BIRDS OF A FEATHER:

The highest-ranking North Korean defector in decades told me Kim Jong UN likes President Trump because he's not "moral," and doesn't judge."All previous US presidents so far have been very moral and they paid great attention on the America's moral image," he said of Trump.

— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) June 30, 2019

WITH NO ONE RUNNING WHO TICKS ALL THREE BOXES...:

PROPS:

Press Secretary @StephGrisham45 bruised as she physically fights off North Koreans to get access for US press to witness Trump Kim meeting. pic.twitter.com/4ROFXR9UMi

— The Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) June 30, 2019

WHY WOULD YOU REGISTER THEM?:

Motel 6 has agreed to pay $10 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over claims the budget chain routinely provided guest lists from properties in Arizona to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, court documents showed on Saturday.

WHY SHOULD OUR GUY BE THE ONLY LAUGHINGSTOCK:

It's not they are falling in line with her idea to "harness love" to defeat US President Donald Trump. It's that they want to keep her in future Democratic debates. For her entertainment value.

Republican strategist Jeff Roe, who ran the 2016 presidential campaign for Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican of Texas, posted a tweet at the end of the second debate on Thursday night calling on Republicans to donate $1 to Williamson's campaign.

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON...:

The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh will give more than $650,000 to victims of the Christchurch terror attacks on two mosques that left 51 worshippers dead.

More than $60,000 of that total was raised by the Tree of Life congregation, which was targeted by an anti-Semitic gunman five months earlier on October 27, 2018.

"After the March 15 attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, we feel compelled to come to the aid of those communities, just as our Jewish community was so compassionately supported only a few short months ago by people around the world of many faiths. We recall with love the immediate, overwhelming support Tree of Life received from our Muslim brothers and sisters in Pittsburgh," the congregation wrote on the GoFundMe page it set up two days after the Christchurch attack in order to raise funds for the Federation's effort.

AN UNPRINCIPLED PRINCIPLE:

Judge Haywood Gilliam, of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, expanded a previous order from May blocking Trump from building the wall in parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The court added four more sections of the wall along the southern border in Arizona and California to the no-build list, and made permanent the previous order.

Administration officials have pushed for alternate ways to fund the wall after Congress denied Trump the over $5 billion he had requested earlier this year. The administration appealed the court's earlier order last month, arguing that building the wall was a top priority for the administration to stop high levels of drug smuggling.

"Another activist Obama appointed judge has just ruled against us on a section of the Southern Wall that is already under construction," Trump tweeted after Gilliam's earlier order. "This is a ruling against Border Security and in favor of crime, drugs and human trafficking. We are asking for an expedited appeal!"

Gilliam noted in his decision that using defense funding for the wall eschews Congress' intent in denying Trump's desired funding, and that the administration's policy priorities cannot justify bypassing Congress' authority.

"Defendants' position on these factors boils down to an argument that the Court should not enjoin conduct found to be unlawful because the ends justify the mean," Gilliam wrote. "No case supports this principle."

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

Last year, in a now-infamous commencement address to the graduates at the Reform movement's Hebrew Union College, novelist Michael Chabon surprised his audience with a disquisition on the virtues of intermarriage, which he described as the "source of all human greatness." Expressing abhorrence of "homogeneity and insularity, exclusion and segregation," he urged the graduates--newly credentialed rabbis and educators--to "find room in our Jewish community for all those who want to share in our traditions."

In a scathing response, Sylvia Fishman, Steven Cohen, and Jack Wertheimer charged Chabon with seeking to "dismantle Judaism." Their real quarry, however, was not the showboating novelist but rather the "left camp" in the broader Jewish communal debate over intermarriage. By failing to come to terms with the damage intermarriage has caused to Jewish family and communal life, Fishman, Cohen, and Wertheimer argued, advocates for greater outreach to intermarried families opened the door to Chabon's more extreme rhetoric: "We urge the proponents of welcoming and inclusion . . . to think anew about where they stand in regard to Chabon's challenge. . . . Where would you draw boundaries?"

Robert Mnookin, a Harvard Law professor and self-described secular Jew, picks up that gauntlet. His book, The Jewish American Paradox, advocates broadening the criteria for inclusion in the Jewish collective and opening wide the doors of Jewish communal life. The book expresses Mnookin's conviction that only a Judaism of choice, open to all who publicly declare their belonging, has any prospect of flourishing in American society.

LAUGHINGSTOCK:

I don't remember exactly when I first saw the photo. I just know it was when Donald Trump wasn't yet president--that's why it was still funny. The Republican nominee had been photographed in a three-piece white suit, his arm around his 14-year-old daughter Ivanka, who is bizarrely stroking his face, and the two of them are both perched, somehow, on a sculpture that looks like it depicts two parrots having sex.

The parrots are not, in fact, having sex, as Slate's Matthew Dessem discovered. There are actually three parrots in the sculpture, and none of them are in flagrante delicto--it just looks like they are because of the angle. This is, if anything, weirder: If the parrots aren't having sex, how strange that a photograph of Trump and his teenage daughter was taken from an angle that made it look like they were sitting next to copulating birds. Did no one notice?

For as long as I've been obsessed with this photo, I hadn't known its exact origin until Thursday's episode of The Daily. In that episode, E. Jean Carroll, Lisa Birnbach, and Carol Martin discuss Carroll's alleged assault by Trump in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. Carroll and Birnbach both said the attack occurred when Birnbach was in the midst of interviewing Trump for a magazine story about Mar-a-Lago. That story ran in New York magazine in February 1996, and the opening photo is the one of Trump with Ivanka perched atop the parrots. The caption reads: "A personal moment: Donald with his daughter Ivanka, poolside. You're welcome to join them."

The odd image fits perfectly with Birnbach's story, which also includes a photo of a landscaped, silvery-gold Mar-a-Lago fire hydrant (caption: "All that glitters"). Trump had recently transformed Mar-a-Lago from a private estate to a pricey golf club, where one of the perks of membership was proximity to the Trump family. The piece is structured as a near-verbatim transcript of Trump leading Birnbach on an elaborate tour, one in which the future president appears to be in on the joke. Yes, we may mock his parrot sculpture, but that's the price he's willing to pay for free publicity. And New York magazine was certainly willing to play along. The subhead of Birnbach's story: "Donald Trump spends the weekend with our lucky reporter inside Palm Beach's Mar-a-Lago Club, his first-classiest, best-people-iest, most-exclusive (and yet unrestricted) vacation home-cum-not quite hotel." In 1996, if not today, these Trumpian superlatives surely read as a harmless way for a magazine to mock its bombastic subject.

THE RED/GREEN SHOW:

In northern Georgia, near the Tennessee line, the city of Dalton made its fame as the carpet capital of the world. These days, a more accurate title would be floor covering capital of the world. It has diversified into hardwood, tile, laminate and other materials.

And in a big move last year, Dalton added a new industry to its manufacturing mix: the largest solar panel assembly plant in the Western hemisphere, a $150 million investment.

This is just one sign that in Georgia, solar is booming.

And it's not for the reasons you might expect. Like most states in the Southeast, Georgia doesn't have the kind of state-level mandates that have propelled the growth of renewable energy in other parts of the country. Nor is it because of a groundswell of public concern over climate change or the need to curb greenhouse gases.

Instead, there are powerful market forces at work. The U.S. is the second-largest market for solar in the world, after China. Ever cheaper and better solar technology, available land and lots of sunshine are driving demand for massive, utility-scale solar projects across the American Southeast.

"This is the largest region for solar installations in the next five years," says Scott Moskowitz, director of strategy and market intelligence for Hanwha Q Cells America.

FACTS ARE STUBBORN THINGS:

This is how the police report described the scene they found at the bakery minutes after the shoplifting:

On Wednesday, November 9, 2016, at approximately 4:58pm, officers responded to the area of Gibson's Bakery in reference to a report of a fight in progress. As officers were responding to the area, dispatch advised that this was involving an alleged theft complaint. Dispatch advised that Allyn Gibson, who is an employee of Gibson's Bakery, was attempting to apprehend a subject who Allyn had witnessed attempt to steal several items. As officers approached the area, Sgt. Ortiz, and Officer Feuerstein both stated they observed Allyn Gibson lying on his back with several individuals kneeling over him punching and kicking him with several other individuals in the immediate area. Officers attempted to gain control of the situation and were met several times with resistance from several different individuals. After a few minutes officers were finally able to take one female into custody and calm the incident and attempt to figure out what had taken place.

Activists on campus immediately concluded the arrest of the three students was evidence of racial profiling, which suggests an assumption that either the students were falsely accused on account of their race, or that Gibson's was happy to allow whites to shoplift but drew the line at blacks. I heard versions of these two theories during interviews I conducted with dozens of the student protesters. The day after the incident, about 200-300 students and others gathered outside the bakery. Inflamed with righteous anger, they chanted accusations of racism and distributed flyers that read:

DON'T BUY. This is a RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING AND DISCRIMINATION.

Today we urge you to shop elsewhere in light of a particularly heinous event involving the owners of this establishment and local law enforcement.

PLEASE STAND WITH US.

A member of our community was assaulted by the owner of this establishment yesterday. A nineteen y/o young man was apprehended and choked by Allyn Gibson of Gibson's Food Mart & Bakery. The young man, who was accompanied by 2 friends was choked until the 2 forced Allyn to let go. After The [sic] young man was free, Allyn chased him across College St. and into Tappan Square. There, Allyn tackled him and restrained him again until the Oberlin police arrived. The 3 were racially profiled on the scene. They were arrested without being questioned, asked their names, or read their rights. 2 were released shortly after and charged with assault. The young man is being held in Lorain County Jail, charged with robbery. No bail until his arraignment this Friday 8:30 AM, 65 S. Main.

The protests occurred on Thursday, November 10 and Friday, November 11. There were no arrests for disorderly conduct by the protesters, although an Oberlin police officer at the protests described a "mob mentality" in his court testimony. The Oberlin College student Senate passed its resolution on the first night of the protests. In addition to endorsing the boycott, it read:

A Black student was chased and assaulted at Gibson's after being accused of stealing. Several other students, attempting to prevent the assaulted student from sustaining further injury, were arrested and held by the Oberlin Police Department. In the midst of all this, Gibson's employees were never detained and were given preferential treatment by police officers.

Gibson's has a history of racial profiling and discriminatory treatment of students and residents alike.

But, despite the students' claims and the vehemence of the language with which they were made, police and others testified that there had been no complaints or allegations of racism made against the family business since it opened in 1885. Not one.

Locals figured the school had this all wrong. A longtime Oberlin resident, Emily Crawford, who also worked in the school's communications department, sent an email to her bosses during the protests which was forwarded to senior members of the college's administration. It read:

I have talked to 15 townie friends who are poc (persons of color) and they are disgusted and embarrassed by the protest. In their view, the kid was breaking the law, period (even if he wasn't shoplifting, he was underage). To them this is not a race issue at all and they do not believe the Gibsons are racist. They believe the students have picked the wrong target ... I find this misdirected rage very disturbing, and it's only going to widen the gap (between) town and gown.

Later that week, a letter was sent by school President Marvin Krislov and Dean of Students, Meredith Raimondo (later named, along with the college, as co-defendant in the case) to the student body. Here is a part of what it said:

Dear Students,

This has been a difficult few days for our community, not simply because of the events at Gibson's Bakery, but because of the fears and concerns that many are feeling in response to the outcome of the presidential election. We write foremost to acknowledge the pain and sadness that many of you are experiencing. We want you to know that the administration, faculty, and staff are here to support you as we work through this moment together.

Regarding the incident at Gibson's, we are deeply troubled because we have heard from students that there is more to the story than what has been generally reported. We will commit every resource to determining the full and true narrative, including exploring whether this is a pattern and not an isolated incident. We are dedicated to a campus and community that treats all faculty, staff and students fairly and without discrimination. We expect that our community businesses and friends share the same values and commitments.

Within a week of the protests, the local police produced a report which listed the age and race of every person arrested in Gibson's for shoplifting between January 2011 and November 2016. These are the numbers: 40 arrests, 33 of which were college students; 32 were white (80 percent), six were African American (15 percent), and two were Asian (5 percent). According to the 2010 U.S. Census numbers, those figures are consistent with the town's racial composition: 73 percent white, 14.8 percent African American, and 4 percent Asian. During the trial, a black former employee and a black current employee both vehemently defended Gibson's against accusations of racism, either in the family's treatment of customers or staff.

In August 2017, the three accused students, none of whom had any priors, plead out to lesser misdemeanor charges of attempting an underage alcohol purchase, and received no time in jail and a clear record after one year of probation. All three read this statement in court: "I believe the employees of Gibson's actions were not racially motivated. They were merely trying to prevent an underage sale."

NO FAIR FIGHTING BACK!:

Many are worried about the risk of war between the US and Iran. But the truth is, the US has been fighting with Iran for decades in an economic war waged via sanctions -- which is about to get a lot worse.

Concerns about a war of guns, warplanes and missiles grew after Iran shot down a US spy drone amid already worsening tensions. President Donald Trump says he ordered a retaliatory strike in response -- only to reverse course at the last minute.

Whether or not a shooting war does break out, the United States' economic war has already been intensifying over the past year. Today, June 24, Trump imposed "hard-hitting" new sanctions on Iran in response to the attack on the drone.

Existing sanctions have already devastated innocent Iranians. Not only that, they've undermined long-accepted principles of international cooperation and diplomacy, a topic I've been researching for the past 25 years.

GOING THE OTHER WAY:

Heading west, the Staffords, the Lijeks, Anders, and several Iranians avoided detection. They had almost reached the British embassy when they encountered yet another demonstration. A local in their group gave some quick advice -- "Don't go that way" -- and then she melted into the crowd. The group zigzagged to Anders' nearby apartment, at one point sneaking single-file past an office used by the komiteh, one of the gun-wielding, self-appointed bands of revolutionaries that controlled much of Tehran.

They locked the door and switched on Anders' lunch-box radio, a standard-issue "escape and evade" device that could connect with the embassy's radio network. Marines were squawking frantically, trying to coordinate with one another. Someone calling himself Codename Palm Tree was relaying a bird's-eye view of the takeover: "There are rifles and weapons being brought into the compound." This was Henry Lee Schatz, an agricultural attach who was watching the scene from his sixth-floor office in a building across the street from the compound. "They're being unloaded from trucks."

The Iran hostage crisis, which would go on for 444 days, shaking America's confidence and sinking President Jimmy Carter's reelection campaign, had begun. Americans would soon be haunted by Khomeini's grim visage, and well-armed Islamic militants would parade blindfolded hostages across the nightly news and threaten trials for the "spies" that they'd captured. Everyone remembers the 52 Americans trapped at the embassy and the failed rescue attempt a few months later that ended with a disastrous Army helicopter crash in the Iranian desert. But not many know the long- classified details of the CIA's involvement in the escape of the other group -- thrust into a hostile city in the throes of revolution.

By 3 o'clock that afternoon, the five people huddled in Anders' one-bedroom apartment realized they were in serious trouble. As the militants seized control, there were fewer English speakers on the radio net. Codename Palm Tree had fled. After the last holdouts in the chancery's vault radioed their surrender, the only voices coming through the box were speaking in Farsi. The embassy was lost. The escapees were on their own.

The CIA was in chaos when Tony Mendez arrived at his desk the next morning. People dashed through the halls, clutching files and papers. Desks were piling up with "flash" cables -- the highest-priority messages, reserved for wartime situations.

Mendez, 38, had been at the agency during the Vietnam War. But this seemed worse. At least then the US had another government to talk to. In Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Revolutionary Council refused to negotiate. With no diplomatic channels open, clandestine efforts were the last hope. But since the revolution had begun a year earlier, most of the CIA's intelligence infrastructure in Iran had been destroyed. As former head of the Disguise Section and current authentication chief of the CIA's Graphics and Authentication Division, Mendez oversaw logistical operations behind the tens of thousands of false identities the CIA was running. He knew there were only three field agents in Iran and that they had all been captured at the embassy.

At first, Mendez thought his job was to free the hostages. He started suiting up agents to penetrate Iran, and he spent a whirlwind 90 hours straight working on a plan called Operation Bodyguard in which a dead body double for the Shah would be used to arrange for the hostages' release. It was a gorgeous plan, he thought. But the White House rejected it.

Then, a few weeks after the takeover of the embassy, Mendez received a memorandum from the State Department marked as secret. The news was startling: Not everyone in the embassy had been captured. A few had escaped and were hiding somewhere in Tehran. Only a handful of government officials knew the details because Carter's advisers and the State Department didn't want to tip off the Iranians.

Mendez had spent 14 years in the CIA's Office of Technical Service -- the part of the spy shop known for trying to plant explosives in Fidel's cigars and wiring cats with microphones for eavesdropping. His specialty was using "identity transformation" to get people out of sticky situations. He'd once transformed a black CIA officer and an Asian diplomat into Caucasian businessmen -- using masks that made them ringers for Victor Mature and Rex Harrison -- so they could arrange a meeting in the capital of Laos, a country under strict martial law. When a Russian engineer needed to deliver film canisters with extraordinarily sensitive details about the new super-MiG jet, Mendez helped his CIA handlers throw off their KGB tails by outfitting them with a "jack-in-the-box." An officer would wait for a moment of confusion to sneak out of a car. As soon as he did, a spring-loaded mannequin would pop up to give the impression that he was still sitting in the passenger seat. Mendez had helped hundreds of friendly assets escape danger undetected.

For the operation in Tehran, his strategy was straightforward: The Americans would take on false identities, walk right out through Mehrabad Airport, and board a plane. Of course, for this plan to work, someone would have to sneak into Iran, connect with the escapees, equip them with their false identities, and lead them to safety past the increasingly treacherous Iranian security apparatus. And that someone was him.

TRUMPONOMICS!

 Apple will manufacture its new Mac Pro computer in China, shifting away from a U.S. assembly line it had been using for that product in recent years, according to a report published Friday.

THANKS, W!:

When Justice Anthony Kennedy retired a year ago, it was obvious that Chief Justice John Roberts--nobody's median anything--would become the court's center of gravity, while remaining its center of gravitas.

As Roberts' first term as the court's decisive vote in major political cases has drawn to a close, he has centered that gravity around upholding the legitimacy of the court as an institution--while pushing our nation's laws as far to the right as possible without cracking the façade of that institutional integrity. In an age of crudeness and ugliness, the Last Reasonable Man still values moral seriousness over scoring points or throwing tantrums, much to the chagrin of the enemies on his own side.

LEADERS OF THE FREE WORLD:

After 20 years of trying, the European Union on Friday finally reeled in its biggest trade deal by striking an accord with the South American Mercosur bloc.

The political deal will give the European Commission something to brag about at the summit of G20 leading economies in Osaka, where the EU's free-trade agenda is finding itself increasingly isolated in the face of U.S. protectionism and Russian President Vladimir Putin's assertions that liberalism has had its day.

Indeed, only moments after the deal was struck, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said in a statement that it was a "historical moment" precisely because of the fevered global debate. "In the midst of international trade tensions, we are sending today a strong signal with our Mercosur partners that we stand for rules-based trade," he said.

Also suggesting that the world is fracturing along ideological lines on openness to trade, EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström added: "This agreement adds four more countries to our impressive roster of trade allies."

ONLY SORTA PRO-LIFE:

Further upriver in Mission, the bodies of a woman and three children were found Sunday in Anzalduas Park, which hugs a curve of the Rio Grande. Officials with the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it appeared the woman, two infants and a toddler died from dehydration and heat exposure.

Their deaths are part of a recent spike in migrants' deaths along the Texas-Mexico border, according to the Missing Migrants Project, which tracks migrant disappearances and deaths. The group has recorded 29 deaths so far this month on the Texas side of the Rio Grande -- the highest monthly total since 59 deaths were recorded last August. Ramirez and his daughter aren't counted in that total because their bodies were discovered on the Mexico side of the river.

Overall, the group has recorded 61 deaths along the Texas-Mexico border so far this year, compared with 89 during the first six months last year and 49 over the same period in 2017. According to the group, 207 migrants died on the Texas-Mexico border in 2018, and 190 died in 2017.

THE MORE THEY ATTACK HIM THE BETTER HE LOOKS:

New York Magazine on Friday took a look at the results of some live polling of 210 Democratic voters from seven demographic groups conducted by pollster Stanley Greenberg during the debates, finding what the report described as some "good news" for Biden. Although pundits saw the debate as downright brutal for the former vice president, according to this limited live-polling, Biden's "overall approval rose after he was done debating."

Additionally, while Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who sparred with Biden during the debate's most notable moment over his civil rights record, increased her African-American approval in this live-polling, Biden actually did as well. Greenberg told New York Magazine that Biden received "significant African-American support" when he defended himself against Harris' criticism. By the end of the second night of debating, Biden and Harris had the highest approval ratings, the report says, although most groups felt Harris won.

AND HALF OF THEM ARE JUST TREND-SUCKING...:

U.S. adults estimate that nearly one in four Americans (23.6%) are gay or lesbian. Gallup has previously found that Americans have greatly overestimated the U.S. gay population, recording similar average estimates of 24.6% in 2011 and 23.2% in 2015. In each of the three polls in which Gallup has asked this question, a majority of Americans estimated this population to be 20% or greater.

Americans' estimate of the proportion of gay people in the U.S. is more than five times Gallup's more encompassing 2017 estimate that 4.5% of Americans are LGBT, based on respondents' self-identification as being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

THE SHI'A CRESCENT VS OUR WAHHABI/SALAFI ENEMY:

DONALD WHO?:

The European Union announced that its INSTEX mechanism to facilitate trade with Iran was up and running on Friday.

"France, Germany, and the United Kingdom informed participants that INSTEX had been made operational and available to all EU member states, and that the first transactions are being processed," said an EU statement.

INSTEX, which stands for Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges, is a payment system that will allow companies to trade with Iran despite harsh US sanctions. It will function as a diplomatic shield allowing the exchange of goods without requiring direct transfers of money between Iran and EU companies.

A CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE:

Among the many interesting discussions at this year's Centre for Policy Studies Margaret Thatcher conference on Britain and America was a panel on 'The Anglo-Saxon Model: In Need of Repair?', chaired by Anne Applebaum and featuring Megan McArdle, Alastair Heath and Ryan Streeter. The conversation went to the heart of the current economic and political settlement on both sides of the pond.

Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, argued that those of us who support what we might broadly consider democratic capitalism have been failing to make the case for free markets recently, or have allowed the brand to become unfairly tarnished.

