TICK, TOCK, FELLAS. Ways and Means Chairman: GOP ‘Fully Committed’ to Tax Reform This Year.

THE PODESTA GROUP (OWNED BY JOHN PODESTA’S BROTHER) RETROACTIVELY UPDATES FILINGS TO DISCLOSE LOBBYING WORK DONE ON BEHALF OF VLADIMIR PUTIN. Plus this detail: “Interestingly, Paul Manafort was the subject of white-hot searing by the media, and yet — get this — he advised the very group that Hillary Bundler Tony Podesta, brother of Hillary campaign manager John Podesta, now confesses he himself represented.”

SO THERE’S GOING TO BE A MONUMENT PROTEST/COUNTERPROTEST IN KNOXVILLE TODAY. The KPD seems to have a pretty good plan — unlike some cities I could name — for preventing violence. But as always, the history is more complicated than the slogans. Here’s an excellent piece by Jack Neely. Excerpt:

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, back when that organization was still composed mostly of actual daughters of Confederate soldiers, marked the spot. Among them were daughters of slain soldiers, women who were raised by widows, and wanted to think the best of fathers they never got a chance to know well. . . .

It’s been useful to me to point out the different sizes of the memorials, as an indication of Knoxville’s memory of the war. For every Union man lost at Fort Sanders, the Confederates lost almost 20. But here’s the Confederate memorial, not much bigger than a single coffin. A block and a half away is the Union monument, also of Tennessee marble but more than twice as large and much more elaborate, like a castle tower, with an unusual bas relief of Union and Confederate soldiers shaking hands.

Specifically a memorial to the New York Highlanders who defended Fort Sanders, it was erected in 1918, about four years after the Confederate monument. By that time, American soldiers were dying rapidly in another meat-grinder of a war. This monument also came with a poem:

The hands that once were raised in strife
Now clasp a brother’s hand
And long as flows the tide of life–
In peace, in toil, when war is rife
We shall as brothers stand
One heart, one soul, for our fine land.

That poet was Joseph Ignatious Constantine Clarke, an Irish-born New York newspaperman who was still alive at the time of the erection, and probably knew about it. This inscription seems to be the best-known usage of his poem.

The crowd who attended the dedication seemed to reflect its truth. Rev. W.R. Barrett, a Confederate combat veteran, attended and, asked to speak, admitted that he saw “a Divine purpose in the preservation of the Union.”

William Rule, newspaper editor and Union veteran, who lived within sight of the monument, made an optimistic remark: “There has never been a time in the history of the nation when so little sectional jealousy existed as at present.”

Neither of the ceremonies directly addressed race, civil rights, or the larger causes and consequences of the war. Maybe they should have. But on both occasions, men and women who had had different sympathies half a century earlier seemed content to honor the dead, and the living who had suffered in this weird hillside battle. Maybe, they seemed to want to believe that horror was finally over. Here, at least, the actual veterans, the ones who were young when they had witnessed their friends blown apart beside them, the ones who were wounded themselves, got along, in common cause to remember.

Here’s something I wrote about the Union monument over a decade ago. To be honest, I had forgotten that the Confederate monument was there. As I said, our ancestors seemed better about coming-together and forgiveness than we are, but then, they understood the costs of not doing so much better than we do. May that last, at least, remain true.

THE CHINESE CERTAINLY HOPE SO: Twilight for Hong Kong’s Democracy?

Exactly twenty years since it reverted to Chinese rule, Hong Kong has its first political prisoners. A group of 16 young activists who took part in the unauthorized pro-democracy protests that began in 2014 were spared jail time after their first trial this past year. The judge sentenced the young protesters to varying lengths of community service, justifying his relatively mild decision by arguing that they had fought “for a noble cause.” However, the Hong Kong government, which brought the cases to court, was dissatisfied with the judge’s leniency. It saw nothing noble in the youngsters’ activism, and so it appealed.

By the time the cases reached the appellate court, all the defendants had already fulfilled the terms of the community service imposed on them. No matter: On August 15, the first group of 13 protesters—who had stormed the local legislature when it was holding a nighttime vote in the absence of the opposition to approve a highly controversial and disruptive development project—were sentenced to between 8 to 13 months in jail for “unlawful assembly.” This second, stunning sentence met with the approval of Hong Kong’s Department of Justice.

Two days later, three of the most renowned student activists were put on the stand again and received jail time: Joshua Wong, now 20, who was still a minor at the time of the protests that became known as the Umbrella Movement; Nathan Law, 24; and Alex Chow, 27.

The sentences have shocked many observers, both locally and internationally, for their harshness and vindictiveness. The same government that refused to talk to its young people through years of growing political polarization now seems to rejoice in jailing them. The young activists were taken to two maximum-security prisons on the very evening of the sentencing.

The Chinese government is not nice, regardless of what Tom Friedman seems to think.

BUT DON’T QUESTION THEIR PATRIOTISM. Student body prez: UC-Berkeley ‘not bound to Constitution.’

THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED WE’D BE BACK TO SEGREGATION. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Dartmouth offers race-specific ‘student advising’ programs.

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A BOTTOM LINE GUY LIKE TRUMP HAS TO ASK “WHAT DOES AMERICA HAVE TO SHOW FOR 16 YEARS OF WAR IN AFGHANISTAN?”: My latest Observer essay.

HORNET BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER: Shocking.

