TOO SOON? Democrats face fierce urgency of 2018.

“The 2018 races are central not only to the individual states, but also to the federal policies in the House of Representatives,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, vice chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, said in an interview. “The key that unlocks the governors’ doors also unlocks the House of Representatives. And we’ve got to get the national team to understand that.”

As Republicans captured control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, Democrats have suffered deep losses at the state and local level in recent years.

Republicans control about 4,170 state legislative seats across the country, almost 1,000 more than they held in 2009 when Barack Obama was sworn in. Today, 33 governors are Republican; when Obama took office, just 21 governors were Republican.

“Their backs are against the wall,” said Matt Walter, who heads the Republican State Leadership Committee, a group that supports GOP candidates in state-level races. “In 2018, they’re in full panic mode about it, so we’re anticipating as a result of that, that they’re going to be throwing everything but the kitchen sink to try to restore the ground that they’ve lost.”

There is one bright spot for Democrats. The party holding the White House loses an average of 26 House seats in off-year elections — enough to turn control over to the Democrats in January, 2019.

Then again, Democrats are still actively avoiding the soul-searching their party has needed since 2010.

So who knows?

FINALLY: Scientists in Boston have found a way to get every last drop of ketchup out of the bottle.

In its manufacture, the container must first be coated on the inside with a rough surface.

A very thin layer is then placed over this. And, finally, a liquid is added that fills in any troughs to form a very slippery surface – like an oily floor.

The ketchup hovers on top and just glides out of the bottle.

According to Prof Kripa Varanasi, who developed the slippery surface, the technology is completely safe.

“The cool thing about it is that because the coating is a composite of solid and liquid, it can be tailored to the product. So for food, we make the coating out of food-based materials and so you can actually eat it.”

The technology’s co-inventor Dr David Smith told me that it could also help reduce waste.

Pretty slick.

MORE ON SWEDEN’S MIGRANT CRIME WAVE: Robert Spencer Has the Facts and Figures.

YOU DON’T SAY: Actually, Sweden is having big trouble with Mideast refugees.

Rich Lowry:

Sweden welcomed more than 160,000 asylum-seekers in 2015, and nearly 40,000 in October of that year alone. For a country of fewer than 10 million, this was almost equal to 2 percent of the population — in one year. The flow doubled the number of asylum-seekers at the height of the Balkans crisis in 1992.

The foreign-born proportion of the Swedish population was 18 percent in 2016, double that of 1990. As of 2015, the most common country of origin for the foreign-born was Finland, which makes sense as it’s a neighboring Scandinavian country. Next are Iraq and Syria.

Predictably, it isn’t easy to integrate people who don’t know the language, aren’t highly skilled and come from a foreign culture. Sweden’s economic polices don’t help. As a report of the Migration Policy Institute puts it politely, Sweden is “an interesting case” because “the state is committed to fostering large-scale immigration despite huge integration challenges in the labor market.”

There’s a stark gap in the labor-force-participation rate between the native-born (82 percent) and the foreign-born (57 percent). As the Migration Policy Institute points out, Sweden is an advanced economy with relatively few low-skills jobs to begin with.

On top of this, high minimum wages and stringent labor protections make it harder for marginal workers to find employment, while social assistance discourages the unemployed from getting work.

None of this is a formula for assimilation or social tranquility. In a piece for the London Spectator, Swedish journalist Tove Lifvendahl writes, “A parallel society is emerging where the state’s monopoly on law and order is being challenged.”

For some, that last item is a feature, not a bug.

PROCUREMENT BLUES: Fixing the Navy’s Carrier Gap.

THE GOP HAS DONE WORSE, AND WILL AGAIN: Kid Rock’s Name Floated as GOP Senate Candidate.

Six or seven years ago, Bill Whittle said, “I don’t know who the next President is going to be, but they’ll come from the pop culture.” That was spot-on, so why not Kid Rock in the Senate?

THE INTERNET IS CHOKING ON ITSELF, EXHIBIT #1,000,006: Not Even IMDb Is Safe From Trolls.

The message boards on IMDb long served as a home for film geeks. For popular movies — even ones that were decades old, like 1977’s Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope — it wasn’t uncommon for a half-dozen or more threads to be active at once, with users swapping theories and debating possible plot holes or filming errors. The boards, a de facto comment section for films, TV shows, actors, directors, producers, and Unnamed Man With Mole at the Bars, was where songs from trailers were tracked down in the pre-Shazam era, where a Q&A from a Teen Mom cameraman gone rogue was preserved and a Brittany Murphy conspiracy theory was invented. It was, enthused a New York Times commenter in 2008, a great place for “messing with Harry Potter fans … by purposely getting key facts wrong and then arguing as if they are right.”

