GOOD LORD: Homeless mother who sent six-year-old son to better school in the wrong town jailed for five years.

RATS ON THE WEST SIDE, BED BUGS UPTOWN: 10 Hotel Chains With the Worst Bed Bug Infestations.

I’M UNIMPRESSED: The iPhone Is Losing Its Headphone Jack But You’ll Be Fine: It’s going to be a little inconvenient, but you’ll survive.

Now there’s great salesmanship: “It’s going to be a little inconvenient, but you’ll survive.”

YOU GO FIRST: Deeming It ‘Safe’, British Airways Resumes Flights to Iran.

BUT WHAT ABOUT ONE NIGHT IN BANGKOK? 12 Hours in Tokyo Will Show You What’s Missing in America.

HOWARD WOLOWITZ TO THE PINK COURTESY PHONE, PLEASE: The Quest to Build the First Robotic Vagina.

WHEN EVERYONE IS HITLER, NO ONE IS HITLER: Frank Bruni: Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump.

Conservative commentators and die-hard Republicans often brush off denunciations of Donald Trump as an unprincipled hatemonger by saying: Yeah, yeah, that’s what Democrats wail about every Republican they’re trying to take down. Sing me a song I haven’t heard so many times before.

Howard Wolfson would be outraged by that response if he didn’t recognize its aptness.

“There’s enough truth to it to compel some self-reflection,” Wolfson, who was the communications director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid in 2008, told me this week.

In fact, he finds himself thinking about it a whole lot: how extreme the put-downs of political adversaries have become; how automatically combatants adopt postures of unalloyed outrage; what this means when they come upon a crossroads — and a candidate — of much greater, graver danger.

“I worked on the presidential campaign in 2004,” he said, referring to John Kerry’s contest against George W. Bush. He added that he was also “active in discussing” John McCain when he ran for the presidency in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.

“And I’m quite confident I employed language that, in retrospect, was hyperbolic and inaccurate, language that cheapened my ability — our ability — to talk about this moment with accuracy and credibility.”

Did Democrats cry wolf so many times before Trump that no one hears or heeds them now? . . .

Democrats were indeed dire about Romney, even though many of them, including President Obama, now speak of him fondly, as a Republican whose prescriptions might be flawed but whose heart is true.

Four years ago, he was a bloodsucking capitalist vampire whose indictment of Obamacare was ipso facto proof of his racism. In The Daily Beast, he was called a “race-mongering pyromaniac.” On MSNBC, he was accused, by a black commentator, of the “niggerization” of Obama into “the scary black man who we’ve been trained to fear.”

Romney was supposedly out of touch with reality — never mind that he had governed a blue state, Massachusetts, without cataclysmic incident — just as McCain was described, in some quarters, as a combustible hothead who couldn’t be allowed anywhere near the nuclear codes. He was Trump before Trump, which makes Trump less Trump.

And those are just the presidential candidates.

Yes, and it’s not just Democrats. But I see on Twitter that Bruni’s getting a lot of butthurt reactions from the left. Because the truth hurts. And the truth is that the political establishments of both parties, and the media (but I repeat myself) have let down the American people through a failure of self-discipline and a want of responsibility. Now the bill is coming due, and Trump is just the first, smallest installment.

Tea Party people were polite, and were betrayed and demonized. Trump supporters are angry, and are betrayed and demonized. What comes next?

WIPE THEM OUT; ALL OF THEM: Mosquitoes Are Deadly, So Why Not Kill Them All?

Powerful new gene-editing technologies could allow scientists to program mosquito populations to gradually shrink and die off. Some efforts have gained enough momentum that the possibility of mosquito-species eradication seems tantalizingly real.

“I think it is our moral duty to eliminate this mosquito,” entomologist Zach Adelman says about Aedes aegypti, a species carried afar over centuries by ships from sub-Saharan Africa. It derived from a forest dweller and adapted to thrive among humans, to whom the mosquito spreads at least four viruses that cause major diseases.

Prof. Adelman, a virologist and associate professor of entomology at Texas A&M University, is working to program Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to develop as males.

Eventually, females would run out of mates, crashing the species’ population in places it invaded and “cleaning up a global mess,” he says. Female mosquitoes are the only ones that bite people and transmit viruses.

This is not a new discussion for longtime Instapundit readers.

MARCONI DOES THE MAMBA, LISTEN TO THE RADIO: Michael Gerson: Get Rid of Conservative Talk Radio. Motes and beams, dude, motes and beams.

THE BUREAUCRATIC MENTALITY IS THE ONLY CONSTANT IN THE UNIVERSE: FEC demands proof of existence from God, Satan.

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA: Russia’s Supreme Court rules that the USSR did not invade Poland in 1939.

Read the whole thing. As Daniel Hannan wrote a couple of years ago in the London Telegraph, “To the modern reader, George Orwell’s depiction of how enmity alternates between Eurasia and Eastasia seems far-fetched; but when he published his great novel in 1948, such things were a recent memory. It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated.”

And it’s necessary now, for Putin to pretend, as the Human Rights in Ukraine Website notes, that the Soviet invasion of Poland “had not been an act of aggression, but a defensive act to ensure the security of the USSR. This is exactly the narrative that the Kremlin has been pushing to try to justify Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea.”

(Via Anne Applebaum.)

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1212.

THIS ISN’T THE 21st CENTURY I WAS PROMISED. LGBT Meltdown: Trans ‘Community’ Angry Gay Man Will Play Trans Woman.

Related:

HE WHO CONTROLS THE PAST… Russia’s Supreme Court rules that the USSR did not invade Poland in 1939.

