A LABOR DAY REMINDER FROM KEVIN WILLIAMSON: We don’t need this quasi-Canadian, crypto-Communist holiday. “There isn’t much good to say about Labor Day, except maybe that it could be worse — it could be on May 1, which would make it a full-on Communist holiday instead of a merely crypto-Communist one. For that we can thank Grover Cleveland, the last pretty-good Democrat (seriously: gold standard, anti-tariff, vetoed twice as many bills as all of his predecessors combined — Rand Paul is a fan), who pushed for the creation of a labor festival in September as cultural competition to the international workers’ celebration in May, sort of the reverse of the strategy of the early Church fathers’ choosing the dates of heathen festivals for the new Christian holidays. So, from the two out of three working-age Americans who are gainfully employed, a round of applause for President Cleveland.”

REMEMBERING THE GOLDEN AGE OF CHEAP CARS. “An array of entry-level wheels such as was never seen before or since.”

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Being a Democrat in the Age of Obama requires you to believe cops kill black kids on purpose but radical Islamists kill Jews by accident.”

UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGY: Massive Ancient Greek city discovered submerged in Aegean Sea.

IS THERE NOTHING THEY CAN’T DO? Video: I caught a fish with my drone!

For the video footage from my drone flights over Rough Creek Lodge in Texas, where we’ll be having our Bullets & Bourbon event in December with Glenn, Roger L. Simon, Stephen Green, Dana Loesch, Ed Morrissey, Kevin D. Williamson and Mark Rippetoe, click here.

LABOR DAY, ‘A PECULIARLY AMERICAN HOLIDAY:’

No other country, I am told, makes a like observance. But in America this high tribute is paid in recognition of the worth and dignity of the men and women who toil.

You come here as representative Americans. You are true representatives. I cannot think of anything characteristically American that was not produced by toil. I cannot think of any American man or woman preeminent in the history of our Nation who did not reach their place through toil. I cannot think of anything that represents the American people as a whole so adequately as honest work. We perform different tasks, but the spirit is the same. We are proud of work and ashamed of idleness. With us there is no task which is menial, no service which is degrading. All work is ennobling and all workers are ennobled.

—Calvin Coolidge on Labor Day in 1924.

THEY ALWAYS LIE, AND THEY ALWAYS DOUBLE DOWN: Hillary Clinton Says No Email Apology: ‘What I Did Was Allowed.’

ILLINOIS: Mourners Line the Streets for Slain Fox Lake Cop’s Funeral.

TWO GRAY LADIES IN ONE! “For Labor Day Drivers, Lowest Gasoline Prices in 11 Years,” the New York Times reports today.

Reminder: The New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, and the Obama administration all consider this to be bad news.

IT’S NICE TO SEE THIS SPIRIT SURVIVES: British man builds helicopter from 54 drones & garden chair. There’s video at the link.

AT AMAZON, Deals and New Releases in Electronics.

CREATING THE VISUAL EFFECTS FOR STEVEN SPIELBERG’S 1941, at the heavily illustrated Matte Shot blog: “Due to the director’s experiences and frustration in endless periods of waiting for opticals to be completed on Close Encounters — with sometimes up to one year between the photography and a final delivered shot, he chose to do as much as possible as in-camera practical shots on 1941.”

JUSTICE: Military selects rarely used charge for Bergdahl case. “Military prosecutors have reached into a section of military law seldom used since World War II in the politically fraught case against Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier held prisoner for years by the Taliban after leaving his post in Afghanistan. Observers wondered for months if Bergdahl would be charged with desertion after the deal brokered by the U.S. to bring him home. He was — but he was also charged with misbehavior before the enemy, a much rarer offense that carries a stiffer potential penalty in this case.”

“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Panetta: Iran Deal Is Bad. Pass It and Prepare for War. “Let’s face it, given the situation in the Middle East, empowering Iran in any way seems like a dangerous gamble.”

Since Panetta’s “bright side” depends on Obama behaving more aggressively against Iran, I think we can write that off.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Overview of molecular machines documents recent progress.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Walter Hudson: Bullying and Teen Suicide Explained: It’s Public Schools. “We teach conformity, then wonder how we get bullies.”

