ROLL CALL: McConnell Faces More Calls for ‘Nuclear Option’ in Senate. It would be nice to see McConnell act as aggressively has Harry Reid did when he was majority leader. It might also discourage such action by future Democratic majority leaders.

DOES ANYBODY IN THE BELTWAY PERMA-BUREAUCRACY EVER LOSE HIS JOB? EPA Administrator: No One’s Lost Their Job Over Agency’s Mine Spill.

RUSH LIMBAUGH’S DEFENSE OF DONALD TRUMP IS SHOCKING: For someone whose conservative bona fides was once praised by no less than William F. Buckley, it is fascinating to see Rush jump in hard on the Trump bandwagon.

JUSTICE IN THE OBAMA ERA: To get my father, Xiaoxing Xi, FBI twisted America’s ideals: Joyce Xi.

This is not the America I thought I knew.

I did not know FBI agents could wake my family in the early morning and enter our home, point guns at my mother, sister and me, and forcefully drag my father away in handcuffs without real evidence of a crime. I did not know they could then obtain a search warrant to flip through our entire home and seize our belongings, including some of my little sister’s things. I did not know the government could restrict my father’s freedom for months and force him to fight for his innocence with only false and reckless claims against him.

I know, sorry, you thought you lived in America. You’re not the first Asian to make that mistake in the Obama era. But, you know, we’ve been “fundamentally transformed.” Hopey Changey!

Alternate: They told me if I voted for Mitt Romney, we’d live in a dystopian national security state where incompetent thugs trampled the rights of innocent Americans. And they were right!

FUNNY, THEY NEVER COMPLAINED WHEN ANDREW SULLIVAN WAS CLAIMING, REPEATEDLY, THAT TRIG PALIN WAS ACTUALLY BRISTOL’S BABY: White House rips Trump over birther reaction.

See, you can’t persuasively pull the “have you no decency?” posture off when you so obviously have none yourself.

YES, THIS IS A SATIRE SITE: And yet…

THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES FOR EVIL VILLAINS: to tamper with this. DARPA Has Made a Brain Implant That Boosts Your Memory.

PLAGUES OF LOCUSTS NEXT MONTH: Hawaii Raises Volcano Alert.

FARTHER PLEASE: This Plane Will Soar to the Edge of Space on Giant Air Currents.

IN CASE YOU WERE GETTING SLEEPY OR SOMETHING: Terror Fears As Iran Frees Al Qaeda Members.

OF COURSE IT DOES: Obama Deal Allows Iran To Pay Others To Build Its Nuclear Program.

HOPEFULLY, THIS WILL DISTRACT PEOPLE FROM THE FACT THAT WE’RE LOSING THE WAR: Obama nominates openly gay man to lead Army.

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WELL, IF I RECALL CORRECTLY, THE CHARGES AGAINST GALILEO WERE BROUGHT AT THE BEHEST OF HIS RIVALS: Professors: Federal government should totally seek RICO charges against climate change skeptics.

You can behave like this and also claim the mantle of science. But not honestly.

WHEN DEMOCRATIC CONSTITUENCIES COLLIDE: Though it’s police unions that protect bad cops, Black Lives Matter activists and politician-supporters are oddly silent on the subject.

WHEN CATTY PUTDOWNS BACKFIRE: Two sponsors drop ‘The View’ after nurse jokes.

HOW HAVE OUR HEROES CHANGED? At Acculturated, Mark Tapson writes:

The model hero in ancient times was of the conquering, killing sort, a warrior earning renown by slaying piles of enemies on the battlefield. Think of Homer’s Achilles, whom Lindberg examines at length: a self-centered, petulant demigod, perhaps, but a warrior of superhuman caliber. Or Julius Caesar, a man so determined to be the greatest man in Rome that he would destroy the Republic in a civil war rather than rein in his ambition.

But over the centuries, the slaying hero gradually fell out of fashion, thanks in large measure to the horrors of World War I and Vietnam, not to mention the rise of the literary antihero such as The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield. Our ideal of the hero morphed instead into a courageous soul who is no less afraid of death but more focused on saving lives than taking them. Achilles’ modern counterpart acts not to kill and conquer, but to serve and save others. “From slaying to saving,” writes Lindberg, “from the highest, riskiest expression of self-regard to the highest, riskiest expression of generosity and the caring will.”

Lindberg uses the history of the Congressional Medal of Honor—the U.S. military’s highest decoration—to demonstrate this evolution of heroism. He reviewed the award from its creation during the Civil War to the present, and concluded that “the percentage of citations that include a saving narrative [as opposed to a killing narrative] has increased markedly” over time.

Whatever cultural changes that allowed the “saving narrative” to triumph over the “killing narrative,” the firemen of 9/11 (whom Tapson refers to at the start of his article) and the men who risk their lives to save others on the battlefield are all legitimate heroes and entirely deserving of society’s respect, despite the culture pushing an Audie Murphy-type such as Chris Kyle into the background.

Far worse is another changing cultural value, in which victims reflexively become not just replacements for heroes but “a new kind of aristocracy,” as Jonah Goldberg writes in his latest G-File:

(Whatever you think of Ahmed Mohamed and his clock, it is now obvious that the best thing that ever happened to him was getting wrongfully arrested. If he’d brought in a baking-soda volcano, or had been a blond kid named Smith, he would not be heading to the White House or getting the royal treatment from Facebook and Google).

