LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Continues Tax Reform Crusade and Much, Much More.

GOLDEN STATE BLUES: San Diego is awash with ‘fecal matter’ due to lack of public toilets and surging rates of homeless people, health officials warn as they try to control the hepatitis A outbreak.

Officials declared a public health emergency in the city after the outbreak killed 15 and infected close to 400 people.

Hepatitis A is a viral liver disease that can spread through ingesting food and drinks that have come in contact with feces from people who are already infected.

County health officials told the city that they needed to come up with a plan to fix the ‘fecally contaminated environment’ that is in the downtown area.

Officials first attempted to contain the outbreak by providing vaccinations to people and improving educational methods, but the virus continues to spread.

The city is now implementing street washing every other week and an extension on public restroom hours to stop the spread of the virus that has affected the homeless population the most.

Lovely.

ALLIES: Turkey Chooses Russian Missile Defense System.

Turkey’s moves have made the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) apprehensive of a non-NATO missile defense system being deployed in a NATO country. The Alliance’s concerns are that a non-NATO country that sells Turkey its missile defense system—especially China or Russia—could then remotely use that complex to gather information on NATO’s alliance-integrated missile defense system and develop ways to either disrupt the system or develop countermeasures to evade it.

Ankara argues that many NATO countries already employ various Russian weapons. And indeed, this is not for the first time that an Alliance member state has sought a Russian-made missile defense system. Notably, Greece operates the S-300, and the bilateral Greek-Russian partnership in the military sphere has been growing (Strategic-culture.org, November 5, 2016). This is worth mentioning as Greece and Turkey are at loggerheads with each other over a territorial dispute in the Aegean Sea. As a March 2017 article by Colonel (ret.) Andrei Akulov, a Moscow-based international security expert, suggests, Russia could try to insert itself as a mediator between the two countries to resolve the issue. And Russia might then try to use that momentum to create some kind of alliance with Turkey and Greece—two NATO countries (Strategic-culture.org, March 10).

NATO’s southern flank was always troublesome, but now it might be disintegrating. But as I’ve written before, post-Cold War NATO is an unserious alliance — big enough to feed Russian paranoia, but perhaps no longer strong enough to contain it.

GOP LAWMAKER ON U.S. POT POLICY: ‘We’re Completely on Our Asses.’

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Portland Police Announce They’re Deleting Gang Member Database.

HEH: Bill Nye the ‘Fake Science’ Guy Gets Schooled by Meteorologist on Hurricane Irma and Climate Change.

BRUCE BAWER: Campus Chaos Comes to Reed College.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Tagging fake news on Facebook doesn’t work, study says.

‘KNOWN WOLF’ TERROR SCANDAL: CIA Knew About 9-11 Hijackers, Didn’t Provide Intel to FBI.

THAT MEANS IT’S WORKING: Insurers make their pitch on how to rescue health-care system.

Funny that WaPo headlines with “health-care system” rather than “ObamaCare exchanges.”

BOMB, BOMB, BOMB: Israel Has a Playbook for Dealing With North Korea.

[Israeli PM Menachem] Begin had no military expertise. But his family had been wiped out in the Holocaust. He looked at Saddam, who was openly threating Israel, and saw Hitler. To Begin, sitting around hoping for the best was not a strategy; it was an invitation to aggression. If there was going to be a cost — political, diplomatic, military — better to pay before, not after, the Iraqis had the bomb.

In the summer of 1981, Begin gave the order. The Israeli air force destroyed the Osirak reactor. The United Nations Security Council condemned the attack. The Europeans went bonkers. The New York Times called it “inexcusable.” But the Israeli prime minister wasn’t looking to be excused by the Times or the Europeans or even the usually friendly Ronald Reagan administration. He enunciated a simple rationale that would come to be known as the Begin Doctrine: Israel will not allow its avowed enemies to obtain the means of its destruction.

The wisdom of this doctrine became clear a decade later, during the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein made good on his threat to fire Russian-made SCUD missiles at Israeli cities. The SCUDs landed, and caused some damage and a fair amount of panic, but they were not armed with unconventional warheads. Israel had taken that option off the table.

Similarly, in 2007, Israel confirmed what it had suspected for five years: Syria, with North Korean help, was trying to build a nuclear reactor. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a Begin disciple, sent Mossad chief Meir Dagan to Washington, to ask for American intervention. The CIA chief, Michael Hayden, agreed with Israel’s contention that Damascus (with Iranian financing) was constructing the reactor. But Hayden convinced President George W. Bush that bombing the site would result in all-out war, and who wants that?

Acting on its own, Israel destroyed the Syrian site (reportedly killing a group of North Korean experts in the process). Hayden was wrong about how Syria would react, as he later admitted. If Israel had been reasonable and listened to the CIA, Bashar al-Assad would have nuclear weapons right now.

One big difference is that unlike Iraq and Syria, North Korea has a Great Power patron right next door — which really makes this China’s problem to deal with, should they ever want to sit at the grownup table of nations.

EQUIFAX DATA BREACH: Here’s What You Should Be Doing Right Now.

