FROM ONE VICTORY TO THE NEXT:

Islamic State said on Tuesday one of its most prominent and longest-serving leaders was killed in what appeared to be an American air strike in Syria, depriving the militant group of the man in charge of directing attacks overseas.

A U.S. defense official told Reuters the United States targeted Abu Muhammad al-Adnani in a Tuesday strike on a vehicle traveling in the Syrian town of al-Bab.

...AND RICHER...:

[E]nter Gen Z, referred to as the "iGen." This generation is comprised of bright and well educated young adults, who want to be entrepreneurs and are attached to a mobile device at all times. But, what is impressive is that they seem to have the money-smarts that were missing in previous generations.

TD Ameritrade's 2nd Annual Generation Z survey uncovered an interesting response to the question: "If you were given $500 today, what would you do with it?" GetRichSlowly.org reported a surprising "... 70 percent of those in Generation Z say they'd save at least part of it, and among them, 34 percent would save it for college."

FROM ONE VICTORY TO THE NEXT:

[D]iplomats say Obama could be pushing on an open door in Laos, thanks to a change of government there in April.

They say the country's new leaders appear ready to tilt away from Beijing and lean more closely toward another neighbor, Vietnam, whose dispute with China over the South China Sea has pushed it into a deepening alliance with the United States.

"The new government is more influenced by the Vietnamese than the Chinese," said a Western diplomat in Southeast Asia." "It's never too late for a U.S. president to visit."

Obama will become the first sitting U.S. president to visit landlocked Laos, where the United States waged a "secret war" while fighting in Vietnam, dropping an estimated two million tonnes of bombs on the country. About 30 percent of the ordnance failed to explode, leaving a dangerous and costly legacy.

Laos has strategic importance to both Vietnam and China. Vietnam has a long land border with Laos that gives it access to markets in Thailand and beyond. For China, Laos is a key gateway to Southeast Asia in its "new Silk Road" trade strategy.

Laos, which is developing a series of hydro power plants along one of the world's longest rivers, the Mekong, aims to become "the battery of Asia" by selling power to its neighbors.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

Bringing genetics together with development was a tougher proposition. Genetics had since Mendel been a science of differences, seeking to explain why some peas are yellow and wrinkled, others green and round, or why one person has blue eyes, another brown. Development, though, was a science of similarities, asking for instance why humans, in their trajectory from fertilised egg to adult, are generally bilaterally symmetrical, each with two eyes, two arms terminating in five-fingered hands. An attempt to unify them was made by another of the Cambridge group, the polymath biologist C.H. (Hal) Waddington, who in the early 1940s coined the term epigenetics to refer to the study of the 'causal interactions between genes and their products which bring the phenotype into being'. (Phenotype is a Humpty-Dumptyish word, but can be roughly taken to mean any observable feature of a living organism, at any level from the molecular to the cellular to the entire organism and its behaviour. Richard Dawkins extended its definition by asserting that the dam a beaver builds is part of its phenotype.)

Epigenetics seeks to explain how, starting from an identical set of genes, the contingencies of development can lead to different outcomes. To illustrate this, Waddington imagined what he called an 'epigenetic landscape' of rolling hills and valleys. Place a ball at the top of the hill and give it a little push. Which valley it rolls down depends on chance fluctuations; some valleys may converge on the same endpoint, others on different ones. Waddington called this process 'canalisation', though the material basis for the metaphor was, at the time, unknowable. He imagined the hills and valleys as held in place by strings stretching from nodes (genes) located below the surface landscape.

He also went further, proposing that if a strongly canalised phenotypic change was repeated generation after generation, some random mutation would eventually catch up with it and it would be assimilated into the genome. He demonstrated that this was possible by exposing developing fruit fly embryos to ether, which induces them to develop a second thorax. After some twenty generations (it takes a fruit fly about seven days to develop from a fertilised egg to an adult ready to mate, so experiments using them are fast and easy), the flies developed the second thorax without exposure to the ether - the epigenetically induced bithorax had become fixed in the fly's genome. To many of his contemporaries, it appeared as if Waddington was arguing for a version of the ultimate evolutionary heresy, Lamarckism - the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It was easy for them to dismiss Waddington's results as the artificial product of extreme laboratory conditions, irrelevant to the real world.

The TBC sought funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to set up a theoretical biology institute in Cambridge, but Rockefeller turned the proposal down in favour of a major investment in biochemistry, which presaged the later triumphs of molecular genetics. By now, many of the group's members had been drafted into war work. Needham was posted to China, where he began the work on the history of Chinese science for which he is now best known. Waddington worked on operations research for the air force. In 1947 he left for Edinburgh, where he remained for the rest of his career, but despite his continued advocacy of the theory, epigenetics faded from view.

With the discovery of the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson in the 1950s, there was a renewed conviction among biologists - especially the physicists and engineers turned biologists like Crick - that what was needed was a ruthless reductionism. It was immediately recognised that DNA's helical structure provided the chemical form of a program - a code made up of the molecule's four subunits or 'bases', adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine, represented by the letters A, C, G and T - that could direct an organism's development, and also a copying mechanism by means of which information could be transferred from generation to generation. Life, it seemed, was computable. The triumph of reductionism seemed so secure that by the 1990s ambitious molecular biologists were able to persuade their funders, public and private, to embark on the massive project of sequencing the entire three billion As, Cs, Gs and Ts that spell out the human genome. The information the sequence provided would, they claimed, transform our understanding of medicine, and in so doing give a powerful boost to a languishing economy.

As the project got underway, the sequencers conducted a poll. How many genes - that is, mini-sequences of A, C, G and T coding for specific proteins - would they discover embedded in the human genome? The betting suggested around a hundred thousand, roughly the same as the number of different proteins in the human body. When it came to it, the chastened researchers reported that the actual number of genes was just over twenty thousand, about the same number as in a millimetre-long nematode worm. Twenty thousand genes to direct the development of the human embryo from fertilised egg to newborn baby, to code for the hundred thousand proteins, to determine the fates of the 37 trillion cells in the human body.

The numbers made a nonsense of the idea that there is a 'gene for' any particular human characteristic, from eye colour to IQ to sexual orientation, and has confounded the hope that sequencing the genome would generate a cornucopia of precision-tailored treatments for complex diseases. The problem lies in the common misconception of genes as 'master molecules' directing the operation of the cells in which they reside. In fact DNA is a rather inert molecule, as it has to be if it is to serve as a code. It is the cells that do the work. Cellular enzymes read, edit, cut and paste, transcribe and translate segments of DNA - the literary metaphor, universally employed by molecular biologists, isn't accidental; they think of DNA as the language in which the Book of Life is written - in a scheduled flow during the development of the foetus, according to whether the cells are destined to become liver or brain, blood or bone. No gene works in isolation but as part of a collaboration. Many genes may be required to produce a single phenotype - more than fifty main gene variants have been shown to affect the chances that someone will contract coronary heart disease, for example - and a particular gene may influence many different phenotypic traits, depending on which organ's cells it is active in. It is during this period of rapid growth that living organisms are at their most plastic, responding to environmental challenges by modifying anatomical, biochemical, physiological or behavioural phenotypic traits. This is epigenetic canalisation.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

STILL TEN HOURS TOO LONG:

The company is set to launch an experimental program consisting of a few teams of workers made up entirely of employees working 30 hours a week, instead of the usual 40 hours expected of a full-time employee.

The new program is small, consisting of a few dozen people in a company that employs more than 225,000. But if it is successful, it could provide a new model for Amazon as well as other large companies seeking to become more competitive in a tightening labor market, and to especially attract more mothers.

THE ANTI-GROWTH CANDIDATE:

Trump's ban on visitors to the U.S. would decrease U.S. GDP by $30.5 billion and cost the domestic economy 182,000 jobs in year one. GDP and job losses would then increase significantly each year the ban remains.

Those losses do not account for the further economic damage banning Muslim and other immigrants would cause. We also examine the implications of an immigrant ban by highlighting the economic contributions of the existing American-Muslim community, which makes an outsize contribution to GDP and job growth in the U.S. 

AND LEAVE THE PACIFIC BACK DOOR WIDE OPEN?:

One reason Trump's campaign may be struggling is that voters just don't buy into the premise that the United States is a dangerous country. Just 26% say they consider it to be, to 64% who don't think it's a dangerous country. That may help explain why Trump's ostensible outreach to African Americans and Latinos- playing up violence within their communities- isn't working. Only 13% of African Americans and Latinos think Trump actually cares about them, to 74% who say they don't think he does. Hillary Clinton is winning their voters 73-9 with Jill Stein at 6% and Gary Johnson at 3%. [...]

-Trump has fought with most of the media over the course of this campaign but battles with the New York Times and CNN have been particularly prominent. Voters say by a 54/29 spread that the Times has more credibility than Trump, and by a 52/34 one that CNN has more credibility. Trump is losing his fights with the media in the arena of broader public opinion. [...]

-It's widely known that Trump voters support building a wall on the border with Mexico to keep undocumented immigrants out of the country. We find that 31% of them also support building a wall along the Atlantic Ocean to keep Muslims from entering the country from the Middle East.

THE REPUBLICAN NOMINEE:

Hillary Clinton plans to stress her support for "American exceptionalism" during a speech in the battleground state of Ohio, while arguing that Donald Trump has rejected the concept.

Clinton's midday address at the American Legion's annual convention in Cincinnati Wednesday comes as Trump plans a last-minute trip to Mexico in advance of a long-awaited speech on immigration. A Clinton campaign official said the Democratic nominee plans to use her first public event in days to portray her Republican opponent as a questionable leader who would "walk away from our allies, undermine our values, insult our military -- and has explicitly rejected the idea of American exceptionalism."

THANKS W!:

The United States and India have signed an agreement to share military logistics, they said in a joint statement on Monday, a step toward building defense ties as both countries seek to counter the growing maritime assertiveness of China.

A WORD TO THE WISE...:

A team of researchers, whose work was published earlier this month in Nature, designed a compound named PZM21 that is producing promising results. Multiple experiments on mice appear to reduce pain without slowing down breathing or being addictive. When the rodents treated with the compound were placed on a hot plate, for example, they appeared to experience as much pain relief as those treated with morphine. Mice showed no preference between being in a chamber where they received PMZ21 and another where they received a saline solution.

Rather than tweaking an existing drug, as most drugs are created, the research team used a combination of computational modeling and synthetic drug generation to design a compound from scratch that would bind well with the known structure of the brain's opioid receptors. Doing so was a four-year effort, involving researchers from Stanford University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of California-San Francisco, and Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany.

REALITY CAN'T PENETRATE THE BUBBLE; YOU'LL NEED TO LEAVE IT:

In a recent paper published in Political Research Quarterly, I tested competing expectations about the ways media can convince partisans to engage in motivated reasoning. The study examines the conditions under which partisans internalize their preferred "facts."

The Cooperative Congressional Election Study is a massive survey project put together by more than 50 research teams nationwide. I presented survey-takers with one of five randomly assigned articles about the economy during the 2014 wave of the study. These stories were designed to mimic the type of content they might see when visiting a partisan news source. Some of the articles presented readers with "just the (congenial) facts": these survey-takers saw a news story showing either optimistic or gloomy economic data. Others saw stories that presented these facts paired with statements blaming or praising President Barack Obama for the trend. These latter treatments make survey-takers highly aware of the agenda of the story's author - especially if they identify as partisans.

Just as expected, Republicans and Democrats in the study were most likely to learn from the news story when it reinforced their own worldview. Republican Reba believed the bad news, while Denny the Democrat believed the good news.

The surprising finding was that this pattern only held for the "just the facts" news stories - not the overtly partisan ones. In other words, partisans enjoy cheerleading for their party but are even more strongly affected by news stories that appear to be highly objective. When asked to report whether they thought the economy in the past year had gotten better or worse, partisans in these treatment conditions were significantly more likely than others to give the party-congenial response.

In the 2016 campaign, we have seen plenty of examples of overt partisan jeering when pundits discuss economic conditions. The study's results suggest that people are actually not very likely to digest economic information from such overtly partisan reports. Instead, the most powerful tool for affecting how we perceive the economy is the subtle process of agenda-setting.

As studies of media slant have reliably shown, agenda-setting is widespread in today's media marketplace. By consistently presenting economic facts that agree with the partisan narrative, free of any overt partisan language, slanted sources can subtly adjust citizens' beliefs about the way the economy is going.

THE MIGHTY CALIPHATE WAR MACHINE:

What appear to be internal documents from the administration of the so-called Islamic State, obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast, show the terrorist organization under strain from financial misappropriation, embezzlement, alleged infiltration by anti-ISIS spies, and bureaucratic infighting. [...]

The documents are mainly bits of correspondence between other ISIS officials and are embarrassing to a messianic movement that proclaims it is growing in strength and expanding its dominions in spite of nearly three years of attritional warfare and battlefield losses across Iraq and Syria.

TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT:

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has some advice for Hillary Clinton: Tax fossil fuels.

Stiglitz, who is an adviser to Clinton, says taxing carbon would be the best way to address climate change -- and boost the U.S. economy. [...]

"I think a carbon tax would stimulate the economy," Stiglitz told CNNMoney. He says it would lead many firms to remodel their factories and redesign their supply chains, which would generate jobs and growth.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Donald Trump says "inner-city" African-Americans will vote for him because of how miserable their lives and neighbourhoods are.

The African-Americans of North Philadelphia say Donald Trump is an ignorant bigot.

Trump's campaign has described his recent rhetoric about black people as outreach. With actual black people, it seems to have produced little but outrage. Trump, Philadelphians said in interviews this weekend, is offering blacks not a helping hand but a slap in the face.

"Extremely insulting. And I think purposely insulting," said lawyer Rasheedah Phillips, 32.

"He's getting the ships ready. He wants to send us back over to Africa," said Douglas Skipworth, 33, who does maintenance work.

"Black folk aren't fooled by this thing. African-Americans are clear about who Trump is," said professor Anyabwile Love, 41, watching his 2-year-old son. "Many other elections, local and national, it's been the lesser of the two evils. In this, it's not even lesser of two evils. It's one is completely against us and one is not."

Trump has a historically dreadful approval rating with black voters, as low as 1 per cent. But as he frantically attempts to convince white people that he is not a racist, black people have suddenly become central to his message.

Which black people believe is racist.

OUR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT:

A widespread - and false - perception is that Obama has kept the US out of the Syrian war. Indeed, the US right wing routinely criticizes him for having drawn a line in the sand for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over chemical weapons, and then backing off when Assad allegedly crossed it (the issue remains murky and disputed, like so much else in Syria). A leading columnist for the Financial Times, repeating the erroneous idea that the US has remained on the sidelines, recently implied that Obama had rejected the advice of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to arm the Syrian rebels fighting Assad.

Yet the curtain gets lifted from time to time. In January, the New York Times finally reported on a secret 2013 Presidential order to the CIA to arm Syrian rebels. As the account explained, Saudi Arabia provides substantial financing of the armaments, while the CIA, under Obama's orders, provides organizational support and training.

Unfortunately, the story came and went without further elaboration by the US government or follow up by the New York Times. The public was left in the dark: How big are the ongoing CIA-Saudi operations? How much is the US spending on Syria per year? What kinds of arms are the US, Saudis, Turks, Qataris, and others supplying to the Syrian rebels? Which groups are receiving the arms? What is the role of US troops, air cover, and other personnel in the war? The US government isn't answering these questions, and mainstream media aren't pursuing them, either.

On more than a dozen occasions, Obama has told the American people that there would be "no US boots on the ground." Yet every few months, the public is also notified in a brief government statement that US special operations forces are being deployed to Syria. The Pentagon routinely denies that they are in the front lines. But when Russia and the Assad government recently carried out bombing runs and artillery fire against rebel strongholds in northern Syria, the US notified the Kremlin that the attacks were threatening American troops on the ground. The public has been given no explanation about their mission, its costs, or counterparties in Syria.

Through occasional leaks, investigative reports, statements by other governments, and rare statements by US officials, we know that America is engaged in an active, ongoing, CIA-coordinated war both to overthrow Assad and to fight ISIS. America's allies in the anti-Assad effort include Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and other countries in the region. The US has spent billions of dollars on arms, training, special operations forces, air strikes, and logistical support for the rebel forces, including international mercenaries. American allies have spent billions of dollars more. The precise sums are not reported.

IT'S JUST A MEANS-TESTED UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME:

How should programs for the poor be changed to increase participation and avoid adverse effects on work incentives? One bad idea that is getting a surprising amount of favorable attention is the so-called Universal Income Benefit: providing enough money to all households (below the age of 65) to keep them above the poverty line, even if they had no other income. The amount given to each household would depend on the number of adults and children, but not on the household's income or wealth.

This unconditional transfer would solve the problem of lifting all Americans out of poverty. But it would be impossibly expensive. Even if it replaced all of the means-tested programs for the poor other than the health programs, its net cost would exceed $1.5 trillion a year, or more than 9% of GDP. To pay for that without raising the deficit would require doubling the personal income tax. So the Universal Income Benefit is definitely a non-starter.

The best way to help the poor is the negative income tax plan originally proposed by both Milton Friedman (the conservative economist at the University of Chicago) and James Tobin (the liberal economist at Yale University). All households below the age of 65 would receive an amount of money that would keep them out of poverty if they had no other income; but the amount of the transfer would decline gradually as their household income rose. Above a certain threshold, the household would pay an income tax as they do today; below that level, the "tax" would be negative.

IMPORTING THE SUPERIOR COUTURE:

[T]he mogul's New York modeling agency, Trump Model Management, has profited from using foreign models who came to the United States on tourist visas that did not permit them to work here, according to three former Trump models, all noncitizens, who shared their stories with Mother Jones. Financial and immigration records included in a recent lawsuit filed by a fourth former Trump model show that she, too, worked for Trump's agency in the United States without a proper visa.

Foreigners who visit the United States as tourists are generally not permitted to engage in any sort of employment unless they obtain a special visa, a process that typically entails an employer applying for approval on behalf of a prospective employee. Employers risk fines and possible criminal charges for using undocumented labor.

Founded in 1999, Trump Model Management "has risen to the top of the fashion market," boasts the Trump Organization's website, and has a name "that symbolizes success." According to a financial disclosure filed by his campaign in May, Donald Trump earned nearly $2 million from the company, in which he holds an 85 percent stake. Meanwhile, some former Trump models say they barely made any money working for the agency because of the high fees for rent and other expenses that were charged by the company.  

Canadian-born Rachel Blais spent nearly three years working for Trump Model Management. After first signing with the agency in March 2004, she said, she performed a series of modeling gigs for Trump's company in the United States without a work visa. At Mother Jones' request, Blais provided a detailed financial statement from Trump Model Management and a letter from an immigration lawyer who, in the fall of 2004, eventually secured a visa that would permit her to work legally in the United States. These records show a six-month gap between when she began working in the United States and when she was granted a work visa. During that time, Blais appeared on Trump's hit reality TV show, The Apprentice, modeling outfits designed by his business protégés. As Blais walked the runway, Donald Trump looked on from the front row.

FIGHT IT? HOW DO WE FOSTER IT?:

A second condition supporting [secular stagnation]1 is rooted in the impact of heightened uncertainty - about growth, job security, policies and regulations, and the many developments that could affect any of those factors - on investment and consumption. People simply don't know whether their governments are going to start making progress in combating deflationary pressure, countering rising inequality, addressing social and political fragmentation, and restoring economic growth and employment.

With future demand far from guaranteed, private investment has been declining in many countries, including, most recently, China. The same goes for household consumption, particularly in the advanced economies, where a larger share of consumption is optional (for example, replacing consumer durables, traveling, and eating out at restaurants).

Total savings rate for 401(k) savers hit a record level in Q1 2016, Fidelity reports.

Its quarterly analysis of Fidelity-administered 401(k) and individual retirement accounts (IRAs) finds the total savings rate for 401(k) savers, which combines individual contributions plus employer contributions, reached 12.7% in Q1, topping the previous record high of 12.5% in Q1 2008. In addition, a record 13.6% of 401(k) investors increased their savings rate in Q1, an increase from the previous high of 12.9% in Q1 of 2015.

Even Fidelity's annual analysis of small business retirement plans found that for self-employed 401(k) accounts, self-employed (SEP) IRAs and Savings Incentive Match Plan for Employees (SIMPLE), contributions increased in every plan category.

.

The median home price in the U.S. was $231,000 last month, according to a report from ATTOM Data Solutions (formerly RealtyTrac). That's 9% higher than a year ago and 1% above the previous record of $228,000 hit in July 2005.

The net worth of U.S. households rose in the first quarter as a boost in real estate values offset a fall in stock market prices, a report by the Federal Reserve showed on Thursday.Families' net worth increased to $88.1 trillion over the quarter, up from a revised $87.3 trillion in the previous period.

AND WE ALL KNOW, FROM BERNIE, THAT SUCH ARE THE SIGNS OF CORRUPTION::

When Bernie Sanders asked for money to fuel his underdog presidential campaign, Geraldine Bryant didn't even need to think about it.

"I loved Bernie, and every time he asked for money, I just gave it to him," Bryant told me in a recent phone interview. A filmmaker in Manhattan, Bryant gave the Sanders campaign 44 separate contributions over a nine-month period between October and June, in amounts ranging from $1 to $2,000. The donations totaled $14,440--more than five times the legal limit that an individual can give to a presidential primary campaign.

Lorraine Grace, an environmentalist and educator who runs a nonprofit organization north of San Francisco, gave the Sanders campaign 17 contributions during the height of the Democratic primary between December and May, in amounts ranging from $15 to $2,000. It added up to $8,625. "I donate almost like automatic," Grace explained. "Bernie Sanders' campaign reaches out to me? Bingo. Donation."

Bryant and Grace epitomize the fund-raising juggernaut that Sanders built virtually from scratch in 2015, allowing a small-state senator with little national following and a non-existent donor base to match Hillary Clinton dollar-for-dollar through much of their hard-fought Democratic primary. Sanders raised $231 million from more than 2.7 million donors, relying on grassroots support rather than the wealthy bundlers who collect large checks for establishment candidates.

But the constant fundraising requests that produced that shower of cash can be troubling in their own way. They're reminiscent of the marketing strategies used by casinos, tobacco companies, and even "the old Nigerian scams," said Timothy Fong, co-director of the Gambling Studies Program at UCLA. The solicitations convey "a sense of urgency, the very impulsive, it's an opportunity that can't be missed," he said. "It's very similar to what drug dealers use or casinos use to get people to continue to play."

WINNING THE WAR ON UNIONS:

A unanimous state appeals court ruling that local and state governments can make "reasonable" changes in pension terms going forward is the best news on the California pension front ... ever.

For decades, under what was known as "the California rule," once a government employee was hired, her or his pension benefits could only be increased, not reduced. This was based on the assumption that these benefits amounted to a contract between employer and employee.

But in a ruling on unions' push to continue late-career pension spiking in Marin County despite a 2012 state law saying such maneuvers were no longer legal, Associate Justice James Richman made a broader point: "While a public employee does have a 'vested right' to a pension, that right is only to a 'reasonable' pension -- not an immutable entitlement to the most optimal formula of calculating the pension."

DEFLATION CAN NOT BE OVERSTATED:

SETTING AN EXAMPLE FOR THE DONALD:

Gov. Paul LePage raised the possibility Tuesday that he may not finish his second term, amid mounting pressure from Democrats and members of his own party to amend for his recent actions.

"I'm looking at all options," the Republican governor said while appearing on WVOM, a Bangor talk radio station. "I think some things I've been asked to do are beyond my ability.

NO ESCAPING:

With his haunted blue eyes and an empathy born of his own history of psychic distress, he aspired to touch audiences much as Charlie Chaplin had. The Chaplin film "City Lights," he said, had "made the biggest impression on me as an actor; it was funny, then sad, then both at the same time."

Mr. Wilder was an accomplished stage actor as well as a screenwriter, a novelist and the director of four movies in which he starred. (He directed, he once said, "in order to protect what I wrote, which I wrote in order to act.") But he was best known for playing roles on the big screen that might have been ripped from the pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

He made his movie debut in 1967 in Arthur Penn's celebrated crime drama, "Bonnie and Clyde," in which he was memorably hysterical as an undertaker kidnapped by the notorious Depression-era bank robbers played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. He was even more hysterical, and even more memorable, a year later in "The Producers," the first film by Mr. Brooks, who turned it into a Broadway hit.

Mr. Wilder played the security-blanket-clutching accountant Leo Bloom, who discovers how to make more money on a bad Broadway show than on a good one: Find rich backers, stage a production that's guaranteed to fold fast, then flee the country with the leftover cash. Unhappily for Bloom and his fellow schemer, Max Bialystock, played by Zero Mostel, their outrageously tasteless musical, "Springtime for Hitler," is a sensation.

The part earned Mr. Wilder an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. Within a few years, the anxious, frizzy-haired, popeyed Mr. Wilder had become an unlikely movie star.

He was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance as the wizardly title character in "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" (1971). The film was a box-office disappointment, partly because of parental concern that the moral of Roald Dahl's story -- that greedy, gluttonous children should not go unpunished -- was too dark in the telling. But it went on to gain a devoted following, and Willy Wonka remains one of the roles with which Mr. Wilder is most closely identified.

ALL THAT JAZZ #42

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

Every morning, a scientist walks into a lab in East Lansing, Michigan, grabs a pipette, and mixes two liquids. One is a cloudy brew of E. coli cells, billions of organisms thick; the other is a sterile solution with glucose and essential nutrients. One part A, 99 parts B, and back in the incubator it goes; over the next 24 hours, the cells will double nearly seven times, adapting to the broth in the process.

And so it goes in the lab of Richard Lenski, a Professor of Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University, just as it has for the last 28 years. That's more than 65,000 generations of E. coli, the "lab rat" of microbiology; the associated experiments have generated freezers' worth of samples and burned through enough petri dishes to fill a warehouse.

It started with 12 replicate populations of the same E. coli strain, each allowed to propagate on its own as it adapted to the glucose- and citrate-containing food source. "Is evolution this invariable slow and gradual process?" Lenski recalls wondering as he set up the first agar plates.

SHOULD HAVE MADE THE MONROE DOCTRINE GLOBAL:

The peace treaty announced this week between the government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, marks more than the end of one war. It is a milestone for peace in the Americas and the world.

The 52-year war between the Colombian state and the FARC is the oldest and only armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere, and the last one held over from the Cold War. From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, war -- in the classic sense of a violent conflict over governance or territory fought by at least one national army -- has disappeared. 

4 MORE YEARS! 4 MORE YEARS!...:

President Obama has presided over some of the best years to invest of the last century, The New York Times reports. The stock market has risen 11.8 per­cent on an annualized basis since Obama took office, the third best performance during an American presidency since 1900. Market performance was only better under Calvin Coolidge (25.5 per­cent) and Bill Clinton (15.9 percent).

Consider that had you been prescient enough to buy shares of a low-cost stock index fund on Mr. Obama's first inauguration day, on Jan. 20, 2009, you would now have tripled your money. Stock market performance of this level has rarely been surpassed. [The New York Times]

OTHER THAN THAT, RUNNING A RACIST CAMPAIGN MADE PERFECT SENSE...:

Charles S. Bullock III is the Richard Russell Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia and the author of several books on southern politics, including the coedited The New Politics of the Old South, now in its fifth edition. What follows is the text of an email interview on Georgia politics today.  [...]

Is Georgia's electorate changing in ways that advantage either party? 

In addition to the higher turnout rates among African Americans, Georgia's electorate is becoming more diverse. The numbers of Hispanics and Asian Americans are growing. In 2014, for the first time the exit poll provided an estimate of Hispanic preferences. The exit poll estimate put the Hispanic share of the vote at 4% while the state's post-election audit was much lower at 1%. In part the difference is attributable to the recency with which the state added Hispanic as a category when voters register. Previously, the options were black, white or other and some Latinos who registered before having Hispanic as a choice identified themselves as white. 

Younger Georgians are more Democratic than their parents or grandparents. In 2014 not only did Millennials favor the Democrats (Michelle Nunn for Senate and Jason Carter for governor), so did voters aged 30 - 44. Polls this year also show younger voters tending Democratic while the older voters continue to prefer Trump. 

MIXED?:

U.S. consumer spending increased for a fourth straight month in July amid strong demand for automobiles, pointing to a pickup in economic growth that could pave the way for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates this year. [...]

Low inflation, however, suggests the U.S. central bank could wait until its December policy meeting before raising borrowing costs.

"This report is a mixed bag for the Fed. While the consumer sector is continuing to advance solidly, progress towards the Fed's inflation mandate has stalled," said Michelle Girard, chief economist at RBS in Stamford, Connecticut.

AND WE'RE MORE LIKELY TO SIGN A TRADE DEAL WITH THEM THAN THE EU:

Two months ago, the world's wise men were warning that if UK voters decided to "Brexit" from the European Union, they'd rain down economic crisis. Guess what? Today, Britain is fine -- and has even seen a boost from its "Leave" vote.

The International Monetary Fund, central bank chiefs, academic economists -- you know, the people who study the economy for a living -- said Brexit would be a disaster.

Then-Prime Minister David Cameron warned that Britons who voted to leave would risk their Social Security-style pensions. President Obama said Britons would have to "go to the back of the queue" to ink trade deals with the United States.

Now, though, Britain is showing how real free-market economics can correct political mistakes -- if, indeed, Brexit was a mistake.

After the vote, the British pound plummeted. Financial traders believed their government's warnings and ditched the currency.

Before Brexit, one British pound was worth $1.48. Today, it's worth $1.32. The pound has fallen against other currencies, too. That has meant record visitors to Britain this summer -- and tourists spending record amounts of money, too.

In the month before Brexit, airline reservations to Britain were down compared to the previous year, the Guardian reported. After the Brexit vote, they jumped 4.3 percent -- and wealthier tourists bought more jewelry and watches.

Other parts of the economy haven't suffered, either. Consumer confidence and domestic spending are both up. "Retail sales smashed expectations in August," the Daily Mail noted on Friday. Manufacturing and home-sales reports are well and good.

ONLY ISRAEL AND FATAH PREVENT POPULAR GOVERNMENT IN PALESTINE:

These are the first elections in more than a decade in which voting is taking place at the same time in both Gaza and the West Bank, and Hamas and Fatah are going head-to-head.

Whatever the result, it will affect not only the status of these organizations but also of their leaders, and could even seep into the relationship between the Palestinians and Israel. While these elections are local, and won't directly change anything politically or security-related between Israel and the Palestinian, a sweeping win by the hardline Islamist movement Hamas is still liable to ramp up the amount of suspicion and lack of trust between the two peoples.

As in the other cities in the West Bank, the trouble in Hebron is that because there are so many secular slates of candidates, there is a reasonable chance that the more moderate camp of Fatah and groups of its ilk will split the secular vote, paving the way for victory by Hamas candidates.

For Hamas's leaders in Gaza and abroad, the vote marks an extraordinary opportunity to take stock of where public opinion stands.

But fear of arrests by Israel or the Palestinian Authority have kept Hamas from openly running its members for office in the municipalities, forcing the movement to content itself with semi-independent figures who are known as Hamas supporters.

PITY THE POOR MALTHUSIANS:

In one end of a facility in Silicon Valley goes electricity--lots of it. Out the other, comes an armored truck stashed with diamonds.

In the middle are 8,000°F plasma reactors and more than $100 million in investment to power a startup that is on a mission to make ethical, sustainable diamonds in California. [...]

Lab-made diamonds aren't new. Since the 1950's, they've been used in industrial applications, but they always had impurities that kept them out of the jewelry sector until recently. Only in the last five years, a few companies achieved the holy grail: colorless diamonds that could not be distinguished from the real thing.

THANKS, HILLARY:

EVIDENCE MEANS THINGS:

What about everything else? It turns out there's a whole journal dedicated to the idea that we could use more rigor in dental recommendations. Evidence-Based Dentistry either publishes systematic reviews or summarizes reviews from other organizations, like the Cochrane Collaboration.

The good news is that brushing appears to work. But it's important to know that it's brushing with fluoride toothpaste that matters, not the brushing alone. Doing that doesn't just prevent gingivitis and plaque formation; it also prevents cavities, which is the outcome that we care most about.

My dentist has always recommended a powered toothbrush. The evidence seems to agree that, as many randomized controlled trials confirm, powered toothbrushes reduce both plaque and gingivitis more than regular toothbrushes. An older Cochrane review concluded that the rotating powered toothbrushes were superior than the side to side powered brushes. I use the latter, and this disappointed me. But the difference between the two types, while statistically significant, was really small.

There appear to be no good randomized controlled trials on brushing frequency. The other studies that do exist, while flawed, seem to support twice-a-day brushing.

Surely the twice-a-year teeth cleanings matter? In 2005, Evidence-Based Dentistry highlighted a systematic review on the effects of routine scaling and polishing (you call it teeth cleaning). Researchers found eight randomized controlled trials that were on point, but they were all judged as having a high risk of bias. The results were all over the map. Their conclusions were that the evidence isn't of sufficient quality to reach any conclusions as to the benefits or harms of scaling and polishing. [...]

What about preventive dental visits themselves? In 2013, Bisakha Sen, Nir Menachemi and colleagues used data from the Alabama Children's Health Insurance Program to follow more than 36,000 children to see how preventive dental visits affected dental care and spending over time. They found that preventive visits were associated with fewer visits for restorative dental care in the future, implying that there was an improvement in oral health. But they found that, for the most part, more than one annual preventive visit in children was not cost-effective.

Further work found that it may have been the use of sealants, and not preventive visits in general, that had this protective effect. Since sealants could be applied without an actual visit to the dentist, that brings into question whether a more cost-effective means of getting sealant on children's teeth might be possible -- using a lower-cost dental hygienist, perhaps. Fluoride varnish appears to work well, too.

No review of dental health would be complete without at least acknowledging water fluoridation. Much of the evidence is old because it's getting hard to do studies. It would be somewhat unethical to withhold fluoridation at this point from some people, because the evidence in favor of the practice is so compelling.

In fact, fluoride is so important that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that in areas where the water supply is deficient, providers prescribe oral fluoride supplementation to children. They recommend the use of fluoride varnish as well.

To recap, there's good evidence that brushing twice a day with fluoride toothpaste is a good idea, especially with a powered toothbrush. For children, there's good evidence that the use of fluoride varnish or sealants can be a powerful tool to prevent cavities. The rest? It's debatable.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

After more than a decade of large, high-tech studies, the genetic basis of diabetes remains, for the most part, unexplained.

Type 2 diabetes is one of the major diseases that biomedical scientists hope to conquer with genomics. It's one of our most common diseases -- the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 10 percent of all Americans have it. Diabetes is also expensive: It accounts for an estimated $176 billion in medical costs each year. And while most of us have the impression that diabetes is something you prevent with a healthy diet and exercise, the disease also has a strong genetic component.

