WHY POLITICO IS DEAD WRONG TO BE PLEASED ABOUT OUR SHRINKING NAVAL POWER: Dude, it’s Politico. The first four words of that headline are a perennial.

IT’S ACTUALLY MORE LIKE A LIMP-WRISTED SLAP: Jeb Bush Takes a Cue From Donald Trump’s Playbook: Punch Back.

Mr. Trump has called Mr. Bush’s immigration plans “baby stuff” and his education policy “pathetic.” He has expressed mock sympathy for Mr. Bush’s audiences, who he says must be so bored that “they’re sleeping.” . . .

After enduring those slings and arrows for weeks, to the mounting dismay of supporters, Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, and his aides have decided to venture outside their comfort zone and borrow a page from Mr. Trump’s playbook: Hit back, with force and creativity, over and over again in the coming weeks.

It is a turning point in Mr. Bush’s campaign that was on display Monday in McAllen, Tex., along the border with Mexico. There, Mr. Bush called Mr. Trump’s immigration plan “unrealistic,” described his policies as un-Republican and acidly recommended that the businessman read Mr. Bush’s book “Immigration Wars” to acquaint himself with a practical solution.

FREE SPEECH UPDATE: ‘NY Daily News’ to NY Colleges: Adopt U. of Chicago Statement on Free Speech.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 838.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: All is not well at Connecticut College: An Andrew Pessin update.

Regular readers may recall that Connecticut College philosophy professor Andrew Pessin was the target of what amounted to a hoax accusing him of expressing racist sentiments against Palestinians. Campus activists circulated a Facebook post he wrote in which he denounced Hamas (he compared it to a rabid pit bull, which, as I’ve noted, is grossly unfair to rabid pit bulls), cut off the comment section to the post where he removed any ambiguity that he was referring to Hamas and not Palestinians in general, and, with the complicity of the school newspaper, made Pessin the subject of a campus-wide and ultimately national campaign of vilification. This included various academic departments in the university and even the university president denouncing Pessin’s alleged “hateful” rhetoric, and a campus-wide forum in which Pessin’s few defenders were heckled.

Months later, Pessin, driven off campus by the stress of the two-minutes hate, still has not resumed his teaching duties.

Cost of attending Connecticut College for one year: $62,965.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: You Can’t Time The Market.

Unless maybe you’re planning to retire tomorrow. Are you planning to retire tomorrow? I don’t mean “soon.” I mean, are you planning to retire on Aug. 25, 2015? Because if not, there’s no reason for you to be looking at the day-to-day movements in your 401(k). You probably lost a lot of money in the last week. And you know what you can do about that? Nothing.

Oh, sure, you could try to time the market by selling now, waiting for it to bottom, and buying back. A lot of people get rich doing this in novels, particularly novels set in the Great Depression. You know why they’re able to do this? Because the author gets to cheat; they have the prices right there in front of them, and they can whisper them to their character, maybe along with a plausible rationale as to how they should know this is the top, and then recognize the bottom when it comes along. In the real Great Depression, a lot of people took a bath attempting this strategy, because what they thought was the bottom turned out to be a temporary pause before the market dropped into the basement, then got out a pick and a shovel and started digging through the bedrock.

Ah, but financial professionals will protest that many people in their industry do sell into a crash and then pick up assets on the cheap. True, though my experience is that you are more likely to hear about the times this was a winning strategy than the times when it was not. More importantly: Are you, dear reader, a financial professional who spends all day glued to the market data feed, watching for the bottom? Or are you the sort of person more likely to park some cash in your trading account in preparation for that golden moment to buy … and then forget about it for six months because Mom had a nasty bout with pneumonia right after you had to shepherd Junior through the college application process?

Attempting to time the market, like most other active trading strategies, produces at best a modest premium that roughly pays for the work needed to generate the excess profits. (At worst, you lose much more in herd behavior and trading fees than you gain in value.) But that’s for people who do this for a living. The odds that you, who have so many other things to think about, are going to wade into the market and outperform the professionals are approximately the same as the odds of you getting up out of your armchair, wandering down to the nearest major league sports arena, and outperforming the folks on the field.

Even professional money managers seldom beat the market for long.

JAMES WEBB: “Many women appear to be having problems with their sexuality.”

