SO HOSTINGMATTERS USED TO HOST INSTAPUNDIT, and they still host my GlennReynolds.com site and (paid for by me) the Zaevion Dobson Memorial Foundation. Now they’re offering special hosting deals for InstaPundit readers. I’ve had nothing but good experiences with them, and recommend them highly.

NEW FRONTIERS IN BIGOTRY: Discriminating Against People With Hotmail Accounts.

I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Threat Level Raised as ‘Violent’ Volcanic Eruption Nears.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Forget the Oscars, It’s Time for the Treachers.

They don’t like him. They really don’t like him.

SURPRISE! JUSTICE DEPARTMENT REFUSES TO RELEASE MUELLER’S BUDGET REQUEST: Of course you’re not surprised. Judicial Watch submitted the Freedom of Information Act request for documents for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s budget. No can do, DOJ said, citing FOIA’s exemption five, the “deliberative process,” which is the transparency law’s all-purpose get-out-of-jail-free card for federal officials. Brendan Kirby of LifeZette has more.

FINALLY, A 21ST CENTURY HEADLINE: This Breakthrough in Tractor Beam Tech Could Pave The Way to Levitating Humans.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: 63% of U.S. Dads Say They Don’t Spend Enough Time With Their Kids, Study Finds.

AYN RAND DIDN’T WRITE THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE AS A HOW-TO GUIDE: Your political leaders are now using “talking sticks” to communicate with one other.

Huh – don’t they know that real coastal elitists communicate with each other via Pinch Sulzberger-brand stuffed moose toys?

WEIRD, I WAS ASSURED THAT THE TAX BILL WOULD ONLY BENEFIT A FEW BILLIONAIRES: 125,000 Disney employees to receive $1,000 cash bonus due to tax reform.

IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: 1.7-Billion-Year-Old Chunk of North America Found Sticking to Australia.

A FULL, INSTRUMENTED TEST DRIVE of the new Ford GT. “While many supercars have been tucked and tweaked to spawn competition variants, the Ford GT is a race car that has been legalized for road use. The lack of practicality struck us when we first drove it briefly on a track, and two days of frequent ingress and egress make the point more clearly.”

AT AMAZON, Shop Amazon Warehouse Deals – Deep Discounts on Open-box and Used Products.

Plus, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals

TYLER O’NEIL: Trump HHS Takes Vital Step to Protect Doctors From Being Forced to Perform Transgender Surgeries.

NORTH KOREA, NOVEMBER 1950: Tanks from the USMC’s 1st Tank Battalion roll toward Chosin Reservoir in North Korea. Frozen Chosin became a nightmare.

Earlier this week StrategyPage.com began a Korean War memorial photo series, similar to the Battle of the Bulge series that ran from December 2016 to January 2017. This is the first photo in the series.

ANOTHER DAMN THING TO SUBSCRIBE TO: Disney Hires Apple Veteran to Launch Its Netflix Killer.

1968: IN 50 YEARS WE’LL HAVE FLYING CARS!

2018: ‘Die With Me’ is a chat you can only access when your phone’s almost dead.

IT’S COLLUSION, I TELLS YA: Pentagon Counters Russia & Tests New SM-3 IIA Missile for Poland.

The Pentagon will soon fire its emerging SM-3 IIA interceptor missile from a land-based Aegis Ashore site for the first time as part of a broad-based, multi-year effort to help defend European allies from short and intermediate-range ballistic missile attacks from Russia, Iran or other potential adversaries.

A follow on to the SM-3, the SM-3 IIA is a larger and more high-tech interceptor missile able to destroy threatening targets at longer ranges; the weapon, being developed as part of a cooperative arrangement between the US Missile Defense Agency and Japan, is designed to work in tandem with Aegis radar systems to track and destroy approaching enemy missiles – by knocking them out
of the sky.

“This is the end of the development phase. We are transitioning into production. This is the final flight test before we get into operational testing,” Amy Cohen, SM-3 Program Director, told Warrior Maven in an interview.

In his first year in office, Barack Obama canceled missile defense plans we had with Poland and Czechia in hopes of courting Vladimir Putin.

And who can forget this classic hot mic slip from 2012?

And as Mark Tapscott reminded us yesterday, Hillary Clinton’s Uranium One/Russia scandal is yuuuuuge.

