CLINTON TELLS GOP HOW TO DEFEAT HER: “Her answers were terrible, but they were terrible because there are no better ones. And this is the Republican opening: She cannot move very far away from the president, because she was his diplomatic steward for four years,” John Podhoretz writes in the New York Post.

At Hot Air, Jazz Shaw notes “Clinton delivers bizarre performance in CBS Dem debate,” including this bit of clumsy tap-dancing from inside the exoskeleton:

The most bizarre part of the entire evening, however, had to be when Sanders challenged Clinton about all the Wall Street money she’s taken. She launched into an answer which invoked 9/11 and how proud she was to help them rebuild after the attacks.

“I represented New York, and I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is.”

“I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild,” said Clinton, who represented New York from 2001 to 2009. “That was good for New York. It was good for the economy, and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.”

At that point I was just staring at the television screen speechless. I was sort of hoping that Dickerson’s next question would be whether or not Hillary was smelling burnt hair at the moment because it sounded as if she’d had a stroke. I clearly wasn’t the only one, either. The bizarre, rambling 9/11 answer led to jaws dropping all over Twitter (you can see a list from the RNC here) including the Daily Beast:

“Clinton Is Having As Bad A Night As She Could Be Expected To Have, With ISIS Not America’s Fight And 9/11 Is Why I Took Wall Street $$” (Twitter.com, 11/14/15)

Which is yet another way that Hillary isn’t moving very far away from President Goldman Sachs:

ACTUALLY, HE’S REDUCED IT BY CONSIDERABLY MORE THAN A TENTH: Obama Has Decimated His Own Party Unlike Any Other Modern President. 913 lost legislature seats. 11 lost governorships. And a partridge in a pear tree.

CLAIRE BERLINSKI: Alive In Paris. “I never want to go near a hospital again.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: FYI: You’re paying to persecute a conservative college professor. “Only time will tell whether CalState’s free-speech warriors will defend Lopez even if they don’t agree with him. Likewise, the cynic in me doubts that the same mainstream and liberal press that hounded the University of Missouri chancellor and president into retirement for, well, nothing will cover an actual attack on constitutional and human rights by university administrators.”

FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS: Our Vegan Diet Almost Killed Us – No, Really. Happily, I’m absolutely safe from the siren song of cashew milk.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Jerry Brown’s weak response to oil scandal. “Last week, AP reported Brown “last year directed state oil and gas regulators to research, map and report back on any mining and oil drilling history and ‘potential for future oil and gas activity’ at the Brown family’s private land in Northern California ….” At Brown’s request, regulators produced a 51-page report over two days, even though elected officials are not allowed to use public resources for personal reasons. The state’s oil and gas agency called this a proper and legal use of state resources.” Yeah, I’m totally sure that the bureaucracy would move this fast for just anyone.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How does she do it? Botox in the neck, hair pieces, physio for the aching joints… Christie Brinkley admits looking this good at 61 is hellishly hard work.

WASHINGTON POST: A defensive Hillary Clinton lost last night’s debate. “For the first 30 minutes of the two-hour debate, the former Secretary of State was on the defensive about everything from the Obama administration being caught off guard by the rise of the Islamic State to her 13-year-old vote for the Iraq war.”

Plus: “To be sure, Sanders did not look like a commander-in-chief. And his insistence that climate change is still our biggest national security threat made him look out of his depth and unserious in the face of global terrorism.”

And: “The Des Moines debate will ultimately be remembered for just one moment: Clinton playing both the gender card and invoking the Sept. 11 attacks to defend her coziness with and campaign cash from Wall Street.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 920.

JOHN SCHINDLER: There is no intelligence or law enforcement fix to the threat Europe faces from global jihad.

Whether ISIS is really behind the Paris atrocity, as appears likely, will take time to determine with precision. It’s possible the operation was actually the work of one of the Al-Qa’ida franchises (for a good analysis of culpability I recommend this). Regardless, recent comments by President Obama that his highly diffident war against ISIS is going well, and the Islamic State has been “contained,” now seem woefully wrong.

Based on recent jihadist attacks in France, it’s also likely that the murderers were a mix of self-starters and trained killers. The standard questions that follow every attack—Were the perpetrators Europeans or foreigners? Were they members of any known terrorist group?—are less germane than the issue of whether this operation was under the control of ISIS, or anybody. In an era when thousands of Europeans have travelled to the Middle East to wage jihad, terrorist experience is not in short supply. . . .

As I explained back in January, after the last outrage in Paris, although France has very competent security services, among the best in Europe at countering terrorism, the number of potential jihadists is now so vast that no intelligence agency can reliably track and deter them all. Time and again, suspects on watch-lists go missing. In real life, unlike the movies, intelligence is never perfect.