By understanding the genetics of diabetes, we hope to combat the disease in three big ways. First, we'll be able to identify people with a high genetic risk, and make them the focus of prevention efforts. Second, we might recognize and specifically treat different molecular forms of the disease -- different people likely have different underlying genetic mutations, which means that not all diabetics respond the same way to a one-size-fits-all therapy. And third, genetics will help us understand the disease's molecular underpinnings, and guide us toward better treatments that directly target those molecules. If we achieved all three goals, we would indeed revolutionize the treatment of diabetes.

And so, for the past decade, researchers have conducted large genetic studies, involving at first thousands, and now tens of thousands of diabetics. The results have been somewhat disappointing: Though researchers have linked dozens of mutations with diabetes, we're clearly still missing much of the picture. Known mutations account for only 10 percent of the estimated genetic contribution to the disease. After more than a decade of large, high-tech studies, the genetic basis of diabetes remains, for the most part, unexplained.

To find the missing mutations in diabetes, scientists of two large international research consortia performed a deeper DNA analysis of a large set of study subjects. Earlier studies used a lower-cost, coarse-grained scan of the subjects' DNA. These scans only had the power to detect mutations that are relatively common in the population. In this most recent study, the researchers decided to survey the subjects' genomes much more comprehensively.

The hypothesis behind this approach is that diabetes is a bit like Leo Tolstoy's famous claim about unhappy families: Each case of diabetes is affected by genetics in its own way. 

IF GOD DID NOT WANT THEM TO BE FLEECED...:

At a glance, the two websites look virtually indistinguishable. Both feature a photo of Donald Trump, in a suit and red tie, in front of a giant American flag. Both seemingly offer a chance for two to win dinner with Donald Trump.

One is at donaldjtrump.com; the other is at dinnerwithtrump.org.

The first belongs to Trump's campaign. The second is a scheme run by Ian Hawes, a 25-year-old Maryland man who has no affiliation with Trump or his campaign and who has preyed on more than 20,000 unsuspecting donors, collecting more than $1 million in the process.

THE MIGHTY RUSSIAN WAR MACHINE:

Russia's politically-sensitive and ultimately fruitless decision to launch bombing missions on Syria from Iranian soil has exposed the limits to its air power, leaving Moscow in need of a new strategy to advance its aims.

People familiar with Russia's military said Moscow opted for the sorties from Iran - and Tehran agreed to allow them - because they were struggling to achieve their aim of crushing rebels in the city of Aleppo.

The gamble failed and rebels fighting their ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Aasad, remain ensconced in parts of Aleppo.

THE DESCRIPTOR SEEMS TOO LIMITING:

Not since the beginning of the Cold War has a U.S. politician been as fervently pro-Russian as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Just four years after his predecessor Mitt Romney declared Russia to be Washington's greatest geopolitical threat, Trump has praised President Vladimir Putin as a real leader, "unlike what we have in this country." Trump has also dismissed reports that Putin has murdered political enemies ("Our country does plenty of killing also," he told MSNBC), suggested that he would "look into" recognizing Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula and questioned whether the United States should defend NATO allies who don't pay their way. When Russian hackers stole a cache of emails in July from the Democratic National Committee's servers, as security analysts have shown, Trump called on "Russia, if you're listening," to hack some more.

"Trump is breaking with Republican foreign doctrine and almost every Republican foreign thinker I know," says Michael McFaul, U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. "He is departing radically from Ronald Reagan, something never done by any Republican Party presidential candidate."

It's easy to see why Putin views Trump's ascendancy as a godsend--and why he mobilized his cyberspies and media assets to his aid, according to security analysts. "Trump advocates isolationist policies and an abdication of U.S. leadership in the world. He cares little about promoting democracy and human rights," continues McFaul. "A U.S. retreat from global affairs fits precisely with Putin's international interests."

"HEY, WILLIE, I NEED A LOOP" (profanity alert):

Country club caddying is much different than working for a professional golfer. You are not asked for distances on every shot or to read the green on every putt, nor do you have to be as concerned with the emotional state of your golfer. It has just one requirement: an ability to walk five miles with up to fifty pounds on your shoulders. Patience certainly helps. Even as a veteran, there were times I'd wait for a loop from seven a.m. until noon. There was an internal struggle between wanting to get on the course and knowing that's just the start of your work. "Gotta make a day's pay," Billy, who was also a full-time firefighter, would always say when you asked if he was sticking around.

Leaving was not easy, anyway. Communicating with the caddy master was like deciphering code. I'd ask whether it was worth staying and get a shrug in return. He'd catch me trying to leave and say, "Hey, where do you think you're going?" and I'd slink back to the bench like a dog who knows he's misbehaved. Two hours later he'd see me sitting there and say, "You're still here?" My friend and I were terrified of him and would play rock-paper-scissors to decide who'd talk to him. But he was fair. If he made you wait around one day he'd get you out early the next, often with a high-paying group.

Once on the course, I learned to zone out while still paying attention so I could get from the first tee to the eighteenth green in what seemed like less time than it really was. Splitting the round into smaller benchmarks was key. I'd tell myself, Just get to the fourth tee, then get through seven. I'd get a free Gatorade at the turn (after nine holes) and a hot dog for a dollar if I wanted. After I climbed the big hill on thirteen, I felt like I was heading home.

Sometimes I'd lose both my focus and sight of the ball. It was never good when I turned my head as if the ball was passing, only to hear it land twenty yards behind me. But even worse was when I didn't hear or see it at all. This warranted one of several stall tactics. The key was to let the golfer lead me to his ball, presuming he saw it. I've untied and retied my shoes, gone to the nearest water fountain to wet my towel, cleaned every club in the bag, stretched -- anything to kill the time until the golfer walked towards his ball. Of course, if neither of us saw it, I was screwed.

When the round was done, I'd put the money from each golfer in separate pockets. Once they were out of sight I counted it. A veteran looper told me the rate was $37.50 a bag when he started in 1996. It was $40 to $50 when I started and $60 to $70 by the time I stopped in 2008. Now it's up to $80 a bag, minimum. The super loopers doing two a day are making at least $320 in cash.

After a summer of single-bag loops and occasional one-and-ones (one bag and one putter from a cart-riding golfer, for half the fee of a bag), I graduated to doubles. The difference between carrying two bags compared to one is less than you think, physically, and if you're going to spend two hours sitting and another four on the course, you'd rather get $100 than $50.

Although, working for two golfers meant twice as many complaints. There are a few I've heard more than a hundred times: "I barely touched it" -- said when a golfer hammers a putt ten feet past the hole. "That's not fair. I hit that sooo well" -- said after a shot lands in a sand trap or the rough or some other undesirable location. And my favorite: "The ball's just not travelling well today" -- said when a golfer's shots repeatedly come up short of the green. I've never heard a golfer say the conditions were making the ball travel farther than usual. One time a woman I was caddying for hit a tree -- in plain sight no more than thirty yards away -- and yelled at her husband, "Why didn't you tell me that tree was there?"

It was always amusing when a horrible player would ask how far away a hole is and I'd tell him "about 135, 140," and he'd say, "Well, which is it? 135 or 140?" as if it mattered. More often than not he was going to shank it sixty yards anyway. And when he did, he'd likely blame it on his clubs. As I heard one golfer tell his annoying partner, "It's not the arrows. It's the Indian."

I saw caddies cheat for their golfers by moving a ball from the rough to the fairway. I even heard about a "hole-in-one caddy," fired a few years before I started, who turned good shots into lifetime memories on holes where the golfer couldn't see the green's surface, in the hopes of getting better tips. It sure as hell wasn't worth losing my job over something like that and I didn't care enough about how well my golfer played.

10K DOWN, 10 MILLION TO GO:

The U.S. will reach its target this week of taking in 10,000 Syrian war refugees in a year-old resettlement program, the U.S. ambassador to Jordan said Sunday, after meeting families headed to California and Virginia.

WORST "BUT" EVER:

Growth in overall health-care spending is slowing, but middle-class families' share of the tab is getting larger, squeezing households already feeling stretched financially. [...]

The Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-care research nonprofit, found deductibles for individual workers have soared in the past five years, rising 67% since 2010 without adjusting for inflation, roughly seven times earnings growth over the same period. A separate Kaiser analysis of tens of millions of insurance claims found patient cost-sharing rose by 77% between 2004 and 2014, driven by a 256% jump in deductible payments.

"The growth in deductibles for workers shows no sign of slowing," said Larry Levitt, senior vice president at the foundation. "What consumers have been paying has been going up much faster than wages. Even people who are insured are having problems paying medical bills."

SHE COULD PROBABLY ONLY HAVE GOTTEN THIS FAR RUNNING AGAINST THE TWO SECULARS:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Asked about the so-called "deportation force" that Trump had promised, vice presidential candidate Mike Pence said that the idea was a "mechanism, not a policy"--as if there was a distinction between the two. 

"I mean, you're going to hear more detail in next two weeks that lays out all the policies," Pence said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday morning. "I think Donald Trump will articulate what we do with the people who are here... what you see going on right now--and I think, at a certain level, it's very refreshing, because it's the Donald Trump that I see every day--is, you see a CEO at work."

Gov. Chris Christie, who chairs Trump's transition team, seemed similarly unable to elucidate precisely what Trump's policy would be in coming days.

"There's going to be, you know, some decisions he's going to have to make as president regarding these folks, and I think what he's said [is] let's get let's first get all of the bad actors out of the country," Christie said on ABC's "This Week."

Meanwhile, on CBS's "Face the Nation," Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway couldn't answer the question of whether undocumented immigrants would need to deport themselves or whether there would be a "deportation force."  [...]

Those who have supported Trump's previous immigration stances are fed up. Mark Krikorian, who leads the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies, which is frequently cited by the campaign, told The Daily Beast earlier this week that he was a fan of the extensive immigration plan that Trump had put out last summer while running for the Republican nomination. 

"It's pretty detailed," Krikorian said. "It's just that he's never read it." 

If Trump is going to clarify his remarks, not even the chairman of the Republican National Committee seems to know exactly when that will be.

"You're going to find out from Trump very shortly. He's going to be giving prepared remarks on the issue I think very soon. I don't want to give a date," Reince Preibus dutifully told NBC's Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press."

FUN WHILE IT LASTED:

The Republican nominee -- three months after clinching the nomination -- has begun frantically trying to reposition himself in the past week, installing a new campaign manager and controversial CEO to help him escape the straitjacket that his 14 months of incendiary comments and hard-edged policy positions have him in.

His task, GOP insiders readily concede, seems close to impossible. In an interview Wednesday night, Trump's new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, recognized how long it may take to improve the public's negative perceptions of the GOP nominee, likening her turnaround project to turning a tanker.

Trump may not have that kind of time. Early voting begins in 26 days in Minnesota and in 32 other states soon after that. And already, as summer inches to its end, 90 percent of Americans say they've decided. For all the televised daily drama this race has provided, the final outcome itself is shaping up to be less dramatic than any presidential election since 1984.

"Kellyanne is good at this, but she's got a very damaged candidate and it's very late in the game," said Tony Fratto, a GOP operative in Washington and former deputy press secretary to President George W. Bush. "I think it's too late, in fact. I don't believe he can change. All of this is trying to trick voters into thinking there is a better Donald Trump out there. There is no better Donald Trump."

THAT MUCH ISN'T EVEN ARGUABLE:

In a previous conversation with Todd, Plouffe had expressed concern with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton winning Virginia and Colorado. Noting the states seem safely in Clinton's column, Todd asked him how he didn't seem to assess those states correctly.

"I think the assessment was that Donald Trump would try and do some things to appeal to the middle of the electorate, to appeal to the suburban college educated women. He's not. Basically we have a psychopath running for president," Plouffe said. "He meets the clinical definition, OK?"

Todd immediately took issue with Plouffe diagnosing Trump on television and stopped him and asked if he had a degree in psychology.

"Is that fair? We're jumping to conclusions here," Todd said.

First described systematically by Medical College of Georgia psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley in 1941, psychopathy consists of a specific set of personality traits and behaviors. Superficially charming, psychopaths tend to make a good first impression on others and often strike observers as remarkably normal. Yet they are self-centered, dishonest and undependable, and at times they engage in irresponsible behavior for no apparent reason other than the sheer fun of it. Largely devoid of guilt, empathy and love, they have casual and callous interpersonal and romantic relationships. Psychopaths routinely offer excuses for their reckless and often outrageous actions, placing blame on others instead. They rarely learn from their mistakes or benefit from negative feedback, and they have difficulty inhibiting their impulses.

Labeling people from afar is an inherently flawed endeavor, of course, especially with regard to mental health. Many psychologists and psychiatrists say that their work could never be done remotely, and should never be attempted outside of the standard, one-on-one approach to diagnosis. Many regard anything less as patently unethical. But certain extenuating circumstances seem to make this exercise worthwhile.

Psychiatrists often bestow labels knowing less about the facts of people's lives and actions than we collectively know today about Donald Trump's. We're also legitimized in this endeavor by the fact that sociopathy and psychopathy--which are similar, and sometimes used interchangeably--are not formal psychiatric diagnoses. The terms "sociopath" and "psychopath" do tend to be thrown around casually by people in need of an insult that carries an air of empiricism. "My boss is a sociopath" is to say that this is not just an opinion or judgment, but a fact. But different people define the terms differently, with understandings converging around the feature of lacking "a conscience."  

The closest thing to psychopathy or sociopathy in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)--the book that defines every mental illness and outlines how mental-health professionals should make the diagnosis--is either Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Antisocial Personality Disorder.

Other analysts have focused on the applicability of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which the Mayo Clinic defines by "an inflated sense of [one's] own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of ultra-confidence lies a fragile self-esteem that's vulnerable to the slightest criticism." One psychologist, Ben Michaelis, called Trump "textbook Narcissistic Personality Disorder." Psychologist George Simon called Trump "so classic that I'm archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there's no better example of his characteristics."

To more wholly assess the claim of sociopathy, then, it may be more illustrative at this point to consider the Antisocial Personality Disorder side of the picture, which focuses on deceit, manipulation, disregard for the rights of others, and failure to take responsibility for one's actions.

According to the DSM, Antisocial Personality Disorder should be diagnosed in a person who meets two criteria about the way they function in the world, and criteria about their personal traits. In the realm of the latter, the person must also demonstrate two other traits: antagonism and disinhibition.

Antagonism can be characterized by hostility, manipulativeness, deceitfulness, or callousness. It's worth considering these one by one.

AMERICANS JUST AREN'T HATEFUL ENOUGH FOR HIS CANDIDACY TO BE VIABLE:

Even Donald Trump recognizes that he has an immigration problem. No, I'm not talking about his wife, Melania, whose promised news conference detailing her sketchy immigration history has, almost three weeks after Trump announced it, still failed to materialize. I'm talking about the pronouncements -- mass deportations, the famous Mexican-financed border wall -- that have been the centerpiece of Trump's presidential campaign.

With November's election fast approaching, it seems Trump is having second thoughts. Given this particular candidacy, it's equally plausible that Trump is having first thoughts. There is no evidence that he has ever seriously considered any issue, including immigration. His purpose throughout the Republican primary was to convey hostility to Hispanic immigrants, and to validate the hostility of his crowds. Accusing Mexicans of crimes and promising deportations and a wall to keep them out accomplished his goal. Were his pronouncements actual policies that Trump intended to carry out? I don't know. Maybe.

Now, polls are showing the limits of bigotry and boorishness in a general election. While the horse-race numbers have been generally bad for Trump, a Pew Research poll released this week is arguably worse. It reveals why he might want to wiggle out of his promises to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants and erect an impenetrable wall along the southwestern border.

WHICH IS UNFAIR TO EDWARD SMITH AND THE ICEBERG:

What I was trying emphasize with all the poll talk Wednesday is that this race is over. There is no coming back from where Trump is now. A candidate with high-favorables and a semi-competent campaign--say, Bob Dole--couldn't do it. A conspiracy-obsessed narcissist who is hated by 60 percent of the country and whose operation spends more money on hats and private planes than on voter turnout isn't going to do it.

Here's the #realtalk: Donald Trump is not going to be elected president. And if you're serious about blunting Hillary Clinton's agenda, then you need to accept this reality and start working to save (1) as many marginal Senate seats as possible and (2) the House.

THANKS, OTHER UNCLE SAM:

Wal-Mart trucks were among the first to deliver much needed supplies after Hurricane Katrina tore through the Gulf Coast in 2005. As many Katrina survivors still note, Wal-Mart trucks arrived well before the Federal Emergency Management Agency did.

Over the weekend, Wal-Mart was again among the large companies in Louisiana able to keep supply lines open and operations going despite catastrophe -- this time historic flooding that devastated whole communities and shut down major roadways.

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Erica Jones said the corporation's emergency operations center in Bentonville, Ark., kicked into high gear late last week as forecast warnings of record rainfall started to roll in. Wal-Mart has about 30 locations in the affected area, including stores in the heavily flooded communities of Denham Springs and Baker.

Jones said early planning included mapping alternate routes for trucks delivering to stores in and around Louisiana. Corporate meteorologists monitored the weather and helped inform plans. Preparations were made to ramp up shipments of essential supplies -- from bottled water to baby formula -- to the region as it became clear conditions would worsen.

Jones said eight Wal-Mart stores were closed because of various levels of flooding and damage. As of Thursday (Aug. 18), five of those stores had re-opened. A key distribution center in Hammond also remained open. The Hammond center serves stores in Louisiana and south Mississippi.

Jones said the current priority is ensuring Wal-Mart employees are healthy and taken care of and that trucks are safely re-routed to get to where they need to be.

"We are shifting our resources to be able to work around the road closures and damage to facilities," Jones said.

Big corporations have a clear motive in investing in disaster preparedness. Planning ahead minimizes the dent otherwise unpredictable natural disasters can make on revenues. And there's a sales advantage in being able to quickly get back to providing supplies and services to customers in a time of need.

On the plus side, corporations can serve as a model for how disaster response should work. Experts point to Katrina. While FEMA's response was lethargic and inefficient, major companies ushered in needed supplies quickly.

WE WASPS JUST GOT TO THE eND OF hISTORY SOONER:

The report, prepared by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and the Earth Institute at Columbia University, showed Syria, Afghanistan and eight sub-Saharan countries as the 10 least happy places on earth to live.

The top 10 this year were Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, and Sweden. 

THE BUBBLE BRIGADE:

The roots of the conservative news media industrial complex came in the 1990s with the rise of three key forces: Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Matt Drudge.

All broke ground and revolutionized their respective platforms: Fox News opinion programming on TV, Limbaugh on radio, and Drudge on the web.

In the years that followed, many emulated their successes. What Limbaugh did with talk radio paved the way for hosts like Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, and more. And what Drudge did with the internet helped spawn a slew of conservative websites. Breitbart, TheBlaze, The Daily Caller, Hot Air, and Townhall came online to serve a right-leaning audience with an insatiable appetite for news told through a conservative lens.

But in the 1990s, the conservative press was not very hostile to politicians on the right. In its formative era, the conservative-media movement mostly played friendly with Republicans. It instead spent its energy zeroing in on President Bill Clinton. Perhaps the peak came with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, during which the conservative media relentlessly hammered the president.

For the most part, Republicans and the conservative media existed symbiotically. Republicans used their newfound apparatus as a vehicle to drive home their message to supporters. Simultaneously, the conservative news media sought to lock in its audience by characterizing the mainstream press as an industry comprising dishonest liberals -- something with which the GOP was more than happy to go along.

"What it became, essentially, was they were preaching this is the only place you can get news. This is the only place you can trust. All other media outlets are lying to you. So you need to come to us," said Ted Newton, president of Gravity Strategic Communications and former communications adviser to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

"And so in an attempt to capture an audience, they almost made them slaves to those news outlets. So there is a whole group of people who will only watch Fox, who will only read Breitbart. And they are living in a bubble," he added.

Toward the end of President George W. Bush's second term, the symbiotic relationship showed signs of souring. Establishment figures inside the GOP supported immigration reform and a bailout at the height of the 2008 recession. Conservative talkers didn't.

THE DEMOCRATS OF THE ARAB WORLD:

Ennahda, one of the most influential political parties in the Arab world and a major force in Tunisia's emergence as a democracy, recently announced a historic transition. Ennahda has moved beyond its origins as an Islamist party and has fully embraced a new identity as a party of Muslim democrats. The organization, which I co-founded in the 1980s, is no longer both a political party and a social movement. It has ended all of its cultural and religious activities and now focuses only on politics.

Ennahda's evolution mirrors Tunisia's broader social and political trajectory. The party first emerged as an Islamist movement in response to repression at the hands of a secularist, authoritarian regime that denied citizens religious freedom and the rights of free expression and association. For decades, Tunisian dictators shut down all political dis­course in the country, forcing movements with political aims to operate exclusively as social and cultural organizations. But the revolution of 2010-11 brought an end to authoritarian rule and opened up space for open, free, and fair political competition.

Tunisia's new constitution, which Ennahda members of parliament helped draft and which was ratified in 2014, enshrines democracy and protects political and religious freedoms. Under the new constitution, the rights of Tunisians to worship freely, express their convictions and beliefs, and embrace an Arab Muslim identity are guaranteed, and so Ennahda no longer needs to focus its energies on fighting for such protections. 

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

Hamilton tells of America's pursuit of greatness and reminds us how much we need goodness. Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical locates politics downstream of marriage and family. Alexander Hamilton's legacy depends, in the end, on the grace of his wife Eliza. She is the answer to the last question of a three-part motif: "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?"

The musical reverences George Washington as general, president, and man of God. Actor Chris Jackson, who originated the role, inhabited this threefold authority naturally, gathering the cast in a backstage prayer circle before each show. On stage Washington recites Micah 4:4, historically his favorite scriptural passage, incorporated into the farewell address: "Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree / And no one shall make them afraid." With these words, Miranda emphasizes how Biblically-saturated America's founding was, and hints at the moral concerns of the show.

Aaron Burr, Hamilton's narrator and Hamilton's killer, complains that Hamilton has been "seated at the right hand of the father," elevated to Washington's side. The Trinitarian image is ironic: Though Washington is a godly man and father-figure, Hamilton isn't quite a spotless lamb. Inaugurating the role, Miranda played his protagonist as an irrepressible motor-mouth, committed to his ideals, hungry for fame, and susceptible to his passions. Hamilton's involvement in America's first political sex scandal is treated as a profound moral failing.

Hamilton woos his wife Eliza (originally played by Philippa Soo) in Act One, in a bright rhythm-and-blues/rap duet called "Helpless." It's a lady-and-the-tramp story, as the orphan immigrant Hamilton courts a daughter of the wealthy Schuyler family. He promises to protect and care for her: "Long as I'm alive, Eliza, swear to God you'll never feel so helpless!" But he breaks this promise. Hamilton commits adultery with a married woman named Maria Reynolds, is blackmailed and extorted by her husband, and finally publishes an account of the whole thing to clear himself of the charge of mishandling government funds. The music of adultery darkly mirrors the music of marriage--again a rhythm-and-blues/rap duet, but more foreboding. Even as Hamilton succumbs to Reynolds's charms, he reflects bitterly on how hollow the whole affair is: "This is the last time / I said that last time / It became a pastime." Sin can take everything from you without even giving what it promised.

By his infidelity and its public fallout, Hamilton leaves Eliza helpless. Devastated, she "erases herself from the narrative" by burning all her correspondence with him (this is the musical's clever way of incorporating the lack of extant writing by Eliza into the character's arc). She sings, "You forfeit your place in my heart, / You forfeit your place in our bed, / You'll sleep in your office instead, / With only the memories of when you were mine." Striving for greatness but falling short of goodness, Hamilton has undone his family.

Hamilton has no reason to expect forgiveness from his wife, yet somehow he gets it. First, he must endure more heartbreak--the death of his eldest son in a duel. In the Act Two show-stopper "Quiet Uptown," the Hamilton family grapples with this new sorrow. Hamilton sings, "I take the children to Church on Sunday, / The sign of the cross at the door, / And I pray. / That never used to happen before." His prayer is for forgiveness, and he gets it. "She takes his hand," go the lyrics, as Eliza draws near him. "There are moments that the words don't reach, / There's a grace too powerful to name": Marriage is capable, if we humbly let it, of producing fruit that is greater than anything we could reasonably hope for.

FIRST THEY CAME FOR MY CIGARETTES...:

Americans are also simply living longer, and the overwhelming majority -- 86 percent -- of all cancers in the US are diagnosed in older people, over the age of 50.

But while more people may be dying from cancer, the cancer death rate has actually been declining since the early 1990s. (In other words, of the people diagnosed with the disease, fewer are now dying from it.) These changes are mainly attributed gains in early detection and treatment advances, as well as declines in the smoking rate.

The drop in heart disease deaths is also clearly good news. According to the American Heart Association, it can also be attributed in part to the decline in smoking, as well as improvements in emergency care for heart disease patients, medications and procedures, and increased awareness about healthy eating and lifestyle.

WELL, IT WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTED:

The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies now view Islamic State as a shrinking and increasingly demoralized military force, a sharp shift from the seemingly invincible extremist army that declared an Islamist caliphate two years ago.

The revised assessment comes after surprisingly swift and relatively bloodless victories this summer near Syria's border with Turkey and in the Sunni heartland of Iraq, two areas where Islamic State had appeared entrenched.

The rapid recapture this week of Jarabulus, the militants' last garrison by the Turkish border, helped close off a boundary region that was crucial for movement of recruits, supplies and money in and out of the group's quasi-state.

It also was the latest fight to suggest the Sunni militants no longer are willing to fight to hold territory against a sustained assault.

THE DEMOCRATS OF THE ARAB WORLD:

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

In the summer of 1980, Donald Trump faced a big problem. For six months, undocumented Polish laborers had been clearing the future site of Trump Tower, his signature real estate project on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, where he now lives, maintains his private offices and hosts his presidential campaign.

The men were putting in 12-hour shifts with inadequate safety equipment at subpar wages that their contractor paid sporadically, if at all. A lawyer for many of the Poles demanded that the workers be paid or else he would serve Trump with a lien on the property. One Polish worker even went to Trump's office to ask him for money in person, according to sworn testimony and a deposition filed under oath in a court case.

For help, Trump turned to Daniel Sullivan, a 6-ft. 5-in., 285-lb. labor consultant, FBI informant and future officer of the Teamsters Union. "Donald told me he had difficulties ...," Sullivan later testified in the case. "That he had some illegal Polish employees on the job."

Sullivan had been helping Trump negotiate a c[****]o deal in New Jersey at the time, and he testified that he was shocked by Trump's admission. "I think you are nuts," Sullivan testified that he told Trump. "You are here negotiating a lease in Atlantic City for a c[****]o license and you are telling me you have got illegal employees on the job."

For 36 years, Trump has denied knowingly using undocumented workers to demolish the building that would be replaced with Trump Tower in 1980. After Senator Marco Rubio raised the issue of undocumented Polish workers during a Republican primary debate this year, Trump described himself as removed from the problem. "I hire a contractor. The contractor then hires the subcontractor," he said. "They have people. I don't know. I don't remember, that was so many years ago, 35 years ago."

But thousands of pages of documents from the case, including reams of testimony and sworn depositions reviewed by TIME, tell a different story. Kept for more than a decade in 13 boxes in a federal judiciary storage unit in Missouri, the documents contain testimony that Trump sought out the Polish workers when he saw them on another job, instigated the creation of the company that paid them and negotiated the hours they would work. The papers contain testimony that Trump repeatedly toured the site where the men were working, directly addressed them about pay problems and even promised to pay them himself, which he eventually did.

The documents show that after things got ugly over unpaid wages, Trump sought Sullivan's advice on the workers and their immigration status. At one point, a lawyer for the Poles testified, Trump threatened, through his own lawyer, to call the Immigration and Naturalization Service and have the workers deported.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

WHAT'S PAPER?:

Five years ago, a new quirky-sounding consumer-rights group set up shop in a sleepy corner of Capitol Hill. "Consumers for Paper Options is a group of individuals and organizations who believe paper-based communications are critically important for millions of Americans," the group explained in a press release, "especially those who are not yet part of the online community."

This week, Consumers for Paper Options scored a big win, according to the Wall Street Journal. Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Mary Jo White has abandoned her plan to loosen rules about the need to mail paper documents to investors in mutual funds.

Mutual funds were lobbying for more freedom when it came to mailing prospectuses -- those exhaustive, bulky, trash-can-bound explanations of the contents of your fund. In short, the funds wanted to be free to make electronic delivery the default, while allowing investors to insist on paper delivery. This is an obvious common-sense reform which would save whole forests of trees.

Consumers for Paper Options fought back. The group warned that changing the default from paper to electronic delivery would "Confuse potentially millions of investors who suddenly stop seeing important printed fund performance material from investment firms."

"Ask Congress to stop the SEC from impeding access to paper-based investment materials," the group's website blared.

Consumers for Paper Options seems to have won for now, the SEC's reported pullback suggests.

If you're not familiar with how Washington works, you might be baffled that such a group exists. But if you understand how the sausage is made, you've probably guessed what Consumers for Paper Options really is: a front group for the companies and unions that profit from the federally required mailing of unread and unwanted materials. They defend tree-killers.

CONSERVATISM IS POSITIVE:

What does it mean to be a conservative in Europe today? My answer is simple: to be a conservative means to reject the politics of negativity -- anger, revenge, hatred, guilt and resentment -- and instead to pursue a positive vision: a liberal-minded vision of generosity and justice, of peace and prosperity, of democracy and conviviality under the rule of law. To be a conservative means, in other words, to take the best ideas of the past and apply them to the present: not in a negative spirit of reactionary fear of the future, but embracing this world as we find it, with all its defects and depravity, its opportunities and its glimpses of divine glory, in the hope of improving it before we leave it for a better place. Conservatives are conscious that the material world matters to us all, but that it is not the only one; just as we know, too, that those living in it are not the only people who matter, for we cherish the generations who have come before us and learn from them, while never forgetting that we are but the harbingers of posterity, the generations to come who will inherit the world that we bequeath them. Conservatives feel the weight of history not as a burden, but with gratitude for the responsibilities that have been placed upon us by God. We are responsible for the preservation of the civilisation that has formed us and of which we in turn must endeavour to be worthy. For us European conservatives, our primary duty is to the civilisation of the West; but our responsibilities do not stop there. Wherever in the world the forces of barbarism seek to destroy humanity and liberty, we must resist and overcome them. If we do not, they will seek us out sooner or later. Even if they fail in their attempt to annihilate us, physically and culturally, the barbarians may do great damage. 

Who are the conservative thinkers to whom we should be looking for inspiration? Here in Madrid, such questions spring naturally to mind, for this Most Catholic Kingdom of Spain is and always has been of a naturally conservative disposition, and conservative thought has flourished here at least since Ferdinand and Isabella ushered in the Spanish Golden Age. The grim fundamentalism of the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada and his Dominicans was only one side -- a dark one -- of that glittering coin. This was also the Spain that opened up the New World, that created global markets and trade routes, and to which we owe, perhaps, the very idea of "Western" civilisation. This was the Spain of El Greco and Velázquez, the Spain of Calderón and, above all, of Cervantes. It is worth recalling that the strict censorship of the Spanish Inquisition did not apply to the most popular literary genre of the day, novels and romances of chivalry. My godfather, the historian Hugh Thomas, describes this as "a remarkable toleration". The author of Don Quixote -- whose quatercentenary we celebrate this year along with that of his contemporary, Shakespeare -- was a true Spanish conservative. He loved the past, he revered the old knightly virtues of courtesy and mercy, but he was also a man of action who was wounded at Lepanto, helping to save Christendom from the Ottoman threat. Like Shakespeare, another great conservative, he loved his country more than himself. He believed in God, but his subject was humanity. For Cervantes, we are all, like the Don, muddle-headed fools with lucid intervals. Such is the hard-headed conservative view of politics and especially ideology. To a conservative, the pursuit of a perfect world, the world of which the Left has always dreamt, is at best like tilting at windmills; at worst, it means the abandonment of all the chivalry that mitigates man's savagery to man and especially to woman. We cannot avoid mistakes, but we may hope by the end to emulate the Don's epitaph: "Morir cuerdo, y vivir loco." ("To die in wisdom, having lived in folly.")

One part of this realism concerns the problem of inequality. Unlike many modern writers, including even some conservatives, Cervantes has no illusions about abolishing inequality: "Dos linajes solos hay en el mundo, como decía una abuela mía, que son el tener y el no tener." ("There are only two families in the world, as a grandmother of mine used to say: the Haves and the Have-nots.") This must be the first literary use of the phrase "Haves and Have-nots", more than two centuries before another great conservative, Benjamin Disraeli, wrote in his novel Sybil of "two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy . . . the Rich and the Poor". Because conservatives do not yearn for an egalitarian Utopia, they prefer to address the problem by ameliorating the effects of poverty, rather than demonising the rich. It is as important today as it ever was to avoid class warfare, which is stoked up by the demagogy of the far-Left; but the Right will only be taken seriously if it is seen to take radical measures to open up society and the economy to enable the Have-nots to compete on equal terms with the Haves. The Left will always try to exploit the guilt complexes of the Haves and the resentments of the Have-Nots; and these two emotions, guilt and resentment, are very powerful political factors, today as much as ever. If the centre-Right cannot counter guilt with generosity and resentment with justice, then its place will be taken by the far-Right, which exploits similarly negative emotions to the Left. The far-Right is in the ascendant across Europe today precisely because the conservative cause has allowed itself to abandon liberalism, and with it the positive politics that alone provide a vision of the future that may inspire the young and old alike. 

In its long period of decline from the 17th to the 20th centuries, Spain produced several conservative thinkers of a deeply pessimistic cast of mind, from the great Jesuit Baltasar Gracián, whose Criticón and Oráculo so impressed Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to the noble diplomat Donoso Cortés, whose Ultramontane polemics against progress exercised a profound influence on Carl Schmitt. We can certainly learn much from these Catholic Cassandras, but in my view the Spanish thinker who should inspire conservatives today is José Ortega y Gasset. In his early tribute to Cervantes, Meditations on Quixote, he declared: "Hatred is the feeling which leads to the extinction of values." That was published in the fateful year 1914. Then came the Great War, from which Spain was fortunate to escape unscathed. In his best-known work, La Rebelión de las Masas (The Revolt of the Masses), published in 1930 as monarchy was replaced by republic in Spain, while Europe was being crushed between the pincers of Fascism and Communism, Ortega developed this thought. "Civilisation," he wrote, "is nothing else than the attempt to reduce the use of force to being the ultima ratio, the last resort." What he called "the revolt of the mass man", the tyranny of the majority and the use of force to resolve political disputes, was "the Magna Carta of barbarism". He went on: "Civilisation is above all the will to live together. A man is uncivilised, a barbarian in so far as he does not take others into account." This is what we see today, in its most extreme form, in the jihad against the West by Isis and other Islamist terrorists. What Ortega held up as his ideal "form of life" he called convivencia, a wonderful Spanish expression which combines the English words "coexistence" and "conviviality", as well as the Latin concordia. Such is the life that is only made possible by civilisation, and such is the true raison d'être of conservative thought and politics.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

That revelation came a day after reports emerged that domestic violence charges were filed 20 years ago against Bannon following an altercation with his then-wife, Mary Louise Piccard.

