OF COURSE, HIS SUPPORTERS...:

American voters believe 51 - 35 percent "that the Russian government has compromising information about President Trump," according to a Quinnipiac University National Poll released today. 

Republicans don't believe 70 - 18 percent there is compromising information, the only listed party, gender, education, age or racial group which does not believe it, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University National Poll finds.  [...]

The Helsinki summit between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin was a failure for the U.S., voters say 52 - 27 percent. The summit was a success for Russia, voters say 73 - 8 percent.  [...]

President Trump should defend all of America's NATO allies, American voters say 78 - 16 percent. 

A total of 68 percent of American voters are "very concerned" or "somewhat concerned" about President Trump's relationship with Russia, while 32 percent are "not so concerned" or "not concerned at all." 

American voters give President Trump a negative 38 - 58 percent job approval rating, compared to a negative 43 - 52 percent rating in a June 20 Quinnipiac University Poll after the summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

BREAKING: Federal judge orders immediate release of Ecuadorean immigrant detained while delivering pizza to Army base in New York.

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 24, 2018

#ALLCOMEDYISCONSERVATIVE:

Not the Onion and not Orwell's missing line from "1984". https://t.co/VphrWSg1EX

— Jeff Greenfield (@greenfield64) July 24, 2018

It can be awkward and painful. But when I give sexual harassment prevention training, I advise managers to give a gentle but firm and direct "no" to an underling seeking a personal relationship.https://t.co/XMYcXUsHNC

— WouldOrWouldn'tHat (@Popehat) July 24, 2018

So Trump is going to engage in government spending and redistributing income (welfare for farmers) in order to counterbalance the predictable impact of his liberal economic policy (protectionist tariffs).... https://t.co/6BVP7HH3dx

— Matt Lewis (@mattklewis) July 24, 2018

TEXTBOOK TRIBALISM:

For 70 years, Israel has been sitting on a contradiction.

From the time its founders inked their Declaration of Independence in the shadow of war against Arab neighbors, Israel defined itself as a Jewish state--one that gave Jews a safe haven after the horrors of the Second World War. But the country's foundational document signed in May 1948 also promised that Israel would "ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex." It guaranteed "freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture."

Seven decades later, it has become harder than ever for Israel to strike a balance between being a Jewish state and promising equal rights to all. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just tipped the scales--or rather, yanked them--in the direction of promoting the state's Jewish character. It's not clear that the equality outlined in the founders' vision statement remains a goal. It's certainly far from reality.

NOT IF HE'S FAITHFUL TO VLAD:

Left: Nunes memo.
Right: Actual FISA application, which didn't list names because of standard minimization procedures that Nunes himself obsessed over for months last year.
Just really, really bad faith. pic.twitter.com/y5U10Dbk4o

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) July 22, 2018

ONE OF US IS GOING TO PRISON YOU SILLY OLD FOOL....:

"It's not the recording that is valuable," one person said. "It's the backstory." Another person close to Cohen said that he was privy to information that could be valuable to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's attempt to interfere in the 2016 election. "When Michael says that he wants the truth out there, and that the truth is not the president's friend, he is not talking about marginal issues. He's talking about core issues at the heart of the Mueller probe," this person continued. Three people familiar with the situation believe that Cohen has discussed information about the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower, during which Don Jr., Kushner, and Paul Manafort met with a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin who promised to provide them with "dirt" on Hillary Clinton.

#ALLCOMEDYISCONSERVATIVE:

This is incredible. @FoxFriendsFirst thought they booked pro-ICE Dem Ann Kirkpatrick on show, but accidentally booked Barbara L'Italien
(@teambarbara) instead.

L'Italien delivers personal message to Trump saying "we must stop abducting children... stop putting kids in cages." pic.twitter.com/OnVAdBVjJB

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 23, 2018

NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR FATHER DID:

Branko Milanović grew up in Yugoslavia, during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. He became an economist at the World Bank and then a professor at cuny; on his blog, Globalinequality, he discusses economics and reminisces about the past. Recently, he published a post about his youth. He had been reading histories of the postwar decades, by Svetlana Alexievich, Tony Judt, and others. Faced with these grim accounts, Milanović felt protective of his past. "However hard I tried," he wrote, "I just could not see anything in my memories that had to deal with collectivization, killings, political trials, endless bread lines, imprisoned free thinkers," and so on. Instead, he had mainly good memories--of "long dinners discussing politics," the "excitement of new books," "languid sunsets, whole-night concerts, epic soccer games, girls in miniskirts." He worried that, with the passage of time, it was becoming harder to imagine life under Communism as anything other than a desperate struggle with deprivation and repression. He titled his post "How I Lost My Past."

Was the past good or bad? Are we on the right track or the wrong one? Is life getting better or worse? These questions are easy to ask--pollsters and politicians love asking them--but surprisingly hard to answer. Most historical and statistical evidence shows that life used to be shorter, sicker, poorer, more dangerous, and less free. Yet many people, like Milanović, have fond memories of bygone years, and wonder if reports of their awfulness have been exaggerated. Others concede that life used to be worse in some ways, but wonder if it wasn't also better in others--simpler, more predictable, more spiritual. It's common to appreciate modernity while fearing its destructive potential. (Life expectancy may be higher today, but it will be shorter after the nuclear-climate-bioterror apocalypse.) If being alive now doesn't feel particularly great, perhaps living in the past might not have felt particularly bad. Maybe human existence in most times and places is a mixed bag.

