THEY ARE COMPLETELY OUT OF THEIR MINDS:  Salon Offers Most Pathetic Attempt Yet to Equate Trump to a Genocidal Dictator.

NEWS FROM THE ONGOING WAR:  Modesto Tow-Truck Driver Planned Christmas Attack on S.F.’s Pier 39, Says FBI.

IF LAWS WERE MAGICAL:  Boston Police Investigate Shooting That Couldn’t Have Happened.

BUT WILL IT ANSWER QUESTIONS?  FBI Agent In Charge: Report On Las Vegas Shooting Should Be Done By Anniversary.

LITTLE GIRLS WHO ENJOY PRINCESS PLAY EVENTUALLY GROW OUT OF IT:  Princess play is an important step for girls.

YEP, THIS WAS MY TAKEAWAY FROM IT AS WELL:  EU endorses GOP tax reform.

THAT WOULD SEEM SOMEWHAT OF A MINIMUM STEP TO TAKE:  China’s ‘Love Hospital’ saves marriages by getting rid of mistresses.

NO, SHE ISN’T. SHE JUST HAS TWO DIFFERENT GENETIC CODES.  GEEESH. CRAZY PEOPLE.  This woman is her own twin sister.

IT’S RETURNING! WE’RE DOOMED, DOOOOOOOMED, I TELL YOU!  Creepy skull-shaped asteroid to haunt Earth again.

ENJOY TONIGHT’S OPEN THREAD: Talk about what you like.

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THE LONDON DAILY MAIL: Uproar at MSNBC as top hosts denounce the network for suddenly firing beloved contributor Joan Walsh for unknown reasons.

“Beloved.”

SO MUCH WINNING, YOU’LL BE SICK OF ALL THE WINNING: Merry Trumpmas, America! It’s Good News Everywhere You Look!

MICHAEL WALSH: As London Brexits, Will it Become Caracas?

DIONYSOPHOBIC HEADLINE: Sad Study Reveals How Many Couples Have Never Had Sober Sex. Mocking Dionysexuals’ sexual preference is not okay!

GIVEN THAT THE IPHONE X HAS TROUBLE TELLING ONE ASIAN FACE FROM ANOTHER, I’D SAY IT’S NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME: Airport Face Scanning Skates on Thin Legal Ice—and Doesn’t Work Too Well.

RESERVATIONS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Woman accuses United of giving her seat to Houston’s Sheila Jackson Lee. “A passenger on a flight from Houston to Washington D.C. has accused United Airlines of giving her first-class seat to U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. D-Houston, and then threatening to remove her from the plane for complaining and snapping a photo of the Houston congresswoman. ‘It was just so completely humiliating,’ said Jean-Marie Simon, a 63-year-old attorney and private school teacher who used 140,000 miles on Dec. 3 to purchase the first-class tickets to take her from Washington D.C. to Guatemala and back home.”

Sheila Jackson Lee’s response is — wait for it, wait for it — that she’s a racist for complaining.

I HAVE BETTER ABS THAN THIS, AND MY LIFE WASN’T RUINED, BUT I STARTED ALMOST A YEAR AGO: I Spent 80 Days Trying to Get Abs and It Ruined My Life. Crash weight-loss is a disaster, maybe worth it if you’re a movie star trying to get in shape for a part, but even then you shouldn’t let yourself get this far out of shape.

In my case, my weight had crept up to 240 last year, a substantial part of it from eating crap at the hospital while my dad was dying. Now I’m at 217, and I’ve added a significant amount of muscle. But I did it over 10 months, not 80 days. And that’s how you should do it, if you want to do it. Your body doesn’t like big, fast, changes.

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AMERICA AND THE ‘ORIGINAL POSITION:’

If you were hovering above Earth looking to be born randomly into any time period in human history, you’d pick now if you had any brains. And if you could pick a place, you’d pick a Western liberal democracy, and probably the United States of America (though as much as it pains me to say it, you wouldn’t be crazy to pick Canada or the U.K. or Holland). Sure, if you could pick being rich, white, and male — and didn’t really care too much about the plight of others — you might take the 1950s. But even then, your choices for food, entertainment, etc. would be terribly curtailed compared to today. If you chose to be a billionaire in 1917, you could still die from a minor infection, and good Thai food would be entirely unknown to you. You’d certainly never enjoy watching a Star Wars movie on an IMAX screen in air conditioning. In other words, while your homes would be bigger and cooler if you were a billionaire in 1917, a typical orthodontist in Peoria in 2017 is in many respects much richer than a billionaire a century earlier.

This can’t possibly be true – everyone in the media assures me on a daily basis that this is the very worst time in our nation’s history.

‘McLAUGHLIN GROUP’ TO RETURN IN 2018.

I hope it’s the original line-up, with Jan Hammer and Billy Cobham!

(Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

THIS WAS A CASE THAT THEY KNEW WOULD GO TO TRIAL AND RECEIVE SCRUTINY, AND YET: The Government Has Screwed Up the Bundy Case Even Worse Than We Realized: A federal judge declared a mistrial in the case of Cliven Bundy’s armed standoff due to government misconduct.. As Clark Neily said on Facebook, 97% of criminal cases are plea-bargained and never go to trial; imagine what goes on there.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: The Media’s Very Bad Year.

WEIRDLY, HARVARD’S COMPLAINTS ABOUT THE NEW TAX LAW didn’t garner much sympathy.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Baltimore Ravens admit anthem protests tanked their ticket sales.