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TO ASK THE QUESTION IS TO ANSWER IT: Why is George Stephanopoulos Even Allowed to Cover the Clinton Campaign?

ON HER MAJESTY’S “MOST SECRET” SERVER.

FASTER, PLEASE: Diagnosing ailments by analyzing intestinal gas.

SOD OFF, SWAMPY: Gourmet Burger Kitchen ad campaign sparks angry backlash from vegetarians.

If it were me, I’d have followed up with a Hitler-was-a-vegetarian ad.

SALON: Rubio’s disqualified because of his “bizarre religious faith” … Catholicism.

Shades of Bill Keller, then executive editor of the New York Times, cluelessly describing Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann in 2011 as belonging to a “fervid subset of evangelical Christianity,” when Santorum is a Catholic and Bachmann a Lutheran.

And didn’t JFK definitively settle this issue well over half a century ago? Why are the Democrats at Salon working overtime to trash his legacy?

Related: Watch this Republican politician school this atheist! …Nicely, mind you, because Jesus was watching.

HMM: “The Supreme Court said Tuesday that it would consider a legal challenge to President Obama’s overhaul of the nation’s immigration rules.” “There is special reason to think the states have standing, after what the Court did in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, allowing the state to challenge the EPA’s idea that the Clean Air Act didn’t refer to greenhouse gases, back in the days when the Bush administration wasn’t doing enough about global warming to suit the political party in power in Massachusetts. The tables are turned now, but the standing doctrine precedents are what they are.”

EVERYBODY THINKS WHAT NOBODY BELIEVES ABOUT OBAMACARE: Megan McArdle is “an honest broker, but I have to wonder about a couple of her phrases in the passage I quoted…Maybe those lines were merely the rhetorical sugar required to make the medicine go down easier for the typical Bloomberg reader.”

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ANOTHER SEXIST CALUMNY EXPLODED BY SCIENCE! Man flu is real because oestrogen protects women from the influenza virus. “New research has – once again – appeared to prove the existence of the much-contested ‘man flu’. The study, published by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, suggests that the female sex hormone oestrogen could help women combat the virus, leaving lesser-protected men out in the cold. Oestrogen, which is found at considerably higher levels in women than in men, was found to reduce the replication of the ‘influenza A’ virus in nasal cells, thereby initiating antiviral effects against the disease.”

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Pentagon ordered to “address climate change” in its war plans.

MORE ON THAT FISHY WACO SHOOTOUT: Who are the Cossacks, and Why Did the Bandidos Biker Gang Want Them Dead? “The word ‘outlaw,’ Wilson says, ‘was never attached to us till May 17.’”

TROLL LEVEL: GRANDMASTER. Amy Schumer Deserves Support For Embracing Virtue.

SCIENCE: “Papers that describe harmful effects to animals fed genetically modified (GM) crops are under scrutiny for alleged data manipulation. The leaked findings of an ongoing investigation at the University of Naples in Italy suggest that images in the papers may have been intentionally altered.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Get Rid Of Your Man Boobs.

My advice: If you follow Gary Taubes and Mark Rippetoe, you’ll do pretty well.

BRITAIN: The election polls weren’t wrong because of mistakes – pollsters deliberately cheated.

So now it’s official. We know what the pollsters did, and we know how they did it. The University of Southampton’s report into the great 2015 general election polling debacle stops short of telling us why they did it, but it doesn’t matter. We can fill that bit in for ourselves.

First, it’s been confirmed that the pollsters “herded”. Of course we knew the polls had mysteriously aligned in the final hours of the campaign – we could all see that for ourselves. But we know now – as some of us argued at the time – that this was not the basis of some ordinary statistical anomaly. As Professor Patrick Sturgiss, head of the inquiry, confirms: “A surprising feature of the 2015 election was the lack of variability across the polls in estimates of the difference in the Labour and Conservative vote shares. Having considered the available evidence, the Inquiry has been unable to rule out the possibility that ‘herding’ – whereby pollsters made design decisions that caused their polls to vary less than expected given their sample sizes – played a part in forming the statistical consensus.” . . .

Remember what the polling industry’s own explanation was for its errors. “Lazy Labour” voters who couldn’t be bothered to turn up on polling day, was one theory. The old favourite “Shy Tories” was also trotted out. Then there was the idea there had been a “Late Swing” to the Tories. Some people even speculated efficient Tory “Micro-targeting” of key marginals may have in some way skewed the results.

