SO IT’S COME TO THIS: Emotional white girl blames RACISM for not being able to order French fries at Taco Bell… despite them not being on the menu.

WOW: Utah Husband Who Walked Miles with a ‘Need Kidney 4 Wife’ Sign Finds a Donor.

On Sunday, Winters told KSTU that he got the call they were both waiting for after two years – there was a kidney available.

“I was just so overwhelmed,” he said of the call he received from the hospital. “I didn’t know what to think.”

Finding a donor is no small feat — there are 3,000 new patients added to the kidney donor waiting list each month, and 13 people die every day while waiting for their chance, according to the National Kidney Foundation. It’s hard to know how long someone will remain on the waiting list, but waits of three years or more are not uncommon.

If you haven’t, and you’re eligible, please consider signing your donor card. If you have, someday somebody might just be thanking you.

SO THAT HAPPENED: Rubbernecking at the GOP’s car-wreck of a Virginia election.

SOCIALISM’S JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR NOTHING LEFT TO GAIN: Venezuelan crisis spawns boom in gambling.

“Most people I see playing the lottery are unemployed, trying to make a bit extra this way because the payouts are good,” said Veruska Torres, 26, a nurse who recently lost her job in a pharmacy and now plays Animalitos every day.

Torres often plays more than a dozen times daily at the kiosk in Catia, spending between 5,000-10,000 bolivars, but sometimes making up to 50,000 or 60,000 bolivars in winnings – more than a quarter of the monthly minimum wage.

When that happens, she splits the money between buying food and diapers for her baby boy, and re-investing in the lottery.

The Animalitos game, whose results appear on YouTube at scheduled times, is hugely popular because it goes through various rounds, holding people’s interest, and provides more chances to win than most traditional betting options.

The cheapest ticket costs just 100 bolivars – a quarter of a U.S. cent at the black market currency rate, and more than 10 times less than that at the official exchange level.

If Venezuela defaults, as is widely expected, Animalitos winnings will be worth less than the ticket by the time Torres gets her payout.

DONNA BRAZILE: Jake Tapper betrayed me after debate questions controversy.

Brazile, a former CNN contributor, recalled in her new book when emails stolen from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta showed that she relayed information about possible topics that would be brought up during the Democratic primary debate hosted by her network.

“The next day, even Jake Tapper took a swing at me, calling me unethical and ‘journalistically horrifying’ during a radio interview with WMAL even though I worked for CNN as a commentator not a journalist,” Brazile wrote in her book Hacks: The Insider Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House. “When I called him on this, he did not apologize. His attack on me was really about him. He wrote in an email, ‘I don’t know what happened here except it undermines the integrity of my work and CNN … you have to know how betrayed we all feel.'”

Brazile continued, “The feeling is mutual, my friend.”

Nobody looks too good here, not even Jake Tapper who used to enjoy a more favorable reputation with many on the Right.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: GOP Slammed in VA, Trump in China and Much, Much More.

HEALTH: FDA Releases New Guidance on Calorie Rule. “Does regulation apply to beer? ‘It depends’.”

The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday released draft guidance to help chain restaurants and groceries comply with an Obamacare regulation that requires calorie labeling on menus.

FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the guidance is “practical, efficient and sustainable,” in an attempt to alleviate concerns from pizza chains and grocers that the government was moving forward with an onerous Obama administration rule that carries criminal penalties for “misbranding” food.

Questions about the rule remain, since the guidance only contains “nonbinding recommendations.” In addition, chain restaurants could be confused by language in the guidance related to what draft beers must be labeled. The FDA says, “It depends.”

Complying with “It depends” could be problematical, to say the least.

And:

Pizza chains represented by the American Pizza Community—including Domino’s, Papa John’s, and Little Caesars—raised the issue that pizza can contain up to a billion topping combinations, making the rule unworkable unless they can comply online. Domino’s has said the vast majority of their orders are already placed online, where customers can use a calorie tracker for any pizza they order.

