HEATHER WILHELM: Hapless in Democratland.

Strangely, the Democratic party’s strategy for 2018 seems to revolve around reminding people how happy they are that Democrats aren’t in charge.

Witness prominent left-leaning responses to Trump’s State of the Union address, which earned an impressive 75 percent approval rating in a CBS News poll. Eight out of ten of the viewers in the poll “felt that the president was trying to unite the country, rather than divide it,” and “two-thirds said the speech made them feel proud.” Sure, we can argue about the policy implications of the address, but that’s been true for almost every State of the Union in the history of the nation. (“Free” community college! The magical “creation” of hundreds of thousands of jobs! An army of hydrogen cars!) In short, it was a well-written, well-delivered speech.

Perhaps that sounds boring to you, so it’s high time for some hyperventilation. Over to you, Democrats! CNN’s Sally Kohn called the speech “scary” and “terrifying.” Elizabeth Warren tweeted that she attended only because she wanted its horrors “burned into my eyes.” But it was perhaps MSNBC’s Joy Reid who took the cake, tweeting out a bizarre and amazing word salad trashing various American institutions: “Church . . . family . . . police . . . military . . . the national anthem . . . Trump trying to call on all the tropes of 1950s-era nationalism. The goal of this speech appears to be to force the normalization of Trump on the terms of the bygone era his supporters are nostalgic for.”

Ah, I can see the campaign posters now: “Can’t stand church and family? Neither can we! Vote for the Democrats in 2018!” It’s mind-boggling, isn’t it? I mean, come on, people. Pretending to be a normal human being can’t really be that hard.

Actually, when politicians rate at least half the country as “deplorable,” then it really is that hard.

BRANDON MORSE: In A Sea Of 3rd Wave Feminist Garbage, A Couple Of Voices Emerge Worthy Of Women’s Attention.

KELLYANNE CONWAY: The Patriots are the Hillary Clinton of football.

C’mon, the Pats never broke the rules that badly.

BILL ROGGIO: US officials estimate Taliban strength at a minimum of 60,000 fighters.

NBC News reports that US and Afghan officials estimate the Taliban’s strength in Afghanistan to be a minimum of 60,000 fighters. This updated figure is significant, because as the report notes, for years the only previous estimate was approximately 20,000.

Given all of the information available to FDD’s Long War Journal, I believe this latest assessment to significantly more accurate. I am quoted in the above-referenced article that 60,000 would be my low-end estimate. In fact, with the amount of territory up for grabs and fighting taking place, that number could easily be doubled.

The report went on to note that one official thinks it’s a “fool’s errand” to estimate Taliban strength as “the fighters often change their allegiance from one terror group to another.”

There’s more than one fool’s errand in Afghanistan.

ED MORRISSEY: Do Dems Have A Bigger SOTU Response Problem?

Reactions to SOTU speeches in the chamber usually matter less than the speeches themselves, which don’t have much staying power either. It’s about as meaningful as the White House bragging today of Trump having received a record amount of applause. It’s meaningless because (a) that’s a function of the speech length, the longest SOTU in 18 years, and (b) applause is just as manufactured as the stony silences on the other side of the aisle. Yes, it’s true that Democrats sat on their hands during the sunnier economic news, but let’s not ignore the fact that Trump was taking all of the credit for that, too. It’s gameplaying on both sides, nothing more.

It’s these responses that may do more damage to Democrats — after the speech when they opened their mouths. As Americans overwhelmingly approved of the speech, Democrats went out to the media to take personal shots at Trump:

“It didn’t deliver on substance. It wasn’t inflammatory, for the most part. But we’ll see what he tweets at 5 o’clock in the morning when his Adderall wears off,” Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) said in an interview with The Hill.

Fellow Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan (Ohio) called Trump “low-energy,” described his speech as “uninspiring” and said he is waiting for sunrise, when Ryan anticipates the president will take to Twitter, “thumbs moving.”

Stay classy, fellas. As Salena Zito reports this morning, this is how we got Trump in the first place, and how we’re likely to get a lot more Trump in the future.

What’s remarkable is that the Democrats still haven’t caught on to the fact that there’s usually a hook inside Trump’s bait.

REAL FEMINISM IN ACTION: In Baltimore, The Gun Market For Women Is Heating Up.

PARANOIA STRIKES DEEP OUTSIDE THE HEARTLAND: Schiff Claims House Intel Republicans ‘Secretly Altered’ Spy Memo.

CHANGE: San Francisco will wipe out thousands of marijuana convictions dating to 1975.

