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CHIP WOOD: Blame Obama and Clinton for the refugee crisis. “The humanitarian crisis is absolutely horrific. And frankly, the blame for it can be laid squarely at the feet of President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As Fred Hiatt put it in The Washington Post, the Obama administration has presided ‘over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions.'” Yeah, pretty much.

THE NIGHT BEFORE: HOBNOBBING WITH JEB: “It’s clear — he said as much — that he is itching to run against Hillary Clinton,” Roger Simon writes of his first meeting with the former Florida governor.

If only Jeb didn’t seem even more eager to run against the GOP base first, he might be better positioned for his wish to be granted.

THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE COLLEGE OF LAW IS HIRING a visiting professor to teach business courses for next year. Information at the link, but note this: “Preference may be given to those applicants who are seeking to enter the academy from private practice.”

JASON CHAFFETZ: With Koskinen at helm, IRS cannot be trusted. “Having lied to Congress, destroyed documents under subpoena, and targeted people based on their political beliefs, the IRS and its commissioner John Koskinen want a bigger budget. . . . Trusting an agency that has so clearly run awry with more of our tax dollars would be foolish. I would be abdicating my duty to taxpayers by empowering an organization that has given the American people so much cause for distrust. Koskinen came before Congress and made promises. He assured us he would comply with a congressional subpoena seeking Lois Lerner’s emails. Not only did he fail to keep that promise, we later learned he did not look in earnest for the information. After Koskinen complained of the extensive cost and effort being undertaken to locate the documents, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) learned from employees at a West Virginia data center that no one had ever even asked for backup tapes of Lois Lerner’s emails.”

PRE-DEBATE, Roger Simon Hangs Out With Jeb Bush.

UNEXPECTEDLY! The economy never seems to be as good as the Fed thinks it will be. That’s some bad luck, right there.

FUNNY THAT THESE THINGS ARE CONSIDERED POLITICALLY INCORRECT: Censored Women’s Film Festival coming to D.C.

A collection of previously censored films made by women will be shown in Washington, D.C., in November. The films — part of the Censored Women’s Film Festival — highlight the plight of women around the world who face genital mutilation, “honor killings” and child marriages.

The films have caused a backlash in various parts of the world. “India’s Daughter,” a film about the gang-rape of a young girl, was banned in India after the filmmakers revealed they had interviewed one of the rapists in prison. “Honor Diaries,” another film to be shown at the festival, received a negative reaction from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which tried to keep the film from being screened across the U.S.

“Persepolis,” a graphic novel published in 2000 documenting the childhood of an Iranian girl during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, was banned from Chicago Public Schools in 2013. A film adaptation of the novel, which was nominated for an Academy Award, will be included in the festival.

CAIR’s efforts at censorship, of course, are no surprise.

SO, LIKE OBAMACARE, THEN? Obama’s Iran deal will pass Congress, but it keeps losing public support.

THAT SEEMS FITTING: Ted Cruz Ad Uses Scorpion to Depict Threat of Islamic Terror. “For most of us, its venom is a clear and deadly threat. But others refuse to even speak its name. Since the scorpion seeks our destruction, isn’t it time we recognize the scorpion for what it is before it strikes again?’’

THE DEBATE WE WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE: At Ricochet, Jon Gabriel looks back of a summer of Trumpian silliness and wistfully writes, “The 2016 election was the grand battle conservatives had been hoping for since Ronald Reagan left the Oval Office. The roster of candidates was to be a who’s-who of smart, proven, center-right leadership:”

We aren’t discussing America’s $18.4 trillion national debt and our insolvent social programs. The stagnant economy and an expansionist China, Russia, and Islamic State. Burning cities at home and burning countries abroad.

Instead we’re trading GIFs of a reality show star on “The Tonight Show,” giggling about menstruation, and wondering if the most impressive GOP field in a generation are a bunch of “dummies” or if they’re a bunch of “losers.”

These are serious times. We are not a serious people.

Well, the American people chose a reality show candidate in 2008 — the comic book superhero “Lightworker,” who could be seen on comic book covers and in the form of plastic action figure replicas, when not appearing on professional wrestling TV shows asking, “Do you smell what Barack’s cooking,” and who modestly pledged that by merely besting Hillary Clinton to win the Democrat nomination, “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Of course voters want more of the same in 2016.

CHANGE: Nearly half of all e-book sales dollars now going to self-published authors.

From an author-earnings perspective, in 18 short months, the US ebook market has flipped upside down.

