ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Obama economy is trouble for Hillary Clinton.

THIS ISN’T THE 21st CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: Plagiarist Fareed Zakaria Calls Donald Trump a ‘Bullshit Artist’ on Live TV.

Flashback: Three major publications have acknowledged plagiarism by Fareed Zakaria. Does CNN have no shame?

Dude. This. Is. CNN.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: How a Secretive Branch of ISIS Built a Global Network of Killers.

The Islamic State’s attacks in Paris on Nov. 13 brought global attention to the group’s external terrorism network, which began sending fighters abroad two years ago. Now, Mr. Sarfo’s account, along with those of other captured recruits, has further pulled back the curtain on the group’s machinery for projecting violence beyond its borders.

What they describe is a multilevel secret service under the overall command of the Islamic State’s most senior Syrian operative, spokesman and propaganda chief, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani. Below him is a tier of lieutenants empowered to plan attacks in different regions of the world, including a “secret service for European affairs,” a “secret service for Asian affairs” and a “secret service for Arab affairs,” according to Mr. Sarfo.

Read the whole thing.

Allowing ISIS to metastasize from an unopposed “jayvee” in the deserts of the Levant and into a global menace might be the West’s worst unforced error since March 7, 1936, when France failed to confront a small force of nineteen German infantry battalions crossing the Rhine.

MOTHER UPSET ABOUT THE DEMANDING KINDERGARTEN-ON-STEROIDS SKILLS LIST HER SON RECEIVED:

The perplexed mother thinks her son is mostly ready. “He knows most of this stuff,” she says, “but no idea how to [teach] him all 30 letters.”

Commenters are speculating on how this [Hamilton County, Ohio] school came up with “30+ letters” to identify. Some thought maybe they meant upper- and lowercase letters, while others suggested maybe they were including some German: “The kid should know german – ö ä ü ß are all additional letters, that makes 30.” Sure, why not.

Thirty letters in the alphabet? Man, the 21st century really isn’t turning out the way I had been promised back in the ’70s.

HILLARY SEEMS TO BELIEVE THE FBI DECLARED HER INNOCENT: This Fox News video clip has made the rounds but it’s still astonishing. Here’s her bet: by October media misinformed voters will believe Comey exonerated her. FBI Director Comey ignored the law, but documented her gross negligence in great detail.

TRUMPSKYGATE: Whittle, Ott, and Green on Hillary and Donald’s Kremlin connections.

Full disclosure: I’m Green.

D.C. METRO TRANSIT COP CHARGED WITH TRYING TO AID ISIS.

THE REAL PRICE OF THE IRAN RANSOM: Whether ransom or quick “return of Iranian assets,” it appears the Iranians associate the $400 million they received via airlift with holding hostages. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce: “Hundreds of millions in the pockets of a terrorist regime means a more dangerous region, period. And paying ransom only puts more American lives in jeopardy.” The report adds: “Since the cash was airlifted, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has arrested two more Iranian-Americans.” Remember, in 2008 Obama promised “Smart Diplomacy.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1182.

ENERGY INDEPENDENCE: Saudi Economic Woes Leave Indian, Pakistani Workers Stranded.

Building projects have fallen off dramatically along with the drop in oil revenue. Construction contracts shrank by about 50 percent in the first quarter from the same period a year earlier, according to data published by Jeddah-based National Commercial Bank. The government didn’t award any contracts during the first quarter in 2016 or the fourth quarter of last year, the bank said.

More than 4,050 workers from Saudi Oger, a Riyadh-based construction and management company, are stranded, according to the Indian Foreign Ministry. The Indian Embassy is providing food to workers in 20 camps in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam, the ministry said.

If this keeps up, someday maybe even Saudi nationals will have to find honest work.

