I WONDER WHAT THE FRAMERS OF THE EIGHTH AMENDMENT WOULD SAY? In U.S. Jails, a Constitutional Clash Over Air-Conditioning.

The air inside the Jefferson Davis Parish jail was hot and musty. Prisoners, often awakened by the morning heat, hoped for cooling rain after nightfall. And ice, one inmate recalled, brought fleeting relief in the cell she called a “sweatbox.”

Even though summer temperatures routinely roar past 100 degrees here, the jail, like scores of other jails and prisons across the country, has no air-conditioning.

“It’s hot,” Heidi Bourque, who was locked up this month for theft, said of the jail as she sat in her home, where the glowing red digits of the living room thermostat showed the temperature as a chilling 62. “It’s miserable.”

Her complaints are unlikely to move local residents, who approved funding to build a new jail after local leaders promised two years ago that it would not pamper inmates with air-conditioning. But they speak to a broader debate about the threshold for when extreme temperatures become cruel and unusual punishment.

So let me get this straight: America’s “obsession” with air conditioning is stupid according to Europeans, and the Washington Post thinks air conditioning is sexist, but taxpayer-paid AC is a constitutional right if you’re in jail?

Sorry, but I’d not only forego taxpayer-paid AC for prisoners, I’d ban it for bureaucrats, too.

I’M NOT AT ALL SURPRISED THAT OBAMA HASN’T MADE A VISIT, BUT I’M A BIT SURPRISED TRUMP HASN’T: 12 photos capture devastating reality of historic flooding in Louisiana.

THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: The Return of Scurvy? Houston Neurologist Diagnoses Hundreds of Patients with Vitamin Deficiencies.

CONFIDENCE: Clinton Super PAC to suspend ads in Virginia, Colorado, Pennsylvania in mid-September.

Allahpundit:

Actually, they’re already off the air in Virginia. Why spend precious dollars in battlegrounds if they’re not really battlegrounds?

Resuming on September 20th is conditional, I assume. If any of those states have narrowed, the ads will go up. If they haven’t, the money is better spent in competitive states like Georgia, Arizona, and, er, maybe Utah. It’s conceivable that Priorities won’t air a single ad for the last two months of the race in three of the biggest purple-state targets for the GOP this year.

As I was saying…

CHRISTIAN SCHNEIDER: In Milwaukee Shooting, Consider The Black Officer. “You’re aware that if it ends up being you lying face down in that yard, the calls for ‘justice’ for your life probably won’t be nearly as loud. No civil rights leaders will be flying in for your funeral; there will be no marches through the streets of Milwaukee calling for federal investigations. And for your efforts, many will cite you as a cause of many of the city’s problems.”

THE MILWAUKEE RIOTS ARE A LOCAL NEWS STORY TO THE MEDIA, Jazz Shaw writes at Hot Air:

Have you been following all of the breathless media coverage of the riots, arson and looting in Milwaukee this week? Me neither. It’s not that I wouldn’t find the subject interesting and pertinent to the national discussion on police shootings and racial unrest. It’s simply a matter of there being almost no coverage on the cable news networks I watch during the day while working. You’d think this would be fairly major story with people being shot, officers being injured and properties burning to the ground.

So why the dearth of coverage? Jim Geraghty has a few ideas on the subject over at National Review and one of them is that the media is simply growing tired of getting repeatedly punched in the face if the desired narrative falls apart.

Literally so – and not in the Joe Biden definition of the L-word – “Racial Violence Forces Reporters To Leave Milwaukee After Police Shooting,” BuzzFeed(!) reports.

Related: Sister of Armed Man Killed By Milwaukee Cops Tells Rioters to Burn ‘Sh*t Down’ in the Suburbs.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON THE GREAT REGRESSION: “Today, it seems that Orwell’s 1984 would better have been titled 2016,” VDH writes:

Orwell was wrong only on his dates. Had he entitled his novel 2016, we would immediately have recognized his parallels to the present “overseas contingency operations,” “violent extremism,” “undocumented immigrants,” and “man-caused disasters.” The campus diversity czar is our Big Brother. Imagining that all lives matter is a thought crime. Due process on a campus today is counter-revolutionary, and proper sexual congress among students is to be scripted as a politically correct act, as if we were all Orwell’s Winston Smith and Julia. Is the Junior Anti-Sex League with its red sashes far behind?

As the London Guardian lamented on Sunday, “Goodbye to sex: a short and heartfelt eulogy.”

Hey, the Washington Post wasn’t kidding when at the start of 2009, via their then-owned magazine Newsweek, they declared “We Are All Socialists Now” – evidently, they didn’t realize (or care) that the result would be something akin to East Germany, albeit with Justin Bieber and the Kardashians for entertainment, rather than ‘60s London with socialized medicine and the Beatles. (Or Sweden and Abba for that matter.)

I’M SO OLD I CAN REMEMBER WHEN SKEWED INTELLIGENCE REPORTS WERE CONSIDERED A VERY BAD THING BY THE MSM. Former Brigadier General: Obama’s Briefer Told CENTCOM Official to Skew Intel on ISIS.

