SURPRISE? Black Female Writer For Lena Dunham’s ‘Girls’ Quits. She Says Dunham Is A Racist.

CAN, KICKED: North Korea May Have ICBM Capable of Reaching U.S. This Year.

PROMISES, PROMISES: White House Sends Mixed Signals on Support for Repeal of Obamacare Individual Mandate.

THIS IS SOME COUP: Mugabe ignores party deadline to quit.

The embattled leader surprised Zimbabweans on Sunday, declaring on TV that he planned to remain as president.

Zanu-PF says it backs impeachment, and proceedings could begin as soon as Tuesday when parliament meets.

In a draft motion, seen by Reuters, the party blamed the president for what it called an “unprecedented economic tailspin”.

The public has poured on to the streets in protest in recent days, calling for the end of Mr Mugabe’s 37-year presidency.

His grip on power has weakened considerably since the country’s army intervened on Wednesday in a row over who should succeed him.

If you’re going to remove a brutal tyrant from power, you’ve got to either exile him or kill him — and exile is often needlessly risky.

JOSH KRAUSHAAR: The Franken Factor In Minnesota.

Minnesota nearly became one of the “blue wall” states that flipped to Donald Trump last November. Hillary Clinton carried the state by a mere point, a big falloff from President Obama’s 8-point romp in 2012. The cultural crosscurrents in American politics are vividly reflected in the state: two Obama-voting Congressional districts flipped to Trump, while one swing seat moved in a Democratic direction.

The Republican-held House seats are endangered because they’re nestled in affluent suburbs that are disillusioned with the president, while the Democratic seats are in rural enclaves where Trump made massive gains in last year’s election.

Democrats are most bullish about ousting freshman Rep. Jason Lewis, a provocative conservative talk-show host who surprised health-care executive Angie Craig in a closely contested race last year. Trump’s narrow victory in the St. Paul-area district carried Lewis to reelection, but he won’t be able to count on strong GOP turnout the second time around. He’s facing a rematch against Craig next year. If Democrats want to take back a House majority, they’ll need to win this seat.

The biggest bellwether in the country is the neighboring Third District, where Rep. Erik Paulsen has been one of the most battle-tested Republicans in Congress. He first won this swing Twin Cities seat in a 2008 Democratic landslide, and routinely wins reelection by sizable margins. He ran a whopping 16 points ahead of Trump in last year’s election despite facing a highly touted Democratic recruit. This year he’s expected to face Democrat Dean Phillips, a wealthy founder of a gelato company, who emerged as an early party favorite.

What makes Minnesota’s politics so interesting is that Republicans have a rare opportunity to make inroads into some traditional Democratic strongholds, as well.

Trump’s inroads was the political story of 2016, but even then it was a near-run thing for Trump in the blue states that put him over the top. Whether Trump and the Republicans can build on that success or whether it proves to be a one-time thing will likely be the political story of 2018.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Manson Dead, Predator Update and Much, Much More.

MYTHEOS HOLT: Silicon Valley’s ‘Terms of Service’ Hypocrisy.

Whenever a new abuse of tech’s power comes down the pike, such as locking users out of their private documents because those documents include “offensive” language, or shutting users out of their emails, or conspiring to block apps that favor free speech from their online stores, or targeting users of a disfavored political persuasion for bans, the justification given is always that the terms of service require it. Never mind whether those terms of service are fair or consistent with American legal principles.

So, it seems only fair to ask, do these same companies follow the rules they set for themselves? In at least one case, the answer is clearly “no.”

According to a report last week from a Los Angeles local CBS affiliate, the home-sharing giant Airbnb has permitted convicted felons to rent out homes using its service. There’s just one problem — Airbnb claims to do a background check on all its hosts to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen. And yet, one of the hosts implicated by the CBS report had this to say when asked if Airbnb was aware of his criminal history:

“I don’t think they even asked.”

It gets worse from there.

Read the whole thing.

CAN’T ANYBODY HERE PLAY THIS GAME? Massive US military social media spying archive left wide open in AWS S3 buckets.

CHANGE: Apple’s Diversity Chief Is Leaving After Only 6 Months.

She had irked some critics in May when she commented during a conference, “There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.” Her comments were seen by some as insensitive to people of color, women, and members of the LGBT community, who have long faced an uphill battle in the workplace.

Denise Young Smith later apologized for her comments, saying that they “were not representative of how I think about diversity or how Apple sees it.”

“For that, I’m sorry,” she said in a staff email. “More importantly, I want to assure you Apple’s view and our dedication to diversity has not changed.”

Her sin was being honest that there’s more to diversity than skin color or sexual orientation.

