GOOD NEWS FOR MANY: Study: MRIs safe for patients with older pacemakers.

MAYBE THIS EXPLAINS THE APPARENT (to be charitable) DOJ/FBI COVERUP ON CLINTON EMAIL WHITEWASH? Turns out that Hillary Clinton got contributions totaling more than $381,000 in 2016 campaign contributions.

Trump? Just 24 DOJ employees sent his campaign a piddling total of $12,535. No wonder they’ve been stalling  the House Select Committee on Intelligence on its August 2017 request for documents related to the Clinton email probe and related matters?

Those data reflect only contributors who specifically listed DOJ as their employer. There may well be many more Trump or Clinton donors who didn’t list DOJ as their employer, since giving your occupation is voluntary.

MARIN COUNTY POLITICIAN TAKES KNEE DURING PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE:

[San Anselmo’s Ford Greene] has been dropping to a knee during the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of council meetings since the October 10th meeting. Some council members assumed he was backing former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s Black Lives Matter protest.

Although supportive of the former 49er, Greene says he’s protesting something else.

“I can’t stand the destruction Donald Trump is wreaking on our country,” he said. “Eliminating net neutrality, his use of office of the Presidency for his own selfish business gain.”

I don’t know about his scrambling ability, but Greene’s throwing mechanics have to be better than Kaepernick’s. If he wanted to get himself noticed by the NFL – Mission Accomplished.

Also, talk about burying the lede – who knew they still read the Pledge of Allegiance in Marin County?

2017: THE YEAR IN REVIEW. Here’s a sample:

Worst Politician of the Year

Disgraced ex-Mayor of Seattle, Ed Murray. In 2017 alone, Murray:

• Allowed Antifa to riot unchecked, as a proxy for his sense of desolation over the election of President Trump;
• Pushed for a municipal income tax on people who made more than $250,000 per year, which was later found unconstitutional;
• Had to resign over several accusations of sexual assault by young men.

You know you’ve had a bad year when Amnesty International requests an investigation of your trip to Belfast and Wales in which you were a chaperone… in 1974.

Heh. Read the whole thing.

DEEPLY UNSATISFYING: This Is What 1,200 Calories Looks Like On A Vegan Diet.

THIS WILL MAKE SOME KNOXVILLIANS AND KNOXVILLE EXPATS SAD: Kay’s Ice Cream on Chapman Highway Closing Doors for the Last Time. The last of a once-thriving regional chain.

LOOKING FOR A PLACE TO MAKE A YEAR-END CHARITABLE DONATION? I recommend F.I.R.E.

DISPATCHES FROM THE CADDYSHACK NEWS NETWORK: CNN Whines About Truck Blocking Golf Course [VIDEO].

The Secret Service and the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office both denied responsibility for the truck, causing CNN to launch into full-on conspiracy theory mode.

“Today this truck showed up out of nowhere and actually moved at one point when our journalists tried to get a different angle,” CNN’s Ryan Nobles cried. “It’s clear no one wanted us to get a picture of the president golfing.”

The Secret Service responded to CNN’s inquiries about the truck with an appropriate level of snark, stating, “The USSS is in the business of protection and investigations not in commissioning vehicles to block the media’s view of the president’s golf swing.”

CNN will get to the bottom of who the truck driver was – and then doxx the daylights out of him. You know they don’t take any guff from their viewers at Time-Warner-CNN-HBO.

Related:

23: The number of times over the past day that CNN has mentioned the white box truck that obscured view of Trump golfing.

0: For comparison, the number of times CNN has mentioned that Politico report on Obama admin’s quashing of Hezbollah investigation.

Unexpectedly.

Update: “At this point, I think the only way we get CNN off this dumb truck story is if we tell them there are Hezbollah drug runners released by Obama behind it.” Heh, indeed.™

ANDREW KLAVAN: My Predictions for 2018.

POLITICO: What Congress Actually Did in 2017: The Bipartisan Successes You Probably Never Heard About.

