THAT MEANS IT’S WORKING: ObamaCare’s Meltdown Has Arrived.

Last week BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee announced it would leave three of the state’s largest exchange markets—Nashville, Memphis and Knoxville. “We have experienced losses approaching $500 million over the course of three years on ACA plans,” the company said, “which is unsustainable.” As a result, more than 100,000 Tennesseans will be forced to seek out new coverage for 2017.

BlueCross is only the latest insurer to head for the exits. Community Health Alliance, the insurance co-op established under ObamaCare, is winding down due to financial failure, leaving 30,000 people without coverage. UnitedHealthcare said in April it is departing Tennessee’s exchange after significant losses. That’s another 41,000 people needing new plans.

All told, more than 60% of our state’s ObamaCare consumers will lose their coverage heading into 2017. When they go in search of a replacement plan, they will confront two unfortunate realities: a dearth of options and skyrocketing costs.

Leave it to government to force a marketplace into existence, where people are coerced into buying something many of them can’t afford to use, and which sellers still lose money selling.

And then leave it to government to blame free markets for the failure.

(If you need a way to get past the WSJ paywall, you might find it here.)

BUYOUT BLUES: Deep-pocketed suitors are reportedly dropping their bids for Twitter.

RE-RECALL? Replacement Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phone catches fire on Southwest plane.

Southwest Airlines flight 994 from Louisville to Baltimore was evacuated this morning while still at the gate because of a smoking Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. All passengers and crew exited the plane via the main cabin door and no injuries were reported, a Southwest Airlines spokesperson told The Verge.

More worrisome is the fact that the phone in question was a replacement Galaxy Note 7, one that was deemed to be safe by Samsung. The Verge spoke to Brian Green, owner of the Note 7, on the phone earlier today and he confirmed that he had picked up the new phone at an AT&T store on September 21st. A photograph of the box shows the black square symbol that indicates a replacement Note 7 and Green said it had a green battery icon.

There was a report last week from China that a replacement Galaxy Note 7 had caught fire, but with Chinese vendors sometimes you can’t be sure what you’re getting. This is the first instance I’ve seen where a known replacement model from the U.S. has proven dangerous.

HEP: Hillary Taps 68-Year-Old Hysteria Monger Gore for Millennial Outreach.

RESET: Russia Adds Hundreds of Warheads Under Nuclear Treaty.

Russia increased its deployed nuclear warheads over the past six months under a strategic arms reduction treaty as U.S. nuclear warhead stocks declined sharply, according to the State Department.

During the same period, the United States cut its deployed nuclear warheads by 114, increasing the disparity between the two nuclear powers.

Russia’s warhead increases since 2011 suggest Moscow does not intend to cut its nuclear forces and will abandon the New START arms accord as part of a major nuclear buildup.

“It is now highly unlikely that Russia intends to comply with New START,” said Mark Schneider, a former Pentagon nuclear weapons specialist now with the National Institute for Policy.

Heckuva job, Barry.

I SUPPOSE THIS WAS INEVITABLE, ALL OF IT: ‘Panty Peeler’ Beer Under Fire for Promoting ‘Rape Culture’

THE INTERNET OF THINGS: Johnson & Johnson warns insulin pumps can be hacked.

SOCIAL JUSTICE MEDIA: A Year After CEO’s Return, Dorsey’s Failure to Invigorate Twitter Leaves It Vulnerable.

Some high-ranking managers now say they are losing faith in Mr. Dorsey. Despite some progress making the service easier to use and improving safeguards against offensive tweets, they say new users are still largely unwilling to try the 10-year-old service, while existing members complain that Twitter accommodates online harassment. Twitter added just 1% more monthly users in the second quarter, while its revenue growth shrank for the eighth straight period to under 20%.

Twitter declined to make Mr. Dorsey available for comment. A spokeswoman said Mr. Dorsey has delivered on his goals laid out to investors, including executing product changes more quickly and simplifying the service. “We’re seeing the direct benefit of recent product improvements,” which have driven user growth and usage, she said.

Unless Twitter figures out how to eliminate the spambots and knocks it off with the heavy-handed social engineering, I suspect the company’s other improvement efforts won’t amount to much.

PEAK OIL: Small Texas company announces massive oil discovery in Alaska.

“This discovery could be really exciting for the State of Alaska,” said Caelus chief executive Jim Musselman. “It has the size and scale to play a meaningful role in sustaining the Alaskan oil business over the next three or four decades.”

While Caelus plans to initiate a more advanced appraisal program which should confirm overall reservoir continuity, the company believes that with adjoining acreage included, the Smith Bay field as a whole could contain up to 10 billion barrels of oil.

