RASMUSSEN: Just 42% Think Russia Meddled More in 2016 Election Than FBI.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Shut Down Averted, the Latest RUSSIA Collusion, and Much, Much More. “This guy is a bigger disappointment out of office than he was while he was in office. He kept his mouth shut while Obama weaponized the government and targeted conservatives. He kept is mouth shut when Obama paid Hezbollah Iran almost $2B and basically greenlighted thei Iranian nuclear program. He kept his mouth shut when former AG Eric Holder ran guns to narcoterrorists in Mexico. But during the Trump administration, he’s going to open his yapper. Overseas.”

You can probably guess who Liz is talking about.

SO WHY WAS HE KEPT ON SO LONG? Kelly knew before abuse reports that Porter would be denied security clearance.

And: Dozens at White House lack permanent security clearances.

Staffing remains a weak spot in this Administration.

THE DERP STATE: Feds Scrambled to Redact Information Showing Top Secret Spy Abuse. “Newly unearthed info confirms Nunes memo on FBI spying.”

Federal authorities scrambled to redact and keep classified key information revealing major abuses of the U.S. surveillance apparatus that targeted President Donald Trump’s associates in the lead up to the 2016 election, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation who said the latest information corroborates findings recently made public by House Intelligence Committee officials.

On the heels of the release of a classified memo by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee disclosing that the FBI relied heavily on a widely discredited anti-Trump dossier to carry out unwarranted surveillance on Trump allies, Senate investigators this week made public their own findings that appear to corroborate the events.

Somewhere between “Lavrentiy Beria” and “Keystone Cops” lies a close-enough estimation of this mess.

ENJOY YOUR CRUMBS, PEASANTS: $20 Billion Hidden in the Swamp: Feds Redact 255,000 Salaries.

Recently, Open the Books filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (pictured) for all federal employee names, titles, agencies, salaries, and bonus information. We’ve captured and posted online this data for the past 11 years. For the first time, we found missing information throughout the federal payroll disclosures. Here’s a sample of what we discovered from the FY2017 records:

254,839 federal salaries were redacted in the federal civil service payroll (just 3,416 salaries were redacted in FY2016).

68 federal departments redacted salaries. Even small agencies like the National Transportation Services Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation redacted millions of dollars in salaries.

$20 billion in estimated payroll now lacks transparency.

A 7,360 percent increase in opacity hides one out of every five federal salaries.

Who’s the bureaucrat in charge? Not a Trump appointee – the president doesn’t even have a current nominee at OPM. So, the buck stops with new acting Director Kathleen McGettigan, a 25-year staffer who assumed the position because she was the next in line, not because the White House appointed her.

Personnel is policy, and this is still one of the Trump Administration’s weak spots even going into its second year.

Bigger picture: Washington either gets cleaned up and stops robbing us blind, or the backlash is going be unpleasant enough to make our political class beg and plead for more Trump instead.

THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: Chuck Schumer Called For Military Parade In 2014.

Contrary to fake news reports, the United States has held massive, flashy military parades since at least 1865. Subsequent public displays of military might, including tanks, missiles, and hundreds of thousands of troops occurred in 1919, 1942, 1946, 1953, 1957, 1961, and 1991.

Also contrary to mainstream media headlines, it wasn’t so long ago that military parades ranked among the few issues to draw bipartisan support. No less a Democrat than Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) vocally supported a military parade on American soil as recently as 2014. The camera-happy senator’s call to arms stirred even New York’s Bolshevik Mayor Bill De Blasio, who proclaimed, “The brave men and women who have selflessly served our nation with courage and skill in Iraq and Afghanistan deserve a recognition for their sacrifice. I stand with Sen. Schumer in his call for a parade to honor our veteran heroes, and New York City would be proud to host this important event.”

Of course, Sen. Schumer has never been known for his consistency.

That’s not entirely true. Schumer says whatever is politically expedient, consistently, over a span of decades.

HMM: Russia Embarks on Military Buildup in the Far East.