It's true that few know about the extraordinary gains that the global market economy has brought to the emerging world. But at home, the free-market has been tarnished by the financial crisis. Some argue this is unfair for a simple reason: the banking system is about as far away from a free-market as it's possible to get. It requires government licenses to enter, relies on government deposit insurance to survive, and at its heart sits a central planning authority which sets its fundamental price: the interest rate. Its profits are private and its losses public.

NOONE KNOWS NOTHIN':

WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME?:

...AND CHEAPER...:

A short time ago, solar power was considered a marginal power source. But it is now one of the major drivers behind the transition to greener, more sustainable sustainable energy.

Around the globe, prices are falling and India is now producing the world's cheapest solar power, according to an International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) survey.

The costs of building large-scale solar installations in India fell by 27% in 2018, year-on-year, thanks to a combination of low-priced panel imports from China, abundant land and cheap labour.

WAR = WAR:

THOSE IRKSOME DUTIES:

Whatever his exact reasons for adopting a more Stoical approach to life, Cicero unwittingly (but perhaps gracefully?) prepared Rome for Christianity in ways that other pagans and paganisms could never have allowed or done. That generation of Stoics, including Virgil and Seneca, expected, amazingly enough, the human incarnation of the God of gods. It is little wonder, then, that so many of the early Church fathers--such as Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose--considered Cicero to be a pagan Christian, more related to Christ and his teachings than not. Most certainly, his martyrdom on December 7, 43 BC, did not hurt his cause among Christians, either.

Cicero begins his treatise, On Duties, by praising his son for having chosen philosophy as a discipline of study, and Athens as the area in which to study. He should, however, never forget that he is a Latin, not a Greek, and he should, accordingly, combine things Latin with things Greek.

Then, Cicero throws down the gauntlet, defining one of the most important aspects of Western civilization. A man, if judged properly, will never be judged by his rights. Instead, all right judgment is judgment of the success and execution of one's duties.

Although philosophy offers many problems, both important and useful, that have been fully and carefully discussed by philosophers, those teachings which have been handed down on the subject of moral duties seem to have the widest practical application. For no phase of life, whether public or private, whether in business or in the home, whether one is working on what concerns oneself alone or dealing with another, can be without its moral duty; on the discharge of such duties depends all that is morally right, and on their neglect all that is morally wrong in life.*

In a modern and post-modern world saturated with our talk of rights, more rights, and still more rights, Cicero seems somewhat antiquated. Yet, he holds his ground. Virtue, by its very nature--that is, "virtue" as the very "power of man"--is the nature of man and at the heart of man and all good, right, and proper living and order. Following the teachings of Aristotle, especially, Cicero notes that man, of all creatures, not only has the desire to procreate and continue the species, but he also has a share of reason.

Reason, when properly employed (the practical Latins always care more about the usefulness of a thing than do the Socratic Greeks), leads one to seek all that is blessed in life. Reason, after all, brings real diversity to life. "Above all, the search after truth and its eager pursuit are peculiar to man," he advises his son. "And so, when we have leisure from the demands of business cares, we are eager to see, to hear, to learn something new, and we esteem a desire to know the secrets or wonders of creation as indispensable to a happy life." As such, there is no greater philosophy, or love of wisdom, than the discovery of what makes life worth living, and what our duties are to one another, to our communities, and to our God.

Moreover, the subject of this inquiry is the common property of all philosophers; for who would presume to call himself a philosopher, if he did not inculcate any lessons of duty? But there are some schools that distort all notions of duty by the theories they propose touching the supreme good and the supreme evil. For he who posits the supreme good as having no connection with virtue and measures it not by a moral standard but by his own interests -- if he should be consistent and not rather at times over-ruled by his better nature, he could value neither friendship nor justice nor generosity; and brave he surely cannot possibly be that counts pain the supreme evil, nor temperate he that holds pleasure to be the supreme good.

In these vital matters, Cicero continues, only the Stoics fully understand. Others come close, but they fail to grasp the essence of goodness, of virtue, and of duty.

Never would God have given man the ability to pursue goodness, truth, or beauty without the desire that we do so. 

I humbly reach out to the only faction of Americans I know of who have the ear of the administration and who care about children: my brothers and sisters in Christ who attend evangelical churches. It seems clear that we are in the midst of a profound humanitarian crisis and that children are being forced to suffer in terrible ways. Maybe it was never supposed to be this way; maybe the system just got overwhelmed. But this is a disaster. Children are programmed to think that any separation from a parent or a caregiver is a life-or-death situation. I keep imagining one of these children having a dream that he's home, with his mother and brothers and sisters, but then waking up to see he's still in a terrible place. If evangelical Christians stood up for these children, things could change in the camps very quickly.

I especially appeal to powerful evangelical leaders such as Rick Warren who have a heart for the immigrant. Warren famously said, "A Good Samaritan doesn't stop and ask the injured person, 'Are you legal or illegal?'" The political problems and policy debates that brought us to this situation are not the point right now; the point is that children are cold and filthy and frightened and we can stop it, or at least greatly improve their situation.

I ask the pastors to request of the administration that all of us--the volunteers and charitable givers of all faiths and of no faith, the army of us who are so eager to help these children--can have access to the sites. Allow us to bring cots and toothbrushes and blankets and food. Allow us to arrange for carefully screened volunteers to work shifts at the sites, to help with diapers and bedtimes and combing for lice and checking for fevers. Allow us to be there when one of these children wakes up from a nightmare or breaks down from sorrow.

I also want to humbly ask all Americans to expedite getting all necessary aid to these children. A week of adult argument is an ocean of time to a 3-year-old. I respect the workers at Wayfair who are protesting the company's planned fulfillment of an order of some 1,600 mattresses and 200 bunkbeds for one of the camps. Profiting from these camps is not morally acceptable. But this is an emergency, and we need to get those beds to those children as fast as possible. Getting 1,600 kids off those cold floors is close at hand--let's not make them wait a minute longer.

Ever since the most recent round of reports on conditions in these camps came out, I've been waking up at night, thinking about the children and wondering what was going on at that moment. I know that while I lie in my warm bed, in my own home and with all my relatives accounted for, children are lying on those cold floors, desperate for their mother, and crying. At those moments, all I can do is think of the nuns at the School of the Madeleine, and how they believed that nothing--nothing at all--was beyond the reach of prayer. And so I lie there and do what millions of other Americans do when they think about these children and come up against the many brick walls keeping us from alleviating their plight: I pray for them.

We know exactly where Christ is, because he told us. He's with the sick and the jailed and the hungry. He's in those camps with those suffering children. And we need to be there, too.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Christopher Hitchens once wrote that "the struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and literal mind." The late journalist and social critic made that argument in an essay on the fatwa against his friend, Salman Rushdie--a case with stakes that were literally life and death. And while the triumph of the literal mind over its ironic competitor in contemporary American culture has not yet wrought consequences as severe and urgent as a death warrant on the head of a novelist, it has succeeded in making public debate numbingly dull and tiresome.

In his first nonfiction book, White, a mix of memoir and cultural criticism, Bret Easton Ellis devotes several chapters to the troubling prioritization, in the arts pages of major newspapers, on cable news, and throughout insipid social media campaigns, of ideology over aesthetics. Ellis speaks from personal experience, recalling his own confrontation with an asinine mob of ideologues after he had the audacity to criticize two recent films of liberal folklore, Moonlight and Black Panther. Ellis is careful to note that he both commended and condemned aspects of each film. Yet millions of people on Twitter refused to settle for anything less than worshipful adoration.

For Ellis, who has worked on several Hollywood films, aesthetics and artistry are more important than allegory and ideology. He explains that he prefers "genre films" over "message movies." The debate regarding the social function of art dates back thousands of years, and presents a fascinating opportunity to discuss the fusion of philosophy, art history, and sociology. Most people likely fall somewhere between the two camps--not crude Marxists or religious fundamentalists who demand that art adhere to dogma, but also not libertines who rank mastery of form over all cultural considerations.

Yet the conversation about aesthetic versus ideology is no longer one that can take place in American public discourse. It appears to have become the duty, and reflexive response, of the pundit to moralize, and in doing so, to destroy nuance with political absolutism.

When Ellis recently appeared at the Commonwealth Club to discuss his new book with New York Times journalist Nellie Bowles, the audience actually gasped and booed when he said, "I didn't really like Moonlight." It is worth noting, perhaps, that Ellis is gay. Bowles then asked, "Who are you to decide what is good and bad art?" Ellis reacted with genuine bafflement at the question. "It is for all of us to decide, and I'm a critic," he cried to deaf ears.

ALL RACE, ALL THE TIME:

With Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America, political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck provide welcome insights into these subjects. They carefully examined multiple sources of data, considering the plausibility of various explanations for the election's results. If they have a thumb on the scale, promoting an ideological agenda, I haven't discerned it. This is the best, most dispassionate analysis of 2016 that I have seen. [...]

After demonstrating why other factors had, at most, a modest influence on the election result, Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck conclude that racial attitudes were a key predictor of vote choice. I hasten to add, they carefully note that the relationship of such attitudes to electoral behavior was complicated--the election was not merely a story of white racial animus, or Trump normalizing racist and nativist language.

They also note that, contrary to conventional wisdom among liberal commentators, there is little evidence that Trump increased racism in the electorate. In fact, polling shows that feelings of prejudice among whites have decreased since 2016. This change has only occurred among white Democrats, however--white Republican attitudes have not changed very much in either direction.

Although Trump's rhetoric did not stir up white anxiety or feelings of racial identity and resentment, he did make these politically salient. That is, there was a weaker correlation between racial attitudes and vote choice in previous elections, including 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama was the Democratic nominee. Because race was a central element of Election 2016, apparently, racial attitudes were a more important predictor of vote choice in both the GOP primary and in the general election.

The chapter on the Republican primaries emphasized the unusual nature of Trump's campaign talking points, and how they served to activate feelings of white identity and anxiety. In recent presidential election years, the leading Republican candidates vying for their party's nomination were mostly indistinguishable on questions related to race; all promoted a formally color-blind conservatism. As the authors note, 2016 was different: "Few Republican candidates for president have attempted to distinguish themselves from their Republican rivals on issues connected to race and ethnicity--until Trump did exactly that." The authors' use of longitudinal survey data was helpful, as they were able to examine responses from subjects surveyed in both 2011 through 2012 and 2016. These data were particularly useful for understanding those voters who voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016.

LESS COMBAT, MORE REFORM:

[B]eyond crude production, deep reforms in crucial areas of the energy sector are needed. Refining, natural gas transport and distribution and electricity generation remain stubbornly concentrated in the hands of state companies, stifling investment and weighing on economic growth. 

Bolsonaro's combative relations with Congress make reforms more difficult, but not impossible. Brazilian industry is plagued by some of the highest natural gas prices in the world, paying up to seven times as much for gas as companies in the United States, according to Carlos Langoni, former president of the Central Bank and architect of the proposed gas reform. In response, the administration hatched a plan to open the gas sector, which is currently dominated by Petrobras. The measures, presented to Congress this week by Mines and Energy Minister Bento Albuquerque, seek to reduce the price of natural gas by 40% in about two years. The designers of the plan estimate that these lower energy prices could increase industrial GDP by 8.4%. 

The most crucial element of the plan is the liberalization of access to Brazil's natural gas pipeline capacity, which is currently controlled almost entirely by state oil company Petrobras, even though it uses a mere 40%. Granting open access to pipelines would enable multiple players to market natural gas. It would also allow private companies that produce natural gas as a byproduct from offshore oil fields (set to nearly triple in the next four years) to the domestic market for power generation and industrial use. 

But a broader power sector reform is also needed. Recent years have made it increasingly clear that Brazil must reduce its heavy reliance on hydroelectric dams (in May hydropower generated around three-quarters of the country's electricity). In 2018, water levels at dams in the populous southeast and central west fell below historical averages for the fifth straight year. Wind and solar capacity are rapidly expanding, but starting from a small base, meaning power providers must turn to more expensive thermal generation when dams are low. In Rio de Janeiro, electricity bills have more than doubled in the past decade, well outpacing inflation. Around 40% of the electricity rate stems from taxes, largely determined and levied by state governments. 

The Bolsonaro administration can take the lead in reforming the power sector to diversify Brazil's energy matrix. Albuquerque has touted the potential of nuclear energy and supports the opening of Brazil's uranium reserves to private companies, and he has argued in favor of new coal plants to maintain the fuel's share of generation to 2027 as demand swells. Bolsonaro has also pushed for more small-scale hydroelectric plants. 

THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE:

Istanbul's new mayor Ekrem Imamoglu has officially taken office on Thursday, before addressing throngs of supporters in front of the municipality headquarters of Turkey's most-populous city.

"Today is a celebration of democracy," he told the cheering crowds, adding: "Nobody has the right to ignore the will of the people."

Imamoglu thanked all of Istanbul's 16 million residents, as thousands of supporters jamming the streets waved the Turkish national flag, celebrating his landslide victory last Sunday in the second mayoral election in less than three months.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Dartmouth College has temporarily halted work on a new $200 million building for its engineering school after construction workers dug and braced a 70-foot deep hole that differed from the intended layout. [...]

"The northern soil retention structure at the Thayer/Computer Science building site has been placed 10 feet south of the intended location. The college has informed the town and is working with Turner Construction and outside design professionals to evaluate our options," Dartmouth spokeswoman Diana Lawrence said via email. [...]

Frank "Jay" Barrett, a Hanover native and architect in White River Junction, said site work on major projects "has become extraordinarily expensive" and complex over the years, and he said fixing the error could "get into seven-digit figures."

"It's not just 'OK, we need to dig the hole a little bit bigger,' " said Barrett, who has worked on smaller projects for Dartmouth in the past but is not involved in this one. "There's no simple way to deal with this thing."

COMMON CAUSE:

Jerusalem on Thursday welcomed comments by Bahrain's foreign minister to Israeli journalists expressing hopes for ties with Israel, and said it would invite Bahraini reporters to visit as a thank you.

Between 60 and 65 per cent of Bahrainis belong to the Shi'a denomination of Islam who, despite making up the majority of the country's population, are socially and politically marginalized.

Historical Context

The persecution of Shia's can be traced back to when the largely Shi'a population of Bahrain was ruled by a Sunni dynasty. In 1861, the ruling family, the Al-Khalifas, brokered an agreement with the British for protection in exchange for 'relinquishing conducts of piracy and slavery trading'. Bahrain's British administration's focus was on progressing the political power of the Al Khalifa dynasty; it paid very little attention to the situation faced by Bahrain's Shi'a population. Thus, the persecution of Shi'a is seen as a direct consequence of colonialism and an absence of substantive change following the country's independence.

Current issues

Shi'a remain disenfranchised in Bahrain in numerous ways: for example, Shi'a citizens are not allowed to work in the Bahraini army, intelligence agency or police force. Despite being an overwhelming majority in the country, they hold only a small portion of senior official positions in the country.

Following the 2011 uprising, driven by a widespread demand for equality and inclusion of all citizens, Bahrain's ruling Sunni elite placed the blame on Bahrain's Shi'a: in order to delegitimize the calls for reform made by protesters, the narrative of the uprising was shaped to claim that the Iranian government was supporting dissident groups in Bahrain, which in turn justified the violent crackdown on protesters. This framing of the protests in sectarian terms overlooked the substantial demand for democratic reform that drove them, concerns also shared by many Sunnis in the country.

Shi'a have also disproportionately been the target of political repression and even had their citizenship stripped as punishment for alleged charges of sedition against the state. In June 2016, for instance, amidst a crackdown on Bahrain's political opposition, the spiritual leader of Al-Wefaq, Sheikh Isa Qassim, had his citizenship revoked arbitrarily and subsequently had charges of money laundering levelled against him. This decision triggered peaceful protests outside his home in Diraz that resulted in further crackdown against prominent Shi'a leaders, with more than 50 Shi'a clerics arrested in the aftermath of the demonstrations. The trial against Qassim opened in May 2017 amid widespread protests. The political leader of Al-Wefaq, Sheikh Ali Salman, was also prosecuted in 2016 on charges of inciting hatred and insulting the Interior Ministry, and is currently serving a four-year jail term.

The government's stripping of citizenship from journalists, human rights activists and political opponents, particularly affecting Shi'a, effectively renders them stateless and has often been followed by forcible expulsions from the country. At the same time, the government has been accused of pursuing a policy of demographic change by allowing the naturalization of thousands of Sunni Muslims from other countries - a move that some have condemned as an attempt to bolster the regime's position.

THE SENATE IS A FUNCTION OF GERRYMANDER...:

Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former staff director of the House of Representatives subcommittee overseeing the census, said a delay would run afoul of "the constitutional requirement for an enumeration every 10 years" and "the statutory requirement to ... report the state population totals by the end of the census year."

"Essentially, we would be facing a constitutional crisis," Lowenthal said.

"WHAT IS THE COST OF LIES?":

[T]here is ample proof that Ross asked the Justice Department to devise a reason--any reason--for the 2020 census to incorporate a citizenship question. When it initially failed to do so, he threatened to pull rank and call in then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Eventually, DOJ officials crafted an unpersuasive letter explaining why a citizenship question would aid VRA enforcement.

This mad scramble for pretext created a legal problem. Under the Administrative Procedure Act, any agency action that is "arbitrary and capricious" violates the law. Moreover, at a minimum, an agency must "disclose the basis" of its action so courts can review its legality. In the key section of his decision on Thursday, Roberts wrote that a district court was correct to hold that Ross failed to disclose the real basis of his action here. He reviewed all the evidence gathered by the district court, including discovery that went beyond the administrative record--"which showed, among other things, that the VRA played an insignificant role in the decisionmaking process." Roberts explained:

The record shows that the Secretary began taking steps to reinstate a citizenship question about a week into his tenure, but it contains no hint that he was considering VRA enforcement in connection with that project. The Secretary's Director of Policy did not know why the Secretary wished to reinstate the question, but saw it as his task to "find the best rationale." The Director initially attempted to elicit requests for citizenship data from the Department of Homeland Security and DOJ's Executive Office for Immigration Review, neither of which is responsible for enforcing the VRA. After those attempts failed, he asked Commerce staff to look into whether the Secretary could reinstate the question without receiving a request from another agency. The possibility that DOJ's Civil Rights Division might be willing to request citizenship data for VRA enforcement purposes was proposed by Commerce staff along the way and eventually pursued.

Even so, it was not until the Secretary contacted the Attorney General directly that DOJ's Civil Rights Division expressed interest in acquiring census-based citizenship data to better enforce the VRA. And even then, the record suggests that DOJ's interest was directed more to helping the Commerce Department than to securing the data.

"Altogether, the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the Secretary gave for his decision," Roberts concluded. "We are presented, in other words, with an explanation for agency action that is incongruent with what the record reveals about the agency's priorities and decisionmaking process."

THERE'S NO END TO THESE CRISIS ACTORS...:

The New York Times followed up Thursday on E. Jean Carroll's recent rape allegation against President Trump, speaking with two women who corroborated her account on the record for the first time. Carroll said she confided in two friends at the time, Lisa Birnbach and Carol Martin, both of whom were in the New York media scene in the mid-1990s when the alleged assault in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room took place. The interview with Birnbach, Martin, and Carroll together was excerpted on the Times' The Daily podcast. Birnbach and Martin had previously been unidentified and were speaking about the incident for the first time together since shortly after the alleged assault.

THERE'S NOTHING MORE AMERIUCAN THAN HOPING HE'S GENUINELY ILL:

You guys, I think the president is kind of nuts. https://t.co/CWynqBEyva

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) June 26, 2019

GRAB HIM BY THE DONALD:

THE MORE IMMORAL THE MORE IT APPEALS TO THE TRUMPBOTS:

The labor union for federal asylum officers is condemning President Trump's policy of sending migrants to Mexico as they wait for their assigned court dates in the U.S., calling the Trump administration's program "fundamentally contrary to the moral fabric of our Nation."

The asylum officers, who are tasked with carrying out a policy widely known as "Remain in Mexico," said they have a duty "to protect vulnerable asylum seekers from persecution," claiming that Trump's policy creates a conflict between their professional responsibility and the president's directives.

The policy formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols is a "widespread violation" of international and domestic law, wrote the asylum workers' union.

DOWN TO DONALD, BIBI AND THE OTHER NATIONALISTS:

On Wednesday, a United Nations expert released a report calling for an investigation into the role of Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, in the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The next day in Washington, the Senate voted to block arms sales worth billions of dollars, the latest in a string of congressional efforts to halt American support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. And in London -- on the same day -- a court ruled that Britain had acted unlawfully in approving arms exports to Saudi Arabia.

These were major rebukes, emblematic of a growing political crisis whose outcome is far from certain. The Saudi kingdom has enjoyed the protection of the Atlantic powers throughout the near century of its existence. But Anglo-American ties with the House of Saud might now be entering a perfect storm, where the relationship becomes politically unsustainable just as its underlying strategic rationale begins to fall away.

How did it come to this? Two events have combined to profoundly undermine Saudi Arabia's international reputation -- and the trans-Atlantic support on which it relies.

The first is the disastrous war in Yemen. The facts are well known but bear repeating. A Saudi-led coalition is responsible for the majority of the war's tens of thousands of deaths and has perpetrated "widespread and systematic" targeting of civilians, according to experts reporting to the U.N. Security Council. The coalition's blockade is the leading cause of what is now the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with 85,000 infant children thought to have died from starvation since 2015.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

One year after scientists flipped the switch on Large Hadron Collider (LHC), physicist Lawrence Krauss fretted, "I worry whether we've come to the limits of empirical science." His worry was not unfounded--for in the last eleven years at the cost of over $13B, the sole accomplishment of the LHC has been the confirmation of the Higgs boson, the elusive particle thought to give rise to the property of mass in the universe.

An important discovery to be sure, but one that points to an ever-receding black hole of inquiry as to where the Higgs comes from, why it has the properties it has, along with some other unsolved mysteries that keep researchers scratching their heads well into the wee hours of the morning: [...] 

What is the nature of the vacuum?

The "vacuum"--that is, the quantum vacuum ("field" or "potential," as it is alternately called)--is a gossamer fabric of reality comprised of neither matter nor energy, but "potentiality." As quantum theory pioneer Werner Heisenberg once wrote, it is a realm "of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things and facts." And yet, this mysteriously numinous essence is a well-spring of limitless power from which the entire universe materializes.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

"The administration is grasping at straws," said Seth Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "We are at the lowest point since 9/11 in terms of al Qaeda numbers in that country. The numbers I have looked at suggest it's less than five [people]."

Jones, a former senior official in U.S. Special Operations Command and a counterterrorism specialist, co-wrote a study that came to this conclusion at the end of last year, and the U.S. intelligence community believes little has changed since then despite the rapidly rising tensions between the United States and Iran, experts say.

