ITS RESEMBLANCE TO MODERN-DAY FEMINISM? What’s the most infuriating thing about Mean Girls?

MY USA TODAY COLUMN OFFERS A SOLUTION TO ROBOCALLS: If You Want My Attention, Pay Me.

EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE THE TRUMP: Fareed Zakaria: Two Obama officials told me he would have ordered a Syria strike just like the one Trump ordered. Heh.

PENCE IN SOUTH KOREA: North ‘Would Do Well Not to Test’ Trump.

This is how you get wily dictators to the negotiating table — not by sending them midnight pallets of cash and hoping for the best.

SECRETS THAT MASSAGE THERAPISTS WILL NEVER TELL YOU. Actually, I think they will tell you most of this stuff.

JAY COST: As goes Kansas, so goes …?

It is a dicey proposition to read too much into special elections to the House of Representatives. Turnout tends to be quite low, and local factors can skew results one way or another. That could be especially true in this case. Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback is immensely unpopular in the state, and Mr. Estes, as state treasurer, is naturally linked to his administration.

Still, the results were notable — especially in Topeka, the state capital and the biggest population center in the district. Mr. Trump won Topeka comfortably against Hillary Clinton in 2016, but in the special election, the vote was split more or less down the middle. In many respects, Topeka is your typical Midwestern city. So, to see the Democratic nominee claim half the vote could be a sign of rising voter discontent nationwide.

Or it could just be a fluke. That’s the trouble with special elections.

Still, congressional Republicans would do well to confront the plain fact that, though they have had complete charge of the government, they have no substantive accomplishments to show for their time in power. Worse, they do not even have any big achievements working their way through the pipeline.

Read the whole thing.

My preference would have been for a GOP loss in Kansas last week. The sacrifice of one easy-to-win-back seat would have been worth it, if it had given the House GOP a wakeup call in time to avoid a 2006-style shellacking next year.

MORNING JOE: Democrats Have Forgotten How To Win.

• Joe Scarborough said that he’s been asking Dem leaders appearing on the show if they’d be okay with a pro-life person from areas like Alabama or Kentucky, so long as they were progressive on economic issues. Said Scarborough, “and I keep hearing, No. No it’s not, no it’s not.”

• Liberal New York Times columnist Frank Bruni said “if you look at certain swing districts, [Dems] do not nominate the person who’s most likely to win in the general. They nominate someone who’s a purist from the primary, and then they wind up losing the district.” Without citing the specific district, Bruni gave the example of an upstate New York House election. He might well have had in mind the 19th district race. With an open seat in a competitive district at stake, Dems nominated the far-left, Occupy Wall Street/Bernie backer Zephyr Teachout. She lost handily to Republican John Faso.

• Dems got a double-dose of bad news from representatives of the Gray Lady. NYT reporter Jeremy Peters said “there is no leadership right now. There is such a vacuum. The sclerosis in the Democratic party is so overwhelming and crippling that they do not have a bench. They do not have leaders.

Obama took the national party Full Left-Progressive, making it as ideologically pure as it’s ever been. The 2010 & 2014 off-year elections all but wiped out moderates at the state and local level.

Expecting moderation and compromise from what’s left is a fool’s game, at least until the next savvy DLC-type candidate comes along.

WHY AIRPLANE COFFEE tastes terrible.

SANITY RETURNS TO THE ACADEMY: Fresno State Reports Own Professor for ‘Trump Must Hang’ Tweet.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Take Over Syria, Roman Edition.

ABOUT TIME: Getting ready: Pentagon to protect electric grid from massive attack.

THE CASE FOR CASELESS AMMUNITION:

The U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Army agree they may have finally found a caseless ammunition design that will work reliably in combat and be much (37 percent) lighter than conventional 5.56mm ammo.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Army Lasers Will Soon Destroy Enemy Mortars, Artillery and Drones From Strykers.

LEARNING TO LOVE Suicide Bombers.

YOU CAN’T ENFORCE THE LAW HERE, GENTLEMEN — THIS IS A COURTROOM! Arresting Illegal Immigrants in Courthouses Violates Their Rights, Say Activists.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “The two main objectives in teaching is…”

(Via David Thompson.)

ROBBY SOAVE: ‘These Institutions Are Betraying Their Own Values’—Here’s How Offended Students Seized Power on Campus: At Middlebury, Claremont, Wellesley, and elsewhere, censorship is winning because faculty and administrators won’t fight it.