Last year, the Pew Research Center asked people around the world whether life had been better or worse in their countries fifty years ago. A slim plurality of Americans said they thought life had been better. In 1967, the United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War. Protest marches were taking place around the country, crime was surging, and race riots were breaking out in Detroit, Newark, Milwaukee, and other cities. That spring, a wave of tornadoes injured thousands across the Midwest; members of the Black Panther Party, carrying shotguns and rifles, marched into the California statehouse to protest a racially motivated gun-control law. In June, the Six-Day War broke out. Americans lived in smaller houses, ate worse food, worked more hours, and died, on average, seven years earlier. On the other hand, nasa launched several moon probes and Jimi Hendrix's "Are You Experienced" helped launch the Summer of Love. By an obscure retrospective calculus, the good appears to balance out the bad. Frightening events seem less so in retrospect. Memory is selective, history is partial, and youth is a golden age. For all these reasons, our intuitive comparisons between the past and the present are unreliable. Many Americans living in 1967 might well have thought that life had been better in 1917.

DONALD WHO?:

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley kicked off a conservative conference of high school students on Monday by urging attendees to avoid inflammatory language in favor of demonstrating real leadership.

"Raise your hand if you've ever posted anything online to quote-unquote 'own the libs,' " Haley asked at the High School Leadership Summit at George Washington University.

The vast majority raised their hands in response, and then erupted into spontaneous applause.

"I know that it's fun and that it can feel good, but step back and think about what you're accomplishing when you do this -- are you persuading anyone? Who are you persuading?" Haley asked. "We've all been guilty of it at some point or another, but this kind of speech isn't leadership -- it's the exact opposite."

"Real leadership is about persuasion, it's about movement, it's bringing people around to your point of view," she added. "Not by shouting them down, but by showing them how it is in their best interest to see things the way you do."

Haley, who was introduced to the audience by her son, said leadership is lacking in this country.

DUDE, YOU'RE KIDDING YOURSELF:

In a nutshell, here's what happened. A young woman, her boyfriend (Markeis McGlockton), and their young son pulled into a handicapped parking spot at a convenience store. While the car idled, McGlockton went inside to get snacks. While inside, a 47-year-old man named Michael Drejka (who reportedly has an odd history of initiating confrontations over parking spaces) approached the car and started an argument with McGlockton's girlfriend, Britany Jacobs.

McGlockton walked outside, saw Drejka and Jacobs arguing and pushed Drejka to the ground. While McGlockton stood a few feet away, Drejka pulled a gun and shot McGlockton in the chest. McGlockton staggered away, into the convenience store, where he died in front of his son.

Incredibly, the Pinellas County sheriff, Bob Gualtieri, is refusing to charge Drejka, citing Florida's stand-your-ground" law. At a news conference, Gualtieri said, "The law in the state of Florida today is that people have a right to stand their ground and have a right to defend themselves when they believe that they are in harm." This is an inexcusably bad misstatement of the law. Drejka should be charged, and law-abiding Florida gun owners should demand accountability.

WELCOME THEM BACK AND REUNITE THE FAMILIES:

The Trump administration said in a court filing Monday that 463 parents of migrant children are no longer present in the United States, indicating that the number of mothers and fathers potentially deported without their children during the "zero tolerance" border crackdown could be far larger than previously acknowledged.

CHOOSING TO BE PHARAOH INSTEAD OF THE JEWS:

Amid a moment of national euphoria, Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, emerged from retirement in July 1967 to warn Israelis they had sown the seeds of self-destruction.

Israel had just won a stunning military victory against its neighbors, elating Israelis with a sense that the grand experiment of a Jewish state might really work.

But Ben-Gurion insisted that Israel give up the territories it had conquered. If it did not, he said, occupation would distort the young state, which had been founded to protect not just the Jewish people but their ideals of democracy and pluralism.

Now, a half century and one year later, Israel has formally declared the right of national self-determination, once envisioned to include all within its borders, as "unique to the Jewish people." [...]

Above all, the law may be a choice between two visions of Israel that have come into growing tension. American diplomats have long issued a version of Ben-Gurion's warning: If Israel did not make peace with the Palestinians, they said, it would have to choose between its dual identities as a Jewish state and democratic one.

WHERE THE WAR STARTED:

The siege of Mecca was the first act of modern international jihad, an opening salvo in the war between a radical version of Islam and the West. It was also a challenge to the House of Saud, which had ruled the Arabian Peninsula since 1744, a radicalizing event for a young Osama bin Laden and a preview of what became al-Qaida.

As soon as word of the assault filtered back to the capital, Riyadh, the country's shaken royal rulers clamped down with a near-total news blackout, cutting off all Saudi phone lines to the outside world and closing the borders. When Mecca's police finally scrambled to the scene a few hours later, they were repelled by gunfire and suffered high casualties. The Ministry of the Interior then did the previously inconceivable: It sent troops -- the national guard, the regular army and special forces -- into Mecca.

But first the ministry had to cut a deal. Muslim tradition holds that the mosque is so sacred it's forbidden to bear arms there. Before reluctant Saudi soldiers agreed to follow orders, the Ministry of the Interior had to secure an authorization, a fatwa, from Muslim clerics vetting the counterattack as permissible under the circumstances. according to Yaroslav Trofimov, former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of The Siege of Mecca.