Beyond that, there is general agreement among experts that to the extent Iran and al Qaeda have a relationship, it is not one of terrorist collaboration but rather a cautious modus vivendi defined by mutual forbearance, in which they agree not to attack each other and occasionally supply harbor (in Iran's case, to use as a bargaining chip with Washington).

Indeed, given their religious enmity, Shiite Iran and Sunni-dominated al Qaeda have been mostly at odds since the terrorist group first emerged in the mountains of neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan. Well before 9/11, Tehran had been backing the Northern Alliance Afghan guerrillas--who were also U.S. allies--fighting the Taliban hosts of al Qaeda. After 9/11, the Iranians rounded up and allegedly placed under house arrest several al Qaeda figures who were inside Iran, and those numbers have fluctuated since then.

THE LIVELY DEBATE OF DEMOCRACIES

The debate got started the day after the series premiered, when presidential adviser Hesameddin Ashena tweeted that politicians and members of the establishment should watch "Chernobyl" and "learn a lesson" from it. He underscored that the final episode raised a key issue: "The main point of [the series] is the shocking question 'What is the cost of lies?'"

Masoud Farasati, a well-known film critic, railed against Ashena on state TV on June 8, urging him and politicians to "keep out of the film sector," particularly when trying to make a political point. He also criticized the Americans for having produced the series in the first place, asserting, "As usual, Americans are taking advantage of the issue to claim [that they are] the righteous ones.'"

Ashena hit right back, tweeting on the same day that he was not advising politicians to watch "Chernobyl" for its political or artistic elements. Rather, he said, he wanted to emphasize the importance of consultation and honesty in crisis management and prevention.

Choosing sides, others jumped into the debate in no time. The Reformist daily Shahrvand argued on June 17 that Farasati had used "Chernobyl" to make a point about "capitalist plotting and propaganda," while Ashena had used it as a lesson for officials on transparency.

The Reformist newspaper Sazandegi wrote on June 10, "The controversy that this five-episode series has created is beyond reviewing a tragic occurrence ... [The series] caused many for the first time to think about nuclear energy and its possible dangers."

The moderate news website Asr Iran also emphasized the consequences and repercussions of a mistake being made in the nuclear sector. "Chernobyl narrates a real story, portraying the men and women who bravely sacrificed themselves to save Europe from an unthinkable catastrophe. The series is worth watching," wrote Asr Iran on June 3.

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND:

There's little doubt, I argued, that outcomes improved dramatically for the lowest-performing students and for children of color from the mid-1990s until the onset of the Great Recession, at least in the key subjects of reading and math. That was especially the case in elementary and middle schools, though high school graduation and college-completion rates were up sharply as well, even if some of that progress might be due to slipping standards.

A fair question, though, is whether this progress was limited to these two basic subjects, especially since they were the focus of state and federal accountability systems over this period. So let's take a look at results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress for most of the other academic subjects, too. As has been my practice in the past, we'll examine trends over time for the national sample, broken down by the major racial groups, as well as by percentiles. This will give us much better information than looking at averages alone.

You can peruse the NAEP charts* below and come to your own conclusions, but here's what I see:

• Compared to the other subjects, the progress in math started earlier and was more widespread. In most subjects, we didn't see gains until the late 1990s into the early 2000s. But math improvement started as soon as the "main NAEP" commenced in 1990, and continued all the way until 2013. And it didn't just focus on the lowest-performing students, but was apparent in the middle and at the top of the performance spectrum, too. Perhaps most notably, even twelfth graders demonstrated progress in math--something we don't see for most other subjects.

• After calamitous years in the mid-1990s, the reading achievement of our lowest-performing students and students of color boomed in the late 1990s into the early 2000s. This happened first for fourth graders and then for eighth graders. White students and students in the middle and at the top of the performance spectrum made some gains, too, but they were more modest. Most of the positive trends flipped around 2013. And over the whole period, the twelfth grade trends are flat or down slightly.

• The writing trends for fourth and eighth graders look similar to those for reading. We see big jumps in achievement for fourth grade students of color between 1998 and 2002--which unfortunately were the only years the NAEP gave that test. Eighth grade black and Hispanic students also demonstrated solid growth through 2007. And twelfth grade? Flat or down from 1998 through 2011.

• The trends for science look like a blend of those for reading and math. Like math, the progress for fourth and eighth graders was widespread--across all racial groups and percentile levels. But they were relatively modest, except for the lowest performers--akin to reading. And (repeat after me): For twelfth grade, the trends were mostly flat or down slightly.

• The U.S. history trends look much like those for reading. There was solid progress for fourth and eighth graders, especially for kids of color and those at the low end and the middle of the performance spectrum. And there's finally some good news on the twelfth grade front: Achievement was up ever so slightly from 1994 to 2010 across the three major racial groups.

• The trends for civics mirror those for reading and writing. The also resemble those in U.S. history, except civics achievement is flat or down slightly at the twelfth-grade level. But there were solid gains in fourth and eighth grades, especially for low-performing kids and students of color.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Last week, for likely the first time, a heavy-duty commercial truck drove for 9.4 miles on the Florida Turnpike with no one inside. The "driver" was 140 miles away, operating the rig remotely.

The big picture: Automated freight delivery is expected to begin long before self-driving cars are here, and at least a half dozen truck companies are working on the technology, with tests in various stages of development. Starsky Robotics' Florida demonstration was believed to be the first unmanned, high-speed test of a heavy-duty commercial truck on a public highway.

Why it matters: The U.S. is experiencing a severe shortage of truck drivers -- as many as 175,000 by 2026, according to the American Trucking Associations. Companies like Starsky Robotics hope they can address the shortage by making the jobs less taxing.

BRING BACK BARRY!:

THOSE ZANY CRISIS ACTORS...:

The man and his 23-month-old daughter lay face down in shallow water along the bank of the Rio Grande, his black shirt hiked up to his chest with the girl tucked inside. Her arm was draped around his neck suggesting she clung to him in her final moments.

The searing photograph of the sad discovery of their bodies on Monday, captured by journalist Julia Le Duc and published by Mexican newspaper La Jornada, highlights the perils faced by mostly Central American migrants fleeing violence and poverty and hoping for asylum in the United States.

According to Le Duc's reporting for La Jornada, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, frustrated because the family from El Salvador was unable to present themselves to U.S. authorities and request asylum, swam across the river on Sunday with his daughter, Valeria.

He set her on the U.S. bank of the river and started back for his wife, Tania Vanessa Ávalos, but seeing him move away the girl threw herself into the waters. Martínez returned and was able to grab Valeria, but the current swept them both away.

FUNCTIONING MARKETS ARE A FUNCTION OF RULES:

Myth 1: the truth is that in the modern world there are very few, if any, entirely free markets - markets that do not rely on any external rules or regulations at all. Even the most devout free-market theorists recognise that property rights need to be clear, public and enforceable, and that generally means law, police, courts and other institutions of the state. Some will actively argue for patent, copyright and other laws protecting intellectual property, but these are themselves significant infringements on market freedoms.

This catalogue merely scratches the surface. In fact, there are many things that generally cannot be legally bought and sold at all: people, body parts, hard drugs, votes, court decisions, public qualifications, the outcome of sporting contests. Then there are items that in many countries can only be sold under licence: guns, alcohol, and many medicines.

There are regulations on who is allowed to work: on child labour, on immigration, on the professions and the qualifications needed to enter them. There are regulations on organisational form: companies, associations, partnerships, mutuals, cooperatives, employee-owned firms, charities. There are entry requirements for some industries, such as tests on ownership, capital and track record in banking.

And then there are rules on product safety, on weights and measures and on conditions of trade, such as the right to a refund. The global foreign exchange markets are often thought of as the nearest thing to a perfectly free market. It is true that they are astonishingly large and astonishingly liquid. The Bank for International Settlements estimated, for example, that trading averaged $5.1 trillion a day in April 2016. Yet they are also very closely bound by rules and regulations.

Myth 2 concerns how markets function. Markets are far from identical to each other, and do not all operate to a single equilibrating mechanism. Markets for food products are very different from asset markets; financial markets differ radically from labour markets; markets in primary goods are different from secondary or resale markets in those goods. [...]

Myth 3 is about culture. Markets shape our lives, our homes, our possessions - even the music we listen to. And yet, they do much more that this. They shape our expectations of others, our manners and our capacity to trust, and those things in turn shape them.

Markets are not merely antiseptic objects of expert study, or neutral tools of public policy. The people who trade in them are not economic automata operating purely in accordance with financial incentives. On the contrary, markets are subject to 'animal spirits'. These are the human passions of confidence or pessimism in the face of the unknown, as well as the human instinct to be moved by stories and narratives, and to react to unfairness or corruption.

In sum, markets constitute a created, constructed order.

IF THE ENDS DON'T JUSTIFY THE MEANS, NOTHING CAN (profanity alert):

JUST DON'T CALL IT A RAFLE DU VEL D'HIV:

TRUMPISM:

"The man and his 23-month-old daughter lay face down in shallow water along the bank of the Rio Grande... Her arm was draped around his neck suggesting she clung to him in her final moments." https://t.co/idCHsVlmbz

— Jill Colvin (@colvinj) June 25, 2019

CHRISTIAN VS. TRUMPBOT:

A Tale of Two Tweets.

Russell Moore expressed shock this morning at the conditions in which migrant children are being held.

And in response, Jerry Falwell, Jr...well. You just have to read it for yourselves. pic.twitter.com/Sj84OVQbZD

— Amy Sullivan (@sullivanamy) June 25, 2019

BRING BACK BARRY!:

U.S. consumer confidence tumbled to a 21-month low in June as households grew a bit more pessimistic about business and labor market conditions amid concerns about a recent escalation in trade tensions between the United States and China.

HE IS MERRICK GARLAND:

BIBI IS WHO THE rIGHT THOUGHT ERDOGAN WAS?:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will consider a proposal by Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein to cancel the September 17 elections, his Likud party said Tuesday.

IT'S NO COINCIDENCE THAT OPPOSITION TO IMMIGRATION AND SUPPORT FOR ABORTION...:

The law's ancestry dates back to World War I. Till that point, U.S. immigration laws had tended to be all or nothing: either no limits at all -- or blanket bans for certain groups, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act. Others were free to enter provided they weren't "lunatics," polygamists, prostitutes, "suffering from a loathsome or a dangerous contagious disease," or so on.

The result was floods of immigrants: Between 1901 and 1910, for example, close to 9 million came to the U.S. As that happened, anti-immigrant attitudes mounted, with mass influxes from parts of Europe associated in the popular imagination with a litany of social problems, like urban poverty and squalor.

In May 1918, after the U.S. had entered World War I, Congress passed a statute called the Passport Act that gave the president the power to restrict the comings and goings of foreign citizens during wartime. A few months later, however, the war ended -- and with it, the restrictions on border crossings.

Federal officials saw potential in the criminal provisions of the Passport Act -- a maximum 20-year sentence -- as a tool for deterring immigration. So prosecutors ignored the expiration of the law and continued to indict migrants under the Passport Act for unlawful entry into the U.S.

Anti-immigration sentiment continued to climb and the rhetoric of the era has resonance today. One anti-immigration group at the time claimed that immigrants tended to be "vicious and criminal" -- the "bootleggers, gangsters, and racketeers of large cities." The war, Columbia University historian Mae Ngai has written, "raised nationalism and anti-foreign sentiment to a high pitch."

In response, Congress began clamping down. With the Immigration Act of 1924, it capped the flow at about 165,000 people a year, a small fraction of previous levels The statute's quotas curtailed migration from southern and eastern Europe severely. Another 1924 law -- the Oriental Exclusion Act -- banned most immigration from Asia. At the same time, Congress made it easier to deport non-citizens for immigration violations.

In 1925, a federal appeals court put a halt to the practice of indicting migrants under the Passport Act outside wartime. But immigration officials liked what they'd seen, and by 1927, they were working on a replacement.

Two men spearheaded the effort that would lead Congress to criminalize unlawful entry into the United States. They were motivated by eugenics and white supremacy.

The first was James Davis, who was Secretary of Labor from 1921 to 1930. A Republican originally appointed by President Warren Harding, Davis was himself an immigrant from Wales who went by "Puddler Jim," a reference to his job as a youthful worker in the steel mills of western Pennsylvania. At the time, the Department of Labor oversaw immigration, and Davis had grown disturbed by what he'd seen.

Davis was a committed eugenicist, and he believed principles of eugenics should guide immigration policy, according to The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot by the historian Hans Vought. It was necessary to draw a distinction, Davis had written in 1923, between "bad stock and good stock, weak blood and strong blood, sound heredity and sickly human stuff."

In November 1927, Davis proposed a set of immigration reforms in the pages of The New York Times. Among his goals: "the definite lessening and possibly, in time, the complete checking of the degenerate and the bearer of degenerates." One "phase of the immigration problem," Davis wrote, was the "surreptitious entry of aliens" into the United States in numbers that "cannot even be approximately estimated."

Deportation alone wasn't enough to deter illegal immigration, Davis wrote. There was nothing disincentivizing the migrant from turning around and trying again. "Endeavoring to stop this law violation" by deportation only, he wrote, "is like trying to prevent burglary with a penalty no severer than opening the front door of the burglarized residence, should the burglar be found within, escorting him to it, and saying 'You have no right here; see that you don't come in again.'"

An immigrant who enters the country unlawfully, he concluded, "should be treated as a law violator and punished effectively."

To bring his vision to fruition, Davis teamed up with a senator from South Carolina. Coleman Livingston Blease, a Democrat, was "a proud and unreconstructed white supremacist," UCLA history professor Kelly Lytle Hernández wrote in her 2017 book City of Inmates.

Migrants from Mexico were one group whose numbers the increasingly powerful nativist elements in Congress hadn't managed to restrict. Mexican workers were key to the booming economy of the southwest. Regional employers, particularly in the agricultural sector, had successfully lobbied Congress to block any bill that would choke off their primary source of inexpensive labor. As a result, migration from Mexico soared, with many Mexicans making illegal border crossings to avoid the cost and inconvenience of customs stations.

Blease saw in Davis's proposal for criminal penalties a way to advance his vision of a white America, and he believed it would bridge the gap between the nativists clamoring for quotas and southwestern congressmen resisting them. Large-scale farmers didn't mind criminal penalties, Hernández writes, so long as the law was enforced once the harvest was over.

LAUGHINGSTOCK:

[S]peculation about Mulvaney's standing with Trump jumped into the public eye earlier this month when the president called out his acting chief of staff for coughing during an interview with ABC News. [...]

Some Trump allies felt the tone represented the public airing of Trump's newfound irritation with his acting chief, while others saw it as common practice for the president and germaphobe who does not like shaking hands or being around sick staffers. He doesn't even like it if people sneeze around him, said one White House aide.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

The Islamic Republic's founder and revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died in 1989, and the country has since been led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories FREE SIGN UP

"Trump doesn't know that Ayatollah Khomeini has passed away and that Ayatollah Khamenei is the leader of Iran," tweeted Sara Masoumi, diplomatic correspondent for the reformist daily Etemad.

"Has this narcissist been waiting for (a dead man) to call him?" wrote another Twitter user, after Trump last month said he would like Iran to phone him.

One social media user suggested "Trump took revenge" for Khamenei reportedly mispronouncing the president's name as Ronald.

HOW MUCH OF IT IS JUST NAME RECOGNITION?:

Our latest Democratic primary tracking data is live:

Biden: 38%
Sanders: 19%
Warren: 13% (+2)
Buttigieg: 7%
Harris: 6% (-1)
O'Rourke: 4%
Booker: 3%
Yang: 2% (+1)https://t.co/19xcvc2eMC

— Morning Consult (@MorningConsult) June 25, 2019

JUSTICE THOMAS IS RIGHT ABOUT OVERTURNING ANTICONSTITUTIONAL PRECEDENTS:

The catalyst for the blood on the carpet at the NRA's Virginia headquarters has been a series of public-relations and legal-political setbacks. In reverse chronological order, the latest boardroom mayhem was precipitated by New York State Attorney General Letitia James's legal challenge to the charitable status of the NRA (enabled by its historical incorporation in the state). That, in turn, had developed out of the earlier effort by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to pressure New York-based banking and insurance companies doing business with the NRA to boycott the organization. Above all, these "inside" moves against the NRA gained vital momentum from the "outside" wave of gun-control sentiment that followed the February 2018 mass shooting at Parkland, Florida. The powerful advocacy on a national stage of the surviving high-schoolers--followed by the financial services boycott, and then the attorney general's investigation into the IRS status and business dealings of the NRA--created the sustained pressure that forced open the internal rift in an organization already troubled by a financial shortfall and growing disquiet about how much of its budget was going to one media and marketing agency, Ackerman McQueen, and who inside the NRA was benefitting from that relationship.

These, at least, are the proximate causes of the NRA's disarray. But viewed in the longue durée, the NRA's vulnerability to this spectacular implosion can be seen as the result of a political movement that had won its "long war" of marching through the institutions of legislative government and conquering them. In short, the NRA became a victim precisely of its own success. The NRA's current predicament is thus in part a historical consequence of its evolution--a story aptly told by the historian and law professor Adam Winkler in Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America (2011)--from a quiescent hunting association up until the early 1970s into the radical Second Amendment rights group that progressives came to fear, despise, and secretly envy for its ability to channel the energy of a social movement into effective political action. As Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice has described in his 2014 book The Second Amendment: A Biography, a radicalized NRA then succeeded in changing the political weather on gun rights. It mobilized a more or less racialized fear of crime to advocate for an absolutist redefinition of the Constitution and create a new personal right to bear arms as a necessity for domestic self-defense.

THANKS, UR!:

JUST DOING WHAT HE WAS HIRED TO DO:

Attorney General Bill Barr killed seven different investigations started by special counsel Robert Mueller just ten days after he submitted his report.

DOWN TO HIS CORE:

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Trump muses privately about ending 'unfair' postwar U.S.-Japan defense pact https://t.co/lJeyO8Y9YZ

— The Japan Times (@japantimes) June 25, 2019

NO ONE EVER MEANS NEVER AGAIN:

Last week, a mini-controversy erupted when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to the federal immigrant detention facilities as "concentration camps". The sky turned Twitter-blue with tweets either justifying the comparison or disputing it. Proponents pointed out that the term "concentration camp" is not a term specific to the Holocaust and refers to any concentration of individuals to isolate them from society. Of course, they also compared the current situation to Nazi Germany and said things like "never again" so they were kind of all over the map on that one. Opponents of the term got into very high dudgeon over the pro-immigration side using such a loaded term and pointed out, rather pedantically, that we aren't actually executing people. Of course, they often paired this with commentary saying that detention conditions should be harsh in order to discourage people from...uh...fleeing to this country to avoid being tortured and murdered by drug gangs. So I'm not sure they were entirely in Earth orbit either.

For a while, I was on Team Not-A-Concentration-Camp. Not because these aren't concentration camps -- they do meet the technical definition. But because I sympathized with the argument that the phrase "concentration camp" is extremely loaded. When people hear that phrase, they think of the labor and extermination camps of the Nazis, which these are not. At best, they think of the Japanese Internment camps, which is closer to the mark, although those involved US citizens. Of course, those associations are precisely why many people want to use the term "concentration camp". But I think using that term is less likely to make people reconsider their position than to hunker down and refuse to listen. Pejoratives have a tendency to do that.

It's at this point in the post where I'm supposed to say, "As a Jew..." to justify my point. Well, as a Jew, I refuse to invoke my religion as some kind of rhetorical shield. You don't have be Jewish to have an opinion on this subject; nor are you required to have a strong opinion on this subject if you're Jewish. While the phrase "concentration camp" has a special and tragic resonance for Jews (as well as Eastern Europeans, Roma, gays and disabled who were also murdered by millions), our historical tragedy is not your rhetorical barb. Regardless of my religion and heritage, I avoid using the phrase "concentration camp". I avoid it because I don't want the extremely esoteric and ultimately useless battle over what we call our immigration detention facilities to distract from what they are. Because what they are is a catastrophe.

SO MUCH FOR THE GOP OPPOSING INFANTICIDE:

ADD THEM TO THE ENEMIES DONALD IS WORSE THAN:

Somali pirates gave me toothpaste & soap. https://t.co/K8zCP3IVMm

— Michael Scott Moore (@MichaelSctMoore) June 22, 2019

OF COURSE WE PURITANS LOVE THE PURITAN NATION MOST:

AIDING WAHHABISM SHOULD BE COSTLY:

MEET JOHN DOE:

After an hour on the tarmac, the junior senator's 5 p.m. flight from Washington, D.C., to Portland, Maine, was canceled due to weather in the Pine Tree State. He quickly rebooked his flight for the next one out -- at 10 p.m., which was already experiencing delays.

So instead of leaving things to chance, King decided to tag along on a road trip with two software engineers, a college professor and a lawyer, who all ditched their airlines, rented a car, and decided to make the nearly 10-hour drive back to Maine.

"You got to be spontaneous," King said in an interview with USA TODAY. "You got to say 'hey, let's go for it.'"

"Because at first blush, you know, driving from Reagan National [Airport] to Portland, Maine, that's an undertaking and something you think about for weeks," he continued. "We just decided to do it in about 15 minutes."

More: Donald Trump talks tough to adversaries - but doesn't always follow through

The senator accompanied Rebecca Gibbons, a professor at University of Southern Maine; Ramon Krikken, a technical professionals analyst at Gartner; Matt Dusoe, a premier field engineer at Microsoft; and Tim Schneider, general counsel and principal consultant at Tilson Technology Management. 

King said he ran into the group as he was going to get his new boarding pass, and asked what they were doing. The group, who recognized the senator, informed him that the 10 p.m. flight was already delayed two and a half hours, so they decided to rent a vehicle instead to drive to Portland.

"They said, 'you wanna go with us,' and I said 'sure!" King said, adding "it was just like an old-fashion road trip."

He said they took turns driving, pitched in for gas and mostly chatted throughout the 10-hour long drive.

THE SOLE SOURCE OF LEGITIMACY:

"We will build democracy in the city, we will build justice," Mr. Imamoglu said. "Nobody's lifestyle and how they dress is a concern for us. We came to embrace everyone."

"I thank the president and my opponent who congratulated me," he said. "We will make the nation embrace each other. We will succeed in this despite everything."

The vote "shows democracy is resilient and elections still matter," said Soner Cagaptay, the director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Imamoglu won with a landslide -- a 10-point lead -- even though Erdogan mobilized all the state resources in this election."

