CYBERTHREAT UPDATE: Doubts Swirl Around Bloomberg‘s China Chip Hack Report.

A week later, I remain deeply troubled by this story—not because of its substance, but because of its lack of substantiation. It seems a little odd that no one has reported identifying a single one of these spy chips in the wild since Bloomberg’s report appeared, no? Wouldn’t it have been easy for any companies using servers containing components from Supermicro, the company whose products were allegedly backdoored, to send an engineer into a data center, pry open a server, pluck out an offending implant, and reveal China’s alleged subterfuge to the world? Instead, we hear cricket chirps.

While this absence of evidence is not enough to debunk the report, it does raise doubts. Besides, wouldn’t it be easier for spies simply to meddle with Supermicro’s notoriously buggy firmware? This approach would achieve the same results and be far less complicated to pull off logistically.

After this long and still no physical evidence that even one of these chips exist, it’s looking more and more like Bloomberg blew it.

MICHAEL WALSH: Will the End of Merkel Mean the End of Merkelism? “Merkelism — pretending to be “conservative” while moving steadily to the left — has now been exposed for the fraud it always was. The German voters have spoken — will the politicians in Berlin heed the warning?”

OH: ‘Aromantic’ Is a Legitimate Identity for People Who ‘Don’t Experience Romantic Attraction.’

WHEW: “USAF suggesting the early reports of badly-damaged F-22s at Tyndall may have been overstated. Also, nice to see they resurrected jet 4006. That was the best performer of early Raptor production.”

This comes from former VodkaPundit co-blogger Will Collier, who used to work on the Raptor program.

SULTANS GOTTA SULTANATE: Turkey suspends almost 260 local officials amid crackdown.

And: Turkey to seize opposition party’s bank stake.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: A Fractional Native American and Much, Much More. “‘Journalist’ Jamal Khashoggi was seen entering the Saudi embassy in Turkey and has not been seen since. All sorts of fantastic stories surrounding his disappearance are showcased in the media: he was chopped up into little pieces by Saudi agents, “sources” say he was murdered in the embassy, there is video and audio of his murder etc. But we have been given no evidence of any of theses claims. None.”

BUT OF COURSE: Venezuela’s Meltdown Creates a Nation of Desperate Capitalists.

Hyperinflation and scarcity have the Bolivarian revolution’s socialist heart pulsing with entrepreneurship. Desperate citizens are eking out a living with ventures such as digging home water wells, bartering bananas for haircuts and transporting commuters in animal-cargo trucks. The economy’s erosion has created markets and market players where none existed.

“I had to improvise in this crisis,” said Ramirez, 31, who always had a knack for fixing things, tinkering with television remotes and microwaves. “Many people today have to pick food over buying things like lightbulbs. I do things well, and I help them afford a good product that will last.”

When the Soviet Union collapsed, I joked at the time that Friedrich Engels was half-right: The socialist state did indeed wither away — so that people could go back to practicing a little capitalism.

FACE, MEET PALM: San Francisco to vote on taxing rich businesses for homeless.

Some streets are so filthy that officials launched a special “poop patrol,” and a young tech worker created “Snapcrap” — an app to report the filth. Morning commuters walk briskly past homeless people huddled against subway walls. In the city’s squalid downtown sector, the frail and sick shuffle along in wheelchairs or stumble around, sometimes half-clothed.

The situation has become so dire that a coalition of activists collected enough signatures to put a measure on the city’s Nov. 6 ballot. Proposition C would tax hundreds of San Francisco’s wealthiest companies to help thousands of homeless and mentally ill residents, an effort that failed earlier this year in Seattle. San Francisco’s measure is expected to raise $300 million a year, nearly doubling what the city already spends.

Subsidies don’t get you less of anything except money.

#METOO: Woman accusing Murphy staffer of rape says she ‘received no justice.’

The woman who accused a senior staffer in [Democrat New Jersey] Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration of sexually assaulting her while he worked for Murphy’s campaign last year is a state official who says she is now telling her story because she has “received no justice.”

Katie Brennan, who later volunteered for the campaign and is now the chief of staff at the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency, detailed her allegations against Albert J. Alvarez publicly for the first time in a story published by the Wall Street Journal on Sunday afternoon.

After the report was published Sunday afternoon, Brennan said in a statement: “On April 8th, 2017, Al Alvarez raped me. On April 9th, 2017 I learned that the system is broken.”

Whether it’s broken depends on what it was designed to actually do.

HMM: Could Democrats be Suppressing Voter Turnout in Georgia?

In yet another crazy conspiracy theory to undermine our electoral process, Democrats across the country are accusing Brian Kemp of “stealing” Georgia’s gubernatorial election against Stacey Abrams. The accusation is based on 53,000 voter registration applications that have been flagged as “pending” by the Secretary of State’s office. Democrats are all up in arms because these 53,000 people won’t be allowed to vote. The only problem? A pending voter registration doesn’t prevent you from voting.

This issue goes back to a state law that requires the address in your voter registration file match the address with the DMV. If there is a discrepancy, you will need to present photo ID to verify your information to obtain an absentee ballot or vote at your polling place. If you provide the ID (which is required to vote in Ga anyways), you can still vote in the November election. The “pending” term essentially amounts to a clerical designation. But Democrats seem hellbent on telling Georgians who are on the list they cannot vote, which could cause some people to stay home.

Plus: “For some reason, Stacey Abrams seems more intent on undermining the credibility of our elections than she is on trying to win.”

Oh, I think we know the reason.

BEN SMITH: Donald Trump Will Dominate The Democratic Primary. Elizabeth Warren Just Showed Him How.