AS A MAN WHO’S BEEN CALLED GOD HIMSELF* ADVISED HIS FOLLOWING, GET IN THEIR FACES, AND PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: D. James Kennedy Ministries Sues SPLC, GuideStar, and Amazon Over “Hate” Labeling.

* By people who should – and did – know better.

BYRON YORK: Trump dossier mystery deepens.

On Wednesday, not long after I posted the story, “Republicans skeptical about origin of Trump dossier,” I got a note from a friend who had been thinking about the claim that a wealthy GOP donor started the infamous Trump dossier.

I had reported that the Republican operatives who ran against Donald Trump — the managers of the Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and John Kasich campaigns — had not only not heard of any GOP-funded oppo project but did not believe one existed. Neither did some of the NeverTrump activists working outside the campaigns to try to stop the GOP front-runner.

“The reason it is not at all believable that a Republican was behind it is, nobody used [any information] from it,” Rubio campaign manager Terry Sullivan told me. “Everybody was pretty damn desperate at the end. If someone had a kitchen sink, they would have thrown it.”

My friend thought there might be some semantics involved. “The phrase ‘wealthy Republican donor’ doesn’t necessarily have to denote a Republican,” he wrote in an email exchange. “It could refer to a Democrat who has also made occasional donations to Republicans, especially if the source of the info is trying to mislead without technically lying.”

Yes, it could. And in so many investigations, misleading-without-technically-lying is the Washington way. So perhaps the dossier origin story fits in that category.

Meanwhile, staffers for the Senate Judiciary Committee are going over hours of testimony given Tuesday by the man who made the dossier happen, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson. Investigators are waiting for a transcript, and committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley said at a town hall meeting in Iowa Wednesday that he’ll hold a committee vote on releasing the transcript publicly (and that he’ll vote in favor of release).

But the fact is, on the question many in the public want answered — who paid for the dossier? — Simpson and his lawyers have been refusing to answer for quite a while, and after the interview Tuesday, Simpson lawyer Josh Levy said that Simpson “kept the identities of Fusion GPS’s clients confidential.”

Well, that suggests to me that it wasn’t a Republican. People seldom go that far to protect their secrets.

OH, ISIS: Can’t a girl just make a living in peace? “Porn star reveals ISIS have threatened to BEHEAD her and mocked up sick execution pics.” I wonder if those are real. The glasses, I mean.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Wake Forest University Launches ‘Leave Patriarchy Behind’ Club.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Horrifying Video of Colorado Cheerleaders Being Forced to Do Painful Splits.

Perhaps it’s time for Reynolds Online University to open up a high school branch…

THIS WILL HELP: Prof accuses Trump voters of ‘authoritarianism,’ ‘prejudice.’ Double down on that whole “deplorables” thing. It’s sure to work this time!

THE MEDIA IS TRUMP’S EVIL EMPIRE: “The media has become for the right what the Soviet Union was during the Cold War — a common, unifying adversary of overwhelming importance. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, religious conservatives and libertarians could agree that, whatever their other differences, godless communism had to be resisted. This commitment was the glue of the GOP coalition, and the basic price of admission to conservatism. Now, a policy of containment, preferably rollback, of the mainstream media occupies that central role….To put it in terms of the famous Isaiah Berlin essay, the fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one thing — CNN sucks.”

Choose the form of your destructor.

WE CAME, WE SAW, PEOPLE ARE STILL DYING: Beheadings in Libya Reaffirm Islamic State’s Foothold.

FLASHBACK: How Anti-White Rhetoric Is Fueling White Nationalism: White people are being asked—or pushed—to take stock of their whiteness and identify with it more. This is a remarkably bad idea.

Or as Brendan O’Neil of Spiked recently wrote on his Facebook page:

“You are a white man. Check your privilege. Stay in your lane. You will never understand black people’s lives or experiences. You’re all about whiteness, that’s how you’re conditioned.” — SJWs

“I am a white man. What a privilege. I’m going to stay in my lane. I will never understand black people. I’m all about whiteness, it’s how I’m conditioned.” — White Nationalists

As O’Neil also wrote, “It’s becoming so clear now why the war of words between SJWs and the new white nationalists is so intense. It isn’t because they have huge ideological differences — it’s because they have so much in common.”

NOBODY CARES: Are you ready for … Kasich/Hickenlooper 2020?

IS EUROPE LOST? An Appropriate Jewish Response to Barcelona.

BUT ALL THAT DEBT HAS MADE CERTAIN INDUSTRIES VERY RICH: Megan McArdle: Too Much Debt Is Making Us Sticks-in-the-Mud.

Our debt has a way of focusing us on downsides, because debt turns a continuous income curve into two discontinuous lines: “solvent” and “insolvent.” More generally, debt has a way of magnifying life events. When things are going well, debt can help them go better: You can buy a house and a car, or you can buy a bigger house and a nicer car. But when things are going badly, debt can turn a slight income loss into a major disaster.

Most Americans now have a lot of debt, whether they’re ordinary workers or commercial landlords. Which means that most Americans have to be extraordinarily sensitive about letting their income cross the line where they can no longer support their debt payments. Which in turn means that already sticky prices may become positively glue-like.

Traditionally, we had various rules and conventions that tended to limit debt. Those were swept aside in the general revolt against bourgeois tendencies. As with most such sweeping-aside, there were winners and losers.

THE FLAW IS NOT IN US, BUT IN OUR STARS: Scientists may have detected a new kind of gravitational wave.

EMBRACE THE POWER OF AND: Kamala Harris is either the stupidest or the cruelest senator in America.