The point is we live in an age where victimhood is the new currency, victims a new kind of aristocracy, and pity a cardinal virtue. Conservatives — who are by no means separate from, or immune to, this cultural shift — have at least been lamenting it for a very long time. What is interesting is that academia is finally catching up. Jonathan Haidt:

I just read the most extraordinary paper by two sociologists — Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning — explaining why concerns about microaggressions have erupted on many American college campuses in just the past few years. In brief: We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more dueling.

Campbell and Manning describe how this culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized. It is the very presence of such administrative bodies, within a culture that is highly egalitarian and diverse (i.e., many college campuses) that gives rise to intense efforts to identify oneself as a fragile and aggrieved victim. This is why we have seen the recent explosion of concerns about microaggressions, combined with demands for trigger warnings and safe spaces, that Greg Lukianoff and I wrote about in The Coddling of the American Mind.

And as Ace recently noted, “Compare to Lukianoff’s and Haidt’s piece in the Atlantic suggesting that ‘microagression culture’ is an insidious, harmful form of cognitive therapy — as positive cognitive therapy would desensitize a hysteric so that the hysteric could behave normally, insidious cognitive therapy supersensitizes normal people into acting like hysterics…Lukianoff describes how he came to have this insight. He’d fallen prey to depression, and went through cognitive therapy to teach his brain to stop ‘catastrophizing’ and to unlearn other pernicious mental habits. It began to dawn on him that the Social Justice Warrior claque was using cognitive therapy to go the other direction, transforming the mentally well into the mentally unwell.”

This doesn’t bode well for the future of western civilization. (Or the lack thereof.)

RELATED: Reverse Engineering Ahmed Mohamed’s Clock… and Ourselves: “So I turned to eBay, searching for vintage alarm clocks. It only took a minute to locate Ahmed’s clock. See this eBay listing, up at the time of this writing. Amhed’s clock was invented, and built, by Micronta, a Radio Shack subsidiary. Catalog number 63 756.”

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ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS LIVING 30 TO A HOUSE IN NJ NEIGHBORHOOD CREATING FIRE HAZARD PROMPTS RESIDENT TO SELL HIS HOME:

Part of his frustration, he says, is that he’s paying $10K a year in property taxes and he’s done either way, and will be heading down south to Georgia.

New research has shown that New Jersey is one of 6 states where 60% of the nation’s Illegal immigrants live.

Bruen stated, “I want equality. I want to be treated equally like the illegal immigrations. I want the same rights as the illegal immigrants. Is that possible?”

If only New Jersey’s governor were running for the presidency, and was seeking a hot-button issue to gain some traction against the candidate who made illegal immigration his signature topic…

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: “Seven years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, D.C. has lost another gun case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia — one that involves the very same plaintiff, Dick Heller.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Bar Exam Scores Drop To Their Lowest Point In Decades — Unprepared Students Can’t Handle A Harder Test.

THIS SEEMS LIKE DUBIOUS FINANCIAL ADVICE:If You Have Savings In Your 20s, You’re Doing Something Wrong.

I don’t have any savings, but I also don’t have any wants.

I don’t know about you, but I like to enjoy my life. I like to go out to eat, buy clothes I don’t “need” and spend money with friends on memorable nights out.

This goes back to a piece of advice a very successful friend gave me: “Don’t save money. Make more money,” he nonchalantly stated, pushing me into a taxi.

Unlike most things people tell me, this advice did not go in one ear and out the other; it stayed with me and changed the way I look at everything from my career to my savings.

I suppose that there are some 20-somethings who may need to relax and live a little. I don’t think there are all that many, compared with the number who need to handle their money more prudently.

OBAMA TO NOMINATE FIRST OPENLY GAY SERVICE SECRETARY: “The president will nominate Eric Fanning to take over as the next secretary of the Army, making him the first openly gay service secretary if he is confirmed by the Senate, the White House announced on Friday,” the Washington Examiner reports. “If approved, he would lead the service at a time where the Army is looking at cutting an additional 40,000 soldiers from its ranks under a tight budget environment as the country faces numerous threats from theaters all around the world.”

WOMEN ARE FLEEING HILLARY because they think she lied about her email server. Well, she did. And is. And will continue to.

HOUSE VOTES TO DEFUND PLANNED PARENTHOOD FOR ONE YEAR: It’s a nice gesture, but will likely remain just that — as Debra Heine writes at the PJ Tatler, “The president has vowed to veto both bills should they pass the Senate, at which point they will need to be passed by a two-thirds majority in Congress to become law.”

BIRTHERS, THEN AND NOW:  Video: Hillary, who started the “Obama is a Muslim” thing in 2008, appalled that Trump might think Obama is a Muslim.

In early 2011, right around the time that proselytizing atheist Time-Warner-CNN-HBO spokesman Bill Maher admitted on the air that he doesn’t think Obama is a Christian, Scott Johnson of Power Line quipped, “One of President Obama’s most prominent and least attractive qualities is his vanity. It almost disposes of the speculation that Obama is a Muslim. The man can’t be a Muslim; he worships himself.”

RELATED: Trump Being Criticized for ‘Not Responding’ to Birther Question.

