AN ARMY OF MCCLELLANS: The Syria Mess and the Pentagon’s Serial Failures.

The U.S. is running a vast, multi-country war effort that has become unhinged from any serious strategic vision, and we have a military system in which the commanders who see the futility and try to do something about it (and there are plenty) are sidelined. Go along to get along is the way things work in Obama’s Pentagon, and both the White House and the Congress are more interested in making the military look pretty on the parade ground than making it perform effectively in the combat zone.

The President and the political overseers in Congress have made their priorities clear: You can persist with strategies that don’t work for years and still get steadily promoted up the ladder as long as you jump through hoops about integrating women and gays into more military roles. There’s nothing wrong with those goals. Integrating the armed services racially was once attacked by traditionalists as a step that would destroy military cohesion, but it’s made both the U.S. and our armed services much stronger over time. But the essence of military leadership (and effective civilian oversight) is to get the combat missions done with the lowest possible cost and loss of life.

Perhaps choosing between successful military operations and reshaping the makeup of the military doesn’t have to be either/or, but under President Obama we have opted for the latter and tanked the former.

It’s almost as if a strong America isn’t a priority for him.

YES IT IS, AND THE ENDGAME ISN’T LIKELY TO BE PRETTY: Turkey Is In Serious Trouble. “The source of Turkey’s dangerous polarization is Erdogan himself. Erdogan has won successive elections since 2002, and built a cult of personality, as a kind of authoritarian underdog, portraying himself as a victim who is forced to crack down harshly on those whose ‘conspiracies’ undermine his authority. On this basis, he has successfully targeted and politically brutalized the secular Turkish military, businesses, liberals, the media, Jews, left-wing voters, Alevis, and now the Kurds.”

Fortunately, America would never elect anyone like that to high office.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Obama saves himself by gunning down Democrats’ electoral chances: Talking about gun control keeps the spotlight off foreign policy failure and a sputtering U.S. employment engine.

GATES, JOBS, SPIELBERG, SPRINGSTEEN, SELLECK, BLOOMBERG … AND KALEY CUOCO AS A JEDI, AT THE LONGINES MASTERS: “Gender equality, yes. Income equality – not so much.”

If this keeps up, people may start to wonder if Springsteen’s whole leather jacketed everyday working man pose (and more recently a dilettantish affair with Occupy Wall Street) is merely a brilliant disguise, to coin a phrase.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE: Report: 1 in 5 campus rape reports are false.

It turns out the “one-in-five number” is correct, but it’s not the one-in-five the media are reporting. Harvard University released its sexual assault statistics as part of federal regulations, and it turns out 18.1 percent of reported rapes on campus are “unfounded,” defined by Harvard police as “any report of a crime that is found to be false or baseless.”

If this number is reported anywhere in the media that’s so eager to report every faulty survey purporting to show 20 percent of women are sexually assaulted in college, you can bet they will add in all the caveats they leave out in reporting incidences of sexual assault.

They’ll say it’s “heavily edited.”

Related: One in 375 Women May Be Victims of Campus Rape at Harvard. Nearly one in five Harvard rape reports determined to be unfounded.

HARRY REID: SOME CONGRESSMEN AND SENATORS ARE ‘ACTING AS PUPPETS FOR THE NRA.’

This trigger-happy senator in particular seems particularly shifty:
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I’d invite Harry Reid to Bullets & Bourbon in December, but he doesn’t seem like he’d enjoy it as much these days. Plus it’s a family-friendly venue, and he’s never responded to all those rumors…

WELL, GOOD. IT SEEMS LIKE MORE CORPORATIST CRONYISM: Obama’s Trade Deal Under Fire From Right And Left.

SECRET PLAN TO DISARM BLUE STATES ADVANCES TOWARD COMPLETION: San Francisco’s Last Gun Store Is Closing.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: U.S. military struggles to explain how it wound up bombing Doctors Without Borders hospital. Note that it’s a “military” error, not one attributed to President Obama. I don’t remember President Bush being treated quite the same way.

REUTERS: OBAMA ADMIN ALL BUT GAVE UP ON PROSECUTING IRAN SANCTIONS VIOLATIONS AFTER 2013.

Hey, from the Obama administration’s perspective, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter — and sadly, from Reuter’s perspective as well.

AND THANK GOODNESS FOR THAT: Chris Mintz Defies The Age Of The Beta Male: Not everyone succumbs to the cowardice of our time. Take Chris Mintz, who fought the Oregon shooter last week.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Chaffetz: ‘Gig Economy’ Is ‘Flowing’ Because Government Is Not Involved.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, expressed concern that the federal government might try to intervene in the “gig economy” and over-regulate companies such as Uber.

“One of the reasons I think this economy is flowing and this sector is flowing is because government hasn’t been involved. It has been the Wild Wild West. It has been tapping into that entrepreneurial spirit,” he said at a POLITICO discussion called “Generation Next: The Future of Work.”

“It’s been tapping into young people’s idealism that says you can make money. You can be an entrepreneur and you can do something without having to wear a tie. You can do it in your bathroom, if you would like, and you can do it at your own pace and your own creativity,” he added.

