THEY WERE AFTER TRUMP TO TALK POLICY, BUT WHEN HE RELEASES A POLICY PAPER ALL THEY WANT TO DO IS TALK ABOUT MUSLIMS: Trump plan calls for nationwide concealed carry and an end to gun bans.

Trump called for the elimination of gun and magazine bans, labeling them a “total failure.”

“Law-abiding people should be allowed to own the firearm of their choice. The government has no business dictating what types of firearms good, honest people are allowed to own,” Trump wrote.

It’s not a departure from what he’s said on the trail this year, though it does mark a shift from a position he took in his 2000 book “The America We Deserve,” where Trump stated that he generally opposes gun control but that he supported a ban on assault weapons and a longer waiting period to get a gun.

“Opponents of gun rights try to come up with scary sounding phrases like ‘assault weapons’, ‘military-style weapons’ and ‘high capacity magazines’ to confuse people,” Trump wrote Friday. “What they’re really talking about are popular semi-automatic rifles and standard magazines that are owned by tens of millions of Americans.”

Trump said in the paper he has a concealed carry permit. The permits, which are issued by states, should be valid nationwide like a driver’s license, Trump said.

“If we can do that for driving — which is a privilege, not a right — then surely we can do that for concealed carry, which is a right, not a privilege,” Trump said.

Trump has apparently had a handgun permit for years; a 1987 Associated Press story said he had one at the time.

Sounds good.

PETER EGAN: How I Became an Accidental Miata Enthusiast. It’s easy to forget just how revolutionary (or maybe counterrevolutionary) the Miata was when it first appeared amid a rather depressing car market. And it’s improved with time. Plus, it’s always fun to read Peter Egan:

“Why are you selling it?” I asked.

“I’d like a newer model,” he said. “I’ve been dating a woman who says she won’t ride in a car without a passenger-side airbag.”

I stared into space and tried to wrap my mind around that caveat. When Barb and I were dating in college, I courted her in a Triumph TR3 that had military-surplus lap belts bolted to a lacy sheet of rust we called “the floor.” My idea of safety was to use big washers on the seatbelt anchors. Women were made of sterner stuff in those days. At least those who survived were.

Read the whole thing. I remember the Insta-Wife test driving a Miata a few months after her heart attack. It was a nice day, the top was down, and when she got onto the road she put the pedal down, it zipped forward, and she let out the first full-throated joyful laughter I’d heard from her since before. I’ll always be grateful to Mazda for that moment.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? “No amount of adjustment can obscure how bad the recovery has been for most American families. By many measures, 2014 was the strongest year of the recovery so far; the economy added nearly 3 million jobs, the most since 1999. Yet incomes were stagnant across virtually all groups: young and old, married and single, rich and poor.2 Virtually the only group to see a statistically significant gain in income was immigrants, whose median household income rose 4 percent to just under $50,000. Native-born households saw their income decline 2 percent to just under $55,000.”

Related: 3 ways to reduce poverty.

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NEWS FROM THE MAN-CESSION: The Typical Male U.S. Worker Earned Less in 2014 Than in 1973.

The typical man with a full-time job–the one at the statistical middle of the middle–earned $50,383 last year, the Census Bureau reported this week.

The typical man with a full-time job in 1973 earned $53,294, measured in 2014 dollars to adjust for inflation.

You read that right: The median male worker who was employed year-round and full time earned less in 2014 than a similarly situated worker earned four decades ago. And those are the ones who had jobs.

This one fact, tucked in Table A-4 of the Census Bureau’s annual report on income, is both a symptom of an economy that isn’t delivering for many ordinary Americans and at least one reason for the dissatisfaction, anger, and distrust that voters are displaying in the 2016 presidential campaign.

If women were falling by a similar margin, it would be a universally regarded as a national crisis.

21ST CENTURY PARENTING: The Trouble With Kids Today: The kids of today’s working class have it worse in so many ways that climbing the socioeconomic ladder has become dauntingly difficult.

Some low-income parents in the accounts are fiercely devoted to their kids; others created children casually and walked away from them casually. There’s rampant incompetence visible in the new lower class—incompetence on the job, as parents, in interpersonal relationships. There’s rampant irrationality and unrealistic expectations, with many respondents oblivious about the steps required to get from point A to point D in life.

Race is not a big deal in “Our Kids.” The voices include many whites along with Latinos and blacks, and the problems are similar across ethnicities. Nor do the Latinos and blacks treat discrimination as a decisive factor in their problems. Sometimes they explicitly discount the importance of discrimination.

