A RIDE IN Ford’s Self-Driving Car.

GERARD VANDERLEUN: Dr. Feelgood’s Tonic: The Cinton is Getting Needled with “B-12 As Needed.” For Gerard, this brings back memories of the Sixties and Seventies.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Missouri Republicans vote to override veto of gun rights “Constitutional Carry” bill. “After shutting down debate Wednesday, the Senate voted to override the governor’s veto on a 24-6 party line vote. The bill moved to the House, where it was quickly approved 112-41. It becomes law in 30 days.”

THAT’S JUST GREAT: 2 million fake accounts later, Wells Fargo drops sales quotas for its employees.

AT AMAZON, the All-New Echo Dot.

IT COMES NATURALLY TO HIM: Putin Goes Full Orwell.

THIS POINT IS WORTH REPEATING: Cheaper and cleaner nuclear plants could finally become reality—but not in the United States, where the technology was invented more than 50 years ago.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Should We Elect Supreme Court Justices? The Supremes are functioning more like a legislature than a court, and no legislature is above politics.

DEMOCRATS ARE STUCK WITH HILLARY, Richard Fernandez writes:

Washington is now beset by a bane once exclusively associated with monarchies and authoritarianisms. Washington has a succession problem that has been growing for some time. This is astonishing for a system which once surprised Adolf Hitler by taking Franklin Roosevelt’s death in stride.

It has become unaccountably fragile for reasons that are not hard to understand. The thinning bench of the Democratic Party, the replacement of a broad national consensus by a crazy quilt of identical political issues, the weakening of constitutional constraints, and the rule of law in favor of cults of personality have all contributed to make the system unpredictable. It is no longer the constitutionally constrained system of former times, but one dependent on the caprice and health of individual human beings. It has become like the USSR America laughed at in its last days, with Kremlin watchers eagerly waiting to see if Brezhnev could stagger to the podium without assistance.

Suddenly the politically easy things become hard. These are signs, like Hillary’s falls, of something progressively degenerative. The poverty of the presidential field is suggestive of seizure: despite the seething activity of millions of individual American who know something’s wrong all the political system can inarticulately utter is “Hillary” or “Donald.” It is almost as if the nation itself were standing beside the Scooby-Doo van of the history, helpless, waiting to be lifted by events to whatever awaited.

Read the whole thing.

BREAKING NEWS FROM 1975: “The New Politics of Late Night — In a wild election with a ripe orange target, comics are ditching balance and taking sides” – and Time magazine is all over this shocking “new” development!

What exactly is “new” about this story? Since the debut of Saturday Night Live in 1975, and particularly since Johnny Carson retired in 1992, when haven’t late night comics been taking sides, and often viciously so? Just think of them as Democrat operatives with punch lines, and you won’t go far wrong.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: A Marine Teaches You How To Fire A Tank-Killing Rocket.

ED MORRISSEY: How Obamacare Clears the Field for a GOP Senate Win.

MUGGERIDGE’S LAW FINALLY CATCHES UP WITH SCTV:

Shot: North Korea airs Saturday Night Live-style sketch show mocking Barack Obama… and the jokes are as awful as you think they are.

Chaser:

https://youtu.be/hS8yZnevvRk?t=15m9s

As Tom Wolfe once noted:

While Malcolm Muggeridge was the editor of Punch, it was announced that Khrushchev and Bulganin were coming to England. Muggeridge hit upon the idea of a mock itinerary, a lineup of the most ludicrous places the two paunchy pear-shaped little Soviet leaders could possibly be paraded through during the solemn process of a state visit. Shortly before press time, half the feature had to be scrapped. It coincided exactly with the official itinerary, just released, prompting Muggeridge to observe: We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.

Still though, give the Hermit Kingdom’s socialist satirists credit – they’re boldly going where few leftwing American comedians have gone before.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Some quick, easy steps to tell if you’re a Deplorable, as proffered by Howie Carr of the Boston Herald.

I’m turning myself in to the Central Scrutinizer for some serious thoughtcrimes after reading this.

GOVERNMENT IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER: Raided On the Street and Debated at City Hall, Times are Tough For Dallas’ Little Free Libraries.

VIACOM SPOKESMAN TREVOR NOAH ASKS IN NEW BOOK IF HITLER WAS AS BAD AS CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS OR ANDREW JACKSON:

“I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don’t have that Jewish people do have is documentation.”