In a sworn court declaration following their divorce, Piccard said her ex-husband had objected to sending their twin daughters to an elite Los Angeles academy because he "didn't want the girls going to school with Jews."

"He said he doesn't like Jews and that he doesn't like the way they raise their kids to be 'whiney brats,'" Piccard said in a 2007 court filing.

GREATEST WAR EVER:

The main battleline pits the approximately 300,000 soldiers of the Syrian army, and allied forces, against myriad rebel groups and Syrian and foreign jihadists.

The largest anti-regime rebel alliance is the Army of Conquest, grouping Islamist factions like Ahrar al-Sham and Faylaq al-Sham with jihadists such as Fateh al-Sham Front, previously Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front.

The biggest battlefront at present is Aleppo city, divided between government and opposition control but surrounded by loyalist forces.

The government is also fighting to retake control of Eastern Ghouta, next to Damascus, which is largely controlled by the Jaish al-Islam rebel group.

Syria's army has fought IS in several parts of the country, expelling the jihadists from the ancient city of Palmyra in March.

AND ALL THAT JAZZ:

Reading the documents feels like stepping back in time. All at once, they reveal the many problems of the calcified system, where farmers and miners alike were rebelling and intellectuals were demanding democratic elections. The people of the Baltic states, the Georgians and the Moldovans were revolting against the Russians, while the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine -- the Soviet Union foreign policy that countries could not leave the Warsaw Pact -- was looming in Eastern Europe.

Gorbachev, who had once been a provincial official in Stavropol, stood at the helm of this country, watching it suffocate as a result of its sheer size and the refusal of its bureaucracy to change course. The documents also show that even under Gorbachev, the bureaucracy was as inefficient as ever.

Gorbachev's aide Anatoly Chernyaev, for example, complains about incompetent leaders in the global communist movement, like French Communist Party leader Georges Marchais ("a dead horse") and Gus Hall, the chairman of the Communist Party USA ("a philistine with plebeian conceits"). Nevertheless, Moscow was still paying millions to support its representatives around the world.

At this time, shops in the Soviet Union had run out of eggs and sugar, and even vodka was in short supply. Conditions were so bad that, in September 1988, Chernyaev had to submit a written request to get a telephone connection in the apartment of his driver Nikolai Nikolayevich Maikov, so that the general secretary could reach him. [...]

Gorbachev later used some of the documents in his books, much to the chagrin of the current Kremlin leadership. But many of the papers are still taboo to this day. This is partly because they relate to decisions or people that Gorbachev is still unwilling to talk about. But most of all it is because they do not fit into the image that Gorbachev painted of himself, namely that of a reformer pressing ahead with determination, gradually reshaping his enormous country in accordance with his ideas.

During a research visit to the Gorbachev Foundation, the young Russian historian Pavel Stroilov, who lives in London today, secretly copied about 30,000 pages of the material archived there and made them available to SPIEGEL.

The documents reveal something that Gorbachev prefers to keep quiet: that he was driven to act by developments in the dying Soviet state and that he often lost track of things in the chaos. They also show that he was duplicitous and, contrary to his own statements, sometimes made deals with hardliners in the party and the military.

In other words, the Kremlin leader did what many retired statesmen do: He later significantly embellished his image as an honest reformer.

The West has praised Gorbachev for not forcefully resisting the demise of the Soviet Union. In reality, it remains unclear to this day whether the Kremlin leader did not in fact sanction military actions against Georgians, Azerbaijanis and Lithuanians, who had rebelled against the central government in Moscow between 1989 and 1991. When Soviet troops violently quelled the demonstrations, 20 people were killed in Georgia, 143 in Azerbaijan and 14 in Lithuania, not to mention the wars and unrest in Nagorno-Karabakh, Trans-Dniester and Central Asia.

Many have not forgotten the tragedy that unfolded in the Georgian capital Tbilisi on the night of April 8-9, 1989, when Russian soldiers used sharpened spades and poison gas to break up a protest march in the city.

Gorbachev claims that he was not made aware of the incident until six hours later. He had not given the military or the intelligence service clear signals to exercise restraint in the smoldering conflict, even though he knew how fragile the relationship was between Russians and Georgians. He also did not call anyone to account later on. Even today, he still says that it was "a huge mystery" as to who gave the orders to use violence in Tbilisi.

But when Gorbachev met with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the then-floor leader of Germany's center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), on April 11, two days after the bloody suppression of the protests, he sought to justify the hardliners' approach. He later had the following passage deleted from the published version of the Russian minutes of the conversation with Vogel:

You have heard about the events in Georgia . Notorious enemies of the Soviet Union had gathered there. They abused the democratic process, shouted provocative slogans and even called for the deployment of NATO troops to the republic. We had to take a firm approach in dealing with these adventurers and defending perestroika -- our revolution.

The "notorious enemies of the Soviet Union" were in fact peaceful civilians. Of the 20 Georgians killed in Tbilisi, 17 were women.

A remark made at a politburo meeting on Oct. 4, 1989, in which Gorbachev learned that 3,000 demonstrators had been killed on Tiananmen Square in Beijing that June, shows that he was prepared for resistance to his reform plans and was not necessarily ruling out the need for violent action. Gorbachev said:

We must be realists. They have to defend themselves, and so do we. 3,000 people, so what?

Although the minutes of the meeting were later published, this passage was missing.

Paradoxically, however, there was a kind of democracy flourishing in the USSR, and that was inside the narrow circle of Politburo members -- the governing body of the Central Committee (CC). All Politburo meetings were strictly secret, but the archives reveal that there were fairly heated discussions and confrontations between opposing points of view. No one was subsequently held responsible, or punished: people simply said what they thought. These Politburo discussions sometimes got as far as the CC itself, if it was necessary to publicise a new tendency. 

The next period of tension between the so-called liberals and conservatives blew up at the beginning of the 1960s. In the corridors of Dom Kino [the building at the centre of the film industry], I remember, there were intense discussions of the rumours about ideological debates going on inside the Kremlin. The new ideological head of the Party, Demichev, attempted to loosen control over literature and art, but this provoked a violent reaction from officials in the Soviet republics. Everyone was discussing the news that the Georgian Ideology Secretary had leapt on to the stage and shouted "I was a Stalinist and I still am! We will not permit the Party to be deprived of its leading ideological role!" A direct challenge to the Politburo!  Clearly these were no longer Stalinist times, when disagreement with the proposed party course meant instant death. But it was a sign that no reforms would get through without difficulty and that the party bosses were not afraid to protect their own interests.

In 1957, Yuri Andropov was head of the CC international department under Khrushchev.  He was then appointed Secretary to the Central Committee, in charge of interparty relations within the Soviet Bloc.  I remember the time very well: Andrei Tarkovsky and I were friends with some young people who were working in Andropov's foreign policy consultancy group in the CC administration.  There was Kolya Shishlin, Sasha Bovin, Zhora Shakhnazarov, Arbatov.... Andropov had employed them so as to inject some flexibility into the work of the all-powerful but cumbersome party apparatus. For Tarkovsky and me, meeting these people was a complete revelation, because they were young, free-thinking, educated, polyglot intellectuals. The freedom of thought that we enjoyed during our discussions at the dinner table -- over lots of vodka -- made me think that Andropov was different from those that had gone before him. If the likes of these people were his consultants, it indicated a wide-ranging world view, which didn't fit neatly into the dogma of the official elite. 

I should add that both Bovin and Shishlin, as well as other like-minded people in the department, were also responsible for writing the Secretary General's speeches. They told me that they always tried to see the text last, just before it was put in front of Brezhnev, and each time they checked to see that their paragraph condemning the cult of personality had not been taken out. The Stalinists working in the editorial section never failed to remove any negative references to Stalin or to the cult of personality.  Every time, Andropov's people would promptly put the offending paragraph back into the text and "guard" it until it was time for the speech. This was a legitimate way of putting their anti-Stalinist ideas into action.

As far as I can see, Andropov symbolised a wing of the Soviet "liberals", to a certain extent anti-Stalinists, though of course he never revealed this publicly. He was interested in European communism, which was natural, as he had always had dealings with Western communists. At the time, Western Marxism was moving actively in the direction of revising Stalinist dogma.

This long preamble is motivated by a wish to remind readers that the ideas of liberalisation and reform began not just anywhere, but from the heart of the Central Committee, and were implemented by people I knew.

In the middle of the 1960s, and under constant pressure from the liberal wing, the party signed itself up to economic reform. Prime Minister Kosygin was charged with putting the reform into effect. Kosygin was an economist and was quite unenthusiastic about the reforms, knowing the resistance this liberalisation would provoke among the Stalinists.  Understandably, for at that time the party had the monopoly of hearts, minds and the subsoil - in short, the riches of the whole country. The party elite had unlimited control over everything that was produced at that time in the Soviet Union, so any liberalisation would deprive the communists of their monopolistic privileges.

I remember meeting my friend Kolya Shishlin as he was returning from talks between the leaders of the Communist Parties of Czechoslovakia and the USSR.  He came towards me with a tragic face. "It's all over", he said. "We spent 10 years 'creeping up' on the enemy (Stalinist) trenches and that idiot (Dubcek) got up and 'ran for it', giving us all away. We'll have to forget about reforms for another 20 years."

The reforms and all the liberalising tendencies came to a tragic end, however, for Alexander Dubcek, Czechoslovakia's communist leader, sensed an opportunity and decided to get in first.  His Prague Spring (1968) set in motion an active programme to reform state organisations and the party.  Dubcek's project to decentralise the economy was christened "socialism with a human face".  We watched what was happening in Prague with amazement and delight, in sharp contrast to my friends in the Central Committee, who were afraid that it could all come badly unstuck.  Which, in the end, is exactly what happened.  The Soviet Stalinists, exploiting the rapid growth of anti-Soviet attitudes in Czechoslovakia, sent in the tanks and immediately put paid to all reforms in the USSR.  The reason given was that reforms could result in a similar catastrophe: the turning of the Soviet people against the whole totalitarian system.

Wise Kolya turned out to be absolutely right. It was 20 years later, in the middle of the 1980s, that the idea of progress dawned again, when Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on the scene as a reformer. He had been transferred to Moscow at the end of the 70s under the direct protection of Andropov, who often took his holidays in the south, where he had treatment for his kidneys and where Gorbachev was First Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee of the CPSU. Andropov took a shine to him and introduced him to Brezhnev, who also liked the young, educated, modern party activist. This was how Gorbachev came to Moscow in 1978 as CC Secretary of Agriculture.

The idea of reform and liberalisation was entirely Andropov's. As head of the KGB, he was better informed than anyone else about the catastrophic economic situation in the USSR. When he became head of state, he was able to start putting into effect the plan he had been hatching for a long time.  [...]

As a "new man",  Gorbachev (who was born in 1931) probably thought he could free the Soviet system from all its economic and ideological encumbrances. He probably hoped that this would guarantee unprecedented economic growth and inspire the people to new heights of achievement in the field of labour and so on. But it didn't happen. What happened was exactly the opposite. 

Gorbachev certainly didn't expect the course that events took, and for most of his time in power he was completely lost. The simple reason is that he didn't have (nor could he have done!) any real political experience which would have enabled him to perceive the results of his actions. It's unlikely that he could have imagined dismantling the system without being buried in the resulting wreckage. His lack of experience, education and intellectual potential meant that he had no idea of what was needed to embark on such a grandiose plan. Of course, it's easy for us to say this now. Back then, few people had any understanding of how complicated everything was - the one passionate desire was to destroy everything "quickly and for ever". 

WHEN THE CHICKEN COMES HOME...

DES MOINES -- Ted Giannoulas's arrival was delayed four-plus hours; some of his luggage had not arrived. Now, in a brightly lit, empty drive-through restaurant outside of downtown, he savored a double burger as closing time neared. It was a late Sunday night in early August. The surrounding suburban strip malls offered little for sale but boredom.

The next day promised to be better. Men will want to shake his hand. Women will want to marry him. Children will want to take him home.

The San Diego Chicken will have a crowd.

Giannoulas, who turned 63 this month, has spent 42 years as perhaps the most influential mascot in sports history. Geoff Belinfante, a former executive producer with Major League Baseball Productions, said he believed Giannoulas's riotous antics in the 1970s spurred other teams to create their own mascots.

David Raymond, the original Phillie Phanatic, said of Giannoulas, "He just created actual entertainment for the fans, and did it in a way that was just spontaneous, interactive and unrehearsed."

Erin Blank, the owner of Keystone Mascots and a former Detroit Tigers and Washington Capitals mascot, added, "We wouldn't be doing what we do today if it wasn't for him."

Giannoulas's business model was always to go where a laugh was appreciated. For years, he pursued them relentlessly, spending up to 260 days on the road.

These days, thanks to the unpredictability of travel and a desire to enjoy life in San Diego, Giannoulas stays still -- or what, for him, passes for still. He hit 11 ballparks in July and August.

He looks uncertainly to the future, unsure about appointing a successor or retiring the character that has been his alone for decades. But he does know one thing.

"It's not the end," he said before the tour, "but I can see it from here."

Jane Giannoulas, his wife, had wondered what the slow times would be like. Though she loved being a part of the rush, the transition to a quieter present has been lovely. Time is theirs. They work in the yard, watch the waves crash onto the beach and devote autumn Sundays to the N.F.L.

Seeing her husband get to enjoy the simple pleasures is like "watching a child experience fireworks for the first time," she said. "People take these things for granted, but to see Ted sit down in the middle of the summer on a blanket at the lake, it's a real special thing."

Yet she acknowledges the Chicken is "in his soul." 

SHE IS THE NEOCON IN THE RACE:

Paul Wolfowitz, a neo-conservative who as a senior advisor to then-US President George W. Bush was a vociferous advocate for the preemptive war against Iraq in 2003, says Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump poses a security risk to the country and that he will vote for the Democratic candidate, Secretary Hillary Clinton.

Wolfowitz told Der Spiegel magazine that he has "serious reservations" about Clinton, but that he could not vote for Trump.

"It's important to make it clear how unacceptable he is," Wolfowitz told the magazine.

IT'S A PURITAN NATION:

A study published on Tuesday found that Berkeley, California's penny-per-ounce tax on sugary drinks had reduced consumption by 21% in low-income neighborhoods - precisely where health officials hoped to see the largest decrease.

"Low-income communities bear the brunt of the health consequences of obesity and diabetes, so this decline in soda and sugary beverage consumption is very encouraging," said study senior author Kristine Madsen, an associate professor of public health at UC Berkeley, in a statement. "We are looking for tools that support people in making healthy choices, and the soda tax appears to be an effective tool."

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE PEACE DIVIDEND?:

In his September cover story for The Atlantic, Steven Brill recounts how the political lessons of those early years evolved into an approach he succinctly summarizes as "never again." Politicians and government bureaucrats understood that the public would not forgive a second, devastating strike. For the administrations of both President Bush and President Barack Obama, "never again" has meant saying yes to any initiative that could be sold as plausible protection against a future attack. The "never again" approach has remained in place even as those who commit acts of terrorism have shifted in recent years to take advantage of the lethal possibilities of the ever-more connected world.

Certainly, some of the government programs created to address vulnerabilities exposed by the 9/11 attacks were long overdue. The U.S. needed a much better system for screening air travelers, one that did not allow people to board airplanes with lethal weapons in hand. And it made sense to harden New York's underwater subway tunnels to limit the damage a bomb could do to both passengers and the city's infrastructure.

But for every valid effort, it seems like the terrorism-industrial complex came up with an array of boondoggles that were profitable for the companies involved but added little to the security of ordinary Americans. The upwards of $47 billion spent on FirstNet, the troubled effort to make sure firefighters and police could talk to each other in an emergency, staggers the imagination. Altogether, Brill calculates, the government has spent $100 to $150 billion on equipment and programs that do not work. What might have been accomplished if all of that money had been spent on, say, reducing the cost of a college education for poor and middle-class kids?

"Never again" might have made some sense when the enemy America faced, al-Qaeda, put all of its effort into planning terrorism spectaculars like the simultaneous attack on two American embassies or the destruction of the Twin Towers. The international logistics and footprint required for such operations gave intelligence and law-enforcement officials something to detect.

EVERY TIME HE OPENS HIS MOUTH HE LOSES VOTES:

IT'S A REPUBLIC, NOT A DEMOCRACY:

WE'LL REFORM IT, NOT REPEAL IT:

At the recession's height in 2009, over 25 million Americans said they had not filled a prescription in the previous year because they couldn't afford it, the analysis of federal government data showed. That was nearly one in 10 Americans.

Between 1999 and 2009, every age group except seniors found prescription drugs increasingly difficult to afford. Among seniors, the problem was worst in 2004, when 5.4 percent were unable to afford their medicine. In 2006, once the new Medicare Part D program was in place, that number fell to 3.6 percent, the study found.

The Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare, was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010.

Most groups now have greater ability to afford prescription drugs, the researchers said. For example, the percentage of 19- to 25-year-olds who couldn't afford to fill a prescription fell from nearly 11 percent in 2010 to just over 8 percent in 2011, as the Affordable Care Act let young adults remain on their parents' health insurance.

FINALLY FOUND THAT VOTER FRAUD THE RIGHT CLAIMS IS A PROBLEM:

CERTAIN BLACK LIVES MATTER:

Alveda King, 65, is a Christian minister, author, and a former member of the Georgia House of Representatives. She regularly speaks on pro-life issues.

During a recent interview on The Jim Bakker Show, co-host Lori Bakker asked, "If black lives matter, then why is it that black women are more than 5 times as likely as a white woman to have an abortion?"

Alveda King said, "Planned Parenthood hates it when this is explained. About 60 to 70% of all Planned Parenthoods are in minority neighborhoods. Abortion is billed and marketed - abortion mills or clinics are in predominantly black communities and we have proven this. Just traveling around the country and they'd say, 'oh, here's an abortion mill,' and it would be on or near a street named after Martin Luther King Jr. I began to see that beginning and then there were various organizations, and so we did the research and Life Research Institute really did confirm that."

"So then you get there [the abortion clinic], and they say, 'We really want to help you. We want abortion to be safe, legal and rare. But if you get pregnant, we're going to do this. We want you to be a credit to your race,'" explained King. "And it's [abortion] not rare. The recourse to this before '73 was the Negro Project. And the Negro Project was marketed primarily to the black community giving free and low-cost vasectomies and tubal ligations."

"When abortion became legal, then it was offered on a disproportionate rate to the black community, and sold as reproductive health care, reproductive freedom - this is your right," said Alveda King. "But Black Lives Matter in the womb, I would think. I think the womb that brings forth the black life should matter. But they don't want that out there. That's the thing. And so because black lives absolutely matter, what about the babies in that womb? What about that mama?"

ALL THAT JAZZ #41

Rudy Van Gelder, an audio engineer whose work with Miles Davis, John Coltrane and numerous other musicians helped define the sound of jazz on record, died on Thursday at his home, which doubled as his studio, in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by his assistant, Maureen Sickler.

Mr. Van Gelder, as he took pains to explain to interviewers, was an engineer and not a producer. He was not in charge of the sessions he recorded; he did not hire the musicians or play any role in choosing the repertoire. But he had the final say in what the records sounded like, and he was, in the view of countless producers, musicians and listeners, better at that than anyone.

The many albums he engineered for Blue Note, Prestige, Impulse and other labels in the 1950s and '60s included acknowledged classics like Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," Davis's "Walkin'," Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage," Sonny Rollins's "Saxophone Colossus" and Horace Silver's "Song for My Father."

A TIME FOR CHOOSING:

Quote by quote, tweet by tweet, Hillary Clinton made an argument Thursday with no precedent in America's modern campaign history: that her opponent is not just dangerous and foolish but an unrepentant lifelong racist.

In a calm but blistering Nevada speech aimed in large part at moderate Republicans, Clinton systematically outlined Donald Trump's alleged housing discrimination as a 1970s landlord, his offensive remarks about minority groups, and his embrace of conspiracy theorists, nationalist foreign leaders and the bigots of the online "alt-right."

"Of course, there's always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment. But it's never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it and giving it a national megaphone. Until now," Clinton said.

Clinton offered specific examples. At one point, she described Trump's retweet of a Twitter user who goes by the name "WhiteGenocide™." At another, to gasps from the crowd at a Reno college, she read out four incendiary headlines from Breitbart News, the far-right website run by his new campaign chief.

"From the start," she said, "Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia. He's taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America's two major political parties."

The speech represented a deepening of Clinton's strategy of separating Trump from the rest of his party. She favourably cited the way three previous Republican nominees, George W. Bush, Bob Dole and John McCain, handled racial matters.

"Race is at the foundation of everything to the alt-righters," says Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the alt-right movement as a hate group. "They have this idea that white people and white civilization is under assault by the forces of political correctness, by social justice and so on."

The term "alt-right" is merely a rebranding of an ideology with deep, dark historic roots, says Jessie Daniels, a professor of sociology at Hunter College and author of the book Cyber Racism. In fact, you could say it's a "dog whistle" for white supremacy. "People who are in the United States, mostly white people, are uncomfortable saying white supremacy," Daniels says. "They're more comfortable saying alt-right"

And social media has been an important vehicle for that rebranding, she says, because it's a place where, for better or worse, all ideas can have equal weight, regardless of where they originate. "It creates an equivalence of ideas, the undermining of expertise," Daniels says. "That's part of what has given them more power. No one's an expert or everyone's an expert. White supremacists saw that and got that early on and use that to their advantage."

IT'S A CHRISTIAN PARTY; HE'S NOT EVEN A REPUBLICAN:

Only 18 percent of Americans believe that undocumented immigrants "are not as honest and hardworking as U.S. citizens." Among Trump's strongest supporters, that figure is 34 percent -- six points higher than among Republican voters, as a whole. Even more starkly, while just 27 percent of all voters think the undocumented are more likely to commit "serious crimes" than are other Americans, 59 percent of Trump's base says the opposite. That puts Trumpists out of step for the majority of their own Party, as 52 percent of Republicans say the undocumented are no more criminal than the rest of us sinners.

THE MIGHTY CALIPHATE WAR MACHINE:

Of the three concentric circles that comprise the Islamic State group, the war is going better than expected against the two innermost circles--the first is the caliphate itself, the core of the Islamic State's organization. In the next outermost circle, the outlying areas of Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen, things are going reasonably well, as Islamic State affiliates in those countries are being slowly but steadily attenuated. Perhaps the most concerning is that last concentric circle, the amorphous and disconnected outer ring of lone wolves and small groups of jihadists inspired by Islamic State propaganda and ideology.

To counter the threat the Islamic State group poses to the Middle East and the West more broadly, it is crucial to understand what the terrorist organization is and what it is not, where it is truly dangerous and where its power and reach have limits. Attributing all jihadist violence to a ruthless gang headquartered in Raqqa, brilliantly planning attacks and managing their caliphate while pulling the strings near and far, exaggerates the power of the Islamic State group and plays into their propaganda and recruiting efforts.

First, the Islamic State is the caliphate, a defined territory stretching across parts of Iraq and Syria with its capital in Raqqa. The caliphate is more than just territory, however, as it remains a major attraction for foreign fighters traveling to the region to join the organization and differentiates the Islamic State group from its chief ideological competitor, al-Qaida. The caliphate is both the Islamic State group's greatest strength--it is what drew tens of thousands of volunteers--and its greatest vulnerability, as the dramatic battlefield defeats of late clearly show.

Second, the Islamic State group is a collection of provinces, affiliates, franchise groups or wilayats, not all of which are created equal. The Islamic State has claimed relationships with satellite groups in Libya, the Sinai Peninsula and Afghanistan, and has garnered bayat, or allegiance, from organizations or splinter groups of these organizations previously independent or formerly aligned with al-Qaida, including Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabab in Somalia and others throughout the Muslim world. This haphazard collective of ne'er-do-wells should not be seen as more than it is. Some groups are, indeed, dangerous and enduring, but most--like the caliphate itself--are likely not.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the Islamic State is an ideology. What it represents is the embodiment of Salafi jihadism and all of its undercurrents--anti-American, anti-Jewish and, of course, anti-Shia. This ideology motivates individuals and groups around the world to conduct attacks in the Islamic State's name, as happened in San Bernardino, Orlando and elsewhere. This third manifestation of the Islamic State group is the most insidious, unpredictable and difficult to eliminate.

Now, for what the Islamic State is not: It is not an existential threat on the order of the challenge the United States faced during the Cold War. It is not a nuclear-armed nation-state like the Soviet Union, nor is it a near-peer adversary, trained and equipped for conventional military operations like China, Iran or North Korea.

The basic starting point, according to Rice, is that the world is better than it ever has been -- and it's getting better still:

We are in an era where, as the president has often said, if you didn't know who you were going to be, or whether you were going to be male or female; white, black, Asian, Native American, Latino, [or] something else; if you didn't know if you were going to be straight or gay -- if you didn't know anything about who you were going to be and you had to pick a time in which to be born...

You would pick this time. Because the odds of success for any individual are much higher in the aggregate than they've ever been.

Rice's support for this theory was a series of rattled-off metrics.

"More people are free of poverty than ever before, conflict between states is less than ever before, technology is providing extraordinary opportunities for advancement, and health and agriculture and well-being," Rice says. "Compare the era we're living in today to the losses we suffered in World War II or even in the Vietnam War, or compare the economic challenges we face now to the Great Depression."

Rice is right on the evidence. The number of people living at $1.25 per day or less declined by roughly 1.1 billion people between 1990 and 2015. The number of war deaths per 100,000 people worldwide has increased in the past three years, owing largely to the war in Syria, but is still far lower than it was even 20 years ago. Average global life expectancy worldwide was 48 in 1950; it was 71.4 in 2015.

Obama and his advisers see these improvements as the product of a network of global institutions and dominant ideas -- things like the global free trade regime, the United Nations, America's alliance networks in Europe and East Asia, and the like. They believe this basic international order has worked to make the world a much better place than it's ever been.

Because Team Obama sees the world's basic institutions through this very positive lens, they're focused on protecting them. The most important foreign policy task, for Team Obama, is to make sure the world keeps getting better.

That means, first and foremost, protecting the current system from things that threaten it.

"We can renew the international system that has enabled so much progress, or we can allow ourselves to be pulled back by an undertow of instability," Obama said in a 2014 address to the United Nations. "We can shape the course of this century, as our predecessors shaped the post-World War II age."

Think about the Obama administration's stated priorities over the years: the pivot to Asia, the push for global climate change agreements, the nuclear negotiations with Iran. Each was designed to address something that could at least theoretically threaten important parts of the system: a conflict-ridden relationship with China, catastrophic climate change, a nuclear Iran.

In those cases, the Obama administration was willing to take risks and spearhead ambitious new policy initiatives, because the tail risk of inaction was extremely high.

The administration is less willing to act, by contrast, when it comes to immediate crises -- significant problems that nonetheless don't pose systemic threats. The Obama administration has been very wary of getting pulled into a major involvement in Syria, for example, or a large-scale troop deployment to fight ISIS.

POLITICS IS SKILLED LABOR:

In a speech today on the subject of Donald Trump's ties to the "alt right," Hillary Clinton painted the GOP nominee as a dangerous racist with a history of discriminatory conduct and hateful rhetoric that dates back to before the beginning of his presidential campaign.

She also went out of her way to deny that this aspect of Trump and Trumpism has anything to do with the Republican Party mainstream.  [...]

Politically speaking, the key passage of Clinton's speech was one where she made an unusual move for a candidate and offered fulsome praise to the opposition political party. Rather than noting the ways in which Trumpism has ties to the GOP past, she highlighted elements of the Republican Party history that push in the opposite direction:

This is a moment of reckoning for every Republican dismayed that the party of Lincoln has become the party of Trump. It's a moment of reckoning for all of us who love our country and believe that America is better than this.

Twenty years ago, when Bob Dole accepted the Republican nomination, he pointed to the exits and told any racists in the party to get out.

The week after 9/11, George W. Bush went to a mosque and declared for everyone to hear that Muslims "love America just as much as I do."

In 2008, John McCain told his own supporters they were wrong about the man he was trying to defeat. Sen. McCain made sure they knew -- Barack Obama is an American citizen and "a decent person."

Clinton is flattering Republicans about their past to shame them about their present.

To reach the kind of electoral targets Clinton is currently aiming for in places like Arizona and Georgia -- or to help her party's House members who need to win in districts that are 4 or 5 points more Republican than the nation as a whole -- Clinton needs to win in places that are full of lifelong Republicans.

BECAUSE HUMAN LIFE IS A "HARM":

It's a common scare tactic in school systems that have the money to pull it off: Give teenage girls dolls that cry incessantly, need to be changed often, and basically acts like any newborn would. Make them take care of it for a grade. The exercise will, in theory, deter girls from pregnancy by having them deal with the consequences in advance, and it can earn them an easy A.

But in a new study, Australian researchers found that the exercise is doing more harm than good--when they compared girls in Australia who participated in the program to girls who did not, eight percent of the girls who carried the doll gave birth at least once while they were still in high school, compared with four percent of girls in the control group who never worked with the doll.

...AND CHEAPER...:

As the world enjoys month after month of the hottest weather ever recorded, more and more countries (like Portugal and Costa Rica) are proving that renewables can provide enough electricity to exceed their entire power needs. Scotland is the latest to join the club: Its wind turbines recently supplied its entire energy needs for one day.

On Sunday, August 14, Scotland's wind turbines pumped 39,545 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity into the grid, while the country's entire consumption was 37,202 MWh. That includes homes, factories, businesses, everything.

NO ONE WILL MISS JOBS:

Respondable analyzes your messages as you write them, predicts how likely they are to get a response, and then suggests ways you can improve them. If your subject line it too terse, for instance, or the email's tone seems rude, it will tell you. In theory, this will make life easier for people on both ends on the exchange: The recipient the email will get clearer, more actionable emails, and the sender should be more likely to get a prompt response. The project is in its early days but it does give us a glimpse of how AI might work in concert with humans, not to take our jobs but to make our jobs a bit easier.

BECAUSE IT'S NOT GENETIC:

DISCOMFORT SHOULD BE THE GOAL:

"You will find [at Chicago] that we expect members of our community to be engaged in rigorous debate, discussion, and even disagreement," Dean of Students Jay Ellison wrote. "At times this may challenge you and even cause discomfort."

"Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called 'trigger warnings,' we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual 'safe spaces' where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own," Ellison continued.

IMPRACITCABLE, NOT ILLEGAL:

FEELING BERNT:

THE HIGH COST OF PARTISAN HYSTERIA (profanity alert):

Since last year, the most influential political talk show host in Wisconsin has found out just how hard it is to be a #NeverTrump conservative on right-wing radio. Ever since Sykes began denouncing Donald Trump on the air--which he does just about every time he talks about the presidential election--he's strained his relationships with the listeners of his daily radio show.

Sykes' many arguments with listeners over Donald Trump's serial outrages have exposed in much of his audience a vein of thinking--racist, anti-constitutional, maybe even fascistic--that has shaken Sykes. It has left him questioning whether he and his colleagues in the conservative media played a role in paving the way for Trump's surprising and unprecedented rise.

A few days before the Wisconsin congressional primary in early August, Sykes seized on remarks by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan's opponent, Paul Nehlen, that raised the idea of deporting all Muslims, even American citizens. It's the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that has become the norm during a presidential cycle that has featured Trump's calls for immigration bans on Muslims, loyalty tests and mass deportations. A friendly and round-faced guy with glasses, Sykes, 61, doesn't even try to conceal his disgust, but a large segment of his listeners, like Audrey from Oshkosh, are eager to defend ideas that Sykes believes violate fundamental conservative principles.

"Yeah! Let me make a comparison, and I don't mean this in a bad way," Audrey says. "They're talking about phasing out breeding of pit bulls. Well, not all pit bulls are bad."

"You're comparing American citizens, Muslims, to rabid dogs," Sykes responds.

"No, I'm saying, they're talking about phasing out the breed because so many are bad. No one wants to phase out poodles! I mean, there's no Lutherans doing this! We never know when one of these people are going to be radicalized."

"One of these people," says Sykes.

Sykes ends the call. He's silent, broadcasting dead air. He looks upset, like he's stopped breathing. He goes to a commercial break.

"OK, that doesn't happen very often," he says off-air. "I'm not usually absolutely speechless." He says his listeners never talked like this until recently.

"Were these people that we actually thought were our allies?" he asks.

HALSEY V. BARBAROSSA:

As Donald Trump undertakes his second major campaign shakeup of the summer, it's worth reflecting on the remarkable stability of Hillary Clinton's 2016 quest for the presidency. Campaign chair John Podesta is exactly where he was a year ago. So are policy point man Jake Sullivan, communications director Jennifer Palmieri, spokesperson Brian Fallon, and basically everyone else.

The campaign is bigger than it was a year ago, with more field organizers and regional offices and an ever-expanded digital team. But fundamentally the team was put in place back when Joe Biden was seen as Clinton's main rival for the Democratic nomination.

The difference is stark: Trump appears to be running a pirate ship with endless mutinies on board while Hillary Clinton is running a well-disciplined battleship.

THEY ARE TRYING TO STAY RELEVANT TO THE 1970s:

When central bankers gather this week in Jackson Hole, Wyo., they will be consumed not with some pressing crisis in the global economy but by an existential threat to their relevance.

The threat stems from the realization that the sluggish economic growth that has prevailed since 2009 may be here to stay. If so, then so are today's low interest rates.

Central banks set interest rates to balance investment and savings and thus keep economies fully employed and inflation stable. The interest rate that achieves that balance is called the natural rate. The fact that inflation and growth are now so sluggish despite ultra-easy monetary policy shows that the natural rate has fallen--by 1 to 2.5 percentage points since 2007 in the U.S., Canada, Britain and the eurozone, according to a recent Fed study. Fed policy makers think the U.S. natural rate is 3%, down from 4.5% before the recession. That's 1.5 percentage points less ammunition to counteract the next shock to the economy.

For the Federal Reserve to succeed in its mandated bid to anchor inflation higher, it needs to overcome a big demographic hurdle: millennials don't expect prices to rise anytime soon.

