“SACRILEGE”: Amazon Prime slammed for streaming ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ with key scene cut out. “Viewers say the abridged cut — roughly 22 minutes shorter than the original 130-minute film — removes the iconic ‘Pottersville’ sequence, the pivotal stretch that explains why despairing hero George Bailey suddenly rediscovers the will to live.”

Buy. Physical. Media.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Merry Christmas! “I will continue to do a “Best Of” rerun of a classic Morning Briefing post on holidays and the day after holidays, but with a twist. I’ll be recording video greetings for each one. These won’t be behind the paywall. Still, I would encourage everyone to join us over there. This doesn’t apply to those Monday Post Office holidays that I barely know are happening.”

2026 PREVIEW: Wyoming GOP Sen. Cynthia Lummis announces she won’t seek re-election.

MAKING IT EASIER THAN EVER TO KEEP THAT NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION: U.S. regulators approve Wegovy pill for weight loss. “The Wegovy pills are expected to be available within weeks, company officials said. Availability of oral pills to treat obesity could expand the booming market for obesity treatments by broadening access and reducing costs, experts said.”

WELL, GOOD: US drops plan to deport Chinese national who exposed Xinjiang abuses, activists say.

THE HILL IS GONNA BE THE HILL, AND KINZINGER IS GONNA KINZINGER:

The Pulitzer goes to… pic.twitter.com/TqTBk61cc5

— Chaplain America (@RealChapAmerica) December 24, 2025

But wait, there’s more…:

Hey clowns, he also canceled it back in July ! @thehill is just another propaganda machine for the left. When they don’t have real news, they run with garbage. pic.twitter.com/K5QdqoLSKL

— Zough Lina (@GodisKing2024) December 24, 2025

He’s probably binging the final season of “Stranger Things” right now.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Newsom Loses More CA Business and Wants to Take Away the Farm. “I did not know that Newsom and his toadies in Sacramento were going after farms as a means of reparations. That is what they are contemplating legislating is so blatantly an unconstitutional land grab that the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, is now involved.”

MAKE AMERICA ROADTRIP AGAIN: Gas prices fall to four-year lows as millions embark on holiday road trips.

The average price of unleaded gasoline in the U.S. has been below $3 a gallon for most of the month — the lowest level since 2021, according to AAA. The association said it’s shaping up to be the cheapest December for drivers filling up their tanks going back to the pandemic year of 2020.

Fuel prices are down about 7% from a month ago, AAA data shows, and have tumbled roughly 43% from mid-2022 highs near $5 a gallon that followed runaway inflation in the wake of the pandemic.

The latest slide in prices comes as AAA forecasts a record of more than 122 million Americans will travel at least 50 miles from home in the 13 days between Dec. 20 and Jan. 1. AAA found nearly nine of 10 people on the move during the period — or close to 110 million — are expected to travel by car.

Travel is way up over 2021, and prices are down. Gotta love it.

MERRY CHRISTMAS: Christmas at the White House: Home Is Where the Heart Is.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Jimmy Kimmel to Face Ultimate Free Speech Test in U.K.

Jimmy Kimmel has failed one free speech test after another.

And, to be fair, he isn’t alone in La La Land.

Most Hollywood dwellers stood down rather than call out the serial speech attacks over the past decade. Consider:

The Twitter Files
Scary Poppins and her “disinformation” crusade
Cancel Culture
Woke thought police
Sensitivity Readers
Biden’s censorship regime
And so much more.

For every Rob Schneider, Bill Maher or John Cleese, there are hundreds of artists who stood down when it mattered most.

And, sadly, Kimmel’s nightly monologues missed all of the above. Night after night. Week after week. Year after year.

Why, it might just be on purpose.

Much more at the link.

THIS IS HOW THE ROGER CORMAN HORROR MOVIE BEGINS: 83K bags of frozen shrimp recalled over radioactive concerns.

UGH: One Test Short of a Pilot’s License — and a Catastrophe in a Major U.S. City.

“RELEASE IT ALL,” THEY TOLD ME. “BUT NOT THAT,” THEY SAID:

And the idiot congress critters that sponsored the bill wrote it so broadly that they’ll probably release post-it-notes before this is over. So now the same oxygen thieves ( @RoKhanna I’m looking at you) are complaining that they really only wanted certain documents. Theatre 🎭

— Steven R. Fields (@stevenrfields) December 24, 2025

WITH RUTHLESS EFFICIENCY: How Trump broke California’s grip on the auto market.

