JAZZ SHAW: California Sheriffs Still Fighting New Sanctuary State Law.

Sheriff Mims has already enacted a variety of policies designed to make it easier for ICE to enforce the law. She set up office space for ICE agents inside her jail so they could have direct access to prisoners for questioning and possible detention where appropriate. She also restructured the schedule, pushing release times for prisoners to later in the day so immigration enforcement agents would have more time to arrive and take care of business. Most of these programs won’t be affected by the new law, but she’s in the process of negotiating other deals to get around the intentional impediments put in place by the state government.

The real irony here is that Mims is actually helping to avoid what most of the Democrats in Sacramento claim is part of the problem. Do you recall the massive ICE deployment dubbed Operation Safe City from a couple of months ago? Agents arrested literally hundreds of criminal illegal aliens in sanctuary cities across the country, going to people’s homes, places of employment, courthouses and other public areas. And the only reason they did it was because they had insufficient access to the criminals at the jails where they could be taken into custody in a safe environment.

California is powerless to stop ICE from doing its job. All they can do is make it more inconvenient and time consuming.

California’s sanctuary law is the legislative equivalent of a temper tantrum.

WHAT A MESS: U.S. Admits Possible Role in Arming Iranian-Backed Militants in Iraq.

U.S. lawmakers and military insiders are concerned by what they described as the American government’s continued arming and training of Iranian-backed fighters in Iraq, an ongoing policy that multiple sources described to the Washington Free Beacon as one of the U.S.’s chief foreign policy failures in the region.

Top lawmakers and others have begun to present evidence showing that the State Department continues to provide widespread support for Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, a program that first begun under the Obama administration.

This has helped solidify Iran’s presence in key Iraqi territories and appears to directly conflict with the Trump administration’s newly outlined push to combat the Islamic Republic’s regional military efforts, which have included targeting U.S. forces in Syria and other locations.

Multiple sources who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon both on and off the record accused the State Department of making “common cause” with the IRGC, which they say has benefited from ongoing American efforts to arm and train Iraqi militia groups, many of which have direct ties to Iran.

These sources pointed to the continued presence of senior Obama administration officials in government as one of the primary drivers of this ongoing policy.

Rex Tillerson needs to get serious about State’s serious personnel problem, but after almost a year in office shows zero interest in doing so.

COUNTERPROTEST: Street Artist Sabo Crashes Anti-Trump Exhibition in L.A., Hoists Black Flag of MAGA.

HMM: Jared Kushner, Mohammed bin Salman, and Benjamin Netanyahu Are Up to Something.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may or may not be a true reformer. His record on that score is not unequivocal. But he is determined to halt the expansion of Iranian influence, which now really does manifest itself as the Shiite crescent about which Jordan’s King Abdullah II forewarned over a decade ago. The crown prince recognizes that his country’s worst nightmare is slowly materializing: Iran is supplying the Houthi rebels to its south and dominates neighboring Iraq to its north. Iran is supplying the Houthi rebels to its south and dominates neighboring Iraq to its north. It foments instability in Bahrain and could well do the same in Saudi Arabia’s Shiite-majority Eastern Province. And if that were not enough, Iran’s influence is entrenched in Damascus and Beirut. It is particularly for that reason the Saudis forced their ally Saad Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister, to resign his office while on a visit to the Kingdom.

Mohammed bin Salman may or may not have recently visited Tel Aviv, where Israel’s Defense Ministry is located. But even if he never set foot in the HaKirya complex, there is little doubt that he has authorized ever closer relations with the Israelis, who view the Iranian threat exactly as he does. And the crown prince is not the only one Jared Kushner has been speaking to: Trump has given his son-in-law overall leadership on the peace process between Israel and the Arabs, and he is reportedly a welcome guest in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.

Given Kushner’s role, did Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman signal his plans when Kushner last met with him — and did Kushner then inform his father-in-law? And if so, how far will Washington, or more precisely, the White House, go to back up the Saudis if their confrontation with Iran gets hot? Or will Israel serve as Trump’s proxy? With this president, this crown prince, and the current prime minister of Israel, anything is possible.

We can certainly hope so.

ALL THESE MOONS ARE YOURS: Privately Funded Team May Launch Life-Hunting Mission to Saturn Moon Enceladus.

Breakthrough Initiatives — a program founded by billionaire tech investor Yuri Milner to hunt for alien life and help explore the cosmos — is considering launching a mission that would fly through the plume of water vapor and other material emanating from Enceladus’ south polar region, Milner said here yesterday (Nov. 9) at The Economist magazine’s inaugural global space summit, called “A New Space Age.”

