THE WALRUS WAS PINCH.

ACTUALLY, WE’RE PRETTY MUCH IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PACK AMONG DEVELOPED COUNTRIES: Fact check: Obama claim that ‘I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings; this just doesn’t happen in other countries.’ “In terms of per capita fatalities, the United States was fourth, after Norway, Finland and Switzerland. Another article, at the Independent Journal website, provides a ‘Rampage Shooting Index’ for 10 countries, covering 2009-2013. Again, the United States is first in total number of incidents, and sixth in per capita fatalities. (Behind Israel and Slovakia, as well as the previously mentioned nations). Updating the index to account for 2015 would put France ahead of the United States.”

STUART ROTHENBERG: Obama Is The Democrats’ Bush:

Both men promised they would bring Americans together but instead contributed to the increased polarization and anger in the country.

Obviously, there were many factors at work, and the opposition party in each case played a role in the growing divide. But it is also true that both men ran for the White House promising to overcome the bitterness that had enveloped the nation’s capital — and both failed, giving up almost completely on trying to change the tone during their second terms.

Both Obama and Bush may well be best remembered for their foreign policy blunders and exaggerated claims of success.

This comparison, though unfair to Bush, is close enough that it should be pretty painful to Dems.

ANALYSIS: LIKELY TRUE. Don Surber: West Virginia Is The State Obama Most Hates.

HMM: Iraqis think the U.S. is in cahoots with the Islamic State, and it is hurting the war.

“The reason is that the Americans aren’t doing the job people expect them to do,” he said. “Mosul was lost and the Americans did nothing. Syria was lost and the Americans did nothing. Paris is attacked and the Americans aren’t doing much. So people believe this is a deliberate policy. They can’t believe the American leadership fails to understand the developments in the region, and so the only other explanation is that this is part of a conspiracy.”

On the streets of Baghdad, most Iraqis see no other explanation.

Remember when electing Obama was going to make everyone love and trust us?

IN TRANSITION: At Commentary, Christine Rosen writes, “Outside South Park, however, there is little that is gentle or fun about the discussion of transgender issues. There is a growing chasm between the message of acceptance that is promoted and the tactics often employed to achieve it,” adding later in her article, “We want our transformation stories to be seamless narratives of the ugly duckling becoming a true swan (and thus her true self); no one wants to see the duckling go under the knife:”

Today we want cultural conversations that rest on this kind of acceptance fantasy, especially when the facts are in dispute (or controversial). But when acceptance is withheld, all hell breaks loose. Germaine Greer was blunt but correct in her assessment of Caitlyn Jenner: Cultural acceptance of transgender identity means accepting the legitimacy of radical and often punishing physical alterations in the service of that identity—the kind of acceptance we don’t offer someone who “identifies” as anorexic, even though there are many websites that actually celebrate and offer coaching tips on how to be “ana.”

In fact, as a culture, we are always policing the boundaries of transformation, and not consistently. While we celebrate Bruce Jenner’s appropriation of the female gender, for example, we’re told to denounce cultural appropriation in other forms. God help the white pop star who adopts dreadlocks, as Miley Cyrus did recently when hosting the MTV Video Music Awards; and don’t even think about posting a picture of yourself on Instagram wearing something that looks Native American or vaguely “ethnic”—you will be reprimanded by real ethnic people proclaiming, “My culture is not a costume.” Even the liberal stalwart Lena Dunham was chided by her young female fans when she jokingly posted a picture of herself online wearing a hijab.

Read the whole thing.

Related: “New York Times adds ‘Mx.’ to the honorific mix for subjects who don’t want the gender-specific ‘Mr.’ or ‘Ms.’” As John Podhoretz tweets, “Idiocracy approacheth.”

Or perhaps a highly dangerous supervillain from the Fifth Dimension.

WE DON’T CARE ABOUT THE CONSTITUTION: One of Maryland’s Top Attorneys Was Caught Behind Closed Doors Airing Controversial Opinions, Confidential Information. “In an 11 minute video released Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Thiruvendran Vignarajah is surreptitiously caught on camera committing an apparent ethical breach, as well as speaking his mind on the Second Amendment.”

He’s the Deputy Attorney General of Maryland. His name is Thiruvendran Vignarajah. Video.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Clinton Emails: It Looks Like She Was An Architect Of The Benghazi Lie.

On Sept. 16, 2012, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice went on five Sunday TV news shows to explain why a few days earlier attacks on U.S. State Department facilities in Benghazi, Libya, killed four Americans, including our ambassador. It was all just a demonstration provoked by an Internet video that got out of hand, Rice said.

It was a cover-up, of course. Rice was pushing in a re-election year a fiction that the administration believed would do the least amount of damage to President Obama’s campaign.
The administration couldn’t allow itself to admit that things were going poorly in the Middle East after it had been saying progress was being made.

Clinton herself went with the story even though she knew it wasn’t true. But was she merely a cog in the conspiracy to cover up the truth, or one of its planners?
An email from a batch released Monday strongly suggests she was an architect.

Her schedule, the Washington Examiner has reported, shows that Clinton met with Rice in Clinton’s office from 9:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Sept. 14, 2012 — two days before Rice misled the American people.

The emailed schedule shows only that a meeting with Rice was planned. No subject was referenced. But a previously released Sept. 14, 2012, email that White House aide Ben Rhodes sent to several high-ranking administration staffers had the subject line: “RE: PREP Call with Susan: Saturday at 4:00 p.m. ET.”

At that prep session, Rice was told “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”
Was this narrative concocted that morning when Clinton and Rice met?

What difference, at this point, does it make?

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Joint Chiefs chairman: ‘We have not contained’ ISIS.