Indeed, within the past several months, the Russian side has repeatedly complained about the presence of the United States in the region. Russia’s main concerns are related to the U.S. military bases (especially, the Air Force component) located in Alaska along with the significant potential (including six aircraft carriers) of the U.S. Pacific Fleet (RIA Novosti, December 18, 2017). Another area of concern for Moscow has been the increasing number of military exercises held by U.S., South Korean and the Japanese naval forces, which is “aggravated” by the growing U.S. military presence in the Pacific region (for instance, the expanding U.S. military potential in South Korea—see EDM, July 22, 2016).

And yet, Russia denies (which frequently occurs in other theaters as well) any attempts to embark on the militarization of the Far East. According to prominent Russian military expert Mikhail Khodarenok, “We are not starting any sort of arms race in the Far East, we are not pursuing saber rattling or preaching war […] we are merely trying to take back what used to be ours.” He further stated that the creation of the new army unit in the Far East and the buildup in local military capabilities is nothing but a “return to common sense” and “the patching up of the old ramshackle hedge—not the creation of a new wall” (RIA Novosti, December 19, 2017).

It’s curious that Russia claims to be so concerned about a few air and naval bases when there are major formations of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army just on the other side of the border from resource-rich-but-sparsely-populated Siberia.

JON GABRIEL: How to keep social media from rewiring your brain.

Those of us who spend too much time on social media (for me, it’s a job requirement) are all too familiar with the firehose of the latest news, trends and jokes. Within hours, they’ll be replaced by new topics just as meaningless.

Many experts have sounded alarms that this torrent of ephemera and the mad chase for clicks are rewiring brains, reducing attention spans and altering how we process information. Too often, our focus is locked on the transient and new as we abandon the meaningful and eternal.

Not wanting to waste so much of each day, I embarked on a new media journey. Or, should I say, a very old one.

At the start of the year, I cracked open “The Iliad” by Homer. Apparently the 3,000-year-old book is kind of a big deal, which is why every smart person I know has read it (or at least has claimed to). But, as with most classics, I had never quite gotten around to it.

It was a bit slow-going at first (I apparently chose a dated translation), but I soon fell into the rhythm of the brutal war epic. After a few days, I was done and … I actually enjoyed it.

Read the whole thing — and then maybe The Iliad.

HMM: Sen. Mark Warner Traded Secret Texts with Russian Oligarch’s Lobbyist Linked to Hillary.

OH: This Guy Paints the Sex He Allegedly Has with Aliens.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Olympic Skater Adam Rippon Is Bigoted Against Mike Pence.

OOPS: University Reportedly Funneled Money From Pro-Traditional Marriage Club to LGBT Groups.

CHANGE: Remember the so-called “death panels”? They’re gone, repealing another key and unpopular component of Obamacare. “It was always a stretch to claim that Republicans had ‘basically repealed Obamacare’ just by repealing the individual mandate. But getting rid of the individual mandate and the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board? Now we’re getting somewhere. The IPAB board was created under Obamacare and given the duty to slow the growth of Medicare spending, but no board members were ever nominated. But as written under the law, IPAB would have enjoyed a lot of power over what Medicare was willing to pay for and how much, with little opportunity for Congress to overrule their decisions. This deal gets rid of IPAB for good.”

Good.

And the above is just one item in Jim Geraghty’s look at the good and the bad in the spending caps deal.

PEAK SALON: Why is the Bible so badly written?

Update: Apparently peak Salon is too Salon even for Salon, so Salon pulled the article. But Paula Bolyard has the details and the reaction.

STEPHEN KRUISER: The death toll continues to rise from tax reform.

IMPRESSIVE. MOST IMPRESSIVE. This is How the World’s Most Covetable Cameras Get Made. “Have you ever wondered what goes into that ‘Handmade in Sweden’ inscription?”

ED MORRISSEY: Even House Dems Wonder: What Was The Point Of The Pelosi Filibuster?

