BATTLE OF MOSUL CASUALTY UPDATE: Since 2014 when the Islamic State seized the city, I’ve written several columns about Mosul and the subsequent campaign to liberate it from ISIS. StrategyPage has also covered it in detail.

Over the last few months the blog Musings On Iraq has had several excellent posts about Mosul and the campaign to liberate northern Iraq. The latest updates the toll in dead and wounded. City fights are killers — street and house to house fighting are “casualty heavy.”

Understand that the UN’s casualty figures are incomplete. Grave sites continue to be discovered. Also note the discussion about the “expected” number of wounded, given the number of confirmed fatalities.

First, the United Nations’ Assistance Mission for Iraq and Human Rights Organization put out a report on the human toll of the Mosul campaign. It had 92 unreported incidents that led to 678 deaths and 518 wounded. That included 396 executions by the Islamic State, 194 casualties caused by Iraqi air strikes and artillery, and another 11 injured by Coalition air power. That brought the total number of dead during the operation to 21,224 and 30,996 wounded. 17,404 of the former and 24,580 of the latter occurred in Mosul. The new numbers still highlighted the fact that there are many more undocumented casualties as the wounded should be four to six times higher than the fatalities figure. Even if you subtract the 5,325 people that were executed by the Islamic State that would still mean there should be 60,000-90,000 injured from the fighting.

The following is a breakdown of casualties by cause. Coalition air strikes accounted for 4.2% of the casualties in Ninewa and 5.1% of those inside Mosul. IS executions led to 10.1% of the casualties in Ninewa and 6.6% in Mosul. 11.8% of the dead and wounded in Ninewa and 14.3% of the ones in Mosul were caused by Iraqi air power or artillery.

Read the entire post.

RELATED: StrategyPage’s detailed report on the offensive in western Iraq against the Islamic State. (Scroll down to “The Western Offensive” section.) This report from June addressed some of the bitter fighting within the city of Mosul. It also speculated that 1,400 Islamic State fighters had been killed in Mosul (through mid-June 2017). Note the Musings On Iraq figure for Islamic State fighters killed in Mosul is 1,892 (through the end of the battle). That means the June 2017 estimate was a solid estimate. It indicates that initial coalition battle reports and enemy casualty estimates were reasonably accurate. That isn’t always the case.

PROMISES, PROMISES: White House Sends Mixed Signals on Support for Repeal of Obamacare Individual Mandate.

THIS IS SOME COUP: Mugabe ignores party deadline to quit.

The embattled leader surprised Zimbabweans on Sunday, declaring on TV that he planned to remain as president.

Zanu-PF says it backs impeachment, and proceedings could begin as soon as Tuesday when parliament meets.

In a draft motion, seen by Reuters, the party blamed the president for what it called an “unprecedented economic tailspin”.

The public has poured on to the streets in protest in recent days, calling for the end of Mr Mugabe’s 37-year presidency.

His grip on power has weakened considerably since the country’s army intervened on Wednesday in a row over who should succeed him.

If you’re going to remove a brutal tyrant from power, you’ve got to either exile him or kill him — and exile is often needlessly risky.

AFTER THE PIVOT: The Outlines of Trump’s Asia Strategy: The President’s Asian trip sketched out a smart approach to containing North Korea, competing with China, and rebuilding trust with allies. Now comes the time to fill in the blanks.

During its long and eventful trip, the Trump Administration laid down important markers as it fashions its strategic approach to Asia. While North Korea is the most urgent issue the region faces, strategic competition with China is the most important. On the former count, Trump is working with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Moon Jae-in to develop a long-term approach that contains and rolls back the threat. On the latter count, Trump began to outline his vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific.

The anchor of a “grand strategy” for Asia is Japan. President Trump and Prime Minister Abe enjoy a warm relationship akin to that between George W. Bush and Jun’ichiro Koizumi. If the two stay close, the visions they outlined have a real chance of succeeding.

Let’s hope.

