NO ONE LIKES BILL DE BLASIO: “Vanity Fair profile littered with unflattering quotes,” as spotted by Lachlan Markay of the Washington Free Beacon, who includes these gems:

From “a longtime political operative who admires the mayor”: “I’ve known Bill a long time, and he is really more like a liberal professor or political activist than he is actually a mayor. If you look at mayors around the country, look at Rahm in Chicago, Garcetti in L.A., they tend to be more nonpartisan than not. They tend to be problem solvers: ‘What’s the problem? What’s the solution?’ Bill comes from a very different perspective. When Bill is presented with a problem, I always imagine him musing, ‘Hmm, what’s my political philosophy on this?’ He’s not a natural manager—I mean, that’s an understatement.”

* * * * * * * *

From an “operative and longtime acquaintance of the mayor’s”: “The founding myth of the de Blasio administration is that people heard his transcendent vision about income inequality and there was a mandate for that … when in fact there was a win by default. He was elected because he was running against three Democrats and a Republican who ran a shitty campaign … He has taken this as a mandate for running this city on what he campaigned on. Bill thinks he was elected on income inequality, and he wasn’t. I think he misunderstands the electorate.”

So Obama on the Hudson, then?

THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS WAS JUST A NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? 35 MILLION migrants heading to Europe, says Hungary as it builds second fence.

EUROPE’S HOLIDAY FROM HISTORY HAS BEEN OVER FOR A WHILE, BUT ITS LEADERS ARE JUST BEGINNING TO NOTICE: Europe’s Migrant Crisis: Ideals vs. Realities. “What Germany has created through three weeks of unrestrained idealism is a policy quagmire that may reverberate for generations.” That’s the price you pay for virtue signalling by the powerful.

OOPS: “Feminists have long argued that women should pursue careers just like men do. Now that many women have successfully done so, however, they are beginning to resent the fact that while they are toiling away at the office, there are free-spirited dudes watching Bravo TV while eating artisanal snacks back at their apartments.”

I WAS ALREADY PRETTY CONVINCED: 10 Stories That Prove Gurkhas Are the Fiercest Fighters on the Planet.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Watchdog finds widespread fraud at U.S. Census Bureau.

WAPO: This Ted Cruz booster is 13, black, and just shredded Obama on clock kid. “When Kate Steinle was gunned down by an illegal immigrant, you didn’t do anything. You didn’t even call the family. You didn’t invite them to the White House. Is that okay? I don’t think so, Mr. President.”

CHANGE: Post-Debate Poll: Fiorina Surges to First Place, Tied With Trump. It’s a real (robo-)poll, not an online poll. “A post-debate poll conducted by Gravis Marketing for One America News Network (OAN) shows Carly Fiorina jumping to first place at 22%, tied with Donald Trump. In their previous poll, Fiorina ranked 7th with 2.7% of the vote.”

FLEEING THE SINKING SHIP: Big business donors, Obama cabinet drop Clinton charity event.

More bad news for the Clintons. With Hillary’s presidential campaign slipping in the polls against Sen. Bernie Sanders and facing a potential fresh challenge from Vice President Joe Biden, six giants of the corporate world are bailing out on the Clinton Global Initiative.

On Sept. 26, CGI, a branch of the Clinton Foundation, convenes its 11th annual meeting with a star-studded cast. Bill and Chelsea Clinton will be joined by Ashley Judd, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Ted Danson, Tina Brown, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sir Richard Branson, Bill Gates and George Soros. What will be missing is more than a million dollars from a who’s who of corporate behemoths that sponsored the meeting last year. Six high-profile firms ended their cash donations, to be replaced with only one similar high-profile corporate donor so far.

USA TODAY has confirmed that sponsors from 2014 that have backed out for this year include electronics company Samsung, oil giant ExxonMobil, global financial firms Deutsche Bank and HSBC, and accounting firm PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers). Hewlett-Packard, which just announced major layoffs, will be an in-kind donor instead of a cash contributor, and the agri-chem firm Monsanto has cut back its donation. Dow’s name is missing from the donor list as well, but the chemical company’s exit is not confirmed.

High-profile corporations might not be the only key supporters backing away from association with the Clinton family’s charitable arm. In 2014, eight national leaders, kings, presidents and prime ministers, appeared on the program for CGI’s annual meeting, including the president of the United States and the prime minister of Japan. This year, only leaders from Colombia and Liberia are currently on the program.

