CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Nebraska Considers Common-Sense Gun Deregulation As Other States Tighten Up.

TYLER O’NEIL: 5 Things to Know About Fusion GPS’s Sordid Past.

SARAH HOYT: If the Left And The Press Were Hostile Aliens.

Aliens? Probably not. Hostile for sure.

OUCH: Europe’s High Representative for Appeasement. “Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Russia have a friend in Brussels.”

Eli Lake:

If Federica Mogherini didn’t exist, the world’s autocrats would be trying to invent her.

As the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs, she is a tireless advocate for engaging rogue states. Few diplomats though have pursued this kind of engagement with such moralizing puffery. In Mogherini’s world, diplomacy with dictators should not aim to transition these countries to open societies, but rather to prevent conflicts at all costs.

Just consider her trip last week to Cuba, a plantation masquerading as a nation-state. Did Mogherini use her visit to call attention to the struggle of human rights activists or to comfort the families of political prisoners? No, Mogherini was in Cuba to reassure a regime that Europe will not go along with America’s trade embargo.

And:

While Mogherini found her voice in Havana about Cuba’s “isolation,” she was mute on the popular uprising in Iran. She waited six days to say anything about the demonstrations there. When she finally did, it was a mix of ingratiation and neutrality. “In the spirit of openness and respect that is at the root of our relationship,” she said, “we expect all concerned to refrain from violence and to guarantee freedom of expression.”

It’s as if Mogherini believes that Iranian demonstrators are arresting and silencing members of the state Basij militia, and not the other way around.

European diplomats have long been the masters of doing business with nasty regimes while accusing Americans of crass commercialism.

IT’S LIKE LOW-ALCOHOL SCOTCH FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T DRINK SCOTCH: Starbucks Has a New ‘Blonde’ Espresso for People Who Don’t Drink Espresso.

NOW THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: Lasers are getting ten times more powerful every 3 years, soon Exawatt lasers will unlock fusion and more.

Multi-petawatt power capability projects.

* Chinese initiative at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) is advancing towards a 10-PW laser facility

* 100 Petawatt Station for Extreme Light (SEL) at the proposed Shanghai Coherent Light Facility (SCLF).

* Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) activated their multi-kJ Advanced Radiographic Capability (ARC) PW scale laser and the PETAL laser at CEA began operations toward the 2-PW level in 2017.

* In South Korea, the Gwangju Institute for Science and Technology is presently commissioning a 4 PW capability that should be available to users in 2017.

* The University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics continues to work on the OPAL multi-phase laser initiative that could evolve from 5-PW to 75-PW capability.

* European ESFRI roadmap project, the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI), consisting of ELI-Beamlines (Czech Republic), ELI-Nuclear Physics (Romania), and ELI-ALPS (Hungary), is rapidly approaching initial operations.

ICUIL and ICFA (International Committee for Future Accelerators), another arm of the IUPAP Working Groups, are now jointly promoting the development of efficient, highpower, laser technology to enable laser-driven wakefield acceleration for future high energy accelerators.

It’s impossible not to notice how far we’ve fallen behind the Chinese.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: North Korea Games the Olympics. “If the International Olympic Committee ever decides to add Totalitarian Cruelty and Nuclear Extortion to its roster of Olympic sports, it might make sense for the IOC to bend over backwards to include North Korea — which would be a shoo-in for the gold.”

Ouch. And that’s just the lede.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela pill shortage triggers rise in teenage pregnancies.

In downtown Barquisimeto, Margaret Khawan’s pharmacy is looking a bit empty these days.

What products she does have she has spaced out along the shelves to make them look a bit fuller.

Ms Khawan has not had any deliveries of contraceptive pills for a year.

Every day people come looking for them and every day she has to turn them away. People are having to adapt.

“It used to be just men buying condoms but women are buying them too now because there’s nothing else,” she says. “The price of condoms has gone up 200%.”

Across town, Darnellys Rodríguez is living the consequences of these shortages.

I’m reminded of the Soviet Union, where abortion was widespread in part because condoms were scarce.

AFGHANISTAN: Perpetual War Without Success or End.