It was all rubbish. The polls were wrong because the pollsters had – inaccurately – manipulated their own samples. . . .

In any case, we don’t need to speculate about whether pollsters manipulated their findings, because the pollsters have admitted it themselves. Survation announced the morning after the result that they had decided not to publish their own “final” poll of the campaign because – in the words of company CEO Damian Lyons Lowe – “the results seemed so “out of line” with all the polling conducted by ourselves and our peers – what poll commentators would term an “outlier” – that I “chickened out” of publishing the figures.

So few institutions are trustworthy, these days. Luckily, this sort of thing could never happen here. . . .

THIS COULD HAPPEN: How Donald Trump defeats Hillary Clinton: Obama’s black supporters are crucial to a Trump win, and pollsters say he has a chance with this bloc. After all, the Democrats are offering nothing but old white people.

Flashback: Milo Yiannopoulos: Donald Trump Would Be the Real First Black President. “Normally what happens with sizeable immigrant populations is that existing groups start to move up the ladder: they become middle-class while the immigrants take low-paid and menial jobs. In LA, even in very black neighbourhoods, the construction workers are all Latino. Yet that upward ratchet doesn’t seem to be happening in the overwhelmingly Democratic-run black ghettoes so in flux in America today. Blacks aren’t benefitting from the Hispanic invasion: in fact, it’s making their lives even worse. . . . Trump also gets away with honesty that others don’t because he has such an affinity for aspirational mainstream black culture. Trump lives precisely the same life of ostentatious and unashamed wealth as do superstar rappers. Wouldn’t Jay Z have his name emblazoned in gold on skyscrapers if he could afford it?”

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY YOU KNOW —  Brain sensors that dissolve once they’ve done their job:

“I just took out a bullet from the back of a guy’s head an hour ago,” says Rory Murphy.

As a neurosurgeon at the Washington University School of Medicine, Murphy “deals with brain trauma all the time.” Between bullets, blunt forces, and blood clots, traumatic brain injuries kill around 50,000 people in the United States every year. These kinds of injuries often cause the brain to swell, which constricts the flow of blood and oxygen, and can lead to permanent damage. So surgeons like Murphy need reliable ways of monitoring the pressure inside their patients’ skulls. Sensors exist, but they are large, clunky, and must be removed once the patient has recovered.

Together with a team of engineers, Murphy is developing a better option: a dissolvable pressure sensor. Thinner than the tip of a needle, it can be left in a patient’s brain to take accurate readings for several days, before completely disappearing. You don’t need to remove them because there’s nothing to remove. They just get absorbed into the body.

John Rogers from the same lab also designed a similar “dissolvable heater that could burn away a bacterial infection in mice, before spontaneously vanishing once the animals were healthy.”

Those miniature heaters have the potential for reducing our dependence on antibiotics.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: Iran’s Hostage Victory. “Iran committed three criminal acts against American citizens and paid no price. We put kidnappers in prison for a very long time in this country, but the Iranian government was rewarded. What’s to stop that government from doing it again? Nothing.”

JON GABRIEL, CALL YOUR OFFICE: ‘Racial Reconciliation’ a Top Priority in 2016, Says Family Research Council.

Or to put it another way:

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 985.

WHY SO MANY EVANGELICALS have faith in Donald Trump.

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT THE WAY I HAD EXPECTED: Scientists Think Eating Poop May Help You Lose Weight.

Or as Iowahawk recently tweeted:

RUMORS SWIRL AROUND THE SAUDI THRONE.

Unnamed U.S. diplomats are said to be speculating that the Saudi King Salman will abdicate in 2016 in favor of his son Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the current Defense Minister. . . .

If true, this would be a revolution: the Saudi succession has gone from one septuagenarian to the next in a ritualized pattern for decades. Putting a young and vigorous 30-year-old in the top spot would change the way the country works and, potentially, would make the new king one of the most powerful people in the world.

U.S. officials are clearly hoping this doesn’t happen. The defense minister has been associated with the recent line of Saudi policy that has been shaking up the region, and it is predicated on a belief that, with the U.S. no longer a reliable ally, the Saudis have to take their destiny in their own hands.

Well, you can hardly blame them for feeling that way. Under Obama, the United States has openly sided with Iran.

UPDATE: Related: “It’s not credible that no one in the U.S. Fifth Fleet recognized what a bad idea it was to send two little riverine boats off on their own to transit north of Farsi Island in these circumstances. And yet, it seems that the priority of avoiding a transit through Saudi territorial waters – nominally friendly waters – was higher.”