THE ABOLITION OF BRITAIN: In the Face of Terror, Londoners Told to “Run, Hide, Tell.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Tolerance Loses Out In An Ineffective War on Terror. “Feckless politicians have let things get to the point where all the remaining options are bad. By allowing the margin of superiority to slip, they are making the descent from the Marquess of Queenbury Rules to street fighting inevitable.”

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: To fight climate change, start with Leonardo DiCaprio’s private jet lifestyle: Even though President Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, there’s plenty Congress can do.

FLASHBACK: Gender Equity Among The Gender Equity Enforcers. “We examined 52 institutions. All have Title IX Coordinators as mandated by law for all institutions receiving federal funding. At 43 of them (82.7 percent), the Title IX Coordinator is a woman. At 9 of the institutions (17.3 percent), the Title IX Coordinator is a man.”

PALLYWOOD COMES TO LONDON: Did CNN stage this Muslim protest against terror in London? Watch.

(Classical reference in headline.)

UPDATE: “I don’t know if this is ‘staging,’ but it does seem like coordination between CNN and the ‘protesters,’ rather than pictures of a spontaneous protest,” Ace of Spades writes. “It seems like a show put on only to be photographed by CNN, with CNN providing cinematography expertise — maybe not ‘staged,’ per se, but it sure looks stage-managed. Would CNN help protesters of any right-wing cause set up their shot for maximum viewer impact?”

Nahh — they prefer to heckle and insult right-wing causes.

MORE: At Power Line, John Hinderaker adds, “Once CNN was done shooting, the ‘protesters’ dispersed. The Associated Press shares CNN’s agenda, so it was happy to piggy-back on CNN’s astroturf with this tweet, showing the same photo-op, but cropped to make it look less forlorn. This is a good example of fake news of an unusually important kind. One of the great issues of our time is whether ‘normal’ Muslims are willing to take decisive action against Islamic terrorism. The evidence so far is not encouraging; if it were, CNN and the AP wouldn’t need to stage photo-ops.”

IT’S ALL SECURITY THEATER: Bruce Schneier on TSA Pre-Check. “PreCheck tells us that, basically, there are no terrorists. If 1) it’s an easier way through airport security that terrorists will invariably use, and 2) there have been no instances of terrorists using it in the 10+ years it and its predecessors have been in operation, then the inescapable conclusion is that the threat is minimal. Instead of screening PreCheck passengers more, we should screen everybody else less.”

JOEL KOTKIN ON THE COMING DEMOCRATIC CIVIL WAR:

The two most remarkable campaigns of 2016 — those of Trump and Bernie Sanders — were driven by different faces of populist resentment. Yet, increasingly, the Democrats’ populist pretensions conflict with their alliance with ascendant “sovereigns of cyberspace,” whose power and wealth have waxed to almost absurd heights. Other parts of their upscale coalition include the media, academia and the upper bureaucracy.

This affluent base can embrace the progressives’ social agenda — meeting the demands of feminists, gays and minority activists. But they are less enthusiastic about the social democratic income redistribution proposed by Bernie Sanders, who is now, by some measurements, the nation’s most popular political figure. This new putative ruling class, notes author Michael Lind, sees its rise, and the decline of the rest, not as a reflection of social inequity, but rather their meritocratic virtue. Only racism, homophobia or misogyny — in other words, the sins of the “deplorables” — matter.

The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, the world’s third-richest man, reflects this socially liberal, but oligopolistic, worldview. Last spring, Bezos worked assiduously to undermine Sanders’ campaign, then promoted Clinton, and now has become a leading voice in the anti-Trump “resistance.” The gentry wing of the party, which dominates fundraising and media, as the opposition to Sanders reveals, likes its money. The tech community is famously adept at avoiding taxes.

How long can this odd pairing of socialism and oligopoly persist? There are growing sentiments on the left to begin confiscating some of the massive wealth of the tech firms. Bank of America’s Michael Harnett recently warned that continued growth of stock market wealth in a handful of tech stocks “could ultimately lead to populist calls for redistribution of the increasingly concentrated wealth of Silicon Valley.”

And note this related bit of irony from veteran left-leaning journalist Thomas Edsall, who discovers that too many wealthy leftists can be very bad for their own income distribution schemes. Or as Ace of Spades quips, linking to a new column by Michael Barone, “Who’s Standing in the Way of the Economic Left’s Dreams of Redistribution of Wealth…? The Affluent Social Left, Which Doesn’t Want to Share Their Money With the Riff-Raff:”

Thomas Edsall, the longtime Washington Post reporter now writing on his New York Times blog, laments the increasing tendency of high-income Americans to vote Democratic. That leaves the Democrats with an increasingly affluent constituency, presumably unwilling (or less willing than others) to support redistributive policies like Bernie Sanders’s proposal for higher tax rates on the affluent.

“In the past,” Edsall writes, “Democrats could support progressive, redistributive policies knowing that the costs would fall largely on Republicans. That is no longer the case. Now supporting these policies requires the party to depend on the altruistic idealism of millions of supporters who, despite being relatively well off, often feel financially pressed themselves.”

