MICHAEL BARONE: Watching The Eclipse With John C. Calhoun.

HEH: Nancy Pelosi Won’t Tell Us What She Feels About Her Father Dedicating Lee, Jackson Statues when he was the Democrat mayor of Baltimore.

COLLUSION: Judicial Watch files lawsuit for communications with environmental groups on Dakota Access pipeline.

Judicial Watch announced on Wednesday it filed suit against the Department of Defense and Army Corps of Engineers, seeking to obtain communications between government officials in the Obama administration and environmental groups related to protests last year opposing the Dakota Access pipeline.

The conservative watchdog group’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, filed June 29 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, charges that the Obama administration and environmentalists worked “hand-in-glove” to try to stop the pipeline’s construction and asks to review communications between the two camps to prove it.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said his group issued a FOIA with the Defense Department for the communications in May but has not received a response. The group wants communications between the Army Corps of Engineers, which had to review and sign off on the project, and Greenpeace, Sierra Club, EarthJustice and Friends of the Earth.

“Barack Obama and radical – and often violent – environmentalists worked in hand-in-glove to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline. We’re not sure why the Trump Defense Department would hide the facts about this scandal and force us to go to federal court to enforce FOIA,” Fitton said in a statement.

The suit relates to months of protests last year over the 1,172-mile pipeline, built to deliver shale oil from North Dakota to Midwestern refineries.

The reason lefties thought the Tea Party movement was astroturf is because that’s how they operate.

JOURNALISM: New York Times asks how long before someone is hurt or worse, neglects to consult GOP baseball team.

Related: James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.

“MOST OF AMERICA: THIS IS COMPLETE INSANITY, THE PRESS LIVES IN A CRAZY BUBBLE. PRESS: THIS IS ALL VERY FINE AND REASONABLE.” CNN publishes defense of ESPN’s Robert Lee decision; Not unreasonable ‘in today’s America.’

Related: Regarding ESPN’s own defense, “This is the DUMBEST statement I have seen a company put out. It says they will bow to trolling. They will pay the ransom.”

Watching ESPN make Lee the fall guy for their own PC meltdown, as talk radio host Buck Sexton tweets, “ESPN owes Robert Lee an apology. Can’t punish Asian Americans as part of PC obsession. Only elite college admissions offices get to do that.”

Heh, indeed.™

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN INDUSTRIES SUCH CESSPITS OF PREJUDICE? Hollywood Fails Latest Test of Diversity With Fall TV Lineup.

I think the Congress should schedule hearings about racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia in the entertainment industry.

THERE’S NO IQ TEST FOR BEING A LEFTY: The Most Shortsighted Attack on Free Speech in Modern U.S. History: A faction on the left wants to weaken the free-speech rights that protect marginalized people at the very moment when doing so would help Donald Trump to persecute them.

WHO KNEW? Apparently, so many Lyft passengers are white supremacists that Lyft has partnered with the SPLC to protect its drivers. Boy, you won’t catch me riding with Lyft now. I wouldn’t want people to think that I was a white supremacist.

ICONOCLASM AND VIOLENCE: The culture war intensifies.

If you want to talk about racializing American society, it didn’t start with Richard Spencer and his crew. Led by elites, America has been balkanizing along racial and ethnic lines since the late 1960s. Multiculturalism, that 1990s buzzword, led to colleges emphasizing ethnic studies and non-Western courses, and devaluing those in Western civilization…What we’re seeing might be thought of as the entirely predictable and normal reaction of a particular group within a pluralistic society, when members of that group come to believe that they are losing ground. In this sense, when white grievance and protest is presented by the media as solely a manifestation of racism, it allows others to justify dismissing those grievances and consider themselves morally responsible for doing so.

Read the whole thing.

KURT SCHLICHTER: Does Anybody Understand What These Never Trump Republicans Think They’re Achieving?

Plus: “That warning was called ‘the Tea Party,’ and the GOP establishment didn’t like it either. Remember how all those activated Republican voters helped recapture Congress, yet most of the establishment types looked at them like they were something nasty that was smeared on their shoes? See, the base isn’t supposed to be activated. It’s supposed to be obedient. It’s supposed to turn out on election day to do volunteer work and write checks. It’s not supposed to try to have input. That’s for our betters, not for us. But the thing is, now we’re woke, and we’ve realized that our establishment sucks, and that we’re tired of being the suckees. They didn’t listen to us when we gave them the Tea Party, so now we gave them Trump.”

