TYLER O’NEIL: Ben Affleck under fire for 20-year-old comment about the acting challenge of kissing another man.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON NPR: “On whether they are silencing Milo, they are silencing themselves. That gives free rein to all who want to say NPR was flummoxed by the troll who wouldn’t troll on cue but spoke rationally about the value of a troll”

ORAL AGREEMENTS AREN’T WORTH THE PAPER THEY’RE WRITTEN ON: Elon Musk Says He Has ‘Verbal’ OK To Build N.Y.-D.C. Hyperloop.

“BOY OH BOY. REMEMBER WE SAID THAT AFTER OBAMA LEFT OFFICE, WE’D FIND OUT THE DAMAGE HE DID? It’s much worse than I imagined.”

Just think of the Democratic Party as “what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party,” and it all makes sense, to merge the favorite sayings of Glenn and Michael Walsh.

EZRA KLEIN: Trump can’t make a health care deal because he doesn’t understand health care.

As Andrew Breitbart pointed out years ago, liberals portray conservatives as either evil or dumb. I see we’ve moved on to dumb.

FRED SIEGEL: Remembering The New York Riots, 40 Years Later.

DEFINING DEVIANCY DOWN: ‘Nobody kill anybody’: Murder-free weekend urged in Baltimore.

Why are Democrat-monopoly cities such cesspits of violence?

Related: “Gov. Hogan [R] rides a tide of high approval ratings despite the 2-to-1 Democratic majority in State,” WJZ, CBS’s Baltimore affiliate tweets. “Despite?” Fox Butterfield, call your office.

(Classical reference in headline.)

CALIFORNIA SECSTATE: ‘Not Hiding Anything’ from Trump’s Election Commission.

VIDEO: Pilot of small plane sticks landing on NY highway, pulls over for police.

“You know that cop was loving [this.] ‘You guys won’t believe what I pulled over today.’”

CHANGE: Hip-hop is bigger than rock music for the first time, thanks to nobody buying albums.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● MSNBC’s Jonathan Alter: Trump ‘Voter Suppression Commission’ Is ‘Threat to Democracy.’

—NewsBusters, today.

● Jonathan Alter Demands Gore Presidency In Spite Of Outcome.

—The Media Research Center, November 9th, 2000.

UPDATE: “MSNBC analyst, Jonathan Alter (Democrat-Barack Obama -Hillary Clinton) Is Textbook Example of Democrat party operative with Byline. Alter’s parents are Chicago Democrat machine hacks,” Steve Bartin writes at Newsalert. Just keep scrolling for the details.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, SCHOLARLY DEBACLE EDITION: Even Rick Perlstein Questions the Merits of “Democracy in Chains.”

DOUBLING DOWN: Mueller Expands Probe to Trump Business Transactions.

THAT WOULD BE NICE: Jeff Sessions Should Drop His Expansion of Civil Asset Forfeiture.

FASTER, PLEASE: Vaccines promoted as key to stamping out drug-resistant microbes.

BRUCE BAWER: Highlights From a Summer in Eurabia.

You’ll want to read the whole thing.

HMM: Rod Rosenstein suggests Comey broke FBI policy by leaking memos to press.

SAYS THE MAN WHO BY ALL APPEARANCES GOT BULLIED INTO CLAIMING THAT A MANDATE IS A TAX: Chief Justice Roberts says criticism won’t stop judges.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: President Trump’s Voter Fraud Commission Meets, Smeared by Deniers.

SO AFTER HAVING IT FOR A COUPLE OF MONTHS, I can report that the MantelMount is a complete success. It’s easy to use, brings the TV down to a comfortable viewing angle, and the “expert installation” bundled with it was first-rate.

BUT WHEN WILL THEY GET SERIOUS ABOUT ISLAMISTS INSIDE THEIR OWN BORDERS? Germany Is Now Warning Travelers About Going To Turkey.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The collapse of GOP support coincides with the popularization of a militant brand of liberal political activism that gestates on college campuses.

Noah Rothman for USA Today:

The Missouri story is indicative of the broader crisis on at many American colleges. Increasingly, the evidence shows, they are places of strictly enforced intellectual, cultural and political homogeneity. That rigid conformity may be enforced from below by energetic activists, but it finds succor and rationalizations for its conduct from above.

A study of “Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology” published in Econ Journal Watch in late 2016 found that at 40 leading universities, registered Republicans were outnumbered by their Democratic counterparts by an average ratio of 11.5-to-1. This disparity isn’t new, but it’s been exacerbated as identity politics has polarized the academy.

The Heritage Foundation’s Kim Holmes, author of The Closing of the Liberal Mind, blames the rise of multicultural studies departments. “If you’re going to have a Gender Studies Department, or something like that, the progressive assumptions are built into the very idea of the department, so you’re not going to hire any conservative professors,” said Holmes. If conservatives self-select out of programs like these, it follows that those who emerge from these programs will consider conservative ideas alien and threatening.

The irony of course is that it’s a mainstay of progressivism that only conservatives are held hostage by such primitive thinking.

ROGER SIMON PROFFERS ADVICE TO TRUMP: Cultivate the Fine Art of Boredom.

Calvin Coolidge, pictured below with his ghostly Jedi halo, once said that one of his administration’s greatest accomplishments was that it minded its own business. The Tea Party’s goal, as Glenn has said, was a government that would leave us alone. In the days of Leviathan government, is that still possible?

UNDER OATH? The Russian Lawyer Who Met With Don Jr. Says She’s Ready to Testify for the U.S. Senate.