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2020 TEASE: Democrat Julian Castro Forms New PAC.

HILLARY’S CAMPAIGN DIED FOR SOMEBODY’S SINS, BUT NOT MINE: Hillary Clinton’s pastor compared her election loss to Jesus’ death and resurrection.

WEIRD: Strokes recently declined among men, but not women, study says.

In 2013, Diana Hardeman was 30 years old. She was a vegetarian, a non-smoker, a surfer and the picture of health — until she had a stroke.

“The paralysis ended up seeping down from my arm to my leg, leaving the whole right side of my body basically immobile,” Hardeman said. “I thought maybe I’m becoming paralyzed or potentially seeing death.”

“It was terrifying,” she said.

Hardeman is an example of a puzzling and concerning trend. A study released Wednesday found that from 1999 to 2005, the incidence of stroke declined in both men and women. But from 2005 to 2010, while the rates among men continued to drop, they stayed the same for women.

Dr. Kathryn Rexrode of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital said risk factors for stroke — such as obesity, high blood pressure, an irregular heartbeat and diabetes — may for some reason affect women differently than men.

“Diabetes is a strong risk factor for stroke in both men and women, but in women the risk is 26 percent higher than in men with diabetes,” Rexrode said.

Hmm.

JUDGE NOT SO SURE IN PALIN’S NEW YORK TIMES LIBEL SUIT: This afternoon Judge Jed Rakoff — a jurist of impeccable integrity — did not dismiss Sarah Palin’s libel suit against the Times, but instead took the highly unusual step of ordering an evidentiary hearing on what the Op/Ed writers knew.

This is unusual, because in libel cases, under a doctrine called “Iqbal/Twombly”, plaintiffs are required to show in their complaint more than a naked assertion of wrongdoing and have to set out a “plausible” claim with some degree of specificity. Here, most media lawyers thought the Times had it in the bag, because under a motion to dismiss, external fact-finding is not allowed, and the judgment is made within the four corners of the pleadings. But Rakoff was not convinced that Palin failed to make a plausible claim, and instead noted that:

One close question presented by that motion [to dismiss] is whether the Complaint contains sufficient allegations of actual malice, an essential element of the claim. To a large extent , determination of that issue may turn on what inferences favorable to the plaintiff are reasonable given the circumstances alleged in the Complaint. For example, the Complaint alleges that the allegedly false statements[…] were contradicted by information already set forth in prior news stories published by the Times. However, these prior stories arguably would only evidence actual malice if the person(s) who wrote the editorial were aware of them…Accordingly, to help inform the Court of what inferences are reasonable or unreasonable in this context, the Court, pursuant to Rule 43(c), will convene an evidentiary hearing on Wednesday, August 16 at 2:00 PM EST.

Normally, judges unsure of who knew what (the key question in this libel case) will deny a motion to dismiss, and after discovery, and a motion for summary judgment, if a genuine issue of material fact remains, they send it to a jury. Here, Rakoff seems to be short-circuiting that procedure, and will decide for himself, hearing testimony as to whether it was plausible that the Op/Ed writers knew that other sections of the paper had already debunked a connection between Palin and the shooting of Rep. Giffords. Hard to read tea leaves here, given that he could have dismissed the case, and it would appear he is giving Palin an extra chance (through cross-examination) to raise triable questions about what the editorialists knew or didn’t know. Stay tuned.

FREAK OUT: Walmart Hangs ‘Back-to-School’ Banner Near Gun Display.

What’s the big deal? I buy my 11-year-old ammo and take him to the range in exchange for good grades.

NORMALIZED RELATIONS: Hearing loss of US diplomats in Cuba blamed on covert device.

The two-year-old U.S. diplomatic relationship with Cuba was roiled Wednesday by what U.S. officials say was a string of bizarre incidents that left a group of American diplomats in Havana with severe hearing loss attributed to a covert sonic device.

In the fall of 2016, a series of U.S. diplomats began suffering unexplained losses of hearing, according to officials with knowledge of the investigation into the case. Several of the diplomats were recent arrivals at the embassy, which reopened in 2015 as part of former President Barack Obama’s reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Some of the diplomats’ symptoms were so severe that they were forced to cancel their tours early and return to the United States, officials said. After months of investigation, U.S. officials concluded that the diplomats had been exposed to an advanced device that operated outside the range of audible sound and had been deployed either inside or outside their residences.

On opening the new US embassy in Cuba two years ago, President Obama said, “This is what change looks like.” I wonder if he has any comment to our diplomats about what change is supposed to sound like.

FUNNY HOW THIS ALWAYS HAPPENS. The Media Lied About The Leaked Google Memo:

Like a game of Chinese whispers, an innocuous memo with proposals on improving Google as a diverse-friendly workplace without sacrificing merit became as radioactive as Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

Poorly written stories, drawing from biased takes on social media, produced a false narrative surrounding the Google memo. Poor readers, digesting only the headlines that reinforced their progressive bias, regurgitated the lies onto social media. The result is a feedback loop of misinformation, grounded in alternative facts.

It’s like it’s intentional or something. But, nahh — can’t be. The DNC-MSM are producing fabulous results this year; just ask them!

UGH: Massive Takata Airbag Recall: Everything You Need to Know, Including Full List of Affected Vehicles.

By the way, this piece by Malcolm Gladwell on the overselling of airbags is an interesting read. And, from Tom Vanderbilt, this crash timeline.

BRUCE BAWER: The Guardian’s Propaganda Film About Dearborn.

