STILL WAITING FOR THIS BLUE ON BLUE CIRCULAR FIRING SQUAD: Why Aren’t Social Justice Warriors Trying to Ruin Hip Hop?

AFTER ALL, IT WAS YOU AND ME: Guess Who Paid for Hillary’s ‘Private’ Server? Look in the Mirror!

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1211.

BIRTH OF A POLICY WONK: TRUMP GETS INTO THE WEEDS ON IMMIGRATION, Roger Simon writes, exploring Trump’s ten-point plan.

SEX, DRUGS AND ROBOTS? Video: Reason’s new editor in chief Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with former Reason editor and author Virginia Postrel (now a columnist at Bloomberg View) at Reason’s Los Angeles headquarters to talk about the future of the magazine as it nears its 50th anniversary:

Plus coming soon: The return of Virginia Postrel to Reason!

PLEASE HEED THE CALL: Ahead of Massive Protest March, Venezuela Opposition Demands Change.

Americo de Grazia, an opposition congressman in the National Assembly for Bolívar state, told NBC News Venezuelans from all parts of the country are traveling to join the march and show the government their “discontent in a peaceful, constitutional and democratic way.”

Venezuelans have vowed to take to the streets to pressure the electoral body, known as the CNE, to move along the recall referendum to oust President Nicolás Maduro. The referendum started earlier this year with the collection of the signatures of 1 percent of the electorate. It’s a process that the coalition of opposition parties, the MUD, says has been marred by a series of setbacks imposed by the president of the CNE, Tibisay Lucena.

This new protest grows out of a frustration at the ravages of the deteriorating economic and political situation.

I probably don’t have to tell you that this NBC News report omitted the word “socialism.”

STATE DEPT. CONFIRMS PJ MEDIA REPORTING ON AMERICAN JOURNALIST ARRESTED IN TURKEY: Lindsey Snell’s “biography notes she has worked for MSNBC, Vice News, ABC News, the Discovery Channel, and Amnesty International, among others,” Patrick Poole writes. “State Department spokesman John Kirby confirmed her arrest during his daily briefing today, stating that she is being held on charges of ‘violating a military zone’… This strange situation comes at a low ebb in U.S. relations with its NATO ally.”

Read the whole thing.

SO MY PHONE JUST WENT CRAZY WITH AN EMERGENCY-ALERT TONE and when I looked it was just a message that it was National Preparedness Month. Then it went off a second time to tell me to prepare an emergency kit. Dude, I know.

WHAT HATH MERKEL WROUGHT? As Migrant Deal Falters, Strains on EU’s Underbelly Grow.

Greece and Italy, two of the European countries most damaged by the euro disaster are also the hardest-hit by the migration crisis—and in both the euro crisis and the migration crisis, policies intended to safeguard northern Europe, and especially Germany, have made things much worse in Europe’s vulnerable south.

The long term costs to the European project are going to be high. That Brussels has been unable to develop a monetary union without causing the greatest economic disaster in many European countries since the Second World War, that it then proved unable to put the affected economies back on the road to prosperity and growth, that Germany benefited immensely (and continues to benefit) from a policy that impoverishes the south, that Europe then failed to deal effectively with the migration crisis in North Africa and the Middle East—and that it then developed a policy that, again, protected Germany at the expense of the southern countries… this does not bode well for the future of one of the most noble political ventures in human history.

Unable to craft policies that work, unable to share the pain of failure fairly: one must hope that history will give Europe a break. More crises—another round of economic trouble, an intensification of the wars in the Middle East, an even more aggressive series of moves by the Kremlin—could stress Europe to the breaking point.

In general, history has not been notably kind to Europe when its leaders have been foolish.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Court Upholds Ban on Gun Sales to Marijuana Card Holders.

The ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco came in a lawsuit filed by S. Rowan Wilson, a Nevada woman who said she tried to buy a firearm for self-defense in 2011 after having obtained a medical marijuana card. The gun store refused, citing the federal rule banning the sale of firearms to illegal drug users.

Marijuana remains illegal under federal law, and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has told gun sellers they can assume that a person with a medical marijuana card uses the drug.

The 9th Circuit said in its 3-0 decision that Congress reasonably concluded that marijuana and other drug use “raises the risk of irrational or unpredictable behavior with which gun use should not be associated.”

The 9th Circuit would probably give its judicial blessing to most any reason to stop the sale of even a single firearm, but that’s not what’s interesting about this ruling.

Smokers with a “legitimate” need for THC in California and other medical marijuana states lose their 2nd Amendment rights simply for having a doctor’s prescription. But in states like Colorado and Washington, there would seem to be no similar infringement on recreational users who just enjoy getting high.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! The Democrats mocked the GOP four years ago for having a Cold War foreign policy. Now it doesn’t seem so funny.

TOM WOLFE HUNTS THE BIGGEST OF PREY IN THE KINGDOM OF SPEECH: Over at Ed Driscoll.com, I have a lengthy review of Tom Wolfe’s latest (nonfiction) book, The Kingdom of Speech, in which Wolfe looks to do to Noam Chomsky – and Darwin – what he did to Leonard Bernstein, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. It’s a fascinating book, a quick read, and very much deserving of plenty of re-readings – there’s a lot going on there.

UH-OH: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket just exploded at Cape Canaveral.

According to numerous eyewitness reports, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket just exploded while resting on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral. This rocket was set to launch on Saturday, September 3 on a mission to deliver Facebook’s first satellite to orbit.

The Associated Press is now stating that the rocket exploded during a test.

We reached out to SpaceX for confirmation and details of the explosion. They have yet to release a statement or respond.

BREAKING: A #SpaceX rocket, due for launch Saturday, just exploded in Cape Canaveral, according to reports. https://t.co/tEfuRUv6El

— Twitter Moments (@TwitterMoments) September 1, 2016

More to come.

