THE LATEST PHOTO-INTENSIVE BLOG POST AT MATTE SHOT IS NOW ONLINE: Urban Landscapes — The Matte Painter’s Concrete Jungle Part One, with before and after shots of King Kong, Citizen Kane, The Fountainhead, Hitchcock’s Frenzy, Blade Runner, Michael Radford’s film version of 1984, Ghostbusters, Rain Man, Batman Returns, and many more.

IT TAKES A BRITISH PAPER, I GUESS: The Daily Mail discusses five different FBI investigations into the Clintons, their inner circle of scoundrels and other associated crooks.

The extent to which Hillary Clinton’s key advisers are now the focus of major FBI investigations is becoming clear. The Clintons’ long-term inner-circle – some of whom stretch back in service to the very first days of Bill’s White House – are being examined in at least five separate investigations. The scale of the FBI’s interest in some of America’s most powerful political fixers – one of them a sitting governor – underlines just how difficult it will be for Clinton to shake off the taint of scandal if she enters the White House.There are, in fact, not one but five separate FBI investigations which involve members of Clinton’s inner circle or their closest relatives – the people at the center of what has come to be known as Clintonworld.

Added thought:

The FBI does not generally comment on investigations, so it is entirely possible there are more under way.

WELL, SOMETIMES WE DIDN’T: How Did We Survive Before These Safety Breakthroughs?

WE TAKE SOLACE WHEREVER WE CAN IN 2016. New post by Spengler: The FBI Agents Who Stood Up for Rule of Law Make Me Proud to be an American.

DAVID BERNSTEIN: Why I don’t donate to my alma mater, Yale Law School.

I graduated from Yale Law School in 1991, and the 25th reunion was held recently. As you might expect, I was solicited to contribute to the law school.

I was ready to give at least a modest gift, but then I started thinking about how unlike literally every other “elite” law school, Yale Law School has never in my lifetime hired a conservative public law (constitutional law, administrative law and so forth) scholar. (Robert Bork was hired as an antitrust scholar, and only wrote about constitutional law later.) This was true even during the Dean Guido Calabresi era, when the law school hired several free-market-oriented law and economics private law scholars.

I then recalled relatively recent conversations I had with two current or recent members of the Yale Law School faculty, who told me that there are members of that faculty who make it their business to block any non-“progressive” appointments in constitutional law and related fields.

I don’t donate either, for similar reasons.

I’M CALLING THIS A NEGATIVE REVIEW: The New Macbook Pro Tool Bar Is A Scab I Want To Pick Off.

UNEXPECTEDLY! NFL Ratings Continue To Fall In Primetime, While Baseball And Basketball Are Up.

I HOPE IT WORKS: This smartphone add-on claims to detect cancer with 99% accuracy. But after the Theranos claims, I’m skeptical.

UNEXPECTEDLY: DOJ official ‘running’ Clinton email probe tried to get son a job with the Clinton campaign.

It’s cronyism and collusion all the way down.

TAKING A LOAD OFF: Trump Supporter Charged With Dumping Manure at Ohio Democratic Party HQ Speaks Out.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Hillary’s Two Official Favors To Morocco Resulted In $28 Million For Clinton Foundation.

FIGHTING COUNTERFEIT DRUGS with optical microtags.

IF YOU LIKE YOUR DOCTOR, TOUGH: Number of doctors participating in Obamacare plummets nearly 20%.

THE ATLANTIC’S MOLLY BALL: HILLARY IS ULTIMATE VICTIM OF 2016:

What had she been through over the past year and a half—what had America been through? She had prepared for a normal campaign, prepared for something like 2012, a boring slog against a sane and decent regular Republican whom she would strain to argue was Wrong On The Issues. Instead she got a hair-on-fire carnival ride, a Russian spy thriller, a national nervous breakdown of an election.

Every day she got up and recited the same jokes and exhortations, and every day the hackers released more of her advisers’ private communications onto the internet, and every day her improbable opponent, a sort of primal scream in human form, waved his arms and called her a criminal.

She had piles and piles of proposals*—to rightsize the prisons and roll back deportations and pay for child care and on and on—and then it turned out the election wasn’t about any of that. It was about trying to be as inconspicuous as possible and waiting for the fire to burn out. It was about being slightly less of a monster. Even then, about half of America looked at her and was not convinced.

Shades of John Kerry on 2004, who knew that as the Democrats’ presidential nominee, he had the entire MSM in his pocket, and that they would keep his radical chic worldview and past under wraps. But Al Gore’s invention, which allows information to flow in a decentralized fashion, unlike the Cronkite-era MSM, is a fickle mistress, as both Kerry and Hillary discovered. In early 2007, Joe Biden referred to Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Biden’s use of the word “clean” meant that Obama was relatively free of similar historical baggage (particularly when compared with rhetorical bomb-throwing past radical chic Democrat presidential wannabes such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton). That wasn’t really true, as we’ve since discovered (QED: Ayers, Wright, Alinsky, etc.), but Obama’s success as a “storybook” candidate, a self-described “blank slate” onto which any narrative can be cut and pasted, was a reminder that the DNC much prefers presidential nominees who have little or no unfortunate backstory to be exploited by their opponents.

