Happy Day after Labor Day, which is, let's face it, the real New Year's Day. The kids are heading back to school, the new television shows roll out soon, college football has begun, and the NFL's kickoff game is Thursday. Heck of a week ahead. Stephen Colbert's new program debuts tonight; Wednesday Apple has some "special event" planned to launch a new product, and then Friday is September 11, which we call Patriot Day, and some Islamists call Try to Kill Americans Even More Than Usual Day. As they used to say on Hill Street Blues, "Let's be careful out there." Remain Calm, Hillary Supporters! All Is Well! All Is Well! The New York Times lets us know that everything is fine in Hillary-land: "There will be new efforts to bring spontaneity to a candidacy that sometimes seems wooden and overly cautious." Got that? They're planning spontaneity. Rick Wilson: "The Autumn Campaign of Joy and Spontaneity! Join the All Party Cadre! Celebrate Kim Jon Hill! Extra gruel! Missile parades!" And if you're wondering about the "joy" reference . . . As she walked away from the podium with Ms. Shaheen, Mrs. Clinton raised her arms and her voice: "And off we go, joyfully," she said. Sounds like she's still thinking about her "adult fun camp" idea: We really need to have camps for adults. . . . None of the serious stuff. None of the life challenge stuff. More fun. I think we have a huge "fun deficit" in America. Oh, amidst all the Joy and Spontaneity, she'll be going negative on her opponents: And, to soothe Democrats uneasy about her shaky poll numbers, they want her to relentlessly contrast herself with Republicans, saying she is at her best when showing willingness to do battle. "The true game changer is when there's a personified opponent," said her communications director, Jennifer Palmieri. Translation: While we may be incapable of making a positive case for our candidate, we're really ruthless and effective at attacking opponents with negative ads, and once we've done that, the entire electorate will be so disgusted and dispirited that our loyal base will turn out in larger numbers than rival loyal bases. In the meantime . . . just keep lying and insisting that classified information isn't really classified information! A special intelligence review of two emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton received as secretary of state on her personal account — including one about North Korea's nuclear weapons program — has endorsed a finding by the inspector general for the intelligence agencies that the emails contained highly classified information when Mrs. Clinton received them, senior intelligence officials said. Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign and the State Department disputed the inspector general's finding last month and questioned whether the emails had been overclassified by an arbitrary process. But the special review — by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — concluded that the emails were "Top Secret," the highest classification of government intelligence, when they were sent to Mrs. Clinton in 2009 and 2011. On Monday, the Clinton campaign disagreed with the conclusion of the intelligence review and noted that agencies within the government often have different views of what should be considered classified. Meanwhile, our Shannen Coffin dissects the inanity of Hillary's claiming she simply "wasn't thinking" when she when she paid a former campaign staffer -- off the federal books -- to build the server and set up "Clinton.com" e-mail addresses for herself and close State Department aides, including her deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin; neglected to report her server to the Department of Homeland Security, as required by law; operated that server and her e-mail addresses for several months without a security certificate . . . and so on. Awful News for Everyone Who Thought Poetry Anthologies Are Based on Merit Oh, look, a furious ethnic scandal in the world of poetry, where a white guy got his poem accepted in the 2015 edition of Best American Poetry by writing under the pen name, "Yi-Fen Chou." A poem rejected by 40 journals under the name "Michael Derrick Hudson" suddenly became more liked by the editors. Isn't the 2015 edition of Best American Poetry precisely where you would expect to see runaway political correctness? Be bothered by this, but don't be surprised. For better or worse, the editor of the book comes out and addresses his thinking process openly and honestly: I did exactly what that pseudonym-user feared other editors had done to him in the past: I paid more initial attention to his poem because of my perception and misperception of the poet's identity. Bluntly stated, I was more amenable to the poem because I thought the author was Chinese American . . . And, hey, guess what? In paying more initial attention to Yi-Fen Chou's poem, I was also practicing a form of nepotism. I am a brown-skinned poet who gave a better chance to another supposed brown-skinned poet because of our brownness. For what it's worth, the editor is keeping the poem in the book: "But I believe I would have committed a larger injustice by dumping the poem. I think I would have cast doubt on every poem I have chosen for BAP. It would have implied that I chose poems based only on identity." Trump: I 'Always Felt That I Was in the Military' Because of Boarding School This won't bother Trump supporters. Nothing does. Donald Trump, who received draft deferments through much of the Vietnam War, told the author of a forthcoming biography that he nevertheless "always felt that I was in the military" because of his education at a military-themed boarding school. Mr. Trump said that his experience at the New York Military Academy, an expensive prep school where his parents had sent him to correct poor behavior, gave him "more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military." . . . According to the book, Mr. Trump attended the New York Military Academy after years of rowdy and rebellious behavior at Kew-Forest, a more traditional prep school in Queens. Mr. Trump once recalled giving a teacher at Kew-Forest a black eye "because I didn't think he knew anything about music." He arrived at the military academy -- where tuition now reaches $31,000 a year -- for eighth grade in 1959 and remained for high school. Like all students at the Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y., campus, he wore a uniform, participated in marching drills and was expected to conform to a hierarchy imposed by instructors, some of whom had served in the military. The book also quotes Trump as saying, "For the most part, you can't respect people because most people aren't worthy of respect." Gee, that philosophy couldn't be possibly be dangerous or a bad idea in a commander-in-chief, right? When you look back at the great presidents in American history, whichever ones you like -- George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, Truman, Ike, Ronald Reagan -- what comes shining through is that fundamental belief that most people aren't worthy of respect, right? ADDENDA: For perspective on how clumped-together the GOP field is now . . . the good news for Bobby Jindal is that he's moved from 12th place in Iowa to 7th place! Fantastic, right? Well, it doesn't look quite as impressive when you realize he's gone from one percent to four percent. But I'm sure he and his team will be happy nonetheless to see forward momentum… Finally, you will not want to miss this event!
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