JOSH KRAUSHAAR: The Franken Factor In Minnesota.

Minnesota nearly became one of the “blue wall” states that flipped to Donald Trump last November. Hillary Clinton carried the state by a mere point, a big falloff from President Obama’s 8-point romp in 2012. The cultural crosscurrents in American politics are vividly reflected in the state: two Obama-voting Congressional districts flipped to Trump, while one swing seat moved in a Democratic direction.

The Republican-held House seats are endangered because they’re nestled in affluent suburbs that are disillusioned with the president, while the Democratic seats are in rural enclaves where Trump made massive gains in last year’s election.

Democrats are most bullish about ousting freshman Rep. Jason Lewis, a provocative conservative talk-show host who surprised health-care executive Angie Craig in a closely contested race last year. Trump’s narrow victory in the St. Paul-area district carried Lewis to reelection, but he won’t be able to count on strong GOP turnout the second time around. He’s facing a rematch against Craig next year. If Democrats want to take back a House majority, they’ll need to win this seat.

The biggest bellwether in the country is the neighboring Third District, where Rep. Erik Paulsen has been one of the most battle-tested Republicans in Congress. He first won this swing Twin Cities seat in a 2008 Democratic landslide, and routinely wins reelection by sizable margins. He ran a whopping 16 points ahead of Trump in last year’s election despite facing a highly touted Democratic recruit. This year he’s expected to face Democrat Dean Phillips, a wealthy founder of a gelato company, who emerged as an early party favorite.

What makes Minnesota’s politics so interesting is that Republicans have a rare opportunity to make inroads into some traditional Democratic strongholds, as well.

Trump’s inroads was the political story of 2016, but even then it was a near-run thing for Trump in the blue states that put him over the top. Whether Trump and the Republicans can build on that success or whether it proves to be a one-time thing will likely be the political story of 2018.

PURSUIT OF INJUSTICE: Further Adventures Under Title IX.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, Updated Hourly.

Plus, new Kindle Daily Deals.

And, today’s Digital Deals.

BOMBER REFUELING: A B-1B gets a drink over rugged Southern California terrain.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Social Media as Social Disease:

I’ve been reading James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, and one of the interesting aspects to the earliest civilizations is how fragile they were. A bunch of people and their animals would crowd together in a city, and diseases that weren’t much of a threat when everybody was spread out hunting and gathering would suddenly spread like wildfire and depopulate the town almost overnight.

As Scott writes, an early city was more like a refugee resettlement camp than a modern urban area. He observes that “the pioneers who created this historically novel ecology could not possibly have known the disease vectors they were inadvertently unleashing.”

Then I ran across this observation on Twitter: “The Internet is rewiring brains and social relations. Could it be producing a civilizational nervous breakdown?” And I saw another article noting that depression in teens skyrocketed between 2010 and 2015, as smartphones took over. It made me wonder if we’re in the same boat as the neolithic cities, only for what you might call viruses of the mind: Toxic ideas that spread like wildfire.

Read the whole thing, of course.

THE WAGES OF BARNEY FRANK AND ELIZABETH WARREN: A Wall Street Journal op-ed by a former Barney Frank staffer, Dennis Shaul, bewails a great mistake by the Democrats: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

Richard Cordray’s resignation as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau provides a great opportunity for President Trump to appoint a new director who can undo an unfortunate legacy of bureaucratic overreach and political bias. More important going forward is what we have learned from our experience with the CFPB to prevent future similar missteps.

The first lesson is that Congress should never again create an “independent” agency with a sole director, particularly one not subject to the congressional appropriations process. Under the law, the CFPB—unlike the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and other independent agencies—is funded by the Federal Reserve, a move specifically designed to avoid congressional oversight.

I had the privilege of working as an aide to then-Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee when the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which created the CFPB, was written. I realized that no bill is ever perfect and the CFPB would have its imperfections. The authors wanted the bureau to be a fair arbiter of protecting consumers, instead of what it has become—a politically biased regulatory dictator and a political steppingstone for its sole director, who is now expected to run for governor of Ohio.

