FINALLY: A PRO FOOTBALL LEAGUE THAT GETS IT: Lingerie Football League Responds to NFL: ‘We Stand!’

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: A Question of National Identity.

JOSH KRAUSHAAR: Democrats Lose Touch With America — Hillary Clinton’s new book blames a lot of culprits for her defeat. It barely notes the biggest reason: her cultural disconnect from the country.

Clinton’s decision to call Trump backers deplorable was one of her campaign’s low points. But the problem runs much deeper within her party. Progressives now instinctively label pro-Trump conservatives as “white supremacists,” a slur that paints nearly half the country with a racist brush. Legitimate anxieties over the country’s national security are frequently dismissed as anti-Muslim xenophobia. Politicized sportswriters assumed that the American public supports players protesting the national anthem, even when a swell of football fans across the country—including those in the most liberal media markets—booed their own team’s players for disrespecting the flag.

President Trump has exploited this gaping disconnect between elite opinion and majority sentiment in the most divisive way possible. But it doesn’t mean that Democrats should be playing into his hands.

For a sign of how far to the left Democrats have drifted on culture, just look at the last major anthem protest to sweep up a sports league. In 1996, Nuggets star Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf refused to stand for the national anthem, calling the American flag a symbol of tyranny. He was promptly suspended for a game and fined by the NBA. There was no uproar in favor of his right to protest, even in a league where most players were African-American. Condemnation of Abdul-Rauf’s action ran across the political spectrum. Then-commissioner David Stern later mandated players stand in a dignified manner when the anthem was played—a wholly uncontroversial decision.

The closest Clinton comes to acknowledging the party’s cultural tone-deafness is an anecdote she shares about the Arkansas Senate race in 2014. She relays a story about an old friend who typically votes Democratic, has fairly liberal economic views, but was having a tough time supporting moderate Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor’s reelection. She recounts him telling her husband: “At least the Republicans won’t do anything to us. The Democrats want to take away my gun and make me go to a gay wedding.” But instead of showing empathy for people with more-traditional social views, she concludes that “the politics of cultural identity and resentment were overwhelming evidence, reason and personal experience.” Successful politicians feel people’s pain; they don’t hector them about their hang-ups.

As president, Bill Clinton’s strategy when tackling divisive cultural issues was to at least offer a signal that he understood the opposition. His famous formulation about wanting abortion to be “safe, legal and rare” offered rhetorical reassurance to those opposed to abortion, even as his administration was solidly and proudly in favor of abortion rights. Inclusive language helps dampen the anger of opponents, even when there’s little agreement on policy.

Even longtime Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg, who has long urged Democrats to adopt an aggressively populist economic message, concludes that Clinton’s cultural disconnect was her most glaring vulnerability in the campaign. In an essay in The American Prospect, he writes: “Despite overwhelming evidence that the Democratic base wasn’t consolidated or excited, the campaign believed that Trump’s tasteless attacks and Clinton’s identification with every group in the rainbow coalition would produce near-universal support…. They were explicitly privileging race and gender over class.”

How’d that work out for you, folks?

FASTER, PLEASE: Heart failure could be treated using umbilical cord stem cells. “Using stem cells derived from the umbilical cord, researchers have improved the heart muscle and function of heart failure patients, paving the way for noninvasive therapies.”

AMERICAN MADE: TOM CRUISE MOVIE FABRICATES HISTORY TO ATTACK RONALD REAGAN.

Cruise plays Barry Seal, a real-life Louisiana TWA pilot-turned-drug smuggler for the Medellin Cartel who got rich in the 1970s and 1980s before he was eventually busted. Desperate, he volunteered to turn informant for the DEA and earned the wrath of the drug lords after photographing some of them with cameras the CIA had installed on his plane . All of this is shown in American Made, but as far as I can tell, most of the rest is fabricated. Seal is, for instance, shown working for the CIA first to conduct spy missions, then becoming a drug trafficker while also delivering CIA rifles to the Contras, and then welcoming the Contras to his Mena, Ark. headquarters for training. Yet according to the author of what appears to be a well-sourced book on Seal, the pilot was not a CIA employee or asset. That’s awkward: Seal’s supposed CIA gig is the central element of this movie. It’s as if it turned out that Goodfellas narrator Henry Hill wasn’t in the mafia at all but was instead hijacking trucks and burying bodies as a foot soldier for the National Endowment for the Arts.

