READER BOOK PLUG: From S.M. Saintsing, Winter Three.

VOTE FRAUD: Rosa Maria Ortega was sentenced to eight years in prison Thursday after being convicted Thursday of two counts of illegal voting. “She was arrested in 2015, just as the state of Texas was winding up to fight for its voter identification law in the federal courts, before going on trial just weeks after President Donald Trump claimed that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 general election, potentially handing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.”

WHERE LEFTY VIRTUE-SIGNALLING HITS A LIMIT: Tesla employee calls for unionization, Musk says that’s “morally outrageous.”

UPDATE: See the update at the link.

HMM: Dozens of New Cancer Drugs Do Little to Improve Survival, Frustrating Patients.

Pushed by patient advocates who want earlier access to medications, the­ Food and Drug Administration has approved a flurry of oncology drugs in recent years, giving some people with cancer a renewed sense of hope and an array of expensive new options. A few of these drugs have been clear home runs, allowing patients with limited life expectancies to live for years.

Many more drugs, however, have offered patients only marginal benefits, with no evidence that they improve survival or quality of life, said Dr. Vinay Prasad, assistant professor of medicine at the Oregon Health and Sciences University, who has written extensively about the FDA’s approval process for cancer drugs.

Overall cancer survival has barely changed over the past decade. The 72 cancer therapies approved from 2002 to 2014 gave patients only 2.1 more months of life than older drugs, according to a study in JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery.

And those are the successes.

Bleeding-edge medicine involves going down a lot of dead ends before finding the next miracle cure. But allowing patients more freedom to enter “risky” new programs might speed that process along.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Court Ruling Was ‘Intellectually Dishonest Piece of Work’

Forget it, Judge — it’s the Ninth.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: What I Learned About Life by Becoming a Landlord. “Lesson one: People will flush anything down a toilet.” Plus: “You never let the tenant start telling a story. . . . That never ends well. A story always leads to an excuse or to an explanation, some reason you should give them a break.”

PRIVACY: Vizios Aren’t the Only TVs That Are Tracking You.

DISPATCHES FROM THE SJW-NFL: “A week after Houston celebrated hosting Super Bowl LI, the NFL says the state’s proposed transgender bathroom bill could affect whether Texas gets to do so again.”

I’m so old, I can remember when the NFL cared more about football than allowing men into ladies rooms.

STUDY: EU must shut all coal plants by 2030 to meet Paris climate pledges.

Coal’s use is falling by about 1% a year in Europe but still generates a quarter of the continent’s power – and a fifth of its greenhouse gas emissions.

If Europe’s 300 coal plants run to the end of their natural lifespans, the EU nations will exceed their carbon budget for coal by 85%, according to a report by the respected thinktank Climate Analytics. It says the EU would need to stop using coal for electricity generation by 2030.

“Not only would existing coal plants exceed the EU’s emissions budget, but the 11 planned and announced plants would raise EU emissions to almost twice the levels required to keep warming to the Paris agreement’s long term temperature goal,” said Dr Michiel Schaeffer, Climate Analytics science director.

Europe had best get busy building nuclear plants if they don’t want a repeat of “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”

GREEN WEENIE OF THE WEEK: GINA MCCARTHY. “Even though she’s out of office, she’s still eligible. And she wins because while she insistently denied that the Obama administration was hostile to coal, some sharp-eyed photographer caught the Sierra Club ‘Coal Sucks’ poster among her office possessions being packed up.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: DeVos Physically Blocked by Protesters From Entering DC School.

Everything old is new again! What is it with Democrats always blocking access to the schoolhouse door?

UPDATE: DC Police tweet that an “Adult male [was] arrested for assaulting a police officer. Report that [Betsy DeVos] was assaulted is under investigation.”

WHY BROADCAST TELEVISION IS DYING, EXHIBIT #1,000,006: ‘American Idol’ Revival Heading to NBC.

HE’LL TRY. AND THEY’LL #RESIST. Can Trump Make Bureaucrats Accountable?

WAR ON WOMEN UPDATE: Anne Mahlum, “owner of trendy Washington-area gym chain Solidcore lashed out at Ivanka Trump over Facebook on Thursday after finding out the president’s eldest daughter took her exercise class.”

Twitchy adds that, “Ya’ know, this wouldn’t be such a big thing if they Left hadn’t spent months and months (years) attacking people for not baking cakes and such – seems more and more their actions and words are coming back to bite them in the ass It’s awesome.”

As D.C. McAllister writes at the Federalist in a related article, “The Claws Out For Ivanka Trump Show Liberal Love For Women Is A Sham.”

EXPEDIA CEO WHO OPPOSED TRUMP TRAVEL MORATORIUM: “Hopefully we will all be alive to see the end of next year.”

“Just a big thank you to our global employee base for an improved 2016 and certainly an improved end to the year. And hopefully we will all be alive to see the end of next year,” Khosrowshahi said on the call Thursday.

After a pause, he added: “Thank you.” Then the call ended.

While he did not explicitly mention President Trump, the unusual remarks come from a CEO who has been among the most outspoken in the tech industry against Trump.

Expedia was one of the first tech companies to file a legal challenge against Trump’s travel ban, citing the potential harm it could do its employees and customers.

Khosrowshahi is an immigrant from Iran, one of the seven Muslim-majority countries included in the travel ban. In an earlier statement, the CEO described the legal measure as a way of “standing up for our travelers and our immigrant roots.”

Expedia declined to clarify Khosrowshahi’s remarks in response to a request for comment.