WAR ON COLLEGE MEN CONTINUES: Her story changed drastically, but the school still expelled him.

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ROGER KIMBALL: The New Criterion At 35.

It has become increasingly clear as the imperatives of political correctness make ever greater inroads against free speech and the perquisites of dispassionate inquiry that the battle against this provinciality of time is one of the central cultural tasks of our age. It is a battle from which the traditional trustees of civilization—schools and colleges, museums, many churches—have fled. Increasingly, it has seemed to us, the responsibility for defending those “intellectual and spiritual foundations of Western civilization” of which George Nash spoke has fallen to individuals and institutions that are largely distant from, when they are not indeed explicitly disenfranchised from, the dominant cultural establishment. Leading universities today command tax-exempt endowments in the tens of billions of dollars. But it is by no means clear, notwithstanding the prestige they confer upon their graduates, whether they do anything to challenge the temporal provinciality of their charges. No, let us emend that: it is blindingly clear that they do everything in their considerable power to reinforce that provinciality, not least by their slavish capitulation to the dictates of the enslaving presentism of political correctness.

Yep.

KAEPERNICK: OH, BY THE WAY, HILLARY SHOULD BE IN JAIL.

DOWNBALLOT BLUES:

Our new Senate ratings map. 50 Safe/Likely/Lean D, 49 S/L/L R, and one toss-up https://t.co/FIyAYworjL pic.twitter.com/aCi17R4PmX

— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) September 1, 2016

WELL, THE WAS CERTAINLY THE CASE WHEN THE LAST CLINTON WAS IN OFFICE: Feminism Is Its Own Worst Enemy.

Flashback: Christina Hoff Sommers on the conspiracy theory that is intersectional feminism:

iLEAVE: Apple and the Irish Example.

We could decry overseas tax shelters for the next decade or two, and change absolutely nothing, or we could — here’s a crazy idea — be the tax shelter. You know what Ireland, Norway, and Sweden all have in common? Within living memory, all were desperately poor. That’s why there are more Irish Americans than Irish nationals, more Norwegian Americans than Norwegians, and more Swedish Americans than Swedes. Hunger will make you get on a boat. Sweden grew wealthy under a form of laissez-faire capitalism strikingly different from the EU norm today, with lower taxes and a smaller public sector than its European counterparts. Norway did much the same thing, helped along by a great deal of oil (which can be both a blessing and a curse). Ireland eventually got sick of being poor and followed a similar program.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if that strategy were followed by a very rich nation — one that accounts for something like a quarter of the economic output of the entire human race.

Low taxes and laissez-faire capitalism don’t provide enough opportunities for graft.

BUT TO BE FAIR, MEN LIKE HER EVEN LESS: Women don’t really like Hillary Clinton that much.

Hillary Clinton’s favorability among women has suddenly reversed itself.

Last month, women had a largely favorable view of the Democratic presidential candidate, with 54 percent viewing her positively and 43 percent viewing her negatively. But those numbers have flipped in the last few weeks, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll.

Women now dislike Clinton, with 52 percent holding a negative view and 45 percent holding a positive view. This is the first time in year that more women have disliked Clinton than liked her.

Women were probably never as pro-Clinton as Democrats and liberal writers had hoped. They certainly were never as pro-Clinton as most of the African-American community was pro-Obama. Earlier this year, polls found Clinton’s lead among women collapsing, as young women in particular favored her then-rival Bernie Sanders.

As Clinton has fallen in popularity among women, her rival, GOP nominee Donald Trump, has gained. Trump has gained 7 points in favorability among women, from 26 percent in early August to a better-but-still-not-great 33 percent now.

Hmm. I wonder what could account for that?

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: The America Obama Leaves Behind. Jim Geraghty writes that “His successor will inherit a mess comparable to the one he inherited in 2008.”

Actually, in many ways a worse one – as Bill McGurn noted in the Wall Street Journal on the day of Obama’s inauguration in 2009, “Bush’s Real Sin Was Winning in Iraq.” To the point where shortly thereafter, Obama and Biden were bragging about what a success Iraq was, before, as Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker noted, Obama unilaterally withdrew all American troops for a reelection talking point, thus throwing it all away and giving rise to ISIS.

And then there’s terrible destruction Obama caused taxpayers via one of the greatest lies ever told — repeatedly — by an American president: “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

Then there’s all of the racial discord that Obama and his attorney general ginned up, again with election years in mind. Or to put it another way:

THIS DEAL KEEPS GETTING WORSE ALL THE TIME: U.S., others agreed to ‘secret’ exemptions for Iran after nuclear deal.

The United States and its negotiating partners agreed “in secret” to allow Iran to evade some restrictions in last year’s landmark nuclear agreement in order to meet the deadline for it to start getting relief from economic sanctions, according to a report reviewed by Reuters.

The report is to be published on Thursday by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said the think tank’s president David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and co-author of the report. It is based on information provided by several officials of governments involved in the negotiations, who Albright declined to identify.

Reuters could not independently verify the report’s assertions.

“The exemptions or loopholes are happening in secret, and it appears that they favor Iran,” Albright said.

Maybe Sarah Hoyt can help me find my shocked face.

VIDEO: THIS LYFT DRIVER SHOWS US HOW EVERY BUSINESSES SHOULD RESPOND TO SJW BULLIES.

Related: “Can anyone tell the difference between this lady and an ISIS militant who forces women into bags?”

Early on, while turning Iran into a layer of Hell*, the Ayatollah Khomeini famously warned, “There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.”

More recently, a famous SJW famously warned (thanks to Jon Gabriel’s Photoshop):

* Or a popular vacation spot for core New York Times subscribers, depending upon how you look at it.