ARTHUR CHRENKOFF: It’s the end of the blogging world as we know it, and I feel fine. InstaPundit turns 15 in two months.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why are There Still Ashtrays In Airplane Bathrooms?

FASTER, PLEASE: Direct-to-Consumer Lab Tests, No Doctor Visit Required.

It’s more of the patient as CEO.

WELL, OF COURSE SHE DOES: Anti-Gun Documentary Producer Defends Her ‘Legal’ Gun Purchases.

Zero tolerance for illegal weapons purchases should start with gun control showboats like Stephanie Soechtig.

NARCISSISM? POLITICAL VANITY? GOOD THING THOSE UNFORTUNATE TRAITS ARE IN SHORT SUPPLY THIS ELECTION SEASON! ‘Moral Narcissism’: Roger L. Simon’s New Book Targets Political Vanity.

Roger discusses I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already with Mike Stopa of the Harvard Lunch Club Political Podcast.

In addition to his ongoing interviews, Roger will be discussing his new book in person this December at Bullets & Bourbon in Texas.

OFF-DUTY SPECIAL FORCES, IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN’T DO? Two guys allegedly tried to rob a French McDonald’s, but off-duty special forces unit was eating inside.

Among the customers were 11 off-duty members of the French paramilitary special forces, soldiers who specialize in hostage situations, reported the Telegraph.

As the men burst into the restaurant late Sunday night, firing a warning shot and allegedly ransacking the cash register, the special forces just waited. They wanted to avoid drawing their guns, officials told the Telegraph, to prevent any collateral damage.

With his loot allegedly in hand, about $2,270 according to AFP, one of the robbers rushed toward the door. But his getaway was quickly thwarted. Mid-escape, he tripped.

The special forces pounced.

Read the whole thing.

SUZANNE VENKER: The Unhappy Female, Brought to You by Feminism. “Here’s the truth: feminists don’t have a beef with men. They have a beef with women.”

POLL: Trump Leads Clinton By One Percent In Florida. On Facebook, Sean Trende comments: “This poll was taken of Florida voters in the middle of the initial blowup over Trump’s comments about the Hispanic judge and immediately after Clinton’s comments about his temperament. It was taken by a Democratic polling firm. It shows him leading by a point. It is the first poll to show him leading since March. Some day, people will figure out that (a) Trump’s penchant for racist comments are already baked into his support/opposition, (b) each blowup only serves to allow him to dominate a news cycle and suck the oxygen out of the room (Clinton’s speech disappeared from the news immediately, and (c) people really, really dislike Clinton as well. But today is not that day.”

OF COURSE THE GAME IS RIGGED: How Obama Is ‘Trump-Proofing’ His Climate Pact.

[Obama “climate envoy” Jonathan] Pershing is now trying to lock in the U.S. side of the accord, which requires all nations to develop public plans detailing how they would cut carbon emissions through at least 2025. Oddly enough, Trump’s own hand-picked new energy czar, Rep. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, agrees that his boss can do only so much damage. Cramer, in an interview with me in late May, was notably noncommittal when I asked him if Trump would simply renege on the Paris accord. He noted that Trump has said at a minimum that he’d “renegotiate” it, and he made the point that this is how Trump has approached past business negotiations, starting from an extreme position.

“I think you might see him pivot away” from his hard-line stance on scrapping the agreement altogether, Cramer told POLITICO.

It’s worrisome that Trump is signaling that he’ll back down before he even gets to the negotiating table, but then again we’ve seen this move before.

DR. HELEN INTERVIEWS ED MORRISSEY: Video shot at this past December’s first Bullets and Bourbon event at Rough Creek Lodge in Texas; click here for details on how to attend this year.

Ed’s new book is Going Red: The Two Million Voters Who Will Elect the Next President–and How Conservatives Can Win Them, which he’ll be discussing in details at Bullets & Bourbon this coming December.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1126.

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED TO FIND THAT CHEATING IS GOING ON BY THE LEFT: Far-Right Party in Austria Challenges Results of Presidential Vote.

The Green candidate, Alexander Van der Bellen, was able to barely overcome the Freedom Party’s big early lead thanks to a suspiciously lopsided mail-in vote.

FRACK, BABY, FRACK: Have You Thanked Shale Today?

The shale boom is barely a decade old and it already accounts for half of American natural gas production, but according to the EIA’s newest Annual Energy Outlook, by 2040 fracking will be producing nearly 70 percent of our country’s gas. . . .