WEDNESDAY A/V CLUB: WHAT WE LEFT AT THE WORLD’S FAIR: “John Crowley and Jason Robards look back at a festival of social planning,” Jesse Walker writes at Reason. “‘The world’s fairs of the 20th century, Virginia Postrel once wrote, ‘encouraged visitors to equate progress and technological optimism with the Galbraithian vision of stable, heavily bureaucratic, industrial quasi-monopolies—the corporate version of nation states—working with government to determine the future.’ The World of Tomorrow, a made-for-TV documentary from 1984, looks back at the most famous of those fairs with a perspective that mixes nostalgia for that vision with an awareness that it didn’t really pan out.”

AS IF ON CUE: Russia Denies Involvement in Syrian Gas Attacks.

This comes on the heels of yesterday’s report that the Russians lost a combat helicopter on a “humanitarian mission” — shot down over the same rebel-held city where a suspected chemical attack occurred.

MICHAEL BARONE: The Coming Electoral Crack-Up: Will voter discontent shatter the partisan deadlock in U.S. politics this November?

Heading into the 2016 presidential election cycle, the most influential guide for political journalists was a 2008 book called The Party Decides. Written by four eminent political scientists, it explained that for several decades presidential nominees have effectively been chosen by unelected political insiders, as candidates fight in “invisible primaries” for endorsements by prominent politicians and interest groups. The voters, it argued, tended to ratify these choices and rally around candidates with widespread and prestigious support.

But like John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1967 book The New Industrial State, which argued that big corporations, tempered by big government and big labor unions, determined the course of the economy, The Party Decides turned out to be a better description of the recent past than an accurate forecast of the near-term future. . . .

One way to look at this election is as a collision of an irresistible force with an immovable object. This irresistible force is the widespread discontent with the direction of the nation today. The immoveble object is the persistent partisan divisions that have prevailed and intensified in presidential, congressional, and state elections over the past twenty years.

The sources of the irresistible force of discontent are not hard to discern. After resurgent growth and victory in the Cold War in the 1980s, and continuing economic growth in the 1990s, the 21st century brought Americans 15 years of mostly sluggish growth and a series of mostly unsuccessful, or at least inconclusive, foreign military interventions. Major legislation passed by one-party votes, notably the 2009 stimulus package and the 2010 Affordable Care Act, have proved to be far less popular than their sponsors expected. Major bipartisan legislation, frequent in Bill Clinton’s presidency and the first term of George W. Bush’s, has become rare if not extinct, with a President lacking the inclination and skill to negotiate and a Republican House majority often unwilling to trust its leadership.

This discontent found an outlet in the disruptive candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Each attracted constituencies different from those in his party’s recent nomination contests. Republicans in 2008 and 2012 were divided between countryside and suburbs, between white Evangelical Christians and less intensely religious groups. The divisions can be seen in the critical contests between John McCain and Mike Huckabee in 2008 and between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum in 2012. In both cases the eventual nominee piled up big majorities in the relatively affluent and somewhat less Evangelical suburbs, while his opponent carried rural areas and small towns, but not by enough votes to prevail.

In 2016 the divisions were different. White evangelicals did not vote solidly for any candidate, but split their votes between Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. Large suburban counties in many states gave Trump pluralities or even majorities. One clear pattern is that Trump ran better among voters without college degrees (“I love the poorly educated!” he exclaimed after winning the Nevada caucuses) than college graduates, but he got sizeable numbers of votes from graduates as well. Certain demographic groups resisted Trump’s appeal: Mormons, Dutch-Americans in northwest and central Iowa and western Michigan, German- and Scandinavian-Americans in Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest states. Other ethnic groups tilted toward Trump. A majority of Italian-Americans live within a hundred miles of New York City, and in that arc Trump won more than 50 percent of the votes, including 81 percent in heavily Italian-American Staten Island. In addition, he ran strongest not in Florida’s Southern-accented congressional districts, but in those with the largest number of migrants from New York and the Northeast. Examining the returns, I argued that Trump fared poorly with those groups with large degrees of what scholars Charles Murray and Robert Putnam have called social connectedness or social capital, and did very well with groups with low social connectedness. His percentages in Appalachia—from southwest Pennsylvania through Tennessee, northern Alabama, and Mississippi—were especially large.

