BLUE WAVE? In Deeply Blue New Jersey, an Unexpected Battle for Senate.

Facing a deep-pocketed Republican challenger, a blitz of negative ads and lingering concerns over a lackluster performance in an uncontested primary, Mr. Menendez’s race has started to concern some Democrats. After weathering a criminal indictment and a harsh ethics rebuke from his Senate peers, Mr. Menendez may find himself in a tough enough re-election fight that will force the party to devote money and energy needed in other races critical to the party’s quest to retake Congress.

In theory, Mr. Menendez, 64, should win easily: Registered Democratic voters outnumber Republicans by nearly 900,000; President Trump remains deeply unpopular; contested congressional races are energizing Democrats; and he has the backing of a Democratic machine that still has enough clout to deliver victory.

But despite the advantages, Mr. Menendez has shown signs of weakened support.

I wonder why that is…

In any case, don’t get cocky.

FREE SPEECH, WHAT DOES IT MEAN? New university policy requires students to get permission for ‘free speech activities.’

WOW: China’s hypersonic aircraft, Starry Sky-2, could be used to carry nuclear missiles at six times the speed of sound.

The Starry Sky-2, which is an experimental design known as waverider – for its ability to ride on the shock waves it generates – completed its first test flight on Friday at an undisclosed location in northwest China, the China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics said in a statement issued on Monday.

The aircraft was carried into space by a multistage rocket before separating and relying on its own power. During independent flight it conducted extreme turning manoeuvres, maintained velocities above Mach 5.5 (five-and-a-half times the speed of sound) for more than 400 seconds, and achieved a top speed of Mach 6, or 7,344km/h (4,563mph), the statement said.

On completion of the flight, which was deemed a “huge success”, the aircraft landed in a designated target zone, the academy said.

Be wary of Communist press releases, but maybe we ought to be treating China’s aerospace advances as a new Sputnik moment.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, HOSTILE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT EDITION: UCLA students forced to pay for ‘Toxic Masculinity Committee.’

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The next step in criminal justice reform is fewer laws: Donald Trump has supported the First Step Act to reduce minimum sentences, but more can be done. For one thing, we need fewer crimes.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Jeff Sessions and Much, Much More.

RAPTOR IN BLACK AND WHITE.

WALTER DURANTY, CALL YOUR OFFICE: The New York Times stands by its error.

Max Fisher of the New York Times has taken to Twitter to defend his claim that David Ben-Gurion “emerged from retirement in July 1967 to warn Israelis they had sown the seeds of self-destruction.”

Fisher sourced this story to a recollection by the late Arthur Hertzberg, a noted Conservative rabbi. Hertzberg, writing in the New York Review of Books in 1987, claimed to have heard the grim prophecy during an encounter between Ben-Gurion and American Conservative rabbis at Beit Berl (near Kfar Saba) in July 1967.

As it happened, a few months ago I’d grown suspicious of this story, and so I tracked down the transcript of Ben-Gurion’s remarks in his archives. I found no evidence of his having said anything of the sort. I published my findings back in April, so imagine my surprise when Fisher ran with a lede repeating a fable I’d just debunked. My blog doesn’t have quite the circulation of the New York Times, but it’s where I pointed to the problem, and that brought it to the attention of Fisher and his newspaper.

Fisher now tweets to me that “we’ve looked into this very carefully and, after speaking with the Ben-Gurion Archives and reviewing the historical record, stand by the story.” I’m pleased that Fisher took my challenge seriously, and didn’t just blow it off. But I’m afraid he’s fallen well short of meeting it.

It’s weird how these errors almost always go in one direction, but it isn’t at all strange for the New York Times to stand by its writers providing cover for mass murderers.

ARE YOU RAHM? ARE YOU REALLY? Emanuel, police officials react to one of Chicago’s most violent weekends of 2018: ‘We are better than what we saw.’

Related: It’s Time To Hold Democrats Responsible For Chicago’s Violence.

Plus: Chicago Politicians Are In Bed With The Gangs.

CHANGE: Claim: ‘Highest wage growth in decade,’ 75% firms hiring.

A key senator from a midterm election battleground state said that the booming economy is helping to increase wages to a new high and spark hiring.

Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman said that deregulation pushed by President Trump and the new tax cut package is proving to be a big factor in the growth.

