WEIRD HOW LITTLE PRESS THIS TRIAL HAS GOTTEN: Judge refuses to dismiss corruption charges against Menendez.

THIS IS ACTUALLY HUGE: Jerry Brown Sides with Betsy DeVos on Title IX. In his message vetoing a state law: “Since this law was enacted, however, thoughtful legal minds have increasingly questioned whether federal and state actions to prevent and redress sexual harassment and assault—well-intentioned as they are—have also unintentionally resulted in some colleges’ failure to uphold due process for accused students. Depriving any student of higher education opportunities should not be done lightly, or out of fear of losing state or federal funding.”

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THE AYATOLLAH’S ADVISOR: ‘The Nuclear Deal Will Not be Renegotiated at All.’

Why would they want to deal with us again? The mullahs got cash up front in exchange for little more than a promise to do a slightly better job of hiding their nuclear ambitions.

Thanks, Obama.

PAUL KRUGMAN ON ELECTION NIGHT: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

MarketWatch, today: Dow industrials’ dalliance with 23,000 is a sign of the stock market’s velocity: Dow has registered 48 record closes—its most all-time high finishes in a single year since 2013.

Sooner or later, of course, markets will tank, because that’s what markets do. And Krugman will probably try to claim vindication when that happens, because that’s what Krugmans do.

HOW STRENGTH TRAINING CAN PREVENT RUNNING INJURIES.

ANAYLSIS: TRUE. Dick Durbin: If Democrats ‘Overdo It’ by Being too Liberal, We Can Lose to Trump.

The current Democratic mood however isn’t amenable to Durbin’s advice.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Action Alert: New York “Gravity-Knife” bill sent to Gov. Cuomo – Please Call/Write Today! The existing law is idiotic, unfair, and leads to lots of sketchy arrests. Even the Village Voice opposes it. Knife freedom has marched across much of America, and now it’s time for it to reach New York.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: A new study claims that not smoking, watching your weight and continuing to learn new things could help you live longer.

As Islamic State Recedes, Iraqi Forces and Kurds Turn on Each Other.

Elite Iraqi forces took control of the local government building in Kirkuk on Monday, pushing out Kurdish fighters and effectively retaking the city after skirmishes that have raised fears of a wider conflict between two of the closest U.S. allies in the war against Islamic State.

Elite military units seeking to restore federal government authority over territory and resources seized by Kurdish forces during the course of the push against Islamic State advanced toward Kirkuk overnight and by evening had taken control of the provincial government headquarters, according to witnesses and Kirkuk officials.

Clashes broke out between Kurdish Peshmerga forces and elite Iraqi units before dawn, but Iraqi forces said they faced only light resistance in retaking the K1 military base, an airport, the Kirkuk refinery and the Baba Gurgur oil field.

There were several casualties on both sides, according to Kurdish and Iraqi military commanders. Thousands of residents were fleeing Kirkuk into the neighboring semiautonomous Kurdish-led region, leading to huge traffic jams on the way out of the city.

I suspect the Kurds will soon be back, and in greater numbers.

THE NEWS IS BLUE: Oil headed to $10? China may be in the driver’s seat.

“As the world’s largest auto market, China’s EV (electric-vehicle) policy, which is still being formulated, could supercharge the race for EVs,” says Cunningham in a blog post for Oilprice.com.

He rattles off a number of signs of China’s electric-car gear-up, such as big planned investments and a growing clampdown on autos that cloud its skies with pollution.

“It will only take a small change in oil demand to upend price forecasts. After all, prices crashed in 2014, falling from $100 per barrel down to $50 in less than a year,” he says.

Cunningham points to a Financial Times report that says China plans to produce 7 million EVs per year by 2025 and to spend at least $60 billion on related subsidies between 2015 and 2020.

And a Bloomberg New Energy Finance report that predicts EVs will cut crude demand by 8 million barrels a day by 2040 should “send chills down the spines of oil executives,” he warns.

Down the spines of various petrocrats, too.

WELL, PERSONALLY IF I HAD TO GO THROUGH A MASTECTOMY, I’D WANT TO COME OUT OF IT WITH THE BEST-LOOKING BREASTS MONEY CAN BUY: Number of women choosing breast reconstruction after mastectomy up significantly.

HOUSE DEMOCRAT DAN KILDEE: GOP, Dems Both Guilty of Harmful District Drawing.

ROLL LEFT AND DIE: Roger Goodell Killed the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.

In the 1960s, American culture was fracturing along a fault line, with the common man on one side and scorn against his mores and values on the other. The league’s commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle, chose to take the side of ordinary Americans in the raging culture war, because they were his natural audience. The league sent star players to visit troops in Vietnam and issued rules requiring players to stand upright during the playing of the National Anthem.

