STEPHEN GUTOWSKI: My Time Shooting with the Liberal Gun Club. “They may not like Trump & McConnell but they love Smith & Wesson.”

TOO LATE: Claire McCaskill To Ocasio-Cortez: Don’t Anger Working Class White People.

AFGHANISTAN: Iran Launches Own Talks with Taliban as U.S. Tries to Negotiate Peace Deal with Terror Group.

JUSTICE: D.C. Judge Hits North Korea with $501 Million Award to Parents of Tortured U.S. Hostage.

TIP OF THE STEINBERG: Farrakhan Is Only A Tiny Part Of Women March Leaders’ Antisemitism.

MINE WAS LOST IN A TRAGIC FISHING ACCIDENT, BUT I CAN’T REMEMBER WHICH LAKE: Rocket Launcher Returned During Baltimore Gun Buyback Program.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Visits Troops, Gov’t Still Shut Down and Much, Much More.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Condescending ‘Vice’ Trips on Its Own Propaganda. “The Dick Cheney biopic is the progressive propaganda Michael Moore wished he could make.”

Don’t be fooled. “Vice” isn’t really about former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Sure, Adam McKay’s film chronicles Cheney’s rise from what it calls a “dirtbag” to the second most powerful man in the world. Christian Bale’s transformation into the title character is a marvel to behold.

That’s not the point.

“Vice” is an all-out assault on conservatives, capturing how Hollywood views roughly half the country. Why else would the film name check Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Antonin Scalia, Climate Change, solar energy, President Ronald Reagan and many more off-topic targets?

That’s entertainment?

The money Christian’s reviews have saved me at the multiplex over the years is considerable.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Oil output goes AWOL in Venezuela as soldiers run PDVSA.

In a little-noted reversal of the Socialist government’s two-decade drive to nationalize the industry, the lack of expertise among military managers is leading PDVSA to hire outsiders to keep afloat even basic operations, like drilling and pumping oil. To the dismay of many familiar with Venezuela’s oil industry, some of the contracts are going to small, little-known firms with no experience in the sector.

Combined, industry veterans say, the steps leave Venezuela’s most important company – which accounts for over 90 percent of export revenue – with even fewer means to rebuild the nation’s coffers, pay its many creditors and regain self-sufficiency as an oil producer.

“What we are witnessing is a policy of destroying the oil industry,” said Jose Bodas, general secretary of the Oil Workers Federation, a national labor union. “The military officials don’t listen to workers. They want to give orders, but they don’t understand this complicated work.”

How can this be, when the officers in charge were all such good Socialists and Chavistas?

ALLIES: France becomes Turkey’s newest bugbear as Kurds court Macron.

The new focus of Turkish ire is France, whose president, Emmanuel Macron, has lashed out at Trump’s decision, saying “an ally should be dependable.” The country could play a bridging role between the Kurds, Moscow and Washington that could upset Turkish plans or so many Kurds hope.

Macron was referring to the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), America’s top ally in the fight against the Islamic State and the target of Turkey’s military threats. France has said it will keep an unspecified number of its special operation forces in the Kurdish-controlled zone in northern Syria because, contrary to Trump’s claims, IS has not been defeated. France has been repeatedly targeted by IS and is especially worried about the continued presence of French and other European jihadists in Syria. The militants claimed responsibility for the Dec. 11 shooting at a Christmas market in Strasbourg in which three people were killed and 11 others wounded.

Turkey has long insisted that the jihadis have been vanquished and that they are being used as a pretext for the US-led coalition to protect the Syrian Kurds as they set up their “terror statelet.”

Erdogan says that about all the Kurds, but the truth is the terrorist minority is mostly in the old-school PKK, which has long been an ethno-Communist terror group. More broadly, the Kurds have survived for a very long time in a very tough neighborhood — long before 2,000 American showed up in Syria. I’d still prefer a de jure Kurdish state, but keep them armed and they ought to do fine.

PROCUREMENT: F-35 production hits target, plane’s maker says.

Lockheed Martin said Thursday that it has delivered its 91st F-35 of the year, representing a 40 percent jump in production from last year and a nearly 100 percent improvement from production numbers in 2016.

East Hartford-based Pratt & Whitney makes the F135 turbofan engine used in every version of the F-35 aircraft.

The 91st fighter jet — a Marine Corps F-35B variant — is bound for a Marine air station in Beaufort, South Carolina, according to Lockheed officials.

“This milestone demonstrates the F-35 enterprise is prepared for full rate production and ready to deliver on increasing demand from our customers worldwide,” said Greg Ulmer, vice president and general manager of the F-35 program at Lockheed.

Flyaway costs continue to come down, too. Now the Air Force just needs to get to work on the Lightning’s spare parts “crisis” — a totally unexpected crisis which comes with every new jet.

BUT OF COURSE: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Twists Christmas Story to Make Jesus an Immigration Talking Point.

VIDEO: Torah on One Foot: Selfish Love vs. Selfless Love.

This is quite lovely.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Are Hershey’s Kisses Suddenly Missing Their Tips?