There's a good reason for that: Americans who entered the workforce from 2000 onwards have experienced a benign inflation climate, with core Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) price inflation averaging just 1.7 percent, below the Fed's 2 percent target. And the PCE rate hasn't breached 2.5 percent at any point since the turn of the millennium.

ONLY THE HUN...:

 By far the most important [ritual...associated with starting elementary school] the so-called "Schultüte," literally school bag or cone."

THE DECLINING VALUE OF APPEALING TO THE CONFEDERATES:

 Hillary Clinton "owes the state of North Carolina a very big apology," Donald Trump thundered, condemning the loss of manufacturing jobs due to free-trade deals supported by the Democratic presidential nominee.

The attack line drew no more than polite applause at his event last week in Charlotte.

In the state that may be the most pivotal to Trump's White House bid, the audience for the Republican's chief economic pitch is shrinking by the day. Textile and furniture manufacturing no longer dominates the state's economy as it did a generation ago. Banking, technology and others industries have driven North Carolina's economic output to grow faster than any state in the past three years.

Voters are flowing into the state at a firehose rate -- young, educated and many who take high-paying jobs when they arrive. They're coming from everywhere and quickly diluting North Carolina's conservative political underpinnings.

"Clinton is winning," said North Carolina Republican pollster Michael Luethy. "Particularly because folks who have moved to the state in the last five years are very different voters. They're persuaded by a different issue set than those have been here a while."

THE KNOW-NOTHING CANDIDATE:

OUR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT:

President Obama designated more than 87,500 acres of forestland in Maine's fabled North Woods as a national monument Wednesday in a historic but unilateral decision following years of fierce debate.

With the stroke of a pen, Obama created the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument - the second national monument in Maine history after Acadia National Park's precursor - on land east of Baxter State Park in an area facing severe economic uncertainty. The move is likely to delight conservation activists and infuriate local opponents fearful the designation is trading potential industrial-based opportunities in the Katahdin region for mostly seasonal tourism jobs.

The designation is a substantial yet partial victory for Roxanne Quimby, the wealthy co-founder of the Burt's Bees product line whose nonprofit, Elliotsville Plantation Inc., donated the land to the federal government this week. 

DUH? WE'RE WEALTHIER AND WE DON'T WORK:

Getting old might not be as bad as it's cracked up to be. Though growing older inevitably comes with the aches and pains of an aging body, a new study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry added further evidence to the theory that it also comes with increased levels of happiness. After surveying 1,546 San Diego residents between the ages of 21 to 99, researchers found that the older people were, the happier they seemed to be.

OUR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT:

SOME HATREDS ARE TIMELESS:

THE LEFT'S LOVE AFFAIR WITH MOSQUITOES:

Genetically engineered mosquitoes may sound like a sci-fi superbug out of a Steven Spielberg film, but these are the real deal. The altered insects are the latest approach to quell the spread of mosquito-borne diseases that claim an estimated 725,000 lives globally each year, not to mention Zika virus, which has spread rapidly in the Americas and causes alarming birth defects--and could turn out to affect the adult brain, too--but seldom kills.

Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first proposed US field trial of genetically modified mosquitoes. The trial is planned to launch in Key Haven, Florida, 161 miles south of the Miami-Dade neighborhood where the nation's first locally transmitted Zika cases have been detected--and five miles from the the heart of Florida's 2009-10 outbreak of dengue, a potentially deadly virus that can be spread by the same mosquito. Local opposition has stalled the release of the altered bugs, even as the Zika virus continues to spread in South Florida. Now residents in this island community will get to weigh in on the fate of the trial via a nonbinding local referendum this November. A majority of the mosquito control commissioners for the Keys, who have final say in the matter, have vowed to side with the locals. If a trial is approved, the mosquitoes could be let loose as early as December.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

A Planned Parenthood clinic in Appleton, Wisconsin, is closing down. But not because of the state's staunchly anti-abortion Legislature.

After two civilians and one police officer were killed at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs last November, the women's health care provider reworked its security plans for each affiliate. The Appleton clinic, which provides a range of reproductive health services beyond abortion to Wisconsin women, is unable to fulfill the new requirements. The closure of this clinic means Wisconsin is down to two Planned Parenthood clinics, 80 miles apart, that provide abortions--one in Milwaukee and one in Madison.

In 2015, anti-abortion activist David Daleiden released undercover videos that purported to show Planned Parenthood officials involved in selling fetal tissue--a federal crime. This led to a string of 12 state and four congressional investigations, but none revealed any evidence of wrongdoing by the provider. The videos did reinvigorate the anti-abortion movement, and threats of violence against abortion providers surged, culminating in the Colorado Springs clinic shooting.

For local affiliates, this has meant providing more security and, as Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin Chief Operating Officer Chris Williams told the Capitol Times, the Appleton facility was unable to meet the "more stringent and scrutinized approach." The Appleton clinic has experienced violence in the past. In 2012, anti-abortion activist Francis Grady threw a homemade explosive device through a window and damaged a small exam room. The facility was closed when the incident occurred, so no one was injured, and it reopened less than a week later.

The biggest concern was the state of the clinic building, Williams told the Capitol Times, and retrofitting it to make it secure would have cost nearly $300,000. He did not specify what precisely needed to be done. The clinic performed about 600 abortions per year, according to Williams.

HELPING REPUBLICANS INSTEAD:

An ABC News analysis of several of Mitt Romney's biggest donors in 2012 revealed that they have so far declined to help fund Donald Trump's campaign, his joint victory fund or super PACs backing him, instead shifting their contributions to congressional election campaigns.

Hedge fund manager Paul Singer, an outspoken critic of Trump, donated $1 million to Restore Our Future, a super PAC that backed Romney in 2012, and $5 million this election cycle to Conservative Solutions, a super PAC supporting Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

Singer, who earlier this summer said Trump's economic policies could cause a "global depression," also gave $2.5 million to Our Principles PAC, intended to stop Trump from winning the GOP nomination.

GREATEST WAR EVER:

Turkey's military launched an operation before dawn Wednesday to clear a Syrian border town of its Islamic State militants, and the country's state-run news agency said Turkish tanks had crossed into Syria as part of the offensive.

EVIDENCE MATTERS:

SOMETIMES A HORSE IS A HORSE, OF COURSE:

[D]emocrats should take steps to address the health law's underlying problems. The obvious solution is one that surfaced repeatedly in the multiple draft versions of the legislation that eventually became the ACA, and that is now part of the 2016 Democratic Party platform: a public option. This would entail making a government-operated health-care plan available on public markets. Allowing good public insurance to compete would both ensure that decent, affordable insurance is available in all 50 states, and prevent power plays like Aetna's by making public insurance available as a backstop. If private companies can provide insurance that people want to buy at rates competitive with the public option, good. If they can't, this would also be fine, because the public sector would absorb a bigger share of the health insurance market, a positive development in itself.

What makes the public option desirable will also make it very hard to pass, of course, even in the event that Congress becomes more Democratic and more progressive after Election Day. Insurance companies know full well how a robust public option would eat into their customer bases and profits, and will fight it with everything they've got. Democrats should exhaust every avenue for winning a public option. But if they fall short, there are other ways to strengthen health insurance exchanges.

One of these, which has been advocated by Hillary Clinton, would be to lower the eligibility age for Medicare to 55, down from 65. This would be an easier political lift, and indeed, had it not been for then-Senator Joe Lieberman's desire to stick it to the liberals who had defeated him in the 2006 Democratic primary, it may well have been part of the original health-care statute. Expanding Medicare makes sense regardless, because it would make good public insurance available to more people. Importantly, it would also indirectly strengthen the exchanges by creating insurance pools that, on average, are younger and healthier. It's a win-win that Democrats on Capitol Hill, who are expected to take control of the Senate this fall and may even have an outside shot at regaining the House, should be able to pass.

Other potentially viable ways to strength the exchanges, as suggested by the University of Chicago's Harold Pollack, including making the subsidies available to people purchasing insurance more generous, and providing better compensation for insurers who end up with sicker-than-expected customer pools. As Pollack observes, the latter will be necessary because of a health-care measure approved as part of a 2014 spending bill that largely eliminated the so-called risk corridors that help insurers. The measure was championed by Republican Senator and presidential also-ran Marco Rubio of Florida. Rubio and his allies had framed the risk corridors as an unearned sop to the insurance industry--"a taxpayer-funded bailout." But that claim didn't hold water, because while insurance companies cannot deny coverage to applicants, they aren't actually required to sell on the exchanges. Rather than a gift, compensation for insurers with older, sicker customers ensures that they will remain in markets. Ultimately, Rubio's initiative did more to harm the middle-class people trying to buy health insurance than to the bottom lines of the insurance companies.

Yet another regulatory fix has been proposed by Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution: expand the coverage pools by requiring everyone purchasing individual plans to do so through the exchanges. This approach is already in effect in the District of Columbia's health insurance exchange, one of the best-run in the country, and has proven to be successful.

Even as Democrats mull incremental fixes, they should keep their eye on what for many progressives is the long-term goal: European-style, comprehensive health insurance coverage.

Recently, there's been renewed interest in reviving the "public option." Loosely, the public option is a policy proposal to create a giant government-run health insurer that would compete with private insurers. The rationale behind it is that a publicly run insurance company would be able to operate on lower overhead and provide health coverage significantly cheaper than private insurers.

The idea, which was dreamed up by Yale political science professor Jacob Hacker, first really came to public attention when it was bandied about in the run-up to Obamacare, before being dropped as too radical. However, with the Obamacare insurance exchanges in a precarious position because private insurers are losing money and dropping out of the system, President Obama has renewed calls for a "public option" to provide insurance coverage. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has also come out in support of a public option, in part because she was pushed to the left on health in her bruising primary with socialist Bernie Sanders. (Sanders called his program "Medicare for all," and Hacker calls the public option "Medicare-like.")

Presented with three separate scenarios for the future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), 58% of U.S. adults favor the idea of replacing the law with a federally funded healthcare system that provides insurance for all Americans. 

A MATTER OF COLOR:

What the people I interviewed were drawn to was not necessarily the particulars of these theories. It was the deep story underlying them--an account of life as it feels to them. Some such account underlies all beliefs, right or left, I think. The deep story of the right goes like this:

You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black--beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you're being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He's on their side. In fact, isn't he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It's not your government anymore; it's theirs.

I checked this distillation with those I interviewed to see if this version of the deep story rang true. Some altered it a bit ("the line-waiters form a new line") or emphasized a particular point (those in back are paying for the line-cutters). But all of them agreed it was their story. One man said, "I live your analogy." Another said, "You read my mind."

THE COMING IMMIGRANT BIDDING WARS:

Some farms are tapping cheap foreign labor. Japan generally doesn't accept migrant workers, but many companies use a so-called internship-training program as a back door. About 7,000 foreign workers entered the agriculture sector through this program in 2013 after passing exams at the end of their first year, according to the Ministry of Justice. That is more than double the number in 2007.

IT'S HARDLY THE BIG LEAGUES:

My high school cross country coach was a big believer in visualization. The day before an important meet, he'd have the entire team lie down on the grass or the gym floor, and he'd tell each of us to picture how the race would unfold. Two weeks ago, lying in my friends' basement the night before the most significant race of my adult life, I remembered what my coach told me. That night, I imagined myself in a bright-green fish costume, waddling to glory.

This was one of the least ridiculous things I did in the days after learning I'd get the chance to run in a mascot race at a Major League Baseball game. For the uninitiated, these in-game stunts typically involve a handful of people--sometimes fans, sometimes ballpark personnel--dressed in cartoonish costumes sprinting from the outfield to a finish line somewhere near home plate. It's a way to inject a little local (and promotional) flare into the downtime between innings, that time when most fans are looking for the bathroom or another beer. The Milwaukee Brewers have a sausage race. In Washington, D.C., the Nationals have the racing presidents. In Minnesota, where I'd be suiting up, the Twins stage a mascot race that features a bunch of anthropomorphized animals at every home game. Hey, it's better than being a Pepsi bottle or a hot sauce packet.

My friend, who works for one of the Twins' corporate sponsors, had managed to snag two of the five spots in the race in anticipation of my visit to Minneapolis. After I confirmed that this wasn't some kind of joke, I got down to work.

My first step was to scout the competition. 

THE REVEREND RINGMASTER:

In 1970, Fr. John heard another calling, and, declaring himself a liberal Republican, challenged Sen. John Pastore in his home state of Rhode Island. An unamused Sen. Pastore obliterated John by two-to-one. It was right after this election, while I was vacationing in the Bahamas, that, one morning, I encountered Father John in his Bermuda shorts at a hotel newsstand on Paradise Island. John was soon, at poolside, explaining to me why I, as a Catholic and a beneficiary of eight years of Jesuit education, had a moral obligation, a moral duty, to get him a job as a speechwriter in the Nixon White House. Over some resistance, we succeeded, and John was soon the oracle of the shop, known to younger speechwriters as, "The Rev."

When Watergate broke, Nixon's aide Dick Moore urged John to get out and use his speaking talents to defend the president. John was soon out on the front lawn of the White House preaching to large assemblies of writing press and TV cameras. Dick Moore told me, "Pat, I think we've created a monster." But John was a portrait in loyalty to the embattled president. When transcripts of the Oval Office tapes were released, containing the phrase, "expletive deleted," hundreds of times, and Dr. Billy Graham was publicly scandalized, John was unfazed. He stepped out on the White House lawn and immortalized himself by calling Richard Nixon, and I quote, "the greatest moral leader in the last third of this century." Now that is loyalty.

When President Ford came in, John, despite his resistance, was the first man out of the White House. To raise his profile, he asked me to contact William F. Buckley Jr., and get him on as a guest on "Firing Line." I wrote Buckley, and got back a letter that read in its entirety, "Dear Patrick: Intending no disrespect, who is the Rev. John J. McLaughlin, S. J.? Cordially, Bill." As it would have crushed John, I did not show him the letter, until he became famous. As he soon did.

John achieved a niche in the pantheon of television journalism when, in 1982, he launched "The McLaughlin Group." As one of the initial panelists, I was joined by Bob Novak of the perpetual scowl, known to colleagues as "The Prince of Darkness," Jack Germond and Mort Kondracke. Soon Eleanor Clift was aboard, and far from being discriminated against as a woman, she was treated every bit as badly as the rest of us.

DON'T TAX WHAT YOU DO WANT:

· It could be much simpler for business to file taxes and could resemble the streamlined home office deduction rules that the Internal Revenue Service recently introduced. "It is a great idea," said Keith Hall, president and chief executive officer of the National Association for the Self-Employed. "The one thing that they never have enough of is time and this type of program would generate additional time for small businesses."

FLEECING HIS SHEEP:

After bragging for a year about how cheaply he was running his campaign, Donald Trump is spending more freely now that other people are contributing ― particularly when the beneficiary is himself.

Trump nearly quintupled the monthly rent his presidential campaign pays for its headquarters at Trump Tower to $169,758 in July, when he was raising funds from donors, compared with March, when he was self-funding his campaign, according to a Huffington Post review of Federal Election Commission filings. The rent jumped even though he was paying fewer staff in July than he did in March.

THERE'S A REASON THEY WORK FOR HIM:

Donald Trump's paid campaign staffers on their personal social media accounts have declared that Muslims are unfit to be U.S. citizens, ridiculed Mexican accents, called for Secretary of State John F. Kerry to be hanged and stated their readiness for a possible civil war, according to a review by the Associated Press of their postings.

The AP examined the social media feeds of more than 50 current and former campaign employees who helped propel Trump through the primary elections.

JUST LIKE ME:

[L]ast June, while reporting on Powell's advice to Clinton for my book, I contacted his office for comment--and got a very different answer.

His principal assistant, Margaret "Peggy" Cifrino, informed me then via email that their calendar showed that the Albright dinner had occurred in June 2009. While he didn't recall some details of the dinner because it had occurred seven years ago, according to Cifrino, he remembered what he did and didn't say to Clinton on the topic in question that evening:

He does recall sharing with Secretary Clinton his use of his email account and how useful it was and transformative for the Department. He knew nothing then or until recently about her private home server and a personal domain, nor, therefore, could he have advised her on that or suggested it. By June I would assume her email system was already set up.

So it is perplexing for him to say he doesn't remember that dinner conversation at all now, since, according to his own assistant, he remembered at least some of what he said as recently as two months ago.

Yet in another sense, it is hardly surprising that Powell would prefer not to be drawn into the center of the continuing controversy over Clinton's emails, a position he has carefully avoided so far.

...AND CHEAPER...:

The $300 million wind farm is relatively small, with 30 megawatts of capacity, enough to power about 17,000 homes in Rhode Island, including dwellings on Block Island, where costly diesel fuel is used to keep the lights on.

The farm's impact may be much larger as it demonstrates the potential for offshore wind energy while coastal states such as Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New York  look increasingly to renewable energy to reduce their carbon emissions.

"It's really difficult for a utility to say, 'We'd like to see you build a couple of hundred megawatts' if no one has even been successful building 1 megawatt offshore," Grybowski said. "Utilities have seen the success of the Block Island project. That makes them comfortable with this new resource."

Grybowski is gearing up for his company's next big undertaking, one with the potential for up to 200 turbines with 1 gigawatt of capacity in 256 square miles of federal waters 30 miles southeast of Montauk, N.Y.

The Long Island Power Authority recently announced plans to acquire 90 megawatts of capacity from 15 Deepwater Wind turbines in the area, though the financial terms  need to be worked out.

GOTTA THINK EVAN McMULLIN WOULD BE BETTER TOO...:

WHICH IS WHY THEY EXITED IN THE FIRST PLACE:

Theresa May's Brexit negotiations with the European Union will be "more difficult" if she cuts corporation tax, European leaders have warned.

Stefan Loefven, the Swedish Prime Minister, said that any "aggressive" tax cuts by Britain will damage relations with the European Union.

ALL UNBOARD:

MORE MATURE THAN THE CANDIDATE:

In the crucial swing state of Colorado, Donald Trump's Jefferson County campaign is being run by someone who is too young to vote ... or even drive. Weston Imer, 12, in in charge of organizing volunteers in the county, which is part of the Denver metro area and has a population of about 552,000.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Republican vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence doesn't seem to take seriously Donald Trump's boast that he'll have 95 percent of the black vote in 2020. During a Monday morning pre-taped interview with Fox News, host Ainsley Earhardt mentioned how "Donald Trump is telling the African-American community 'I am the guy for you,' and he says by 2020 he's going to have 95% of the African-American support." Pence chuckled in response, prompting Earhardt to ask, "Why are you laughing?" Pence then immediately deflected: "Well, that's Donald Trump. Look, he has a heart for every American. And also he's a truth teller. He speaks the truth. It's been the failed policies of Democratic politicians that have harmed people living in the cities in this country now for generations... [A]nd his optimistic view about the 2020 when he's running for re-election, that's pure Donald Trump."

WHICH TELLS YOU EXACTLY HOW HE VIEWS HIS SUPPORTERS:

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump plans to present an immigration plan in Colorado Thursday that will include finding a way to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants, according to three people who attended a meeting between the candidate and Hispanic leaders on Saturday at Trump Tower in New York.

"I really liked that Trump acknowledged that there is a big problem with the 11 million [undocumented] people who are here, and that deporting them is neither possible nor humane," said Jacob Monty, a Texas immigration lawyer who attended the meeting.

EVERYBODY IN THE (CESS)POOL!:

5. Under Bannon's Leadership, Breitbart Openly Embraced The White Supremacist Alt-Right. Andrew Breitbart despised racism. Truly despised it. He used to brag regularly about helping to integrate his fraternity at Tulane University. He insisted that racial stories be treated with special care to avoid even the whiff of racism. With Bannon embracing Trump, all that changed. Now Breitbart has become the alt-right go-to website, with Yiannopoulos pushing white ethno-nationalism as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: ALL THAT JAZZ...INSTALLMENT #1:

ONLY MADMEN:

In mid-April 2013, Abu Ahmad noticed a dark red-brown car pull up in front of the headquarters of Majlis Shura al-Mujahideen (MSM), a Syrian jihadi group led by Abu al-Atheer, in the northern Syrian town of Kafr Hamra.

One of Abu Ahmad's friends, a jihadi commander, walked up to him and whispered in his ear: "Look carefully inside the vehicle."

The car was nothing special: not new enough to attract attention but not a jalopy, either. It wasn't armored and it did not have a license plate.

Inside the vehicle sat four men. Abu Ahmad recognized none of them. The man sitting behind the driver wore a folded black balaclava like a cap. On top of it was a black shawl, falling over his shoulders. He had a long beard. Except for the driver, all occupants held small machine guns on their laps.

Abu Ahmad could see that there was no extra security at the gate of the headquarters. As usual, just two armed fighters stood guard in front of the entrance. The internet connection at the headquarters was working normally. To him, there didn't seem to be any sign that today was different from any other day.

But after the four men got out of the car and disappeared into the headquarters, the same jihadi commander walked up to him again and whispered "You have just seen Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi."

Since 2010, Baghdadi had been the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), al Qaeda's affiliate in that war-torn country. According to Baghdadi's own account, he sent Abu Muhammad al-Jolani as his representative to Syria in 2011, instructing him to set up the Nusra Front to wage jihad there. Until the beginning of 2013, ISI and Nusra worked together. But Baghdadi wasn't satisfied. He wanted to combine al Qaeda's Iraqi and Syrian affiliates to create one outfit that stretched across both countries -- with him, of course, as the leader.

Every morning, for five days in a row, the red-brown car dropped off Baghdadi and his deputy, Haji Bakr, at the headquarters of MSM in Kafr Hamra. Before sunset, the same car with the same driver would pick them up from the headquarters and take Baghdadi to a secret location for the night. The next morning, the car would come back to drop off Baghdadi and Bakr.

Over the course of those five days, inside the headquarters of MSM, Baghdadi talked extensively to a group of important jihadi leaders in Syria. These were some of the world's most wanted men, all gathered in one room, sitting on mattresses and pillows on the ground. They were served breakfast and lunch: roasted or grilled chicken and french fries, tea, and soft drinks to wash it down. Baghdadi, the most wanted man in the world, drank either Pepsi or Mirinda, an orange-flavored soda.

In addition to Baghdadi, the participants included Abu al-Atheer, the emir of MSM; Abu Mesaab al-Masri, an Egyptian jihadi commander; Omar al Shishani, a leading Chechen jihadi who had come to Syria from Georgia; Abu al-Waleed al-Libi, a jihadi leader from Libya who had come to Syria; Abed al-Libi, an emir in the Libyan Katibat al-Battar group; two Nusra intelligence chiefs; and Haji Bakr, Baghdadi's second in command.

Abu Ahmad was fascinated by the congregation of so many senior commanders. During breaks in the talks, he would walk around the headquarters, speaking to people who attended the meeting. Abu Ahmad was full of questions: Why did Baghdadi come from Iraq to Syria? Why did all these commanders and emirs meet with him? And what was so important that Baghdadi himself discussed for days on end?

The answer to Abu Ahmad's questions could be found in a speech made by Baghdadi, shortly before the Kafr Hamra meeting. On April 8, 2013, Baghdadi announced that his organization had expanded into Syria. All jihadi factions there -- including Nusra -- had to submit to his control. "So we declare while relying on Allah: The cancellation of the name Islamic State of Iraq and the cancellation of the name Jabhat al-Nusra, and gathering them under one name, the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham," he intoned.

"The sheikh is here to convince everybody to abandon Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Jolani," one of the participants in the talks told Abu Ahmad. "Instead, everybody should join him and unite under the banner of ISIS, which soon will become a state."

Baghdadi, however, faced one big problem in realizing his goal. The assembled emirs explained to the ISI chief that most of them had sworn allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's chosen successor and the leader of al Qaeda. How could they suddenly abandon Zawahiri and al Qaeda and switch to Baghdadi?

According to Abu Ahmad, they asked Baghdadi during the meeting: Have you pledged allegiance to Zawahiri?

Baghdadi told them that he had indeed pledged allegiance, but hadn't declared it publicly, per Zawahiri's request. But Baghdadi assured the men that he was acting under the command of the al Qaeda leader.

The jihadi leaders had no way to check if this claim was true. Zawahiri was perhaps the most difficult person in the world to contact -- he had not been seen in public in years, and is still in hiding, most probably somewhere in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

With Zawahiri unable to mediate the dispute himself, the jihadi leaders had to make up their own minds. If Baghdadi acted on behalf of Zawahiri, there was no doubt they had to follow the order to join ISIS. But if Baghdadi was freelancing, his plan to take over Nusra and other groups was an act of mutiny. It would divide al Qaeda and create fitna, or strife, between all the jihadi armies.

So the commanders gave Baghdadi a conditional allegiance. "They said to him: 'If it is true what you are saying, then we will support you,'" Abu Ahmad told us.

Baghdadi also spoke about the creation of an Islamic state in Syria. It was important, he said, because Muslims needed to have a dawla, or state. Baghdadi wanted Muslims to have their own territory, from where they could work and eventually conquer the world.

The participants differed greatly about the idea of creating a state in Syria. Throughout its existence, al Qaeda had worked in the shadows as a nonstate actor. It did not openly control any territory, instead committing acts of violence from undisclosed locations. Remaining a clandestine organization had a huge advantage: It was very difficult for the enemy to find, attack, or destroy them. But by creating a state, the jihadi leaders argued during the meeting, it would be extremely easy for the enemy to find and attack them. A state with a defined territory and institutions was a sitting duck.

Abu al-Atheer, the MSM emir, had already told his fighters before the arrival of Baghdadi that he was very much against declaring a state. "Some people are talking about this unwise idea," Atheer told his men. "What kind of madman declares a state during this time of war?!"

Omar al-Shishani, the leader of the Chechen jihadis, was equally hesitant about the idea of creating a state, said Abu Ahmad. There was a reason why Osama bin Laden had been hiding all these years -- to avoid getting killed by the Americans. Declaring a state would be an open invitation to the enemy to attack them.

JUST ANOTHER DEMOCRATIC PARTY:

Ghannouchi said the new composition, which includes "veiled and unveiled" women as well as young members, consolidates the orientations announced at the congress.

He indicated that the election of Laadhari as secretary-general serves as a positive message to young people and reflects the will of the party to strengthen the presence of young figures on different levels.

By appointing moderates such as Laadhari and Ounissi, Ghannouchi seems to be attempting to shift the party from "a religious" party toward a more "civil" party, which he himself announced at the congress.

In fact, these modern and moderate young people with strong academic credentials breathe new life into the party and undoubtedly shine its image, which is too often seen as "retrograde."

The Executive Bureau of Ennahda has been renewed by 50% and "feminized" by almost 25%. It now has members belonging to the "three generations of the party" and includes some of Ennahda's executives who held ministerial posts, others who have served abroad, those who remained in Tunisia, those who had spent years in prisons and others long known for their militancy. "A true complementary combination," Laadhari said.

TERRY McAULIFFE ALREADY ANNOUNCED HER SUPPORT FOR TPP:

60 in '16:

Sen. Pat Toomey is feeling the ripple effect of Donald Trump's sagging poll numbers in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania.

Up until a few weeks ago, the GOP senator was consistently leading Democrat Katie McGinty in this year's most expensive Senate race so far.

But if Hillary Clinton maintains her double-digit edge in the Keystone State, pollsters and strategists don't see how Toomey can withstand Trump's down-ballot drag.

"That's got to be a red flag for Toomey who looked like he was cruising along," said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, which has McGinty up 3 points and Clinton surging by 10 points. A month earlier, the survey had Toomey leading by 10 points and Trump by 2 points.

COME BACK, JEB!:

The 2016 presidential election was supposed to be close -- but Republicans should have had the edge.

An election forecast built by Vox and a team of political scientists projects that a generic Republican should win 50.9 percent of the two-party vote in 2016. But Donald Trump isn't a generic Republican -- and he is polling at 45.3 percent of the two-party vote, according to the Huffington Post Pollster. The difference between those numbers -- 5.6 points, as of today -- is what we're calling the Trump Tax: the electoral penalty Republicans appear to be paying for nominating Trump.

THE GROWTH CANDIDATE:

Hillary Clinton's increasingly confident campaign has begun crafting a detailed agenda for her possible presidency, with plans to focus on measures aimed at creating jobs, boosting infrastructure spending and enacting immigration reform if current polling holds and she is easily elected to the White House in November.

In recent weeks, as her leads over GOP nominee Donald Trump have expanded, Clinton has started ramping up for a presidency defined by marquee legislation she has promised to seek immediately. The pace and scale of the planning reflect growing expectations among Democrats that she will win and take office in January alongside a new Democratic majority in the Senate.

While careful not to sound as if she is measuring the draperies quite yet, Clinton now describes what she calls improved odds for passage of an overhaul of immigration laws -- the first legislative priority she outlined in detail last year -- and what could be a bipartisan effort to rebuild the nation's roads, bridges, airports, rail system and ports. [...]

Clinton has lately been telling Democratic audiences about her growing support among Republicans and touting what she says is a record of successfully working across the aisle to get things done. Her campaign regularly trumpets Republican endorsements and GOP disavowals of Trump.

A recently published working paper from the San Francisco Fed shows that the fiscal multiplier of infrastructure spending is much larger than the typical government spending multiplier.

Sylvain Leduc and Daniel Wilson studied the effect of unexpected infrastructure grants on state GDPs (GSPs) since 1990 and found that, on average, each dollar of infrastructure spending increases the GSP by at least two dollars. Valerie Ramey, Professor of Economics at UC San Diego and member of the National Bureau of Economic Research, reports that the typical fiscal multiplier is between 0.5 and 1.5.

Immigration benefits America in at least two ways. First, increased immigration expands the American workforce and encourages more business start-ups. Second, immigrants increase economic efficiency by raising the supply of low- and high-skilled immigrants. In many cases immigrants' educational backgrounds complement, rather than displace, the skills of the native-born labor market.

For instance, on the low-skill end of the spectrum, 91 percent of native-born Americans hold high school diplomas or higher, whereas only 62 percent of noncitizens do. Immigrants account for about 16 percent of the U.S. labor force, with 24.3 percent of workers who are foreign-born and over the age of 25 not completing high school, compared with merely 4.8 percent of native-born workers. These immigrants work in the agriculture and leisure and hospitality sectors.

Immigrants provide much of the low-skill labor for these industries. Without the immigrant labor, prices consumers pay for hotels and restaurants would be substantially higher, and some agriculture might migrate offshore.

On the high-skill end of the spectrum, 56 percent of engineering doctoral degrees, 51 percent of computer science doctoral degrees, and 44 percent of physics doctoral degrees were awarded in 2011 to students who were neither U.S. citizens nor permanent residents. National Science Foundation data show that 163,000 foreign graduate students studied science and engineering in U.S. universities in 2010, up from 152,000 in 2008.

Immigrants benefit from, and disproportionately contribute to, U.S. research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Many universities rely on graduate students for research assistance and technical expertise, with government research funding training graduate students in the latest technologies. Most research, moreover, does not require security clearances-and little, if any, research is restricted to American students.

DON'T SUBSIDIZE ELECTRIC, TAX OIL:

[T]here are early signs that even the combustion engine, lynchpin of the industrial age, might eventually be on its way to the technological graveyard.

According to the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv, the ruling party Framstegspartiet will ban all combustible fuel-driven cars in the country by 2025.

It may seem ambitious, but perhaps not impossible. Worldwide sales of electric cars are booming. According to the International Energy Agency, in 2015 the global threshold of one million cars on the road was exceeded, with 1.26 million up and running. In 2005, electric cars were still measured in hundreds.

Government initiatives are partly behind the boom in electric cars. Incentives and subsidies such as toll-free driving, free public parking, use of public transport lanes and exemptions from heavy car taxes as well as purchasing incentives have encouraged the driving public to go electric.

GREATEST WAR EVER:

Jarablus, located on the western bank of the Euphrates river, is the last significant town held by the militant Islamist group on Syria's border with Turkey. It is 34 miles (54km) east of al-Rai, a border town the same rebel groups recently took from Islamic State.

By taking Jarablus themselves, the rebel groups would preclude an assault on the town by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a group of Kurdish-dominated militias who on Aug. 6 took the city of Manbij, 20 miles (30km) to the south, from IS. [...]

Islamic State has pulled personnel out of Jarablus in recent days, the rebel leader said. On Friday families of IS fighters were evacuated from Jarablus and another city nearby, al-Bab, to the group's stronghold of Raqqa, a war monitor said.

The operation aimed to effectively end Islamic State's foothold at the Turkish border, the official said, adding that the assault on the town would difficult.

CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR:

More than two years after Russia annexed Crimea and promised its 2 million people a better life, residents say prices have soared, wages and pensions have stagnated and tourists have fled.

The sunny and mountainous Black Sea peninsula is back in the news, with Russian President Vladimir Putin accusing Kiev of sending infiltrators across the border to wreck its industry. But locals say the damage has already been done by Moscow's neglect.

"We joined Russia and they stopped giving a damn about us," Yevgeny, a worker at a titanium plant in the town of Armyansk told Reuters.

"People are naive. They thought that if we were part of Russia, everything would be Russian. Prices have now jumped to the Russian level, but wages have stayed the same. That's the main problem."

OPPOSITE:

After almost nine years, we are finally beginning to reap the political whirlwind of the financial crisis. But how did neoliberalism manage to survive virtually unscathed for so long? Although it failed the test of the real world, bequeathing the worst economic disaster for seven decades, politically and intellectually it remained the only show in town. Parties of the right, centre and left had all bought into its philosophy, New Labour a classic in point. They knew no other way of thinking or doing: it had become the common sense. It was, as Antonio Gramsci put it, hegemonic. But that hegemony cannot and will not survive the test of the real world. [...]

Large sections of the population in both the US and the UK are now in revolt against their lot, as graphically illustrated by the support for Trump and Sanders in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK. This popular revolt is often described, in a somewhat denigratory and dismissive fashion, as populism. Or, as Francis Fukuyama writes in a recent excellent essay in Foreign Affairs: "'Populism' is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don't like." Populism is a movement against the status quo. It represents the beginnings of something new, though it is generally much clearer about what it is against than what it is for. It can be progressive or reactionary, but more usually both.

Brexit is a classic example of such populism. It has overturned a fundamental cornerstone of UK policy since the early 1970s. Though ostensibly about Europe, it was in fact about much more: a cri de coeur from those who feel they have lost out and been left behind, whose living standards have stagnated or worse since the 1980s, who feel dislocated by large-scale immigration over which they have no control and who face an increasingly insecure and casualised labour market. Their revolt has paralysed the governing elite, already claimed one prime minister, and left the latest one fumbling around in the dark looking for divine inspiration.

