruction in the region.

Overreach and underperformance have consequences. Not the least part of Obama’s legacy is a shrunken and enfeebled Democratic Party in the states, a successor in the White House he tried hard to derail, and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress who are determined to overturn his signature domestic and foreign policy achievements.

Obama’s real legacy will be sworn into office on Friday.

THE REAL PROBLEM IS PAJAMA-BOY LEADERSHIP: Geography, Not Gerrymandering: Why Democrats Struggle in the States.

Throughout the latter half of the Obama era, many Democrats have pointed to GOP-led gerrymandering to explain their party’s weakness in state legislatures and the House of Representatives. And not without reason: Because Republicans won big in 2010, the decennial redistricting produced lines that favored Republican candidates in some states.

But the most important stumbling block to Democratic legislative power is geography, not gerrymandering. In Governing magazine, Alan Greenblatt takes a look at Iowa, a state where Democrats have been wiped out despite a “scrupulously nonpartisan” redistricting process. . . .

As Greenblatt notes, 1990s-era Democrats still had a strong presence in rural areas. But as the party moved to accommodate a more urban and liberal electoral base, its support outside of major metropolitan areas faded, especially during the Obama years.

Territorial representation penalizes parties for failing to build geographically broad political coalitions. So matter how lopsided a majority the Democrats can build in places like Des Moines, they will always be hamstrung if they can’t win compete less-densely populated areas as well.

While Democrats are right to demand fair redistricting procedures, the case of Iowa is a reminder that their problems go much deeper. The path out of the wilderness doesn’t just involve fighting gerrymandering; it also involves winning back voters who are not sold on the kind of liberal cosmopolitanism that is popular in big cities and university towns.

When gerrymandering helped Democrats, it was generally treated the way voter fraud is now — as a minor problem at best, and mostly a humorous reflection of the kinds of hijinks politicians engage in. But of course if it hurts Democrats’ chances it suddenly becomes a Major National Crisis.

CHANGE: Russia’s Lavrov Wants Trump Administration at Syria Peace Talks.

Mr. Lavrov said he hoped the talks, which will take place in Almaty, Kazakhstan, would be more productive under Mr. Trump than they have been under President Barack Obama.

“It is totally possible to breathe new life into these [peace talk] mechanisms, considering that the new U.S. administration says it aims to fight terrorism in earnest, unlike [the administration] before it,” he told reporters.

The peace process stalled in recent months, as U.S. officials found themselves sidelined by an emboldened Russia, which helped the Syrian forces of President Bashar al-Assad recapture the key city of Aleppo.

It’s nice to be noticed again.

TYLER COWEN: A bit of context on Trump, NATO, and Germany.

BREXIT: Britain will leave EU single market, May says.

“I want to be clear: What I am proposing cannot mean membership of the single market,” May told an audience of foreign diplomats and Britain’s own Brexit negotiating team at a mansion house in London.

“Instead we seek the greatest possible access to it though a new comprehensive, bold and ambitious free trade agreement. That agreement may take in elements of current single market arrangements in certain areas,” May said.

Her announcement that she will put the final Brexit deal to a vote in both houses of parliament comes ahead of a court decision on whether she has the power to start the process of withdrawing without parliamentary approval.

Brexit isn’t about ending free trade; it’s about restoring powers to Parliament, ceded to and usurped by Brussels.

VIRGINIA POSTREL AND KATHERINE MANGU-WARD talk about the future of Reason.

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SO IT’S COME TO THIS: Bruce Springsteen Cover Band Drops Out of Trump Inauguration Party.

Will Forte, the group’s 63-year-old keyboardist, manager, agent and publicist, among other roles, was telling the band about the “thousands of emails from both sides” he had received after news broke that the group would be playing the Garden State Presidential Inaugural Gala on January 19th as part of Donald Trump’s inauguration. “We’re standing out in the storm right here,” he told the band. “We gotta get out of the storm.”

In the past few days, they had started to feel isolated because, as Forte says, “the story was so distorted.” “There were misleading headlines like, ‘Trump Hires B-Street Band,'” he says. “We felt like we were out on our own on an island.”

The Left has gone so insane that they’re even driving cover bands out of work.

WHY ARE DEMOCRATS SO VIOLENT AND UN-AMERICAN? Unprecedented threats drive Secret Service inauguration security. I’m so old, I can remember when accepting election results was the sine qua non of citizenship.

Is anybody keeping track of Robert Creamer, Jan Schakowsky’s (D-IL) husband, who ginned up violence at Trump rallies on behalf of Hillary’s campaign? Because what’s going on now isn’t some sort of spontaneous upwelling. It’s organized, which means that there are organizers.