You almost feel sorry for Hillary as the inevitability falls apart again. Almost.

CHANGE: A Nuclear Evolution Is Occurring In Tennessee.

While it’s been a long and slow process, the Tennessee Valley Authority is moving closer to starting up one of its nuclear plants that it expects will displace coal and help curb the region’s carbon emissions.

Most of the attention is now given to those merchant nuclear units that are in the process of closing, with little focus on the gradual development of TVA’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant Unit 2. Originally licensed in 1972, it shut down in the 1980s because of security and economic concerns. Now, though, the Clean Power Plan has thrust this plant forward.

That final regulation released in August requires a 32 percent cut in carbon emissions by 2030, from a 2005 baseline. It gives full recognition to all new nuclear plants or those existing ones that make upgrades, although it does not give current nuclear plants any credit for carbon reductions. With that, Watts Bar 2 is expected to rev up this year — long before 2020, which is when Southern Co SO +2.33%. and Scana Corp. are to complete two units each.

All are to be baseload plants that run around-the-clock. The two units at Southern and the two at Scana will each generate about 2,200 megawatts. TVA’s Watts Bar 2 will crank out 1,150 megawatts. For the record, nuclear power has the greatest “capacity factors” of all power generation, or 92 percent; wind and solar energy are half that.

If you’re worried about carbon emissions, you need to support nuclear power, or you’re not serious.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 862.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Cascading Border Closures Rock Europe.

Europe is experiencing a series of cascading border closures, rippling outward like circuit breakers tripping during a power surge. A week ago, Denmark suspended its rail link to Germany. On Monday, Germany closed its border with Austria. Austria, Slovakia, and the Netherlands all clamped “temporary” border restrictions into place.

On Tuesday, Hungary sealed its border with Serbia; yesterday, Hungarian border guards used water cannons, tear gas, and truncheons to beat back a sea of migrants. This in turn forced more than 5,000 people to seek an alternate path through Croatia north to Slovenia and Germany. Croatian authorities indicated that while they want to help, Croatia’s capacity for handling migrant flows was limited to the thousands, not to the tens of thousands. And then Slovenian authorities today announced that they would reinforce their border with Croatia, potentially creating another dead end for the thousands of migrants massing in the Balkans.

This was inevitable when Brussels and Berlin signaled a determination to treat the immigration problem—which is a hybrid refugee crisis and migrant moment—in purely humanitarian terms. Those languishing in the south of Europe or even in refugee camps in Turkey heard the official declarations as an open-ended invitation to the generous, prosperous, new Germany; they rushed northward and overloaded the system.

European leaders had no practical plans to deal with the wave of migrants they were encouraging. While some of the border shutdowns—such as Hungary’s—were triggered by ideology, many are a matter of logistics. Germany, it turns out, has absolutely no legal immigration mechanism. It hasn’t enforced a land border since 1995. Is it any wonder it wasn’t able to process the inflow into Bavaria, despite the government’s best intentions? Now, border controls are now rippling from the desirable destinations in Europe (Germany and Scandinavia) outward to its more remote borders.

The Gods of The Copybook Headings smile and nod.

COMPARISON: Ted Cruz’s Scorpion Ad vs. Ronald Reagan’s Bear-in-the-Woods ad.

FROM “LET THEM IN” TO “GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS” IN RECORD TIME: E.U. nations pull welcome mats for migrants, imposing new restrictions.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: On campus political correctness, Obama gets it right: Even our Democratic president understands blacklisting conservative speakers doesn’t promote learning.

ASHE SCHOW: One year since White House launched ‘It’s On Us’ campaign, where are the results?

On Sep. 19, 2014, the White House launched the “It’s On Us” campaign, its latest attempt to combat campus sexual assault.

If the measure of a successful program is the number of celebrities that endorse it, then “It’s On Us” has been a rousing success. But in the year since the campaign was launched, the Obama administration has been unable to point to one tangible success of the program.

Earlier this month, the administration sent out a “fact sheet” highlighting the first year of the campaign and including everything President Obama and his administration has done to combat sexual assault and violence against women. One thing noticeably absent from the press release: One iota of evidence that any of the numerous committees, task forces, programs, campaigns or speeches has made a dent in the number of sexual assaults.