Warren’s decision to launch her campaign on Donald Trump’s terms is not going to discourage him.

And it’s easy to see how Trump will keep weighing in. The most obvious path is simply tweeting — he can live-tweet speeches and debates, comment in the early morning hours on a candidate’s looks or conduct, the usual. The other, which he’s begun to try out, is to try to revive the flagging media interest in court gossip by talking about the Democrats to his sieve-like staff and watching it leak into the press as a catalog of his “views” on the candidates. There even seems to be a race to figure out the nicknames he’ll attach to each, something to which commentators — in this moment of a bipartisan suspicion that the president has magical political abilities — attach totemic power.

Candidates, meanwhile, will not exactly have their feelings hurt by a mean tweet. Anyone who has the misfortune of having her email full of quarterly fundraising requests from Democrats knows there’s no better subject line than “The President Is Attacking Me” to harvest credit card numbers. And in a crowded field, Trump will have the power to elevate his targets.

What’s more, Trump and the reporters covering him will be bound by an eternal truth of presidential campaign coverage: Re-election campaigns are grindingly boring.

That last line is so far removed from reality that I think it must be Smith’s tell that he believes Trump will win in 2020.

OOPS: Beto O’Rourke Fundraising ‘Cannibalized’ Money From Other Dems, Boosting GOP Hopes. “O’Rourke is on a vanity mission that is just basically flushing money down the toilet.”

I had been assured by members of the “Party of Science” that O’Rourke was the man to beat Ted Cruz and well-qualified for high office because he has Kennedyesque teeth.

I STOPPED BELIEVIN’: The 10 Most Overrated Hit Singles of All Time.

#FREEGAYPATRIOT: “So long as Twitter remains the Left’s favorite outlet for self-aggrandizement and (most importantly) self-beclownment, then we’ve got to stay engaged with it. Even if sometimes all we can do is call them out on their ‘inclusivity’ B.S.”

DAVID SOLWAY: Aboriginal Claims of Sovereignty in Canada Are Complete Fiction. “A separate chapter [in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)] on Indigenous Rights failed to make the cut, a serious blow to the aboriginal resistance movement which has become a rallying cry not only for Native activists but for the Canadian political, media and academic elites. These latter are committed to abrogating national jurisdictions and dismantling the historical structure of the country in a torrent of land-claim and legal negotiations favoring the so-called First Nations.”

GOOD LORD: 10 Percent of Critical F-22 Fleet Reportedly Damaged or Destroyed by Hurricane Michael. “Up to $8 billion in damage to top fighter jets.”

RASMUSSEN: Voters Reject Clinton’s Call for Incivility.

Maybe she’s used to voter rejection by now.

HOW JACK BECAME BLACK: A father forced by the public school system to categorize his multiracial children by “primary race” explores the silliness of racial identity.

Miss Liberty has a full review at the link, but even just the trailer looks good.

LEE SMITH: 10 Key Questions About The Khashoggi Affair To Answer Before Buying The Press Narrative. “The discipline shown in the messaging campaign against Saudi Arabia suggests Turkish President Recep Erdogan is managing the Khashoggi file directly.”

Interesting stuff — you’ll want to read the whole thing.

FIRST MAN, THIRD BOX OFFICE: One Giant Flop for Ryan Gosling? “Planting our flag with national pride, while also stating that we ‘came in peace’ and ‘for all mankind,’ no less — that’s a very American thing, isn’t it? Exceptional, you might even say.”

Wrong link before — fixed now!

GUY BENSON: Sad Trombone: Curtains for Media Heartthrob ‘Beto’ O’Rourke in Texas? “Might the Kavanaugh firestorm have helped focus the minds of some Texas voters, now that they’ve been vividly reminded of what’s at stake in the United States Senate? Quite possibly. I recently mentioned that a source close to the Cruz camp told me that their internals were tracking close to a ten point lead. We then noted an in-progress New York Times survey showing Cruz’s advantage on the cusp of double-digits.”

KING OF THE WORLD: Trump just met with a classic-rock legend and a missile-defense expert — and it was the same guy.

Jeff “Skunk” Baxter has earned eight platinum records in a music career that started in the 1960s, and he has received numerous security clearances and contracting jobs since the 1980s as a self-taught expert on missile-defense and counterterrorism.

Baxter was one of many luminaries at the White House on Thursday to watch President Donald Trump sign the Music Modernization Act, which reforms copyright laws.

Unlike every other musician in the room, including Kid Rock, Baxter has built a successful second career as a defense consultant.

Baxter dropped out of college in Boston in 1969 to join a short-lived psychedelic-rock band. After that, he moved to California and become one of the original six members of Steely Dan.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to play for Steely Dan — but it helps.

JUST DO IT: Alec Baldwin Says We need to overthrow the government.

21ST CENTURY SPORTSMANSHIP: Biological Male Wins World Championship In Women’s Cycling.

Rachel McKinnon, a professor at the College of Charleston, won the women’s sprint 35-39 age bracket at the 2018 UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championships in Los Angeles.

McKinnon, representing Canada, bested Carolien Van Herrikhuyzen of the Netherlands and American cyclist Jennifer Wagner to take home the gold.

McKinnon celebrated the victory on Twitter, writing: “First transgender woman world champion…ever.”

Allowing biological males who identify as transgender women to compete in women’s athletic events has been a controversial subject, as critics have argued that it puts the female competitors at an inherent disadvantage.

Sorry, ladies, but you were warned.

YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF LEFTY PROJECTION: David Garcia’s #MeToo Political Director Has a History of Lewd Photography and Unpaid Tickets.