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NOW ON SSRN: My paper for the Cato Supreme Court Review on the Supreme Court’s next term. I discuss leading cases pending, some cases not taken (like the New York / Connecticut gun-control laws), the possibly-disastrous effect of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comments on Donald Trump should there be a disputed election result, and the diminishing role of the Supreme Court in relation to lower courts. Download it early and often!

Here’s an excerpt from my Ginsburg discussion:

The comments were injudicious, and though they are unlikely to become relevant in the coming term, should they in fact matter – because of a contested election, with the nation closely divided – her recusal, or worse, her refusal to recuse herself, would undoubtedly have explosive results, both for the nation and for the Court itself, an institution that depends on public regard and that has been growing less popular already in recent years. The comments are an iceberg that most likely will never meet its Titanic, but worth noting here because, should that meeting come to pass, the results would surely be the most significant event of the coming term.

Looking somewhat more likely now than last month.

TROLL LEVEL: GRAND MASTER. Chelsea Clinton, Your Elderly Mother Needs Help.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS INTRODUCE RESOLUTION TO IMPEACH IRS COMMISSIONER JOHN KOSKINEN: Good, he should be impeached. He behaves as if he’s above the law. The resolution faces procedural hurdles and may not move forward. Even if Koskinen isn’t convicted, the process will serve a useful and instrutive purpose. Per a comment today on my NY Observer essay deploring our deplorable FBI Director Comey, yes, Comey has earned a similar fate.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Ohio Northern Welcomes 59 1Ls, Down 15% From Last Year (51% From 2010).

Related: Brooklyn Welcomes 350 1Ls, Down 11% From Last Year (28% From 2010).

WITH THE CONNIVANCE OF THE GOVERNMENT: How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat. “The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of research on sugar, fat and heart disease. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.”

If you can’t trust Harvard scientists. . . Gary Taubes had something to say about this.

IT’S REEFS ALL THE WAY DOWN: Surprise! Another Massive Reef Is Hiding Behind the Great Barrier Reef.

The scientists called the discovery “vast,” as they’ve mapped about 2,300 square miles (6,000 square kilometers) of the reef. Each doughnut-shaped mound measures 650 to 980 feet (200 to 300 meters) across and up to 33 feet (10 m) deep at the center.

The structures form “a significant inter-reef habitat” covering a greater area than nearby coral reefs, said Mardi McNeil, lead author of the new study and a marine geoscience research student at the Queensland University of Technology.

But is the diving any good?

VOX: QUESTIONING THE HEALTH OF A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE IS — WAIT FOR IT — SEXIST:

Wouldn’t this have been a much pithier headline for Vox? 

GE, we bring Portmeirion to life!

HMM: Ford: Robotaxis in 2021, Self-Driving Cars for Consumer 2025.

HEH: Columnist Says He Won’t Date Feminists, Feminists Instantly Validate Him.

ISN’T THIS THE IMPLICIT MESSAGE OF ALL LEFT-LEANING PUBLICATIONS?

I’m old enough to remember when the Huffington Post said f*** you to its Democrat readers — for voting for Hillary. In any case, as with the grim reality of North Korea and its fantasy of nonstop state propaganda and happy talk, the contrast between the headline above and the mission statement on the masthead atop it “inform, inspire, entertain and empower” couldn’t be clearer.

BUBBLES GOTTA POP: US Think Tank Warns That Australia Is About 6 Weeks Away From Housing Collapse.

Real estate prices in Australia’s largest housing markets have soared over the past couple of years fueled, in no small part, by demand from Chinese buyers looking for offshore locations to park cash. The Sydney and Melbourne markets have been the largest beneficiaries of foreign capital with real estate prices up 53% and 51%, respectively, since 2012. That said, based on data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics it looks like home prices in Australia have already started their descent.

Looks like China may have found yet another way to export its economic mismanagement.