Read the whole thing.

JOHN SCHINDLER: Why Trump’s Crimea Gaffe Matters.

Amid all these unforced errors in a single, disastrous week for the GOP, Trump made another statement that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves, between the Republican nominee’s other highly publicized gaffes.

This was a comment he made about Crimea, the Ukrainian region on the Black Sea that was annexed by Russian forces in early 2014, setting off what I termed at the time Cold War 2.0. On Sunday’s This Week program on ABC, Trump appeared to accept Moscow’s occupation of Crimea, indicating that, as president, he would “look at” recognizing Russian rule there, adding memorably, “the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were.”

Making matters worse, Trump then denied Russia’s military involvement in Ukraine, stating twice of President Vladimir Putin, “He’s not going into Ukraine.” This overlooks the well-known fact that since 2014 occupied Crimea has become a major Russian military venue, with the Kremlin publicly boasting of a hundred new units stationed on the peninsula. Moscow’s forces in Crimea include the Black Sea Fleet (with a cruiser, a destroyer, four frigates, five submarines plus numerous smaller vessels), while the air force recently showcased its power in a memorable demonstration of strength over Crimea. And let’s not forget the two whole Russian army corps—nine brigades plus five regiments—that occupy a substantial chunk of eastern Ukraine and are involved in daily combat operations against Ukrainian forces.

Many people, myself included, would have fewer reservations about Trump if he’d ditch Paul Manafort.

ULTIMATE MEDIA PRIVILEGE: HILLARY’S CRIMES VERSUS TRUMP’S MOUTH.

ROGER SIMON: TRUMP V. TRUMP: CAN DONALD SAVE HIMSELF AND AMERICA?

As Roger writes, the 2016 election is coming down to Magic Johnson used to call “winnin’ time.” Does Trump got game?

MORE ON NORTH KOREAN MISSILE SHOT: Stephen Green posted on this earlier, but there’s a chaser to this shot that —according to one report— landed in Japan’s maritime Exclusive Economic Zone. CHASER: Japan is promising “resolute action” in coordination with South Korea and the US. I’m not sure what this means, but the Japanese are very tired of North Korea’s threats.

A DUBIOUS DEFENSE OF THE BLUE MODEL:

Wealthy coastal states tend to vote for Democrats. Therefore, Democratic economic policies are superior.
If this reasoning sounds fallacious, that’s because it is. And yet it is the main argument of a widely-praised New York Times op-ed published last week by two of America’s leading political scientists, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. . . .

Put aside the fact that blue states have higher levels of economic inequality than red states, and that blue state spending has been fueled in part by massive public sector pension deficits (Hacker and Pierson mention this but brush it off). Put aside the fact that, according to Richard Florida, “red states, like Texas, Georgia and Utah, have done a better job over all of offering a higher standard of living relative to housing costs.” And put aside the decision to depict “Red America” as a monolith rather than a demographically, culturally, and historically diverse grouping of regions ranging from Appalachia (a major source of red state economic underperformance) to the more prosperous Great Plains and Mountain West.

The fatal flaw with Hacker and Pierson’s effort to demonstrate the fundamental defectiveness of Republican economic policies is even easier to spot than these objections: It doesn’t distinguish correlation from causation. We are supposed to assume that states like New York have high per capita incomes because they are governed by Democrats, and that states like Kentucky have lower per capita incomes because they are governed by Republicans. In fact, it may be that there is some third unaccounted-for variable (like geography or birthrate or immigration) or even that the causation runs in the opposite direction: That New York prefers Democrats because it is wealthy, and that Kentucky prefers Republicans because it is not.

