MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: FDA Approves ‘Novel’ Single-Dose Flu Drug — The First Of Its Kind In 20 Years.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: NY AG Files Ridiculous Climate Change Lawsuit Against Exxon Mobil.

(Classical reference in headline.)

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Identity Politics in Overdrive. “From the Kavanaugh hearings to a lawsuit alleging that Harvard discriminates against Asian-Americans, the Left sees “white supremacy” at the heart of everything.”

The core premise of academic victimology is that whites game the system to disable non-whites. The effort seems to have failed miserably. But rather than acknowledging the implications of Asian success for the narrative of systemic pro-white bias, the proponents of identity politics simply trot out the “white supremacy” mantra as if doing so routs any countervailing evidence. That some left-wing Asians adopt the same rhetoric is a testament to the status accorded to alleged victims of white privilege and to the lure of oppositional identity politics in elite circles.

The use of “white supremacy” to characterize the Harvard racial-preferences lawsuit is a model of lucidity, however, compared with its deployment in the final days of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process. Categories of privilege and oppression shifted, recombined, and split apart, highlighting internecine tensions within the intersectional Left.

Read the whole thing.

REFUGEE WAVES VERSUS MIGRANT MARCHES.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, ADMINISTRATIVE REVENGE EDITION: Professors fired for creating “distress in workplace” were actually fired for disagreeing with administrators.

TOM MAGUIRE: Flashback: Mass Murder Mailing of 2005. “Back when this story broke in 2006 some lefty bloggers promptly blamed an Ann Coulter ‘joke’ about poisoning Justice Stevens for this attack. OK, the timing was backwards since her joke followed the attack (but preceded the publicizing of it). And the sentencing memorandum explaining the motivation was available in the public record. But there were political points to be scored, so whatever.”

HE’S AN AMAZING MAN WHO WAS HORRIBLY SMEARED: Petition supporting Clarence Thomas gets 10 times more signatures than opposition. “A Change.org petition calls for the Savannah College of Art and Design to keep the name of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on one of its buildings. The petition was launched three weeks after a separate petition called for the Georgia college to remove Thomas’ name from the building, labeling the Supreme Court Justice a ‘sexual predator.'”

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Bombs Away and Much, Much More. “Two things drive the news cycle: when the media can make itself the story (CHECK!) and when the media can use the news to beat up on President Trump (CHECK!). Yesterday was a jackpot.”

Indeed.

YOUNG-ADULT INFOTAINMENT SITE VOX: Fight Suicide By Adding Lithium To Drinking Water. It’s actually not a bad piece, but I couldn’t resist using Stephen Green’s Vox tagline.

WHY TRUMP IS GETTING MORE POPULAR.

AND THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING: Arizona state troopers withdraw Kyrsten Sinema endorsement after members object.

Related: “‘It was Rousseau,’ writes Frank M. Turner in European Intellectual History from Rousseau to Nietzsche, ‘who made the hatred of one’s own culture the stance of the cultivated person.’ The Rousseau of Arizona is the alternately contemptuous and clownish Kyrsten Sinema, who is trying to persuade Arizonans to overlook her well-documented contempt for the state and tap her to be one of its two U.S. senators.”

FLOTUS: Melania Invited Ellen Producer to Kindness Event After His Cynical Tweets.

After Andy Lassner, a producer for The Ellen DeGeneres Show, tweeted the other day that he’s “way more afraid of another Melania getting in to this country than” he is of the thousands of migrants in the caravan marching towards the U.S. border.

First Lady Melania Trump’s office tweeted him an invite to her gathering of children at the White House to talk about kindness and screen the movie Wonder.

You can guess how this man child responded.

The First Lady deserves far more positive press than she’ll ever receive.

IT IS A RIDDLE, WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY, INSIDE AN ENIGMA; BUT PERHAPS THERE IS A KEY: California Has a Housing Crisis and Can’t Figure Out How to Solve It.

INTERESTING: Forget the A-10 Warthog: The Army Wants the F-35.

“When you are in a firefight, the first thing infantry wants to do it get on that radio to adjust fire for mortars and locate targets with close air support with planes or helicopters. You want fires. The F-35 has increased survivability and it will play a decisive role in the support of ground combat,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told reporters at the Association of the United States Army Annual Symposium.