The wave of populism marks the return of class as a central agency in politics, both in the UK and the US. This is particularly remarkable in the US. For many decades, the idea of the "working class" was marginal to American political discourse.

THE DIFFERENCE:

The campaign doled out $773,000 to reimburse various Trump-owned companies for expenses. In all, nearly $7.7 million has been paid out to Trump companies or Trump family members to cover campaign expenditures, filings show.

BETTER HURRY:

Growing numbers of Westerners appear to be trying to join the battle against the Islamic State group in Iraq before it's too late, frontline volunteer fighters say.

IS group jihadists have suffered a string of setbacks in Iraq and Syria in recent months, including the loss of key towns and facilities surrounding the remaining major strongholds in their self-declared "caliphate" -- Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

Although limited or unreliable public data make it difficult to track numbers, anecdotal evidence suggests aspiring anti-jihadists -- many of them military veterans -- recognize they may be running out of time to fight IS in a pitched battle as the group loses territory and morphs into a traditional terror group.

GOLF, TRADE AND THE WoT:

President Barack Obama has come under criticism from Republicans for refusing to interrupt his Martha's Vineyard vacation to visit or even personally comment on the devastating flooding in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that has killed more than a dozen and devastated the lives of tens of thousands of Americans, but he's gotten a pass from Democrats and the mainstream media.

In 2008, however, then Senator Obama was much less forgiving of President Bush's handling of the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, attacking him for flying over the flooded city rather than visiting it.

NORWAY, ICELAND AND SWITZERLAND SEEM FINE TOO:

It is less than two months since the historic victory for Vote Leave in the EU referendum and increasingly the gloomadon poppers are facing humiliation.

Economists polled by Reuters predicted a 9,500 jump in unemployment claims in July due to Brexit. But the number of unemployment claims fell by 8,600.

The Guardian described this as "a big surprise".

It will certainly come as a big surprise to George Osborne. Before the referendum he said that "a vote to leave would represent an immediate and profound shock to our economy" which would "lead to an increase in unemployment of around 500,000."

There was more good news about retail sales in July: they were up 1.4% on June and 5.9% on July last year. While the BBC were filling the airwaves with messages of woe from "expert" remainers about the collapse of confidence, the rest of us were shopping.

The credit agency, Moody, predicts there will be no recession. It had downgraded the growth forecast for 2017 but has quietly nudged it back up.

The financial data firm Markit offers a cheering Household Finance Index (which measures economic confidence) for August. It has reversed July's plunge and edged above its level in June:

On June 23rd, the day of the EU referendum, the FTSE 250 closed at 17,333. It is now up to 17,846.

THE ONLY WAY IS THIRD:

We may be watching the Labour Party's death throes. It gets harder by the day to recall that heady time less than 20 years ago when Labour won the General Election--after 18 years of Tory rule--with a huge majority. So what's happened? Paradoxically, given its title, Richard Seymour's Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics charts a history of the party's decline.

It's a long story of successful efforts by the Labour Party establishment to keep its left wing under control and as far as possible from power. Under Tony Blair, the party was firmly centre-right. Yes, there were a few improvements on welfare and taxation, but Blair was in thrall to Thatcherism, and his government did little to reduce inequality and nothing to return privatised industries and utilities to public ownership.

A DEFLATIONARY EPOCH:

WALKING THE WALK:

Companies belonging to Donald Trump have at least $650 million in debt, more than twice the amount shown in public filings made by his presidential campaign, the New York Times reported Saturday.

The paper employed a property information firm to search publicly available data on more than 30 US properties connected to the Republican candidate, including offices and golf courses.

In addition to the $650 million liabilities, "a substantial portion of his wealth is tied up in three passive partnerships that owe an additional $2 billion to a string of lenders," the Times said about debt that could significantly affect Trump's wealth.

TRUMP BASE:

"Hillary Clinton wants to be America's Angela Merkel," said Donald Trump at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, this week.[...]

[H]e's signaling to the far right, which despises Merkel for sullying German purity by letting in refugees.

"There is no question that the people who call him their 'glorious leader' know exactly what he's talking about," said Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. "That is the audience that is concerned about this issue. Merkel is hated by Trump's white supremacist supporters, and she and Clinton are seen in the same light." [...]

Much of this hatred of Merkel comes from Europe's Generation Identity movement, with has released videos and books accusing politicians like Merkel of trying to destroy white ethnic heritage.

"You impose tolerance and diversity but you mean self-hatred, self-denial, and self-abolishment. You love and support the foreign and hate and fight what is our own," one video states.

IT'S NOT AN ALLIANCE; SHE IS ONE:

Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton's campaign released a TV ad that should give pause to anyone hoping to avoid foreign policy catastrophe in coming years. As part of her ongoing effort to court disaffected Republicans, independents and assorted apolitical centrist types, the ad featured a number of purported experts solemnly attesting to the unreliability and volatility of Donald Trump.

Among these characters was Max Boot. One of the chief intellectual architects of the Iraq War, Boot has emerged from richly earned ignominy and ostracization to enjoy a sudden career revival, in large part thanks to liberals eagerly touting his Trump-bashing op-eds and media appearances. The logic behind lavishing Boot with such effusive praise, these Dems presumably reckon, is to show that hostility to the wildman GOP nominee crosses party lines.

THE PEACE DIVIDEND GETS BIGGER:

The United States Army's finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.

The Defense Department's Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.

As a result, the Army's financial statements for 2015 were "materially misstated," the report concluded. The "forced" adjustments rendered the statements useless because "DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions."

Disclosure of the Army's manipulation of numbers is the latest example of the severe accounting problems plaguing the Defense Department for decades.

The report affirms a 2013 Reuters series revealing how the Defense Department falsified accounting on a large scale as it scrambled to close its books. As a result, there has been no way to know how the Defense Department - far and away the biggest chunk of Congress' annual budget - spends the public's money.

THE ENTIRETY OF THE WoT CONSISTS OF EMPOWERING THE SHI'A:

As Houthi demonstrators packed Sanaa's Sabeen Square waving Yemeni flags and chanting slogans, chairman Saleh al-Samad outlined the council's plans for running the war-ravaged country following the breakdown of the peace talks earlier this month.

"Economic affairs will be the priority of our work in the coming period," he said. [...]

Saturday's declaration formalized a vow earlier this month by the Houthis and their allies in the General People's Congress, the party of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, to establish a body to govern the capital and other parts of the country under their control.

The demonstration -- one of the biggest in Yemen since the civil war broke out last year -- took place as the Saudi-led coalition backing exiled President Abd-Rabbou Mansour Hadi stepped up air strikes and fighting on the ground intensified.

AMNESTY IS THE ONLY PRO-GROWTH MEASURE EITHER CANDIDATE HAS PROPOSED:

A new forecasting tool at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania estimates Trump's plan to deport undocumented workers would result in four million lost jobs by 2030.

"A lot of undocumented workers are taking on jobs that frankly no one else wants, so it's unlikely those jobs are going to be filled," says Kent Smetters, an economics professor at Wharton who led a team that took a year to create the forecasting tool by using census data.

THE RIGHT'S MONDALE:

PPP released a poll from Texas today showing Trump leading Clinton by only 6 points. But here is the part that could signal a sea change.

Trump's lead is based entirely on his holding a 63-33 advantage among seniors. With voters under 65, Clinton leads him 49-45. And when you look just specifically at voters under 45, Clinton leads Trump 60-35. Older voters are overwhelmingly responsible for the Republican advantage in Texas, and generational change is likely to help Democrats become more competitive.

A big piece of that generational change is the increasing racial diversity of the electorate in Texas. Trump has a 69/25 lead with white voters but the reason the state's so competitive overall is that among non-white voters Clinton has a 73-21 lead, including a 68-27 edge with the state's booming Hispanic population.

THE OTHER PATH:

BUT NOW THEY AREN'T SPECIAL ANYMORE...:

Although experts estimate that only 1 percent of Americans - about 3 million people - actually suffer from celiac disease, 18 percent of adults now buy gluten-free foods.

Since gluten is a protein found in any normal diet, Gibson was unsatisfied with his finding. He wanted to find out why the gluten seemed to be causing this reaction and if there could be something else going on. He therefore went to a scientifically rigorous extreme for his next experiment, a level not usually expected in nutrition studies.

For a follow-up paper, 37 self-identified gluten-sensitive patients were tested. According to Real Clear Science's Newton Blog, here's how the experiment went:

Subjects would be provided with every single meal for the duration of the trial. Any and all potential dietary triggers for gastrointestinal symptoms would be removed, including lactose (from milk products), certain preservatives like benzoates, propionate, sulfites, and nitrites, and fermentable, poorly absorbed short-chain carbohydrates, also known as FODMAPs. And last, but not least, nine days worth of urine and faecal matter would be collected. With this new study, Gibson wasn't messing around.

The subjects cycled through high-gluten, low-gluten, and no-gluten (placebo) diets, without knowing which diet plan they were on at any given time. In the end, all of the treatment diets - even the placebo diet - caused pain, bloating, nausea, and gas to a similar degree. It didn't matter if the diet contained gluten. (Read more about the study.)

"In contrast to our first study... we could find absolutely no specific response to gluten," Gibson wrote in the paper. A third, larger study published this month has confirmed the findings.

It seems to be a 'nocebo' effect - the self-diagnosed gluten sensitive patients expected to feel worse on the study diets, so they did. They were also likely more attentive to their intestinal distress, since they had to monitor it for the study.

VOX CLAMANTIS IN RIO:

An Olympic runner whose sportsmanship drew headlines this week says that her faith in God helps her to find joy in her sport.

Abbey D'Agostino, who was raised in a Catholic family, spoke to Julia Hanlon's "Running On Om" podcast, published November 18, 2015. She discussed her fears and anxieties about running, her injuries, and her prayer life.

"I ended up just accepting Jesus and recognizing what that meant in my life," she told Hanlon. "I felt the peace that comes with acknowledging that I'm not going to run this race with my own strength. And I think that acknowledging those fears before God is what allowed me to feel that peace and I was drawn to it and I wanted to know a God who would work that way in my life."

"That's when I started to rekindle more the sheer joy of the sport," said D'Agostino, who is now 24.

IT WAS NOT A SYSTEM DESIGNED TO CREATE EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP:

The idea of reform and liberalisation was entirely Andropov's. As head of the KGB, he was better informed than anyone else about the catastrophic economic situation in the USSR. When he became head of state, he was able to start putting into effect the plan he had been hatching for a long time.  I don't think Andropov completely trusted Gorbachev. He, Andropov, belonged to the older generation and was not intending to dismantle the system; the maximum he was prepared to consider was that a new type of person should be able to rule the country.

In many ways Heydar Aliyev was Andropov's more obvious successor and student. It was Aliyev that Andropov counselled to embark on reforms in his country, Azerbaijan, without worrying about the Soviet leadership.  He also recommended to Aliyev that he should study the Hungarian economy and visit Hungary more often. There, economic reforms were in full swing after the 1958 uprising and there were even private companies, something quite unimaginable in the USSR.

Andropov rang Aliyev and invited him to Moscow as First Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers (Sovmin), which was an important economic post. To my mind this offer of an All-Union [central] position meant significantly more than we can imagine.

Perhaps Andropov realised Gorbachev did not have the required authority to introduce reforms in the empire that was the USSR. Perhaps he understood what was needed was a politician of a different calibre.  I've heard many times from friends of Aliyev that the terminally ill Andropov was torn with uncertainty over whom he should appoint as his successor.  Many thought it might be Aliyev who would become the head of this great state.  But Aliyev himself realised the impossibility of this for a non-Russian.  After Stalin, the Russian people would not have wanted to see an Azeri from an Islamic republic as their head of state.

Thus there were two fairly strong political figures in the CC Politburo when Andropov left the scene:  Heydar Aliyev, believer in a strong state and national hero of Azerbaijan; and Mikhail Gorbachev, young and raring to go out and make historic changes. Gorbachev denies that he did everything to ensure Aliyev was not part of a possible leadership battle. At the same time, Heydar Aliyev told me himself that when he had a heart attack in 1987, Gorbachev failed to visit him in hospital, and even ignored repeated requests to meet once he had recovered. This belied the fact that Aliyev had been one of Andropov's closest disciples and had many times spoken out in favour of Gorbachev. The battle between these two powerful figures ended when Gorbachev achieved supreme power, while Aliyev was left under a cloud and forced to retire from the scene.

As a "new man",  Gorbachev (who was born in 1931) probably thought he could free the Soviet system from all its economic and ideological encumbrances. He probably hoped that this would guarantee unprecedented economic growth and inspire the people to new heights of achievement in the field of labour and so on. But it didn't happen. What happened was exactly the opposite. 

Gorbachev certainly didn't expect the course that events took, and for most of his time in power he was completely lost. The simple reason is that he didn't have (nor could he have done!) any real political experience which would have enabled him to perceive the results of his actions. 

IT'S AS MUCH AS TRUMP KNOWS:

The jihadi employment form asked the recruits, on a scale of 1 to 3, to rate their knowledge of Islam. And the Islamic State applicants, herded into a hangar somewhere at the Syria-Turkey border, turned out to be overwhelmingly ignorant.

The extremist group could hardly have hoped for better.

At the height of Islamic State's drive for foot soldiers in 2013 and 2014, typical recruits included the group of Frenchmen who went bar-hopping with their recruiter back home, the recent European convert who now hesitantly describes himself as gay, and two Britons who ordered "The Koran for Dummies" and "Islam for Dummies" from Amazon to prepare for jihad abroad. Their intake process complete, they were grouped in safe houses as a stream of Islamic State imams came in to indoctrinate them, according to court testimony and interviews by The Associated Press.

"I realized that I was in the wrong place when they began to ask me questions on these forms like 'when you die, who should we call?'" said the 32-year-old European recruit, speaking to the AP on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. He said he thought he was joining a group to fight President Bashar Assad and help Syrians, not the Islamic State.

The European, whose boyish demeanor makes him appear far younger than his age, went to Syria in 2014. He said new recruits were shown IS propaganda videos on Islam, and the visiting imams repeatedly praised martyrdom. Far from home, unschooled in religion, having severed family ties and turned over electronic devices, most were in little position to judge.

An AP analysis of thousands of leaked Islamic State documents reveals most of its recruits from its earliest days came with only the most basic knowledge of Islam.

PITY THE POOR MALTHUSIANS:

THE MARKETS HATE PROTECTIONISM, NATIVISM AND THE ENTITLEMENT STATUS QUO:

The last four times the S&P 500 has hit a new high in August during an election year, the victor won in a landslide. That insight comes from Art Cashin, director of floor operations at the New York Stock Exchange for UBS, and was confirmed by CNBC.

History could be poised to repeat itself with the S&P having struck a number of new highs this month, most recently hitting an intraday high of 2,193 and a closing peak of 2,190 on Tuesday.

"It's very rare to make new highs in August to begin with, and when you've done that in an election year, whoever won took 30 or more states, so that will lead to the idea that however this comes out, it might be a landslide," Cashin told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street."

...AND CHEAPER...:

A solar cell is great if you want electricity right now, but what if you could get a solar panel that pulled CO2 from the air and used sunlight to turn it into burnable fuel? It might sound fantastic, but that's just what plants do when they photosynthesize, and it's also the promise of a new device from researchers at the University of Illinois.

"Instead of producing energy in an unsustainable one-way route from fossil fuels to greenhouse gas," lead author Amin Salehi-Khojin said in a news release, "we can now reverse the process and recycle atmospheric carbon into fuel using sunlight."

Instead of storing generated electricity in batteries, this artificial photosynthesis uses the sun to convert atmospheric carbon dioxide into fuel. 

CAN WE WALL OUT THE NATIVES?:

Immigrants in America work more, search for jobs more and get paid way less than native-born U.S. citizens.

They're a big chunk of the U.S. job market too. Documented and undocumented immigrants make up nearly 20% of America's labor force, according to a report by Goldman Sachs (GS).

Immigrants have a lower unemployment rate (4.3%) than native-born U.S. citizens (4.9%). They also participate more in the economy, meaning they're either working or looking for work.

But they make far less than native-born citizens. Immigrants weekly income is about $681. Native-born Americans earn $837 a week, according to Goldman.

YEAH, BUT HE AND CONDI ARE REPUBLICANS:

The Times did not just rely on a congressional leak, however. According to an advance copy of Joe Conason's new book on Bill Clinton's post-presidency, Powell gave her the email counsel at a dinner hosted by Madeleine Albright, in which Albright asked Powell and two other former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, to give Clinton one piece of advice. Powell, Conason said, "told her to use her own email, as he had done, except for classified communications, which he had sent and received via a State Department computer.... Saying that his use of personal email had been transformative for the department, [Powell] thus confirmed a decision she had made months earlier -- to keep her personal account and use it for most messages."

NO ONE WILL MISS WORK:

Being a good provider isn't all it's cracked up to be, says a new study. Guys who are required to earn the lion's share of the family income are less happy and less healthy than guys who aren't. And the higher the percentage of the bacon a guy has to bring home, the bigger hit his body and brain take.

IT'S HAPPENING:

SHOULDN'T HIS BDS HAVE WORN OFF BY NOW?:

When I first heard that acclaimed historian and presidential biographer Jean Edward Smith was writing a biography of former President George W. Bush, I recall telling a fellow historian that I was cautiously optimistic it would be a well-crafted, insightful book and that I looked forward to its publication. I had read some of Smith's earlier works, including biographies of former presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and found the books to be elegantly written, carefully researched, and deeply insightful. But my optimism was tempered by the fact that the materials and perspectives of history are not yet available to Smith, or to any other would-be biographer of Bush.

How wrong I was to be optimistic at all.

Readers should be forewarned that this essay is longer than the customary book review. I beg their indulgence, because Smith's biography, Bush, is so replete with factual errors and specious judgments that an extended set of corrections and remonstrances seems warranted for the sake of the historical record. All the more so because I am not aware of any other reviews to date that have identified the many flaws in the book. If anything, it has received some surprisingly positive assessments from the generally credible Peter Baker and Morton Kondracke in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, respectively. As I hope to demonstrate, such favorable reviews are wholly unwarranted.

IF ONLY HE UNDERSTOOD THE COROLLARY:

Today's open-borders agenda has its roots not only in economic factors--the need for low-wage workers who will do the work that native-born Americans or Europeans supposedly will not--but also in several decades of intellectual ferment, in which Western academics have created a trendy field of "borders discourse." What we might call post-borderism argues that boundaries even between distinct nations are mere artificial constructs, methods of marginalization designed by those in power, mostly to stigmatize and oppress the "other"--usually the poorer and less Western--who arbitrarily ended up on the wrong side of the divide. "Where borders are drawn, power is exercised," as one European scholar put it. This view assumes that where borders are not drawn, power is not exercised--as if a million Middle Eastern immigrants pouring into Germany do not wield considerable power by their sheer numbers and adroit manipulation of Western notions of victimization and grievance politics. Indeed, Western leftists seek political empowerment by encouraging the arrival of millions of impoverished migrants.

Dreams of a borderless world are not new, however. The biographer and moralist Plutarch claimed in his essay "On Exile" that Socrates had once asserted that he was not just an Athenian but instead "a citizen of the cosmos." In later European thought, Communist ideas of universal labor solidarity drew heavily on the idea of a world without borders. "Workers of the world, unite!" exhorted Marx and Engels. Wars broke out, in this thinking, only because of needless quarreling over obsolete state boundaries. The solution to this state of endless war, some argued, was to eliminate borders in favor of transnational governance. H. G. Wells's prewar science-fiction novel The Shape of Things to Come envisioned borders eventually disappearing as elite transnational polymaths enforced enlightened world governance. Such fictions prompt fads in the contemporary real world, though attempts to render borders unimportant--as, in Wells's time, the League of Nations sought to do--have always failed. Undaunted, the Left continues to cherish the vision of a borderless world as morally superior, a triumph over artificially imposed difference.

Yet the truth is that borders do not create difference--they reflect it.

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

AHMED: [W]e are in America. America is genuinely a pluralist society, so you have every kind of group here, every kind of opinion. So in this environment, the confrontation--the stark confrontation--between Shia and Sunni is blurred.

LAWTON: Also, for second and third generation American Muslims, the old sectarian divides from abroad become less important. Nazneen Zaidi is a Shitte who was born in Florida.

NAZNEEN ZAIDI: When my parents immigrated here in the late 70s, there was no Shia mosque here, and so their first friends were all Sunni, and so my first introduction to Islam was with their Sunni friends.

23LAWTON: Zaidi teaches at a Sunni school where she says she has been warmly accepted. She has become close friends with some of her fellow teachers, who are Sunni.

ZAIDI: As a Shia, I see myself as a Muslim first. Yes, I am Shia, I'm very proud to be Shia, but when I consider myself and someone asks me what religion I am, I don't say I'm Shia, I say I'm Muslim. And I think that's how I identify, and I've always identified as that.

LAWTON: Still, there have been some tensions between the two communities. Razvi says sometime Shiites have not been welcomed at Sunni mosques.

RAZVI: It does happen occasionally, but then it's a small segment of people that I personally feel might be ignorant because they might not have been exposed to some Shia people in the community or in their circle of friends, and they just think that whatever you're doing is wrong.

LAWTON: This past Ramadan, her Shia mosque held a special prayer service where the two communities prayed together and then broke their fast together.

20RAZVI: It's become like an extended family. There's Shia, there's Sunni, there are men, women, children. And since it's an open environment you feel more comfortable.

NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR FATHER DID:

Julia Belluz

You wrote a very optimistic book about the trend toward less violence on earth. But it feels like we've seen a lot of violence here in the US since then. We had the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012 -- and there have been at least 1,069 mass shootings since then. Overseas, more than 1,200 people have died in ISIS-related terror attacks, not including those killed in Iraq and Syria. And we've heard a lot about killings of young black men by police, and the killings of police, over the past several years. How do you put all this in context?

Steven Pinker

News is a misleading way to understand the world. It's always about events that happened and not about things that didn't happen. So when there's a police officer that has not been shot up or city that has not had a violent demonstration, they don't make the news. As long as violent events don't fall to zero, there will be always be headlines to click on. The data show -- since the Better Angels of Our Nature was published -- rates of violence continue to go down.

Rates of death in war show something of an uptick because of the war in Syria -- but that's still a fraction of the levels they were in the 1960s through the early 1990s, and that's to say nothing of the World Wars.

There has probably been a slight increase in the rate of violent crime in the US in 2015, and I say probably because the FBI figures are still not out for that year.

But even then that wouldn't even be as high as it was in 2012, just three years ago, and that itself is a huge decrease in the levels of '60s, '70, and '80s in the US, where violent crime has fallen by more than half. So there is probably an uptick for 2015 and 2016. But it's just a wiggle in a curve that's been going down, down, down.

Even if you even compare situation this year to a random year in the 1970s or 1980s, by every measure our world is much more peaceful.

THE SAME FOR SINGLE WOMEN:

THE POINT OF HEALTH CARE REFORM IS TO INCREASE THE COST OF CONSUMPTION:

Choosing the right medical coverage can be a daunting task, especially for those who suffer from chronic illnesses or have a large family. Xerox HR Services recently released its 32nd National Healthcare Trend Survey and found that since 2010 healthcare costs have dropped from 11.6% to 8%. Despite this drop, when compared to the inflation rate, cost still maintains a wide lead above inflation, which the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics says is sitting at 1.4%.

This wide gap between cost and inflation has caused many employers to shift more cost over to employees. This has resulted in some consumers weighing price into their decisions of where and when to seek healthcare, and even delaying treatment due to cost.

THE REFUSAL OF REALITY TO CONFORM TO RIGHTWING RHETORIC:

Aggregated from surveys in taken the second quarter, the Gallup data show that 63% of Americans say their standard of living is getting better, up from 55% a year earlier.

The data also reveal a fault line running through communities that lean heavily Republican. While some Republican-leaning communities don't see their standard of living improving, data from others, particularly exurban areas, show a large majority say their standard of living is getting better.

The numbers shed some light on why Mr. Trump is struggling in the polls and having a hard time bringing the GOP together behind his message that the U.S. economy is in tatters and the country is in decline.

WE ALL KNOW WHERE WE'RE HEADED:

[A]s the parties re-align, Basic Income may find a champion with the new corporatist, quasi-libertarian Democrats, while being vilified by the populist Republicans.

If you believe there is a coming re-alignment, then the future of the Democratic party is big business, and big business, especially the technology sector, will love Basic Income. The tech sector likes minimal government regulation, which has allowed them to gain monopoly power, amass giant profits, and control and manipulate entire areas of the economy. These companies are very opposed to heavy-handed market interventions such as breaking those companies up (Google, Amazon) or heavily regulating what it means to be an employee (Uber).

The tech companies will argue that they are efficient and keep prices low for consumers, and that heavy regulation will hamper innovation. With Basic Income, these companies don't have to change their behavior, but everyone would become more economically secure. Uber employees will be financially secure, even if they don't get paid much, and are automated away later by driverless cars (the same logic explains why Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber, supported Obamacare).

No company wants to pay higher taxes, but they would trade higher taxes to fund Basic Income if it allows them to continue to dominate the market. Greg Ferenstein, who used to write for TechCrunch and has studied the political views of Silicon Valley elites said in a recent interview: "It is absolutely false to consider Silicon Valley anti-tax. They are not anti-tax, and they are not anti-re-distribution. They are generally anti-regulation, but they are pro anything that uses their wealth to help the common good in way that doesn't inhibit economic disruption and innovation." Marginally higher taxes are not an existential threat. Market controls are.

And besides, these companies, often funded by advertising dollars, understand that money needs to continue to circulate in the economy in order for consumers to keep buying things, which thus justify the business model of many of the tech companies' services.

And while it's especially true in the technology sector, the leaders and workers of large U.S. companies are increasingly coastal, cosmopolitan elites, which means the values of their companies will reflect their own values. Those values are not only socially liberal, but that the government should help people efficiently and with limited bureaucratic interference.

Cosmopolitan elites will also like how Basic Income helps prevent the proletariat from revolting without too many invasive policy solutions. Urban poor will like Basic Income because it will increase their incomes, and also frees them from demeaning parochial meddling of administrators telling them how they can and cannot spend their money (i.e., food stamps).

THE SOUND AND THE FUHRER:

A website for millennial supporters of Donald Trump that bore striking similarities to the Hitler Youth movement was no longer online Thursday morning, two days after the Forward broke the news of its existence.

Both the group's name, "Trump Youth," and its rhetoric evoked Hitler Youth, a wing of Germany's Nazi party.

In a video posted to the site, the group's blond leader spoke of having to fight a worldwide "parasite" enemy, which he later identified as "globalists."

Nazi propaganda likened Jews to parasites and condemned them for their perceived lack of loyalty to their "host" countries.

"Our nations have been commandeered by an international criminal cartel and this parasite is feeding on our energy. It's in Japan, it's in China, it's in Germany, it's in America -- now, if we don't throw this parasite off our backs, the world will fall into chaos," said Jayme Louis Liardi, the self-identified leader of "Trump Youth."

In white-nationalist lingo, "globalism" represents the "oppressive" economic elite, often associated with Jews, that is hurting the lower class, said Peter Montgomery an expert on right wing politics at People for the American Way.

PITY THE POOR LUDDITES:

If you're still worried that an electric car battery isn't enough to get you from Point A to Point B and back, stop. According to a new study by MIT, the 'range anxiety' discussion is overblown.

By analyzing driving habits across the country, MIT researcher Jessika Trancik and a team of colleagues found that currently available electronic car technology would prove suitable to replace 87 percent of the personal vehicles on the road, and up to 98 percent by 2020 -- assuming current rates of battery improvement remain stable.

CAN'T DITCH HIM SOON ENOUGH:

In a 1986 paper, political scientist James Campbell sought to measure the coattail effect and found that each additional percentage point that the presidential candidate won was commensurate with a three seat gain in the House. It's possible that this effect has waned somewhat in recent years with the rise in polarization and the number of safe seats. (The scatterplot above suggests the relationship is more like two seats for each percent of the vote today.) There are fewer massive seat shifts in the House during presidential elections than there used to be, but there are also fewer presidential blowouts.

So what might this year look like? Republicans, with 247 of the House's 435 seats and 4,125 of the states' 7,383 legislators, are certainly exposed.1 Trump's polling numbers aren't great, but there are so many factors that make him an unusual candidate, from his rejection of many core conservative principles to his lack of support from several prominent Republicans. We've really not seen a candidacy quite like his at the presidential level.

But we have seen it at the state level. Colorado provides us with a couple of useful recent examples. One is the state's 2010 gubernatorial race, in which Dan Maes, widely seen as an unqualified and irresponsible candidate for governor, nonetheless won the Republican nomination. Instead of trying to coach him or prop him up, most party leaders quickly abandoned him and championed former Rep. Tom Tancredo, the nominee of the American Constitution Party, as the "real" Republican in the race. They also diverted campaign resources into state legislative races. The result: Republicans badly lost the gubernatorial race despite a strong national Republican tide. But the GOP actually picked up a net of one state Senate seat and five state House seats, seizing narrow control of the lower chamber.

In 2004, Colorado Democrats targeted key state legislative races and channeled millions of dollars their way. Despite President George W. Bush's winning the state by nearly 5 percentage points, Democrats managed to seize seven state House seats and one state Senate seat, taking control of both chambers for the first time in four decades. The top of the ticket doesn't have to dictate what happens below.

As we're seeing in several races this year, it's tricky for Republican candidates to simultaneously run with their party while running against their national ticket. But it's not impossible.

SAFER AND CHEAPER:

WE ALL KNOW WHERE WE'RE HEADED:

An important starting point should be deregulation of the use of resources in Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). HSAs are the most prominent effort to place consumers at the center of important decision-making in the health sector. Consumers (and their employers) can make tax-preferred contributions to their HSAs, which can then be used to pay for the costs of needed medical care not covered by insurance payments. For consumers with high deductibles (often several thousand dollars), HSAs become an important financing source for paying for costs before insurance coverage kicks in.

HSA enrollees have an incentive to conserve the resources in their HSAs because it is their money. The more judicious they are in the use of their HSA funds, the larger their accounts will grow over time (they can make penalty free withdrawals for non-medical purposes at age 65 or older).

But an unspoken presumption of HSAs is that the account holders will use their funds to pay for care on a fee-for-service basis. Indeed, that is a requirement of current law and IRS regulations: HSA funds can only be withdrawn to pay for qualified medical expenses, which is to say they must be used to pay for a specific service or product purchased by the HSA account holder. But, in the best-managed care plans, care is not paid for on a piecemeal basis. Rather, the plan gets paid a fixed fee of some sort and then provides care to the enrollee according to medical need and the terms of their contract.

Despite the HSA bias toward unmanaged fee-for-service medicine, there are many examples in the marketplace today of HMOs sold in tandem with an HSA. Kaiser Permanente, for instance, enrolls many patients in its HSA-HMO plan. But these managed care offerings are adjusted to fit within the confines of today's HSA rules, which means they look and feel more like loose network plans than tightly integrated managed care products.

To begin to harness more fully the power of both consumerism and managed care in controlling costs, the rules for HSAs should be modified substantially to allow HSA holders to use their balances to purchase care from integrated systems in more creative ways than on a fee-for-service basis. For instance, HSA holders should be allowed to pay a fixed monthly fee to integrated plans to secure access to a wide variety of services, including access to electronic records and the ability to connect with their providers remotely. Moreover, HSA holders should be allowed to purchase options contracts allowing them to access an integrated plan's network and care protocols in the event they incur large medical expenses, such as in the course of cancer treatment. Giving consumers more leeway over the use of their HSA resources will allow them to exert more pressure on those supplying medical services to them, and thus also allow them to get services provided to them in ways that they prefer and at prices they find acceptable.

To many state insurance regulators, these kinds of arrangements will look suspiciously like premium payments. But if an HSA holder is already enrolled in an high-deductible insurance product, there is no reason to prevent them from using their HSA balances to secure the best possible arrangement for securing both primary and preventative care in an integrated setting and for accessing the best management possible in the case they need more expensive care.

Loosening the rules for the use of HSA accounts with managed care and other private plans could make room for creative arrangements, and it could foster greater price and quality competition among integrated care offering.

THE RIGHT FOUND ITS MONDALE:

Hillary Clinton is within striking distance of Donald Trump in Texas, according to a new poll.

Public Policy Polling, a firm that does polling largely for Democrats, found that Trump beats Clinton by 6 points in Texas, where Mitt Romney beat President Barack Obama by 16 points in 2012.

NO ONE WAS EVER SERIOUS ABOUT BENGHAZI:

Richard Cross, a lifelong Republican, wrote the scathing anti-Hillary Clinton speech delivered by the mother of one of the Benghazi victims at the Republican National Convention, but now he's saying he might vote for the former secretary of state in November. [...]

Cross, a former staff member for Maryland Republicans like Gov. Bob Ehrlich and former Rep. Helen Bentley, said the final straw was Trump's proposed ban on Muslim immigration into the United States, a bold policy proposal the billionaire businessman has since reformed to be specific to countries where terrorism flourishes.

"President Eisenhower would have never proposed banning Muslims from America. Nor would President Nixon. Nor would President Reagan," Cross wrote. "Donald Trump has betrayed and perverted their legacies. Consequently, I no longer recognize my party."

In Cross' view, the November election is "a citizenship election," equating it to the civil rights movement, when supporters were called to "stand up and be counted." It seems, though, Cross feels boxed in to vote for a candidate he doesn't appear to support.

"I am confronted by two painful choices: Vote for the most divisive political figure in the past 25 years or throw away my vote on a kooky Libertarian ticket," he lamented, later suggesting Clinton is "the only choice" in 2016.

HILLARY HAD THE ONLY SECURE SERVER:

On Saturday, a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers sent notices to media outlets about its purported hack of the Equation Group, an organization that was exposed last year by Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab as likely one of the world's most sophisticated hacking collectives. As Foreign Policy wrote, Kaspersky Lab called Equation Group "a threat actor that surpasses anything known in terms of complexity and sophistication of techniques." Without directly calling Equation Group an NSA organization, Kaspersky linked the group to the intelligence agency and pointed to involvement with the Stuxnet malware software that was widely believed to be a U.S.-Israeli cyberattack against Iran's nuclear program.

hISTORY eNDS EVERYWHERE:

[A]n entrepreneurial spirit is taking hold in the country. Spending is increasing to invest in the tourism sector, such as hotels and restaurants. Cuba's future economic health may depend on a private sector maturing outside of state government regulations. [...]

The growing embrace of entrepreneurship is having a subtle effect on Cuban society, says Cárdenas, the coordinator of the El Toque digital platform.

"I don't think that the young Cuban entrepreneurs see themselves as the new face of capitalism that will take down socialism," Cárdenas adds. Still, he notes a shift away from more than 50 years of Cuban history under communist rule that, as he says, focused on, "... the great social project, the 'mass' - which was the term used.

