LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Lanny Davis Panhandles for Cohen on Cable News and Much, Much More. “Yesterday, the media was LIT UP talking about their favorite thing: Trump’s impeachment.”

FINALLY, A SENSIBLE GUN POLICY: Betsy DeVos Is Said to Weigh Letting School Districts Use Federal Funds to Buy Guns.

ASHE SCHOW: Judge Reconsiders Dismissal of Accused Student’s Equal Protection Claim.

The accused student in this case, John Doe, had met his eventual accuser, Jane Roe (as they are referred to in court documents), while John was a student at OSU and worked as a registered nurse at the school’s Wexner Medical Center (WMC) in 2012. They dated through 2014, during which time Jane (by her own admission) initiated much of the sexual contact. It was John who ended the relationship after Jane told him she loved him but he did not want a committed relationship. Seven months after they broke up, Jane accused John of sexually assaulting her on their last date, November 20, 2014. John was found responsible and expelled from the university and fired from the WMC.

John sued, but his case was dismissed on March 10, 2017. He petitioned for reconsideration after the Sixth Circuit decision and was granted a reversal on just one claim — equal protection.

“Plaintiff is now arguing that the Defendants … violated the equal protection clause when they initiated and disciplined Plaintiff, but not Jane Doe despite receiving information from Plaintiff that she may have also violated OSU’s sexual misconduct policy,” Judge Smith wrote.

“Out of an abundance of caution and based on the analysis of the Sixth Circuit in Miami Univ., the Court reverses its finding on Plaintiff’s equal protection claim and reinstates that claim as to Defendants. …” Smith added.

More like this, please.

MICHAEL BARONE: Democrats will do better playing by the rules than denouncing the rules.

When you lose a game, particularly a game you had good reason to expect you’d win, do you try to figure out how to play better? Or is your first reaction to demand changes in the rules?

In the case of the Democratic Party, it’s the latter. Perhaps that comes naturally to a party that takes some pride in having advocated changes in rules that everyone today sees as unfair (even those, like racial segregation laws, that they enacted themselves). But sometimes it’s wiser to change the way you play than to denounce long-established rules.

The Democrats argue that they’ve been winning more votes but don’t control the federal government. They’ve won a plurality of the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, but have elected presidents in only four of them. That darned Electoral College— “land,” as one liberal commentator puts it — gave the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.

Of course, the Gore and Clinton campaigns knew that the winner is determined by electoral votes, not popular votes. But that hasn’t stopped many Democrats from calling for changing the rules to election by popular vote.

Or from complaining about the composition of the Senate. A majority of senators, writes ace election analyst David Wasserman, represent only 18 percent of the nation’s population. That’s because under the Constitution, each state elects two senators, and a majority of Americans today live in just nine states.

It’s suggested that the framers didn’t expect population to be so heavily concentrated in a few states. Actually, it was similarly concentrated in big states 50, 100, 150 and 200 years ago. And when the framers met in 1787, small states demanded equal Senate representation precisely from fear that the big states would dominate them. . . .

It’s true that the Electoral College works against a party whose voters are geographically and demographically clustered. For the Framers, that was a feature, not a bug. They feared domination by a concentrated bloc of voters with no broad support across the country.

A party which wants to win more elections might take note of that and look to broaden its support base, rather than plead for impossible constitutional changes and fiddle with fixes that might produce unanticipated negative consequences.

Indeed.

OUT: POCAHONTAS. IN: ELIZABETH DUKAKIS. Elizabeth Warren’s tone-deaf talk on CNN could alienate Iowa voters.

A MEN’S HEALTH CRISIS at Canadian universities.

MORE EVIDENCE FOR MISMATCH EFFECT IN STEM: There’s a lot of evidence now.  For an explanation of the Mismatch Effect in STEM, see Want to Be a Doctor? A Scientist? An Engineer? An Affirmative Action Leg Up May Hurt Your Chances. Note that it’s not just affirmative action that can hurt a student’s chances of getting a STEM degree. Legacy and athletic bumps can hurt too.

BLUE WAVE? Fox News Poll: Democrats maintain lead in race for House.

Several findings point to the potential for a blue map in November:

– President Trump’s job rating remains underwater.

– Republicans alone say the economy is in positive shape.

– The GOP tax law is less popular (40 percent favorable) than Obamacare (51 percent favorable).

– The Republican Party is less popular (39 percent favorable) than the Democratic Party (50 percent favorable).

– Optimism about life for the next generation of Americans is down eight points from last year.

– There is greater enthusiasm to vote in the midterms among out-of-power Democrats.

It’s never too soon to donate, or even better, volunteer for a local campaign.

THEY’RE NOT WRONG: Teens Are Worried They Spend Too Much Time On Their Phones.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Want More Power To The People? Choose Capitalism.