PROTESTOR BEWARE: North Dakota lawmaker’s bill protects drivers who negligently hit someone obstructing traffic.

The Star Tribune reported Monday that the legislation is a response to protests at Standing Rock Indian Reservation, and sponsored by state Rep. Keith Kempenich, R-Bowman.

“If you stay off the roadway, this would never be an issue,” he told the paper. “Those motorists are going about the lawful, legal exercise of their right to drive down the road….Those people didn’t ask to be in this.”

Kempenich told the paper that the law’s intent is to shift the blame from the driver to the person who was in the road who should not have legally been there. According to the report, Kempenich said he was concerned about panicked drivers who see a mob of protesters coming in their direction and hit the gas instead of the brake.

“You can protest all you want, but you can’t protest up on a roadway. It’s dangerous for everybody,” he told the paper.

You have the right to “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Not to block traffic and make yourself a nuisance or a danger to people trying to get on with their lives.

A FAILED PRESIDENCY: After eight years, Obama leaves a legacy of a wider racial rift.

JAYVEE: ISIS Is Dropping Bombs with Drones in Iraq.

“It’s not as if it is a large, armed UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] that is dropping munitions from the wings—but literally, a very small quadcopter that drops a small munition in a somewhat imprecise manner,” [Col. Brett] Sylvia, commander of an American military advising mission in Iraq, told Military Times. “They are very short-range, targeting those front-line troops from the Iraqis.”

Because the drones used are commercial models, it likely means that anti-drone weapons already on hand with the American advisors are sufficient to stop them. The Battelle Drone Defender, spotted in Iraq last summer, is a gun-shaped jamming tool that can send some models of drone crashing to the ground. It’s part of a growing field of anti-drone countermeasures, many of which focus on radio-frequency jamming to disable the flying machines.

It’s worth noting that the bomb-dropping drones are just a small part of how ISIS uses the cheap, unmanned flying machines. Other applications include scouts and explosive decoys, as well as one-use weapons. ISIS is also likely not the first group to figure out how to drop grenades from small drones; it’s a growing field of research and development among many violent, nonstate actors and insurgent groups. Despite the relative novelty, it’s also likely not the deadliest thing insurgents can do with drones.

Techniques like these aren’t very effective against soldiers, but they’re cheap, easy to “export,” and perhaps deadlier against softer targets.

INAUGURATION: Day 1 of Trump: A hard-changing 24 hours is forecast.

For the first two hours after President-elect Trump takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, he will toast his inauguration with a lavish lunch and celebratory parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. But President Trump will probably fill the rest of his first 24 hours in office beginning to demolish his predecessor’s legacy, which he has promised to reverse almost completely once he is sworn in on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

Trump has already signaled that Day One of his presidency will be activistic in its agenda and energetic in its execution. The president-elect has cut short the time he will spend watching the customary parade and pared down the number of inaugural balls he will attend with his wife, Melania, who will then be first lady.

His transition team says that while Trump is happy to observe many of the historic traditions surrounding presidential inaugurations, he also wants a rapid start on his promise to “Make America Great Again.”

He seems to be a fairly energetic fellow.

JOHN KASS: That violent Chicago police culture that shocks Loretta Lynch and Rahm Emanuel? It came from Chicago’s corrupt Democratic machine:

The Department of Justice report criticized the CPD for excessive force, lousy training and lax discipline.

At the downtown news conference, many fine and earnest things were said by the politicos, and many flowery words were spoken about police trust and police responsibility, and the need for police to be respected by the community.

But the politicians — meaning Lynch and Emanuel and others — protected themselves by ignoring the most important aspect of Chicago police culture.

It wasn’t the Chicago cops who shaped the police culture. The political corruption and cynicism of politicians over decades in a one-party Democratic machine town shaped the culture.

Police are just part of that culture. They’re the part with guns. . . .

The police didn’t order the hiring and promotion of top Outfit-controlled boss cops to run things for decades, cementing a cynicism that oozes to this day. It wasn’t the police who didn’t want better training for officers.

It wasn’t the police that sat on the video of Laquan McDonald, the black kid shot 16 times by a white cop until dead. It wasn’t police that refused to release the video until Emanuel was safe and had won a tough re-election.

City Hall sat on that video.

And for all the talk of “police accountability” there was nothing said by Lynch or Emanuel or U.S. Attorney Zach Fardon about investigating how the political types squelched the video until after the mayor’s politics were covered.

What isn’t said is often the most important part of the story.

Certainly in today’s journalism.

Note, too, that amid all the violence on Chicago’s streets, Chicago’s Democratic politicians are in bed with the gangs.

