CHRISTIAN TOTO: Denzel Betrays Own Message with “Roman J. Israel Esq.”

I’m willing to cut him some slack. Every big-name actor takes questionable roles, but Denzel seems to have taken fewer than most.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Another Conyers Accuser, Indian Warren and Much, Much More.

DAILY CALLER: Congressman Said Coke-Addled Staffer Tried To Shake Him Down For $1.8M After Sleeping With Him.

Texas Democratic Rep. Al Green had sex with a staffer who he said was a drug addict and then sued her when she threatened to go public with claims she suffered a hostile work environment, saying he “will not be extorted or blackmailed.”

Lucinda Daniels, his onetime district director, claimed she suffered a hostile work environment, claimed sexual harassment and demanded $1.8 million. Green sued her, saying she was using their sexual relationship to shake him down at the behest of other unnamed conspirators.

“Daniels has threatened to go public with her complaints if the Congressman does not per her money. Green has done nothing wrong and refuses to pay ‘hush money’ just for political expediency. Green will not be extorted or blackmailed by Daniels. He will not be the victim of a shakedown by Daniels and her agents. Green demands vindication of his actions and now sues Daniels for declaratory judgment relief relating to her workplace allegations and her quest for money,” documents Green filed in federal court in 2008 say.

The story stayed under the radar until now, much like Cokie Roberts’ belated admission that “Oh, we all knew to avoid getting in an elevator with Rep. Conyers.”

THE PARTY OF THE LITTLE GUY: “I didn’t report the harassment because it was clear nobody wanted to take it seriously. John Conyers is a powerful man in Washington, and nobody wanted to cross him.”

Deanna Maher, Conyers’ former deputy chief of staff who ran his downriver office from 1997 to 2005, told The Detroit News that the Detroit Democrat made unwanted advances toward her three times.

Maher is the second former Conyers staffer to go public with accusations about the veteran lawmaker. Conyers on Sunday stepped aside as the the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee amid a congressional ethics probe of sexual harassment allegations involving former staffers.

The first instance of harassment happened, Maher said, shortly after the congressman hired her in September 1997 during an event with the Congressional Black Caucus.

“I didn’t have a room, and he had me put in his hotel suite,” said Maher, 77, adding that she rejected his offer to share his room at the Grand Hyatt in Washington and have sex.

The other incidents with the now 88-year-old Conyers involved unwanted touching in a car in 1998 and another unwanted touching of her legs under her dress in 1999, she said.

Cokie Roberts’ years-long silence effectively empowered Conyers.

GOOD LORD: Oregon Pays $750k to Sexually Abused Kids Assigned to Parents Who Didn’t Speak English.

THIS IS DISAPPOINTING: NASA’s next flagship telescope is “not executable” in its current form.

A new report—released without fanfare on the Wednesday before the Thanksgiving holiday—calls into question the viability of the project. “The risks to the primary mission of WFIRST are significant and therefore the mission is not executable without adjustments and/or additional resources,” the report states. It estimated the cost of the project at $3.9 billion to $4.2 billion, significantly above the project’s $3.6 billion budget.

Produced by an independent and external team to review the technical aspects of the program, its management, and costs, the report is critical of a series of key decisions made by NASA. The addition of a coronagraph and other design choices have made for a telescope that is “more complex than probably anticipated” and have substantially increased risks and costs, according to the report.

It also offered a scathing review of the relationship between NASA headquarters and the telescope’s program managers at Goddard Space Flight Center. “The NASA HQ-to-Program governance structure is dysfunctional and should be corrected for clarity in roles, accountability, and authority,” the report states.

Just the surreptitious timing of the report lends it more credibility than NASA has enjoyed in recent years, but I do hope they get the bugs worked out of WFIRST quickly enough to make it a success.

WINNING: Keith Olbermann has nothing left to say, reportedly retires from political commentary.

And from the comments: “Trump broke him.”

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: New Venezuela oil boss to give military more PDVSA posts.

