NON-BACKLASH: Michigan Student Made Up Anti-Muslim Hate Crime.

Several days after the U.S presidential election in November, a female student at the University of Michigan reported being attacked by a man who threatened that if she did not remove her hijab, her would set her on fire.

The student told police that the obeyed the man’s order before fleeing the scene and reporting the incident. She described the perpetrator as a white male between the ages of 20 and 30. University police alerted students of the alleged crime, and said they were “disturbed by this report of hate crime in our community.” The FBI was called in to investigate.

Now police in Ann Arbor have determined that the “hate crime” never happened. After conducting multiple interviews and reviewing surveillance footage, investigators found “numerous inconsistencies” in the alleged victim’s statements, which led them to conclude that she made it all up.

Well, it’s not like she was kicked off a Delta flight for speaking Arabic.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: DOJ-FBI Fails to Investigate Crimes Against the Electoral College.

FASTER, PLEASE: The oil industry must brace for five energy “tsunamis” that threaten to drag prices as low as $10 a barrel in less than a decade.

The falling cost of solar power and battery storage, rising sales of electric vehicles, increasingly “smart” buildings and cheap hydrogen will all weigh on crude, Thierry Lepercq, head of research, technology and innovation at the French energy company, said in an interview.

“Even if oil demand continues to climb until 2025, its price could drop to $10 if markets anticipate a significant fall in demand,” Lepercq said at his office near Paris. Crude last slumped to that level in 1998.

“Solar, battery storage, electrical and hydrogen vehicles, and connected devices are in a ‘J’ curve,” he said. “Hydrogen is the missing link in a 100 percent renewable-energy system, but technological bricks already exist.”

Bring ’em on.

WELL, YES: NY Times Editorial Calling To Abolish The Electoral College Is Historically Inaccurate Garbage.

It’s almost as if the New York Times editorial board was taken over by fools from Media Matters, Salon, Slate, and Think Progress. It is the only rational explanation for their unhinged rant against the electoral college in their Monday edition. It is bereft of any facts about the actual creation of the electoral college. Instead, it relies on revisionist history, claiming the electoral college was birthed due to slavery:

The Electoral College, which is written into the Constitution, is more than just a vestige of the founding era; it is a living symbol of America’s original sin. When slavery was the law of the land, a direct popular vote would have disadvantaged the Southern states, with their large disenfranchised populations. Counting those men and women as three-fifths of a white person, as the Constitution originally did, gave the slave states more electoral votes.

This kind of thinking is lazy in that it doesn’t seek to make an argument, but instead, projects on to others the motives the Times editorial can use to shame people into agreeing with them. “The Electoral College exists due to slavery. Why on earth would you continue to defend such a system?” They don’t rely on facts or logic. Their goal is to tug at emotional heartstrings and hope people won’t pay attention to their complete lack of historical coherence.

How’s that workin’ out for them?

I’LL HAVE THE RIBEYE AND THE PORTERHOUSE: New study insists larger portions of beef and pork can actually be GOOD for blood pressure.

Indeed, nutritional guidelines in both the UK and the US advise eating no more than 70g of beef, pork, or steak per day.

But a new review of clinical trials from Purdue University has found quite the opposite.

According to the study, eating more than the recommended daily amount of red meat does not affect short-term heart disease risk factors, such as blood pressure and blood cholesterol.

In fact, they found unprocessed red meat to be a good source of nutrients for patients.

The science is settled. You don’t want to argue with science, do you?

MAD DUCK: Obama plans up to 18 more Guantanamo prisoner transfers before leaving office.

The Obama administration notified Congress it intends to send the detainees, nearly a third of the remaining 59 held at the U.S. naval base in Cuba, to at least four countries, including Italy, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, before President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20, the source said.

The notification came just before this week’s deadline, which by law requires Obama to give Congress 30 days’ warning before moving prisoners out of Guantanamo. It will be the last in a flurry of recent transfers aimed at leaving as few inmates as possible for the next administration.

But the transfer plan – first reported by the New York Times – also signifies that despite Obama’s pledge dating back to the 2008 presidential campaign to close the facility, it is all but certain to be turned over to Trump. He has vowed to keep it open and “load it up with some bad dudes.”

Compare and contrast.

TERROR DOWN UNDER — OR JUST AN ACCIDENT? Van drove into Australian Christian Lobby’s Canberra headquarters and ‘exploded’

A van reportedly carrying gas cylinders was driven into the Australian Christian Lobby headquarters in Canberra on Wednesday night, causing an explosion.

There were no injuries suffered from people inside the building but the alleged driver was receiving medical treatment for his injuries, according to reports.

The vehicle was allegedly carrying gas bottles when it exploded about 10.45pm, News Corp reported. It was destroyed and the two-storey office building named Eternity House was badly damaged by fire.