Russia’s Supreme Court has upheld the conviction of Perm blogger Vladimir Luzgin for reposting a text which states that both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939. The Supreme Court’s ruling came on September 1, 2016, the 77th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, 17 days before the anniversary of the Soviet invasion from the east.

Henry Reznik, the well-known lawyer who was representing Luzgin, commented that the Supreme Court has discredited itself through this ruling and promised to appeal further. He added that an application to the European Court of Human Rights was simply demanded.

Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Rippentrop could not be reached for comment, nor could more than 20,000 men and officers of the Polish Army last seen in or near the Katyn Forest.

DEATH PANEL DISCUSSION: Obamacare Costs Skyrocket; When Does It Stop?

Middle-class households are finding more of their Obamacare costs are coming out of their own pockets.

Self-covered individuals are hit hardest, but employers providing coverage have fought back against rising costs by reducing plan benefits.

Deductibles are up 67% since 2010. That’s seven times more than wages. And the cost of prescription drugs is out of sight.

Read the whole thing, including some scary-ass charts from the Obamacare-lovin’ Kaiser Foundation.

They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.

YAHOO NEWS: “For truly undecided voters, the stagecraft was probably persuasive…” Yes.

JOHN SCHINDLER: Why Obama Is to Blame for Russia’s SpyWar on America: The Kremlin is attacking our democracy—and our president let it happen.

His “reset” with Russia was terribly timed, though at least Hillary Clinton was able to assist Russia in developing the very high-tech industry that’s now being used to cyber-pillage America. True to form, the Clinton Foundation made big money off this too.

Naïve and uninformed yet supremely self-confident, Obama and his bloated National Security Council ignored repeated warnings from the Intelligence Community about nefarious activities by Russian spies against America. Back in 2012, when Obama was castigating Mitt Romney for his “1980s thinking” when the Republican presidential nominee called Russia our main geopolitical threat, Moscow was becoming exactly that.

In response, Obama did basically nothing.

If he were trying to destroy America’s superpower status, what would he be doing differently?

OBAMA’S POWER VACUUM: China Pivots to the Middle East.

This year, China has opened its first foreign military base in Djibouti and sent a senior military advisor to Syria. Both the FT and SCMP report that some prominent Chinese academics and officials are rethinking the wisdom of non-alignment. Meanwhile, a 2015 law gave the PLA the ability to intervene in other countries to prevent terrorism even without a UN mandate.

Nowhere is China’s expanding hard power more visible than in the Middle East, and it’s hard not to see that at least partially as a consequence of U.S. withdrawal. The United States is still a big player in the region. But as Ambassador Dennis Ross and others have observed, these days Arab leaders are turning to Putin, not Obama, for assistance. Now China is also looking to fill the vacuum.

Obama Administration officials past and present keep saying they’re playing a “long game.” That’s hard to dispute directly, of course, because we have no vision of how things will look in the long run. But we can see the short term pretty well, and increasingly the outlines of the medium term are coming into view. As far as stability and prosperity go, the foreseeable future doesn’t look promising.

Actually, Obama’s brilliant. He thinks that this troublesome region can only be controlled with an iron heel, and the United States, for various reasons, can’t wield an iron heel. So we let the Russians and Chinese do it. In that past the oil would have been an issue, but now fracking has made that much less important. So Islamists will be bought off, or killed and tortured en masse, but the world won’t care because America isn’t the one doing it. Genius!

CLAUDIA ROSETT: The Obama Narrative Goes to Midway.

Now comes President Obama, who enroute to a G-20 summit in China stopped Thursday on the Midway Atoll for some climate-change grandstanding, a golf-cart motorcade tour and some snorkeling.

According to the New York Times, Obama did make brief mention of the Americans who died defending Midway in World War II, praising their “courage and bravery” and calling Midway “hallowed ground.” But that part of the visit was apparently so perfunctory that the Associated Press reporter missed the message (or did he?), and instead described Obama’s mention of “hallowed ground” as a reference to the place Midway Atoll occupies “in Native Hawaiian tradition.”

Obama’s main purpose in traveling to Midway, according to a White House fact sheet, was to “mark the significance” of his own “historic conservation action” (has Obama done anything during his presidency that the White House has not described as “historic”?) in creating, off the coast of Hawaii, “the world’s largest marine protected area” — and to “highlight firsthand how the threat of climate change makes protecting our public lands and waters more important than ever.”

It’s always about him.

PALEONTOLOGY: Unusual pterosaur fossil has been discovered in Patagonia. The skull is intact. “It’s rare to find an intact pterosaur braincase, according to the researchers, and little has been known about the way pterosaur skulls (and thus brains) evolved over time.”

SUSAN SARANDON: Hillary Clinton Has ‘Horrible’ Record on Environmental Issues.

When you’ve lost Louise…

THERE’S A PLAN? Obama’s ISIS Plan Has Another Problem.

Others close to the ISIS fight say that when it comes to U.S. policy, information flow inside the administration has been tricky at best and nonexistent at worst, a fact that is complicated by the complex dynamics on the ground among allies who are sometimes at odds.

“This is not going to turn out well; it starts with the basics of using locals as our infantry,” says former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey, who has been critical of the Obama administration for limiting U.S. military intervention against ISIS to rely so heavily on local fighters. “Letting them do it isn’t working out too well, is it, when they start fighting each other?”

Indeed, it is hard to understand why policy is being made seemingly on the fly when the conflict between Turkey and the Kurds was so easy to foresee.

Hoping against hope that groups who hate each other will band together to clean up your mess is not a plan.

Also note that first line about “information flow inside the administration.” Obama doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know, and has a staff devoted to making sure he doesn’t know.

2016 IN A NUTSHELL:

ANDERSON COOPER HAS NO BUSINESS MODERATING A PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: If someone has to ask why, here’s why.