WASHINGTON POST COMPARES COUNTY CLERK KIM DAVIS TO GEORGE WALLACE: To be fair, they’re both Democrats, but in a rare double feature edition of “Name that Party,” you wouldn’t know that from reading the Post’s article.

(Via NewsBusters.)

MAN-CESSION: Why those working-age men who left the U.S. job market aren’t coming back. “Meanwhile, many workers who have been able to land only part-time jobs are finding that a stronger economy doesn’t necessarily lead to more work hours. The number of part-time workers wanting to work full time remains unusually high today, and there’s some evidence that this increase since the recession is largely permanent.”

BUT THE MESSAGE WILL SOON BE FORGOTTEN: “The Kentucky Miracle: Kim Davis Teaches Liberals to Value the Rule of Law.”

Nonsense — as impeached Federal judge, Democrat Rep. and Florida Man Alcee Hastings said about Obamacare in 2010, “There ain’t no rules here, we’re trying to accomplish something…. All this talk about rules, when the deal goes down, we make ’em up as we go along.”

From Lois Lerner to Obama’s arrests of multiple video makers to Hillary’s “badass” illegal email server, Hastings’ quote neatly sums up the events of the last eight years.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Does Andrew Cuomo think only women can be victims of sexual assault?

In a recent speech at New York University, Gov. Andrew Cuomo appeared to suggest that only women can be victims of sexual assault and that only men are perpetrators.

“Every woman should know that — that they have more rights than they had before,” Cuomo said. “And every male should know … you’re not getting away with what you got away with before.”

Yes, women are more likely to report being sexually assaulted. They’re also more likely to report that a man was the perpetrator. But there are male victims of sexual assault, and there are female perpetrators.

Part of the lack of male reporting may come from the stigma of being a male victim. One sees it most prominently in cases involving high school students and their teachers. When a male teacher has sex with a female student, the story is reported as a helpless underage woman being taken advantage of by a man in a position of power. But when a female teacher has sex with a male student, it is suggested he wanted it. You know, because the assumption is that all that men want is sex, all the time.

Such bias against male students is prevalent on college campuses, where an alleged epidemic of sexual assaults on female students has led to an evisceration of due process rights and a guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality.

Cuomo’s remarks come as he promotes his latest campaign to combat this alleged epidemic.

What’s he going to do when Hillary quits the race and the whole War On Women narrative is obsolete?

SECOND ANNUAL INDIE AUTHOR LABOR DAY SALE: Sabrina Chase’s The Long Way Home, 99c

SECOND ANNUAL INDIE AUTHOR LABOR DAY SALE: Peter Grant’s Take the Star Road at 99c.

WHOSE PROBLEM: Genocide, Islam and Weaponized Empathy.

NO FEAR: Fear is the Mindkiller.

WHOSE EDUCATION: Protecting the religious liberties of the city’s Jewish schools.

ADDED VALUE:Project Thor: Denmark’s first astronaut arrives at International Space Station with Lego.

UNEXPECTEDLY:Thousands of cancer patients to be denied treatment. Common drugs for breast, bowel, prostate, pancreatic and blood cancer will no longer be funded by the NHS following sweeping cutbacks. … BUT Great Britain had a pony and our progressives wanted one too. So they assured everyone that everything over there was running beautifully.

THE SMASHING TRUMPKINS: Billy Corgan applauds Trump for ‘f—ing’ up the political class.

SHE DIDN’T SCREAM MICRO-AGGRESSION:Brazilian mugger pleads for ‘daddy’ after trying to rob professional female MMA fighter.

AT AMAZON, it’s the September Baby Sale! (Note: No actual babies being sold.)

Plus, the new OnHub Wireless Router.

BELTWAY REPORTER DISCOVERS AMERICA: I called this place ‘America’s worst place to live.’ Then I went there.

