MATTE SHOT: THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY MATTE ART: Part Two.

Another photo-intensive post at the brilliant Matte Shot blog; many of these ‘60s and ‘70s-era films are far from Disney’s best product, but scrolling through the post gives some idea of just how much work went into even their B-movies, in an era when special effects meant paint, not pixels.

DAN RATHER ON TRUMP: ‘DRUMBEATS OF THREATENING VIOLENCE.’

Rather damaged his credibility twice by attacking two comparatively genteel presidents named Bush. In attempting to twist the events of the smear that finished off his career as a Big Three anchorman, last year, Rather was happy to be portrayed in the unintentionally camp “Truth” by a waxworks Robert Redford, whose previous film praised the actual violence of the Weathermen terrorists.

Appearing on Good Morning America in to plug The Company You Keep in 2013, after gushing over how “empathetic” he was about the Pentagon-bombing Weathermen, “because I believed it was time for a change,” George Stephanopoulos tried to throw his fellow leftist Democrat a lifeline, and asked Redford, “Even when you read about bombings?” Redford immediately replied, “All of it. I knew that it was extreme and I guess movements have to be extreme to some degree.”

In his retirement at Mark Cuban’s HD-NET channel, Rather was happy to praise a man whose motto is “get in their faces and punch back twice as hard.”  (And of course, Obama began his political career in the living room of former Weatherman Bill Ayers.)

With that sort of “Company You Keep,” it seems a bit too late to for Rather to be hearing aura of penumbras of drumbeats of threatened violence. But when it comes to whom Dan approves of as presidential candidates, choose the form of your destructor.

STRENGTH: Watch This Guy Pull a 17-Ton Truck.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Hillary Discovers She’s Not As Smart As Henry Kissinger.

CRAZY BARRY’S IS HAVING A HALF-OFF SALE! “Bank of America gets half off its Justice Dept. settlement…by giving millions of dollars to liberal groups approved by the Obama administration:”

The bank has wiped about $194 million off its record $16.6 billion 2014 mortgage settlement by donating to nonprofits and legal groups. Thanks to little-known provisions in the settlement, the bank only had to make $84 million in donations to do that.

The bank wasn’t exploiting any loophole. It’s a key part of the deal the Justice Department offered to get it to settle in the first place. For every dollar the bank has given the nonprofits — none of which were victims of fraud themselves — it has claimed at least two dollars off the settlement. The deal ensured the Obama administration that a certain part of the settlement funds would go to friendly liberal groups, bypassing the normal congressional appropriations.

Among the groups receiving the money were Hispanic civil rights group the National Council of La Raza ($1.5 million), the National Urban League ($1.1 million) and the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America ($750,000).

* * * * * * * *

“This is nothing short of a shakedown and another example of how the Obama administration is rigging the system to benefit their political allies. Instead of directing settlements directly to victims or returning the money to the U.S. Treasury, President Obama set up a slush fund for community organizers and other liberal activists. This is outrageous,” said Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., chairman of the Financial Services Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.

It’s quite a racket – the 2008 financial crisis was caused by the Clinton administration massively expanding Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act, forcing banks to give high-risk loans to those who had no business owning a home, in a textbook example of Reynolds’ Law run amok. Now in its wreckage, Bank of America is shaken down for billions by the same party that created the CRIA. And of course, no one in the MSM will ask Hillary about her husband’s involvement in the debacle – instead, as this NewsBusters headline today notes, “NY Mag Writer Begs Media to ‘Stop Bugging Hillary Clinton!’”

As Michael Walsh would say, “think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party,” and you won’t go far wrong. Not to mention how all of the above is another marker on the road to “The Coming Middle-Class Anarchy,” if sufficient voters begin to realize how corrupt Beltway elites have rigged the system to benefit themselves and their cronies.

TALKING ABOUT MALE RAPE. Well, not that much, because it doesn’t fit the narrative.

#GUNSENSE: Remember when Obama lectured Kimberly Corban on firearm safety? Well, her story saved this woman’s life.

Just read the whole thing.

[Link fixed!]

MEH. THIS IS JUST A COVER STORY FOR THE ALIEN BASE, OF COURSE: Team finds convection could produce Pluto’s polygons.

MICHAEL WALSH: Is Trump Like Reagan? Frank Rich Makes the Case.

It’s not a comparison I would make, but having infamously described small government-seeking New York State Tea Partiers as “Stalinist” in 2009, it seems like a safe bet that anybody who Frank Rich despises can’t be all bad.