OBAMA THROWS HILLARY UNDER THE BUS: “The central mission of Barack Obama’s White House in the waning days of his administration is to communicate to the public that none of this is his fault,” Noah Rothman writes at Commentary:

The aim was to identify reasonably secular moderate fighters in Syria, transfer them to third-party countries in the region, train them, equip them, and reintroduce them into the theater of operations. By August of this year and $500 million later, the Pentagon acknowledged that only 54 Syrian rebels had been prepared for combat. Less than a month later, almost all of them had been killed or captured. General Lloyd Austin told Congress this week that only “four or five” are continuing the fight against ISIS in Syria.

This self-evidently failed half-measure is a substantial embarrassment for this White House, and the administration’s insular and paranoid handlers cannot allow that. As is the wont of this pathologically defensive administration, they have gone about looking for blame-worthy figures outside the ever-shrinking circle of Obama loyalists. “The finger, it says, should be pointed not at Mr. Obama but at those who pressed him to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place,” New York Times reporter Peter Baker revealed, “a group that, in addition to congressional Republicans, happened to include former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

The White House all but washed its hands of the training program after General Austin’s testimony.

“It is true that we have found this to be a difficult challenge,”[White House Press Secretary Josh] Earnest said. “But it is also true that many of our critics had proposed this specific option as essentially the cure-all for all of the policy challenges that we’re facing in Syria right now. That is not something that this administration ever believed, but it is something that our critics will have to answer for.”

Forget for the moment a craven and humiliating self-defense that rests on the notion that the president was led by the nose into executing this flawed strategy, and the inescapable conclusion inexplicably promoted by this White House that the commander-in-chief is simply too pliant and irresolute. The desperation of blaming not merely Republicans but the Democrats’ best hope for retaining the presidency and preserving Obama’s achievements in office, Hillary Clinton, is pusillanimous in the extreme.

Read the whole thing. And get ready for the most surreal final year of a president ever. Pass the popcorn — and at the rate Obama is going, perhaps the anti-radiation pills as well.

ONLINE SHOPPING OFFERS INSUFFICIENT OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRAFT: In an age of painless online shopping, why do we keep buying vehicles at dealerships?

OF COURSE SHE DOES: Hillary Clinton pushes campus sexual assault myths. If she told the truth, that rape on and off campus has been plummeting for over 20 years, her whole War On Women campaign would collapse.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: How Putin Outflanks Obama in Syria.

Once again, President Obama and his foreign policy team are stumped. Why is Vladimir Putin pouring troops and weaponry into Syria?. . .

Kerry and Obama are serially surprised because they cannot fathom the hard men in the Kremlin. . . .

Putin will offer Russia as a core member of a new anti-Islamic State coalition. Obama’s Potemkin war — with its phantom local troops (our $500 million training program has yielded five fighters so far) and flaccid air campaign — is flailing badly. What Putin is proposing is that Russia, Iran and Hezbollah spearhead the anti-jihadist fight.

Putin’s offer is clear: Stop fighting Assad, accept Russia as a major player, and acquiesce to a Russia-Iran-Hezbollah regional hegemony — and we will lead the drive against the Islamic State from in front.

And there is a bonus. The cleverest part of the Putin gambit is its unstated cure for Europe’s refugee crisis.

Wracked by guilt and fear, the Europeans have no idea what to do. Putin offers a way out: No war, no refugees. Stop the Syrian civil war and not only do they stop flooding into Europe, those already there go back home to Syria.

When America fails to lead, others will step in to fill the global vacuum.

RELATED: Russia moves fighter jets to Syria.

NO ONE LIKES BILL DE BLASIO: “Vanity Fair profile littered with unflattering quotes,” as spotted by Lachlan Markay of the Washington Free Beacon, who includes these gems:

From “a longtime political operative who admires the mayor”: “I’ve known Bill a long time, and he is really more like a liberal professor or political activist than he is actually a mayor. If you look at mayors around the country, look at Rahm in Chicago, Garcetti in L.A., they tend to be more nonpartisan than not. They tend to be problem solvers: ‘What’s the problem? What’s the solution?’ Bill comes from a very different perspective. When Bill is presented with a problem, I always imagine him musing, ‘Hmm, what’s my political philosophy on this?’ He’s not a natural manager—I mean, that’s an understatement.”

* * * * * * * *

From an “operative and longtime acquaintance of the mayor’s”: “The founding myth of the de Blasio administration is that people heard his transcendent vision about income inequality and there was a mandate for that … when in fact there was a win by default. He was elected because he was running against three Democrats and a Republican who ran a shitty campaign … He has taken this as a mandate for running this city on what he campaigned on. Bill thinks he was elected on income inequality, and he wasn’t. I think he misunderstands the electorate.”

So Obama on the Hudson, then?

THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS WAS JUST A NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? 35 MILLION migrants heading to Europe, says Hungary as it builds second fence.

EUROPE’S HOLIDAY FROM HISTORY HAS BEEN OVER FOR A WHILE, BUT ITS LEADERS ARE JUST BEGINNING TO NOTICE: Europe’s Migrant Crisis: Ideals vs. Realities. “What Germany has created through three weeks of unrestrained idealism is a policy quagmire that may reverberate for generations.” That’s the price you pay for virtue signalling by the powerful.

OOPS: “Feminists have long argued that women should pursue careers just like men do. Now that many women have successfully done so, however, they are beginning to resent the fact that while they are toiling away at the office, there are free-spirited dudes watching Bravo TV while eating artisanal snacks back at their apartments.”