In February 2012, after returning from my second combat deployment to Afghanistan, I published an 84-page analysis of the U.S. war effort in which I concluded, “despite what our senior defense leaders say in public, the military surge failed to reduce the insurgency, and with the drawdown in full swing, our future efforts are virtually certain to likewise fail.” The past six years have regrettably confirmed my assessment as accurate.

Despite the overly optimistic claims of every U.S. commander since 2005, the continued degradation in the Afghan government, the unrepentant corruption, and the undisguisable reemergence of the Taliban cannot be disguised. The so-called Afghan “unity” government continues to fragment, as President Ashraf Ghani dismissed a regional governor in Balkh Province, but Mohammad Atta Noor refuses to leave.

Ghani has thus far been unable to enforce his order. As the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has routinely testified, the Afghan government remains hopelessly corrupt, the Afghan military of limited ability, and the Taliban insurgency expands its territorial influence and control.

We must put a stop to the endless, and unnecessary, bleeding of our troops and U.S. taxpayers’ money, and recognize that our attempts to externally force a military solution on the political problems plaguing Afghanistan will never succeed.

Read the whole thing.

Winning in Afghanistan would require a level of violence we haven’t applied since World War II, and even then I’m not sure we would achieve anything lasting.

BUT I HAD BEEN TOLD THAT SNOWFALLS WERE A THING OF THE… NEVER MIND: Those viral pictures of snow in the Sahara are real.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Feds Used Dossier for Trump Snoop Warrant and Much, Much More.

There’s a lot to cover this morning, including “Senators work to salvage awful Iran deal.”

QUESTION ASKED (AGAIN): Was the DNC/Clinton campaign-funded dossier used to obtain Trump FISA warrant?

Sara Carter:

A large portion of the evidence presented in the salacious 35-page dossier put together by former British spy Christopher Steele, has either been proven wrong or remains unsubstantiated. However, the FBI gained approval nevertheless to surveil members of Trump’s campaign and “it’s outrageous and clearly should be thoroughly investigated,” said a senior law enforcement source, with knowledge of the process.

Multiple sources told this reporter that the dossier was used along with other evidence to obtain the warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as FISC. The sources also stressed that there will be more information in the coming week regarding systemic “FISA abuse.”

“(The dossier) certainly played a role in obtaining the warrant,” added another senior U.S. official, with knowledge of the dossier. “Congress needs to look at the FBI officials who were handling this case and see what, if anything, was verified in the dossier. I think an important question is whether the FBI payed anything to the source for the dossier.”

FBI officials could not be immediately reached for comment.

Maybe they were too busy making sure their stories jibe with Diane Feinstein’s posted testimony.

CUE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN: IRS Needs Funding for GOP Tax Overhaul, Report Says.

The tax agency needs to update forms, create new definitions, write regulations and field questions from taxpayers, which tend to increase when Congress passes new laws. That will be challenging for the IRS, which is planning to answer just 60% of taxpayer calls during the tax-filing season and has cut its training budget by 75% since 2009, said Nina Olson, the national taxpayer advocate.

“We have already seen confusion about withholding changes, confusion about the deductibility of prepaid property taxes, and confusion about whether states can allow taxpayers to make charitable contributions in lieu of taxes as a way of permitting their residents to claim larger tax deductions,” Ms. Olson said as she released her annual report Wednesday on challenges facing taxpayers and the IRS. “With more funding, strong leadership, and a closer working relationship with Congress, I am convinced the IRS can do the job well.”

It’s far from clear, however, whether Congress will provide the IRS with additional money to implement the new tax system.

Maybe the IRS could find some extra money by disbanding its SWAT team and getting its agents to pay their taxes.

Until then, cry me a river.

BRUCE BAWER: Oprah, Hollywood Heroine?

But don’t miss the 100-proof chaser: How She Could Win.

FAKE NEWS: No, Media. Trump is Not Kicking El Salvador Immigrants to the Curb.

Mary Chastain has the facts which the media would never let get in the way of a good story.

ONE-PARTY STATE: Wave of Republican Congressional Retirements in California.

With this wave of GOP retirements in Congress, Democrats have got to be fired up for massive gains in the November elections. This is more than tsunami territory, as far as I can see. This is going to be an earthquake with world shattering implications. Worlds are colliding!

