FRAUD, BULLYING, INTIMIDATION: Shocking Evidence of the FBI’s Assault on 2nd Amendment Rights. “According to a wealth of internal documents and communications obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by the gun rights organization Gun Owners of America (GOA), the FBI secretly coerced Americans into signing documents that waive their rights to own, buy, or even use firearms — a blatant assault on their Second Amendment rights.”

JOHN O’SULLIVAN: Boris Gives an Energized Curtain Speech. “It didn’t sound like the speech of a man who was bowing out of public life.”

To be honest, his energy policies have been poor and Covid was a series of unforced errors. But he was right on Brexit, and that was the big one. Now is a great time not to be in office as Britain looks at a cold winter.

WHEN SLOGANS EVAPORATE: New poll shows majority of Americans oppose student loan forgiveness once they become aware of the obvious tradeoffs involved, like higher inflation and rising tuition prices. “A new poll shows that President Joe Biden’s decision to forgive $10,000 in student loan debt for many individuals who borrowed money from the federal government to pay for college (and $20,000 for those with need-based Pell Grants) is broadly popular—as long as people don’t think about the scheme’s knock-on effects. Once the potential consequences—including higher inflation and rising college tuition costs, are taken into account—support for student debt forgiveness craters, even among self-identified Democrats.”

AT THE VERY LEAST: To Restore Americans’ Faith In Elections, Fix Sloppy Record-Keeping: If we can enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1960’s data retention requirements, we will be able to help restore confidence in our elections. “Unfortunately, election officials across the country are not keeping the most basic data to monitor election outcomes. Even when they say they do, the numbers do not come close to matching up. It was a simple goal: match the number of voters with the number of ballots cast. After the last general election there were concerns that ballots were counted multiple times (so that there could be more ballots cast than voters who voted) and that ballots were destroyed (so that there could be more voters who voted than ballots cast). But, through our examination, we learned that it cannot be determined if these discrepancies exist, because most states and counties simply do not keep timestamped records of who voted as required by law.”

THE POWER SOURCE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME: Why Nuclear Power Is (Quietly) Making a Big Comeback All Around the World.

LINCOLN BROWN: If It Hadn’t Been for Mush-Mouth Joe… “Yes, I know the economy is in the toilet, the Resident of the United States has declared half the country to be political enemies, race relations are in the toilet, and the world is tottering on the brink of war. But at the same time, there is an absurdity to it all that says we should, if nothing else, laugh.”

NOW OUT: The Handler: A Nick Reagan Thriller. #CommmissionEarned #1 new release in Afghanistan Travel Guides.

DEAL OF THE DAY: ProsourceFit High Density Speckled Black Foam Roller. #CommissionEarned

POSTMODERN WARFARE HAS SO MANY INTERESTING NEW PARAMETERS: Ukrainian hackers locate Russian bases by posing as attractive women on social media. “The pictures sent by the soldiers were used to identify their location, the remote military base in occupied Melitopol. These details were then passed on to Ukraine’s military. It was only a matter of days before the group saw the base blown up by Ukrainian artillery, Knysh told FT.”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: In Biden’s America, 1 in 6 U.S. Households Can’t Afford Their Energy Bills.

LIVE WEBCAST TODAY AT NOON EASTERN TIME: I will be talking about my book Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America at the Cato Institute, with comments from Joan Coaston of the New York Times and Robert Cottrol of George Washington University. You can register here.

WELL, OKAY THEN: Matt Gaetz opponent blowing up local Dems and making friends. “Democratic Congressional District 1 candidate in Florida, self-proclaimed ‘COVID whistleblower,’ alleged felon, fired geographer, and never-ending drama queen extraordinaire Rebekah Jones has been on a roll these past few weeks, and have they ever been a doozy.”

Hey, no candidate is perfect.

YOU’LL OWN NOTHING, HAVE YOUR POWER RATIONED, AND LIKE IT: Yellen Says US Back on Track to Ending Fossil-Fuels Dependence.

The US is on track to hit ambitious emissions-reduction goals following recent climate legislation that encourages investment in green technology, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will say in a speech in Detroit on Thursday.

The law, signed by President Joe Biden on Aug. 16, “represents the largest investment in fighting climate change in our country’s history,” Yellen will say, according to an excerpt provided to Bloomberg News.

What Yellen means is, we’re giving up reliance on inexpensive and dependable energy for dependence on expensive and unreliable energy.

HOW’S THAT GREEN ENERGY POLICY GOING? Europe Is Sacrificing Its Ancient Forests for Energy.

What did environmentalists burn before wood? Gas and oil!

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Potential rail strike threatens to kneecap US economy ahead of midterms. I mean, there’s no way that will be allowed to happen, right? Not before the midterms.