But change in publishing isn’t limited to the ebook market.

Last month, a self-published indie PRINT children’s book — a trade paperback — was one of the Top five print bestsellers in the US for over two weeks, selling over 29,000 print copies in its first week and hitting #6 on USA Today’s combined Best Seller List. (An oddly-timed rule change that same week by the New York Times Best Seller List kept it from appearing on the NYT List.)

But the exciting news for indie print books doesn’t end there. Walmart will very shortly be carrying a self-published book on its store shelves: Jamie McGuire’s Beautiful Redemption.

Both pieces of news disprove the outdated notion that a traditional publishing contract is necessary if an author wants to achieve chart-topping PRINT sales, or to see their print book sold on Walmart shelves.

Old print distribution barriers are starting to crumble, just as they already have for digital.

We can’t help but wonder what the next 18 months will bring.

Bad news for the gatekeepers, I guess. Who could have seen this coming?

CHRIS MATTHEWS’ DOG WHISTLE? HE ACCUSES BILL KRISTOL OF BEING NEOCON PUPPET MASTER: “Matthews, as we’ve documented time and again, revels in hitting Republican politicians for ‘dog whistle’ and ‘code word’ racial pitches in political messaging. Certainly Matthews has to be aware of the not-so-subtle nature of his vicious attack on a prominent Jewish conservative thinker and how it walks like and quacks like anti-Semitism.” Also in the same post, video from earlier this year “wherein Matthews whined about pro-Israel ‘piggish money people’ and their influence on GOP politics.”

All that being said, I think John Nolte of Big Journalism is correct when he writes about Kristol’s threat to support a third party, “The old GOP Establishment hotness was demanding Trump pledge in writing to support the Republican nominee, even if it isn’t Trump. He has since done so. It now looks as though the new GOP Establishment hotness is threatening to support a third party candidate if Trump wins — the same third party maneuver the Establishment loudly and repeatedly assured would mean a Hillary Clinton victory if Trump chose that route.”

Ross Perot, call your office.

OF COURSE, HIS REPUTATION WILL NEVER FULLY RECOVER: A Campus Rape Ruling, Reversed: The University of Michigan has vacated its findings against a student accused of sexual assault, after he sued the school for violating his civil rights.

The sexual encounter in question took place in March 2012, in the spring semester of Sterrett’s freshman year. Legal documents described how the female student, CB, who was a friend of Sterrett’s, asked to stay in his room because her roommate was having guests. He expected her to sleep on a mat on the floor and was surprised when she got into his bunk bed. Soon the two were kissing, then more; CB asked Sterrett about a condom, and he got one. Their encounter went on for so long, and was so loud, that Sterrett’s roommate, who was trying to sleep in the top bunk, sent Sterrett an annoyed Facebook message about being kept awake. The roommate later gave a sworn statement that he was close enough to the pair that he would have heard, and intervened, if CB had said no or objected.

The semester ended, and Sterrett and CB left school. The events that prompted the university investigation of Sterrett are described in an affidavit sworn on his behalf by LC, a friend of CB and her sophomore-year roommate. While CB was home for the summer, her mother discovered her diary, in which the young woman described her drinking, drug-taking, and sexual encounters. (In her own deposition, CB confirmed the contents of the diary.) After confronting her daughter with her discovery, CB’s mother drove her to campus, where CB made her accusation. She never reported it to the police.

During the summer, campus officials informed Sterrett via Skype that a student had made an allegation against him. When the tone of the interview turned hostile, he asked if he should retain a lawyer. He was told if he ended the interview this would be reported to the university and the investigation would go on without him. He continued to talk.

Sterrett was never provided with the charges against him in writing. The Skype interview turned out to be his sole encounter with the campus officials investigating and deciding his case. He never had a chance to question his accuser. He was not told the names of the witnesses the university interviewed in its inquiry. In November of his sophomore year he received a “Sexual Misconduct Investigation Report,” which concluded he was responsible for the accusation against him.

Everyone involved in this travesty should be fired, and the University of Michigan should have to pay a large damage award. Vindication is nice, but not enough. And since the rape charges are unfounded, shouldn’t the “victim’s” name be public now?

Meanwhile, male students, and parents of male students, have a reason to be suspicious of the University of Michigan, which costs at least $27,812 per year in-state and $57,432 per year out-of-state.

DEMOCRAT CALLS FOR CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS ON FANTASY FOOTBALL: Having solved all of the other problems facing America right now, New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone Jr. has called for a congressional hearing on Fantasy Football.

