It’s Wednesday, September 5th, 2018…and no, we’ll never be buying or wearing another Nike product again as long we live, along with returning or refusing any we receive as gifts.  And we’ll toss any Nike golf balls we find even further into the woods than where we find them.  We would urge you to do the same.

As for Bob Woodward’s book, Carl Bernstein’s reporting or anyone else who, after eight years of Obama, can’t find a single good to say about The Donald, or would intimate, after eight years of Biden, he’s out of his mind, these two pictures sum up our complete and triumphant contempt:

We should also offer a special shout-out to Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and the rest of the Dimocratic Senate contingent whose short-sighted pursuit of short-term political gain made the ascension of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the highest court in the land possible.

Meanwhile, as Jim Freeman notes at Best of the Web:

“…Today the Journal reports on what’s been happening outside of Washington:

American factory activity in August expanded at the strongest pace in more than 14 years, despite rising tensions with some of the U.S.’s largest trade partners.

The Institute for Supply Management on Tuesday said its manufacturing index rose to 61.3 in August, the highest level since May 2004, from 58.1 in July. Sales of factory-made products, or new orders, output and employment all grew at a faster pace in August.

Based on this bullish manufacturing report and another pleasant surprise today in the Census Bureau’s report on construction spending, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta raised its estimate of economic growth in the third quarter to a sizzling 4.7%.

One might conclude that allowing the economy to grow by reducing the burden of taxes and regulation is so simple that even an unhinged ignoramus can do it. Yet many seemingly sane and knowledgable politicians have proven unable to grasp the concept.

Therefore we must search for other explanations. Could it be that Donald Trump is not as crazy and ignorant as Mr. Woodward and his media brethren would have us believe?“

Just sayin’.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, since John McCain’s finally been laid to rest and his successor named, we offer Scott Morefield‘s thoughts on the late senator as our eulogy:

“…By all accounts, John McCain was a good and sincere man who loved his country, passionately believed what he believed, and meant well. He was doubtless a wonderful husband and father (at least to his second wife…

…and family), an honorable man, and yes, despite Trump’s ill-advised characterization of him during the 2016 election, a bona fide war hero.

And yet, from endless wars to a lax immigration policy and even to his vote that single-handedly saved a healthcare law that will eventually collapse, he was also a man who espoused policies that has and will result in untold suffering for millions upon millions of people.

In that way, John McCain the man was entirely different from John McCain the politician and policy maker. And it is McCain the politician and policy maker that the “Washington Establishment” really adores, even while pretending to love McCain the man.Because the character traits that make someone a good man are qualities that can be only be tolerated by liberals when one otherwise lets liberals have their way.

And if John McCain the politician was good at anything at all, it was letting liberals have their way.

Surely it’s possible to appreciate the honorable man, the war hero, the devoted husband and father while also abhorring the job he did as a politician…”

Or as just a war hero, though even that is, to some extent, as overhyped as the rest of McCain’s purported accomplishments…not to mention he should have served time in a U.S. prison for his involvement as a member of the infamous Keating Five.  As with John Glenn, only his prior service and fame saved him from the slammer.

Here’s the juice: like those who shared, if not his specific injuries, certainly his torture, suffering and privation, McCain never volunteered to be a POW: rather the status was thrust upon him.  And when viewed in the context of what his fellow POW’s also willingly endured, McCain’s refusal to accept repatriation…a.k.a., “parole or special treatment“…wasn’t particularly noteworthy.  After all, every single other POW also could have been on their way home on the next flight out of Hanoi…provided they were prepared to violate…

…the Code of Conduct.

In McCain’s case, when, less than a year after his imprisonment, his father, John S. McCain, Jr. was named commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, the North Vietnamese saw the potential for a propaganda coup by offering the younger McCain’s release: they could appear magnanimous while at the same time completely demoralizing the other American POWs.

But McCain refused, sticking with the Code of Conduct; or, in other words, he simply did his duty.  Which was nothing more than Jim Stockdale, Jack Fellowes, Rod Knutson, Dave Carey, Jack Ensch or Doug Hegdahl did; though their funerals have not been…nor ever will be…near as grand, their non-involvement in the perpetuation of ObamaCare over a fit of personal pique notwithstanding!

This neither diminishes McCain’s wartime record, nor does it unnecessarily elevate it.

Next up, writing at the WSJ, Kim Strassel details that from which the McCain funeral was deliberately designed to distract:

What Bruce Ohr Told Congress

He warned the FBI that Steele had credibility problems. The bureau forged ahead anyhow.

“To believe most media descriptions of Justice Department lawyer Bruce Ohr, he is a nonentity, unworthy of the attention President Trump has given him. This is remarkable, given that Mr. Ohr spent Tuesday confirming for Congress its worst suspicions about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s abuse of its surveillance and sourcing rules.

If Mr. Ohr is only now under the spotlight, it’s because it has taken so much effort to unpack his role in the FBI’s 2016 investigation of the Trump campaign. Over the past year, congressional investigators found out that Mr. Ohr’s wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion GPS, the opposition-research firm that gave its infamous dossier, funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign, to the FBI. They then discovered that Mr. Ohr had numerous interactions of his own with Fusion chief Glenn Simpson and dossier author Christopher Steele, and that he passed on information from these talks to the bureau. So the G-men were being fed the dossier allegations from both the outside and the inside.

