HOLLYWOOD: FLOP-A-RAMA.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Jimmy Carter: The media has been harder on Trump than predecessors.

Plus, he and Rosalynn voted for Bernie.

(Sorry, I had my Carter women mixed up before. Fixed!)

SALENA ZITO ON VIRGINIA: The Race Is Close. It Shouldn’t Be. Democrats Should Be Terrified.

IN THE MAIL: Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business.

Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals. Get them while they last!

ANDREW KLAVAN: Trump’s a Big Mouth; Journalists are Villains.

SALENA ZITO: John James could be the future Republicans have been waiting for.

There’s a little irony there, his father and mother are both Democrats. In fact, his father donated to the very sitting U.S. Senator he would like to face next fall in a general election.

James smiles, “I have been a conservative and Republican all of my life. My parents I suspect will support me,” he says laughing.

James has been very successful in his post-military life, he became the president of the family company in 2014. “It’s an automotive logistics company that specializes in warehousing distribution manufacturing and assembly and supply chain information systems. When I started the company it was making 35 million. It was good, it was very good. Strong customer base. I bring a passion for service, and I am pretty much an energetic leader. With a clarity of vision, we were able to grow from 35 million to 137 million in less than five years and added a hundred jobs here in Michigan,” he said.

James says what people need at this time is pulling together instead of apart. That, he says, requires people to work together and get results so that the state and the country can succeed even in the toughest of environments. “I believe that I was needed, where I could do the most good. I want to continue my service to my country, continue my service to my community,” he said.

The last Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Michigan was Spencer Abraham in 1994 – he lost his reelection bid in 2000 to current Democratic U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow who is up for reelection next year.

Michigan stunned the political class last year when it’s electoral votes favored Donald J. Trump over Hillary Clinton.

While strategists calculate name ID and Stabenow’s favorable ratings, and while the media focuses on whether musician Kid Rock — teasing a run for months — is actually going to jump in, James is about the business of winning.

He has already raised an impressive $300,000 in just under a month.

Read the whole thing.

TRUE: Gorsuch: Civility doesn’t mean suppressing disagreement.

IN ITALY, two regions, Lombardy and Veneto, vote on greater autonomy.

FIRST AUSTRIA, NOW THIS: Czech Election Won by Anti-Establishment Party Led by Billionaire.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: San Jose State University lecturer threatens to ‘beat the s**t out of’ pro-life protesters. Not sure this actually qualifies as a “threat,” but it’s the kind of thing that suggests all the talk about “diversity and inclusion” is pretty bogus.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, updated hourly.

Plus, Kindle Daily Deals.

And, Today’s Digital Deals.

WAPO: Trump Has Already Largely Won His War Against The Media. “Consider the language used in this question. Marist didn’t ask people whom they trusted more between the media at large and Trump; it was a choice between the media outlet you like the best and the president. Presumably, the media outlet you like the best is the one you consider most reliable and informative, but even pitting a Trump supporter’s top pick of all of the media outlets against the president, the president wins. . . . This poll was released on the heels of another survey that adds still more context to the question of media trust. A Politico-Morning Consult survey conducted online found that nearly half of Americans, a plurality, thinks that the media makes up stories about the president out of whole cloth.”

Well, if you guys weren’t so obviously, rabidly eager to bring Trump down, maybe people would trust you more.

ROBERT EHRLICH: Chaotic White House aside, Trump is achieving Reaganesque policy wins.

The narrative includes criticisms that have grown familiar during Trump’s first year in office. Here, the president is viewed as a shoot-from-the-hip neophyte too undisciplined to govern and quite dangerous in a world populated by despots who wield nuclear weapons.

Sen. Bob Corker’s recent broadsides qualify here. The retiring Republican Senator from Tennessee sees an overmatched executive lacking in “competence” and “stability,” albeit surrounded by a competent senior group daily engaged in the task of keeping the leader of the free world from careening off the rails. (Whatever did happen to keeping family disputes within the family?)

Make no mistake, this is how today’s Washington views the president and his administration. Note that this particular indictment is distinguished from the “all hands on deck” Trump haters who continue to be transfixed by a Trump/Russian collusion conspiracy story that lacks credible supporting evidence after two years of exhaustive investigation and desperate mainstream media attention.

In striking contrast are a series of Trump administration policy initiatives that not only define Trump as the anti-Obama, but also as more Reaganesque than a “Never Trumper” could ever have imagined. How else to describe a president willing to buck the status quo, and a powerful establishment press, in pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords and now refusing to recertify a notoriously deficient nuclear deal with the mullahs in Tehran.

As expected, these decisions have propelled the left (and numerous feckless allies) into yet additional anti-Trump tirades. But this president seems more intent on serving America’s long-term interests than attempting to curry favor with a hostile media or spiking his approval numbers in foreign countries. (That even President Obama never dared submit either agreement to Congress in the form of a treaty provides insight into how viable he viewed the respective agreements, but I digress…)

Trump’s aggressive contrariness is not confined to foreign policy initiatives. Witness his insistence on a return to the rule of law with respect to both DACA (undocumented children brought to the U.S. at a young age) and Obamacare. Here, the layman executive manifests a better understanding of executive restraint than his Constitutional law professor successor. How refreshing, and old school, to find an administration intending to operate within established Constitutional constraints. How stunning to see a president disinclined to unilateral executive action even when the stakes are extraordinarily high.