9 FOR ’18: ENDANGERED POLITICIANS ON CAPITOL HILL.

DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONTIERS OF FOOD: “Authenticity is an illusion, and a highly overrated one. Most of the foods we think of as ‘authentic’ are of relatively recent vintage — since capsaicin-containing hot peppers are native to the Americas, any spicy cuisine like Szechuan or Thai is by definition a Johnny-come-lately invention. … What diners are really seeking is variety; hand-processed food will not be as consistent as the industrially processed versions, and those small variations reward us with a new experience with each bite.”

PARTY OF SCIENCE: A biology professor from San Jose State University recently argued in several tweets that “chromosomes don’t determine sex.”

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, Updated Hourly.

Plus, new Kindle Daily Deals.

And, today’s Digital Deals.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Scientific breakthrough cuts cancer risk from bacon.

WEIRD THAT THIS ISN’T GETTING MORE ATTENTION: Huma’s Cousin, Who Partnered With Russian, Convicted of Fraud, Tampered With Case By Deleting Emails.

WELL SURE, WHAT WITH SNOWFALLS BEING A THING OF THE PAST, AND EVERYTHING: Apple’s flagship Chicago retail store wasn’t designed to handle snow.

(Classical allusion in headline.)

IF UNITED AND SHEILA JACKSON LEE THOUGHT THIS PROBLEM WAS GOING TO GO AWAY QUICKLY, THEY WERE WRONG: Bumped United passenger fires back at Rep. Jackson Lee’s racism charge, airline.

A United passenger whose first-class seat on a recent flight from Houston to D.C. was given to Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is firing back at the Democratic congresswoman’s accusations of racism – while challenging the airline’s account of the incident.

Jean-Marie Simon, an attorney and private school teacher, became the latest face of airline passenger woes when she detailed on Facebook and later to the news media how she lost her seat to the Texas lawmaker.

But despite a statement from United seeking to explain the switch-out, she’s not giving up the fight. And the congresswoman’s response – essentially claiming Simon made a scene because Jackson Lee, as an African-American woman, is an “easy target” – did not calm the waters.

Simon, in an interview with Fox News, rejected the racism allegation.

“That could have been Donald Duck in my seat,” Simon, a Democrat, told Fox News on Thursday. “I could not see who had boarded the flight. I didn’t even know who she was.”

Simon originally accused United of bumping her from her first-class seat on a Dec. 18 flight in order to accommodate the Texas congresswoman.

At first, Simon didn’t know who was in her seat as she argued at the gate. United eventually gave her a $500 voucher and reseated her in the economy plus section. In her original Facebook post, Simon said another Texas congressman then informed her a fellow member of the delegation was in her seat, and “regularly does this” to passengers.

Simon proceeded to take a photo of Jackson Lee, have a tense encounter with a flight attendant who allegedly threatened to remove her — and has been battling with the airline ever since she got home. . . .

Simon used 140,000 frequent flyer miles on Dec. 3 to purchase her first-class ticket from Washington, D.C., to Guatemala and back. On her way home, she had a layover at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.

Simon said the attendant scanned her ticket but her reservation had been removed from the system. At that point, the member of Congress already was in first class, and Simon eventually got the economy plus seat.

I don’t think that someone with Sheila Jackson Lee’s documented history of abusing her position should serve on Homeland Security, much less as the ranking member of Transportation Security.

Related: Woman Accused of Racism by Dem Rep Sheila Jackson Lee is Human Rights Activist.

Also: In fallout of Sheila Jackson Lee’s ‘United’ incident, let’s not forget she once was named ‘meanest’ member of Congress.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Monday Night Football Hits All Time Ratings Low on ESPN. “I’m not an expert on ratings data, but based on these numbers ESPN has lost around 35% of its Monday Night Football audience since 2010. As if that weren’t enough, ESPN has also let it be known that they may not be keeping Monday Night Football when this deal expires because the company can no longer afford to pay $2 billion a year thanks to collapsing subscriber numbers, increased costs for other sports programming, and the dwindling ratings on their network.”

BRENDAN O’NEILL: “The middle-class media mob is officially out of control.”