This week’s news is that Mr. Ohr’s deliveries to the FBI came with a caveat. Congress already knew that Mr. Ohr had been aware of Mr. Steele’s political biases. In notes Mr. Ohr took of a September 2016 conversation with Mr. Steele, he wrote that the dossier author “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” Congressional sources tell me that Mr. Ohr revealed Tuesday that he verbally warned the FBI that its source had a credibility problem, alerting the bureau to Mr. Steele’s leanings and motives. He also informed the bureau that Mrs. Ohr was working for Fusion and contributing to the dossier project.

Mr. Ohr said, moreover, that he delivered this information before the FBI’s first application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a warrant against Trump aide Carter Page, in October 2016. Yet the FBI made no mention of this warning in the application, instead characterizing Mr. Steele as a “reliable” source. Nor does the application note that a senior Justice Department official’s spouse was contributing to the dossier and benefiting financially from a document the FBI was using in an investigation. That matters both because the FBI failed to flag the enormous conflict and because Mr. Steele’s work product potentially wasn’t entirely his own.

No reference to Mr. Ohr—direct or cloaked—can be found in any of the four applications for Page warrants, according to those who have seen them. This despite his more than a dozen conversations with FBI agents over the course of the probe that addressed the content in and sourcing behind the surveillance applications. I’m told Mr. Ohr made clear that these conversations variously included all the heavyweights in the FBI investigation—former lead investigator Peter Strzok, former FBI senior lawyer Lisa Page, and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. So senior people were very aware of his role, information and conflict.

All this is what Republicans are referring to when they hint that the Ohr interview provided solid evidence that the FBI abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “Before yesterday, we thought the FBI and DOJ had not disclosed material facts they were aware of in the FISA application. If Bruce Ohr testified truthfully, we now know that to be the case,” Rep. John Ratcliffe of Texas tweeted Wednesday…

Nothing to see here…have we told you about how wonderfully bipartisan John McCain was?!?

Moving on, courtesy of The College Fix via Drudge, when…

This professor asked ‘Why Can’t We Hate Men?’ Her university got hit with a Title IX complaint.

‘Disparate treatment’ doesn’t require ‘intent to harm’

“Suzanna Walters has the academic freedom to question why women shouldn’t be allowed to hate men, but her public remarks on the subject may have created regulatory trouble for her university. The National Coalition for Men filed a Title IX complaint against Northeastern University earlier this month, asking the Boston office of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to investigate an alleged 20-plus “women programs.”

…The “legal theory” behind the complaint is that Northeastern’s programs for women show “disparate treatment” of the sexes, even if it shows no “intent to harm” males or hostility toward them, which it said is based on “OCR policy.” It cites legal precedents from two federal appeals courts – the 2nd and 6th, but not the 1st, which is binding on Northeastern – that anti-male bias is unconstitutional “even in the absence of malicious intent” and “can be inferred when the overwhelming majority of the impacted parties are male.”

The coalition notes that men are a minority in higher education both nationally and more narrowly at Northeastern. It cites a 2015 study that found a two-to-one preference for hiring female applicants as biology, engineering, economics, and psychology professors.

Northeastern shows its anti-male bias by stating its preference for women in hiring and admissions practices and accepting financial aid from a program that explicitly bars men unless they are “underrepresented minority students.”

The university’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program also “has an overall hostile effect against male participants,” according to the coalition: Its “core” faculty and executive committee members are all women, and only two out of 100-plus visiting scholars were men. It has no comparable studies program for men’s issues…”

Walters’ hate-filled homily was initially met with this incredibly lame response from Northeastern: “Hate has no place here”.  Yeah,…

Any doubt, had Walters’ op-ed questioned why White men can’t hate women, gays or ethnics, not only would hate have had no place at Northeastern, neither would the author?!?

And in the Environmental Moment, forget the decades of sexual abuse, Francis ain’t goin’ down THAT rabbit hole, as we learn how the…

Pope decries “emergency” of plastics blighting world’s seas

“Pope Francis on Saturday called for concrete action to combat the “emergency” of plastics littering seas and oceans, lamenting the lack of effective regulation to protect the world’s waters. Building on his papacy’s concern for the environment, Francis issued a message aimed at galvanizing Christians and others to commit to saving what he hails as the “impressive and marvelous,” God-given gift of the “great waters and all they contain.”

…He also denounced as “unacceptable” the privatization of water resources at the expense of the “human right to have access to this good.”

With countries from Italy to Australia promoting policies to thwart migrants from arriving by sea, Francis prayed that “waters may not be a sign of separation of peoples, but of encounter for the human community.” “Let us pray that those who risk their lives at sea in search of a better future may be kept safe,” Francis added…”

Just when you’d thought you’d seen it all…just when you’d thought you’d seen it all!

Which brings us, sadly enough, to The Lighter Side:

Finally, we’ll call it a day with this from Speed Mach, deep in the heart of Texas:

Magoo