How revealing that most of the political class is appalled.

SLATE: This Is Not Trump’s Benghazi: The deaths of U.S. troops in Niger were a tragedy, but there’s no need for conspiracy theories.

Weirdly, most of the people who are calling it Trump’s Benghazi are the same people who were telling us that Benghazi was a right-wing political fiction.

MEGYN KELLY’S SLIDING CAREER: “What a dismal slide for Kelly! Remember how high she was riding when she moderated that GOP debate? That was more than 2 years ago. She made a big leap that night, confronting Trump, and there was so much liberal hope for her when Trump went menstrual on her. But Trump went on to win, and what use is she now? No use to celebrities, and now she can’t get celebrities on her show, and what’s a daytime talk show without celebrities?”

As was commented here a few days back:

She was brilliant on FNC. She was like a cross-examining prosecutor with a witness in the box. Nothing got past her and she ran to ground every specious talking point the liberal flacks who went on her show tried to spout.

Then, she got that haircut and everything changed.

Yeah, that haircut did seem to mark a transition. I wonder what prompted it?

JOHN MCWHORTER: Educated liberals overuse the term ‘racist.’

No one can fail to be amazed by the courage of the people who protested segregation and bigotry in the 1950s and 1960s. Those who endured physical injury justifiably stick in our minds the most.

Today’s educated liberals lack the courage they admire in their forebears, at a time when it is needed more than ever. Namely, too many liberals in power lack the guts to sanction those dedicated to shouting down speakers from the right. Instead, they let pass a state of dialogue as choked as the one that Berkeley’s Free Speech movement resisted.

To hurl the N-word at someone is an attempt to shut down discussion. Today, the word “racist” serves the same function. Or, today’s fashionable new version is the now grievously overused “white supremacist.” Such that, for example, liberal man of letters and Columbia professor Mark Lilla is accused of making white supremacy “respectable” — for suggesting that Democrats emphasize identity politics less with the goal of winning the White House from Donald Trump. . . .

It has become clear over the past few years that the shouting students and their civilian accomplices (the latter of whom have sometimes outnumbered the former, as at Middlebury when Charles Murray was accosted) are a charismatic minority who do not represent general opinion, even among enlightened people on the left. The verdict is in: even those of us deeply committed to battling discrimination and inequality find this shutting down of speakers barbaric: unintellectual, uncivil, crude, counterproductive.

Crucially, however, these objections make not a dent in these happy warriors’ actions.

Nope. Only consequences will do that.

THOMAS FRANK: What Harvey Weinstein tells us about the liberal world: Harvey Weinstein seemed to fit right in. This is a form of liberalism that routinely blends self-righteousness with upper-class entitlement.

What explains Weinstein’s identification with progressive causes? Perhaps it was all about cozying up to power, the thrill of being a friend of Bill Clinton.

Perhaps it was all about moral absolution, in the same way that lists of corporations-that-care always turn out to be led by outfits like Walmart, Goldman Sachs and Exxon-Mobil. In the world of the wealthy, liberalism is something you do to offset your rapacious behavior in other spheres. It’s no coincidence that, in Weinstein’s desperate first response to the accusations against him, he thought to promise war against the National Rifle Association and to support scholarships for women.

But it’s also something deeper than that. Most people on the left think of themselves as resisters of authority, but for certain of their leaders, modern-day liberalism is a way of rationalizing and exercising class power. Specifically, the power of what some like to call the “creative class”, by which they mean well-heeled executives in industries like Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Worshiping these very special people is the doctrine that has allowed Democrats to pull even with Republicans in fundraising and that has buoyed the party’s fortunes in every wealthy suburb in America.

That this strain of liberalism also attracts hypocrites like Harvey Weinstein, with his superlative fundraising powers and his reverence for “great artists”, should probably not surprise us. Remember, too, that Weinstein is the man who once wrote an essay demanding leniency for Roman Polanski, partially on the grounds that he too was a “great artist”.

Narcissism coupled with entitlement.

APPARENTLY FOOTLOOSE DOES NOT PRESENT AN ACCURATE DEPICTION OF FLYOVER AMERICA:  Former NPR CEO opens up about liberal media bias.  Shocked, shocked, shocked. This is my shocked face!

NEWS YOU CAN USE:  Senior-citizens should watch out for scammers.

YOUNG PEOPLE DOING SOMETHING STUPID AND ROMANTIC?  There’s my shocked face again.  Meet the pretentious millennials who romanticize living in vans.  The world will surely go to h*ll in their hands, as it’s been going to h*ll in the hands of the young since the third millennium.  BC!

ONLY HAVE IT TO GO RED FASCISM INSTEAD OF BLACK ONE, DECADES LATER:  How Hitler’s plan to take over LA was thwarted by a Jewish lawyer.

NOT SURPRISINGLY COMING FROM THE EAST:  The European Revolt Continues.

YEAH, I REMEMBER WHEN HE SENT HIS AIDES TO MORNING SHOWS TO SAY IT WAS ALL ABOUT A MOVIE AND THE WHOLE MEDIA COVERED FOR HIM:  Dems hope to spin Niger ambush as Trump’s Benghazi.  Also, Trump told potential rescuers to stand down, right?  Oh, wait, my bad.  All that was Obama.  Sorry Democrats. No Sale!