IT’S COMPLICATED: Is there really a Turkey-Iran rapprochement?

A number of common concerns have recently emerged between Turkey and Iran, which has facilitated the recent thaw in relations. Two factors have been particularly important.

First of all, the struggle to establish a post-Arab Spring regional order has generated anxiety in both Ankara and Tehran. The most obvious manifestation of this struggle was on full display during the latest Gulf crisis. Neither Iran nor Turkey regarded this crisis as an isolated confrontation between Qatar and the Gulf-Arab coalition.

The Saudi-Emirati-Egyptian axis is trying to establish a new regional order supported by the Trump administration and Israel, and condoned by countries like Jordan. The logical other of this alliance is political Islam, and by extension Turkey, and the publicly announced enemy is Iran. Therefore, this new regional order, if imposed, would be detrimental to the interests of both regional powers.

If there’s one thing both nations share, it’s disdain for their Arab neighbors — and I suspect that someday Turkey will use Iran’s nuclear program (or a theoretical Saudi bomb) as a justification for its own.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: DACA Dinner, Unmasking and Much, Much More.

LATE THEM EAT HARE: Venezuela’s ‘Plan Rabbit’ encounters ‘cultural problem.’

The president urged crisis-hit Venezuelans to breed rabbits and eat them as a source of animal protein.

Venezuela is facing record levels of child malnutrition amid persistent food shortages.

An opposition politician said the plan was “a bad joke”.

President Maduro revealed the idea on state television, saying that “for animal protein, which is such an important issue, a ‘rabbit plan’ has been approved because rabbits also breed like rabbits”.

The leader did say that the “rabbit plan” had not got off to a good start and the minister of urban agriculture, Freddy Bernal, said there had been a “cultural problem”.

President Maduro said rabbit kittens had been handed to 15 communities as part of a pilot project by Mr Bernal.

“When he came back, to his surprise he found people had put little bows on their rabbits and were keeping them as pets, it was an early setback to Plan Rabbit.”

“A lot of people gave names to the rabbits, they took them to bed,” Mr Bernal said.

The minister urged Venezuelans to start seeing rabbits “from the point of view of the economic war”.

You can’t make up incredible stories like this one — and in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, you don’t have to, because they’re the only thing not in short supply.

MICKEY KAUS: Don’t buy all the PR-style hooey about ‘dreamers.’

Compared with the general population, dreamers are not especially highly skilled. A recent survey for several pro-dreamer groups, with participants recruited by those groups, found that while most dreamers are not in school, the vast majority work. But their median hourly wage is only $15.34, meaning that many are competing with hard-pressed lower-skilled Americans.

The dreamers you read about have typically been carefully selected for their appeal. They’re valedictorians. They’re first responders. They’re curing diseases. They root for the Yankees. They want to serve in the Army. If dreamers are the poster children for the much larger undocumented population, these are the poster children for the poster children.

Still, taking the dreamers as a whole, not just the dreamiest of them, they represent an appealing group of would-be citizens. So why not show compassion and legalize them? Because, as is often the case, the pursuit of pure compassion comes with harmful side effects.

Plus:

Under “chain migration” rules established in 1965 — ironically as a sop to conservatives, who foolishly thought that they’d boost European inflows — new citizens can bring in their siblings and adult children, who can bring in their siblings and in-laws, until whole villages have moved to the United States. That means today’s 690,000 dreamers would quickly become millions of newcomers, who may well be low-skilled and who would almost certainly include the parents who brought them — the ones who, in theory, are at fault.

Mickey was an immigration hawk before it was cool.

REGULATION ROLLBACK: Trump Administration Working in Other Ways to Dismantle Obamacare.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL, AND IT’S VERY, VERY OLD: Himalayan glaciers melting for 400 years, finds BSIP study.

KATE KLONICK: The Terrifying Power of Internet Censors.

While there have long been worries about internet service providers favoring access to some content over others, there has been less concern about companies further along the pipeline holding an internet on/off switch. In large part, this is because at other points in the pipeline, users have choice. Private companies can make their own rules, and consumers can choose among them. If GoDaddy won’t register your domain, you can go to Bluehost or thousands of other companies.

But the fewer choices you have for the infrastructure you need to stay online, the more serious the consequences when companies refuse service. This is why Cloudflare’s decision to drop The Daily Stormer is so significant. Denying security service to one Nazi website seems fine now, but what if Cloudflare started suspending service for a political candidate that its chief executive didn’t like?

With this move, Cloudflare is wading into the business of evaluating the content of its clients — something sites like Facebook and Twitter have been wrestling with for years, leading them to develop complex rules and procedures that govern what users are and are not allowed to post. Most agree that it’s appropriate for social media companies to take down certain kinds of content — that’s how they ensure our newsfeeds aren’t full of pornography or violence. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want that type of content to be able to exist somewhere on the internet. Ensuring that sites like Cloudflare remain content-neutral might be necessary to guarantee that.

