THIRD NIGHT OF VIOLENT PROTESTS: St. Louis County Police Officers Get Sprayed with Unknown Chemical.

CUPID’S SHORTCUTS: Try these “love hacks” to fix your marriage. They’re not miracle cures, but they take only a few minutes a month. And they’re a lot cheaper than couples therapy or a joint self-actualization vacation.

BAILOUT NATION: Senators near deal to stabilize ObamaCare markets.

MIKE GONZALEZ: Getting Rid Of La Raza.

Ever heard of La Raza? Probably not, but you and other taxpayers are funding it.

We shouldn’t be. Along with public broadcasters, environmental organizations, and other entities that use taxpayer money to keep insider networks in power, ethnic identity groups should be taken off public support. These movements have for decades lived off the government only to keep enlarging it, maintaining power in the hands of a self-dealing bureaucratic elite increasingly unaccountable and disconnected from outside society.

La Raza—recently renamed UnidosUS—is a case in point. Set up in 1968 with a grant from the Ford Foundation (which also helped create other movements), La Raza has always been more boardroom than barrio. It depends for its survival not on grassroots, but on government contracts and kickbacks, and grants from foundations and the corporations it can shake down.

This corporate and government coziness doesn’t mean that La Raza hasn’t been a divisive force in society. On the contrary, it’s been so from the beginning, and the balkanization it has caused has benefited elites.

No less a liberal lion than U.S. Representative Henry Gonzalez of Texas took to the floor of the House on April 22, 1969, to decry the Ford Foundation’s creation of “a very grave problem” in his district. “I cannot accept the belief that racism in reverse is the answer for racism and discrimination,” he said. It is worth quoting Gonzalez at some length, as the dysfunctions he identified remained a fixture of the group.

Read the whole thing.

BETSY MACCAUGHEY: How BernieCare slams working people.

If Sanders has his way, 180 million Americans who currently have private coverage would have it ripped away and be automatically enrolled in public insurance.

Kids would be enrolled at birth.

Medicare for All doesn’t just offer government health insurance to the needy. It makes private coverage illegal, including the health coverage you get at your job. Employers are prohibited from covering workers, retirees and their families.

Sanders’ bill raises a critical question: If you’re seriously ill, will you be able to get the care you need?

BernieCare guarantees you hospital care, doctors’ visits, dental and vision care, mental health and even long-term care, all courtesy of Uncle Sam. Amazing, right? But read the fine print. You’ll get care only if it’s “medically necessary” and “appropriate.” Government bureaucrats will decide, and they’ll be under pressure to cut spending.

“Single payer,” as I never tire of reminding people, is code for “single decider.”

QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES: Governments have taken to suing people who make open records requests. That’s one way to hide the decline.

(Classical allusion, etc.)

GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE: VA only filling half of its medical appointments while veterans wait for weeks.

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STRIKE EAGLES OVER IRAQ: The photo was snapped September 6.

BUT OF COURSE: Father of the Constitution Blacklisted in Dallas on Eve of Constitution Day.

ROBERT SAMUELSON: THE MIDDLE CLASS MAKES A COMEBACK.

The middle class is back — or so it seems.

That’s the message from the Census Bureau’s latest report on “Income and Poverty in the United States.” The news is mostly good. The income of the median household (the one exactly in the middle) rose to a record $59,039; the two-year increase was a strong 8.5 percent. Meanwhile, 2.5 million fewer Americans were living beneath the government’s poverty line ($24,563 for a family of four). The poverty rate fell from 13.5 percent of the population in 2015 to 12.7 percent in 2016.

The Census report reinforces Gallup polls — reported here a few weeks ago — that Americans have re-embraced their middle-class identities.

But all is not well. Read the entire column.

TRUCK DRIVER: ‘Overregulation’ Means Government Literally Deciding When I Work, Eat, And Sleep.

Unless you own a business, when you hear pundits and politicians drone on about “overregulation,” the notion probably goes in one ear and out the other. But being a truck driver is similar to owning your own business. So next time you hear your Senator or your favorite radio show host decry government regulation and oversight, let me give you an idea of what “overregulation” looks like on the ground.

For starters, let’s talk “logs” and “hours of service.” While you’re only fighting one clock on your morning commute, a truck driver is fighting five clocks. Like you, he’s fighting real time. You have to be at work by 9:00 a.m., and he has a 9 o’clock appointment at the local distribution center. It’s 8:45 and I-40 is a parking lot. In addition to this, he has four other clocks to worry about: the “eight-hour break” clock, his “14-hour on-duty, not driving” clock, the “11-hour on-duty, driving” clock, and the “70-hour weekly on-duty” clock. For simplicity, I will call each of these the “eight,” the “14,” the “11,” and the “70.”

Now I’ll explain what’s known in the transportation industry as the “Hours of Service” regulations. The Federal Motor Carrier Administration (FMCA) requires drivers to log everything they do, where they did it, the duration of the task, and when the specific tasks were done. The biggest principle to keep in mind is that when any one of the “clocks” runs out, you can no longer drive legally. Once you start the clock by going on-duty, you have eight hours before you must stop driving and take a 30-minute break.