POLL: Americans now see a war on police, and they know who to blame. “Rasmussen found that fully 58% of voters believe there is a war on police these days, while 27% disagree and 15% simply can’t decide. But here’s an interesting twist: Many might expect different views of this situation by various races. But not this time. White voters see the assault on law enforcement at a 60% rate. Blacks and other minorities say almost the same, 54% and 56% respectively.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Utah Law School Celebrates Opening Of New Building With Audacious Goal: 100% Bar Passage, 100% Professional Employment.

Setting goals is easy.

“RIDING A BIKE AROUND CAMPUS SUCKS.” Enterprising University of Texas student drives Barbie Jeep around campus after DWI. The Insta-Daughter had one of these when she was 3 and loved it, but I think top speed was only about 3 mph. I guess it beats walking. . . .

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Macroscopic mechanical manipulation controls molecular machine array.

UPDATE: Link fixed.

WELCOME TO THE 21ST CENTURY: Poison-Injecting Robot Submarine Assassinates Sea Stars to Save Coral Reefs. “Bring on the autonomous stabby poison-injecting robot submarines, please.”

WHEN BLACK MUSIC WAS CONSERVATIVE: At City Journal, Howard Husock has a lengthy read the whole thing article on the peak of black popular music in the ‘60s and ‘70s that’s been augmented with plenty of YouTube clips for your listening enjoyment as well:

Some black intellectuals have recognized how whites drive the commercial success and cultural acceptance of rap and hip-hop. Most prominent among them is critic Stanley Crouch, who has called the music “contemporary minstrelsy” and asserted that “no segment of our society has been more deformed and dehumanized than black American popular culture and whatever intellectual seriousness lays before it, from the sidewalk to the hallowed halls of higher education.” Crouch disdains white intellectuals who feel that they “learn something” from the allegedly authentic street culture depicted in rap and hip-hop. In a biting speech at a 2007 forum sponsored by the Los Angeles Times, Crouch recalled asking a white rap fan why he liked the rapper 50 Cent: “ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I feel like that when I put on his records I’m actually getting an experience.’ That’s just bunk, period.” One English rap admirer told Crouch that he enjoys the music because it’s “word-driven.” Crouch replied, “I don’t think that’s why people like you like it. As far as I know, there’s never been a small audience for any idiom that projects the Negro as inferior to the white man. You are not going to tell me that when you read those lyrics so-called, you think the person who wrote them is equal to you. I think that’s the point.” Crouch’s sentiments are echoed by some African-American academics—notably, Niagara University’s Raphael Heaggans, author of The 21st Century Hip-Hop Minstrel Show: Are We Continuing the Blackface Tradition?

Criticism of rap and hip-hop, at least in some black quarters, suggests the possibility that cultures don’t change completely and that the currents of optimism and uplift that characterized the classic soul period will resurface. Consider, for instance, the sign outside the legendary Marigold, Mississippi, “juke joint” called “Po’ Monkeys.” Outside what is little more than a shack in the Mississippi Delta—but one featuring traditional soul and blues—one finds a drawing that warns against entering with low-hanging pants, along with this printed admonition: “No Loud Music. No Dope Smoking. No Rap Music.”

Signs of hope can also be found in some wildly popular contemporary black music, such as 2000’s “Ms. Jackson,” the poignant Number One hit by Atlanta-based hip-hop duo OutKast. In it, the rappers appeal to the mother of the singer’s girlfriend, petitioning—almost the way one might ask a sweetheart’s parents for her hand—for acceptance. Having gotten his girlfriend pregnant, the singer pledges to be there for his child’s first day of school and graduation, even envisioning the possibility of a lifelong relationship. “Me and your daughter got a special thang going on. You say it’s puppy love, we say it’s full grown. Hope that we feel this way forever.” Even more notable is Beyoncé’s 2008 megahit “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” in which she tells an ex-boyfriend, jealous of her new relationships, that if “you liked it then, you should’ve put a ring on it.” Her husband, Jay-Z, took that advice.

Perhaps a generation marked by the persistence of a black underclass, inner-city crime, and family breakdown will eventually turn away from rap and hip-hop’s hedonism, outlaw ethos, and misogyny. If it does, black music may once again become a messenger for what America’s first black president famously called hope and change.