ACTRESS (?) DEBRA MESSING TAKES SELFIES OF HERSELF DURING UCLA SHOOTING TO, SHE CLAIMS, BRING ATTENTION TO GUN VIOLENCE, AND/OR HERSELF.

Someone should write a book on the dangers of moral narcissism, and how it’s destroying our republic, if it hasn’t already — it seems like a rather timely topic.

And speaking of the UCLA shooting, look for it to be rapidly memory holed by the MSM: “UCLA shooter identified as former Ph.D student Mainak Sarkar; Liberal narrative hardest hit.”

SO I OFTEN FEEL LIKE I’M LIVING IN JERRY POURNELLE’S FUTURE HISTORY, but at least we get our own version of Laurie Jo Hansen: Why Jeff Bezos Wants to Build Giant Factories in Space.

ACLU LEADER DISCOVERS CONQUEST’S FIRST LAW OF POLITICS: Georgia ACLU leader quits after daughters encounter men in the women’s restroom.

Everyone is conservative about what he [or she] knows best.

REMEMBER WHEN THE LEFT CRUCIFIED ROSE MARY WOODS? GOOD TIMES, GOOD TIMES. State Department: Yep, We Deleted That Video Proving We Lied About The Iran Deal.

NOBODY’S AS RACIST AS LEFTY MINORITY FOLKS WHEN THERE ARE NO WHITE PEOPLE AROUND: Facebook ‘safe space’ shuttered after anti-white/male statements leak.

FROM THE MOST DELIBERATELY RACIALLY DIVISIVE PRESIDENT IN MY LIFETIME: Obama Accuses “Right-Wing Radio” And “Some Cable News Stations” Of Stoking Racial Fears Among White People. Notice, by the way, the deliberate en passant smear of the VFW.

And this remains evergreen, alas:

But aside from being a disgrace, Obama’s action is a tell: They always start this talk when they think they’re losing.

And a warning: The Tea Party was smeared as racist. Now we have Trump. Keep this up, and who comes after Trump? “When politeness and orderliness are met with contempt and betrayal, do not be surprised if the response is something less polite, and less orderly.”

LONDON DAILY MAIL US POLITICS EDITOR: ‘A LOT’ OF THE REPORTERS COVERING HILLARY ARE ‘FANS,’ ‘IN AWE.’

Just think of them as Democrat operatives with bylines, and you won’t go far wrong.

Flashback: WaPo reports in 2006, Bill Clinton Expects That “Establishment Old Media Organizations Are De Facto Allies.”

And they were, except during their “Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media,” as ex CBS man Bernie Goldberg described it.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE: Middle school teacher had sex with student, 13, ‘daily.’

21ST CENTURY CAMPAIGNING: Trump’s aversion to data puts RNC on the hot seat.

The RNC says it is ready for the challenge, having spent millions of dollars after Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat to build a data and digital infrastructure able to compete with Democrats.

“We’re building an operation that’s scalable and workable for all candidates,” said Katie Walsh, the RNC’s chief of staff.

But some question whether it will be possible for the RNC to completely pick up the slack if Trump decides to outsource the work of building a high-tech campaign apparatus, which performs countless tests to optimize a campaign’s resources.

“There’s no way to do that through a party structure,” said Chris Wilson, who directed data operations for Sen. Ted Cruz’s (Texas) Republican primary campaign.

In an interview with The Associated Press last month, Trump called data “overrated” and said he plans to rely mostly on rallies and media interviews to propel his campaign. He cited President Obama as an example, even though his 2012 campaign was famously obsessed with data and spent millions using it.

If Big Data can propel a weak candidate with an aversion to truthfulness like Hillary Clinton to victory, then it has already become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Hillary Discovers She’s Not As Smart As Henry Kissinger.

CUE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN: OPEC fails to reach oil production deal.

Although a deal was not expected, the failure to reach an accord underscores the increasingly disparate interests within the organization. Two members in particular — Saudi Arabia and Iran — are engaged in a geopolitical standoff, and analysts say neither country wants to yield market share to the other.

“Member countries,” OPEC said in a statement following the meeting, “confirmed their commitment to a stable and balanced oil market, with prices at levels that are suitable for both producers and consumers.”

So the oil will continue to flow.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer cartel.

WHEN THEY’RE CALLING YOU RACIST, IT MEANS THEY’RE LOSING: The legal campaign against Gawker has roots in the racist South.