Gen. Milley’s comments are quite significant, given the historic value of close air support when it comes to ground war. His remarks also bear great relevance regarding the ongoing Pentagon evaluation assessing the F-35 and A-10 Warthog in close air support scenarios.

Over the years, close-air-support to Army ground war has of course often made the difference between life and death – victory or defeat. The Army, Milley said, wants next-generation close-air-support for potential future warfare.

To be clear, the Army doesn’t want its own F-35s, which it doesn’t have the logistical tail to support:

“We fight with the Navy, Marines and Air Force. Our soldiers have never heard an Air Force pilot say ‘I can’t fly into that low-altitude area,’ These guys take incredible risk. If there are troops on the ground, they are rolling in hot,” Milley said.

Good to know.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED BY MANY PROMINENT DEMOCRATS THAT VOTER FRAUD WAS A MYTH: Former Democratic Party leader paid women in alleged Tarrant voter fraud ring, AG says.

A Fort Worth woman recently indicted on voter fraud charges paid others involved in the scheme with funds provided by a former Tarrant County Democratic Party leader, court documents filed this week show.

After learning about a state investigation, Leticia Sanchez — one of four women arrested and indicted on voter fraud charges — allegedly directed her daughter to send a text message to others in the scheme, urging them not to cooperate with investigators, state officials say.

The allegations are made in a state’s notice of intent to introduce evidence in Sanchez’s criminal case, where state officials say she was among those who collaborated to vote for certain down-ballot candidates on a number of north side residents’ mail-in ballots.

Sounds to me like a criminal conspiracy to disenfranchise legally registered voters.

TWO-MINUTE WARNING: The Democratic Party is Calling!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2up4KWqEjvc

It’s satire, but is it really?

HMM: Trump Admin Will Allow Iran Key Financial Lifeline in Major Concession.

The United States is set to allow Iran to remain connected to the SWIFT baking system, an international monetary consortium that facilities cross-border transactions, according to sources familiar with ongoing talks between top U.S. officials and European allies who have been pressuring the Trump administration to take a softer line on Tehran ahead of the Nov. 4 implementation of new sanctions on Iran.

The move is being met with frustration by Iran hawks on Capitol Hill and elsewhere who have argued that SWIFT continues to provide Iran with a critical financial lifeline as the country continues to fund terrorist operations across the region despite its ailing economy.

In the past months, as European allies pressured the Trump administration to take a softer line with Iran, SWIFT has emerged as a key sticking point. While the Trump administration had vowed to choke off Iran’s financial routes, senior officials appear to have softened that stance in the face of European pressure.

To date, the speed with which the Administration had been able to get sanctions back on Iran had been a pleasant surprise. But now this.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Suicides Surge in a Hopeless Venezuela.

“We live between terror and impotence,” said Ignacio Sandia, who heads the psychiatry department. “We constantly think we can’t do what we should in the moment we’re able to, and we’re terrified that patients commit suicide and there’s nothing we can do for them.”

Suicides are rapidly rising across this once-wealthy nation, but particularly in mountainous Merida, where they are hitting levels never seen. The Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a nongovernmental organization, estimates that the state’s suicide rate was more than 19 per 100,000 in 2017. Only 12 nations have a rate so high.

Such deaths are becoming ordinary in a population plagued by hyperinflation, hunger and mass emigration. Xiomara Betancourt, a neurologist who heads mental-health services at Corposalud Merida, the public health system, blamed scarcities of antidepressant and anti-anxiety medicine and loneliness as loved ones leave.

Unbelievably sad and unnecessary.

ANDREW GILLUM (D-FL): LET’S FACE IT, YOUR CONCERNS ABOUT MY DUBIOUS ETHICS ARE RACIST. “The bad news: He’s probably going to be governor. The good news: If there are any scandals during his administration, rest assured that they’ll merely be figments of your racist imagination.”

BUT OF COURSE: Former Clinton Staffer Blames Trump for Clinton, Obama Attempted Bombings.

Flashback: Hillary Clinton Says Democrats Can’t Be Civil Until They’re Back in Power.

JOEL KOTKIN: One Nation, Two Economies.