SIMPLE JUSTICE: It’s Title IX Rape Adjudication Or The Girl Mob. Feminism seems increasingly indistinguishable from cruelty.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

● Shot: Is Google A Search Engine Or ‘Deep State’ Organ?

—Zero Hedge, yesterday.

● Chaser: Who DID this?! Please please PLEASE let it be DuckDuckGo that epically trolled Google with this gif.

—Twitchy, today.

Heh.™ I suspect DuckDuckGo is picking up a fair amount of new users this week.

CORN, POPPED: The Future Of The Democratic Party Is … White Guys?

Ossoff’s campaign is now infamous for how much press attention and money it received, while Perriello got endorsements from a series of high-profile Obama administration officials and was profiled in national outlets. (I wrote about him in March.) Pod Save America, the brainchild of former Obama staffers that has become a de facto outlet for Democratic politicians, the fireside chat for “the Resistance,” has hosted and promoted all of these young, white Democrats.

And it’s not as if there is a dearth of minority talent. Turner herself has been floated as a potential 2018 Ohio gubernatorial candidate, while Stacey Abrams, another black woman, is making a bid for the Georgia governor’s mansion, and Ben Jealous, former head of the NAACP, recently announced a long-awaited bid for Maryland governor. Where is their national party hype machine?

It might be that at the heart of the matter, Democrats have internalized most acutely the accusation that they shamed and alienated white constituencies by elevating cultural conversations around issues like the Black Lives Matter movement and gay rights. The more subtle argument, that exciting the party’s base — namely, minority groups — could be just as electorally rewarding, has been less interrogated. There are years left for younger Democratic talent to develop, and perhaps for the party to again focus on strengthening its base. But for now, at least in its promotion of rising talent, it seems the Democratic approach is lopsided.

Something so problematical might also prove highly entertaining.

RETAIL BLUES: Department Store Chains See Key Sales Figures Fall Again.

BLUE ON BLUE: Our Revolution Takes Issue With The “Dictatorial,” “Arrogant,” “Pompous” DNC.

DRIVING THE 2018 Mercedes-AMG GT C Roadster.

NORTH KOREA’S NUKES: Reagan made them do it.

(A fisking.)

SHOCKER: Dang — looks like those women-only “Wonder Woman” screenings were illegal: Turns out that when men whined about being banned from the screenings, they had a legal point. They weren’t “whining,” they were mansplaining the law. And as is usually the case with mansplaining, they were right.

WHY DID GOOGLE FIRE JAMES DAMORE? “Maybe what is really freaking out Google management is race. I noticed this, in Damore’s discussion with Jordan B. Peterson. Damore was provoked by ‘super-secret’ meetings about ‘potentially illegal practices that they’ve been doing to try to increase diversity… basically treating people differently based on what their race is’ (pause) ‘or gender are’ (sic).”

GOOD LUCK: Federal judge orders State Department to search for more Clinton Benghazi emails.

State will have to want to find them.

FASTER, PLEASE: This Insane Nanochip Device Can Heal Tissue Just by Touching The Skin Once.

PETER SUDERMAN: Why Republicans Didn’t Repeal and Replace Obamacare.

Trump’s inexperience is a factor here. But the outsider president’s expectations were set in large part by seven years of Republican promises to repeal and replace the health care law. And throughout that time, Republicans were never really serious about developing a replacement plan that could pass.

Back in 2013, when Obamacare’s exchanges went online, and immediately crashed, it was clear that many Republicans were simply not interested in productive health policy improvements. Instead, they viewed the struggles of the health care law strictly as a political cudgel to wield against political opponents.

To be clear: I am not saying that there were literally zero Republican health care policy proposals. There were any number of white papers and policy frameworks and even a fully written piece of legislation or two. But there was very little effort to sell these plans to either the broader public or to Republican lawmakers, and to create the political conditions under which they were likely to both pass and be successful. What Republicans lacked was a shared vision—a theory of the case and how best to address it.

These efforts take significant time and energy. Democrats and their allies on the left spent nearly two decades working through ideas and building broad consensus after the failure of President Bill Clinton’s health care plan in the early 1990s. Republicans didn’t mount a similar effort. This was a widespread institutional failure driven by a combination of policy disinterest and political cynicism.

Read the whole thing.

HMM: A new study claims marijuana is tied to a threefold risk of dying from high blood pressure — but there’s a catch.

Isn’t there always?

A new study suggests that anyone who smokes marijuana faces a threefold risk of dying from high blood pressure than people who have never used the drug.

Those findings sound alarming, but it’s important to keep in mind that, like any study, this one has limitations, including that it defines marijuana “users” as anyone who’s ever tried the drug and that it doesn’t differentiate among strains of a highly unregulated product.

However, the study highlights some key areas for future study — including how using cannabis might affect the heart.

Criminalization made thorough studies of marijuana’s health effects almost impossible, and a study like this one amalgamating one-time users with habitual users probably doesn’t have much utility, either. This needs to change, now that there’s greater legal tolerance for the drug, so that individuals and governments can better understand what we’re getting into.

HMM: Klotho longevity hormone helped make mice smarter. “Klotho is a naturally occurring hormone in the body. More than two decades ago, Japanese researchers discovered that this hormone plays a role in aging. People with more klotho in their body, tend to live longer and to retain more of their faculties—that is to stay sharp—well into old age. . . . They found that mice that had daily injections and were better able to navigate the maze (as measured by the distance traveled to find a hidden platform) than their control group peers. In a classic example of work smarter, not harder, the klotho mice were just much more efficient seekers.”