Nancy Pelosi spoke for eight hours yesterday — and even some of her own colleagues don’t quite know why. She took advantage of a rarely used privilege which allows House caucus leaders to hold the floor indefinitely. Pelosi insisted that she would keep talking until Paul Ryan agreed to schedule a vote on a DACA compromise and would block any attempt to pass a budget until he did.

That sounded great … right up until her negotiating partner Chuck Schumer announced a budget deal without linkage to the “dreamers” issue in the middle of her filibuster. Now Pelosi’s colleagues wonder whether she intended to move the issue at all, or whether she was covering her behind after selling them out.

It’s difficult to imagine that Pelosi and Schumer weren’t keeping each other informed on exactly what they were doing.

THIS SEEMS PRUDENT: Cotton, Rubio Introduce Bill Banning Govt. Use of Chinese Telecom Devices.

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: ISIS Deploys Wheelchair-Bound Suicide Bomber.

PROCUREMENT BLUES: German Navy experiences “LCS syndrome” in spades as new frigate fails sea trials.

The Baden-Wurttemberg now bears the undesirable distinction of being the first ship the German Navy has ever refused to accept after delivery. In fact, the future of the whole class of German frigates is now in doubt because of the huge number of problems experienced with the first ship during sea trials. So the Baden-Wurttemberg won’t be shooting its guns at anything for the foreseeable future (and neither will the Zumwalt for the moment, since the US Navy cancelled orders for their $800,000-per-shot projectiles).

System integration issues are a major chunk of the Baden-Wurrenberg’s problems. About 90 percent of the ship’s systems are so new that they’ve never been deployed on a warship in fact—they’ve never been tested together as part of what the US Navy would call “a system of systems.” And all of that new hardware and software have not played well together—particularly with the ship’s command and control computer system, the Atlas Naval Combat System (ANCS).

Perhaps most inexcusable, the ship doesn’t even float right — it has a permanent list to starboard.

MICHAEL WALSH: Tear Down That Wall . . . of Silence. “From the moment it dawned on Hillary Clinton, late on election night, that she had managed to blow a fixed fight, and that there would, therefore, be hell to pay, the Democrat-Deep State-Media Complex suddenly had to conceal their own malfeasance by doing what the Left does best — projecting its own sins onto others.”

Read the whole thing.

INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST BROTHERHOOD: Cuba Is Making the Crisis in Venezuela Worse.

Pressing forward on a strategy of increased sanctions and multilateral pressure is right, but at the same time the Trump administration cannot delink Venezuela and Cuba, for there will be no resolution in Venezuela without addressing the pernicious influence of the Castro regime in fortifying Maduro’s grip on power and rooting out any internal opposition to the breakdown of democratic order.

Today, the penetration of Venezuela by thousands of Cuban operatives is complete. While it remains difficult to quantify the exact numbers, according to a Brookings Institution report, Cuban intelligence operatives and military advisors in Venezuela range from hundreds to thousands. Organization of American States Secretary General Luis Almagro puts the number at 15,000, likening them to “an occupation army from Cuba in Venezuela.”

Certainly, there is nothing new to the incestuous Venezuela-Cuba relationship. What is new is the Maduro regime’s increasing brazenness in pursuing an uncompromising survival strategy straight out of the Castro playbook: ever-more reliance on repression to maintain control, while driving the discontented out of the country. Cuba’s fingerprints are all over this human tragedy.

You might think that the Obama Administration would have made an issue out of Cuban enabling and meddling before normalizing relations with Cuba, but… no, you wouldn’t think that.

WASN’T THAT THE WHOLE POINT OF OBAMACARE’S CRONYISM? Warren on Medicare for All: ‘Taxpayers Have Helped Make Insurance Companies Wildly Profitable.’

ANA QUINTANA: Venezuela resembles Dante’s ‘Inferno.’

You know there’s real trouble when a Detroit paper can — without hypocrisy or irony — publish a piece with that headline.

SOON, TOO: Drones Will Surpass IED Threat in Future Conflicts.

Western air supremacy hasn’t been seriously challenged in a long time, but the threat is evolving quickly.