Instead of worrying about Trump, they should worry about what comes after Trump, if he’s stopped.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: The Quiet Exodus From Mass Schooling.

If only there had been some sort of warning.

WHY ARE LEFTY MEDIA SUCH CESSPITS OF ILLEGAL DISCRIMINATION? WaPo quietly settles age, race discrimination lawsuit.

“WHEN THE GOING GETS STUPID, THE STUPID TURN PRO:” The Left Opens Fire on Columbus Statues.

HE LIED TO CONGRESS ABOUT SPYING ON AMERICANS, SO HOW DO WE KNOW HE’S TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT THIS? Clapper questions Trump’s fitness for office.

AT AMAZON, End of Summer Savings on Luggage and Bags.

Plus, save big in Health and Personal Care.

SOME WORTHWHILE LEADERSHIP ON FREE SPEECH from Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ:

This fall, the issue of free speech will once more engage our community in powerful and complex ways. Events in Charlottesville, with their racism, bigotry, violence and mayhem, make the issue of free speech even more tense. The law is very clear; public institutions like UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance with campus policies to speak, without discrimination in regard to point of view. The United States has the strongest free speech protections of any liberal democracy; the First Amendment protects even speech that most of us would find hateful, abhorrent and odious, and the courts have consistently upheld these protections.

But the most powerful argument for free speech is not one of legal constraint — that we’re required to allow it — but of value. The public expression of many sharply divergent points of view is fundamental both to our democracy and to our mission as a university. The philosophical justification underlying free speech, most powerfully articulated by John Stuart Mill in his book, On Liberty, rests on two basic assumptions. The first is that truth is of such power that it will always ultimately prevail; any abridgement of argument therefore compromises the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. The second is an extreme skepticism about the right of any authority to determine which opinions are noxious or abhorrent. Once you embark on the path to censorship, you make your own speech vulnerable to it. . . .

We all desire safe space, where we can be ourselves and find support for our identities. You have the right at Berkeley to expect the university to keep you physically safe. But we would be providing students with a less valuable education, preparing them less well for the world after graduation, if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous. We must show that we can choose what to listen to, that we can cultivate our own arguments and that we can develop inner resilience, which is the surest form of safe space.

Indeed you do.

NBC: Polls Show Trump Cratering? Not So Fast.

When his competition thinks an Asian sportscaster named Robert Lee is a neo-confederate provocation, well . . . .

A VERY PERSONAL PIECE FROM STEPHEN KRUISER on his crisis of faith.

WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS: Antibiotic-free Duck Fat.

WHY IS ACADEMIA SUCH A CESSPIT OF MISOGYNY? Women Economists Face A ‘Toxic’ Work Environment.

DON’T DRINK THE FIREWATER: They Blacked Out at a Mexico Resort. They Woke Up to a Nightmare.

MOSTLY PEACEFUL: “As many as 2,000 ‘hostile’ protesters surrounded police, some throwing bottles filled with urine and punching and spitting at cops as they tried to escort participants from Saturday’s ‘Free Speech Rally’ out of Boston Common, according to police reports filed in court yesterday.”

GOODNESS, GRACIOUS, GREAT BALLS OF SCHADENFREUDE! Watch: Top Five Remixes of the Antifa Protester Getting One in the Yarbles Outside Trump’s Rally.

(Classical reference in headline.)

PURE COMEDY GOLD: Antifa protester getting hit in the groin with a rubber bullet + “I Will Always Love You” = Comedy Gold. And better yet, it’s backed up by Science! In a 1993 article, Popular Science asks “Why Is It Funny When A Guy Gets Hit In The Groin?”

Besides the Freudian implications of the aggressive and sexual tension in the situation, there’s also the suddenness with which a blow to the ‘nads can take down even an otherwise big, strapping man. “Someone who’s powerful and dignified, who’s now keeling over in response to what seems like this minor infraction–so easily brought down from their normally human perch–is a violation of expectation..”

All I can add is: “Hey, nice shooting, officer.”
**UPDATE: not clear whether it was a rubber bullet or paintball-type of tear gas projectile. Still, I’m betting the cop who fired that shot won’t have to pay for his own drinks for a month.**