Capitalism is a kind of economic democracy, where consumers vote with every dollar they spend, determining which businesses succeed and fail. Look at the thousands of products in your local grocery store, shopping mall, or on Amazon, all vying for your attention. These products represent entrepreneurs striving to meet your needs as the way to achieve their own success. That may not be purely altruistic conduct, since capitalism depends on the desire of people to better their own lives, but it channels that natural desire into focusing on the opinions and preferences of a broad class of consumers.

In a socialist economy, rather than meeting the needs of others, you improve your life by getting more for yourself from the limited supply of goods, services, or benefits the government either makes or allows others to make available. Whether you get those goods depends on how well you please the political elites. People who are willing and able to make themselves useful to the powerful get special privileges, and since socialist systems produce so little wealth, everyone who is neither useful nor well connected stands in the inevitable bread line or waits her turn for gasoline.

Even in relatively free countries, where does the line move faster: At the corner McDonalds or the DMV?

WEIRD THAT NOBODY TEACHES THEM THAT IN SCHOOL: Millennials’ Rosy View of the Welfare State Dwindles Once They’re Told What It Costs.

AND A LOT OF AMERICANS ARE HAPPY TO HELP: Russia Influence Operations Seek to Sow U.S. Division.

Russia’s aggressive influence and cyber operations targeting the United States are not aimed at supporting specific political parties but seek to sow internal divisions, a senior State Department official said Tuesday.

A. Wess Mitchell, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, also said the State Department is working to counter Russian influence operations through an interagency-backed Global Engagement Center.

Under President Trump, the administration has imposed sanctions on over 200 Russians and Russian entities, closed six Russian diplomatic posts, and expelled 60 spies, Mitchell said. In all, the United States has imposed 580 sanctions on Russia, mostly related to illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea.

The testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Russia sanctions prompted criticism from some Democrats who said that while Russia’s economy is suffering under American sanctions, Moscow’s behavior has not changed significantly.

Well, sanctions can impose pain, but by themselves they can’t force a change in conduct.

THIS SEEMS LIKE KIND OF A BIG DEAL: Despite Comey Assurances, Vast Bulk of Weiner Laptop Emails Were Never Examined.

Virtually none of his account was true, a growing body of evidence reveals.

In fact, a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information. Three FBI officials completed that work in a single 12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges.

“Most of the emails were never examined, even though they made up potentially 10 times the evidence” of what was reviewed in the original year-long case that Comey closed in July 2016, said a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation.

Yet even the “extremely narrow” search that was finally conducted, after more than a month of delay, uncovered more classified material sent and/or received by Clinton through her unauthorized basement server, the official said. Contradicting Comey’s testimony, this included highly sensitive information dealing with Israel and the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas. The former secretary of state, however, was never confronted with the sensitive new information and it was never analyzed for damage to national security.

Our premier counterintelligence agency was more concerned with Clinton ass-covering than with national security. But somehow that pales in comparison to sex with a porn star.

Anyway, read the whole thing.

CLARK NEILY ON WASHINGTON D.C.: Trump Might Be a Criminal. But So Is Everyone Else: A question that now hangs like a miasma over D.C. is “Which of my staffers would hang me out to dry in order to avoid going to federal prison?”

When everyone is a criminal, everything depends on who the prosecutor wants to go after.

A VERY PUBLIC EDUCATION: Millennials Don’t Think America Was Ever That Great. “The left is winning the battle for the hearts and minds of young people and America is suffering as a result.”

THE ECONOMIST: The dangers of illiberal liberalism: Liberals who repress speech to prevent harm risk inviting authoritarianism.

I still consider myself a liberal in the Enlightenment sense of the word. But I have to admit that being a liberal these days is confusing. I continue to take inspiration from John Locke, John Stuart Mill and those more recent freedom fighters of the 1960s who challenged conformism and repression. In Britain this led to partial decriminalisation of both homosexuality and abortion in 1967, and a more open, tolerant, permissive society. These are the liberal values which I recognise and admire.

In contrast, today’s so-called progressive liberals are often intolerant, calling for official censure against anyone perceived as uttering non-progressive views. They openly despise everyone from Trump-voting “Deplorables” and Brexit-voting ”Gammons” (those “others” who dare to vote the wrong way and won’t espouse their “tolerant” values) to those in their own ranks who refuse to toe the liberal line. Many will have noticed the murky civil war among feminists on the transgender issue, or the venom heaped on anyone daring to demur on 100% endorsement of the #MeToo movement. Prominent women, many of whom would call themselves liberal feminists, have been turned on and accused of treason for daring to dissent.

Margaret Atwood’s thoughtful article, “Am I a Bad Feminist?”, was met with howls of rage from fellow feminists. The iconic novelist was accused of being a victim-blaming rape apologist, all of which apparently stemmed from her “white privilege”. Ironically, Ms Atwood’s essay notes that “anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor”. How right she is. After Catherine Deneuve wrote an open letter raising concerns about the effect #MeToo might have on flirting, Asia Argento, also an actress, denounced her and “other French women” for their “interiorised misogyny [which] has lobotomised them to the point of no return”. For daring to raise questions about female sexual agency, Ms Deneuve and others have essentially been told that they’ve been brainwashed.

This particular viciousness is also aimed at liberals who dare any self-criticism. Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, published a stinging rebuke of his own tribe for facilitating Donald Trump’s accession to the White House. His New York Times op-ed, “The End of Identity Liberalism” went viral, and received a savaging from his peers. Katherine Franke, a colleague of his at Columbia, accused him of “contributing to the same ideological project”’ as David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. “Both men are underwriting the whitening of American nationalism”, Ms Franke writes “Lilla’s op-ed does the…nefarious background work of making white supremacy respectable”. Such delegitimising slander is commonplace—it’s the liberals’ version of hate speech, spouted without apology in the fight against (ahem) hate speech.

Yeah.

HOLMAN JENKINS: The Media Fesses Up:

“After weeks of hype, white supremacists managed to muster just a couple of dozen supporters on Sunday in the nation’s capital. . . .”

This column has not always praised the New York Times, but let’s belatedly credit its lead sentence (to which we’ve added emphasis) in its story about the sparsely attended Aug. 12 white-power rally in D.C. As the paper made clear, the “hype” it mentions was supplied by the media itself, working off what the Times called a “template.”

Here’s how it goes: “A group like the Ku Klux Klan announces a rally. Next comes news coverage, fevered and intense. That prompts a huge number of activists, police officers and everyday people to turn out, dwarfing what is often a pathetically small band of extremists in hoods or armbands.”

Bingo. And the top practitioner of this left-right symbiosis is Jason Kessler, a 34-year-old University of Virginia graduate. He began as a Barack Obama supporter, then shifted into promoting white identity politics. As well as being the permittee for this month’s tiny D.C. rally, he was the permit holder for last year’s highly instructive debacle in Charlottesville, Va.

Those Charlottesville events, as a painstaking official report would later document, got out of hand when local police deliberately allowed a violent confrontation to develop between a small group of neo-Nazis and a large number of counterprotesters. The goal was to create a pretext for the state police to declare an emergency and unleash riot forces while local cops stood on the sidelines. A woman would later be killed when a mentally ill neo-Nazi (almost a redundancy) drove his car into a crowd.

The reality of what happened in Charlottesville remains lost on much of the media, but it wasn’t lost on the people of the overwhelmingly liberal city. They got rid of the police chief, the mayor and the town manager. It also was not lost on cities elsewhere. Witness D.C.’s successful effort to keep its tiny number of legally sanctioned white nationalist demonstrators (about 20) isolated from thousands of peaceful antiracism demonstrators, and, most important, from hundreds of helmeted, masked “antifa,” or antifascist, militants adorned in black.

The absurdity was apparent even in less knowing press accounts. “Thousands of counter-protesters struggled to even catch a clear glimpse of the white nationalist rally,” noted the Associated Press. With nobody else to oppose, the mostly white counterprotesters turned their free-floating rage on D.C.’s predominantly black police with chants of “cops and Klan go hand in hand.”

If neo-Nazis didn’t exist, the left would have to invent them. And to some extent have.

Yep.

HE’S READING HIMSELF BACK IN TIME:  Mag Review: Spaceway June, 1954.

IN WRITING OR IN LIFE, YOU CAN’T GET THERE UNLESS YOU KNOW:  Where Do You Want To Go?

ALL THINGS I’VE SAID, BUT HE SAYS IT OH SO MUCH BETTER:  The Fiery Angel.

IT’S WHO THEY ARE, IT’S WHAT THEY DO:  Senate Dems Use Michael Cohen Plea in ‘Desperate and Pathetic’ Attempt to Stop Kavanaugh.

WELL, IT’S BASED ON MONEY EXTORTED WITH THE THREAT OF FORCE AND ADMINISTERED BY PEOPLE LIKE WARREN.  WHAT DO YOU GUYS THINK THAT MAKES IT? Warren Slams Reagan: ‘Government Help Is “Terrifying”? Give Me a Break’

AND THIS IS INDEED A GOOD QUESTION:  Mollie Tibbetts’ Murder: Where’s the outrage?

AND THIS TOO IS NOT THE ONION:  UChicago Must Defend Professor Against Social Justice Slander.