JOHN SOLOMON: Democrats were first to enlist Ukraine in US elections.

Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.

Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election-meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.

That’s different because shut up.

CHANGE: Trump Administration To End ‘Catch And Release’ Immigration Policy, Says DHS Chief.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: AOC Fails to Pay Back Taxes, Succeeds in Drawing a Primary Challenger.

NO. Dems Demand Ben Carson Resign After Media Twists His Words on Trans Issues.

NOT TOUGH ENOUGH: For Democratic Hopefuls, Qualifying for November Debate Just Got Tougher.

The committee said Monday that candidates would need to reach at least 3% in four polls and attract at least 165,000 individual donors. The party is also creating an alternative way to hit the polling requirement, allowing candidates to qualify if they reach 5% in at least two polls in early-voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire.

The requirements represent a slightly tougher standard than this month’s debate in Houston and the two-night event planned in October in Ohio. For those, candidates need 130,000 individual donors and at least 2% support in four polls.

Ten candidates qualified for the Houston debate, but one or two additional candidates are expected to make it into the next forum, likely pushing it into two nights, Oct. 15-16, in Westerville, Ohio.

Leave it to the DNC to tighten the rules yet still let in more contenders.

I had hoped we were done with these two-night debates, which turn simple drunkblogging into a marathon of ickiness. But at least they allow me to write off an even bigger portion of my liquor bill.

POLICE STATE: China footage reveals hundreds of blindfolded and shackled prisoners.

The video, posted anonymously on YouTube last week, shows what appear to be Uighur or other minorities wearing blue and yellow uniforms, with cleanly shaven heads, their eyes covered, sitting in rows on the ground and later being led away by police. Prisoners in China are often transferred with handcuffs and masks covering their faces.

Nathan Ruser, a researcher with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s international cyber policy centre, used clues in the footage, including landmarks and the position of the sun, to verify the video, which he believes was shot at a train station west of Korla in south-east Xinjiang in August last year.

It’s curious that the Muslim world outside of China isn’t putting up any fuss.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Trolling Tuesday. “Much to my surprise, the little Swedish climate brat became even more tedious as Monday wore on. We’ve not been subjected to that kind of ubiquity on social media since the last time Hillary Clinton was caught fondling a mango at Whole Foods by one of her ‘neighbors’.”

GET OFF MY LAWN LOT: Sacramento McDonald’s takes unusual measure to reduce loitering. “Recent Yelp reviews suggest that that McDonald’s management at this location are not the only ones who have noticed a serious loitering problem.”

WHEN AMERICA’S FIRST RED DIAPER BABY PRESIDENT IS NO LONGER RED ENOUGH: 2020 Dems Love Obama, Hate Obama’s Policies.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released last week put numbers on what has long been a visceral cultural nostalgia for the 44th presidency. Ninety percent of Democrats hold a favorable view of Barack Obama today, compared with just 4% unfavorable (Bill Clinton, by contrast, is at 64/15). Sixty-nine percent hold a “very positive” view of Obama, up 8 percentage points over 2015. Most relevant, 78% say they are “satisfied” that the previous occupant of the White House “did as much as was possible at the time in addressing issues facing the country.”

So why, then, on issue after issue, are the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders staking out positions far to the left of anything Obama ever imagined — even while attempting to bask in his holy glow?

I’m not sure which, but it seems like there are two main possibilities. Either today’s Dems are convinced they can’t beat Trump and are letting their freak flags fly, or they think they can’t lose and see a once-in-a-lifetime chance to implement the far-left agenda Obama would have if he could have.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Why the Repo Market Is Such a Big Deal — and Why Its $400 Billion Bailout Is So Unnerving.

The repo market seized up last week, with median repurchase rates skyrocketing from their usual band of 2.00-2.25% to 2.46% on Monday, and 5.25% on Tuesday. Keep in mind, that’s the median rate. Some repo rates were as high as 9%, more than quadruple the Federal Reserve’s own target rate, which usually puts a cap on how high Treasury repo rates could climb.

An unlucky confluence of events, including an exceptionally large demand for cash from U.S. companies that needed to pay their corporate tax bills, sucked a lot of the available cash out of the financial markets. What happened last week was any counter-party in need of cash, and only holding collateral like Treasuries, agreed to pay the much higher going repo rates. That’s supply and demand, plain and simple, and it mirrors what happened in certain repo markets in 2007 before the housing crash and the Great Recession that followed.

