CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: “Emanuel has collected $3.1 million in high-dollar contributions. And more than $2.1 million of it — nearly 70 percent — has come from 83 donors who have benefited from actions at City Hall.”

THE MOST POWERFUL FORCE IN THE UNIVERSE. Roger Simon: Not Even Two Hurricanes Can Stop Trump Derangement Syndrome.

THE LUMPING-TOGETHER WAS ALWAYS THE GOAL: Megan McArdle: Southern Poverty Law Center Gets Creative to Label ‘Hate Groups’: Principled conservatives are lumped together with bigots.

In 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center designated the Family Research Council a “hate group” because of its orthodox position on homosexuality, and its occasionally incendiary defenses of that position.

In 2012, Floyd Corkins showed up at the Family Research Council headquarters with a gun.

I don’t mean to imply that these two things were connected. I’m telling you that they were connected. We know because the shooter told the FBI where he got the idea.

Conservatives have used this to try to discredit the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups. But the sad truth is that if you criticize someone, there’s always some small chance that an unstable person will read your criticism and decide its subject needs killing. The shooting is still not the fault of the writer, but the fault of the shooter.

(Just in case it helps, I interrupt this column to point out that you should not shoot anyone I write about, or anyone I don’t write about, or anyone.)

Also, you don’t need to manufacture ersatz accountability in order to discredit the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate group tally. You just need to tell people what’s on the list.

Some of the groups named are what anyone would think of as a hate group, like, you know, the Ku Klux Klan. But other entries are a festival of guilt-by-association innuendo about people with at best a tangential relationship to the target institution, and whose statements fall well short of blanket group-calumny or calls for violence. Or the center offers bizarrely shifting rationales that suggest that the staff started with the target they wanted to deem hateful, and worked backward to the analysis.

Think of them as leftist propagandists and grifters and you won’t go far wrong.

WEIRD HOW THIS DIDN’T COME OUT DURING THE CAMPAIGN: Video Emerges of Hillary Clinton Saying Illegal Immigrant Children Have to Go. Or even after the campaign, until Democrats and journalists (but I repeat myself) suddenly decided that Hillary was bad for the brand.

Democracy dies in darkness. Or as a great philosopher puts it:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The latest term deemed offensive by college administrators: ‘last name.’

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A sample:

Dynamic truth: Basically means “this is the plan when my supervisor gave it to me, but change is already in the works.” In other words, we’re about to waste our time working on this because the orders are about to change. May also mean “we don’t know for certain.” (“Consider this to be dynamic truth.”)

It’ll be out in December as a paperback.

ATTENTION, U.S. NAVY: Beijing Suspected in Hacking Yacht Owned by Chinese Billionaire. “The suspicious hacking took place in July on the Hudson River near New York City and left the ship temporarily unable to turn and in danger of colliding with nearby freighter.”

SEA DRAGON ASSIST: A USN MH-53E Sea Dragon helicopter on a Hurricane Harvey relied mission. The caption says the Navy helicopter’s mine counter-measures squadron (which is based in Key West, Florida) is conducting logistics support missions for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The photo was snapped August 31.

THE ART OF CREATIVE SMEARING: Megan McArdle nails it on how the SPLC uses overbroad and malleable ideology to smear conservatives:

I spent a day diving down the rabbit hole of one of the listings on the hate group, for the Ruth Institute, a small nonprofit that thinks the sexual revolution was a giant mistake. The Ruth Institute does seem to have a couple of marginally attached figures who have at some point theorized an unsupported connection between homosexuality and pedophilia. But however wrongheaded and insulting this may be, by itself, it hardly merits branding the whole organization a “hate group.”

As the Professor says: “Read the whole thing.”™

GOOD: While you aren’t watching, Trump is doing a great job of nominating lower-level judges.

When Donald Trump was elected and then started tweeting strange things or firing staffers, liberals asked conservatives, “Was Gorsuch worth it?” They are referring, of course, to the logic behind why many conservatives rallied for Trump — They wanted a conservative Supreme Court justice in the mold of Justice Scalia to replace him. Many liberals, and even conservatives, are acting now like that litmus test has passed, as if there’s no redeeming factor.

Not so. Trump is still nominating judges and the Senate still needs to confirm them. Much is on the line during this process, far beyond one presidency and one federal judge. It showcases a true battle of ideas and values.

True.

MEXICO’S EARTHQUAKE: 8.1 to 8.2 on the Richter, so it was big.

…tsunami waves are possible off the Pacific coasts of Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Ecuador.