ACL managing director Lyle Shelton posted two images online on Thursday morning of a vehicle he claimed had been driven into the group’s office in the inner-southern Canberra suburb of Deakin.

“A vehicle has rammed our office in Canberra & exploded all staff are safe,” Mr Shelton posted on Twitter.

“I do not know the condition of the driver. Prayers appreciated.”

That’s all that’s known so far.

BLESSED ARE THE CHEESEMAKERS: The Foolish Reason The Federal Government Is Storing A Literal Mountain Of Cheese.

For the past few decades, the feds have been keeping a literal mountain of cheese lying around for no ascertainable purpose. As of March 31, about 1.2 billion pounds of excess cheese had been accumulated in commercial cold-storage freezers across the United States — the largest such stockpile in history, according to the Washington Post. That’s 39 pounds of cheese for every man, woman and child in the country — so much cheese, in fact, that the government has been encouraging fast food chains to create new cheesy-centric products just to get rid of some of it.

Perhaps you remember Burger King’s Mac n’ Cheetos, a plate of Cheetos coated in fake macaroni-and-cheese goop, then deep-fried for your sinful pleasure. Yes, that’s a real thing.

So why, you may ask, are the feds subsidizing such monstrosities?

Turns out, the national cheese stockpile is a glaring example of how the federal government’s addiction to subsidies has gotten drastically out of hand.

Read (but don’t eat) the whole thing.

RETIREMENT: Today Marks the Final Flight of the Venerable F-4 Phantom.

BAD IDEA: South Carolina Lawmaker Proposes Porn-Blocker Mandate for New PCs.

South Carolina state representative Bill Chumley (R-SC 35) has pre-filed a new bill in the legislature that would require all manufacturers and sellers of computers to pre-install and pre-activate porn-blocker software that can only be unlocked by paying a $20 fee to the state of South Carolina.

The bill, which Chumley claims is meant to fight human trafficking in the state, would fine any computer manufacturer who chooses to sell a computer in the state without the blocking software, unless that manufacturer pays a $20 fee per device. If the manufacturer complies with the install order, the machine could then be unlocked after the user pays a $20 fee to the State of South Carolina and verifies their age. Fines and fees collected from the scheme would be earmarked for the SC Attorney General’s Human Trafficking Task Force.

This unenforceable — and likely unconstitutional — proposal is really about shaming South Carolinians and taking their money.

It always comes down to money and power with these people.

AND SO THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE DRAWS TO A CLOSE: Percentage of Young Americans Living With Parents Rises to 75-Year High.

Despite a rebounding economy and recent job growth, the share of those between the ages of 18 and 34 doubling up with parents or other family members has been rising since 2005. Back then, before the start of the last recession, roughly one out of three were living with family.

The trend runs counter to that of previous economic cycles, when after a recession-related spike, the number of younger Americans living with relatives declined as the economy improved.

The result is that there is far less demand for housing than would be expected for the millennial generation, now the largest in U.S. history. The number of adults under age 30 has increased by 5 million over the last decade, but the number of households for that age group grew by just 200,000 over the same period, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Washington priced young people out of the housing market with the first bubble, and then priced them out again by re-inflating prices after the first bubble popped. If Millennials ever wake up to how badly Washington has screwed them, the political effects could be huge.

FAKE VIAGRA SELLERS HARDEST HIT: AT&T App Blocks Spam Phone Calls.

The service offers two solutions to stop robocalls. It can automatically block numbers suspected of fraud at the network level, preventing them from reaching your phone entirely, or it can deliver the call from a suspected number with a fraud warning on the display. The latter feature requires the user to be in an area with HD Voice support.

AT&T customers can activate the feature via their MyAT&T account or by downloading the AT&T Call Protect app. The app allows users to look at call details, receive spam warnings, block specific numbers and turn on and off Automatic Fraud Blocking.

The service requires an iOS or Android smartphone eligible for HD Voice. AT&T also warns that automatic blocking may block wanted phone calls, which means users would potentially have to manually whitelist certain numbers to make sure they aren’t blocked.

If you’re an AT&T customer, installing this app is a no-brainer.

VIDEO: The Celebrity Electoral College Video Was Edited to Support Donald Trump.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Six 2016 Movie Flops Explained.

ANALYST: Twitter is ‘toast’ and the stock is not even worth $10.

The microblogging platform’s chief technology officer, Adam Messinger, tweeted that he would leave the company and “take some time off”, while Josh McFarland, vice president of product at Twitter, also said he was exiting the company. Both executives announced their departure on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, last month, Adam Bain stepped down as chief operating officer last month to be replaced by chief financial officer Anthony Noto, who has yet to be replaced. Twitter has also lost leaders from business development, media and commerce, media partnerships, human resources, and engineering this year.