COFFEE — IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Cup of Joe Could Fight Age-Related Inflammation.

Next, researchers investigated why some older adults showed lower activation of the genes that encode IL-1-beta, and found an interesting correlation: The older participants who reported that they consumed more caffeinated beverages generally showed a lower activation of these inflammation-causing genes.

When researchers looked again at the blood samples of the older participants, they found that those whose blood had higher levels of caffeine and its breakdown products showed lower activation of these genes than participants whose blood had lower levels of caffeine and its breakdown products.

Researchers then turned to the laboratory again to confirm a cause-effect relationship. This time, they added caffeine into human immune cells growing in lab dishes, along with compounds that would trigger inflammation. Results showed that caffeine actually prevented these compounds from causing inflammation in cells. [10 Things You Need to Know About Coffee]

This finding may “explain why caffeine consumption correlates with lower blood pressure,” Davis told Live Science.

Stronger, please.

THE RETURN OF THE LEFTOVER LEFT: “The leftist groups seeking to disrupt the inauguration have formed a front under the name DisruptJ20 (January 20), of which the DC Antifascist Coalition seems to be a constituent. James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has released the first of a series of undercover videos (below) that features planning to disrupt one event. Stink bombs figure prominently, but that ‘DC Antifascist Coalition’ moniker is a stink bomb all by itself. It harks back to the days of the Communist Party’s Popular Front in the days before World War II. The Popular Front survived as a supposed antiwar movement until the day the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.”

JAY COST: Republicans Should Make Hay While They Can. Yep. The GOP squandered its opportunity in 2000 and 2004. If it does that again, there might not be another one.

JOHN FUND AND HANS VAN SPAKOVSKY: Obama’s ‘Scandal-Free Administration’ Is a Myth.

In reality, Mr. Obama has presided over some of the worst scandals of any president in recent decades. Here’s a partial list:

• State Department email. In an effort to evade federal open-records laws, Mr. Obama’s first secretary of state set up a private server, which she used exclusively to conduct official business, including communications with the president and the transmission of classified material. A federal criminal investigation produced no charges, but FBI Director James Comey reported that the secretary and her colleagues “were extremely careless” in handling national secrets.

• Operation Fast and Furious. The Obama Justice Department lost track of thousands of guns it had allowed to pass into the hands of suspected smugglers, in the hope of tracing them to Mexican drug cartels. One of the guns was used in the fatal 2010 shooting of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Congress held then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt when he refused to turn over documents about the operation.

• IRS abuses. Mr. Obama’s Internal Revenue Service did something Richard Nixon only dreamed of doing: It successfully targeted political opponents. The Justice Department then refused to enforce Congress’s contempt citation against the IRS’s Lois Lerner, who refused to answer questions about her agency’s misconduct.

• Benghazi. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed in the attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya. With less than two months to go before the 2012 election, the State Department falsely claimed the attack was not a terrorist attack but a reaction to an anti-Muslim film. Emails from the secretary later showed that she knew the attack was terrorism. Justice Department prosecutors even convinced a magistrate judge to jail the filmmaker.

• Hacking. Mr. Obama presided over the biggest data breach in the federal government’s history, at the Office of Personnel Management. The hack exposed the personnel files of millions of federal employees and may end up being used for everything from identity theft to blackmail and espionage. OPM Director Katherine Archuleta, the president’s former political director, had been warned repeatedly about security deficiencies but took no steps to fix them.

• Veterans Affairs. At least 40 U.S. veterans died waiting for appointments at a Phoenix VA facility, many of whom had been on a secret waiting list—part of an effort to conceal that between 1,400 and 1,600 veterans were forced to wait months for appointments. A 2014 internal VA audit found “57,436 newly enrolled veterans facing a minimum 90-day wait for medical care; 63,869 veterans who enrolled over the past decade requesting an appointment that never happened.” Even Mr. Obama admitted, in a November 2016 press conference, that “it was scandalous what happened”—though minutes earlier he boasted that “we will—knock on wood—leave this administration without significant scandal.”

All of these scandals were accompanied by a lack of transparency so severe that 47 of Mr. Obama’s 73 inspectors general signed an open letter in 2014 decrying the administration’s stonewalling of their investigations.

One reason for Mr. Obama’s penchant for secrecy is his habit of breaking rules—from not informing Congress of the dubious prisoner swap involving Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and the Taliban, to violating restrictions on cash transfers to Iran as part of a hostage-release deal.

The president’s journalistic allies are happily echoing the “scandal-free” myth.

Well, they figure if they don’t talk about it, it’s not really a scandal.