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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: A Turning Tide In The War On College Men?

WOW, THE 2016 MERCEDES ARE BIGGER THAN EVER! (And I thought my ’85 500SEL was whale-sized…)

CC: Tim Blair.

#OREGONSTANDOFF ENDS: Massive Government Convoy Descends on Refuge; Militiamen Taken Away (Photos).

“THAT’LL TEACH HER!” Melissa Click suspended with pay, according to the Columbia Missouri Tribune.

(Headline via Iowahawk.)

FUNNY HOW SOCIALISTS ALWAYS KEEP DEMANDING MORE. Sanders Camp: If Clinton Wants Another Debate, She Should Agree to Three More.

THIS IS COOL: Near real-time (updated every 3 hours) maps of winds worldwide.

DRUDGE: TRUMP MANIA ENGULFS MEDIA; DEBATE ATTENDANCE STILL POSSIBLE?

Trump may or may not show up tonight, but Steve Green and his titanium liver will be on duty at PJM to drunkblog the debate at 9:00 PM eastern tonight.

POPULAR MECHANICS: The Challenger Disaster, 30 Years Later.

BUT SEX DIFFERENCES ARE CULTURALLY CONSTRUCTED: How women can tell when other females are ovulating using clues in their face – and how they may then try to hide their partners from the ‘threat’ of these fertile ladies.

WELL, THERE’S THE PROBLEM WITH THEIR RESEARCH:

“We don’t believe that little girls naturally play a certain way or speak a certain way,” says Fought, a professor of linguistics at Pitzer College. “They’re not born liking a pink dress. At some point we teach them. So a big question is where girls get their ideas about being girls.”

Having two X chromosomes plays a major role. I’m guessing that Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer don’t have kids.

A TRUMP-LED TRIUMVIRATE?: Well, not exactly, but it’s not far off the mark. Huckabee and Santorum to join Trump at his fundraising event for veterans following their GOP undercard debate.

Huckabee tweeted that he will participate in an earlier debate of lower polling candidates and then head off to nearby Drake University, where Trump is holding his event after bolting from the debate after a war of words with Fox News and Megyn Kelly, who is set to co-moderate the event.

Huckabee’s announcement is part of a last ditch effort for the 2008 Iowa victor to boost his standing with caucus-goers before Monday and stick it to Sen. Ted Cruz, who he has been harshly attacking on the campaign trail. By early Thursday afternoon, Santorum representatives confirmed to the Washington Examiner, as well as multiple media outlets, that he, too, would attend the event. Santorum won the caucus in 2012. . . .

More than anything, Huckabee and Santorum’s appearance at the event helps provide cover from criticism being launched at Trump by Cruz for ducking the debate and plays into Trump’s image as a candidate who doesn’t play by the normal rules of politics.

Santorum and Huckabee are angling to steer attention and votes away from other candidates–particularly Cruz– so their appearance at the Trump-led event isn’t any sort of endorsement. But still, their attendance illustrates how Trump is undeniably a flame to the media moths.

RELATED:  Ted Cruz Mega-Donors Holding Veterans’ Charities Hostage for Donald Trump Debate.

In response to Senator Ted Cruz’s challenge of a one-on-one debate, the principal donors of the Keep the Promise I and II super PACs are offering presidential candidate Donald Trump a truly fantastic deal, pledging to donate $1.5 million to charities committed to helping veterans if Mr. Trump agrees to debate Senator Cruz in Iowa.

That’s right, a group of Ted Cruz mega-donors have offered the princely sum of $1.5 million, but only if Trump agrees to debate Cruz. Otherwise, tough luck, heroes! This is sick, even by the stunt-charity standard being set by Trump, who, along with his own sketchy history of exploiting veterans, is apparently only raising money for them tonight because Fox News pissed him off. But at least he’s raising the funds, not withholding them as a political ransom.

Apparently, Carly Fiorina has offered her own $1.5 million contribution to veterans’ groups if she can join any Cruz-Trump debate.

Meanwhile, one veterans’ group has said it would decline any such donations, from Trump or any other GOP candidate participating in the event, calling it a “political stunt.”  Of course it’s a political stunt–it’s being organized by politicians, for goodness sake. But it seems odd–and itself perhaps political– that the head of a veterans’ organization would turn down a charitable gift for this reason.

RAND SIMBERG: Challenger lessons still unlearned after 30 years.

FASTER, PLEASE: There will now be a third hyperloop test track. Okay, it’s actually pretty fast already.

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WASN’T HOWARD WOLOWITZ WORKING ON THIS PROJECT? Squishy Robot Fingers Gently Tickle Deep Sea Critters.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Female Sperm: A Trans Woman’s Perspective On Reproduction.

ASK, AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE, with Amazon Echo.

UPDATE: For those who don’t like always-on voice control, the Alexa on the Fire TV Stick only works when you press the button.

21ST CENTURY QUESTIONS: How much do you need to read about Zika virus before you scream “no” to the question “Would it be wrong to eradicate mosquitoes?”

SPACE: Europe Looks Toward NASA’s Cargo Plane To Clean Up Space Junk.

