AN ACTRESS WHO LOVES THE CONSTITUTION: Yes, you read that right. Janine Turner, famous for Northern Exposure, talks regularly to students about the Constitution, and she’s not complaining about it.

HMM: Amazon Puts Whole Foods on Fast Track to Conventional Supermarket.

Under the changes planned to begin in April, Whole Foods’ 470 locations will no longer allow brand representatives to promote their products or check to make sure they are stocked and displayed correctly.

Whole Foods also is centralizing much of its decision-making regarding the assortment of products across the country. Instead of allowing brands to frequently pitch their products to individual stores or regions, Whole Foods executives in its Austin, Texas headquarters will choose a higher percentage of the items stores carry.

The move had slowly gotten under way in recent months, but Amazon.com Inc.’s AMZN 0.35% merger with the chain in August provided additional incentive for Whole Foods to move away from its decentralized model and become more efficient.

“This is another step in the conventionalizing of Whole Foods as we know it,” said Jim Cusson, of Charlotte, N.C.-based Theory House, a brand consultancy.

Amazon is hoping to boost sales at the struggling grocer, in part, by standardizing operations and prices. Market reports show traffic improvement since the deal closed last month, likely because the chain lowered prices on key items like eggs and milk.

“Conventional” for grocery stores also means “low margins,” which would be new for Whole Foods. But Amazon has always been happy with low (or nonexistent) profits, so long as cash flow remained high and competitors were brought low.

CHRIS CILLIZZA: John Kerry running for president in 2020 wouldn’t be the craziest thing.

Yeah, “crazy” isn’t the word I’d use, either.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Princeton’s campus newspaper disbands editorial board after string of right-leaning opinions.

Leaders of the student newspaper at Princeton University have disbanded the publication’s independent editorial board, a move that comes after the group put forth a string of right-leaning opinions, including denouncing the women’s center for its radical feminist agenda and arguing in favor of due process.

“The top editors of the Prince have no involvement in what we write,” said Jack Whelan, a member of the dissolved editorial board, in an interview with The College Fix. “The reason why were we were destroyed is the opinions we published on a regular basis were more conservative than the opinions published on a daily basis in the Princetonian as a whole.”

While most campus newspapers’ editorial boards consist of top editors, the Princetonian had a unique set-up in which its editorial board was made of students representing a wide and diverse swath of campus life, as well as students who leaned left, right and center.

So basically this was an attack on diversity.

THE GREAT TUNE-OUT: Disappointing August 2017 Closed Out the Worst Summer Movie Season in Over 10 Years.

CTRL-F “Trump” on this Box Office Mojo article brings up zero returns, oddly enough.

(Classical reference in headline.)

REPORTS: Manafort Offered Campaign Briefings to Oligarch; Mueller Wants Docs on Oval Office Meeting.

NEW FRONTIERS IN LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Leftists Decry Straight Black Men as ‘The White People of Black People.’ So I guess they should start voting for Trump, right?

Related: “White women have a history of betraying their sisters.”

EMBRACE THE SUCK: Second Edition pre-order page at Amazon.

SHARYL ATTKISSON IN THE HILL: It looks like Obama did spy on Trump, just as he apparently did to me.

UPDATE: Flashback: “Hypothesis: The spying-on-Trump thing is worse than we even imagine, and once it was clear Hillary had lost and it would inevitably come out, the Trump/Russia collusion talking point was created as a distraction.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Don Surber: Why CNN told you Trump’s campaign was wiretapped.

Bonus question: At this point, would anyone be surprised to find out that they were spying on the Romney campaign, too?

MORE: From the comments: “Do you remember when the IRS scandal unfolded? It was brought up at a press briefing. They were trying to get ahead of the Scandal by releasing the information in measured doses, so it could be handled carefully by Administration allies in the Press. That is what they are doing right now, with the wiretapping.”

UNCONSTITUTIONAL, UNACCOUNTABLE, UNAMERICAN: I have a new paper out today, The Case against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Unconstitutionally Structured and Harmful to Consumers. If you need arguments why Senator Warren’s favorite agency needs to be killed by the courts or Congress as matter of political hygiene (as a great man once said about Obamacare) I hope you’ll find them there.

THINK OF THE ROOT AS A DEMOCRATIC PARTY HOUSE ORGAN AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Here Are 7 Influential Black Figures The Root Forgot To Honor. Glad to see Antonia Okafor top the list; I’ve been a fan of hers for a while.

CHEATS: From Russia with fuel – North Korean ships may be undermining sanctions.

At least eight North Korean ships that left Russia with a cargo of fuel this year headed for their homeland despite declaring other destinations, a ploy that U.S. officials say is often used to undermine sanctions.

Reuters has no evidence of wrongdoing by the vessels, whose movements were recorded in Reuters ship-tracking data. Changing a ship’s destination once underway is not forbidden and it is unclear whether any of the ships unloaded fuel in North Korea.

But U.S. officials say that changing destination mid-voyage is a hallmark of North Korean state tactics to circumvent the international trade sanctions imposed over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.

Changing course and the complex chain of different firms — many offshore — involved in shipments can complicate efforts to check how much fuel is supplied to North Korea and monitor compliance with a cap on fuel imports under U.N. sanctions.

It may be time to bring up at the UNSC a Cuban Missile Crisis-style quarantine of cargo ships headed for North Korean ports — at least as a public test of Russian and Chinese intentions.