They could also be much more than that: Many of the site’s avid users had been posting for years; IMDb’s database actually predates the internet, and its online message boards first came about in the ancient-web days of 2001. Deep in threads of subgenre arcana, users met friends and spouses and sometimes people who sounded like they might be trivia items on their own IMDb pages: “I met the guy I lost my virginity to thanks to IMDb’s message board almost a decade ago,” wrote one user recently.

On Monday, that message board closed.

Read the whole thing.

PROGRESS: Amazon plans to sell beer and wine at its new high-tech convenience store.

The e-commerce giant confirmed to Recode on Monday that it plans to sell beer and wine from the Seattle store. The confirmation came after I inquired about a flyer I spotted on the store’s window that mentioned its application for a liquor license.

“When we start offering beer and wine, there will be an associate checking identification,” an Amazon spokesperson wrote in an email.

Dubbed Amazon Go, the store concept allows shoppers to grab prepared food and drinks off of shelves and automatically be billed without stopping to pay on the way out. Amazon accomplishes this feat by making shoppers scan an app on the way in, and then uses a mix of sensors, cameras and computer vision to track the items that each customer takes. When the computers can’t figure it out, humans step in.

When the business histories of the early 21st Century are written, it may turn out that Amazon had to destroy retail in order to save it.

FRIENDS AGAIN? Mattis Says ‘Valiant,’ Resilient Iraqi Army to be Highlighted in ISIS Plan to Trump.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Facing death chants and hate crimes, Sweden’s Jews live in a climate of fear.

ALL THE BETTER TO FRIGHTEN YOU WITH, MY DEAR: Climate Models Are Warming Earth Two Times Faster Than Reality.

“So far in the 21st century, the GCMs are warming, on average, about a factor of 2 faster than the observed temperature increase,” Dr. Judith Curry, a former Georgia Tech climate scientist who now runs her own climate forecasting company, wrote in a report for the U.K.-based Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Curry has been one of the foremost critics of climate models, arguing that while they can be useful, there are too many uncertainties and issues to rely on models for public policy decisions.

Curry’s report gives a detailed rundown of why models can be useful for modeling complex climate systems, but also points out that GCMs fail to capture natural variability in the climate.

“The reason for the discrepancy between observations and model simulations in the early 21st century appears to be caused by a combination of inadequate simulations of natural internal variability and oversensitivity of the models to increasing carbon dioxide,” wrote Curry.

Read the whole thing.

Reality must be made to better conform to the models, which are of course correct.

HILLSDALE PROF TO NY TIMES: ‘I Am Proud’ We Don’t Promote ‘Social Justice.’

He should be — there’s no justice in “social justice,” which also happens to be anti-social. Other than that, it’s a fine term.

CHANGE: These Republicans didn’t like Trump at first. They do now.

“Trump’s a buffoon,” David Searles said before casting a vote for Marco Rubio in the New Hampshire primary.

“He scares me,” Rebecca Meyer said before settling on Ben Carson in South Carolina’s primary.

“He’s not presidential,” Gail Francioli said after backing Ohio Gov. John Kasich in that state’s primary.

Yet like nearly nine out of 10 Republicans nationwide, Searles, Meyer and Francioli supported Trump in the general election. And like the vast majority of Republicans, they support him still.

In fact, these one-time-skeptics are part of the bulwark that is bolstering a President whose first month in office roiled the nation.

Hilary Clinton and the prospect of two or three Supreme Court vacancies was enough to seal the deal for me, but Trump himself had me at “Gorsuch.”

OH: The U.S. is largely underprepared to detect or respond to the threat of a radiological terrorist attack on American soil.

RICK MORAN: DHS Orders Breathtaking Crackdown on Illegal Immigration.

SOLID ADVICE: Stop Chuck Todd Before He Tweets Again.

Well and good to mock the unfiltered 3 a.m. Trump tweets. But what of the many thousands of tweets by those who cover the president, all launched into the vast Twitterverse without benefit of an editor’s skeptical eye? Often these tweets reveal more about the tweeter than Mr. Trump.

