ANOTHER FAKE HATE CRIME: Gay Bar Owner Admits Writing Anti-Gay Slurs on Walls, Torching Bar.

PERMANENT BIPARTISAN FUSION PARTY: Hillary Clinton’s Mega-Donors Are Also Funding Jeb Bush.

SCHOLARSHIP: The Teen Who Exposed a Professor’s Myth.

Rebecca Fried had no intention of preserving the record of a persecuted people whose strife was ready to be permanently written off in the eyes of history as exaggerated, imagined, or even invented.

That’s because Rebecca was too busy trying to get through the 8th grade.

In 2002, University of Illinois-Chicago history professor Richard J. Jensen printed “No Irish Need Apply: A Myth of Victimization.” His abstract begins:

“Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination, which featured omnipresent signs proclaiming ‘Help Wanted—No Irish Need Apply!’ No one has ever seen one of these NINA signs because they were extremely rare or nonexistent.”

In short, those famous “No Irish Need Apply” signs—ones that proved Irish Americans faced explicit job discrimination in the 19th and 20th centuries? Professor Jensen came to the blockbuster conclusion that they never existed. . . .

Here, of course, is the problem: After only couple of hours Googling it, Rebecca, a 14-year-old, had found out these signs had, in fact, existed all along. Not only in newspaper listings—in which they appeared in droves—but, after further research, in shop windows, too.

The Irish were persecuted in the American job market—and precisely in the overt, literally written-down way that was always believed.

All of this would have been written off as a myth if it weren’t for Rebecca Fried, a rising high school freshman—who one of the preeminent scholars on the Irish diaspora in the United States now calls a “hero” and “quite extraordinary”—and who simply couldn’t believe it, either.

I wonder how much trendy scholarship is like this?

FOX ANNOUNCES ITS CUT FOR THURSDAY’S GOP DEBATE: “It’s Megyn and O’Reilly’s world and we just live in it,” Roger Simon laments.

DEAR STARBUCKS, YOU LOST ME AT PLANNED PARENTHOOD.

SO MUCH FOR THE NARRATIVE: Heather Havrilesky: Want to Be Better at Your Job? Have a Kid.

RIGHT CONCLUSION, UTTERLY WRONG ANALYSIS: A member of the “ruling class” himself, liberal Robert Reich, opines that “A revolt is taking place against the ‘ruling class.’ “

Political insiders don’t see that the biggest political phenomenon in America today is a revolt against the “ruling class” of insiders that have dominated Washington for more than three decades.

In two very different ways, Trump and Sanders are agents of this revolt. . . .

On the right are the wreckers. The Tea Party, which emerged soon after the Wall Street bailout, has been intent on stopping government in its tracks and overthrowing a ruling class it sees as rotten to the core. . . Donald Trump is their human wrecking ball. The more outrageous his rants and putdowns of other politicians, the more popular he becomes among this segment of the public that’s thrilled by a bombastic, racist, billionaire who sticks it to the ruling class.

On the left are the rebuilders. The Occupy movement, which also emerged from the Wall Street bailout, was intent on displacing the ruling class and rebuilding our political-economic system from the ground up. . . .

Bernie Sanders personifies them. The more he advocates a fundamental retooling of our economy and democracy in favor of average working people, the more popular he becomes among those who no longer trust the ruling class to bring about necessary change.  

Yet despite the growing revolt against the ruling class, it seems likely that the nominees in 2016 will be Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. After all, the ruling class still controls America.

Reich is correct that many Americans are angry at the “ruling class” in Washington, D.C. But he’s wrong about the constituencies that Trump and Sanders represent, and why they are proving popular.

Notice that leftist Reich characterizes the tea party as “wreckers” and the occupy movement as “rebuilders.” He then proceeds to proclaim Trump as a “bombastic, racist” wrecking ball that represents the tea party. Sanders, by contrast is merely advocating a “fundamental retooling of our economy in favor of average working people” and representing the “rebuilders” of the occupy movement.

Reich’s overt leftist bias aside, his analysis is all wrong. Trump is no more a champion of the tea party than any of several other GOP presidential candidates, including most notably Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, Cary Fiorina or Rand Paul. Likewise, Bernie Sanders isn’t popular because of the occupy movement, which has been long moribund, and he certainly isn’t a political outsider, having served in Congress for almost 25 years (since 1991).