DAVID STEINBERG: Glenn Greenwald and Pierre Omidyar: Retract and Apologize For Smearing PJ Media, Misleading The Intercept’s Readers. It’s easier to demonize people you disagree with if you lie about them.

BUT HE’LL PROBABLY BE LECTURING ME ABOUT MY CARBON FOOTPRINT SOON: Microsoft cofounder’s yacht allegedly destroyed a coral reef. These are sites I’ve dived many times. Sorry to see them wrecked.

I SAW A FILM ABOUT THIS AS A KID AND IT INFLUENCED ME FOR LIFE: Door Plucked From Grapevine Fire Shows How Closed Doors Can Save Lives. “Flames badly damaged one side of the interior door that was directly exposed to the flames. But the other side barely shows hardly any damage at all. Firefighters in Grapevine saved the door and plan to use it as a teaching tool to remind people why they should sleep with their bedroom door closed.”

ED MORRISSEY: Here’s Why the Republican Populist Revolt Will Backfire.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Pew: 10.2 million ‘detached’ young adults in U.S., ‘source of social unrest.’

I STILL BELIEVE IN AMERICA: Bacon shot glasses dipped in chocolate and filled with whisky.

OUCH: WaPo: Bernie Sanders Fiction-Filled Campaign. “Mr. Sanders is not a brave truth-teller. He is a politician selling his own brand of fiction to a slice of the country that eagerly wants to buy it. . . . He would be a braver truth-teller if he explained how he would go about rationing health care like European countries do. His program would be more grounded in reality if he addressed the fact of chronic slow growth in Europe and explained how he would update the 20th-century model of social democracy to accomplish its goals more efficiently. Instead, he promises large benefits and few drawbacks.”

To be fair, socialists always lie, because if they told the truth nobody would vote for them.

DEPARTMENT OF THINGS YOU NEVER THOUGHT YOU’D SAY: I agree fully with the action taken today by French President Francois Hollande.

A lunch between the French and Iranian presidents in Paris was scrapped today because France refused to remove wine from the menu.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has been on a tour of Europe, signing billions of pounds worth of business deals with different nations, after economic sanctions against the country were lifted.

He was due to dine with President Francois Hollande at an upmarket restaurant in the French capital.

More like this, please.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Obama administration needs to abandon its Petraeus obsession:

In politically driven moods, the ancient Romans often wiped from history all mention of a prior hero or celebrity. They called such erasures damnatio memoriae.

The Soviet Union likewise airbrushed away, or “Trotskyized,” all the images of any past kingpin who became politically incorrect.

The Obama administration seems obsessed with doing the same to retired Gen. David Petraeus.

Read the whole thing.

As Bill McGurn noted in the Wall Street Journal on the day of Obama’s inauguration in 2009, “Bush’s Real Sin Was Winning in Iraq.” Petraeus was the man who made that possible until Obama unilaterally chose to throw that all away as part of his reelection bid, as Dexter Filkins of the leftist New Yorker noted in 2014, thus giving rise to ISIS. No wonder Obama wants him punished in his last year in office.

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Man arrested with handguns, Koran at Disneyland Paris.

JOHN SCHINDLER EXPLAINS JUST HOW MUCH DAMAGE Hillary Clinton’s email problem did to our national security:

To take just the Russians: their plus-sized embassy in Washington, D.C. is conveniently located on a hill overlooking the city, with an impressive antenna field on its roof aimed downtown. That is where Ms. Clinton’s “unclassified” emails went. The Russians care so much about State Department information they’ve been caught planting bugs inside a conference room just down the hall from the Secretary of State’s office. “Of course the SVR got it all,” explained a high-ranking former KGB officer to me about EmailGate (the SVR is the post-Soviet successor to the KGB’s foreign intelligence arm). “I don’t know if we’re as good as we were in my time,” he added, “but even half-drunk the SVR could get those emails, they probably couldn’t believe how easy Hillary made it for them.”

Any foreign intelligence service reading Ms. Clinton’s emails would know a great deal they’re not supposed to about American diplomacy, including classified information: readouts from sensitive meetings, secret U.S. positions on high-stakes negotiations, details of interaction between the State Department and other U.S. agencies including the White House. This would be a veritable intelligence goldmine to our enemies. Worse, access to Ms. Clinton’s personal email likely gave foreign spy agencies hints on how to crack into more sensitive information systems. Not to mention that if Clinton Inc. was engaged in any sort of illegal pay-for-play schemes, our adversaries know all about that, as well as anything else shady that Ms. Clinton and her staff were putting in those unencrypted emails.

Read the whole thing.

IN THE MAIL: F*ck Feelings: One Shrink’s Practical Advice for Managing All Life’s Impossible Problems.

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THIS IS NOT AN UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE OF OBAMA’S DIPLOMACY: The Humbling Of The West: Europe and the U.S. bow and scrape to ascendant Iran.

Some wonder how history will treat Barack Obama’s presidency. That depends on who writes the histories.

Secretary of State John Kerry’s account will fist-pump the Iran nuclear deal as the central foreign-policy event of the Obama presidency, a triumph for Western diplomacy.

But news photographs in recent weeks are producing a different history. These photos document the abject humiliation of the West by Iran. Americans who plan to vote in their presidential election should look hard at these photos, because the West’s direction after this will turn on the decisions they make.