The New York Post recently fired a sportswriter for a tweet likening Mr. Trump’s inauguration to the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks. Before that a Politico contributing writer tweeted out a suggestion the president might be having an incestuous relationship with his daughter Ivanka.

As over-the-top as these may be, they are less damaging than the steady stream of self-indulgence emanating from the Twitter feeds of those covering Mr. Trump. The defining characteristics of such tweets are two: near uniformity on substance and a tone of moral superiority. Even the New York Times public editor admitted certain tweets by her paper’s reporters were “outrageous” and deserving of “some kind of consequence.”

Jake Tapper and Salena Zito’s Twitter feeds are well worth following, but they’re exceptions to the rule.

WELL, OK THEN: There Is No American ‘Deep State’

Be wary of any article beginning with “Experts on…”

INSTAPUNDIT READERS HAVE BEEN AWARE OF THIS FOR A WHILE: The Next Financial Crisis Might Be in Your Driveway.

Lured by low interest rates, low gas prices, and a crop of seductive vehicles that are faster, smarter, and more efficient than ever before, American drivers are increasingly riding in style. Don’t be fooled by the curb appeal, though—those swanky machines are heavily leveraged.

The country’s auto debt hit a record in the fourth quarter of 2016, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, when a rush of year-end car shopping pushed vehicle loans to a dubious peak of $1.16 trillion. The combination of new car smell and new credit woes stretches from Subarus in Maine to Teslas in San Francisco.

It’s an alarming number, big enough to incite talk of a bubble. In fact, the pile of debt would cover the cost of 43.4 million Ford F-150 pickups, one for every eight or so people in the country.

Another way to look at: Every licensed driver in the U.S., on average, owes about $6,100 in car payments.

The self-inflicted problem which nearly killed GM and Chrysler a decade ago was a combination of two factors: Relying on subprime borrowers to goose sales, and “channel stuffing” unsold (and often unsalable) inventory. When Detroit ran out of customers and was sitting on top of months worth of inventory, the proverbial stuff hit the fan.

A downturn on lean inventory would hurt, but no worse than any typical recession. A downturn on stuffed channels would be like 2007-08 all over again.

I’ve seen reports that GM may have returned to its bad old habits. IWB reported in December that GM had fleetwide average of 87 days worth of inventory on hand (60 days is the industrywide standard/goal), but with four-to-six months worth of certain Chevy, Buick, and Cadillac models left unsold.

The best thing for GM might be for a recession to come too soon for them to build up much more inventory.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to pair beer with Girl Scout cookies.

HUGH HEWITT: Fire Obama’s ‘Deep State’ Sleeper Cells Yesterday.

Faster than yesterday, please.

CHARLIE MARTIN: We’re Doomed! More Awful Media Coverage of a Radiation Incident.

FAITH: Ultra-Orthodox Israelis Struggle Against New Draft Law.

MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE HERBERT MCMASTER: Trump’s pick is known for saying superiors “want criticism”

Want it or not, they always need it.

QUESTION ASKED: Was ‘Weird Al’ the real star all along?

Yankovic has sold millions of albums, played 1,616 shows and outlasted so many of the stars he once spoofed. His most recent album, 2014’s “Mandatory Fun,” featured parodies of Iggy Azalea, Lorde and Pharrell Williams, a polka medley and his usual smattering of original songs. The album hit No. 1. At 57, he’s now readying a complete set of his 14 studio recordings, plus an album of bonus tracks. “Squeeze Box,” on sale through a PledgeMusic drive until the end of February, will naturally come in an accordion-shaped box. “Comedy recording and funny songs go back to the earliest days of the record industry,” says Barry Hansen, better known as Dr. Demento, the radio host who introduced Yankovic to the public 40 years ago. “But Al is unique. There’s nothing like him in the history of funny music.”

For Chris Hardwick — the comedian who created the Nerdist empire and hosts two game shows, “@midnight” and “The Wall” — Yankovic is more than a musical success story. He’s a triumph for all the oddballs and outsiders.

I still remember all the words to “I Lost On Jeopardy,” but couldn’t tell you anything about the original Greg Kihn song other than the name.

CHILDHOOD’S END: These Dolls Were Classified as ‘Hidden Espionage Devices’ in One Country. “Regulators in Germany have decided that when it comes to devices that can be used for spying, especially on children and their parents, that being “connected” is not a good thing. My Friend Cayla is a doll that recently became popular, but those who have purchased it are being asked to destroy it.”