Dejected and desperate Democrats are grasping at hope that recounts in three (relatively) close states could reverse Trump's win and make Hillary Clinton president. They've tossed $6 million-plus into third-party candidate Jill Stein's recount campaign. Delusional. Meanwhile, they are ignoring the reality that Republicans have (so far) won only 51 of the 100 Senate seats. Louisiana will hold a runoff vote in less than two weeks.

It's official: Debbie Wasserman Schultz will not speak at the Democratic convention. She's still nominally chairwoman of the DNC, though Hillary was forced to strip her of all actual power as down payment toward winning Bernie's endorsement. The issue for the convention was not whether Debbie would be booed by Sanders delegates if she took the podium, it was whether she would be booed off the stage a la Ted Cruz. The question became pretty much moot Friday, after Wikileaks released 20,000 hacked DNC emails, some of which detailed how she and her staffers basically colluded with the Clinton campaign to sabotage Bernie's run. Then yesterday, Robert Reich called for her to be fired immediately, rather than just demoted out of the way.

The cosmos put on quite a show yesterday, sending two massive asteroids (one a total surprise) Earth's way within hours of each other.

A good thing, all in all. Nobody died, but the astronomic coincidence -- and especially the stunning dash-cam images out of Chelyabinsk -- focused a lot of minds on a real threat our civilization faces.

In 2006, I witnessed close-up one of the most shameful events in Canadian journalism. The conservative National Post had received a column by Iranian-born writer Amir Taheri stating that Iran’s parliament had passed a law requiring distinctive clothing (possibly colored badges or stripes) for each of the country’s religious minorities. The Post ran the story, along with its own incendiary commentary, atop Page 1. And illustrated it with photos of Jews wearing stars of David in Nazi death camps.

The story went viral; other right-wing rags and blogs elaborated on it. The next day, the Post retracted and apologized, after receiving a point-by-point rebuttal from Iran’s lone Jewish legislator (the community has been guaranteed one constitutionally for more than a century). No such law had been proposed, much less passed. And it turned out one of the sources Taheri cited didn’t exist. He claimed his words had been taken out of context. They hadn’t. Taheri’s credibility was ruined, or so I assumed.