In 1967, the NFL produced a film that combined sideline and game footage titled, “They Call It Pro Football.” The film was unapologetically hokey. It was crew cuts and high tops and lots of chain smoking into sideline telephones. With a non-rock, non-folk, non-“what’s happening now” soundtrack, heavy on trumpets and kettle drums. John Facenda, who would come to be called “The Voice of God” for his work with NFL Films, provided the vaulting narration. The production began with the words, “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” There was nothing Radical Chic about it.

The NFL surpassed baseball as America’s pastime with careful branding that conformed to the tastes and sensibilities of middle-class Americans – Nixon’s silent majority. A half century later, Roger Goodell would kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

In August 2016, America was experiencing a polarizing presidential election. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the playing of the national anthem, to protest injustice. It was a politically divisive act directed at fans who regard the national anthem as something sacred. The league did not lift a finger to stop him.

Most employers don’t let their workers make controversial political statements to their customers. It is why you do not know your UPS driver’s views on the expansion of NATO. The Constitution does not prohibit private businesses from regulating speech during work.

A savvier commissioner would have reminded Kaepernick that he is being paid millions to wear the logo of the NFL, and the league does not permit players to use its brand to flaunt their personal politics. Instead, Roger Goodell permitted the pregame ceremonies to become the focus of intense political scrutiny, as the media lined up to catalog whether players stood, sat or knelt during the national anthem.

I suppose this is now mandatory:

ANN ALTHOUSE BUSTS MAUREEN DOWD: “And note the unopened door: Calling Weinstein ‘a master at protecting himself… by giving to liberal causes and cultivating friends in the media and politics’ makes it sound as though he was a genius and ignores the lameness of the journalists in allowing this obvious and simple ruse to give him cover. Shine some light on the weakness of your own profession, Ms. Dowd. You’ve been writing very extensively about the movie business for years. Why didn’t you go after Weinstein? Were you and your colleagues bought off by his generosity to causes that you like?”

Then she describes Dowd’s campaign season writing about Weinstein: “There’s not a whiff of negativity about Weinstein in this old column, which is about Obama’s cool lack of interest in being ‘a glad-handing pol.’ The phrase ‘a glad-handing pol’ seems to relate more to going out among the common people. At Harvey’s, Obama was ensconced with the beautiful elite.”

HOW NOT TO MARGINALIZE THE ALT-RIGHT:

An old Jewish joke, full of the mordant humor of Judaism’s darkest hours, is typically told thus:

Rabbi Altmann and his secretary were sitting in a coffeehouse in Berlin in 1935. “Herr Altmann,” said his secretary, “I notice you’re reading Der Stürmer! I can’t understand why. A Nazi libel sheet! Are you some kind of masochist, or, God forbid, a self-hating Jew?”

“On the contrary, Frau Epstein. When I used to read the Jewish papers, all I learned about were pogroms, riots in Palestine, and assimilation in America. But now that I read Der Stürmer, I see so much more: that the Jews control all the banks, that we dominate in the arts, and that we’re on the verge of taking over the entire world. You know — it makes me feel a whole lot better!”

I thought of that joke upon reading Thomas Chatterton Williams’s brave New York Times column on the common threads connecting the racialism of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the racialism of Richard Spencer:

Read the whole thing.

PROCUREMENT BLUES: 108 F-35s Will Not Be Combat Capable.

The new F-35 Program Executive Officer, Vice Admiral Mat Winter, said his office is exploring the option of leaving 108 aircraft in their current state because the funds to upgrade them to the fully combat-capable configuration would threaten the Air Force’s plans to ramp up production in the coming years. These are most likely the same 108 aircraft the Air Force reportedly needed to upgrade earlier in 2017. Without being retrofitted, these aircraft would become “Concurrency Orphans,” airplanes left behind in the acquisition cycle after the services purchased them in haste before finishing the development process.

The F-35 is finally shaping up to be a great jet, but heads need to roll at the Pentagon for such a wasteful and slow development.

MEDICINE TODAY: “Physicians are so risk-averse they prescribe medications as a default and reflexively refer patients to specialists. It’s systemic.”

Plus: “The electronic medical record has turned physicians into data entry technicians.”

MICHAEL LEDEEN: Trump’s Iran Policy Is A Good Start.

IT’S A QUESTION MORE AND MORE PEOPLE ARE ASKING: America, Your Campuses Are Madhouses. Why Are We Paying For This?

