THAT MEANS IT’S WORKING: ObamaCare’s Meltdown Has Arrived.

Last week BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee announced it would leave three of the state’s largest exchange markets—Nashville, Memphis and Knoxville. “We have experienced losses approaching $500 million over the course of three years on ACA plans,” the company said, “which is unsustainable.” As a result, more than 100,000 Tennesseans will be forced to seek out new coverage for 2017.

BlueCross is only the latest insurer to head for the exits. Community Health Alliance, the insurance co-op established under ObamaCare, is winding down due to financial failure, leaving 30,000 people without coverage. UnitedHealthcare said in April it is departing Tennessee’s exchange after significant losses. That’s another 41,000 people needing new plans.

All told, more than 60% of our state’s ObamaCare consumers will lose their coverage heading into 2017. When they go in search of a replacement plan, they will confront two unfortunate realities: a dearth of options and skyrocketing costs.

Leave it to government to force a marketplace into existence, where people are coerced into buying something many of them can’t afford to use, and which sellers still lose money selling.

And then leave it to government to blame free markets for the failure.

(If you need a way to get past the WSJ paywall, you might find it here.)

JOHN SCHINDLER: Politicization of the FBI Threatens American Democracy: Obama and Hillary have allowed our secret police to become a tool of the Democrats—which should trouble all Americans.

ROLL CALL: In TV Ads, Senate Democrats Avoid Trump.

BUYOUT BLUES: Deep-pocketed suitors are reportedly dropping their bids for Twitter.

OF COURSE! BUT ONLY IF HE’S A REPUBLICAN: Should We Judge A Politician By His (Or Her) Garbage Supporters?

RE-RECALL? Replacement Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phone catches fire on Southwest plane.

Southwest Airlines flight 994 from Louisville to Baltimore was evacuated this morning while still at the gate because of a smoking Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. All passengers and crew exited the plane via the main cabin door and no injuries were reported, a Southwest Airlines spokesperson told The Verge.

More worrisome is the fact that the phone in question was a replacement Galaxy Note 7, one that was deemed to be safe by Samsung. The Verge spoke to Brian Green, owner of the Note 7, on the phone earlier today and he confirmed that he had picked up the new phone at an AT&T store on September 21st. A photograph of the box shows the black square symbol that indicates a replacement Note 7 and Green said it had a green battery icon.

There was a report last week from China that a replacement Galaxy Note 7 had caught fire, but with Chinese vendors sometimes you can’t be sure what you’re getting. This is the first instance I’ve seen where a known replacement model from the U.S. has proven dangerous.

THE HILL: GOP chairmen slam ‘unusual restrictions’ on FBI Clinton probe.

Four Republican committee chairmen on Wednesday pressed Attorney General Loretta Lynch on what they termed “the unusual restrictions” placed on the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of State.

In a letter to Lynch, they pointed to a pair of letters from Beth Wilkinson, an attorney for two of Clinton’s lawyers, that laid out a limited immunity agreement that the Department of Justice (DOJ) agreed to in exchange for cooperation with the investigation.

“The Wilkinson letters raise serious questions about why DOJ would consent to such substantial limitations on the scope of its investigation, and how [FBI Director James] Comey’s statements on the scope of the investigation comport with the reality of what the FBI was permitted to investigate,” House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) wrote.

Members of a few committees and “one or two staff members” were allowed to review the letters last week but could not take notes or make any record of them, according to lawmakers.

According to members who saw the documents, Wilkinson and the DOJ negotiated a deal for Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, who sorted Clinton’s personal emails from her work-related ones before turning over 30,000 to the State Department in 2014.

Mills and Samuelson, who were acting as Clinton’s attorneys throughout the proceedings, turned over their computers to the FBI as part of the investigation.

The immunity deal promised that the Justice Department would not prosecute Mills or Samuelson based on information obtained from the laptops.

It also limited the emails that the FBI was allowed to review to those sent between June 1, 2014, and Feb. 1, 2015, and promised that the DOJ would destroy the laptops at the close of the probe.

Wilkinson has said that she advised Mills and Samuelson to take the deal “because of the confusion surrounding the various agencies’ positions on the after-the-fact classification decisions.”

The four lawmakers took issue with the restrictions on reviewing the letters, the timeframe limitations and the agreement to destroy the laptops.

The timeframe limitations, according to the Wednesday letter, “would necessarily have excluded, for example, any emails from Cheryl Mills to Paul Combetta in late 2014 or early 2015 directing the destruction or concealment of federal records.”

Yeah, how about that.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: From Yale to Stanford, an Academic Curtain has descended across America’s universities, Thomas Sowell warns.

Or as Iowahawk likes to say, “College: an oasis of totalitarianism in a desert of freedom.”

HEP: Hillary Taps 68-Year-Old Hysteria Monger Gore for Millennial Outreach.

RESET: Russia Adds Hundreds of Warheads Under Nuclear Treaty.