Also, once you start your clock, you have now started a nonstop 14-hour window in which you must get all the driving done you need to for that day. If you get stuck at a shipper for three hours, you now have only 10 hours to drive. Which brings us to your “11”: In any given 14-hour on-duty period, you are only allowed to drive legally for 11 hours within that 14-hour period. In addition, in any eight-day period, you are only allowed to be on-duty (not driving and driving) for a total of 70 hours. Hence, your “70.” (This week, I made it back home with only one hour on my 70… I was cutting it close.)

Read the whole thing — and keep it in mind the next time somebody bemoans or brags about Jimmy Carter deregulating the trucking industry.

YOU CAN TELL HE’S DONE A GOOD JOB BY HOW LITTLE THE PRESS IS TALKING ABOUT IT: Faced with Harvey and Irma devastation, Trump finds his footing.

A summer filled with few high notes for the Trump administration is ending on the lowest note yet: Thousands of Americans remain displaced from their homes or without power in the wake of back-to-back hurricanes that pummeled two of the top four most populated U.S. states.

But amid the destruction left behind by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, some say President Trump has flourished.

Following the president’s return to Washington after his visit to Florida, where he and the first lady passed out hoagie sandwiches to families still grappling with the damage to their neighborhoods and homes, a source close to the president told the Washington Examiner that Trump “looked like the leader Americans have been wanting to see.”

“And I don’t mean to suggest he was faking it or playing to his crowd,” the source said, adding that Trump seemed “genuinely emotional” about the devastation in a state he carried last November and where he spent so much of his time during the earliest months of his presidency.

“I know he enjoyed being down there and wants to go back,” the source said.

Thursday’s trip to Fort Myers and Naples, Fla., was markedly different from the president’s visit to Corpus Christi, Texas, last month, where he described Harvey as “murderous” and “epic” and told first responders “nobody has ever seen this much water.” . . .

But by the time Trump visited Florida, which came days after he returned to Texas a second time, the locals were gushing about his warmness and eagerness to help.

“They’re everything I thought they would be,” a woman in Naples told the New York Times after Trump pet her Chihuahua and complimented her “Bikers for Trump” t-shirt.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott had praised Trump days before his arrival, telling reporters that the president “has given me everything I’ve asked for.”

Trump rapidly stepped up to the task of coordinating with local and state officials before, during and after both hurricanes made landfall, and later ensured they had the resources necessary to carry out search-and-rescue missions and provide shelter for thousands of evacuees.

And the latest presidential approval ratings seem to reflect the mostly positive responses Trump has drawn while navigating two natural disasters.

Flashback: Katrina On The Hudson.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TABASCO SAUCE AND THE U.S. MILITARY: Good read.

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Is the EU Anywhere Near Getting Its Own Army?

In truth, EU member states and especially the so-called “big three” – France, Germany and the UK – would have to be fully committed to the project politically. They would also have to strategically reconfigure everything from defence budgets to capabilities to chains of commands to align with the goal of an EU army. There are absolutely no signs of this transpiring in the near future – and not just because the UK has been the traditional foot-dragger.

It is no secret that the UK has been a reluctant champion of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) for some time. Yet for different reasons and in different ways, France and Germany have also been less than willing to invest much more than rhetoric to the D in CSDP of late too, never mind to a full-blown EU army.

France – historically the traditional advocate of European defence – has lost confidence in her EU partners due to their reluctance to commit to EU operations. And although a general promoter of multilateralism, Germany still sidesteps the issue of how and when to use force in response to the threats it identifies.

Let’s assume for a moment that all these issues were settled advantageously, and that an EU army was indeed created. But then try to imagine how effective that force would actually be, micromanaged on virtually everything by bureaucrats in Brussels.

IT SOUNDS LIKE SHE THINKS THOSE ARE BAD THINGS: Black female chair of Ohio State’s engineering department calls it ‘very male, very white.’ “Dr. Monica Cox, the female, black chair of the Department of Engineering Education at Ohio State University, recently told the campus community that her relationship with her colleagues is adversely impacted simply because they’re mostly white and male.”

That sounds awfully insensitive. I wonder if they feel marginalized by this observation.

CHANGE: True to his word, arrests of unauthorized immigrants are rising sharply under Trump.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: St. Louis Riots, McMaster Chats, Another O-Care Repeal Attempt and Much, Much More.

HMM: Facebook Gave Special Counsel Robert Mueller More Details on Russian Ad Buys Than Congress.

Facebook Inc. FB 0.40% has handed over to special counsel Robert Mueller detailed records about the Russian ad purchases on its platform that go beyond what the company shared with Congress last week, according to people familiar with the matter.

The information Facebook shared with Mr. Mueller included copies of the ads and details about the accounts that bought them and the targeting criteria they used, the people familiar with the matter said. Facebook policy dictates it would only turn over “the stored contents of any account,” including messages and location information, in response to a search warrant, some of them said.