All of these protests and disruptions have two things in common. The first is a student body that is increasingly fanatical, irrational, unhinged, and dynamic in the worst way possible. Just a few short years ago, even the most militant and zealous student-activists needed some sort of catalyst to muster the energy to protest. Today’s protester students—bored, underworked, overly stimulated by progressive media, and convinced they are living in a social carbon-copy of Montgomery, Alabama, circa 1962—cannot be bothered with all that waiting. If they can’t find something real to protest, they’ll make it up.

The second common feature to these protests is no less pervasive but far more frightening: college administrations who, through their own obsequious cowardice, have become utterly powerless against the activists running amok on their campuses.

It would be fair to conclude that this is the natural result of eight years of top-down revolution led by a “former” community organizer.

“FUNGIBLE” ISN’T A PART OF CLINTONSPEAK: The Clinton Foundation will not return or re-donate any of the $250,000 it received from disgraced film producer and Democratic donor Harvey Weinstein, saying the funds have been spent already.

The only thing wrong with tainted money is there taint enough of it.

SCIENCE ON THE MARCH, BACKWARDS: Standing on the Shoulders of Diversocrats. Now that identity politics rules the humanities, it’s time to conquer the sciences and engineering. The UCLA engineering school has its first “dean of diversity and inclusion” ready to rectify the “implicit bias” that so distorts engineers’ calculations. Heather Mac Donald in City Journal:

The only thing that the academic diversity racket achieves is to bid up the salaries of plausibly qualified candidates, and redistribute those candidates to universities that can muster the most resources for diversity poaching. The dean of UCLA Engineering, Jayathi Murthy, laments that of the 900 females admitted to the undergraduate engineering program in 2016, only about 240 accepted the offer. “There are (about) 660 women there that are going somewhere else and the question is . . . is there an opportunity for us to do something differently,” she told the Daily Bruin.  Presumably, those 660 non-matriculants are getting engineering degrees at other institutions. If the goal (a dubious one) is to increase the number of female engineers overall, then it doesn’t matter where they graduate from. But every college wants its own set of “diverse” students and faculty, though one institution’s gain is another’s presumed loss.

The pressure to take irrelevant characteristics like race and sex into account in academic science is dangerous enough. But Silicon Valley continues to remake itself in the image of the campus diversity bureaucracy. Dell Technologies announced in September a new “chief diversity and inclusion officer” position. Per the usual administrator shuffle, the occupant of this new position, Brian Reaves, previously served as head of diversity and inclusion for software company SAP. Reaves will engage the company’s “leaders” in “candid conversations about the role of gender and diversity in the workplace,” said Dell chief customer officer Karen Quintos in a press statement. “Candid” means:  you are free to confess your white cis-male privilege. “Candid” does not mean questioning Dell’s diversity assumptions, as this summer’s firing of computer engineer James Damore from Google made terrifyingly clear to any other potential heretics.

Read the whole thing.

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS TO NO ONE IS ASKING: “NFLers are Protesting During the National Anthem. Here’s Why Cheerleaders Aren’t,” young Democrat operative with a byline Kalhan Rosenblatt writes at NBC. And check out her lede:

Millions of Americans have applauded the NFL players who have taken a knee during the national anthem, but not the women whose job it is to root for the teams — the cheerleaders.

No leftwing bias here! And it’s a somewhat poorly written biased sentence as well — millions of American guys applaud the NFL’s cheerleaders whenever the programming director cuts to a shot of them on the sidelines, whatever the players are doing on the field before or after the game. Of course, what Rosenblatt really wants is the women’s edition of what Allahpundit calls the NFL’s pregame “woke Olympics:”

They have been noticeably absent from the year-long drama that has divided football fans and outraged President Donald Trump and their reasons range from not wanting to undermine the team — to not wanting to lose their prized spot on the squad.

“Definitely the financial compensation isn’t high enough where you’re concerned about paying rent … but certainly if you’re creating waves you could lose your spot,” Danetha Doe, a two-season Indianapolis Colts cheerleader, told NBC News.

Doe remembers when it was rare to find an African-American in the rah-rah ranks and understands why a cheerleader might think twice about joining the players’ protest against the persecution of black people in America.

Ahh, so the NFL is a cesspit of racism as well. OK, yet another reason for fans to tune it out — and why is NBC facilitating it each Sunday night?

According to this 2014 PBS article, NFL cheerleaders earn on average about $100 or so a game…

San Diego Chargers cheerleaders are paid $75 per game, for example. Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders earn around $150 per game, and Baltimore Ravens cheerleaders are paid around $100 per game, according to the Atlantic.

Some cheerleaders employed by NFL teams say the job is not about the money and is more of a hobby. They add the exposure of being an NFL cheerleader can lead to better, more lucrative positions down the line.

…Sure, drag them into the protests as well, NBC.