DIPLOMACY: Haley Slams UN for ‘Ugly Creation’ of Jewish ‘Blacklist’ as U.S. Vetoes Jerusalem Resolution.

UNHINGED: ‘He Would Probably Be a Dictator by Now.’

Last year, Eliot Cohen rallied dozens of fellow veterans of Republican administrations, people like him who had served in the upper reaches of the Pentagon, State Department and National Security Council, to warn against Donald Trump winning the White House. He would become, the group open letter Cohen organized said, “the most reckless president in American history.”

A year later, Cohen, a top official in President George W. Bush’s administration, and another charter #NeverTrump proselytizer, his fellow conservative Max Boot, hardly back down when asked whether their predictions of global gloom and doom had been proven right in the first year of the Trump presidency. Both men, lifelong Republicans and historically minded policy intellectuals, offered unequivocal yeses in a joint interview for this week’s Global Politico podcast – and castigated former friends inside the party they’ve both now renounced as “Vichy Republicans” for collaborating with a president they believe is not fit to hold office.

If anything, I found the two even more terrified about the Trump presidency at the end of Year One – filled with the sort of to-the-barricades warnings I’m still not used to hearing from learned defense wonks like Boot, who’s spent a career advising politicians like Republican Senator John McCain from establishment precincts like the Wall Street Journal op-ed page and the Council on Foreign Relations. “In many ways,” Boot said, “the damage he’s doing at home is even worse, where he’s undermining the rule of law. He’s obstructing justice. He’s lending the support of the presidency to monsters like Roy Moore. He is exacerbating race relations. He is engaging in the most blatant xenophobia, racism and general bigotry that we have seen from the White House.”

An honest assessment shows that there have been a couple of real disappoints in Trump’s first year, but even more pleasant surprises. Boot and Cohen come across as unhinged.

BREAKING: Matthew Peterson withdraws his nomination following “wince-inducing” testimony.

SALENA ZITO: Why depression and suicide are rampant among American farmers.

Menn sees the crippling impact of depression several times a week at the clinic. The first thing he does is make sure visitors are getting counseling “and then we utilize medication like SSRI’s (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) . . . which makes it harder for the patient to get to the darkest point of depression,” he said.

When he heard about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released in 2016, which showed farmers take their lives more often than people in any other occupation in this country, including the military, he was not surprised. “There is particularly a lot of depression in rural society. It happens for a lot of different reasons. A lot of it is our roller-coaster economics. People outside of farming, I think, understand that farming is hard work. What they don’t understand is the depth of the lows that can hit you at any one time, with just one small problem that can lead to hundreds of little problems.

“I just had the discussion today with my son-in-law,” he explained. “We sold feeder steers. We missed by about 50 pounds what we were hoping to get. Well, that was about another $15,000 worth of income we’re not going to have. That’s a big deal, because the margins are so tough.”

Yet another well-told, underreported story from Salena.

BUT OF COURSE: Italian Veterans Group Ordered to Remove Christmas Tree to Avoid ‘Offending’ Muslims.

Prosciutto, anyone?

RASMUSSEN: 48% See Anti-Trump Bias in Senior FBI, Justice Officials.

NEW YORK TIMES: As Venezuela Collapses, Children Are Dying of Hunger.

The word “socialist” appears only twice, and only in the third-to-last paragraph — and even then, only in the context of “critics say”:

The Venezuelan government has used food to keep the Socialists in power, critics say. Before recent elections, people living in government housing projects said they were visited by representatives of their local Socialist community councils — the government-aligned groups that organize the delivery of boxes of cheap food — and threatened with being cut off if they did not vote for the government.

Of course, it isn’t exactly surprising that the onetime employer of Walter Duranty could launch a five-month investigation into Venezuela’s food shortage without ever locating the real killers.

NEWS YOU CAN (STILL) USE: Six Tips for Getting the Right Christmas Present(s) for Your Wife.

PERSONNEL IS POLICY: Washington Bureaucrats Are Chipping Away at Trump’s Agenda.

The professional bureaucracy has turned out to be more corrupt than the spoils system it was supposed to clean up.

BREAKING: Amtrak Train Derails Onto Highway Near Seattle.