While Mr. Erdogan has acquired sweeping powers under a new presidential system and controls all of the levers of power, a degree of democracy has remained as he has always sought legitimacy through the ballot box and assured citizens of the integrity of the process.

Mr. Imamoglu, 49, was backed by an alliance of opposition parties, united by their rejection of Mr. Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian grip on Turkey.

Besides the blow to Mr. Erdogan's image and prestige, the loss of Istanbul has practical political consequences for him, analysts said. The city is Mr. Erdogan's home and political base, where he began his political career as mayor.

"Losing Istanbul would mean losing a significant revenue source for A.K.P.'s political machinery, ranging from subsidies to the party faithful to construction contracts and funds for pro-government media," Asli Aydintasbas, a senior fellow with the European Council for Foreign Relations, said before the vote.

"It would set off a chain reaction that can herald early elections later this year or in 2020," she said. [...]

Mr. Erdogan grew up in a working-class district on the Golden Horn in Istanbul and embarked on his political career as a popular and energetic mayor of the city in the 1990s.

The city has remained in the hands of his party ever since, and he transformed it with extensive infrastructure projects and grandiose signature constructions, including a vast hilltop mosque, high-rise towers and expanding suburbs.

But Mr. Erdogan's popularity in Istanbul, which derived largely from delivering services to city residents, has waned in recent years as the construction boom has stalled and the economy has slipped into recession, although growth rebounded somewhat earlier this year.

Unemployment and inflation have angered Turkish voters and cost Mr. Erdogan several of the largest cities, including the capital, Ankara, in local elections in March.

"Erdogan lost his magic touch," said Mr. Cagaptay, the analyst. "Erdogan was this politician who came from the other side of the tracks, representing the voice of the common man, the pious, the dispossessed, making this his brand for nearly two decades. That is gone."

Mr. Imamoglu has been compared to a young Mr. Erdogan because he comes from the same Black Sea region known for its fighting spirit, and for his personable and energetic attitude. He won voters' support by offering a clean and all-embracing administration, tapping into a general weariness with the governing party and complaints of corruption and cronyism.

He promised that municipal workers' jobs would be secure and that his administration would be nonpartisan.

"Nothing sticks to Imamoglu," Mr. Cagaptay said. "He became the new Erdogan."

SUPPOSE JOE BIDEN IS WRONG...:

Politics, let it be noted, is a matter of addition, not subtraction. Putting together a majority to pass legislation to aid widows and orphans or a majority to win elections requires winning converts to your side rather than hunting down and banishing heretics to the Outer Darkness. Nobody understood this principle better or practiced it more successfully than the late "liberal lion of the Senate," Massachusetts eight-term senator Ted Kennedy. [...]

Those Kennedy initiatives included, to name a few, Children's Health Insurance Program for children of working parents who did not get health insurance from their employers, mental health parity in coverage, immigration reform, AIDS research, ending apartheid, the Americans with Disabilities Act, voting rights and special education funding. Among the Republican senators he worked closely with to write laws were Mike Enzi and Alan Simpson of Wyoming, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Nancy Kassebaum and Bob Dole of Kansas, John McCain of Arizona and Warren Rudman and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. Kennedy was able to do all that by seeking common ground, by never demonizing his Senate opponents, by never making the perfect the enemy of the good.

But now we're in a different political era. The president of the United States regularly demonizes his political opponents, labeling Democrats as "evil." The Democratic Party, he told a rally, is "the party of crime." Make no mistake: More than a few Democrats have responded the same way, censuring Donald Trump in similar rhetoric.

For me to call my political opponent mistaken or misguided on a particular controversy is acceptable and does not preclude her and me working together constructively in the future on a different issue. But when I call you, or you call me, "evil" or "immoral" or "irredeemable," we have foreclosed any possibility of future collaboration. Who in good conscience can collaborate with someone who is "evil," "immoral," and worse?

THANKS, W:

In 2010, Afghanistan was ranked 195 among nations in FIFA men's soccer. Today, it's ranked 149, and it has stayed in the 140s over the past five years, demonstrating that their success is no flash in the pan. No other Asian nation has risen by as many spots as Afghanistan in this period. Currently, Afghanistan is ranked behind only India in South Asia, and ahead of much larger nations such as Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Since 2008, Afghanistan -- which had never won an Olympic medal until then -- has won two: one in 2008 and one in 2012, both in taekwondo. That's again more than any South Asian nation other than India. Afghanistan has also won more medals -- seven -- in the last three Asian Games, the continent's apex sporting event, than in all previous Asian Games combined. These recent Asian Games medals have come in cricket, taekwondo, wushu and the Turkic wrestling form known as kurash.

Afghanistan was admitted into cricket's global body only in 2001. But in 2018, the country became the 12th nation to earn Test status, a five-day test of endurance and cricket's toughest format. Months later, they beat a more seasoned Ireland for their first Test win. And in the shortest format of the sport, T20, Afghan spinner Rashid Khan is ranked the world's top bowler and is a star of the Indian Premier League (IPL), cricket's richest series.

"The fact that Rashid Khan got a million-dollar contract from the IPL allows its youth to dream and believe that we can," says cricket historian Boria Majumdar.

DEBANGLIFIED:

Not only did Prince discover the Bangles' early music, he sought out the performers themselves. It happened one night at one of the band's shows in Hollywood. "Suddenly, word gets to us Bangles backstage that Prince had come to see us," Hoffs remembers.

But he wasn't just there to see them. He was there to perform the band's single, "Hero Takes a Fall," with them onstage. Hoffs calls the experience "magnificent on so many levels."

"It was truly mind-blowing," Hoffs says of playing alongside Prince. "I'd never seen anybody play a guitar like that. It was almost like his guitar was just part of his body; There was no disconnect."

Later, when the band members were recording their second studio album, Different Light, Prince sent word that he had written a song for the band. He invited the members to his studio to pick up the cassette and give the first version of "Manic Monday" a listen.

Hoffs still has that cassette. She recalls listening to the song for the first time with the band: "We Bangles hovered around the cassette machine -- 'cause back then, it was tape -- and we were smitten with the song."

Hoffs remembers being amazed that Prince captured the mundane, relatable feeling of "just trying to get through the moment."

Still, Hoffs says that they made sure to add their special touch to the track. "That's one thing that we Bangles decided en masse, and were very unified in this, that we wanted to kind of make it ours -- Bangle-fy it, in a sense," she says.

THANKS, NIKKI:

This year, the Confederate flag won't temporarily be raised at the South Carolina Statehouse to mark the day it was permanently taken down.

A group calling for racial fairness -- Showing Up for Racial Justice Columbia -- has a permit to rally on the grounds July 10.

The South Carolina Secessionist Party has raised a Confederate flag on a temporary flagpole the past three years to protest the date the rebel banner was permanently removed.

Showing Up for Racial Justice Columbia founder Sarah Keeling told The State newspaper she applied for the permit the minute it was available so the Secessionist Party couldn't gather.

IF THEY WERE CONCENTRATION CAMPS WE'D BE INFLICTING TORTURE AND DISEASE....:

"The conditions within which they are held could be compared to torture facilities," the physician, Dolly Lucio Sevier, wrote in a medical declaration obtained exclusively by ABC News.

Lucio Sevier, who works in private practice in the area, was granted access to the Ursula facility in McAllen, which is the largest CBP detention center in the country, after lawyers found out about a flu outbreak there that sent five infants to the neonatal intensive care unit.

After assessing 39 children under the age of 18, she described conditions for unaccompanied minors at the McAllen facility as including "extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food."

All the children who were seen showed evidence of trauma, Lucio Sevier reported, and the teens spoke of having no access to hand washing during their entire time in custody. She compared it to being "tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease."

In an interview with ABC News, Lucio Sevier said the facility "felt worse than jail."

"It just felt, you know, lawless," she said. "I mean, imagine your own children there. I can't imagine my child being there and not being broken."

Conditions for infants were even more appalling, according to the medical declaration. Many teen mothers in custody described not having the ability to wash their children's bottle.

And children who were older than 6 months were not provided age-appropriate meal options, including no pureed foods necessary for a child's development, Lucio Sevier reported.

"To deny parents the ability to wash their infant's bottles is unconscionable and could be considered intentional mental and emotional abuse," she wrote.

THAT "ALL MEN" IS A DANG TOUGH TASKMASTER:

Independence Day gives us an opportunity to reflect on the ideological tug-of-war about religious freedom in America. The Declaration of Independence is the topic of this episode. What can we make of the references to religion and God in the text?

Our guest this week is author and academic Ira Stoll.  He's the author of the books Samuel Adams: A Life, and JFK, Conservative. He's also the managing editor of Education Next, an education policy journal published by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

On July 4, 1946, Kennedy -- then 29 years old, the Democratic nominee for a Massachusetts Congressional seat, and still a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve -- was the featured speaker at the City of Boston's Independence Day celebration. He spoke at Faneuil Hall, the red-brick building where long ago the colonists had gathered to protest taxes imposed by King George III and his Parliament.

Kennedy began by talking not about taxes, or about the British, or about the consent of the governed, but about religion. "The informing spirit of the American character has always been a deep religious sense. Throughout the years, down to the present, a devotion to fundamental religious principles has characterized American though and action," he said.

For anyone wondering what this had to do with Independence Day, Kennedy made the connection explicit. "Our government was founded on the essential religious idea of integrity of the individual. It was this religious sense which inspired the authors of the Declaration of Independence: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.'"

It was a theme that Kennedy would return to during the 1960 presidential campaign, when, in a speech at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, he described the Cold War as "a struggle for supremacy between two conflicting ideologies; freedom under God versus ruthless, Godless tyranny." And again in his inaugural address, on January 20, 1961, in Washington, D.C., when he said, "The same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe -- the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God."

Whatever Kennedy's motives were as a politician for emphasizing this point, on the historical substance he had it absolutely correct. The Declaration of Independence issued from Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, included four separate references to God. In addition to the "endowed by their Creator" line mentioned by JFK in his July 4 speech, there is an opening salute to "the laws of nature's God," an appeal to "the Supreme Judge of the World," and a closing expression of "firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence."

CAPITALISTS VS TRUMPONOMICS:

Regional leaders are alarmed over "the unabating tide of protectionism", according to the final statement of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit that closed Sunday in Bangkok.

"The winds of protectionism are hurting our multilateral trading system," Thailand's junta leader-turned-premier Prayut Chan-O-Cha said.

He added the bloc would carry their trade conflict concerns to a G20 meeting in Japan next week.

Leaders also called for urgency in concluding talks on a China-led trade pact this year, which once inked will be the world's biggest.

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) includes all 10 ASEAN economies, plus India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

"It (RCEP) will help off-set any impact from the ongoing trade conflict," said Prayut.

HOW DEMOCRACY WORKS:

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan congratulated opposition candidate Ekrem Imamoglu on Sunday for winning Istanbul's re-run mayoral election according to unofficial results.

Cloud photo of the day: Cloudless skies are like Brutalist Architecture https://t.co/W93kAJZktF

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) June 23, 2019

VULNERABILITY? IT'S HIS ONLY SELLING POINT:

"One heading in the document about Kris Kobach, in the running for Homeland Security Secretary, listed 'white supremacy' as a vulnerability. It cited accusations from past political opponents that he had ties to white supremacist groups." https://t.co/hjTy78q5ID

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 23, 2019

WAHHABIST-IN-CHIEF:

BANNING RADICALISM:

What was the top-line finding there?

I think there are a few. One of the things that I found most interesting was the extent to which a kind of social etiquette seemed to make these once very critical people, or even people who still felt very critical of marriage as an institution, feel like they couldn't express that as freely anymore. Because suddenly you're getting wedding invitations in the mail. And it's not this abstract debate that you're having. Your good friends that you've known for years are getting married. And it might be seen as insulting to decline. Or, even more than to decline, to challenge them. Do you say, wait a minute, what about all those debates we used to have? I think there was this kind of self-policing going on. People realized that it just wasn't seen as appropriate anymore to critique marriage as an institution because they were worried that if they did, it would come across as a personal attack.

What I heard a lot was this group of people saying that we just kind of have to grin and bear it. People told me that they just couldn't believe that people they'd known for years, that they thought identified as radical feminists, were now calling each other "wife." But they didn't feel like they could say anything to these people even though they'd obviously once had very deep conversations with them about marriage. Now they felt like they have to keep it all in. You can't critique the fact that someone is now wearing a big, flashy diamond ring when once they were anti-capitalist.

That was one of the biggest findings: Before you have access to something, it's kind of fair game, right? It's this abstract theoretical thing and we can all jump in and we can critique it.

Or at least debate it openly. And then suddenly you gain access to it, and your friends are doing it, and your family's doing it, and you just don't feel able to be as critical anymore.

In addition to the etiquette issue, you also identified other mechanisms muting the criticism of marriage. Can you talk about the role emotion played for your respondents?

Sure. It wasn't just that the people were keeping [their criticisms] in or felt like they couldn't express them anymore. Over time, reluctantly or not, they acknowledged to me that their views had softened. People would tell me, well suddenly we were going to these weddings and you know, I couldn't believe how overcome with emotion I was. I couldn't believe how happy I felt for these people getting married. And so, the emotional power of marriage was really striking. You could have these intellectual critiques of marriage as an institution, but then all of a sudden it was happening and people got very, very swept up in the emotion of it. Like, people saying: How could you not be moved by watching an elderly couple on the news that had been together for 50 years suddenly being able to tie the knot? It was always sort of unhuman not to be moved by them.

Along with that, the more that you felt warmed by it, and softened, suddenly then the next stage is: Oh, well maybe I can do this myself ...

WHO ELSE WOULD WORK FOR HIM?:

Nearly 100 Trump vetting documents leaked to me identify a host of "red flags" about officials who went on to get some of the most powerful jobs in the U.S. government. https://t.co/7Y7QZP45WB

— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) June 23, 2019

WE DESERVE DRUBBING:

"His numbers are problematic," said one top Republican pollster, who asked for anonymity to describe private survey data. "Folks are nervous, but no one is surprised." [...]

In the last month, several public polls have showed Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden and other Democratic contenders by double digits in Michigan, and by wide margins in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Three consecutive polls have showed Trump trailing Biden in deep-red Texas, though he led other Democratic rivals. And a survey from Quinnipiac University Poll of Florida voters released Tuesday showed Trump trailing six of his Democratic rivals.

A survey released Tuesdayby Firehouse Strategies, a Republican firm run by veterans of Sen. Marco Rubio's (R-Fla.) campaign team, and the data analytics firm Optimus found Trump trailing Biden in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the lynchpins of his 2016 victory.

The common threads through all of those surveys, analysts said, are Trump's dismally low approval rating and the inelasticity in those numbers. Voters have formed hard opinions about Trump, whether favorably or unfavorably, and few seem willing or able to move off those feelings. [...]

Trump has become so inextricably linked with the Republican base that party strategists worry his low poll numbers could act as a drag on the rest of the ticket. Seven Republican senators are seeking reelection in states that are either swing states or where Trump has trailed in recent polls.

Those Republicans include the three most vulnerable seeking reelection this year, Sens. Martha McSally (Ariz.), Cory Gardner (Colo.) and Susan Collins (Maine). But Trump also appears vulnerable in states represented by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), David Perdue (R-Ga.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and John Cornyn (R-Texas).

Texas has become a particular concern for Republicans worried about Trump's fortunes. For years, Texas Democrats have waited for a surge that would finally make a deep-red state competitive -- and they nearly scored that long-sought victory in 2018, when Sen. Ted Cruz (R) survived a spirited challenge from former Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D).

DONALD WHO?:

This week's big leak about a major Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation was orchestrated by acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan in an effort to sabotage the raids before they were scheduled to take place, according to three current and two former senior administration officials. [...]

However, all five officials who spoke with the Washington Examiner confirmed McAleenan's decision to go rogue and stymie the operation was what prompted the White House to call off the 10-city operation.

THE DISCIPLINE OF DEMOCRACY:

The ruling Justice and Development Party's (AK Party) candidate in the controversial rerun of Istanbul's mayoral election has conceded defeat after initial results showed the opposition leading the vote. 

The state-run Anadolu news agency said on Sunday that the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) candidate Ekrem Imamoglu was leading with 53.69 percent of the vote, compared with AK Party's Binali Yildirim's 45.4 percent, with more than 95 percent of ballots counted.

BEING "MORALLY INDEFENSIBLE" IS DONALD'S CHIEF APPEAL TO THE rIGHT:

The government's "safe and sanitary" argument did not arise from a new case generated by Trump administration policies. It arose in 1985, during the Reagan administration, when a 15-year-old El Salvadoran child named Jenny Lisette Flores was detained after entering the United States illegally, hoping to escape her country's vicious civil war. Flores spent two months at a facility in California, confined with adult strangers in poor conditions and strip-searched regularly. In July 1985, she and three other minors brought a class action against what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service, challenging its policies for the care and confinement of minors.

In 1997, after a dozen years of litigation, the parties settled the lawsuit in what became known as the "Flores Agreement." The Flores Agreement requires, among other things, that the government hold minors in facilities that are "safe and sanitary" and that they be released from confinement without delay whenever possible.

Over the years, lawyers acting on behalf of minors protected by the Flores Agreement have filed numerous motions asking judges to enforce it, claiming that the government has fallen short of its obligations. They filed the motion now at issue in 2016, during the Obama administration, arguing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) were violating the Flores Agreement by, among other things, confining minors in facilities that are not "safe and sanitary."

United States District Judge Dolly Gee, who considered hundreds of declarations from minors and their parents, ultimately ruled that CBP was violating the Flores Agreement. In 2017, during the Trump administration, she found that CBP failed to provide adequate food and water to minors, that it did not maintain the facilities at adequate temperatures, and that it deprived the minors of sleep by confining them on concrete floors under bright lights. Gee also found that CBP's obligation to provide "safe and sanitary" conditions included providing soap, dry towels, showers, toothbrushes, and dry clothes. Gee ultimately ordered CBP to appoint a monitor to bring its facilities into compliance with the Flores Agreement.

Gee's order put the government in a technical legal bind. When a federal judge appoints an official to monitor compliance with an already existing injunction or agreement like the Flores Agreement, the government cannot immediately appeal. Such a measure is considered an "interlocutory" order--an intermediate one that does not generate a final decision suitable for appellate review. The government can only appeal if the judge modifiesthe prior injunction or order.

So that's what the United States argued. In its appeal to the Ninth Circuit, the United States--through Fabian and the other attorneys of the Office of Immigration Litigation--claimed that Gee had altered the deal. They argued that by ruling that "safe and sanitary conditions" specifically required things like dry clothes and toothbrushes and showers and not sleeping on concrete under bright lights, Gee changed the Flores Agreement and "substantially altered the legal relations of the parties by reading new requirements into the Agreement." That was the premise of their assertion that they could appeal, after all.

It was this sequence of events that brought Fabian before three judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit last week to make her startling argument. The panel--which included Judge A. Wallace Tashima, who as a child in World War II was confined to an internment camp with other Japanese Americans--was perhaps not an ideal forum. The judges were openly hostile, incredulous that the government would argue that a facility is "safe and sanitary" even if the minors confined there have no soap, toothbrushes, or dark places to sleep. "I find that inconceivable that the government would say that that is safe and sanitary," said Judge William Fletcher, in a representative comment. The judges ultimately suggested that the United States should consider whether it wanted to maintain the appeal--a signal that litigants ignore at their grave peril.

The United States's loathsome argument--that it is "safe and sanitary" to confine children without soap, toothbrushes, dry clothes, and on concrete under bright lights--is morally indefensible.

One of the nationalist principles Hazony emphatically propounds is "non-interference in the internal affairs of other states." This, of course, leaves open the problem of what to do about genocidal dictators like Hitler, a figure who seems to bedevil Hazony's analysis at every turn. As is well known, in the course of the 1930s, as Hitler tightened the noose around the Jews of Germany, there was a significant number of Americans who believed passionately in something very much like Hazony's principle of non-interference. Like Hazony, they regarded themselves as nationalists. Some were admirers of Mussolini and Hitler. Most were proponents of the slogan Trump has resurrected from that era, "America First." To these America Firsters, Germany's persecution of the Jews was simply the trouble of a wretched people in a faraway land and of no concern whatsoever to the United States.

Some of Hazony's nationalist compatriots like Patrick Buchanan insist to this day that American intervention in Europe in World War II was a historic error. Such a stance is evidently an embarrassment to Hazony, who identifies himself as a "Jewish nationalist, a Zionist, all my life." Confronted with the problem of a Hitler, Hazony jettisons his principle of non-interference and shifts into reverse.Confronted with the problem of a Hitler, Hazony jettisons his principle of non-interference and shifts into reverse. In some instances, Hazony avers, independent nation-states "have no choice but to interfere." Hazony's rationale for this 180-degree turnabout is that the crimes Hitler committed against his own people "were only a prelude to the attempt to destroy all the neighboring national states and to annex their populations to a universal empire." But as Suzanne Schneider asked in a pointed review in Foreign Policy, "How is one to know for sure when crimes committed internally are a prelude to those of outward aggression?" The answer, of course, is that one cannot know. But even if one could know, what course of action would Hazony recommend if the internal crimes were not a prelude to aggression, as in the wholesale slaughter of the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994 or if Hitler had confined his genocidal ethnic cleansing to within German borders? Would Hazony, like Buchanan, recommend that the United States remain a bystander under the banner of America First? The return of a 1930s-style isolationism is where Hazony's principles appear to lead.

Closely related to the problem of ethnic cleansing is the question of the homogeneity of the nation-state. Although Hazony does not include it in his enumeration of virtues, in the course of his argument it emerges that he regards homogeneity as a significant strength for an independent nation-state. The unwelcome "diversity" that one finds in empires or other agglomerations of peoples, he writes, makes them "more difficult to govern, weakening the mutual loyalties that had held it together, dissipating the attention and resources in the effort to suppress internal conflicts and violence that had previously been unknown to it." For Hazony, what is required for the establishment of a free state is "a majority nation whose cultural dominance" is so "overwhelming" that "resistance appears to be futile." He approvingly quotes Johann Gottfried Herder, the 18th-century father of German nationalism, who warns against "the wild mixing of races and nationalities under one scepter."

The United States thus poses a special challenge to the nationalist idea, for ours is a land where there has long been just such "wild mixing of races and nationalities." Rooted in the involuntary influx of the slave trade and the voluntary influx of immigration, our diversity in the 19th century brought us the bloody strife of a civil war, but in the 20th century it contributed to our remarkable success. Yet diversity is disquieting to Hazony and his fellow neo-nationalists; it is regarded not a strength but a weakness. Many of America's nationalist conservatives, it emerges on inspection, harbor a pronounced strand of nativism.

To Tucker Carlson, a keynote speaker at the Washington conference, immigration is something that "makes our own country poor and dirtier and more divided." Michael Anton warns that "a republic that opens its doors to immigrants must choose carefully whom and how many to accept." He cautions darkly against "ongoing mass immigration that. . . .'fundamentally transforms' one American community after the next." He inveighs against "the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty." As for Stephen Bannon, at a rightist rally in France, he was the most explicit. He told the crowd, "Let them call you racist, let them call you xenophobes, let them call you nativist. Wear it as a badge of honor." The racialist tenor of such alarums is as transparent as Donald Trump's comments about the "very fine people" among the white supremacists carrying tiki torches as they marched in Charlottesville.

nATIONALISM IS rACISM:

Similar in some ways to US President Donald Trump, she rose to national fame through reality TV. Both appeared on the same franchise, The Apprentice - a particularly crass example of the genre.

Hopkins appeared as a contestant in the UK version of the show. She is naturally a supporter of President Trump and of his racism; Trump, for his part, has returned the compliment. With his usual disregard for the truth, he has claimed she is a "respected columnist".

Her time spewing violently anti-Muslim garbage for the Sun and the Mail Online mercifully lasted only a few short years. It's an indicator of just how extreme she is that even two of Britain's most racist publications found her too much.

Her Sun contract ended in 2015 after public disgust at a particularly bad column, in which she attacked the (often Muslim) refugees and migrants fleeing across the Mediterranean Sea into Europe, labelling them "cockroaches".

Her openly genocidal language continued with a tweet in which she called for a "final solution" for Muslims - an invocation of the Nazi Holocaust against Jews. This thankfully led to the end of her LBC radio show.

None of this is legitimate free speech - it is open incitement to violence and even to genocide.

Read: UK: Pro-Israel activists plead guilty to harassing Palestine solidarity campaigners

Yet as with so many of the modern fascist far-right, Katie Hopkins is a big fan of Israel.

Earlier this month, Hopkins appeared on an Israeli TV channel openly calling for the expulsion of the almost seven million Palestinians who now live in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

The i24 News channel shamefully gave this fascist a platform to call for Israel to "remove the people who don't belong here" - the indigenous people of Palestine. This must be understood as a call for ethnic cleansing, though it more likely constitutes incitement to genocide.

Like other fascists, Hopkins has also propagated anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, tweeting that "Soros NGOs" are to blame for critical media coverage of Israel. This was a reference to Jewish billionaire George Soros, who has donated billions to his foundations supporting liberal and anti-communist causes.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Veterans groups announced plans Friday to give away shirts of the USS John McCain during next month's Fourth of July festivities on the National Mall in D.C., where President Trump is scheduled to give an address from the Lincoln Memorial.

Rags of Honor and VoteVets.org said volunteers will distribute shirts of the warship, nicknamed "Big Bad John," to celebrate the service of its namesakes: late Sen. John S. McCain III, his father and grandfather, who combined served more than a century in the U.S. Navy.

"We had a lot of policy battles with Sen. McCain, and fights on issues of war, but we always respected his service and his sacrifice," said VoteVets chair Jon Soltz. "While VoteVets and John McCain never much saw eye-to-eye on policy, and probably still would not if he was around today, his family's service to America spoke to that sense of realizing this nation is bigger than just one man. Honoring that kind legacy -- especially of a political opponent's -- seemed fitting for July 4."

TRUMPISM V. NEOCONSERVATISM:

Donald Trump has reportedly complainted that his closest advisers "want to push [the US] into a war" with Iran, following his decision to cancel military strikes against the Islamic Republic.

"These people want to push us into a war, and it's so disgusting," the US president said about his inner circle of aides, according to The Wall Street Journal.

TOO LATE; WE'RE ALREADY LOUSY WITH FRENCH-CANADIANS:

Congratulations to the U.S. Border Patrol. Its recent checkpoint on Route 2 in northwestern Vermont bagged one individual alleged to be "illegally present" in the country, according to the news site VtDigger. And it only took stopping 900 vehicles and questioning their occupants to pull off this critical feat of border enforcement.

Actually, it went better for the Border Patrol than the last time it set up a dragnet on the same stretch of road. In May, no arrests or property seizures were made. [...]

What these two checkpoints did confirm was the prediction the state's congressional delegation made last fall after being notified that Customs and Border Protection intended to stage another round of checkpoints in Vermont. "While these checkpoints will cause needless delays for travelers and hinder commerce between Vermont and Canada, we are not convinced that they will make Vermont or the United States any safer," they wrote.

Going through these checkpoints is indeed a hassle, as readers may recall from the ones erected for long periods years ago on Interstate 91 in Hartford and, for briefer periods, on Interstate 89 in Lebanon. But as the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont has pointed out, the bigger issue is that, absent suspicion of wrongdoing, stopping a line of cars to question their occupants about their citizenship status is inimical to an open society and makes a mockery of the constitutional right to be free from unreasonable, warrantless searches and seizures.

HECK, I'D MARRY THE oTHER bROTHER...:

The Star Tribune has sought to authenticate some of the most egregious allegations, using public records and available social media posts, which make up the bulk of the case against her.

Some of the original social media accounts linking Elmi to Omar after their split in 2011 appear to have been removed, and documents verifying the family relationships of refugees from war-torn countries with limited government record-keeping are notoriously hard to obtain, even by U.S. immigration authorities.

Omar declined to make her tax and immigration records available for this report.

What is known is that Omar, at the age of 19, sought a legal marriage license with Hirsi in Minnesota. Though they had three children together, they would not legally marry until January, 2018, after she had been in the Minnesota Legislature for a year and had dissolved the marriage in 2017 with Elmi.

After reaching what Omar called "an impasse in our life together," she and Hirsi split for a period in 2008. They had two children at the time.

In February 2009, public records show that Omar legally married Elmi, who she has identified as a "British citizen."

The relationship was brief. Omar said it ended in 2011, when she reconciled with Hirsi.

She gave birth to their third child the following June. She identified Hirsi as the father.

While Omar said she and Elmi had divorced in 2011 "in our faith tradition," they would not legally divorce until December, 2017 -- a month before she got legally married to Hirsi.

Imam Makram El-Amin of Masjid An-Nur in Minneapolis said an Islamic marriage must include the officiant and at least two witnesses, preferably one from each side of the family, to be a valid union. El-Amin, who did not perform Omar's marriages, said he has credentials to sign a marriage certificate. But just like any wedding at a church or synagogue, it's not legal in the state of Minnesota until processed by the county.

Similarly, an Islamic divorce requires two witnesses, ideally the same two who witnessed the marriage, plus a three-month waiting period, El-Amin said. The marriage can be then dissolved in the faith, although the divorce would require a Minnesota court to earn civil legal standing.

In her 2017 divorce, Omar attested that she had no contact with Elmi after their 2011 separation. Conservative activists say photos and other social media posted by Omar and Elmi on Instagram and Facebook suggest Omar may not be telling the truth. The Star Tribune has been unable to independently obtain the original posts, although images purporting to be screen grabs continue to populate right-leaning media sites such as Power Line Blog, PJ Media and Alpha News. They remain in public view.

One image featured on AlphaNewsMN depicts an Instagram photo purportedly posted by Elmi on June 12, 2012, the day after Omar gave birth to her third child. It shows a close-up picture of Elmi holding a newborn child the website says is Omar's, based on accompanying text that ostensibly refers to the baby girl as "nieces."

That and other Instagram photos have since been removed.

In her divorce, Omar said she had tried unsuccessfully to reach Elmi to respond to her court filings, including through social media. She also said that she did not know any other friends of family members who could contact him.

Omar and Elmi used a Columbia Heights address on the marriage application. Three months later, Hirsi used the same address to obtain a business license for his One-on-One Cafe Lounge, public records show.

Omar declined to offer an account of their living arrangement at that time.

Siblings who petition for a U.S. visa for a noncitizen sibling have typically had to wait more than a dozen years to obtain the document, according to the U.S. State Department. 

THE DISCIPLINE OF DEMOCRACY:

The city of 15 million is Turkey's economic powerhouse and has been a crucial source of patronage for Islamic conservatives since Erdogan himself won the mayorship a quarter-century ago.

But Imamoglu, of the secular Republican People's Party, has become a household name since being stripped of his victory.

He has vowed a "battle for democracy" and used an upbeat message under the slogan "Everything will be fine", in stark contrast to the usual aggressive name-calling of Turkish politics.

At a voting station in the trendy Beyoglu neighbourhood, 31-year-old architect Begum said: "I voted against injustice and those who seek to polarise this nation."

Imamoglu faces Binali Yildirim, a mild-mannered Erdogan loyalist who oversaw several huge transport projects and served as prime minister.

Yildirim's well-funded campaign has included ads on YouTube to attract younger voters and support from a pliant mainstream media.

Fearing fraud, the opposition has mobilised an army of lawyers from across Turkey to monitor Sunday's election, with the Istanbul Bar Association unfurling a huge banner at their headquarters that reads: "Stand guard for democracy". 

The March election showed Erdogan's party remains the most popular in Turkey, adored by millions for overseeing dramatic growth, fiercely defending the country's interests abroad and allowing religious conservatives a seat at the table. 

But double-digit inflation and rising unemployment have dented Erdogan's reputation for economic stewardship.

GETTING THE YAK BUTTER IS TOUGHER...:

On rare occasions as a kid, Renzin Yuthok and his family got to share a special breakfast. They'd gather around a table in their home in Bellevue, Wash., his dad would roll tsampa flour, butter and tea into balls called pa, and then he'd hand them out to his kids.

The meal served a symbolic purpose for Yuthok: "From a very young age, [Tibetans] are taught that ... reclaiming our homeland ... is what our highest aspiration could be," he says. Yuthok's family fled Tibet in the 1950s, but their breakfast -- and its grounding ingredient, tsampa -- kept him connected to that dream.

The word tsampa in Tibetan usually refers to ground-up, roasted barley flour, although occasionally the flour comes from wheat or another grain. It can be made into cereal, mashed into a poultice or mixed with yak butter and tea to make calorie-dense energy balls for long mountain treks (or breakfast treats for schoolkids). It's tossed into the air at religious ceremonies and can be incorporated into wedding cakes. The Dalai Lama says he eats it for breakfast.

Thanks to its hardiness (it's one of the few cereal crops that can survive on the high, arid and harsh Tibetan Plateau), barley has sustained the Tibetan population for thousands of years. Scientists say the cultivation of barley may have enabled ancient Tibetans to expand their civilization into the Himalayas. Researchers have found barley traces in 2,100-year-old remains of tea, which means it's possible that tsampa was eaten during that time.

But over the last century, tsampa has become even more than a culturally significant staple food. It's become a centerpiece of Tibetan identity and a tool of protest.

TRUMPISM SEEMS ADEQUATE:

In the back of a nondescript building at the University of Maryland, a team of researchers combs through the files of homegrown extremists who have plotted attacks in the name of far-right causes.

In each case, researchers are hunting for the motivation, the ideology, that inspired the violence. That means digging into the many elements that make up the far right, as researcher Michael Jensen explained on a recent afternoon.

"White supremacist, white nationalist, white extremist, sovereign citizen, anti-government, Patriot [movement], neo-Nazis, skinhead. What else?" Jensen asked two of his colleagues, Elizabeth Yates and Patrick James.

"I've seen 'anti-federalist' recently," Yates said.

"We also deal with a lot of just specifically anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant," James added. "Kind of xenophobic cases."

That list, rattled off on the spot, is nowhere near exhaustive, but it shows the complexities of trying to better understand far-right violence, which federal authorities say is the deadliest and most active form of domestic extremism. The labels the researchers use to code attacks are part of a wider debate over what to call the far-right threat -- and how politics plays into that debate.

The analysis produced by the university's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START Center for short, gets picked up by policymakers, academics and journalists. So, the research team says, the more precise the wording, the better, when it comes to helping public understanding of an evolving threat that defies simple labels.

"It's difficult to put people in these neat buckets and say there's the white supremacist over there and there's the anti-government ones over there," Jensen said. "It doesn't work that neatly."

But while academic researchers are pushing for more precision in describing white nationalism and other far-right extremism, the Trump administration seems to be moving in the opposite direction, with some officials adopting more generic terms such as "ethno-violence" or "racially motivated extremism." Unless they're being questioned by Congress, security officials rarely mention "white nationalist" or "white supremacist" violence. Those terms are missing from federal agencies' websites, too.

"I'm appalled that the leadership, at least some people, feel that they can't use those terms," said Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw terrorism-related cases at the Justice Department. "These acts of violence we've seen recently -- Tree of Life synagogue [in Pittsburgh], the recent events in California, international events like in Christchurch in New Zealand. I mean, these are white supremacists."

WHERE'S JANET RENO WHEN YOU NEED HER:

One of the groups, the Oregon Three Percenters, joined an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. Dozens of people occupied the remote Oregon refuge for more than a month to protest federal control of Western lands. The standoff began to unravel when authorities fatally shot the group's spokesman and arrested key leaders as they headed to a community meeting.

"The Oregon State Police has recommended that the Capitol be closed tomorrow due to a possible militia threat," Carol Currie, spokeswoman for Senate President Peter Courtney, said in an e-mail to The Associated Press late Friday.

The governor's office also confirmed the threats.

Oregon State Police, in a statement, said it has been "monitoring information throughout the day that indicates the safety of legislators, staff and citizen visitors could be compromised if certain threatened behaviors were realized."

Also late Friday, Courtney and House Speaker Tina Kotek, both Democrats, condemned comments made by Sen. Brian Boquist, a Republican from Dallas, Oregon, that urged the state police to "send bachelors and come heavily armed" when they come to bring him back to the Capitol.

"His comments have created fear among employees in our workplace," the leaders said in a joint statement. "We will always defend free speech and welcome frank policy discussions, but threats like these are unacceptable."

1 1/4 pounds fresh sweet cherries, about 4 cups measured with stems and pits

3 large eggs

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/8 teaspoon almond extract

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar

1 1/3 cup whole or low-fat milk

PROCEDURE

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Smear a 2-quart shallow baking dish liberally with butter.

2. Stem and pit cherries; place in a single layer in the baking dish.

3. In a standard blender, or using an immersion blender and a bowl, mix eggs, flour, vanilla and almond extracts, 1/2 cup sugar, and milk together until smooth. Pour batter over cherries and sprinkle fruit and batter with 2 tablespoons of sugar.

4. Bake the clafoutis until the custard is just set; a knife poked in the center should emerge relatively clean. It will take about 45 minutes. The clafouti can be served warm, at room temperature, or cold.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

'Puerile' is a Latin-derived equivalent of 'childish' that specifies "in a way that shows a lack of seriousness or good judgment." https://t.co/7ub1t8DIF7

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) June 22, 2019

SHE SHOULD REALLY BE IN ONE OF THOSE GLASS BOOTHS:

This is embarrassing and shameful pic.twitter.com/Jdo5Kasq6t

— nilay patel (@reckless) June 22, 2019

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATION:

THE GREATEST SHORTCOMING OF THE GND....:

More UK electricity is to come from zero-carbon sources than from fossil fuels this year - the first time since the industrial revolution, according to the National Grid.

Wind, solar, nuclear and hydropower are on course to outstrip supply from coal and gas-fired power stations after the closure of a number of older plants in recent years and a rapid expansion in renewable capacity.

Green energy sources have more than doubled their contribution to Britain's energy mix from 22.3 per cent in 2009 to 47.9 per cent in the first half of 2019.

NATIONALIST VALUES:

They know. They know very well.

They simply don't care. https://t.co/RQ7vWZPTIP

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) June 22, 2019

SOMEONE HAS TO FIX THE METS' SLIDERS:

The New York Mets made an out-of-the-box move yesterday, hiring 82-year-old Phil Regan as their interim pitching coach. The former big-league hurler, and longtime coach, takes over for Dave Eiland, who along with understudy Chuck Hernandez, was relieved of his duties in the throes of what has been an underachieving season.

As you should be aware, Regan's nickname is "The Vulture." It was given to him by Sandy Koufax, in a year that Regan went 14-1 out of the Dodgers bullpen with 21 saves and a 1.62 ERA. Prior to that 1966 season, he'd pitched primarily as a starter for the Detroit Tigers, the team he grew up rooting for in rural Michigan. Overall, Regan appeared in 551 games, for four teams, from 1960-1972. [...]

Laurila: You ended up signing with them after graduating from high school.

Regan: "I did. As a kid, I never really got to play many games of baseball, because I lived out on a little farm, near a little town. Mostly I threw against a barn, with my brother, and stuff like that. But I had a good arm, and after graduating I was invited to Tiger Stadium to work out. They offered me a contract, but I decided that I wanted to go to Western Michigan [University]. After a year at Western, I decided to sign with the Tigers. From there I went into their minor league system."

Laurila: How much did you sign for?

Regan: "At that point in time, if you got more than $4,000, you had to stay with the major league team for two years. That' s a guy like Al Kaline. The year I signed, there were two players -- an outfielder named Jim Small, and a left-handed pitcher named Jim Brady -- who got those bonuses and had to stay with Detroit. My signing bonus was $2,700. Then I got $250 a month, playing in Jamestown, New York. This was in 1956."

Laurila: I understand that you learned your slider from a Tigers pitcher who'd starred in the 1930s.

Regan: "Schoolboy Rowe. This has always amazed me. I was a young high school kid, and I was down at a clinic in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He told me I had a good arm, but that it was too low; I needed to get it up, or big left-handed hitters would eat me up in pro ball. Being a high school kid, I didn't listen.

"In the spring of 1958, I was with the Birmingham club. We trained in Ocala, Florida, and Schoolboy Rowe came down there. The first thing he said when he saw me throw was, 'You have to get your arm up higher.' Then he said, 'We're going to get you a different breaking ball.' He taught me a slider -- I picked it up really quick -- and it became probably my best pitch. And I did change my motion. I used to have a low, smooth delivery. From that, I became kind of a short-arm, herky-jerk pitcher. I cut my walks in half that year. Two years later I was in the big leagues."

Laurila: What do you remember about your debut?

Regan: "I came up from the [Triple-A] Denver Bears and pitched against the old Washington Senators [on July 19, 1960]. I relieved Jim Bunning. We got beat -- Pedro Ramos shut us out; I think he pitched a one-hitter -- and the one run I allowed was on a home run by Harmon Killebrew. I went five innings.

"The 25,000 people who were there [at Detroit's Briggs Stadium] seemed like 100,000 to me. The town I was from is about 1,200 people, and you don't see a lot of fans in the stands in the minor leagues, so that was quite the experience for me."

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

When did the investigation start?

The FBI began probing the Trump campaign's connections to Russia on July 31, 2016, based on an alarming tip from the Australian government. Two months earlier, Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos had told Australia's top diplomat in London over drinks that the Russian government had "dirt" on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and might release the information to help the Trump campaign. The diplomat, Alexander Downer, thought Papadopoulos was too young and inexperienced to have any real influence in a presidential campaign, but notified his superiors. When WikiLeaks began releasing hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee on July 22, the Australian ambassador to the U.S. informed American officials of what Papadopoulos had said. Days later, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation, code-naming the operation "Crossfire Hurricane."

What did the FBI investigate?

The unusual ties of several Trump campaign aides to Russia. The early investigation focused on Papadopoulos, as well as Trump senior adviser Michael Flynn, campaign manager Paul Manafort, and foreign policy adviser Carter Page. Flynn had been paid $45,000 by Russia's state-sponsored television network RT for a 2015 speech in Moscow, where he was given a place of honor at the same dinner table as President Vladimir Putin. Manafort had been paid millions lobbying for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine. Page, an oil industry consultant who had lived in Russia for three years during the early 2000s, was already well known to the FBI. Russian spies had attempted to recruit him as an asset in 2013, after which a Russian operative was overheard in a wiretapped conversation telling his superiors that Page was "an idiot." As a Trump campaign aide...

THE ONLY BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

WE AREN'T REJECTING THE FACT THAT THEY ARE CONCENTRATION CAMPS...:

[T]he argument is really about how we perceive history, ourselves, and ourselves in history. We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison. As for history, the greater the event, the more mythologized it becomes. Despite our best intentions, the myth becomes a caricature of sorts. Hitler, or Stalin, comes to look like a two-dimensional villain--someone whom contemporaries could not have seen as a human being. The Holocaust, or the Gulag, are such monstrous events that the very idea of rendering them in any sort of gray scale seems monstrous, too. This has the effect of making them, essentially, unimaginable. In crafting the story of something that should never have been allowed to happen, we forge the story of something that couldn't possibly have happened. Or, to use a phrase only slightly out of context, something that can't happen here.

A logical fallacy becomes inevitable. If this can't happen, then the thing that is happening is not it. What we see in real life, or at least on television, can't possibly be the same monstrous phenomenon that we have collectively decided is unimaginable. I have had many conversations about this in Russia. People who know Vladimir Putin and his inner circle have often told me that they are not the monsters that I and others have described. Yes, they have overseen assassinations, imprisonments, and wars, but they are not thoroughly terrible, my interlocutors have claimed--they are not like Stalin and his henchmen. In other words, they are not the monsters of our collective historical imagination. They are today's flesh-and-blood monsters, and this makes them seem somehow less monstrous.

Anything that happens here and now is normalized, not solely through the moral failure of contemporaries but simply by virtue of actually existing. 

THERE'S ONLY ONE STORY:

What glimmers of light do we spy in O'Connor's weird stories? Grace penetrates the fantastic freaks and gothic grotesqueries. Like light filtering through cracks of a dungeon wall, there are moments of enlightenment. The grandmother touches the Misfit tenderly the moment before he shoots her, and in her final moment grim reality finally punctures the facade of her smug self-righteousness. A calm resignation penetrates the story as Motes pursues an ascetic life in recompense for his insane violence. Some power is unleashed in the midst of the horror--a power that could not be at work in the same way without the horror.

Whether Mr. Tarantino intended it or not, the same tremor of redemption and hints of grace reverberate within his terrible film. The gangster Jules believes he was spared from the bullets intended for him by a miracle, and he decides to turn from crime to be what we might recognize as a holy fool--a wandering pilgrim. Butch the boxer saves Marsellus Wallace (the man who was about to kill him) from the depraved rapists, and he himself is spared only by a seeming coincidence from being killed by Vincent Vega. Does the working of grace echo through Pulp Fiction as it does through the work of Flannery O'Connor?