Kotkin concludes that “Trump, by his incoherence and incompetence, has opened the door to the Democrats. But the passage to redemption may prove more difficult if the party fails, as Hillary Clinton and the Democratic congressional delegation showed last year, to relate to the broad ranks of the citizenry.”

It will be interesting to see the left try and reconcile that with their concurrent goal of aiming towards ideological purity by casting off not just those Americans whom they declared “Deplorable,” but all Republicans.

IT’S A MESSAGE TO ISIS: WE WILL BURY YOU. Model Wearing American Flag as Hijab on Magazine Cover Shows Underboob.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● What Changes Will We Make After the Giffords Shooting?

—Alec Baldwin, the Huffington Post, January 15, 2011.

● Alec Baldwin Tells Kathy Griffin About Her Critics: ‘F–k Them All’

—Tim Graham, NewsBusters, today.

Related: FLASHBACK: Kathy Griffin Blames Sarah Palin For AZ Shooting; tweeted in 2009, “Vegas this Friday night! 2 shows at Mandalay Bay. Oh, Palin, ur goin down so hard, you’d better just stay in Wasilla w ur ‘retarded baby.’”

Or to put it another way, “To hell with you people.”

IT’S COME TO THIS: Socialist Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant was cheered when she declared she has no Republican friends.

But this isn’t all that new; there’s a reason why veteran (conservative) journalist Harry Stein’s 2009 book was titled, I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next To A Republican.

UPDATE: I had wanted to link to Stein’s appearance on C-Span’s Book TV where he explains the title of his book, but for some reason, embedding is disabled on that clip. So click on the screen capture below to be taken to YouTube. Leftists want to pretend that their current behavior is being caused by the urge to go all out to fight this strange disease that is Trump and his supporters, when Trump’s election was in large part due to the reaction of millions of conservatives to decades of leftist excess.

WHITE PRIVILEGE: For Them, Being Pale Can Bring Scorn, Threats, and Worse: Fashion models with albinism are popular, but many people with the condition face exclusion, health problems, and savage attacks.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: To fight climate change, start with Leonardo DiCaprio’s private jet lifestyle: Even though President Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, there’s plenty Congress can do.

LEFT: TRUMP IS DESTROYING THE CONSTITUTION! Also, states should form unconstitutional treaties with each other to resist Trump’s agenda.

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!

SOLVING THE MYSTERIES OF SCIENCE: Why Do Men Run Faster Than Women?

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THIS IS CNN: Human-brain eating CNN host declares Trump “piece of shit [who] is not just an embarrassment to America and a stain on the presidency. He’s an embarrassment to humankind.” As P.J. Gladnick writes at NewsBusters, “Reza Aslan, the human brain-eating CNN host of Believer expressed not the slightest hint of sympathy for the victims of the June 3 terror attacks in London on Twitter. Instead, he was solely animated by intense hatred of President Donald Trump to the extent that he cursed him out as you can see in the following tweet: ‘This piece of shit is not just an embarrassment to America and a stain on the presidency. He’s an embarrassment to humankind.’”

The 21st century isn’t really working out the way I had hoped, as the Insta-professor would say. But Aslan’s meltdown is another reminder, that as Victor Davis Hanson recently noted, “progressive” media and Democrats have formed an anti-Trump “Fusion Party:”

The media brag that they now more or less run the Democratic agenda. Univision’s Jorge Ramos (whose daughter worked for the Hillary Clinton campaign) recently thundered:

Our position, I think, has to be much more aggressive. And we should not expect the Democrats to do that job. It is our job. If we don’t question the president, if we don’t question his lies, if we don’t do it, who is going to do it? It’s an uncomfortable position.

In other words, Ramos confessed that the Democratic party apparently has neither new ideas nor a political agenda that would win over the public, and thus self-appointed journalistic grandees like him would have to step forward and lead the anti-Trump opposition as they shape the news.

Fellow panelist and CNN’s media correspondent Brian Stelter answered Ramos, “You’re almost saying we’re a stand-in for the Democrats.” Thereby, Stelter inadvertently confirmed Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon’s widely criticized but prescient assertion that the media are in fact “the opposition party” — and should be treated as such.

Gosh Brian, why would anyone think the media, not least of which CNN, is a stand-in for the Democratic Party?

HIM AND SAYYID QUTB: How Freud’s Only Visit to America Made Him Hate the U.S. for the Rest of His Life.

HISTORY: The Socialist Holocaust and its American Deniers.

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BE THANKFUL FOR WHAT TRUMP IS NOT, Andrew Klavan writes:

[W]with the Supreme Court taking on the role, as it has, of super legislature, all it requires is five idiot intellectuals who believe in leftist crap for us to lose the right to speak free — which, let’s face it, is inseparable from the right to live free.

Because Trump is what he is — and because of what he is not — we have preserved that precious right for another day. For that alone, he deserves our thanks and support.

Read the whole thing.

ANNALS OF FAKE NEWS: The WaPo’s inventive flip-flop on suppressors.

FASTER, PLEASE: Prostate cancer trial stuns researchers: ‘It’s a once in a career feeling.’