Did you catch that? We’re just two years away from becoming a net exporter of natural gas—a remarkable feat when you consider that we spent most of the last decade beefing up our liquified natural gas (LNG) import infrastructure in a quest to secure alternative methods of gas supply in the coming years. Now, those import terminals are looking like a busted bet, and we’re instead constructing export facilities to start liquifying and shipping our glut of shale gas to customers abroad. And, no surprise, it’s shale gas that’s changing the game. . . .

That’s a striking visualization of one of the quickest transformations of energy fortunes we’ve seen in decades, and it comes courtesy of the ongoing innovations of an upstart industry that continues to find new ways to make new plays profitable. The shale boom has already done so much, but as you can see, it’s not close to being done yet.

Yep.

HERE’S A CLASSIC CASE OF BUREAUCRATS COVERING UP FOR EACH OTHER: When an Environmental Protection Agency work-crew accidentally unleashed a three-million gallon flood of dangerous waste from Colorado’s Gold King Mine in August 2015, it turned the Animus River yellow for nearly a week. That river provides drinking water for millions of people in three states and the Navajo Nation.

Federal officials promised an “independent” review of the disaster by the Army Corps of Engineers to determine its cause and who was responsible for it, not least because the flood included 880,000 pounds of toxic materials like lead and arsenic. But when the review came out, it was full of gaps, most notably concerning who made the critical decisions that resulted in the flood.

Ethan Barton, one of the determined reporters with the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group, has been digging for months seeking the full story about Gold King Mine. His findings are being published this week and what has become clear is that officials at EPA caused the disaster and they then joined with compatriots at the Department of the Interior (which is a part-owner of the mine, oh by the way!) in a bald-faced coverup.

The review was ultimately conducted by Interior, not the Army Corps because, Barton reports today, “Army Corps, however, had already developed potential topics to probe, and its lead reviewer was highly experienced in similar investigations, documents obtained by TheDCNF show. DOI’s final scope for the Gold King Mine review, in fact, nixed crucial topics Army Corps planned to examine, including the root cause of the spill.”

House Committee on Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop has been closely following Barton’s reporting and the panel’s investigators have compiled a mountain of evidence about the events that led up to Gold King Mine. Don’t be surprised if a full-fledged congressional investigation is in the offing. Barton has also exposed EPA’s $3.3 billion worth of secret slush funds.

ROGER SIMON: Will Trump’s Signal-to-Noise Problem Sink Him and Us?

As Trump takes on more and more water, somebody throw this man a lifeline, and fast!

THEY CERTAINLY SEEM ANGRY TODAY, JUDGING FROM MY SOCIAL-MEDIA FEEDS: Can dazed and disappointed Bernie-ites hear the call of Donald Trump?

CRISIS OF CHARACTER: PJTV alums Bill Whittle, Scott Ott, and Steve Green discuss former Secret Service agent Gary J. Byrne’s new Clinton-era tell-all.

Full disclosure: I’m Green.

GOT A CREDIT CARD OR A MORTGAGE? THEN CFPB KNOWS ALL ABOUT YOU: Officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – the hybrid financial regulatory agency President Obama and a Democratic Congress created in 2010 – are accumulating what may well be the world’s largest database of information on American consumers. And CFPB’s bureaucrats refuse to tell Congress how or why they are doing so, or what specifically they intend to do with the data.

Now, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, chaired by Texas Republican Lamar Smith, has asked Mark Bialek, the Federal Reserve’s Inspector General, to disclose everything it knows about the CFPB data collection operation. Bialek is involved because Obama and the Capitol Hill Democrats put CFPB in the Federal Reserve, which essentially puts the bureau beyond congressional oversight.

What is known, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock, is the database is being created “by pulling private consumer records from 7,062 financial institutions and 300 credit card issuers without the permission of the record holders. The bureau has rebuffed previous congressional queries about its big data program and the measures it has taken to protect the security of millions of records and the privacy of the people covered by the records.”

In other words, not only are these unaccountable bureaucrats collecting the intimate financial data about hundreds of millions of Americans, they won’t say how they are protecting the information from hackers. Let’s just hope they aren’t consulting colleagues elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy such as the Office of Personnel Management. 

THE DEMOCRATS’ WAR ON SCIENCE: Can we talk about climate change like civilized adults? Yesterday, I wrote a column asking that question. The response from the internet suggests: “no.”

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ANALYSIS: TRUE. “The Clinton Foundation is the signal; Trump U is the noise. Donald should concentrate on that, but he doesn’t.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student Loans Increasingly Backfire, Leaving Borrowers Worse Off For Going To School.

If only there had been some sort of warning.

FLUSHED AWAY: NYC spends $265G to urge people to use restroom of their choice.

THE PASSWORD IS: KOBAYASHI-MARU. So, Who Is the GOP Going to Install as Its Nominee Instead of Trump?