THAT’S BECAUSE THE MEDIA OPERATES LIKE A BUNCH OF SHALLOW MIDDLE-SCHOOL MEAN GIRLS: Media focuses on Trump’s leadership, character more than policy: study.

“A Pew Research media study released Monday showed that nearly three-quarters of all stories on President Trump focused on his leadership and character instead of policy agenda.

The survey also found that “stories were four times as likely to carry an overall negative assessment of the Trump administration’s words or actions as a positive assessment.”

Do tell.

EVERYTHING THE VEGAS SHOOTER IS BELIEVED TO HAVE USED WAS ALREADY ILLEGAL: Jimmy Kimmel Seizes on Las Vegas Shooting to Champion Gun Laws in Emotional Monologue.

THEY TOLD ME IF DONALD TRUMP WERE PRESIDENT, HATE WOULD TAKE OVER. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! One GOP state representative, Candice Keller, has had her house pelted with feminine hygiene products, received death threats, and had fake accounts used to smear her on social media.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, updated hourly.

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And, Today’s Digital Deals.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Puerto Rico has big problems, but President Trump isn’t one of them.

EMBRACE THE SUCK ALERT: Second Edition pre-order page at Amazon.

SAN JUAN MAYOR: Puerto Rican Statehood Like ‘A Slave Becoming a Slave Owner.’

COMFORT TO PUERTO RICO: USNS Comfort departs Norfolk to aid Puerto Rico.

YOU STAY CLASSY, NFL: Fan fury as three Kansas City Chiefs players sit or kneel during the national anthem hours after 59 Americans died in Las Vegas massacre. “Marcus Peters, Chiefs cornerback, was the only seated player shown on TV. But Chiefs linebacker Justin Houston knelt while Ukeme Eligwe sat on bench.”

ACCOUNTABILITY: Evergreen State imposes punishments on 80 protesters. “They received sanctions ranging from formal warnings, community service and probation, to suspension.” It’s a start.

THEY DO THIS BY POLICY AFTER EVERY INCIDENT, AND EVERY TIME SOME TOOL IN THE PRESS TRIES TO PRETEND IT’S A SIGN OF GUILT OR SOMETHING: NRA Goes Dark After Las Vegas Massacre.

ROGUE NATION: Assessment of North Korea’s Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Chemical Weapons, and Small Arms.

THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED: The Left Prays After San Bernardino Shooting, To Its God Of Government.

RED TAPE ROLLBACK: Red Tape Rollback Report: Trump Ends Fiscal Year as America’s Least-Regulatory President Since Reagan. “Under Reagan, both regulations and Federal Register pages (where agency rules and regulations are published) dropped more than one-third. So far, Trump has reduced the flow of regulation even more. . . . According to the data below, President Trump compared to his predecessors is—so far—the least regulatory president of all.”

20 YEARS AGO, when there was a mass shooting, the gun-rights community was muted, and perhaps a bit intimidated by national media. Not anymore, as a scroll through Kurt Schlichter’s timeline will illustrate.

HMM: As fight enters second month, FBI still withholding dossier documents.

It has now been more than a month since a House Intelligence Committee subpoena set a September 1 deadline for the FBI and the Justice Department to turn over documents related to the Trump dossier.

Not a single document has been produced. The first deadline was extended once, then again, then again, and is now on some sort of hold. But no documents have been handed over.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein met with committee chairman Devin Nunes last Thursday — the committee can perhaps take comfort in the fact that it is being put off by progressively higher-ranking officials — but it is not clear if the committee is any closer to receiving the documents than when it first issued its subpoena on August 24.

Read the whole thing.

I still have the small plaque from Dad’s office wall which reads, “When you’re up to you ass in alligators, it’s difficult to remember your initial objective was to drain the swamp.”

WHEN TALKING POINTS MEET THE FACTS:

WELL, GOOD: This week: Congress gets ball rolling on tax reform.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Day Two of the Las Vegas Massacre and Much, Much More.