American Made could have been called American Made-Up. It amounts to an enormously contrived effort by Doug Liman, the son of the Senate’s lead counsel in the Iran-Contra hearings, to reshape the tangle of that scandal into a larkish Tom Cruise adventure. Truth was not an impediment. “We’re not making a biopic,” Liman has said, confessing that during filming he would dream up on the spot entertaining new exploits for Seal: “Wouldn’t it be fun if we did this, or funny if we did that?” He calls the film a “fun lie” in publicity notes. Yet American Made has no core to hold it together if it uses a real person, real events, and even news clips of Reagan talking about matters discussed in the movie, to cloak its many fabrications in history. We love Goodfellas because we know it happened, because it’s a confession. American Made borrows the confession motif and many other elements from Goodfellas, but it’s mostly just Liman and Cruise fun-lying.

Flashback: Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday excuses massive inaccuracies in Sean Penn’s 2010 Valerie Plame biopic (not least of which, the absence of Plame leaker Richard Armitage, by writing, “In Washington, watching fact-based political movies has become a sport all its own, with viewers hyper-alert to mistakes, composite characters or real stories hijacked by political agendas. But what audiences often fail to take into account is that a too-literal allegiance to the facts can sometimes obscure a larger truth…Thus, the movies about Washington that get the right stuff right — or get some stuff wrong but in the right way — become their own form of consensus history. ‘Follow the money,’ then, assumes its own totemic truth. Ratified through repeated viewings in theaters, on Netflix and beyond, these films become a mutual exercise in creating a usable past. We watch them to be entertained, surely, and maybe educated. But we keep watching them in order to remember.”

Winston Smith, call your office.

“SAVING $1,000 A YEAR ON TAXES IS NOTHING. LESS THAN $100 A MONTH:” Mic senior politics writer Emily Singer responds to Trump’s tax cut proposal, smugly writes off huge chunk of America.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE SEXISM: “The coked-up British med student who stabbed her boyfriend with a bread knife has, as was predicted, avoided any jail time because it might damage her career prospects. Because the National Health Service must be so hard up for potential heart-surgeons that they will take anyone apparently. Or something.”

But we know what’s going on.

THANKS TO THE FREE MARKET, AN AFFORDABLE WAY TO RETURN HOME AFTER EVACUATING: In the Wake of Hurricane Irma, Rental Companies Now Offering $5 Car Rentals from Northeast to Florida. It’s a cheap way for them to rebuild their fleets in south Florida, too.

THAT’S BILLION WITH A B: Illegal aliens are costing the American taxpayer $135 billion a year.

INTERNET 4.0: Chris Berg (Australia’s free speech champion), Sinclair Davidson (of Catallaxy Files fame), and Jason Potts have put together The Blockchain Economy: A beginner’s guide to institutional cryptoeconomics. If they’re right, regulators and taxmen have a lot to fear.

REPORT: Kurds vote overwhelmingly in favor of independence from Iraq.

THINKING OUTSIDE THE SHIPPING CONTAINER:

Brilliant.

THEY SEEM TO BE ROUNDING THESE PEOPLE UP ALL OF A SUDDEN: Antifa leader, teacher Yvonne Felarca arrested at ’empathy tent’ Berkeley brawl. “Three men were also arrested on charges including possession of body armor, carrying a banned weapon and participating in a riot.”

FED STUDY: Most Americans Still Worse Off Than Before Recession.