In a surprise move, unpopular leftist President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday tapped Major General Manuel Quevedo to lead PDVSA [PDVSA.UL] and the Oil Ministry, giving the already powerful military control of the OPEC nation’s dominant industry.

Besides the corruption scandals, Quevedo will have to tackle an attempted debt restructuring, within the context of a deep recession and debilitating U.S. sanctions.

Sources in the sector said Quevedo’s appointment could quicken a white-collar exodus from PDVSA and worsen operational problems at a time when production has already tumbled to near 30-year lows of under 2 million barrels per day.

About 50 officials at state oil company PDVSA have been arrested since August in what the state prosecutor says is a “crusade” against corruption.

Socialists always wage a losing crusade against corruption immediately following their winning crusade against competence.

IT’S “FAUXCAHONTAS,” MR. PRESIDENT: Trump Digs at Warren as ‘Pocahontas’ During Navajo Ceremony Under Jackson Portrait.

RACISM, STRAIGHT UP: IU Health nurse no longer an employee after investigation into controversial tweet.

IU Health said Taiyesha Baker faced an internal investigation by HR after allegedly posting on Twitter that “Every white woman raises a detriment to society when they raise a son.”

A spokesman confirmed to FOX59 that Baker was a registered nurse but declined to comment on which specific hospital employed her.

In since deleted social media posts, Baker claimed that she worked in pediatrics.

If so, IU Health might want to conduct a thorough review of her record.

AMY PEIKOFF: The Supreme Court’s Opportunity to Legalize Privacy.

Enduring, reliable protection for the data we share with third parties must come from the Fourth Amendment. This is precisely the opportunity presented by Carpenter v. United States, soon to be heard by The Supreme Court.

Carpenter concerns the application of the third-party doctrine to Cell Site Location Information (CSLI) collected by service providers. Petitioner Carpenter argues that, unlike other data shared with a third party, longer-term cell phone location data (here collected for 127 days) is something in which one has a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” (“Reasonable expectation of privacy” is the standard the Court uses to determine whether a search has occurred within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.) Accordingly, Carpenter argues that the third-party doctrine should apply neither to longer-term cell phone location data, nor to similarly sensitive data: “There is no basis in [the Supreme] Court’s jurisprudence for extending Smith and Miller [cases extending the third-party doctrine to ‘ordinary business records’] to CSLI, both because the information is more sensitive, and because it is not voluntarily shared with a third party in any meaningful way.”

Once you extend the scope of the third-party doctrine to “ordinary business records,” how do you draw even a semi-bright line, particularly one for which there is a principled rationale? How long is the “long-term” over which one’s data is collected, before one’s expectation of privacy becomes “reasonable”? Why shouldn’t digital information be subsumed if analog is? How sensitive is sensitive? And so on.

The Court should overturn Smith and Miller, and return the third-party doctrine to its original scope: sharing information with government agents in the course of criminal activity.

Read the whole thing.

BREAKING: Christmas Threat Against Times Square in New ISIS Santa Poster.

FAITH MOORE: Why I Won’t Be Sharing #MeToo.

BREAKING: Marine Colonel Announces He’s Running Against Roy Moore.

When retired Marine Col. Lee Busby read it was too late for a write-in candidate for the Alabama senate race, he said, “Hold my beer, we will just see about that.”

Busby told The Daily Beast on Monday he is launching his long-shot bid to stop Republican nominee Roy Moore from reaching the Senate.

“I have no idea if the allegations against him true or not, but I don’t see anything within his experience as a judge that qualifies him for the job.”

Busby said his state needs a choice other than Moore or Democrat Doug Jones.

“Alabama is not happy with the two choices we have down here. They are not appealing.”

Busby said he spent 31 years in the Marine Corps and on his last tour of duty was vice chief of staff to then-Gen. John Kelly, who is now White House chief of staff.

Since retiring, Busby has been the CEO of his own business and worked as a defense consultant and investment banker.

You think he ran this past Kelly before announcing?

ONLY IN RUSSIA: Ex-Russian minister says he thought bag with $2 million cash was gift of alcohol.