There doesn't seem to be anything in Mr. Tarantino's other work or in his own comments on the film to indicate an awareness of theological depth that might underscore the story. And yet there is that curious detail... after Butch escapes the torture chamber and returns to rescue his enemy Marsellus, he rides off into the sunset on a chopper motorcycle with the word "Grace" emblazoned on the tank.

Are Pulp Fiction and the work of O'Connor witnesses to the absurdity, violence, and insanity of nihilism, or are they pointers to the prevailing power of Providence? The fractured structure of Mr. Tarantino's film and the episodic and seemingly disjointed structure of O'Connor's Wise Blood smell of nihilism: "There is no structure here," we want to say, "There is no meaning, no overarching narrative. All is random. All is meaningless."

Yes, but at the end of the film, and at the end of O'Connor's stories with their famous sting in the tail, the light of Providence glimmers tantalizingly. So there was a meaning after all! But it was not the meaning I was expecting. So there was a plot line and structure after all! But it was not the structure I was expecting.

And isn't that what life within the adventure of faith is all about?

GOT A FAIR CHUNK OF THAT ONE...:

5️⃣0️⃣5️⃣ FEET! 😱😱😱 pic.twitter.com/C40SrLUXIl

— MLB (@MLB) June 22, 2019

WE'RE GONNA NEED MORE POPCORN:

Fox News host Tucker Carlson is a man on a mission. His objective? To use his influence over Donald Trump to stop war with Iran. Last night, he used his opening monologue to praise the President for having cancelled the military strike on Iran on Thursday night. Almost directly addressing the President, Carlson said into the barrel of the camera: 'Ill-advised wars are like cocaine: The initial rush raises your poll numbers, but the crash is inevitable, and horrible.' He described Trump's change of course as the 'high point of his presidency.' [...]

'Try as you might, you can't expel him. He seems to live forever in the bowels of the federal agencies, periodically reemerging to cause pain and suffering -- but somehow never suffering himself. This is Washington in a nutshell: Blunder into obvious catastrophes, refuse to admit blame, and demand more of the same. That's the John Bolton lifecycle. In between administration jobs, there are always cushy think-tank posts, paid speaking gigs, and cable news appearances. War may be a disaster for America, but for John Bolton and his fellow neocons, it's always good business.'

SERVED COLD:

A "nonpartisan" dark money group that regularly files litigation against President Donald Trump's administration is powered by money from the Center for American Progress (CAP), the liberal think tank founded by former Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.

The Democracy Forward Foundation, a D.C.-based 501(c)3 nonprofit, was founded in 2017 to "help expose the rampant corruption in the Executive Branch and fight in court on behalf of the people it hurts." The group also has a 501(c)4 "social welfare" arm that goes by Democracy Forward. The foundation has filed suit against numerous government agencies, such as the Department of Justice, Department of Treasury, and the Office of Management and Budget, and has aided other entities with similar litigation, including Baltimore's lawsuit against the Trump administration over immigration policy.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Democrats in a House agriculture subcommittee lashed out at a retired millionaire who applied for and received food stamps in an effort to prove that eligibility for the government benefits in his home state of Minnesota were too lax and could be easily exploited.

Rob Undersander noticed several years back that income was the only criterion for receiving benefits from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps.

A retired engineer with a seven-figure nest egg but no real income, Undersander decided to perform an experiment to determine if someone as well-off as he and his wife could obtain the benefits.

"I've got the [SNAP] form in my hand and I'm thinking of my financial situation, and I said 'you know, I just can't believe this,'" Undersander told the Washington Free Beacon by phone earlier this week. "So I went down to the second floor of the Sterns County Courthouse, stood in line a little bit, handed in the application and three weeks later I'm getting food stamps, a balance on my EBT card."

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

Over the past four years, since the beginning of Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen in March 2015, the conflict in the poorest Arab nation has gone through various phases, with calamitous consequences for Yemeni civilians.

However, in recent weeks, Houthi attacks against military and civilian targets within Saudi territory have markedly escalated, which notably coincided with amplifying pressure from the United States and its allies on Iran, a key regional supporter of Yemen's Houthis.

The surge in Houthi attacks may be aimed at showing the US and its allies that any conflict between them and Iran risks igniting a regional war, analysts told Al Jazeera. Others see the attacks as asymmetric retaliation against US regional allies by Tehran, which lacks the economic or diplomatic power to punish Washington in response to US-led sanctions and "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran.

As the situation in the Middle East continues to escalate, with Iran and the US-Saudi axis trading accusations over sabotaged vessels in the Gulf, Qataris quietly marked two years of living under siege.

Although the land, sea and air blockade the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt imposed on Qatar in June 2017 has taken a backseat because of the Iranian crisis, the confrontation at its heart has by far not diminished.

Riyadh and Abu Dhabi continue lobbying against Doha on international platforms and are showing no sign of easing their economic siege. This became apparent once again at the three summits the Saudi king hosted in Mecca last month, to which Qatar was invited.

During the proceedings, Saudi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Assaf said a solution to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) crisis would only be possible if Doha goes back to the "right path" - that is, if it heeds to the Saudi and Emirati regional agenda.

Despite having failed to subdue their neighbour thus far, both Abdu Dhabi and Riyadh seemingly believe that hostile measures can still yield the desired outcome. Their persistence with the blockade is part of their larger plan to establish regional hegemony in the long term. The success of their plan, however, is very much wedded to US President Donald Trump securing a second term.

YEAH, BUT HILLARY'S EMAILS...:

An advice columnist for Elle fashion magazine said in an account published Friday that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of a New York department store more than two decades ago.

E. Jean Carroll said the incident occurred in either 1995 or 1996, when Trump was a prominent real estate developer and she was a well-known magazine writer and host of a television show.

The account, revealed in an excerpt of Carroll's latest book and published Friday by New York magazine, makes her at least the 16th woman to have accused Trump of sexual misconduct before he became president.

EXCEPT THE JUDGE WAS A MAN OF HONOR:

The Time magazine cover said it all. Above a somber portrait of U.S. President Ronald Reagan's national security advisor, William "The Judge" Clark, a bold-faced headline proclaimed: "The Big Stick Approach." The message was clear: The White House was taking charge of a more forceful foreign policy. Yet just two months later, in October 1983, that cover boy was out of the job, a casualty of a breakdown on the National Security Council over the United States' role in the Middle East.

This mostly forgotten history should serve as a warning to President Donald Trump's National Security Advisor John Bolton--whose push to use the big stick effectively against Iran, North Korea, and other countries has led to speculation over his job security.

Unlike Clark, a longtime Reagan loyalist who admitted his own lack of expertise on foreign policy, Bolton has been a decades-long fixture in the right-wing national security establishment. But the two national security advisors have something fundamental in common: They both found themselves pushing so hard for hawkish policies that they turned off their colleagues and their presidents.

On Thursday night, Trump pulled back from a retaliatory strike against Iran--urged, reportedly, by Bolton--for shooting down a U.S. drone. Planes and ships were moving into position by the time Trump changed course. Friday morning, Trump explained the whiplash on Twitter, saying the strikes would have been disproportionate.

Such an about-face--a president not feeling confident enough in his own call and having to change it--is the result of Bolton's muddled decision-making processes, with senior advisors pulling one way and the president another, and none of the options solid enough for the commander in chief's comfort. For the national security advisor, the question is whether he can find a way to wield a big stick effectively without getting whacked himself. The question for the rest of us is whether we should be worried more about how the Trump administration makes policies than about the decisions themselves.

SCRATCH A TRUMPBOT?:

The spokesman for an infamous border militia now faces a fraud charge for allegedly using a child's cancer diagnosis to make money. Court records in Logan County, Oklahoma show that Jim Benvie, 43, faces a misdemeanor count of attempting to obtain money by false pretenses, on top an existing felony charge of possession of a stolen vehicle.

Benvie's alleged activity was previously reported by The Daily Beast and CBS 4 Local back in May, but there were no fraud charges at the time. He was allegedly collecting money, ostensibly on behalf of 11-year-old Ryan Cremeens, a child suffering from cancer. Instead, he was taking to cash for himself, authorities said.

WHAT CONSTITUTION?:

The Time reporters noted that Trump confidante Corey Lewandowski had testified "under threat of prison time" that Trump told him to order then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit the Mueller investigation. Trump had just denied trying to limit the investigation. Things got weird:

Trump: Excuse me -- Under Section II -- Well, you can go to prison instead, because, if you use, if you use the photograph you took of the letter that I gave you ... confidentially, I didn't give it to you to take photographs of it. So don't play that game with me. 

ALL THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

The survey showed 41 percent of North Carolina voters polled said they would vote for Cunningham if he was the state's Democratic Senate nominee, while 40 percent said they would vote for Tillis. 

The poll also showed Tillis's approval ratings in the state to be underwater, with 23 percent of North Carolina voters saying they approved of the way he does his job in the Senate, and 46 percent saying they disapproved. 

Tillis is also trailing another one of his three challengers, according to an Emerson College poll released earlier this month. 

ONLY THE SA'UDS ARE MISSING:

AMENITIES ARE HISTORICALLY POOR IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS:

The Trump administration went to court this week to argue that migrant children detained at the United States-Mexico border do not require basic hygiene products like soap and toothbrushes in order to be in held in "safe and sanitary" conditions. Trump's team also argued that requiring minors to sleep on cold concrete floors in crowded cells with low temperatures similarly fulfilled that requirement.

SCRATCH A TRUMPBOT:

DONALD WILL CARRY AL TOO:

After Doug Jones won Alabama's U.S. Senate race in 2017 -- the first time a Democrat had won a seat there in 25 years -- it seemed as if Roy Moore's political career was over. After all, he faced allegations that he initiated unwanted sexual contact with teenage girls when he was in his 30s. (Moore has denied the allegations, dismissing them as "fake news.")

But now Moore has decided to run for the Senate again. On Thursday, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court announced his bid -- and his new campaign can't be entirely written off. Yes, Moore is defying the wishes of many Republicans, including President Trump, who said in a tweet last month that "Roy Moore cannot win." But Moore still has a passionate base of support, particularly among conservative evangelical Christians.

DUTY BOUND:

I disagree with Walker that liberal democracy, if understood as the Anglo-American political/constitutional tradition, is not a "good unto itself." Fervently I believe this tradition has been not just a positive good but a unique and tremendous contribution to the uplift of humanity, politically, materially, intellectually and spiritually.

The Anglo-American political tradition ultimately is based on a Christian anthropology about the God-ordained dignity of each person. Its Protestant and especially Calvinist-influenced realism about human nature and society constructed safeguards against supreme trust in any individuals or institutions.

This Anglo Protestant tradition's animus against centralized power has generated constitutional monarchies and republics of unparalleled endurance and stability. Its protections of private property and intellectual rights have generated unequaled wealth, ingenuity and beneficence. Its premise that each person carries the political image of God, irrespective of caste or class, has been the most democratizing and egalitarian force in human history.

These regimes and their egalitarian principles have, for all their warts, offered relative liberty and protection to hundreds of millions across time and culture, including of course persons and groups outside the Anglo-Protestant tradition. And these regimes remain inspirations, consciously or implicitly, for billions globally who live outside their rule. These regimes of British Protestant origin also are the primary bulwarks against authoritarian alternatives.

We who are Anglo-American Protestants should be especially protective of this political tradition of ordered liberty since it is we who were its primary crafters and have been its main cultural stewards across four centuries. The tradition was brewed during the struggles between Protestant established churches and Protestant dissenters in Britain of the 1600s.

FLATLANDERS NEED NOT APPLY:

The New Hampshire primary is one of the biggest prizes of the 2020 presidential campaign. Every candidate would like to win it, but four may have a built-in advantage: They already have a lot in common with Granite State voters because they're from just next door.

This year, four presidential candidates hail from a state that borders New Hampshire: Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren on the Democratic side and former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld on the Republican side. And candidates from right next door have historically overperformed in the New Hampshire primary compared with how they did nationally.

Going back to the start of the modern primary system in 1972, I identified nine "major"1 candidates who have run in the New Hampshire primary and who were from either New Hampshire or the neighboring states of Maine, Massachusetts or Vermont. (It turns out none of the candidates from New Hampshire met our "major" threshold, so we're talking exclusively about neighboring candidates from here on out.) Of the nine, six finished in first place, and three finished in second. In other words, when politicians from neighboring states contest the New Hampshire primary, they win it 67 percent of the time, and impressively, they have always finished in the top two.

IF THE BRAND HAD VALUE DONALD WOULDN'T BE A SERIAL BANKRUPT:

The House GOP campaign arm is under fire from Republicans who are growing increasingly anxious about the party's plan to win back the chamber in 2020.

Republicans still don't have an answer to Democrats' online fundraising behemoth ActBlue. GOP leaders are bickering behind closed doors. The head of recruitment has decided to retire. And some rank-and-file lawmakers are starting to express alarm about the party's strategy as the campaign ramps up.

WE ARE THE HOUTHIS:

RETURN TO NORMALCY:

According to Pew, 53 percent of Republican or Republican-leaning voters say they sometimes feel "embarrassed" by Trump's comments -- while 59 percent are sometimes "concerned" by them. Some of the adjectives Pew ran by GOP or GOP-leaning voters were even stronger, including "angry," "exhausted" and "frightened."

And according to the same survey, 41 percent of them sometimes feel "exhausted" by Trump's comments, while 37 percent sometimes feel "angry" because of them. And 32 percent felt "insulted" by things Trump says, although only 22 percent feel "frightened" by them.

RACISM IN FANCY DRESS:

In December, during a public event by the right-wing organisation Turning Point UK, American conservative commentator and activist Candace Owens answered a question on nationalism and globalism by explaining how Adolf Hitler was not a nationalist, because his policy was expansionist.

Needless to say, curiosity got the best of us over here in Europe. We attempted to find out how apparently not all historical evidence points us to the conclusion that nationalism - and its unholy alliance with bigotry and institutionalised discrimination - created the Third Reich and its destructive motivations. Owens "clarified" her statements by doubling down: "I'm saying Hitler wasn't a nationalist." For her, Hitler was "a homicidal, psychotic maniac" and there is "no excuse or defense ever for ... everything that he did."

Owens is, to nobody's surprise, very wrong. While Hitler did not create the nationalist movement as such, he did need to tap into it to justify expansionism and ethnic cleansing.

Hitler's nationalism was expressed through those two wishes: giving the Germans "Lebensraum" (habitat) by reuniting Greater Germany (incorporating Austria, the Baltics, Belarus, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the Caucasus region, and all of European Russia).

But this was not the first time that nationalism had effectively destroyed Europe. In fact, nationalist destruction peaked with World War I, which would bring the continent from prosperity to decades of destruction.

THE LESSON OF TURKEY & EGYPT...:

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took part in funeral prayers in Istanbul's ancient Fatih mosque today in honor of Egypt's former President Mohammed Morsi, who collapsed and died in a Cairo court on Monday.

Crowds gathered for the ritual chanted "God is Great" as Erdogan capped the prayers with an impassioned speech lionizing his onetime Muslim Brotherhood ally. 

Erdogan openly questioned the circumstances of Morsi's death. "I don't believe it was normal," he said, adding, "Morsi had wanted to be buried in his native village upon his death but had been denied this last wish." Erdogan labeled Egypt's current President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi a "murderer" who had overseen the executions of many people, prompting a fresh volley of Islamist slogans.

The scenes were repeated at mosques in all 81 of Turkey's provinces, where funerals "in absentia" were held on orders from the government, an extraordinary gesture signaling the importance bestowed on Egypt's first democratically elected leader.

TRUMPONOMICS:

Pain has returned to the US steel industry, despite the tariffs put on imported steel last year that were designed to help.

Late Tuesday US Steel announced it will idle two of the blast furnaces where it makes steel, one in its flagship mill in Gary, Indiana, near Chicago, the other in Ecorse, Michigan, near Detroit. The idled furnaces will cut production by about 200,000 tons of steel or more a month, the company said.

THAT WOULD BE THE FIRST REFUGE:

[T]rump is perhaps in the worst position of any incumbent president in recent history. His poll numbers are so bleak he refuses to acknowledge them, going so far as to fire pollsters who had the temerity to show the president consistently losing to his potential Democratic rivals. He is trailing in a number of key electoral states, including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. He is on the verge of dragging the United States into war with Iran, and his other high-profile diplomatic gambits have failed. His luck with the economy could run out any moment, due either to the vicissitudes of economic cycles or the trade wars he has tried to gin up. Even if House Democrats don't officially start an impeachment inquiry, the investigations they conduct could drive presidential poll numbers into the earth's core.

But when the walls close in, you can always count on President Trump to do what any man in his position (his position being a rageful and insecure manchild) would: Turn again to racist fearmongering.

MITCH SLAPPED:

Most Americans say the legacy of slavery still affects black people in the U.S. today https://t.co/5CACudv141 pic.twitter.com/1eaGHnyZau

— Pew Research Fact Tank (@FactTank) June 19, 2019

IT'S ALWAYS JUST RACISM:

[R]acism was a substantial factor in the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924--a law that effectively cut immigration to America in half based on quotas that preferred immigrants from Northern and Western Europe over those from Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, or Asia. For those inclined to see the current efforts at restricting illegal and legal immigration as similarly motivated, it might be mildly reassuring to know that today's trend is not unprecedented. Or it may be all the more dismaying, if the current effort is a repeat of past mistakes rather than progress beyond them.

There is also a second, perhaps less-obvious way in which Okrent's account resonates today--especially for those interested in education and philanthropy as well as immigration policy. This way has to do with seeing the 1924 episode as a case study in erroneous elite groupthink. Scholars at America's most prestigious universities, backed by wealthy donors, influential newspapers, and powerful labor leaders, went off the rails. Their eugenics research, investigating the heritability of complex traits and associating them with racial groups, served their own preconceptions of progress, but it was groundless and deeply flawed science, lacking in rigor, cherrypicked, sloppy, disconnected from empirical reality, and morally untethered. It had disastrous public-policy consequences.

Cover of "The Guarded Gate" by Daniel OkrentOkrent is unsparing in documenting the leading role played by academics in the eugenics fad that contributed to the rewriting of our nation's immigration law. It's a story about a failure in higher education. Professors inspired by Charles Darwin's work on natural selection and Gregor Mendel's work on genetics became propagandists advancing the dangerous fantasy that a nation's population could be perfected by government action to promote the "Nordic race" and its supposedly superior physical, moral, and intellectual traits over allegedly inferior Mediterranean, Asiatic, African, and Alpine types. The president of Stanford, David Starr Jordan, chaired the eugenics committee of the American Breeders Association and was a major fundraiser for the research. Edward Ross, the coiner of the phrase "race suicide," had a doctorate from Johns Hopkins and taught at Stanford, the University of Nebraska, and the University of Wisconsin. One of the most prominent eugenicists, H. Fairfield Osborn, taught biology at Barnard. Other figures identified by Okrent as "critically important . . . in the spread of scientific racism and its application to the immigration issue" included professors Robert Yerkes and Ellsworth Huntington of Yale, Charles Conant Josey of Dartmouth, William McDougall and Edward East of Harvard, Carl Brigham of Princeton, and Roy Garis of Vanderbilt.

As Okrent tells it, some of the academics were "committed progressives" who argued for outlawing child labor because doing so "would take away the poor's incentive to breed." The New York Times cheered; Okrent, who served a stint as public editor of that newspaper, has unearthed a 1921 editorial in which the Times warned of "swarms of aliens" bringing "diseases of ignorance and Bolshevism." At a climactic moment in the immigration debate, the New York Times Book Review, under the headline, "Failure of the Melting Pot," lavished praise on a pseudoscientific restrictionist book. Even the president of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, himself a Jewish immigrant from England, described unrestricted immigration as a "pressing evil," warning that "the persistence of racial characteristics" meant that America could be "overwhelmed" by outsiders.

DEMOCRATS DON'T EVEN NEED A VOTE SUPPRESSION OPERATION:

President Trump's campaign manager Brad Parscale is predicting Mr. Trump will win even more electoral votes than in 2016 -- "an electoral landslide" -- dismissing independent polling that shows the president trailing top Democrats. 

THE rEPUBLICAN THEY CAN'T ATTACK:

Progressive activists and operatives eager to knock down Biden from his frontrunner perch admit it could be a serious problem that eight years of Biden's political career is effectively off-limits. And for Biden, who is explicitly running as Obama's heir, it's been a godsend.

"It's going to be challenging for progressives to attack that legacy," said Yvette Simpson, chief executive of the progressive political action committee Democracy for America. "Because Obama not only is and was so popular, but people are very nostalgic for that time, particularly after a few years of Trump."

For years, left-wing activists have disapproved of the Obama administration's management of the economic crash, opioid crisis, immigrant deportations, and ill-fated attempts to compromise with Republicans. But many believe it would be political suicide for progressive presidential candidates to question Obama's record at length, even in the service of defeating Biden.

SCRATCH A TRUMPBOT:

A former Republican operative notorious for his connections to white nationalists has established himself as an opinion contributor for several national publications, including the Wall Street Journal, while writing under a thinly veiled pen name, BuzzFeed News has learned.

Marcus Epstein, who worked for former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo and founded a nativist political club with white nationalist Richard Spencer, has written more than a dozen opinion pieces for the Journal, the Hill, Forbes, US News and World Report, and the National Review over the past two years. His pieces, which mainly focus on the regulation of the technology industry, were published under the byline "Mark Epstein."

In six different pieces for the Journal, Epstein is identified as an "antitrust attorney and freelance writer" and addresses topics including the supposed threat to conservative speech posed by Google and Facebook, and the ways regulation and antitrust might be used to ensure "viewpoint neutrality" and consumer protection, respectively. They make no mention of his past, which includes contributions to the white nationalist site VDare and charges that he assaulted a black woman, after racially abusing her, in 2007.

SCRATCH A TRUMPBOT:

That backstory, in true Trump-tabloid fashion, features the friendship between Mr. Falwell, his wife and a former pool attendant at the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach; the family's investment in a gay-friendly youth hostel; purported sexually revealing photographs involving the Falwells; and an attempted hush-money arrangement engineered by the president's former fixer, Michael Cohen. [...]

At around the same time, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump were arranging with The National Enquirer and its chief, the Trump ally David Pecker, to buy and bury stories about Mr. Trump and women that could harm his political prospects. Mr. Cohen's confessed role in two such deals -- one with The Enquirer to silence the former Playboy model Karen McDougal, the other with the pornographic actress Stormy Daniels, whom he initially paid out of his own pocket -- contributed to the three-year sentence he is now serving at the federal prison in Otisville, N.Y.

Mr. Cohen, a longtime fixer for Mr. Trump, described an effort to buy and bury embarrassing photos involving the Falwells.CreditJohn Taggart for The New York Times

By Mr. Cohen's account, the Falwells appeared to be in need of just that sort of help.

