HEH:

MICHAEL VAN DER GALIEN: The Real Reason Le Pen Lost.

KURT SCHLICHTER: For Fussy Liberals, It’s Always Apocalypse Right Now.

So, off we go to the Numbskull Olympics. Taking the gold for Freestyle Idiocy is California Democrat Senator Kamala Harris, who is incredibly stupid even for a California Democrat senator. She tweeted that 129 million people are going to lose their health insurance and presumably die. This is surprising, both because the 129 million figure is so insanely dumb that merely seeing that figure drops the reader’s IQ into freefall, and also because Kamala somehow managed to count past 10 without taking her shoes off.

Kamala also announced, without citation, that health care is “a right for all.” Those of us familiar with the Constitution are confused, since that document is entirely free of any such right, nor of any other right to force others to toil to provide you with things you want for free. What is in there are the rights to speak freely and petition, but Kamala discovered a footnote that says those enumerated rights don’t apply to citizens who dare doubt the other great Mystery Right, the penumbraed and emanated right to freely kill babies. And don’t bother asking about the Second Amendment either; sophisticated folk like Kamala aren’t restrained from indulging their limitless appetite for petty oppression by the express enumeration of rights.

It’s impossible to go over the top when writing about Harris.

POLL: Trump’s Approval Climbs As His Tax Cut Plan Wins Strong Support.

Cut hard, cut deep, cut soon.

KEEP ON JIHADIN’ Remedial ISIS Tutorial Steers Jihadists Toward Heavier, Deadlier Truck Attacks.

AETNA CEO: Obamacare Will Continue to Deteriorate If Nothing Happens.

Aetna, one of the largest insurers in the United States, announced last week that it planned to exit the Obamacare exchanges in Iowa and Virginia, citing major losses.

“Looking beyond 2017, we continue to evaluate our footprint with a view towards significantly reducing our exposure to individual commercial products in 2018,” said Shawn Guertin, Aetna’s chief financial officer. “We have already disclosed our planned 2018 exit from one of our 2017 state-based exchanges and intend to communicate other 2018 footprint decisions when appropriate.”

Bertolini mentioned that Medica, another health care insurer, notified Iowa last week that it was also pulling out of the exchanges which means there will be no one in Iowa with coverage.

I’m so old I can remember when ObamaCare was touted as the salvation for private health coverage.

DEPLOYMENT: F-35 Joint Strike Fighters Are Getting and Closer to Russia’s Doorstep.

GOING TO CALIFORNIA: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told Al Jazeera that California is the model to “transform” the Democratic Party.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Republicans Party Like It’s 1984.

Krugman conveniently fails to mention that 1984 was Orwell’s dystopian vision of the results of English socialism.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Hey Walmart, Amazon is eating your lunch.

TWO-YEAR MISSION: Mysterious military spacecraft lands in Florida causing sonic boom.

The Air Force posted tweets that the X37B spacecraft landed Sunday morning at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral after 718 days in orbit.

Multiple media outlets reported that the 29-foot-long spacecraft’s return caused a sonic boom that rattled central Florida and could be heard as far away as Tampa and Fort Myers.

It’s the spacecraft’s first landing in Florida. Previous X37B missions have landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

In a statement , officials said the X37B spacecraft is “an experimental test program to demonstrate technologies for a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the U.S. Air Force.” Another mission is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral later this year.

Just what was it doing up there all that time?

BUT OTHER THAN THAT… House Conservative: Congress ‘Lacks the Intellect or Lacks the Backbone’ to Avoid ‘Debilitating Insolvency’

Update: Judging by the early returns in the comments, I should have gone with “EMBRACE THE HEALING POWER OF ‘AND’.”

I regret the error.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Jailed Venezuelan opposition leader says ‘we can’t stop’

“We can’t stop until we achieve our freedom. I’m on the streets with you, in mind and spirit,” he said, according to tweets from his wife Lilian Tintori.

Tintori relayed her husband’s words after she visited him on Sunday at a prison outside Caracas
Lopez, a speaker and leader of the opposition, has been detained since 2014 after he was accused of terrorism and inciting deadly anti-government protests.

His family’s visit comes days after the government released a video on state television in an effort to dispel rumors about his health condition.

The family had been denied access to the prison for about 35 days.

His wife said Lopez was not aware of the political turmoil and mass protests happening across Venezuela in recent weeks until she filled him in about the unrest during her visit.

“He is good… He is fit and well…. He is isolated. He resists. It is hard but he resists,” Tintori said outside the prison.

Over the weekend, the White House called for a “quick, peaceful conclusion to unrest,” but it’s almost certainly too late for that.

HOPE: Survivors of the caliphate savour simple freedoms after witnessing acts of depravity.

The fighter stared uneasily out across the front beyond the village of Ruwayyan, 20 kilometres northwest of Raqqa, to where a sandstorm approached, stretching from ground to sky. “The first thing they do when they see us is tear off their veils.”

Thousands of women have crossed these lines, fleeing Raqqa and its surrounding villages as the so-called caliphate begins to collapse. Local authorities in Rojava, Syria’s self-administered northeast, say that more than 100,000 people have escaped in the past three weeks alone — an exodus all but unseen by the outside world.