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BLOGGINGHEADS: Matt Lewis: Hillary Doesn’t Have Bill’s Talent For Escaping Scandal. “I think she looks fake, she looks phony. . . . a grandmother who’s not hip, who’s screeching.”

PALACE GUARD FIERCELY DEFENDS THE THRONE! ‘Dear Leader will be OK’: WaPo ‘hackery’ puts America’s fears at ease during market plunge.

IT WAS NECESSARY TO DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENT IN ORDER TO SAVE IT: Obama Jets Out to Vegas to Talk Climate Change as Stock Market Plummets on Black Monday. Or to put it another way, “Pres. Obama will fly Air Force One to Las Vegas, burning 24,560 gallons of jet fuel to deliver an environmental speech.”

Remember when Obama was telling Americans ‘don’t go to Las Vegas’ early in his first term? Good times, good times.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Old Dominion University: Offensive Messages On Private Property “Will Not Be Tolerated.”

My advice to these fraternity guys: (1) Immediately complain to the Department of Education and the Department of Justice that you’re being targeted because of your race and sex, and denied your First Amendment rights. No, nothing will come of this, but that’s not the point. The process is the punishment. (2) Sue on the same grounds. (3) The real killer: Go to the Virginia Legislature and tell them they should cut Old Dominion’s budget. Come prepared with figures on the number of administrators on campus now, versus 10 and 20 years ago. File freedom of information requests and get the travel expense figures for the folks in the administration. Look over them for suspicious and large expenditures. (You’ll find them!) Make a big stink about those.

Administrative bloat leads to large numbers of “student life” educrats without enough to do, so they’ve created a quasi-police-state to fill the time. State legislators are looking for things to cut anyway, and higher ed doesn’t have the clout it used to have. This will hurt them more than anything else you can do.

ASHE SCHOW:

“Moreover, ‘yes means yes’ legislation effectively criminalizes millions of actions by individuals and partners that do not lead to rape or sexual assault,” Staley wrote. “Rape and sexual assault still occur at unacceptably high levels, but the solution is not to criminalize normal, healthy behavior.”

I’ve written about this aspect of “yes means yes” before. Under these policies, all sex is rape unless one follows the rules set forth under the policy. And even then, unless one can prove they obtained consent under these policies, the existence of a “yes” every step of the way is meaningless.

These policies are deliberately designed to terrorize men. They are, in and of themselves, responsible for creating a hostile educational environment on account of sex.

NOT EVEN A SMIDGEN: Lois Lerner Had Another Secret Email Account, Under The Name “Toby Miles.”

UNEXPECTEDLY: Second-highest paid L.A. County employee in 2014 didn’t work a single day.

Reminder to California civil servants: Bell, California’s staggering fiscal meltdown at the dawn of the Obama era is a warning, not a how-to guide for the topping the Guinness World Record Book of graft.

MILO YIANNOPOULOS: Silicon Valley Is Headed for Disaster, and No One Can Save It.

America will always plant crops and need chemicals to service those crops. And it will always need payment, delivery and data services. But will it always need Facebook and Twitter? Cisco runs a large proportion of the Internet; Facebook hosts your grandma’s pictures. You do the math.

There won’t be any suicides in Silicon Valley – the most dangerous thing to happen in northern California occurred last month when an angel investor’s Birkenstocks got caught in the BART elevator – but the whole edifice on which the delicate San Francisco ecosystem is based is about to come crashing down all over again.

The only silver lining in all this is that Jim Cramer is about lose what little remaining hair he had as all of his recent “buy” picks melt into oblivion. You heard it here first.

Ouch.

JOHN HINDERAKER: The Left’s Plot to Impoverish America’s Middle Class and Enrich Left-Wing Billionaires. Party of the rich. “Nothing in American politics is more corrupt than the environmental movement. . . . What’s it all about? Money. Money for the politically connected, at your expense.”

ALL THE SMOKE SIGNALS POINT TOWARDS JOEMENTUM! Joe Biden Meets with Liz Warren as Clinton Campaign Melts Down.