By late 2015, the lawsuit over ownership of the hostel had devolved into a fight over compromising photos, according to several people involved in the case. It was understood that between Mr. Granda, the Fernandezes and their lawyers, one or more people were in possession of photographs that could be used as leverage against the Falwells.

And so Mr. Cohen tried to play the fixer for his friends.

In a recent legal filing, Mr. Fernandez Jr. said he was forced to change his name because of the case. He became Gordon Bello. His father, Mr. Fernandez, Sr., became Jett Bello. Their name changes took place after Mr. Cohen intervened.

Mr. Cohen described his involvement in his conversation with Mr. Arnold, which was first reported last month by Reuters.

"There's a bunch of photographs, personal photographs, that somehow the guy ended up getting -- whether it was off of Jerry's phone or somehow maybe it got AirDropped or whatever the hell the whole thing was," Mr. Cohen told Mr. Arnold in the recording, which Mr. Arnold shared with The Times. Mr. Cohen never identified "the guy."

"These are photos between husband and wife," Mr. Cohen added, joking that "the evangelicals are kinkier than Tom Arnold." 

DONALD WHO?:

A little more than a year ago, moments after he fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson by tweet, President Donald Trump looked ahead optimistically to reshaping his Cabinet.

Standing on the White House driveway, the president told reporters, "I'm really at a point where we're getting very close to having the Cabinet and other things that I want."

It hasn't quite worked out that way. Instead, Trump has a Cabinet by default, with many of its members simply being the last person standing after others pulled out of the running, declined the president's offers or couldn't get through their confirmation hearings.

In just the latest example of a Trump official going down amid the harsh glare of an invigorated Washington press corps, acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan withdrew from consideration for the top Pentagon job on Tuesday as news outlets published lurid details of his divorce.

KEEP FUNK ALIVE:

[N]either Webb nor Dayton is giving up: They're fighting to keep Dayton alive as a funk hub for future generations. Billboard-topping artists and groups from the city such as Steve Arrington, the Ohio Players and Zapp are still touring, reminding fans of that legacy. Last year, street murals were unveiled depicting Dayton's legendary funk artists. This summer, the city is organizing 52 outdoor concerts, including four dedicated funk acts. Webb, meanwhile, is desperately searching for alternative accommodations for the Funk Center. He's in the midst of a GoFundMe campaign to raise $50,000 that would help secure a $100,000 state grant, and he continues to be on the lookout for a venue in downtown Dayton. At stake is one of American music's modern legacies.

"I think something's going to come together for us," says Webb. "We're a one-of-a-kind museum in the world."

Dayton's claim as the funk world capital has been rarely disputed. Local musicians, DJs and scholars estimate that between 1972 and 1998, 16 funk and R&B groups connected to Dayton produced more than 110 charting singles. Zapp's 1980 track "More Bounce to the Ounce" was named in 2016 by Billboard as the greatest funk song of all time. Without Dayton, there'd likely be no Daft Punk or "Uptown Funk."

Unlike Detroit's Motown, the "Dayton sound" was not rooted in a producer-driven theme but in an organic, eclectic mix of divergent voices. Zapp star Roger Troutman's use of the talkbox voice synthesizer in the 1980s was the precursor to tracks such as 1996 hit "California Love" and a sound sampled by a generation of West Coast rappers and R&B artists. Furthermore, instead of moving to major cities, groups such as the Ohio Players stayed in Dayton, helping to encourage and develop new acts.

BUT DRUDGERY IS THE POINT!

Robotic dishwasher saves restaurants from drudgery https://t.co/ydbmgMQXhH pic.twitter.com/OdcsaxVILF

— Engadget (@engadget) June 18, 2019

NO ONE LEFT TO BE LIED TO BY:

AS IT WAS A DUTY FOR ALL OUR FAMILIES:

In the village of Comunidad Agraria Emanuel, a coffee-growing region in western Guatemala, Fernando González Hernández watches as his nephews saw wood. They're building a cabinet for his new home.

González helps by straightening out old nails with a hammer so that they can be reused. The home is a work in progress -- thanks to one person: González's eldest son. 

He states his son's name with pride: "Federico González Morales. He's in Indiana."

His son works in construction and sends home remittances, or cash, every month. It's money that's helping build this home, which is bare-bones but comfortable: a big living room, small kitchen, two bedrooms, a concrete floor. The roof is mostly tin shingles roped together -- but González says it's better than it was before.

"When it rained, the wind blew off parts of the roof. We had to go run and fetch it," he said, laughing at the memory. So far, the new house has cost around $6,500 -- far beyond what the family here could save without help from their son's remittances.

González makes around $4.50 per day as a coffee farmer in Guatemala, which isn't enough to pay for basic expenses. It's a situation many families face here, especially since coffee prices have crashed in recent years.

Today, around one in four Guatemalan families receive remittances -- mostly from the US -- and those remittances account for roughly 50% of their income. The reliance on family remittances in Guatemala started around 15 years ago, said Manuel Orozco, director of the Migration, Remittances and Development program at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington, DC-based think tank. The average remittance is around $300 per month, he said. 

One of the first things migrants do is send money to family members to invest in a new home, or fix up their old one. [...]

As more Guatemalans migrate, new houses are going up every month in Comunidad Agraria Emanuel with money from remittances. But the tradeoff is an exodus of people. Since October 2016, more than 800,00 unaccompanied minors and parents traveling with children have turned themselves in to US Border Patrol agents. Guatemalans make up 40% of them.

Overall, Guatemala has seen "over 1% of its total population migrate to the US in the first seven months of this fiscal year," according to acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan.  

ALL THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

As President Trump heads to Florida for the official launch of his 2020 campaign, a new poll shows him trailing several of his potential Democratic opponents in the key state.

Former Vice President Joe Biden leads Trump by 9 points among Florida voters in a survey released by Quinnipiac on Tuesday, with Biden scoring 50 percent to Trump's 41 percent. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) also leads Trump by six points, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) leads him by four points.

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST:

Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, who has done a wonderful job, has decided not to go forward with his confirmation process so that he can devote more time to his family....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2019

DE NOVO:

Firstly, the most visible sign of liberalism is seen in the figure of the current Minister of Economics, Paulo Guedes. Popular known by the media as Bolsonaro's guru, Guedes was a crucial factor in the President's victory. A disciple of the Austrian School of Economics, he obtained his PhD from the University of Chicago. The new Minister of Economics is taking huge step towards liberalism, such as reducing the overprotective barriers to enter the market, privatizing companies owned by the government, and most importantly, proposing pension reforms. The proposal is being analyzed by Congress, and if passed, it will save billions of dollars, tremendously reducing national debt. In its 197 years of existence, Brazil has never seen such classical liberal actions taken from inside the ruling government.

Secondly, liberalism is finally taking form in political parties. The New Party (NOVO) is the first classical liberal party to ever exist in Brazil. Founded in 2011, it is formed only by non politicians. NOVO is adopting innovative practices in politics, such as a process of interviews in order to become a member and refusing public money to fund its campaign, only accepting funds from donors, who share the same values.

NOVO is a strong advocate of free markets, reduction of taxes -- which are absurdly high in Brazil -- privatizations, end of subsidies and tax exemptions, and an educational system that shuns political indoctrination. Surprisingly, the party has done extremely well in its first elections in 2018. The presidential candidate Joao Amoedo obtained around 3% of the popular vote, beating traditional candidates who were well known by the general public. In addition, 8 legislators were elected to the House of Representatives. However, the most astonishing victory came in the second richest state of the country, Minas Gerais, where Romeu Zema was elected governor. The sudden rise of the New Party is a clear sign of a new mindset among Brazilians.

This new mindset was highly influenced by the activist group Free Brazil Movement (MBL). It was the main organization responsible for the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The movement started as a small group, originating from the middle class in the state of Sao Paulo, and became a huge phenomenon around the entire country. MBL stands for classical liberal values at its finest. Its main leaders are devoted disciples of Ludwig von Mises, and these leaders were the first popular figures to publicly teach classical liberal principles, with more than 2 million subscribers to their Youtube channel. During the Rousseff impeachment process, MBL gathered millions of Brazilians dressed in yellow and green, protesting against the corrupt government of PT. Today, the movement represents the face of a new classical liberal tradition implemented in the country. Various of its members were elected legislators in the 2018 election, promising shrink the size of government.

For the first time in Brazil's history, liberalism has been established in different sectors of society. The idea of a free and virtuous society has finally been spread in a national scale. Today, more than ever, a significant part of the population understands the importance of classical liberal principles for the formation of a successful nation. The figure of Paulo Guedes, the political party NOVO and the movement MBL are examples of it. Fortunately, these three bodies are part of the current government. What they must not do is to let politics and small differences between them create conflict. Instead, they must unite themselves for a common good, which they all advocate: a liberalism for Brazilians.

CAT PEOPLE:

But a large part of the problem is that Trump has lost the financial support of one of his biggest backers in 2016: the Mercers. With their ties to Steve Bannon, Breitbart, and Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah were superstars last cycle. According to half a dozen sources familiar with the reclusive family's political activities, the Mercers have drastically curtailed their political donations in recent months and will likely not play a significant role in 2020. "They think that the administration could do so much more. They've been very vocal about that to the president," a person familiar with the Mercers' thinking told me. "It's like they've disappeared," the former West Wing official added. "Crickets. They're gone," a prominent Republican strategist said.

Watch Now: Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman on the One Party They Go To Every Year

The numbers tell the story. In 2016, Robert Mercer, the former co-CEO of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, and his wife, Diana, donated $15.5 million to a variety of different organizations to help elect Trump, and they put up another $1 million for the inaugural committee. They also provided substantial support to Breitbart, which at times seemed to function as an extra arm of the Trump campaign. The Washington Post reported they spent more than $49 million on political activities in 2016 and that year's election cycle. "The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution," Steve Bannon said in 2017. In addition to the millions the Mercers pumped into Trump's election, they spent $10 million on Breitbart News and millions more on Cambridge Analytica, the data firm cofounded by Robert Mercer in 2013.

But in 2018 the Mercers donated only $400,000 to the pro-Trump Great America PAC, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Their total political spending dropped to $2.9 million last year. Sources said the Mercers cut back their spending because they felt scarred by the press scrutiny that followed their association with Trump. Two sources said Rebekah's divorce from her husband is also motivating her to keep a low profile. "This whole thing did not end up well for them," former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg told me. "They've been destroyed," a former West Wing official said. A former Renaissance executive said: "Bob views all his political spending as a bad investment." (The Mercers did not respond to requests for comment.)

Like Trump, the Mercers exploded onto the national scene from seemingly nowhere. Robert, a painfully shy computer scientist who reportedly prefers cats to people, never gave interviews. When I approached Robert at Trump's 2016 election-night party at the New York Hilton, he smiled and walked away.

At that time, the Mercers had become so influential with Trump that they successfully installed their handpicked strategists, Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, to run Trump's campaign in the closing months of 2016. After Trump won, Rebekah served as a senior member of the transition team. And in December 2016, Trump repaid their loyalty by making an appearance at Robert's annual costume ball held at his Long Island mansion known as the Owl's Nest.

But the relationship was stress tested from the beginning of Trump's term. In March 2017, The New Yorker published an embarrassing profile of Robert Mercer, depicting him as an eccentric recluse. Five months later, Trump exiled Bannon, which drove a wedge between Trump and the Mercers, Bannon's longtime patrons. Around the same time, Mercer's support for Trump and Breitbart was outraging Renaissance employees and the fund's investors, sources told me. (The hedge fund's founder, James Simons, is among the country's biggest Democratic donors.) In November 2017, Mercer was pushed out of Renaissance and he publicly transferred his stake in Breitbart to his daughters. A month later, the Mercers' relationship with Bannon reached a breaking point when Bannon was quoted extensively in Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury criticizing the Trump family. Rebekah issued a rare statement distancing herself from Bannon. "My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements," it read. "Bob and Rebekah both felt so burned by Bannon and the negative publicity," a person close to the Mercers told me.

Meanwhile, the Mercers' investment in Cambridge Analytica was putting them in legal jeopardy. A few months after Robert left Renaissance, it was reported that the FBI opened an investigation of Cambridge in the wake of revelations that the firm appropriated private data from more than 50 million Facebook profiles. Last May, the Mercers shut the company down. "The Cambridge investigation really spooked them," said the prominent Republican strategist.

Another factor driving the Mercers off the national stage is that Trump was never their ideal candidate, despite the millions they spent helping him, sources told me. "They never really liked Trump," the person close to the Mercers said. During the 2016 Republican primary, the Mercers put all their cards on Ted Cruz. The source recalled that Robert invited Kellyanne Conway, who was then working for a pro-Cruz super PAC, to his Florida mansion and told her to "beat Trump!" What seemed to be most driving the Mercers was a hatred of Hillary Clinton. "Trump was just Bob's play against Hillary," the former Renaissance executive said. "Bob said she and her husband were murderers who would destroy the country. He thought she was an evil person and a socialist."

Without the specter of a Clinton presidency to motivate them, the Mercers are returning to their pre-Trump private existence. 

LIBERTY, NOT EQUALITY:

On the day C.S. Lewis died, his last written work was already in press with the Saturday Evening Post. "We have no 'right to happiness,'" Lewis declared in the essay, by which he meant that we have no moral right to trample the rules of justice to gratify our impulses.

Lewis did concede that the idea of a right to the pursuit of happiness is "cherished by all civilized men, but especially by Americans." However, the authors of the American Declaration of Independence, according to Lewis, could only have meant that we have a right "'to pursue happiness by all lawful means': that is, by all means which the Law of Nature eternally sanctions and which the laws of the nation shall sanction."

In her new book The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History, Carli Conklin has assembled a wealth of evidence that supports Lewis's basic insight.

Far from being a "glittering generality" or a euphemism for property, the "pursuit of happiness" had a distinct and widely understood meaning in the eighteenth century. It "refers to man's ability to know the law of nature as it pertains to man," Conklin concludes, "and man's unalienable right to then choose to pursue a life of virtue or, in other words, a life lived in harmony with those natural law principles." This broadly Aristotelian understanding of the pursuit of happiness cut across the eclectic intellectual traditions that informed the American founding, including the classical Greek and Roman traditions, Christianity, the English common law, and Newtonian science.

HIS CRIME WAS BEING A MUSLIM/dEMOCRAT:

The first freely elected president in Arab history, and the first Islamist to occupy that role, Mr. Morsi was elected on June 17, 2012, seven years to the day before he died. His election was the apex of the Arab Spring uprising, and a high point for the Muslim Brotherhood, a 91-year-old Islamist movement founded in Egypt and whose influence extends across the Arab world.

For many Egyptians, Mr. Morsi's election was their greatest hope for a definitive break with the country's long history of autocracy after decades of harsh and corrupt rule under President Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted in the 2011 uprising.

Some Egyptians worried that he might impose strict Islamic moral codes, while critics in Washington and around the region raised alarms that he might even seek to establish a form of theocratic rule.

Mr. Morsi surprised many by seeking cordial relations with the United States and maintaining diplomatic ties with Israel. He developed a warm working relationship with President Barack Obama, and the two men worked together to help stop a bout of fighting between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas in the fall of 2012.

But at home, Mr. Morsi's rule was troubled from the start. He governed clumsily, at one point issuing a decree that critics said put him above the rule of law. Supporters said the decree was part of his efforts to grapple with a hostile security establishment that was actively maneuvering to undermine his authority.

AND, NOT OR:

A remarkable courtroom drama played out in real time this month in Tucson, Arizona, a beloved story from the tenth chapter of Luke's gospel, "The Parable of the Good Samaritan." I can easily imagine a biblical court transcript unfolding something like this:

Prosecuting attorney to witness for the defense: "Sir, how can you justify what the defendant has done?"

Witness: "Shouldn't an American citizen be free to practice his or her faith? And shouldn't a person in America be free to follow the greatest commandment in the Bible? Do you even know what that commandment is?"

Prosecuting attorney: "I'm the one asking questions in this court, but we both know that according to the Bible, the greatest commandment is, 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself."

Witness: "You have given the right answer; make this central, and you will reach a good verdict."

Prosecuting attorney: "And who is my neighbor?" 

Witness: "Imagine that thousands of people in a certain area suffered under gangs, drug cartels and local economies ravaged by corrupt politicians and international trade agreements. Many fled as refugees into a scorched no-man's land scattered with the human bones of thousands who had fled before them. Those who did not die were left half-dead from thirst in parched southwest deserts.

"Now comes a Political Figure who heard about them and said they infested his country. It was the same with a Religious Figure, who said the refugees were not his problem.

"But a Compassionate Citizen in the area heard about their suffering and was moved. He frequently left them food, jugs of water and supplies for warmth. Upon meeting two men who said they were cold and tired, hungry and thirsty, he offered food and water and a place to rest. For this he was arrested and charged with harboring illegal aliens and conspiracy to transport them, with a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.

"Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to those wandering in the desert?"

Prosecuting attorney: "I suppose it was the one who showed them mercy."

Witness: "Go and do likewise."

A question for all Americans: What can Christians on the left and right do about the evil of our world?

The compassionate citizen in our parable, and the defendant in the very real trial that ended last week, is geography teacher Scott Warren, 36, a volunteer with the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths. He faced a lengthy federal prison sentence for "doing likewise."

JOBS WHITE PEOPLE WON'T DO:

The Trump administration's anti-immigration policies could worsen workforce shortages.

 

The Trump administration's immigration policies won't just impact immigrants. It turns out, they could make it harder for people to avoid spending the later years of their lives in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

According to a study published this month in Health Affairs, immigrants make up nearly a quarter of the long-term care workforce, which struggles to retain labor.

 Immigrants comprise 23.5 percent of the long-term care workforce, including family caregivers. Almost 12 percent of that workforce are naturalized citizens, 8 percent are legal noncitizens and 3.7 percent are undocumented immigrants. The numbers are similar for "direct care," a subset of long-term care that provides services to people in their homes.

"What this study shows is we need that low-skilled workforce, particularly in the industries that take care of our family. Any policies that scare that workforce are going to have large ramifications in caring for our aging population," says Leah Zallman, the director of research at the Institute for Community Health and lead author of the study. "What we see are immigrants filling in the gaps in the low-skilled labor market."

THERE IS NO CHINA:

DONALD V. THE ECONOMY:

[h]e hasn't been bluffing about his tariffs on imports from China and other countries, which so far are taking about $106 billion out of the economy on an annual basis, costing the typical household $813 per year, according to the New York Federal Reserve. Bank of America recently cut its profit forecast for big companies on account of the Trump tariffs, and warned that stock prices still aren't pricing in the possible damage, despite the recent swoon.

Some companies importing products from China are now switching to other countries not subject to the new Trump tariffs, such as Vietnam, Taiwan and Korea, according to Capital Economics. But that still entails relocation costs and new sources of production that might not be as cheap as China.

Some U.S. importers, such as camera maker GoPro, have shifted production from China to Mexico--and now face a double-whammy from Trump's surprise announcement of the Mexican tariffs. Other U.S. firms seem to be targets of Chinese retaliation. The Chinese government, for instance, is investigating FedEx for misrouting two packages meant for the offices of tech giant Huawei in China. Yes, that Huawei--the one Trump wants to shut off from U.S. suppliers as part of his trade crusade. We can play that game, too, China seems to be saying.

The tax cuts companies cheered last year contributed to a modest bump in business investment in 2018. But that has trailed off, and manufacturing activity has now slumped to the lowest level since late 2016. That implies weak economic growth of just 1.5%, according to Capital Economics. Morgan Stanley warned recently that if Trump imposes additional tariffs on Chinese imports, as he has threatened, the result could be a recession early next year.

PURITAN NATION:

Releasing data that he recently shared speaking at an academic conference in Dublin. William Jeynes, a senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton and a Harvard graduate, noted some shocking results. The study was a meta-analysis, which is a very highly regarded statistical approach. This is because a meta-analysis statistically combines all of the studies that have ever been done on a particular topic. The findings indicated that the effects of illegal drugs and prescription opioids on the academic and behavioral -outcomes of young people are substantially more negative than is generally acknowledged in the media. The study examined the effects of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, amphetamines, hallucinogens, opioids, and illegal drugs overall.

Dr. Jeynes stated, "I was surprised by the magnitude of the results. I have done meta-analyses for many years and when an academic undertakes them, one has to allow the numbers to guide him. These numbers are nothing short of alarming. It leads a person to the conclusion that there is a serious disconnect between the actual results of taking these drugs and the perception by young people that they do little harm at all. I found the strong relationship between taking these drugs and acts of violence both against others and oneself particularly disconcerting." Dr. Jeynes shared that as one would expect, the impact of consuming harder drugs was greater than taking marijuana, but whether one examines the results of taking cocaine, opioids, heroin, amphetamines, or any other type of drug that is largely obtained illegally, the results are decidedly negative and substantial.

Dr. Jeynes added, "These results, together with the over 70,000 Americans that die each year from drug overdoses, should cause us to re-evaluate several of the contemporary views and policies regarding the illicit use of drugs and the use of prescription opioids."

BRA-CAGO:

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

A team of scientists recently determined certain quantum particles can regenerate after they've decayed.

SCRATCH A TRUMPBOT... (profanity alert):

A survivor of last year's deadly shooting at a Parkland, Florida high school who recently graduated said on Monday that Harvard College had rescinded his acceptance over racist comments he had made as a 16-year-old.  [...]

There is precedent for Harvard revoking admission of accepted students, The Atlantic noted: In 2017, the elite university rescinded offers to 10 students who were found to be members of an anti-Semitic Facebook group.

A REVEALING TIME FOR DONALD TO START PAYING OFF HIS DEBTS:

The most prominent of the C.I.A.'s sources of intelligence on Russia's election interference was a person close to Mr. Putin who provided information about his involvement, former officials have said. The source turned over evidence for one of the last major intelligence conclusions that President Barack Obama made public before leaving office: that Mr. Putin himself was behind the Russia hack.

Long nurtured by the C.I.A., the source rose to a position that enabled the informant to provide key information in 2016 about the Russian leadership's role in the interference campaign, the officials said.

John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director under Mr. Obama, would bring reports from the source directly to the White House, keeping them out of the president's daily intelligence briefing for fear that the briefing document was too widely disseminated, according to the officials. Instead, he would place them in an envelope for Mr. Obama and a tiny circle of aides to read.

But Mr. Trump's promise to declassify a broad swath of documents suggests that Mr. Barr's mandate is more extensive than investigating any single source. Mr. Trump's comments mentioning Britain and Australia appeared to be a reference to the F.B.I.'s investigation of George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign aide.