The first photo is of a hallway in Rome’s Capitoline Museums, a repository of art dating to Western antiquity. Out of what the government of Italy called “respect” for the sensibilities of visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, the museum placed large white boxes over several nude sculptures, including a Venus created in the second century B.C.

Then, because Mr. Rouhani will not attend a meal that serves alcohol to anyone, the nominally Italian government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi declined to serve wine.

They did so for the same reason that beggars grub change in front of Rome’s churches. Freed by the Obama nuclear deal with Iran, Italy’s tin-cup businesses signed about a dozen deals with Mr. Rouhani this week, totaling $18 billion.

As I say, this is no accident.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 994.

MIZZOU IN DISARRAY: Ex-Missouri President Lashes Out in Confidential Email. “In an email to a group called the Missouri 100, Wolfe accused the former chancellor of Missouri’s Columbia campus, R. Bowen Loftin, of stirring up controversy to try to protect his own job, and criticized the football team’s decision to go on strike.”

Related: Controversial U of Missouri Professor Suspended. “The University of Missouri Board of Curators announced late Wednesday that it was suspending Melissa Click, who teaches communications at the university’s flagship campus in Columbia. Click was recently charged with misdemeanor assault in relation to her videotaped blocking of a student journalist during last fall’s campus protests. She has apologized for the action, but many Republican legislators have called for her dismissal. Faculty members, while not defending her actions during the protests, have said she should not be fired.”

A QUANTUM OF ACCOUNTABILITY: Rolling Stone rape hoaxer ordered to release communications. “Jackie, the woman whose tall tale of a gang-rape captivated readers of Rolling Stone in late 2014, will have to turn over her communications as part of a lawsuit. However, the communications will be labeled confidential, so we won’t be able to read them unless they are leaked.”

HOLLYWOOD IS PURGING OLD WHITE PEOPLE. “No really. They’ll be making sure you’ve been active in the business within the last ten years, or else you forfeit your Academy membership,” Ace of Spades writes. “I support these rules for a simple reason: Liberal institutions have long ignored the onerous, stupid rules they inflict on everyone else. They don’t realize how bad these rules are, because they except themselves. Thus we get super-white Vox arguing about other companies not hiring enough minorities. It’s time that they lived under their own rules. Period.”

WATCH THIS FAST FOOD WORKER EXPLAIN WHY SHE DESERVES TO BE PAID MORE THAN PARAMEDICS.

Related! Minimum-wage offensive could speed arrival of robot-powered restaurants.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: WHO leader: Zika virus ‘spreading explosively.’ I hope the response is less inept than the Ebola response. More here.

JONATHAN ADLER: The Illegal Implementation Of ObamaCare.

The Obama administration has repeatedly flouted legal requirements or acted outside the scope of its delegated authority when implementing Obamacare. I’ve argued as much in numerous blog posts, congressional testimony and in a chapter on what I call the “Ad Hoc Implementation of Obamacare” in a new book, “Liberty’s Nemesis: The Unchecked Expansion of the State.” David Bernstein also makes this case in his book, “Lawless,” as have others such as Iowa law professor Andy Grewal.

Criticism of the Obama administration’s implementation of Obamacare from the administration’s critics is not particularly surprising. Although some of us may have criticized equivalent Bush administration lawlessness, there’s not much newsworthy about an administration taking fire from across the aisle.

It is more notable when a prominent defender of the Obama administration acknowledges that the administration has colored outside the lines, and not always with good justification. So those interested in the Affordable Care Act and the administrative law should give Nicholas Bagley’s new paper on “Legal Limits and the Implementation of the Affordable Care Act” a careful read. The paper’s still in draft form — and in my view bends over backward to provide the most charitable read of the administration’s actions — but still concludes that the administration has violated the law repeatedly in implementing the ACA, even if not quite as often as some administration critics have claimed.

Law is for the little people. For the bigshots, there is only will.

THE COLONIALS STRIKE BACK: African Bishops Against Sexual Liberation.

Africa is today an area of frequently bloody confrontation between Christianity and Islam. But south of the Sahara there is a strong Protestantism very similar theologically and morally to the one energizing the 1910 conference, even though the religious landscape of western Europe and northern America has changed dramatically since then. The former is now the most secularized region in the world. The latter still contains a robust Evangelical subculture, but with its mainline Protestant churches (including the Presbyterians who were hosts in Edinburgh) greatly liberalized both theologically and morally.

The slowly unfolding schism in the Anglican Communion can be seen as a late (and rather ironic) fruition of the great missionary success of Protestantism. The incipient schism, mainly pitting African bishops against those in the English-speaking world, has focused on what I Iike to call issues south of the navel (sexuality and gender). But there are underlying theological issues, especially based on different views of the authority of Scripture. The schism is on a slow fuse. But it has recently accelerated.