HOW POLITICS KILLED COMEDY, from Andrew Stiles at Acculturated:

One of the most frustrating aspects of our increasingly politicized culture is the demise of comedy. Not that there isn’t a ton of hilarious material to enjoy these days—there is—but it’s impossible to ignore the extent to which lame activism is tarnishing the “comedy” brand. As is often the case, millennials are probably to blame.

As I wrote nearly a decade ago, Orrin Judd, the early blogger and conservative book reviewer has a theory that “’all comedy is conservative.’ I agree with that to a certain extent, but it’s definitely true that at some point on the leftward curve, humor seems to be anathema–there’s just too many shibboleths that risk offending.”

UPDATE: An Insta-reader emails, “Another factor is that you are no longer allowed to enjoy the writing, performing, etc., of anyone who has outed themselves or been outed as a conservative.  I work at a library and a patron told me that is why he no longer reads Orson Scott Card (albeit that he is a fiction writer, not a comedian).”

Yes — getting Ender’s Game to the big screen while keeping Card in the background was like something out of the ’50s blacklist. But then, somebody should write a book about how the blacklist really never went away — it was merely updated from blocking reds to blocking red staters.

THE BRIDE AT EVERY WEDDING, THE CORPSE AT EVERY FUNERAL: White House won’t rule out Obama primary endorsement.

The White House on Monday said President Obama may offer an endorsement in the Democratic primary, which could pit his former secretary of State against his vice president.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is the front-runner for the party’s nomination, but Vice President Biden is looking at the race.

“I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of an endorsement during the Democratic primary,” press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on Monday.

But Earnest offered few clues about which candidate the president might ultimately endorse.

“I have indicated that the president does plan to vote in the Illinois primary, and that ultimately it will be Democratic voters who are responsible for choosing the Democratic nominee,” he said.

The spokesman heaped praise on Biden, reiterating Obama’s decision to make Biden his running mate “was the smartest decision that he’d ever made in politics.”

He also said there is “no one in American politics today” who better understands what it takes to run for president than Biden, who has run twice previously for the nation’s highest office.

Citing Biden’s own end-of-summer deadline to make a decision, Earnest said he expects the vice president to make a decision within the next month.

He also cited Obama’s “respect, appreciation and admiration” of Clinton’s service as secretary of State.

If I were Hillary, I’d be nervous.

PHONING IN THE FINANCIAL NEWS: Monday was one of those rare occasions when news of the stock market escapes from the confines of CNBC and the nightly TV news’ 30 second Chyron of the Dow’s closing price and onto the 11:00 PM news proper. Since most TV news reporters aren’t very good at covering the financial world, and since they feel that any such coverage must be dumbed-down for the average viewer, watching one of the local Bay Area stations report on TV tonight at the gym, the assemblage of shots appeared straight out of this classic 2010 segment by satirist Charlie Brooker of the BBC. (Language warning for an F-bomb if you’re watching this at work with the sound up):

In contrast, this is probably the best advice for the current period, but if more investors followed it and kept their inner riverboat gambler in check, the stock mavens at CNBC — not to mention plenty of stockbrokers — would be out of a job:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Reader John Farmer writes:

I wonder if the sudden and severe economic troubles in China will affect the higher ed bubble in the USA. It appears that many U.S. universities are dependent on a large swath of students from China paying full freight. If the volume of such lucrative students drops off substantially, a lot of U.S. university budgets are going to take a hit. This seems to be especially so for expensive private schools below the top tier.

That seems likely.

ALLUM BOKHARI: Rise Of The Cultural Libertarians.

A new force is emerging in the culture wars. Authoritarians of all stripes, from religious reactionaries to left-wing “social justice warriors,” are coming under fire from a new wave of thinkers, commentators, and new media stars who reject virtually all of their political values.

From the banning of Charlie Hebdo magazine across British university campuses on the grounds that it promoted islamophobia, to the removal of the video game Grand Theft Auto V from major retailers in Australia on the grounds that it promoted sexism, threats to cultural freedom proliferate.

But a growing number of commentators, media personalities and academics reject the arguments that underpin these assaults on free expression, in particular the idea that people are either too emotionally fragile to deal with “offence” or too corruptible to be exposed to dangerous ideas.

Faster, please.

ARE STATE GOP LEADERS IN NC AND VA CONSPIRING TO KEEP TRUMP OFF THEIR PRIMARY BALLOTS?