Morning Reads: Off-Duty Black Cops Face Racial Profiling in New York

Good morning! On this date in 1955, NORAD — then called CONAD — tracked Santa’s journey around the Earth for the first time, establishing a holiday tradition that continues today.

NYPD has a problem –> Reuters interviewed 25 current and former black police officers in New York, and 24 said they’d been victimized by racial profiling by white cops while out of uniform. Two-thirds didn’t report the incident to supervisors for fear of retaliation. All but one of those who did were ignored or punished. ALSO: Experts say that Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the man with a long history of mental health issues and criminal arrests who gunned down two police officers in New York last Saturday, probably took advantage of a loophole to gain access to a weapon. David Edwards reports for Raw Story.

Sorry, sheriff –> The first lawsuit against Obama’s executive order on immigration — brought by Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio and presidential birth certificate expert Larry Klayman — was thrown out of a federal court on Tuesday. The judge wrote that the role of the judiciary is “not to engage in policymaking better left to the political branches.”

Something stinks –> FAIR’s P.U.-ilitzers, which honor the year’s worst mainstream reporting, features some doozies.

Working the refs –> Brian Beutler writes at TNR that the Congressional Budget Office’s projections of how many people would sign up for Obamacare are turning out to be spot-on, just as Republicans get ready to “break” the nonpartisan watchdog agency.

Science fact? –> NASA has a proposal to send a manned mission to Venus. The astronauts would spend a month researching the planet from the safety of a lighter-than-air dirigible.

Cold War problems –> Below, via CNN’s Chris Moody, is a letter that John Kennedy sent a little girl who was having an anxious Christmas during the height of the Cold War…