I wouldn’t hold my breath — as I noted last month, Motown and the Beatles were lucky to be creating their incredible music in the 1960s, when they were still the counterculture — the original popularizers of the American songbook, Bing and Frank and Ella and Nat and their songwriters and arrangers were all still alive and still making music. (And in instrumental jazz, Duke and Count and Miles and Gil and Brubeck.) Both rock and black music could survive another decade after the downfall of both institutions in the early 1970s — the breakup of the Beatles and Berry Gordy abandoning Detroit and his virtuoso house band, the Funk Brothers – because the shadows their work cast were so long. But by the mid-‘80s, both rock and black music were running on fumes. When black music in particular has lobotomized its craftsmanship by jettisoning melody and harmony, where can either form go now for what Tom Wolfe calls “The Great Relearning?”

Which brings us to John Podhoretz’s review of Straight Outta Compton in the latest edition of the Weekly Standard. After noting that Sinatra had his thug like moments – being friendly with the mob, and not so friendly with his myriad groupies, Podhoretz writes, “The difference, of course, was that Sinatra sought to make beauty, while NWA sought to embody, personify, and reflect the rage of its audience:”

And here, I guess, one has to suspend a certain kind of judgment and pay obeisance to the market. Sinatra was a voice of his time, and NWA was a voice of its time. And both have stood the test of time​—​so far.

The success of Straight Outta Compton raises the surviving members of NWA (the depiction of Eazy-E’s death from AIDS in 1995 brings the movie to a close) to the level of cultural elder statesmen. It’s been 27 years since NWA released the album that gives Straight Outta Compton its name. Ice Cube, who shouted “F— tha Police,” will soon appear in the sequel to his hit 2014 movie Ride Along​—​in which he plays a hard-bitten cop. (His son, O’Shea Jackson Jr., plays him in Straight Outta Compton.) Dr. Dre sold his headphones company to Apple last year in a deal that made him $620 million in a day​—​and, as a good employee, released his first album in 16 years exclusively on his corporation’s horrendous new Apple Music platform.

Meanwhile, the pop form they helped pioneer is now so enshrined that a hip-hop biography of Alexander Hamilton on Broadway has made its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the most celebrated artistic figure in America. And as for the output of NWA itself? I still prefer beauty to rage, but rage is infectious and multigenerational. For as Philip Larkin also said, “Man passes on misery to man / It deepens like a coastal shelf.”

Which sadly, is the answer to the conclusion of Husock’s article at City Journal.

MEIN FÜHRER…I CAN WALK!!! Seven Movies About Nuclear Nightmares.

As Glenn noted last month in USA Today:

When the Cold War ended, people forgot about [stuff like duck and cover], to the point that when I teach Cold War material in my Constitutional Law or National Security Law courses, I find that my law students, except for a few military veterans or emergency-services types, know nothing about basic nuclear weapons facts that almost everyone knew as late as the 1980s. But now it may be time for that knowledge to come back.

Israel and India have the bomb, but they’re not threats. Russia and China have the bomb, and they’re not entirely friendly. Pakistan has the bomb, and it’s not so friendly. North Korea has nukes and issues periodic threats. And now Iran is on track to get the bomb, and the Iranians are still shouting “Death To America” at every opportunity. It’s just possible that they might mean it.

Nahh, lovely lads, those chaps. Mr. Obama and his cronies have announced that he’s delivering “Peace in Our Time”; I’m sure the mullahs share the same good wishes to all, right?

HOW SOCIAL MEDIA IS RUINING POLITICS: With a headline like that, you won’t be surprised to learn that Nicholas Carr, who in 2008 asked “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the Atlantic, the first draft of his 2010 book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, isn’t a fan of social media. At the Politico, he places it into context with the 20th century’s communication revolutions and their impact on national politics:

Twice before in the last hundred years a new medium has transformed elections. In the 1920s, radio disembodied candidates, reducing them to voices. It also made national campaigns far more intimate. Politicians, used to bellowing at fairgrounds and train depots, found themselves talking to families in their homes. The blustery rhetoric that stirred big, partisan crowds came off as shrill and off-putting when piped into a living room or a kitchen. Gathered around their wireless sets, the public wanted an avuncular statesman, not a firebrand. With Franklin Roosevelt, master of the soothing fireside chat, the new medium found its ideal messenger.