I WAS ALREADY PRETTY CONVINCED: 10 Stories That Prove Gurkhas Are the Fiercest Fighters on the Planet.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Watchdog finds widespread fraud at U.S. Census Bureau.

WAPO: This Ted Cruz booster is 13, black, and just shredded Obama on clock kid. “When Kate Steinle was gunned down by an illegal immigrant, you didn’t do anything. You didn’t even call the family. You didn’t invite them to the White House. Is that okay? I don’t think so, Mr. President.”

CHANGE: Post-Debate Poll: Fiorina Surges to First Place, Tied With Trump. It’s a real (robo-)poll, not an online poll. “A post-debate poll conducted by Gravis Marketing for One America News Network (OAN) shows Carly Fiorina jumping to first place at 22%, tied with Donald Trump. In their previous poll, Fiorina ranked 7th with 2.7% of the vote.”

FLEEING THE SINKING SHIP: Big business donors, Obama cabinet drop Clinton charity event.

More bad news for the Clintons. With Hillary’s presidential campaign slipping in the polls against Sen. Bernie Sanders and facing a potential fresh challenge from Vice President Joe Biden, six giants of the corporate world are bailing out on the Clinton Global Initiative.

On Sept. 26, CGI, a branch of the Clinton Foundation, convenes its 11th annual meeting with a star-studded cast. Bill and Chelsea Clinton will be joined by Ashley Judd, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Ted Danson, Tina Brown, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sir Richard Branson, Bill Gates and George Soros. What will be missing is more than a million dollars from a who’s who of corporate behemoths that sponsored the meeting last year. Six high-profile firms ended their cash donations, to be replaced with only one similar high-profile corporate donor so far.

USA TODAY has confirmed that sponsors from 2014 that have backed out for this year include electronics company Samsung, oil giant ExxonMobil, global financial firms Deutsche Bank and HSBC, and accounting firm PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers). Hewlett-Packard, which just announced major layoffs, will be an in-kind donor instead of a cash contributor, and the agri-chem firm Monsanto has cut back its donation. Dow’s name is missing from the donor list as well, but the chemical company’s exit is not confirmed.

High-profile corporations might not be the only key supporters backing away from association with the Clinton family’s charitable arm. In 2014, eight national leaders, kings, presidents and prime ministers, appeared on the program for CGI’s annual meeting, including the president of the United States and the prime minister of Japan. This year, only leaders from Colombia and Liberia are currently on the program.

You almost feel sorry for Hillary as the inevitability falls apart again. Almost.

CHANGE: A Nuclear Evolution Is Occurring In Tennessee.

While it’s been a long and slow process, the Tennessee Valley Authority is moving closer to starting up one of its nuclear plants that it expects will displace coal and help curb the region’s carbon emissions.

Most of the attention is now given to those merchant nuclear units that are in the process of closing, with little focus on the gradual development of TVA’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant Unit 2. Originally licensed in 1972, it shut down in the 1980s because of security and economic concerns. Now, though, the Clean Power Plan has thrust this plant forward.

That final regulation released in August requires a 32 percent cut in carbon emissions by 2030, from a 2005 baseline. It gives full recognition to all new nuclear plants or those existing ones that make upgrades, although it does not give current nuclear plants any credit for carbon reductions. With that, Watts Bar 2 is expected to rev up this year — long before 2020, which is when Southern Co SO +2.33%. and Scana Corp. are to complete two units each.

All are to be baseload plants that run around-the-clock. The two units at Southern and the two at Scana will each generate about 2,200 megawatts. TVA’s Watts Bar 2 will crank out 1,150 megawatts. For the record, nuclear power has the greatest “capacity factors” of all power generation, or 92 percent; wind and solar energy are half that.

If you’re worried about carbon emissions, you need to support nuclear power, or you’re not serious.

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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 862.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Cascading Border Closures Rock Europe.

Europe is experiencing a series of cascading border closures, rippling outward like circuit breakers tripping during a power surge. A week ago, Denmark suspended its rail link to Germany. On Monday, Germany closed its border with Austria. Austria, Slovakia, and the Netherlands all clamped “temporary” border restrictions into place.

On Tuesday, Hungary sealed its border with Serbia; yesterday, Hungarian border guards used water cannons, tear gas, and truncheons to beat back a sea of migrants. This in turn forced more than 5,000 people to seek an alternate path through Croatia north to Slovenia and Germany. Croatian authorities indicated that while they want to help, Croatia’s capacity for handling migrant flows was limited to the thousands, not to the tens of thousands. And then Slovenian authorities today announced that they would reinforce their border with Croatia, potentially creating another dead end for the thousands of migrants massing in the Balkans.

This was inevitable when Brussels and Berlin signaled a determination to treat the immigration problem—which is a hybrid refugee crisis and migrant moment—in purely humanitarian terms. Those languishing in the south of Europe or even in refugee camps in Turkey heard the official declarations as an open-ended invitation to the generous, prosperous, new Germany; they rushed northward and overloaded the system.

European leaders had no practical plans to deal with the wave of migrants they were encouraging. While some of the border shutdowns—such as Hungary’s—were triggered by ideology, many are a matter of logistics. Germany, it turns out, has absolutely no legal immigration mechanism. It hasn’t enforced a land border since 1995. Is it any wonder it wasn’t able to process the inflow into Bavaria, despite the government’s best intentions? Now, border controls are now rippling from the desirable destinations in Europe (Germany and Scandinavia) outward to its more remote borders.

