JONAH GOLDBERG: What Other GOP Candidates Can Learn From Trump. “It is true, however, that there is something refreshing about the way Trump talks. It’s not actually candor, though lots of people mistake it for that. Rather, he’s unfiltered. The one thing you can be sure of is that he hasn’t consulted with a political consultant about how to talk. He doesn’t worry what the liberal editors at the New York Times or the Washington Post — or, for that matter, the conservative editors at National Review — think of him. . . . There are many reasons the non-politicians — Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina — are doing so well, but near the top is the fact that they haven’t internalized the language of political consultants and pundits. They understand something the politicians have forgotten: Politics is about sales.”

Yep. And selling only seems easy to you if you’ve never done it.

WELL, WELL: Staffer who worked on Clinton’s private e-mail server faces subpoena, will take the Fifth. “A former State Department staffer who worked on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private e-mail server tried this week to fend off a subpoena to testify before Congress, saying he would assert his constitutional right not to answer questions to avoid incriminating himself. The move by Bryan Pagliano, who had worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009, came in a Monday letter from his lawyer to the House panel investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.”

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Politics Of Symbolism. “The Obama administration might have failed at everything it tried, but it has achieved a whole series of ‘firsts’. We have the First Latina to head OPM, the first trangender official in the White House, the first renamed peak in Alaska, etc. . . . But not everyone is aware of the absurdity of the situation. Many people actually live in this fantastic world; laughing on cue, clapping with the laughtrack and buying into the narrative. They don’t realize they’re living in a political Matrix. One would think that living in a lie for any extent of time is impossible. In fact, it is quite possible to live inside an unchallenged fantasy for a long time unless we deliberately challenge it.”

DOPPELTRUMPER: Yet more proof that Trump 2016 is the Bizarro World doppelganger of the Obama 2008 campaign:

WELL, THERE YOU HAVE IT: F*ck Your Rules: Why I’ve Decided I’m Going to Have Fun All The Time. The article, actually, isn’t as dumb as the headline makes it sound.

ISN’T SHE A DEMOCRAT? WHY ISN’T ANYONE MENTIONING THAT? Kim Davis, issue marriage licenses.

MILO YIANNOPOULOS: Sneaky Little Hobbitses: How Gamers Transformed The Culture Wars.

Despite the common stereotypes of gamers as losers, nerds and shut-ins, gamers proved to be the perfect opponents for cultural authoritarians. The left relies on destroying the reputations of their opponents — but how do you destroy the reputations of people who have been ridiculed as often as gamers? When you’re already hated by the left, the right, and the media, the only way to go is dank.

Gamers also benefited from being one of the few genuine grassroots communities, with few leaders and no official structures. Unlike the tedious “movements” that regularly emerge from college campuses – whether Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) or Slut Walks – the gamers have no radical ideology.

They are ordinary, in some cases really quite apolitical, people, brought together by a shared hobby. They have no grand social objective beyond protecting the medium they love from authoritarian scolds and they cannot be neatly categorised.

The more you try to paint gamers as basement-dwelling straight white nerds, the more paraplegic black lesbian World of Warcraft addicts come tumbling out of the woodwork. (Is that offensive to dykes? I have no idea. Nor would the lesbians in GamerGate give a flying toss.)

One of the features of GamerGate is that it includes people from every background imaginable. A survey on GamePolitics found a broad mix of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Gamers don’t care if you’re black, white, gay, straight, or disabled. All that matters is that you know how to game. They’ll even welcome right-wing bastards like me.

That kind of diversity and tolerance — the genuine kind — frightens cultural authoritarians, not just because they are so mercilessly intolerant to their opponents, but also because it undermines their view of the world. Gaming is that most hated of words in identity politics: a meritocracy. Who you are is unimportant. All that matters is what you know, what you can do, and if you’re being honest with yourself and others about those two things.

Read the whole thing.

THE DEMOCRATS NOW OWN IRAN. THEY’LL SOON WISH THEY DIDN’T, Jonathan S. Tobin writes at Commentary:

Obama got his deal despite the opposition of the majority of Congress and the American people. But the Democratic Party now gets the responsibility for Iranian terror and hate. By making Iran a partisan issue in this manner, Obama saddled his party with the blame for everything that will happen in the coming years. Munich analogies are often inappropriate but when Rep. Patrick Murphy (the likely Democratic nominee for the Senate seat Marco Rubio is vacating next year) said the deal gives us “peace in our time,” his channeling of Neville Chamberlain was no ordinary gaffe. In the years to come when Obama is retired and Iran uses the deal to make new mischief and atrocities, Democrats may regret giving in to the president’s pressure. But, like the appeasers of the 1930s, the legacy of the pro-Iran deal Democrats is now set in stone.

