YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Clown Car Update for August 19, 2019. “Hickenlooper is Out, Sanders slams the press, Gabbard comes out for legal pot and serves joint duty, and Biden just keeps chug-chug-chuging along.”

BREAKING: Is Russia Hiding Another Chernobyl?

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Desperate for Attention, ‘Beto’ Goes to Gun Show to Talk Gun Control.

Snarky headline aside, I’d actually like to see more stories like this one.

ADAPT, IMPROVISE, OVERCOME: Marines Use Armored Vehicle to Defend Navy Ship from Small Boats off Iranian Coast. “Members of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit were photographed sailing through the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf this week with a Light Armored Vehicle on the flight deck.”

FLASHBACK: California’s Background Check Law Had No Impact on Gun Deaths, Johns Hopkins Study Finds.

Johns Hopkins isn’t exactly a rightwing think tank.

JON GABRIEL: No one is immune from the Cancel Culture.

Cancel culture is spreading for one simple reason: it works. Instead of debating ideas or competing for entertainment dollars, you can just demand anyone who annoys you to be cast out of polite society.

Way back in the mists of time, say five years ago, if you didn’t like a TV show or movie, you wouldn’t watch it. Now you can ensure that no one watches it, just by slinging some outrage on social media.

Our woke mentality is America’s new Puritanism. Instead of a handy list of sins written thousands of years ago, modern sins are ever-changing. A joke that was deemed progressive a decade ago is retroactively condemned as hate speech.

“If you say the wrong thing,” Silverman said, “everyone is, like, throwing the first stone. It’s a perversion. It’s really, ‘Look how righteous I am and now I’m going to press refresh all day long to see how many likes I get in my righteousness.’ ”

When the mob has burned one witch, they tighten the buckles on their hats and pore through old YouTube videos for their next victim.

It isn’t healthy, culturally, and worse it’s just no damn fun.

CLAUDIA ROSETT REPORTING FROM HONG KONG: ‘It’s All for Our Kids’: Hong Kong’s Protesters Double Down on Demands for Freedom.

VIDEO: ‘It’s a Large Real Estate Deal’: Trump Confirms He’s ‘Looking at’ Buying Greenland.

If it happens they’ll call it “Trump’s Folly” or something similar, but then it will turn out to have been a brilliant move.

CHANGE? 2020 Presidential candidate Andrew Yang wants mass pardon for nonviolent marijuana convictions.

EVERGREEN QUESTION: What Will California Ban Next?

Starting Tuesday, the sale of plastic water bottles will be banned at San Francisco International Airport, one of the few places they actually make sense. California has many dumb laws and statutes and bans, but this one is especially brainless—spurred by futile self-righteousness.

After running late for your flight after a 30-minute security line only to have TSA confiscate your Fiji water bottle, you’ll now have to stop at a crowded water fountain to fill your own metal flask. Or buy an overpriced glass or aluminum bottle at the concession stand, paying another 10 cents for a bag. And your teeth will chatter if you drink through a paper straw. Of course you could risk dehydration instead: Men lose up to a half-gallon of water during a 10-hour flight. Oddly, you can still buy sugary drinks in plastic bottles at SFO; only healthy, calorie-free water is banned in plastic. You can’t make this stuff up.

In California, you never have to.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: RECESSION! (Or Probably Not). “Few things can turn the tide in an election like a tanking economy so the Democrats are now praying to whatever passes for a god over there and hoping that, absent a real recession, they might be able to scare voters into thinking one is on the way.”

It worked in ’92, when the media played along with Bill Clinton’s claim that the sharp (but short) ’90-’91 recession was the “worst economy since the Great Depression,” and that it was still going on months after it was over.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Red-light cameras undermine rule of law.

The Confrontation Clause grants criminal defendants the right to be confronted with the witnesses against them. Since it is a camera and not a person that witnessed the offense, such violations generally cannot be considered a criminal offense. The ticket is issued to the owner of the vehicle, not to the person driving it, leaving a lack of certainty as to the identity of the offender.

Therefore, the “ticket” in most places is nothing more than a civil fine, making enforcement and collection difficult. To date, governments have avoided this problem by requiring payment of the fine before motorists can renew their driver’s license or auto registration. Although there generally are appeals procedures, they typically do not give drivers a day in court. In other words, what happened to being innocent until proven guilty?

Indeed.