WHEN A COUGH IS NOT JUST A COUGH. At Commentary, Matthew Continetti writes, “the worst day of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has to be September 11, 2016. An hour and a half into a 9/11 memorial ceremony at Ground Zero, Clinton suddenly left and was spirited to her daughter’s apartment three miles away:”

At first there was confusion, since Clinton departed without the pool of reporters that follow her every move. Then a spokesman said that she had left because she was feeling “overheated.” Then a video surfaced in which Clinton struggled to reach her SUV, and had to be lifted by staff members into the vehicle. Then Clinton appeared outside the apartment and said she felt great. And then, hours after the event, the campaign released a statement by Clinton’s physician saying that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia two days before.

This sequence of events was more than bizarre. It exemplified the opacity and dissimulation, the changing explanations and outright lies, for which Clinton is known. There couldn’t be a worse way for her to combat her reputation for dishonesty and untrustworthiness than to have a medical episode at a 9/11 memorial, be tight-lipped about what happened, and then say she’d had a serious illness for days.

The media did not come across any better. MSNBC weekend anchor Alex Witt ascribed Clinton’s departure to the New York weather that day, which in her words was “humid,” “horrible,” “horrific,” and “ridiculously awful.” It was 79 degrees. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell said Clinton had looked fine to her. Brian Stelter of CNN warned his peers not to give credence to “conspiracy theories.”

Apparently, the Washington Post didn’t get the message, publishing a John le Carré-esque conspiracy theory yesterday that Hillary may have been poisoned – by Trump or Putin: “Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who has made the NFL so uncomfortable with his discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the brains of deceased players, suggests that Hillary Clinton’s campaign be checked for possible poisons after her collapse Sunday in New York…. But this is Omalu, whose credentials and tenacity are well known. He wasn’t giving up on Twitter, adding that his reasoning is that he does not trust Russian President Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee who has expressed admiration for Putin.”

As Ed Morrissey notes in response, “Hillary has had Secret Service protection for years, and even more so over the course of the campaign…[But] one thing is certain :Dr. Omalu isn’t buying the pneumonia explanation. Will Hillary start complaining about conspiracy theorists on the Left now, and perhaps start a new basket of deplorables with Omalu as the first entry. We could get Will Smith to play Omalu again in The Deplorables II: Putin on the Fritz. I wonder what kind of reception Omalu will get the next time he testifies before Congress … or if we hear much from him in the future at all after this.”

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BUT DO WE WANT THEM TO? Self-Driving Cars Can Learn a Lot by Playing Grand Theft Auto.

NOW ON SSRN: My paper for the Cato Supreme Court Review on the Supreme Court’s next term. I discuss leading cases pending, some cases not taken (like the New York / Connecticut gun-control laws), the possibly-disastrous effect of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comments on Donald Trump should there be a disputed election result, and the diminishing role of the Supreme Court in relation to lower courts. Download it early and often!

ELIANA JOHNSON: Why Rob Portman Is Crushing Ted Strickland In Ohio.

WHAT MERKEL HATH WROUGHT: 3 Syrians — believed a sleeper cell sent by ISIS — arrested in Germany.

The three are accused of coming to Germany in mid-November at the behest of IS “in order either to carry out an assignment they had already received or to keep themselves ready for further instructions,” federal prosecutors said. The three are suspected of membership in a foreign terrorist organization.

Their arrests followed raids at refugee homes in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s northernmost state. Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the men had been under observation for months, and that “there are no indications of concrete attack plans” at present.

“This may have been a sleeper cell,” he told reporters.

More to come, I’m sure.

HILLARY CLINTON’S REAL SICKNESS IS NOT PHYSICAL, Roger Simon writes, listening in on a psychoanalysis session with Sigmund and the C. Monster.

THANKS, JEFF! Bezos names new Blue Origin Heavy Lift vehicle the “New Glenn.”

SAFETY FIRST: Don’t Leave Your Kids Near Judgmental Strangers.

As a child, Ashley Thomas loved to go by herself to a meadow about a 10-minute walk from her house in Ojai, California. Playing on her own let her imagination soar. “You can pretend you’re the Queen of Sheba,” she says. Exploring made her feel independent and grown up. Once, when she was in about the first grade, she even found a snake. “There’s no way I would have picked up a snake in front of my parents,” she says. “The reason I knew it was OK was I had also gone by myself to the library to take a snake safety class.” (Yes, a snake safety class.)

