ZERO MEASURE OF DEVOTION: Vets group blasts ‘secret’ VA ratings system.

A veterans group has blasted the Department of Veterans Affairs over leaked internal documents showing dozens of medical facilities performing at below-average levels.

USA Today obtained the documents and published them Wednesday, revealing the secret system.

The VA had previously refused to make the ratings public, claiming the system is for internal use only. It rates each of the VA’s medical centers on a scale of one to five, with one being the worst.

Roughly 45 facilities — many in the Upper Midwest and the Northeast — performed at an above-average rating, the report said, while 40 were below average.

The worst performing centers are in Dallas and El Paso, Texas, and in Nashville, Memphis and Murfreesboro, Tenn.

The documents also show that some medical centers have not improved despite scandals and scrutiny from Congress. The Phoenix VA still sits at a one-star rating despite a 2014 scandal revealing veterans died while waiting for care and that staff manipulated wait-time data there and at other VA hospitals across the country.

The VA announced last October it plans to allocate $28 million to the Phoenix center in addition to its annual budget.

Abolish the VA and give vets vouchers for the private health coverage of their choice.

MAY BE? Keeping Too Many Documents Secret May be Wasting Billions of Dollars.

MEANWHILE, ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE AISLE: Democrats Plan Fight to Save Obamacare.

The emerging strategy is centered around highlighting people who have benefited from the law and who would lose insurance coverage or key consumer protections if it goes away. “We have to lead with them and their stories,” said Jeremy Bird, a Democratic strategist who served in senior roles for both President Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012 and Hillary Clinton’s campaign this year. “This is about what Trump and the Republicans want to take away from working families across the country, and we have to make that very clear this is what we’re talking about.”

Organizers say they’ll announce details about the coalition on Friday, but the efforts could include rallies both in Washington and in the states and districts of Republican members of Congress. It might also involve television advertising, although Bird said the most important part of the drive would be mobilizing constituents—including Trump voters who would be negatively affected by repeal—on the ground across the country. “I think that’s more important than some barrage of national ads,” Bird said. “That strategy is not going to work anymore in the future. It’s got to be about grassroots organizing. It’s got to be about real people who are constituents of these folks making it known.”

This sounds all-too nice. Because it is.

If you — or GOP lawmakers — aren’t mentally prepared for the howls, the accusations of racism/sexism/etc, the tales of woe, and the panic-mongering, then you don’t understand how Democrats play this game.

The ugliness hasn’t even begun to begin.

JUSTICE? OSU Activists Complain Terrorist Was Wrongly Shot By Police.

An Ohio State University (OSU) student who attempted to go on a stabbing spree last month before being gunned down by a nearby officer has been added to a protest list of non-whites “wrongly” shot and killed by a police.

The OSU Coalition for Black Liberation is a campus protest group on OSU’s main campus in Columbus. The group held a rally Wednesday to protest the death of young black men at the hands of police, and read off a list of non-white men who had been killed by police in the last two months. Among the names read off was that of Abdul Razak Ali Artan.

Artan, of course, is the man who attempted to kill his classmates last week by attacking them with his car and then going on a stabbing spree. He was gunned down by OSU policeman Alan Horujko, who arrived on the scene just minutes after the rampage began and swiftly neutralized Artan.

If there is ever a time for the police to use deadly force, this would have to be it.

But to some, political correctness and race-baiting are more important than protecting innocent lives.

BAD SPORTS: More than 1,000 Russian athletes involved in doping, McLaren report says.

The findings come in the second part of an investigation by Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren, who announced the results of his inquiry in London on Friday.

His second report – which comes after WADA extended his mandate in July – confirmed the findings of the first report while revealing more about a system of covering up tests that was refined over time.

“The results of the forensic and laboratory analysis initiated by my team established the conspiracy that was perpetrated between 2011 and 2015,” McLaren said. “It is impossible to know how deep and how far back a conspiracy goes. For years, international sports competitions have unknowingly been hijacked by the Russians. Coaches and athletes have been playing on an uneven field. Sports fans and spectators have been deceived.”

Most notably, he said more than 1,000 Russian Olympians and Paralympians – in summer and winter sports – were identified “as being involved in or benefiting from manipulation to conceal positive doping tests.”

Mixing sports and politics never works out very well for sports.

