WINNING: Apple Gives Employees $2,500 Bonuses After New Tax Law.

The iPhone maker will begin issuing stock grants to most employees worldwide in the coming months, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The move comes on the same day Apple said it would bring back most of its cash from overseas and spend $30 billion in the U.S. over the next five years, funding an additional technical support campus, data centers and 20,000 new employees.

Apple confirmed the bonuses in response to a Bloomberg inquiry Wednesday. The Cupertino, California-based company joins a growing list of American businesses that have celebrated the introduction of corporate-friendly tax law with one-time bonuses for staff. AT&T Inc., Comcast Corp., JetBlue Airways Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. also said they were giving bonuses.

I can’t imagine many of the people in these boardrooms being exactly happy about making a Republican tax law look so good, but the economics of it are undeniable.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Team Obama still hasn’t learned the lesson of 2016.

Never does [Samantha] Power give any indication that the policies and character of the administration she served for eight years might have had some role in the outcome of the election. Weak economic growth, capricious and stultifying and often-unconstitutional regulation, a rejection of military deterrence in favor of negotiation and accommodation with undemocratic great powers and their proxies, the removal of troops from Iraq and the supercilious reference to ISIS as the “JV team,” the constant tweaking and trolling of conservatives and Republicans to make them batty, and all enacted with an omnipresent and choking air of moral and intellectual superiority and pride—none of this factors in her analysis. So convinced is Power of the righteousness of her positions and stature and the inevitable course of History and Progress that Trump appears to her almost as an apparition, a figure from a different dimension, far removed from any universe in which she and her boss lived and acted. Another Obama mistake.

I don’t mean to single out Power. This distended mentality of merit and awesome lack of self-awareness was an Obama administration specialty.

Read the whole thing, needless to say.

REPORT: ‘Believe the victim’ mentality undermines justice.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Fusion GPS Unleashed, Shutdown Countdown and Much, Much More.

HOW ABOUT ON EARTH? Nuclear reactors the size of wastebaskets could power our Martian settlements.

B-52 ON GUAM: Good photo.

IF I WERE A GOP DONOR, I’D FUND A “WELCOME WAGON” EFFORT TO EXPLAIN TO THESE TRANSPLANTS WHY THEIR NEW STATES ARE DOING BETTER THAN THEIR OLD ONES: People flocking to low-tax states could swing future elections. It wouldn’t be hard to identify the movers, and reach out to them.

WELL, GOOD: New HHS civil rights division charged with protecting health-care workers with moral objections.

IT’S DIRTY TRICKS ALL THE WAY DOWN: BOMBSHELL: SIMPSON ADMITS FUSION GPS WENT TO THE PRESS TO SALVAGE HILLARY’S CAMPAIGN.

NANCY PELOSI: ‘We Must Fight Even Harder Against Trump’s Authoritarian Impulses Now That We’ve Voted To Enable Them.’

Not really — that headline is from The Onion. On the other hand, genuinely funny comedy always contains at least a germ of truth.

SOMEWHERE, ROGER AILES IS SMILING: Male Megyn Kelly staffer fired after reporting ‘toxic and demeaning’ work culture. “Kevin Bleyer was fired as a writer from ‘Megyn Kelly Today’ this week after complaining that Kelly’s two top execs, Jackie Levin and Christine Cataldi, were bullying lower level members of staff. He was fired even though Kelly has made fighting abuse her personal crusade. Plus, in the wake of Matt Lauer’s firing, NBC ordered all staff to report workplace bad behavior, supposedly without fear or reprisal.”

What kind of sucker would believe that, or that it applied to men?

CHANGE: The U.S. Air Force Is Quietly Cutting A-10s.

No doubt the A-10 is a great ground-pounder, but those airframes are getting old and expensive to maintain. Worse, they won’t be survivable in the surface-to-air missile-infested environment we’ll find against near-peer foes.

WHY NOT JUST USE THE NEW FEINSTEIN STANDARD AND RELEASE THEM AT WHIM? GOP Reps Demand Immediate Release of ‘Shocking,’ ‘Troubling’ Memo on FISA Abuses.

HERE WE GO AGAIN: Congress hurtles toward shutdown.

Though House Republicans voted Thursday night to keep the government open, the real drama is in the closely divided Senate, where it’s unclear what, if anything, can clear the chamber’s supermajority threshold. The Senate couldn’t even agree on holding a vote on Thursday night, adjourning after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spurned Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s request to hold a vote and, assuming it failed, restart bipartisan negotiations on immigration and government spending levels.

Senators said they expected a vote on Friday, but had little idea what would come next.

“These are hard issues, there’s a lot of disagreement. Not just on substance but how to proceed to it. And everybody’s trying to gain leverage,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.)., the No. 3 GOP leader.

The real sticking point is DACA, or as Mark Steyn put it last night, “the Democrats’ ever more explicit preference for illegal immigrants over American citizens.”

UH-HUH: Today Show Executive Producer Steps Down To Spend More Time With His Children. “Don Nash, the executive producer of NBC’s Today Show for the past five years, is stepping down to spend more time with his family. At least that’s what the official word inside NBC News is claiming is the reason. CNN suggests people inside NBC aren’t buying it.”

MICHAEL WALSH: Media Chickens of the Frankfurt School Have Come Home to Roost.

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN MEDIA ORGANIZATIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF MISOGYNY? Accusations Of ‘Frat House’ Behavior Trail ‘LA Times’ Publisher’s Career.

GRADED: USA Today: President Trump’s first year anniversary report card, with grades from A+ to F.

EYE IN THE SKY: Six Chinese Ships Covertly Aided North Korea. The U.S. Was Watching.

The effort identified the ships by name and tracked their movements. The ships either entered ports in North Korea and transported what U.S. officials concluded was illicit cargo to Russia and Vietnam or made ship-to-ship transfers at sea.

According to the U.S., which presented the information to a U.N. sanctions committee, the ships also made extensive maneuvers designed to disguise their violations of the U.N. sanctions. In August, the U.N. banned North Korean exports of coal, iron ore, lead and seafood, which have generated an estimated $1 billion a year in hard currency for North Korea.

A review by The Wall Street Journal of corporate records and shipping databases shows that the six vessels identified by the U.S. are owned or managed by Chinese companies or firms that are registered in Hong Kong and have shareholders who are Chinese nationals and have used addresses in mainland China.

In December, the U.S. asked the sanctions committee to formally designate the six ships as sanctions violators. China resisted that request but allowed four other vessels with no apparent links to Chinese companies to be blacklisted. The names of the four blacklisted ships were announced by the U.N., but the other six weren’t.

Let’s name names. And if China is so determined to kill nuclear non-proliferation in East Asia, perhaps it’s time we encouraged South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan to deploy nukes of their own.

Strictly for self-protection from local tyrants, of course, whom we do not have to name.

DISHWASHERS… YOU IS USING THEM WRONG: You could get a UTI from your dishwasher.  Unless your dishwasher is human, in which case you might still be doing it wrong, but it’s at least understandable.

SMOD NOT DROPPING IN, YET:  Skyscraper-sized asteroid will buzz Earth.

I’M SURE THEY WILL BE VERY HAPPY TOGETHER – ESPECIALLY AS HER IN-LAWS AREN’T LIKELY TO VISIT:  This woman is, straight up, crazier than most writers.  I speak advisedly.  Woman marries ‘pirate ghost,’ says the sex is out of this world.

A CONSUMMATION DEVOUTLY TO BE HOPED FOR: House committee document could mean trouble for anti-Trump “deep statists”.