TRUMP VS. “THE POLICY COMMUNITY:” We resolve policy disputes by elections, not impeachments. Running for election is so common. They just want power to be handed to them by virtue of their high SAT scores and shining resumes.

Plus: “Never forget: The coup is driven by policy differences. The Left will tell you it’s not — it’s driven by lawlessness. But the Left treats all disagreement with its policy preferences as lawlessness. And when it can’t pull that off, it slanders the dissenters as outlaws.”

Actually, I think the coup is driven by egos, and by the fear that a Trump presidency may involve accountability for things the “policy community” would rather not admit.

FLASHBACK: NBC Admits It Hid Evidence That Undermined Kavanaugh Accuser Julie Swetnick’s Wild Claims.

HMMM:  San Diego proposes to deal with the lack of affordable housing by raising real estate taxes, thus making real estate even less affordable.

ABC NEWS POLITICAL ANALYST MATTHEW DOWD HITS ELISE STEFANIK IN CONTROVERSIAL TWEET SPARKING ‘SEXISM’ BACKLASH:

Stefanik was one of several Republicans who spoke out against the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into President Trump during its first public hearing Wednesday, but Dowd singled her out on Twitter.

“Elise Stefanik is a perfect example why just electing someone because they are a woman or a millennial doesn’t necessarily get you the leaders we need,” the self-proclaimed “proud independent” commentator wrote in the now-deleted tweet.

As Stephen Miller tweeted in response, “Give Matt Dowd a break here. Going after women seems to be the company norm for ABC. He’s just falling in line.”

QED, from mid-October: ABC’s Matthew Dowd Attacks Megyn Kelly, Makes A Fool Of Himself (Repeatedly).

BECAUSE OF COURSE THEY DO: Canada’s SPLC-Style ‘Anti-Hate’ Watchdog Carries Water for Antifa.

ANTITRUST: Google Is Basically Daring The Federal Government To Block Its Fitbit Deal.

Google’s plan to buy Fitbit took chutzpah from the start. The company was already being investigated by Congress, state attorneys general, and federal antitrust regulators, a reflection of growing alarm over a conglomerate whose dominant market share is built on unrivaled access to personal data. Now it was announcing a $2.2 billion acquisition of a firm with troves of the most intimate details of its users’ physical health, from their heart rate to their exercise routines to how many hours they sleep at night. Fitbit was apparently worried enough about the threat of the deal being blocked that it negotiated a $250 million breakup fee in case of “a failure to obtain Antitrust Approvals.”

A week later, almost on cue, Makan Delrahim, the top antitrust official at the Department of Justice, suggested at a conference at Harvard that federal enforcers might start treating data privacy as a relevant issue in evaluating mergers. “It would be a grave mistake to believe that privacy concerns can never play a role in antitrust analysis,” he said. So there was some reason to wonder whether the Google-Fitbit deal would be the first casualty of the growing antitrust techlash.

And that was all before the Wall Street Journal reported this week on Google’s Project Nightingale, a mostly secret deal with one of the country’s largest nonprofit hospital networks granting Google free access to tens of millions of complete, nonanonymized patient records, which it is using to train an AI platform that will be able to customize patient care. (This is apparently legal, somehow, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.)

Is it? Is it really?

FLASHBACK: Politico Admits ‘Mistake’ In Sending DNC An Article In Advance.

ABOVE THE BAP ANGAMOS: An MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter conducts a hoist exercise with the Peruvian navy submarine BAP Angamos off the coast of San Clemente Island.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: 10 reasons why this impeachment ‘inquiry’ is really a coup.

OOPS: Amb. Taylor’s Awkward Silence in Response to a Question About Hunter Biden Was Very Telling.

OPEN THREAD: Make it special.

HOW SAD IS THIS? Some Dickinson alumna is writing classmates soliciting 35+ year old #MeToo stories. Apparently she hasn’t gotten the memo that #MeToo is over now that it’s taken more Democratic than Republican scalps.

SPACE: Tour Rocket Lab’s Stunning New Zealand Launch Site in This Video.

CIARAMELLA AND VINDMAN: How hard is it to lose your job over a security violation? Pretty hard, if you’re doing the bidding of your superiors. “The point here is that all of these things would, in the normal course of events, be security violations punishable by everything from actually losing a job to extended terms in Kansas making small rocks.” This is not the normal course of events.