The Golden State’s power to shape the national car market is in tatters thanks to Trump 2.0. Where it took federal officials nearly 18 months in Trump’s first term to revoke the state’s nation-leading electric vehicle sales mandate, they accomplished it in less than five months this time around — and California has yet to come up with a way to counter it.

The result is a stark reversal from Trump’s first term, when California repeatedly slowed or blunted federal rollbacks — and often outmaneuvered a White House mired in internal dysfunction. Now, he is running roughshod over one of the signature policy priorities of this heavily Democratic state.

The infighting, sloppy rulemaking and a lack of clear policy goals that marked Trump’s first administration have been replaced by an aggressively overhauled government workforce stocked with MAGA loyalists and an eagerness to test the bounds of executive authority. Backed by more-seasoned agency staff, congressional Republicans in lockstep with Trump’s agenda and a playbook in the form of Project 2025 — the conservative Heritage Foundation’s comprehensive policy blueprint — Trump 2.0 has looked like a completely different animal.

It’s been a head-spinning 2025, and I can’t wait to see what this White House does in 2026.

BOY, HE SURE SHOWED TRUMP: Outrageous: Boasberg Demands Trump Return 130+ Terrorist Illegals to U.S.

COMMIES STEAL: North Korean agents are trying to infiltrate Amazon, chief security officer says.

“Their objective is typically straightforward: get hired, get paid, and funnel wages back to fund the regime’s weapons programs,” Stephen Schmidt wrote in a LinkedIn post on Friday, adding that applicants were using fake or stolen identities to pursue remote IT jobs in the U.S. and worldwide.

“We’ve stopped more than 1,800 suspected DPRK operatives from joining since April 2024,” he said, using the acronym for the secretive communist state’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “We’ve detected 27% more DPRK-affiliated applications quarter over quarter this year,” he added.

The fraud was detected by Amazon’s AI-powered application screening system combined with manual verification by its staff, he said.

Schmidt said that the agents often use so-called “laptop farms” — computers physically based in the U.S. but operated remotely from abroad — to conceal their true locations.

I’m less concerned with the money they took out than with the code they might have left behind.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump’s Economy Delivers Some Early Christmas Joy. “To the surprise of absolutely no one who has paid attention to the irresponsible, hostile hacks in the media, the word ‘unexpected’ was used a lot in the reporting of this news. It’s the same old thing: good economic news under a Republican president is unexpected, as is bad economic news when a Democrat is in the White House. They don’t even bother to avail themselves of a free online thesaurus to find a synonym. Thanks to the trademark lack of self-awareness on the left, the idiots don’t know that ‘unexpected’ is a running joke.”

MERRY CHRISTMAS, DAD: Hunter Biden rips dad Joe’s presidency over immigration, Afghanistan in stunning interview: ‘Obvious f–ing failure.’

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT LIKE THAT…:

You are the former communications director for the Lincoln Project, where your job was covering up for actual pedophiles! https://t.co/5UmH3NUYfW

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 23, 2025

EARLY THIS WEEK, IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: Trump’s Big, Beautiful Battleships Are… What, Exactly?

WAR AND PEACE: EU’s roughly $105B loan allows Ukraine to keep fighting Russia, changes dynamics of any peace deal.

The outcome, which was the result of difficult and uncertain negotiations, provides dramatic support to Ukraine’s medium-term fiscal viability. It means Kyiv can continue paying soldiers, maintaining domestic weapons production, and resist the temptation to accept an early and unfavorable settlement with Moscow.

The loan is structured so that repayment is designed to be covered by future Russian reparations or proceeds from frozen Russian assets.

The European Union and over 30 other countries signed what is known as the Council of Europe convention establishing an international claims mechanism for Ukrainian losses, a plan designed to increase pressure on Russia and reduce the possibility there could be a “normalization” of the country’s relations with Ukraine without consequences.

Exit quote: “The loans are likely to provide enough support for the Ukrainians to continue their fight for another year or more. And perhaps just as significant, they represent a rare example of European states acting in their own interests without any outsourcing to Washington.”

Trump’s tough-love approach to Europe is working.

ROBERT SPENCER: Cops Avert the ‘Deadliest Terrorist Attack in UK History’ — Guess Who the Target Was.

NEWS YOU CAN USE? Ready, Set, Shop: Use My Favorite Last-Minute Christmas Gift Ideas.

SPACE: James Webb Telescope Unveils A Dazzling Map Of The Early Universe.

THEY AREN’T SAYING IT’S ALIENS, BUT…: We didn’t find answers in 2025, but UFO researchers say the search continues.