ROGER SIMON: “Trust But Verify” — Why Trump Is Right on Russia.

Nonsense. I’m told by reliable former community organizers that such thinking went out with the heyday of MTV.

COUNTERPROTEST: Street Artist Sabo Crashes Anti-Trump Exhibition in L.A., Hoists Black Flag of MAGA.

I’M SORRY DAVE – I’M AFRAID I CAN’T DO THAT: Without Humans, Artificial Intelligence Is Still Pretty Stupid (may be a WSJ paywall). On the general question, Garry Kasparov has some good insights on how AI + human is the likely future.

HMM: Jared Kushner, Mohammed bin Salman, and Benjamin Netanyahu Are Up to Something.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may or may not be a true reformer. His record on that score is not unequivocal. But he is determined to halt the expansion of Iranian influence, which now really does manifest itself as the Shiite crescent about which Jordan’s King Abdullah II forewarned over a decade ago. The crown prince recognizes that his country’s worst nightmare is slowly materializing: Iran is supplying the Houthi rebels to its south and dominates neighboring Iraq to its north. Iran is supplying the Houthi rebels to its south and dominates neighboring Iraq to its north. It foments instability in Bahrain and could well do the same in Saudi Arabia’s Shiite-majority Eastern Province. And if that were not enough, Iran’s influence is entrenched in Damascus and Beirut. It is particularly for that reason the Saudis forced their ally Saad Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister, to resign his office while on a visit to the Kingdom.

Mohammed bin Salman may or may not have recently visited Tel Aviv, where Israel’s Defense Ministry is located. But even if he never set foot in the HaKirya complex, there is little doubt that he has authorized ever closer relations with the Israelis, who view the Iranian threat exactly as he does. And the crown prince is not the only one Jared Kushner has been speaking to: Trump has given his son-in-law overall leadership on the peace process between Israel and the Arabs, and he is reportedly a welcome guest in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.

Given Kushner’s role, did Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman signal his plans when Kushner last met with him — and did Kushner then inform his father-in-law? And if so, how far will Washington, or more precisely, the White House, go to back up the Saudis if their confrontation with Iran gets hot? Or will Israel serve as Trump’s proxy? With this president, this crown prince, and the current prime minister of Israel, anything is possible.

We can certainly hope so.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Professor details how a ‘cancerous disease’ has ruined liberal arts colleges.

Much ado has been made about administrative creep and bloat at big universities across the country, the proliferation of vice presidents and deans and assistant directors and supervisors and others with executive-sounding or middle-manager puffed-up titles. That cancerous disease has infected small colleges too, and its damaging effects are particularly pernicious there.

An autonomous managerial class has emerged whose immediate and ulterior motives are occupational as opposed to educational (a distinction that ought not to be collapsed), and whose mission is to serve administrative as opposed to teaching purposes. Perhaps worse of all, the managerial model of organization, in trying to bring small colleges into the fold of purportedly national “best practices” is destroying the distinctiveness, the very raison d’etrê, of small colleges.

Plus: “Regarding administrative bloat, Seery reports that at Pomona College the number of administrative positions has climbed from 56 in 1990 to 271 in 2016.”

And most poisonously, many of those additional administrators are “student life” educrats who are ginning up the protests and behavior that are destroying higher education’s brand.

“JUST THREE:” Just three NFL players kneel during the National Anthem as the league honors the military during Veterans Day weekend.

If only there was precedent for a professional sports league to bar players from kneeling during the national anthem.

ALL THESE MOONS ARE YOURS: Privately Funded Team May Launch Life-Hunting Mission to Saturn Moon Enceladus.

Breakthrough Initiatives — a program founded by billionaire tech investor Yuri Milner to hunt for alien life and help explore the cosmos — is considering launching a mission that would fly through the plume of water vapor and other material emanating from Enceladus’ south polar region, Milner said here yesterday (Nov. 9) at The Economist magazine’s inaugural global space summit, called “A New Space Age.”

NASA’s Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft discovered the plume, and the 100-odd geysers that create it, in 2005. Subsequent observations by the probe revealed that these geysers are blasting stuff out from a potentially habitable ocean of salty liquid water that sloshes beneath the 313-mile-wide (504 kilometers) moon’s icy shell. [Photos of Enceladus, Saturn’s Geyser-Blasting Moon]

The plume provides a way to sample this ocean without even touching down on Enceladus. Cassini flew through the plume repeatedly during its epic Saturn mission, which ended with a fiery plunge in September, but the probe was not outfitted with life-detection gear. So astrobiologists have been clamoring to go back.
…
“We formed a sort of little workshop around this idea: Can we design a low-cost, privately funded mission to Enceladus which can be launched relatively soon and that can look more thoroughly at those plumes and try to see what’s going there ahead of a more expensive mission that NASA is considering right now, which might take maybe 10 years to launch?” Milner said.

I hope the answer is “Yes.”

HOSTILE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT: U Conn Women’s Center Wages War Against “Mansplaining.”

