IT COULDN’T HAPPEN TO A NICER NETWORK OR A NICER ANCHOR: Norah O’Donnell Is Killing What’s Left of the CBS Evening News.

HARSH, BUT FAIR:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Veteran accuses instructor of marking grade down due to anti-military bias: report.

FLASHBACK: Yes, antifa is the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Rich Chinese outnumber wealthy Americans for first time.

China has roughly four times our population, and an economic system rigged in favor of the very few with Party privilege. If there’s a surprise here, it’s that it took them this long.

IF CHINA DOESN’T WORRY YOU, THIS FILM WILL CHANGE THAT: Issues & Insights effectively lays out the case for why every American should see this new film that debuted recently on One America News. Former Trump campaign counselor and White House senior adviser Steve Bannon is the executive producer of “The Claws of the Red Dragon,” from NTD Television (which is corporately related to The Epoch Times newspaper for which I cover Congress).

CULTURE OF HATE: Student gov trashes conservative ‘coming out’ event.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.

Plus, Best Selling Products – Updated Every Hour.

Also, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Trudeau and Liberal Hypocrisy About Race Survive in Canada. “Justin Trudeau won re-election, but it wasn’t easy for him. His party’s struggles provided some great early-week entertainment. The internet responded swiftly to the news that a politician who has most recently been plagued by a blackface scandal would now be forced to form a ‘minority’ government.”

Heh.

WHY DO ONLY ONE IN THREE YOUNG ADULTS FEEL ‘DEEPLY CARED-FOR BY THOSE AROUND  ME’? HillFaith reports another survey — of more than 16,000 people aged 18-35 in 25 countries — on emerging issues that Glenn presciently raised in “The Social Media Upheaval.”

Growing isolation and loneliness is not just a problem in the U.S., though our affluence and secularized culture likely heightens it here. I posit the current debate in Congress as an opening skirmish in a larger debate about social media and suggest that understanding an even deeper root of the problem points to the enduring solution.

OOPS: Flavored vapor still for sale in Boulder through ban loophole.

After consulting with City Attorney Tom Carr, Red Star leaders determined the shop could continue to offer its do-it-yourself vapor mixes under Boulder’s prohibition of flavored vapor sales, which kicked in Thursday after city council agreed to new rules in response to parent concerns of skyrocketing youth use.

While Boulder sought to exile vapor products tasting like anything other than tobacco itself, its new law evidently failed to catch many Red Star products with the regulation. They remain legal to sell in Boulder because its tasteless nicotine-based product is sold separately from the flavoring agent, allowing customers to simply mix the contents of the two distinct containers together and then vape and still stimulate taste buds. The city’s ban apparently only applies to pre-mixed flavored products.

Someday, some government, somewhere will pass the exact right law to make prohibition work with no loopholes or unintended consequences worse than the thing they tried to prohibit.

This is not that day.

SALENA ZITO: Will The Democrats Blow It With Middle America Again?

In the weeks, then months, and now years after losing the presidential election in 2016, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly demonstrated in speeches and television interviews she has no idea why she lost. She has blamed everything from racism to Russia, from the media to sexism, from deplorables to backwards-looking stubborn nostalgia.

Now she’s out saying Trump’s presidency is illegitimate and that she would defeat him again.

She has not visibly reflected on the effects of her position on guns, her anti-fossil fuel talk, and her open embrace of globalism. She seemingly hasn’t considered the political cost of living within the bubbles in Washington, New York, and Hollywood.

Talk to Democrats today who live outside her bubble, those who either volunteered endless hours to help elect her or voted for her, and they will tell you that Clinton has no idea why she lost. Worse, they see their party going down the same road that led to her defeat four years ago, blaming white resentment, as well as Russia, the media, sexism, and deplorables.

You don’t have to look any further than any of the sound bites from this past week’s Democratic debate or the recent town halls. Confiscating guns, banning fracking, hiking taxes, providing free healthcare to illegal immigrants, and stamping out religious liberty were the promises Democrats made to compete for primary voters.

Here is what most of Trump’s critics do not understand about why this new conservative populist coalition voted for Trump over not just Clinton but also over 17 very qualified, distinguished, mostly establishment Republican candidates in the party’s primary battle.

It was never about Trump. It was always about their communities. Trump was the symptom, not the cause.

These voters aren’t going to budge. It’s not that everyone who voted for him considers his first term a massive success that has improved the economy in America and made us safer. It’s that Democrats and Never Trump Republicans have done nothing to reflect on why they lost to this guy.

They’d rather make fun of the voters (it is easier and makes for great sport on Twitter) than admit their contribution to this flee from normalcy.

Successful people, when trying to recover from a setback, ask themselves, “Well, what did I do wrong to get my job or life in this predicament?”

Never Trump Republicans and Democrats won’t accept any blame for losing the public. Instead, they blame the public.

