ANDREW MCCARTHY: Do Republicans See the Strategy to Discredit the Barr Investigation?

ROGER SIMON: Bernie Sanders’ Heart: America in a Time of Rage.

DON’T LET UP ON THE PRESSURE: New Lawsuit Alleges State of California Violated National Voter Registration Act: California failing to verify citizenship before placing voters on the voter rolls.

ERIC POSNER: The Impeachment Trap. “America’s Democrats have made a serious mistake by launching impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. They are replaying the Republican impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, a futile exercise that damaged Republicans, enhanced Clinton’s power, and caused institutional damage as well.”

VERY SAD: Two Dead After B-17 Crash At Bradley Airport.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Fairfax County Virginia Police Officer Suspended for Turning Individual over to ICE.

YES, THIS IS ALL A SPOILING ATTACK INTENDED TO BLUNT THE IMPACT WHEN THE TRUTH COMES OUT: Dems, media aim to squash Barr’s probe of Russia collusion hoax.

UPDATE: But there’s a problem.

Story: Voters Don’t Trust Political News, Say Most Reporters Want to Stop Trump. If you think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines you won’t go far wrong — and nowadays, that’s how most people think of them.

AT AMAZON, an 82″ 8K QLED TV.

#STANDBYYOURMAN: Hillary Clinton Says Not Getting a Divorce Was the ‘Gutsiest’ Thing She’s Ever Done.

Sticking with a humiliatingly public serial philanderer (or worse) in order, at least in part, to have continued access to connections, power, and wealth otherwise unobtainable isn’t my idea of gutsy, but what do I know?

HMM. HILLARY STARTS MAKING NOISES ABOUT GETTING INTO THE RACE, AND SUDDENLY . . . NO, THAT’S CRAZY TALK. Bernie Sanders cancels campaign events after being hospitalized with blocked artery. Get well soon, Bernie.

WOW: Trump and RNC Raise $125 Million in 3rd Quarter.

DON’T GET COCKY: Happy retirement, Speaker Pelosi.

GROW UP, KIDS: Now ‘survivors’ at Georgia Tech demand Angel Cabrera be fired for supporting Kavanaugh. Seriously, you’re embarrassing yourselves and Georgia Tech, which was once a hardheaded engineering school.

IT’S GOING TO TURN OUT THAT TRUMP SET THIS WHOLE THING UP, ISN’T IT? Holman Jenkins: All Roads Lead To Mueller: The Russia collusion morass threatens to spoil the Democrats’ impeachment drama.

Watergate comparisons are in the air but a big difference is overlooked. Only a few days elapsed between news breaking of anonymous whistleblower allegations against Donald Trump (the actual report hadn’t even been seen yet) and Nancy Pelosi’s opening of an impeachment inquiry.

No Ben Bradlee. No weeks and months as the story developed to ponder and reflect on what it might mean. Luckily, media ranks today are overflowing with people who don’t need to labor their minds over the matters that come before them. They instantly know the answer because Twitter tells them.

And yet, once again, their rush to judgment is getting ready to blow up in their faces.

Numerous press accounts claimed falsely, even with the evidence in hand, that Mr. Trump had asked for a “favor” from Ukraine’s president in the form of “dirt” on Joe Biden. The plain words of the available transcript show the “favor” he sought was cooperation with the Justice Department’s perfectly proper investigation of the 2016 election.

Now come reports in the Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post that, at the behest of Attorney General William Barr, the administration has reached out in similar fashion to other governments, including Italy’s, Britain’s and Australia’s.

House Democrats, of course, are free to impeach over any charge that can win 218 votes, including a claim Mr. Trump sought foreign interference in the 2020 election. But they didn’t bargain on the Russia-collusion fiasco forcing its way into the drama they are trying to create. Even a daily email blast from the Trump-unfriendly Columbia Journalism Review acknowledges that the “Trump-Ukraine story, it’s safe to say, is now about much more than Trump and Ukraine.” . . .

But more important is the new outpouring of reporting that sets these questions in the broader context of a legitimate inquiry into the actions of U.S. intelligence agencies in the last presidential election. The implications are not small. Democrats may have to reconsider their selection of Adam Schiff as impeachment frontman because of his role in promoting the Russia-collusion canard. Questions will have to be asked about the motives of the whistleblower—a CIA official who dropped his highly polished bomb on the eve of a Justice Department inspector general’s report that will begin opening the lid on FBI and CIA actions during the 2016 campaign.

At least by the public, questions should also be asked about the mainstream media’s conspicuous reluctance to look into Democratic and Obama administration behavior in the Russia-collusion matter. Why, it’s almost like the press doesn’t want the subject investigated, for fear of what might be learned about the press.