None of this is news to Instapundit readers, but it’s refreshing to see the case for internet First Amendment protection being made on the OpEd page of the New York Times.

THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT: As Florida Fuel Grew Scarce, GasBuddy App Change Filled Gap.

As Glenn previously noted, “The importance of social media in recovery efforts suggests that restoration of cell service — including cellular data — should probably get a higher priority than in the past.”

Indeed.

RON RADOSH: Steve Bannon Goes into Full Attack Mode on “60 Minutes.”

WHAT’S OLD IS NEW AGAIN: Nordstrom tries store with stylists, but no clothes.

Nordstrom is opening a new store in California next month that’s significantly smaller than what the department store chain usually builds and — in a twist — won’t be stocking clothing or any inventory at all.

Instead, the Seattle-based company (JWN) said Monday the store will offer shoppers personal stylists to help pick out clothing and accessories, dressing rooms to try them on, online ordering, and services, such as alterations, manicures, wine and beer and hand-delivery of items to customers’ cars.

Sounds like a high-end take on the old catalog showroom stores I remember from the 1970s. That might be a smart move, given that expensive floorspace and (especially) carried inventory costs are two huge disadvantages of traditional retail versus e-commerce.

WELL, GOOD: US Air Force Dusts Off Old Skills to Fight a New Kind of War in Eastern Europe.

It’s a small exercise, tiny in comparison to Zapad 17, but 16 years of “small wars” have meant too little practice for fighting near-peer adversaries.

CLAY TRAVIS: ESPN is Drowning and They’re Not Smart Enough to Recognize it.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED — OR ELSE: Calls to punish skeptics rise with links to climate change, hurricanes.

Calls to punish global warming skepticism as a criminal offense have surged in the aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, but it hasn’t discouraged climate scientists like Judith Curry.

A retired Georgia Tech professor, she argued on her Climate Etc. website that Irma, which hit Florida as a Category 4 hurricane on Saturday, was fueled in large part by “very weak” wind shear and that the hurricane intensified despite Atlantic Ocean temperatures that weren’t unusually warm.

That is the kind of talk that could get policymakers who heed her research hauled before the justice system, if some of those in the climate change movement have their way.

“Climate change denial should be a crime,” declared the Sept. 1 headline in the Outline. Mark Hertsgaard argued in a Sept. 7 article in the Nation, titled “Climate Denialism Is Literally Killing Us,” that “murder is murder” and “we should punish it as such.”

Shut up, they explained.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Bombshell Report Catches Pentagon Falsifying Paperwork For Weapons Transfers Linked To Organized Crime.

BURMA CALLING: Al-Qaeda Orders Jihadists to Rescue Rohingya ‘by Force.’

REMEMBRANCE: While Hillary Used Her Book Tour to Spread the Blame, Here’s What the CIA Was Up To.

No one was safe from the finger-pointing — everyone from former FBI Director James Comey and Joe Biden to the Russians and the angry women who didn’t start marching early enough got a taste of the blame.

And after the book’s release on Tuesday, September 12, she continued to promote it — and push her alternate theories of responsibility.

Meanwhile, the CIA embarked on a very different mission: to honor two of the men many blame Clinton for deserting six years ago in Benghazi.

Read the whole thing.

CHANGE: German right-wing party on course to enter parliament.

NO, REALLY: It’s nice to see that Republicans are not letting a Democrat crisis go to waste.

A LITTLE PIECE OF POLAND, A LITTLE PIECE OF FRANCE… Wary NATO Eyes Turn to Moscow’s ‘Zapad 17’ in Belarus.

General Philip Breedlove: Zapad is not new. It’s a recurring exercise that Russia typically does in its central and western districts.
…
This year is a little different in that it is going to be accomplished largely in Belarus, and a large [Russian] force will move into Belarus. I have no personal sources other than repeating the things I have heard from Belarusians and from others in the eastern NATO nations that this exercise can be between 70 to 100,000 troops – that is a large number. As I said, it’s probably not all in one location, but it will be a grouping of exercises in the west that would come to some numbers like that. There also have been numbers used that say there are over 4,000 railcars being ordered for this year’s exercise.

So there is some chance that this year’s exercise will be much larger than others in the past.

TCB: There’s been reporting in American media that the railcars and the troops in Belarus could be used as a kind of Trojan horse to leave equipment and people in Belarus – potentially in preparation for some kind of attack. What are the similarities and differences that can be drawn from past experiences with Russia when they’ve done something similar – like before the invasions of Georgia and Crimea?