Trump and Sanders are popular for different reasons. Trump appeals to the conservative base of the GOP because he is willing to talk tough and defy a stifling and overwhelming atmosphere of political correctness.  Sanders appeals to the progressive base of the Democrats because he is willing to overtly and unapologetically push a progressive/Socialist agenda. Sanders has also gained attention simply because so many Democrats are looking for an alternative to scandal-plagued Hillary Clinton.

Do Americans–of all political stripes–distrust the D.C. “ruling class”? Yes, undoubtedly. And presidential candidates who can tap into this widespread frustration will do well. But neither Trump’s nor Sanders’ popularity is based on this sentiment. And Reich should check his #liberalbias.

BULLETS & BOURBON NEWS: Nina Yablok (aka PJM’s attorney, aka Mrs. Ed Driscoll) who’s been organizing the Bullets & Bourbon event in the Dallas Fort Worth area coming this December featuring Glenn, Dana Loesch, Ed Morrissey, Kevin D. Williamson, Roger L. Simon, Steve Green and Mark Rippetoe is scheduled to appear on Michael Graham’s radio show at 10:45 eastern/7:45 pacific tomorrow morning on Atlanta’s News Radio 106.7 FM. Tune in here to listen online; for more on Bullets & Bourbon (we’d love to see you attend), click here.

WHEN LAW ENFORCEMENT VALUES PRIVACY: Suspended Cops Say Video of Them Eating Marijuana Edibles During a Raid Violated Their Privacy: Santa Ana officers want to stop their department from using the footage to investigate them.

Remember the Santa Ana, California, cops who were caught on video munching on what seem to be cannabis-infused chocolate bars after raiding an unlicensed medical marijuana dispensary in May? The Orange County Register reports that three officers who were suspended after the incident are trying to stop the Santa Ana Police Department from using the footage in its internal investigation. Among other things, their lawsuit argues that the officers thought they had disabled all of the security cameras at Sky High Holistic and therefore had a reasonable expectation of privacy. The cops complain that the dispensary never got their permission to record them as they searched the premises.

“All police personnel present had a reasonable expectation that their conversations were no longer being recorded and the undercover officers, feeling that they were safe to do so, removed their masks,” says the complaint, which was filed in Orange County Superior Court. “Without the illegal recordings, there would have been no internal investigation of any officer.” Under California law, “all parties to a confidential communication” must consent to being recorded, but that rule does not apply when “the parties to the communication may reasonably expect that the communication may be overheard or recorded.”

For their gall in making this argument, they should be tarred and feathered a second time.

THIS IS THE NATURAL PATH OF MOST SOCIAL MEDIA: As Shares Plunge, Twitter Scrambles to Attract New Users.

THINK OF ALL THE MONEY YOU COULD SAVE WITH ONE OF THESE! 2015 Porsche Cayenne S E-Hybrid: Plug it in or don’t—the E-Hybrid don’t care.

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Trump Outwits Gawker: Turns Cell Phone Number Into Free Campaign Ad.

Still though, as Scott Ott reminds us, “Inevitable: Tough-Talking, Thrice-Married New Yorker Led GOP Polls in July…2007.”

ROBERT CONQUEST, RIP: “Sad news passing the news wire this hour of the passing of the great historian Robert Conquest, at the age of 98,” Steve Hayward writes at Power Line:

Conquest surely deserves to be counted among the top five most important historians of Communism and the Soviet Union in our time. His book The Great Terror, about the Soviet purges and deliberate famine policy of the 1930s, made it impossible for anyone to deny the essential character of Stalin’s regime. But leftists tried anyway. As the Wall Street Journal explains in its new story:

Mr. Conquest’s master work, “The Great Terror,” was the first detailed account of the Stalinist purges from 1937 to 1939. He estimated that under Stalin, 20 million people perished from famines, Soviet labor camps and executions—a toll that eclipsed that of the Holocaust. Writing at the height of the Cold War in 1968, when sources about the Soviet Union were scarce, Mr. Conquest was vilified by leftists who said he exaggerated the number of victims. When the Cold War ended and archives in Moscow were thrown open, his estimates proved high but more accurate than those of his critics.

Like many great figures though, his most legendary line was supplied by someone else: As Conquest himself told the New York Review of Books, it was Kingsley Amis who famously quipped that Conquest should have re-titled the post-Soviet Union edition of The Great Terror “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.”

(I had the privilege of meeting Conquest, then in his early 90s, and his gracious wife, when I videotaped Roger L. Simon’s interview with Conquest at Stanford in the fall of 2008, for the very early days of PJTV.)

