DAN MARKEL UPDATE: Another Garcia cellmate comes forward with information on Markel. “While they worked out, the conversation turned to religion and salvation. The former inmate said Garcia told him he was facing the death penalty for a murder he was paid to carry out.”

WELL, THAT’S MUCH BETTER THAN DOG EATING. “North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho slammed U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday, saying his threat to destroy the nation amounted to ‘the sound of a dog barking.’”

Former President Obama could not be reached for comment.

PUERTO RICO: “We’re looking at four to six months without electricity.”

ANALYSIS TRUE: Socialism Corrupts and Absolute Socialism Corrupts Absolutely, Sarah Hoyt writes.

THE FIRST RULE OF TITLE IX IS DON’T TALK ABOUT TITLE IX: TheFire.org summarizes a New Yorker piece today that shows college bureaucrats think  “1984” is a manual, not a warning:

In May 2015, Laura Kipnis was famously the subject of a Title IX investigation by Northwestern University for an essay she wrote suggesting there are too many Title IX investigations. Today, Jeannie Suk Gersen reports for The New Yorker that Kipnis was the subject of yet another Northwestern Title IX investigation earlier this year — this time for writing “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus,” a book about being investigated for saying there are too many Title IX investigations.

Read the whole thing and donate a few bucks to The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education here.

TELL US HOW YOU REALLY FEEL, SAM: Sam Kass of the Huffington Post on “What Should Have Happened In Hillary Clinton’s Useless Book:”

It’s like a self-care book written by a serial killer. Aside from the alternate-nostril breathing, she drinks plenty of Chardonnay but refuses antidepressants. (“Wasn’t for me. Never has been.”) She redecorates her other mansion, the one next door to the mansion she lives in. She retreats from her quest for world domination, returning to the simple joys of being a multimillionaire. In one revealing anecdote, a well-wisher sends her a thousand origami cranes. Hanging them up inside your house, the accompanying note tells her, brings you good luck. Clinton hangs them on her porch.

* * * * * * *

In literary terms, the book could be classed as a Mary Sue self-insertion fanfic. Reading What Happened induces a horrifying claustrophobia, the feeling of being pent up in a small room as someone delivers an unending lecture about how much better they are than everyone else. Like every horrifying little room, this one is cluttered with cutesy sayings on every wall. Each chapter begins and ends with an inspirational quote about believing in yourself and reaching higher, 25 epigraphs in total. One (“It is hard to be a woman. You must think like a man, act like a lady, look like a young girl, and work like a horse”) is attributed to “a sign that hangs in my house.”

Ordinarily, I’d snark, “When Hillary’s lost the Huffington Post” – but as we saw in 2008, she had never won them, and eight years before her “Deplorables” smear against Trump’s supporters, the Huffington Post was declaring her own voters as racist white men. Used cars rarely succeed as Democrat party presidential nominees – they like their candidates with that shiny new presidential smell, and as minimal baggage as possible to used against them, but hey, as the Hillary campaign moronically debated as a slogan in 2016, it was her turn…

WHAT WOULD IT TAKE for the US to bury its power lines?

POOR PUERTO RICO: Puerto Rico ‘100 percent without power’ after Maria hits.

“WITH HIGH-PROFILE ROLL-OUTS IN FRANCE AND JAPAN, BULLET TRAIN MANIA WAS UNDERWAY. AND THEN REALITY SET IN.” Reason TV: The Politician Behind California High Speed Rail Now Says It’s ‘Almost a Crime.’

So is the “road diet” that Jerry Brown set down to (further) punish California drivers, to help advance his pet project. But as the Cato Institute noted in a paper on light rail titled “The Desire Named Streetcar:”

A transit agency that expands its bus fleet gets the support of the transit operators union. But an agency that builds a rail line gets the support of construction companies, construction unions, banks and bond dealers, railcar manufacturers, electric power companies (if the railcars are electric powered), downtown property owners, and other real estate interests. Rail may be a negative-sum game for the region as a whole, but those concentrated interests stand to gain a lot at a relatively small expense to everyone else.