Hillary is the very opposite of that, but she was next in-line, the backbench was very sparsely populated (in large part thanks to the disaster of Obamacare, ironically enough), and when you’re the Democrats, you go to war against the American people with the candidate you have, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld.

* Reading Ball’s past hot-takes, you just know she views Hillary as a real-life Tracy Flick, and that she thinks Flick is a character to be admired.

GOTV: Confidence Even as Hillary Clinton’s Momentum Slows.

Mrs. Clinton’s troubles still have not altered the overwhelming difficulties faced by Republicans running in states that Mr. Trump is likely to lose. And Republicans in some of these races have quietly started to take steps to win with the help of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters.

Late last week, Pennsylvania Republicans updated their scripts for volunteer phone callers and canvassers to identify, and ultimately turn out, voters who are supporting Senator Patrick J. Toomey — but who also plan to back Mrs. Clinton.

Triage — giving up on Trump for the possibility of saving Toomey.

Pennsylvania looks to remain the GOP’s will-o’-the-wisp.

STILL RELEVANT! Virginia Postrel’s The Future and its Enemies on sale for $3.99 on Kindle.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Paint Your Garage Floor, It’s Worth It. I have a fiberglass coating on mine. It’s nice.

PIERS MORGAN: Desperate Democrats need to stop lashing Comey now. He had no choice. The ONLY people to blame for this email mess are Huma, Bill and most of all Hillary. When Piers Morgan is saying this, it’s not a good sign for Hillary’s narrative.

CLAUDIA ROSETT CHALKS UP ANOTHER OBAMA LEGACY: THE CLINTON EMAIL BURLESQUE. “It is Clinton’s longtime top aide, Huma Abedin, who has some explaining to do about how emails pertinent to the Clinton server saga arrived on the computer of her now-estranged husband, Weiner, who is currently under FBI investigation for allegedly sending sexually suggestive messages to a teenage girl. But it is Obama who presides over the administration whence came this mudslide of wayward emails, classified information, pay-for-play opportunities and a Justice Department that has itself become part of the scandal. And it is at the president’s desk that the buck — or the mudslide — is supposed to stop.”

In a memorable Seinfeld episode, George Costanza once confessed to his therapist he believed that, “God would never let me be successful. He’d kill me first. He’ll never let me be happy.” His therapist queried, “I thought you didn’t believe in God?” “I do for the bad things,” George deadpanned in response.

Apparently the DNC-MSM believes that the American people should look at the last eight years through an inversion of the Costanza formula. We should only think of Obama for the good things that he and his administration were responsible for.

Get back to me if you discover what they were.

BUYER’S REMORSE: States Where You Can Change Your Early Vote.

Early voting is up there with electronic voting on the list of things democracies do to corrupt themselves.

COLUMBIA LAW PROF PHIL HAMBURGER: Investigating The Investigators: “The last several weeks have seen extraordinary developments in the climate-change investigation of ExxonMobil. What once was an investigation of ExxonMobil by states attorneys general has become an inquiry into the misconduct of the attorneys general. . . . If attorneys general are to have the subpoena power, they need to be held accountable. Hence the investigation of the investigators.”

Accountability should be for everyone.

CARVILLE MELTS DOWN: ASSERTS FBI, GOP, AND KGB IN CAHOOTS.

Wow, James Carville morphed into James Gregory in the Manchurian Candidate so slowly, I hardly even noticed:

And shades of Iowahawk’s “It Could Happen Here” parody in 2009, a period when former Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano, then newly-ensconced, believed that the real terrorist threat she was hired to fight was the dreaded Red State Menace.

As with the darkly satirical Manchurian Candidate, I’m so old, I can remember when Democrats made huge sport of those who feared reds were under every bed.

YOU DON’T SAY. ‘We’re not in perfect control’: U.S. plans operation against Islamic State in Syria despite obstacles.

The Obama administration is racing to settle questions that could scuttle a planned offensive against the Islamic State in the Syrian city of Raqqa that Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter has said will begin “within weeks . . . and not many weeks.”

Senior administration officials have attributed the newly described urgency to Raqqa’s symbolic role as the “capital of the caliphate” claimed by the militants and intelligence indicating that it is the center of Islamic State planning for terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States.

But the officials acknowledged a wealth of problems that could derail the offensive, including the need to gather and train additional Syrian forces. More ominously, they cite the explosive dynamics between two allies: Turkey and Syrian Kurdish fighters, who form the bulk of the existing offensive force.

There’s also the little matter of Russia’s no-fly zone of Syrian airspace.

2016, MAN: Yoga Pants Flash Mob Terrorizes Hapless Letter-Writer.

Pretty sure I saw Yoga Pants Flash Mob open for the Waitresses at the TLA in Philly back in ’83.

THE PURGE GOES ON: Turkish PM says has no regard for Europe’s ‘red line’ on press freedom.