Yep. As with Brexit, it’s amazing how bourgeois liberalism is unable to admit a political defeat.

NEOCONSERVATIVE FANTASY LIVES ON: Properly understood, neoconservatism is an ideology that supports using U.S. diplomatic and especially military power to spread liberal democracy throughout the world. One would think that Afghanistan and Iraq would have taught the establishment some humility in this regard, but op-eds like this one by William H. McRaven, a retired Navy admiral and former commander of the United States Special Operations Command, suggest not:

We are not the most powerful nation in the world because of our aircraft carriers, our economy, or our seat at the United Nations Security Council. We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate.

But, if we don’t care about our values, if we don’t care about duty and honor, if we don’t help the weak and stand up against oppression and injustice — what will happen to the Kurds, the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Syrians, the Rohingyas, the South Sudanese and the millions of people under the boot of tyranny or left abandoned by their failing states?

As is often the case, Trump’s blunderbuss style is far from ideal, but is useful in showing the rot in the establishment.

If we can’t have faith in our nation’s principles, why would the men and women of this nation join the military? And if they don’t join, who will protect us? If we are not the champions of the good and the right, then who will follow us? And if no one follows us — where will the world end up?

Do high-level military officials really believe that Americans join the armed forces to try to liberate “the millions of people under the boot of tyranny or left abandoned by their failing states?” Or that the U.S. military is capable of doing this? Has nobody noticed the hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of lives lost trying to fix just Afghanistan, without any significant payoff? Exactly what does the McRaven think the U.S. military can do for the Rohingyas or the South Sudanese?

ROGER KIMBALL: Media Attempt to School Republicans Is a Disingenuous Fraud. “The sobbing editorial is called ‘The Crisis of the Republican Party,’ but it might have been better titled ‘Whistling Past the Graveyard.'”

MY COLLEAGUE MAURICE STUCKE, WHOSE IDEAS HAVE INFLUENCED MINE ON THE SUBJECT: UT Law professor advises U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

The research of University of Tennessee College of Law Professor Maurice Stucke is playing a role in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s investigation into whether tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon have too much power in the marketplace.

During a meeting last week of the of the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, legislators heard testimony about online platforms and market power with a focus on how data and privacy affect competition.

Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi, co-authors of the forthcoming book “Competition Overdose,” were asked to submit a written statement for the committee’s consideration in this third hearing on the subject matter since June.

In their statement, Stucke and Ezrachi concluded, “Congress needs to act.”

“Part of the problem is an ongoing erosion of the scope and relevance of U.S. antitrust law,” the two wrote. “A series of Supreme Court decisions have emasculated antitrust under a consumer welfare standard that neither concerns citizens nor promotes their welfare.”

They have a book coming out soon.

PRIVACY: Alexa and Google Home devices leveraged to phish and eavesdrop on users, again.

M.D. CREEKMORE: Surviving a Winter Power Outage – How to Stay Warm.

OUR MOST UNDER-APPRECIATED NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT: “Mexico is now on a trajectory to become a vast gangland governed more by warlordism than by the state. . . . The idea that a nation of 120 million people with whom the United States shares a 2,000-mile border and ever-increasing economic ties might spiral into collapse has not seriously occurred to the American people.”

MATT TAIBBI: Everyone Is a Russian Asset: America laughed at Hillary Clinton’s remarks about Tulsi Gabbard, but her ideas fit perfectly in the intellectual mainstream. “This witch-hunting insanity isn’t just dangerous, it’s a massive breach from reality.”

That’s because, to be plain, the “intellectual mainstream” of our political/media/academic class is currently batshit crazy. (Bumped).

UPDATE: Seen on Facebook:

JUDICIAL WATCH: New Benghazi Documents Confirm Clinton Email Cover-Up.

Judicial Watch today released new Clinton emails on the Benghazi controversy that had been covered up for years and would have exposed Hillary Clinton’s email account if they had been released when the State Department first uncovered them in 2014. The long withheld email, clearly responsive to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit seeking records concerning “talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack,” contains Clinton’s private email address and a conversation about the YouTube video that sparked the Benghazi talking points scandal (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). This Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit led directly to the disclosure of the Clinton email system in 2015.

The Clinton email cover-up led to court-ordered discovery into three specific areas: whether Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server was intended to stymie FOIA; whether the State Department’s intent to settle this case in late 2014 and early 2015 amounted to bad faith; and whether the State Department has adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s request. The court also authorized discovery into whether the Benghazi controversy motivated the cover-up of Clinton’s email. (The court ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”)

She’ll prove beyond a shadow of a doubt and with geometric logic that the Russians did it.

HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS, CONT’D: Biological Male Sets World Record For Women’s Cycling.

Related: Dani Shugart: Trans Athletes: The Death Of Women’s Sports.

21st CENTURY TWEETS: