GOOD FOR HIM: Sen. Mike Lee blocks bill that would ban publication of plans for 3D printed guns.

Senator Mike Lee of Utah blocked an effort to ban the publication of blueprints for 3D printed guns online.

The Hill reports Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, tried to pass a bill that makes it illegal to intentionally publish a file that allows a 3D printer to produce a firearm and sought to do so by unanimous consent.

Unanimous consent is a rule that allows a Senator to set aside rules or procedures to expedite a process. If no Senator objects then the action is allowed, however if any one senator objects the request is rejected.

On Tuesday it was Mike Lee who voiced the objection to Nelson’s request. He said while he had only just recently reviewed the legislation, he immediately saw language that gave him cause for concern.

Prior restraints are always bad.

THE AWARD FOR WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERIENCE I’VE HAD IN RECENT MEMORY GOES TO: TaskRabbit. I hired a Tasker to move a heavy treadmill from my basement up two flights of stairs. He tried to disassemble it, couldn’t get if fully disassembled, then couldn’t get it back together. Easy-peasy, you’d think, given TR’s “happiness pledge:” either send someone to fix and move the treadmill, or give me credit to buy a new one. Nope. They offered to give me credit to hire another Tasker to move it, with no guarantee it will be fixed or is fixable. And that resolution took weeks and weeks of emails back and forth, and despite the fact that Taskers pay a hefty insurance fee for just such eventualities. And then when the resolution agreement arrived, it had a “non-disparagement” clause and a confidentiality clause, meaning I’d be legally bound to not complain about how awful TR customer service is, nor to explain how they make folks seeking a resolution sign various rights away. To heck with that. I’m not going to sign, I’m going to disparage away, and I’ll find another way of resolving my treadmill problem. Stay away from Task Rabbit, if a Tasker breaks something there is no guarantee it will be fixed, it will take weeks and weeks to reach an unsatisfactory resolution, and then they will want you to sign away various legal and other rights before they will do anything.

By contrast, kudos to Amazon, which eventually offered a generous resolution to a previous problem with Amazon Services.

JERRY BROWN: FIRE-FUELING HEAT WORSE THAN ‘SINCE CIVILIZATION EMERGED 10,000 YEARS AGO.’

I’d ask when does Jerry ban the internal-combustion automobile — but he’s already working on that.

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SOUTH AFRICA SPRINTS TOWARD FULL, RACE-BASED COMMUNISM: ANC to change Constitution to expropriate land without compensation. “The decision has far-reaching consequences for both the South African economy as well as its political space. It comes following yet another quarter in which the South African economy has shed jobs, with Statistics SA announcing an increase in the unemployment rate on Tuesday. The move is set to further dent investor sentiment and confidence by local business in the economy.” The target, of course, is the remainder of white farmers. But chasing them out and taking their land worked great for Zimbabwe, so no worries, right?

FROM MY COLLEAGUE MICHAEL HIGDON, WHO SOME OF YOU MAY REMEMBER FOR HIS PIECE ON NON-CONSENSUAL PATERNITY, A NEW ARTICLE: The Quasi-Parent Conundrum. My sister and brother-in-law are raising a nephew — and doing an amazing job of it — in their capacity as “quasi-parents,” and I can attest that the law doesn’t make things easier.

OPEN THREAD: Let it roll.

CUE ANOTHER SMUG LECTURE FROM MARGARET SULLIVAN ON HOW TRUMP IS WHIPPING UP VIOLENCE: Massachusetts woman enraged by Trump bumper sticker intentionally rammed into car, police say.

JOHN KASS: Media don’t want to understand Trump voters, all 63 million of them.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: What Your Check Engine Light Means and What To Do About It.

You can get an OBD II scanner quite cheaply nowadays, and many connect with your smartphone.

CHANGE: Private payrolls boom in July, increasing by 219,000 vs 185,000 estimate: ADP.

POST-MILLENNIAL TERROR: How Generation Z Became America’s Most Intolerant Generation. But they were taught to be this way.

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CULTURE OF CONTEMPT: Politico Reporter Apologizes for ‘Caustic Remarks’ After Mocking Trump Supporters at Florida Rally.

Politico reporter Marc Caputo faced backlash on Twitter after he mocked President Donald Trump’s supporters for heckling CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta, calling the president’s supporters “garbage” and saying they didn’t have any teeth.

Acosta checked in with CNN host Wolf Blitzer Tuesday night to report on the environment of the Trump supporters at the upcoming rally in Tampa Bay, Florida on Tuesday evening. He said they were chanting things like “CNN sucks” and “fake news.” He would later post videos on Twitter showing the crowd chanting, prompting reporters and Democratic figures to come to his defense and condemn the crowd for verbally attacking the media.

“Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa. I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy,” Acosta tweeted.

In a now-deleted tweet, Caputo commented on the video, saying, “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.”

In another deleted tweet, he responded to a tweet castigating his mockery of Trump supporters. “Oh no! I made fun of garbage people jeering at another person as they falsely accused him of lying and flipped him off. Someone fetch a fainting couch,” Caputo wrote.

Two points: (1) Yes, this is what the press thinks about Trump supporters, and this now-deleted tweet was an honest reflection of that. It’s totally hypocritical for people like Acosta to clutch their pearls about Trump’s “rhetoric” given how they treat, and talk about, his supporters. And as for their fear that Trump’s “rhetoric” might lead to violence, note how they skip right over the fact that Democrat James Hodgkinson shot GOP Congressman Steve Scalise as he tried to massacre the Republican House leadership.

(2) What’s worse is, Caputo’s actually one of the better political reporters, willing to report stuff that hurts Democrats and helps Republicans without sweeping it under the rug. That’s good, but if he thinks this way, what are the rest like?

And yes, he offered a solid apology. But that doesn’t change the attitude that his original statement revealed, or the fact that it seems to be widely shared among his press colleagues.

UPDATE: From the comments: “What Acosta and his ilk are missing is that Trump isn’t whipping up that hostility, he’s just tapping into it.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oh, this helps: Amy Siskind reports Eric Trump for encouraging violence after he retweets video of Jim Acosta being heckled. Journalists and their hangers-on are doing more to encourage violence against journalists than Trump is.

Related:

JOSEPH EPSTEIN: There’s Too Much Virtue In Politics.

Each party sees in the other the devil. Mr. Trump is the savior of the country, confronting an utterly corrupt establishment. His critics view themselves as brave defenders of democracy, facing down a neofascist. The two sides are not altogether unhappy with what they see, for their separate views fortify each in their own righteousness.

American politics have never before felt so divisive, and the chances of this soon changing appear slim. The tone of political discourse slips lower and lower. Donald Trump seems unable to refer to an adversary, current or former, without adding an epithet: Crooked Hillary, Crazy Joe Biden, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, et alia. What these people and his other opponents must call Mr. Trump in private cannot be printed in a family newspaper.

If there are any peacemakers among either the Democrats or the Republicans, they have yet to appear.

Well, as we saw just yesterday, even admitting that you have a Republican friend can get you mobbed in academia.

But I think the real problem started with the Civil Rights era, where thinking yourself morally superior to your opponents was easy. The elites have been chasing that high ever since, even when they have to invent entirely new kinds of prejudice to crusade against.

WAIT, WASN’T THIS A THING IN THE 1970s? The Great Pyramid of Giza Might Focus Electromagnetic Energy in Its Chambers.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Jim Acosta Remembers When Americans Were All on the Same Team.

That was back in 1996, when CNN’s founder was comparing Fox News to Hitler five minutes after it went on the air, I assume.

JEFF BEZOS TO SEND ALEXA TO AMAZON ROBOT REEDUCATION CAMP IN 3…2…1…Alexa Names Her Favorite Conservative Pundit: Ben Shapiro.

BLESS HER HEART: Andrea Mitchell Compares Trump to Joseph Stalin.

Based on what I read in the New York Times both last year and in Stalin’s obit, I’m not sure if I understand what the problem here is…

MODESTY BE DAMNED ON THIS PLATFORM: I feel obliged to say that the nervous Englishman in the video Mark so kindly recommended below is, in fact, me. I have some more to say on the subject here. And if you’d like a bibliography of books, papers, and articles going into more depth on the subject, you can find that here.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Slate defends “brutalist” architecture, in a piece titled, “Of Course Trump Hates Brutalism —Buildings like the FBI headquarters are everything Trump is not.”

It is also not surprising that Trump the architecture critic has no love for FBI HQ, one of the most reviled examples of the maligned Brutalist style. In the public imagination, capital-B Brutalism—the postwar fad named for béton brut, French for raw concrete, and defined by its heavy, cast-concrete forms—tends to be lumped in with both the shoddy, underfunded modernism of public housing projects and the space-age experiments that followed. As Julia Gatley and Stuart King write in Brutalism Resurgent, a 2016 anthology, brutalist came to be “a pejorative term used to describe monolithic buildings of raw concrete construction that impose themselves on their surroundings.” In the New York that shaped Trump’s aesthetics, that description would have suited affordable housing projects like Waterside Plaza, River Park Towers, Chatham Towers, and Tracey Towers—the antitheses of Trump’s new brand. The far right appears to be leading a broader backlash against architecture self-evidently built with 20^th-century technology. Such structures, in addition to their perceived deviance from the “Western traditions” venerated by American fascists, represent the tastes and lifestyles of America’s treacherous urban elite.

“Fascists?” Wait until the author discovers who the father of brutalism worked for during WWII. Though I have to give the him bonus points for subtextual chutzpah in his phrase “America’s treacherous urban elite.”

(Found via Varad Mehta of the Ace of Spades Decision Desk, who tweets, “‘Brutalism is good because Trump hates the FBI building’” might be the Slate pitch to end all Slate pitches.”)

ME IN POPULAR MECHANICS: Should We Be Afraid of the 3D Printed Gun?

BRUCE BAWER: Freedom for Tommy Robinson.

I’M HOLDING OUT FOR THE STRETCHED MODEL: 2018 Lincoln Navigator 4×4: Three tons of speedy, hedonistic SUV pleasure. Three tons, zero to sixty in just over five seconds.