It is important to understand both the demographic and the financial resources of the two parties. The total number of Anglicans in the world is generally estimated as between seventy and eighty million. The website of the Anglican Communion tries to be very careful to distinguish between official numbers (that is, individuals formally on parish rolls, some of whom rarely if ever show up in church) and “realistic” numbers (those who participate in the life of the church with some regularity). Even with the best of intentions, the latter are quite unreliable estimates. There is no central headquarters comparable to the Vatican (though recent revelations about its finances do not suggest confidence in its statistics): Each national church is autonomous under its own “primate” (an unfortunate term, since zoologists use it to refer to the big apes); the Archbishop of Canterbury is no pope, but simply presides over meetings of all the other bishops; the mother church, the Church of England, is still a state establishment headed by the monarch (thus its membership figures mean very little indeed—you stay listed unless you make the effort to opt out); finally, many government censuses do not ask questions about religion, as for example in the U.S.). Nevertheless, the discrepancy between the main Anglican churches in Western countries and those in Africa (now the demographic center of the Anglican Communion) is instructive. The Church of England has 44 dioceses with 26 million official members, 1.2 million “realistic” ones. The Episcopal Church in the U.S. has 111 dioceses with 2.4 million official members, 800,000 “realistic” ones. Nigeria and Uganda are the largest churches in Africa, the website does not differentiate between the two categories of members; be this as it may, in Nigeria there are over 100 dioceses with over 17 million members, in Uganda 32 dioceses with over 9 million members. It’s clear who has the numbers. Needless to say, the financial resources of the Western churches are much superior to the African ones.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has been trying hard to avoid an outright schism. A recent event, which he himself caused for this end, has made his task more difficult. The leaders of African Anglicans, along with those in other non-Western countries, have been particularly shocked as the Episcopal Church in the U.S. sequentially consecrated an openly gay bishop, then ordained gay and lesbian priests, and most recently authorized priests to conduct same-sex weddings.

Yes, the Africans now send missionaries to minister to the souls of the benighted heathens in Britain and America.

Plus:

But the new African elites who celebrated the end of the Victorian Raj had been successfully indoctrinated with Victorian morals—and those turned out to be very functional to poor people trying to get out of poverty (if you will, the Max Weber effect), even if the elite (like elites everywhere) only paid lip service to moral principles while enjoying the hedonism supported by the privileges of power. But Anglican bishops are not part of the elites in Africa: When they uphold good Protestant values, in the best Evangelical tradition, this is no mere lip service—they really mean it! And so the Archbishop of Uganda may by 2019 excommunicate the Archbishop of Canterbury!

The getting-out-of-poverty thing is key, and will soon (again) have a similar relevance in the First World.

DISPATCHES FROM THE HIGHER EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Amherst College Drops ‘Lord Jeff’ as Mascot: “The institution, which is one of the most diverse private colleges in the nation, was encouraged to cut its ties with Lord Jeff, who came to be seen as an inappropriate symbol and offensive to many members of the student body.”

Isn’t everything?

CAN WE BUY THIS AND SEARCH FOR POLITICIANS’ AND JUDGES’ MOVEMENTS? THAT’LL GET IT FIXED FAST. A private company has captured 2.2 billion photos of license plates in cities throughout America. It stores them in a database, tagged with the location where they were taken. And it is selling that data.

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FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: The admiral in charge of Navy intelligence has not been allowed to see military secrets for years.

For more than two years, the Navy’s intelligence chief has been stuck with a major handicap: He’s not allowed to know any secrets.

Vice Adm. Ted “Twig” Branch has been barred from reading, seeing or hearing classified information since November 2013, when the Navy learned from the Justice Department that his name had surfaced in a giant corruption investigation involving a foreign defense contractor and scores of Navy personnel.

Worried that Branch was on the verge of being indicted, Navy leaders suspended his access to classified materials. They did the same to one of his deputies, Rear Adm. Bruce F. Loveless, the Navy’s director of intelligence operations.

More than 800 days later, neither Branch nor Loveless has been charged. But neither has been cleared, either. Their access to classified information remains blocked.

Although the Navy transferred Loveless to a slightly less sensitive post, it kept Branch in charge of its intelligence division. That has resulted in an awkward arrangement, akin to sending a warship into battle with its skipper stuck onshore.

It’s like this administration isn’t really serious about defending the country or something.

PUBLIC SPACES THEN AND NOW: “New Yorkers sense something changing, and not for the better. Much of this new unease seems to involve the rise in homelessness and increasing displays of disorder that take many new Gothamites by surprise while giving long-timers a chill of recognition.”

Read the whole thing.

Related: #NewYorkValues: City to soften its stance on public urination.

VIDEO: MSNBC Relentlessly Mocks Hillary Clinton For Leaving Iowa To Fundraise

Et tu, MSNBC?

DISPATCHES FROM THE HIGHER EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “Yes, it turns out that if you dare to question the premise of microaggressions, you will be called names and there will be shoving and punching.”

Punch back twice as hard, as a wise community organizer and Constitutional “scholar” once said.

ASHE SCHOW: Camille Paglia knocks Hillary Clinton’s brand of feminism.

American social critic Camille Paglia has accused Hillary Clinton of conforming to a “blame-men-first” brand of feminism. This kind of feminism “defines women as perpetual victims requiring government protections,” according to Paglia.

Paglia also suggested that this, coupled with her “sometimes impatient or patronizing tone about men,” could end up hurting her campaign.