That seems… overwrought.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Rochester School District to Hold ‘Black Lives Matter’ Day.

ROGER SIMON ON MARCO RUBIO VERSUS THE SHOW TRIALS OF THE NINTH CIRCUIT.

TURNAROUND? Sears maps out survival strategy, sending stock soaring.

The plan unveiled Friday thrilled investors, who drove Sears shares up 45.1% in pre-market trading to $8.04.

The latest restructuring plan does not include new closures of Sears or Kmart stores after the company recently announced plans to shutter 150 of its more than 1,300 locations.

The company estimated that its new measures would lower its debt and pension obligations by $1.5 billion and reduce annual costs by $1 billion.

The debt reduction includes a contribution from the recent sale of the company’s Craftsman brand, which was worth about $900 million, while the cost reduction includes savings from the store closures.

To be sure, the company’s sales performance remains dismal. Sales at stores open at least a year fell 10.3% in the fourth quarter, including an 8% reduction at Kmart and 12.5% at Sears.

Sooner rather than later, the company is going to run out of costs to save and assets to sell, and is going to have to get paying customers back into its stores.

I HOPE THAT THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION WILL HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT THIS BLATANT ACT OF SEXISM: GE to Discriminate Against Men in Order to Meet a “Gender Ratio.”

“Could you imagine a public school district favoring men as teachers to close the gender imbalance?”

Take a look at the “future of GE” which shows a picture of a group of self-satisfied looking women with nary a male in sight. Is that the real goal?

Short the stock.

NEW YORK TIMES: Trump’s Iran Policy Is Working.

The New York Times may not like to openly admit to admiring President Trump’s Iran policy, but its latest dispatch from Tehran shows how his combative approach is already causing headaches for Iran’s leaders. . . .

It sure looks like Trump’s policy of turning up the heat on Iran is causing problems for the Iranian government—and, indirectly, confirming critics of the Iran deal who argued that its effect was to make it easier for the mullahs to keep power at home, even as they stepped up Iranian aggression abroad.

Taking a tough posture toward Iran has been one of Trump’s most clear-cut priorities since assuming office; in many ways, he has more clearly laid the groundwork for confronting Iran than Sunni jihadists like ISIS. By putting Iran “on notice” after its latest missile launch, imposing new sanctions, calling out Iranian proxies in Yemen, and questioning the future of the nuclear deal, Trump is signaling that the Obama era is over and that the Iranians can expect forceful pushback, not conciliation, when they challenge U.S. interests.

Despite the risks, picking an early fight with Iran does make some strategic sense for Trump. Of the three main revisionist powers who have gained ground under the Obama administration, Iran is clearly the weakest and most overextended. By coming out swinging against Iran, Trump is stoking fears of unpredictable escalation to make the Iranians back down from further provocations, while sending a signal to other challengers that it is unwise to test the new administration.

Well, stay tuned.

HOW YOU GOT TRUMP: Flashback: Corrupt journalism doesn’t pay. Nor does abetting it. “Former Atlantic contributing editor Marc Ambinder is showing appropriate contrition for having participated in some dubious journalistic practices back in July 2009. As exposed by some Freedom Of Information Act documents secured by J.K. Trotter of Gawker, Ambinder was pursuing a copy of the speech that then- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was to make at the Council on Foreign Relations. So he emailed renowned Clinton advocate and spokesperson Philippe Reines. The back-and-forth confirms anyone’s worst suspicions about access journalism.”

L’EFFET TRUMP? The French election is now Marine Le Pen vs a collapsing French establishment.

This is because France fluctuates between short spasms of change and longer periods of immobility. It has developed institutional barriers and tacit compromises to hold things steady. Its current Fifth Republic is a ‘republican monarchy’, with parliament downgraded and a powerful president supposed to unite the nation — a task sadly beyond most politicians. Another, less noticed, institution goes back even further than Enjolras’s fictional death on the barricades: the two-round ballot, designed in the 1820s to prevent hotheads like him from winning elections. It gives voters and politicians a second chance, not so much to reconsider their own choices as to react against the choices of others. In the first round you vote for the person you want; in the second you vote against the person you fear.

This evolved historically into what was called ‘republican discipline’: in the first round there could be a range of competing candidates of all shades, but in the second round all loyal republicans, from the mildest liberal to the reddest communist, would vote for the candidate best placed to beat the enemy of the republic — usually a royalist or authoritarian nationalist. The apparition of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in the 1970s, combining traditionalist conservatives, embittered nationalists and nostalgic fascists, met the same response.

Le Pen could just become the first upstart to breach the institutional barricades around the French presidency. However, former Prime Minister (under Nicolas Sarkozy) François Fillon, running as an almost-Thatcherite reformer, is generally seen as the frontrunner.

But these days, who knows?

ACCOUNTABILITY: Judge orders feds to identify agent in Cliven Bundy case.

HMM: National security adviser Flynn discussed sanctions with Russian ambassador, despite denials, officials say. “The emerging details contradict public statements by incoming senior administration officials including Mike Pence, then the vice president-elect. They acknowledged only a handful of text messages and calls exchanged between Flynn and Kislyak late last year and denied that either ever raised the subject of sanctions.”

That sounds bad, but: “Prominent Americans in and out of government are so frequently in communication with foreign officials that singling out one individual — particularly one poised for a top White House job — would invite charges of political persecution. Former U.S. officials also said aggressive enforcement would probably discourage appropriate contact. Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, said that he was in Moscow meeting with officials in the weeks leading up to Obama’s 2008 election win.”

Stay tuned.