Stay tuned. Flashback, March 2017: “Hypothesis: The spying-on-Trump thing is worse than we even imagine, and once it was clear Hillary had lost and it would inevitably come out, the Trump/Russia collusion talking point was created as a distraction.”

GREG JONES: The Media’s No Good, Really Bad, Terrible Two Weeks.

Apparently still bitter that the first press-led character assassination of Brett Kavanaugh failed to stop his confirmation to the highest court in the land, the Gray Lady doubled down on September 14 by teasing a book by Times writers Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly.

The article lobbed yet another accusation of sexual misconduct against the Supreme Court Justice (well, sort of: Kavanaugh’s friends allegedly shoved his penis in the face of an unsuspecting female). Not only did it appear that Kavanaugh was a victim as well, but the Times piece also conveniently failed to mention that the alleged female victim was never interviewed and according to her friends doesn’t remember the incident.

Rather than apologize and pledge to do better, however, Pogrebin and Kelly instead blamed their editors and … wait for it … Fox News. Because, of course, nothing says strong, independent women like blaming a television network for your own faulty newspaper reporting.

But before the ink could dry on a libel suit, a new circus rolled into town and bumped the Kavanaugh debacle from the headlines.

I’m speaking, of course, about the “whistleblower” complaint, in which an anonymous official claims he has reason to believe that President Trump was attempting to enlist the help of the Ukrainian government in the upcoming American presidential election. And in which the American press committed more unforced errors than the Bad News Bears.

Read the whole thing.

I said it was the media’s worst single week ever, but that was nearly a week ago.

WELL, THAT WOULD BE A CHANGE: Harvard dean: ‘We need to be vigilant in ensuring no one is prevented from speaking.’ They must be getting heat from donors on this.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Twitter Outage and Outrage Edition.

Impeachment fever is getting hotter in the Dems’ brains every day and they are not just going to overreach, they are going to WAY overreach. There’s a prime example of the lunacy in Tuesday’s New York Times. An Op-Ed titled “Trump Has Disqualified Himself From Running in 2020” is the most hysteria-riddled nonsense they’ve posted yet.

The beauty of that is that none of the coastal media bubble people understand how off-putting their ravings are to at least half of the country. It’s a gift that keeps on giving and won’t be going away any time soon.

With the 24/7 friendly air cover provided by the media and our cultural and educational institutions, all the Democrats have to do is not act crazy. And they can’t even manage that, doubly so under Trump.

OLD AND BUSTED: White Privilege.

The New Hotness? Vegan Privilege: Vegan Claims Sausage Roll ‘Traumatized’ Her ‘For Life.’

Ayn Rand didn’t intend for The Return of the Primitive to be a how-to guide.

TECH COMPANIES SURE DO LOVE FLYING COVER FOR DEM POLITICIANS: Facebook reverses takedown of “Elizabeth Warren Wiki” page exposing her Cherokee and other controversies.

But maybe Zuckerberg is souring on Liz: Mark Zuckerberg, Elizabeth Warren spat shows cracks in liberal Silicon Valley.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Could Pricey Urban Meccas become Crime-Ridden Ghost Towns?

IT’S SUPPOSEDLY SATIRE, BUT IT HAS THE RING OF TRUTH: REVEALED: China hacked Pentagon to ensure only incompetent officers get promoted.

YA THINK? Byron York: In Trump impeachment, ‘no one is above the law’ could backfire on Democrats. To be fair, they mean no one Republican.

HMM: Experimental German radar ‘tracked two U.S. F-35 stealth jet for 100 MILES’ after lying in wait on a pony farm to catch them flying home from airshow.

It used a new ‘passive radar’ system that analyzes how civilian communications – such as radio and TV broadcasts and mobile phone stations – bounce off airborne objects.

This, the firm says, renders the jet’s stealth technology, that is designed to absorb ground based radar to stop it reflecting back, redundant.

The new radar has no emitters so pilots do not realize they are entering a monitored area – but it relies on there being civilian communication waves.

Interesting, but unless it can generate enough of a return for an antiaircraft missile to home in on — detection and missile tracking are two very different things — then I’m not sure how useful it is.

Previously:

Retired Marine Maj. Dan Flatley told Business Insider why pilots of America’s most expensive weapons system weren’t afraid of Russian or Chinese counterstealth.

“Adversaries have to build a kill chain,” said Flatley, a former F-35 pilot. Just because a radar can find an object — and Russian VHF radars can spot F-35s — doesn’t mean it can fix, track, target, and consummate that kill chain with a missile hit, he said.

“We’re not trying to prevent every aspect of that chain, just snap one of those links,” Flatley said.

Still, a development to keep an eye on.