San Francisco will retroactively apply California’s new marijuana legalization laws to prior convictions, expunging or reducing misdemeanors and felonies dating to 1975, the district attorney’s office announced Wednesday.

Nearly 5,000 felony marijuana convictions will be reviewed, recalled and resentenced, and more than 3,000 misdemeanors that were sentenced prior to Proposition 64’s passage will be dismissed and sealed, Dist. Atty. George Gascón said. The move will clear people’s records of crimes that can be barriers to employment and housing.

Another barrier to employment is showing up drunk or stoned, but there’s no law or commutation which can help with that.

DON’T BE EVIL OR WHATEVS: Google Exec Threatens To Unmask Whistleblowers Who Report Misconduct Toward Conservatives.

Google has vast power and apparently no compunction about using it — maybe it’s time for an antitrust investigation, after all.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook Comes Under Fire for Problems with Messenger Kids App.

HELEN RALEIGH: Why North Korea Will Be The Biggest Winner Of The Winter Olympics. “South Korea caved to all of Kim Jong Un’s demands. What did Seoul get in return? Pretty much nothing.”

I have to give the “Little Rocket Man,” Kim Jong Un, credit for choosing his timing so strategically. Only a month ago, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed the toughest sanctions to date against North Korea, which would further suppress Pyongyang’s energy supplies and the usage and exploitation of North Korean labor overseas.

Pyongyang quickly denounced the latest sanctions as an “act of war.” The international community had been hopeful that this latest round of sanctions might be tough enough to get North Korea back to the negotiation table. But the Little Rocket Man came up with an ingenious strategy to break out this economic isolation.

He recognizes that the Winter Olympic games in South Korea provides him with a perfect stage, a rare opportunity to promote his own propaganda and shape world opinion about him and his regime, at little cost to him. To make his strategy work, he needs a willing and foolish partner, and he quickly found one in South Korea’s President Moon Jae In.

Surprising exactly no one who has followed Jae In’s progressive politics.

DON’T GET COCKY: Republican National Committee has huge financial edge heading into 2018 midterms.

THE NEXT WAR: Russia Steadily Cultivating Electronic Warfare While U.S., NATO Lag Behind.

The nearly two-decade American-led campaign against insurgent groups that use relatively unsophisticated weaponry has forced the United States to deprioritize investment in this realm. Defense officials eyeing Russian offensives in Ukraine and Syria are now concerned that the U.S. military has lost its edge in countering and waging electronic warfare against near-peer adversaries.

“[NATO does] not exercise to put forces into an EMS-contested battle space, the Russians do, and they feel they’re making advances in this area that gives them an injection of confidence,” Roger McDermott, a senior research fellow in war studies at King’s College London, said Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

The Kremlin most recently demonstrated its electronic warfare capabilities earlier this month when Russian military hackers used cyberware to take out several armed drones that attacked two of its military bases in western Syria.

In Ukraine, Russia has deployed an array of hybrid tools to deny Kiev the use of information space, including advanced jamming technologies to shutdown government communications and cyber attacks against critical infrastructure.

We should be better at this stuff, so I can’t help but wonder how quickly we could catch up with bounties paid to US-based hacker groups.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Rosenstein Wanted Trump to Help Him ‘Fight’ Congressional Oversight and Much, Much More.

THE FIX WAS IN: FBI Officials Knew of New Clinton Emails Weeks Before Alerting Congress. “Andrew McCabe learned of thousands of emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop at least a month before alerting lawmakers.”

Top FBI officials were aware for at least a month before alerting Congress that emails potentially related to an investigation of Hillary Clinton had emerged during a key stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, according to text messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had learned about the thousands of emails by Sept. 28, 2016, and Director James Comey informed Congress about them on Oct. 28, 11 days before the presidential election, the messages show. Mr. Comey later said nothing in the new emails had changed the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s decision that Mrs. Clinton had committed no prosecutable offenses.

In the text messages reviewed by the Journal, FBI agent Peter Strzok, who led the probe into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server, told FBI lawyer Lisa Page on Sept. 28 that he had just been summoned to speak to Mr. McCabe about the newly discovered emails.

Agents in New York had found them on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, a former congressman and husband of Huma Abedin, one of Mrs. Clinton’s closest advisers. The FBI was investigating Mr. Weiner for sexting a 15-year-old girl; he would later plead guilty to transferring obscene material to a minor and was sentenced to 21 months in prison.

