DEMOCRATIC PARTY “CONSULTANT” ROBERT CREAMER RAN A DOMESTIC POLITICAL TERROR AND PROPAGANDA OPERATION

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Uncomfortable Truth of Having a Black Conservative on Campus.

Obligatory:

WHAT WOULD ANDREW DO? Breitbart coordinated with liberal activist and organizer who disrupted GOP primary campaign events.

Aaron Black, an associate with Democracy Partners and a former Occupy Wall Street organizer, worked with the pro-Trump site Breitbart, tipping it off about his stunts, exchanging raw video and coordinating coverage, according to a source with direct knowledge of the situation.

Black has resurfaced recently as one of the people featured in undercover video from the Project Veritas group. In the video, he claims to work for the Democratic National Committee. Though he does not appear on their payroll, his bio at Democracy Partners credits him with “working closely with the Democratic National Committee” during the 2012 election cycle. Black in the video says he helped organize protests in Chicago that led to Trump’s cancellation of a rally there in March.

According to the source, Black coordinated with Breitbart via email, phone and in person, including when he dressed up as a robot and trolled Marco Rubio’s events. The relationship was described as very friendly. An article subsequently published on Breitbart featured video footage of a physical confrontation between Black and Rubio’s New Hampshire campaign chairman.

“He worked directly with Breitbart’s political team on the ground in the primary states to sabotage Marco Rubio & Ted Cruz, and elect Trump as nominee of [the Republican] party,” the source told POLITICO. “[Black] was coordinating with [Breitbart’s] top staff to rabble rouse against Rubio at rallies.”

If true, this coordination would mark an ugly end to an ugly political season.

TRAINWRECK UPDATE: Obama Botchs Presser On Double-Digit ObamaCare Premium Increases.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Left-Wing Berkeley Protesters Demand ‘Spaces of Color’, Harass White Students Trying to Pass. Why should anyone tolerate this behavior?

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I’D LIKE FOR THIS TO BE THE LIBERTARIAN YEAR, BUT HE’S JUST NOT A VERY GOOD CANDIDATE: Gary Johnson Poll Collapse: Just 3% of Likely Voters in CNN/ORC Survey: Libertarian nominee hurtling southward toward the 5% threshold nationwide. Plus, of course, the media treatment turned hostile as soon as it became plain that he was taking more votes from Hillary than from Trump.

DOES SIZE MATTER? Clinton has bigger ground game than Trump.

Reporting from North Carolina:

“My sense is we got a late start,” said Dan Gurley, former deputy political director and field director for the RNC. “We are playing catch up, but we are catching up.”

The Trump/RNC operation’s 11 field offices in North Carolina compare to 24 that Mitt Romney had in 2012, according to FiveThirtyEight.

But they say what they lack in bricks and mortar, they are making up with boots on the ground.

Although this is comparing apples and oranges, the RNC has said it had 61 staffers in North Carolina in 2012 and this year has 657 “staff/trained organizers,” a figure which seems to include a lot of volunteers.

Chairman “Robin Hayes at the N.C. GOP, along with the RNC and their large investments in North Carolina, have put together a strong ground game competitive with Hillary’s many offices,” said Jonathan Felts, former White House political director under President George W. Bush.

“But my observation is that Donald Trump doesn’t seem very interested in the ground game,” Felts said. “Whether intentional or not, Trump seems to have decided to run a grand experiment betting that earned media and a cult of personality is more important than grass-roots infrastructure. It’s not how I learned to win elections, but we’ll see who was right on Nov. 8.”

It’s been a year of surprises, to say the least — so who knows?

GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING: Before Progressives Hated Trump, They Were For Him.

But then, what does the left have to offer, beyond graft and gaslighting?

DAN MARKEL UPDATE: The Dan Markel Murder Investigation: Why Was Katherine Magbanua’s First Degree Murder Charge Reduced To Second Degree Murder? “One possibility: Magbanua has entered into a plea agreement and is cooperating with the police. This would not be shocking.”

REMEMBER, THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, WITH SOME GOP MEMBERS OF CONGRESS, WAS GOING TO BASE NATIONAL POLICY ON THIS HOAX: 6 things a rape hoaxer said in interview with Rolling Stone author.

Jackie, the woman who made up a frightening story about being gang raped at the University of Virginia as a freshman, was really committed to her lie when talking to a Rolling Stone reporter.

The taped interview between Jackie and Rolling Stone author Sabrina Rubin Erdely was made public by CBS19 on Saturday, and professor and author K.C. Johnson posted what he believed were the best excerpts. Knowing that the gang rape didn’t occur makes Jackie’s comments in the tape all the more astounding.

Well, she told feminists, university administrators, and journalists propagandists what they wanted to hear.

21ST CENTURY QUESTIONS: What if your Obamacare insurer has left the business?

The result is a substantial increase in the number of people who’ll be changing health care plans during the 2017 open-enrollment period. Many will have only one insurer left in their exchange selling multiple plans. According to Kaiser Family Foundation, only 60 percent of exchange members nationwide will have three or more insurers to choose from, compared to 85 percent during 2016’s open enrollment.

What can you do if you’ve been abandoned by your insurer? You’ll need to keep an eye on the government’s efforts to match consumers with another plan to make sure you understand what’s happening. You’ll also need to do some due diligence on your own. The following advice from Joel Ario, a previous director of Health and Human Services and managing director of consulting firm, Manatt Health, may help.

Letting government do the shopping has never proven to be a good way of getting the best prices, historically speaking.

