1967: IN 50 YEARS WE’LL HAVE FLYING CARS!

2017: Study Using Inflated Penises Reveals The Bizarre Mechanics of Dolphin Sex.

THURSDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL RATINGS DIP AS EAGLES WIN & NATIONAL ANTHEM NOT SHOWN: “As social media went into overdrive in reaction, the TV audience did not see the Panthers all stand for the song, nor the Eagles’ Malcolm Jenkins and Rodney McLeod each raise a fist into the air with teammate Chris Long appear to show solidarity.”

Related: NFL not seeking mandate for players to stand during anthem.

SHARKS GOTTA SWIM, BATS GOTTA FLY: Media Matters Continue War Against the Right.

THAT’S WHY WE’LL PROBABLY HAVE TO SETTLE FOR JUST A TAX CUT, IF THAT: Tax reform can finally drain the swamp by getting rid of lobbyists.

FLASHBACK VIDEO: BARBARA WALTERS SCOLDS COREY FELDMAN FOR CALLING OUT HOLLYWOOD PEDOPHILIA. “You’re damaging an entire industry!”

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT POTUS HAS DONE WITH THE IRAN DEAL WITHOUT ANY MEDIA SPIN, Liz Sheld has the full text.

THE DAM HAS BURST: The Weinstein Co. Nears The Brink As Agencies Cut Off Talent Supply.

Agents did not want to be on record, but reactions ranged from not wanting to risk the wrath of clients in the event of more fallout by putting them into TWC projects, and others said that if there was evidence of Weinstein benefiting directly or indirectly in projects, the agencies wanted no part of it. They felt even a re-branded company will carry a tarnish, and hoped that projects would be sold off. This wasn’t unanimous; at least one said that if Bob Weinstein and Glasser could change the messaging, and make it clear that Harvey Weinstein’s indiscretions were not in fact covered up, forgiveness could come over time.

But with a splintered board of directors and financiers that were already upset that a TV sale to ITV got derailed in the wake of that NYPD investigation that focused on Harvey Weinstein but didn’t yield charges, with another live sale prospectus possibly harmed by these latest allegations, does TWC have that time? We have heard that some financiers are already poring over the list of plum projects they might pry loose. And agents are looking for outs for their clients on projects that are percolating.

Who wants to work for a company where one of the founding partners had a sexual harassment clause in his contract?

INSTITUTIONAL ROT: “First and foremost, standards at West Point are nonexistent. They exist on paper, but nowhere else.”

PAY TO PREY: Harvey Weinstein’s contract basically allowed for sexual harassment — so long as he paid the company. “That is to say “Harvey Weinstein, currently accused by dozens of women of acts ranging from extreme skeeviness to aggravated felony, may have been … improperly terminated under his contract,” Allahpundit writes. (Ellipses in original.) “Here he is at a Women’s March a few months ago, ostensibly signaling his wokeness but in all probability scouting for targets.”

Related: Yikes! Donna Brazile’s (now deleted) praise for The Weinstein Company looks even worse now.

More: Great twitter thread from Brian Cates that’s well worth your time, including: “What took out Ailes/O’Reilly was so many women coming forward at once. The usual playbook of legal threats/buying them off didn’t work. Watching Ailes & then O’Reilly being suddenly toppled, it COULD be some women in Hollywood realized there was hope.”

WILDFIRE STORIES: They survived six hours in a pool as a wildfire burned their neighborhood to the ground.

LICENSED TO ILL: Harvey Weinstein’s Contract Allowed for Sexual Harassment.

BUT OF COURSE: Equifax says code on its website ‘was serving malicious content.’

Late Wednesday night, independent security analyst Randy Abrams said in a blog post that while he was trying to download his credit report from the Equifax site, he clicked a link that kicked him to a third-party website with “one of the ubiquitous fake Flash Player Update screens.” His post was first reported by technology news site Ars Technica.

Equifax said Thursday afternoon that the problem stemmed from code provided by a third party.

“The issue involves a third-party vendor that Equifax uses to collect website performance data, and that vendor’s code running on an Equifax website was serving malicious content,” the company said in a statement. “Since we learned of the issue, the vendor’s code was removed from the webpage and we have taken the webpage offline to conduct further analysis.”

Equifax emphasized that its “systems were not compromised” and said that despite early reports, the problem “did not affect our consumer online dispute portal.”

Its spokespeople did not answer questions about when the company learned of the problem or how many website visitors clicked the link.

Nobody should be using Flash for anything, because it is essentially malware masquerading as a multimedia platform. Even Adobe has belatedly decided to end-of-life it. If Flash is on your system, here’s a link to Adobe’s removal tool.

ACTUALLY, GUN CONTROL DOESN’T MAKE ME FEEL GOOD: Feel Good Remedies Like Gun Control Won’t Stop Mass Shootings.

There are about 300 million guns in this country—nearly one for every man, woman, and child. Congress can pass all the regulations it wants—and even declare an outright ban on guns. Anyone who wants a gun badly enough would still be able to get one. Substantially reducing America’s stockpile of guns might make it more difficult for a potential killer to get a firearm undetected, but accomplishing that won’t require a ban on guns, but a war on guns, whose constitutional implications are identical to those of the conservative war on terrorism. Indeed, it won’t just require liberals to end their “truce with the Second Amendment”—as The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik wants—but also eviscerate other aspects of the Constitution.

There is no good or easy way to get Americans to voluntarily surrender their guns. Asking them nicely won’t do the trick.

Liberals like to tout Australia’s “buyback” programs as a possible model, but the success of that program in actually reducing the number of guns—and gun-related homicides—is deeply disputed. Indeed, one indication that the program wasn’t all that it is cracked up to be is that illegal gun ownership in Australia is up again, necessitating yet another amnesty initiative by the country this year.