Unless Paris is willing to contemplate harsher measures, such as the internment of potential jihadists, known Islamist radicals, we should expect more attacks. There is democratic precedent for this. In October 1970, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, a liberal icon, declared martial law, deployed the army in the streets, and rounded up nearly 500 extremists, thereby crushing the nascent terror threat in Quebec. Bleeding hearts objected but Trudeau’s famous response, “go on and bleed,” was telling – and he won.

If Hollande has the gumption to do something similar, France can still turn the tide against the jihadists and save many lives. “We know who they are, we usually know where they are,” explained a French counterterrorism official, an old friend, to me in the hours after the Paris attacks: “But will Paris let the gloves come off now? I don’t know.”

In truth, no experts in European jihadism were surprised by this latest atrocity. Given French and EU realities, it was only a matter of time. No experts will be surprised by the next jihadist attack in Europe either. Whether that happens is now up to the Europeans, with France in the lead. Although President Obama can help by doing something more meaningful than sending James Taylor to Paris to sing. Calling the enemy what it actually is would be a start. The fate of a continent is at stake.

I’m not expecting major progress for about 14 or 15 months. But I’d love to be surprised.

EVERYTHING SHE DOES IS FINE, BECAUSE VAGINA! Hillary Says It’s OK That She Takes Wall Street Money Because of Women and 9/11. “It was such an unusual answer, in fact, that CBS soon thereafter returned to the subject, displaying a tweet from a viewer who wrote that he’d ‘never seen a candidate invoke 9/11 to justify millions of Wall Street donations.'”

AU REVOIR? AUF WIEDERSEHEN? GOODBYE? What The Paris Attacks Mean For Europe’s Open Borders.

AT AMAZON, fresh deals on bestselling products, updated every hour.

Also, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food.

Plus, Kindle Daily Deals.

And, Today’s Featured Digital Deal. The deals are brand new every day, so browse and save!

JOURNALISM: CNN’s counterterrorism coverage raises ethics questions.

CNN on Friday came dangerously close to violating longstanding journalism ethics on hostage-taking situations and terrorist events, by live-broadcasting French counterterrorism measures as they were taking place in Paris. . . .

As counterterrorism experts geared up to storm the concert hall, looking to rescue the few who hadn’t been executed yet, a CNN producer, Pierre Buet, reported live on their movements from his hiding spot in a nearby bush.

“I believe this is police trying to get inside the building from the side of the building,” Buet said in a phone interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, as live images of the terrorism event played across the screen.

“There were gunshots five minutes ago and ten minutes ago. I believe these were gunshots from the police trying to get in the building, trying to break doors and break to through walls to get inside the buildings. I don’t believe these were gunshots from terrorists,” he added. “Right now, what I can see is police, those police and firemen trying to get to evacuate about 20 or 28 hostages from the first floor of the building.”

Blizter said, “Even as we speak right now, Pierre, you can see what’s going on. How close are you to the actual theater?”

“I’m about 40 yards away, yeah, 30, 40 yards away,” Buet responded. “I’m actually hidden in the bushes. Police have tried to clear off journalists from the scene, so that’s why I’m not talking too loud as you can probably hear. Police don’t want us journalists being here.” . . .

The Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school for journalism, advises that, “In covering a developing raid or law enforcement action, journalists are advised to: Be extremely cautious to not compromise the secrecy of officials’ planning and execution.”

“If staking out a location where a raid will occur or if accompanying officers, reporters, and photographers should demonstrate great caution in how they act, where they go, and what clues they might inadvertently give that might compromise the execution of the raid. They should check and double-check planning efforts,” the group added in a lengthy list of do’s and don’ts.

These sentiments cross national borders.

This is CNN.

GOOD: Ashe Schow: Students Starting To Push Back Against Campus Lunacy.

Across the country, college campuses are abandoning their purpose of education and expanding the minds of young people in favor of “safe spaces” and witch hunts. And some students are tired of being silent.

Voices of dissent to this politically correct culture began popping up sporadically several weeks ago, before the campuses of Yale and the University of Missouri (and many more sense) became engulfed in protests, in the area of anti-male campus sexual assault activism. In mid-October, George Lawlor of the University of Warwick refused to attend a “consent class” because, as he put it, he didn’t need to “be taught not to be a rapist.”

“That much comes naturally to me, as I am sure it does to the overwhelming majority of people you and I know,” Lowler wrote in his school newspaper. “Brand me a bigot, a misogynist, a rape apologist, I don’t care. I stand by that.”

Lowler was followed by a female pre-med student in California who wrote a response to “rape culture” hysteria in her public health class. She was lucky in that the person who graded her assignment actually welcomed her countercultural viewpoint, unlike so many others on college campuses and in the media who define any dissent as being “pro-rape” or “rape apologia.”