It’s not hard to see where Paglia is coming from on this. Clinton endlessly reminds voters that she is a woman and running to be the first woman president, as if we forget or can’t tell. Yet despite this constant discussion of women and “women’s issues,” Clinton is beginning to lose support among women. Young women especially don’t care for Clinton, which at least seems odd considering how many college-aged social justice warriors there are claiming women in America are horribly oppressed.

Paglia also brings up how Clinton detoured from the “women don’t need men” mantra of second-wave feminism and began relying on Bill Clinton for her career advancements.

“As his most trusted counselor and strategist, she helped guide her husband’s rise to attorney general and governor of Arkansas, but at every point, her professional life, culminating in a partnership at the Rose Law Firm, was at least partly derived from her association with him — not an ideal feminist paradigm,” Paglia wrote.

The social critic took special note of how Clinton deviated from the “women as victims” narrative when it suited her — when her future was at risk due to husband Bill’s infidelities. At that time, Clinton began berating women who accused her husband of rape and women who remained in abusive relationships.

That’s true.

CLINTON FOUNDATION DONOR/LIBERAL FUNDER’S ILLEGAL DRUG TRIALS KILLED FIVE PEOPLE: But Obama’s Justice Department didn’t prosecute him. Swiss billionaire Hans Wyss – he of the $5 million promise to Hillary’s “No Ceilings” Clinton Foundation project – escaped prosecution after being the unnamed co-conspirator “Person No 7″ in a 2009 federal indictment. He ordered four corporate subordinates to conduct illegal human drug trials. Ultimately, five people died in the trials. The subordinates went to jail, but Wyss didn’t. Now Citizens United – yes, that Citizens United –  is demanding documents from Obama’s Justice Department on why.

Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group, who has been all over Wyss for three years, has the story on the Citizens United Freedom of Information Act requests. Wyss is on the Center for American Progress board of directors and one of the liberal think tank’s most generous funders. He also funds huge land grabs in the Western U.S. by enviro groups. Wyss is like George Soros but without the Hungarian accent. “Veddy, veddy bad man,” as Seinfeld’s Babu might well say.

NEBRASKA SEN. BEN SASSE REBUKES MEDIA FOR FAILING TO ASK TRUMP TOUGH QUESTIONS: “The media failed to vet President Obama in 2008, and right now I don’t think the people in your profession are doing a very good job of asking Trump real questions.”

The “I can’t believe he brought that up” grin from Chuck Todd, who began his career as an operative to former Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and remains a de facto Democratic operative with a byline is a nice tell.

NATION’S TWO LEADING SOCIALISTS MEET AT THE WHITE HOUSE, CONCLUDE EVERYTHING IS BUSH’S FAULT.

I never thought I’d say this, but Dubya really is unconstitutional — judging by the rhetoric of Bernie, Barry, and Hillary, he’s violated the 22nd Amendment and matched the number of terms that FDR served as president!

HMM: CQ Roll Call Survey of Hill Staff Finds Cruz, Trump on the Rise.

Republican staffers on Capitol Hill still are hoping Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will win the GOP presidential nomination, but more of them are having doubts that he’ll be able to do it.

Six in 10 of those who responded to CQ Roll Call’s Capitol Insiders Survey this month said Rubio would be the most formidable candidate for the Republicans. But only half think he’ll actually be the nominee and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and businessman Donald Trump are on the rise.

Trump and Cruz both doubled their tally from December when it comes to who aides believe will be the nominee. Twenty-one percent of the GOP aides surveyed said it will be Trump, while 17 percent think it will be Cruz.

Stay tuned.

FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION: The Ferguson Effect Is Real, and You Better Get Used To It, Jack Dunphy writes.

FRANCE AND IRAN COZYING UP ECONOMICALLY now that sanctions are lifted.

France and Iran hailed a set of business tie-ups and export deals on Thursday including the sale of dozens of Airbus planes and a car factory revamp that re-ignites a decades-old relationship between Tehran and carmaker Peugeot.

The deals, some of which were not yet finalised, were announced at a Franco-Iranian business forum attended by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and a host of ministers and business leaders.

The visit follows a deal between Iran and the west on the middle-eastern country’s nuclear program that resulted in the lifting earlier this month of trade sanctions.

Now that everybody is getting a taste of Iran’s oil money, those sanctions aren’t going to “snap back” no matter how flagrantly Iran violates the “treaty” which they never signed and which our Senate never ratified.

A TALE OF TWO TAPES: Teen Cruz and Terror-Coddler Obama.

THE UNCANNY PARALLELS BETWEEN Donald Trump and FDR. “Imagine a U.S. president who is bombastic, egotistical, and just a little racist. He worries opening the borders will mean an influx of undesirables. He implements capricious executive orders, and seems more concerned with his own power than with the Constitution. He’s often called a fascist by people who know what the term means. No, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

CLINTON CAMPAIGN CASH QUERY QUASHED: MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell asks about fundraising, gets the runaround.

Mitchell asked Brian Fallon why Clinton is doing a fundraiser in Philadelphia in the critical final days before the Iowa causes on Feb. 1. Clinton was originally slated to also have one in New York, but The Intercept reported that had been postponed until Feb. 16.

Mitchell noted Clinton trails Sanders in a Quinnipiac Iowa poll, suggesting Clinton might be “cutting it a little close.”