The new FDA guidance does not allow pizza chains to comply online but attempts to provide more flexibility with allowing companies to use calorie ranges.

The regulatory state marches on.

CHANGE: Republican Tax Plan Would Slam California Housing Market.

The bill would cap the size of mortgage loans for which taxpayers can deduct interest payments at $500,000. In most regions of the U.S., that represents a small fraction of properties.

But in the priciest markets, concentrated in some of the nation’s largest coastal cities, the impact could be significant. In the San Jose, Calif., metropolitan area, 75% of new mortgage loans thus far in 2017 were for more than $500,000, according to an analysis by CoreLogic Inc., a housing data provider. The median home price there is more than $1 million, and even small starter homes can climb well above the proposed cap.

In the San Francisco metro area, 60% of new loans were for more than $500,000, while in Los Angeles and San Diego, the figures were 44% and 37%, respectively.

Maybe it’s time for California to end its war on affordable housing.

OH: DNC Chair Refuses To Answer Brazile’s Allegations Of Rigging For Hillary.

AND: Wasserman Schultz Ducks Questions On Brazile Accusations.

HONEYPOT CONFIRMED? Russian Lawyer Met With Clinton-Funded Fusion GPS Before and After Trump Jr. Meeting.

MONICA SHOWALTER: Did Fusion GPS pay journalists to publish fake news?

Circumstantial information also signals that there may be more than just killing stories in Fusion GPS’s repertoire. According to an investigation by The Tablet, Fusion GPS also influences reporters to write stories, effectively planting them. Halvorssen accuses reporter Ken Silverstein, who identifies himself as a journalist with cash-flow problems and a friend of Fusion GPS’s founder Glenn Simpson, as one such person who has taken his cue to write based on information that apparently came from Fusion GPS, although Silverstein denies it. Silverstein’s work generally seems to be very good yet what he wrote about Halvorssen is utter rubbish, seemingly out of character.

With those kinds of allegations going on, it’s very much the public’s right to know whether journalists have been bought off by firms like Fusion GPS, which has been known to take money from the Russians. There’s not a reputable news outlet out there that will tolerate this kind of activity and yes, anyone who does engage in such profit-taking, for whatever reason without telling anyone does get fired, as the recent firing of Wall Street Journal chief foreign correspondent Jay Solomon shows. Readers have a right to know that their news is untainted by sly little payments from special interests made under the table.

Particularly if they are foreign governments, in the case of Fusion GPS.

Developing…

THE DAM HAS BURST: Five more women come forward to accuse Roman Polanski of sexual assault – including one who says she was just nine when he attacked her.

AND: Journalist Accuses Rev. Jesse Jackson of Sexual Harassment.

IT IS YOUR PATRIOTIC DUTY, COMRADE: Will Americans Die Young Enough to Save Pension Plans?

VIDEO MONTAGE: Media and Dems Mocking the Power of Prayer After TX Shooting.

BLACK REPUBLICAN: ‘Very Hard for a White Person to Defend Themselves’ Against Racist Label.

Perhaps, but the charge has lost some of its sting after years of overuse.

HE’S LOVIN’ IT: Trump Bodyguard Went On McDonald’s Runs for POTUS Because WH Chefs Couldn’t Replicate Quarter Pounders.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Kellyanne Conway Says Trump Team Keeps Talking About Hillary Clinton Because She ‘Won’t Go Away.’

Really, she should have taken the hint last November.

AT HOT MIC: Sutherland Springs, Wil Wheaton, and Hannibal Lecter.

UNEXPECTEDLY! The California Marijuana Tax Problem: Why Prices Could Increase 70% in 2018.

California will include a 15% levy on all cannabis sales in the state, including medical pot products, starting in January. Meanwhile, local governments are also adding taxes for sellers and growers that could result in a 70% increase in the price of a small bag of good quality marijuana in parts of the state.

Between state and local taxes, some buyers will see an effective tax as high as 45% on adult-use cannabis in California. Proponents of legalization have long pointed to the collection of state and local taxes on marijuana sales as a big benefit.