A billion barrels here and a billion barrels there, and pretty soon you’re talking real energy.

KURT SCHLICHTER: The Meaning of Donald Trump – An American Conservative’s Perspective.

Perhaps most important, Trump represents both a repudiation of the liberal demands for conformity of thought, often lumped generally under the label “political correctness,” and a rejection of the “rigged system” that sees one set of laws for the elite and another for regular citizens. “Political correctness” had successfully stifled free discussion of the costs of both legal and illegal immigration. Complaints about the loss of jobs, about terrible crimes committed by immigrants who should have been deported, and about the government refusing to enforce duly enacted laws were silenced with blanket assertions of racism. At the same time, rampant corruption among those connected to the liberal establishment – most shockingly with Hillary Clinton being cleared of charges of misusing classified material when the same facts would have doubtlessly led to the imprisonment of unconnected Americans – opened a path for Trump. This was especially disruptive because so many Republican politicians, while ideologically conservative, culturally identified with prosperous coastal, urban elites over the suffering citizens of “flyover” America and tried to enforce the same “political correctness.”

But Trump is no traditional American conservative. He defies much of what the Republican Party had stood for in recent decades. He brought to the surface previously marginalized views within the party. The Republican Party had defined itself with free trade, but in doing so ignored many of its constituents who have seen their solid, working class manufacturing jobs moved overseas. While the Republican (and Democrat) elite pointed to net gains from free trade, the very real negative effects on working class Americans were ignored. Trump has also bypassed many of the traditional Grand Old Party’s social issues, like gay marriage and abortion, while still winning the support of the vital evangelical Christian component of the Republican coalition.

Make time today to read the whole thing, please.

DON’T YOU LOVE FARCE? WH Weighs In on Creepy Clown Epidemic, ‘Clown Riot’ at Penn State, More Sightings.

PROTECTING FAMILIES OR CRONY CAPITALISTS? The FDA is getting ready to squash cigar makers.

Normally when we discuss the intersection of the FDA, government regulations and tobacco we’re talking about cigarettes. (Or vaping in more recent days.) But this week Uncle Sam is getting into full retro mode and going after cigar manufacturers. The most recent spate of moves in the Food and Drug Administration aimed at saving the nation from itself is based on a bit of legislation passed more than six years ago known as the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. This act was supposed to be targeted towards the prevention of tobacco advertising geared toward minors and enforcement of labeling requirements and a few other details. It also included a rather ominous provision described as the authority “to take further action in the future to protect public health.”

Apparently “the future” has arrived and some of those further actions will be geared toward traditional manufacturers of cigars rather than the cigarette market which is the major concern when it comes to children and families.

Read the whole thing.

The real weight of the FDA’s hand will come down on small cigar manufacturers, who simply won’t be able to afford complying with the new regulations while still creating innovative new products. Big cigar makers will absorb the costs, or pass them on to consumers as the small fry are forced out of business.

Imagine a regulatory scheme protecting Anheuser-Busch InBev’s mediocre beers, while forcing your local brewpubs out of business — that’s what the FDA is doing to the cigar industry.

THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT THE ROBOTS WANT YOU TO THINK: No, robots won’t take your job.

MY CHILD, MY CHOICE: Parents Report Kids’ School Lunches Taken Away by Teachers.

Tami DeVries said that when her son took his lunch to kindergarten, it was confiscated. A teacher took away his kielbasa, cheese, and Wheat Thins crackers, replacing them with Cheerios. Alicia Nesbitt reported that her stepdaughter, in first grade, had chips removed from her lunch during the first week of school.

“She came home and told me they weren’t a ‘healthy choice,’” Nesbitt said. “That may be true, but the rest of her lunch and snacks were very healthy and it’s up to parents if they want to put a little treat in for their kids. Unless the school wants to provide lunches, I don’t really think it’s their business.”

Read the whole thing.

BREAKING: 2 Belgian cops stabbed in possible terror-related incident.

SUPERCUT: The Kaine Interruptions.

SKYNET SAYS TO WIPE THEM ALL OUT: MIT Game Asks Who Driverless Cars Should Kill.

JUST ONE TIME? Tim Kaine Left Out That Time Hillary Appeased Russian Oligarchs To Enrich A Donor.

Kaine repeatedly attacked Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Mike Pence for calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “better leader than president Obama.”

But Kaine left out an inconvenient fact about his running mate. Specifically, reports Clinton’s non-profit took money from a Canadian businessman looking to cut a deal with Rosatom — Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy company.