Newly released income and wealth data from the Federal Reserve Board’s triennial Survey of Consumer Finances show that America’s richest families enjoyed gains in income and net worth over the last decade. Not part of the top 10 percent? Then your income probably fell. The data show that families ranked in the highest percentile saw an income gain of $16,300 from 2007 to 2016. Those below are still making less money.

When it comes to wealth, the gap is even bigger. In 2007, half of families had a net worth of $139,700 or more and half fell below this level. By 2016, the midpoint dropped to $97,300 — a decline of $42,600. Families ranked in the top tenth of net worth have enjoyed a sizable gain since 2007: a $132,100 rise in net worth to reach almost $1.2 million.

Thanks, Obama.

IN-DEPTH REVIEW: 2018 Mazda CX-9.

BUT OF COURSE: Of course the Aston Martin AM37 speedboat is fast and beautiful.

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Plus, deals on Vitamins and Dietary Supplements.

SPENGLER: Washington’s despicable hypocrisy towards the Kurds.

Since September 11, 2001, we’ve been told that America has to ally with moderate Muslims against “extremism.” There are in fact moderate Muslims in the world. The Kurds are “moderate Muslims.” The Kurds do not persecute nonbelievers. They don’t hate Jews and Christians. They don’t forbid women to leave the house without a male relative; in fact, their militias are the only effective fighting force in the world that includes women in front-line combat units. They protect Iraqi Christians against ISIS, and Iraq’s Christians in turn support Kurdish independence. They have excellent and long-standing relations with the State of Israel. Jewish life is flourishing in the Kurdish Autonomous Region in the north of Iraq.

Most of all, Kurdish fighters are the spearhead of American-backed ground forces fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq. They do not only act the way we say we want Muslims to act, protecting Christians and Jews and promoting the equality of women. They shed blood for what they believe in.

The Kurds are everything that George W. Bush and Barack Obama told us we should find in the Islamic world, and more. They want nothing but friendship with the United States of America. And we have thrown them under the bus. There isn’t an Appalachian outhouse that stinks worse than our foreign policy Establishment.

It’s difficult to decide which our foreign policy establishment lacks most: Backbone or imagination.

And do read the whole thing.

IT’S A SHAKEDOWN: More evidence that the London Uber ban is about politics and demanding concessions, not safety. You can read my take here if you haven’t seen it already.

THE WOODERSON EFFECT: As Tom Cruise gets older, his on-screen love interests stay the same age.

It’s a well-known fact that Hollywood likes to pair older men with younger women. And to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with an age gap between two consenting adults. According to the 2013 US Census, 4.8 percent of heterosexual married couples included a husband 10-15 years his wife’s senior.

The problem, rather, is that Hollywood doesn’t really care about showcasing the stories of that 4.8 percent so much as normalizing the expectation that women are only romance material when they’re in their mid-20s/early-30s, whereas men are free to age and remain conceivably f—able.

Of the leading men frequently cited in critiques of the age gap, Tom Cruise is the highest-paid. Consequently, the way he’s represented on screen matters. He is worth the deep dive. And deep dive I did. I crunched the numbers for every single Tom Cruise movie, comparing his age relative to that of the actresses playing his love interests over time.

All told, Cruise’s age gap mirrors, and indeed confirms, the larger critique of Hollywood’s bias against older actresses. This isn’t just anecdotally-sourced rhetoric, by the way. There’s more and more statistical evidence showing how women age out of Hollywood. Time and The Pudding, for instance, do a great job at visualizing how more roles and dialogue are available to men as they age, where the opposite is true for women.

Why is Hollywood such a cesspit of misogyny and ageism?

THE LINK BETWEEN FREQUENT EJACULATION AND REDUCED RISK OF PROSTATE CANCER.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is Porn Harmful?

I BLAME THOSE MARTIAN SUVs: Radar survey offers new insights into Martian climate change.

FREEDOM CAUCUS CHAIRMAN: ‘Very Aggressive Timeframe’ on Tax Reform a Challenge.

Is it time to bring back the old “Do-Nothing Congress” label?