An independent federal agency should be nonpartisan. A bipartisan commission on the model of the SEC and FCC would allow for better and more evenhanded decision-making. To show how partisan the CFPB became under Mr. Cordray’s leadership, not one of the agency’s employees made a contribution to Donald Trump’s campaign, while a multitude contributed to Hillary Clinton. The new director will have a partisan staff.

Yes, Trump’s in charge, not Hillary. Tsk. The essay goes on to list several egregious examples of CFPB overreach.

This one, for example:

The CFPB, like other agencies, collects fines and fees. Astonishingly, Congress does not require them to be transferred to the federal Treasury. Mr. Cordray has boasted of collecting billions of dollars on behalf of consumers, but portions of that money ultimately go to favored consumer groups—a continuing problem of ideological preference.

Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren helped create and build this hideous government monster. Yes,”a politically biased regulatory dictator.” Tsk again.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Manson Dead, Predator Update and Much, Much More.

EXCLUSIVE: Bill Clinton Still Silent About Flights On Pedophile’s Sex Plane.

MYTHEOS HOLT: Silicon Valley’s ‘Terms of Service’ Hypocrisy.

Whenever a new abuse of tech’s power comes down the pike, such as locking users out of their private documents because those documents include “offensive” language, or shutting users out of their emails, or conspiring to block apps that favor free speech from their online stores, or targeting users of a disfavored political persuasion for bans, the justification given is always that the terms of service require it. Never mind whether those terms of service are fair or consistent with American legal principles.

So, it seems only fair to ask, do these same companies follow the rules they set for themselves? In at least one case, the answer is clearly “no.”

According to a report last week from a Los Angeles local CBS affiliate, the home-sharing giant Airbnb has permitted convicted felons to rent out homes using its service. There’s just one problem — Airbnb claims to do a background check on all its hosts to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen. And yet, one of the hosts implicated by the CBS report had this to say when asked if Airbnb was aware of his criminal history:

“I don’t think they even asked.”

It gets worse from there.

Read the whole thing.

HONESTLY, TAR AND FEATHERS IS THE LEAST THAT SHOULD HAPPEN TO THESE PEOPLE: Minor Violations Lead to Massive Prosecution Fees in Two California Desert Towns.

We’ve seen cities across the country abuse their own citizens—particularly its poorest residents and visitors—with vicious enforcement of petty laws designed to create a revenue stream via a cascade of fines and fees.

But I don’t think we’ve seen an enforcement mechanism as nasty and cruel as the one the Desert Sun has uncovered out in California’s Inland Empire. The cities of Indio and Coachella partnered up with a private law firm, Silver & Wright, to prosecute citizens in criminal court for violations of city ordinances that call for nothing more than small fines—things like having a mess in your yard or selling food without a business license.

Those cited for these violations fix the problems and pay the fines, a typical code enforcement story. The kicker comes a few weeks or months later when citizens get a bill in the mail for thousands of dollars from the law firm that prosecuted them. They are forcing citizens to pay for the private lawyers used to take them to court in the first place. So a fine for a couple of hundred dollars suddenly becomes a bill for $3,000 or $20,000 or even more.

In Coachella, a man was fined $900 for expanding his living room without getting a permit. He paid his fine. Then more than a year later he got a bill in the mail from Silver & Wright for $26,000. They told him that he had to pay the cost of prosecuting him, and if he didn’t, they could put a lien on his house and the city could sell it against his will. When he appealed the bill they charged him even more for the cost of defending against the appeal. The bill went from $26,000 to $31,000.

Brett Kelman of the Desert Sun found 18 cases in Indio and Coachella where people received inordinately high legal bills for small-time violations. A woman fined for hanging Halloween decorations across a city street received legal bill for $2,700. When she challenged it, the bill jumped to $4,200.

Kelman notes that these thousands of dollars in fees came from a single court hearing that lasted minutes.

Somebody should file bar complaints on these people.

