SCHADENFREUDE, IT’S WHAT’S FOR DINNER:  You can be a wife beater without a gun! Moms Demand Lobbyist arrested.

YEAH? AND WHAT IS HIS PLAN TO DEAL WITH AMERICANS WHO ACTUALLY BELIEVE IN THE SECOND AMENDMENT?   Biden Pledges To Defeat National Rifle Association.

MY FACE, LOOK HOW SHOCKED IT IS!  Christopher Steele won’t cooperate with the investigation by US Attorney Durham.

YOU DON’T SAY! THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE:  Study: ‘White Privilege’ Lessons Make Liberals Less Empathetic to Poor Whites.

SHE HATES CAULIFLOWER, BECAUSE IT’S A MORE FUNCTIONAL BRAIN THAN HERS:  AOC: No, Seriously, We Only Have 12 Years Left.

IN A NUTSHELL:  Mueller Just Proved His Entire Operation Was A Political Hit Job That Trampled The Rule Of Law.

HEY, VICTORY GIRLS, YOUR EDITORIAL STANDARDS ARE SLIPPING. YOU SPELLED “MALICE” IN A REALLY WEIRD WAY:  The Cunning Cowardice of Robert Mueller.

I LIKED ALFRED E. NEUMAN BETTER WHEN HE WAS JUST A MAGAZINE MASCOT:  Buttigieg & Moulton Condemn Trump For Not Serving.

BECAUSE SCIENCE IS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE.  YO, BODY CONFORMATION IS NOT THE SAME FOR MEN AND WOMEN, AND A YEAR OF HORMONE THERAPY DOES NOT REMAKE BONES:  NCAA: The Best Woman Athlete is a Man.

IF HE TOOK OUT HIS FLAMING RED GLASSES WITH THE HAMMER AND SICKLE EMBOSSING, HE’D SEE WE’RE ALL STILL THE SAME:  WaPo Drama: Journalist Doesn’t Recognize America Anymore.

AT AMAZON, save on Vitamins and Dietary Supplements.

Plus, deals on Kitchen Utensils and Gadgets.

ON THE REASON PODCAST, Nick Gillespie interviews me about my new book, The Social Media Upheaval.

YES, IT IS: It’s Time for a Thoroughgoing Revamping of the Intelligence Community.

Among the urgent tasks we must quickly undertake, few are so urgent as a thoroughgoing revamping of the intelligence community. At the moment, it isn’t very impressive in either of the two main activities with which it’s entrusted: spying on our enemies and supporting our friends. You can see this easily enough. The Israelis, not the CIA et al., made off with the Iranians’ secret nuclear plans. So much for effective espionage. And there are two very closely linked enemies, Iran and Venezuela, that should be prime targets for subversion, but we don’t seem to be making good progress.

On the other hand, the intelligence community seems to do well, or at least try harder, at subverting our own political order, as we’ve learned over the recent past.

Or maybe not. Although the attempted subversion of Trump and associates produced the downfall of Lt. General Michael Flynn, the centerpiece of the intel operation—the Mueller show investigation—came up empty-handed, and the top levels of the FBI and CIA now face inquiries from Attorney General Barr, Justice Department Inspector General Horowitz, and the U.S. Attorney in Connecticut. Some of our top spooks have been fired.

Rather like Iran and Venezuela, isn’t it?

It’s an opportunity. For decades, Congress and various special committees and duos (such as Robb-Silverman) have invariably responded to intelligence failures by adding more bodies to the agencies and expanding their budgets. The predictable result? Today we’ve got too many spooks collecting too much money, with predictably bad results. Among other bad consequences, intelligence is typically churned out by committees, guaranteeing that we don’t identify our best analysts. We need to drastically reduce the numbers of both budgets and bureaucrats, in order to figure out who’s good. Then we need to promote them, within a much smaller system.

It’s hard to imagine this happening under normal circumstances, but today’s circumstances aren’t normal.

Time to clean house, and take out the trash.

AN ALL-FEMALE KC-135 CREW IN 2019? I’ll see that and raise you an all-female KC-135 crew in 2003.

OPEN THREAD: Keep it clean. You’re really talented — you don’t have to work blue. And yes, that’s a Simpsons reference.

BYRON YORK: Retrospective: Mueller and the fatal flaw of the Trump-Russia affair.

So as Clinton and her aides pushed the collusion narrative, with the help of an enthusiastic press, campaign officials were also being briefed on the newest, freshest allegations from Steele.

The problem, of course, was that the allegations were not true. Steele also gave his reports to the FBI, which tried to verify them “line by line,” according to former FBI general counsel James Baker. It did not succeed. Nearly three years later, the Mueller report failed to corroborate any of the dossier’s serious allegations. It was wrong at best, a fraud at worst.