Plus:

There is more evidence that greater public safety actually depends on the timing of yellow and red lights. Longer yellow and all-way red times have been shown to significantly reduce accidents. Sometimes local governments actually decrease yellow-light timing to catch more red-light runners, a result of the perverse financial incentives that tempt government officials and camera companies. Studies also show motorists are more likely to hit the brakes hard at camera-enforced intersections, increasing rear-end collisions.

They’re just bad news.

OH: James Comey and Wife Donated Nearly $20K to Democrats This Year. “Klobuchar, Harris, Abrams among recipients of Comey cash.”

NOW THAT’S THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: The U.S. Navy Wants To Build the World’s Largest Robot Warship.

HMM: In blue Seattle, Trump supporters are starting to come out of hiding.

The latest federal-election reports show that Trump is doing surprisingly well getting backers in this bluest of blue places. With nearly 15 months to go before the 2020 election, he already has drawn more donations from Seattle addresses than he did during the entire 2016 campaign.

In Washington state, where his approval rating is 28 points underwater, Trump has still racked up far more donations, big and small, than any of the Democratic candidates — in fact more than the top six Democrats combined.

I’m not talking about total dollars raised — though on that front Trump is a juggernaut, too. But the total number of donations reflects how many people are inspired enough by a candidate to send any amount of money, sometimes repeatedly. As I wrote in 2016, about how democratic socialist candidate Bernie Sanders was swamping the field in the donations category, “it’s like a measure of people power.”

Well, now Trump, of all candidates, has nearly three times as many donations from Washington state as Bernie Sanders does. The Vermont senator has 8,080 itemized donations here, while Trump has the most ever recorded at this point in an election, by any candidate in either party, 21,657.

We just saw an almost identical story last week, but in California.

PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING: Woodstock at 50: What Went Wrong With the ‘Summer of Love’?

THEY’RE NOT THE ONLY ONES: Epstein’s Attorneys: We’re Not Fully Buying The Suicide Ruling.

“Gross negligence” is the absolute kindest possible take on what happened.

FINE. I BET CANADA WOULD GIVE US A SWEET DEAL ON BAFFIN ISLAND. Greenland to Trump: We’re Flattered But ‘Greenland Is Not For Sale.’

I HAD BEEN ASSURED THAT TRUMP’S ABANDONMENT OF THE IRAN DEAL WOULD LEAVE US ISOLATED AND FRIENDLESS IN THE MIDDLE EAST: U.S. Arranges Secret Talks Between Israel, U.A.E. Over Iran. “Washington prods longtime adversaries on intelligence sharing, military cooperation against a common threat.”

The meetings were convened by Brian Hook, the State Department’s top official for Iran, and are the latest sign of a steady thaw between Israel and Gulf Arab nations, largely brought about by their shared antipathy toward Tehran and its attempts to spread its regional influence.

A first meeting took place this spring and a second was held more recently, a U.S. official said. The exact dates and locations of the unpublicized meetings couldn’t be learned. Their existence was known to only a handful of people within the U.S. government, officials said.

Israel has diplomatic ties among Arab states only with Egypt and Jordan. Historic disagreements remain with those two as well as other Arab nations, particularly over the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

But covert, and occasionally overt, contacts between Israel and Gulf Arab nations have increased rapidly in recent years as concerns grew about Iran’s nuclear program and its role in conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Smart Diplomacy™.

THE LEFT’S CLIMATE OF HATE: Man planned to stab Florida students because of elementary school’s ‘obnoxious pride in America.’

BECAUSE OF COURSE IT WAS: Rashida Tlaib And Ilhan Omar’s Botched Israel Trip Was Sponsored By Terror-Linked Organization.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Florida Man Steals Friday, Starts Weekend with High-Speed Chase.

FLASHBACK: Presidential Hopeful Marianne Williamson Promoted Anti-Vaxer Conspiracies on Her Radio Show.

GIVE ME YOUR VOTE, HATERS: Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Core Part’ of Trump Coalition Racists.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela, China, Russia – Oh My.

Venezuela has the largest known reserves of oil in the world, and in 1950 had the fourth largest Gross Domestic Product in the world and second highest GDP per capita. Venezuela’s economy was six times the size of China, and as late as 1982, they were still the largest GDP in South America. However, by 2017 Venezuela’s per capita GDP had shrunk back to levels last seen at the turn of the century, and they continue to shrink in spite of its impressive oil reserves.

“Bad luck.”

But: “With their eye on both Venezuela’s oil riches and the ability to project short-and medium range missile threats to the United States from the Caribbean country, China and Russia have been sending billions of dollars to prop up the Maduro madness.”

What nasty regimes, all three of them.