The California high speed rail project, is that graft on Barry Bonds-level steroids, and as Reason TV’s Justin Monticello says in the above video, it “will be both the slowest bullet train in the world—and the most expensive. The Rail Authority cut costs by using track mixed with conventional rail, which means the train won’t reach the speeds they promise. Coupled with a sinewy route that winds its way between endpoints, that means it will never go from Los Angeles to San Francisco in the promised 2 hours and 40 minutes. The train, if it ever comes to pass, will also be competing with air travel at a time when a new generation of quiet supersonic planes is about to take flight.”

Haven’t we learned anything from the debacles of the 1970s?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUERtAe73NI

WALL STREET JOURNAL: All Mr. Comey’s Wiretaps: Congress needs to learn how the FBI meddled in the 2016 campaign.

When Donald Trump claimed in March that he’d had his “wires tapped” prior to the election, the press and Obama officials dismissed the accusation as a fantasy. We were among the skeptics, but with former director James Comey’s politicized FBI the story is getting more complicated.

CNN reported Monday that the FBI obtained a warrant last year to eavesdrop on Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager from May to August in 2016. The story claims the FBI first wiretapped Mr. Manafort in 2014 while investigating his work as a lobbyist for Ukraine’s ruling party. That warrant lapsed, but the FBI convinced the court that administers the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to issue a second order as part of its probe into Russian meddling in the election.

Guess who has lived in a condo in Trump Tower since 2006? Paul Manafort. . . .

It is thus highly likely that the FBI was listening to the political and election-related conversations of a leading contender for the White House. That’s extraordinary—and worrisome.

Mr. Comey told Congress in late March that he “had no information that supports those [Trump] tweets.” Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was even more specific that “there was no such wiretap activity mounted against—the President-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign.” He denied that any such FISA order existed. Were they lying?

The warrant’s timing may also shed light on the FBI’s relationship to the infamous “ Steele dossier.” That widely discredited dossier claiming ties between Russians and the Trump campaign was commissioned by left-leaning research firm Fusion GPS and developed by former British spy Christopher Steele—who relied on Russian sources. But the Washington Post and others have reported that Mr. Steele was familiar to the FBI, had reached out to the agency about his work, and had even arranged a deal in 2016 to get paid by the FBI to continue his research.

The FISA court sets a high bar for warrants on U.S. citizens, and presumably even higher for wiretapping a presidential campaign. Did Mr. Comey’s FBI marshal the Steele dossier to persuade the court?

All of this is reason for House and Senate investigators to keep exploring how Mr. Comey’s FBI was investigating both presidential campaigns. Russian meddling is a threat to democracy but so was the FBI if it relied on Russian disinformation to eavesdrop on a presidential campaign.

This stinks.

ACE ON THE MEDIA’S POST-ELECTION INSANITY: “They’re destroying themselves, and sabotaging their own propaganda operations, because they’re just too crazy to think or care about such things any longer. And I gotta tell you: I love it.”

Plus: “Destroying the media is a thing to be dearly wished for — but watching them destroy themselves is tons better. They’re now Othering themselves, and I think that’s just fine. People don’t want to associate with weirdoes — and now that they’ve decided to fly their freak flags proudly and put their Full Metal Weird on display for the world, I can only sit back and cheer.”

NOW I’VE SEEN EVERYTHING: Topless carwash raises cash for deputies wounded in gun battle at Rastafarian pot farm.

HE SAYS IT WOULD BE UNFAIR TO THE OTHER 100 STUDENTS: University Of Illinois Professor Put On Paid Administrative Leave For Refusing To Give PowerPoint Slides To Learning Disabled Student.

A “WHAT IF” NORTH KOREAN ATMOSPHERIC NUCLEAR TEST SCENARIO:

PJ Media contributor Charlie Martin asked me to consider the following “gray area” scenario:

What if a North Korean EMP (electromagentic pulse) is intended as a “demonstration”? Suppose the nuke explodes over the North Pacific in an area that, say, the geography- and technology-ignorant cable news talking heads swear is open water, thousands of miles from U.S. and Japanese territory? And they claim that the only danger at that point is Trump’s response?

My reply includes a map exercise.

RELATED: From 2013, a report that North Korea was seeking non-nuclear EMP weapons. See the October 23, 2013 post: “…South Korean intelligence also warns that North Korea is using Russian technology to develop EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) weapons.”