* * * * * * * *

He concludes: “So in Europe and America yes, Hitler is the Greatest Madman in History. In Africa he’s just another strong man from the history books.”

We’re guessing that Noah will have some explaining to do regarding his historical musings when the book is out in November.

At the start of 2015, after a series of earlier anti-Semitic tweets from Noah emerged, including, “Almost bumped a Jewish kid crossing the road. He didn’t look b4 crossing but I still would hav felt so bad in my german car!” and “South Africans know how to recycle like israel knows how to be peaceful,” Comedy Central rushed to defend their new would-be star, the man they hired to succeed Jon Stewart’s clapter-based political “humor:”

Comedy Central appeared unmoved by criticism it branded as “unfair”, offering staunch support to Noah in a statement.

“Like many comedians, Trevor Noah pushes boundaries; he is provocative and spares no one, himself included,” the network said, according to AFP.

“To judge him or his comedy based on a handful of jokes is unfair. Trevor is a talented comedian with a bright future at Comedy Central,” it added.

Of course, that was before a year and a half of poor ratings, painfully unfunny shows, and now this latest firestorm. Does Viacom wish to continue employ someone who plays moral equivalence games with the Holocaust?

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Is Russia Preparing For War?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1225.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON JOHN KERRY’S HARD WORK: The “working hard” meme — it’s propaganda to cover for failure.

I’d rather have a Secretary of State who succeeds effortlessly, than one who works hard at failure, but when you appoint Kerry, well. . .

THE POPULIST-CONSERVATIVE SPLIT OVER THE TRUMP FAMILY-LEAVE PLAN, as analyzed by Ron Radosh. It’s triangulation, Trump-style, as “Trump family values” moves to the center.

I THINK PETER THIEL HAS BIGGER PLANS THAN SUPREME COURT JUSTICE, but if Trump were to nominate Thiel for the Supreme Court, he’d be strong: Stanford Law grad (which actually brings diversity to a court composed entirely of Harvard/Yale grads), libertarian, actual real-world experience — and he’d be the first openly gay Supreme Court justice. Only homophobic bigots could oppose him, right?

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: ‘So Help Me God’ Left Out of Naturalization Oath in D.C. Ceremony (Video).

STUCK IN THE 20TH CENTURY: Hillary Clinton Never Learns That the World Sees Every Stumble.

To state the obvious: Obviously Hillary Clinton’s health matters, and the public has a right to know whether she has the physical stamina to be president. Obviously Sunday’s events are a real story, not only because of what happened, but because the Clinton team lied about it. If it didn’t matter, why did they lie, and hide it from her press pool?

Perhaps less obvious, but also true: this whole cycle was straight out of the playbook that worked for Bill Clinton for many years. Hide, deny, lie, and when that lie breaks down, spin another while surrogates and supporters attack. That playbook lost its mojo on Jan. 19, 1998, when the Drudge Report broke the story of Monica Lewinsky’s presidential trysts. It has been steadily getting less effective since that day. Unfortunately, the only person who doesn’t seem to realize that is Hillary Clinton.

I will hardly be the first to observe that all of us, and especially famous people, now live in a digital panopticon, where at any moment our actions may be observed, videotaped, and uploaded to the internet. Nor that the web has democratized publishing, creating what law professor Glenn Reynolds has dubbed “an Army of Davids” willing and able to attack the powerful. Nor that the amazing proliferation of data and records on the web has given those Davids an array of weapons far more powerful than a slingshot. Why has the news not yet reached Hillary Clinton?

If you collapse in public, and you are famous, the odds that this event has not been captured on someone’s cell phone are starting to approach zero. And the odds that this video will be seen by virtually every American are starting to approach 100 percent because there are no longer any gatekeepers to bully. Trying to control stories like the old Clinton spin machine did is like trying to fight World War II with tactical maneuvers that worked for Caesar’s legions.

Yep. But Hillary’s grasp of technology — except, apparently, for BleachBit — is notoriously poor.

AND NOW A WORD FROM AMERICA’S TROLL-IN-CHIEF. Obama: ‘Imagine What My Approval Rating Would Be’ if Media ‘Worked for Me.’

Yes, just imagine it – it’s unexpectedly easy if you try.