BUBBLE: Bitcoin mining ‘is using so much energy that it is causing electricity blackouts’ amid fears it will consume more power than the world by 2020.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED THERE WAS NO SHAME IN THAT: Did Elizabeth Warren just call her fellow senator a slut?

JEFF DUNETZ: So You Think You Know What Hanukkah Is All About? Think Again.

WEIRD HOW THIS ISN’T GETTING MUCH COVERAGE: Fewer Blacks, Hispanics Go Jobless Under Trump.

YOU DON’T SAY: Turkey’s Erdogan Was ‘No. 1’ in Corruption Probe, Witness Says.

Delivering fresh accusations against the Turkish leader through a court interpreter today, Korkmaz shared a personal story of exile, persecution, deliverance and globe-hopping escape worthy of a cross between a John Le Carre novel and a Homeric poem.

“I did not feel legally secure in any way for myself,” Kormaz told the jury about events that proceeded his dramatic escape from Turkey.

“During that time, the prosecutor had requested an order for arrest for myself based on a different investigation,” he continued. “I understood this time to be a time where rights to defend one’s own and freedoms of an individual and freedoms as a human were taken away. So I took my wife and my daughter, and I left the country that I dearly love.”

Korkmaz, who is barely 30 years old, told a New York jury that he graduated third in a class of roughly 360 students to rise through the ranks in the Istanbul police force, where he served as a ranking officer on the projects and public corruption desk.

In that capacity, Korkmaz said, his unit came across the case of gold trader Reza Zarrab, a former Erdogan ally whose testimony for the U.S. government last week rattled the highest echelons of the Turkish government.

Zarrab secretly pleaded guilty before trial to laundering billions of dollars to Iran through a complicated system of sham gold trades and spurious humanitarian food aid.

Read the whole thing.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS ON THE CHEESEHEAD STASI, AND LESSONS FOR THE MUELLER PROBE: Governmental accountability board? More like Wisconsin’s Secret Police.

UH-HUH: CAIR Director Outside White House: Trump ‘Empowering Christian Religious Extremism.’

FLASHBACK: Is CAIR a Terror Group?. Daniel Pipes wrote three years ago, “We who follow the Islamist movement fell off our collective chair on November 15, when the news came that the United Arab Emirates’ ministerial cabinet had listed the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as one of 83 proscribed terrorist organizations, up there with the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and ISIS.”

THE HARDCORE LEFTIES AT COUNTERPUNCH AREN’T IMPRESSED WITH “THE RESISTANCE:” The Year of the Headless Liberal Chicken.. “At this point, the amount of utterly baseless, contradictory propaganda, mass hysteria, and just flat out insanity the ruling classes have demanded they swallow is more than any human mind, no matter how medicated, could possibly handle. Is it any wonder so many of them of lost it and started seeing Nazis and Russians coming out of the woodwork? Just consider what the average liberal has been forced to try to cognitively reconcile since the tragic events of last November.”

YOU AND WHAT NAVY? China Threatens to Invade Taiwan If U.S. Navy Visits.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but one reason for a US Navy visit to Taiwan is to demonstrate the futility of trying to invade Taiwan.

CONSERVATIVE ICON SEES FOUR REASONS FOR A MOORE WIN: Dan Oliver has seen it all, heard it all. Former FTC Commissioner, chairman of the board for National Review during its golden Buckley era and much, much more.

In his Tuesday Washington Times column, Oliver lays out four imminently reasonable factors he thinks point to a Roy Moore win in today’s Alabama special election for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Here’s Oliver’s opening: “First, the Moore story was broken by The Washington Post, which has little or no credibility among Trump supporters, who also tend to be Roy Moore supporters. Having savaged Donald Trump relentlessly, The Post is seen as a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, and ironically, The Post’s story on Mr. Moore may have been factually correct.”

Worth the click to get Oliver’s other three factors.

LET IT BURN, SOUTH OF THE BORDER EDITION: Venezuela’s Ruling Socialists Sweep Mayoral Races Amid Opposition Boycott.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON LAYS OUT WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR ABOUT CONFLICTS OF INTEREST AND MISCONDUCT: “Something has gone terribly wrong with the Mueller investigation.”

Related: FBI’s McCabe ‘has an Ohr problem,’ will not testify on Tuesday, source says.

SIXTH CIRCUIT: Appeals judge grills university that told Title IX hearing panel ‘future of 1000 girls’ was at stake. “This ‘1000 girls’ comment, had it been a Black Lives Matter defendant who assaulted a white male, and [the panel] said we have to take the safety of our 1000 white students into account, we [judges] would lose our minds here. If you were up here trying to defend that comment, we would lose our minds.”

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, Updated Hourly.

Plus, new Kindle Daily Deals.

