BIG, IF TRUE: Confession: I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the New York Times.

ONLY IF DEMOCRATS LOSE. IF THEY WIN, WE’LL HEAR NO MORE ABOUT IT: Will Foreign Agents Rig the U.S. Midterm Elections Through Social Media?

WHEN YOU’VE LOST BOB WOODWARD: Woodward on Anonymous NYT Op-Ed: ‘I Wouldn’t Have Used It.’

CONTAGION: Two Airplane Health Scares This Week Were Linked to People Returning From the Hajj in Mecca.

IT IS SERENA WILLIAMS WHO OWES AN APOLOGY TO UMPIRE CARLOS RAMOS: “I should know, as the memories and scars of my own welcome-to-the-job match are fresh even more than 30 years later. It happened at the 1987 US Open. I was the chair umpire for the fourth-round stadium court match between John McEnroe and Slobodan Zivojinovic where I issued a warning, point penalty and a game penalty against McEnroe.”

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: New Research Says Wine Before Bed Makes You Lose Weight.

RONAN FARROW STRIKES AGAIN: As Leslie Moonves Negotiates His Exit from CBS, Women Raise New Assault and Harassment Claims.

Why are Democrat-dominated industries such cesspits of sexual abuse and exploitation?

WELL, THAT SUCKS: Vaccines Against H.I.V., Malaria and Tuberculosis Unlikely, Study Says.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON IS ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS. The Itch for Kitsch: Playboy is bringing back its NYC club. Why?

Read the whole thing.

HMM: Infectious Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease Draws Fresh Interest.

It’s an idea that just a few years ago would’ve seemed to many an easy way to drain your research budget on bunk science. Money has poured into Alzheimer’s research for years, but until very recently not much of it went toward investigating infection in causing dementia.

But this “germ theory” of Alzheimer’s, as Norins calls it, has been fermenting in the literature for decades. Even early 20th century Czech physician Oskar Fischer — who, along with his German contemporary Dr. Alois Alzheimer, was integral in first describing the condition –noted a possible connection between the newly identified dementia and tuberculosis.

If the germ theory gets traction, even in some Alzheimer’s patients, it could trigger a seismic shift in how doctors and understand and treat the disease.

For instance, would we see a day when dementia is prevented with a vaccine, or treated with antibiotics and antiviral medications? Norins thinks it’s worth looking into.

Norins received his medical degree from Duke in the early 1960s, and after a stint at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention he fell into a lucrative career in medical publishing. He eventually settled in an admittedly aged community in Naples, Florida, where he took an interest in dementia and began reading up on the condition.

After scouring the medical literature he noticed a pattern.

“It appeared that many of the reported characteristics of Alzheimer’s disease were compatible with an infectious process,” Norins tells NPR. “I thought for sure this must have already been investigated, because millions and millions of dollars have been spent on Alzheimer’s research.”

But aside from scattered interest through the decades, this wasn’t the case.

Very interesting.

NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: ‘I Can’t Get No Socialism’: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s photo inspires HILARIOUS titles and songs for her new album.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Woman stabbed naked boyfriend in bed when he said no to sex. I blame our pervasive culture of female sexual entitlement.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Harvard Prof: Merit-based admissions ‘reproduce inequality.’

I agree. The Ivy League should have to admit students based on lottery.

Because inequality is wrong, and the Ivy League is a major reproducer of inequality.

IT’S ALWAYS NICE TO MAKE TWITCHY.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: ABA: Florida Coastal Remains Out of Compliance With Law School Accreditation Standards.

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MR. X IN THE NEW YORK SUN: It appears I have in Washington a kindred spirit, who has discovered the tremendous power of anonymity. “Trust me, though, the anonymous writer in the White House doesn’t know what real concern for your reputation is. Try being a conservative on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.”

THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: Flashback: Obama prosecuted staff leakers, gave lie-detector tests, ‘paranoid.’

Should President Trump need a model to use to track down leakers inside his administration like the “anonymous” insider who challenged his authority in a New York Times op-ed, he need go no further back than the Obama administration that prosecuted leakers and shutout the media.

According to reports at the time from even New York Times journalists, no administration was tougher on leakers and punishing to the media than Obama’s, a saga reinforced by reporters who have called Trump’s team more forthcoming.

Criticism of Obama’s attacks on the media and leakers did not just come in tweets and TV appearances by journalists but in an official report from the Committee to Protect Journalists, authored by former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr.

“This is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered,” said David E. Sanger, veteran chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times, in the report.

