ESPN’S HOWARD BRYANT: Don’t expect protests in baseball — it’s a white man’s game by design.

THIS IS PRETTY MUCH THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: Uber Debuts Self-Driving Cars in Pittsburgh.

More than two years ago Uber – like most in the car business – identified autonomous driving technology as the springboard for the next stage of growth.

The aggressive San Francisco-based startup has already shaken up the world’s taxi services, earning a valuation of $68 billion. It plans ultimately to replace many of its 1.5 million drivers with autonomous vehicles.

But it is not as if robots are taking over the Steel City. There will be only four self-driving vehicles available to passengers, to start, and two people will sit in the front to take over driving when the car cannot steer itself.

Two people?

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF ABUSE, INJUSTICE, AND UNDERAGE PROSTITUTION? She Accused Bay Area Cops of Sex Crimes, They Sent Her to Rehab.

Seven of these officers from the Oakland, Contra Costa, and Livermore police departments now face charges for underage sex, obstruction of justice, engaging in prostitution, and public lewdness. As the accusatory witness for the prosecution, Guap’s testimony is key; without it, there’s no case, as Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley said on Friday.

But in a remarkably lucky break for the officers accused, Guap has left California.
Two weeks ago, one of the police departments implicated in her case, the Richmond P.D., paid for her to go rehab out of a state fund for drug recovery and even drove her to the airport where she boarded a flight for southern Florida.

Only three days into her rehab stint, Guap was arrested for allegedly biting a security guard.

Now she’s in jail and the case against California cops is on hold.

There don’t seem to be any good guys in this story.

HERBAL TERROR: ISIS Guide Tells Jihadists to Use ‘Accessible’ Yet ‘Brutal’ Poisonous Plants.

ASIA PIVOT: North Korea Could Have Enough Uranium For 6 Nuclear Bombs By 2017, Experts Say.

North Korea is also desperately short of cash, which Iran is suddenly flush with.

POWELL IN LEAKED EMAIL: ‘I didn’t tell Hillary to have a private server at home’

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell vented to his associates earlier this year about Hillary Clinton’s attempts to rope him into her defense of her email practices, according to alleged leaked messages reviewed by POLITICO late Tuesday.

“I didn’t tell Hillary to have a private server at home, connected to the Clinton Foundation, two contractors, took away 60,000 emails, had her own domain,” Powell said in one Feb. 4 email to former Reagan White House chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein, in the latest cache of hacked communications among top Washington insiders to emerge in the heat of this year’s presidential campaign.

In a separate email that day to Condoleezza Rice, who succeeded him as George W. Bush’s secretary of state, Powell wrote: “Been on the phone and email all afternoon. Hillary and Elijah Cummings have popped off.”

Two days later, Rice wrote back, “I don’t think Hillary’s — ‘everyone did it,’ is flying.”

It’s flying for those who want it to.

BEER, IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? How the Denver beer scene made a German beer connoisseur realize he didn’t know much after all.

Denver might just be the best city in the world for beer lovers.

IT’S WORSE THAN YOU KNOW: The Sordid History of Liberals Calling Republicans Racists.

TROLL LEVEL: GRAND MASTER. Chelsea Clinton, Your Elderly Mother Needs Help.

IT’S REEFS ALL THE WAY DOWN: Surprise! Another Massive Reef Is Hiding Behind the Great Barrier Reef.

The scientists called the discovery “vast,” as they’ve mapped about 2,300 square miles (6,000 square kilometers) of the reef. Each doughnut-shaped mound measures 650 to 980 feet (200 to 300 meters) across and up to 33 feet (10 m) deep at the center.

The structures form “a significant inter-reef habitat” covering a greater area than nearby coral reefs, said Mardi McNeil, lead author of the new study and a marine geoscience research student at the Queensland University of Technology.

But is the diving any good?

BUBBLES GOTTA POP: US Think Tank Warns That Australia Is About 6 Weeks Away From Housing Collapse.

Real estate prices in Australia’s largest housing markets have soared over the past couple of years fueled, in no small part, by demand from Chinese buyers looking for offshore locations to park cash. The Sydney and Melbourne markets have been the largest beneficiaries of foreign capital with real estate prices up 53% and 51%, respectively, since 2012. That said, based on data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics it looks like home prices in Australia have already started their descent.