MARK RIPPETOE: The Olympic Games: Time To Stop.

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THE NATIONAL MEDIA, when Louisiana’s devastating floods barely register as a story?

Well for one thing, there’s no political angle to beat up Republicans, when the state’s governor is a Democrat, and so is the president.

AMERICA’S FIRST SOMALI STATE LEGISLATOR EMBROILED IN MARRIAGE, IMMIGRATION FRAUD ALLEGATIONS, Patrick Poole writes:

Now just days after her upset primary victory, Omar faces serious allegations that she engaged in marriage and possible immigration fraud.

In a story broke by attorney Scott Johnson at the Power Line blog on Friday, there are allegations that one of her sham marriages may be to her own brother.

This isn’t the 21st century I was promised; read the whole thing.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1195.

FASTER, PLEASE: Trump Advocates “Extreme Vetting” of Muslim Immigrants in Forceful Foreign Policy Speech, Roger Simon writes.

“Republican presidential candidate Donald J Trump — has just outflanked Hillary Clinton on the Left and announced what can only be described as an ultra-progressive immigration policy,” Milo Yiannopoulos enthusiastically cheers.

MISSING FROM THIS STORY: THE LEAST HINT OF WHO’S BEHIND IT. Cars burn across Sweden as fire-starters roam free. Which means we know who’s behind it, right?

ON THE SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP of Drudge and Trump.

RESET: Russia, for First Time, Uses Iranian Base for Syria Campaign.

Russian bombers launched attacks in Syria from an Iranian air base for the first time on Tuesday, potentially altering the political and military equation in the Middle East.

Long-range Tupolev-22M3 bombers, which would otherwise have to fly from Russia, used an Iranian base near Hamadan to hit a series of targets inside Syria, according to a brief statement from the Russian Defense Ministry.

The agreement to let Russia use the base significantly deepens the country’s military role in the region, most obviously in Iran. And it could help solidify Russia as the main broker of any future peace agreement in Syria.

I was writing almost a year ago about a developing Russo-Iranian Axis, hoping it wouldn’t seem too far-fetched. Eleven months later and it’s nearly a fait accompli.

DER SPIEGEL: Losing Trust: Frustrations Grow Over German Response to Terror. The Merkel era, I predict, will be looked back upon as a disaster.

THE CLINTONS’ POST-BLUE FLOP: The Greatest Failure of Democratic Social Policy.

A new study has found that it would take two hundred and twenty-eight years for black families to accumulate the same amount of wealth that white families have now, if current policy prescriptions remain in place. . . .

No program epitomized the boomer progressive synthesis better than the efforts to increase black homeownership launched by the Clinton administration in the 1990s. Using the power of Fannie Mae and a flexible mortgage market, instructions went out to help get more black and minority families in homes of their own.

There is nothing wrong with the idea in many ways. Home ownership has been the foundation of middle class prosperity and wealth accumulation for many American families: $12.5 trillion in home equity, most of it held by middle class households, provides financial security, dignity and stability to millions of American families. I have written at length about how the owner occupied home replaced the owner-occupied farm as the central institution of American life in the 20th century.

Family farms produced wealth. Homes produce debt. The program to promote homeownership failed because it confused causation and correlation, as summed up in Reynolds’ Law:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

But when you subsidize things, there are glorious opportunities for graft. And when you talk about blacks being sent “to the back of the bus” — a practice that ended years before I was born — you’re not engaged with today’s realities.

GRASSLEY WANTS TO KNOW WHY FEDS AREN’T ENFORCING THE LAW: Federal law bars fugitives from the law from living, even temporarily, in tax-funded public housing. But an unpublished Inspector General report in 2012 found an estimated 1,300 such fugitives in just one region of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to Ethan Barton of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley isn’t buying the HUD IG’s claim the report wasn’t published because of “data problems” when it was completed. The IG also said the report was a draft, despite the fact such status was nowhere indicated on the copy obtained by TheDCNF.

“The HUD Inspector General needs to explain whether the wanted fugitive felon report was final or not and if there are problems with the data,” Grassley told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “And HUD needs to explain why the federal law isn’t being enforced.”

“These discrepancies don’t inspire confidence that the agency has a good handle on wanted fugitive felons in public housing or that the residents are being adequately protected. Inspector general reports should be public with very few exceptions,” he said.

Here’s the really troubling question: If there are 1,300 in one HUD region four years ago, how many are there across the nation today?

MILE-MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO SINGLE-PAYER: Citing Losses, Aetna Withdraws from Most Obamacare Markets.

OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: A Wakeup Call for Donald Trump.

POST-GAY AMERICA: Kentucky Has a Gay Senate Candidate — Does Anybody Care?

Sorry, gays, you’re old news now. Muslims are the new gays.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: When rulers despise the ruled: It’s like The Hunger Games: the Capital City, and its hangers-on, flourish, while the provinces starve.