SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET: 

CRAZY – From townhall.com:   Last week, Hillary Clinton pledged to spend $2 billion a year to find a cure for Alzheimer’s by 2025 – an admirable effort, no doubt. At the time, an aide said the program would be paid in the form of tax reforms and other savings. On Tuesday, Clinton gave us some indication regarding what those “other savings” would look like.  At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, the former Secretary of State suggested that to invest more in medical research, we should redistribute our military expenditures..."You know, if we put the money into Alzheimer’s that we otherwise would put into some additional military asset, just think of the lives it would save,” Clinton said... And if we don't increase our already depleted military, Secretary Clinton, just think of all the lives that could lose.  But I guess liberals don't think that way.

AND SHE SHOULD HAVE – From the Washington Times:   A key Hillary Clinton adviser told her that she may have to consider resigning as secretary of state after President Obama was caught telling Russia’s president off-mic early in 2012 that he could make more concessions on missile defense after November’s U.S. elections.  In addition, Mark Penn told Mrs. Clinton that Mr. Obama’s not-so-secret words “may be about the stupidest thing ever said by a president in foreign policy.”  Mr. Penn’s advice was made public on New Year’s Eve as part of the court-ordered release of Mrs. Clinton’s emails from her time as America’s top diplomat, when she used a private email server rather than the offered state.gov account. This had the effect of rendering incomplete years of document searches under open-records and oversight laws.  Clinton didn't resign.  She liked the glamour too much.  She liked being Secretary Clinton.  In her world, that's what counts, not national security.

BABY SOUNDS – From Fox:   An app that can differentiate between a variety of crying sounds made by babies has been developed by Taiwanese researchers.  The Infant Cries Translator was developed at the National Taiwan University Hospital Yunlin and can differentiate between four separate crying sounds by recording the sounds of babies and comparing them against a vast database.  Over a two year period researchers collected around 200,000 crying sounds from approximately 100 new-born babies, and uploaded them to an online database. Analysis of the frequency of individual screams among these helped researchers, led by Chang Chuan-yu and Dr Chen Si-da, distinguish subtle differences in acoustics.  This would be very useful in identifying students on America's college campuses.

January 2, 2016