The only tangible result that this campaign was intended to produce was a firming up of the “War On Women” narrative that was supposed to solidify female votes for Hillary. Problem is, it turns out women don’t much like Hillary. Men either.

And, hey, campus sexual assault has already been dropping on its own since 1992, so no harm done.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Obama’s Messy Iraq Intelligence Scandal: We’ve heard tales of ‘cherry-picked intelligence’ before—it hasn’t ended well.

THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS WAS JUST A NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? On the edge of Europe, more and more refugees reach this idyllic Greek island.

UPDATE: Chaos in Croatia as Hungary Closes Border. “Migrants flooding into Croatia will be ‘moved on’, PM Zoran Milanovic has warned, adding that his country cannot become a ‘migrant hotspot’.”

ROLL CALL: With Boehner Squeezed, Pelosi, Reid, Obama Unified on Shutdown Strategy.

If they passed a normal budget, with separate spending bills for each department, instead of continuing resolutions, there wouldn’t be a credible threat of a shutdown. So why don’t they do that? . . .

Related: House GOP invokes ‘martial law’ for avoiding shutdown.

ANNALS OF SMART DIPLOMACY^TM: Finger-Pointing, but Few Answers, After a Syria Solution Fails.

By any measure, President Obama’s effort to train a Syrian opposition army to fight the Islamic State on the ground has been an abysmal failure. The military acknowledged this week that just four or five American-trained fighters are actually fighting.

But the White House says it is not to blame. The finger, it says, should be pointed not at Mr. Obama but at those who pressed him to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place — a group that, in addition to congressional Republicans, happened to include former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At briefings this week after the disclosure of the paltry results, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, repeatedly noted that Mr. Obama always had been a skeptic of training Syrian rebels. The military was correct in concluding that “this was a more difficult endeavor than we assumed and that we need to make some changes to that program,” Mr. Earnest said. “But I think it’s also time for our critics to ‘fess up in this regard as well. They were wrong.”

In effect, Mr. Obama is arguing that he reluctantly went along with those who said it was the way to combat the Islamic State, but that he never wanted to do it and has now has been vindicated in his original judgment. The I-told-you-so argument, of course, assumes that the idea of training rebels itself was flawed and not that it was started too late and executed ineffectively, as critics maintain.

Either way, it underscored White House sensitivities about the widening Syrian catastrophe.

Out: The Buck Stops Here. In: I’m Passing This Buck Anywhere I Can. Worst. President. Ever. And with language like this, even the New York Times seems to be starting to acknowledge his failure.

REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE POWER RANKINGS: Welcome to politics as sports, as Roger Simon ranks who’s going up and who’s going down in the endless primary season.

THE BLACK HOLE OF THE TV NEWS INDUSTRY: “78% of CNN’s GOP primary coverage was devoted to Trump,” the Legal Insurrection blog notes; I clocked at least 40 minutes of wall-to-wall Trump obsession by Anderson Cooper last night during my hour at the gym.

RELATED: Have we reached “Peak Trump?” As James Lileks once said, “joyless monomania is death” to any publication, and it’s pretty painful to watch in a TV network as well. If Trump’s popularity descends to the middle of the GOP pack, what story will CNN obsessively glom onto next?

THE HILL: Go ‘nuclear’ to stop Obama’s Iran deal, urge 57 House Republicans in letter.

Dozens of House Republican lawmakers are making a late stab at pressuring Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to abandon the filibuster on legislation to block the nuclear deal with Iran.

A total of 57 House lawmakers signed on to a letter led by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) telling McConnell that blocking the deal was “simply so consequential” that it demanded a change to the Senate’s rules, known as invoking the “nuclear option.”

“Our request to eliminate the filibuster for some votes simply underscores that in a democracy the majority should decide,” they wrote. “The super-majority now required to advance legislation is 60 votes, which is not serving our country well.”

The letter is part of a sentiment that has grown dramatically in the House in recent days, as it became increasingly apparently that critics of the Iran accord would fall short of being able to send a resolution of disapproval to the president’s desk. As The Hill had previously reported, Smith began circulating the letter on Capitol Hill earlier this week.

Senate Democrats successfully filibustered legislation killing the deal on three separate occasions this month, most recently on Thursday. Despite the support of some Democrats, opponents of the Iran pact could not muster the 60 votes needed to move forward with rejecting it.

McConnell has firmly rejected calls to change the Senate’s rules.

I was hoping for more from a Republican Senate.