BUT OF COURSE: House Democrat Dismisses Muslim Woman’s Charge Against Muslim Staffer, Citing Islamophobia.

WHY DOES NBC’S CHRIS MATTHEWS HATE HIS A FORMER NBC EMPLOYEE SO MUCH? Chris Matthews Compares the Trump Family to Saddam Hussein’s.

I’m so old, I can remember when the left thought Saddam was just a warm fuzzy guy.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Constitutional carry legislation proposed in Wisconsin, likely to pass.

NATE COHN: Turnout Wasn’t the Driver of Clinton’s Defeat.

Ultimately, black turnout was roughly as we expected it. It looks as if black turnout was weak mostly in comparison with the stronger turnout among white and Hispanic voters.

This was part of a broader national pattern. Mr. Trump’s turnout edge was nonexistent or reversed in states with a large Hispanic population and a small black population, like Arizona. His turnout advantage was largest in states with a large black population and few Hispanic voters, like North Carolina.

What was consistent across most states, however, was higher-than-expected white turnout.

The increase in white turnout was broad, including among young voters, Democrats, Republicans, unaffiliated voters, urban, rural, and the likeliest supporters of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump. The greatest increases were among young and unaffiliated white voters.

For this reason alone, it’s hard to argue that turnout was responsible for the preponderance of Mr. Trump’s gains among white voters. The turnout among young and white Democratic voters was quite strong.

In other words, white working-class Democrats did turn out to vote — for Trump.

PROPS TO EINSTEIN: Relativity Just Passed a Major Test Involving the Most Accurate Clocks Ever.

SORRY, COMRADE, BUT YOUR FIREARMS QUOTA IS FILLED: Virginia’s McAuliffe Wants to Restore One-Gun-a-Month Policy.

AS A WISE COMMUNITY ORGANIZER ONCE SAID, ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES: Trump moves decisively to wipe out Obama’s climate-change record.

Faster, please. But hey, if anything goes wrong, we can still take Obama’s “Science” “Czar” up on his modest 2009 plan to shoot rockets full of pollution into the stratosphere, right?

(Classical reference in headline.)

‘FREE’ CAMILLE PAGLIA! Kathy Shaidle looks back on the initial impact of Paglia, as reflected in her new book, Free Women, Free Men, which Shaidle described as “a superb introduction to Paglia’s vision for the uninitiated, and a sobering, timely reminder to us old culture warriors that all apparent victories are only tomorrow’s battles, in drag:”

In one of many litanies devoted to her (now forgotten) feminist foes, Paglia blasts the “diarrhea prose” of one unfortunate, and calls another “Mrs. Fifties Tea Table.” (I spat laughing.) Rather than serving to settle old scores, in the great tradition of all aging polemicists, Free Women, Free Men seems calibrated to shaking them awake.

And why not? Contra Sayre’s law, the stakes of these particular academic feuds were, in fact, the highest imaginable: The minds of college students—future parents, citizens, bosses, leaders—were being poisoned. Paglia clearly saw her role as that of stomach pump, and still does.

But the same clarion quality that means every fresh Paglia piece is Drudge-worthy news to this day makes reading a compendium like Free Women enervating rather than energizing. As the dates at the bottom of these pages remind us, her earliest acidic denunciations of political correctness, campus speech codes, and “rape culture” are almost thirty years old. Any real-world impact they had was clearly fleeting.

Hence this recent headline at Minding the Campus: “How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture.” In his 1980 book, The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler coined the phrase “the demassified media,” to describe a media that had only just recently made the transition from three commercial broadcast television networks to a cable TV system that promised narrow-casted channels to every interest from 24-hour news to 24-hour rock music to 24 hour home and gardening tips – and interactive computer networks, which then consisted of CompuServe, The Source, and privately-owned bulletin boards. Contra its more elderly denizens such as Ted Koppel, a demassified media is quite a healthy and useful thing. A demassified, balkanized culture will soon find itself going to war over tribalism and politics, as the last three decades have shown. However meager her ultimate success, I’m glad Paglia is fighting the good fight from inside the barricades.

THIS DOESN’T GET MADE OFTEN ENOUGH: The Moral Case for Spending Restraint.

ALLAHPUNDIT: Pat Leahy says he’s not inclined to filibuster Gorsuch.

A not-so-crazy conspiracy theory for you: What if Schumer put Leahy up to this? No minority leader likes to see his authority undermined, but Schumer’s in a terrible bind here. If he doesn’t show the left that he’s willing to avenge Merrick Garland by using every obstructionist trick at his disposal, progressives will scapegoat him and turn him into a lightning rod for their anger over Trump. In fact, they already have. If, on the other hand, the caucus follows his lead and successfully filibusters Gorsuch, it’ll be a fiasco — McConnell will nuke it, Gorsuch will be confirmed anyway, and the left will have lost their last bit of procedural leverage over an eventual Trump nominee for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s or Stephen Breyer’s seat. A filibuster now would be the purest strategic idiocy and Schumer knows it. Solution, then: Endorse the filibuster in his role as minority leader while nudging Leahy, a Senate institution and Judiciary Committee veteran who almost certainly can’t be defeated in Vermont, to lead the rebellion instead. Now, when Manchin and Bennet and McCaskill et al. need to justify their votes in favor of cloture, they can point to Leahy and say, “Sen. Leahy’s judgment carries such heavy weight with me, especially in terms of getting politics out of judicial nominations, that I feel obliged to join him in this vote.” Leahy then becomes the lightning rod. But so what? He’s immune from this sort of political lightning.