“It’s heartening to see that there are serious changes being made in our economy that are positive for someone who’s making $40,000 to $50,000 a year and can now see a higher wage,” said Portman. “Even the quarterly numbers in terms of non-supervisory wages represent the highest wage growth we’ve seen in at least a decade. So this is exciting. It’s actually happening — the things that we hoped would happen in the context of tax reform,” he added.

More, please.

CHANGE: Trump Administration Requires Hospitals To Post Standard Prices Online.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will require hospitals to update their online price list annually starting Jan. 1, reported The Hill. Before the new rule, CMS required that hospitals share prices with people who requested them.

CMS said the rule was made to “encourage price transparency,” according to The Hill. Administration officials hope the rule will help patients save money and even “encourage them to shop around,” reported the Washington Examiner.

This could be a game-changer, or at least an important step towards returning some price incentive back to the medical marketplace.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Leftist Tribalism Killed Liberalism. “Trump didn’t break the old order, the Left did.”

Daniel Greenfield:

The left resents these defections by the white working class, but it was the left that truly defected. The old lefty romance with the working class has left behind only a handful of artifacts, like mementos from an old relationship, a fondness for expensive prole wear, folk music, stories about old coal miners (not the current despised polluters), and occasional forays into trying to live on a few dollars a day. But even two generations ago, the left was trading its working-class costumes for ethnic togs and jewelry.

These days the left romanticizes race the way that it once did class. But class can be shifted, race can’t. It was one thing to demonize capitalists and another to demonize entire races. Class war could be rationalized as an effort to make society fairer by sharing the wealth, but race can’t be shared. No Communist revolution can redistribute skin color or any other fixed attribute of human biology. Tolerance and equality were liberal answers to racism, but they could never be lefty answers.

Instead of redistributing wealth, the left began redistributing racial power. It inveighed against the boogeyman of racial tribalism even as it was busy creating it.

That’s probably inevitable when your political bread & butter consists of identity politics and group grievances.

And do read the whole thing.

PRINTED FIREARMS ARE LEGAL TO OWN FOR PERSONAL USE: The ATF Explains the Law Surrounding 3D-Printed Guns.

Knight said it is legal for Americans to build their own firearms without a license so long as they are not prohibited by law from possessing firearms, the firearms are legal to own, for personal use, and not for sale or transfer to others. Whether the gun parts are printed, created by other ways of manufacturing, or legally purchased from a licensed dealer has no impact on whether it is legal for an American to build a gun for personal use, though some states like California have placed additional requirements on the process.

In the interest of protecting Americans’ civil rights, I think laws that place additional limits on gun ownership, beyond the extent of federal law, should be preempted by Congress. Why let a few bigoted, backward states crush people’s freedom?

REIHAN SALAM ON THE UTILITY OF WHITE-BASHING:

One reason I’ve been disinclined to take this sort of talk seriously in the past is that it has so often smacked of intra-white status jockeying. It is almost as though we’re living through a strange sort of ethnogenesis, in which those who see themselves as (for lack of a better term) upper-whites are doing everything they can to disaffiliate themselves from those they’ve deemed lower-whites. Note that to be “upper” or “lower” isn’t just about class status, though of course that’s always hovering in the background. Rather, it is about the supposed nobility that flows from racial self-flagellation.

But many of the white-bashers of my acquaintance have been highly-educated and affluent Asian American professionals. So why do they do it? What work is this usually (though not always) gentle and irony-steeped white-bashing actually performing?

Some of this is just obvious edgelord trolling: the most transgressive thing you can get away with saying without actually getting called out for it. In this sense, it’s a way of establishing solidarity: All of us in this space get it, and we have nothing but disdain for those who do not. And some may well be intended as a defiant retort to bigotry.

But that doesn’t exhaust the universe of possibilities. In some instances, white-bashing can actually serve as a means of ascent, especially for Asian Americans. Embracing the culture of upper-white self-flagellation can spur avowedly enlightened whites to eagerly cheer on their Asian American comrades who show (abstract, faceless, numberless) lower-white people what for.

Pretty much all race-talk in American society today is about positioning and reassuring high-status whites at the expense of lower-status whites. But the lower-status whites have noticed, and they aren’t amused. Like so much of what America’s professional class does today, this offers short-term benefits for them, at the cost of doing serious structural damage to the society. It has also, of course, sharply undermined the moral superiority that the upper class uses to justify its position at the top of the heap, with consequences that it will likely come to regret in time. But avoiding this behavior would require principles and self-discipline of a sort that it has not cultivated.