BASICALLY, IF YOU’RE PAYING FULL FREIGHT YOU’RE A SUCKER: Top 50 Law Schools: Percentage Of Students Receiving At Least 50% Tuition Scholarships.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Nailed It—Biden’s Philly Fascist Folly Blowback Has Begun. “If I were more mature I would resist an easy attempt to gloat, but you’ve all met me. There’s not a real big premium placed on maturity at Casa Kruiser.”

SALENA ZITO: The realities of covering John Fetterman.

When Fetterman returned to the public forum in Erie, the stroke went from “a bump in the road” to him saying, “I almost died,” leaving open the delicate question of what is the extent of his illness, with no one to date offering that answer.

The few speeches he has given have been short — he visibly struggled in giving them — no direct questions from the press have been taken outside of two closed-captioned interviews, and he is surrounded by a circle of staff who do not allow people or the press to interact with him, including during the Labor Day parade where he marched encircled by dozens of staff and volunteers.

Last week, he refused to debate his Republican rival Oz in the first debate in Pittsburgh that was scheduled to happen Sept. 6 on KDKA; it remains again very unclear if he will do any debates at all.

On Tuesday, I asked Fetterman press secretary Joe Calvello whether the candidate would be releasing an update on his medical condition. I received no answer.

In this case, no answer is an answer.

ADVICE NRO SHOULD HAVE FOLLOWED IN 2016: Stop anathematizing each other, Republicans.

THE NEW YORKER HAS A PIECE ON Killing Lionfish.

Bowman found that local restaurants were happy to accept a lionfish catch. “They’re low in mercury and have some of the highest omega-acid content of any fish,” she told me. It was not particularly important to her that her activity could be described as environmental activism. “I’m just a bartender who goes diving,” she said. Nor did she know that she was breaking the law—restaurants can serve only fish acquired from authorized providers. (That way, if there is an illness, the source can be traced.) She recalled, “The wonderful people at F.W.C.”—the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission—“reached out and said, ‘Hey, what you’re doing is awesome. It’s also illegal.’ ” Instead of fining her, though, they encouraged her to sell her fish through proper channels, and with supporting paperwork.

In May, 2016, Bowman became the first person to sell lionfish to Whole Foods. For a while, her photograph accompanied a display of lionfish dumplings at the supermarket chain. Bowman’s father died before this happened, but she thinks he would have been thrilled to find that she had also ended up a commercial fishing captain. “That would have been the moment I finally made up for not being a boy,” she told me. The Whole Foods purchase became an important crossover moment for eating lionfish. Al Massa, who is the chef at Brotula’s, a seafood restaurant in Destin, told me, “A lionfish’s sweet, flaky light-white meat can take a wide variety of sauces, from classic beurre blanc to a roasted-red-pepper broth or a yellow-tomato gazpacho.” (In 2017, Gordon Ramsay filmed himself incorporating lionfish into a Caribbean seafood curry.)

Thanks to lionfishing, Bowman started making real money.

See also my piece from over a decade ago: The Perfect Way to Get Rid of Invasive Species—Eat Them.

POLITICAL PROSECUTIONS CONTINUE: J6 rioter gets prison time for “gesticulating.” “Richard Michetti of Pennsylvania didn’t even participate in any of the activities that would normally qualify as ‘rioting,’ and was instead guilty of trespassing. But in the process of doing that, he “yelled” at some of the Capitol Hill Police. Oh, and he “pinched the sleeve” of one officer briefly. For this, he was given a sentence of nine months in federal prison followed by two years of supervised release.”

Compare this to the treatment of BLM and Antifa rioters and it’s impossible not to conclude that a thoroughly partisan Justice Department is taking sides politically.

WHAT DID THE PRESIDENT KNOW AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT? New Evidence of Biden’s Role in the FBI Raid of Trump’s Home.

DEAL OF THE DAY: 8″ Professional Bypass Pruning Shears. #CommissionEarned

GREAT MOMENTS IN OPTICS: Bundled-up Dem begs everyone else to cut back on AC during brutal heatwave. “California’s power grid operator declared a stage 3 energy emergency alert Tuesday evening, warning that rotating power outages were ‘very possible’ as a brutal heat wave walloping the state pushed electricity demand to its limits. ‘Energy Emergency Alert 3 with rotating #power outages very possible. Please reduce your energy use,’ The California Independent System Operator (ISO) tweeted…California Gov. Gavin Newsom, wearing what appeared to be a fleece jacket, and hat, issued a statement Tuesday commending Californians’ efforts so far, but qualified that everyone needs to ‘double down to save energy after 4 p.m.’”

The French Laundry sure has a relaxed dress code these days:

T-MINUS OCTOBER AND HOLDING: Artemis launch plan: Here are NASA’s next steps. “Mike Sarafin, NASA’s Artemis mission manager, said it would take ‘several weeks of work’ to resolve the current technical issues. If this involves rolling the SLS back to the assembly building, any launch could then be pushed back until the middle of October.”

I was talking to Bill Whittle about this yesterday, and at this point, he doesn’t expect SLS to fly even once.