Besides, Australia’s love affair with guns is nowhere as strong as America’s—which is why Australia doesn’t have the Second Amendment to begin with and America does. That, combined with the greater number of guns in this country, might make any buyback program prohibitively expensive for taxpayers.

So what is the alternative? Basically, forcing people to give up their guns. But the kind of intrusive searches of the homes and property of gun owners this would entail would make the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance of telecommunications look positively restrained. Nor are Americans likely to simply lie down and take it. They will likely resist and fight back, which would require the government to crack down even more—or, in other words, declare war on its own people.

There’s nothing that would provoke more “gun violence” than an attempt to seize guns. But gun control isn’t about preventing violence, it’s about forcing those rubes in Flyover Country to knuckle under.

ED MORRISSEY: Dems Grumble as Perez Tanking At The DNC.

Democrats have a legitimate gripe about their new party chair — and probably his deputy, too. Despite having what should be a great environment for fundraising, neither Tom Perez nor Rep. Keith Ellison have performed nearly as well at the DNC as other party organs have in 2017. The DCCC has outraised the NRCC by tens of millions in direct contributions, while the DSCC has outpaced the NRSC by just about $10 million. Not only has the RNC outraised Perez and Ellison, they’ve beaten them in small donations alone this year by $12 million — normally a Democratic strength.

As The Hill’s Amie Parnes reports, Democrats are starting to revolt.

Plus:

Perez won on the strength of his service to Barack Obama, but shows little if any of Obama’s talent for outreach and electoral organization. His idea of talking to people outside the Democratic Party’s urban core is mainly to express himself in scatalogical and profane vocabulary. Unsurprisingly, that approach has not resulted in an avalanche of donations, even in an environment as ripe for success as Democrats have at the moment.

Democrats can continue with the lousy fundraising, or they can revolt and remove an Obama-approved person-of-color from power.

HOW THE NFL Lost To Trump.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Rutgers students ‘don’t need no facts’ to heckle speaker. The taxpayers of New Jersey aren’t getting a bargain, here.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, updated hourly.

Plus, Kindle Daily Deals.

And, Today’s Digital Deals.

BUT OF COURSE: Former Playboy model: Oliver Stone sexually assaulted me.

BEN CARSON ON TRUMP’S PUERTO RICO TWEETS: Not Good ‘to Go Around Shaming People.’

A PROBLEM: Weinstein scandal has Democrats in a bind – can they afford to cut their celebrity messengers loose?

Last year at the 89th Annual Academy Awards, then-Vice President Joe Biden walked on stage to a standing ovation to introduce Lady Gaga. He gave a passionate speech on the topic of campus sexual assault, about the need to speak up and “intervene in situations when consent has not or cannot be given.”

In 2013, Michelle Obama appeared at the Oscars via satellite from the White House decked in full evening gown and flanked by U.S. military service members to announce the winner of the best picture Oscar, which just so happened to go to director Ben Affleck’s “Argo.”

These are just two of the most prominent examples of how closely the Obama administration – and with it, the Democratic Party – has been tied to Hollywood, using them as messengers to push their agenda out to the mass public. . . .

The late night hosts who only last week were happy to help Chuck Schumer push the Democrats’ gun control message are suddenly mute when it comes to Weinstein. And this is exactly where the Democrats find themselves in a bind. The party has depended on celebrity messaging for the better part of eight years, and were clearly planning to depend on it heading into the 2018 and 2020 elections (remember Maxine Waters appearing to raucous applause as a voice of The Resistance™ at the MTV Movie Awards?).

But the days of happy backslapping with Ben Affleck and George Clooney are coming to an end for a party that now has to distance itself from celebrity-spokespeople who were content to lecture the rest of the country about their religion, their guns or their politics – but who couldn’t seem to bring themselves to clean up their own house by calling out one of their closest friends and business colleagues for preying upon vulnerable young women – for years.

Read the whole thing.

THE DAM HAS BURST: Amazon TV Producer Goes Public With Harassment Claim Against Top Exec Roy Price.

Isa Hackett is the daughter of author Philip K. Dick, whose work is the basis for Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, as well as the upcoming anthology series, Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. Hackett, 50, is an executive producer on both series. Price, 51, is head of Amazon Studios and has presided over its growth into a major streaming service with such series as Transparent and movies such as Manchester by the Sea. His family has deep connections in the entertainment world: His father, Frank, ran Columbia Pictures and Universal Studios.

On the evening of July 10, 2015, after a long day of promoting Man in the High Castle at Comic-Con in San Diego, Hackett attended a dinner with the show’s cast and Amazon staff at the U.S. Grant Hotel. There she says she met Price for the first time. He asked her to attend an Amazon staff party later that night at the W Hotel (now the Renaissance) and she ended up in a taxi with Price and Michael Paull, then another top Amazon executive and now CEO of the digital media company BAMTech.

Once in the cab, Hackett says Price repeatedly and insistently propositioned her. “You will love my dick,” he said, according to Hackett, who relayed her account to multiple individuals in the hours after the alleged episode. (The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed Hackett told at least two people about the alleged incident in the immediate aftermath.) Hackett says she made clear to Price she was not interested and told him that she is a lesbian with a wife and children.

Hackett says Price did not relent in the cab or once they arrived at the Amazon party. As she talked with other executives, she says that Price stepped close to her and loudly said, “Anal sex!” in her ear.

I don’t want to hear one more goddamn lecture on civility from anyone in Hollywood.

UPDATE: Price has been suspended.

THIS IS WEIRD: Las Vegas security guard Jesus Campos disappears moments before TV interviews. “We were in a room and we came out and he was gone.”

This case gets curiouser and curiouser.