The departures prompted Trip Chowdhry, the managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research, and a noted “uber-bear” on tech stocks, to issue a note on Tuesday claiming Twitter is “toast” and “not even a $10 stock”.

Twitter was fun in its freewheeling early days, a sort-of 24/7 cocktail party you could visit when it suited you. But it never was useful at driving web traffic, and its signal-to-noise ratio got way out of whack, just as the company was making ham-fisted efforts at monetizing a platform where there wasn’t much money to be made.

The social justice warrior stuff of the last couple of years was really just the stale icing on a badly made cake.

ANALYSIS: ARE YOU KIDDING ME? The electoral college is thwarting our ability to battle global warming.

TRENDS: The New Swing Voters Are Suburbanites And Populist, And Both Lean Right.

Brad Todd:

Democrats in 2016 now know their coalition, and their platform, has become too urban and elitist. Hillary Clinton carried each of the nation’s 18 largest cities by large margins—and none of those margins was decisive in changing a single electoral vote. For example, even if she’d tied Trump in New York City, she’d still have won the Empire State’s electoral votes due to her 62,845-vote victory in the rest of the state.

Republicans, meanwhile, saw rock-bottom shares of the suburban vote go for Trump, revealing a vulnerability unseen for the GOP since modern suburbs were invented in the middle of the last century.

Both parties shed an important part of their historic bases in 2016 and their task now is to get them back. Smart analysts looking toward the next election should ask whether it will be easier for Trump to placate his educated affluent defectors in suburban cul-de-sacs or for Democrats to heal the party’s estrangement from white voters outside metropolises.

If Trump can deliver on his promise of Rust Belt jobs, then it won’t matter if he wins the South and the Midwest in 2020 by smaller-than-GOP-normal margins — just like it didn’t matter last month.

MIDSHIPTRANSPERSON NOT REPORTING FOR DUTY: Navy Abandons Plan to Use PC Job Titles After Sailors Complain.

AMERICA, F*** YEAH! The Electoral College is actually awesome.

Ed Morrissey:

Unlike governors, whose state governments have total sovereignty within their borders, the presidency governs over states with their own sovereignty under the Constitution. The role of the presidency is at least somewhat limited to foreign policy and questions that are at least loosely connected to interstate issues and enforcement of other provisions of the Constitution. For that reason, the framers of the Constitution wanted to ensure that the president would have the greatest consensus among the sovereign states themselves, while still including representation based on population.

That is why each state gets the same number of electors as they have seats in the House and the Senate. It reduces the advantage that larger states have, but hardly eliminates it entirely; California has 55 electors while Wyoming has only three, to use the Times’ comparison. Rather than being an “antiquated system,” as they write, it’s an elegant system that helps balance power between sovereign states with national popular intent, and it forces presidential contenders to appeal to a broader range of populations.

The Founders’ genius endures.

REMINDER:

Here's what the election would look like without the electoral college: pic.twitter.com/KUB0BoTqDS

— MARK SIMONE (@MarkSimoneNY) December 20, 2016

JACOB SULLUM: Obama has not issued more pardons and commutations than any other president or the most in a single day.

The [New York] Times called Obama’s total of 1,324 pardons (which clear people’s records, typically years after they have completed their sentences) and commutations (which let prisoners go free early) “by far the largest use of the presidential power to show mercy in the nation’s history.” As clemency expert P.S. Ruckman Jr. pointed out on his blog, that was clearly wrong. Several presidents have issued more than 1,324 pardons and commuations, including Harry Truman (2,031), FDR (3,307), Calvin Coolidge (1,546), and Woodrow Wilson (2,453).

The Times also falsely suggested that there’s nothing unusual about the dramatic backloading of Obama’s clemency actions, saying “most presidents—including Mr. Obama—have waited until the end of their presidencies before issuing pardons and making grants of commutation.” In fact, Ruckman noted, “most presidents have granted clemency early in their administration and continued to do so every month of the term.” Obama, by contrast, has had many months and two entire years with no clemency grants at all. So far he has issued 94 percent of his pardons and commutations in the last two years of his presidency and 81 percent in his last year. Ruckman notes that the number of clemency actions this year is about 1,300 percent higher than the average for the previous three years, compared to an average fourth-year surge of 73 percent for all other presidential terms.

Why the backlog?

BERLIN’S MOST WANTED: Police hunt ‘armed and dangerous’ Tunisian asylum seeker, 23, after his ID is found under lorry driver’s seat at scene of Christmas market massacre.

Police today revealed they are hunting Anis Amri, 23, a refugee who came to Germany earlier this year. His paperwork was found in truck’s footwell.