Hell, many of them are ginning it up. It will not end well.

Related: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus: Future generations will look back on the recent upheavals in sexual culture on American campuses and see officially sanctioned hysteria. They’ll also ask “what’s a campus?”

RETENTION: The Air Force Nosedive Will Continue Until it Deals with Toxic Commanders.

When Col. Debbie Liddick relieved Lt. Col. Craig Perry from command without proper cause, it was abuse of power. When she had him investigated to give credibility to her lie, it was abuse of power. When Brig. Gen. Mark Camerer failed to relieve Liddick of command for her actions and failed to punish her, he abused his power.

When Col. Pat Rhatigan relieved Lt. Col. Blair Kaiser from command without cause, it was abuse. When Gen. Darren McDew failed to remove or reprimand Rhatigan, McDew himself became culpable for abuse.

When Col. Brian Hastings reprimanded and grounded three of his officers without proper evidence, he abused his power. When Gen. Robin Rand failed to relieve Hastings or investigate his actions, Rand abused his power. When Gen. Mark Welsh allowed Hastings to be placed on the promotion list for Brigadier General in spite of his conduct, Welsh participated in and deepened the abuse.

When Brig. Gen. Robert LaBrutta ignored the fact that Maj. Michael Turpiano had been railroaded by a sham prosecution containing zero evidence of sexual misconduct, he abused his power.

These are just a few prominent examples of a phenomenon that has been baked into the Air Force’s institutional climate and is now pervasive, no where more obvious than in reprimand and Article 15 proceedings that often curtail liberty and remove property from airmen without sufficient evidence to meet even a modest preponderance standard. The phenomenon is that the Air Force has given commanders the power of professional assassination and turned them loose to wield it without training, education, or accountability.

“Toxic commanders” act a lot like SJWs in uniform.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN OFFERS A SOLUTION TO ROBOCALLS: If You Want My Attention, Pay Me.

METHOD ACTOR: Will the real Alex Jones please stand up?

CHANGE? Trump’s message to Democrats: Negotiate Obamacare, or payments to insurers will be cut.

President Trump is threatening to cut off critical Obamacare payments to insurers unless Democrats come to the table to negotiate a new health care bill, taking a tough negotiating stance that could force Democratic leaders into a government shutdown by month’s end.

At stake are “cost sharing” payments that Obamacare backers say are supposed to be made to insurance companies to cover their losses from low-income customers.

A federal court has invalidated the payments, saying the Obama administration spent the money even though Congress specifically stripped the funds from its annual spending bills.

The government is still making the payments pending an appeal of the case, but Mr. Trump hinted last week that he would halt the payments himself, forcing Obamacare into a quick death unless Democrats agree to negotiate over major changes to the Affordable Care Act.

“If Congress doesn’t approve it, or if I don’t approve it, that would mean that Obamacare doesn’t have enough money, so it dies immediately as opposed to over a period of time,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

Alternately, Trump could hit them where it really hurts:

Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law, said that if Mr. Trump truly wants leverage, then he should cancel an Obama-era rule that lets members of Congress and their staff keep their federal health care subsidies, even though they are mandated by law to use Obamacare’s exchanges.

Don’t let Congress get away with breaking the law, Mr. President!

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The De-Professionalization of the Academy. “Over twelve years, I have watched with increasing dismay and incredulity as academic integrity, fairness, and intellectual rigor have eroded, with the implicit endorsement of administration and faculty alike. I have witnessed the de-professionalization of the professoriate—hiring policies based on tokenized identity politics and cronyism, the increasing intellectual and ideological conformity expected from faculty and students, and the subsequent curtailment of academic freedom.”

MICHAEL WALSH ON TRUMP’S FIRST 100 DAYS.

What’s your take on how it’s going? Let us know in the comments below.

Al JAZEERA HAS NO MEMORY OF OBAMA: An Al Jazeera opinionizer slams the Trump Administration for its “ambivalent approach” and a “non-consistent” policy in Syria. He does recognize that “Assad’s hopes of a US-Russian deal to his benefit are fading” and Trump has raised “the moral cost of supporting Assad.” OK, but inconsistent, ambivalent and outright fraudulent describe Obama’s Syrian legacy.