Nonsense — look at how it was for the Democrats and their operatives with bylines to make Iraq an entirely GOP issue only a few years after calling for the ouster of Saddam Hussein themselves:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5p-qIq32m8

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Woman sentenced for sexually abusing boys at Talent trailer park. “Shawna Marie Nerby, 25, of Lower Lake, Calif., was sentenced to five years’ probation after pleading guilty to attempted first-degree sodomy, attempted first-degree rape and attempted second-degree rape. She is a former resident of the trailer park. She previously had been indicted on two counts of first-degree sodomy, second-degree sodomy, first-degree rape and second-degree rape. . . . She admitted in court to having sexual contact in 2009 with two boys who were age 10 and 12 at the time, Smith-Norton said. The sexual contact came to light in late 2014 after the boys stepped forward and talked to authorities. They told police the sexual contact began in 2005, when they were about 6 and 8 years old, according to Talent police.” Would a male convicted of such offenses get probation?

¡INESPERADAMENTE! Study: 87% of Donations Made by Univision goes to Dems; Further Prove Network Bias.

And just as a reminder, “Jorge Ramos’s Daughter Worked for Obama WH, the Bidens, and OFA, Prior to Joining Hillary’s Campaign.”

WHY WALMART IS REDUCING WORKER HOURS, AFTER RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE — AND OTHER LESSONS IN REALITY from Kevin D. Williamson, including this:

“An unprecedented number of Californians left for other states during the last decade, according to new tax-return data from the Internal Revenue Service,” the Sacramento Bee reports. “About 5 million Californians left between 2004 and 2013. Roughly 3.9 million people came here from other states during that period, for a net population loss of more than 1 million people.” A quarter of that net loss was to Texas, where a state income-tax rate of 0.00 percent and low cost of housing stand in contrast with California. That’s not what was supposed to happen.

As Kevin writes, “You can loot California until the only people comfortable living there are too rich to care or too poor to care, but the people between those limits have cars, and they know where the local U-Haul office is.”

Speaking of which:

RELATED: Since I’ve been meaning to link to this quote for a few days now, and hadn’t yet found a decent hook for it:

People come here thinking of this as the center of innovation and entrepreneurship, and they see a street scene that looks like something out of a Third World country.

— The San Francisco Chronicle on the city’s turd and stench problems

Just pop in the Blu-Ray of Vertigo if you’d like an inadvertent documentary on San Francisco urban aesthetics prior to the arrival of the late ’60s and ’70s.

And if you’d like to hear Kevin explain economics and much much more in December in Texas, just click here.

GWEN IFILL CELEBRATES CLINCHING OF IRAN DEAL: “The non-journalist from a supposedly non-partisan public television network spitefully and sarcastically rubbed the prime minister of Israel’s face into it,” Rick Moran writes at the PJ Tatler.

In October of 2008, Ifill moderated the vice presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden while having a book scheduled to be published the following January titled The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Obviously, “the breakthrough” couldn’t occur unless Obama won in November, but that Candy Crowley-sized conflict of interest didn’t deter Ifill from serving as moderator. Back then, I titled my post on Ifill’s ginormous bias as “Writing the Last Chapter First.”

But with lame duck Democrat Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) willing to take one for the team as the final vote Obama needs to override a veto on his deal with Iran, the real last chapter of Obama’s biography may have just been written. Fortunately for Ifill, as Rick concludes, “by then, a Republican will probably be president so Ifil and her Obama worshippers can blame them for their own towering stupidity in blindly following the dangerous legacy-building of their hero.”

UPDATE: Gwen Ifill, IowaHawk & The State of American Journalism in two Tweets.

THAT WAS SMART, BUT AMAZON BEAT THEM OUT. Report: Apple Tried to Hire Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May.

Maybe because Amazon offered a massive salary boost to all three.

AT AMAZON, deals galore in Training & Fitness.

And shop the Amazon Emergency Prep Store. Plus, Emergency & Long-Term Storage Food Deals. When bad things happen, it’s good to have food.

Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season. The Insta-Wife now loves our generator.

HOW TO DESTROY A CITY IN FIVE MINUTES: At World Affairs, Michael Totten writes:

Look at Tunisia’s resort city of Sousse on the Mediterranean. Two months ago, an ISIS-inspired nutcase named Seifeddine Rezgui strolled up the beach with a Kalashnikov in his hand and murdered 38 people, most of them tourists from Britain.

The police shot him, of course. There was never going to be any other ending than that one. And before the police arrived, local Tunisians formed a protective human shield around Rezgui’s would-be foreign victims. “Kill us! Kill us, not these people!” shouted Mohamed Amine. According to survivor John Yeoman, hotel staff members charged the gunman and said, “We won’t let you through. You’ll have to go through us.”

Tunisia’s hospitality and customer service are deservedly legendary, but that was truly above and beyond. It’s how Tunisia rolls, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. Tourists are not going back.

Read the whole thing — the conclusion is particularly chilling.

MIRACLE MAX WOULD UNDERSTAND: Transplant Surgeons Revive Hearts After Death.