HOLIDAY NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Host a Toddler-Friendly Holiday Party for Grown-Ups.

Good advice, but I’ve never done anything more than make sure there’s plenty of Duplo for the kiddos and plenty of cocktails for the grownups.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: “Does the US Air Force or America’s intelligence agencies have a secret hypersonic aircraft capable of a Mach 6 performance?”

I would certainly hope so.

FAKE NEWS: Newsweek Writer Kurt Eichenwald Falsely Reports That Trump Supporters Booed John Glenn.

It was a tweet, since deleted, but the mainstream media would be wise to keep its reporters off of Twitter during work hours.

THE SOFT BIGOTRY OF LOW EXPECTATIONS: Obama hails Obama for his anti-terror work.

“He gave himself an A,” reports Andrew Malcolm — well of course he did.

More:

Obama has struggled to seem relevant in these waning 43 days of his lame-duckness. As Americans’ eyes turn hopefully toward a new presidential administration under construction in New York City, simple static shots of a Trump Tower elevator overwhelmed once must-see images of Obama greeting leaders and reviewing troops in foreign capitals.

Obama’s got one long Air Force One voyage left: An 18-hour round-trip vacation junket to Hawaii next week at $209,000 per flight hour. But before then, he flew down to Tampa to tell Special Ops troops what they’ve been doing these last long eight years under his command.

As usual, Obama’s report had a strong emphasis on Obama. “On January 20th,” he said, “I will become the first President of the United States to serve two full terms during a time of war.” An unexpected boast from a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

You may recall Obama has told the military the biggest threat to national security is global warming. You may also remember he’s often said that defeating ISIS is his No. 1 priority. Your choice.

It’s nice to have choices.

VOTE AS THOUGH YOUR LIFE DEPENDS UPON IT: Trump over performed the most in counties with the highest drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates.

The president-elect performed better than Mitt Romney in many places, but he fared best compared to the Republican nominee four years ago in the counties with the highest drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates.

Shannon M. Monnat, an assistant professor of rural sociology and demography, created a data set with numbers from 3,106 counties. She found this trend to be true nationally but especially so in two regions: In the industrial Midwest, which is how academics refer to the Rust Belt, Trump ran ahead of Romney by an average of 16.7 percent in the quarter of counties with the highest mortality, compared to 8.1 percent in the lowest quartile. In New England, Trump did worse than Romney by an average of 3.1 percent in the lowest mortality counties but better than the former Massachusetts governor by an average of 10 percent in the highest mortality counties.

Overdoses, alcoholism and suicide are known by experts collectively as “the diseases of despair.” People often (but not always) turn to pills, syringes, the bottle and other self-destructive behaviors when they lose hope, when they don’t have the means to live comfortably or when they don’t get the dignity that comes from work.

These findings could be taken as an indictment of Trump voters, but I don’t see it that way. This massive outbreak of “diseases of despair” — and the resulting turnaround in voter patterns — is instead a stunning rebuke by those left furthest behind by eight years of hopenchange.

RELATED: My previous lunch hour item.

AND THUS ENDETH THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE:

More people now die of heroin overdoses than gun homicides.https://t.co/CU6FXDY3Tb pic.twitter.com/fsgLaV866R

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) December 9, 2016

Take Chicago’s skyrocketing homicides off of the chart and it wouldn’t even be close.

HMM:

BREAKING: President-elect Trump picks Goldman Sachs president & COO Gary Cohn to be National Economic Council Director – @NBCNews

— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) December 9, 2016

GORGEOUS: This telltale tail shows dinosaur feathers in ‘exquisite detail’ after 99 million years.

The amber hunters who dug up the segment in Burma (Myanmar) assumed the encased remains were vegetation, making the amber valuable when carved into jewelry. It probably did not occur to them that their discovery could be a dinosaur tail with secrets to tell. But a Chinese paleontologist named Xing Lida, perusing a Burmese amber market in 2015 for objects of scientific interest, recognized the amber’s true value.