ELI LAKE: What We Still Don’t Know About Obama-Era ‘Unmasking.’

Unmasking Kushner, Bannon and Flynn in that meeting is not in and of itself evidence of political spying. It does not support Trump’s claim that Obama had tapped Trump Tower. It doesn’t rise to the level of a scandal. What’s more, Republicans like Representative Trey Gowdy have praised Rice for her openness this month in her closed-session testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, and reiterated a point made by that committee’s chairman, Devin Nunes, that Rice did not violate the law by requesting that some U.S. persons in intelligence reports be unmasked. Rice, according to sources familiar with her testimony, reiterated that she never leaked the information she unmasked.

Gowdy is still trying to get answers. He told me Monday, “The issues are serious enough to warrant an open-minded, objective review, but we don’t have all the information necessary to draw to a conclusion.”

That’s important. Gowdy says he still has not received exact numbers on how many times Rice or other senior Obama officials made requests to unmask U.S. citizens in intelligence reports. He said he doesn’t yet have enough information to determine whether the volume of requests or their dissemination within the intelligence community were unusual. His committee has learned that Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, also made a number of unmasking requests in her final year in office. Was that unusual or part of her job? Why did she need this information?

Keep digging.

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HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Controversy Over Law Profs’ Op-Ed On The Breakdown Of The ‘Bourgeois Culture’ Shifts From Penn To San Diego. If some evil genius of the right wanted the destroy the academy’s reputation, he/she couldn’t do better than the academy is doing for itself.

HASSAN ROUHANI, INTERNATIONAL MAN OF PATIENCE: ‘We are Waiting for Mr. Trump to Apologize’ for ‘Offensive’ Speech.

FABULOUS –AND EERIE– PHOTO FROM THE COCKPIT: An Air National Guard C-130J prepares to drop fire retardant on a fire southeast of Fresno, California.

U.S. PRESSURES KURDS TO HALT REFERENDUM:

The United States ramped up pressure Wednesday on Iraq’s Kurds to abandon a planned referendum on independence, threatening to withdraw international support for negotiations with Baghdad if the vote isn’t scrapped.

In a forceful warning, the Trump administration said the costs of holding the Sept. 25 vote would be high “for all Iraqis, including Kurds.” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the U.S. was urging the Kurds to “accept the alternative” — talks between the northern Kurdish region and Iraq’s central government that the U.S. and United Nations would facilitate.

“If this referendum is conducted, it is highly unlikely that there will be negotiations with Baghdad, and the above international offer of support for negotiations will be foreclosed,” Nauert said.

We live in interesting times.

JAMES POULOS: Two Cheers for Democracy.

How best to return the body politic to both liberal moderation and classical natural right is the puzzle that defines American conservatives’ central challenge. David Brooks, also invoking Craiutu, recently attempted to cast moderation’s charm in stark terms, as the only alternative to the “warrior mentality” in politics. The radicalizing, “warrior” mentality, he says, “just means more culture war, more barbarism, more dishonesty and more dysfunction.” The moderate soul does “not see politics as warfare,” but as “a voyage with a fractious fleet,” or a method of “coping with the complexity of the world.” No sect can master the science of politics, because politics is a “limited activity” that can never save us or become the whole. Thus, the political art emerging from the acceptance of politics’s limits is a conversational art. Political arts require mediating between what are falsely propounded and marketed as airtight, mutually exclusive, comprehensive doctrines. Both extremism and careless moderation can cause disaster, but humility emerges from practicing political arts, properly understood. Politics is the art of reflectively choosing the least bad options—accepting human political wisdom and knowledge’s limits, instead of lusting and lurching after utopian visions of justice.

Plus, “In today’s political landscape, the influence of fake ‘warriors,’ for social justice or other causes, is maximized, while the deployment of soldiers, real warriors, is seen as a risk and burden to be minimized.”

Young people need some kind of outlet for their energies, and it would seem that social-justice warrior-ing is filling in for more traditional coming-of-age rituals.

IT WON’T BE A STORY, BECAUSE THIS IS THE KIND OF VIOLENCE THE PRESS APPROVES: New Democratic Party Leader Threatens Fox Host With Violence.

WELL, THIS IS CONSISTENT WITH THIEL’S SKILLSET: Is Trump Mulling Peter Thiel for a Top Intelligence Advisory Post? Especially if you’re worried about Russian abuse of social media.

But I think Peter Thiel’s place is bringing diversity to the Supreme Court.

PERHAPS SARAH HOYT WILL LET ME BORROW HER SHOCKED FACE: This NPR Reporter Doesn’t Understand Federalism.

Every now and then, there is a reporter who tries to play analyst without realizing what in God’s name they are talking about. It may surprise you to find out than an example of that would be an NPR reporter, and it may further surprise you to find out this reporter was attacking a GOP plan.

Brace yourselves, lads.

That’s right, folks. Obamacare, which seeks to force everyone in the nation, regardless of what state they are in, to buy health insurance, is a shining example of federalism.

That’s… That’s not how this works, Domenico.

When Obama propagandist Ben Rhodes said that “the average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and… literally know nothing,” his only crime was committing a gaffe of the Kinsley variety.

MY SENSE IS IT’S MARSHA BLACKBURN’S IF SHE WANTS IT, BUT I COULD BE WRONG: Tennessee Republicans Prepare for Another Senate Primary.