Transplant surgeons have started using a device that allows them to “reanimate” hearts from people who have recently died, and use the organs to save others.

The “heart in a box” is a wheeled cart with an oxygen supply, a sterile chamber, and tubing to clamp onto a donor heart and keep it fed with blood and nutrients. Doctors say it may extend the time a heart can last outside the body and is letting them recover hearts from donors who haven’t been eligible before.

In at least 15 cases, surgeons in the United Kingdom and Australia say they have used the system to successfully transplant hearts removed from patients after they’ve died. Typically, heart transplants only come from brain-dead donors whose hearts are cut away while their bodies are still healthy.

So long as the people they come from are dead.

OLDER PEOPLE IN ENGLAND AND GERMANY getting smarter, but not fitter. “People over age 50 are scoring better on cognitive tests than people of the same age did in the past — a trend that could be linked to higher education rates and increased use of technology in our daily lives, according to a new study published in an open-access paper in the journal PLOS ONE. But the study also showed that average physical health of the older population has declined.”

Quick, Euro governments — hire Mark Rippetoe. It works! Just ask 92-year-old Gus.

BECAUSE HE’S JUST A CROSSDRESSER: More than 150 Hillsboro High School students in Missouri walked out to protest a male student being allowed to use the female locker room because he self-identifies as “transgender.” Good for them for resisting the siren of political correctness.

The 17 year-old student, who goes by “Lila” Perry, has not had any surgery or medical procedures to alter his male body. He wears a wig and wears girl’s clothing. So in my book, that makes him a crossdresser, and merely because he “thinks” he is a female cannot make it so. And of course, in true “victim” mentality, Perry is accusing all of the (actual) young ladies who are protesting his presence in their locker room as bigots:

“There’s a lot of ignorance, they are claiming that they’re uncomfortable. I don’t believe for a second that they are. I think this is pure and simple bigotry,” Perry told local news station KMOV.

This is typical far-left hyperbole, branding those who disagree with you as “bigots.” Transgender should be a label confined to those who undergo surgical alteration of their physical genitalia–you know, those who actually change their gender. It should not be so broad as to encompass those who subjectively “think” they are another sex, whilst still objectively possessing the genitalia associated with their genetic makeup. If it is a term that has any meaning at all, it must be judged by objective, not subjective, standards.

And I’m sorry, but “Lila” is clearly just a dude with a wig, and I wouldn’t want my teenage daughter to share a locker room with him/her/it:

A DRIVING APP that crowdsources the weather.

ABUSING THE EQUIPMENT: Watch 2,000 Volts Turn a Plasma TV Into a Lightning Storm: It’s… so beautiful.

BLOGGINGHEADS: Glenn Loury On Cops: They deserve ‘sympathetic regard… respect and gratitude’ for doing ‘a nearly impossible job… they’re not the enemy.’ I yield to no one in thinking that police need to be held accountable for misconduct, and that currently they’re not held sufficiently accountable. That’s not the same as treating them as the enemy. And, as I’ve noted, those doing so need to think hard about who the “thin blue line” is really protecting.

HEY, PRESIDENT OBAMA IGNORES THE LAW WHEN HE DOESN’T LIKE IT AND NOTHING BAD HAPPENS TO HIM. Justice Scalia explains why Kim Davis should issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples or find a new job.

Hillary ignores the law. She hasn’t been charged. And, hey, Kim Davis is an elected Democrat, so why bother following the law? Well, one reason might be to avoid The Coming Middle Class Anarchy, but given the leadership at the top, why should a mere county clerk care about that?

A VICTORY FOR OBAMA, A DEFEAT FOR AMERICA: Mikulski pushes Obama’s Iran nuke deal over the top in Senate. The GOP should make him veto, and make them vote, anyway.

YET ANOTHER MYTH SHATTERED: “What’s Mavis Beacon Up To These Days? Nothing. She’s Fake:”

One day at their office in Beverly Hills, during the creation of their typing program, Crane asked Abrams to join him on a trip to Saks Fifth Avenue. According to Abrams, there at the perfume counter, while shopping for a gift, Crane and Abrams met their typing teacher.

Abrams described Renee L’Esperance as a “stunning Haitian woman,” with “three-inch fingernails.” Crane instantly wanted to put her face on the box for his typing software. They got to talking, and despite the concerns Abrams voiced (“She’s never been near a keyboard!”), they soon made a deal. Abrams told us they paid L’Esperance a flat fee, bought her a conservative outfit that befitted a typist, and rented a business square in Century City on a Sunday, in order to take the cover photo. As for her long fingernails, Crane said “Don’t worry. We won’t show her hands,” according to Abrams.

* * * * * * * *

Abrams said Crane came up with the first name, “Mavis,” in honor of singer Mavis Staples. “Beacon,” had something to do with a “beacon of light,” Abrams said.

All of Scott Adams’ TRS-80 Adventure programs though were based on his real-life experiences, right? Right?

(Via James Lileks.)