Looks like China may have found yet another way to export its economic mismanagement.

WHAT MERKEL HATH WROUGHT: 3 Syrians — believed a sleeper cell sent by ISIS — arrested in Germany.

The three are accused of coming to Germany in mid-November at the behest of IS “in order either to carry out an assignment they had already received or to keep themselves ready for further instructions,” federal prosecutors said. The three are suspected of membership in a foreign terrorist organization.

Their arrests followed raids at refugee homes in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s northernmost state. Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the men had been under observation for months, and that “there are no indications of concrete attack plans” at present.

“This may have been a sleeper cell,” he told reporters.

More to come, I’m sure.

DANA MILBANK: Yes, half of Trump supporters are racist.

Maybe they’re the almost-half of the Washington Post’s readership that’s disappeared since 2004.

BREAKING:

Mr Cooper just admitted he had complete access to Hillary's server and had no security clearance #HillarysEmails pic.twitter.com/Z0xPEHAMDc

— Citizen Dale (@Trumptbird) September 13, 2016

Is there anybody but the American public who didn’t have access to Hillary’s email?

THE OLD “WASTE AND FRAUD” CANARD WILL MAGICALLY PAY FOR AN OLD DEMOCRAT GOAL:

Trump aide says 6 weeks of guaranteed paid maternity leave will be paid for by eliminating fraud in unemployment insurance.

— Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) September 13, 2016

I’m still voting for the guy, but he doesn’t make it easy.

ALLIES: Turkey formally requests US to arrest Fethullah Gulen.

Turkey’s state-run news agency says the Justice Ministry has sent the United States its first formal request demanding the arrest of the alleged mastermind of July’s abortive coup.

Justice Ministry officials told Anadolu the written request sent to counterparts in Washington alleged the Pennsylvania-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen “gave the orders and commanded” the violent coup that killed over 270 people. Gulen denies any involvement.

Turkish officials have been informally demanding the cleric’s arrest and extradition for weeks.

It will be interesting to see just how far President Obama is willing to go to please our “friends” in Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s post-coup, pre-Islamist government.

And it’s going to be a very tense time around the world until at least January 20, 2017.

OLD NEWS, NOTHING TO SEE HERE, SHE’S ALREADY DISCLOSED EVERYTHING: Tech expert who set up Clinton’s server ignores subpoena.

Bryan Pagliano was scheduled to testify Tuesday before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (CHAY’-fits) of Utah is the committee’s Republican chairman. Chaffetz says there will be consequences for Pagliano’s refusal to appear and for “thumbing his nose at Congress.”

He didn’t specify what the penalties would be but says, “We’re not letting go of this.”

A letter from Pagliano’s attorney released by the committee says Pagliano will continue to assert his constitutional right not to testify.

The story notes that in 2012, Pagliano also refused to answer House questions about Benghazi.

And now this:

Paul Combetta and Bill Thornton both appeared in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for a hearing to examine the preservation of Clinton’s State Department emails.

Both technicians work for Platte River Networks (PRN), a Denver-based tech firm that Clinton hired in 2013 to manage her private email setup.

Combetta is one of two technicians who was granted immunity by the Justice Department in order to cooperate with the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s server. The other is Bryan Pagliano, a former Clinton campaign official who managed Clinton’s off-the-books email server as an IT adviser at the State Department. He ignored the Oversight Committee’s subpoena to appear on Tuesday.

Combetta’s immunity agreement has angered some Republican lawmakers because he seemingly lied to the FBI during one of two interviews he attended earlier this year.

According to the FBI’s report of its Clinton email investigation, Combetta gave conflicting answers when asked about his decision to use a software program called BleachBit to delete backups of Clinton’s emails from PRN’s servers.

It seems like only yesterday that Jill Abramson was encouraging Hillary to try “radical transparency.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: John Kerry’s State Department Funneled MILLIONS To His Daughter’s Nonprofit.

The Department of State funded a Peace Corps program created by Dr. Vanessa Kerry and officials from both agencies, records show. The Peace Corps then awarded the money without competition to a nonprofit Kerry created for the program.

Initially, the Peace Corps awarded Kerry’s group — now called Seed Global Health — with a three-year contract worth $2 million of State Department money on Sept. 10, 2012, documents show. Her father was then the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, which oversees both the Department of State and the Peace Corps.

