OF COURSE HE DOES, IT’S A RELIABLY DEMOCRATIC CONSTITUENCY: Obama backs special bankruptcy protection for Puerto Rico. “With Puerto Rico buried in debt and on course to completely run out of money by the end of the year, the Obama administration is urging Congress to take unprecedented action to help the island, including granting a type of bankruptcy protection unavailable to the nation’s 50 states. The administration said the broader bankruptcy protection, which would be available only to territories but not fiscally pressed states, is needed to help Puerto Rico avert a mushrooming crisis and restructure its $73 billion in debt.”

There are constitutional questions regarding Congress’s power to make bankruptcy laws for states; I’m not sure whether similar issues would apply here.

VIDEO: Zoom Out the Back of This C-130 Hercules On a Pile of Cargo — And feel your stomach drop out.

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Where’s The Denominator? A newspaper peddles spurious claims about the cruelty of American immigration policy.

SHOT: “You just watch. The moment of simulated agony over a man she didn’t give her email.”

CHASER: Clinton to Benghazi Committee: ‘I’ve Lost More Sleep Than All of You Put Together.’

HILLARY: HEY, I THOUGHT CHRIS STEVENS WAS JOKING ABOUT SECURITY IN BENGHAZI.

YOU KNOW YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THAT, RIGHT? “A drunk man allegedly stripped off on an aeroplane and asked a stewardess for sex – forcing the plane to make an emergency landing…as the plane took off it is alleged the man began stripping off, before taking off his underwear and starting to wave his penis around.”

As Steve Green adds, “I prefer to sit in the non-penis-waving section.”

MAYBE IT SHOULD BE REPLACED WITH SOMETHING MORE CARBON-FRIENDLY, LIKE A BLIMP: The President’s Plane Is Surprisingly Old, And Its Replacement Is Still Years Away.

HEH:

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: Hillary Clinton’s Sidney Blumenthal Problem.

Related: Hillary Clinton’s Enabler-in-Chief.

S.E. CUPP: YES, THE BENGHAZI HEARINGS ARE POLITICAL. SO WHAT?

For the left, everything is political. Why should this be an exception?

Related: Jim Treacher spots a New York Times cover story that perfectly encapsulates The Narrative: “When a Republican screws up, that’s the story. When a Dem screws up, the GOP’s reaction is the story.”

THE GOP IS FACING CONSEQUENCES FROM NOT KEEPING ITS 2010 AND 2014 PROMISES: Lee, Cruz, And Rubio Issue Joint Statement on House Reconciliation Bill. “On Friday the House of Representatives is set to vote on a reconciliation bill that repeals only parts of Obamacare. This simply isn’t good enough. Each of us campaigned on a promise to fully repeal Obamacare and a reconciliation bill is the best way to send such legislation to President Obama’s desk. If this bill cannot be amended so that it fully repeals Obamacare pursuant to Senate rules, we cannot support this bill. With millions of Americans now getting health premium increase notices in the mail, we owe our constituents nothing less.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: CAN CALIFORNIA BE SAVED? “Why is California choosing the path of Detroit — growing government that it cannot pay for, shorting the middle classes, hiking taxes but providing shoddy services and infrastructure in return, and obsessing over minor bumper-sticker issues while ignoring existential crises?”, VDH asks:

But what turned a once bipartisan and purple state bright blue?

A perfect storm of events.

Higher taxes and increased regulations have driven out lots of small-business owners. In the last few years, hundreds of thousands of disgruntled middle-of-the-road voters voted with their feet and left for no-tax Nevada, Texas, or Florida.

The state devolved into a pyramid of the coastal wealthy and interior poor — the dual constituencies of the new progressive movement.

A third of America’s welfare recipients reside in California. Nearly a quarter of Californians live below the poverty line.

Yet nowhere in America are there more billionaires. California’s long, thin coastal corridor has become a tony La-La land unto itself. Some of the highest housing prices in the nation and richest communities are clustered along the Pacific coastline, from the wine country and Silicon Valley to Malibu and Hollywood, dotted by marquee coastal universities and zillionaire tech corporations.