"We've changed the focus from the collective history to individual stories."

In March, U.S. President Barack Obama met with Cuban entrepreneurs to jump-start the economy. Obama's visit, during which he called for an end to the U.S trade embargo with the country, meant that new doors would be opened for Cuban entrepreneurs, Cárdenas says.

"Cuba is only 90 miles from the U.S. It has to create its future by counting on the U.S.," he says. "But one shouldn't think, either, that Cuban entrepreneurs are nothing without the U.S. "You can blame the government, people or the law. But at the end of the day, you're the one responsible for not trying."

Adds Causa, of A la Mesa: "We're throwing ourselves in the digital era with great optimism."

CHEAPER AND SAFER:

These robots will replace workers at meat-packing factories, and not a moment too soon.

The meat-packing company JBS is part of the world's largest beef processor, and in its Greeley, Colorado plant, it is experimenting with robots on the production line. In order to automate the processing of the meat, JBS has invested in a New Zealand robot company called Scott Technology. According to a recent NPR program, automating production would trim the $100 million that JBS pays to its employees every year.

UNITING AMERICA:

Hillary Clinton's winning streak in battleground state polls continued this week. The latest Quinnipiac University polls out Wednesday showed Clinton with double-digit leads over Donald Trump in Colorado and Virginia and a slim margin over Trump in Iowa.

Trump is favored by 45 percent of likely Missouri voters and Clinton is backed by 42 percent, according to the poll. Another 13 percent of respondents said they are undecided.

Clinton has decreased the gap between her and her opponent since the last statewide poll was conducted; the July 11-12 survey showed the Democratic nominee trailing Trump by 10 points, 46 percent to 36 percent.

Interviews with Republican members of the Electoral College - all from the red states Trump has his best chance of winning - reveal that the divisions that have wracked the GOP for months have also reached this oft-overlooked body with the ultimate authority to decide the election.

All of the members contacted by POLITICO - including Greathouse, Lynch and Byers - insisted they would cast their electoral vote for Trump if he prevailed in their state. (They'd disenfranchise millions of voters and risk a Constitutional crisis if they didn't.) But most indicated they would do so through gritted teeth - if only to reject Hillary Clinton or to uphold oaths they took to their party.

"You hold your nose and do some things," said Jim Skaggs, a Kentucky GOP elector, who said he would cast his electoral vote for Trump but may stay home on Election Day. "Neither one of them give a damn about the voters of Kentucky. They're here to get elected."

Several GOP electors refused to say who they'd cast their personal ballot for on Election Day. Others committed to voting for a third party or write-in candidate - if they vote at all - even though they committed to support Trump with their electoral votes.

VOX CLAMANTIS IN RIO:

In an Olympics that has seen a few unsavory incidents -- the Egyptian judoka who refused to shake hands with his Israeli opponent, the booing of a French pole vaulter by the Brazilian crowd -- Hamblin and D'Agostino provided a memory that captured the Olympic spirit.

"I was like, "Yup, yup, you're right. This is the Olympics Games. We have to finish this,'" Hamblin said.

It was a scene to warm the hearts of fans during a qualifying heat of the women's 5,000 meters. Hamblin and D'Agostino set aside their own hopes of making the final to look out for a fellow competitor.

It started when D'Agostino clipped Hamblin from behind and they both went sprawling with about 2,000 meters to go.

Hamblin fell heavily on her right shoulder. D'Agostino got up, but Hamblin was just lying there. She appeared to be crying. Instead of running in pursuit of the others, D'Agostino crouched down and put her hand on the New Zealander's shoulder, then under her arms to help her up, and softly urged her not to quit.

"That girl is the Olympic spirit right there," Hamblin said of D'Agostino. "I've never met her before. Like I never met this girl before. And isn't that just so amazing. Such an amazing woman."

As it turned out, D'Agostino probably needed more help: She soon realized she'd hurt her ankle in the fall.

Grimacing, she refused to give up, though, running nearly half the race with the injury. Hamblin did what she could, hanging back with D'Agostino for a little while to return the favor and offer encouragement.

WAIT, IT'S NOT AN ACT OF W?:

An act of God is how some are describing it, a catastrophic 48-hour torrent of rain that sent thousands of people in Louisiana scrambling for safety and left many wondering how a region accustomed to hurricanes could get caught off guard so badly.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

John McLaughlin was a Jesuit priest, unsuccessful Senate candidate in Rhode Island, and White House aide to Richard Nixon. But he won't be remembered for any of that because he did something a lot bigger. He changed TV political commentary and made it faster, funnier, and far more watchable--in other words, a whole lot better.

McLaughlin, who died Tuesday at 89, actually invented a new type of political chat show. He was the bombastic anchor. He was joined by four Washington journalists--big names in some cases--from whom he elicited opinions on the week's happenings. Then he often mocked what they said.

There weren't many political shows on TV when The McLaughlin Group went on the air in 1982. And the existing ones were staid and less exciting than a weather report. McLaughlin changed that. TMG was rambunctious, sometimes raucous, always sharply opinionated. The panelists argued with each other, at times angrily, and McLaughlin frequently declared their views "WRONG!"

Without letting on to what he was doing, McLaughlin turned the journalists on his show into television characters. He gave them nicknames. There was Eleanor Rodham Clinton. I got the nickname Freddy the Beadle Barnes. Viewers picked their favorites and rooted for them.

MORE FOR LESS:

Patients who gained health coverage through the Affordable Care Act are filling significantly more prescriptions while paying less for their drugs, according to a new study that credits the health law and adds to evidence of its benefits for previously uninsured Americans and those with chronic conditions such as asthma, diabetes and high blood pressure.

NOT JUST THE HAIR IS CHEESY:

On Sunday, a digital marketer sent a message to the mailing list run by Breitbart, a conservative website. The message -- entitled "How great is this?" -- was from Donald Trump, inviting recipients to send him $3 to earn a chance to tour Trump Tower and have lunch with his son Eric.

No mention of any campaign issues that might light a fire under donors. No thoughts about how the three bucks could help propel a conservative agenda. Just a lunch raffle and the promise that Eric will spring for the chow and that Dad will ask him what was said over the $19 "gold label" burger or $25 lobster roll at Trump Grill - although there actually were no details about exactly where the winner will be allowed to regale young Trump with his or her political views.

THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE:

Critics of the status quo will find plenty to dislike, but there's no reason to believe her administration would represent any kind of dramatic departure in foreign policy -- not just in the Middle East but around the world.

It's not credible to say that there isn't much evidence for Clinton's hawkishness. In almost every case for the last twenty years, Clinton has reliably sided with those favoring more rather than less aggressive measures in response to foreign conflicts and crises. She did this during her husband's administration ("I urged him to bomb" [Kosovo]), she did it as a senator with her Iraq war authorization vote, and she did it as Secretary of State (see Libya, Syria, etc.). Unlike many presidential nominees, Clinton has not shied away from her hawkish record as a candidate. During the primaries, she touted the Libyan war as "smart power at its best" and as I mentioned earlier this week she has made no secret of her support for "no-fly" and "safe" zones in Syria that would entail a significant increase in the U.S. military role in that country.

ONLY THE NEAR WAR MATTERS:

The son of al-Qaeda's slain founder Osama bin Laden has urged Saudis to "overthrow" the kingdom's rulers in order to "free" themselves from US influence, SITE Intelligence Group reported Wednesday.

WORRY:

Carl Mays, who is on the Veterans Committee ballot this year, went to his grave believing one pitch cost him from being enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

It may be the most infamous pitch in Major League history. Mays threw the pitch in the fifth inning on Aug. 16, 1920, while with the New York Yankees at the Polo Grounds. He was pitching against the Cleveland Indians and the batter was shortstop Ray Chapman.

It was a high fastball and Chapman was known to crowd the plate. Mays, a submarine-style pitcher who released his pitches just off the ground, had a reputation for throwing inside but insisted afterward that Chapman leaned into the pitch. One theory suggested that the spikes on Chapman's front left shoe got caught in the dirt and kept him from getting out of the way.

For whatever reason, he did not. Instead the pitch hit him on the left side of the head. In those days, they did not wear batting helmets and wouldn't for several more decades.

The ball made a loud sickening sound as it hit Chapman and bounded back to Mays. The pitcher thought the ball had hit the bat and threw over to first base for the out.

Chapman crumpled to the ground. He eventually tried to get up and walk toward the clubhouse in deep center field but collapsed around second base. The ball hit him so hard that it not only lacerated the left side of his face at the point of impact but on the opposite side as well where the brain pushed against the skin. Blood came out of the right ear.

He was taken to the clubhouse, where he mumbled, "I'm all right, tell Mays not to worry."

NOT EVEN A SWING STATE WITH TRUMP RUNNING:

CIRCLING THE WAGON:

Whereas once Putin looked to his former comrades in the KGB and the St. Petersburg administration for his go-to guys, now he is recruiting disproportionately from the people he knows. Given his cloistered lifestyle, that often means bodyguards, personal assistants, and the like. Vaino, for example, was head of his personal protocol office (and even memorably carried his umbrella from time to time).

This, however, does not represent a fundamental change in the system. Putin has always been the unchallenged "decider" presiding over a court of boyars who know their power, wealth and futures depended on the tsar's favour. And while many of the new appointees are not yet well-known, we cannot assume that they are all docile yes-men and colourless ciphers. Today's grateful appointee will likely become tomorrow's arrogant power in the land. The inexorable logic of Putin's personalised, de-institutionalised and essentially ruthless regime is that he must periodically devour his favourites -- where Yakunin and Ivanov go, other past cronies such as Rosneft head Igor Sechin and deputy prime minister Igor Shuvalov may well follow -- as they become tiresome, embarrassing or a threat.

NEOLIBERAL, NOT pROGRESSIVE:

"They are the names you would expect - people who have been advising her for a long time; people who have worked with her for a long time and people who are peers, who she respects," Matt Bennett of the moderate Democratic group Third Way said of Clinton's transition team.

The group will be headed by Ken Salazar, a former interior secretary and U.S. senator. He will lead four co-chairs: former Obama national security adviser Tom Donilon; former Obama aide Neera Tanden, who now leads the progressive think tank the Center for American Progress; former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and Maggie Williams, the director of Harvard's Institute of Politics.

Heather Boushey, the executive director of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, will be the chief economist. Two additional policy advisers from Clinton's campaign, Ed Meier and Ann O'Leary, will also move full-time to the transition team, the campaign said in a statement.

THE WAR OF ALL AGAINST THE SALAFI:

Iranian security forces claim they have killed three purported Sunni militants in western Iran.

Police reported that the men were killed in a shoot-out on August 16 in the city of Kermanshah, about 500 kilometers southwest of Tehran and about 100 kilometers from the border with Iraq.

Russian warplanes took off on Tuesday from a base in Iran to target Islamic State fighters and other militants in Syria, the U.S. military confirmed -- a move seen as a widening of Moscow's bombing campaign, while drawing Russia and Iran closer as the Obama administration is seeking greater cooperation with Moscow in its fight against the radical insurgents.

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

An admission by the prime minister of Israel or the defense minister that they were wrong is not "a shock." It's an earthquake. Israeli recognition of the fact that Iran does not have the capacity to produce nuclear weapons is the sky falling on Israel's entire defense perception.

If Iran's nuclear threat has dissipated, why does Israel need the hundreds of nuclear bombs it has (according to foreign sources)? If there's no nuclear threat on the horizon, there's no need for nuclear deterrence. Why does Israel deserve to be the only country in the Middle East exempted by the United States from joining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)? On the day Israel concedes its mistake regarding the nuclear agreement with Iran, what reason would the United States have for maintaining Israel's "qualitative military advantage" -- a laundered way of saying that it protects Israel's nuclear policy? Not only that, but if the threat has indeed been eradicated, as the president says, there's no reason to keep boycotting Iran.

NATIVISM IS THIN GRUEL:

The findings have implications for politics long past the November election. If the trend continues, the Democratic Party will have scored double-digit victories among younger voters in three consecutive elections, the first time that has happened since such data became readily available in 1952. That could shape the political affiliations of the largest generation in American history for years to follow.

In the new survey, half of those under 35 say they identify with or lean toward the Democrats; just 20% identify with or lean toward the Republicans. Seventeen percent are independents, and another 12% either identify with another party or don't know.

Trump's weakness among younger voters is unprecedented, lower even than the 32% of the vote that the Gallup Organization calculates Richard Nixon received among 18-to-29-year-old voters in 1972, an era of youthful protests against the Vietnam War.

ALL THAT JAZZ #40

BETTER ROLE MODELS:

Patrick Smith, who said he has "been going back and forth in jail," then apologized for not setting a different example for his kids.

"When they see the wrong role model, this is what you get," he said. "I've gotta start with my kids, and we gotta change our ways, to be better role models. And we gotta change ourselves. We've gotta talk to them, put some sense into them."

Smith also alleged the "targeting" of blacks but refused to admit that it's "their fault."

"If you know there's a reason, don't give in to the hand. Don't be going around with big guns, don't be going around shooting each other and letting them shoot y'all cause that's just what they're doing and they're out to destroy us and we're falling for it," Smith said.

ONE OF THE BEST ARGUMENTS FOR OPEN BORDERS:

[T]he billionaire candidate proposed a more stringent immigration test for admission into the United States to admit only "those who share our values and respect our people."

THE POWER OF LIFE AND DEATH:

As we watch the Republican Party tear itself to shreds over Donald Trump, perhaps it's time to take note of another conservative political phenomenon that the GOP nominee has utterly eclipsed: the Tea Party. The Tea Party movement is pretty much dead now, but it didn't die a natural death. It was murdered--and it was an inside job. In a half decade, the spontaneous uprising that shook official Washington degenerated into a form of pyramid scheme that transferred tens of millions of dollars from rural, poorer Southerners and Midwesterners to bicoastal political operatives.

What began as an organic, policy-driven grass-roots movement was drained of its vitality and resources by national political action committees that dunned the movement's true believers endlessly for money to support its candidates and causes. The PACs used that money first to enrich themselves and their vendors and then deployed most of the rest to search for more "prospects." In Tea Party world, that meant mostly older, technologically unsavvy people willing to divulge personal information through "petitions"--which only made them prey to further attempts to lighten their wallets for what they believed was a good cause. While the solicitations continue, the audience has greatly diminished because of a lack of policy results and changing political winds.

I was an employee at one of the firms that ran these operations. But nothing that follows is proprietary or gleaned directly from my employment. The evidence of the scheming is all there in the public record, available for anyone willing to look.

As the Tea Party movement has gained momentum during the last 12 months, it seems few Tea Partiers have caught on to the troubling past of the man at the center of their movement: FreedomWorks chairman, former House Majority Leader and recently-retired lobbyist extraordinaire, Dick Armey.

As chairman of FreedomWorks, the group credited with mobilizing the Tea Party movement, Armey is the movement's de facto leader. Yet Armey's years spent lobbying for a group recognized by the State Department as being a terrorist organization should give Tea Partiers pause.

In the weeks before April 15, 2009, local newspapers began reporting that groups calling themselves TEA, or Taxed Enough Already, were planning rallies to protest wasteful government spending. By the time Tax Day rolled around, over 300 protests were under way in all 50 states. More than 100,000 people took to the streets, gathered in parks and city centers with signs, slogans and costumes evoking America's revolutionary past.

The protests have continued. On Sept. 12, 2009, Tea Partiers marched on Washington, D.C. From a podium at the base the Capitol Building, Armey addressed the crowd with his wife Susan by his side. They were standing there together, he said, for the future of their grandchildren.

When the first rounds of stimulus didn't work, what'd they do? The same thing the government always tries to do with a bad idea: If it doesn't work, do more. ... I want to make one clear idea: Not too long ago, President Barack Obama stood right there on that stage. He said the one singular pledge of commitment that we ask of every elected official in America at every level. He pledged a commitment of fidelity to the United States Constitution.

At which point the crowd burst into the collective chant: "You lie! You lie! You lie," echoing Rep. Joe Wilson's (R-S.C.) outburst during Obama's address to Congress three days earlier.

Armey went on to lead the masses in the chant: "Freedom works! Freedom works! Freedom works!"

KNOWING WHO ISN'T YOUR ALLY:

According to several Israeli sources familiar with the Israeli-Russian relationship, telephone calls between Netanyahu and Putin are now a matter of routine. Over the past few months, Netanyahu met with Putin face to face on three separate occasions, while he did not meet once with US President Barack Obama. He even turned down an invitation from Obama's staff for a meeting in the United States. The question now is whether Netanyahu and Obama will meet in September at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York. While it is assumed that they will, given the terrible relationship between the two men, it is hard to bet on such a meeting taking place.

As Netanyahu drifts away from Obama at a rapid pace, he is drawing closer to Putin at an equally quick pace. That is not all. Israel's relationship with China is also heating up with microwave-like speed. Over the past few years, Israel has invested considerable energy in an effort to upgrade its relationship with the Far East and Southeast Asia and with India, Korea and other countries.

Not everyone in Israel is happy about this. Does it come "at the expense" of Israel's close relationship with the West, particularly with the United States and the European Union?

BREAKING THE CURSE OF OIL:

In 2014 the International Monetary Fund reported that Saudi Arabia needed oil prices of at least $106 per barrel to maintain the government spending level.

Today, the House of Saud recognizes that oil prices might not come back any time soon. To cut back, it has increased gasoline, diesel, and kerosene prices, although they remain far below international averages. It also increased prices on water and electricity. In the future, Saudi leaders plan to implement a sales tax and privatize health care and education.

Saudi Arabia isn't the only oil producer suffering. Thanks to substantial oil and natural gas reserves, Qatar is the wealthiest nation in the world per capita. But, because the country produces few products other than oil, its budget was also hard hit by the collapse of oil prices.

In November 2015, the ruler of Qatar, Emir Sheik Tamim, announced that the country could "no longer provide for everything" and admitted that heavy subsidization had led to "dependency on the state to provide for everything".

As a result, Qatar is ending its fuel subsidies to reduce its budget deficit. This reform represents a significant change of policy from 2014, when the IMF reported that Qatar had the highest per person energy subsidies in the world.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar are not alone--several other nations have recently cut subsidies that had been in place for a long time. These include big oil producers United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Oman.

GREATEST WAR EVER:

"Nothing really happened," an Iranian military source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. "What does it really mean in the field? ... It's only a public relations move that makes it easier for backers of the terrorist group to pay money and send arms [to it] without being criticized. So rather than paying in secret, they'll do it openly."

To Iran, Jabhat al-Nusra, Jaish al-Fatah and Ahrar al-Sham are much more dangerous than the Islamic State, the Iranian military source told Al-Monitor. "International and regional backers are doing whatever possible to tell the world that these groups are moderate Islamists, while they know that they are all -- like Daesh -- of the same origin, which is al-Qaeda." The Iranian military source said, "Today, the central command of al-Qaeda is weak. The killing of Osama bin Laden left the group with nothing but some heritage that's being exploited every now and then by its leaders to preserve influence, but now that even this heritage is gone, the [al-Qaeda-linked] groups are giving up their 'mother' because of her enemies. But this means that one day, when they are stronger, they [al-Qaeda affiliates] won't mind giving up their new allies for whoever will preserve their existence. That's why we are going to rid the world of them." The Iranian military source told Al-Monitor, "For years now, we've been doing our duty without looking at names and without giving attention to whoever is backing and supporting [these groups]. We'll continue to do what we have to do, wherever we need to be, and whether it's Nusra, al-Qaeda, Daesh -- or the new name it [Jabhat al-Nusra, now Jabhat Fatah al-Sham] was given -- our mandate is to uproot it and rid the region of such a terrorist group." He told Al-Monitor, "But it's not us who should be on alert; it's their backers who will be the first to be hit. Those who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks were one day sweethearts of the United States in Afghanistan, and there's no doubt that those in Syria, when strong enough, will want to do 10 times what happened in New York in 2001. We know our enemy well, but others -- despite their advanced techniques in foreseeing dangers -- are still supporting their real enemies."

Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of Iran's parliamentary national security and foreign policy commission, said Aug. 4, "Dividing terrorists between good ones and bad ones doesn't change anything." Following a meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Boroujerdi said, "Changing the names of terrorist groups doesn't change the fact that they are terrorists. This won't change the nature of such groups, and Jabhat al-Nusra continues to embrace the same radical, terrorist mentality despite the name change."

FIT, NOT FAT:

The aim of the meta-analysis, published in the BMJ, was to suss out how disease risk changes with increasing activity, a question hasn't been fully answered. Exercise is generally measured in metabolic equivalents (METs). The 150 minutes of moderate and 75 minutes of vigorous activity correspond to 600 METs/week, for instance, and the WHO recommends getting more than this amount per week. [...]

[P]eople getting the highest amounts of exercise in the study (at least 8,000 METs/week) compared to people with the lowest levels (less than 600 METs/week), had 14% reduced risk for breast cancer, 20% reduced risk for colon cancer, 28% reduced risk for diabetes, 25% reduced risk for heart disease and 26% reduced risk for stroke.

That said, getting these more extreme amounts of exercise wasn't absolutely necessary-there were "diminishing returns" at levels beyond 3,000-4,000 METs/week, which the paper suggests could be an optimal amount. And which suggests that while we may need more than many of us currently get, some serious health benefits are seen at levels that are not totally out of reach for most of us.

NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE:

According to a poll conducted for KSN-TV, Trump would get 44 percent of the vote compared to 39 percent for Hillary Clinton. That's 3 points down from what Trump received in KSN's July poll and Clinton was up 3 points.

Mitt Romney won the state in 2012 with almost 60 percent of the vote, while Barack Obama got 38 percent.

PITY THE POOR MALTHUSIANS:

A central aspect of Gordon's thesis is that the conventional measures of economic growth omit some of the largest gains in living standards and therefore underestimate economic progress. A point that is little appreciated is that the standard measures of economic progress do not include gains in health and life expectancy. Nor do they include the impact of revolutionary technological improvements such as the introduction of electricity or telephones or automobiles. Most of the book is devoted to describing many of history's crucial technological revolutions, which in Gordon's view took place in the special century. Moreover, he argues that the innovations of today are much narrower and contribute much less to improvements in living standards than did the innovations of the special century.

Rise and Fall represents the results of a lifetime of research by one of America's leading macroeconomists. Gordon absorbed the current thinking on economic growth as a graduate student at MIT from 1964 to 1967 (where we were classmates), studying the cutting-edge theories and empirical work of such brilliant economists as Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Dale Jorgenson, and Zvi Griliches. He soon settled in at Northwestern University, where his research increasingly focused on long-term growth trends and problems of measuring real income and output.

Gordon's book is both physically and intellectually weighty. While handsomely produced, at nearly eight hundred pages it weighs as much as a small dog. I found the Kindle version more convenient. Here is a guide to the principal points.

The first chapter summarizes the major arguments succinctly and should be studied carefully. Here is the basic thesis:

The century of revolution in the United States after the Civil War was economic, not political, freeing households from an unremitting daily grind of painful manual labor, household drudgery, darkness, isolation, and early death. Only one hundred years later, daily life had changed beyond recognition. Manual outdoor jobs were replaced by work in air-conditioned environments, housework was increasingly performed by electric appliances, darkness was replaced by light, and isolation was replaced not just by travel, but also by color television images bringing the world into the living room.... The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.

The series of "only once" economic revolutions behind this short summary makes up the next fourteen chapters of the book. Most of the innovations are familiar, but Gordon tells their histories vividly. More important, in many cases, he explains quantitatively the way these economic revolutions boosted the living standards of the statistically average American. Among the most illuminating chapters are those on housing, transportation, health, and computers.

The last two chapters are about the fall in Rise and Fall. This book differs from the Spenglerian "decline of the West" genre in an important respect. As the mathematicians might say, Gordon moves up a derivative. In other words, he is not predicting that living standards in the US will decline; rather he views it as likely that the growth rate of living standards will decline from its very rapid pace in the special century.

Gordon sees two sources for his pessimistic outlook. The first is that the long list of "only once" social and economic changes cannot be repeated. A second source is what he calls "headwinds." These are structural changes in the economy that reduce actual output below the country's technological potential and provide another reason for slow growth in living standards in the decades ahead.

AS W, WHO ACTUALLY WON ELECTIONS, TRIED EXPLAINING TO THEM...:

SO CLOSE to the stage that Donald Trump could almost have touched it, a notice on the school wall in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, carried this message: "Welcome to Cumberland Valley where sportsmanship is an expectation. So please ...let the spectators be positive." No chance of that. Even before the Republican nominee appeared, late on August 1st, on a pit-stop between Ohio and New York, the 3,000-odd people packing the gymnasium were spewing hate. 

"What should we do with Hillary Clinton?" hollered a local politician, as if this crowd, of young people wearing "Trump that bitch" T-shirts and older ones who apparently did not mind the slogan, needed warming up. "Kill her!" someone shouted. "Lock her up!" the chant began.

This is Mr Trump's achievement. The billionaire demagogue has not merely responded to the grievances of working-class whites--such as the folk in Mechanicsburg, mourning their lost steel mills and the pay rises and other benefits that once accrued to being hardworking and white in America. He has also sought to stoke their anger. Vengeance against "rapist" Mexicans, Muslim fifth-columnists, job-killing outsourcers and his "criminal" Democratic opponent, Mr Trump tells his supporters, is the solution to their gripes. Anyone who says otherwise, he added in his bleak convention speech last month, is conning them. "No longer can we rely on those elites in media and politics, who will say anything to keep a rigged system in place."

And yet, appearing onstage in Mechanicsburg, to the accompaniment of mock-heroic synthesiser chords, as if he were a game-show host, Mr Trump looked tired and unenthused. He did not thump the air and trumpet polling data as he likes to; how could he? After a disastrous fortnight for the Republican nominee, in which the chaos and thuggery he has brought to American politics appear to have united much of non-Trumpian America in disgust, the polls look bad for him.

Unless something radical and unexpected happens, Donald Trump is going to lose the 2016 presidential election -- he'll lose it more than Hillary Rodham Clinton will win it -- for more or less the reasons that his critics on the right have been explaining for more than a year now: In short, the sort of thing that makes hearts go pitter-patter out in derka-derka talk-radio land doesn't necessarily fly in the rest of the country and may in fact even come off as creepy and weird, which is why three times as many people watch The Middle -- a show I'd never heard of -- as watch Sean Hannity's nightly Trump-fest on Fox News. There's more to America than your Uncle Bob's right-wing Facebook circle, and Trump isn't very well prepared for that. 

Our friend Hugh Hewitt found this out the hard way. The talk-radio host was trying to help the Republican nominee explain away his absurd and surreal claim that Barack Obama is the founder of the Islamic State. "I know what you meant," Hewitt said. "You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace." But Trump refused to take Hewitt's good counsel: "No, I meant he's the founder of ISIS," Trump insisted. "I do." Hewitt pointed out that President Obama does, from time to time, invest a fair amount of time and energy in killing Islamic State operatives. Trump: "I don't care."

JUST RAISE GAS TAXES AND WE'RE THERE:

[T]he shale oil and gas revolution of the last couple of decades has made the improbable goal of American energy independence close to reality. Analysts at Raymond James recently predicted the U.S. will be "tantalizingly close" by 2020, as long as oil prices and domestic production rebound.

"The U.S. will be a much smaller importer of oil in the future than anybody thought was possible a decade ago," said Jason Bordoff, a Columbia University professor and former energy policy adviser to President Obama.

Ironically, the historic oil boom that President Obama has presided over is what makes that dream achievable today.

THE WILL UNFETTERED:

In February 1837, South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun changed the tone of the cultural, religious, political, and social war over slavery by declaring human bondage a "positive good." Most members of the generation of Americans who created the United States government, by contrast, saw slavery as an unfortunate legacy of the colonial period. A few in Georgia and South Carolina were indifferent to its moral status but committed to its economic benefits. Many others hoped that the new government might eventually put slavery on the road to extinction.

During the debates over the federal constitution, even members committed to allowing the retention of slavery argued against provisions that might affirm the morality of human bondage. William Paterson of New Jersey, for example, opposed representing slaves in the Congress because it might afford "an indirect encouragement of the slave trade," an institution seen as wicked even by many slaveholders. And in 1790, when Quakers presented a petition to Congress arguing for the abolition of the slave trade, Virginia planter Josiah Parker thanked them for "attending to matters of such momentous concern to the future happiness and prosperity of the people." Parker, like Washington, Adams, and scores of the revolutionary generation, hoped eventually to eradicate chattel slavery from the new United States. Richard Henry Lee, another slaveholding Virginian, called slavery a moral blight. Even as late as 1820, when Congress argued over slavery's expansion into federal territories and the new state of Missouri, South Carolina's virulently pro-slavery Senator William Smith could only offer an anemic moral defense of slavery when he called it a "necessary evil."

Calhoun's radical embrace of slavery added to the dehumanization of African-Americans and departed from long-held moral and political understanding of slavery in American political life. In our own time, modern-day John C. Calhouns make up the abortion lobby in American politics. [...]

Abortion activists couch their arguments in the language of absolute individual autonomy. A woman, they declare, has a right to do what she pleases with her body. No one--not her husband, parents, family, faith community, or society at large--has a right to tell her what to do with it. In an interview in April 2016, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards exasperatedly told the audience that she and women around the country were "so sick of men telling us what to do with our bodies." But Richards wasn't just sick of men coercing the individual will of women to spare the life of the unborn. She was sick of churches, families, local communities, state legislatures, and any other human institution. Her will should be absolute over theirs even in the case of the life or death of a human being. The DNC crowd cheered when Ilyse Hogan invoked the same idea. In so doing, they cheered nothing less than the tyrannical disposition that dominated the psyches of antebellum slaveholders.

A popular antebellum argument against abolition and emancipation foreshadowed the current abortion narrative in its emphasis on total autonomy. John Townsend, a southern pamphleteer, published a virulently pro-slavery tract during the 1860 election titled The South alone, should govern the South: And African slavery should be Governed by Those Only Who are Friendly To it. That southerners alone--without the influence or interference of natural law or revealed religion--should govern slavery was a very new idea, even for slaveholders. Patrick Henry, a slaveholding Virginian, believed that slavery was "repugnant to humanity . . . inconsistent with humanity, and destructive to liberty." Townsend and the slaveholding generation of 1860 rejected any and all cultural, legal, political, and religious restrictions on slavery--much in the same way their latter-day analogues have done with the killing of the unborn. The tyranny of the individual is as complete with abortion activists as it was with slave owners.

Both slavery and abortion defenses often use the language of submission. Abortion supporters argue that women should not have to submit themselves to the state or any other mediating authority, such as churches and family. Not even the father of the unborn child has a say. Similarly, Townsend angrily denounced those who would allow authorities other than the individual to determine the moral rightness of chattel slavery in the United States. "Submission," cried Townsend, remained intolerable because it abrogated the individual slaveholders' ultimate and final authority over their human chattel. In the same way, modern abortion advocates have viewed any obstacle to abortion-on-demand--including waiting periods and parental consent for minors--as an entirely unwarranted invasion of women's totalitarian authority over their unborn children.

AND LOSING TO THEM TOO:

"I am not running against Crooked Hillary Clinton," Trump said in a speech Saturday in Fairfield, Connecticut. "I'm running against the crooked media."

60 in '16:

RIDING THE O'BOOM:

As recently as mid-July, when voters were asked which candidate "would better handle the economy," they picked Trump over Clinton by a wide margin (54% to 43%), according to CNN/ORC polling.

Now Clinton has the edge. In the most recent CNN/ORC poll, conducted July 29 to 31, Clinton was ahead on the economy question, 50% to 48%.

NO ONE WILL MISS LABOR:

      The deeper problem facing America is how to provide meaningful work and good wages for the tens of millions of truck drivers, accountants, factory workers and office clerks whose jobs will disappear in coming years because of robots, driverless vehicles and "machine learning" systems.

      The political debate needs to engage the taboo topic of guaranteeing economic security to families -- through a universal basic income, or a greatly expanded earned-income tax credit, or a 1930s-style plan for public-works employment. Ranting about bad trade deals won't begin to address the problem.  

      The "automation bomb" could destroy 45 percent of the work activities currently performed in the United States, representing about $2 trillion in annual wages, according to a study last year by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. We've only seen the beginning of this change, they warned. Currently, only 5 percent of occupations can be entirely automated, but 60 percent of occupations could soon see machines doing 30 percent or more of the work.

      The McKinsey analysts sharpened their argument in a new paper released last month. Their estimates, based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data covering more than 800 occupations, drew a shocking picture of the future. In manufacturing, 59 percent of activities could be automated, and that includes

"90 percent of what welders, cutters, solderers and brazers do." In food-service and accommodations, 73 percent of the work could be performed by machines. In retailing, 53 percent of current jobs could be lost.

      White-collar workers may imagine that they're safe, but that's wishful thinking. If computers can be programmed to understand speech as well as humans do, 66 percent of jobs in finance and insurance could be replaced, for example, McKinsey warns.

GREATEST WAR EVER:

WE'D ALL PREFER IT:

Carlos Gutierrez, former United States Secretary of Commerce under George W. Bush, has endorsed Hillary Clinton, adding to a number of Republicans who are siding with the other side of the aisle in this election.

"I actually think Hillary Clinton has the experience, she's been around, she knows how the system works. I think she'd make a darn good president," he said on CNN's State of the Union. "I would have preferred Jeb Bush, but I think Hillary is a great choice. I am afraid of what Donald Trump would do to this country."

RESTORING DIGNITY:

Next month will be the first anniversary of Albuquerque's There's a Better Way program, which hires panhandlers for day jobs beautifying the city. In partnership with a local nonprofit that serves the homeless population, a van is dispatched around the city to pick up panhandlers who are interested in working. The job pays $9 an hour, which is above minimum wage, and provides a lunch. At the end of the shift, the participants are offered overnight shelter as needed.

In less than a year since its start, the program has given out 932 jobs clearing 69,601 pounds of litter and weeds from 196 city blocks. And more than 100 people have been connected to permanent employment.

"You can just see the spiral they've been on to end up on the corner. Sometimes it takes a little catalyst in their lives to stop the downward spiral, to let them catch their breath, and it's remarkable," Berry said in an interview. "They've had the dignity of work for a day; someone believed in them today."

Berry's effort is a shift from the movement across the country to criminalize panhandling. A recent National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty report found a noticeable increase, with 24 percent of cities banning it altogether and 76 percent banning it in particular areas.

There is a persisting stigma that people begging for money are either drug addicts or too lazy to work and are looking for an easy handout.