FLASHBACK: Al-Qaeda Targets D.C. to Boston Line, Hazmat Cargo Trains in DIY Derailment Guide.

MORE: Multiple fatalities reported.

JAIME MCINTYRE: 5 things you should know about Trump’s new national security strategy.

Here are four:

What role does the strategy play in shaping policy? Think of the National Security Strategy as a mission statement, one that translates the president’s vision into a series of practical principles that serve as guide to policy decisions on everything from involvement in foreign wars to immigration law. In a recent speech, national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster called it “a dramatic rethinking of American foreign policy from previous decades.”

What are its guiding principles? The full strategy will be released Monday in conjunction with the president’s remarks, but McMaster has already sketched its four pillars in broad terms. They are: Protecting the homeland, advancing American prosperity, preserving peace through strength, and enhancing American influence.

Who wrote it? The NSS is largely a product of the National Security Council, including McMaster, his outgoing deputy Dina Powell, and Nadia Schadlow, a close confidant of McMaster. But the document was fashioned with input from experts inside and outside government, including members of Congress, think tanks, and industry CEOs.

How is it different? Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. focused on the “big 4 plus 1,” which is threats from China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, plus terrorism. The Trump strategy also names China and Russia as “revisionist powers,” and North Korea and Iran as “rogue regimes.” But it also defines the threats in terms of economic competition, not just military strength.

Almost anything would be an improvement over prostrating ourselves in almost every way imaginable to protect and enrich Iran’s mullahs regime.

BRIDGET JOHNSON: What Religion is a Libertarian? Party Wants to Find Out.

The party opened an online poll to get a feel of their faith makeup, in the spirit of the holiday season. In additional to denominations of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikh, Buddhist, agnostic, atheist, etc., Wiccan, Druid and Pagan are included among the choices.

“We have freedom of religion in the United States and more than 100 religions flourishing. Religious groups aren’t at war with each other inside America. People see that freedom of religion works,” said executive director Wes Benedict in an email inviting party supporters to share their beliefs.

“In religion, as in all things, Libertarians are a diverse group. I think this is one of the great beauties of Libertarianism. We have devout Christians working side-by-side with staunch atheists working side-by-side with Jews and Muslims and pagans and people of every other religious conviction,” he added.

It’s much easier for people to get along when no one is pushing for compulsory conformity.

DIRTY LITTLE SECRET: Coal Is Fueling Bitcoin’s Meteoric Rise.

Eight 100-meter-long metal warehouses in northern China are a case in point. Bitmain Technologies Ltd. runs a server farm in Erdors, Inner Mongolia, with about 25,000 computers dedicated to solving the encrypted calculations that generate each bitcoin. The entire operation runs on electricity produced with coal, as do a growing number of cryptocurrency “mines” popping up in China.

The global industry’s power use already may equal 3 million U.S. homes, topping the individual consumption of 159 countries, according to the Digiconomist Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index. As more bitcoin is created, the difficulty rate of token-generating calculations increases, as does the need for electricity.

“This has become a dirty thing to produce,” said Christopher Chapman, a London-based analyst at Citigroup Inc.

Where’s the outcry from Silicon Valley?

ALL WITHIN THE STATE, NOTHING OUTSIDE THE STATE, NOTHING AGAINST THE STATE: Venezuela Will Force Bitcoin Miners to Register With the Government.

No one will be surprised to hear the Venezuelan government isn’t too keen on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Since Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can’t be regulated or controlled by the government in any official capacity, they could damage the country’s brittle economy even further. As a result, the government has imposed new rules for anyone mining cryptocurrency.

To be more specific, all miners will now be taxed and required to register with the government. Being taxed is not entirely illogical, but the registration requirement is pretty worrisome, to say the least. The government shouldn’t need to know who is doing what in regards to crypto trading and mining. Nevertheless, authorities want to know who is mining, where they are located, and what type of equipment they use.

That’ll put food back on the shelves.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Mueller Fake Firing, Obama Admin Gave Pass to Iranian Narcoterrorists and Much, Much More.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS: Anti-Trump Liberal Activist Group Pulls in Another $400,000 In Gov’t Grants.