The Gods of The Copybook Headings smile and nod.

COMPARISON: Ted Cruz’s Scorpion Ad vs. Ronald Reagan’s Bear-in-the-Woods ad.

FROM “LET THEM IN” TO “GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS” IN RECORD TIME: E.U. nations pull welcome mats for migrants, imposing new restrictions.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: On campus political correctness, Obama gets it right: Even our Democratic president understands blacklisting conservative speakers doesn’t promote learning.

ASHE SCHOW: One year since White House launched ‘It’s On Us’ campaign, where are the results?

On Sep. 19, 2014, the White House launched the “It’s On Us” campaign, its latest attempt to combat campus sexual assault.

If the measure of a successful program is the number of celebrities that endorse it, then “It’s On Us” has been a rousing success. But in the year since the campaign was launched, the Obama administration has been unable to point to one tangible success of the program.

Earlier this month, the administration sent out a “fact sheet” highlighting the first year of the campaign and including everything President Obama and his administration has done to combat sexual assault and violence against women. One thing noticeably absent from the press release: One iota of evidence that any of the numerous committees, task forces, programs, campaigns or speeches has made a dent in the number of sexual assaults.

The only tangible result that this campaign was intended to produce was a firming up of the “War On Women” narrative that was supposed to solidify female votes for Hillary. Problem is, it turns out women don’t much like Hillary. Men either.

And, hey, campus sexual assault has already been dropping on its own since 1992, so no harm done.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Obama’s Messy Iraq Intelligence Scandal: We’ve heard tales of ‘cherry-picked intelligence’ before—it hasn’t ended well.

THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS WAS JUST A NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? On the edge of Europe, more and more refugees reach this idyllic Greek island.

UPDATE: Chaos in Croatia as Hungary Closes Border. “Migrants flooding into Croatia will be ‘moved on’, PM Zoran Milanovic has warned, adding that his country cannot become a ‘migrant hotspot’.”

ROLL CALL: With Boehner Squeezed, Pelosi, Reid, Obama Unified on Shutdown Strategy.

If they passed a normal budget, with separate spending bills for each department, instead of continuing resolutions, there wouldn’t be a credible threat of a shutdown. So why don’t they do that? . . .

Related: House GOP invokes ‘martial law’ for avoiding shutdown.

ANNALS OF SMART DIPLOMACY^TM: Finger-Pointing, but Few Answers, After a Syria Solution Fails.

By any measure, President Obama’s effort to train a Syrian opposition army to fight the Islamic State on the ground has been an abysmal failure. The military acknowledged this week that just four or five American-trained fighters are actually fighting.

But the White House says it is not to blame. The finger, it says, should be pointed not at Mr. Obama but at those who pressed him to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place — a group that, in addition to congressional Republicans, happened to include former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At briefings this week after the disclosure of the paltry results, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, repeatedly noted that Mr. Obama always had been a skeptic of training Syrian rebels. The military was correct in concluding that “this was a more difficult endeavor than we assumed and that we need to make some changes to that program,” Mr. Earnest said. “But I think it’s also time for our critics to ‘fess up in this regard as well. They were wrong.”

In effect, Mr. Obama is arguing that he reluctantly went along with those who said it was the way to combat the Islamic State, but that he never wanted to do it and has now has been vindicated in his original judgment. The I-told-you-so argument, of course, assumes that the idea of training rebels itself was flawed and not that it was started too late and executed ineffectively, as critics maintain.

Either way, it underscored White House sensitivities about the widening Syrian catastrophe.

Out: The Buck Stops Here. In: I’m Passing This Buck Anywhere I Can. Worst. President. Ever. And with language like this, even the New York Times seems to be starting to acknowledge his failure.

REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE POWER RANKINGS: Welcome to politics as sports, as Roger Simon ranks who’s going up and who’s going down in the endless primary season.

THE BLACK HOLE OF THE TV NEWS INDUSTRY: “78% of CNN’s GOP primary coverage was devoted to Trump,” the Legal Insurrection blog notes; I clocked at least 40 minutes of wall-to-wall Trump obsession by Anderson Cooper last night during my hour at the gym.

RELATED: Have we reached “Peak Trump?” As James Lileks once said, “joyless monomania is death” to any publication, and it’s pretty painful to watch in a TV network as well. If Trump’s popularity descends to the middle of the GOP pack, what story will CNN obsessively glom onto next?

THE HILL: Go ‘nuclear’ to stop Obama’s Iran deal, urge 57 House Republicans in letter.

Dozens of House Republican lawmakers are making a late stab at pressuring Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to abandon the filibuster on legislation to block the nuclear deal with Iran.

A total of 57 House lawmakers signed on to a letter led by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) telling McConnell that blocking the deal was “simply so consequential” that it demanded a change to the Senate’s rules, known as invoking the “nuclear option.”

“Our request to eliminate the filibuster for some votes simply underscores that in a democracy the majority should decide,” they wrote. “The super-majority now required to advance legislation is 60 votes, which is not serving our country well.”

The letter is part of a sentiment that has grown dramatically in the House in recent days, as it became increasingly apparently that critics of the Iran accord would fall short of being able to send a resolution of disapproval to the president’s desk. As The Hill had previously reported, Smith began circulating the letter on Capitol Hill earlier this week.

Senate Democrats successfully filibustered legislation killing the deal on three separate occasions this month, most recently on Thursday. Despite the support of some Democrats, opponents of the Iran pact could not muster the 60 votes needed to move forward with rejecting it.