TAXES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Howie Carr: Whiny Ivies apoplectic over endowment tax.

Ya think Harvard could afford $14 million?

After all, their trust-funded professors and legacies are always loftily lecturing the rest of us about how we must pay our “fair share.” It’s an “investment in the future.” And this would be their favorite kind of tax, one that’s imposed solely on the “one percenters” and their “unearned income.”

Not to mention, it’s “for the children.”

How many times do the swells quote Oliver Wendell Holmes that “taxes are the price we pay for civilization.”

The price we pay, apparently, not them.

As a famous man once said, at some point I think you’ve made enough money.

MAYBE THERE’S SOME LARGER PHENOMENON HERE? Europe’s Merkel, Macron, May less popular than Trump. “President Trump’s approval ratings, often mocked by Democrats and the media, top those of Europe’s biggest three leaders, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Britain’s Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron. A new Zogby Analytics survey of people in those countries also finds that the disapproval ratings are sky-high.” (Bumped).

ANGELA MERKEL HAS LEFT BERLIN’S SCHLOSS BELLEVUE, “after informing President Steinmeier that she’s unable to form a government.”

ANN ALTHOUSE BUSTS FELLOW LAWPROF LAURENCE TRIBE FOR BOGUS CHARGES OF ANTISEMITISM:

Tribe — who must know about Occam’s Razor — tries to exclude the simple mistake by stating that “Trump had to override autocorrect,” but I opened a compose window in Twitter and typed “Frankenstien” and it did not autocorrect. I tried another “i before e” mistake and wrote “recieve” and it autocorrected, so I know how Twitter autocorrect works, and it doesn’t reject “Frankenstien.”

So Tribe just sounds ridiculously conspiracy-theory-oriented. Why didn’t he test autocorrect before making that assertion? I’m so careful about things like that that I feel the need to say right now that maybe Tribe’s Twitter experience, perhaps in a different browser, works differently from mine. And I’m not spreading scurrilous hate by calling somebody anti-Semitic.

I’m so embarrassed for Tribe, dipping into this kind of crap. I wonder where his hands go when he’s typing out tweets that he chooses not to publish to the world? This is what he thinks is impishly cute or brilliantly smart or importantly alarming??

And the dumbest part of it is, who thinks of “Frankenstien” as “distinctively Jewish” in a way that “Frankenstein” is not? There are many Jewish names that end in “-stein.” If anything, the “-stein” ending might cause me to think Jewish. But of all the names that end in “-stein,” the last one I’d think of as Jewish is “Frankenstein.” Who thinks of the Frankenstein monster as Jewish? Here’s the full text of Mary Shelley’s novel, and there isn’t one reference to Jews or Jewishiness or Judaism.

But if the subject is on your mind, perhaps you’d get the idea that misspelling the familiar name would be a way to make it seem Jewish, but who thinks about “-stien” as being Jewish? . . .

I can’t believe the badness of that Laurence Tribe tweet. Maybe the idea is something like: Trump’s bad tweets work for him. Bad is good. You’ve got to tweet badly. . . . If anything here seems anti-Semitic it’s jumping to call something “distinctively Jewish.”

Yep.

THE KOCH BROTHERS TAKE GLENN REYNOLDS’ ADVICE:

Some say that the Kochs intend only a passive investment and an opportunity to make a modest return on their investment. I hope this isn’t correct. If I were in their shoes, I would take control, clean house, and install conservative management in every Time, Inc. property. Then I would go on to buy Meredith, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, etc, as Glenn recommended years ago.

Meanwhile, liberals at Time, Inc.–whom are we kidding, all those at Time, Inc.–are appalled at the idea of being owned, at least in part, by Charles and David Koch.

Why? Ownership of Time and its offshoots under the Kochs would simply be a long overdue return of these publications to their original center-right roots.

FLASHBACK: A rape epidemic — by women? New CDC report reveals troubling equality when it comes to sexual assault rates.

