JAMES COMEY: The Watergate Variations.

Related: Comey: I am not a weasel!

HMM: Approved tapeworm drug may offer babies protection from Zika. “Study authors said a compound in the tapeworm drug Nicolsamide, which animal studies suggest does not pose harm to pregnant women, showed particular promise for Zika treatment. The team plans to further study the compounds and begin testing them on animals infected with Zika to test their effects.” Faster, please.

COMPARING THE ORIGINAL MINIVAN with its most modern iteration.

VIDEO: Final 20 seconds of Tennessee-Georgia pure bonkers.

ELECTRIC AND AUTONOMOUS: Volkswagen Group looks to add ridesharing brand to portfolio.

MATT WELCH: The Media’s Hypocrisy On Gary Johnson.

Is Gary Johnson qualified to run for president? Let’s talk about that, but first let’s talk about this:

Two weeks ago, the foreign affairs select committee of the British House of Commons released a detailed, damning report about one of Hillary Clinton’s signature achievements as secretary of state: The 2011 US/UK/French-led military intervention into Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya, which was sold as a necessity to prevent (in President Barack Obama’s words) “a massacre that would have reverberated across the region.”

“This policy,” the conservative-led committee concluded, “was not informed by accurate intelligence. In particular, the [British] Government failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element. By the summer of 2011, the limited intervention to protect civilians had drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change. That policy was not underpinned by a strategy to support and shape post-(Gadhafi) Libya. The result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of (Gadhafi) regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa.”
You might think that a deeply sourced report from an allied government about trumped-up intelligence leading to yet another destabilizing Middle East war might make some headlines in the country where the administration’s leading proponent of said intervention is poised to become the next leader of the free world.

But you would be wrong.

Aside from a handful of mostly ideological outlets, the US news media declined to even note that the Democratic presidential nominee suffered a comprehensive rebuke to her oft-repeated assertion that Libya represented American “smart power at its best.” As The Atlantic delicately put it, “The British public has been engaged in a debate about war that has been largely absent from the U.S. presidential election.”

Ah, yes, but did you hear the one about Gary Johnson not being able to come up on the spot with the name of his favorite foreign leader? Disqualifying! And also, oddly, nearly ubiquitous in the same media that couldn’t be bothered to reexamine a Hillary Clinton policy that has adversely affected countless human lives.

Well, once it became clear that he takes more votes from Hillary than Trump, this was inevitable.

WHO YOU GONNA CALL? The Granbury Ghost and Legends Tour wisely kept a member of Ghostbusters’ Texas Division on call today, just in case.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Kentucky Bar Passage Rates Crater: UK, Louisville Down 15%, 20% Since 2011. “While not every state has released final bar exam results from this summer, most that have released their results saw a similar decline in pass rates in 2016, continuing a downward trend in recent years.” So people who follow these things tell me that this is mostly because the bar examiners are getting more restrictive to hold down competition in a troubled legal market. Kind of unfair to do this at the back end, after people have spent 3 years in law school. But there’s this:

These declining pass rates around the country have been accompanied by a drop in the mean Bar Exam Score, which is derived from a standard multiple choice section from exams in each state. The mean score of July exams slightly increased nationally to 140.3 in 2016, but is still the second-lowest recorded since 1988 and is over five points lower than what it was in 2008. …

Some commentators have blamed the falling bar exam pass rates and scores around the country on law schools increasingly lowering their admissions standards, arguing that this is the inevitable outcome of pushing unprepared students into the field.

Hmm. Plus, from the comments: “These results are disgraceful. Isn’t Louisville the law school that passed a social justice resolution and required the faculty and students to take diversity training? Dean Duncan should concentrate on turning out lawyers not social justice warriors.”

More on Louisville here, here, and here.

WELL, GOOD: Children Who Get Zika After Birth Tend Not to Fall Seriously Ill, Study Finds.

WHY ARE UNIVERSITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF SEXISM? EEOC To Sue Denver Law School For Underpaying Female Faculty.

AT AMAZON, save on Wheels and Tires. Snow season is coming.

Plus, deals in Health & Personal Care.

I TALK TWITTER, ACADEMIC POLITICS, MEDIA EVOLUTION, AND TRUMP VS. HILLARY on the Reason podcast.

PAPER BALLOTS ALL THE WAY, BABY! Hackers have attempted to gain access to elections systems in 20 states.

Actually, if I were a foreign hacker trying to disrupt an election, I’d try to crash the EBT payment system on the last payment date before the election in swing state big-cities. That would probably produce disruptive riots and chaos.

SO I FREQUENTLY MENTION DAVID BARON’S EXCELLENT BOOK, The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator’s Deadly Return to Suburban America. Now I see he’s got a new one coming out called American Eclipse.

GOOD FOR THEM: Nashville Cops Don’t Want to Enforce Airbnb Regulations Because They’d Rather Focus on Stopping Actual Crime.

WASHINGTON POST: The big difference in the way white and black Americans view protests against police.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1241.

THIS KEEPS HAPPENING: Can’t shake the cough! Hillary Clinton chokes up at Florida rally and pops a throat lozenge just minutes before she’s helped down a set of stairs by an aide as health woes continue to plague her.

CLINTON MOCKS SANDERS SUPPORTERS IN LEAKED FUNDRAISER RECORDING. “Living in their parents’ basements.”

ANGELA MERKEL’S LEGACY: Europe’s Immigration Fatigue: Europe continues to fragment as an anti-immigrant backlash gathers strength.

The continued flow of MENA migrants into Europe remains the defining factor transforming the internal political dynamic in the European Union. The more than 1.5 million people who entered the EU last year, as well as those who are continuing to arrive on Europe’s shores, are straining state resources. The security of the EU’s external borders, a key subject of the recent heads-of-state meeting in Vienna, is also a serious problem. But even more significant than these are the internal political changes the migrant flows are driving: the growing polarization of the public and the hardening of anti-immigrant feelings across Europe.

The latter effect, the change in attitudes, is much more important for the EU’s future than whether member states can negotiate a plan for redistributing new arrivals; immigrants’ continuing difficulty integrating into society is an increasingly urgent problem. The newcomers’ failure to adapt to their new environment is a function of their often-limited language skills, cultural differences, and continued low levels of employment. All of this is driving a general sense in a number of host nations that the open door policy pursued by Germany and a number of other states last year is stretching their countries past the breaking point.

Who could have seen this coming? Meanwhile, Hillary says Angela Merkel is her favorite world leader.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: AFSOC shoots for AC-130 laser gunship mod in 2020.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Feminist PhD Candidate: Science Is Sexist* Because It’s Not Subjective.

Well, so much for Paul Krugman’s “liberal bias of facts” aphorism.

* Isn’t everything these days? And possibly for the next four to eight years as well.

WELL, YEAH, IT’S 2016: Voters Choosing Among ‘Lesser of Two Evils,’ Survey Finds. As somebody was saying on Facebook, Gary Johnson’s slips suggest he was better off not making the debates. Right now he’s getting the libertarian vote plus the “none of the above” vote, while if he’d been on the debate floor making gaffes like these, he’d probably lose a good deal of the latter.

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