McConnell has firmly rejected calls to change the Senate’s rules.

I was hoping for more from a Republican Senate.

BETTER DEAD THAN RUDE: “The lesson learned from the Texas ‘It’s not a bomb, it’s a clock’ episode: If you see something — don’t say something.”

(Headline via this 2002 John Derbyshire post.)

WHY YES, YES HE DOES: Donald J. Boudreaux: Pope Francis Misses The Sizable Moral Dimensions To Capitalism. “This hostility toward capitalism springs from ignorance of the facts and a deep misunderstanding of the logic of markets.”

The Pope’s economic views are informed by Peronism. So, yes.

BARRY LATZER: Holder’s Hatchet Job: Another look at the Justice Department’s misguided Ferguson report, which caps the former attorney general’s legacy of racial divisiveness.

One lesson should have been driven home from the shooting of Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in August 2014: racial interpretations of complex events are dangerous. The media and Eric Holder’s Justice Department initially cast Wilson as a racist who shot an innocent black youth. They were, as we now know, flat wrong. Not only did a state grand jury decline to prosecute Wilson last fall, but the Justice Department itself backtracked and recommended against federal prosecution. The evidence confirmed that Wilson acted in self-defense and didn’t provide a whiff of support for allegations of anti-black bias.

Nevertheless, it bears recalling that the racial narrative did serious damage. It sowed mistrust of police around the nation, especially among African-Americans. The antipolice protests and the shootings of police officers, in Brooklyn last year, in Ferguson this year, and most recently in Houston, were byproducts of the poisoned atmosphere created by the campaign against allegedly racist law enforcement. Perhaps unsurprisingly, shooting deaths of law enforcers spiked 52 percent in 2014, declining in 2015 as tensions eased. (Forty-seven on-duty officers died from intentional gunfire in 2014, compared with 31 the previous year. Twenty-four died as of the end of August 2015, which at the same rate would result in 36 deaths for the year.) . . .

Well-established research on police has shown that, contrary to what we see in television cop shows, a small part of police officers’ duties involves actually fighting crime. This is even truer for departments in places like Ferguson, where serious crimes are uncommon. Police officers in small cities spend most of their time answering calls for assistance—such as for fires, accidents, illness, or injuries—handling minor disturbances, and controlling traffic. How well does the Ferguson Police Department (FPD) do these things? For that matter, what exactly is the crime situation in Ferguson? Readers will get no earthly idea from reading the Justice Department report, which devotes none of its 102 pages to the everyday work of the FPD or to crime conditions in the city. Indeed, at least one-quarter of the report has little to do with the FPD, focusing instead on the city’s municipal court.

Read the whole thing.

THEY’VE FORGOTTEN WHO IS BOSS: Interior Secretary Refuses To Testify On EPA Toxic Mine Spill.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED, I TELL YOU: Oswald visited embassies in Cuba and Soviet Union to plot his escape before assassinating John F Kennedy.

THE COALITION TO STOP GUN VIOLENCE ALSO JUMPS THE SHARK: Code Blue at CSGV HQ: They are having a collective stroke.

TEH GRAUNIAD AT WORK AGAIN: The Left Jumps the Shark — in a Rocketship.

WHY BOTHER NOT WASTING OUR SEED CORN: Why Bother Educating Smart Kids?

WHEN YOU CAN’T BEAT THEM, LIE ABOUT THEM: Carmen Fariña’s ugly lie about which kids charters help.

IT’S ALWAYS NICE to make Twitchy.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Do Feminists Hate Sex Robots?

HMM: Clinton lawyer balked at first effort to delete classified email.

Hillary Clinton’s personal attorney balked at the State Department’s first effort to erase a newly-classified email from the thumb drive containing about 30,000 messages she turned over to her former agency, according to just-released correspondence.

Clinton lawyer David Kendall said deleting the now-secret message could run afoul of promises he previously made to the House Benghazi committee and two inspectors general to preserve electronic copies of all Clinton’s work-related message from her tenure as secretary of state.

“I have responded to each preservation request by confirming to the requestor that I would take reasonable steps to preserve the 55,000 pages of former Secretary Clinton’s emails in their present electronic form,” Kendall wrote to Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy on June 15. “I therefore do not believe it would be prudent to delete, as you request, the above-referenced email from the master copies of the [Microsoft Outlook] PST file that we are preserving.”

The letters shed more light on the unusual arrangement State eventually set up to allow Kendall to hold classified information in his law office. The set-up — which has been questioned by Senate Republicans and private attorneys who’ve not received similar approval — involved installing a safe in the office of one of Kendall’s colleagues at D.C. law firm Williams and Connolly.

Shady.

MEGAN MCARDLE: How HealthCare.gov Went So, So Wrong. “1. The architects of the law were incredibly naïve. 2. Federal contracting rules are crazy.”

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: On campus political correctness, Obama gets it right: Even our Democratic president understands blacklisting conservative speakers doesn’t promote learning.

OBAMACARE HEALTH CO-OPS: DOING ONLY MARGINALLY BETTER THAN OBAMA’S SYRIA POLICY.

Late last month, the Nevada Health Co-op became the third casualty among 23 insurance start-ups created under the federal health care law to inject competition for coverage in certain parts of the country.