Another student, Thomas Briggs of the College of William and Mary, penned his own opposition to the hysteria, suggesting that what we face in America is a “hookup culture” and nothing like the “rape culture” occurring in the Middle East (despite what Ms. Magazine thinks).

While it took so long for students to begin speaking out against the suggestion of a “rape culture” — the answer to which has been creating kangaroo courts to oversee witch hunts against innocent young men — opposition to the current campus protests has been swifter.

Let the resistance commence. The campus “activists” are in fact a tiny minority whose impact stems mostly from being noisy and unopposed. They’ve bullied the large number of other students who have different views into silence, but that needs to stop.

UNEXPECTEDLY: “The three candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination had different ideas at Saturday night’s Iowa debate about what to call terrorists — but they wanted to leave ‘Islamist’ out of any descriptor.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Fiorina: Obama took a ‘victory lap’ on ISIS before Paris attacks.

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina on Saturday lambasted President Obama for saying the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was “contained” hours before a terror attack massacred Paris.

Fiorina said she was “angry that just yesterday morning, hours before the Paris attacks began and against all the evidence, President Obama declared ISIS ‘contained’ and took a victory lap.”

She also censured the president for downplaying ISIS’ dangerousness last year.

“They are not a JV team, Mr. President,” Fiorina said at the 2015 Sunshine Summit in Orlando, Fla. “They are not contained. They are at our shores and their measure of victory is the body count.”

Obama has shown no signs of making ISIS a priority for elimination.

FLASHBACK: Obama on Oregon shooting: ‘We’re the only developed country where this happens.’

ROGER SIMON: Look, Ma, No Islam — The Stupefying Democratic Debate.

How bad was it last night? CBS pulled the plug with seven minutes to spare.

THIS WILL GO OVER WELL WITH THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY: Convicted spy, ex-Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard to go free after 30 years.

Jonathan Pollard, the Navy intelligence analyst whose 1985 arrest for selling secrets to Israel set off a sensational spy saga, is scheduled to be released from federal prison next week, marking the end of a three-decade diplomatic burr in the relationship between the two allies.

Pollard, 61, had been serving a life sentence, but was granted parole this year under sentencing rules in place at the time of his prosecution that made him presumptively eligible for release this month.

Although the decision from the U.S. Parole Commission came around the same time as a sharp disagreement between the U.S. and the Israeli governments over a nuclear deal with Iran, officials from both countries have strongly denied the release was in any way tied to that arrangement, or was intended as a concession to Israel.

Hmm.

HILLARY CAMPAIGN GOES INTO SPIN MODE OVER 9/11 REMARKS AT #DEMDEBATE (VIDEO).

Of course, that’s in addition to the 9/11-related spin that ABC has been doing on her behalf for nearly a decade.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Trump: Paris attacks would have been ‘different’ if civilians were armed.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump says victims of the terrorist attacks in France on Friday would have had a better chance of defending themselves if they were allowed to carry guns.

“When you look at Paris, you know, the toughest gun laws in the world, nobody had guns except for the bad guys, nobody,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Beaumont, Texas, on Saturday. “Nobody had guns, and they were just shooting them one by one.”

The billionaire business mogul said the outcome would have been “different” if citizens were armed.

“And I’ll tell you what, you can say what you want, but if they had guns, if our people had guns, if they were allowed to carry, it would have been a much, much different situation,” he said.

At least 129 civilians were killed in France in a series of coordinated terror attacks Friday. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has taken responsibility for the attacks.

Trump also called President Obama’s plan to take in displaced Syrian refugees “insane.”

He was onto this issue quick.

INSOMNIA THEATER (COMEDY DOC EDITION): This week’s post features an exclusive clip from Can We Take a Joke? a FIRE-supported feature documentary about the threats outrage culture poses to comedy and free speech. Considering everything that has been going on this week at Yale and the University of Missouri, it’s very fitting that on Friday, Can We Take a Joke? made its world premiere at DOC NYC, America’s largest documentary film festival. There will be an additional screening of the film tomorrow, Monday, November 16.

Can We Take a Joke?, directed by Ted Balaker, is narrated by Christina Pazsitsky and features interviews with comedians including Gilbert Gottfried, Penn Jillette, Lisa Lampanelli, Adam Carolla, and Heather McDonald, as well as free speech experts and advocates like Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Jonathan Rauch and First Amendment attorneys Bob Corn-Revere and Ron Collins.

If you weren’t able to make it to the film’s premiere, don’t worry— stay tuned for more news about the film by visiting the film’s Facebook page, following its Twitter account, and signing up for email updates at its website.

 And, in the meantime, you can check out this exclusive video outtake from the film on IndieWire’s website.

I AM AWAY TILL TUESDAY (WHEN I’LL RESUME LATE-NIGHT DJ-YING): But I wished to share Paris.