The Clinton Foundation got millions from people associated with Uranium One, a uranium mining company, after Clinton helped approve the company’s selling shares to Rosatom in 2010.

Clinton was one of the voices on the Committee on Foreign Investment to approve the deal, but she didn’t disclose people associated with the Uranium One deal donated $8.65 million to the Clinton Foundation between 2008 and 2010.

To be fair, you can’t expect Kaine to interrupt with every little thing.

VENEZUELA: Health Crisis Means Kid’s Scraped Knee Can Be Life or Death.

It was just a scraped knee. So 3-year-old Ashley Pacheco’s parents did what parents do: They gave her a hug, cleaned the wound twice with rubbing alcohol and thought no more of it.

Two weeks later, the little girl writhed screaming in a hospital bed. Her breathing came in ragged gasps as she begged passing patients for a sip of water.

Her mother stayed day and night in the trauma unit. She kept Ashley on an empty stomach in case she might cut in front of hundreds of other patients for emergency surgery in one of the hospital’s few functioning operating rooms.

Her father scoured Caracas for scarce antibiotics to fight the infection spreading through his daughter’s body.

They had no idea how much worse it was going to get.

Venezuelans chose a crooked political system cooked up the the 19th Century, and now they’re enjoying 19th Century medicine.

MAYBE THEY’LL ASK TIM KAINE SOME TOUGH QUESTIONS ABOUT THIS IN TONIGHT’S VEEP DEBATE: New Cold War? Russia, U.S. Relations At Lowest Point Since 1970s.

Oh, right…

PRIVACY: Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence.

SMART DIPLOMACY: How the Nuclear Deal Enriches Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

In short, whether its internal security, foreign adventures, or large corporate ventures, the IRGC plays an outsized role in Iran’s internal power structure. Established in 1979 to consolidate the Islamic revolution and fight its enemies, the IRGC has evolved over the years into a full-fledged conventional army, conducting and directing terrorist activity abroad. The Guard has also become a political power broker, an economic conglomerate, and an agency in charge of nuclear and ballistic-missile proliferation.

The interaction among military, economic, and political power is critical in understanding the centrality of the IRGC to Iran’s current system. The Guard exploits its influence and capabilities in one realm to increase its presence in another. Its growing economic clout is both an end in itself and a tool to advance its other agendas. Thus, IRGC revenues from economic activities yield the necessary resources and political leverage to place its members in positions of power. Conversely, the Guard’s political power serves the economic enterprises it owns, and both its political and economic weight in turn advance its military projects.

That’s just from the online introduction. The full report is available in PDF format, and is both dry and damning of the Obama Administration.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Obama administration considering strikes on Assad, again.

Inside the national security agencies, meetings have been going on for weeks to consider new options to recommend to the president to address the ongoing crisis in Aleppo, where Syrian and Russian aircraft continue to perpetrate the deadliest bombing campaign the city has seen since the five-year-old civil war began. A meeting of the Principals Committee, which includes Cabinet-level officials, is scheduled for Wednesday. A meeting of the National Security Council, which could include the president, could come as early as this weekend.

Last Wednesday, at a Deputies Committee meeting at the White House, officials from the State Department, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed limited military strikes against the regime as a means of forcing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to pay a cost for his violations of the cease-fire, disrupt his ability to continue committing war crimes against civilians in Aleppo, and raise the pressure on the regime to come back to the negotiating table in a serious way.

It seems Obama isn’t yet done throwing prestige away on Syria.

JUSTICE FOR SALE: Obama DOJ drops charges against alleged broker of Libyan weapons.

Lawyers for the Justice Department on Monday filed a motion in federal court in Phoenix to drop the case against the arms dealer, an American named Marc Turi, whose lawyers also signed the motion.

The deal averts a trial that threatened to cast additional scrutiny on Hillary Clinton’s private emails as Secretary of State, and to expose reported Central Intelligence Agency attempts to arm rebels fighting Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi.

Government lawyers were facing a Wednesday deadline to produce documents to Turi’s legal team, and the trial was officially set to begin on Election Day, although it likely would have been delayed by protracted disputes about classified information in the case.

A Turi associate asserted that the government dropped the case because the proceedings could have embarrassed Clinton and President Barack Obama by calling attention to the reported role of their administration in supplying weapons that fell into the hands of Islamic extremist militants.

“They don’t want this stuff to come out because it will look really bad for Obama and Clinton just before the election,” said the associate.

Old news, nothing to it, let’s move on.

THAT’S RICH: Obama Hopes for No More ‘Imperial Presidencies’

From “I won” to “My pen and phone” to “Do as I say, not as I do” in eight short years.