DUTCH PROBE: Missile brought from Russia downed Malaysia Airlines plane over Ukraine.

The SA-11 missile that struck the Malaysia Airlines plane was smuggled into Ukraine from Russia in July 2014, the investigators said at a news conference, and then returned to Russia. More than 100 suspects have also been identified, the investigation concluded, although their names were not made public on Wednesday.

“It may be concluded that Flight MH17 was shot down on 17 July 2014 by a 9M38 series missile launched from a BUK trailer. This BUK trailer was brought in from the territory of the Russian Federation and after launch was subsequently returned to Russian Federation territory. This conclusion is based largely on forensic investigation,” an investigator said.

The MH17 shootdown generated enough of an outcry to bring Putin’s offensive into eastern and southern Ukraine to a halt. But after two years without much followup from the West, Putin appears to be preparing for a renewed attack.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Navy launches investigation into sailor who didn’t stand for National Anthem.

THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: Anti-Vax Mom Has Rude Awakening When All 3 Kids are Stricken With a Preventable Disease.

WORRIED: Democrats target Libertarian ticket.

The Libertarian ticket of Johnson and Bill Weld is running surprisingly strong among young voters — a cog in the Obama coalition that Democrats need to turn out for Clinton if she’s to pull away from Trump.

Whether Clinton reaches those voters could determine the outcome of critical battleground states like Colorado, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Democrats still vividly remember the 2000 election and blame Ralph Nader for costing Al Gore the presidency in the closest election in history. They’re worried history could repeat itself in 2016, as third-party candidates are attracting more interest than they have in decades.

The Clinton campaign and its liberal allies are increasingly taking the threat from Johnson and Stein seriously, making direct appeals to young voters and punching down at the third-party candidates they view as potential spoilers.

“Young voters are suggesting that they’re uncomfortable with Clinton and are using Johnson and Stein as protest votes,” said Douglas Schoen, a former official in the Bill Clinton administration. “The campaign must make the case that unless young people vote for Clinton, they’re effectively voting for Trump.”

I’m not sure how much difference young voters see between the two near-septuagenarian major party candidates.

But mostly Democrats should be asking themselves why the Libertarian Party’s least-likely nominee ever is doing so well with a traditional Democratic constituency.

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF: A College Is a Community but Cannot Be a Home: Campus life is too diverse at most schools for dorms to serve as a place of respite from uncomfortable ideas. “What feels like a ‘safe space’ to one person can feel stifling or even ‘unsafe’ to another.”

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GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: Sarah Westwood: Five unanswered questions for James Comey on Clinton email case.

FASTER… WHOA! Elon Musk unveils radical ‘megashuttle’ that will take man to Mars in 80 days to set up a million person city.

‘What I want to achieve is make Mars seem possible, to show that we can do it in our lifetimes, and you could go,’ he said at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico.

However, he warned the trip was likely to be dangerous – and said candidates for the first missions ‘must be prepared to die’.
…
Musk outlined plans for a fleet of large ‘megashuttles’ that would take 100 people at a time to Mars for $200,000 a trip, after warning ‘eventually history suggest there will be some extinction event on Earth’.

They’ll all be strangers in a strange land — and how will humans change, physically, on a planet with a surface gravity just one-third of the Earth’s?

THE US-RUSSIA SYRIAN PARTNERSHIP UNRAVELS: The US-Russia partnership in Syria was more Obama Administration malarkey.

NARRATIVE FLIP: Keith Scott Had Illegal Gun, Threatened Family with It.

New information casts serious doubt on the original story. Scott’s wife can be heard on a video she released telling the police that her husband didn’t have a gun. The police can be heard on her video recording repeatedly telling Scott to “drop the gun.” Law enforcement released video from the dash cam of the police car that showed Scott didn’t raise his hands before he was shot, and the police audio also shows that police yelled at Scott to drop the gun at least ten times. The gun and holster found at the scene had Scott’s fingerprints and DNA on it. The book Scott was allegedly reading before he was shot and killed was not recovered at the scene.

But Mrs. Scott knew her husband did have gun. According to papers filed last year by Scott’s wife, he threatened to kill her and his family with it.

Read the whole thing.

ASHE SCHOW: Where are the fact checkers for Clinton’s pay gap claims?

We were only a minute or so into the debate before Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton uttered her first fabrication by implying we don’t already guarantee equal pay for women.

“…guaranteeing, finally, equal pay for women’s work,” Clinton said, in response to the first question about why her policies would be good for the economy.

Well, Clinton, equal pay is already guaranteed in the Equal Pay Act of 1963.

Clinton’s implication that women aren’t paid the same as men is false. On average, women earn less than men not because of discrimination, but because of the different choices men and women make in their careers.

Women and men choose different majors and different careers, for starters. Nine of the 10 lowest-paying majors are dominated by women, while nine of the 10 highest-paying majors are dominated by men. Women also tend to leave the work force after having children, while men end up working harder. Women also work fewer hours than men.

I’m so old I can remember when feminists denied that there was any such thing as “women’s work.”

TRANSPARENCY: The White House Asked Congress To Keep Quiet On Russian Hacking.