WAAAAY MORE THAN SUFFICIENT OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRAFT LEAD TO THE MOST EXPENSIVE MILE OF SUBWAY TRACK ON EARTH:

Workers in the East Side Access tunnel, which will connect Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan with the Long Island Rail Road. The project’s costs have ballooned to nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track.

An accountant discovered the discrepancy while reviewing the budget for new train platforms under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.

The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.

“Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”

The discovery, which occurred in 2010 and was not disclosed to the public, illustrates one of the main issues that has helped lead to the increasing delays now tormenting millions of subway riders every day: The leaders entrusted to expand New York’s regional transit network have paid the highest construction costs in the world, spending billions of dollars that could have been used to fix existing subway tunnels, tracks, trains and signals.

No doubt, Sacramento is reading the above article as a how-to guide.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: The ‘Stupidity’ of Donald Trump: He’s had far more success than Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jesse Ventura.

This time one year ago, the assumption dominating political coverage was that the only people more stupid than Donald Trump were the deplorables who elected him.

Since then, of course, President-elect Trump has become President Trump. Over his 11 months in office, he has put Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court and four times as many judges on the appellate courts as Barack Obama did his first year; recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel; withdrawn from the Paris climate accord; adopted a more resolute policy on Afghanistan than the one he’d campaigned on; rolled back the mandate forcing Catholic nuns, among others, to provide employees with contraception and abortifacients; signed legislation to open up drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; initiated a bold, deregulatory assault on the administrative state—and topped it all off with the first major overhaul of the tax code in more than 30 years.

And yet that Mr. Trump is a very stupid man remains the assumption dominating his press coverage.

Let this columnist confess: He did not see Mr. Trump’s achievements coming, at least at first.

Plus:

In Mr. Trump’s case, critics equate lowbrow tastes (e.g., well-done steaks covered in ketchup) as confirmation of a lack of brainpower. It can make for great sport. But starting out with the assumption that the president you are covering is a boob can prove debilitating to clear judgment.

Quick show of hands: How many of those in the press who continue to dismiss Mr. Trump as stupid publicly asserted he could never win the 2016 election—or would never get anyone decent to work for him in the unlikely miracle he did get elected?

The Trump presidency may still go poof for any number of reasons—if the promised economic growth doesn’t materialize, if the public concludes that his inability to ignore slights on Twitter is getting the best of his presidency, or if Democrats manage to leverage his low approval ratings and polarizing personality into a recapture of the House and Senate this coming November. And yes, it’s possible to regard Mr. Trump’s presidency as not worth the price.

But stupid? Perhaps the best advice for anti-Trumpers comes from one of their own, a Vermont Democrat named Jason Lorber. Way back in April, in an article for the Burlington Free Press, the retired state politician wrote that “while it may be good for a chuckle, calling or even thinking someone else stupid is virtually guaranteed to give them the last laugh.”

Is that not what Mr. Trump is now enjoying at the close of his first year?

And yet, you read stuff like this piece by Walter Shapiro, who should know better, saying that “The 45th president combines the temperament of an authoritarian with the competence of Elmer Fudd hunting rabbits.” But I’m not sure it’s Trump who’s playing Fudd here.

IS THE LAST JEDI UNDERPERFORMING? Is There a Backlash Against It?

Only Harrison Ford’s surprisingly charismatic performance made The Force Awakens watchable, and (spoiler alert!) his character was killed off two-thirds of the way through, Ben Kenobi-style. Rogue One seemed like much ado about nothing, and had few sympathetic characters. When the bad guys, a CGI Peter Cushing and Ben Mendelsohn’s beleaguered bureaucrat Orson Krennic were the most interesting characters in a movie, something has gone wrong in the writing and/or casting. That coupled with the ewok-esque Porg in the The Last Jedi trailer and all the Lady Ghostbusters-esque feminist hot takes circulating on its opening weekend did not give me the urge to rush and be first in line to see it. Not to mention its ever-dropping fan-to-critics ratio at Rotten Tomatoes. How about you?