IF YOU’RE GOING TO ARGUE ABOUT AMERICA, YOU MIGHT AS WELL KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT. The Blessings of Liberty digs into the ideas, cases, and historical fights behind the Constitution with Jeffrey Rosen and guests who know the material cold.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dear Gavin Newsom — When You’ve Lost Ann Arbor… “The adoring throngs never materialized. One could hardly refer to the smattering of people who showed up for Newsom’s public events as ‘crowds.’ Democrats are very adept at astroturfing attendance, but the party wasn’t doing any favors for Newsom.”

IT’S EVERYWHERE: Morning Greatness: White House Launches Interactive Map Tracking Billions in Suspected Fraud.

TOO MUCH IS NEVER ENOUGH: Bill Gates’ Daughter Phoebe Faces Jail Time After Being Accused Of Profiting From Sales She Didn’t Drive. “A July 2026 Bloomberg investigation alleged that Phia co-founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni knowingly pushed for features within the software that took credit for sales they didn’t actually drive. The illicit practice carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison.”

ED MORRISSEY: Woke Will Eat Itself, Chapter MCLXII: WNBA Meets to Discover Definition of ‘Woman’, And …

Ahem. It wasn’t Enes Kantor Freedom or Royce White who created this problem. Sophie Cunningham didn’t create it either; an ESPN reporter demanded Cunningham’s opinion on it while Cunningham was criticizing the league’s treatment of her teammate Caitlin Clark. Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve made it worse by attempting to troll Cunningham at a game with a “Trans Kids Belong” T-shirt during a game against the Fever, and the Lynx made it worse by attacking women and girls who support Cunningham.

And now that two biological males want to compete in the league, the woke morons who run the league find themselves hoist by their own petard.

So when do these geniuses plan to settle on a definition of woman? Maybe they’ll drop it under the Christmas tree. No, I am not kidding:

The WNBA and team representatives from across the league met Wednesday, Aug. 12 for planned talks on various matters, including ongoing debate over transgender females’ participation in women’s basketball.

“Today’s meeting covered a wide range of topics, including ongoing discussions on transgender athletes and the continued hate and vitriol directed at players online. We will continue to engage all league stakeholders in the coming weeks and months,” a statement USA TODAY received from a WNBA spokesperson said.

“Weeks and months”? Will it take the Women’s National Basketball Association “weeks and months” to define the word “women”? What did the league think it meant for the past thirty years since its founding?

They’ll get back to Ed on that in weeks or months, or after they’ve chosen where to go for lunch, depending upon which comes first:

Sad: WNBA Task Force Fails To Define Woman After Spending Entire Meeting Trying To Pick Restaurant For Lunch https://t.co/enE6fnxsGl

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) August 14, 2026

Related:

“If woman ran the world”… bitch they can’t run a league that’s funded by men. https://t.co/U8aeuGqE92

— EducatëdHillbilly™ (@RobProvince) August 13, 2026

BACKLASH: McKinney Mosque Vote Sparks Recall Effort Targeting Mayor, 3 Council Members.

AWFL NEWS:

‘Nuff said https://t.co/TOPE4HEujF pic.twitter.com/j0va3i9zHq

— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) August 14, 2026

THE ENEMY WITHIN: Two federal agencies routed taxpayer dollars to terror-linked charities, new reports find. “Charities.”

ICYMI: Is Trump Pal David Ellison About to Get the Greenlight to Buy Warner?

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot:

Chaser:

Earlier: Under James Murdoch, New York Magazine Tilts Toward Hamas.

I KEEP TELLING PEOPLE NOT TO GET COCKY:

The most dangerous thing Republicans can do is underestimate candidates like AOC in 2028.

We need to focus on addressing the issues that are attracting voters to them instead of dismissing their concerns.

Time to get serious. https://t.co/vS6rkgBDVu

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 13, 2026

MAGA: Apple’s Tim Cook joined by Howard Lutnick in opening Houston manufacturing plant.

Apple CEO Tim Cook was joined by government officials, including Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, on Wednesday to open a new manufacturing facility offering free training and educational classes for businesses in Houston, Texas.

The facility is also where Apple will manufacture Mac Mini desktop computers later this year, the company said. AI servers for Apple are also assembled at a portion of the location.

“We stood up a factory, started production, and shipped the first advanced AI servers off the line, and with Mac Mini production set to begin later this year,” Cook said, adding that Apple had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the facility.

What the country really needs though is more RAM and SSD fabs.

The Mac mini is great — I love mine, and the unified memory architecture makes the Pro model with upgraded RAM a surprisingly capable LLM server.

But in addition to the price hikes forced by the memory storage, it’s now a two-and-a-half month wait for the model I received overnight back in April.

LIMITED TIME DEAL: BAMBOO COOL Men’s Underwear Breathable Boxer Briefs. #CommissionEarned

CONSCIOUSNESS OF GUILT: This Isn’t Suspicious: Michigan Secretary of State Requires Deletion of Election Records One Week After Certification.

JUSTICE: Fifth Circuit Allows 2021 Texas Election Integrity Law To Finally Go Into Effect. “In short, we have been playing an exhausting game of Whac-A-Mole to correct the district court’s mishandling of this case.”

JOHN LUCAS: Rules for Radicals? Whither the WNBA? Sophie’s choice — Honesty and candor over cowardice.

INCLUDING THE MOST CRINGEWORTHY POLITICAL AD IN RECENT YEARS: The Gentleman’s Guide to Destroying the DSA, Humiliating El-Sayed, and Saving America!

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION:

The chances are quite high that virtually every gender clinic and doctor in America already has a long backlog of criminal acts that will be trivially easy to discover — and that now will be found and prosecuted https://t.co/WbYFQ1TDQd

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) August 13, 2026

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Kamala Harris Issues Dire Warning That SAVE America Act Could Result In America Being Saved https://t.co/dyXgRavq4g

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) August 13, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Let’s see your best work tonight.

BAD IDEAS GET MUCH HARDER TO KILL ONCE THEY ACQUIRE CREDENTIALS. A shaky claim becomes a study, the study becomes a textbook lesson, and the lesson becomes conventional wisdom. Kitty Genovese and the Stanford Prison Experiment show why we need better ways to trace bad claims, broken citations, and everything built on top of them.

I HOPE SO: SpaceX could make $500 billion in 2028, Elon Musk says.

Related: SpaceX AI Data Center Will Be Rented by Microsoft for Hundreds of Billion Per Year.

TOXIC: FDA Finds Bacteria in a Third of ‘Sterile’ Tattoo Inks, And That’s a Problem.

CRAZY:

I still think about the random utility truck driver who was fired because someone got him to do an "ok" symbol.

— Lefty's Cheap Hotel (@JrWannamaker) August 13, 2026

Related:

Tyler is obviously right and this is one meta irony that perpetually floats over academia for me:

So many academics think political activism is the most important thing.

Yet, academics are reliably the most incompetent political actors IRL, they lack the say they should have in… https://t.co/Jvk1Hkae9I

— Coddled Affluent Professional (@feelsdesperate) August 13, 2026

TADALAFIL AND GLAUCOMA: Popular Erectile Dysfunction Drug Linked to Vision-Threatening Eye Disease.