IT’S COME TO THIS: California Enacts Law Requiring IMDb to Remove Actor Ages on Request.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1235.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Fake YouTube video fools clueless iPhone7 owners into drilling holes in their phones to get a headphone jack.

A MURDER IN JORDAN: “A prominent and outspoken Jordanian writer (Nahed Hattar) on Sunday was shot dead in front of the courthouse where he had been on trial for sharing a cartoon deemed offensive to Islam.”

Hattar’s murderer was arrested, immediately. The government called it a heinous crime — which it is. However, the government was prosecuting the author for putting a cartoon on Facebook. The cartoon as described in the AP report:

“The caricature depicted a bearded man in heaven, smoking and in bed with two women, asking God to bring him wine and cashews. Relatives said the cartoon was meant to illustrate what Hattar viewed as the twisted religious views of Islamic State extremists. The post was quickly deleted after many angry responses.”

Islamist fanatics called for Hattar’s death. Hattar’s family notes that the government did not respond to the fanatics’ explicit on-line death threats.

How should his murderer be punished?

Read the entire report.

ANTI-ZIONISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM: Fighting Anti-Semitism at CUNY:

Militant anti-Israel ideology is a hallmark of the illiberal Left that has been taking college campuses by storm in recent years, creating a flashpoint at elite private colleges and large public universities alike. . . .

The campus Left suggests that hard-core “anti-Zionist” activism is undertaken entirely in good faith. Meanwhile, many of Israel’s lonely defenders in the Ivory Tower have resorted to asking universities to censor constitutionally protected anti-Israel speech. As Johnson notes, neither approach is productive. The distinction between “anti-Zionism” and “anti-Semitism” has been all but collapsed on many campuses, and administrators can and should condemn bigoted speech and impose sanctions in those instances where it crosses the line into true threats or harassment.

However, it’s important that the pro-Israel forces on campuses don’t adopt the tactics of the campus Left and attempt to use the power of the administration to punish speech merely because it is offensive. Not only would that be unethical, Johson notes, but it allows anti-Israel activists to “shift the discussion away from their extreme beliefs, from which most people outside academia appropriately recoil, to a different debate about protecting student civil liberties for all.” In other words, according to Johnson, defenders of Israel should see the First Amendment as an ally, not an adversary, in their fight against the forces of intolerance in the academy.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

OH, I’M SURE THEY’LL FAIL THIS PRETTY BADLY, AS USUAL: Obama’s Colossal Email Lie Final Test for Tarnished MSM, posits Roger Simon.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO SPOUSE-BEAT! Labour’s shadow minister for domestic violence was once cautioned over a bust-up with her husband after hitting him with a framed painting.

JOHN SCHINDLER: The FBI Investigation of EmailGate Was a Sham: We now have incontrovertible proof the Bureau never had any intention of prosecuting Hillary Clinton.

How exactly Cheryl Mills got immunity, and what its terms were, is the long-awaited “smoking gun” in EmailGate, the clear indication that, despite countless man-hours expended on the year-long investigation, James Comey and his FBI never had any intention of prosecuting Hillary Clinton – or anyone – for her mishandling of classified information as secretary of state.

Why Comey decided to give Mills a get-out-of-jail-free card is something that needs proper investigation. This is raw, naked politics. . . .

Corruption is the tamest word to describe this sort of dirty backroom deal which makes average Americans despise politics and politicians altogether.

How high in this administration EmailGate went is the key question, and it’s been reopened by the latest tranche of redacted documents that the FBI released – on Friday afternoon, as usual. There are lots of tantalizing tidbits here, including the fact that early in Hillary’s term at Foggy Bottom, State Department officials were raising awkward legal questions about her highly irregular email and server arrangements.

Most intriguing, however, is the revelation that Hillary was communicating with President Obama via personal email, and he was using an alias. The alias he used with Hillary, and apparently others, was withheld by the FBI, and let it be said the fact that the president wanted to disguise his identity in unclassified email is not all that odd.

What is odd, however, is the fact that Obama previously told the media that he only learned of Hillary’s irregular email and server arrangements from “news reports.” How the president failed to notice that he was emailing his top diplomat at her personal, clintonmail.com address, not a state.gov account, particularly when they were discussing official business, is something Congress may want to find out – since certainly the FBI won’t.

Not if it can help it.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Trump could win the debate simply by bluffing:

Whatever his failings may be, Trump is an alpha male, and Holt is a nerd. Nobody outside the media-political-progressive class likes to see nerds beat alphas. It’s contrary to the basic order of things.

All Trump has to do is raise his voice a little to make it clear who’s in charge: “Ex-CUSE me, Lester, are you going to let me finish?” Or, “Listen, I’m the candidate here. People want to hear what I have to say, not what you have to say, OK?”

Holt will look pathetic, Trump supporters will roar and middle-of-the-road voters will think, “The man’s a strong leader, no doubt about it.”

Debates are not intelligence tests. They’re not LSATs. They’re television shows, and one participant is the former star of one of the top-ten highest-rated programs in the land.