The quake killed 15 people according to early reports.

THE HILL: Clinton’s score-settling frustrates Democrats.

Clinton unloads on Sanders, mocking his policy proposals as pie-in-the-sky fantasies and ripping his supporters on social media — the so-called Bernie bros — as sexist.

Clinton says that Sanders’s attacks did “lasting damage” to her general election hopes. She accuses him of “paving the way” for Trump to cast her as a corrupt corporate stooge deserving of the nickname “Crooked Hillary.”

Sanders brushed off Clinton’s criticism in a Wednesday interview with The Hill, saying it’s time for Democrats to “look forward, not backward.”

Not everyone was so charitable. Even some of Clinton’s allies have grown weary of her insistence on re-litigating the 2016 campaign at a time when the Democratic Party is looking to forge a new identity in the age of Trump.

“The best thing she could do is disappear,” said one former Clinton fundraiser and surrogate who played an active role at the convention. “She’s doing harm to all of us because of her own selfishness. Honestly, I wish she’d just shut the f— up and go away.”

Not me. I think she should run in 2020. Prove the critics wrong! Run, Hillary, Run!

FLASHBACK: U.S. coastline vulnerability to hurricanes is growing to unprecedented levels.

Obviously, we need to Tax The Blue Zones!!!

I GUESS THAT EXPLAINS DETROIT: Hurricanes Don’t Kill Cities: People Do.

Cities that believe in themselves are hard to kill. In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey many pundits have urged Houston to abandon many of the traits that have made it a dynamic, growing metropolis, including key elements of its light-handed, pro-business regulatory regime.

Houston, we are told, should retrench and reduce its sprawl; Slate recommends New Orleans’ post-Katrina shrinkage as a model. This goes against the best of urban tradition. Great cities generally do not shrink themselves.

Many cities have rebounded and even improved after far more lethal devastation, including London, Berlin, Tokyo and New York. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the city ultimately constructed a downtown that may well be the world’s most beautiful. San Francisco famously rebuilt itself after the 1906 earthquake and fire into “a new and improved city” that has evolved into an integral part of the world’s dominant tech hub.

In contrast cities that destroy themselves from within, like Detroit after the 1968 riots, and New Orleans before Katrina, can decline for decades.

Urban resiliency requires two things: an ability to learn from experience and, per Northeastern University’s resiliency expert Daniel Aldrich, a commitment on the part of its residents to improve their city.

Unlike New York or New Orleans, Houston is not celebrated by the mainstream press or intellectuals; its residents have been portrayed as hypocritical religious fanatics and even neo-Nazis, despite living in what may well be America’s most diverse city.

Well, you know, oikophobia.

I’M NOT HOLDING MY BREATH, BUT JUST THINK OF CHARLIE AS A DEMOCRAT OPERATIVE WITH A LAVALIER, AND THE DISPARITY MAKES PERFECT SENSE: Can’t Wait For Charlie Rose To Press Catholic Democrats On Their Positions On Abortion.

MIKE LEE WARNS DEMOCRATS: Your hostility to religion makes average Americans feel despised by their leaders.

To be fair, Democrats aren’t hostile to all religions, just those believed in by average Americans.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: New Data: Illegal Voters May Have Decided New Hampshire in 2016.

ANGELO CODEVILLA: The GOP is dead and Americans need a true alternative to the ruling ‘Uni-party.’

THE GREAT THING ABOUT TWITTER IS THE DIVERSITY OF OPINION: Twitter Bans Activist Mommy for Tweeting Her Dislike of Teen Vogue’s Anal Sex Guide.

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HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Americans Losing Faith in College Degrees, Poll Finds. Gee, I wonder why?

If only someone had warned them.

THIS EXPLAINS MUCH ABOUT THE LAST DECADE IN PRO FOOTBALL. Roger Goodell When Asked About Colin Kaepernick: “I’m Not A Football Expert.”

SOLAR FLARES CAN BE X-RATED. “The strongest flare ever observed has been dubbed the Carrington Superflare of 1859, after principal observer Richard Carrington; it is estimated to have been around an X100, and it and the subsequent CME it generated had significant worldwide effects. . . . Fortunately, as the Sun rotated, it had carried 2673 a bit farther around so that it wasn’t aimed directly at Earth, so when the CME hits Earth a glancing blow sometime between the evening of 7 September and the late afternoon of 8 September, it shouldn’t be too bad. We’ll get some really cool aurorae that might dip down to the mid-latitudes.”