The new cannabis industry in the state has a projected value of $7 billion with the potential to collect $1 billion per year in tax revenue. But industry leaders in California claim that the high taxes give illicit vendors the upper hand.

“High tax rates raise prices in legal markets, reinforcing the price advantage of black markets,” the global credit ratings firm Fitch Ratings said in a report. “California’s black markets for cannabis were well established long before its voters legalized cannabis in November 2016 and are expected to dominate post-legalization production.”

Only California could legalize pot and still make black markets more attractive than ever.

HARD DAY’S NIGHT: Solving a Beatles mystery with mathematics.

“This is the one chord that everyone around the world knows,” says Randy Bachman, a rock star in his own right from The Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive.

It dates to July 1964 — the height of Beatlemania. The band was about to release its third album.

For the first time, it was all original music. Plus, the Beatles were shifting away from their rock ‘n’ roll roots to a more poppy sound, and this album was to be the soundtrack for their first feature film.

They needed to make a statement.

After a lot of experimentation, the band come up with a wondrous, jangling cacophony of sound: the opening chord to the song, album, and film A Hard Day’s Night.

“I don’t think there’s another song with an opening like that. It’s just an indescribable chord of beauty.”

Indescribable and — as it turns out — really rather mysterious.

Because for decades, no-one could figure out exactly how those two seconds of music were made.

Until now.

HORSE, BARN DOOR: Air Force Reviewing All Records After Error Let Texas Shooter Buy Guns.

HMM: Amazon Has a Risky Strategy for Cutting Prices This Holiday Season.

If you find more goods than usual on Amazon are discounted as the holiday season starts, that may not be because the sellers have chosen to cut their prices.

Instead, as The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, Amazon itself has started briefly discounting certain items sold by sellers, by as much as 9%. This only seems to apply to third-party sellers who ship their products through Amazon’s distribution centers.

Until Amazon started doing this in “recent weeks,” it only controlled prices on the goods it sold directly to consumers. Some brands, such as The North Face, therefore avoid selling directly to Amazon, in order to control their own pricing strategies.

In its new discounting push, Amazon is absorbing the amount of the discount itself, in order to tempt customers away from other retailers.

That means the third-party sellers get the same amount they usually would—and indeed, it seems Amazon isn’t even telling them about its discounting. This last point could prove problematic for sellers who have signed agreements with brands or other marketplaces, to maintain a minimum price on the goods they sell through all platforms.

This is not going to win Amazon any friends at the premium brands the discount retailer has always struggled with.

WRONG QUESTION: Did Hillary commit any crimes in ‘rigging’ the Democratic primary?

The more important question, at least for the DNC, is whether they broke faith with their own voters — and how to restore it.

DR. TIM BALL AND TOM HARRIS: In Bonn, a Global Warming Propaganda Tsunami Is Triggered.

STEPHEN MOORE: Why the Left Has Been So Wrong About the Trump Boom.

But so far the Trump haters have missed the call on the economy’s trajectory. Doubly ironic is that the same Obama-era economists who are trashing Trump’s increasingly realistic forecast of 3 percent growth are the ones who predicted 4 percent growth from the Obama budgets. Obama never came anywhere near 4 percent growth, and at the end of his second term, the economy grew at a pitiful 1.6 percent.

Under Obama, free enterprise and pro-business policies were thrown out the window. What was delivered was the weakest recovery from a recession since World War II, with a meager 2.2 percent average growth rate. Middle America felt it, which is why Trump won these forgotten Americans.

One reason that economist Larry Kudlow and I and others assured Donald Trump that 3 to 4 percent growth was achievable was that Trump could capitalize on the underperformance of the Obama years. Under Obama, business investment fell almost two-thirds below the long-term trend line — thanks to higher taxes on investment. Now, partly in anticipation of the tax cut, business spending keeps climbing.

“Get the hell out of my way!” the wise man once said.