NASA’s Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft discovered the plume, and the 100-odd geysers that create it, in 2005. Subsequent observations by the probe revealed that these geysers are blasting stuff out from a potentially habitable ocean of salty liquid water that sloshes beneath the 313-mile-wide (504 kilometers) moon’s icy shell. [Photos of Enceladus, Saturn’s Geyser-Blasting Moon]

The plume provides a way to sample this ocean without even touching down on Enceladus. Cassini flew through the plume repeatedly during its epic Saturn mission, which ended with a fiery plunge in September, but the probe was not outfitted with life-detection gear. So astrobiologists have been clamoring to go back.
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“We formed a sort of little workshop around this idea: Can we design a low-cost, privately funded mission to Enceladus which can be launched relatively soon and that can look more thoroughly at those plumes and try to see what’s going there ahead of a more expensive mission that NASA is considering right now, which might take maybe 10 years to launch?” Milner said.

I hope the answer is “Yes.”

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump-RUSSIA Narrative Fires-Up, The Fate of Alabama and Much, Much Moore.

GODSPEED: Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser performs critical glide test flight.

Roughly one-quarter the length of a space shuttle orbiter, the Dream Chaser was to be released from a heavy-duty carrier helicopter at an altitude of around 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) for the approach and landing test, Sierra Nevada officials previously said.

The spacecraft was carried aloft under the helicopter connected with a 200-foot (60-meter) lift line, then positioned for the drop. The Dream Chaser’s on-board guidance computer was expected to maneuver the ship with its aerosurfaces, then line up with the runway for a steep final approach.

Two main landing gear wheels and and a nose skid deployed from the bottom the spaceplane just before touchdown.

Sierra Nevada is developing the Dream Chaser in partnership with NASA to carry cargo and experiments to the space station. It will launch on top of a rocket and land on a runway, returning equipment and experiment specimens to the ground for quick handover to engineers and scientists.

This is more like the 21st Century I was hoping for.

FASTER, PLEASE: Navy’s Ultimate Weapon: Sub-launched Hypersonic Missiles.

The test was announced by Vice Adm. Terry Benedict, the director of the Strategic Systems Program (SSP), at the Naval Submarine League’s annual symposium in Arlington, Virginia, on November 2. “I’m very proud to report that at 0300 on Monday night SSP flew from Hawaii [Pacific Missile Range Facility] . . . the first conventional prompt strike missile for the United States Navy in the form factor that would eventually, could eventually be utilized if leadership chooses to do so in an Ohio-class tube,” Benedict said, according U.S. Naval Institute News, which first reported his remarks. “It’s a monumental achievement.”

Benedict refused to provide any other details of the test, but a Pentagon spokesperson later gave additional information when contacted by U.S. Naval Institute News. “The Navy Strategic Systems Program (SSP), on behalf of the Department of Defense, conducted an Intermediate Range Conventional Prompt Strike Flight Experiment-1 (CPS FE-1) test on Oct. 30, 2017, from Pacific Missile Range Facility, Kauai, Hawaii,” said Cmdr. Patrick Evans, the Pentagon spokesperson. “The test collected data on hypersonic boost-glide technologies and test-range performance for long-range atmospheric flight. This data will be used by the Department of Defense to anchor ground testing, modeling, and simulation of hypersonic flight vehicle performance and is applicable to a range of possible Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) concepts.”

Hypersonic missiles are defined as those traveling at speeds between Mach 5 and Mach 10. That is, between 3,106 and 15,534 miles per hour, or one to five miles per second.

Launching a hypersonic missile from intercontinental distances can still provide the intended defender with a few minutes’ warning. Launching from thousands of miles closer in, via stealthy submarine, reduces the warning time to virtually nil.

TYLER O’NEIL: 54 Percent of Democrats Still Think Hillary Clinton Beat Bernie Sanders Fair and Square.

Yes, 54% is a majority, but it isn’t exactly confidence-inspiring.

OH: Surveillance Cameras Made by China Are Hanging All Over the U.S. “Company 42%-owned by the Chinese government sold devices that monitor U.S. Army base, Memphis streets, sparking concerns about cybersecurity.”

Hikvision (pronounced “hike-vision”) was nurtured by Beijing to help keep watch on its 1.4 billion citizens, part of a vast expansion of its domestic-surveillance apparatus. In the process, the little-known company has become the world’s largest maker of surveillance cameras. It has sold equipment used to track French airports, an Irish port and sites in Brazil and Iran.

Hikvision’s rapid rise, its ties to the Chinese government and a cybersecurity lapse flagged by the Department of Homeland Security have fanned concerns among officials in the U.S. and Italy about the security of Hikvision’s devices.

“The fact that it’s at a U.S. military installation and was in a very sensitive U.S. embassy is stunning,” says Carolyn Bartholomew, chairwoman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was created by Congress to monitor the national-security implications of trade with China. “We shouldn’t presume that there are benign intentions in the use of information-gathering technology that is funded directly or indirectly by the Chinese government.”

The internet of things is worrisome enough. An internet of things made in China and installed in sensitive locations is just stupid.

THAT’S WHAT WORRIES ME: Biden 2020? It’s Not as Crazy as It Sounds.

