IT’S COME TO THIS: Holocaust Museum Pulls Study Absolving Obama Administration For Inaction In Face of Syrian Genocide.

I HAVE A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS: Colin Trevorrow Out as ‘Star Wars: Episode IX’ Director.

U-G-L-Y: What War With North Korea Would Look Like.

Ground forces along the DMZ, largely South Korean, will be locked in a knife fight. The terrain is rugged, narrow and provides very little room to maneuver. The mobile battlefield we all witnessed in 1991 and 2003 in Iraq will not be possible amidst the rice paddies and mountains of Korea. Massive firepower would rein death on both sides. The confined nature of the terrain, and the North’s ability to infiltrate behind our lines, makes even hand-to-hand combat possible. If the ground fight had to roll north for a decisive resolution, we would need more soldiers — a lot more soldiers. We would be almost certainly be viewed as occupiers, not liberators, in the minds of the North Koreans. We would have to dig them out of their defenses and control their population, and that would take a lot more soldiers.

The “horror” would set in as thousands were killed or wounded. In some estimates, North Korea would inflict 20,000 casualties a day just in Seoul during for the first few days. The herculean effort to limit collateral damage witnessed in our Middle Eastern wars will be impossible to repeat. We will operate within the laws of armed conflict, but significant loss of innocent life would be unavoidable due to the locations North Korea chooses to base or hide its weapons.

We will use cluster weapons that spread bomblets over areas the size of football fields. We will return artillery fire wherever enemy batteries are firing. When optimum for military conditions, we will hit targets in the middle of urban areas; it would be impossible to prevent civilian casualties. To fight effectively, we will have to bomb command facilities in the heart of neighborhoods. We will destroy missiles on mobile launchers even if they are placed in sensitive areas. Our ground forces will pour fire into the enemy without an excessive regard for damage. And, yes, we will bomb targets more widely than in recent decades.

Read the whole thing.

Absent resupply from China — and who knows which way that would go — it’s doubtful North Korea has the logistical wherewithal to fight for more than a week or so. But it would be the most horrific week or so since the last war we fought in Korea.

Related? China’s military practices for ‘surprise attack’ over sea near Korea.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Hurricane Harvey revealed the awesome power of real America. “Across the affected area, Americans are coming together to help each other. Despite the racial divisions exacerbated by small numbers of fanatics on the left and right, (and amplified by the press), out in the real America white people, black people and Asians helped each other, men rescued women and children, and so on. The ‘Cajun Navy,’ which had so distinguished itself in response to flooding in Louisiana, took its boats to Texas and started saving people. . . . Some of the people helping were rich, others clearly were not. Likewise those they helped. The photos of rescuers and rescued show the kind of wide-ranging diversity that our colleges and corporations aspire to, but usually fail to deliver.”

YEMEN’S ODD WAR IS A HUMAN DISASTER: My latest Creators Syndicate column.

DON’T DREAM IT’S OVER: Graham, Durbin Make Case for ‘Win-Win’ DREAM Act as Trump Signals ‘Revisit’ if Congress Fails to Save DREAMers.

MAIL CALL IN THE ARABIAN GULF: The photo was snapped on the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.

AND YOU KNEW WHO YOU WERE THEN. GIRLS WERE GIRLS AND MEN WERE MEN. Leftist Editor: You Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Even Think Men Are Men And Women Are Women.

(Classical reference in headline.)

AGREED: Stop Starting School Before 8:30 AM. Research shows that unreasonable start times lead to chronic sleep deprivation in teens. Why are schools so slow to make changes? Not just teens. My life improved immeasurably when the Insta-Daughter switched to online high school and I didn’t have to drive her to school at the crack of dawn anymore.

KURT SCHLICHTER: Curse Of The Woke Conservatives. “So what does the GOP establishment do in 2018 when it comes before us dirty, nasty normals and tries to make the case that its members deserve being reelected to Congress instead of being tarred and feathered? After seven years of solemn assurances, it couldn’t even get its act together and keep its promise to put a stake through the heart of the abomination that is Obamacare. But hey – when Donald Trump kept his promise to undo DACA, that sure spurred the True Conservatives to action.”

REFUGEE CONTROL: Myanmar laying landmines near Bangladesh border.

Myanmar has been laying landmines across a section of its border with Bangladesh, said two government sources in Dhaka, adding that the purpose may have been to prevent the return of Rohingya Muslims fleeing violence.

Bangladesh will on Wednesday formally lodge a protest against the laying of land mines so close to the border, said the sources, who had direct knowledge of the situation but asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

An army crackdown triggered by an attack on Aug. 25 by Rohingya insurgents on Myanmar security forces has led to the killing of at least 400 people and the exodus of nearly 125,000 Rohingya to neighbouring Bangladesh, leading to a major humanitarian crisis.

“They are putting the landmines in their territory along the barbed-wire fence” between a series of border pillars, said one of the sources.

These are the actions taken by the government of the all-but-sainted Aung San Suu Kyi.

WHEN YOU’VE LOST POLITICO… This Pro-Hillary Website Looks Like North Korean Agitprop.

Not to mention making the satiric DPRK News Service twitter feed look like a model of subtlety and decorum.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: F-35 Development Inches Closer To Finish Line.

The first operational U.S. Air Force F-35 squadron is set to receive its initial aircraft configured with a version of the long-awaited Block 3F software in September. But the event, while a sign of progress toward the end of the F-35’s lengthy development phase, is mostly symbolic. The 34th Fighter Sqdn., known as the “Rude Rams,” of Hill AFB, Utah, will receive F-35 aircraft equipped with an initial release of 3F, but not the final updates that are still under test, according to service spokesman Capt. Mark Graff.