Related: When Rape Matters and When It Doesn’t: In the eyes of the media, all rapes are equal. But some rapes are more equal than others.

IT’S BASICALLY A RAPE FESTIVAL: Kyle Smith: Let’s Just Cancel The Oscars.

HOLLYWOOD: WHERE “RAPE CULTURE” MAY ACTUALLY BE A REAL THING. Russell Simmons and Brett Ratner face new allegations of sexual misconduct.

Keri Claussen Khalighi was a 17-year-old fashion model from a farm town in Nebraska when she met Brett Ratner and Russell Simmons at a casting call.

Ratner was an up-and-coming music video director and a protege of Simmons, the Def Jam Recordings mogul. They took Khalighi to dinner one night in 1991 at Mr. Chow in New York, and then back to Simmons’ apartment to show her a music video they’d been working on.

Quickly, Simmons began making aggressive sexual advances, yanking off her clothes, Khalighi said.

“I looked over at Brett and said ‘help me’ and I’ll never forget the look on his face,” she recalled. “In that moment, the realization fell on me that they were in it together.”

Khalighi said that Simmons, who was then about twice her age, tried to force her to have intercourse. “I fought it wildly,” she said. He eventually relented and coerced her to perform oral sex, she alleged. “I guess I just acquiesced.”

Ratner, meanwhile, “just sat there and watched,” she said.

Feeling “disgusting,” Khalighi said she went to take a shower. Minutes later, she alleged, Simmons walked up behind her in the shower and briefly penetrated her without her consent. She said she jerked away, then he left. “It hurt so much.”

But maybe it’s not true: “In a statement, Simmons, 60, strongly disputed her account. ‘Everything that occurred between Keri and me occurred with her full consent and participation,’ he said.”

Well, that’s okay then. It’s not like he was flirting with her at the mall.

ROGER SIMON: Charlie, the Monster, Is Dead — Was My Generation Insane?

HELL IS TOO GOOD FOR HIM: Multiple sources reporting Charles Manson dead at age 83.

Related: Charles Manson, a Villain in Life & Death, Praised as a Counterculture Hero in 1969, Dead at 83:

The charismatic Bernardine Dohrn, later a friend of Barack and Michelle Obama, feverishly told Weatherman followers: “Dig it: first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!”

When I asked Weatherman Mark Rudd why his otherwise intelligent friends paid homage to Manson, he told me: “We wanted to be bad.”

Like Dohrn, Rolling Stone later went on to enjoy mainstream respectability despite publishing bizarre views on one of the twentieth century’s most notorious serial killers. Whereas Manson looked every bit the madman on the cover of Life, he appeared as a visionary on the front page of Rolling Stone. Therein, the magazine depicted Manson’s refusal to offer an insanity plea as a principled stand and characterized his criticism of the legal system as “obviously accurate in many ways.” In calling him Charlie, a first-name-basis intimacy later reserved for Madonna, Prince, Bruce, and other singing celebrities, the magazine actively sought to humanize the man who dehumanized so many.

In Sticky Fingers, his recent (and well-written) biography of Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s founder and publisher, author Joe Hagan wrote:

As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner [who would then have been about age 24–Ed] leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”

Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’ ”

* * * * * * * *

Meanwhile, a lawyer in the DA’s office, believing he was doing a favor for a friend of [David] Felton’s at the Los Angeles Times and that this hippie rag from San Francisco was a benign nonentity, brought Felton [then-recently hired away from the L.A. Times by Wenner] and Dalton into the office to show them the crime scene photos of the butchered bodies of Manson victims — including a man with the word war etched in his stomach with a fork. Dalton blanched when he saw the words “Healter [sic] Skelter” painted in blood on a refrigerator, instantly recalling what Dennis Wilson told him about the coded instructions Manson heard in the Beatles songs. “It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” said Dalton. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.” Jann Wenner changed the headline.

Rolling Stone’s infamous 2013 radical chic hot take on Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev looking totally cool and dreamy on their cover has its roots in the magazine’s founding days.