But that's not necessarily the reality. Panhandling is not especially lucrative and it's demoralizing, but for some people it can seem as if it's the only option. When panhandlers have been approached in Albuquerque with the offer of work, most have been eager for the opportunity to earn money, Berry said. They just needed a lift. One man told him no one had said a kind word to him in 25 years.

TOO SMALL A MAN FOR THE JOB:

THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RACE:

All these woebegone Republicans whining that they can't rally behind their flawed candidate is crazy. The G.O.P. angst, the gnashing and wailing and searching for last-minute substitutes and exit strategies, is getting old.

They already have a 1-percenter who will be totally fine in the Oval Office, someone they can trust to help Wall Street, boost the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cuddle with hedge funds, secure the trade deals beloved by corporate America, seek guidance from Henry Kissinger and hawk it up -- unleashing hell on Syria and heaven knows where else.

The Republicans have their candidate: It's Hillary.

NICELY PLAYED:

The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah terror group quoted Trump at a rally in the country's south Saturday, saying the presidential candidate's statements were based on facts.

"This is an American presidential candidate who is saying this. What he says is based on facts and documents," Hassan Nasrallah said.

THERE ARE NO SAFE SEATS:

Ask Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri about his party's presidential nominee and you'll likely get a polite but weary response.

It's tough enough for the political veteran seeking re-election against up-and-coming Democrat Jason Kander, Missouri's secretary of state who is showing surprising strength in the polls and in raising money. The string of recent controversies involving Donald Trump, who Blunt has endorsed, doesn't help.

Like many of his Senate GOP colleagues, Blunt, who served seven terms in the House before his election to the Senate in 2010, prefers to talk about his own record and agenda, not Trump's.

THE MOST CONFORMIST PEOPLE ON EARTH:

Nolan points out the common themes that connect these visitors to America over a period of 100 years (Tocqueville traveled to America in 1831-32, Weber in 1904, and Chesterton in 1921 and 1930-31). But many of their themes and concerns were shared by an almost uniformly critical observer of America, the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb (who spent time in America from 1948 to 1950). The first three visitors "were simultaneously impressed with and disquieted by what they saw in America." Qutb saw only shadows and the dissolution of the human spirit. In his view, Americans lived for the almighty dollar, had no sense of beauty, and were fundamentally estranged from nature and religion. Moreover, the happiness they pursued constantly eluded them. He saw in America only conformity and a tendency to form an agitated "herd." Much of this is undoubtedly overwrought. But Nolan is struck by the fact that many of the same criticisms were made in a more balanced way by the friendly critics of America and American democracy. One doesn't have to indulge Qutb's penchant for political extremism, his one-sided hostility to Western democracy, his hatred of Zionism and Jews (which Nolan understates), or his fanciful belief that Islam will solve all the problems of modern civilization to recognize that he, too, has something to say about the limits of modern democracy.       

Alexis de Tocqueville was "the first to identify the paradoxical tendencies of individualism, conformism, and voluntarism in American society." A self-declared friend of America and democracy, Tocqueville nonetheless described Americans' "conformist habits and acute sensitivities to the opinion of others." Americans always wanted praise from foreigners, as if they were searching for confirmation of their own superiority. Tocqueville worried about the "tyranny of the majority" (excessively assertive majorities) as well as the passivity that could accompany democratic conformism. The later visitors to America repeated these themes and concerns, in somewhat different form. Tocqueville and Chesterton were both sensitive to the paradox that excessive individualism, and disengagement from the larger society, undermined authentic individuality--the ability to withstand public opinion and the pressures of the crowd. They feared the rise of what later came to be called "mass society." 

Tocqueville was the first to praise the American propensity to "associate" with others--to overcome pernicious individualism through voluntarism and collective efforts that didn't entail intervention by an obtrusive central government. This "art of association," as Tocqueville called it, went hand in hand with a vigorous system of local self-government. Tocqueville admired Americans' capacity to take charge of their own lives in a way that avoided the twin extremes of individualism and collectivism. Chesterton, too, praised "the pro-democracy" force of voluntary associations and saw in American habits "of social organization" a "power that is the soul and success of democracy." 

As for political economy, Tocqueville, Weber, and Chesterton all admired the energy and industriousness of the American people. At the same time, they criticized the excesses of what Tocqueville called the "mercantile spirit." Long before Weber articulated his famous thesis on "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," Tocqueville noted the multiple ways Americans brought together Puritanism and the mercantile spirit. Americans, he noted, affirmed the value of religion, even as they redefined virtue in utilitarian terms (virtue was increasingly tied to self-interest and worldly success). 

SOMEONE HAS TO PAY THE PRICE FOR HIS FAILURES:

POLITICS IS SKILLED LABOR:

Concerned Republicans say their worries go beyond the campaign's decision to send its greatest resource -- the candidate himself -- to chase one or two electoral votes in Maine, or to what they believe are unwinnable states like Connecticut. The other phenomenon perplexing veteran operatives is that the Trump campaign now has the needed money to finance television ads and ground operations -- they just don't appear to be spending it.

The imbalance in ad spending is astonishing. Since the end of the primaries, Hillary Clinton has spent $42.9 million in ads. Donald Trump has spent zero.

"They have to spend money efficiently right now to avoid getting buried by Hillary," argued Austin Barbour, a longtime Republican political operative.

"We saw this in 2012 against Obama when we were working on Romney. They were burying us with negative ads in swing states well before Labor Day. That same thing is happening with Trump," added Barbour.

Miller says the Trump campaign plans to start running television ads "soon" but declined to go further than that, saying he doesn't want to reveal internal campaign strategy.

SOUNDS LIKE THE NOTORIOUS RBG:

NFL player Ben Watson has made a radical charge against Planned Parenthood. The 35-year-old Baltimore Ravens tight end alleged Planned Parenthood was created to eliminate the black race while discussing how race factors into abortion during an interview with the Turning Point Pregnancy Resource Center, CBS Sports reported Sunday. 

"I wouldn't say I have any unique insight," he said. "I do know that blacks kind of represent a large portion of the abortions, and I do know that honestly the whole idea with Planned Parenthood and [Margaret] Sanger in the past was to exterminate blacks, and it's kind of ironic that it's working."

According to Watson, who has written lengthy and popular essays highlighting the many social injustices faced in the black community, Planned Parenthood is one of the biggest forces pushing minorities to get abortions.

"We [as minorities] support candidates, and overwhelmingly support the idea of having Planned Parenthood and the like, and yet, that is why she created it," Watson said. "We are buying it hook, line, and sinker, like it's a great thing. It's just amazing to me and abortion saddens me period, but it seems to be something that is really pushed on minorities and provided to minorities especially as something that they should do."

Over the years, Sanger has received a lot of criticism over her ideals about abortion and the black community. In the late 1930's, Sanger started "The Negro Project," which was aimed at providing abortion and pregnancy prevention services in the rural south. Her known support of the Nazi party's eugenics movement, the idea of improving the human race by encouraging reproduction based on specific genes, has led to backlash in recent years, the Washington Post reported.

"It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people," Ginsburg says.

This isn't the first time she's sounded in favor of eugenics. Ginsburg caused a stir in July 2009 when she made comments about the Roe v. Wade abortion case that appeared racist. In an interview with the New York Times, Ginsburg said made it appear she supported Roe for population control reasons targeting minorities. [...]

Ginsburg first advocated taxpayer funding of abortions and followed it up by saying she backed Roe to eliminate "populations that we don't want to have too many of."

THE MOST PRO-ESTABLISHMENT ELECTION EVER:

[Tom] Friedman need be frightened no longer. Today it looks as though his elites are taking matters well in hand. "Jobs" don't really matter now in this election, nor does the debacle of "globalization", nor does anything else, really. Thanks to this imbecile Trump, all such issues have been momentarily swept off the table while Americans come together around Clinton, the wife of the man who envisaged the Davos dream in the first place.

As leading Republicans desert the sinking ship of Trump's GOP, America's two-party system itself has temporarily become a one-party system. And within that one party, the political process bears a striking resemblance to dynastic succession. Party office-holders selected Clinton as their candidate long ago, apparently determined to elevate her despite every possible objection, every potential legal problem. The Democratic National Committee helped out, too, as WikiLeaks tells us. So did President Barack Obama, that former paladin for openness, who in the past several years did nearly everything in his power to suppress challenges to Clinton and thus ensure she would continue his legacy of tepid, bank-friendly neoliberalism.

My leftist friends persuaded themselves that this stuff didn't really matter, that Clinton's many concessions to Sanders' supporters were permanent concessions. But with the convention over and the struggle with Sanders behind her, headlines show Clinton triangulating to the right, scooping up the dollars and the endorsement, and the elites shaken loose in the great Republican wreck.

She is reaching out to the foreign policy establishment and the neocons. She is reaching out to Republican office-holders. She is reaching out to Silicon Valley. And, of course, she is reaching out to Wall Street. In her big speech in Michigan on Thursday she cast herself as the candidate who could bring bickering groups together and win policy victories through really comprehensive convenings.

Things will change between now and November, of course. But what seems most plausible from the current standpoint is a landslide for Clinton, and with it the triumph of complacent neoliberal orthodoxy. She will have won her great victory, not as a champion of working people's concerns, but as the greatest moderate of them all, as the leader of a stately campaign of sanity and national unity. The populist challenge of the past eight years, whether led by Trump or by Sanders, will have been beaten back resoundingly. Centrism will reign triumphant over the Democratic party for years to come. This will be her great accomplishment. The bells will ring all over Washington DC.

In this ironic and roundabout way, Trump may prove to be a disaster for the reform politics he has never really believed in. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a leader who could discredit populism more thoroughly than this compassion-free billionaire. For Friedman's beloved "elites", I predict that Trump will come to serve an important symbolic purpose. Trump loves to boast that he is immune to the scourge of money in politics, that he's nobody's puppet, and from his coming ruin and disgrace we will no doubt be told to draw many lessons about how money in politics actually helps prevent the rise of people like Trump and makes the system more stable.

"STRONGHOLD" MUST NOT TRANSLATE WELL FROM THE ARABIC:

THERE'S SO LITTLE TO DISAGREE ABOUT AT THE eND OF hISTORY...:

[T]he legislative record of the 114th Congress (which runs from January 2015 through January 2017) is one of the most productive in recent years, due to considerable compromise and cooperation among members of both parties on key issues. And that is the last thing that either party wants you to know.

As my colleagues at POPVOX have noted, major bipartisan policies have been enacted over the past two years. Longstanding issues that have vexed Congress for years have been resolved during the 114th -- under GOP control, with Democratic cooperation, signed by President Barack Obama. Congress ended the Medicare physician payment system that required a temporary "doc fix" every year for 17 years. It repealed No Child Left Behind (which officially expired in 2007) and began the process of reforming federal education policy. This Congress repealed the National Security Agency's bulk data surveillance program while reauthorizing the PATRIOT Act. It passed the first long-term transportation bill in a decade a new version of toxic chemicals bill, and updated the Freedom of Information Act for the 21st century. You may support or oppose the substance of any of these bills, but they are hardly the work of a do-nothing Congress.

Brookings recently released its "Democracy Dashboard," measuring a few key indicators for various government institutions. While that data only runs through 2014, a quick check on available data for the 114th (2105-16) shows that many of the gridlock trends appear to be on the upswing -- more big votes, more conference committees.

MESSIN' AROUND:

Can anyone learn how to listen to any kind of music by reading about it, even from someone as knowledgeable as Gioia? (Especially without the help of a CD, and none is included with this book.) Count me as sceptical going in. As Fats Waller is said to have warned, "If you have to ask, don't mess with it."

Gioia's early chapters, on rhythm and phrasing - the swing and pulse of jazz - and on self-expression are the least helpful and the most self-evident. "This intensely personal quality to improvisation, its tendency to mirror the psyche," he writes, "may be the most enchanting aspect of jazz." For some of us, it's the only aspect of jazz.

But starting with the chapter on structure, the book really begins to swing. There is no musical notation here - not that I could have read it - and jazz, a music of nuance, is notoriously difficult to transcribe anyway. But there are detailed analyses of three jazz standards: Duke Ellington's Sepia Panorama, Sidewalk Blues by Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers, and Charlie Parker's Night in Tunisia.

For each, the author lays bare the basic structure. For example, Night begins with a 12-bar intro, first four guitar, next four adding bass and drums, the final four adding horns. Then on to the A theme, B theme, and so forth to the final repetition of the A theme, then the coda.

Complicated? Not at all. Fortunately each piece is available on YouTube, and with the book in my lap and my computer at my side I listened and counted my way through the labyrinth, bar by bar. It's helpful to at least know what a bar is, but gradually I began to understand something I had only dimly sensed.

Gioia offers other hints and nudges: if lost follow the bass player, not the drummer. Soloists tend to trade off phrases in four-bar chunks. Sing or hum along as you listen. 

MUCH EASIER THAN CHECKING TRUMP:

JUST A GOOD METHODIST GIRL:

In her book God & Mrs. Thatcher, Dr. Eliza Filby, professor of British History at Kings College in London, recognizes this tendency to perceive Margaret Thatcher as some ahistorical persona present in all of Britain's affairs. Filby thus attempts, without minimizing Britain's first female Prime Minister's achievements or personality (that would be a futile endeavor indeed), to "consign" the Iron Lady to her historical context. We cannot be led by the dead, no matter how formidable, but we can learn from them. In other words, when applying the thrust of Filby's argument to the continuing post-Brexit uncertainty, asking "Would Thatcher have been a Brexiteer?" is not the operative question, but rather, "How does understanding Thatcher in her context inform us in ours?" Filby points out that the Iron Lady's "passing simply revealed how much [Britain] had changed" between her premiership and her death. With Brexit underway, the UK promises to continue changing. After rejecting the EU bogeyman, British citizens must think deeply about what they want for their country and how they must behave to get it.

Apart from contextualizing Thatcher's life and legacy, God & Mrs. Thatcher, as the title implies, contributes to our understanding of Margaret Thatcher by tracing the Christian, specifically Methodist, origins of her political convictions. It places what her husband, Denis Thatcher, called her "deep religious faith" at the center of the narrative. Filby recounts that Denis referenced his wife's faith when correcting Bernard Ingham, who purported to enumerate Mrs. Thatcher's leadership style with five characteristics, none of which touched on religion. Like Denis Thatcher in that instance, Filby contends that including Margaret Thatcher's faith is essential for understanding the Prime Minister. She goes a bit father, however, rightly situating Christianity as the organizing theme for Margaret Thatcher's whole life and work. Refreshingly, the author understands that ideas and beliefs can be powerful motivators, even for powerful people.

Some ideas encountered in childhood stick. To see this in Margaret Thatcher's life, one must start in Grantham, a small town in Lincolnshire where she grew up. As a politician, Thatcher invoked her early years for overtly political purposes (to distance herself from the "millionaire's wife" label and extol the virtues of capitalism), but her time in Grantham was truly formative. Margaret's father was a devout Methodist and a grocer. She inherited his abhorrence of debt, so it is "not without irony" that her government later allowed significant expansion of personal credit. Both father and daughter struggled to reconcile the creative power of free-market capitalism with the materialist culture it encouraged. Filby's text shows Thatcher's world-view never severed itself from Grantham.

As the introduction to God & Mrs. Thatcher advertises, the book is not technically a biography. This is clearly seen in Filby's overview of the late 1960s, a time when political discourse presaged somewhat the discussions now surrounding Brexit. 1968 was a year of upheaval. The political center was in crisis. Enoch Powell delivered his "Rivers of Blood" speech, which stirred fears about immigration in the midst of a struggling British economy. Sound familiar? Powell was vigorously anti-European but ardently pro-market, a policy pairing that has earned him the title "God-father of Thatcherism." It should be noted, however, that in the 1970s Margaret Thatcher strongly supported the European Economic Community (EEC), which Britain entered in 1973. Similarly to modern discourse, immigration fueled in some quarters the sense that "British-ness" was eroding. By 1980 "a tangible sense of England" was entering Tory thinking on immigration and European federalism.

Thatcher became party leader in 1975 and won the PM position in 1979. Once in office she followed Powell's belief that the Gospel is primarily for the individual and that "original sin" could be leveraged against utopian visions of society. Powell also paved the way for Thatcher's opposition to the agenda of liberal Anglicanism, calling the clergy amateurs in economics and politics.

MISSISSIPPI AND ALABAMA ARE THE BATTLEGROUNDS:

The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist polls out Friday delivered more bad news for Donald Trump. Surveys of the battleground states of Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia each revealed Hillary Clinton well ahead of Trump, with some of her winning margins even cracking double digits. "These are supposed to be battleground states, but right now, they don't look that way," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion.

IT'S A PURITAN NATION:

Perhaps the single most important political and social concept in all of Puritan theology is that of the covenant. Modern readers often conflate the notion of covenant with the more widely understood notion of contract. A contract is a legal document between two or more parties that defines a quid-pro-quo exchange between them. For example, Party A might enter into a contract with Party B to mow his grass each week for fifty dollars. The two parties negotiate a price, terms of service, and other details and then bind themselves to the contract. The contract is legally enforceable should one party violate the terms.

A covenant is quite different. The covenant is a biblical concept and many examples can be found on the pages of Scripture. All covenants have certain common characteristics. First, a covenant is always made between God and people, as opposed to a contract which is made simply between people. Next, the terms of a covenant are non-negotiable. Whereas the parties to a contract typically collaborate on mutually acceptable terms, the terms of a covenant are dictated by God Himself and are not subject to amendment. Finally, a covenant is permanent, in many cases extending beyond the lifetimes of the initial generation of subscribers. Whereas a contract ordinarily concludes when the relevant parties have fulfilled their obligations to one another, a covenant has no earthly expiration date.

To further illustrate this principle, consider an example from the Old Testament. God famously enters into a covenant with Abraham in Genesis 17. In declaring this covenant, the Lord issues the terms to Abraham: "I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you... And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojourning." For their own part, Abraham and his descendants (none of whom were even born yet) are to worship God and circumcise their children as a sign. And of course, several times throughout the chapter, God calls this Abrahamic covenant "an everlasting covenant," an indication of its permanency.

NOT THEIR UNICORN RIDER:

On Thursday night, though, legalization advocates had grown weary of the 44th president. They scheduled a protest to throw marijuana seeds on the White House lawn to show their dismay at the Drug Enforcement Administration's rejection of a petition to remove marijuana from its place on the list of most dangerous drugs.

The decision quashed the hopes of legalizers who thought it would be Obama who would finally remove marijuana from the list that includes LSD and heroin.

The long-awaited ruling by the DEA means the federal government's official position is that marijuana has absolutely no medical use.

THE MIGHTY CALIPHATE WAR MACHINE:

Gordon Trowbridge, deputy press secretary, said Hafiz Saeed Khan died in southern Nangarhar Province on July 26.

The State Department last year designated Khan a global terrorist, saying he is the leader of the Islamic State in Khorasan, which includes former members of the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban. Khan had previously been a Tehrik-e Taliban commander, but last year pledged loyalty to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

BALLERS:

Our "Dream Team" of NBA all-stars was put together for a State Department goodwill tour. We played 19 games in the Iron Curtain countries of Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia -- which doesn't even exist as a country anymore -- and two games in Egypt, winning them all by large margins. We also put on clinics in every city we visited.

Our team was personally selected and coached by Red Auerbach, the most successful coach, general manager and team president in NBA history, and anchored by Bill Russell, who won 11 NBA titles.

We only had eight players: Boston Celtics' Russell, Tom Heinsohn, KC Jones and Bob Cousy (retired a year earlier and then coaching at Boston College); Jerry Lucas and me from the Cincinnati Royals; Bob Pettit from the St. Louis Hawks, and Tom Gola from the New York Knicks.

Russell, Jones, Lucas and I had been Olympic gold medalists, all of us were all-NBA, and all eight players plus Red are now in the Hall of Fame.

But our "Dream Team" has essentially been forgotten by the NBA, the media, even our own State Department - just as we were largely ignored in our own country back then. But there's a particular reason this tour should be remembered, which I will get to in a moment.

THE LAST PEOPLE YOU WANT CHOOSING OUR LEADERS:

Economic distress and anxiety across working-class white America have become a widely discussed explanation for the success of Donald Trump. It seems to make sense. Trump's most fervent supporters tend to be white men without college degrees. This same group has suffered economically in our increasingly globalized world, as machines have replaced workers in factories and labor has shifted overseas. Trump has promised to curtail trade and other perceived threats to American workers, including immigrants.

Yet a major new analysis from Gallup, based on 87,000 interviews the polling company conducted over the past year, suggests this narrative is not complete. While there does seem to be a relationship between economic anxiety and Trump's appeal, the straightforward connection that many observers have assumed does not appear in the data.

According to this new analysis, those who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration, compared with people with unfavorable views of the Republican presidential nominee. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed. [...]

Among Americans who were similar in terms of income, age, education and other factors, those who lived in places where people were less healthy had more favorable views of Trump. In these communities, whites are dying faster, there is more obesity, and people report more health problems. Again, this pattern held when Rothwell focused on white respondents only and on white Republicans specifically.

In other words, between two people who earn the same amount of money and have the same amount of schooling, the person who comes from a place with bad health is more likely to support Trump. It's hard to say what is causing this bad health, but at least some of this probably has roots in cultural practices -- diet and exercise habits, patterns of drinking and smoking, and more. [...]

Although Trump voters tend to be the most skeptical about immigration, they are also the least likely to actually encounter an immigrant in their neighborhood.

Rothwell finds that people who live in places with many Hispanic residents or places close to the Mexican border, tend not to favor Trump -- relative to otherwise similar Americans and to otherwise similar white Republicans.

Among those who are similar in terms of income, education and other factors, those who view Trump favorably are more likely to be found in white enclaves -- racially isolated Zip codes where the amount of diversity is lower than in surrounding areas.

These places have not been effected much by immigration, and Rothwell believes that is no coincidence. He argues that when people have more personal experience of people from other countries, they develop friendlier attitudes toward immigrants.

DANG, SHE'S TOO HONEST:

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton paid an effective federal tax rate of 34.2 percent last year and a combined federal, state and local effective tax rate of 43.2 percent, her campaign said on Friday. [...]

It is customary for U.S. presidential candidates to make their tax returns public, although they are not required by law to do so.

Clinton's tax returns have been made public, in some form, every year since 1977.

NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO:

The great American consumer is very much alive. It's just that people aren't shopping like they used to, reluctant to pay full price or even leave the couch -- cutting deep into the business of many top retailers. [...]

For decades, Americans have relied on the country's dense footprint of shopping centers and department stores for their prom dresses, paper towels and everything in between. Often, they were willing to drive to the mall, pay full price or wait for annual sales to get a deal.

But that has been transformed in the last decade, with the meteoric rise of the online giant Amazon, discount and low-cost stores like T. J. Maxx gaining popularity, and a long recession that reset the value of a dollar.

People continue to spend. In the spring, household spending rose at an annualized rate of 4.2 percent, driving overall economic growth. But more and more, they now want bargains and convenience -- in stores and online -- and know how to find them.

TOXIC ASSOCIATION:

Marco Rubio's lead in the Florida Senate race has evaporated, making him the latest down-ballot Republican to slump as voters register increasing dissatisfaction with Donald Trump as the party's nominee, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll released Friday. 

Incumbent Republican Senate candidates in the three key swing states surveyed -- Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio -- all polled better than Trump, the survey showed. But in Florida and Pennsylvania, both considered crucial to the party's efforts to maintain control of the Senate, the races are now too close to call.

ONE LESS SUPERFUND SITE:

[T]he Trump campaign appears to have pulled up stakes in the Garden State.

After two messages left at the number of Trump's New Jersey headquarters were not returned, POLITICO visited the nondescript suburban complex listed as its address.

That office no longer exists.

IT'S A DEFLATIONARY EPOCH:

U.S. producer prices unexpectedly fell in July on declining costs for services and energy products, pointing to a tame inflation environment that could make it difficult for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.

CATCHING THEM:

A glorious exhibit, Chasing Dreams: Baseball and Becoming American, refracts that history through the lens of baseball. The exhibit displays over 130 artifacts, original films, and interactive experiences that highlight how Jews and other minority groups, including Italians, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and others, used baseball to help them find common ground as Americans. It documents the country's history of immigration, ethnic and racial conflict, tensions between group identity and assimilation, and crusades to challenge bigotry and dismantle discrimination. Organized by the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, it will be on display at the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles through October 30, the American Jewish Historical Society in New York through July 2017, and other cities.

It is difficult today to imagine the excitement that greeted Jackie Robinson when he broke baseball's color barrier in 1947. His success on the baseball diamond--he won the Rookie of the Year Award that season--was a symbol of the promise of a racially integrated society. The dignity with which Robinson handled his encounters with racist players and fans and dealt with Jim Crow on the road in hotels, restaurants, trains, and other public places drew public attention to the issue. His experiences stirred the consciences of many white Americans and gave black Americans a tremendous boost of pride and self-confidence.

By hiring Robinson, the Dodgers earned the loyalty of millions of black Americans from across the country. But the team also gained the allegiance of many white Americans, most fiercely American Jews, especially those in the immigrant and second-generation neighborhoods of America's big cities, who believed that integrating our national pastime was a critical steppingstone to tearing down many other obstacles to equal treatment. 

Despite the fact that Americans fought in World War II in part to end Hitler's persecution of Jews, anti-Semitism was still widespread in postwar America. Throughout the country, colleges, employers, real estate agents and homebuilders, hotels, resorts, and country clubs still discriminated against Jews. In this climate, Jews and African Americans were natural allies, and Jewish groups were at the forefront of campaigns to integrate housing and break down other barriers for both groups.

One of the most interesting artifacts in the Chasing Dreams exhibit is a 1948 poster portraying four white boys and one African American boy holding bats and gloves, preparing for a game of baseball. One of the white boys, clearly upset, tells another white player, "What's his race or religion got to do with it? He can pitch!"

The caption on the poster says: "Keep pitching for EQUAL RIGHTS for all Americans. Remember--Home runs are made by children of every race, color, creed, and national origin. FIGHT FOR racial and religious understanding."

The poster was part of a campaign in Cincinnati to promote religious and racial understanding. In 1948, as the Brooklyn Dodgers were prepared to meet the Cincinnati Reds, Mayor Albert D. Cash used the occasion to collaborate with Phil Goldsmith, owner of Goldsmith Sporting Goods and local president of B'nai B'rith, a Jewish fraternal and service organization, in an effort to combat prejudice and discrimination. 

POLITICS IS A SKILLED OCCUPATION:

"If you are a Trump supporter and want to get a sign for your yard, there's no place to go and get it," said Fergus Cullen, the former chair of the state GOP.

Cullen is not a Trump supporter, but he is worried that a lack of organization in the state will hurt the rest of the Republican ticket.

"At this point, we would traditionally have regional field offices that are being opened that are basically funded by the presidential campaign," Cullen said. "But none of that is happening. The lack of coordination and funding on the Trump campaign means there is no organized get-out-the-vote effort, and that's going to have significant consequences down-ballot."

GREATEST WAR EVER:

 The Russian military sent long-range bombers to strike a series of Islamic State targets in the group's de facto capital of Raqqa on Thursday -- a fresh round of airstrikes that Syrian activists said killed at least 20 civilians and came amid Turkish calls for greater cooperation with Moscow against the extremist group.

IT'S A CREDIT TO THE GENEROSITY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE...:

Trump's erratic behavior in recent weeks, including publicly feuding with a Gold Star family, joking that "Second Amendment people" could possibly stop Hillary Clinton, and saying President Obama is the "founder of ISIS," has accompanied a sharp drop in the polls.

"I think he's absolutely exhausted," Brzezinski said. "I don't think he's slept since he won the nomination, and even before, when he was starting to realize that he was going to win the nomination."

She said she'd heard Trump sleeps in "two-hour spurts."

"That takes a toll on the brain in a very real way," she said. "It impacts your judgment. It impacts your mood. It impacts your ability to connect with people. It impacts your ability to retain and take in and process information. I think he's losing it."

THE MISEDUCATION OF THE RIGHT:

Mr. Hannity has never made a secret of his feelings for Mr. Trump, which is the love that dares to speak its name. But his comments were also a revelation, and not just that it has dawned on him that the Republican nominee is likely to lose and lose big. Like members of a cult who discover too late that their self-proclaimed messiah is mortal after all, rationalizations are required.

Mr. Trump has lately been road-testing one such rationalization, saying the election will be "rigged." Voter fraud is a reality in American elections, but it is typical of the candidate to confuse anecdote with data and turn allegation into conspiracy. Mr. Trump also says the media is "rigged" against him, which is amusing coming from the beneficiary of the equivalent of $3 billion in free advertising.

Mr. Hannity's excuses are even more disgraceful, combining oily self-absolution with venomous obloquy for the very conservatives who have spent the year warning that a Trump candidacy is an epic GOP disaster that all-but guarantees Hillary Clinton's election. The habit of shifting blame and refusing to take responsibility is supposed to be the curse of the underclass and its political hucksters, but Mr. Hannity is giving Al Sharpton a run for his money.

Mr. Hannity's other goal is to preserve the fiction--first cultivated by Ted Cruz and later adopted by the Trumpians--that a wan GOP "establishment" and its "Acela corridor" voters sat on their hands while Mr. Obama traduced the Constitution and sold us out to the enemy. "They did nothing, nothing!" the anchor fumed Thursday on his show. "All these phony votes to repeal and replace ObamaCare, show votes so they go back and keep their power and get re-elected."

Maybe Mr. Hannity thinks that Messrs. Ryan and McConnell should have jumped the White House fence and stuck a pitchfork in the president. Or that they should have amended the Constitution to repeal Article One, Section Seven--the one that gives the president his veto. Otherwise, it's hard to understand the constant lament about a do-nothing Congress except by wondering whether Mr. Hannity is stupid or dishonest.

On a relative basis, Republicans are more likely than independents or Democrats to say their main source of news is television. At the same time, independents rely the most of the three groups on the Internet, while Democrats put the most emphasis on print.

Fox News is a clear driver of Republicans' higher tendency to turn to television for their news, with 20% versus 6% of independents and 1% of Democrats, naming it as their main news source. No other television, print, or online news source generates as much loyalty from either Democrats or independents. 

KEYSTONE WAS THE UR'S STEEL TARIFFS:

It took seven years of protests, sit-ins, letter-writing, and, finally, a presidential review to prevent the Keystone XL oil pipeline from being built. Now, in a matter of months, America's newest mega pipeline--the Dakota Access Pipeline Project (DAPL)--has quietly received full regulatory permission to begin construction. Known also as the Bakken Pipeline, the project is slated to run 1,172 miles of 30-inch diameter pipe from North Dakota's northwest Bakken region down to a market hub outside Patoka, Illinois, where it will join extant pipelines and travel onward to refineries and markets in the Gulf and on the East Coast. If that description gives you déjà vu, it should: The Bakken Pipeline is only 7 miles shorter than Keystone's proposed length.

HE'S NOT A REPUBLICAN:

"Every dollar spent by the RNC on Donald Trump's campaign is a dollar of donor money wasted on the losing effort of a candidate who has actively undermined the GOP at every turn," the letter reads. "Rather than throwing good money after bad, the RNC should shift its strategy and its resources to convince voters not to give Hillary Clinton the 'blank check' of a Democrat-controlled Congress to advance her big government agenda."

The letter has been signed by five former GOP members of Congress: Mr. Shays, former New Hampshire Sen. Gordon Humphrey, who said he may vote for Mrs. Clinton, and former Reps. Tom Coleman of Missouri, Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma and Vin Weber of Minnesota.

The vast majority of signatories to the letter are former Republican staffers, including 15 who worked for the RNC. Others signing include Bruce Bartlett, who was an economic policy adviser to President George W. Bush, Rory Cooper, who was communications director for then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and Sharon Castillo, who worked for the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign and the RNC.

THE MIGHTY CALIPHATE WAR MACHINE:

Afghan forces, backed by the United States, have killed an estimated 300 Islamic State fighters in an operation mounted two weeks ago, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan said on Wednesday, calling it a severe blow to the group.

General John Nicholson said the offensive in the eastern province of Nangarhar was part of U.S. operations to degrade the capabilities of Islamic State wherever it raised its head, whether in Iraq and Syria or in Afghanistan.

A SUCCESSFUL THIRD WAY GOVERNMENT IS ALWAYS HATED BY ITS WING:

Blair built a coalition around public sector workers, union support, and by injecting just the right smidge of solidarity into enough aspiring politicians in marginal constituencies to make them feel relaxed with the targeted redistribution of social benefits. (Yes, that was done in your name). Notwithstanding the Iraq war, student fees and augmenting Tory-inaugurated Private Finance Initiatives, some of those far-reaching achievements include increased NHS funding, Sure Start Nurseries, Working Tax Credits, the intervention in Kosovo, the brokering of the Northern Ireland peace accord, and lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of child poverty. How these have not contributed to improved material conditions of those living in Britain and abroad is difficult to see.

THE DARK AGES BROUGHT THE LIGHT:

I was fascinated to read Kyle Harper's chapter "Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity" in Timothy Shah and Allen Hertzke's new volume, Christianity and Freedom, from Cambridge University Press. (The price of the book will make it affordable only for large institutional libraries, but you can get it through Interlibrary Loan programs or wait for a paperback edition, which I am told is forthcoming.) Harper, an expert on Christianity in late antiquity, and the provost at the University of Oklahoma, notes that we commonly associate ideas of human rights with the "Enlightenment" of the eighteenth century, on which some of the Declaration draws.

But Harper posits that human rights advocacy--especially that all people have equal dignity--had key, if not unique roots in Christianity of the fourth through the sixth centuries. Why did these roots not appear earlier, we might ask? Harper answers that the difference from the early church is that Christians in the age of Constantine were moving into positions of power. They could hope to effect social change, in accord with Christian principles, for the first time.

The philosophers of Greek and Roman antiquity "lacked the concept of human dignity," Harper explains. As Christianity became more widespread, leaders of the church developed more influence, and some rulers even became Christians. This "created the grounds for the development of human rights."

WOULD ANYONE WORK FOR HIM IF YOU DIDN'T HOLD A GUN TO THEIR HEAD?:

IT'S A DEFLATIONARY EPOCH:

The world's billionaires are holding more than $1.7 trillion in cash -- the highest amount since one firm began recording the measure in 2010.

WHICH WILL FREE THEM UP TO CONSTRUCT THE NEW HOMES WE NEED:

For farm workers, picking strawberries is painful work. Laborers--often migrant workers from Mexico, if the farm is in California--might spend 10 to 12 hours a day in the sun, bending and re-bending over the tiny plants, trying to fill baskets with the fragile fruits as quickly as possible for little pay. If the crop isn't organic, the fields are doused in pesticides that can put workers at risk of cancer.