FIFTH PLANNED PARENTHOOD VIDEO WORST YET? ‘Intact Fetal Cadavers’ At 20 Weeks ‘Just a Matter of Line Items.’

Plus note this chilling metaphor:

In the video, actors posing as representatives from a human biologics company meet with Farrell at the abortion-clinic headquarters of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast in Houston to discuss a potential partnership to harvest fetal organs.

“Where we probably have an edge over other organizations, our organization has been doing research for many many years,” explains Farrell. When researchers need a specific part from the aborted fetus, Farrell says, “We bake that into our contract, and our protocol, that we follow this, so we deviate from our standard in order to do that.”

George Orwell, Dr. Strangelove, call your offices.

And speaking of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” “CNN Asks Activist Behind Planned Parenthood Videos if He’s a ‘Violent Extremist.’”

TRAILER: I, Whiskey: The Spirit of the Market.

LIVING THE #VANLIFE.

HOMELAND SECURITY: Hobbyist-sized drones are the latest terrorism threats.

IT SHOULD BE: Is Drone Racing Legal? “The attraction of drone racing is easy enough to understand. What puzzles me is how an organized sport could emerge in the face of what appears to be a legal prohibition on the whole activity.” Our governmental betters don’t follow the law. Why should we?

IT DEPENDS, DO WE GET BOLOS OR DO WE GET TERMINATORS? Military Robots: Armed, but How Dangerous? Will artificial intelligence inevitably make warfare worse?

A FINE MESS: Driverless Cars Could Put City Hall Out Of Business. I’ve said for years that traffic fines were essentially a randomly-imposed tax, rather than anything having to do with safety. This kind of proves it. . . .

VIDEO: 1936 Film Perfectly Explains How a Manual Transmission Works: Even if you already understand the concept behind a stick-shift transmission, this 1936 film explains it so perfectly a school kid could grasp it.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Chris Christie: At 16 of 17 New Hampshire Town Halls, I’ve Been Asked About High Student Costs.

Free advice, Chris: Read this.

OBAMACARE PREMIUMS SOAR: In response, the Obama Administration once again sticks its fingers in its ears and pretends to hear no evil. As revealed in this New York Times piece, “Obama Administration urges States to cut health insurers’ requests for big premium increases.”

After finding that new customers were sicker than expected, some health plans have sought increases of 10 percent to 40 percent or more. . . .

Kevin J. Counihan, the chief executive of the federal insurance marketplace, is urging states to consider a range of factors before making their decisions.

“Recent claims data show healthier consumers,” Mr. Counihan said in a letter to state insurance commissioners. The federal tax penalty for going without insurance will increase in 2016, he said, and this “should motivate a new segment of uninsured who may not have a high need for health care to enroll for coverage.”

In addition, federal officials said, much of the pent-up demand for health care has been met because consumers who enrolled last year have received treatments they could not obtain when they were uninsured. . . .

But Scott Keefer, a vice president of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, which requested rate increases averaging about 50 percent for 2016, said his company had not seen an improvement in the health status of new customers.

“Our claims experience has not slowed at all,” Mr. Keefer said. “The trend has gotten a little worse than we expected.” . . .

President Obama, on a recent trip to Tennessee, said the final rates for 2016 would “come in significantly lower than what’s being requested.”

Moreover, consumers can avoid large rate increases by switching to lower-cost health plans next year, administration officials said. In any event, they said, the federal government pays most of the premium for most people who buy insurance on the exchanges, so consumers will be largely shielded from higher premiums.

The politics of Obamacare work so well for the Democrats who supported it precisely because Obamacare beneficiaries are shielded from premium increases. They continue to get their “free stuff”–or heavily subsidized stuff–and any increases they experience are blamed on “greedy insurers.” I predict more and more insurers will become insolvent, and concomitantly fewer and fewer choices will become available on the exchanges. After another decade or so–if Congress can’t muster the political willpower to repeal–there will be calls for amendments that will further subsidize the few, but large, insurance companies that remain to serve this population, likely through the mechanism of taxpayer-funded reinsurance. They will be “too big to fail.”

If you like Obamacare’s vision of government-run “competition,” you’re really going to love the Clean Power Plan, which will do for the energy sector (beginning with coal-fired electricity) what Obamacare has done for the health care sector–i.e., slowly asphyxiate it, leaving only large, heavily-taxpayer subsidized “private” crony-companies.  Hold onto your wallets and start hoarding bright lightbulbs, because prices are going to go up dramatically, and choices will decline.