In the 1960s, television gave candidates their bodies back, at least in two dimensions. With its jumpy cuts and pitiless close-ups, TV placed a stress on sound bites, good teeth and an easy manner. Image became everything, as the line between politician and celebrity blurred. John Kennedy was the first successful candidate of the TV era, but it was Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who perfected the form. Born actors, they could project a down-home demeanor while also seeming bigger than life.

Today, with the public looking to smartphones for news and entertainment, we seem to be at the start of the third big technological makeover of modern electioneering. The presidential campaign is becoming just another social-media stream, its swift and shallow current intertwining with all the other streams that flow through people’s devices. This shift is changing the way politicians communicate with voters, altering the tone and content of political speech. But it’s doing more than that. It’s changing what the country wants and expects from its would-be leaders.

What’s important now is not so much image as personality. But, as the Trump phenomenon reveals, it’s only a particular kind of personality that works—one that’s big enough to grab the attention of the perpetually distracted but small enough to fit neatly into a thousand tiny media containers. It might best be described as a Snapchat personality. It bursts into focus at regular intervals without ever demanding steady concentration.

Perhaps that explains why Trump has been the Teflon Don, cheerfully rebounding from endless gaffes and head-scratching statements that would bury other candidates. As Leon Wolf wrote last month at Red State, “Trump is the political equivalent of chaff:”

Watching Donald Trump speak and answer questions, though, is like watching a billion targets appear in the sky all at once, for a political opponent. Each thing he says is so bizarre, or ill informed, or demonstrably false, or un presidential in tone or character, that it becomes impossible to know which target to lock on to or focus on. And to the extent that he makes a policy statement, it is so hopelessly vague and ludicrous that it’s impossible to know where to begin, at least within the context of the 30-second soundbite that the modern political consumer requires (and chances are, he will say something diametrically opposed to it before the press conference is over anyway).

Donald Trump is the political equivalent of chaff, a billion shiny objects all floating through the sky at once, ephemeral, practically without substance, serving almost exclusively to distract from more important things – yet nonetheless completely impossible to ignore.

Which, to return to Carr’s theorem, sounds exactly like the nature of Twitter itself, doesn’t it?

Of course, at the start of 2004, plenty of left-leaning pundits were writing think pieces on how Howard Dean was the candidate who had mastered social media, only to see him spectacularly flameout with his infamous YEEEARRRRGH!!!! moment, causing the Democrats en masse to place their bets on a dull plonker like John Kerry. Given his disastrous performance yesterday talking foreign policy with Hugh Hewitt, Trump could similarly implode. (In the meantime, Trump has switched back into the thing he does best: Attack! Attack! Attack! — at least when attack mode is aimed at Republicans.)

As for his Democrat opponent, a question: After narrowly losing the 1960 election in part because of Kennedy’s photogenic looks and his Democrat media operatives, Richard Nixon mastered the skill-set of that decade’s television, rebranded himself as “The New Nixon,” and went on to win the 1968 election. Starting in 2007, the Obama campaign skillfully used the Internet, social media, graphic design, and their friends in the MSM to end-run what Hillary Clinton had so clearly planned at the start of that year as her inevitable coronation. Clinton and her handlers have had years to study how they were broadsided, and adapt accordingly. Why do they seem so awful at stagecraft and packaging in the Internet era?

(H/T fellow Insta-contributor Virginia Postrel.)

IT’S THE 21ST CENTURY. EVERYTHING SHOULD HAVE LASERS. Laser Breakthrough Could Speed the Rise of Self-Driving Cars.

OH, MY: YouGov poll: 64% want a border fence with Mexico — including pluralities of Dems, blacks, and Hispanics.