PATRICK POOLE AND THE NEW NORMAL: Europeans Decorate Security Barricades for Christmas.

OH: Flat-Earther Delays Launch In His Homemade Rocket, Saying ‘It’s Not Easy.’

“Mad” Mike Hughes, limousine driver and self-proclaimed flat-Earther, announced that he had to delay his plan to launch himself 1,800 feet high in a rocket of his own making. The launch, which he has billed as a crucial first step toward ultimately photographing our disc-world from space, had been scheduled for Saturday — before the Bureau of Land Management got wind of the plan and barred him from using public land in Amboy, Calif.

Also, the rocket launcher he had built out of a used motor home “broke down in the driveway” on Wednesday, according to Hughes. He said in a YouTube announcement that they’d eventually gotten the launcher fixed — but the small matter of federal permission proved a more serious stumbling block (for now).

The BLM “informed me that they were not going to allow me to do the event there — at least at that location,” Hughes said.

Clearly, BLM is in on the Spherical-Earth Conspiracy.

FAKE HATE: Black Man Arrested for Vandalizing Five Black NJ Churches.

GOP SENATOR TIM SCOTT ON ROY MOORE: ‘I Want to be on the Side of Right When the History Writes This Story.’

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: The Substitute Phone is designed to help smartphone addicts cope in their absence.

NOT EMBARRASSED OR ASHAMED ENOUGH TO RESIGN, OF COURSE: ‘I’m Embarrassed and Ashamed.’ Al Franken Speaks Publicly About Sexual Harassment Allegations.

CHANGE: Suddenly, Zimbabwe’s biggest newspaper can print exactly what it wants. It’s harder than it sounds.

For 37 years, it was the official newspaper of Robert Mugabe. Then, this month, the staff of the Zimbabwe Herald got an impossible assignment: They would have to cover the downfall of their benefactor.

In the days after Mugabe was detained by the military, editors and reporters gathered in a wood-paneled newsroom in an old office building downtown, trying to figure out what to do.

Should they back Mugabe or the military takeover? Did they still have to echo the party line? What was the party line, anyway?

Suddenly, a newsroom that had been the mouthpiece of the regime was without a censor.

“In the past we could never criticize the president,” said Felex Share, a political reporter, in the hours before Mugabe’s resignation. “Right now, we can touch anything.”

WaPo is sympathetic, having undergone a similar metamorphosis in the last year.

BUT OF COURSE: Teachers Attend ‘LGGBDTTTIQQAAP’ Sensitivity Training.

YOU DON’T SAY: In Greenwich and Manhattan, Tax-Hike Fears Fuel Talk of Exodus.

“It would almost be irresponsible if you weren’t thinking about moving,” he said.

The problem for the Connecticut hedge-fund set — and, more broadly, for a lot of the Wall Street crowd — is that Republican proposals in both the House and Senate would drive up taxes for many high-earners in the New York City area. By eliminating the deduction for most state and local taxes, an individual making a yearly salary of $1,000,000 — a figure not uncommon in the financial industry — would owe the Internal Revenue Service an additional $21,000, according to a preliminary analysis by accounting firm Marcum LLP.

Billionaire hedge fund managers have blazed the trail south in recent years. David Tepper, Paul Tudor Jones and Eddie Lampert are New York-area transplants to Florida, which has no personal income tax.

A final bill could still do away with the hike, but so far there are no signs coming out of Washington that will happen.

I had been assured that the SALT deduction in no way subsidized the Blue Enclave lifestyle.

PASS THE TURKEY AND THE AMMO: FBI receives single day record of over 200,000 requests for gun background checks on Black Friday – smashing record set on same day last year.

The bureau said that it received 203,086 requests for background checks on Friday, smashing the previous all-time single day record of 185,713 in 2016 and 185,345 in 2015.

Those records were also set on Black Friday, according to USA Today.

Background checks are required for anyone seeking to purchase a gun at a federally licensed dealer.

While the number of requests for background checks is high, the number of guns sold is likely even higher since one customer often seeks to buy more than one weapon.

Pat yourself on the back, America.