MICHAEL BARONE REVIEWS JOEL KOTKIN’S THE HUMAN CITY:

Gov. Jerry Brown is pushing policies that would concentrate new housing in high-rise clusters around mass transit stations, with ready access to bike paths and walking trails but not to streets and roads for private cars. It’s a good thing to offer people such a choice. It’s a bad thing to deny them any others.

The result is that housing costs in coastal metropolises have skyrocketed far above the level affordable for median-income singles, much less married couples with children. These cities are increasingly the home of the connected rich and the disconnected poor. They have the nation’s highest levels of economic inequality and the highest percentage of singles. The central city of San Francisco has 80,000 more dogs than children.

Plus:

[The focus of urban planners] is typically visual, and on the exterior of buildings and cityscape, easily reproduced in glossy coffee-table books, rather than on the interiors where people spend most of their hours. They take their cues from 20th century architects like Le Corbusier, who wanted to knock down all of Paris’ historic structures and replace them with a few skyscrapers rising from parkland.

As Jane Jacobs and Tom Wolfe have noted, that worked out just swell for all concerned when tried as low-income housing in America: Two word: Pruitt-Igoe.

THE PRO-CANCER COALITION: Democrats and FDA protect Big Tobacco and Big Pharma from competition that would save lives but cut their profits. 

Why would public-health officials oppose what may be the most effective tool yet discovered for getting smokers to quit? The campaign against e-cigarettes makes no sense medically, since there’s little to no evidence of harm from these devices and mounting evidence that smokers are using them to quit, as the British Royal College of Surgeons recently concluded. But while the British scientific establishment is encouraging this new industry, the FDA is trying to destroy it with regulations that will outlaw most products and make new ones prohibitively expensive to introduce unless you’ve got the kind of financial resources available to tobacco companies (who market their own e-cigarettes).

You can blame this prohibitionism partly on the American Left’s moral zeal to ban anything it finds offensive (pot okay, nicotine evil). But there’s also money involved, as Monica Showalter of the American Media Institute reports: 

Drug companies favoring the FDA rules—usually big backers of Democrats—have huge sums invested in prescription smoking-cessation drugs, covered in many cases under the Democrat-passed Affordable Care Act, which they helped shape. They now face stiff competition from readily available e-cigarettes. Similarly, tobacco companies, left flat-footed by the growth of the upstart vaping market, also support the FDA rules as they look to shore up market positions in both tobacco and e-cigarettes.

Case Western University law professor Jonathan H. Adler calls this alignment a classic “Baptist-bootlegger” alliance where unlikely parties share an aim and combine forces, similar to the way Baptists and bootleggers once worked in tandem to preserve the prohibition status quo in the 1920s. “When such forces are aligned, they have a particularly powerful influence on policy outcomes,” he writes in an upcoming study for the Yale Journal of Regulation called “Baptists, Bootleggers and E-Cigarettes.”

The alliance puts Democrats at odds with vaping hipsters and others in their political base, including smokers just trying to quit. “As someone who, thanks to vaping, was able to quit the deadly habit after decades of smoking myself, this is a very disturbing development,” wrote Brad Friedman on the Daily Kos, the left-leaning website. “It’s made even more disturbing by the particular big-name Democrats … who support the new regulations.”

The divide on the left has been noted by Bill Godshall, founder of Smokefree Pennsylvania, a Democrat who sees vaping, while not risk-free, as a means of helping smokers quit. “The whole politics of this is decidedly left-wing,” he said.

Showalter notes that the current FDA commissioner, Dr. Robert Califf, formerly worked with nearly every pharmaceutical giant with a smoking-cessation product on the market. The FDA’s chief tobacco regulator, Mitch Zeller, was a consultant for one of those companies, GlaxoSmithKline. And she points to the large campaign contributions from pharmaceutical companies to prominent anti-vaping Democrats, including Frank Lautenberg, Ed Markey, Sherrod Brown and Richard Blumenthal. Meanwhile, Republicans have been fighting the FDA regulations and resisting the junk-science hysteria from the Left:

As the anti-vaping alliance solidified, Republican opponents began to embrace e-cigarettes as a cause. Rep. Duncan D. Hunter of California openly vaped an e-cigarette on the House floor in 2015 to show his support.

Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, told the American Media Institute that the vaping issue could help swing the 2016 election. E-cigarettes, he said, are not so much a product as “a movement,” a bellwether of a new consumer-driven economy.