THE QUAKERS WON’T BE MISSED: Quakerism is a dying religion, with only seventy thousand or so adherents left in the United States, and falling. Instead of tending to their dying religion, the leadership has been investing in Palestinian rejectionism with echoes of anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, the Quakers still have disproportionate ideological influence through their prestigious private “Friends” schools.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, Updated Hourly.

Plus, new Kindle Daily Deals.

And, today’s Digital Deals.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump-RUSSIA Narrative Fires-Up, The Fate of Alabama and Much, Much Moore.

GODSPEED: Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser performs critical glide test flight.

Roughly one-quarter the length of a space shuttle orbiter, the Dream Chaser was to be released from a heavy-duty carrier helicopter at an altitude of around 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) for the approach and landing test, Sierra Nevada officials previously said.

The spacecraft was carried aloft under the helicopter connected with a 200-foot (60-meter) lift line, then positioned for the drop. The Dream Chaser’s on-board guidance computer was expected to maneuver the ship with its aerosurfaces, then line up with the runway for a steep final approach.

Two main landing gear wheels and and a nose skid deployed from the bottom the spaceplane just before touchdown.

Sierra Nevada is developing the Dream Chaser in partnership with NASA to carry cargo and experiments to the space station. It will launch on top of a rocket and land on a runway, returning equipment and experiment specimens to the ground for quick handover to engineers and scientists.

This is more like the 21st Century I was hoping for.

CLARENCE THOMAS IS NO HARVEY WEINSTEIN: I keep seeing articles mentioning that Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of “sexual harassment,” and lumping him in with Harvey Weinstein et al. Hill accused Thomas of asking her out insistently, and making several lewd comments about porn movies, pubic hairs, and his own sexual prowess. Hill herself acknowledged that her allegations didn’t amount to “sexual harassment” as defined by law, just that they made her uncomfortable and she thought them inappropriate. I don’t want to relitigate the Thomas-Hill he said-she said, but even accepting Hill’s allegations at face value, they were nothing approaching what Weinstein or some of the others who have been in the spotlight lately, have been accused of–no assault, no battery, no exposing himself, no quid pro quo, no drugging victims, no shenanigans with minors. Surely we want to distinguish between those allegations and alleged rude and obnoxious behavior.

A DEMOCRAT SHOT A REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN, ANOTHER DEMOCRAT BEAT AND CRIPPLED A REPUBLICAN SENATOR, AND A DEMOCRATIC GOVERNOR IS USING VIOLENT RHETORIC: California Gov. Jerry Brown to protesters during climate speech: ‘Let’s put you in the ground.’

FASTER, PLEASE: Navy’s Ultimate Weapon: Sub-launched Hypersonic Missiles.

The test was announced by Vice Adm. Terry Benedict, the director of the Strategic Systems Program (SSP), at the Naval Submarine League’s annual symposium in Arlington, Virginia, on November 2. “I’m very proud to report that at 0300 on Monday night SSP flew from Hawaii [Pacific Missile Range Facility] . . . the first conventional prompt strike missile for the United States Navy in the form factor that would eventually, could eventually be utilized if leadership chooses to do so in an Ohio-class tube,” Benedict said, according U.S. Naval Institute News, which first reported his remarks. “It’s a monumental achievement.”

Benedict refused to provide any other details of the test, but a Pentagon spokesperson later gave additional information when contacted by U.S. Naval Institute News. “The Navy Strategic Systems Program (SSP), on behalf of the Department of Defense, conducted an Intermediate Range Conventional Prompt Strike Flight Experiment-1 (CPS FE-1) test on Oct. 30, 2017, from Pacific Missile Range Facility, Kauai, Hawaii,” said Cmdr. Patrick Evans, the Pentagon spokesperson. “The test collected data on hypersonic boost-glide technologies and test-range performance for long-range atmospheric flight. This data will be used by the Department of Defense to anchor ground testing, modeling, and simulation of hypersonic flight vehicle performance and is applicable to a range of possible Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) concepts.”

Hypersonic missiles are defined as those traveling at speeds between Mach 5 and Mach 10. That is, between 3,106 and 15,534 miles per hour, or one to five miles per second.

Launching a hypersonic missile from intercontinental distances can still provide the intended defender with a few minutes’ warning. Launching from thousands of miles closer in, via stealthy submarine, reduces the warning time to virtually nil.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Toomey: ‘No good reason’ to subsidize high-tax states. “There’s no good reason why federal tax payers all across the country should have to subsidize, have to pay a higher federal tax rate, to subsidize those municipalities that choose to have high taxes.”

TYLER O’NEIL: 54 Percent of Democrats Still Think Hillary Clinton Beat Bernie Sanders Fair and Square.

Yes, 54% is a majority, but it isn’t exactly confidence-inspiring.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? “People with a history of ‘self-mutilation,’ bipolar disorder, depression and drug and alcohol abuse can now seek waivers to join the Army under an unannounced policy enacted in August,” according to documents obtained by USA Today.

OH: Surveillance Cameras Made by China Are Hanging All Over the U.S. “Company 42%-owned by the Chinese government sold devices that monitor U.S. Army base, Memphis streets, sparking concerns about cybersecurity.”