A search warrant from Mr. Mueller would mean the special counsel now has a powerful tool to probe the details of how social media was used as part of a campaign of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election. Russia has denied any interference in the election.

That story is behind the WSJ paywall, but Natasha Bertrand’s analysis for Business Insider isn’t:

Legal experts say the revelation has enormous implications for the trajectory of Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s election interference, and whether Moscow had any help from President Donald Trump’s campaign team.

“This is big news — and potentially bad news for the Russian election interference ‘deniers,'” said Asha Rangappa, a former FBI counterintelligence agent.

Rangappa, now an associate dean at Yale Law School, explained that to obtain a search warrant a prosecutor needs to prove to a judge that there is reason to believe a crime has been committed. The prosecutor then has to show that the information being sought will provide evidence of that crime.

Mueller would not have sought a warrant targeting Facebook as a company, Rangappa noted. Rather, he would have been interested in learning more about specific accounts.

“The key here, though, is that Mueller clearly already has enough information on these accounts — and their link to a potential crime to justify forcing [Facebook] to give up the info,” she said. “That means that he has uncovered a great deal of evidence through other avenues of Russian election interference.”

It also means that Mueller is no longer looking at Russia’s election interference from a strict counterintelligence standpoint — rather, he now believes he may be able to obtain enough evidence to charge specific foreign entities with a crime.

If foreigners are buying political ads, we need to know about it. It would also be useful to know just how much foreign money Barack Obama illegally accepted in 2008 and 2012, and what protections we can take in the future against such meddling.

A DEFEAT FOR ANTI-CHRISTIAN BIGOTRY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD: Tunisian women free to marry non-Muslims. “Until now, a non-Muslim man who wished to marry a Tunisian Muslim woman had to convert to Islam and submit a certificate of his conversion as proof. Tunisia, which is 99% Muslim, is viewed as one of the most progressive Arab countries in terms of women’s rights. . . . It sets apart Tunisia as the first country in the Middle East and North Africa to remove the legal hurdles to marrying outside the official state religion.”

SCENES FROM ACADEMIA: A Campus Conservative’s Year Facing Anger, Doxing and Intimidation.

The University of Minnesota did call for a “Campus Climate” conversation about the recent controversial events, but this, too, devolved into chaos. About 15 minutes into the event, more than 200 protesters came into the room chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, racism has got to go,” surrounding those students who had come to the event to engage in a civil conversation.

The protesters took over the stage as the student body president stood at the front of the room with her fist in the air, leading the chants. Students took turns lamenting how their feelings were hurt, how writing “Build the Wall” amounts to hate speech, and how they want to be included in conversations on campus. At the end of the event, one of the protesters stood on stage and asked the crowd if any College Republicans had attended. Madison stood up and raised her hand.

When the “event” ended, she was swarmed by the mob. “They were completely surrounding me; I was unable to leave the event. They were screaming in my face calling me racist, xenophobic, and other unmentionable names. They were aggressive, and I just wanted to get out safely,” said Madison. “One girl was holding another girl back saying, ‘She’s not worth it. Don’t hit her.’”
Later in the year, the radical left struck her again. Madison runs the University of Minnesota’s chapter of Turning Point USA, a nonpartisan group that promotes fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government. Members of the loosely organized far-left militant group Antifa targeted her for promoting capitalism on campus, posting online her address, phone number, parent’s address, parent’s phone number, a photo of her, and a reference to her as an alt-right Nazi.

“I endured a lot of violent threats throughout the year, but Antifa’s attack was the scariest.”

“Shut up, they explained” has gone from humorous Instapundit literary reference to the current condition of free speech on campus.

CLINTON-ERA CIA CHIEF: Regime Change Through ‘Decapitation’ Would be Wrong North Korea Strategy. “Each UN Security Council resolution levied against North Korea is an incremental improvement in weakening Kim, expert tells House.”

What would we do without the experts who spent 20 years getting us into this mess?

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Salena Zito: The day that destroyed the working class and sowed the seeds of Trump. “Within a decade 40,000 jobs were gone. Within that same decade, 50,000 people had left the region, and by the next decade that number was up to 100,000. Today the 22 miles of booming steel mills and the support industries that once lined the Mahoning River have mostly disappeared — either blown up, dismantled or reclaimed by nature.”

CNBC: The Party’s Over: Republicans And Democrats Are Both Finished.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, UMN EDITION: A campus conservative’s year facing anger, doxing, and intimidation. “As the protests grew, so did violent threats against the College Republicans and Madison, in particular. The group’s members were scared for their safety on campus. Madison and the rest of the executive board didn’t go out at night and tried to never be alone on campus. Many used campus security to walk home. Rather than condemning vandalism and standing up for the First Amendment right of freedom of speech, many supposed adults in the administration instead lashed out at the College Republicans.”

And higher ed folks think the decline in public support is because the American public suffers from “anti-intellectualism.”