COMING SOON: Jay Nordlinger’s Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators. I’ll just note that, although those dictators usually rose to power on promises of fairness and equality, their kids — take, say, Hugo Chavez’s daughter — somehow always seem to be extraordinarily rich.

FASTER, PLEASE: Patient power will fix our ills.

STOP BEING PETTY, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. LET REPUBLICANS PLAY YOUR MUSIC — “Liberal rock stars shouldn’t allow politics to polarize our music, too,” says…The New Republic(!) — though note this:

No neophyte in the political realm, Springsteen was the first and most famous celebrity scold, rejecting Ronald Reagan and George Will’s extremely tone-deaf attempt to conscript “Born in the U.S.A.” as a mindless hymn of blue-collar patriotism. That episode was probably the only time one of these dustups needed to happen, and the last time it was handled well, since Reagan’s endorsing “Born in the U.S.A.”—a painstaking inventory of the rage and sorrow festering beneath his “Morning in America” platitudes—was like George III whistling Yankee Doodle.

While TNR will never admit it, as Daniel Scotto of the Federalist perceptively wrote earlier this year, “‘Born In the USA’ Now Fits The Conservative Message.” And he’s right — the song is Springsteen’s attack on the Vietnam War, a thoroughly “liberal idea,” as David Gelernter has written, “especially the militarily disastrous first phase, before Abrams replaced Westmoreland in command and Nixon replaced Johnson as president,” the bureaucratic nightmare of the V.A., and the refinery where Springsteen’s protagonist can’t find employment likely due to environmentalist pressures.

“Born in the USA” is an explicit indictment of Great Society overreach; but as Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism, “In the liberal telling of America’s story, there are only two perpetrators of official misdeeds: conservatives and ‘America’ writ large…. Liberals are never responsible for historic misdeeds, because they feel no compulsion to defend the inherent goodness of America. Conservatives, meanwhile, not only take the blame for events not of their own making that they often worked the most assiduously against, but find themselves defending liberal misdeeds in order to defend America herself.”

Of course, to return to TNR’s thesis, perhaps the real reason why Springsteen has shown such disdain first towards Reagan, and more recently Chris Christie and Rick Perry may not only be partisan – the 65 year old multimillionaire vegetarian limousine leftist engaging in cosplay as a 20-something leather jacket-clad grease-monkey may simply be dismissing them as “not our class, dear.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Debt Burdens Students, Economy; Elite Schools Lobby Against Proposal To Cap Graduate School Loans. Of course they do.

DISPATCHES FROM THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: The Insanity of ‘Gender Neutral’ Pronouns.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 851.

RADLEY BALKO On The ‘Terrifying’ New Threat to Free Speech in America.

Radley Balko, the award-winning reporter and author of Washington Post’s opinion blog The Watch, shares his thoughts on the biggest threats to free speech in America today, specifically increased public demand for protection from offensive speech and government crackdowns on extremism.

Balko called the idea that the government should police offensive speech “an impossible standard to enforce.”

“I mean, I’m offended by the notion that I can’t write something that offends people,” said Balko.

“At some level, some government official is going to have to decide whose claims to offense are legitimate,” he said. “We need to live in a society where you can say whatever you want, whenever you want as long as you’re not causing direct harm or violence to someone.”

As for the biggest free speech threats Balko thinks Americans face today:

“Despite the fact that we have a pretty robust First Amendment, there is a threat of government sort of cracking down on what’s seen as extremism,” said Balko.

“That’s terrifying when you think about it. [If] you look back on U.S. history, and the people who were considered extremists in their time, you’re talking about abolitionists, right? You’re talking about people who advocated for desegregation, [and] people who advocated against lynching,” Balko said of the types of views now widely accepted.

Yes, but this time the authorities are right about everything.

SARAH HOYT on “weaponized empathy.” “So, what is weaponized empathy? It is the use of your own best qualities against you.” Yeah, well, I’m happy to put those qualities on the shelf as needed. They’re my best qualities, and you’re not entitled to them if you’re acting badly.