Set up as nonprofits with consumer-led boards, the co-ops were designed to provide affordable insurance coverage to individuals and small businesses. They were intended under the law to offer alternatives — and hopefully cheaper prices — to the plans sold by large established insurance companies in some regions.

But as the new co-ops begin failing just a year into the effort to remake the health care industry with more competition and lower costs, the marketplace is proving hostile to newcomers trying to break into an industry dominated by powerfully entrenched businesses.

Hey, the demise of competition and the shoring-up of powerfully entrenched businesses was always what ObamaCare was about. The rest was just for the rubes.

REP. POLIS: ‘SORRY I’M NOT SORRY’ FOR BELITTLING STUDENT DUE PROCESS RIGHTS – Glenn posted this morning about Colorado Rep. Jared Polis’ so-called “apology” for suggesting that college students accused of sexual assault should be expelled even if they are innocent.

Although FIRE appreciates his “apology,” we found that Polis’ Daily Camera mea culpa misses the mark since he continues to defend misguided principles about how to best handle campus sexual assault allegations. FIRE has published a response explaining why these allegations should be dealt with by law enforcement. This opinion is not only shared by the vast majority of the American public, but also leading victim-advocacy groups and some of Polis’ fellow congressional Democrats.

You can check out FIRE’s full response to Polis’ statement over at The Torch. You can also watch the video of Polis’ now-infamous remarks in the video below or over at the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training’s YouTube channel, which has the full hearing.

KNOXVILLE MERCURY: Bruce McCamish’s Facebook-Famous Photos Give a New Perspective on Knoxville.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: More Bar Exam Carnage.

IF ERECTION LASTS MORE THAN FIVE DAYS, SEE YOUR DOCTOR: This Is What Happens When You Take 35 Viagra Pills at Once.

On the upside, I’m pretty sure that Daniel Medforth just catapulted to the front of the Washington Free Beacon’s “Men of the Year” list for 2015.

ANN COULTER’S VILE, ANTI-JEWISH TWEET: “What got into Ann Coulter last night during the debate?…Coulter’s star has fallen precipitously the last few years and as it has descended, she has sought to become once again the edgy provocateur that aided her rise to the top of political punditry,” Rick Moran writes at the PJ Tatler. “But as I pointed out several years ago, once you start down the road of going ‘over the top’ to please your fans, you fall into a trap. How can you top ‘over the top’?”

MEDIA LASH OUT AT CARLY FIORINA FOR TELLING TRUTH ABOUT PLANNED PARENTHOOD IN DEBATE: This was inevitable, wasn’t it?

Even though “Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn’t know because they might reflect badly on Democrats,” as Jim Treacher tweeted last year, from time to time news that’s inconvenient to the left escapes out into the open, and that makes the gatekeepers in the MSM rather angry.

11 years ago, the late Tony Blankley quipped, “Mark the calendar. August 2004 is the first time that the major mainline media — CBSNBCABCNEWYORKTIMESWASHINGTONPOST L.A.TIMESNEWSWEEKTIMEMAGAZINE ASSOCIATEDPRESSETC. — ignored a news story that nonetheless became known by two-thirds of the country within two weeks of it being mentioned by the ‘marginal’ press.”

And the DNC-MSM have been pounding their high chairs over the Swift Vets ever since. That cycle would be repeated time and time again in the years since. The “keep rockin’” LA Times attempting to prop up John Edwards’ campaign by embargoing details of his affair with Rielle Hunter. Followed in short succession by Obama and the MSM’s “Wright-Free Zone.” Van Jones’ myriad controversies ignored until the MSM suddenly had to report on why he was tossed under the wheels of the Obama bus, ACORN, ClimateGate, Gosnell, and now Planned Parenthood.

But if old media wants to get up to speed on this issue, perhaps they should take Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist’s advice and “Watch The Video Planned Parenthood And Its Media Allies Deny Exists.”

I CAN SEE A DOWNSIDE TO THIS: New U.S. Military Chip Self Destructs on Command. I mean, given that we seem to be hacked by everyone on Earth, who’s going to actually send that command? . . .

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: On campus political correctness, Obama gets it right: Even our Democratic president understands blacklisting conservative speakers doesn’t promote learning.

THE BIG 2016 DANGER MAY BE ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES: Not this story again:

We have less than five months before the primary voting begins and, perhaps more to the point, less than 14 until the general election. The clock is ticking for the candidates, of course, but it’s also counting down for the infrastructure which will handle the tedious chore of counting all the votes. In many states, election officials are taking a very worried look at the no longer newfangled electronic voting machines which were put in place after the hanging chad debacle of the 2000 election and finding them unready for the task.

As the Professor is wont to point out, perhaps it’s time to go to back to the future: “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the paper ballot: An idea whose time has come again.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Enrollment in Humanities Ph.D. Programs Declines as More Graduate Schools Slim Down.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: The Roomba Now Sees and Maps a Home. “iRobot is adding vision and mapping to its robot vacuum cleaners, and says its devices could eventually recognize and manipulate objects.”

BRINGING BACK CAMPUS FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Episode 17 in the How Do We Fix It? Podcast.

ARE COMPUTERS BAD FOR LEARNING? “Students are cutting and pasting answers instead of finding them.”

THE QUESTIONS WE’RE NOT ASKING ABOUT SEX ROBOTS. Well, my question is, is a vibrator a sex robot?

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Nanoparticles disguised as blood-cell fragments slip past body’s immune defence: Drug-delivery systems coated in platelets used to repair damaged blood vessels.

