WEIRD: Why Is the Media Silent a Week After Methodists Dismissed ‘Child Abuse’ Charge Against Jeff Sessions?

HMM: Sean Trende at RCP warns that the November Blue Wave could materialize.

My 18-month-old advice to the GOP House still stands: Legislate like there’s no tomorrow, because there might not be one.

And if they did, the increase in voter enthusiasm could make all the difference in November.

ONE SECOND AFTER: As Russians Hack the U.S. Grid, a Look at What’s Needed to Protect It.

CHANGE: Faced with falling birth rates, China urges citizens to have more babies.

The one child policy ran until 2015 when it was partially relaxed to allow some couples to have two children, but families have been slow to embrace official approval to expand.

An op-ed in a state-run newspaper titled “Giving birth is a family matter and a national issue too” is the latest to encourage couples to have more children, and call for official action to enable young people to start families.

The full-page column was published in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily, mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party. It warned that “the impact of low birth rates on the economy and society has begun to show.”

The piece has attracted millions of comments online, and comes as the government revealed a new official postage stamp, which seems to hint that it may drop the remaining restrictions on the number of children people can have.

Can the State cajole a country out of a State-induced demographic tailspin? We’ll see…

YOU MIGHT NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG, BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOU: Advertisers Jump on the SJW Bandwagon, Declare Masculinity Dead. “They’re now working hard to create campaigns to re-educate consumers.”

BECAUSE UNLIKE EUROPE WE’RE REDUCING EMISSIONS JUST FINE WITHOUT IT. NEXT QUESTION? Why Hasn’t the US Put a Price on Carbon Yet?

ANDREW MALCOLM: Here’s how Trump could pull off another election surprise.

Absent some major news event like, oh, say, a damning special counsel report, what can Trump do in the next 13 weeks to at least mitigate GOP losses? First of all, will Trump’s so-far loyal base show up when his name is absent? Obama’s never did.

Trump is solid with about nine of 10 Republicans. But those 2016 voters who handed him the electoral votes from Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, for instance, are not Republicans.

Standard Democrats seem unlikely converts. Which leaves those crucial swing independents.

If you want to make a difference, spend less time on the internet and more time volunteering for a local campaign.

BRUCE BAWER: Suicide by Condescension? “Posh Brits want to be saved from Islam, but not – horrors – by a working-class yob.”

When classism is more important than national survival, you’ll end up with neither your nation nor your rank.

RYAN MITCHELL: The Realist Case for a Korean Peace Treaty.

If North Korea’s ruling class can only be convinced of their existential safety by a peace treaty, then that is a precondition for any lasting and verifiable denuclearization process. Given that the regime has quite reasonably cited examples such as the Libyan intervention to explain its reluctance for disarmament, it seems obvious that it will not be convinced to pursue “greatness” via economic development (as Trump has recommended) until its basic safety is guaranteed.

A peace treaty with the United States, already long overdue, would be the basic existential guarantee that North Korea needs in order to begin turning into a “normal country”—i.e. one that is motivated on a day-to-day basis by normal greed and self-aggrandizement, not by a desperate struggle to survive amidst a (perceived) life-or-death state of exception. Much of the bizarre and militaristic character of the regime, though partially attributable to its dynasty of paranoid dictators, can also be ascribed to the threats and isolation that have made invasion and regime change a continuously perceived threat for decades.

How much of the hostility between the United States and North Korea is due solely to the fact that they have no mutually acknowledged, formal legal relationship aside from that of belligerents in what will soon be a seventy-year-long war? Given that the regime has been willing to flout the international “rule of law” as to its nuclear weapons development and other activities (from cyber-attacks to assassinations), can it really put so much faith in the legal protection from invasion that states are afforded by UN Charter Article 2?

The fact that North Korea has for its guarantor a world power we don’t want to go to war with, ought to be all the assurance Pyongyang needs in its continued existence.

Or as I quipped the other day: Know nukes, no peace. No nukes, know peace.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Stealthier Tanks Are On The Way.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Election Results, Rick Gates, Bruce Ohr and Much, Much More. “Yesterday’s election a complete repudiation of Trump. Just kidding. That’s the spin your are going to hear today and I just want to get you ready for what you will face out there in the political post-election jungle.”

UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: Democratic Socialist Agenda To Cost $42.5 Trillion In Next Decade, Says … Vox?

Now wait just a minute, some astute readers will protest, that doesn’t sound like the Vox we know. And you’d be right — because to Vox’s credit, they offered some space to analyst Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute. Riedl also previously served as adviser to Senators Rob Portman and Marco Rubio, as well as Mitt Romney, and did a gig as staff director for the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth.

Riedl has extensive experience in estimating legislative proposals and their costs, which comes in handy even when analyzing pie-in-the-sky proposals. Using projections primarily from either liberal or libertarian-leaning resources, Riedl patiently totes up the costs from all of the above to get a final cost for the first decade of Democratic Socialism — $42.5 trillion in new spending.