“With the new specimen from Myanmar, we finally get that association between identifiable bones and feathers preserved in exquisite detail,” said Ryan McKellar of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada, a paleontologist and an author of the study, in an email to The Washington Post. Lida, McKellar and their Chinese and Canadian colleagues published an analysis of the tail on Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

This was not the first time that paleontologists examined feathers trapped in Cretaceous amber. But without underlying body parts, doubt remained that the plumage once sprouted from dinosaurs. This amber held eight vertebral segments as well as soft tissues. Beneath the feathers were, McKellar and his co-authors wrote, “presumably muscles, ligaments, and skin” — rarities in a discipline historically reliant on fossilized bones. (Chemical analysis even found traces of iron oxides in the tail, suggesting dino blood contained hemoglobin.)

This is a stunning find — photos at the link.

UPDATE: More from Kruiser.

FAKE NEWSKI: Census Bureau, IRS, And St. Louis Fed Added To Washington Post’s List Of “Russian Propaganda” Websites.

WELL, GOOD: Donald Trump’s Cabinet Selections Signal Deregulation Moves Are Coming.

Business leaders are predicting a dramatic unraveling of regulations on everything from overtime pay to power-plant emission rules as Donald Trump seeks to fill his cabinet with determined adversaries of the agencies they will lead.

The president-elect’s pick Thursday to head the Labor Department, fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, is an outspoken critic of the worker-pay policies advanced by the Obama administration. Mr. Trump’s choice for the next administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, is a primary architect of legal challenges on President Barack Obama’s environmental regulations.

Other cabinet nominees critical of regulations advanced under Mr. Obama include Rep. Tom Price to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, financier Wilbur Ross Jr. at the Commerce Department and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. All will require Senate confirmation.

Those picks suggest the Trump administration, backed by a Republican Congress, is determined to advance labor, environmental and financial regulatory policies more favorable to many American corporations, though not all will back his proposals.

President Obama engineered the largest increase in federal regulation in at least 40 years, when that progressive and self-described Keynesian, Richard Nixon, held office. There’s no reason to consider the results of just two years of Democratic legislative action and Obama’s “pen and phone” to be a new normal.

HISTORY: My hunting trip with Yeltsin killed off the Soviet Union.

The Belavezha Accords, which were signed in Belarus on 8 December 1991, broke up the Soviet Union and launched its constituent republics on the path to statehood.

But Stanislav Shushkevich, then chairman of the Belarus supreme soviet, had no plans “to bring up the question about what the Soviet Union is and how it should exist” as he went to meet Russia’s Boris Yeltsin and President Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine at a state resort in the Belavezha forest, he told the Guardian.

He had invited Yeltsin to a hunting trip there to try to secure Russian oil and gas supplies for Belarus during the impending winter. In the end, both the hunting and the energy talks gave way to more serious matters.

As the delegations gathered, they realised the political crisis would have to be solved first. After the August 1991 hardliner coup against Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts at reform, the Soviet Union had become “essentially ungoverned”, Shushkevich said.

The agreement they signed started the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose alliance of 11 of 15 former Soviet republics. But its greatest achievement was dissolving the USSR after 70 years without large-scale violence, Shushkevich said. Western leaders had feared that a Soviet breakup would lead to civil war in the nuclear power.

Russian President Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the USSR “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” But in fact, the Soviet Union was a “prison house of nations,” and its peaceful dissolution was a modern miracle.

FAKE NEWS: The Fact-Challenged Women of ‘The View’ Brag About Their High Fact-Checking Standards.

MICHAEL WARREN: GOP’s game plan for undoing Obamacare.

It didn’t take long for Republican leadership in both houses of Congress to get over the shock of winning the election last month and start gaming out a repeal plan. The details remain under discussion, but House speaker Paul Ryan, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, and Vice President-elect Mike Pence (who is working closely with Ryan and McConnell on repeal) are already coalescing around a rough legislative framework. The plan might be summed up as: repeal, delay, replace. More precisely, Republicans plan to repeal most of the law, delay the implementation of most of that repeal for at least two years—and figure out what to replace it with in the interim.

It’s a legislative strategy adopted largely from the Heritage Foundation’s recommendations. The think tank’s health care experts Nina Owcharenko and Edmund F. Haislmaier authored a brief in November that advocated a four-step process that begins: “Maximize the reconciliation process for repeal.” According to Mitch McConnell, this will come in the form of an “Obamacare repeal resolution” on January 3, the first day of the new Congress.