Make the Road New York (MRNY), a New York City-based Latino immigrant group with nearly 20,000 dues-paying members, is closely linked to an $80 million dollar anti-Trump network and an approved funding group of the Democracy Alliance, a secretive liberal donor network.

MRNY has already hauled in millions of dollars in government grants. Between 2002 and 2014, the group was the recipient of more than $20 million in grants, the Washington Free Beacon previously reported. The amount that they received in 2015 and 2016 are not fully known, given the group’s most recently available tax form is from 2014.

According to USASpending, a site that tracks federal government grants, MRNY was given $725,000 in grants in 2015 and more than $4.4 million in 2016. However, figures on the site show only a fraction of the total amount in government grants the group has received in previous years as marked on their tax forms.

On August 10, MRNY was awarded another grant totaling $420,000 from the Department of Education, records show.

MRNY was behind the widely covered protests at the JFK airport following Trump’s initial travel ban. The protests, which were billed as spontaneous at the time, were later found to be in the works since one day after the presidential election.

Start stripping Washington of money and power and this sort of thing won’t be such a problem.

HE’S NOT SAYING IT’S ALIENS… ACTUALLY, THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT HE’S SAYING: Former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge hints Pentagon UFO disclosure is only the beginning: ‘There’s a lot more s–t coming.’

According to DeLonge, disclosures like Saturday’s report are “only the tip of the spear,” and further “confirmation” of extraterrestrial life will continue to trickle out.

DeLonge claims the U.S. government has not only known about the existence of alien life for decades, but that they’ve also been actively experimenting with alien technologies.

And while this information has largely been hidden from the general public, DeLonge wants to lead what he believes will be an international – and perhaps, one day, intergalactic — conversation about how these soon-to-be-declassified technologies can benefit mankind.

One such innovation is what DeLonge refers to as “engineering the space-time metric,” which is being developed by Dr. Hal Puthoff, a longtime government physicist and a current To the Stars partner.

“It’s like a time machine,” DeLonge said. “You get into this craft and you turn it on — boom! — you’re in China in one minute as a ball of light.”

The speedy travel is nice, but manifesting as a ball of light does make it more difficult to enjoy the local cuisine.

MICHAEL WALSH: How Much Does the ‘New York Times’ Hate Donald Trump?

SILENCE IS GOLDEN: NBC silent on whether MSNBC’s Chris Matthews could face other sexual harassment accusations.

THEY NEED WIDER POWERS! Prosecutors Treat Opioid Overdoses as Homicides, Snagging Friends, Relatives.

Police ​are increasingly investigating opioid overdoses as homicides and prosecuting addicts who procure drugs for others. Heroin user Fred Rebmann was recently sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. Video: Jake Nicol/WSJ; Photo Illustration: Heather Seidel/WSJ

Fueled by a flood of heroin laced with fentanyl and other powerful synthetic opioids, the overdose death rate in Hamilton County more than tripled between 2006 and 2016 to 50 per 100,000 people, or four times as many as those killed in traffic accidents. Nationally, some 64,000 Americans died from overdoses last year, up 86% from 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A newly created heroin task force in Hamilton County has investigated hundreds of deaths in the past two years, resulting in a dozen involuntary manslaughter indictments in state court and 13 federal indictments for distribution of controlled substances resulting in death.

But in courtrooms around the country, prosecutors are also sweeping up low-level dealers who are addicts trying to support their habit, as well as friends and family members of overdose victims who bought or shared drugs with the deceased. Some critics of the prosecution tactic say these users need treatment, not harsh prison sentences.

That doesn’t look very much like justice.

THANKS, OBAMA: The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook. “An ambitious U.S. task force targeting Hezbollah’s billion-dollar criminal enterprise ran headlong into the White House’s desire for a nuclear deal with Iran.”

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.

Read the whole thing.

RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE: Mystery Pooper Is Running Amok in Buffalo Suburb.

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: 8 Worst Defenses Of FBI Agent’s Anti-Trump ‘Insurance Policy’ Texts.

SOMETIMES NOT-SO-SECRETLY: 5 Things Women Do That Secretly Annoy Men.

SEA STORY: Two men sentenced in baby eel trafficking scheme.