RELATED: It’s official: Double-digit rate hikes for Obamacare.

All of this, of course, means it’s working.

Turkey Mulls Iraq Ground Action Amid IS Threat.

Turkey’s foreign minister says Ankara will consider all military options — “including ground operations” — if developments in Iraq deteriorate to the extent that they threaten Turkey’s security.

The minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, told private broadcaster “24 TV” on Tuesday that Turkey would use its international right to quell threats from the Islamic State group and Kurdish militants in Iraq.

He says that “if the threat against us” increases, “we will use our power … to end the threat against us and that is our most natural right.”

Cavusoglu in televised comments the day before said the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK is crossing into Turkey from Iraq and coordinating attacks.

Ankara will likely use ISIS again as a smokescreen for bombing the Kurds, and perhaps to increase their military presence in northern Iraq.

LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS removes head of Copyright Office. “Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden on Friday announced she had removed the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, who last year asserted to Congress that the office should be independent and no longer under the LOC umbrella. . . . Pallente was appointed by former Librarian of Congress James Billington in 2011. In a letter last year to House Judiciary ranking member John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., she argued the copyright office should no longer be part of the library, citing “mounting operational tensions” and a number of other concerns.”

There’s no very compelling reason why copyright should be administered by the Library of Congress.

RAMESH PONNURU: Why Obama Won’t Listen to Reason on Obamacare.

The core problem with his speech was not that he overestimated the merits of Obamacare (as much as I believe that he did). Nor was it the partisan silliness in which the president sometimes indulged. It’s that he refused to acknowledge that conservatives have reasonable disagreements with him about the direction of health-care policy.

Obama believes that only comprehensive insurance policies are real insurance. Conservatives generally believe, by contrast, that people should be free to buy cheaper policies that protect them only from financial catastrophes arising from their health needs.

It’s a difference that leads to others. Obama says that people who are having trouble buying insurance on Obamacare’s exchanges should receive more generous subsidies. The conservative alternative — relax the regulations that make the insurance unaffordable for them — is unacceptable to him because it would be a retreat from comprehensiveness.

All of the president’s shows of open-mindedness include similar caveats.

“I won” is not indicative of a open-minded thinker willing to listen to others and reach a consensus.

HARRY REID: ‘I have set the Senate’ for nuclear option.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is predicting a Democratic-majority Senate next year could break out the “nuclear option” to change the rules on Supreme Court nominations.
The outgoing Democratic leader told Talking Points Memo that he’s paved the way for what would be a historic change of the Senate’s rules, allowing Supreme Court nominees to bypass a 60-vote procedural requirement and be approved by a simple majority.

“I really do believe that I have set the Senate so when I leave, we’re going to be able to get judges done with a majority,” he said. “It’s clear to me that if the Republicans try to filibuster another circuit court judge, but especially a Supreme Court justice, I’ve told ’em how and I’ve done it, not just talking about it. I did it in changing the rules of the Senate. It’ll have to be done again.”

Reid’s comments come as Senate Republicans have refused to give Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a hearing or a vote for more than eight months. They argue that the vacancy from Justice Antonin Scalia’s death should be filled by the president’s successor

It’s all Calvinball with these people. The only rule is “We win, you lose.”

WELL, GOOD: Former Pennsylvania Attorney General Gets Prison Term.

Ms. Kane, 50 years old, was convicted in Montgomery County Court outside Philadelphia in August on nine counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice, for leaking grand jury documents to a local newspaper in a bid to embarrass a political foe and for lying about it under oath.

An attorney for Ms. Kane couldn’t immediately be reached to comment.

Once viewed as a rising political star in the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania, Ms. Kane resigned as attorney general a day after she was convicted. Her law license had already been suspended. She had faced a maximum sentence of between 12 and 24 years in prison.

Before her sentencing, Ms. Kane’s lawyers had asked the judge for leniency. They had argued that probation and home arrest were adequate punishment and that Ms. Kane needed to be home to care for two teenage sons.

Prosecutors had sought a significant prison sentence, arguing that the facts in the case were “particularly egregious” and that Ms. Kane had shown no remorse.

We need to set more examples like this one.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. America’s foreign policy is turning Iran into a world power.

By accident or by design will have pundits and historians arguing for years.

TO BE FAIR, ISN’T EVERYTHING, THESE DAYS? Is SNL’s “Black Jeopardy” racist?

PAUL RAHE: Polling Perplexity. “Almost every day, I check the Presidential polls at RealClearPolitics, and then I shake my head. Ordinarily, there is some variation. This year, however, the differential is dramatic. Right now, for example, CNN/ORC has Clinton ahead by five points. Rasmussen Reports has Trump ahead by two. IBD/TIPP has it all tied up. The ABC News Tracking Poll has Hillary ahead by a whopping twelve, and the LA Times Tracking Poll (not listed by RealClearPolitics) has her ahead by one point.”

WAR AND RUMORS OF WAR: The Lure of Har Megiddo.

SO THEY WERE STUDYING THE CLINTONS? What a tangled web we weave…

BAEN BOOKS HAS POSTED ON FACEBOOK THAT: This novel, and also this novel are finalists for the Prometheus award.  As always, speaking for myself, it’s an honor just to be nominated.

THEY CAN HAVE TOASTERS THAT DON’T TOAST, OR THEY COULD, YOU KNOW, GET LESS PRISSY ABOUT ENERGY: The EU is reviewing the policy that makes its appliances so energy efficient.

IN THE EMAIL FROM JAN VAN STRY: Days of Future Past.