TWEET OF THE WEEK:

IT’S PARTISAN WITCH HUNTS ALL THE WAY DOWN IN WISCONSIN: More Wisconsin emails reveal John Doe investigators targeted conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justices.

Our liberal friends in Wisconsin are unhappy. They think someone is leaking emails that make the state’s partisan campaign regulators look bad. We’ll plead guilty to having sources, but the emails are news and they sure are revealing.

Today’s installment from court documents concerns how a special prosecutor and regulators at the Government Accountability Board (GAB) targeted the state’s conservative Supreme Court justices. The partisan goal was to force some justices to recuse themselves from hearing a constitutional challenge to their probe of GovernorScott Walker and his political allies. . . .

The GAB and prosecutors tried to rig [Wisconsin] Supreme Court review of a constitutional challenge to their probe. They used information they had collected through kitchen-sink subpoenas to search for information well outside their already voluminous writ. Then they targeted conservative justices while giving liberals a pass. The good news is that in July Wisconsin’s Supreme Court shut down their investigation as unconstitutional.

Kevin Kennedy, who runs the GAB, responded to our last editorial by saying his staff merely “feel passionately about ensuring that all parties comply with campaign finance laws” and partisan emails can be explained because “staff of the G.A.B. are human.” Human enough to abuse their power to punish their political opponents.

Drip, drip, drip. There’s much more partisan nastiness going on in Wisconsin than has thus far been revealed. Mr. Kennedy, his accomplices on the GAB staff, and the prosecutors involved in this cabal should lose their jobs for their blatant, partisan abuse of government power.

Tar. Feathers. Sicilian Bull.

GENDER GAP: Women earned majority of doctoral degrees in 2014 for 6th straight year, and outnumber men in grad school 136 to 100. A gender gap is only a problem when men outnumber women. When women outnumber men, it’s progress.

IN THE MAIL: From David Goodman, Compost Everything: The Good Guide to Extreme Composting.

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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 861.

HELL, I’D BE THINKING OF BLOWING THE CHANNEL TUNNEL: Chances of Brexit Rise as Migrant Crisis Roils EU.

The migrant crisis increasingly looks like it could break the EU, with euroskepticism on the rise as the crisis continues. The biggest news: The chances of a Brexit are up, with a poll by ICM putting support for leaving the EU at 40 percent, with 43 percent in favor of staying and 17 percent undecided. The poll gives the pro-union camp an edge—unlike the Survation poll earlier this month that found a majority of respondents favored leaving—but that lead has narrowed from 11 percent to just 3 percent. The uptick in support for a Brexit comes after a change in the way the poll question was worded, but the reason for the change appears to be the migrant crisis.

And the UK isn’t the only country seeing knock-on effects from the crisis. Euroskeptics are also picking up steam in Germany. We noted in yesterday’s newsletter that support for Germany’s far-right AfD party rose to 5.5 percent in a recent poll, even as Angela Merkel’s coalition was down to 40 percent approval, a loss of 1.5 percent. But today another poll shows that AfD is tied in Saxony with the SPD, a party that belongs to Merkel’s coalition. Both are polling at 13 percent in that region.

The miserable failure of the EU governing class is becoming apparent.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Why Americans Still Think the Economy Is Terrible. “The median American household in 2014 had a lower income, in inflation-adjusted terms, than it did in 2013. The $53,657 the household in the middle of the income distribution earned last year was down 1.5 percent from the year before. . . . The 2014 real median income number is 6.5 percent below its 2007, pre-crisis level. It is 7.2 percent below the number in 1999. A middle-income American family, in other words, makes substantially less money in inflation-adjusted terms than it did 15 years ago.”

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ASHE SCHOW: Second GOP debate: Where Each Candidate Excelled and Faltered.

WELL, COOKED BOOKS DO SEEM TO BE THE NORM THESE DAYS: Is The IRS Undercounting Americans Renouncing U.S. Citizenship?

MEET THE NEW BOSS: “Who Really Won The Cold War?”, John Schindler asks at the Federalist:

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party has sent shockwaves far beyond Britain. There has been disbelief that the United Kingdom’s storied left-wing party opted to be led by a man so obviously contemptuous of his own society. In the wake of their recent electoral debacle under the uninspiring Ed Miliband, Labour has chosen as its leader an activist who resembles a walking leftist cliché.

* * * * * * * *

Barack Obama is the most left-wing president ever on social justice, yet he is a darling of Wall Street. Hillary Clinton, despite her belated interest in social issues, is deeply enmeshed in high finance and will never challenge it. Thus Bernie Sanders, who is an amalgam of Old and New Left, is treated like an atavism by mainstream liberals when he opens the economics can of worms.

Read the whole thing.

NICK COHEN: Why I’ve Finally Given Up On the Left: Left-wing thought has shifted towards movements it would once have denounced as racist, imperialist and fascistic. It is insupportable.

I RECOMMEND TRYING SOMETHING THAT ISN’T A COMPLETE, DISMAL FAILURE: Administration searches for new approach to aiding rebels in Syria. “In comments that appeared to shock even many of those involved in Syria policy elsewhere in the government, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the head of the U.S. Central Command, told Congress on Wednesday that only ‘four or five’ trainees from the program, a $500 million plan officially launched in December to prepare as many as 5,400 fighters this year, have ended up “in the fight” inside Syria.”