Russia increased its deployed nuclear warheads over the past six months under a strategic arms reduction treaty as U.S. nuclear warhead stocks declined sharply, according to the State Department.

During the same period, the United States cut its deployed nuclear warheads by 114, increasing the disparity between the two nuclear powers.

Russia’s warhead increases since 2011 suggest Moscow does not intend to cut its nuclear forces and will abandon the New START arms accord as part of a major nuclear buildup.

“It is now highly unlikely that Russia intends to comply with New START,” said Mark Schneider, a former Pentagon nuclear weapons specialist now with the National Institute for Policy.

Heckuva job, Barry.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Will We See A Trumpism Of The Left?

Some kind of celebrity (ahem, Oprah, ahem) might be able to win the Democratic nomination under present circumstances. But they would need to be respectable rather than disreputable, and run a campaign that accepted guardrails and gatekeepers rather than gleefully destroying them. The wrecking-ball left-wing analogues to Trump that pundits have imaginatively toyed with — an Oliver Stone, a Sean Penn — wouldn’t stand a chance.

But what’s true today might not be true forever. The differences between the Democratic Party’s younger, poorer, browner base and its older, whiter, richer and more moderate leadership are a potentially unstable equilibrium. The anger coursing through left-wing protest politics could find a cruder, more nakedly demagogic avatar than Bernie Sanders. A Hillary Clinton administration could supply various betrayals and compromises or foul up in some disastrous way, encouraging a sense that the professional class that dominates liberalism’s upper reaches needs to give way to a revived (and larger) version of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition — a “real American future” analogue to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” appeals.

If Trump has thrived by imitating Europe’s right-wing nationalists, a Trumpism of the left would imitate the left-wing populists of Latin America and Asia — the Chavismo of Alicia Machado’s native Venezuela, or the Trumpian socialism presently being served up by the ranting, trigger-happy president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte.

This may sound implausible, indeed frankly un-American — but so did the ascent of Trump’s National Front-ish politics, and yet here we are. Cultural and demographic change can ripple into politics slowly, and then all at once. The elite checks on a gonzo left-wing populism are real and powerful, but so are the cultural forces roiling underneath. And the same demographic changes that have made the right more nativist and populist, more European and reactionary, could expose the left to a Latin American temptation if liberal governance ever really hits the rocks.

If and when it does, the Hillary Clinton campaign’s skillful deployment of Alicia Machado may be cast in a somewhat different light. It’s Clinton’s Democratic Party today — managerial, technocratic, polished, a little smug. But Machado’s wilder, messier, “I’m not a saint girl” style might have its own claim on the American left’s future, if the technocrats and managers ever let her kind of Democratic voter down.

And they will.

DANG, THEY CALLED OUR BLUFF: The stunning tale of naive weakness that led to the Iran deal.  In other news, leftist oikophobes rolled by “them poor brown peoplez”.  Who could have seen it coming?

YES IT MATTERS, IT REALLY MATTERS: Yesterday, just before going to bed, I found myself in the midst of a group talking about how wonderful, competent and patriotic Hillary was.  No.  She isn’t. This is a small corner of why not.  Why Hillary Clinton’s Email Server Matters.

ET TU CATO INSTITUTE? No.

DREAMS OF CHINA’S REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS: Liberal Protesters Surround, Berate Conservatives At University Of Kansas. This sounds like stuff that went on in my high school in the seventies.  Pro tip, if you tell them where to put it and that they’re boring and walk out, they don’t know what to do.  Okay, it probably helped that I was a head taller than most girls my age and wore steel toed boots.  Maybe conservative-libertarian students need to consider the steel toed boots.

WHAT? ANOTHER ONE? ARE WE COLLECTING THE FULL SET? Letting cabbies not learn English is another ‘progressive’ debacle.

CHINA’S PLA DREAMS OF WIELDING THE POWER OF IRAN’S REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS: How the nuke deal is funding Iran’s darkest forces.

HOW IS THIS EVEN A QUESTION: Why Watching Silly Cat Videos Is Good for You.

COMBATING THE CULTURE OF COMPETITIVE VICTIMHOOD: What Tocqueville Can Teach Us About Microaggressions.

CLINTON TROLLS ATTACK DILBERT, IN MOVES THAT ARE BECOMING STUNNINGLY FAMILIAR: The Week I Became a Target.

YES, BUT EVEN A PRO-ABORTION REPUBLICAN COULDN’T GET AWAY THIS STUFF: Intimidating and defaming accusers of sexual assault, violating security protocols, and using political office for private enrichment are part of liberal privilege. Hillary Clinton supports abortion, so we should forgive her terrible acts?

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Living donor uterus transplants performed in US.

IN 2016, IT’S NOT CLEAR THAT WE DO: Why Do We Need Healthy Brains?

OCTOBER 5, 1877: “Hear me, my Chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.” Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. What an eloquent man.

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