The United States has “not contained” the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the nation’s top military officer said Tuesday, contradicting President Obama’s remarks last month about the terror group.

“We have not contained” ISIS, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told lawmakers at a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

The comment runs counter to what the president said days before ISIS launched a string of attacks across Paris.

“I don’t think they’re gaining strength. What is true is that from the start, our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them,” Obama told ABC News.

Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, later said the president’s remarks applied specifically to Iraq and Syria.

Dunford said ISIS has been “tactically” contained in areas they have been since 2010 but added, “Strategically they have spread since 2010.”

His remarks were in response to questioning by Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.) on whether ISIS has been contained at any time since 2010.

Dunford added that ISIS posed a threat beyond Iraq and Syria to countries such as Egypt, Nigeria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon and Jordan.

Related: Analysis: US support for ISIS ‘unprecedented.’

Academic experts fear that American support for radical Islamism has reached “unprecedented” levels, even while it stays well below the support for the extremists seen in other countries.

Academics at George Washington University’s program on extremism found that the types of Americans drawn to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) vary widely in terms of race, age, education and family background. Yet they are largely all united by their use of social media, which ISIS has been able to master as its reach has grown.

“What we do see in the United States is an unprecedented mobilization” that is “bigger than any other mobilization we have seen since 9/11,” said Lorenzo Vidino, the director of the university’s program, said during an event releasing the report on Tuesday.

“It is not as big as some of the European countries that have been affected by the phenomenon,” he added. “But it is, in a historical sense, unprecedented.”

The findings are likely to add new urgency to officials’ concerns about ISIS, which have peaked in the weeks following attacks in Paris that killed 130 people. The Paris violence came on the heels of bombings in Beirut and the downing of a Russian airliner over the Sinai Peninsula, a troubling sign of ISIS’s expansion beyond its self-proclaimed caliphate.

Intelligence and law enforcement officials have repeatedly warned that ISIS’s fluency on the Internet has made it attractive to disaffected Americans who grow radicalized online.

I don’t understand. We have President Lightworker.

OH, THAT BARRY! Your Stupid President: Obama Declares, In Paris, in the Wake of a Mass Shooting Resulting in 132 Deaths, That Mass Shootings Just Don’t Happen Outside the US.

RELAX, WHAT COULD GO WRONG? What’s Next in the Terrifying, Unraveling Russo-Turkish Crisis.

Mr. Putin and Mr. Erdoğan are charismatic strongmen with deep nationalist credentials. They have successfully employed faith mixed with chauvinism to handsome political effect, including nostalgia for lost imperial glory that rankles and scares their neighbors. They are popular with many citizens, who credit them with big economic advances among average people. Their political foes have fled the country in fear, while dissenting journalists and activists get arrested or killed in “mysterious,” never-solved crimes. Above all, they have used quasi-democratic ends to establish very un-democratic regimes, personally profiting in the process. Neither man has any history of backing down in the hour of crisis.

If all this sounds alarming, it should. . . .

In Mr. Erdoğan, Mr. Putin has encountered a foe whose congenital response to the Kremlin strongman’s usual foreign policy playbook of tantrums and threats will be pushback rather than backing down. This matters because Turkey is a key member of NATO and it possesses a large and competent military—though it lacks the several thousand nuclear weapons Mr. Putin controls. Alarming signs are not difficult to detect. Demands in Moscow that Turkey return Hagia Sophia to the Orthodox Church, which fell to the Ottomans in 1453 when Constantinople—now Istanbul—at last was taken by the Turks after centuries of effort, are sure to inflame passions among history-minded Turks of an Islamist bent like Mr. Erdoğan.

Falling back on militant faith and historical grievance in a crisis is seldom an encouraging sign, and NATO needs to make it abundantly clear to Ankara that Article 5, the Alliance’s collective defense clause, does not apply if Turkey goads Russia into an avoidable war. That said, Moscow must understand that it cannot bully a NATO member without consequences either.

Ideally, both Putin and Erdogan would lose, but unfortunately, a lot of other people would lose along with them.

PRIORITIES: Israel Invests in Desalinization; California Builds High-Speed Rail.

THINGS GEEKS LIKE: The Star Wars folding screens just unveiled at Kyoto’s Kiyomizu Temple are amazing.

NEVER ASSUME: Someone living in a communist regime has to say certain things to stay alive.  Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. But I understand why people would be hurt.  Liu Cixin to Sci Fi: Drop Dead.

BUILD A BETTER BLANKET: This woman is making a fortune selling massive blankets she knits without needles.

WHEN CHANGE WAS ACCEPTABLE: Climate and Human Civilization over the last 18,000 years, updated.

COOLNESS: Sauropod footprint find makes Skye Scotland’s largest dinosaur site.

OH THE WALRUSITY: The Walrus and the New York Times.

THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE: Russia Spreads Propaganda in Crimea During Blackout.

BUT WHO WILL TAKE HIS PEN AWAY: Government Report: Congress Will Block Obama’s Paris Climate Deal.

SEND THE SNOWFLAKES HOME BEFORE THEY MELT: No, Nissy Aya, Columbia’s Core Curriculum Is Not ‘Traumatizing’. I tell you, these are emotional bubble-children, feeling trauma out of very small things, because their life has been so devoid of hardship.

THE MOTIVES HAVE TO BE THOSE APPROVED BY MARXISTS: Social Justice Morons Blame Income Inequality for the Rise of Daesh.

AS RELIABLE AS ONLINE POLLS: The new cheaper Census brings lots of changes.

WHEN HEATED RHETORIC CAUSES DEATH: Handbills are now appearing in reaction to the Killings at Harpers Ferry Virginia.

APPARENTLY THIS IS NEWS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST: How history got the Rosa Parks story wrong.