Such observations are heartening, and they correspond to my own experience living in a part of rural Maryland with a Southern heritage and a significant black presence: race is not the angst-ridden issue in working-class America that you would assume if you based your expectations on the highly publicized problems in Ferguson or Baltimore. The same observations are disheartening insofar as “Our Kids” drives home how widely the problems it describes have spread throughout the working class. We’ve got a national affliction on our hands, not pockets of affliction.

The Gods Of The Copybook Headings smile and nod.

SUDHIR HAZAREESINGH: The Decline Of The French Intellectual.

KYLE SMITH: How Ahmed’s clock became a false, convenient tale of racism.

Related: Reverse Engineering Ahmed Mohamed’s Clock… and Ourselves.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Laura Everett and Abbi Holt: United by Love and Religion. “Ms. Everett wore a vintage Priscilla of Boston gown bought from a thrift store, and Ms. Holt wore a kilt of her maternal family’s tartan. Challah and gluten-free wafers were offered for communion. During his blessing, Mr. Morisse, who sports a mohawk, took a selfie that included all of the approximately 115 guests.”

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WE CALL IT VOIGHT-KAMPFF FOR SHORT: Ricochet needs to amend their podcast opening; their weekly segments open with an audio montage featuring Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Chris Christie uttering these famous last words of politics:

● “I’m not a crook.”
●“I’ll never tell a lie.”
● “I’m not a bully.”

We can now add one more, courtesy of Hillary Clinton, who when asked to describe herself “in three words” by Face the Nation host John “Destroy the GOP” Dickerson instead chooses five:

“I am a real person,” the “I’m not a witch” of the 2016 election cycle, and as Rick Wilson tweets, “prima facie evidence of a failed Turing Test.”

Or yet another example of our ongoing national Voight-Kampff test on this potentially animatronic presidential candidate.

IS THE ANSWER TO FERMI’S PARADOX that aliens are using quantum-based encryption?

‘NOT A REAL PROFESSION’: HOSTS OF ABC’s THE VIEW TRASH NURSES AFTER ON-AIR APOLOGY:

After co-hosts Michelle Collins and Joy(less) Behar aired a segment where they ridiculed a nurse who participated in the Miss America contest, the embattled gabfest found itself consumed by social media blowback, which eventually resulted in the loss of five major advertisers: Johnson & Johnson, Eggland’s Best, Party City, Snuggle and McCormick.

Wednesday, in the hopes of containing the fallout, the women offered an on-air apology. According to Nicole Arbour, a guest co-host, the apology was far from sincere. She claims that after the apology, while the show was not on the air, the ladies went right back to trashing nurses, ‘Yeah, that’s not a real profession. They want to be doctors.’

Well, not everyone can fulfill the vital role of daytime talk show host.

The View has been running on fumes ever since Barbara Walters retired last year, but it’s curious that the show lost sponsors over catty nurse jokes, because I don’t recall seeing any articles about advertisers deserting after Walters’ then-cohost was in full-on raging “Truther” mode a decade ago.

FASTER, PLEASE: A Portable Blood Cleanser for Treating Sepsis. “A portable machine that can treat sepsis by filtering pathogens from blood is nearing the point where it could be ready for human clinical testing. Recent tests in rats have shown that the device—which works in a similar way to the dialysis machines already used to filter the blood of patients with kidney failure—not only efficiently removes pathogenic material from the bloodstream but also works in concert with antibiotics to prevent a harmful immune response that can lead to organ malfunction and even death.”

CLOCK BOY STORY IMPLODES: ‘It’s fraud’: Now Richard Dawkins lays in to Texas schoolboy Ahmed Mohamed for claiming the clock was his invention.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Sugar Daddy Secrets: Men reveal what it’s REALLY like to shower younger women with money in return for sex.

JAKE BREWER, RIP: “It is with great shock and sadness that we offer our condolences and prayers to the family of Jake Brewer, the husband of Mary Katharine Ham, and the father of Georgia and a child on the way, as well as his colleagues and friends at the White House and Change.org,” Ed Morrissey writes.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): This is just awful, and my heart goes out to Mary Katharine. Back when she and Jake were pre-kids, I used to meet them at Calhoun’s as they passed through town. Here they are in happier days, in 2009.

A SETBACK FOR THE ANTISEMITES OF THE BDS MOVEMENT: Reykjavík to Cancel Boycott of All Israeli Products.

I LIKE THEIR SPUNK: Standing up to John Boehner.

As Congress begins to negotiate several must-pass bills with President Obama, there is a sense of rebellion afoot in the House Republican conference.

