AT THIS POINT, WHO ISN’T? Is Turkey Going Nuclear?

AVIATION: The Badass Behemoth That the Air Force Will Use for Mid-Air Refueling. “Pretty, it ain’t. It’s based on the Boeing 767, but with matte gray paint covering the layers that protect its highly combustible cargo from attack. But it’ll have the full suite of defensive measures, like missile launch detectors, and can carry 18 fuel pallets per mission. That means the two 94-inch Patt & Whitney engines are flying up to 415,000 pounds of airplane. . . . The US government paid Boeing $50 billion for production through 2028 for 175 units. The final planes will be delivered to the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps in August 2017 according to Boeing’s contract. The Air Force says its added efficiency will save hundreds of millions of dollars in maintenance and repair costs.”

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Michael Scheller, The Threads of Jericho.

ALSO, MORE POPULAR WITH THE LADIES: Robots With Smooth Moves Are Up to 40% More Efficient.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: ‘Sister Wives’ family cites gay marriage ruling in polygamy case. “A polygamous family says the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage shows that laws restricting consensual adult relationships are outdated, even if certain unions are unpopular. . . . The Browns are defending a legal victory they won in 2013, when a federal judge struck down key parts of Utah’s law banning polygamy. Advocacy groups for polygamy and individual liberties called the ruling a significant decision that removed the threat of arrest for the state’s plural families.”

EPA’S CREDIBILITY IN THE TOILET: Federal judge blocks EPA rule on jurisdiction over waterways. U.S. District judge Ralph Erickson (a George W. Bush appointee) has issued a preliminary injunction against implementation of the EPA’s new Clean Water Act rule that would extend the agency’s jurisdiction to virtually every waterway in the country.

Judge Erickson concluded that that the 13 States challenging the rule had established a “likelihood of success” on the merits of their claim that EPA has exceeded its authority:

The Rule allows EPA regulation of waters that do not bear any effect on the “chemical, physical, and biological integrity” of any navigable-in-fact water. While the Technical SupportDocument states that pollutants dumped into a tributary will flow downstream to a navigable water,44 the breadth of the definition of a tributary set forth in the Rule allows for regulation of any area that has a trace amount of water so long as “the physical indicators of a bed and banks and an ordinary high water mark” exist. . . While the Agencies assert that the definitions exclusion of drains and ditches remedies the defect, the definition of a tributary here includes vast numbers of waters that are unlikely to have a nexus to navigable waters within any reasonable understanding of the term. . . .

The Rule asserts jurisdiction over waters that are remote and intermittent waters. No evidence actually points to how these intermittent and remote wetlands have any nexus to a navigable-in-fact water. The standard of arbitrary and capricious is met because the Agencies have failed to establish a “rational connection between the facts found” and the Rule as it will be promulgated. . . .

 Itis within the purview ofthe traditional powers ofthe States to maintain their “traditional and primary power over land and water use.” Once the Rule takes effect, the States will lose their sovereignty over intrastate waters that will then be subject to the scope of the Clean Water Act.

Ouch–the EPA has been officially toasted. The Obama Administration is, as usual, playing hardball and taking the position that Judge Erickson’s opinion only blocks implementation of the waterways rule in the 13 States that were joined as parties to the litigation. Technically this is true, but normally an Administration won’t bother implementing a rule in some states while it is enjoined in others due to broad concerns regarding the rule’s legality. States that didn’t join the North Dakota lawsuit will now have to seek an injunction of their own, and may draw judges who are Obama Administration appointees less inclined to restrain federal executive authority.

So the buck certaily won’t stop with Judge Erickson, and the latest Obama Administration executive power grab looks headed to the Supreme Court.

WHAT A SMARTER DIPLOMACY WOULD BE DEALING WITH: “A new report by two American think tanks asserts that Pakistan may be building 20 nuclear warheads annually and could have the world’s third-largest nuclear stockpile within a decade.”

NARRATIVE FAIL: Donna Brazile praises Bush’s Katrina response on flight with Obama.

Donna Brazile, a prominent Democratic political operative, praised President George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina on Thursday, just hours before President Obama’s speech in New Orleans marking the storm’s 10th anniversary.

Brazile, a Louisiana native, has applauded Bush’s Katrina response before. But she made her latest comments on board Air Force One while flying to the Big Easy with Obama, who has previously criticized’s his predecessor’s handling of the storm recovery.

“Under President Bush’s leadership, we got it right,” she told reporters.

Brazile said Bush’s initial response to the storm was “slow,” but chalked that up to chaos plaguing state and local governments along the Gulf Coast.

Anybody talked to Kanye West lately?

TRUMP CAN’T WIN? THINK AGAIN: HERE’S HOW TRUMP WINS THE GOP NOMINATION: Donald Devine was one of the political strategists who helped Ronald Reagan win in 1980, so he knows something about presidential politics. Love Trump or hate him, Devine’s analysis of the Trump surge is absolutely essential reading.