Related: The Elites’ War On The Deplorables.

SPANISH REPUBLICANS POUNCE: Spain’s right whips up fear as migration surge hits Andalucian shores.

Thirty years after Spain was first shocked to find the body of a migrant washed up on its shores, and scarcely six weeks after the new government took in 630 people on the rescue ship Aquarius who had been turned away by Italy and Malta, some rightwing politicians have begun to talk of identity papers, more border controls and “millions of Africans” wanting to come to Europe.

In a country that has traditionally been pro-immigration and devoid of a significant far-right party since its return to democracy, their words have raised eyebrows and concerns. “The first thing we need to be clear about is that there’s a bit of unwarranted alarm over the arrivals we’ve seen over the past month,” said Villahoz, president of Algeciras Acoge, the local branch of an Andalucian NGO that works to protect, educate and integrate migrants and refugees.

We’ve seen how well a virtual open-borders policy has worked for Germany, where 40% of five-and-under kids are from migrant families.

(Classical allusion in the headline.)

WAIT, ARE YOU EVEN ALLOWED TO SAY THIS NOW? Anti-immigration, like pro-immigration, is a legitimate political position.

WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS? Facebook to Banks: Give Us Your Data, We’ll Give You Our Users.

The social-media giant has asked large U.S. banks to share detailed financial information about their customers, including card transactions and checking-account balances, as part of an effort to offer new services to users.

Facebook increasingly wants to be a platform where people buy and sell goods and services, besides connecting with friends. The company over the past year asked JPMorgan Chase JPM 0.03% & Co., Wells Fargo WFC 0.10% & Co., Citigroup Inc. C 0.01% and U.S. Bancorp USB 0.04% to discuss potential offerings it could host for bank customers on Facebook Messenger, said people familiar with the matter.

Facebook has talked about a feature that would show its users their checking-account balances, the people said. It has also pitched fraud alerts, some of the people said.

Data privacy is a sticking point in the banks’ conversations with Facebook, according to people familiar with the matter.

I would certainly hope so.

SHE CERTAINLY SMART ENOUGH TO WIN ELECTIONS. GOP Conference Vice Chairman Counters Trump: Maxine Waters Is ‘Very Smart.’

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: California offers training for ‘stranded workers.’ “California is moving ahead with an online college for ‘stranded workers,’ reports Mikhail Zinshteyn on EdSource. It will offer short-term vocational certificates, but not degrees. The online college will advance students when they demonstrate competency: Those who’ve learned skills on the job should be able to move quickly to a credential.”

It was opposed by university faculty, who rightly see it as potentially deadly competition.

Related: ‘Work colleges’ go urban. “When he took over the struggling college, Sorrell instituted a dress-for-sucess code: Students must wear ‘business casual’ clothing to classes.”

DEVAL PATRICK, drinking alone.

To be fair, though, he appears to have been wearing pants.

AUGUST 7 IS THE 276^th ANNIVERSARY OF NATHANAEL GREENE’S BIRTH: During the Revolution, General Nathanael Greene was second only to George Washington in importance. Honors were heaped upon him just after it ended. To give you just a taste, the following places were named for him: Greensboro, N.C., Greenville, N.C., Greenville, S.C., Greeneville, Tenn., Greenburg, Penn., Greene Co., Mo., Greene Co., Va., Greene Co., Penn., Greene Co., Tenn., Greene Co., Ohio, Greene Co., N.C., Greene Co., N.Y., Greene Co., Miss., Greene Co., Ill., Greene Co., Iowa, Greene Co., Ind., Greene Co., Georgia, Greene Co., Ark., and Greene Co., Ala.

But Greene died just five years after Yorktown at the age of 43. In part for that reason, his fame has been eclipsed by other Founding Fathers who played a role in the making of our Constitution or in the early years of the Republic. I suspect few school children, even those living in the various Greene Counties, have ever heard of Nathanael Greene. I count my blessings when they know something about George Washington beyond his owning slaves.

I REMEMBER WHEN CORPORATE MONEY WAS BAD: Corporate America hikes contributions to key Democrats.

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