Hikvision (pronounced “hike-vision”) was nurtured by Beijing to help keep watch on its 1.4 billion citizens, part of a vast expansion of its domestic-surveillance apparatus. In the process, the little-known company has become the world’s largest maker of surveillance cameras. It has sold equipment used to track French airports, an Irish port and sites in Brazil and Iran.

Hikvision’s rapid rise, its ties to the Chinese government and a cybersecurity lapse flagged by the Department of Homeland Security have fanned concerns among officials in the U.S. and Italy about the security of Hikvision’s devices.

“The fact that it’s at a U.S. military installation and was in a very sensitive U.S. embassy is stunning,” says Carolyn Bartholomew, chairwoman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was created by Congress to monitor the national-security implications of trade with China. “We shouldn’t presume that there are benign intentions in the use of information-gathering technology that is funded directly or indirectly by the Chinese government.”

The internet of things is worrisome enough. An internet of things made in China and installed in sensitive locations is just stupid.

WELL, GOOD: GOP nears initial victory on tax reform.

House Republicans are on the precipice of a big victory on tax reform, but the legislation still faces enormous hurdles before it can reach President Trump’s desk and be signed into law.

Legislation is expected to receive a vote on the House floor this week after clearing the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee in a party-line vote with no GOP defections.

At this point it would be a surprise if Republicans weren’t able to pass the bill through the House.

The number of Republicans publicly opposed or leaning against the bill is in the single digits, and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) appears poised to meet his ambitious timeline of having the tax bill introduced in early November and passed by Thanksgiving.

“I do believe that the momentum continues to move us forward,” Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.), chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, told The Hill.

He said Republicans can’t afford to hold off the bill after the failure to approve ObamaCare repeal. Last week’s losses in off-year elections across the country just added urgency for Republicans.

Yes, they need to start delivering.

THAT’S WHAT WORRIES ME: Biden 2020? It’s Not as Crazy as It Sounds.

Al Hunt:

To see why they’re not crazy, start with this fact of political life: When an incumbent runs for re-election, the contest is a referendum on him. A challenger, to be successful, must offer an appealing alternative that better addresses whatever’s bothering people. Jimmy Carter, the outsider, beat President Gerald Ford in 1976 in the shadow of the Watergate scandals. Ronald Reagan defeated Carter four years later by showing resolve that resonated during the Iranian hostage crisis. Bill Clinton’s domestic focus had broad appeal in 1992, the first presidential contest after the end of the Cold War, against the veteran cold warrior President George H.W. Bush.

After three-and-a-half years of Trump, what will swing voters be looking for? A grown-up who is committed to getting things done by trying to bridge the bitter partisan divide. A person with experience in governing, savvy about the ways of Washington and wary of national-security booby traps. A reputation for incorruptibility to drain the ethical swamp of the Trump years.

More than most outsiders, new faces or ideological purists, the 74-year-old former senator and vice president could fit that bill.
…
A politician first elected in 1970 is not going to be the face of the future. But after the exhaustion, trauma and incompetence of the Trump years, voters will look for stability, solidity, maturity, global experience, civility and integrity. Biden checks all the boxes.

These are indeed Heinlein’s Crazy Years — we just live in them.

CLETA MITCHELL AND HANS VAN SPAKOVSKY: Hillary Clinton, the DNC and the Law: Did their arrangement violate legal limits on coordination between a candidate and a party?

The purpose of joint fundraising committees is to allow more than one entity to collaborate in raising money and share in the costs. Each participant is subject to federal contribution limits. When the party itself is a participant, its committee (in this case the DNC) normally handles accounting and financial controls. Not here. The Hillary Victory Fund was controlled by the Clinton campaign, with a campaign employee as treasurer and the fund’s bank account established at the Clinton campaign’s bank. According to Federal Election Commission reports, the Hillary Victory Fund has raised more than $526 million.

The DNC asserted its “neutrality” by also entering into a joint fundraising committee with the Sanders campaign. It raised a total of $1,000. And the Bernie Victory Committee treasurer was the DNC’s designee. . . .

Contributions to the DNC, even though made through the Hillary Victory Fund, were required by law to be transferred to the party and could not legally be withheld by the Clinton-designated treasurer. Nor does the law allow a single candidate to control a political party’s operations and expenditures.

National party committees have higher contribution limits than candidates do—$334,000 a year vs. $2,700 for each election. The memorandum raises the possibility that Clinton campaign took advantage of the DNC’s higher limits, then availed itself of all the resources the DNC could buy—without having any of the attendant costs or expenditures assessed against the campaign.

There are strict statutory limits on what a party committee can contribute to any candidate and what a party can spend in coordination with its candidates. We don’t like limits on the ability of parties to support their candidates. But campaign-finance zealots, egged on by media outlets (which are not subject to any limits), made certain that the McCain-Feingold law of 2002 stringently limited coordination between candidates and political parties. Although the Supreme Court struck down parts of McCain-Feingold in the 2010 Citizens United case, the coordination limits still apply. The FEC and the Justice Department should investigate the Clinton-DNC arrangement.

Yes, they should.

SALENA ZITO: Pennsylvania’s elections tell us how worried Republicans nationwide should be.