SHE’S FLAILING: MSNBC Panel Excoriates Hillary Over ‘Absolutely Disgusting’ Remarks: ‘If a Republican Did This, the World Would Come to a Halt.’

DAVID MASTIO: What the alleged TV shooter has in common with the accused train terrorist and church killer.

MURPHY’S LAW FOR PARENTS: 10 Things Guaranteed to Happen With Kids at Exactly the Wrong Time: “We’ve all been there. When you have kids, life can be unpredictable and it’s usually at the wrong time! You feel me parents?,” asks Julie Prince at the PJ Parenting section. “Here are my top 10 joys of ‘Murphy’s Law for Parents.'”

What are yours?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 841.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “Black Lives Matter” Will Have Trouble Micromanaging Cops.

Fundamentally, they’re trying to answer a problem that has perplexed society for a long time: How do we send police out to control crime (which, we should remember, disproportionately affects minorities and the poor), while holding them accountable for not misusing the considerable power we’ve vested in them? It’s a life-and-death version of a broader question economists and business-school types have wrestled with: How do you manage professionals? Unfortunately, so far no one has come up with great answers.

Since police are not usually thought of as members of the professional class, let me define what I mean by a professional: someone who does a lot of work unsupervised, and whose output is important, yet hard to measure. Professionals tend to deal with some of the most sensitive and important issues that our society has, like treating illness and educating our children. It’s no accident that these people generally end up being regulated by their peers — and that the rest of us are frequently unsatisfied with the results. When professional groups decide what’s good for the rest of us, it usually turns out that what they think is good for the rest of us is what’s best for them.

This doesn’t have to be nakedly venal, and it often isn’t. College professors genuinely care about their students, lawyers about their clients, doctors about their patients, journalists about their readers, and yes, police care about the communities they serve. But when a proposal comes up that will hurt them in some way, it’s very easy for the professionals to see all the reasons against it, and to convince themselves that the world will be better off without it. And when it comes time to discipline a member for some offense, unless it is straightforwardly heinous, they will naturally sympathize with the accused, thinking of all the times they made mistakes that could have landed them in the same place.

The alternative seems obvious: Don’t let them regulate themselves. The Black Lives Matter proposal calls for two strong civilian oversight boards that do not include any police representatives, former cops or family members of cops. These boards would no doubt be tough on cops. But there’s a small problem, which is that you would have a board that has, at best, a 50 percent understanding of policing: The members might know what it is to be policed, but they will not know what it is to police. Excluding people with knowledge of the system from your regulatory board is not a formula for good decision making. If you constitute such a body, you are asking for open conflict with your police force, which will justifiably resent being told that they did their jobs wrong, all the more so if the charge is coming from people who have never tried to do the job. Because police officers spend a lot of time operating unsupervised, and do not have measurable outputs other than the time they put in, they will have a lot of ways to rebel against perceived unfairness.

Two thoughts. First, it’s cute to pretend that Black Lives Matter is actually about making policing better when it’s really just another Democratic party constituency agitprop group. Second, if you really want to improve policing (1) abolish official immunity; (2) require insurance for all police; (3) give people a choice of who polices their neighborhoods. That won’t happen, though, because it’s bad for public employee unions and it doesn’t make for appealing slogans designed to drive black voter turnout in November of 2016.

BLUE MODEL JUSTICE IN CALIFORNIA: The public overwhelmingly favors safeguards that law-enforcement unions oppose—and the unions are winning.

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IF THEY’RE NOT RELEASING IT, IT’S BECAUSE IT’S POLITICALLY UNCOMFORTABLE: When Will ABC News Release the Full Vester Flanagan Manifesto? “Two days ago, ABC News reported that Vester Flanagan, the murderer of two WDBJ employees, sent a 23-page faxed manifesto to ABC News. ABC reported bits and pieces of the manifesto. Yet we still haven’t seen the full document. ABC hasn’t made it available. Why?”

IN RESPONSE TO MY POST ON THE COLLEGE BOARD’S AP HISTORY CHANGES, Stanley Kurtz emails that people shouldn’t get cocky:

It’s true that the College Board has been thrown back on its heels by this battle, but it’s way too early to declare victory. The changes to the APUSH framework are largely cosmetic. The textbooks and course syllabi have all been conformed to the controversial 2014 framework. There are no immediate plans to make changes to the guts of the course based on the revised framework. Even if there were, little would change because most of what’s happened is removal of biased phrasing, not the addition of major new directions.