“Does she need the money because it’s now going to be a longer race than she had anticipated?” Mitchell asked.

“Oh, we’ve always planned for a long race, Andrea, and I don’t think we’re going to have any problem raising the resources we need to contest this nomination as far as it goes, but there’s also going to be other meetings that will probably be read out later in the day that she’s doing today,” Fallon said. “But, so, it’s not all fundraising, Andrea. But yeah, the realities of fundraising are what they are, but we’re ready for a long nomination fight, if necessary, but she’s still in Iowa every day this week.”

Clinton ran an expensive and top-heavy campaign in 2008, and nearly went broke in the early running, trying unsuccessfully to fend off the challenge from Senator Barack Obama. She’s running another expensive and top-heavy campaign in 2016, only this time the challenge comes from an elderly and almost-unknown self-avowed “Democratic Socialist” from tiny Vermont.

Given her political experience and proven fundraising skills, the way Clinton lurches from one unnecessary crisis to another should give voters pause about how she’d govern the country.

IS BERNIE SANDERS PLAYING OLD-FASHIONED POSTAL PORK BARREL POLITICS? He’s got a Senate hold on five presidential nominations to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors. That means the three people now left on the 11-member board are running the Post Office. Maybe the fact Bernie opposes a Post Office plan to close one of Vermont’s two big postal processing centers has something to do with his holds? Ethan Barton of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group connects the letters, uh, the dots.

AND CHILDREN OF MEN WASN’T 12 MONKEYS. BUT STILL. White House: Zika virus is not Ebola.

The Obama administration is looking to ease public fears over the Zika virus as it becomes increasingly likely that the mosquito-borne disease will spread to the U.S.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Wednesday that federal officials are planning a “conspicuous, concerted effort” to communicate the risks of the disease, making clear that it poses a far different — and less severe — threat than the recent Ebola epidemic.

While both viruses had a rapid spread, the Ebola virus can be fatal for anyone who becomes infected, while the Zika virus is most dangerous to women who are pregnant. Healthy, non-pregnant adults who contract the Zika virus will encounter symptoms like a “mild form of dengue fever,” Earnest said.

“Certainly the risk to pregnant women and women who may become pregnant is serious. But it’s also important for people to understand, if you’re a man, or you’re not pregnant, that the impact of the virus is relatively mild,” Earnest said. “We want to make sure people are properly educated about the risks of this virus.”

The outreach efforts on the Zika virus could help the administration avoid the panic caused by the Ebola virus’s spread into the U.S. in fall 2014. That disease, which is easily spread through human contact, has killed more than 11,000 people, nearly all in three small West African nations.

I mean, yes, it’s too early to panic. But when else have we had an entire country tell its women not to get pregnant for two years?

But what was troubling about Ebola was mostly the bumbling government response. Will they do better this time?

UPDATE: From the comments:

Ignoring pregnant men and men who may become pregnant? Someone needs to troll Josh Earnest about his transphobia. “Down with the gender binary!”

Heh.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Hundreds of DHS badges, guns, cell phones lost or stolen since 2012. “The missing badges and guns suggest a shocking lack of security from federal law enforcement officers and represent a significant security risk, experts say.” Ya think?

MAKE THE GREAT SOCIETY GREAT AGAIN! “Can you recall Trump ever talking at length about making the government smaller? He accused Republicans of ‘attacking Social Security — the Republicans — they’re attacking Medicare and Medicaid’ and he praised the infrastructure spending in the stimulus. His health-care plan is, ‘Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now. I would make a deal with existing hospitals to take care of people. The government’s gonna pay for it.’ Why do we need that in the Republican presidential nominee? We already get that from the Democratic nominee.”

Related: Trump Tells MSNBC He Has Great Relationships with Pelosi and Reid and He Will Make Deals with Democrats.

More: Harry Reid Recalls ‘Good Old Days’ When Trump ‘Did a Fundraiser or Two for Me.’

ROGER SIMON: Fox News Needs a Chill Pill before Thursday’s Debate.

WHY DONALD TRUMP AND BERNIE SANDERS ARE SURGING: “For many, the predominant feeling is pessimism rather than anger. Attend a Trump rally or a Sanders rally, and you’ll see less anger than excitement. They’re excited because they think they’ve found someone who stands for them, and with them. And the clearest sign of standing with them: declaring that the game is rigged and that America is a mess. This pessimism sounds odd inside the Beltway, and among most Americans with college or graduate degrees. Most politicians, in both parties, operate in circles where the American Dream is alive and well. And if the game is rigged, it’s rigged in their favor.”

IF IT’S A LEFTY TALKING POINT, ODDS ARE GOOD THAT IT’S A FRAUD: The ‘Tampon Tax’ Fraud:

Maybe this makes me a traitor to my sex, but I support the tampon tax.

Mostly because it’s not actually a tampon tax.

For those unaware, “tampon tax” is shorthand for the fact that menstrual products are subject to sales taxes in most states, even though other products considered necessities (such as food and medicine) are often exempted.

In recent months, this has spawned a legion of articles suggesting that squeamish, old, predominantly male politicians are punishing half of humanity for the crime of having a period. Some offer stories about poor women who say “tampon taxes” are cutting into money they desperately need for groceries or other bills.