He is probably armed, ‘highly dangerous’ and a member of a ‘large’ Islamic organisation and has weapons training abroad, security sources say.

The suspect was also in contact with a ‘network of leading Islamist ideologists’.

Amri, who was born in the desert town of Tataouine in 1992 – a well-known ISIS stronghold close to the Libyan border – was apparently recently arrested for GBH but vanished before he could be charged.

In August 2016 he was arrested with a fake Italian passport and released but his phone was said to be monitored. He then disappeared in December, according to Die Welt.

A Facebook profile in his name shows ‘likes’ linked to Tunisian terror group Ansar al-Sharia, a Tunisian group with followers linked to extremists who murdered 22 at Tunis’ Bardo Museum in March 2015 and then 39 tourists at a beach resort in Sousse.

Amri has temporary permission to stay in the country but was due to face an asylum hearing.

I’d say it’s difficult to believe he was allowed to stay in the country, but it isn’t difficult at all.

SOCIAL MEDIA: EU accuses Facebook of misleading it in WhatsApp takeover probe.

The issue regards a WhatsApp privacy policy change in August when it said it would share some users’ phone numbers with parent company Facebook, triggering investigations by a number of EU data protection authorities.

The Commission said Facebook had indicated in its notification of the planned acquisition that it would be unable reliably to match the two companies’ user accounts.

“The Commission’s preliminary view is that Facebook gave us incorrect or misleading information during the investigation into its acquisition of WhatsApp,” said Vestager.

Creepy.

PROCUREMENT: Pentagon Arsenal Plane to Fly With F-35, F-22.

An “Arsenal Plane” networked to F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters would enable the fighter aircraft to maintain their stealth properties while still having substantial offensive bombing capability. If stealth fighters attach weapons to their external pylons, they change their radar signature and therefore become more vulnerable to enemy air defenses. If networked to a large “flying bomb truck,” they could use stealth capability to defeat enemy air defenses and still have an ability to drop large amounts of bombs on targets.

Such a scenario could also likely rely upon now-in-development manned-unmanned teaming wherein emerging algorithms and computer technology enable fighter jets to control the sensor payload and weapons capability of nearby drones from the cockpit of the aircraft. This would enable Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance assets to more quickly relay strategic or targeting information between fighter jets, drones and “Arsenal Planes.”

Aboulafia explained that air fighters being developed by potential adversaries, such as the Chinese J-20 and other fighters, could exist in larger numbers than a U.S. force, underscoring the current U.S. strategy to maintain a technological edge even if their conventional forces are smaller. An “Arsenal Plane” could extend range and lethality for U.S. fighters, in the event they were facing an enemy force with more sheer numbers of assets.

In the air dominance role, an arsenal plane should also serve as a flying warehouse for medium- and long-range air-to-air missiles. The arsenal plane would remain out of harm’s way, while stealthy F-22s detect enemy aircraft and guide the missiles to target — without losing any of their stealth characteristics and effectively with a much-increased anti-air payload.

LAWFARE: Families of three Pulse victims sue Facebook, Twitter, Google.

Family members of three men killed in the Pulse nightclub attack are suing Twitter, Facebook and Google, claiming that the social media companies allowed the so-called Islamic State to post propaganda and push its agenda, and saying that they are seeking justice for their loved ones.

The suit was filed Monday in a federal court in eastern Michigan on behalf of the families of Tevin Crosby, 25; Javier Jorge-Reyes, 40; and Juan Guerrero, 22. Crosby was a Michigan native, and Jorge-Reyes has a sister who lives there.

The three men were among the 49 people killed when Omar Mateen opened fire June 12 in the nightclub. In conversations with police that night, Mateen pledged his allegiance to ISIS.

Twitter in particular has been lax in who and what it allows online — except of course for certain conservatives and their viewpoints.

MAD DUCK: President Obama bans oil drilling in large areas of Atlantic and Arctic oceans.

Obama used a little-known law called the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect large portions of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in the Arctic and a string of canyons in the Atlantic stretching from Massachusetts to Virginia from oil exploration and the potential for spills.

The announcement by the White House late in the afternoon was coordinated with similar steps being taken by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to shield large areas of that nation’s Arctic waters from drilling. Neither measure affects leases already held by oil and gas companies and drilling activity in state waters.

White House officials said the withdrawals under Section 12-A of the 1953 act used by presidents dating to Dwight Eisenhower cannot be undone by an incoming president. It is not clear if a Republican-controlled Congress can rescind Obama’s action.

How is it possible for one President’s signature to mean more than another, or that Congress suddenly can’t pass new legislation superseding old legislation?

In any case, it’s long past time for Congress to start reclaiming the powers it has ceded to the Executive — but don’t hold your breath.