Ah, the olde-time memories of the days when kids could play on their own without someone posting a video online to shame their parents — or calling the police to have mom arrested and the children seized by social services. But Thomas isn’t an aging baby boomer telling tales to her grandkids. She’s just 30.

Only in the past decade or so has “no child left alone” become the social and legal norm in the U.S. A doctoral student in cognitive science at the University of California at Irvine, Thomas is the lead author of a recently published study designed to understand what’s going on. After all, under most circumstances, the objective risk to children left by themselves is extremely low. The chances that a stranger will abduct and kill or not return a child — the great fear driving the new norm — is about 0.00007 percent or one in 1.4 million annually. It’s much more dangerous to drive a child somewhere, or even to walk with one across a parking lot, than to leave a kid alone in a well-ventilated car.

These are the Crazy Years.

DENVER POST: Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark goes way too far.

Before elite donors at a glitzy fundraiser on Friday, Hillary Clinton managed to insult millions of Americans by arguing that half of Donald Trump’s supporters are deplorable individuals animated by racist, sexist, homophobic and other warped ways of thinking. Though she’s backed away from applying that characterization so broadly, she deserves the backlash she’s getting over the remarks. . . .

We condemned Mitt Romney in 2012 for making his 47 percent comments to well-heeled donors. Romney said that nearly half the nation was comprised of freeloaders who “pay no income tax” and who are in the tank for Democrats because of the party’s identification with government assistance.

And we remember that in 2008, the last time Clinton ran for president, she happily joined criticism of then-candidate Barack Obama for telling donors that struggling Americans “cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren’t like them.”

Related: Not Deplorable, Not Horrible, Not Irredeemable:

When Hillary Clinton denounced half of Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” last Friday, it seemed less an unscripted gaffe and more part of a targeted messaging strategy. Earlier last week, in an interview with an Israeli television network, she also trotted out the “basket of deplorables” line. Perhaps this “deplorables” attack will help rally the Left’s base. Maybe this was intended as a strategy to distract from Secretary Clinton’s myriad scandals and try to make the election a referendum on Donald Trump. However, the partisan optics of her attack might be less revealing than its deeper assumptions. Whether or not this proves an effective partisan gambit, the “deplorables” attack reveals some of the assumptions that have rendered public debates more fractious. . . .

Making politics simply the conflict between right-thinking people and “deplorables” (or sheep misled by such “deplorables”) undermines the foundation of serious political discussion, which demands a good-faith effort at communication and a recognition that those who differ from us might have legitimate alternative viewpoints. Without that mode of discussion, politics degenerates into simply screaming slogans at the opposing side. It’s a commonplace to lament political “gridlock,” but the impulse to deplorablize one’s opponents very much gets in the way of finding prudential compromise. The politics of demonization decreases civil trust and threatens to increase the fractures of an already divided body politic.

It makes perfect sense, though, if you divide voters into those who can be useful and those who might stand in your way.

UPDATE: Ramesh Ponnuru: Clinton’s ‘Basket of Deplorables’ wasn’t just impolitic, it was wrong.

DANA MILBANK: Yes, half of Trump supporters are racist.

Maybe they’re the almost-half of the Washington Post’s readership that’s disappeared since 2004.

BREAKING:

Mr Cooper just admitted he had complete access to Hillary's server and had no security clearance #HillarysEmails pic.twitter.com/Z0xPEHAMDc

— Citizen Dale (@Trumptbird) September 13, 2016

Is there anybody but the American public who didn’t have access to Hillary’s email?

POWERING THROUGH THE JOURNOLIST: “It must have tested well with focus groups, because the Hillary Clinton campaign had one line it wanted to get out on Monday: Hillary Clinton was trying to power through her illness this weekend. Campaign manager Robby Mook and spokespeople Brian Fallon and Kristina Schake all repeated the talking point ad nauseam in their cable appearances on Monday. The media picked it up as well, with reporters on CNN and MSNBC using the phrase to describe how Hillary Clinton bravely reacted to a pneumonia diagnosis on Friday.”