Read the whole thing.

EXCITEMENT ABOUNDS: New Washington Post Poll: Clinton and Trump in virtual dead heat before first debate. Hmm. This is better for Trump than most recent polls I’ve seen. Maybe he got a boost (or Hillary a cut) from the Charlotte riots? But most of the sampling period is too early for that, and it’s all too early for Hillary’s latest email revelations to have an effect.

PERSONALLY, I THINK COMPLAINING ABOUT “CULTURAL APPROPRIATION” IS RACISM, STRAIGHT UP: Lionel Shriver responds to her critics.

Earlier this month, fiction writer Lionel Shriver made headlines when she delivered a speech to the Brisbane Writer’s Festival (which most of her online critics had probably never heard of) and said she hoped “the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad.”

She explained that being told we cannot appropriate other cultures – like wearing sombreros at fiesta-themed parties – will ultimately harm fiction writers. “The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: You’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats,” Shriver said. “Yet that’s what we’re paid to do, isn’t it? Step into other people’s shoes, and try on their hats.” (Emphasis original.)

She went on to talk about college campuses and how people are no longer allowed to do anything that is associated with particular identities. These words offended one woman, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese-born Australian engineer and memoirist, so much that she stormed out and gave an interview to the Guardian.

(One thing about millennials, which Abdel-Magie is, and outrage, is that they have to let everyone know they’re outraged and get attention for themselves in the process.)

Now Shriver has responded to the controversy with an op-ed in the New York Times. She said she worried that the point of her speech — about how constraining fiction writers to only write about their own personal experiences would destroy fiction — would be “so self-evident” that it would be “bland.”

“Viewing the world and the self through the prism of advantaged and disadvantaged groups, the identity-politics movement — in which behavior like huffing out of speeches and stirring up online mobs is par for the course — is an assertion of generational power,” Shriver wrote.

“Among millenials [sic] and those coming of age behind them, the race is on to see who can be more righteous and aggrieved — who can replace the boring old civil rights generation with a spikier brand.”

This, Shriver wrote, has made the Left now the “oppressor,” the ones who enforce conformity. Shriver said she is a “lifelong Democratic voter” but is “dismayed by the radical Left’s ever-growing list of dos and don’ts — by its impulse to control, to instill self-censorship as well as to promote real censorship, and to deploy sensitivity as an excuse to be brutally insensitive to any perceived enemy.”

Yes. When victimhood is power, skins grow very thin.

OF COURSE. SHE’S MUCH MORE AGGRESSIVE ABOUT FIGHTING THE FORMER THAN THE LATTER: Hillary Clinton Would Rather Blame Free Speech than Islam for Terrorism.

THE HILL: Hispanic Dems ‘disappointed’ with party’s Latino outreach.

Congressional Hispanic Democrats are questioning the party’s approach to campaigning in Latino communities, as Republicans led by Donald Trump exceed expectations with the demographic.

The poor results reveal a rift between the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) and Democratic Party leadership over how to approach Latino voters.

Although Trump has alienated many Latino voters with his strong rhetoric on immigration and comments about Hispanics, his performance in polls has been roughly on par with 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney. A recent Bloomberg Politics average of polls found Hillary Clinton leads Trump by 38 points among Hispanics. Obama beat Romney by 44.

(Emphasis added. Because wow.) So for all the talk about Trump being racist and killing the GOP with Hispanics, he’s actaully doing 6 points better than Romney.

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT MONOPOLY INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM? First Latina cast member of NBC’s Saturday Night Live caught deleting thousands of tweets, including several racist and offensive posts.

IT’S RARE THAT THE UNDERCARD FIGHT SOUNDS LIKE IT WOULD BE MUCH MORE FUN THAN THE MAIN EVENT: Mark Cuban And Gennifer Flowers To Square Off At Monday’s Debate.

JUST NBC THE OBJECTIVE JOURNALISM! Leaked emails reveal NBC journalist Andrea Mitchell told Colin Powell a Trump nomination would be ‘awful’—just a month before it became reality.

AS WE HEAR REFERENCES (WHICH ARE PROBABLY TRUE) to Trump advisers having connections to Russian interests, note this: John Podesta’s Ties To Russian And Saudi Money.

Plus, this flashback: Ted Kennedy’s Soviet Gambit. “Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.”

Then there’s that whole “more flexibility” thing.

WE WERE PROMISED TRANSPARENCY, BUT WE KEEP SEEING STORIES LIKE THIS: How the FDA Manipulates the Media: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been arm-twisting journalists into relinquishing their reportorial independence, our investigation reveals. Other institutions are following suit.

A LIFE SAVING GUN THROUGH A VERY BIASED LENS: Fear and Loathing in Charlotte.

OF COURSE THEY DO: Boycott Israel Group Hopes to Host Future Events with Members of Congress.

DEFINE CIVILIZATION: DNA analysis points to humanity’s oldest civilization.

COVERUP GIRL: How’s the Coverup Going, Hillary?

FROM B. BRUMLEY: Woe for a Faerie: Keepers of New York.