Mark Meadows — a soft-spoken, well-liked Republican congressman from North Carolina — foresees in this exclusive video interview for The Daily Caller that “there’s a real battle coming” this fall witin the Republican House conference.

With regard to the government spending bill, the debt limit increase and transportation bill President Obama wants Congress to pass, Meadows says Republican leaders “need to read ‘The Art of the Deal’ by Donald Trump” as Republicans have routinely come up short in similar negotiations thus far — admitting they will not shut down the government over anything. .  . .

Since January, poor leadership strategy and messaging have left President Obama virtually unopposed. Meadows sees Congress as becoming impotent and irrelevant — a sign of eroding self-government.

He blames this primarily on a culture of enforced “timidity.”

“You are not rewarded for fighting in Washington, D.C.,” Meadows says. Republicans have various means by which to enforce their non-confrontational culture that helps liberals and the mainstream media. In this interview, the congressman provides examples of the phrases Republicans often hear. They include: “are you part of the team?” “we need to show we can govern,” and “don’t make waves.”

However, partisan Democrats seem not to have gotten this memo.

When Meadows voted his conscience against a rule vote to consider the Obama trade legislation, Meadows was punished by getting stripping of his sub-chairmanship, starting him on a path of being a public and likable rebel against Speaker Boehner. When a national backlash against Boehner started, Meadows was allowed to return. Now a growing number of dissenters are finding momentum this fall in challenging the House Speaker again. . . .

For more on Rep. Meadows, see his website here, his Facebook page here or follow him on Twitter @RepMarkMeadows.

I like Meadows and his compatriots in the House Freedom Caucus, such as Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Justin Amash (R-MI) and Raul Labrador (R-ID). They fight, and they haven’t forgotten why they were elected. They aren’t afraid to vote on controversial issues even when they lack a veto-proof supermajority. They understand that forcing President Obama to veto bills enables the American people to properly assign political accountability.

Boehner & Co. prefer to hide under a rock, quaking and soiling their undergarments while Obamasaurus ravages the land.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 864.

SURELY THEY’RE ON SOMETHING: Americans Want Congress Members To Pee In Cups To Prove They’re Not On Drugs.

While most Americans like the idea of drug testing for welfare recipients, they LOVE the idea of drug testing for members of Congress.

According to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, 64 percent of Americans favor requiring welfare recipients to submit to random drug testing — a measure pushed by Republican lawmakers in recent years — while 18 percent oppose it. But an even stronger majority said they’re in favor of random drug testing for members of Congress, by a 78 percent to 7 percent margin. Sixty-two percent said they “strongly” favor drug testing for congressional lawmakers, compared to only 51 percent who said the same of welfare recipients. . . .

While drug testing for both welfare recipients and lawmakers received support across party lines in the new poll, the congressional proposal was the one more likely to bring Americans together. Eighty-six percent of Republicans, 77 percent of Democrats and 75 percent of independents said they want drug testing for members of Congress.

Test both.

ROGER KIMBALL HAS more thoughts on the New York theater’s Gilbert & Sullivan fiasco.

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ROGER SIMON: Is Obama A Muslim? What Trump Should Have Said. “Is Obama a Muslim? The answer is no. But what is he then? Is Obama a Christian, as Jeb Bush asserted in an attempt to make Trump look bad after Thursday’s dustup? Not a chance. Obama is about as pure a post-modern agnostic as you can find. He’s about as Christian as your average gender studies professor at Swarthmore. Religion is for the president a convenience, an instrument of power.” Like everything else.

Plus:

So Obama is neither Muslim nor Christian, but that is an entirely incomplete view of his belief system. Something is going on in an emotional sense that trumps (excuse the phrase) conventional religious belief. He seems almost always to side with Islamic society against Christendom, bending over backwards on occasion to set up false equivalences. At the very moment the Islamic State was lopping off the heads of Christians and Yazidis in Libya, Syria and Iraq, he invoked the Crusades at a National Prayer Breakfast as if this behavior from centuries ago were even marginally equivalent. Unlike other major world leaders, he didn’t bother to attend the Charlie Hebdo massacre memorial in Paris. He couldn’t even say the Islamic terrorists who shot the people in the Paris kosher deli the day after did so because the victims were Jews. And then there’s the Iran deal, the giveaway of the century ($150 billion) to an Islamic state building nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles, not to mention sponsoring terrorism across the world, for absolutely no verifiable quid pro quo.

Who would do such a thing? Well, Barack Obama obviously.

Our nation is ruled by a man who doesn’t think much of the nation he rules or the culture from which it sprang.

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Mike Mollenhour.