USA Today said of the report, it “portrays an administration gripped by strict policies about information flow and paranoid about leaks across all executive branch departments.”

It detailed prosecutions and even the use of lie-detectors on staffers. Some have encouraged Trump to use lie-detector tests on his staff, something he has so far ignored.

While Trump has ripped leakers and the anonymous Times writer of being cowards and traitors, it was Obama who took the war to a higher level by targeting staff and reporters while also cutting out the media to promote its story via social media.

“The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in the Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent,” wrote Downie in the report that was criticized by Obama officials.

When a Democrat does it, it’s a sad mistake in judgment. When a Republican does, it’s HITLER HITLER HITLER!!!!

ANDREW MCCARTHY: Mr. Rosenstein, Where Is The Crime?

For precisely what federal crimes is the president of the United States under investigation by a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department?

It is intolerable that, after more than two years of digging — the 16-month Mueller probe having been preceded by the blatantly suspect labors of the Obama Justice Department and FBI — we still do not have an answer to that simple question.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein owes us an answer.

To my mind, he has owed us an answer from the beginning, meaning when he appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller on May 17, 2017. The regulations under which he made the appointment require (a) a factual basis for believing that a federal crime worthy of investigation or prosecution has been committed; (b) a conflict of interest so significant that the Justice Department is unable to investigate this suspected crime in the normal course; and (c) an articulation of the factual basis for the criminal investigation — i.e., the investigation of specified federal crimes — which shapes the boundaries of the special counsel’s jurisdiction.

This last provision is designed to prevent a special counsel’s investigation from becoming a fishing expedition — or what President Trump calls a “witch hunt,” what DAG Rosenstein more diplomatically disclaims as an “unguided missile,” and what Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, invoking Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret-police chief, pans as the warped dictum, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” In our country, the crime triggers the assignment of a prosecutor, not the other way around.

Well, that’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. Peter Morgan and I noted 20 years ago in The Appearance of Impropriety — which at the time was seen as a Clinton defense — that the special counsel process turned that on its head.

CLIMATE HORROR EXPOSED AS SWISS MILLIONAIRE LOSES EVENING PAT-A-BALL GAME: “According to the New York Times, Australia’s John Millman did not defeat Roger Federer at the US Open. Instead, Federer was beaten by climate change.”

Time to update the list.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Alvin Greene, celebrity candidate, lives in obscurity, approves of Donald Trump.

In 2010, the unemployed no-hoper famously walked in from his home in the cornfields of Clarendon County, plunked down $10,440 of his Army G.I. pay to run for the U.S. Senate with absolutely no political experience.

Now 41, Greene became an overnight celebrity as a result — The Washington Post and outlets nationally and internationally carried stories — after recording a surprisingly easy 30,000-vote primary win over Democratic establishment favorite Vic Rawl, a retired Charleston County judge.

It made Greene the nominee to take on powerful GOP incumbent Jim DeMint.

It didn’t matter he had little grasp of the issues, had no staff, no cellphone or computer and would be criminally charged with showing obscene material to a coed at a University of South Carolina computer lab.

To be fair, some of that was probably the Dem establishment seeking revenge. But now:

For a Democrat, he’s also willing to speak heresy: He supports President Donald Trump.

“I think he’s doing better than President (Barack) Obama and the Democrats were doing eight years ago,” he said.

Maybe he should run again.

CONRAD BLACK: Trump And His Enemies: He ran for office against both parties and the status quo and carries the fight into the midterms.

Either the Democrats will win the House of Representatives and force an utterly hopeless impeachment trial on the Senate with only the ravings of Maxine Waters and the false pieties of Dick Durbin et al. as a case, or they will win the House but recognize that they have no case and leave it there after an excruciatingly futile debate; or the Republicans will hold the House and Donald John Trump will grind his heel in the faces of his rabid enemies. The conventional wisdom remains that the Democrats will win the House. I don’t think so. No president has ever run a midterm campaign remotely as determined as this president will, his objective performance in office is good — the economy, the border, and trade; his only weaknesses are stylistic, but he is a good deal more substantial and even likable than his gutter-sniping enemies.

My uninformed suspicion is that the president has not accepted Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s letter of resignation of last May, and has delayed ordering the release of all the documents the congressional committees have demanded from the Justice Department, for a reason. The right moment for the documents is very soon. The president has made a hero out of Sessions to the Democrats, although all 48 Democratic senators opposed his confirmation and Elizabeth Warren promised vengeance on the Republicans for installing him. If Sessions repossesses his office as collusion evaporates, it will be difficult for the Democrats to change lanes again.

Well, stay tuned.