The desert north of Raqqa is filled with these displaced, escaping on foot or by tractor, pulling their most treasured belongings, seizing the chance to escape caused by recent SDF advances and Isis’s weakening grasp.

Many have moved numerous times during Syria’s six-year conflict, smuggling themselves and their families across one front line after another as each new sanctuary becomes riven with violence. The lives of the women became ever more restricted the deeper into Isis territory they travelled.

Few of these women waste any time, and hurl away their dark clothes as soon they reach the first positions of the SDF, the American-backed units now approaching Raqqa from three sides.

An apparently necessary reminder of what oppression really looks like.

NBC NEWS: Crucial for Americans to Resist ‘Hate,’ Obama Says in Rare Address.

His previous rare address was two weeks ago.

STRIKE A BLOW FOR EQUALITY: ISIS widow now on a high-priority terrorist ‘kill list’

Sally Jones has recently become a “high priority” on the “kill list” of wanted terrorists, the Sunday Times of London reported.

Jones, 49, has been implicated in two horrific, but foiled, plots to spill the blood of innocent Americans.

The first was an attempt to live-stream the murder of a US veteran; the second was a plotted mass shooting at a North Carolina concert, the British newspaper reported.

Jones also is believed to have joined in a failed plot targeting Queen Elizabeth in 2015, during V-J Day celebrations in London.

Now Jones, originally from Kent in southeast England, is believed to be in Iraq or Syria, where she hopes to avoid the fate of her late ISIS hubby.

The husband, Junaid Hussain, a computer hacker from Birmingham, England, was killed by a US drone in the then-ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, Syria, in 2015.

We don’t want women receiving unequal treatment, do we?

VIDEO: Obama Communications Director Doubts Hillary Would Have Won Before Comey.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Was the American Revolution such a good idea?

“We could have been Canada,” Adam Gopnik says. Well, there’s a Canada right up there for anyone who wants it.

RUN, HILLARY, RUN! Hillary’s election loss excuse means one thing — She’s running in 2020.

Michael Goodwin:

With the party demoralized and divided, and holding the fewest number of elected seats in a century, Clinton’s return will likely prolong the misery. While she’s a media magnet, she’s also a political dead end, having lost two presidential runs and ceded the future to the Bernie Sanders’ socialist wing.

It’s hard to imagine her as the party’s savior, yet, instead of going away quietly, she’ll be competing with its candidates for money and attention. Anything she gets will come at the expense of new leaders and ideas.

On the other hand, what’s bad for Dems is great for Trump. Clinton’s decision to jump back into partisan politics is a gift to the president.

With polls showing little buyers’ remorse over the election, any contrast between the sitting president and his defeated opponent favors him. Especially because Clinton is stuck in the same tiresome blame game that helped cost her the election.

Her excuse-mongering has become… deplorable.

BRING ‘EM ON? ISIS Tells Jihadists To Attack U.S. Gun Store Owners As Way To Acquire Firearms.

WHEN EVERYTHING IS PROBLEMATICAL… NOTHING IS: Chris Pine’s SNL monologue reminds us how bad Hollywood’s superhero diversity problem is.

Alternate take: Why are leftist-dominated industries such cesspits of stereotyping, racism, and sexism?

CHRIS MATTHEWS: ‘Went Along’ with Polls ‘Because I Used to Think They Were Honest’

HAVE YOU HUGGED A FRACKER TODAY? How cheap oil is changing the world.

Now then you get a country like Venezuela, which was on the edge even before prices fell from $100 a barrel, well they’re running out of foreign exchange reserves, they’ve fallen from $66 to about $15 billion. And they’re collapsing collapsing and they’re running out of the ability to import food and other materials, and so there you’re dealing with almost societal instability, and order is being maintained by folks with guns.

And so countries are dealing with it differently, it’s been very very difficult. They all want to get out of this as fast as possible – those towering oil inventories and the risk of another oil price collapse and prolonging this hemorrhaging – because no matter what strategy they’ve chosen, they’re all painful. They want out. All producers want out.

But the question is are they willing to cut and cooperate collectively? What we’ve seen since the beginning of the oil market is that it’s very difficult to get producers to cooperate collectively to restrain their production. The temptation is to cheat, to let somebody else do some cutting and you enjoy the higher oil prices. This has always been a challenge for the oil industry.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of kleptocratic petrostates.

FORMER PRESIDENT SELFIE STICK: The Audacity Of A Monumental Library.

FINGERS CROSSED: A North Korean Nuclear EMP Attack? … Unlikely.

Considering the physics behind EMP and the status of North Korea’s nuclear program to date, doomsday headlines in the press regarding the North’s potential EMP threat are grossly overstated.[4] North Korea’s nuclear tests have not yet demonstrated sufficient yield to cause damage to large areas through EMP. Moreover, with only a limited arsenal, it would not make sense for the North Koreans to conduct nuclear tests simply to develop EMP weapons.

But enough Iranian cash might just make it worth Pyongyang’s while.