The public did not know what was happening behind the scenes. All they heard — if they watched cable TV — was collusion, collusion, collusion. After the election, the allegations consumed reporting on the Trump transition and then the Trump presidency — especially after the dossier was published in its entirety in January 2017, following the decision by the nation’s top intelligence chiefs to brief President-elect Trump on parts of it.

After that, each new revelation that appeared in the press — Flynn, Manafort, Trump Tower, Michael Cohen, all of it — appeared in the context of collusion. Ordinary events became shady scheming against the backdrop of Trump-Russia collusion.

As that was happening, Mueller was trying and failing to establish that collusion ever occurred. From interviews with various players in the investigation, it now seems clear that by the end of 2017 Mueller knew that he could not establish conspiracy or coordination. That part of his investigation effectively ended when 2017 did.

Yet Mueller continued his probe for more than a year, mostly focusing on obstruction allegations. Collusion as a topic of investigation might have been dead and gone by that time, but the fact that the Mueller investigation was still going on kept the collusion narrative alive. And that fed the public perception that events Mueller secretly knew were not part of a collusion scheme were still in some way suspicious.

By letting that happen, Mueller played a partisan role. Related: Mueller Just Proved His Entire Operation Was A Political Hit Job That Trampled The Rule Of Law.

Also:

Plus:

And a friend on Facebook comments: “It is somewhat difficult to feel at ease in a republic wherein federal prosecutors feel comfortable pronouncing sentences of not not guilty. There has been so much talk since a Tuesday evening in late 2016 about the importance of civic norms, and much of it has been correct. Well, this is one too — and a big one.”

Yes, the “norms and civility” crowd has done more to undermine our institutions than Trump. By a huge margin.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY:

● Shot: The Bay Area of 1970 was less racially segregated than it was in 2010.

—The San Francisco Chronicle, yesterday.

● Chaser: Housing prices are resegregating the Bay Area, UC Berkeley study finds.

—The San Francisco Chronicle, September 19, 2018.

There’s no doubt that housing prices play a factor. Thomas Sowell has written that they’re part of the Bay Area’s built-in “Housing Price of Liberalism.” As Sowell writes, “Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.”

But another contributing factor is the poisonous spread of identity politics on the left beginning in the mid-1970s, a topic explored by the left-leaning professor Mark Lilla in his 2017 book, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. Identity politics have caused a radical transformation from the color-blind Great Society of the LBJ/MLK years, to a disastrous self-segregation made up of hyphens and boxes.

I WISH THEY’D KILLED ALL THEIR ASSAILANTS: ‘It would have given her a chance to go home’: Self-defense school honors Channon Christian, Christopher Newsom.

YOU KNOW IT’S BAD WHEN THE WAPO FACT-CHECKER CORRECTS PLANNED PARENTHOOD ON ABORTION: Planned Parenthood’s false stat: ‘Thousands’ of women died every year before Roe. “There is no citation in the statement for the estimate of ‘as many as 5,000 annual deaths,’ even though many of the other sentences are carefully documented. None of the citations around this sentence supports the figure, and there is no explanation about how it was calculated. . . . ‘In 1957, there were only 260 deaths in the whole country attributed to abortions of any kind. In New York City in 1921, there were 144 abortion deaths, in 1951 there were only 15.'”

HE DID SOME STUFF WHEN I WAS A BABY, AND HE’S USED THAT AS AN EXCUSE TO BE NASTY EVER SINCE: Rep. John Lewis Perpetuates Myths Around Racism, Anti-Semitism During Trump’s Presidency.

I LOVE THIS: US energy department rebrands fossil fuels as ‘molecules of freedom.’ And shipping US LNG to Europe frees them from Putin’s influence, which is probably why the commies at The Guardian are mocking it.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: Mueller’s Press Conference Makes the Impeachment Tightrope Tougher to Walk for Democrats.

MAN SETS HIMSELF ON FIRE NEAR WHITE HOUSE:

Other witnesses told Fox 5 DC that the man was wearing a sweatshirt — despite the 90-degree heat — and carrying a black bag. The shirt had writing on it but the witnesses couldn’t make out what it said.

The Ellipse is a 52-acre public park that lies south of the White House.

The man, who wasn’t immediately identified, was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries after suffering burns to 85 percent of his body, sources told TMZ.

A suspicious package that was on fire was also found in the park, near where the man was extinguished.

Democrats hardest hit: During a life-threatening event on the White House Lawn the House Democrats account complains about a protest being interrupted.

“The thing to remember is that in the face of such a dramatic tragedy playing out, the Dems managed to stay focused on what is truly important here.”

Heh, indeed.™

THIS IS CNN: CNN Anchor Mocks Rape Survivor For 2nd Amendment Views.

JAMES GAGLIANO: Robert Mueller says the report speaks for itself. He still needs to testify. “That is a fairly stark departure from the long-standing legal tradition of not ‘dirtying up’ a person under investigation who is ultimately not charged.”