Meanwhile, poorer people in the interior, in places such as Madera and Delano — far from Stanford, Google, Pacific Heights, and Santa Monica — require ever more public services. The very rich don’t mind paying the necessary higher taxes, while the strapped, shrinking middle class suffers or flees.

The Detroit analogy is apt — Zev Chafets of the New York Times wrote his harrowing book Devil’s Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit in 1990, nearly a quarter century before Detroit declared bankruptcy, and his descriptions match the Obama-era reports describing Detroit’s collapse.  Conservatives including Ann Coulter, George Will, and Heather Mac Donald have been sounding the alarm on California’s decline for at least the last 15 years. Comparing their earlier warnings with California’s dire current state as described by VDH illustrates how thoroughly the state has declined in the years since.

But hey, we have gender-neutral bathrooms, so that’s nice.

REVEALED: HILLARY TOLD EGYPTIAN PM DAY AFTER BENGHAZI ATTACK THAT MOHAMMED MOVIE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.

WIRED: Climate Change Is Going to Be Expensive—For Everybody.

That’s why we need to tax the Blue Zones!

HANS BADER: New York Times inadvertently reveals stupidity of “Yes Means Yes” sexual assault policies.

Unfortunately, there is one shortcoming in the New York Times story: it repeats the erroneous idea spread by the San Francisco Chronicle that all drunk consensual sex is already legally rape on campus under California’s “Yes Means Yes” law regulating campus sex. In reality, as defense lawyer Scott Greenfield, legal commentator Walter Olson, and I have all explained earlier, that law only bans incapacitated sex, not all drunk sex. . . .

Although California’s “affirmative consent” law does not ban all drunk sex, some campus “affirmative-consent” policies do, invading the privacy of students (there is no logical reason why a married couple should not be able to have a glass of wine before sex). But California’s law does heavily intrude into people’s private lives, and create a climate of fear, as some of its most outspoken supporters readily acknowledge.

This micromanagement of adult sex lives — and college students are adults, you know — is a violation of the right of sexual privacy protected under Lawrence v. Texas.

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Drivers Push Tesla’s Autopilot Beyond Its Abilities: Tesla says its new Autopilot feature is not synonymous with autonomous driving, but some drivers are acting like it is.

A LOOK AT technologies for interstellar travel.

SPYING: Researchers Prove Connected Cars Can Be Tracked. “You can build a real-time tracking system using off-the-shelf devices with minimum sophistication.”

THIS VIDEO OF TENNESSEE SENATE HEARINGS ON HIGHER EDUCATION AND INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM IS INTERESTING, especially at 1:14 to about 1:29. Note the mention of F.I.R.E. and its green-light rating for UT. It’s a nice contrast with Williams College. . . .

IN MY MAILBOX TODAY, the Tennessee Law Review’s Third Amendment Symposium issue, now out.

You can read my contribution, Third Amendment Penumbras: Some Preliminary Observations, here.

SPECIAL SNOWFLAKES FEAR UNWELCOME THOUGHTS: Suzanne Venker is unwelcome at Williams College. “I don’t know enough about Venker to know whether her talk would have been particularly enlightening. But judging from the reaction of some Williams students to the mere prospect that she would speak on campus, it’s quite clear that enlightenment is something Williams desperately needs. . . . And to think Williams was once considered one of the finest liberal arts colleges in the nation.”

Why, exactly, would anyone value a degree from such an institution?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 896.

SAN ANDREAS: MY KIND OF FAULT: “Look at it this way: Any movie in which Los Angeles and San Francisco are destroyed and then people say the Lord’s Prayer and unfurl an American flag…how bad can it be?”, asks Andrew Klavan, adding exuberantly, “It’s a big action movie! It’s big! It has action! It’s a movie! What are we comparing it to? Hamlet? Relax and pass a happy couple of hours.”

BECAUSE GEEKS DON’T HAVE PERSONAL LIVES: The black geek is hardly a real-world stereotype, but he’s a stock character in Hollywood.