The issue has gained steam on the left, partly because it fits neatly into both the “war on women” and “war on the poor” narratives. Protests have erupted across the United States and abroad; bills have been introduced in state legislatures around the country, and a change.org petition gathered more than 40,000 signatures. Activists have already logged wins in Canada and France.

Last week, even President Obama got drawn into the battle. …

[I]t’s highly misleading to call the taxes that tampons are subject to “tampon taxes.” To my knowledge, no jurisdiction has a tampon-specific tax, as it might an alcohol or yacht tax. …

They lie, because if they told the truth people wouldn’t support them. And they use vicious racial and sexist stereotypes because that’s how Democrats have traditionally rolled.

FASTER, PLEASE: We are witnessing the end of the House of Clinton.

IDEALLY, EVERY TIME SOMEONE IN THE MSM BRINGS UP THE TOPIC: Another Environmentalist Doomsday Clock Expires, When Can We Laugh?

Do not miss the Reefer Madness-esque 2008 Good Morning America video forecasting CLIMATE APOCALYPSE 2015. “By the end of the clip I was expecting to see the esteemed doctors Peter Venkman, Egon Spengler, and Ray Stantz step forward to predict, ‘Rivers and Seas boiling!’ ‘Forty years of darkness!’ And of course the ultimate disasters: ‘Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together . . . Mass hysteria!’

At this point, I trust the Ghostbusters’ scientific methods more than I do those trotted out by the DNC-MSM.

TAKING WISDOM FROM A 14 YEAR OLD IS LIKE DRINKING FROM THE TOILET BOWL: ‘Girl Meets World’ Star Might Want to Meet a Biology Textbook.

DARWIN AWARD WORTHY: The New Defense for Criminal Activity: We Did It To Save the Planet!

EUROPE USED TO BE A SAFE ZONE:A ‘Safe Zone’ in Cologne.

THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE: Facebook is Run by SJWs.

OBAMA AND KERRY GIVE IRAN THEIR LUNCH MONEY: Post-sanctions Iran rakes in the dough — and still slaps America.

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT: Women and Science Fiction—So What Am I, Chopped Liver?

A VIEW OF THE CIRCLING HYENAS: After Abbas: The coming Palestinian bloodbath.

I DON’T THINK IT’S THAT GREAT A DANGER: that said, we should bring back DDT.  We should have done it long ago.  We should never have outlawed it.  The only silent spring is the millions of children dead of malaria throughout the world. The CDC is brushing off the Zika virus.

IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Hundreds of DHS badges, guns, cell phones lost or stolen since 2012.

DESECRATING THE CLASSICS ON THE ALTAR OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: Do you ever wonder, should we survive the Crazy Years whether the future generations will despise us or REALLY despise us?  ‘Anne of Green Gables’ Gets the Politically Correct Remake Treatment.

THE COUNTRY IS IN THE BEST OF HANDS: Clinton Chief Of Staff Lost Her Personal Blackberry, Which Contained Classified Emails.

AND SPEAKING OF STACEY MCCAIN: Democrats, Feminists and Other Liars.

RUNNING AROUND THE SUPREME COURT: California AG Threatens Non-Profit Donors’ First Amendment Rights.

PAGING STACEY MCCAIN: A new feminist ‘critique’.

RITES OF INCLUSION: ‘Excluded’ by the Rev. Martin Luther King — a new low in campus PC.

VICTIMHOOD NOT MERIT: Hollywood Plays “Who’s the Biggest Victim?” Game.

THAT’S NOT THE WAY I’D BET: Does Europe Have a Future?

CREDIT WHERE DUE; MARVEL REACHED OUT THROUGH WOUNDED WARRIOR PROJECT: Marvel gave its amputee superhero prosthetic legs — with the help of an Iraq War vet.

A QUANTUM OF ACCOUNTABILITY: Mizzou professor who called for ‘muscle’ suspended.

A University of Missouri assistant professor who has faced an avalanche of criticism after she was caught on video calling for “some muscle” to help her eject a student journalist at a protest site on campus has been suspended from her duties, the University of Missouri System Board of Curators announced Wednesday.

The decision to suspend Melissa Click came two days after the Columbia, Mo. city prosecutor’s office announced it had filed a misdemeanor simple assault charge against the department of communication professor. The charge relates to the Nov. 9 incident on campus that captured national attention.

“MU Professor Melissa Click is suspended pending further investigation,” said Pam Henrickson, chairwoman of the Board of Curators, which governs the four University of Missouri campuses. “The Board of Curators directs the General Counsel, or outside counsel selected by General Counsel, to immediately conduct an investigation and collaborate with the city attorney and promptly report back to the Board so it may determine whether additional discipline is appropriate.”

Melissa Click faces a Class C misdemeanor simple assault charge for the incident, in which she was filmed having physical contact and berating a student journalist. The student was trying to conduct interviews at a site set up on the university’s flagship campus in Columbia by students protesting the treatment of African Americans by administrators.