That makes perfect sense, although is likely to change if the Democrats smell enough GOP blood in the water that it doesn’t look like they have 51 votes to nuke the filibuster.

UPDATE: Joe Manchin Opposes Filibuster of Neil Gorsuch.

Word may be trickling down, if Allahpundit has it right.

IT LOOKS HEALTHY AND DELICIOUS: The Secret, Off-Menu “Bowl of Doom” That’s Become Famous in Dallas CrossFit and Paleo Circles.

THIS SEEMS RIGHT: Byron York: Whatever Trump does next, it has to be about jobs and wages.

STEVE FORBES TO HOUSE REPUBLICANS: “You have just pulled off one of the most astonishing acts of political self-immolation in history.”

He’s too gentle.

WELL, THE TIPOFF SHOULD HAVE BEEN WHEN SOMEONE WITH A PENIS BECAME “WOMAN OF THE YEAR.” Sorry, Feminists — The Patriarchy Wins Again.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Judge Approves Petition to Be Legally ‘Genderless’

WHY ARE LEFTY INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM AND MISOGYNY? SXSW Panelist Looking for the Bouncer Who He Says Shoved His Girlfriend. I was invited to speak at SXSW 10 or 15 years ago, and couldn’t go. I kind of wish I had, because I think it was a lot nicer back then.

LIVE BY THE PEN AND PHONE, DIE BY THE PEN AND PHONE: Trump takes biggest swing yet at Obama climate legacy.

Trump plans to order the EPA to rewrite tough rules that make it virtually impossible to build a new coal-fired power plant, and he will tell the Interior Department to end Obama’s moratorium on new coal mines on federal lands, among other steps, White House officials said.

Additionally, the president’s “energy independence” executive order also will repeal several Obama-era environmental directives aimed at reducing the federal government’s own carbon footprint, and it will direct agencies to ferret out any additional policies that “result in impediments” to U.S. energy production, a likely reference to restrictions on fracking and offshore drilling. The president also will tell federal regulators to stop using the “social cost of carbon,” which attempts to quantify the effects of climate change, in economic analyses of future rules.

“There is every reason to believe that the federal government will no longer seek to punish American consumers and businesses for using the energy resources that fuel our economy,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue said in a statement welcoming the order.

Excellent. The key to energy independence, or close to it, is simply to follow John Galt’s polite request to “Get the hell out of my way!”

I REMEMBER WHEN EXPRESSING DOUBTS ABOUT “PEAK OIL” GOT YOU CALLED A SHILL FOR EXXON: New Crude Found in UK Waters.

“Peak oil” decriers must be used to feeling foolish at this point, but their folly continues (and will continue) to be exposed by discoveries of new oil supplies. The latest example comes to us courtesy of the North Sea waters off the shore of the UK’s Shetland islands, where the oil exploration firm Hurricane Energy claims to have found the country’s biggest new offshore reserve of extractable oil in more than a dozen years. . . .

Many more wells will need to be drilled before we can get a reliably accurate estimate of how much oil Hurricane has discovered, but this is a very good start and comes as something of a lifeline for Britain’s offshore oil industry. North Sea oil supplies made the UK a net exporter of crude in the 1980s, but since then the region’s output has fallen considerably as fields have matured and new discoveries have failed to make up that difference. The collapse in crude prices over the past two years was especially hard on the industry, whose operating costs are among the highest in the world.

In the face of all of this, the UK has been using every tool in its possession to cajole investors to continue to scour its waters for reserves like the one Hurricane just found. And while the road ahead doesn’t exactly look promising, there is at least one reason for Brits to be hopeful: North Sea operating costs have fallen 45 percent in recent years. If that trend continues and exploration keeps yielding valuable new discoveries like this latest one, there might yet be life for Britain’s offshore oil and gas industry.

I also remember when Barack Obama said we couldn’t “drill our way out of” high gas and oil prices.

MEGAN MCARDLE: How Utah Keeps The American Dream Alive. “Once I got there, I found that it’s hard to even get a complete picture of how Utah combats poverty, because so much of the work is done by the Mormon Church, which does not compile neat stacks of government figures for the perusal of eager reporters.”

Plus: “David Sims, a Brigham Young economist who has done work on income mobility, suggests that the secret to Utah’s especially good mobility is not that it’s especially good at building effective public institutions. What it’s especially good at is a sort of middle classness that’s so broad it’s almost infectious.” Weirdly, the intelligentsia in the rest of America have been waging war against the very idea of “middle classness” for 50 years — and at the same time, social dysfunction among the poor and working classes has gotten worse. Go figure.

BOOM:

That sounds an awful lot like “Repeal is dead.”

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Scientists turn mammalian cells into complex biocomputers.

FAKE NEWS: CNN Aired a ‘Live’ Interview With a Congresswoman That Wasn’t ‘Live.’ To be fair, they’re also constantly touting “breaking news” that’s neither breaking, nor news.

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WAIT… WHAT? Women’s March Convicted Terrorist Agrees to Be Deported in Exchange for No Jail Time. “But not before she is a featured speaker at an upcoming Jewish conference.”

All-too-believable.