The College Board is trying to deflect criticism and hold off possible business competition, without truly changing its U.S. history course. The only lasting and reliable solution is the creation of a company advised by top traditionalist historians that can compete with the College Board. Only that can restore choice to states and local school districts. Relying on the good faith of the College Board will not work. You can see this in the brand new AP European history framework, which shares all the biases of the original APUSH framework, very much including hostility to capitalism. You can find my take on the 2015 APUSH changes here, and links within that piece to further responses to the APUSH changes.

Eternal vigilance and all that.

THE DEAD HAVE ARISEN — AND THEY’RE STILL NOT VOTING REPUBLICAN! Yes, Really: 141 Counties Have More Registered Voters Than People Alive:

“Corrupted voter rolls provide the perfect environment for voter fraud,” said J. Christian Adams, President and General Counsel of PILF. “Close elections tainted by voter fraud turned control of the United States Senate in 2009. Too much is at stake in 2016 to allow that to happen again.”

As Hugh Hewitt likes to say, if it’s not close, they can’t cheat. And as my friend Stephen Kruiser quipped in 2010, every Republican should assume that his election is well within the margin of ACORN.

(Headline via noted election scholar Bartholomew J. Simpson.)

THEY KNOW THERE’S NO BETTER WAY TO ENSURE A GOP VICTORY IN 2016: Obama Won’t Be Pushing Second Amendment Rollback After Latest Shooting. So they’ll issue some sound bites, and try some under-the-radar gun control, but nothing more.

Meanwhile, Charles C.W. Cooke issues a put up or shut up challenge.

Go on, chaps. Bloody well do it.

Seriously, try it. Start the process. Stop whining about it on Twitter, and on HBO, and at the Daily Kos. Stop playing with some Thomas Jefferson quote you found on Google. Stop jumping on the news cycle and watching the retweets and viral shares rack up. Go out there and begin the movement in earnest. Don’t fall back on excuses. Don’t play cheap motte-and-bailey games. And don’t pretend that you’re okay with the Second Amendment in theory, but you’re just appalled by the Heller decision. You’re not. Heller recognized what was obvious to the amendment’s drafters, to the people who debated it, and to the jurists of their era and beyond: That “right of the people” means “right of the people,” as it does everywhere else in both the Bill of Rights and in the common law that preceded it. A Second Amendment without the supposedly pernicious Heller “interpretation” wouldn’t be any impediment to regulation at all. It would be a dead letter. It would be an effective repeal. It would be the end of the right itself. In other words, it would be exactly what you want! Man up. Put together a plan, and take those words out of the Constitution.

Not likely. Even a flatworm is smart enough to turn away from pain.

THIS IS CNN: “U.S. stocks poised for gains despite new China fall,” a CNN headline that’s the winner of Orrin Judd’s “Fox Butterfield Award of the Week.”

SO IS “SOCIAL SCIENCE” JUST A NICE WAY OF SAYING “MADE-UP SHIT?” Many Psychology Findings Not as Strong as Claimed, Study Says.

The past several years have been bruising ones for the credibility of the social sciences. A star social psychologist was caught fabricating data, leading to more than 50 retracted papers. A top journal published a study supporting the existence of ESP that was widely criticized. The journal Science pulled a political science paper on the effect of gay canvassers on voters’ behavior because of concerns about faked data.

Now, a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested. The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work. Their conclusions, reported Thursday in the journal Science, have confirmed the worst fears of scientists who have long worried that the field needed a strong correction.

The vetted studies were considered part of the core knowledge by which scientists understand the dynamics of personality, relationships, learning and memory. Therapists and educators rely on such findings to help guide decisions, and the fact that so many of the studies were called into question could sow doubt in the scientific underpinnings of their work.

Will the authors of these papers suffer any consequences?

ERIC CANTOR ENDORSES BUSH. Yeah, that’ll boost his credibility.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump mocks:

Who wants the endorsement of a guy (@EricCantor) who lost in perhaps the greatest upset in the history of Congress?

Cantor lost because he was too establishment, too pro-amnesty, too contemptuous of the base. Great choice, Jeb! Do you even want to win?

TRUMP: MCCAIN ON STEROIDS? “Incoherency: Trump, like McCain, represents a grab bag of ideas that have little in common besides simply being his personal preferences,” Henry Gomez writes at PJM.

Even more so than McCain redux, Trump is giving me serious flashbacks to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cruise to victory in the California recall election of 2003. Both are the very definition of media savvy — Arnold in film and Trump in television; both pass the media’s stereotypical “fun guys you would like to hang out with and have a beer” test with ease – and both are ultimately pretty squishy RINOs who will say anything to get elected and placate their base.

When Arnold was running for the governorship, his leftwing True Lies costar Jamie Lee Curtis told Good Morning America that “even though he pretends to be a Republican, I think he’s a social Democrat at heart.” Which turned out to be absolutely spot-on in retrospect, leaving the Republican party, and arguably the state of California for dead by the time he left office at the start of 2011.

How would we describe President Trump after a couple of years in office?