It’s almost as though all this talk about Trump colluding with Russia was just some kind of smokescreen for Democratic collusion (or near enough, effectively) with Russia.

SO NICE OF YOU TO NOTICE: How the Right’s War on Unions Is Killing the Democratic Party.

Since 2010, six states have passed “right-to-work” laws, meaning that workers can benefit from union representation without paying to keep the union funded. In other states, Republican legislatures have hamstrung public-sector unions by denying them collective-bargaining power.

Everyone remembers the high-profile battle in Wisconsin that Governor Scott Walker launched in 2011, but the union-busting efforts have not slowed down. In 2017, Missouri and then Kentucky’s right-to-work laws were rammed through within weeks of Republicans’ gaining power, and Iowa successfully limited the collective-bargaining power of public-sector unions. There was a push to do the same in New Hampshire, though it failed.

Few of these battles drew the same attention as what happened in Wisconsin, particularly after Donald Trump’s carnival began dominating news coverage. But there is good reason to believe that all these efforts will profoundly change the future of American politics.

It’s nice to see the Left acknowledge, even tacitly, that they can’t win without the advantage of legalized theft against the workingman.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: ‘I Had Vaginal Reconstruction Surgery And It Transformed My Sex Life.’

WELCOME TO OUR WORLD: A message to our Progressive friends following the #SchumerSellout.

AMITY SHLAES: American history shows that expanding the economy benefits everyone.

Decades in which policy endeavored or managed to even out and equalize earnings—the 1930s under Franklin Roosevelt, the 1960s under Lyndon Johnson—score high. Decades where policymakers focused on growth before equality, such as the 1920s, fare poorly. Decades about which social-justice advocates aren’t sure what to say—the 1970s, say—simply drop from the discussion. In the same hierarchy, federal debt moves down as a concern because austerity to reduce debt could hinder redistribution. Lately, advocates of economically progressive history have made taking any position other than theirs a dangerous practice. Academic culture longs to topple the idols of markets, just as it longs to topple statutes of Robert E. Lee.

But progressives have their metrics wrong and their story backward. The geeky Gini metric fails to capture the American economic dynamic: in our country, innovative bursts lead to great wealth, which then moves to the rest of the population. Equality campaigns don’t lead automatically to prosperity; instead, prosperity leads to a higher standard of living and, eventually, in democracies, to greater equality. The late Simon Kuznets, who posited that societies that grow economically eventually become more equal, was right: growth cannot be assumed. Prioritizing equality over markets and growth hurts markets and growth and, most important, the low earners for whom social-justice advocates claim to fight. Government debt matters as well. Those who ring the equality theme so loudly deprive their own constituents, whose goals are usually much more concrete: educational opportunity, homes, better electronics, and, most of all, jobs. Translated into policy, the equality impulse takes our future hostage.

Touring American history with an eye on growth, not equality, has become so unusual that doing so almost feels like driving on the wrong side of the road.

The Left gave up on “A rising tide lifts all boats” a long time ago.

THEY LEFT OUT LENA DUNHAM: Causes of Erectile Dysfunction.

TRUMP TRAUMA: ex-Washington Post and current Fox media critic Howie Kurtz comes right out and says it:

“These are not easy words for me to write. I am a lifelong journalist with ink in my veins. And for all my criticism of the media’s errors and excesses, I have always believed in the mission of aggressive reporting and holding politicians accountable […] But the past two years have radicalized me. I am increasingly troubled by how many of my colleagues have decided to abandon any semblance of fairness out of a conviction that they must save the country from Trump.”

The nut graf:

“This is not just a feud or a fight or a battle. It is scorched-earth warfare in which only one side can achieve victory. To a stunning degree, the press is falling into the president’s trap. The country’s top news organizations have targeted Trump with an unprecedented barrage of negative stories, with some no longer making much attempt to hide their contempt. Some stories are legitimate, some are not, and others are generated by the president’s own falsehoods and exaggerations. But the mainstream media, subconsciously at first, has lurched into the opposition camp and is appealing to an anti-Trump base of viewers and readers, failing to grasp how deeply it is distrusted by a wide swath of the country.”

I have nothing to add, other than “Read the Whole Thing.” ™ And I promise the link is not behind a paywall.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Hawaii Gov. David Ige slow to correct false missile alert after he forgot Twitter log-in.