Roll Call called it in September, “House Retirement Tide Is Coming.”

Ed Royce of Buena Park announced he was retiring on Monday. And now today we have the news of Darrell Issa’s retirement. These two aren’t noobs. They’re powerful GOP congressional veterans. Plus, Royce has a huge war chest of over $3 million in the bank, and Issa’s independently wealthy — so campaign finance isn’t the issue. It’s two things: (1) Donald Trump’s iconoclastic presidency has shaken up American politics and many Republicans will be the target of ire as surrogates for all kinds of voter disenchantment with politics, and (2) California’s formerly solid Republican majority in Orange County is history.

If memory serves, George W. Bush in 2002 was the only postwar President whose House majority gained seats in an off-year election — and that was coming on the heels of an expertly waged Afghanistan offensive in the months after 9/11.

THAT’S A FEATURE, NOT A BUG: Google’s New ‘Fact-Checker’ Is Partisan Garbage.

David Harsanyi:

Luckily for us, there are methods available to analyze the veracity of Google’s project. One way, for example, is to take a “reviewed claim” made against The Federalist, the site I happen to know best, and contrast it to the coverage of other sites.

Consider the case of a woman named Eileen Wellstone. Out of many thousands of pieces published by The Federalist over the past four years, a single one mentions the name Eileen Wellstone. That article, detailing the sordid history of Bill Clinton, mentions her name exactly once: “Another woman, Eileen Wellstone, claimed Clinton raped her while he was at Oxford University in the late 1960s.”

For some reason, in this “reviewed claim” against The Federalist, Google sends the reader to a Snopes fact-check that argues that Clinton wasn’t expelled from Oxford over this alleged rape — a point I concede sounds completely accurate and is also an assertion that no one has ever made in this publication.

So the question is, does Google tag every article that relays accusations of sexual misconduct or rape as “unproven,” or just the ones against Bill Clinton? Or is the mention of Wellstone specifically worthy of a claim? The Wellstone case has not only been cited in all types of publications (and not in efforts to debunk it, either; 1,2,3,4,5, and so on) but by The Washington Post’s own fact-checker.

In a 2016 article detailing allegations against Bill Clinton that might be brought up by then-candidate Donald Trump, WaPo notes, “Eileen Wellstone says she was assaulted by Clinton when he was a student at Oxford University in 1969.” There is virtually no difference between that statement and the one published in The Federalist.

Yes, but The Washington Post doesn’t require Google’s supervision because reasons.

LISTICLE: 10 TV Shows That Should Have Been Canceled But Still Lumber On.

Grey’s Anatomy never should have been greenlighted in the first place, but The Blacklist has fallen further from grace than any other show I can think of.

THIS IS PRETTY MUCH THE 21ST CENTURY I’VE COME TO EXPECT: Pole dancing robots go head-to-head with strippers at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

TRUE CRIME: Nearly 40 Percent of Sex Offenders in Oregon Prisons Are Illegal Aliens.

GOOD GIRL: Black lab saves family of 5 from burning home.

CRIME OF THE CENTURY: Florida man caught with ‘full rack of ribs’ in his pants, police say.

GUESS WHO: GOP senator says she’ll vote to restore net neutrality rules.

TUCKER CARLSON: Main Threat to Freedom No Longer Big Government — It’s Big Corporations Like Google.

Instead of “no longer” I’d have gone with “in addition to.”

RETAIL BLUES: Sears warns it will consider ‘all options’ if efforts to refinance $1 billion fail.

While reiterating his belief that the department store has the right strategy to turn Sears around, Chief Executive Officer Eddie Lampert said should the refinancing “not be fully successful, the Company’s Board will consider all other options to maximize the value of Sears Holdings’ assets.”

“If we successfully complete the financing transactions we are contemplating, we will materially improve the financial strength and operating focus of Sears Holdings and provide meaningful reassurance of our viability to our vendors and business partners,” Lampert said.

Sears said its same-store sales dropped between 16 and 17 percent for the first two months of the fourth quarter, or what represents the crucial holiday shopping season.

Further debt restructuring at this point looks like throwing bad money after worse.