TAKING A CUE FROM THE PRIVATE SECTOR: New F-35 Roadmap Would Roll Out Updates Like iPhone.

“Envision in your head: the pilot jumps in a jet, fires it up, the panoramic cockpit display comes up,” said Vice Adm. Mat Winter, F-35 program executive officer, during an event Sept. 6. “Envision a little window that pops up that says, ‘Your latest [electro-optical distributed aperture system] software update is ready for download: yes or no?’ Similar to what you do on your smart phone.”

This new strategy will allow the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) to move ahead with follow-on development while still fixing software “deficiencies” that are less urgent to resolve, Winter said.

But what happens if a disgruntled tech releases the “gold master” software to the public?

I’LL TAKE TWO: Mercedes-AMG Project ONE Revealed: AMG’s $2.5 Million Halo Hypercar.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: UN Passes Mega-Ultra-Jumbo Toughest-Ever North Korea Sanctions (Again).

But this time it’ll work for sure.

FAKE NEWS: Clinton Cited False Study As Reason She Lost Wisconsin.

To be fair, she drank heavily while her book was being authored.

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Can California Really Go 100 Percent Renewable Energy?

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: UN warns of possible crimes against humanity in Venezuela.

“My investigation suggests the possibility that crimes against humanity may have been committed, which can only be confirmed by a subsequent criminal investigation,” Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein told the UN Human Rights Council on Monday.

Venezuela’s foreign minister defended the record of the government of President Nicolas Maduro, rejecting the allegations as “baseless”.

Venezuela has been convulsed by months of demonstrations both for and against Maduro, who critics say has plunged the oil-rich country into the worst economic crisis in its history and is turning it into a dictatorship. At least 125 people have been killed in clashes with police since the protests began.

Zeid said the government was using criminal proceedings against opposition leaders, arbitrary detentions, excessive use of force and ill-treatment of detainees, which in some cases amounted to torture.

Socialism is a crime against humanity, and it’s one the people usually commit against themselves.

Related: Venezuela Supreme Court has staged effective coup.

In two rulings in March 2017, the Supreme Court of Justice “effectively claimed legislative powers for itself, depriving the National Assembly of its Constitutional powers and granting sweeping arbitrary powers to the executive,” it said.

“These decisions amount to a coup d’état against the Constitutional order and have ushered in a new reign of arbitrary rule,” Sam Zarifi, ICJ Secretary General, said in a statement.

Judges on the Supreme Court are mainly from the ruling Socialist Party and/or former officials of the government of Maduro, the Geneva-based jurists’ group said.

Does this mean that the right people are at long last in charge?

WHAT HAPPENED: There’s enough blame to go around to cover everybody — except for Hillary Clinton.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE RECIPIENT AUNG SAN SUU KYI UPDATE: Apparent ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Is Now Unfolding In Myanmar, U.N. Says.

GO FIGURE: Germany will fall short of 2020 emissions target by around amount of shuttered German nuclear power.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED THAT WIDESPREAD VOTER FRAUD WASN’T AN ISSUE: Study Finds Non-Citizens Are Unknowingly Registered to Vote. “Bill Clinton’s Motor Voter law looks like the culprit.”

HMM: Eyes on 2018 as 3rd House Republican Says He’ll Retire.

The decision by Rep. Dave Trott of Michigan followed retirement announcements last week by Reps. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania and Dave Reichert of Washington, three members Democrats planned to try to unseat next year. Though all would have been difficult incumbents to unseat, the districts are likely to be much more competitive for Democrats as open races. Several nonpartisan handicappers immediately switched Trott’s district to a “toss up” after his announcement.

Though the trio of retirements hasn’t invited panic among Republicans, it could be a warning sign of a tough political environment facing GOP lawmakers next year. On average, the party in power tends to lose seats in a president’s first midterm election, and Republicans worry that struggling to accomplish their agenda on Capitol Hill and the tumult of President Trump’s first year leave them vulnerable in 2018.

“It’s clear the political environment is trending away from Republicans; the question is, to what extent?” said GOP consultant Ken Spain, who ran communications for the National Republican Congressional Committee during the 2010 cycle. “The next six months are going to tell the story.”

On the Senate side, even Tennessee Republican Bob Corker is “unsure about running for reelection.”

Perhaps if this Congress were delivering on the promises they made to the constituents who put them in office, they’d be reading the tea leaves differently.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: What Are Critics Saying About Kennedy in “Chappaquiddick?”

FAKE NEWS? Illegal immigration in Southwest doubled over past four months.

More than 30,000 illegal immigrants were nabbed in August, up 22 percent compared to July and up nearly 100 percent compared to April, when fewer than 16,000 illegal immigrants were arrested by the Border Patrol or stopped at ports of entry by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers.

The numbers are still lower than they were a year before under Mr. Obama, but the gains Mr. Trump made in his first months in office are dissipating.

Actually, I’m not sure you can read anything into these numbers. July of 2017 should be compared to July of 2016 — not to the previous month of the same year. Month-to-month figures are probably worthless for a variety of reasons.