Well, sure, America has problems, but New Jersey’s Democratic politics are as fresh and clean as a daisy. No wonder Pallone needs to find something useful with his time.

RELATED: California Legislature Approves Ban On ‘Redskins’ Mascots: Four high schools would have to choose a new mascot under legislation passed Thursday.

Good to know that’s the most serious issue facing that happy far left utopia as well.

WHEN YOU’VE LOST ANDREA MITCHELL: White Women ‘Abandoning’ Hillary Clinton ‘in Droves,’ Mitchell Reports:

During Tuesday’s edition of NBC’s Today morning program, news anchor Andrea Mitchell addressed a trend that probably has former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her campaign staff feeling “trumped:” White women are “abandoning” the Democratic front-runner in the 2016 presidential campaign “in droves.”

The host of Andrea Mitchell Reports — which airs at 12 noon weekdays on the MSNBC cable channel — started her report by stating: “Hillary Clinton is reaching out to that group that she’d always counted on: white women voters who are now abandoning her in droves during the last two months. “

Gee, I can’t imagine why women would be turned off by the Clintons.

RELATED: In Shift, Hillary Clinton Says Rape Victims Have Right to Be Believed.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Devastating, Lifelong Consequences of Student Debt: It’s threatening fundamentally American ways of life.

We see this with other lifetime measures, such as how entrepreneurial people are. A recent study by Brent W. Ambrose of Pennsylvania State University, and Larry Cordell and Shuwei Ma of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, found “a significant and economically meaningful negative correlation between changes in student loan debt and net business formation for the smallest group of small businesses.” This makes sense. You can keep your high student loan burdens low if you stay with an established employer. But if you strike out on your own, you’ll have less and more volatile income when you start. This is harder to manage with student loans, which also impacts your credit rating. Again, we can see the short-term student loan burdens staying the same, even though lifetime choices are much more limited as a result.

The lifetime framework also puts front and center something the Brookings study largely hand-waves: the rapid increase in how long people are paying off their student debt. Though the percentage of income that student-loan debtors pay stays the same, the length they are paying those loans is up 80 percent. What was once an average length of 7.4 years in repayment in 1992 is now 13.4 years. All things equal, a large increase in the length you will be paying student loans means you will dedicate a larger portion of your lifetime income to student loans. This burden goes missing by narrowly looking at a month-to-month basis.

This has major consequences for people’s ability to build wealth. Indeed, much of the current energy in analyzing student loan burdens are looking at this longer dynamic, and how it interplays with the ability for people to amass savings. As Richard Fry of Pew found, using the same data set as Brookings, “households headed by a young, college-educated adult without any student debt obligations have about seven times the typical net worth ($64,700) of households headed by a young, college-educated adult with student debt ($8,700).” Fry also finds that those who took out loans are less satisfied with their financial situation compared to people without loans. Similar results have been investigated and found by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

This, in turn, has major consequences for how young people will ultimately transition into adulthood. According to Dora Gicheva of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, student debt decreases the long-term probability of marriage by a significant amount.

Do tell.

HOW IS THAT WORKING OUT FOR TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING: How To Win The Battle And Lose The War.

YES IT’S WHAT WE NEED FROM THE GLITTERATI: Oooh, more advice.

BUT WOMEN ARE HYPERGAMIC: Love shouldn’t require a college degree.

IT’S COME TO THIS: California Has to Outlaw Free Speech to Save It.

EUROPE WANTED US TO BE MORE LIKE THEM: Europe’s Refugee Crisis Will End When the Middle East Empties Out.

The mess with the refugees stems from the mess in Syria… which stems from the West’s determination to not intervene during the uprising against Assad. That crisis got worse because everyone, including the U.S., was eager to leave Iraq and not deal with rebuilding that country or the Arab world as a whole.

THIS IS NOT WHAT “BARE ALL” MEANS: Colorado park stays closed because too many people are trying to take selfies with bears.

FCC COMMISSIONER: FREE CONTENT MIGHT VIOLATE AGENCY’S ‘INTERNET CONDUCT STANDARD.’

It’s reassuring to see an agency that dates back to the first term of FDR and the days of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on AM radio keeping an eye on the Internet considering how equally limited the bandwidth is there.

A TRAILER PARK CALLED CAMELOT: How serial cheater Bobby Kennedy Jr ‘exposed himself around the house, demanded a ménage à trois with tragic wife Mary – and told her things would be easier if she killed herself after he went public with Cheryl Hines.