WELL, WHY SHOULD THEY, HONESTLY? Voters Don’t Like Democrats, Either.

UNFORCED ERROR: Beto O’Rourke hands GOP, NRA golden ticket. Unintentional honesty will do that.

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Western Couple Travel to Middle East to Prove It ‘Gets a Bad Rap’ — End Up in Iranian Prison.

Related: Millennial Couple Set Out to Prove ‘Humans Are Kind’ – The Terrorist Who Killed Them Disagrees.

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STEPHEN GREEN SUMS UP THE DEMOCRATS’ DEBATE: “This wasn’t a debate. It was an over-long display of huge egos touting small ideas to well-meaning (but sadly misinformed) kids and preening celebrity infotainment newsreaders. And yet, chances are a large number of American primary voters will make one of these jokers their nominee for the office of President of the United States.”

Plus: “Biggest Lie of the Night: ‘It was a great debate. I think we learned a lot tonight.’ -G. Stephanopoulos What a preening suck-up.”

JAMES BOVARD: Democratic Debate is Like Police Line-up of Future Molesters.

BETO O’ROURKE VOWS TO PURSUE GUN CONFISCATION: ‘HELL YES, WE’RE GOING TO TAKE YOUR AR-15.’

All the Democrats have to do is not be crazy, and they can’t even do that.™

CHANGE: The NC-9 special election and racial politics. “Robeson County is mostly rural, but Cumberland County is predominantly urban. Bishop’s performance in these two counties and several others suggests that, in the Trump economy, minority group voters, including blacks, may be more inclined than before to vote Republican now. . . . black voters may be moving towards the center, even as Democrats lurch to the left.”

HONG KONG EXECUTIVE CARRIE LAM: Police Are Outnumbered Not Just by Protesters, But By The People.

JUDGES: Justices Barbara Lagoa, Robert Luck Are Trump’s Choices for 11th Circuit. And that gives Fla. Gov. Ron DeSantis two new picks for the Florida Supreme Court, too.

OPEN THREAD: Celebrate.

HOW TO SUCCEED IN TENNIS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING: At Real Clear Books, J. Christian Adams reviews Roger Simon’s new novel, The GOAT.

THERE ARE LEADERS, AND THERE ARE FOLLOWERS: Europe’s ArianeWorks Aims for Reusable Rockets (with a Very SpaceX Look).

EXPRESS, COMMUTER NEWSPAPER PUBLISHED BY THE WASHINGTON POST, SHUTS DOWN AFTER 16 YEARS; INSULTS ITS READERS ON THE WAY OUT:

Colorful and lively, Express was designed to be a fast read for public-transit commuters each morning, especially people who didn’t subscribe to The Post. It featured eye-catching and sometimes cheeky cover illustrations that highlighted a single news story or trend, often one underplayed by The Post or ignored by TV newscasts.

But its circulation has declined in recent years, falling to around 130,000 copies a day this year. The drop reflected, in part, falling Metro ridership, which has been driven by a switch to home telework, riding-sharing services and other means of transportation, Caccavaro said.

In the end, however, Express may have been done in by a technological change within the Metro system itself: WiFi. The wiring of the transportation system has enabled riders to stay on their smartphones throughout their trips, dooming a printed paper like Express and others as many travelers’ companion.

In a farewell column that will be published in Express on Thursday, Caccavaro, the paper’s founding editor, noted this change. “This Monday morning, as I rode the train to work … three people on my crowded Blue Line train were reading Express (thank you!),” he wrote. “One man had his nose in an old-fashioned book. Almost everyone else was staring at a phone.”

And that was a sore-spot apparently. Very apparently — as this is the cover the editors of Express chose to go out on:

Well, yes, I do happen to enjoy my stinkin’ iPhone and iPad. I like portable devices that allow me the choice of reading every news source on the planet, instead of just one, and then, if I wish to do so, share what I’ve read with others, all done wirelessly, along with dozens of other things, both simple and complex. And the beleaguered commuters in DC obviously do, too. (At least until electricity is banned by President Ocasio-Cortez.)

Once again though, a newspaper chooses to insult (and guilt-trip) its readers. As Matt Welch of Reason noted in 2012, pace Churchill, very often history is really written by the losers: “Life looks a hell of a lot different from the perspective of a dinosaur slowly leaking power than it does to a fickle consumer happily gobbling up innovation wherever it shoots up.”

THIS PROBABLY WON’T BE MENTIONED IN TONIGHT’S DEBATE: Federal prosecutors recommend that Andrew McCabe, former FBI second-in-command, face criminal charge. “Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe after a Justice Department Inspector General’s report found he misstated his involvement in a leak to The Wall Street Journal days before the election about an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. He was ousted days before he could begin collecting retirement benefits.”

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leads battle for party favorite: poll.

THE COMMISSION WRITES ITS REPORTS FIRST AND GATHERS ITS FACTS LATER, IF AT ALL:  In 2015, the Commission on Civil Rights issued a ghastly report that purported to find egregious conditions at immigration detention facilities.  (Maggots in the food!  Torture!  Or … uh … rather something that seems to us a little bit like torture!)  Interestingly, the draft was largely written before that anyone from the Commission had visited any of these centers.

I hope you’ll agree that my dissent made it clear just how misinformed that report was.  

The Commission will release an “update” to that report in a few weeks.  This time its members didn’t bother to tour a facility at all.  I had to arrange a tour in my private capacity.

This post is a shout out to the ICE officers who gave me and a USD colleague of mine a tour yesterday morning of the Otay Mesa Detention Facility here in San Diego County.  Thank you!  

I won’t be able to write as much this time.  The Commission has seen to it that I won’t have enough time.  But I will get something out.

TROLL LEVEL: PRESIDENTIAL.

WHY SHOULD THIS PRIMARY BE DIFFERENT FROM THE LAST ONE? Tulsi Gabbard warns that DNC debate qualifications could make voters think ‘the fix is already in.’

STEPHEN GREEN IS DRUNKBLOGGING THE DEBATE: “Former/Current Clinton Tool George Stephanopoulos is heading up this goat rodeo, so expect lots of questions along the lines of: Tell us how fabulous you are compared to the Orange Bad Man.”

WELL, YES: John Bolton’s Departure Shows “Personnel Are Policy.”

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ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why the iPad has never shipped with a calculator app.

SEPTEMBER 11th WAS ALSO THIS MUCH HAPPIER ANNIVERSARY: The Atari 2600 is 42 years young today. “For many households, the Atari VCS was quite likely the first electronic peripheral they had ever connected to their televisions, as its release predated the normalization (if not the commercialization) of VCRs by a number of years. Not discounting the considerable success of Pong and other dedicated consoles which pre-dated the VCS, there’s a pretty good chance a given family’s purchase of an Atari represented the first time they actually interacted with their televisions rather than acting as passive audiences of whatever their three or four channels had on offer.”