And, today’s Digital Deals.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS ON THE CHEESEHEAD STASI, AND LESSONS FOR THE MUELLER PROBE: Governmental accountability board? More like Wisconsin’s Secret Police.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Alabama Election Day, Fusion GPS, NYC Terror Attack and Much, Much More.

CRASH DRILL ON THE NIMITZ: Dig the motto stenciled on the crane: “No air support without ground support.” That’s direct and effective. On the Nimitz “flight deck support” might be more accurate but no doubt the crane crew’s sending a message to plane crews every where.

WHY ARE LEFTY-DOMINATED INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF SEXUAL ABUSE? Unsportsmanlike Conduct: Sexual Harassment At The NFL Network?

THE BOTTOM LINE: Apple aims to block climate, rights proposals with quick use of SEC guidance.

While companies routinely seek permission to skip shareholder proposals, Apple’s application of the new SEC guidance shows how it could be used to ignore many investor proposals by claiming boards routinely review those areas, said Sanford Lewis, a Massachusetts attorney representing Apple shareholders who had filed two of the resolutions.

Were the SEC to side with Apple, “this would be an incredibly dangerous precedent that would essentially say a great many proposals could be omitted,” Lewis said.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment beyond its letters to the SEC.

An SEC spokeswoman declined to comment. Officials had previously said the new guidelines were only meant to improve the resolution process.

Often seen as distractions in the past, shareholder measures have taken on new significance as big asset managers increasingly back those on areas like climate change or board diversity.

This might appear to go against Apple’s corporate grain, but I can’t imagine it isn’t good for shareholders in at least some small way.

SPENGLER ON HOW TRUMP HAS CONFOUNDED HIS OPPONENTS. “Economic growth is accelerating, stock prices are rising, and consumer confidence is soaring. The only distressed asset in the US market is conventional wisdom, which dismissed the former real-estate developer and reality TV star as a blundering amateur. On the contrary, Trump evinces a shrewdness about American voters better than that of any politician of his generation. Even more importantly, he has the nerve to take risks in order to draw his opponents into battles that he thinks he can win. I can think of no politician with his combination of courage and cunning since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to whom I compared the then president-elect in a December 2016 essay for Standpoint.”

THEY’VE GOT REASON: Trump Lawyers Want A Second Special Counsel: They want a probe into “obvious conflicts of interest” in the Department of Justice.

BYRON YORK: Former top spy rethinks: Maybe we shouldn’t have attacked a new president.

“Let’s put ourselves in Donald Trump’s shoes,” Morell said to Glasser. “So what does he see? Right? He sees a former director of CIA and a former director of NSA, Mike Hayden … criticizing him and his policies. Right? And he would rightfully have said, ‘Huh, what’s going on with the intelligence guys?'”

“And then he sees a former acting director and deputy director of CIA criticizing him and endorsing his opponent,” Morell continued. “And then he gets his first intelligence briefing, after becoming the Republican nominee, and within 24 to 48 hours, there are leaks out of that that are critical of him and his then-national security adviser Mike Flynn.”

“And so, this stuff starts to build, right? And he must have said to himself, ‘What is it with these intelligence guys? Are they political?'”

The answer to that was simple: Yes, they were political. But the astonishing part of the Morell interview is his admission that at the time he did not stop to consider what was happening from Trump’s perspective, even as the leaks continued when Trump took office. “He must have thought, ‘Who are these guys?'” Morell said. “Are these guys out to get me? Is this a political organization?”

That this obviously foreseeable consequence wasn’t foreseen demonstrates that these “intelligence” guys aren’t very good at what they’re supposed to be good at. And it explains why their work product hasn’t been very good with regard to other countries, when they couldn’t even foresee an obvious result in their own.

HMM: Beijing Develops Plan to Counter Trump Tax Overhaul.

Under the plan, the people say, the People’s Bank of China stands ready to deploy a combination of tools—higher interest rates, tighter capital controls and more-frequent currency intervention—to keep money at home and support the yuan.

An official involved in Beijing’s deliberations called Washington’s tax plan a “gray rhino,” an obvious danger in China’s economy that shouldn’t be ignored. “We’ll likely have some tough battles in the first quarter,” the official said.

Central to officials’ fear is the yuan, which has just regained its footing after enormous government efforts to prop it up. Should the yuan lose steam again, the thinking goes, it could further exacerbate capital outflows in a vicious cycle.

And:

While the tax overhaul isn’t directly aimed at Beijing, it is another way China will be squeezed.

Under the tax plan now going through the U.S. legislative process, America’s corporate levy could drop to about 20% from 35%. Over the next few years, economists say, that could spur manufacturers—whether American or Chinese—to opt to set up plants in the U.S. rather than China, where total tax burdens on companies are among the highest of major economies.

Our current corporate tax code — a black hole of time-sucking, innovation-throttling cronyism — is perhaps the most enormous own-goal in modern economics.