Over the past few decades, the U.S. has developed essentially two economies. On the one side is the widely celebrated “post-industrial” economy: software, entertainment, media, and financial and business services. These sectors flourished as the stock market soared in the ultra-low interest-rate environment fostered by the Obama administration, whose recovery strategy was built around bailing out major banks, all headquartered in deep-blue cities. The winners under Obama included urban real estate, financial-service firms, and the tech oligarchs. These elements now constitute the Democratic Party’s burgeoning financial base, allowing it consistently to spend more than the GOP in key congressional races, while the GOP still gains support in energy and other less heralded “legacy” industries.

There’s a glitter gap between the parties, too. The Democrats now own the fashion, media, literary, and entertainment communities, in the process turning the putative party of the common man into the political vehicle of the leisure class. In contrast, during the depth of the recession, a much larger, more dispersed America struggled. As traditional industries like manufacturing, energy, agriculture, home construction, and basic business services declined, the progressive clerisy in forums like Slate crowed that these blue-collar jobs were never coming back. Unlike the tech oligarchy or the financial giants, these older sectors wielded little political influence under Obama and, in the case of energy, seemed destined for a radical downsizing.

These heritage industries and the people who work in them elected Trump. Despite repeated tales of how tariffs are destroying manufacturers, the industrial sector, after weakening at the end of Obama’s term, has been enjoying its best growth since the mid-1990s. Critically, incomes are up for the lower deciles of the labor force, including young workers. Nothing guarantees that this recovery will continue, but Trump can justifiably boast about accomplishing what Obama failed to deliver in eight years. Democrats might mutter that renewed growth has come from regulatory reforms and big corporate tax breaks, but that makes Trump’s point: a continuance of Obama-style economic and regulatory policy would have hurt most Americans outside of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Despite the media’s national obsession with gender and race, American politics continues to follow broad geographic and economic lines. The battle lines have changed over time, from a conflict between coastal merchants and southern farmers to splits over tariffs between western farmers and eastern financiers, and eventually to the battle between an ascendant Sunbelt and struggling older states in the northeast. Today we have a new divide, what might be described as the “tangible” sector versus the ephemeral; the French Marxist economist Thomas Piketty has aptly called it “the brahmin left against the merchant right.” One economy trades in digits, images, and financial transactions, the other in real goods such as cars, steel, oil, gas, and food. These economic sectors have often radically different imperatives.

The Bay Area economy, for example, depends on noncitizens for as much as 40 percent of its workforce, including relatively cheap, work-visa-shackled, latter-day indentured servants from Asia. This explains why Trump’s travel ban and other, often crude or insufficiently justified moves on immigration have helped transform Silicon Valley into a one-party political goldmine. This software-dominated economy, along with its cousins in Hollywood and finance, also is far less exposed to regulatory excesses than firms in manufacturing, home-building, or energy. Tech servers can be located in low-cost regions like the Pacific Northwest or the South, while manufacturing, highly sensitive to environmental regulation and electricity prices, has been relocated to places like Texas or the Midwest—or preferably to China—so that firms can produce gadgets without expanding their localized “carbon footprint.”

Any return to Obama’s energy policy—or the even more extreme one enacted in California—could set back the economic recovery in much of the country, most notably Appalachia, but also across the energy belt that extends from the Permian Basin and the Gulf to the Bakken fields in North Dakota. Even Democratic Texas senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, who in the past supported a $10 a barrel tax on oil, has a tough task justifying his position in oil-rich Texas.

The tangible and ephemeral economies create distinct political trajectories. In Texas or Tennessee, for example, working-class people can get decent jobs and aspire to homeownership and other aspects of middle-class life. Historically, Democrats and Republicans in these regions favored robust economic growth, battling mainly over how to achieve it. But today, a pro-growth bipartisan consensus is increasingly elusive, as Democrats adopt the environmental and lifestyle preferences of their often childless urban base. Superstar firebrands like Democratic congressional aspirant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can talk about going on a war footing to fight global warming because there’s not much industry left in her district in Queens and the Bronx.

Childless.

BASED ON THE OBAMA ERA, PRETTY PLAUSIBLE:

The press, of course, will ignore the Obama era history and pretend this is the first time an administration has ever acted this way.

SURE. HE’LL DO IT AS SOON AS THE LEFT APOLOGIZES FOR THEIR WORDS INSTIGATING VIOLENCE, AND THE VIOLENCE THEY INSPIRED:  Schumer, Pelosi: Trump Bomb Condemnation ‘Hollow’ Until ‘He Reverses Statements That Condone Violence’.