GENTLEMEN, YOU CAN’T TALK ABOUT SPORTS HERE, THIS IS ESPN! WashPost Columnist: ESPN Must Be Safe for Charging Trump With Racism.

As Glenn has written, “All ESPN had to do, a couple of years ago, was say ‘we do sports, politics are for those other cable channels.’ That would have drawn in the many Americans who are sick of 24/7/365 politics. Instead, ESPN decided to do politics, but with less balance than MSNBC. Shockingly, this has not drawn more people in.”

SONNY BUNCH: IF HOLLYWOOD WANTS A SCAPEGOAT FOR POOR TICKET SALES, BLAME THE POOR PROJECTION TECHNIQUES OF MOVIE THEATERS.

It has gotten to the point that, were I not literally writing about movies for money, I would never go to theaters anymore. Why would I go watch a muddy picture on a screen showing a dimmed image surrounded by grayish-letterboxed rectangles when I can stay at home in the darkness of my basement and watch a movie in the appropriate brightness on my 60-inch HD plasma a few months after its initial theatrical release? A Blu-ray is often cheaper than a theater ticket anyway, radically so once concessions are taken into account. To say nothing of the price differential for an On Demand rental. If you don’t need to see something upon its initial release, why would you even bother going to theaters?

No wonder AMC stock is down radically. If exhibitors can’t be bothered to exhibit films properly, what, exactly, is their raison d’etre?

So a terrible product, made by people who viscerally loathe middle America, terribly displayed by theater owners who don’t give a damn about their customers. Heckuva job all around, fellas.

LEAKED: WATCH MSNBC’S LAWRENCE O’DONNELL’S UNHINGED OUTTAKES…FOR EIGHT CRAZY MINUTES.

Lawrence O’Donnell acting unhinged? Who could have predicted that?

UPDATE: Bill O’Reilly and Lawrence O’Donnell: Together at Last!

1967: In 50 years, we’ll have flying cars!

2017: App lets users rent ‘warmed up’ second-hand sex dolls.

JOHN ELLIS: The Best Albums of the Reagan Presidency.

I would have swapped out Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs for Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombone. And really, any ’80s list is more than complete if it doesn’t include The Joshua Tree.

I COULD HAVE SWORN DIVERSITY WAS OUR STRENGTH: Bridgewater State Professor Says “Fuck Any” Students Who Voted For Trump, They Are KKK And Are Not Welcomed In His English Class.

For all the complaints about “chilly” or “hostile” classroom environments, here’s the real deal — and you don’t have to guess which side the hostility comes from.

DUMB: What Was Tom Price Thinking?

This Politico piece blows him up so thoroughly, I’m not sure there’s anything left to say. He chartered private jets for HHS-related travel five times in the last week alone, likely at an average cost of at least $12,000 per flight, when he could have easily flown commercial for some or all of them. The most ridiculous charter: A flight from D.C. to Philly, which only takes two to three hours to drive and may well have been faster than traveling to and from airports in both cities to use a plane. When Politico asked Obama’s HHS people if they’d ever felt obliged to use a charter, the only time they could recall doing so was when the secretary had to get to a remote part of Alaska. And that department was tasked with rolling out the ObamaCare exchanges across the country, remember. It’s not like their travel needs were any less pressing than Price’s.

As I write this on Wednesday morning, he and HHS haven’t even tried to justify the flights beyond a pro forma statement that “When commercial aircraft cannot reasonably accommodate travel requirements, charter aircraft can be used for official travel.” The point of the story, though, is that commercial aircraft could have accommodated him. In at least one case, a *rental car* could have accommodated him. The only obvious conceivable excuse is that it wasn’t taxpayers who ended up footing the bill for the flights, it was someone else. But the groups Price visited last week during his trips say they didn’t pay for his travel.

I had hoped we’d gotten rid of such imperial travel accommodations along with the previous Administration.

IF HILLARY HAD WON, HE’D HAVE BEEN IN THE LINCOLN BEDROOM: Democrat Freak Anthony Weiner Watched Naked 15-Year-Old Fondle Herself on Skype. And he knew she was underage.

COMPARISON: 2017 Honda Civic Si vs 2017 Volkswagen Golf GTI.

AT AMAZON, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

Also, Storm Preparedness Essentials.

Plus, an Earthquake Preparedness List.

Still timely, sad to say.