“Got called up to Andy’s earlier,” Mr. Strzok wrote in a Sept. 28 text. He continued: “hundreds of thousands of emails turned over by Weiner’s atty to sdny, includes a ton of material from spouse. Sending team up tomorrow to review … this will never end ….” SDNY refers to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which was investigating Mr. Weiner.

Republicans and critics of the FBI have suggested the bureau may have sat on the emails to avoid hurting Mrs. Clinton before the Nov. 8 election.

Ya think?

GOOD LORD: ‘They Couldn’t Hide all the Death.’ 5 More Rohingya Mass Graves Found in Myanmar.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s Oil Power Vanishing, Hard Default Fears Rising.

The country has over $1 billion in overdue interest payments, which is more than 10% of the country’s central bank reserves at this point.

There has been no official communication from the government on any other coupon payments and lengthy delays are now prompting review on whether the oil firm has entered into permanent default. If so, bond holders will accelerate and request principal payment. Of course, they will not get their principal payments, at least not immediately.

“The markets will recognize declining probability of payment each day that passes without receipt of funds or notification from the intermediaries,” says Siobhan Morden, a managing director at Nomura in New York.

Defaults stress erodes the margin of flexibility for Maduro and exposes a worse phase of cashflow woes for the bills the country owes in dollars.

Unexpectedly.

THE MORE THEY TIGHTEN THEIR GRIP, THE MORE USERS WILL SLIP THROUGH THEIR FINGERS: Facebook Really Wants You to Come Back. “The social network is getting aggressive with people who don’t log in often, working to keep up its engagement numbers.”

RELATED: Facebook users are spending less time on the site.

BRANDON WEICHERT: Democrats Should Revise Their Hopes for 2018.

There are good reasons for them to expect some gains, but their understanding about what will drive those gains, if there are some, is skewed perfectly to suit their prejudices.

Watching tonight’s speech, I couldn’t help but wonder if the Left had totally checked out of reality and focused solely on their echo chamber. Did they really think that marginally Democrat voters would be impressed with their performance? The majority of elected Congressional Democrats were caught on camera tonight sneering at the concept of average American workers keeping more of their pay, bettering their lives, and overcoming stifling government regulations. They were caught in stone cold silence at the concept of honoring the flag and the ideas it represents.

The Democrats are banking on President Trump’s alleged unpopularity to carry them forward in their 2018 campaigns. However, that is a born-to-lose proposition going forward. Tonight’s speech proved that while the Democrats snigger and sneer at the Right, the Republicans—led by Trump—are actually doing things to demonstrate their sympathy with the American people and producing results that people can applaud. The Democrats are not “woke” if they fail to recognize this fact.

Trump reached across the aisle several times in his address, trusting that the Democrats would play to their worst instincts. His faith was not misplaced.

REPORT: White House Will Release FISA Abuse Memo on Thursday.

UGH: More pervy allegations about Fox News Universe.

RECOMMENDED READING: The Sinews Of Empire.

Modern scholars of politics revel in their complex descriptions of state action. Rather than oversimplifying and reducing the state to a unitary body, they separate its internal components and assess each of their relative strengths. There’s something to this. However, politics are contradictory. Man may create sprawling decision-making bodies, and systems that disperse power at multiple levels. Nevertheless, states are remarkably like people. They feel pride and anger, loyalty and hatred, fear and hope.

States are also structured like people. They have minds, hearts, and amorphous limbs with which to influence the world around them. Moreover, they have sinews, connective links that unite their metaphorical bone and muscle, tie their appendages together, and enable the use of power. Roads and internal thoroughfares are sinews common to every state.

But empires, the titans that shape the international system, derive their power from the seas, and their control over portions of international trade. As such, naval forces are the sinews of great powers. They ensure the free movement of goods between friendly ports, the transit of forces between far-flung bases, and uninterrupted communications between the core, its distant commercial partners, and allies.

Two historical examples help suggest the effect of the sustained cuts to American seapower that began with the Cold War’s end and have continued to today. First, the experience of Habsburg Spain, an empire that neglected consistently to fund its naval forces, and paid the price in its loss to a distinctly inferior power. Second, the experience of the Soviet Union, an empire that saw its naval power grow from 1945 until 1980, followed by an increase in its ability to shape international events.

This is a longer-than-usual article, but well worth your time.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: You Are an Unconscious Racist!

But now at least you’re a consciously unconscious racist.

CHANGE: Trey Gowdy not seeking reelection.

FAKE NEWS: CNN Discredits Own Poll Showing Overwhelming Positive Reaction to SOTU.