IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Hillary’s short circuit.

AS A WISE COMMUNITY ORGANIZER IS WONT TO SAY, PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Calif. Religious Leaders Stand Up, Dem Lawmaker Backs Down on Campus LGBT Rights.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Why Are American Workers Growing Less Productive? For most of the last year, employees haven’t been getting as much done with their time at work. What’s happening?

The worker productivity rate is gauged by the output of goods and services produced for each hour worked. Ultimately, a decrease in that rate suggests that Americans are working more to create less. When held against more uplifting recent economic news, including the 500,000 jobs created in the past two months alone and a perking-up of wages, lower efficiency could have a surprising bite, potentially lowering long-term income and living standards, as well as encouraging the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low.

So what gives? Well, according to one economist, it has little to do with social-media-inspired slacking off and more to do with workers having outgrown existing technology. “We have an $18 trillion economy,” explains Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, whose book The Rise and Fall of American Growth came out earlier this year. “Most of it is operating by the same business methods and procedures that have been in place for at least 10 years.”

Maybe. But workers are always less productive under socialism.

JAPANESE BATTLE OF MIDWAY AFTER ACTION REPORT: An Army buddy sent me the link a few days ago. Lots of details, a bit of a slog, but worth the look for military history fans.

REPORT: MULTIPLE FBI INVESTIGATIONS INTO CLINTON FOUNDATION CORRUPTION ARE UNDERWAY.

As Roger Simon asked on Friday, Which Is Worse—an October Surprise or a December Surprise?

THE SLOW CRAWL TO MOSUL CONTINUES: Today Kurdish forces launched a limited offensive southeast of the city. More here.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Tinder is destroying men’s self-esteem.

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

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REPORT: TRUMP EXHAUSTED, BEWILDERED.

WELL, TO BE FAIR, HE’S HAD A LIFETIME OF EXPERIENCE PREYING ON COLLEGE STUDENTS: Bill Clinton netted $1.6 million from for-profit colleges.

Bill Clinton netted $1.6 million last year from a pair of for-profit education companies that caused controversy for the future president during Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state.

Laureate Education paid Bill Clinton nearly $1.1 million in 2015, according to tax returns released by his wife’s campaign Friday. GEMS Education, a Dubai-based firm, paid him more than $560,000.

Both companies are major donors to the Clinton Foundation.

Bill Clinton’s lucrative consulting contracts with the corporations have raised questions about how closely his personal fortune is linked to his philanthropic activities.

What’s more, the State Department handed Laureate’s chairman taxpayer-funded grants under Hillary Clinton’s watch.

Culture of corruption.

CLASS, NOT RACE: Study: Americans care more about poor students than black or Hispanic students.

According to a new study published in the Educational Researcher, Americans care more about the academic gaps between poor and wealthy students than they care about gaps between minority students and white students.

“We find that Americans are more concerned about — and more supportive of proposals to close — wealth-based achievement gaps than Black-White or Hispanic-White gaps,” researchers wrote. “High-income, low-income, and White respondents all indicated it was a higher priority to close poor-wealthy gaps than to close Black-White and Hispanic-White gaps.”

Almost two-thirds of American adults say it is “essential or a high priority” to close the test score gap between poor and wealthy students. Roughly one-third say the same about the gap between black and white students or Hispanic and white students. “Respondents were also more supportive of proposals to narrow wealth-based rather than race- or ethnicity-based gaps,” researchers wrote.

Among black respondents, the average response was roughly the same when they were asked how high a priority it was to close the poor-wealthy gap and the black-white gap.

But politicians want to tribalize us along race lines.

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Milwaukee erupts in arsons, violence, looting after ARMED suspect was fatally shot: photos, video.

THIS SEEMS LIKE A SAFE PREDICTION: HuffPo Will Be Just As Freakin’ Nuts Without Arianna.

Nora Ephron certainly wrapped up her career in grand style there.

JOURNALISM: NBC News covers Trump with ‘sarcastic’ tweet.

One thing that Trump has done is, he’s clarified the state of a lot of institutions.

HUMA ABEDIN’S HUSBAND ANTHONY WEINER HASN’T LEARNED A THING. But then, neither has Huma’s boss.

PEGGY NOONAN ON HOW GLOBAL ELITES HAVE MORE LOYALTY TO EACH OTHER THAN TO THE CITIZENS THEY CONTROL:

In Manhattan, my little island off the continent, I see the children of the global business elite marry each other and settle in London or New York or Mumbai. They send their children to the same schools and are alert to all class markers. And those elites, of Mumbai and Manhattan, do not often identify with, or see a connection to or an obligation toward, the rough, struggling people who live at the bottom in their countries. In fact, they fear them, and often devise ways, when home, of not having their wealth and worldly success fully noticed.

Affluence detaches, power adds distance to experience. I don’t have it fully right in my mind but something big is happening here with this division between the leaders and the led. It is very much a feature of our age. But it is odd that our elites have abandoned or are abandoning the idea that they belong to a country, that they have ties that bring responsibilities, that they should feel loyalty to their people or, at the very least, a grounded respect.

I close with a story that I haven’t seen in the mainstream press. This week the Daily Caller’s Peter Hasson reported that recent Syrian refugees being resettled in Virginia, were sent to the state’s poorest communities. Data from the State Department showed that almost all Virginia’s refugees since October “have been placed in towns with lower incomes and higher poverty rates, hours away from the wealthy suburbs outside of Washington, D.C.” Of 121 refugees, 112 were placed in communities at least 100 miles from the nation’s capital. The suburban counties of Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington—among the wealthiest in the nation, and home to high concentrations of those who create, and populate, government and the media—have received only nine refugees.

Some of the detachment isn’t unconscious. Some of it is sheer and clever self-protection. At least on some level they can take care of their own.

Oh, they take care of their own, all right.

Flashback:

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, “I got mine, you get yours.”

You’re a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you’re an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you’re a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you’re making your life a little fortress. That’s what I think a lot of the elites are up to.

If the wheels come off, it won’t be enough.

FROM MICHAEL BROTHERTON: Science Fiction by Scientists: An Anthology of Short Stories (Science and Fiction).

WE STILL DON’T KNOW HIS GRADES, WHAT HE STUDIED OR HIS IQ: Anyone believe he’s hiding those out of modesty?  If so, have I got a deal for you in Florida swampland. And None So Deaf as They Who Will Not Hear.

SEEING THROUGH THE GASLIGHTING: If Americans don’t get the truth about ISIS, we’ll never defeat it.

YOU MEAN THERE’S A TIME THEY WEREN’T? How the Federal Government Became the Worst Helicopter Parent.

THE WSJ BRANCHES OUT INTO FANTASY: Yes, You Can Train Your Cat.

GREEDY, CORRUPT AND DELUSIONAL: Doing for America what she did for Haiti.

VIVE LA DIFFERENCE: The Intellectuals and Feminism: Why Do Fantasies of Sexual ‘Equality’ Persist?

FROM JOHN VAN STRY: Wolf Killer (The Hammer Commission).

AND TALK TO THE PUBLISHERS ABOUT STOPPING WITH THE EQUIVALENT: Hollywood: Stop Making Silly Feminist Reboots of Movies.