So, what happened to the usual abundance of cash and liquid securities that powers the trillion-dollar repo market?

In a word? Government.

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: Media Corruption On Perfect Display In One Washington Post Paragraph. “What are Philip Rucker, Bob Costa, and Rachel Bade smoking?”

SHE’LL BE CAST AISDE AS SOON AS SHE STOPS GENERATING THE CASH: Climate-Industrial Complex: Financiers Aim to Cash in on Greta Thunberg.

WINNING: Latest Mac Pro to be made in Texas after securing tariff exemptions.

The new Mac Pro is out of my price range, but it’s a beast.

OFF THE RESERVATION: Free-Thinking LGBT Activists Say the ‘Gay Mafia’ Is ‘Harming Gay People.’

I ASSUME THERE’S A PAYOFF: Jerry Brown partners with China to fight climate change.

CHARMING: Patricia Arquette Uses Her Brother’s Death to Push Transgenderism at Emmy’s.

VIDEO: Greta Thunberg Rips World Leaders at the U.N. “When someone castigates their own audience, and the audience applauds, then the castigation is not meant. It’s nothing but a theatrical affectation for TV cameras — a hoax perpetrated by the speaker and the audience, together. I doubt someone Thunberg’s age knows the ins and outs of speechmaking to understand that, but that whoever handles her, does. Certainly the people there at the UN got exactly the TV clip they wanted, even at the ‘price’ of pretending to be publicly shamed.”

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for September 23, 2019. “De Blasio quits, Warren rises, Sanders falls, Harris freefalls, Booker’s going broke, Klobuchar shows signs of life, Messam registers, and everyone is all-in on Iowa.”

LITERALLY. AND I’M USING “LITERALLY” CORRECTLY: ‘Shut Down DC’ Climate Protesters Start a Dumpster Fire.

#CLIMATESTRIKE GETS PERSONAL: Can You Save the Planet with Your Choice of Razor?

CHANGE: Air Force certified Falcon Heavy for national security launch but more work needed to meet required orbits.

UGH: Military unit apologizes for tweet suggesting stealth bomber would be sent against Area 51 crowd.

According to Reuters, the DVIDS tweet referred to another post on Friday that targeted people who planned to break into the Nevada Air Force facility after a joke campaign, titled “Storm Area 51,” went viral earlier this year.

In the since-deleted tweet, DVIDS reportedly shared a photo of military members standing in front of a B-2 stealth bomber.

“The last thing #Millennials will see if they attempt the #area51raid today,” the tweet reportedly read.

The only thing they did wrong was apologize and delete an obvious joke.

SUMMER GOES OUT WITH A BANG: 26 shot, 5, fatally, in Chicago weekend violence.

GOVERNMENT IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOSE TO DO TOGETHER: Florida Woman Facing Possible HOA Fines For Taking In Bahamian Friend Displaced By Hurricane Dorian. “Lavalvo faces a fine of $100 a day if she can’t find a home for them by this week.”

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF: When Greta goes to Guangzhou.

While China now produces more CO2 than the United States and the European Union put together, the Asia-Pacific region (which does include a few industrialised countries, like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, but is mainly in the “developing” category, with China, India and Indonesia the most prominent examples) emits nearly twice as much CO2 as the United States and the European Union combined. And rising.

This is what you always have to keep in mind whenever you hear about the great progress being made in China (and to a lesser extent in India) in embracing the renewables. It’s a case of “yes, but…” It might be true, as far as it goes, yet still India’s coal-powered electricity generation capacity is expected to increase by over 22 per cent to 2022; China itself, for whatever else it’s doing with wind and hydro, is also building hundreds of new “old” power stations as it’s creating the largest middle class in history. And while it’s true that in emissions per capita the developing world still leads the rest of the world where all the billions live, the climate only cares about the absolute numbers.

St Joan of Arc of the Children’s Crusade against Carbon, Greta Thunberg, should be going to Beijing or Bangalore and staging her protests there instead of, or at least in addition to, Sweden or New York. She should be hounding President Xi and Prime Minister Modi about their shameful emissions. She should be leading throngs of Asian kids out of schools for her Friday student strikes. She should be castigating the industries and the consumers of the developing world for destroying the planet and killing humanity in the process. She should be doing all this if she were serious about the global nature of the problem. But I won’t be holding my breath.

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