Chaffetz said he is “deeply concerned” the federal government is going to interfere and attempt to suddenly “save people from themselves.”

“I’m worried about that. I like the Wild West. I like the idea that entrepreneurs can thrive,” he said. “I worry that the government will come in and over-regulate it and create more barriers and slow people down.”

He also said there is a “generational” problem in Congress that could ultimately hurt the state of the gig economy, which is based on independent contract work.

The political system is scurrying to find ways to shut the gig economy down, or to extract graft from it. Because, you know, extracting graft is mostly what they’re about.

HER ADMINISTRATION SHOULD REALLY FINISH OFF THE ECONOMY: Hillary Hits Obama for Being Too Strict on Illegal Immigrants on Telemundo.

The L.A. Times put the phrase “funemployment” into wide circulation to Orwellianly describe life in the Obama economy; what phrase will they popularize to disguise the lack of jobs in Hillary’s?

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: The Coming Cultural Shift On Guns, Take 45.

The headline on the Daily Beast in the wake of the shootings at a community college in Roseburg, Ore., didn’t exactly come as a surprise. “The New Crusade for Gun Control: The Brady Campaign hopes we’re about to see a cultural shift in the debate over guns —and has a plan to capitalize on that change.”

What is somewhat surprising is that the press falls for this claim over and over again.

After every gun tragedy, gun control advocates talk about how this latest one is the one that will change American minds about the prevalence of guns in the U.S. And every time, journalists write about it as though it were a real prospect.

But then, sure enough, gun sales go up after each shooting, and nothing, or next to nothing, gets achieved.

After the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the press ran numerous stories about how the scale and horror of that tragedy opened the door to serious gun control laws.

The New York Times, for example, concluded that the massacre “appears to be profoundly swaying Americans’ views on guns, galvanizing the broadest support for stricter gun laws in about a decade, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.”

After spending zero time on gun control during his reelection bid, President Obama made it a top priority of his second term.

But a year after, a Pew Research Center survey found that attitudes were little changed from before the Newton killings. Obama’s plans had fizzled.

And now, a long-term Roper survey finds that public support for gun control laws is lower than it was in 1989, when 65% backed stricter laws. In fact, more now oppose stricter laws than support them.

It’s like the whole gun-control thing is really just virtue signalling for clueless lefties.

BLOODBATH: LOS ANGELES TIMES TO CUT 10% OF STAFF:

While it may be impossible to believe that an upstanding newspaper like The Los Angeles Times, a trusted and beloved publication that describes half-black men as “white supremacists,” is having financial troubles, the fact is that a bloodbath involving at least 10% of newsroom staffers is underway.

The Los Angeles Times staff will be reduced from 500 to around 450, and buyouts are being offered, but not really. There’s some severance and an additional amount that equals a week’s pay for every year of employment. This sounds like less of a buyout than a small incentive to avoid being laid off, which is what will happen if not enough people accept the so-called buyout.

The LA Times is owned by Tribune Publishing, which will be laying off 80 total employees.

Bottom line: The LA Times is doomed. Imagine a left-wing publication that is so poorly edited, so untrustworthy, and so useless, it can’t even survive in one of the most left-wing cities in America. Things are so bad, the paper’s last publisher didn’t even last a year.

Don’t think of it as a bloodbath — think of it as a chance to enjoy “funemployment” — as in, “For the ‘funemployed,’ unemployment is welcome!” — after all, it’s a chance to “Keep rockin'”!

THANKS, BARACK! In Obama era, selling guns has been as good a bet as selling iPhones. “If you’d bought shares of Sturm, Ruger & Co. in 2009, they’d be worth about 10 times as much today. That’s a slightly better return than if you’d bought Apple.”

I wish I’d bought Ruger stock in 2008. And business has been good for my former students’ online ammo company, Luckygunner.com, which they were, er, lucky enough to start in the summer of 2008.

NOAH ROTHMAN: It’s Not A New Cold War. It’s Worse.

WOULD YOU TRUST THIS MEDIA: CNN Turns Mixed Race Oregon Shooter into a White Man. LA Times claims Mercer was a white supremacist.  (Oh, why not? After all entertainment weekly turned a Latin man, a Latina and a man in an interracial marriage into racist, sexist and homophobic bigots who want to keep women and minorities out of science-fiction.  Dizinformazia. It’s what they do.)

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): This photo-lightening report has been walked back, and is apparently false. Sadly, all too believable in light of past media behavior.

IT WOULD HELP IF THEY DIDN’T LIE: by omission and commission, by what they’ve reported and what they’ve failed to report. Why Americans don’t trust the media.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED (AGAIN): Bill Clinton White House suppressed evidence of Iran’s terrorism.

IS THAT ALL? Time’s Erica Williams Simon Overstates Slut Walk Attendance by a Mere 5,000%

GO ON, GUESS:What Do They Have in Common? But give the bureaucrats more power.  This time they’ll get it right.  Pinky swear.

THEY DON’T;THEY DRINK THEIR OWN INK: How Do They Know?

SO, THE REVERSE OF VIRGIN SACRIFICE: Attack of the Killer Virgins!