And that’s before the ripple effects create the need for even more spending, which creates even more ripple effects, etc., until a once-wealthy country is ruined.

Unexpectedly, of course.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: How can Americans now trust the intelligence agencies shown to be corrupt in the very recent past?

In sum, many within the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, the NSC, and the State Department may have been involved in the greatest scandal in American electoral history, by directing agents, informants, and employees to help one campaign to harm another — and then, even after the election, to work to undermine a sitting president. In addition, these rogue agencies spent two years fighting congressional requests to release incriminating information. And then, when they were forced against their will to cough up some documents, they redacted them so heavily that they’re almost undecipherable.

Former FBI director Comey spent months on a book tour, punctuated by daily back-and-forth feuding with the president of the United States. Former CIA director John Brennan is a current paid CNN analyst who devotes much of his commentary to calling the president treasonous and unfit. Former director of national intelligence James Clapper is a paid MSNBC consultant who has alleged that the president is a Russian intelligence asset.

So let us recontextualize the intelligence agencies’ current dilemmas.

Our current agency directors and cabinet are rightly calling universal attention to the ongoing threat of Russian espionage efforts.

They do so in concert because they are apparently worried, though they cannot say such openly, that President Trump himself and the American public are not yet sufficiently woke to these existential threats from Russia.

Such concern for the national security is fine and necessary.

But somewhere, somehow, someone must also must explain and rectify the past.

A top-to-mid-level-management housecleaning would do wonders, too.

#METOO: Top female executive leaves Amazon after being accused of ‘inappropriate’ comments in meetings and ‘abuse of power’, nine months after getting promoted in sex harassment reshuffle.

SNEAKY COMMIES: Venezuela dodges oil asset seizures with export transfers at sea.

Venezuela’s state-run oil company PDVSA has limited the damage from an unprecedented slump in crude exports by transferring oil between tankers at sea and loading vessels in neighboring Cuba to avoid asset seizures.

Venezuela has been pumping oil this year at the lowest rate in three decades after years of underinvestment and a mass exodus of workers. The state-run firm’s collapse has left the country short of cash to fund its embattled socialist government and triggered an economic crisis.

I’m pretty sure it was the socialist government’s battle against free markets which triggered the economic crisis.

WINNING: Trump’s Ambassador To Germany Scores Another Victory Against Iran.

Grenell has scored a series of victories in recent days by successfully lobbying against a $400 million payment from the German central bank to the Islamic Republic and convincing car company Daimler to cancel expansion plans in the country.

“The Trump administration intends to fully enforce the sanctions reimposed against Iran, and those who fail to wind down activities with Iran risk severe consequences,” the White House warned in a Monday release.

Grenell was particularly instrumental in convincing Daimler to cancel its expansion and business with Iran, having met with the CEO of the company on several occasions, a U.S. official familiar with the process tells The Daily Caller.

I’m old enough to remember when leaving the Iran Deal would isolate us on the world stage and cause our trading partners to side with Tehran.

DAVID SOLWAY: Jewish Self-Estrangement Is Perennial.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A SMALLER BLOG: Top Ten Reasons to Be Nostalgic for Obama. “He absolutely excelled at setting ignoble records.”

At least according to Don Draper, nostalgia comes from the Greek for “the ache from an old wound.”

COMMIES RUIN EVERYTHING, EXHIBIT #1,000,006: Winnie the Pooh film banned in China after the country’s miserable leader Xi Jinping was compared to the dopey bear.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Christian Campus Group Sues for Right To Choose Christian Leaders.

FRAMING: A Top Syrian Scientist Is Killed, and Fingers Point at Israel.

The NYT headline says “scientist,” but the lede says, “Aziz Asbar was one of Syria’s most important rocket scientists, bent on amassing an arsenal of precision-guided missiles that could be launched with pinpoint accuracy against Israeli cities hundreds of miles away.”

More:

He had free access to the highest levels of the Syrian and Iranian governments, and his own security detail. He led a top-secret weapons-development unit called Sector 4 and was hard at work building an underground weapons factory to replace one destroyed by Israel last year.

On Saturday, he was killed by a car bomb — apparently planted by Mossad, the Israeli spy agency.

In other words, this “scientist” was a weapons developer with top-level ties to two terrorist regimes.

HEH: Alex Jones Threat Spurs Facebook ‘Don’t Click’ Button.

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY: White Supremacist Extremists Skirting Social Media Bans. “They ‘continue to leverage social media to communicate, organize, and spread propaganda, despite the efforts of mainstream social media companies to remove extremist content from their online platforms’.”

Unexpectedly.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Comedy Central Inc. Calls Trump Admin Racist. “The company’s latest Tweet is Resistance on steroids, with a dollop of free speech denial.”

I’m so old, I remember when Comedy Central was about providing comedy.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED THAT VOTER FRAUD IS A MYTH: 670 ballots in a precinct with 276 voters in Georgia’s primary.

Update: Link was missing before. Fixed now — sorry!