In a statement released Friday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff, the vice-chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, respectively, formally accused Russia of attempting to influence the US election. It was the first official, on-record confirmation from US government officials that the Kremlin is actively working to manipulate public confidence in the country’s election system.

But sources tell BuzzFeed News that the White House — which has stayed silent despite mounting pressure to call out its Moscow adversaries — tried to delay the statement’s release. The public accusation was of such concern to the administration that White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough was personally involved in the negotiations over releasing it, according to a congressional source.

The White House convinced Feinstein and Schiff, both Democrats, to omit part of their original statement for security reasons, according to another congressional source.

It’s a testament to America’s inherent strengths that between Russia’s hacking and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unsecured email server that we haven’t found ourselves in a major war already.

QUESTION ASKED: Is Clinton winning over Obama’s coalition?

Clinton’s path to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House is paved with support from the millennials, women, African-American and Hispanic voters who lined up behind President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. But there have been mounting concerns among Clinton supporters that key elements of Obama’s base vote are not enthusiastic about her campaign as pre-debate national and battleground polls tightened.

So while her clash with Trump on Monday night at Hofstra University in New York was primarily about who had the temperament, experience and knowledge to serve in the Oval Office, it’s no surprise that Clinton’s debate strategy and rhetoric was laced with subtle outreach to the diverse Democratic coalition she badly needs to flock to the polls in November.

“Subtle?”

IF IT WERE ME, I’D NOMINATE JULIAN CASTRO, JUST TO CONFUSE PEOPLE: Obama nominates ambassador to Cuba.

GEORGE MONBIOT: No fracking, drilling or digging: it’s the only way to save life on Earth.

You give up everything dependent on fossil fuels first, George, and then we’ll talk.

NEW VIDEO FROM PRAGER UNIVERSITY: What’s Killing the American Dream?

Don’t think of it as “Killing the American Dream,” just think of it as “fundamental transformation” hard at work.

WHY ARE DEMOCRATS SO OBSTRUCTIONIST? Roll Call: Senate Democrats Block Republican Stopgap From Advancing.

Okay, the actual headline at Roll Call just says “Senate Blocks Republican Stopgap From Advancing.” But mine’s more accurate.

RESET: U.S. Believes Russia Steered Hacked Documents to Websites.

A fuller picture of the operation has come into focus in the past several weeks. U.S. officials believe that at least two hacking groups with ties to the Russian government, known as Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, are involved in the escalating data-theft efforts, according to people briefed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe of the cyberattacks.

Following successful breaches, the stolen data are apparently transferred to three different websites for publication, these people say. The websites—WikiLeaks, DCLeaks.com and a blog run by Guccifer 2.0—have posted batches of stolen data at least 42 times from April to last week.

WikiLeaks has published U.S. secrets for years but has recently taken an overtly adversarial tone toward Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Cybersecurity experts believe that DCLeaks.com and Guccifer 2.0 often work together and have direct ties to Russian hackers.

No biggie — “it’s ‘tradition’ in Russia to tamper with elections,” according to James Clapper, our own Director of National Intelligence.

ERDOGAN’S IRON FIST: 32,000 people arrested since failed coup in Turkey.

The Turkish justice minister says 32,000 people have been arrested since the country’s failed coup, and more may follow.

In a live interview with private broadcaster NTV on Wednesday, Bekir Bozdag said 70,000 people have been processed and 32,000 were formally arrested since the July 15 coup attempt. “There may be new arrests or releases according to the evidence and information gathered in the investigation,” Bozdag said.

He also said Turkey was building a courthouse in the outskirts of Ankara, the national capital, for the prosecution of suspected coup plotters.

The way these things go, the special courthouse will likely have “special” judges, too — the kind Erdogan can count on.

Also, “50,000 people have been expelled from the civil service” by emergency decree.

It wasn’t a failed coup; it’s a successful purge.

ANN ALTHOUSE: Hillary Clinton’s unchallenged, illogical statement about private prisons. “Government prosecutes criminals and obtains convictions and prison sentences. If government uses privately run prisons, it must pay these private businesses to house its prisoners. The entity filling the prison therefore has an economic incentive against putting more people in prison. The private business — the one with the ‘profit motivation’ — has no power to create more prisoners. I can see opposing private prisons for other reasons, but Hillary’s justification made no sense to me other than a random expression of disgust for business.”

MAN IN HIS 70S SAYS YOUNG VOTERS WILL TURN OUT FOR WOMAN IN HER NEAR-70S: Sanders: Young voters will ‘come on board’ Clinton’s campaign.

ANGELO CODEVILLA: After The Republic. “We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where it will end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought it about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate manifestation. Regardless of who wins in 2016, this revolution’s sentiments will grow in volume and intensity, and are sure to empower politicians likely to make Americans nostalgic for Donald Trump’s moderation.”

JOURNALISM: In debate, Clinton gets no follow-up questions, Trump gets 6.

MICHAEL BARONE: Did Trump deconstruct Hillary among “marginal” voters? In this column Barone reassesses his original assessment of the debate. Read the whole thing.

THE UNIVERSITY ENDS ITS INVESTIGATION: “In short, no disciplinary action will be taken against Professor Reynolds. The tweet was an exercise of his First Amendment rights.” Though perhaps not the most brilliant such.