SOUNDS GOOD: The Mysterious And Potentially Revolutionary Celera 500L Aircraft May Fly Soon. “The patent goes on to describe a notional aircraft that would cruise between 460 and 510 miles per hour at an altitude of up to 65,000 feet, yielding a fuel efficiency rate of between 30 and 42 miles per gallon. To put this in perspective, the Pilatus PC-12, a popular light, single-engine turboprop aircraft has a service ceiling of 30,000 feet, a cruising speed just under 330 miles per hour, and still burns, on average, 66 gallons of jet fuel per hour, for a fuel economy of roughly five miles to the gallon. Even going to a Learjet 70, which has similar speed performance to what’s stated in the Celera patent documents, but still nowhere near as high a ceiling, we are talking about roughly three miles per gallon of gas at cruise. So, Otto Aviation is talking about performance that is at least 10 times more efficient than existing light business jets with similar cruise capabilities.”

I hope they can deliver, but at present I’m skeptical. But now it’s flown. “Now the big question is, when will Otto Aviation actually say anything about the aircraft that is basically their reason for being. Usually successful first flights are something to be grandly promoted and are a huge validation of so much tireless work by the project’s team, yet this endeavor seems to have been run in a manner far more akin to a secretive military aircraft project than a potentially transformative civil aviation one.”

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Adversary technology: The very things that improve our lives could be used against us.

MORE WASHINGTON POST FOLLIES: The WaPo’s fashion critic doesn’t like Jim Jordan’s fashion sense. Or something like that. She criticizes him for failing to wear a suit jacket at the hearing (and, for good measure, throws in that he was “disingenuous” in explaining why).

Flashback:  This is the same fashion critic who attacked John Robert’s children for being too old-fashioned in their dress.  This lady is hard to please … unless you’re a Kennedy.

WATCH: Devin Nunes Condemns ‘Impeachment Sham Drama’ in ‘Search of a Crime.’

Related: FLASHBACK, 2018: Joe Biden Brags At CFR Meeting About Withholding Aid To Ukraine To Force Firing Of Prosecutor.

WHY ARE ALL THESE “WOKE” COMPANIES SUCH CESSPITS OF ABUSE? Mary Cain, Nike Oregon Project runners detail toxic culture under Alberto Salazar.

A METAPHOR FOR — OR MAYBE THE INSTANTIATION OF — THE LAST FEW DECADES: “The Rake” – An Unparalleled Transfer Of Wealth To The Managerial Class.

ROGER KIMBALL: A tale of two quids: The Democrats have decided to weaponize impeachment.

Today marks the official beginning of the Schiff Show Impeachment Follies. It is therefore fitting that I take as my text for today’s meditation Matthew 7:5: ‘Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.’

What do I mean? I’ll tell you. The ostensible predicate of this spectacle is President Trump’s alleged effort to influence the 2020 election. Specifically, the allegation is that Trump made aid to Ukraine (the quid) conditional on Ukraine’s investigation of Joe Biden’s demand (the quo) that the prosecutor investigating a company on which his son, Hunter, sat be fired. Biden’s demand is not controverted. He bragged about it himself, in public, at the Council on Foreign Relations.

‘I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.’

Unless you haven’t been paying attention, you know that ‘quid pro quo’ is this season’s ‘Russian collusion’. A meme that is ubiquitous but also empty. Just as in yesterday’s phrase, it’s all Oakland, at least so far as Donald Trump is concerned, with respect to any quid pro quo. You can read the transcript of the president’s call with the Ukrainian president. Read it. Then take this reading comprehension quiz: What was that call about? You get a gold star if you said if you said ‘Ukrainian corruption, especially efforts by Ukrainian figures and entities to help Hillary and hurt Donald Trump during the 2016 election cycle.’

Efforts to meddle in the 2016 election: that is what the call was chiefly about. Since that effort was part of a larger concern about corruption in Ukraine, Trump also asked about reports that Biden’s son Hunter was trading on his father’s name and position to peddle influence and line his pockets.

This is a subject that Adam Schiff will be at pains to avoid airing, but do not worry. It has been, and will continue, to be aired.

If you are worried about President Trump asking about Joe Biden in his telephone call to President Zelensky, what do you make of Ukraine’s efforts to aid Hillary Clinton and harm Donald Trump during the 2016 election? Back before ‘Ukraine’ and ‘quid pro quo’ became memes, even Politico, no friend of Donald Trump, was frank about that reality. On January 11, 2017 before Trump even took office, Politico reported that.

Now Politico is hoping you’ve forgotten that reporting.

Meanwhile, if there was a Republican version of Code Pink, it would have flooded the hearing room with clowns. But then again, the Democrats basically took care of that themselves.

VERY SERIOUS REPORTERS COVERING VERY SERIOUS PEOPLE CONDUCTING VERY SERIOUS BUSINESS: NBCNews.com Swoons Over Drag Queen At Impeachment Hearings.

AMNESTY IS JUST ANOTHER LEFTY FRONT GROUP THAT CAN’T BE TRUSTED: Amnesty International Called Out for Falsely Accusing Israel of Attacking Gaza Building — Which Was Actually Hit by Misfired Palestinian Rocket.