WERE THEY TRULY INTELLIGENT? BY THEMSELVES, THAT IS? I DON’T KNOW, AND I DON’T KNOW WE CAN EVER FIND OUT:  ‘Oath’ Director: Yes, Fascist Comedy Is About Trump.

IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THIS YET, YOU SHOULD:  Trump the knuckleballer.

LIBERAL PRIVILEGE:  Twitter has no problem…

THE SWAMP BUBBLES: Treasury Official Arrested And Charged For Leaking Info On Russia And Manafort.

INDEED:  Censorship and the Fascist Mob.

ALL OCCASIONAL CORTEX:  Kyrsten Sinema’s Problematic Record Regarding Taliban And Terrorist Attorney Lynne Stewart.

HONESTLY, NOW: ARE THEY ALL OCCASIONAL CORTEX?  Heitkamp’s “Prairie Tough” Turns into “Prairie Oops!”   [Oh, and I’m back at posting. I answered a lot of you, but for those that didn’t ask and wondered, a shingles vaccine kicked me sideways, so I was passing out way before nighttime.- SAH]

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STOP MAKING CHILDREN YOUR MOUTHPIECES: Sarah Hoyt on the political abuse of children.

She’s mad again. You know you love it.

BUT DON’T CALL THEM A MOB: Multiple Reports Of Left-Wing Partisans Attacking GOP Candidates, Staffers.

BRAVE OF HER TO TAKE THIS STAND: Lionel Shriver says it is time to end the #MeToo movement.

Speaking at Cheltenham Literature Festival, the controversial author of We Need To Talk About Kevin said that the ongoing movement against sexual harassment has “run its course” and is having a negative effect on relationships between men and women.

According to The Times, Shriver said that that the movement had been “important to begin with”, having exposed “some of the real malefactors” such as Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

However, she added: “Then it took a turn and suddenly we were talking about bad dates and bad taste or making crass remarks and it trivialised itself and I thought that was really regrettable.

“I don’t like the feeling that now everyone has to have their story of some kind of terrible sexual abuse in order to be able to have an opinion about any of this stuff.

“I don’t want younger women to locate their sense of power in their weakness, in their fragility. I think the movement has run its course and we can pretty much call time on it now.”

Shriver also criticised Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who claimed US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when she was 15 and he was 17. He denies the allegations.

“I wouldn’t say it was negligible [the incident] but I also did not think it was life-changing,” the author said, adding that she failed to comprehend how Blasey Ford was “haunted by it and having post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms”.

“Let’s have a sense of proportion about sexual offences and levels of grievousness,” Shriver continued.

I didn’t know people were allowed to speak so sensibly anymore.

THIS PUTRID SOCIALIST PARASITE HAS NEVER CREATED ANYTHING OF VALUE. SHE SHOULD GIVE THANKS EVERY DAY THAT WE DO NOT LIVE IN A JUST WORLD. Seattle Councilmember Kshama Sawant blasts Paul Allen.

DEEP STATE UPDATE: Treasury employee charged with leaking financial info on Trump team was arrested with flash drive in hand, prosecutors say.

THE MOB COMES TO TENNESSEE: Blackburn backlash shocks Mt. Juliet restaurant owner.

Courtney’s Restaurant and Catering owner Tom Courtney said he’s experienced a strong social media backlash because he rented the event room at his Mt. Juliet business to U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Marsha Blackburn on Saturday.

Courtney said he’s been called a Nazi, an abuser, had his life threatened and said his staff has been verbally attacked.

Hundreds of posters on social media said they would boycott his restaurant because it was a local venue to Blackburn, who is running for a seat in the U.S. Senate against former Democratic Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen.

Disgraceful. You don’t hear of Republicans targeting places like this for hosting Democrat events.

OPEN THREAD: Make me proud.

WELL, LET’S SEE IF THIS PREDICTION DOES BETTER THAN SOME OF THIS OTHERS: Nate Silver forecasts Republicans have better chance of reaching at least 54 seats than Democrats have of taking over the Senate.

SOCIALISM SUCKS: How social democracy lost its way: a report from Germany.

Last year’s defeat came as a shock because of the magnitude of the drop in votes, but it was the continuation of a decades-long erosion of support. With one exception, the party has lost votes at every general election going back 20 years. Since 1998, it has shed half its electorate, and there is no sign the decline has stopped. Some recent polls show the party now being eclipsed not just by Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats but also by the Greens and the far-right Alternative for Germany.

On Sunday, the party suffered another humiliating defeat in a regional election in Bavaria, where it slumped to just 9.7 per cent of the vote. All of this raises a profound question: can Europe’s oldest social democratic party survive? The answer has implications that resonate far beyond Berlin.

It’s hard to survive as a party that sets itself against the nation it wants to govern. Yet socialist “transformations” increasingly involve just that.

Plus: “The 2015 refugee crisis and the political convulsions that followed are a case in point. The SPD backed Merkel’s decision to accept more than a million refugees from crisis countries such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, despite the evident risk of a political backlash from voters. The decision was right in principle, Schäfer believes, but was poorly explained.”

When lefty policies fail, it’s always because they were “poorly explained,” never because they were horrible, destructive ideas that any reasonable person would have rejected out of hand.

OVER AT P.J. MEDIA: The Lynching Of Mark Judge. “When you were accused, it was news but it wasn’t true. Now you’re cleared — that’s true, but it isn’t news.”

I HOPE IT SINKS ALL THE WAY: Sleazy Bob Menendez’s Sinking New Jersey Campaign.

BLOOMBERG: The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse: The next generation of graduates will include more borrowers who may never be able to repay.

If only there had been some kind of warning. I mean, any kind of warning at all.

WELL, IT HARMS EVERYTHING, SO. . . How Identity Politics Is Harming The Sciences.

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Plus, Fall Deals in Home and Garden.

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CLUE? The Economist: Liberals need a new approach to immigration.

Matteo Salvini, Italy’s hard-right interior minister, deputy prime minister and leader of its Northern League, is surging in the popularity polls. Mr Salvini is likely in due course to become Italy’s leader in large part because of his uncompromising stance on immigration. “People whose only contact with immigrants is with the Filipino servant who takes the dog for a walk in the evening are in favour of immigration, but they have no idea of how immigration is lived in the peripheries,” he said in July.

That, in a nutshell, is the charge made against smug liberals who champion “open borders”. They get all the benefits of large-scale migration from low-wage countries: cheap nannies, Uber drivers, decorators, waiters, sandwich-makers, chambermaids and dog-walkers. But they don’t rely on public housing, tend to have private health-care and often pay for private education so that their children are not brought up in classes where, in some cases, their native tongue is spoken by a minority.

Meanwhile those locals not so fortunate as the cosmopolitan elite (who kid themselves that they deserve their good fortune because they worked hard, ignoring that they started life on third base) often compete with people who will work for less because they are prepared to live in dorms or bedsits, having left their families at home.

If immigrants were undercutting the wages of lawyers, bankers, journalists, and politicians, every nation would have a wall.

DUMB AND DUMBER: The Army’s New PT Test.

LIFE UNDER LATE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s Suicide.