Al Hunt:

To see why they’re not crazy, start with this fact of political life: When an incumbent runs for re-election, the contest is a referendum on him. A challenger, to be successful, must offer an appealing alternative that better addresses whatever’s bothering people. Jimmy Carter, the outsider, beat President Gerald Ford in 1976 in the shadow of the Watergate scandals. Ronald Reagan defeated Carter four years later by showing resolve that resonated during the Iranian hostage crisis. Bill Clinton’s domestic focus had broad appeal in 1992, the first presidential contest after the end of the Cold War, against the veteran cold warrior President George H.W. Bush.

After three-and-a-half years of Trump, what will swing voters be looking for? A grown-up who is committed to getting things done by trying to bridge the bitter partisan divide. A person with experience in governing, savvy about the ways of Washington and wary of national-security booby traps. A reputation for incorruptibility to drain the ethical swamp of the Trump years.

More than most outsiders, new faces or ideological purists, the 74-year-old former senator and vice president could fit that bill.
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A politician first elected in 1970 is not going to be the face of the future. But after the exhaustion, trauma and incompetence of the Trump years, voters will look for stability, solidity, maturity, global experience, civility and integrity. Biden checks all the boxes.

These are indeed Heinlein’s Crazy Years — we just live in them.

BARACK OBAMA: EGOTISTICAL SPENDTHRIFT? Donna Brazile Lays Out How Obama’s Obsession With ‘His Image’ ‘Leeched’ The Democratic Party ‘Of Its Vitality.’

“Barack never had seen himself as connected to the party. He had not come up through it the way Joe Biden and Hillary had, but had sprung up almost on his own and never had any trouble raising money for his campaigns,” Brazile wrote.

Obama “used the party to provide for political expenses like gifts to donors, and political travel.” Because he “also cared deeply about his image,” he used DNC funds for “his pollster and focus groups” late into his second term, even though he couldn’t run for president, Brazile said.

Paying of the party’s debt made the DNC beholden to Clinton and her the de facto head of the party, Brazile wrote. Most decisions had to be run through Clinton’s Brooklyn, N.Y., headquarters. Brazile referred to it as the “high command of Brooklyn” on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos Sunday.

Despite blaming Obama, Clinton and Wasserman Schultz for the party’s troubles, she admitted that the three do love the Democratic party.

They only abuse it because they love it so much.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER LISTICLE: 4 Will Ferrell Films We Wish We Could Unsee.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Top 4 Marvel Studios Scenes We Can’t Stop Watching.

UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE DAY: Sex harassment claims reveal the unholy among the holier-than-thous.

BLUE ON BLUE: Democrats Deeply Divided on Transgender Issues, Pew Survey Finds.

The “acceptance by our constantly shifting definition — or else” attitude isn’t winning many independent friends, either.

HEALTH: Mushrooms are full of antioxidants that may have antiaging potential.

I’m just going to assume that sautéing in butter and wine, then pouring over a steak helps to lock in the antioxidants for maximum benefit.

SO IT’S COME TO THIS: Occidental Professor Warns: Be ‘Suspicious of Males Who Strongly Identify as Men.’

NEWS YOU CAN USE? A Guide to the Most Expensive (and Useless) Holiday Items in the Crate and Barrel Catalog.

EVEN VOX IS GETTING CURIOUS: Sen. Rand Paul was violently attacked a week ago. We still don’t know why. What the hell is happening with this case?

ROUND UP THE USUAL SUSPECTS: Iranian Arab separatist shot to death in Netherlands.

An Iranian activist who advocated for the independence of the country’s Arab minority was shot to death in the Netherlands on Wednesday.

Ahmad Mola Nissi, 52, was a founder of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz, or ASMLA, which advocates for an independent state in Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan Province.

Dutch police said an investigation had been opened into the shooting and a suspect had been detained at the crime scene in The Hague.

“His involvement in the incident is being investigated,” police said about the suspect, according to Reuters. “Emergency services were at the scene quickly and reanimated the victim, but he died shortly later.”

The Netherlands have rolled out an impressive welcome mat for Islamic immigrants, but they have a less-than-impressive track record of providing security to genuine political refugees from Islamic countries.

FORMER ASSISTANT FBI DIRECTOR: Clinton Crimes 20 Times Bigger than Watergate.

THANKS, OBAMA! US Air Force official: Missile targeting Saudis was Iranian.

DEFAULTSKI: Russia Comes to Venezuela’s Rescue as US Imposes More Sanctions.

The Putin administration agreed to the restructuring of the nearly $3 million in loans Venezuela has taken from the Russians—although the amount pales in comparison to the overall $120 billion debt Venezuela still grapples with.

Russia is restructuring 0.000025% of Venezuela’s debt? This is some rescue.

REPORT: Fusion GPS Gave Russian Lawyer Dirt on Clinton to offer Don Jr.