NO SYMPATHY FOR THE REPUBLICAN DEVILS. “A top legal executive at CBS, Hayley Geftman-Gold, said she ‘is not even sympathetic’ for the victims of the shooting at a country music festival at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas Sunday night,” Neo-Neocon writes. “But why did Geftman-Gold allow herself to write this on Facebook? Did she think it wouldn’t come back to bite her?”

[Note added 4:45 PM: See ADDENDUM below; CBS has fired her.]

But whatever happens, I would wager that what prompted Geftman-Golds to feel quite safe in expressing her sentiments is the fact that she most likely lives in a liberal bubble that has allowed and even at times encouraged such thoughts. I’ve lived in liberal bubbles, and I still operate in smaller liberal bubbles at times, and although I’ve never personally heard anything quite approaching the viciousness of Geftman-Golds’ remarks, I hear plenty of hatred and contempt expressed for Republicans in general.

It’s pretty standard, and after a while it becomes a sort of expected background noise to those who frequent such circles continually, and whatever shock value it might have had (if it had any in the first place) probably starts wearing off. If everyone considers expressions of hatred for members of a political party standard and worth hardly a yawn, after a while those expressions might start to escalate.

Read the whole thing.

Related: ‘I want every Trump supporter dead’: J.R. Salzman exposes today’s compassionate liberals.

SMALL GOAL MISSED BY A WIDE MARGIN: Tesla Misses Model 3 Production Goals.

The Silicon Valley electric-car maker built 260 of the Model 3s between July and September, the company said Monday in a statement. In August, the auto maker predicted it would build more than 1,500 Model 3s before cranking up production to 5,000 a week by the end of the fourth quarter.

The Model 3, which starts at about $35,000, represents Chief Executive Elon Musk’s bet that he can transform the luxury auto maker into a more mainstream player around the world. Tesla blamed “production bottlenecks” for the weaker production.

“It is important to emphasize that there are no fundamental issues with the Model 3 production or supply chain,” Tesla said in a statement. “We understand what needs to be fixed and we are confident of addressing the manufacturing bottleneck issues in the near-term.”

Elon Musk’s ramp-up goal for the Model 3 always seemed optimistic, verging on wildly so. And setbacks like today’s on an entirely new vehicle are to be expected even from an old-school automaker with a century of experience.

But you still have to wonder if, after producing the 500,000th Model 3 and filling all the pre-orders, just how much mass market there really is at this early stage for electric vehicles.

STEVEN HAYWARD: A Reckoning for Silicon Valley Coming?

I’m not closely following the vote for independence going on this weekend over in Catalonia, but the news caught my eye that Google has acceded to the ruling of a Spanish judge that it must shut down the mobile phone app that referendum supporters had ginned up. Maybe this is the proper course, though it should also raise questions about whether it is a case study in what happens when you don’t have robust protections for free speech.

Beyond this instance, we know that Google, Apple, and other Silicon Valley tech giants are utterly supine in the face of demands for their cooperation with heavy government censorship especially in China. It is curious that Google and Apple, so confident in their pronouncements about How Things Should Be in America (example: Apple CEO Tim Cook saying he can’t understand why there is any debate at all about DACA—I guess the rule of law only counts when it’s being used to protect Apple’s intellectual property rights), are so timid when it comes to Chinese demands. Does China really want to eschew what Google has to offer? I can recall when American companies told South Africa that they would not cooperate with Apartheid laws there, and the South African government capitulated rather quickly.

That was different, because shut up.

YOU CAN’T QUIT — YOU’RE FIRED: Baghdad suspends Kurdistan Regional Government MPs from Iraqi parliament.

That’s the whole story for now. More to come.

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: WaPo’s ‘five myths’ feature about Vietnam ignores ‘Cronkite Moment,’ Nixon ‘secret plan,’ ‘Napalm Girl.’

STEVE SCALISE: ‘Our Whole Nation Must Respond with Countless Acts of Kindness’ to Vegas Massacre.