Seed secured a four-year extension in September 2015, again without competition. This time, the Peace Corps gave the nonprofit $6.4 million provided by the Department of State while John Kerry was secretary of state.

Seed also received almost $1 million from a modification to the first award, as well as from Department of State funds the group secured outside the Peace Corps.

One hand washes the other, in a solid gold sink paid for by American taxpayers.

YOU DON’T SAY:

88% of the rise in US price level since 1990 has been down to 4 tightly regulated sectors https://t.co/t8Wgq2EegZ pic.twitter.com/Ee48xGcxLM

— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) September 12, 2016

As Milton Friedman said, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” And it would be priced like diamonds, too.

JOHN SCHINDLER: We’re Losing the War Against Terrorism.

President Obama’s diffident, pseudo-war against the Islamic State is stalled, with top generals in retirement now admitting that this White House’s efforts against jihadism in its homeland are strategically deluded and militarily hopeless.

Hillary Clinton has promised more of the same failed policies, which show no sign of defeating the Islamic State, the evil ISIS, in anything faster than geologic time. For his part, Donald Trump’s aggressive talk of “crushing” the Islamic State with quick and decisive victories can be safely dismissed as just that—talk. In reality, there is no military option available short of large-scale use of nuclear weapons, which would kill tens of millions of innocents, to annihilate ISIS in the Middle East.

Even then, inflicting nuclear Armageddon on Iraq and Syria—which is something no American president seeking to avoid war crimes and genocide charges can do—would achieve little in terms of mitigating the threat of jihadism inside the West today. A high percentage of the terror plots that are uncovered across the Western world, from Europe to North America to Australia, involve homegrown jihadists, native-born citizens and residents of Western countries. Even if ISIS disappeared from the Middle East tomorrow, the West would still be facing jihadist plots at home for years to come.

Read the whole thing.

BECAUSE IT UPSETS ALL THE RIGHT PEOPLE: ‘Black Rifles Matter’ Sign Causes Controversy.

ASIA PIVOT: Duterte wants US forces out of southern Philippines.

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte said Monday he wanted U.S. Special Forces out of his country’s south and blamed America for inflaming Muslim insurgencies in the region, in his first public statement opposing the presence of U.S. troops.
…
Duterte’s relationship with the U.S. has been a bit rocky since he became president in June. Duterte has been openly critical of American security policies aimed to chart a foreign policy that would not depend on America, his country’s treaty ally.

The U.S. military deployed troops to train, advise and provide intelligence and weapons to Filipino troops battling Al Qaeda-linked militant group Abu Sayyaf militants in the southern Philippines in 2002, but when most of them pulled out last year, the U.S. kept a few military advisers.

With China’s growing power, sometimes aggressively so, there’s an almost inevitable tendency for the smaller countries around China to gravitate toward the U.S. — a friendly outside power with no territorial ambitions. That’s in stark contrast to China, which has made claims or grabbed land (or even made land) in or near a semicircle of nations from India all the way up to Japan. It would take a really determined effort by an American President to screw up those natural alliances from developing or strengthening.

Well…

WASHINGTON POST: Clinton’s impulse to ‘power through’ with pneumonia set off cascade of problems.

Over at CNN this morning, Clinton campaign chief Robby Mook was blaming her staff. Somebody forgot to check the Journolist for today’s pravda.

NEVER CHANGE, New York Post.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: U.S. bombers fly over South Korea in show of force after nuclear test.

Two U.S. B-1 bombers flew over South Korea on Tuesday in a show of force and solidarity with its ally after North Korea’s nuclear test last week, while a U.S. envoy called for a swift and strong response to Pyongyang from the United Nations.

Speaking in the South Korean capital on Tuesday, Sung Kim, the U.S. envoy on North Korea, added that the United States remained open to meaningful dialogue with Pyongyang on ending its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

“Our intention is to secure the strongest possible (U.N. Security Council) resolution that includes new sanctions as quickly as possible,” Kim told a news briefing after meeting his South Korean counterpart.

Russia and China are reportedly “ambivalent” about new sanctions. Besides which, both countries might find it convenient to allow North Korea to test the incoming U.S. president early in their first term.