Why start here and not a straightforward repeal bill? While such a repeal could pass the House of Representatives with a party-line vote, the small majority Republicans hold in the Senate (likely 52 to the Democrats’ 48) means there’s no supermajority of 60 to override an almost-certain Democratic filibuster. So the GOP plans to repeal Obamacare the same way Democrats passed it: through budget reconciliation, because Senate rules limit debate (and thereby avoid the filibuster threat) on budget legislation.

This process, however, also limits what Republicans can repeal.

Read the whole thing, although it did leave me with one nagging question: ObamaCare was passed in its entirety via reconciliation, so I don’t understand why it can’t be repealed in its entirety via reconciliation.

JAYVEE: ISIS has flooded Europe with 1,500 highly-trained terrorists ‘ready to launch attacks’, chilling EU report claims.

An estimated 5,000 European ISIS fanatics went to Syria and Iraq and 15 to 20 per cent of them died on the battlefield.

Around 30 to 35 per cent have returned with “specific missions”, while the other half remained in the battle theatre – which amounted to between 2,000 and 2,500 Europeans.

This means as many as 1,750 may have returned, based on the percentages listed in the report which EU counter-terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove will present to EU interior ministers on Friday.

The report said there were two types of ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ returning.

It warned: “It is important to share information on returnees who are already back in Europe, those that are in transit and … (those) still in the conflict zone.”

“There are largely two categories of returnees: those in the majority who will drift back and those who will be sent back on specific missions, which are of most concern.”

Add this to today’s report of 100-200 ISIS jihadis in Trinidad , and the next couple of years look to be all-too interesting.

GOING… GOING… South Korea President Park Geun-hye, country’s first female leader, impeached in stunning fall.

Once formal documents are handed over to the presidential Blue House later Friday, Park will be stripped of her power and her No. 2, Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn, will assume leadership until the country’s Constitutional Court rules on whether Park must permanently step down.

Park did not immediately comment, but she convened a Cabinet meeting for later Friday where she was expected to speak publicly. The hand-over of power prompted the prime minister to order South Korea’s defense minister to put the military on a state of heightened readiness to brace for any potential provocation by North Korea. No suspicious movements by the North were reported, however.

The Constitutional Court has up to 180 days to decide on Park’s fate. She will be formally removed from office if at least six of the court’s nine justices support her impeachment, and the country would then hold a presidential election within 60 days.

JAYVEE: ISIS in the Caribbean. Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

In a recent paper in the journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, John McCoy and W. Andy Knight posit that between 89-125 Trinidadians—or Trinis, to use the standard T&T idiom—have joined ISIS. Roodal Moonilal, an opposition Member of Parliament in T&T, insists that the total number is considerably higher, claiming that, according to a leaked security document passed on to him, over 400 have left since 2013. Even the figure of 125 would easily place Trinidad, with a population of 1.3 million, including 104,000 Muslims, top of the list of Western countries with the highest rates of foreign-fighter radicalization; it’s by far the largest recruitment hub in the Western Hemisphere, about a four and a half hour flight from the U.S. capital.

How did this happen?

I’m guessing that dismissing the terror group as “jayvee” for a couple of years and then taking our own sweet time on a half-assed effort at rooting them out didn’t help.

SELECTED NOT ELECTED II: Clinton blasts ‘epidemic’ of fake news.

Hillary Clinton on Thursday decried the spread of fake news online, calling it an “epidemic” that Congress should take action against.

“The epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year — it’s now clear the so-called fake news can have real-world consequences,” Clinton said during a speech on Capitol Hill.

Some Democrats have argued the spread of anti-Clinton fake news online contributed to her electoral loss to Donald Trump.

Emphasis added.

This is all about discrediting Donald Trump, and the First Amendment be damned. Besides, it isn’t like Democrats haven’t tried at least once in recent years to repeal free speech.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Trump should troll the Democrats by taking this seriously, then announcing he’s going to act against fake news, then listing all the bogus stories about him from the New York Times. . . . Or maybe the GOP Congress should invite Hillary to testify on the subject. How long before she smells the trap? I mean, normally when one has lost the Executive and Legislative branches to the other party is not the time to call for government censorship of political speech on vague and mutable grounds.

FIRST CAME KANGAROO-PUNCHING, NOW THIS: French Farmers Strike Sultry Poses with Their Animals in This 2017 Calendar.

PROMISES, PROMISES: If You Like Your Longevity, You Can Keep Your Longevity.

2016, MAN: Boy claims he was fat-shamed by Santa Claus.