The issue apparently initially came to light thanks to members of the Facebook group The Wedding Cookie Table Community. The page’s Pittsburgh-based founder Laura Magone told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that a fellow baker first pointed out the problem over two weeks ago. But things got even more bizarre when Magone called to complain: “Hershey has told people on this page (including me today) they are intentionally breaking off the tips of the iconic American Hershey kiss at the factory so the tips don’t break off in transit — this makes no sense,” Magone wrote on Facebook. She told the Post-Gazette that answer “doesn’t pass the smell test,” and urged other members of the group to also call and complain.

They can keep the tips just so long as they keep making the ones with the sliver of almond inside.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Budweiser looking at making marijuana-infused drinks.

JEFF DUNETZ: Federal Judge Slaps Down Leftist Attempt To Access Trump’s Tax Returns.

IT TAKES TWO TO MAKE PEACE: If You Like the Peace Process, Please Don’t Read Polls of Palestinians.

If a new presidential election was held today between the current president, Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas, and the leader of the terrorist group Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas would beat Fatah 49 percent to 42 percent.

88 per cent said that Palestinians who sell property to Jews are traitors. 64 percent said the punishment for selling property to Jews should be the death penalty.

Palestinians oppose the concept of a two-state solution, 55 percent to 43 percent.

“A large minority of 44 percent thinks that armed struggle is the most effective means of establishing a Palestinian state next to the state of Israel while 28 percent believe that negotiation is the most effective means and 23 percent think non-violent resistance is the most effective.”

In lieu of negotiations, “54 percent support a return to an armed intifada,” i.e. terrorism.

50 percent of Palestinians reject in principle the holding of negotiations in order to resolve the conflict.

None of this is essentially new, but it does bear repeating.

OH, COME ON: If You Fall Asleep Easily, It Could Be A Red Flag Of These 9 Things.

For the first time in my adult life I’m both staying asleep through the night and falling asleep about when I want to — and now this is a thing I’m supposed to be concerned about?

I’ll try not to lose any sleep over it.

MATT MARGOLIS: Democrats Secretly Used Russian Tactics in 2017 Alabama Senate Special Election. “Democrats want to win at all costs, even employing false flag operations if necessary.”

SPENGLER: China leapfrogs the US in 5G Internet.

In a Dec. 14 op-ed for the Washington Post, former Acting CIA director Michael Morell declared that our present tangle with China is not a trade war but a tech war. If China’s flagship telecom equipment company Huawei gets the jump on the rollout of 5G internet, Morell said, China will have the capacity to monitor communications, sabotage industrial systems, and “will have a significant head start economically, in cybersecurity and in signals intelligence — i.e., in promoting its economy, protecting its secrets and stealing those of its rivals.”

That’s the least of our problems.

Read the whole thing.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Gasoline Shortages Grip Venezuela’s Capital Ahead of Christmas.

Caracas awoke to shuttered service stations and long lines of vehicles as motorists tried to fill up their tanks before Venezuela’s extended-Christmas vacation kicks off. For the second consecutive day, honking messes of cars crawled along many of the city’s main arteries as residents thronged few remaining operational stations.

“I should be buying presents or helping to plan my sister’s wedding, but here I am stuck trying to gas-up since yesterday,” said Greiska Velasquez, a 23-year-old dentistry student, as her Chevrolet Aveo inched along a row of vehicles that stretched two blocks. “Nothing works here anymore, not even the gasoline.”

Sitting atop even more oil than Saudi Arabia, Venezuela has long sold the world’s cheapest gasoline, costing less than penny to fill up a tank.

The Chavistas bought votes by selling gasoline at below cost, and then ran out of gasoline — unexpectedly.

THAT’S NOT HOW THIS WORKS: North Korea Won’t Denuclearize Unless U.S. Removes Threat.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: House Passes Billions for Wall, Mattis Down and Much, Much More. “The House approved a bill with $5B for border funding; now it goes to the Senate. A very small part of gov’t could shut down if the Senate doesn’t sign and no one will notice.”

JUSTICE: Deer poacher sentenced to watch ‘Bambi’ every month during a year in Missouri jail. “The man was one of a group of poachers found to have illegally killed hundreds of deer, sometimes taking only their heads and leaving the rest to rot in fields.”

My preferred activity for poachers would be a most dangerous game.

HMM: Jason Chaffetz Says Trump’s border wall may get funding after all (thanks to this dirty little Washington secret).

President Donald Trump, to his credit, has worked hard to get his wall funding properly authorized. But he may ultimately do exactly what presidents before him have done: take advantage of the broken Congressional process.

Washington’s dirty little secret is that unauthorized spending is not even uncommon anymore. As a freshman member of Congress, this truth stunned me – and I was not alone. By my estimation, there were many in the body who disapproved of the practice. But to our disappointment, the body as a whole was not inclined to address the issue.

The Democrats may feign exasperation with the president potentially spending “unauthorized” money on the wall, but they have enthusiastically participated in the budgetary games that will make it possible.

Sticking it to Nancy Pelosi while fulfilling his signature campaign promise would surely excite Trump’s base — and go a long way towards straightening up yesterday’s mess.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Heh: