SCRAPPLEFACE: Cohen, Manafort Felony Guilt Spurs Trump Departure.

The accompanying photoshops are well done.

SHOOT, SHOVEL, AND SHUT UP: My colleague Rob Gordon has a new paper out that makes the simple point – “whatever the cost” of the Endangered Species Act, it’s huge.

WHAT’S THIS? DONALD TRUMP, FIRST AMENDMENT CHAMPION? It came near the end of the president’s long campaign rally Tuesday night in West Virginia, so hardly anybody noticed it. But LifeZette’s Brendan Kirby caught it.

Now, when will ABC, CBS, NBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, etc. etc. put aside the fact Trump defending the First Amendment rights of even his most intellectually dishonest media critics totally undermines their “Tyrant Trump Is Destroying the First Amendment” meme and quote what he actually said? No, I’m not holding my breath, either.

ROGER SIMON: Social Media Companies the Most Dangerous Monopolies Ever.

SWAMPLAND STORIES: GOP Rep. Hunter, Wife Accused of Illegally Siphoning Campaign Funds for Personal Use. “U.S. Attorney says couple swiped a quarter of a million dollars in campaign funds ‘to purchase goods and services for their personal use and enjoyment’.”

WELL THAT’S DISCONCERTING: Hey, Has Anyone Seen Russia’s Allegedly Missing Nuclear-Powered Missile?

According to CNBC, those sources said Russia tested four of the missiles, which are reportedly called Burevestniks, between November 2017 and February 2018. But President Vladimir Putin’s boasting earlier this year that the prototypes could “attack any target” at any range (specifically Florida) appears to have been somewhat premature. The sources said all four tests failed, with Russia’s best attempt lasting a pitiful two minutes and covering just 22 miles (35 kilometers), and the nuclear core failing to activate mid-flight. CNBC wrote the Russians are not particularly happy about this and are trying to recover one of the lost missiles.

(There is no reason to worry about the possibility of a nuclear warhead being on board.)

As Task and Purpose noted, the U.S. military may be looking for the lost missiles too: The Air Force flew “nuclear-sniffing WC-135 ‘Constant Phoenix’ aircraft” over the Barents and Baltic Seas from March to August 2018.

Russia has a long history of producing vaporware, but this is ridiculous.

WHEN TOXIC MASCULINITY ISN’T TOXIC: ‘Feminist Fight Club’ at public university teaches participants how to raise their testosterone.

MARK LEVIN SLAMS MICHAEL COHEN’S PLEA DEAL.

Meanwhile, on Manafort, Andrew McCarthy says: “I don’t get belittling of Mueller’s Manafort win. He made terrible deal with Gates, & it hurt. But SC pitched a shutout on 8 felonies that were decided, didn’t lose any of other 10 counts, and has home game in DC next time. If point was pressure for Manafort’s cooperation, done.”

My own sense is that the legal stuff matters only insofar as it relates to impeachment. If the Dems take the House, they’ll probably try to impeach; if they take the House and the Senate it’s much more likely. If not, there won’t be impeachment. Whether an impeachment effort will work out as a plus for the Dems or not is unclear. The 1998 Clinton impeachment, which in some ways set the table for impeachment talk today, is generally regarded as a failure for the GOP, but they won the White House in 2000. I will note that the Dems’ position on impeachment would be stronger if they hadn’t started talking about impeaching Trump before he was even sworn in.

UPDATE: Mollie Hemingway: 6 Takeaways About Paul Manafort And Michael Cohen’s Legal Woes.

YOU DON’T SAY: Venezuela: New currency fails to curb hyperinflation. “Price of goods are already going up after the Venezuelan bolivar was devalued by 95 percent over the weekend.”

It’s almost as though treating the symptom does nothing to cure the underlying disease.

FRUITS OF THE LEFT’S LONG MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS: VIDEO: Millennials say America was ‘never that great.’

We need to not simply slow, but actively and dramatically reverse, the Gramscian Damage.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Manafort, Cohen, Mollie and Much, Much More. “We had a NEWS BONANZA yesterday. Buckle up, Brief-heads!”

DEFENDING NATO’S EASTERN RIM: Rapid reinforcement or forward deployment? Or both?

MAKING A FEDERAL CASE OUT OF EVERYTHING: The Federal Commission on School Safety was set up in the wake of the Parkland massacre and has been meeting over the last several months. Until it issues its report, it’s unlikely we’ll see any movement toward returning school discipline policy back to the local schools where it belongs. So I’m waiting—as are many teachers. And I’m a slightly optimistic that things will turn out okay in the end. But it’s slow. Read this if you have the time: The Department of Education’s Obama-Era Initiative on Racial Disparities in School Discipline: Wrong For Students and Teachers, Wrong on the Law. The Obama Administration’s effort to assert federal control over school discipline practices was remarkably wrongheaded. It hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention.

I STILL THINK THEY SOUNDED MORE EXCITING WHEN THE PACIFIC ONES WERE CALLED TYPHOONS: What Experts Are Saying About Rare Category 5 Hurricane Lane Threatening Hawaii. I notice Joe Bastardi says the water around Hawaii is unusually warm for this time of year, which isn’t good.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook has TRUST ratings for users – but it won’t tell you your score.

Earlier this year, Facebook admitted it was rolling out trust ratings for media outlets.

This involved ranking news websites based on the quality of the news they were reporting.

This rating would then be used to decide which posts should be promoted higher in users’ News Feeds.

User ratings are employed in a similar way – helping Facebook make a judgement about the quality of their post reports.

According to Lyons, a user’s rating “isn’t meant to be an absolute indicator of a person’s credibility”.

Instead, it’s intended as a measurement of working out how risky a user’s actions may be.

If Facebook were transparent about this stuff, users — the network’s actual content providers and creators — could work to improve trust.

But that kind of openness just isn’t in the company’s DNA, says Frederic Filloux on Monday Note:

Facebook’s DNA is based on the unchallenged power of an exceptional but morally flawed — or at least dangerously immature — leader who sees the world as a gigantic monetization playground. In Mark Zuckerberg’s world, the farther from home, the more leeway he feels to experiment with whatever comes to his prolific mind. Yielding on the Ford Pinto syndrome, he feels little incentive to correct the misuse of the tools he created. And he managed to have no one standing against him.

It’s a fascinating article, and I recommend reading the whole thing.

HMM: GOP has ‘record-shattering’ 30 million voter contacts, 20,000-member outreach team.

The Republican National Committee’s program to out-do former President Obama’s grassroots organizing has gone into warp speed and already made a record-breaking 30 million voter contacts in its goal of keeping the House and Senate in GOP hands.

RNC officials said that 30 million voter contacts is a month ahead of schedule and better off than it was in 2016 when it out-hustled the Democrats to help Donald Trump win the presidency over presumed winner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The unusually aggressive ground campaign was designed to build a Republican grassroots effort. The RNC turned to its Republican Leadership Initiative Fellowship and it has locked in 20,000 fellows, four times its voter outreach force of just two years ago.

This has been a GOP weak point in recent years, so this is a big deal if it comes off.

MAKE TEXAS GREAT AGAIN: Texas Exports More Oil Than It Imports For First Time Ever.

On second thought, don’t tell anyone in Texas there might have been a time when it wasn’t.

UH OH: Could Violating Federal Housing Laws Finally Bring Facebook Down? The feds hound Facebook for ads that allegedly violate the Fair Housing Act.

From Democrats incensed about Russian ad buys to Republicans convinced that the site censors Diamond and Silk, Facebook has been on the receiving end of a lot of hate lately. Yet the issue that could finally bring the hammer down on the social media giant might be its alleged violation of housing regulations.

On Friday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced that it was filing an official complaint against Facebook for enabling advertisers to run discriminatory housing ads in violation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act (FHA).

“When Facebook uses the vast amount of personal data it collects to help advertisers to discriminate, it’s the same as slamming the door in someone’s face,” Assistant HUD Secretary Anna María Farías said in a press release.

Why is Mark Zuckerberg such a racist?

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Why Hollywood’s Silence on Free Speech Matters. “Bill Maher is all alone. Again.”

Naturally:

How many stars held their nose and said the Alex Jones of the world deserve to have a voice, too? Chelsea Handler, Billy Eichner, George Takei and Debra Messing did just the opposite, cheering on Jones’ dismissal via their Twitter accounts.

That, Maher said, is simply wrong.

“If you’re a liberal, you’re supposed to be for free speech. That’s free speech for the speech you hate. That’s what free speech means. We’re losing the thread of the concepts that are important to this country. If you care about the real American s*** or you don’t. And if you do, it goes for every side. I don’t like Alex Jones, but Alex Jones gets to speak. Everybody gets to speak.”

He’s right, of course.

Jones isn’t part of the privileged class, and what fun is privilege if it doesn’t mean denying others the things you enjoy the most?

I THINK WE NEED TO KEEP THEM OUT OF SHADY LAND DEALS, A LA HARRY REID: Elizabeth Warren wants to bar Congress from owning individual stock.

Better still, she could get behind my — bipartisanly endorsed! — revolving door surtax.

HMM: Internal documents reveal the grueling way Tesla hit its 5,000 Model 3 target.

Of the 5,000 Model 3s that contributed to Tesla’s end of June manufacturing target, about 4,300 of them required rework, according to internal documents viewed by Business Insider.

Within the auto industry, cars that make it through a manufacturing process without requiring rework are part of a factory or line’s “first pass yield (FPY).”

That means the factory had a first pass yield for vehicles as low as 14% during the last week of June.

An industry expert told Business Insider that good auto plants have a first pass yield of about 80%.

But:

A Tesla spokesperson said the number of labor hours required per Model 3 has decreased by almost 30% since last quarter.

With so many investors short on Tesla, it’s impossible to know whose numbers to trust.