There's another option: Agrobot, one of several new specialized robots designed to do some of the worst manual labor on farms. The strawberry harvester moves carefully through a field, using an artificial vision system to identify ripe fruit and gently pick it. One new version of the robot, with 60 arms, can harvest a 20-acre farm in three days; the same task would take 20 humans three days.

ONE OF THE MORE CURIOUS ASPECTS OF ALL THIS...:

"In many respects, you know, they honor President Obama," Trump said at a rally in Florida. "He's the founder of ISIS. He's the founder of ISIS. He's the founder. He founded ISIS."

Trump continued: "I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton."

REPUBLICANS HAVE ALWAYS LIKED HER:

"I've sat across the table with Hillary Clinton eye-to-eye, and when you're working outside of staff and outside of the press she is somebody I can work with," King said during a speech at The Des Moines Register's Political Soapbox at the Iowa State Fair.

SHE'S AN ADULT:

THANKS, HILLARY:

U.S.-backed Libyan militias say they have captured the Islamic State (IS) group's headquarters in their main Libyan stronghold of Sirte.

A spokesman for forces loyal to Libya's UN-backed government of national accord, Rida Issa, said on August 10 that the forces also took Sirte's Ibn Sina hospital and university campus.

THE WRESTLER:

Clinton's views on abortion are more nuanced and reflect her religious commitments to a greater degree than partisans on either side of the issue may realize.

For the most part, Clinton's stance matches the official stance of the United Methodist Church, or UMC--the tradition in which she was raised and remains a faithful member. Clinton, who calls herself an "old-fashioned Methodist," told a Newsweek interviewer in 1994 that abortion is morally wrong. One of her biographers, Paul Kengor, notes that she has turned to the UMC's Book of Resolutions when she has wanted help reaching a decision or when grappling with a moral question. The Book accepts abortion but only in a qualified way. It professes "the sanctity of unborn human life" while allowing that certain circumstances--"conflicts of life with life"--may warrant terminating a pregnancy. This may explain Clinton's recent comments on NBC's "Meet the Press" during which, to the dismay of many pro-choicers, she described the fetus as an "unborn person." She has also declared her support of some "late-pregnancy" restrictions that would go into effect perhaps as soon as the "unborn person" is viable, except in cases of rape or incest or when the life or mental or physical health of the mother is at risk.

Husband Bill has perhaps been a more reliable defender of legal abortion. Already pro-choice when he served as governor of Arkansas, he seemed troubled by the question of when life begins. He noted in his 2004 memoir that it is self-evident that biological life starts at conception. Even so, "No one knows," he wrote, "when biology turns into humanity or, for the religious, when the soul enters the body." Kengor reports that Bill sought the guidance of his then-minister, the Reverend W. O. Vaught, a conservative Baptist whose anti-abortion stance was well known. Vaught's opposition, however, had been shaken by the real-life trials of parishioners faced with difficult pregnancies. Challenged by Bill to offer a definitive answer, Vaught turned to the Bible. Based on his reading of scripture, he concluded that not until God "breathes life" into a body does "personhood" start. Human life, then, begins at birth with the first breath, he said; while abortion may be morally suspect, it does not qualify as murder. For Bill, Vaught's interpretation--which differs from the UMC's--settled the issue.

In her public comments, Clinton has been more ambivalent than her husband. She has noted that the question of when human life begins is "delicate" and "difficult," echoing the UMC's position that the beginning of life is "the God-given boundary" of human existence. When Clinton was New York's Senator, she refused to sanction legislation placing limits on access to contraception because, she argued, doing so effectively turns abortion into a stand-by method of birth control. In a 2006 email released by her campaign, Clinton argued that low-income women experience more unintended pregnancies when contraception is expensive or hard to find, and "almost half of unwanted pregnancies end in abortion." She made clear in a 2007 Democratic presidential forum that she wants to make abortion "safe, legal, and rare." And, she emphasized, "By rare, I mean rare."

Clinton has broadened the scope of standard pro-choice arguments by acknowledging that abortion can be an agonizing decision and that it "represents a sad, tragic choice to many, many women." She has also acknowledged that it can lead to long-term feelings of guilt and regret, which the UMC calls "post-abortion stress"--after-effects rarely discussed by pro-choice activists. When women weigh whether to terminate a pregnancy, Clinton counsels them to "summon up what we believe is morally and ethically and spiritually correct and do the best we can with God's guidance." Once again, her religiously grounded advice tracks the UMC's: "We call all Christians to a searching and prayerful inquiry into the sorts of conditions that may cause them to consider abortion. We entrust God to provide guidance, wisdom, and discernment."

IT'S NEVER TOO LATE TO DO THE RIGHT THING:

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) said Tuesday that she will write in Jeb Bush's name when voting for president in November, according to ABC News.

"I think I'll write in the name Jeb Bush," she told the Miami Herald editorial board. "A candidate should espouse optimism."

IN ALL FAIRNESS, HE MAY JUST BE MENTALLY ILL:

It was a mid-December morning in 2007 -- the start of an interrogation unlike anything else in the public record of Trump's life.

Trump had brought it on himself. He had sued a reporter, accusing him of being reckless and dishonest in a book that raised questions about Trump's net worth. The reporter's attorneys turned the tables and brought Trump in for a deposition.

For two straight days, they asked Trump question after question that touched on the same theme: Trump's honesty.

The lawyers confronted the mogul with his past statements -- and with his company's internal documents, which often showed those statements had been incorrect or invented. The lawyers were relentless. Trump, the bigger-than-life mogul, was vulnerable -- cornered, out-prepared and under oath.

Thirty times, they caught him.

Trump had misstated sales at his condo buildings. Inflated the price of membership at one of his golf clubs. Overstated the depth of his past debts and the number of his employees.

That deposition -- 170 transcribed pages -- offers extraordinary insights into Trump's relationship with the truth. Trump's falsehoods were unstrategic -- needless, highly specific, easy to disprove. [...]

Trump has had a habit of telling demonstrable untruths during his presidential campaign. The Washington Post's Fact Checker has awarded him four Pinocchios -- the maximum a statement can receive -- 39 times since he announced his bid last summer. In many cases, his statements echo those in the 2007 deposition: They are specific, checkable -- and wrong.

Trump said he opposed the Iraq War at the start. He didn't. He said he'd never mocked a disabled New York Times reporter. He had. Trump also said the National Football League had sent him a letter, objecting to a presidential debate that was scheduled for the same time as a football game. It hadn't.

Last week, Trump claimed that he had seen footage -- taken at a top-secret location and released by the Iranian government -- showing a plane unloading a large amount of cash to Iran from the U.S. government. He hadn't. Trump later conceded he'd been mistaken -- he'd seen TV news video that showed a plane during a prisoner release.

But, even under the spotlight of this campaign, Trump has never had an experience quite like this deposition on Dec. 19 and 20, 2007.

He was trapped in a room -- with his own prior statements and three high-powered lawyers.

"A very clear and visible side effect of my lawyers' questioning of Trump is that he [was revealed as] a routine and habitual fabulist," said Timothy L. O'Brien, the author Trump had sued.

NOT THAT THERE ARE ANY BAD ONES:

NO ONE CAN DENY THE SS IS BIASED...:

A US Secret Service official confirms to CNN that the USSS has spoken to the Trump campaign regarding his Second Amendment comments.

"There has been more than one conversation" on the topic, the official told CNN.

JUST ANOTHER COMMODITY:

IT'S THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY:

The win dealt a blow to anti-establishment forces in the Republican Party that had rallied behind Nehlen, who recently said that the United States should consider deporting all of the more than 3 million Muslims living in the country.

IT'S ABOVE POLITICS:

GIVE IT A WEEK:

Some 19 percent think the New York real estate magnate should drop out, 70 percent think he should stay in and 10 percent say they "don't know," according to the Aug. 5-8 poll of 396 registered Republicans.

4TH AND LONG:

[T]rump is polling worse among black voters than almost every single Republican presidential nominee since 1948 in polls taken between the party conventions and Election Day.

Trump is currently in fourth place among black voters. You read that correctly: He's trailing Hillary Clinton, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein. 

THE REPUBLICAN IN THE RACE:

As Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign reaches out to Republicans alarmed by Donald Trump's national security blunders, there's a group of high-profile GOP hold-outs whose endorsement would be a major coup if the Democrat could win them over.

Condoleezza Rice, James Baker, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger are among a handful of so-called Republican "elders" with foreign policy and national security experience -- people who have held Cabinet-level or otherwise high-ranking positions in past administrations -- who have yet to come out for or against Trump.

A person close to Clinton said her team has sent out feelers to the GOP elders, although it wasn't clear if those efforts were preliminary or more formal requests for endorsement, or if they were undertaken through intermediaries. 

CAN HE REACH THE MONDALE LINE?:

Pennsylvania has long been viewed by election analysts as a potentially decisive state in the 2016 presidential contest, but new polls out of the Keystone state show a race that isn't even close.

A Quinnipiac poll released Tuesday shows Donald Trump getting trounced by Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania by 10 points (52 percent to 42 percent) in a head-to-head matchup and by 9 points when Libertarian Gary Johnson is included.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

rEALIST VS NEOCON IS AN EASY CALL FOR THEM:

EVIDENCE MEANS THINGS:

Wanda Morrison, 61, of Louisville, Ky., with her physician, Dr. Kimberley Brumleve, at the Family Health Center in Louisville in November 2015. CreditBrittany Greeson for The New York Times

Obamacare has provided health insurance to some 20 million people. But are they any better off?

This has been the central question as we've been watching the complex and expensive health law unfurl. We knew the law was giving people coverage, but information about whether it's protecting people from debt or helping them become more healthy has been slower to emerge.

A few recent studies suggest that people have become less likely to have medical debt or to postpone care because of cost. They are also more likely to have a regular doctor and to be getting preventive health services like vaccines and cancer screenings. A new study, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, offers another way of looking at the issue. Low-income people in Arkansas and Kentucky, which expanded Medicaid insurance to everyone below a certain income threshold, appear to be healthier than their peers in Texas, which did not expand.

The study took advantage of what Dr. Benjamin Sommers, an author of the paper and an assistant professor of health policy and economics at Harvard, called "a huge natural experiment."

HE HAS NO SHOT AT 37%:

A Monmouth University poll released Monday shows Democrat Hillary Clinton leading Republican Donald Trump by double-digits, building greatly upon her two-point lead before party conventions last month. Clinton earned 50 percent support among likely voters to Trump's 37 percent...

EVEN MORE WILL BE MANUFACTURED HERE AS MACHINES REPLACE UNION JOBS:

[I]t is important to recognize that international investment flows and job creation are closely related--and the United States is a big beneficiary of this process.

The U.S. automobile industry is a perfect example of that. Many foreign automobile brands actually produce vehicles here in America, and vice versa. The Toyota Camry and Honda Accord top the list of the 2016 American Made Index, which rates cars assembled in America based on what percentage of their parts are domestic.

As mentioned in the 2016 "International Automakers in America" report released by Global Automakers, which represents many of the international automakers that produce vehicles in the United States, "the growth of international automakers in the U.S. is an American success story."

International automakers have invested $73 billion in U.S.-based design, research, development, manufacturing, finance, and other operations. Their 36 manufacturing facilities operating in the United States produced nearly 5.4 million vehicles in 2015. It is also worth acknowledging the fact that 126,500 Americans were directly employed by these companies.

Domestic automobile brands, like the "Big Three," benefit from foreign investment too. For example, Chrysler, a Michigan-based company, is now known as Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, since Italy's Fiat became its main investor. The same argument is valid in the opposite direction. The popular Ford Fusion is assembled in Mexico, and the Chevrolet Impala is assembled in Canada.

JOBS WHITE PEOPLE WON'T DO:

OUR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT:

PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK (self-reference alert):

It was 1936, and the United States men's basketball team stepped onto the rain-soaked outdoor courts sporting bright white Converse shoes--patriotic blue and red pinstripes wrapping around each sole. The Americans were taking on the Canadians in the Olympic finals, and the conditions were miserable. As it poured, water inundated the courts, turning them into a "sea of mud," according to the New York Times. But, in a painfully low-scoring game, the U.S. ultimately won 19-8.

This was basketball's inaugural year in the games and the first of seven consecutive Olympic gold medals for the U.S. men's team. But it also marked the first appearance of the iconic "Olympic white" Chuck Taylor shoes--a design still around to this day.

The history of the shoe is nearly as old as the game of basketball itself, and in a way both matured together. In 1891, YMCA physical educator James Naismith invented the indoor game, played with a soccer ball and two peach baskets, to keep his students fit during the frigid Massachusetts winters. Seventeen years later, Marquis Converse founded his Converse Rubber Shoe Company, also in Massachusetts, to produce rubber galoshes, a far cry from the canvas kicks the company is known for today.

The company churned out these protective boots for the wet spring, winter and fall, but sales inevitably dropped during the dry summer months. After two years of Converse firing his employees at the beginning of the slump and rehiring when the rains returned in autumn, the entrepreneur made a bid to keep his most skilled workers year-round. He started making a non-skid, canvas-topped shoe.

The first version was a low-top oxford kind of shoe, says Sam Smallidge, the head archivist at Converse. But these dressy sneaks quickly became associated with sports, specifically the rapidly spreading basketball craze. In 1922, the Converse Rubber Company hired a charismatic athlete named Charles "Chuck" Taylor as part salesman, part player-coach for the shoe's club team, the Converse All Stars.

ALL THAT JAZZ #39

 

BAATHISTS VS AL QAEDA VS HEZBOLLAH VS ISIS VS RUSSIA VS....:

Syrian insurgents who broke the siege of rebel-held eastern Aleppo on Saturday in a significant territorial gain came under intense air attack from pro-government forces on Sunday trying to repel the advance which also cut government-held Aleppo's main supply route. [...]

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad wants to take full control of Aleppo, pre-war Syria's most populous city, which has been divided between rebel and government-held areas.

Assad's government forces are supported in Syria by Russian air power, Iranian militias and fighters from Lebanon's Hezbollah group [...]

As the insurgents took over parts of the government's Ramousah military complex, which contains a number of military colleges, they broadcast images of the weaponry and ammunition they were taking possession of.

Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, formerly the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, posted pictures of rows of armored vehicles, munitions, howitzers, rockets and trucks. [...]

Fears are growing in government-held western Aleppo that it might become besieged by rebels, as east Aleppo has been by government forces, because the main route south to Damascus for goods transport, the Ramousah road, has been severed.

AND SAVED WHAT 200 MILLION LIVES?:

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

The head of Iran's judiciary, Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani, made an interesting proposition to European countries during a speech Aug. 3 on the occasion of Human Rights Day in Iran. He said Iran is willing to hold talks on human rights as long as Europe is willing to also discuss the human rights situation in their countries.

"It cannot be that only Iran is questioned," Larijani said. "It has to be two-way. We have questions for Europe, too." He said that Iran wants to question Europe on the spread of Islamophobia, forced unveiling in schools and restrictions on discussing the Holocaust, specifically in France.

Iran, which has the highest number of people executed per capita in the world, has been on the defensive over the human rights reports issued by American and European organizations and the human rights sanctions issued by those countries. Iranian authorities, however, view this human rights pressure more as a political tool. "The West applies double standards with respect to human rights," Larijani said. As examples, he raised the relationship of Europe and the United States with Bahrain despite its recent crackdown on clerics and dissidents. In regard to the recent scandal of removing a Saudi Arabian-led coalition from the child rights blacklist, Larijani said, "With their own dollars, they silence the secretary-general of the United Nations over the violation of children in Yemen."

IN ONE VITAL SENSE KG WAS MJ...:

NOW SPIN FOX OFF:

In a recent telephone interview, Whately said he became involved with Inspector Morse after colleagues urged him to portray Inspector Lewis, a younger man on television than he was in the Colin Dexter novels on which the series was based.  John Thaw portrayed Inspector Morse.

He said that in the early part of this century, he was again asked to portray Lewis in a spin-off series, opposite CS James, the character portrayed by Laurence Fox .

"They asked me for two or three years whether I'd consider spinning Lewis off.  I didn't want to do it, I didn't think it was a good idea.  I didn't think the character was strong enough.  An executive on Morse took me out to lunch, said if you do one and it's a failure, we will leave you alone.  I did one as a pilot and it took off immediately.  We were back on the moving train."

Whately said Inspector Morse ran for 33 episodes and that Inspector Lewis will run for the same number of episodes.  "Morse was so important to me, I didn't want to go beyond that number," he said.

THEY SHOULD ALL BE PUBLIC (profanity alert):

Maher then posed a question: "Why don't you hack into Donald Trump's tax returns?" since the real estate heir has refused to release his taxes, thereby becoming the first U.S. presidential candidate in decades to do so.

"Well, we're working on it," a smirking Assange replied.

A DEFLATIONARY EPOCH:

For starters, notes Manhattan Institute's Scott Winship, the American working class is stable. (His four-part series in Forbes earlier this year dissecting the various arguments and data deployed by inequality-narrative peddlers is well worth a look.) He notes that the rate of increase of median wages of workers has certainly slowed since the 1970s. But that isn't because workers aren't being fairly compensated for their productivity contributions. Rather, he points out, the labor market entered a period of prolonged correction after powerful unions artificially bid up wages for several decades in the post-World War II era. There were other factors too, but realistic calculations show that today's wages, earnings and income -- individual and household -- are stuck at 2000 levels, he says. "That sounds bad, except that in 2000, the American middle class was richer than it had ever been, and essentially the richest middle class in global history," he maintains. [...]

Remarkably, our quality of life has continued to improve. [...]

St. Lawrence University economist Steve Horwitz examined the consumption patterns of Americans post-9/11 in 2014 and found that for virtually every good -- washing machines, computers, cell phones, and so on -- the consumption gap between the rich and poor diminished between 2003 and 2005. 

WHERE ARE THE BLUES BROTHERS WHEN YOU NEED THEM:

Rocky Suhayda, who heads the Arlington, Virginia-based neo-Nazi group, told his followers last month that he predicted Trump would defeat Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, and that the real estate mogul gave them the best chance to assemble an alliance dedicated to advancing their agenda.

"I'm gonna project, that I believe that Trump is going to win the election this November, for various reasons which I don't want to go into again," Suhayda said during a July broadcast. "I think it's gonna surprise the enemy, because, I think that they feel that the white working class, especially the male portion of the working class, and with him his female counterparts have basically thrown in the towel. Given up hope of any politician again standing up for their interests."

He went on to say: "Now, if Trump does win, okay, it's going to be a real opportunity for people like white nationalists, acting intelligently to build upon that, and to go and start -- you know how you have the black political caucus and what not in Congress, and, everything, to start building on something like that, okay. It doesn't have to be anti, like the movement's been for decades, so much as it has to be pro-white. It's kinda hard to go and call us bigots, if we don't go around and act like a bigot. That's what the movement should contemplate. All right."

WE'LL TAKE ALL WE CAN GET:

RUTLAND, Vermont -- Mayor Christopher Louras sees trouble ahead for this small city of about 16,000 at the foot of the Green Mountains.

"It's a strong, vibrant community but unless we do something to stem the population decline, we're going to be in big, big trouble," Louras said. "And it's not just Rutland. Rutland is a microcosm of the state and small towns around the country."

Related: Christians Only? Debate Over Syrian Refugees Quickly Turns Toxic

But the mayor sees a quick fix. He's asked Vermont's resettlement agency to send refugees to Rutland, and says they would help fill vacant housing and entry-level jobs to keep the economy moving.

It's an approach small towns from Montana to Georgia are increasingly considering as they grapple with shrinking and aging populations. 

NO ONE DOESN'T LOVE A TRAIN OR A YULE LOG:

Their first broadcast in 2009 was a 7.5 hour long train ride from Bergen to Oslo. It turned out to be immensely popular and was watched by two million people - roughly 45 percent of Norway's population. [...]

The full list of the shows you're now able to watch on Netflix are:

Slow TV: National Firewood Evening (2016)

Slow TV: National Firewood Morning (2016)

Slow TV: National Firewood Night (2016)

Slow TV: National Knitting Evening (2016)

Slow TV: National Knitting Morning (2016)

Slow TV: National Knitting Night (2016)

Slow TV: Northern Passage (2016)

Slow TV: Northern Railway (2016)

Slow TV: Salmon Fishing (2016)

Slow TV: The Telemark Canal (2016)

Slow TV: Train Ride Bergen to Oslo (2016)

TRYING TO SAVE THE ACTUAL REPUBLICANS:

[T]he New York Times is reporting that top GOP strategists, growing increasingly resigned to the likelihood of Trump being an election-day disaster for the party, are now actively working on plans to distance down-ticket incumbents from the nominee.

Those plans exclude fully disavowing Trump (and potentially alienating his base), but include other coping mechanisms like accelerating the development of ads that distinguish GOP candidates from Trump -- airing as soon as early next month -- or possibly launching a large-scale ad campaign to support conventional Republican positions, thus bolstering the party itself instead of the party's nominee -- or as the Times paraphrases one strategist's explanation, "to provide voters with a different, nonthreatening view of Republicans, so that the party is not wholly defined by Mr. Trump's day-to-day pronouncements."

In addition the Club for Growth, a major conservative political group, is itself researching contingency plans to motivate voters who don't like Trump but might vote for down ticket candidates. And while the GOP's hold on the Senate is most at risk this year, Paul Ryan, who is himself facing an ugly -- if not terribly risky -- primary battle at home in Wisconsin, has warned Republican donors that the party's 30-seat majority in the House isn't safe either.

WHAT IF WE REDEFINED SOVEREIGNTY AND THE ELITES DIDN'T PAY ATTENTION?:

COMIC GOLD:

"It's a bad deal but it's an accomplished fact, and during the first year we spotted no significant breach from the Iranians," said Steinitz, who is close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"But it's still too early to conclude that this 12-year deal is a success," he told Israel Radio.

GREATEST WAR EVER:

A drone that crossed into northern Israel last month belonged to Russia -- not Hezbollah, as was initially suspected -- the Haaretz newspaper reported Sunday.

OBSTRUCTION MAKES SINGLE PAYER INEVITABLE:

[M]edicaid works, as my CBPP colleagues explain in a new blog series of that name.

Medicaid, which Washington and the states jointly fund, provides health coverage to low-income families and individuals, including children, parents, pregnant women, seniors and people with disabilities. Since President Johnson signed Medicaid into law in 1965, policymakers have significantly expanded eligibility and closed many gaps in coverage, as Judith Solomon shows here.

Medicaid is now an essential and popular part of the nation's health care system, providing quality health coverage for 97 million low-income Americans over the course of 2015 - that's Fact #1 in Edwin Park's 10 Key Facts post. Fact #2: Medicaid and the new health marketplaces created under health reform have already helped cut the number of uninsured Americans from 45 million in 2013, before health reform's key provisions kicked in, to 29 million last year. Medicaid is a cost-effective program, with high participation, that provides significant financial support to low-income beneficiaries.

Health reform's designers envisioned a critical role for the Medicaid expansions in reducing the number of uninsured. They would fill a longstanding coverage gap for low-income adults without employer coverage who were not previously eligible for Medicaid and whose income is too low to qualify for the premium tax credits to buy health insurance in the new health marketplaces. States have flexibility to design their Medicaid programs, and the federal government pays the entire cost of covering the new Medicaid enrollees through this year - and no less than 90 percent thereafter for suitable expansion programs.

Many states have taken the opportunity to expand coverage for this neglected population. For several states, it has produced net savings for their budgets, partly through lower payments to hospitals for uncompensated care, as Jesse Cross-Call discusses here. States that expanded coverage have seen a substantially larger drop in the share of adults without health coverage than states that haven't (see chart).

NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO:

Absorbing a disruptor. Dollar Shave Club is an interesting illustration of the theory of a disruptor breaking into a highly profitable and over-served industry from the low-end; it's not unusual for incumbents to seek to absorb these rivals when they're still relatively small.

Thanks to the momentum Dollar Shave Club created, the online market for razorblades has grown from essentially zero to $263 million, according to estimates from Slice Intelligence, a market research firm. While disruption has become an over-hyped and misunderstood idea, particularly in the tech industry, it is still relatively novel in consumer goods whose products may be "fast moving," but with far more slowly evolving business models.

Despite all this, it is hard to rationalize paying such a high premium for a small player, no matter how disruptive, with a low margin business model, focused on a zero-sum game of taking business away from an incumbent. This would be particularly at odds in a time when Unilever's corporate strategy is focused on re-balancing in favor of higher margin categories and brands, with growth potential. At the very minimum, the company would be sending a confusing signal to its shareholders.

A fundamental shift in the industry.  A third rationale that builds on the first two, to my mind, is the most compelling one. As I mentioned earlier, a deal such as this - involving an acquisition of a disruptive rival for a five-times revenue multiple -- would feel at home in Silicon Valley. The best explanation for it is that it is, indeed, a "Silicon Valley" play. Unilever's move is a signal of more fundamental changes in the consumer products industry.

Dollar Shave Club has shown that the shaving market can still be transformed - thanks to an online subscription model, a memorable brand, and a strong consumer experience. For more evidence of this, consider that Gillette, still the No. 1 razor brand, saw its market share fall from 71% in 2010 to 59% in 2015. (And for the record, P&G-owned Gillette sued Dollar Shave Club late last year for patent infringement. Dollar Shave Club filed a countersuit in February.)

One of the ways in which P&G managed to slow Dollar Shave Club's encroachment was by responding with its own subscription entry, the Gillette Shave Club. In fact, P&G has extended the idea into new categories, the Tide Wash Club, offering pod refills for a subscription fee. Other competitors, such as Harry's, have also jumped on the bandwagon with its own "shave plans".

In the meantime, the biggest player on the online retail block, Amazon, is growing as a serious competitor to consumer products companies, with its push into private-label goods - diapers, detergents and grocery items -- combined with its "subscribe and save" option for these sorts of staples that require regular replenishment.

The accumulation of these transitions suggests that the classic consumer-products business model is about to be busted across the board, with both retailers and their suppliers gearing up to encroach on each others' traditional positions along the value chain using a digital connection with the consumer.

THE FACE OF ISLAM:

A billboard campaign in Chicago denouncing the Islamic State terror group has become a hit with social media users worldwide.

The campaign was launched by an American non-profit organization representing American Muslims.

Quoting the verse "Life is sacred," from the Quran (5:32), the billboard sign reads "Hey ISIS, you suck!!! From: #ActualMuslims," using another name for the terror group.

IT'LL SOAR IF HE DRIVES HIM OUT O THE RACE:

President Barack Obama's favorability rating continues to gain as he steps up criticism of his would-be successor, Donald Trump.

The percentage of voters who think the country is on the right track has increased in the latest McClatchy-Marist poll, and 53 percent of registered voters say they approve of the job Obama is doing as president, compared with 40 percent who disapprove.

LET THE BIG DOG EAT!:

North Korea has accused Washington of planning a pre-emptive nuclear strike, after the US announced it would deploy its B-1 bomber in the Pacific for the first time in a decade.

WE ARE ALL NEOLIBERAL NOW:

Many of our left-wing opponents would describe us as neoliberal to slander us. I suggest we follow the Suffragettes and wear this label with pride.

So who are "we"? Here are a few common beliefs that I think "we" have in common. I'm not claiming that these beliefs are exclusive to us, of course.

We like markets -- a lot. We think that markets are by far the best way of organising most human affairs that involve scarce resources, because they align people's incentives in ways that communicate where resources can be be used most efficiently, and give people reasons to come up with new ways of using existing resources. This means that markets and market-like systems are desirable in many, many places they're not present at the moment -- healthcare, education, environmental policy, organ allocations, traffic congestion, land-use planning.

We are liberal consequentialists. A system is justified if it is the one that best allows people to live the lives that they want to live, or makes them happiest or more satisfied than any other. There are no inherent rights that override this. People's wellbeing is all that matters, and generally individuals are best at defining what is best for themselves.

We care about the poor. [...]

We care about the welfare of everyone in the world, not just those in the UK. [....]

We base our beliefs on empirics, not principles. There is an unlimited number of stories that you can tell about the world, but only a few are true. You find out which are true by comparing the stories to reality with experiments and throwing away the ones that don't fit. It doesn't matter if a theory appears to be internally coherent -- if it can't stand up to experimentation, it's wrong. In particular, quantitative empirical research is what we look for.

We try not to be dogmatic. [...]

We think the world is getting better. And, really, it is: pro-market ideas have taken hold nearly everywhere, raising living standards by an extraordinary amount for a huge number of people. [...]

We believe that property rights are very important. Predictable and formalised ownership of scarce resources is extremely important. [...]

But we're comfortable with redistribution, in principle. Because we're consequentialists we don't think that property rights are morally significant in and of themselves -- they're a useful rule that allows the economy to function properly but there is no intrinsic value to them.

IN CASE THERE WAS ANY CONFUSION ABOUT WHAT SUPPORTING HIM MEANS:

An internal memo from Donald Trump's presidential campaign obtained by FiveThirtyEight shows that Trump sought to court voters who felt a "persistent state of disenfranchisement" from the U.S. political process by offering them a "safe space" to express their views.

Trump's campaign strategy during the 2016 primary season specifically targeted voters who "have been called 'stupid,' 'racists,' and 'bigots'" by "elites," according to the memo.

GREATEST WAR EVER:

Jihadists and rebels captured strategic military positions on the edges of Syria's second city Aleppo on Saturday, turning the tables on Russian-backed regime forces besieging the city.

THERE IS NO YEMEN:

THE NEXT SUPERHERO MOVIE:

Humans might not be the only creatures that care about the welfare of other animals. Scientists are beginning to recognize a pattern in humpback whale behavior around the world, a seemingly intentional effort to rescue animals that are being hunted by killer whales.

Marine ecologist Robert Pitman observed a particularly dramatic example of this behavior back in 2009, while observing a pod of killer whales hunting a Weddell seal trapped on an ice floe off Antarctica. The orcas were able to successfully knock the seal off the ice, and just as they were closing in for the kill, a magnificent humpback whale suddenly rose up out of the water beneath the seal.

This was no mere accident. In order to better protect the seal, the whale placed it safely on its upturned belly to keep it out of the water. As the seal slipped down the whale's side, the humpback appeared to use its flippers to carefully help the seal back aboard. Finally, when the coast was clear, the seal was able to safely swim off to another, more secure ice floe.

Another event, involving a pair of humpback whales attempting to save a gray whale calf from a hunting pod of orcas after it had become separated from its mother, was captured by BBC filmmakers. [...]

Perhaps the most stunning aspect of this behavior is that it's not just a few isolated incidents. Humpback whale rescue teams have been witnessed foiling killer whale hunts from Antarctica to the North Pacific. It's as if humpback whales everywhere are saying to killer whales: pick on someone your own size! It seems to be a global effort; an inherent feature of humpback whale behavior.

NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO:

WORK LESS, DO MORE:

New analysis of GDP data from the OECD and hours worked data from the Central Intelligence Agency reveals that working longer hours doesn't always translate into more productivity. 

Seven countries among those with the highest GDP also rank for the top ten fewest working hours. 

HOW MANY PEOPLE DIED FOR RACHEL CARSON'S SINS?:

 In medieval cities kites were as commonplace as pigeons today, and as scavengers served a vital function, clearing the streets of human detritus. In The Knight's Tale Chaucer had a kite pilfer a bone from a pair of dogs. Shakespeare - whose collected works refer to red kites no fewer than  15 times - described London in Coriolanus as  the 'city of kites and crows'.

This alliance came to an end with improved urban sanitation and the Tudor Vermin Acts, which introduced bounty payments for species including the red kite. Records show that 329 kites were killed in Tenterden, Kent, between 1679 and 1693. In Morwenstow, Cornwall, 276 were killed between 1676 and 1690.

By the late-18th and 19th centuries, gamekeepers had seized the mantle of eradicating  the kite to stop the birds taking the chicks of ground-nesting birds. In 1808, according to the ornithologist Ian Carter, an expert on the reintroduction of the red kite, the Marquess of Bute prepared an oath for gamekeepers on his estate in Argyll: 'I shall use my best endeavours to destroy all birds of prey etc... wherever they can be found therein. So help me God.'

The decline was hastened by the fact that the rarer the red kite became, the more egg collectors targeted its nests. This situation culminated in a letter written in 1903 by the naturalist and Aberystwyth University professor JH Salter to the British Ornithologists' Club, pleading for help to save the remaining pairs, which he located in Carmarthenshire's Towy Valley.

The letter prompted the formation of an unlikely and self-funded coalition, comprising landowners, farmers, a retired colonel and a local vicar. They circulated pamphlets imploring gamekeepers not to shoot and kept a watch - and a veil of secrecy - around nesting sites.

THE BAILOUTS WERE TOO SUCCESSFUL:

Mortgage giant Freddie Mac reported net income of $993 million for the second quarter, down sharply from the same period of 2015.

The company said Tuesday its income from fees received from lenders for guaranteeing mortgages increased in the April-through-June period, but it sustained losses on investments because of the decline in interest rates.

McLean, Virginia-based Freddie will pay a dividend of $933 million to the U.S. Treasury next month. Freddie will have paid $99.1 billion in dividends, exceeding its government bailout of $71 billion.

THE RIGHTWING PLOT TO END GRIDLOCK:

[R]epublican insiders in key battleground states have a message for The Donald: Get out.

That's according to The POLITICO Caucus -- a panel of activists, strategists and operatives in 11 swing states. The majority of GOP insiders, 70 percent, said they want Trump to drop out of the race and be replaced by another Republican candidate -- with many citing Trump's drag on Republicans in down-ballot races. But those insiders still think it's a long-shot Trump would actually end his campaign and be replaced by another GOP candidate.

"I'd rather take our chances with nearly anyone else than continue with this certain loser who will likely cost the Senate and much more," said a New Hampshire Republican -- who, like all respondents, completed the survey anonymously.

"The effect Trump is having on down-ballot races has the potential to be devastating in November," added a Florida Republican. "His negative image among Hispanics, women and independents is something that could be devastating to Republicans. Trump's divisive rhetoric to the Hispanic community at large has the potential to be devastating for years to come."

NOT THAT THEY WERE A THREAT IN THE FIRST PLACE:

[C]onsider the following assessment:

"Without a doubt the nuclear deal between Iran and the West is a historic turning point. It is a big change in terms of the direction that Iran was headed, and in the way that we saw things."

"It has many risks, but also presents many opportunities. Our role is to look at the risk prism and the capability prism and to judge from that--not to assume that the worst-case scenario will take place, because that is as dangerous as the best-case scenario. Therefore, we are now revisiting our strategy."

"In the 15-year timeframe that we are looking towards, we are still keeping Iran high on our priority lists because we need to monitor its nuclear program. But this is a real change. This is a strategic turning point."