A video of the confrontation, which was taken by student journalist Mark Schierbecker and went viral on the Internet, begins with a group of protesters yelling and pushing another student journalist, Tim Tai, who was trying to photograph the campsite. At the end of the video, Schierbecker approaches Click, who calls for “some muscle” to remove him from the protest area. She then appears to grab at Schierbecker’s camera.

Click, who will continue to be paid during her suspension, was at the protest site as an ally of the activist group Concerned Student 1950, which mounted weeks of protests on campus. Those protests culminated with the firing of University of Missouri system president and the chancellor of the university’s Columbia campus.

It will be interesting to see if there’s a greater penalty down the line.

AT AMAZON, Free Assembly on Premium Grills.

SIGNS OF CIVILIZATIONAL COLLAPSE: Danish teen fought off her attacker – now she’ll face fine.

The teenager told police that she was attacked in central Sønderborg on Wednesday at around 10pm by a dark-skinned English-speaking man. She said the man knocked her to the ground and then unbuttoned her pants and attempted to undress her.

The girl was able to save herself from further assault by using pepper spray on the attacker, but now she may be the one who ends up in legal trouble.

“It is illegal to possess and use pepper spray, so she will likely be charged for that,” local police spokesman Knud Kirsten told TV Syd.

The case has sparked a backlash among some Danes who point to increasing reports of sexual harassment in Sønderborg and other Danish cities at the same time that police say they are stretched too thin to properly carry out their duties.

Numerous readers wrote in the comments section on TV Syd’s story about the incident that they would be willing to pay the girl’s fine, which will most likely be 500 kroner.

The man who attacked the 17-year-old fled from the scene and has not been charged.

Sexual assaults have been in the news in Sønderborg recently after several women in the town reported earlier this month that they sometimes feel harassed by the aggressive behaviour of some male asylum seekers and refugees at the local asylum centre.

Pathetic.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Meet Bernie Sanders, The Bum Who Wants Your Money.

It wasn’t as bad as he says. His family managed to send him to the University of Chicago. Despite a prestigious degree, however, Sanders failed to earn a living, even as an adult. It took him 40 years to collect his first steady paycheck — and it was a government check.

“I never had any money my entire life,” Sanders told Vermont public TV in 1985, after settling into his first real job as mayor of Burlington. . . .

Sanders took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him. Penniless, he went on unemployment. Then he had a child out of wedlock. Desperate, he tried carpentry but could barely sink a nail. “He was a shi**y carpenter,” a friend told Politico Magazine. “His carpentry was not going to support him, and didn’t.”

Then he tried his hand freelancing for leftist rags, writing about “masturbation and rape” and other crudities for $50 a story. He drove around in a rusted-out, Bondo-covered VW bug with no working windshield wipers. Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.

The only thing he was good at was talking … non-stop … about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off. “The whole quality of life in America is based on greed,” the bitter layabout said. “I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation.”

So he tried politics.

Beats honest work.

TRY A 30-DAY FREE TRIAL of Amazon Prime.

WELL, WHY WOULD IT BE? Camille Paglia psychoanalyzes Hillary Clinton and it’s not very pretty.

ANOTHER OLD GUY, RETAINING THE INGRAINED BIGOTRY OF HIS YOUTH: Nobel Laureate Won’t Allow Guns in Class, Despite Law.

ANDREW KLAVAN: Why We Should Celebrate The Revenant.

Beyond the obvious reason, of course.

NEWSPAPER PUBLISHES MAP showing thieves which neighborhoods are safest to rob.

But only 3% of Texans are licensed to carry? Here in Knox County it’s like 12%.

WATERY GRAVE: Century Later, Fate of Lost German U-Boat Revealed. “After being on the seabed for over a century, the submarine appears to be in a remarkable condition with the conning tower present and the bows partially buried.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Advertisers now portray men the way they portrayed women in the 1950s: as either dumb or pretty.

“Modern men: brainless, buffed bimbos, they can’t put up a shelf to save their lives, they’re too thick to even do the laundry or look after the kids, but – oi, oi! – they don’t half look good in budgie-smugglers! Come on, boys, get yer pecs out for the girls!”

This repellent mindset might sound like the bastard child of a 1990s hen party from hell, but, if a new report from Mintel is to be believed, this is exactly how contemporary consumer “hunkvertising” depicts men – and, tragically, some us are even starting to believe it. . . .

What is more concerning is advertisers’ and programme makers’ depiction of men as stupid, subservient slaves to career-juggling supermums – a trend that runs from the buffoonery of Daddy Pig to an endless tidal wave of cretinous TV ad dads.

Lots of men are starting to notice.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Five Tips to Get Your Body in Shape for Self-Defense.

ONE DEAD IN OREGON AS WILDLIFE REFUGE OCCUPATION LEADERS ARRESTED: Occupiers remaining at refuge headquarters told they can leave, but will they dig in for a standoff?

THE IMPORTANCE OF taking all your antibiotics.

HILLARY TRYING THE “SORRY IF YOU WERE OFFENDED” NON-APOLOGY APOLOGY ANGLE: Clinton Regrets ‘Uproar and Commotion’ Over Her Insecure Email System. “In other words, the reason her unique email arrangement was a mistake is not that she mishandled classified information (making it easier to hack into, possibly even exposing intelligence assets on the ground) but because it got her in trouble.”