This means the aircraft will have all the capabilities of 3F but be restricted to the more limited 3i flight envelope and weapons the squadrons are currently flying, Graff says.

Even at 3i the F-35 performed very well at Red Flag earlier this year, but given events in Korea and elsewhere, getting to 3F is looking like a real nail-biter.

ACROSS THE AISLE: Trump Wants to See DACA Deal with ‘Chuck and Nancy’ and ‘Make a Lot of Happy People.’. “Asked if he wants to see a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers: ‘That’s going to be discussed later, but we want to talk about legal right now.'”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. North Korea’s Nuclear Arsenal Threatens China’s Path to Power.

China’s path to dominance requires an American withdrawal and a message to American allies that they cannot count on the United States for protection. But North Korea threatens to draw the United States more deeply into the region and complicate China’s effort to diminish its influence and persuade countries to live without its nuclear umbrella.

At the same time, the strategic location of the North — and its advancing nuclear capabilities — makes it dangerous for China to restrain it.

“North Korea may not be the biggest problem to China, but it does add a unique and very serious dimension to China’s task of supplanting America in East Asia,” said Hugh White, a former strategist for the Australian Defense Department. “That’s because it is the only East Asian power with nuclear weapons.”

Even if the United States steps back from the region, Mr. White added, “North Korea’s capability means China can never be able to dominate the region as much as its leaders today probably hope.”

The time for China to rein in its erratic ally was yesterday, but Beijing still thinks they can have it all.

EMILY YOFFE: The Uncomfortable Truth About Campus Rape Policy: At many schools, the rules intended to protect victims of sexual assault mean students have lost their right to due process—and an accusation of wrongdoing can derail a person’s entire college education. “The way in which Bonsu’s case was handled may seem perverse, but many of the university’s actions—the interim restrictions, the full-bore investigation and adjudication even though R.M.’s own statement does not describe a sexual assault—were mandated or strongly encouraged by federal rules that govern the handling of sexual assault allegations on campus today. These rules proliferated during the Obama administration, as did threats of sanctions if schools didn’t follow them precisely. The impulse behind them was noble and necessary—sexual assault is a scourge that should not be tolerated in any society, much less by institutions of higher learning. But taken in sum, these directives have left a mess of a system, and many unintended consequences.”

I’m not sure they were all that unintended.

YOU STAY CLASSY, LEFTISTS:  Pat Toomey questioner arrested for allegedly disrupting town hall by asking “Do you know whether you daughter, Bridget, has been abducted?”

On Facebook following the town hall, Radecki posted that he was trying to force Toomey “into a place of empathy for the briefest moment in the hope that he would acknowledge the humanity of so many others who live with fear that he is directly responsible for every day.

“My question in full, should I have been allowed to ask it in full:

“‘Thank you, Senator Toomey, for coming here tonight to hear our questions. I’m assuming you’ve been busy thinking about how to answer our questions, so you haven’t seen the news. Do you know whether you daughter, Bridget, has been abducted?’

“‘Whatever you’re feeling right now, that’s what it feels like to have a daughter deported. Thousands of fathers here in the Valley that live with that fear every day. Their daughters have names, too. So here’s my question. Do you unequivocally denounce any attempt by the administration to reverse DACA, which would hang the threat of deportation over hundreds of thousands of children the same age as Bridget?'”

As John Sexton writes at Hot Air, “My take is that the question is disturbing and inappropriate as phrased, i.e. not as a hypothetical but as news. A spokesman for Toomey called the question ‘reprehensible’ and that really seems to fit. Suggesting a politician’s teenage child has actually been kidnapped completely violates one of the few clear rules in American politics: leave the kids out of it.”

No who’s being, naïve, John? As we’ve seen repeatedly over the last several presidential administrations, that rule only applies to the children of Democrat politicians.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Silicon Valley Courts Brand-Name Teachers, Raising Ethics Issues. “Ms. Delzer is a member of a growing tribe of teacher influencers, many of whom promote classroom technology. They attract notice through their blogs, social media accounts and conference talks. And they are cultivated not only by start-ups like Seesaw, but by giants like Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, to influence which tools are used to teach American schoolchildren.”

OH MY: Democratic IT staffer who fled the country strikes deal to return, face charges.

A document filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia indicates that federal prosecutors have struck a deal with Alvi that would allow her to return to the U.S., but would also require her to surrender her passport and afterwards not book any international travel. The deal only surrounds how Alvi will turn herself in, and is structured so that she can avoid being arrested in front of her children when she returns to the U.S., “during the last week of September 2017.”

Alvi, and Awan in particular, are the focus of investigations by the FBI and Capitol Police regarding irregularities for purchases of some computers and other equipment which was later discovered to be missing. The pair, and their associates, could have had access to sensitive government information over the years.

In July, the Daily Caller reported that the FBI seized smashed hard drives from Awan’s home.

Hardest hit: Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

Exit Question: Whatever happened to Russiagate, anyway?

THE HILL: Trump pulls off a stone-cold stunner.

ADMIN SOURCES: Creepy Tweet Was a Coded Message to General McMaster About Leakers.. David Steinberg adds, “This one’s weird, and it’s big, and you’re just going to have to read it.”

MORE IMPORTANT THAN VIRTUE SIGNALING? NEVAH!  Dear Virginia Senators – Don’t You Have Actual Business to Attend To?

GOOD. WITHOUT MEANINGFUL VOTE LEGALITY, WE’RE ALL DISENFRANCHISED:  Texas Voter ID Law Upheld on Appeal.