FLASHBACK: “If Europe leaves us in the crisis, we will flood it with migrants, and it will be even worse for Berlin if in that wave of millions of economic migrants there will be some jihadists of the Islamic State too.”

THE MEDIA’S STAGGERING HYPOCRISY ON THE TRUMP QUESTIONER: “Whether Barack Obama is a Muslim or not is, I would think, of far less import than whether 9/11 conspiracy theories are true or not. And yet, observe here when former Democratic Presidential candidate (and former Vice Presidential nominee) John Edwards was confronted with an insane question about whether the government was responsible for causing World Trade Center tower 7 to fall.”

GOOD: American U Faculty Senate Criticizes Trigger Warnings. “The Faculty Senate at American University has passed a resolution affirming the importance of academic freedom and questioning the use of ‘trigger warnings’ that alert students to books or other materials that may be offensive or upsetting to them. The resolution was not prompted by an incident at AU, but concerns — especially among librarians — that they might be asked in the future to provide such warnings.”

OF COURSE IT DOES: New sexual assault survey suffers same problems as others.

A new survey released Monday purports to prove that 1 in 5 women (or more) will be sexually assaulted while in college.

The survey, conducted by the Association for American Universities, included responses from 150,000 students at 27 colleges and universities, including many Ivy League schools. Despite this large number of responses, the survey still suffers from the same problems as so many others trying to prove the existence of “rape culture” and scare colleges into expelling innocent students based on no evidence (or evidence to the contrary).

The researchers who developed the survey acknowledged fairly up front in their report that a “non-response bias” may have resulted in estimates that are “too high because non-victims may have been less likely to participate.” The researchers also acknowledged the large difference in estimates across the 27 schools, meaning that “1 in 5” is not the national percentage of victimhood, despite what every other news outlet will be claiming.

“[M]any news stories are focused on figures like ‘1 in 5’ in reporting victimization. As the researchers who generated this number have repeatedly said, the 1 in 5 number is for a few [institutions of higher education] and is not representative of anything outside of this frame,” the researchers wrote. “The wide variation of rates across IHEs in the present study emphasizes the significance of this caveat.”

Next, the survey’s developers “specifically avoided” using the words “rape” and “assault” so that, as they said, “respondents would use a set of uniform definitions when reporting on the types of events that were of interest.”

A skeptic might see this as an attempt to get higher responses by avoiding such harsh words. Indeed, that’s what the Washington Post did, as they admitted, to get “dramatically” higher results.

The other major problem with this survey and all others is the expansion of the definition of “sexual assault” to include everything from a stolen kiss to forcible rape. When broken down, 11.7 percent (about 1 in 9) of students across all 27 universities “reported experiencing nonconsensual penetration or sexual touching by force or incapacitation” since enrolling in college.

While on paper forced kissing sounds bad, think of how this has been employed in movies without it appearing to be sexual assault. (Remember when Indiana Jones sexually assaulted someone? Neither do I.) Again, on paper this seems bad, and we can all imagine a scenario where a forced kiss is indeed sexual assault, but it seems absurd to assume that all of them are.

Well, it’s not absurd if your goal is to inflate the numbers in support of “War on Women” agitprop in support of Hillary’s floundering campaign, and to create more power and positions for campus educrats.

Plus:

And that brings us to the next problem with this and other surveys: Respondents not believing they were victims of sexual assault. Nearly 60 percent of students who had responded to what researchers defined as sexual assault said they did not report the incident because they did not consider it serious enough. Vast majorities of students gave this as the reason for individual classifications of assaults, including harassment (78.6 percent), sexual touching due to physical force (75.6 percent) and sexual touching due to incapacitation (74.1 percent). These were the types of “sexual assault” most students said they had experienced.

That might imply that students themselves don’t believe what they experienced was sexual assault in the way that the media and the White House want them to believe.

Hey, you can’t have phony solutions if you don’t first have a phony crisis.

REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE SURVIVOR: First they came for Rick Perry, then they came for Scott Walker. Roger Simon asks who will be the next candidate to be booted off the island?

Related: Rubio Moves Decisively in the Wake of Walker Exit.

DEAR HILLARY: THE DEBATE OVER A LAW IS NEVER “OVER.”

ROLL CALL: Foreign Relations Leaders Still Question Human Trafficking Report.

The State Department still has some explaining to do after a closed briefing Thursday with Senate Foreign Relations Committee members over allegations that a report vital to several administration initiatives was watered down for political purposes.

Committee members have cried politics since July when the annual Trafficking in Persons report was released. After Thursday’s briefing, senators called for more transparency in the process that saw Malaysia and Cuba upgraded from the lowest ranking in terms of human-trafficking conditions.