UPDATE (From Ed): I’m so old, I can remember when Apple’s marketing slogan was “Think Different.”

MAD DOG MATTIS: Military Aiming to ‘Buy Time for the Diplomats to Resolve’ North Korea.

NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER: Obama Administration Misled on al Qaeda.

“The overall narrative that I think was being pushed to the press, and if you look back at the editorials that were done when that trove came out, was an image of bin Laden isolated, he had lost control of this group,” Rukmini Callimachi said during an event at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, referring to the 17 hand-picked documents released by the Obama administration in May of 2012.

Her remarks triggered the following question from Kim Dozier, a former top correspondent for the Associated Press and CBS, and current executive editor of the Cipher Brief: “Do you think that was something that was kept from the public’s view because it revealed that there had to be reams of communication going back and forth, which means U.S. intelligence, Western intelligence, was missing this?”

“Think back to when bin Laden was killed. It was 2011, it was right before a major campaign season. I don’t want to underplay the role that the killing of Osama bin Laden had,” said Callimachi. “But I think that that was theorized into something much bigger.”

And the press was willing to play along, so that Obama could declare “victory” in Iraq — and make way for the rise of ISIS.

BRUCE BAWER: Why Didn’t Liberals Embrace ‘Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’?

THE WORKERS’ PARADISE: North Korean defector found to have ‘enormous parasites.’

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 20 years as a physician,” South Korean doctor Lee Cook-jong told journalists, explaining that the longest worm removed from the patient’s intestines was 27cm (11in) long.

“North Korea is a very poor country and like any other poor country it has serious health problems,” Prof Andrei Lankov of Kookmin University in Seoul told the BBC.

“North Korea does not have the resources to have a modern medical system,” he says.

“Its doctors are relatively poorly trained and have to work with primitive equipment.”

In 2015 South Korean researchers studied the health records of North Korean defectors who had visited a hospital in Cheonan between 2006 and 2014.

They found that they showed higher rates of chronic hepatitis B, chronic hepatitis C, tuberculosis and parasite infections, compared to South Koreans.

“I don’t know what is happening in North Korea, but I found many parasites when examining other defectors,” Professor Seong Min of Dankook University Medical School was quoted by the Korea Biomedical Review as saying.

It takes a willful ignorance for a South Korean to not have at least some idea of what is happening in North Korea.

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Libertarian has ‘Most Awesomest’ Plan to be Voters’ Salvation in Alabama Senate Race.

PARTY LIKE IT’S 1983: Democrats Revive the ‘Trickle Down’ Smear.

REVIEW: ‘Justice League’ Is a Great Action Movie, But It Needs a Lesson in Teamwork.

LOUIS FARRAKHAN: America ‘Became Great Enslaving Us,’ So Trump Won’t ‘Make America Great Again.’

Nobody tell Louis, but the slaveholding South was an economic backwater, and wasn’t able to seriously start catching up with the rest of the country until after Jim Crow was ended.

Freedom works.

NO. Ladies and gentlemen, we have spaghetti burritos now.

SKY PENIS AND THE WORLD OF 2017: Navy Admits to Being Involved in Obscene Skydrawings Spotted in Okanogan Co.

HEY NOW: ‘Transparent’ Star Alleges Jeffrey Tambor Sexually Harassed Her, “Got Physical.”

GEORGE P. BUSH: Restoring, Reinforcing and Remembering the Alamo is my Mission.

HMM: More than a dozen top Trump campaign officials subpoenaed in Mueller probe.

QUESTION ASKED: What Does Tesla’s Automated Truck Mean for Truckers?

On Thursday night, Elon Musk rolled out Tesla’s biggest gizmo yet: a fully electric semitruck. The Semi can go a whopping 500 miles between charges, hauling 80,000 pounds along the way. And it can sorta, kinda drive itself—on highways, anyway. The truck comes with Enhanced Autopilot, the second generation of Tesla’s semiautonomous technology, equipped with automatic braking, lane keeping, and lane departure warnings.

“Every truck we sell has Autopilot as standard,” Musk said of the Semi, which goes into production in 2019. “This is a massive increase in safety.”

Be that as it may, Tesla is having serious issues gearing up full-scale production on a simple midsize sedan — on an assembly line still suffering from issues worked out by Henry Ford a century ago.

VIDEO: Leeann Tweeden on Al Franken: ‘I Accept His Apology … I’m Not Calling for Him to Step Down.’

But some high-level Minnesota Democrats are.

THE COUNTRY HAS BEEN ABOUT TO COLLAPSE ANY DAY NOW SINCE 1991: The Problem with Hoping for North Korea’s Collapse.