It’s like what Nassim Taleb says about higher education — people think it’s a cause of wealth, but actually it’s a symptom of wealth, because only wealthy societies can afford extensive higher education.

BIG BADA BOOM: Trump asks why US can’t use nukes.

Donald Trump asked a foreign policy expert advising him why the U.S. can’t use nuclear weapons, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said on the air Wednesday, citing an unnamed source who claimed he had spoken with the GOP presidential nominee.

“Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump. And three times [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can’t we use them,” Scarborough said on his “Morning Joe” program.

It’s MSNBC and an unnamed source, so who knows if there’s any truth to this.

On the flip side, there’s nothing wrong with using a “leak” to put a little fear of God, Curtis LeMay-style, into America’s adversaries.

KNOW YOUR PLACE, PEASANTS! File A FOIA Request, Get Sued.

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PURGE THE UNBELIEVERS: Saatchi & Saatchi chairman Kevin Roberts has resigned following his controversial gender diversity comments.

In an interview published Friday, Roberts said the debate over gender diversity in the advertising industry was “over” and he spent “no time” thinking about the issue at Publicis, thanks to its 50-50 gender split, adding that the company had “never had a problem.”

Roberts also suggested that many female and male creatives did not take top leadership roles because they simply wanted to be happy and “do great work.”

Heretic.

HOWIE CARR ON OBAMA’S CLAIMS THAT TRUMP IS “UNFIT” TO BE PRESIDENT: It Takes One To Know One.

Brave talk from a guy who thinks there are 57 states, that they speak Austrian in Austria, that they speak Arabic in Afghanistan, who pronounced the state he lived in for three years as “Mass-a-tu-setts,” who pronounced corpsman as “corpseman.” Who thinks the Transcontinental Railroad was “intercontinental.”

He described Eric Holder’s wife, a physician, as a “nationally renowned ohbee-gynee.” He misspelled “Syracus” on his NCAA brackets sheet. He is utterly tongue-tied without a teleprompter. He makes “recess” appointments when the Senate is not in recess.

If he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. His grandmother was a typical white person. The Cambridge Police Department acted stupidly.

It never ends with this buffoon. Yesterday, in Singapore, he mangled the name of the country’s founding father. He can’t be bothered acting like an adult. He chews gum in public. Remember how he took selfies of himself with the Danish hottie at Nelson Mandela’s funeral?

The media were all over Trump like white on rice yesterday because he was goofing around with a baby at a rally. But Obama gets a base on balls on absolutely everything. If his middle name weren’t “Hussein,” it would be “Entitlement.”

All the more hurtful, because true. Meanwhile, here’s how Donald Trump responded:

Obama-Clinton have single-handedly destabilized the Middle East, handed Iraq, Libya and Syria to ISIS, and allowed our personnel to be slaughtered at Benghazi. Then they put Iran on the path to nuclear weapons. Then they allowed dozens of veterans to die waiting for medical care that never came.

Hillary Clinton put the whole country at risk with her illegal email server, deleted evidence of her crime, and lied repeatedly about her conduct which endangered us all. They released criminal aliens into our country who killed one innocent American after another — like Sarah Root and Kate Steinle — and have repeatedly admitted migrants later implicated in terrorism. They have produced the worst recovery since the Great Depression. They have shipped millions of our best jobs overseas to appease their global special interests. They have betrayed our security and our workers, and Hillary Clinton has proven herself unfit to serve in any government office.

She is reckless with her emails, reckless with regime change, and reckless with American lives. Our nation has been humiliated abroad and compromised by radical Islam brought onto our shores. We need change now.

Also hurtful, because true.

BECAUSE NOT EVERYONE CAN DESCRIBE AMERICANS AS BITTERLY CLINGING TO THEIR RELIGIOUS BELIEFS DURING A PRESIDENTIAL RUN: Obama says Trump is ‘unfit’ to serve as president after attack on parents of hero Muslim soldier.