“My concerns were not alleviated in any way,” Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said. “I don’t think there is anybody who was there that didn’t feel even more firmly that politics played a major role in determining some of the upgrades in the TIP report.”

Next you’ll tell me that politics affect intelligence reports, too. Oh, wait. . . .

DAVID CAMERON DIDN’T PORK THAT PIG, BUT THE INTERNET DOESN’T REALLY CARE.

Is the unporked pig perfidious Albion’s journalistic equivalent to Bush’s non-plastic turkey?

IT LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE GOING TO NEED A BIGGER BLOG: The Lessons Lost in the Aftermath of Ann Coulter’s F-Bomb.

BECAUSE NARRATIVE: How is it allowed to go unnoticed that Sanders suggests that economic growth was better under Richard Nixon than under Barack Obama? “There is little to no curiosity among our media elite about how a Democratic candidate for president is able to campaign on a shrinking middle class, record highs of unemployment, record lows of workforce participation, record wage stagnation, and record entitlement dependency, while a Democratic president simultaneously travels around the country touting his economic success on all counts. . . . It seems newsworthy that in the run-up to a pivotal election, a presidential candidate is not only actively campaigning against the record of a sitting president of the same party, but gathering auspiciously large crowds by doing so. Of course, if the media were to report on the fiery John Reed–inspired rhetoric Sanders is blasting out to his zombie hordes at sold-out arenas, the carefully crafted Hollywood script of Barack Obama’s successful presidency would come tumbling down.”

UNEXPECTEDLY! US sees ‘surprising’ spike in border crossings.

The United States saw a spike last month in the number of unaccompanied minors and families illegally crossing the southern border, the White House said Monday.

“We have seen, just in the last month, in the month of August, a surprising uptick,” press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters.

Earnest did not provide exact an exact number but said it was “far below” last year’s peak level, which initially overwhelmed U.S. government resources.

The spokesman said the increase was unusual because the number of unaccompanied minors who cross the border usually falls in August due to extreme heat.

“That is something that is concerning,” Earnest said.

The increase in crossings could raise fears about a repeat of last year, when the U.S. faced a border crisis spurred by people from Central America fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries.

At the crisis’s peak, as many as 10,000 children per month, and 16,000 adults with children, came to the U.S.-Mexico border, according to CNN, which first reported the news about the August figures.

Earnest said administration officials would brief members of Congress on the latest details. And he said the U.S. is redoubling its effort to warn people in Central America about the dangers of the journey.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think they really mind all that much. Now if these illegal aliens were likely to vote Republican. . . .

CHANGE: Pennsylvania Supreme Court strips away State AG Kathleen Kane’s law license.

TWEET IN HASTE, REPENT IN LEISURE: I now owe my lion-slaying dentist a sincere apology.

OF COURSE IT WAS: Heilemann Confirms: It Was Hillary Who Started Rumor Obama Not Christian.

OF COURSE NOT, BERNIE’S A DEM: Would The IRS Revoke The Catholic Church’s Tax Exempt Status If Pope Francis Endorses Bernie Sanders?

YES, VIRGINIA, THERE WAS A JOHN DUVAL GLUCK: Meet the con artist who popularized writing to Santa Claus.

THEY’RE NOT FOR ANIMAL RIGHTS; THEY’RE AGAINST HUMANS: Animal rights activists would stop animal research even when it could save humans.  Mouse Experiments Point to Alzheimer’s Treatment.

IT’S ALWAYS THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: An Unexpected Democratic Revolt.

DALEK: What Type of Non-Person Is Hillary Clinton?

THIS WILL END IN TEARS: IT BEGINS: Muslim demands Munich end ‘anti-Islamic’ Oktoberfest.

FIRST THE RISE OF BERNIE SANDERS, THEN THE IRAN DEAL: Now this.  Doomsday prophets: Don’t buy green bananas with blood moon coming.

YOU’D HAVE TO BE MAD: A British lesson in why voters are flirting with ‘crazy’ candidates.

THE IDEA IS IMPRACTICAL, EXPENSIVE AND SHORT SIGHTED: The folly of teaching computer science to high school kids. And that’s ignoring the fact that any teacher certified in it would have outdated skills by the time he was done.

NO. NEXT QUESTION: Is ‘Macbeth’ Too Bloody for Kids?

SURE GLAD WE WON: Remember during the Clinton administration, the big battle to prevent the census bureau from just “extrapolating” (aka making stuff up) instead of counting?  Yeah.  That sure worked.  See this: Department of Labor needs to own up to fake unemployment numbers.  And this: Sex, lies and threats at the Census Bureau.  … the country is in the very best of hands.