Breedlove: This is exactly what has been talked about. And some even point back to the late 1930s and how Russia comported itself there before World War II. So this is a concern.

Now Zapad is not a snap exercise; it is an announced exercise. But snap exercises, and especially large snap exercises, in the recent past have been used to cover movements of troops, movements of equipment, set preparations for things like Crimea and the Donbas. So many share concern that this might happen. I don’t personally use the Trojan horse analogy – but what I have heard is that there’s great concern in several areas about the fact that a lot of force may come forward and it may not all go home.

NATO hasn’t held an exercise comparable to Zapad since the end of the Cold War, and the new NATO nations on Russia’s western flank have never been included in one.

DEM CONGRESSMAN: Single-Payer Healthcare ‘Clearly Resonating’ with Trump Voters.

THE RATCHET EFFECT: Sanders’ single-payer push splits Democrats.

Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin on Tuesday became the single-payer bill’s first supporter from the class of Senate Democrats up for reelection next year in states Trump carried. But other politically imperiled incumbent Democrats have said no to Sanders.

Sen. Claire McCaskill said in a brief interview that lawmakers have more work to do to keep health care costs in check “before we would think about expanding that [Medicare] system for everyone.”

Single-payer on a national level would have “a lot of problems,” McCaskill added, although she came out in support of allowing individuals as young as 55 to buy into Medicare. That idea is also backed by Baldwin and two other red-state Democrats up for reelection next year who are declining to endorse Sanders’ bill: Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.

Stabenow, also a member of Democratic leadership, said Tuesday that she would keep working on her Medicare-at-55 plan “because I think there is some bipartisan interest in that.” She said the party’s first order of business should be shoring up the Obamacare markets, followed by other goals.

That’s this year. By 2020, support for single payer will likely be the Democrats’ new litmus test.

OH: South Korea detects radioactive gas from North Korea bomb test.

The Nuclear Safety and Security Commission said its land-based xenon detector in the northeastern part of the country found traces of xenon-133 isotope on nine occasions, while its mobile equipment off the country’s east coast detected traces of the isotope four times.

“It was difficult to find out how powerful the nuclear test was with the amount of xenon detected, but we can say the xenon was from North Korea,” Choi Jongbae, executive commissioner, told a news conference in Seoul.

The commission could not confirm what kind of nuclear test the North conducted, he added.

Xenon is a naturally occurring, colorless gas that is used in manufacturing of some sorts of lights. But the detected xenon-133 is a radioactive isotope that does not occur naturally and which has been linked to North Korea’s nuclear tests in the past.

If North Korea hasn’t yet tested a hydrogen bomb, they probably aren’t far away from one.

Related: More than ever, South Koreans want their own nuclear weapons.

STEPHEN KRUISER: Hillary’s Media Criticisms Are a Perfect Snapshot of Why She Lost.

What has struck me most about Clinton’s book at media tour is her tone. When she casually dismissed a quarter of the American electorate as “deplorables” and, worse, as “irredeemable,” Clinton revealed a contempt unworthy of a candidate for any office. That was a far worse character smear than Mitt Romney’s political judgement about the “47 percent” who he believed would never vote Republican. Clinton’s casual contempt, probably more than any other single factor, cost her what should have been a gimme election.

But she doesn’t seem to have learned anything, if her book and recent statements are anything to go by. Clinton not only thinks that Trump is an inexcusable disaster, but her book indicates that she places the blame for him (while blithely comparing herself to Cersei from Game of Thrones) on those same deplorables, still so full of “anger and resentment.”

So while there’s always good fun to be had at the expense of a clueless politico, the idea of a sitting President filled with that much contempt for her fellow Americans ought to make one shudder.

LAME:

This isn’t the GOP majority I was hoping for, but it is the one I’ve come to expect.

(Full story here.)

GOOD QUESTION: What Kind of History Did Hillary Clinton Make?

“Hillary made history by winning the nomination” is another way of saying “Hillary made history by managing to not lose the nomination with institutional advantages that no other candidate is likely to enjoy for the next few decades.”

And then she headed into a general election with another slew of institutional advantages: her campaign spent twice as much as Trump’s did, the media detested Trump, and the Republican nominee stumbled from one mess to another. Many prominent Republicans skipped their party’s convention in Cleveland while the Democrats’ gathering in Philadelphia went off without a hitch. Clinton may complain about FBI Director James Comey’s last minute reopening (and re-closing!) of the bureau’s investigation of her, but it’s not like Trump had a smooth final month with the revelation of the Access Hollywood tape in early October. Sure, the first line of Hillary’s obituary will mention she was the first woman to win a major party’s presidential nomination. But it’s likely to continue, “and the loser in the most shocking upset in American political history.”

She was a terrible candidate — and aside from Barack Obama, the best the Democrats have put up since 1996.