An Australian diplomat told the F.B.I. in the summer of 2016 that Mr. Papadopoulos had said that Russia had made an offer to help the Trump campaign by releasing stolen Democratic emails. The F.B.I. enlisted an informant, Stefan Halper, to talk with Mr. Papadopoulos, an investigative technique that prompted Mr. Trump to accuse the bureau of spying on his campaign.

Mr. Barr has picked up on the term "spying," invoking it multiple times in recent weeks to describe steps the F.B.I. took to investigate the Trump campaign but stopping short of alleging that the bureau acted improperly.

It would have been improper for the intelligence agencies to sit on the information from Mr. Papadopoulos, Mr. King said.

"If someone came and told that to the C.I.A. or F.B.I. and they didn't open a counterintelligence investigation, they would be guilty of malpractice," he said. "If they had ignored that, it would have been unacceptable law enforcement, especially when we are dealing with an adversary trying to undermine our country."

He also said the Intelligence Committee looked at both the F.B.I.'s and the C.I.A.'s role in the origins of the Russia inquiry. He said the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency played roles in the inquiry, but said that was proper.

Some revelations about intelligence operations around the 2016 campaign have angered officials in Britain, Australia and other closely allied countries, according to former officials. Exposing further information about British or Australian cooperation in the investigation could deepen tensions with two of America's closest intelligence partners.

"It is yet another step that will raise questions among our allies and partners about whether to share sensitive intelligence with us," said Michael Morell, the former deputy director of the C.I.A. and host of the "Intelligence Matters" podcast.

NO ONE HAD THAT VOTE IN FANTASY SUPREME COURT:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Neil Gorsuch. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the dissenting opinion, backed up by Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Stephen Breyer and Brett Kavanaugh.

Ginsburg argued that the House Republicans don't represent all of Virginia. "One House of its bicameral legislature cannot alone continue litigation against the will of its partners in the legislative process," she wrote.

ONLY THE RED STATES ARE BATTLEGROUNDS:

A new poll shows that less than 40 percent of Texans would "definitely" vote for Donald Trump in the next election, marking trouble for the president as the traditionally red state shows early signs of moving towards blue in 2020.

According to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune survey, just 39 percent of state registered voters said they would "definitely" vote to re-elect President Trump in 2020 while 43 percent said they would "definitely not" support his bid for a second term.

TOOLS OF IGNORANCE?:

THE EMPEROR'S NEW CITY:

President Donald Trump likes to have his name on things. And now he can add another one to the roster: a tiny Israeli settlement in the Golan Heights. The fact that it doesn't actually exist seems to be incidental as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu celebrated what the opposition criticized as a PR stunt. 

HELP ME OBI RASMUSSEN, YOU'RE MY ONLY HOPE:

Biden Leading Trump By 10 Points In Latest Fox News Poll https://t.co/pHaABOkqha

— The Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 16, 2019

NOT OUR BLOOD AND SOIL:

For all those focused on Rustbelt battlegrounds, in new Fox Poll only 35% of non-college white women say Trump's economic policies benefit "everyone" or "people like them." 51% of them say they benefit either people w/more money or no one. Even non-col white men are net negative.

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) June 16, 2019

THE DISCIPLINE OF DEMOCRACY:

 In a rare democratic experience for Turkish citizens, the two main candidates for mayor of Istanbul, gearing up for a repeat election on June 23, went head to head Sunday evening in the first live television debate the country has seen in 17 years.

The debate pitted Binali Yildirim, the government-backed candidate and former prime minister, against Ekrem Imamoglu, a district mayor who, supported by an alliance of opposition parties, has been leading in the polls. [...]

Ihsan Aktas of the Genar polling firm, which had correctly predicted a close race in Istanbul, said the A.K.P. "forgot how to win by winning so often." The opposition, he said, was far more motivated and united because of its opposition to Mr. Erdogan.

Opinion polls show the opposition candidate, Mr. Imamoglu, 49, just ahead of Mr. Yildirim, 63. Mr. Imamoglu, mayor of an outlying district of Istanbul for the past five years, won support with an all-embracing grass-roots campaign that played well with residents of the city.

Many have grown weary of more than 20 years of the A.K.P.'s running the city and are feeling the bite of an economic downturn as the currency, the lira, has shed much of its value over the past year.

Some analysts have predicted that a sympathy vote for Mr. Imamoglu -- who was declared winner and took up office the first time around, only to have his mandate subsequently withdrawn -- could increase his chances in the rerun. [...]

Mr. Yildirim acknowledged after the March vote that the opposition had succeeded by forming an alliance, with its three main parties putting aside their considerable differences and voting tactically for a single candidate.

But the biggest shock for members of Mr. Erdogan's party was the resistance from their own supporters. An analysis of the voters who abstained in the last round may spell similar trouble this time.

In one Istanbul district, Umraniye, 77,000 A.K.P. members did not vote, the A.K.P. lawmaker said. Considering that the margin between the candidates was only 13,000 votes, a better turnout would have changed the result, the lawmaker noted.

All told, according to Mr. Aktas of the Genar polling firm, "300,000 voters did not come out to vote for A.K.P. this time in the local elections," meaning those in March.

Most of those were ethnic Kurdish voters who had traditionally supported Mr. Erdogan. Many have been alienated by his alliance with the Nationalist Movement Party and the increasing anti-Kurdish tone of the political arena, Mr. Aktas said.

"Kurdish supporters became uncomfortable," Mr. Aktas added. "The nationalist talk caused a loss in Istanbul."

The A.K.P. has also brought influential tribal and religious leaders to Istanbul in an effort to persuade Kurdish voters, said Mehmet Ali Kulat, who runs a political consulting firm and who has polled Kurdish voters.

Mr. Yildirim spent the religious holiday of Eid al-Fitr visiting regions in southeastern Turkey to woo the Kurdish vote, even tentatively reading a message in Kurdish.

He went as far as to mention the word Kurdistan -- usually a taboo in Mr. Erdogan's Turkey -- drawing a sharp rebuke from nationalists.

CREDITS, NOT ACCUSES:

The U.S. military says Yemen's Shi'ite Huthi rebels shot down a U.S. government-operated drone earlier this month with "assistance" from Iran.

"A U.S. MQ-9 was shot down over Yemen by what we assess to be a [Huthi] SA-6 surface to air missile on Jun 6," Lieutenant-Colonel Earl Brown, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, said in a statement on June 16.

Brown added that the altitude at which the drone was shot down marked "an improvement over previous [Huthi] capability, which we assess was enabled by Iranian assistance."

THE DEMOCRACIES ARE THE COMMON ENEMY FOR DONALD AND MBS:

Blame game -- The crown prince joined the U.S. in blaming Iran for recent attacks against oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, which Tehran has vehemently denied. He also said that, while Riyadh does not seek war with Iran, he will not hesitate to to "deal with any threat" to Saudi Arabia's sovereignty.

Veiled attack -- Prince Mohammed also warned against "exploiting" the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi for political gains in what Al Jazeera writes was likely a veiled attack against Turkey, where Khashoggi was killed (those accused of the crime are Saudi government officials.)

IF I CAN'T SEE THEM, THEY CAN'T SEE ME...IF I CAN'T SEE THEM...:

President Donald Trump's re-election campaign is cutting ties with some of its own pollsters after leaked internal polling showed the president trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in critical 2020 battleground states, according to a person close to the campaign.

The move comes after NBC News obtained new details from a March internal poll that found Trump trailing Biden in 11 key states.

Portions of the campaign's expansive March polling trickled out in recent days in other news reports.

But a person familiar with the inner workings of the Trump campaign shared more details of the data with NBC News, showing the president trailing across swing states seen as essential to his path to re-election and in Democratic-leaning states where Republicans have looked to gain traction. The polls also show Trump underperforming in reliably red states that haven't been competitive for decades in presidential elections. [...]

In Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan -- three states where Trump edged Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by narrow margins that proved decisive in his victory -- Trump trails Biden by double-digits. In three of those states -- Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida -- Biden's leads sit outside the poll's margin of error.

Trump is also behind the former vice president in Iowa by 7 points, in North Carolina by 8 points, in Virginia by 17 points, in Ohio by 1 point, in Georgia by 6 points, in Minnesota by 14 points, and in Maine by 15 points.

In Texas, where a Democratic presidential nominee hasn't won since President Jimmy Carter in 1976, Trump leads by just 2 points.

AND TROUT MIGHT BE THE BEST OF THEM:

I always get a chuckle when I offer my opinion about a player and read that my opinion was wrong. I don't think a person's opinion is ever wrong. In fact, it is an opinion. Not a fact. Be that as it may, I certainly have opinions about baseball players.

I began watching baseball seriously when I was eight years old. I believe by the time I was nine I could distinguish a good player from a bad one. I spent all my waking hours watching baseball when I wasn't in school. Frankly, I even watched baseball when I was in school.

I lived in what many call "The Golden Age of Baseball" of the 1950's and 1960's. I was fortunate to see some of the greatest players of all time. Most of them I saw live and in person.

Decades later I am watching baseball every day-even in the offseason. Baseball lives within my DNA. I don't have veins, I have seams.

Through the years I have established some favorites. I have separated players among the greatest I have ever seen, the very good I have ever seen, the good players I have seen and average players I have ever seen. In my baseball card collecting days my cards were separated by "stars" and "commons."

Today I want to share my list of the greatest players I have ever seen. They are my opinions. Am I wrong? You may think so if they aren't your favorite players.

"WILLIE, I NEED A LOOP!":

"This project has reconnected me with a special time in my life, and I feel inspired to tell this unique and relatively unknown story of the caddie," Baffa said. "I grew up playing golf with my dad and his brother. I have great memories of walking 18 early on a Sunday so we could get home and watch Nicklaus, Faldo or Crenshaw finish."

Growing up outside Chicago, Murray and his six brothers caddied at Indian Hill Club, earning as little as a few dollars a day for guiding golfers around 18 holes -- or in caddie parlance, "loops." Murray's career as a comedian and actor later took off due to roles like Carl Spackler, the eccentric and unhinged caddie in the 1980 classic Caddyshack.

These days, some real-life caddies have themselves become rich and famous in a profession with blue-collar, hardscrabble roots across the Atlantic Ocean in the home of golf.

Loopers traces the history of caddies to Mary Queen of Scots, at one time credited with originating the profession during the 16th century, though this historical claim has since been revised.

Irrefutably, the first caddie of renown is Tom Morris Sr. "Old Tom" became the original caddie master at storied St. Andrews and the professional game's first great player, winning five of the first eight Open Championships and fathering a son who won four more.

In Old Tom's day, a caddie's value was as much as a retriever as a resource for information on the course layout and the conditions. Golf balls known as "featheries" were not inexpensive, costing 2 to 5 shillings, or the equivalent of $10-$20. Producing these hand-sewn round leather pouches stuffed with chicken or goose feathers and coated with paint was tedious and time-consuming.

In the early part of the 20th century, an estimated 300 golfers from Carnoustie, located in Angus across the water from St. Andrews, emigrated to the United States, providing caddies and club makers to help grow a fledgling sport. [...]

During one of the lighter moments of Loopers, caddies from Lahinch Golf Club in Ireland sit around a table, sip pints of beer and share laughs and stories about their trade. Subtitles are used to help viewers unaccustomed to the thick Irish brogue.

The caddie subculture is one fewer and fewer golfers will come to understand outside of the British Isles, where loopers are as commonplace as the rain, wind, knee-high heather and neck-deep pot bunkers.

Exclusive U.S. clubs, like Augusta National, or high-end public courses like Pebble Beach, Bandon Dunes or Streamsong Resort, located 90 minutes south of Orlando, offer caddies. Generally, though, the golfer-caddie experience is less and less accessible and available due to golf carts equipped with GPS tracking and offering comfort and ease.

Loopers is a pleasing, poignant reminder of what has been lost: Two people joined at the hip with the common goal of conquering a difficult game and enjoying every step of the way.

For nine weeks every summer, 60 boys call Sankaty Head Golf Course on Nantucket Island their home. These boys have the privilege of attending Sankaty Head Caddie Camp, the last residential caddie camp in the country.

Sankaty Camp has been running 85 years without any interruption. It opened in 1930 when there were a lot of caddie camps around the country. Slowly, though, they began shutting down. World War II required young men to fight, and after the war clubs could not afford to keep them open. 

But Sankaty has stayed in operation. "This camp exists because membership believes in it," says camp director David Hinman. It costs $400,000 to run the camp, and the funding comes from member donations. 

Members help the boys on and off the golf course, too. When one boy came to camp, he had never held a golf club. A member gave him a set of clubs that he didn't need anymore. Another member donated new sneakers for all the boys. "It's like members have more children for the summer," Hinman says. 

Sankaty Golf Club members include Jack Welch, retired chairman and CEO of General Electric, and Bill Belichick, coach of the New England Patriots. 

Caddie campers pay $5 per day, which includes room and board. They caddy six days a week, and at the end of the summer, they can take home their earnings.

The boys work hard and play hard. They wake at 7 a.m. and caddy all day.  In the evening, they play organized sports such as touch football, basketball, volleyball, baseball, swimming, tennis, horseshoes, and, of course, golf.  Lights go out at 10 p.m. 

"After a long day of caddying and playing sports, there are no complaints about bedtime," Hinman says. 

HOLY DAYS (self-reference alert)

Moments before the opening pitch of a Giants-Cardinals doubleheader at the Polo Grounds in the summer of 1934, my dad remembers Jerome "Dizzy" Dean strutting up and down the length of the Giants dugout. The scrappy Cardinals ace taunted the opposition, repeating, "You guys ain't got a chance. Nah, you ain't got a chance today. You know why? 'Cause Dean's pitchin'. Yeah, that's right. Dean's pitchin'.... Dizzy and Daffy." My dad was three. Baseball was in my father's bones before he knew he had bones. And so it is for me because it was for him. Like a treasured family heirloom, baseball has been passed down in our family from one generation to the next.

I arrived in the late-middle innings of my father's life--that long, sleepy stretch between the bottom of the fourth and the top of the seventh. By the time I was two years old, baseball had definitively revealed that I was the family's lone southpaw, much to my grandmother's dismay (and distress). This had been a matter of some debate until, seeing my sister playing whiffle ball with my dad in the front yard, I demanded my turn at bat. My father, our dutiful designated pitcher, called out, "Batter up," as I stepped into the lefthanders batter's box, and struggling to keep the plastic yellow bat over my shoulder.

Through the weaving refrain of stories told at regular intervals on 'high holy days'--Opening Day, the All-Star Game, Pennant races, the World Series, any steamy, sticky summer's day--baseball's poetic elegy was etched onto my heart from an early age. Between stories of the Great Depression, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the early morning paper route, my father regaled us with his baseball stories, told and retold with the same meticulous precision from one season to the next. The archive of treasures, these gems of memory taken out and polished at regular intervals, were in some mysterious way relived in the re-telling.

My early childhood was so steeped in the narrative of baseball that for years I really believed the New York Yankees were a criminal gang and I am still convinced I can remember the Baltimore Orioles' 1983 World Series victory over the Philadelphia Phillies. (I was only one-and-a-half.)

...AND CHEAPER... (self-reference alert):

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Here are two take-aways from Tom Shippey's latest book: One, "Viking" was a job description, not a racial or ethnic designation; and two, a quality demanded of those Vikings was a finely honed, mordant sense of humor that perhaps we modern nine-to-five cubicle-dwellers would find difficult to understand.

That sense of humor includes composing, on the spot, even as the composer is being bitten to death by a pit-full of adders, a beautiful song that will be handed down through the ages. The song concludes with the line, "Laughing shall I die," primarily because the dying Viking knows his sons are coming to wreak vengeance on the king who put him in the pit and will subject said king to a longer, slower, far grislier demise.

It's pretty funny, apparently, if you're a Viking.

For the rest of us, it's funny because the death song's composer is named Ragnar Hairy-breeches, and one of his avenging sons is named Ivar the Boneless. It turns out, though, that while Ragnar may be mostly the stuff of myth and legend, Ivar is not only an historical figure, he is a significant one.

As for the "Boneless" part, no one is quite sure of the nickname's origin, but one theory is that he was being compared to a serpent -- which to the Vikings meant a dragon -- so it's actually a compliment.

The author's stated purpose in this book is to explore what gave Vikings their edge, when they had fewer people and resources than most of the populations they came up against, as they swept across Britain and mainland Europe into Russia and the Middle East over a distinct 300-year period. He argues that their edge was "the Viking mindset. To put it bluntly, it's a kind of death cult." Their disdain of death made them hard to beat on and off the field of battle.

OLD WHITE MEN ONLY NEED APPLY:

House Republicans' pitiful number of women in their ranks could fall even further in 2020, as Rep. Susan Brooks (R-IN) announced on Friday that she is retiring rather than seeking reelection, according to USA Today.

Brooks is one of just 13 women in the House Republican caucus and serves as the head of candidate recruitment for the National Republican Congressional Committee -- which seeks to elect Republicans to the House.

As part of her role of convincing Republicans to run for the House, Brooks has said that she wants to see more women and people of color run.

"It's important that we, as a conference, do a better job of looking like America, and better representing the very diverse country that we have," Brooks told Roll Call in April.

So her decision to leave Congress in 2020 looks like a pretty bad omen for the House GOP as it desperately tries to diversify its almost entirely white male membership and win back the majority they were swept out of in spectacular fashion in 2018.

SOMEONE TAKE HIS BOXCUTTER:

One should never underestimate Trump's capacity for self-harm, of course. This is the man who, in May, 2017, fired James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., in a fit of pique, thereby siccing a special counsel on himself and everyone around him for the next two years. This week's blooper may not compare with that blunder for the ages, but it was epic nonetheless. To begin with, consider the timing. Just two days before Trump sat down with Stephanopoulos, the House Judiciary Committee began its quest to build a public case against him on the basis of Volume II of the Mueller report, which focusses on possible obstruction of justice. In a hearing devoted to legal experts, John Dean, who was Richard Nixon's White House counsel and went to prison for his role in the Watergate coverup, compared the special counsel's report to the grand-jury report to Congress that played a significant role in Nixon's downfall--the so-called Road Map. Like that document, the Mueller report "conveys findings, with supporting evidence, of potential criminal activity based on the work of federal prosecutors, F.B.I. investigators, and witness testimony before a federal grand jury," Dean said in his opening statement.

But if Monday's hearing annoyed the President--he lashed out at Dean in advance of his testimony--it didn't necessarily represent any new threat to him. Dean and the other witnesses had no news to impart. Nor could they provide any firsthand accounts of the incidents contained in the Mueller report. The hearing produced no blockbuster moment, and there were subsequent reports that some Democrats had questioned the wisdom of calling Dean. So far, so good for Trump, but then came his Rose Garden sitdown with the ABC News anchor.

It all started to go wrong for the White House when Stephanopoulos brought up Donald Trump, Jr.,'s closed-door appearance on Wednesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Stephanopolous asked Trump if his son should have contacted the F.B.I. when, in the summer of 2016, he received an e-mail from the British publicist Rob Goldstone offering him a meeting with some Russians connected to the Russian government who allegedly had the goods on Hillary Clinton. As he has done before, Trump defended Donald, Jr. Then he doubled down and tripled down. By the time he was done, Trump had said that "you don't" call the F.B.I. in such circumstances; asserted that the current F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, "is wrong" to suggest you do; and vouchsafed that in the 2020 election, if the Chinese or Russians offered him information on his opponents, "I think I'd take it."

THANKS, UR!:

WHAT ABOUT THE RACKETS?:

Physicists understood that an expanding bundle of energy would grow into a crumpled mess rather than the huge, smooth cosmos that modern astronomers observe. In 1980, the year before Hawking's talk, the cosmologist Alan Guth realized that the Big Bang's problems could be fixed with an add-on: an initial, exponential growth spurt known as cosmic inflation, which would have rendered the universe huge, smooth, and flat before gravity had a chance to wreck it. Inflation quickly became the leading theory of our cosmic origins. Yet the issue of initial conditions remained: What was the source of the minuscule patch that allegedly ballooned into our cosmos, and of the potential energy that inflated it?

Hawking, in his brilliance, saw a way to end the interminable groping backward in time: He proposed that there's no end, or beginning, at all. According to the record of the Vatican conference, the Cambridge physicist, then 39 and still able to speak with his own voice, told the crowd, "There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the universe, and what can be more special than the condition that there is no boundary?"

The "no-boundary proposal," which Hawking and his frequent collaborator, James Hartle, fully formulated in a 1983 paper, envisions the cosmos having the shape of a shuttlecock. Just as a shuttlecock has a diameter of zero at its bottommost point and gradually widens on the way up, the universe, according to the no-boundary proposal, smoothly expanded from a point of zero size. Hartle and Hawking derived a formula describing the whole shuttlecock--the so-called "wave function of the universe" that encompasses the entire past, present, and future at once--making moot all contemplation of seeds of creation, a creator, or any transition from a time before.

"Asking what came before the Big Bang is meaningless, according to the no-boundary proposal, because there is no notion of time available to refer to," Hawking said in another lecture at the Pontifical Academy in 2016, a year and a half before his death. "It would be like asking what lies south of the South Pole."

IN A HEALTHY MANNER WITH YOUR SPOUSE?:

A majority of adults who came of age in evangelical churches in the 1990s and 2000s were exposed to "purity culture," a term for teachings that stressed sexual abstinence before marriage. We had our own rituals, such as "purity balls," and our own merchandise, such as "purity rings." I had a "Wait for Me Journal" that I kept as a college freshman; created by a prominent Christian pop singer, the journal was designed to hold letters to my future husband. It held out the promise that if I remained pure, then God would reward good behavior with a husband -- surely before I turned 30 so that we could have lots of children.

Somehow God and I got our wires crossed, because the husband hasn't arrived. Twenty years later, I no longer subscribe to purity culture, largely because it never had anything to say to Christians past the age of 23. Yet lately, I also find myself mourning the loss of the coherent sexual ethic that purity culture tried to offer. Is consent culture the best that we have in its place?

PURITAN NATION:

HE'LL NEVER KNOW UNLESS FOX TELLS HIM:

Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place "implants" -- software code that can be used for surveillance or attack -- inside the Russian grid.

Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction -- and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017 when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign minister.

Because the new law defines the actions in cyberspace as akin to traditional military activity on the ground, in the air or at sea, no such briefing would be necessary, they added.

OUR TWO REPUBLICAN PARTIES:

AS gOD EXPLAINED TO aDAM AND cAIN...:

It might seem counterintuitive to hope for more robots, given their track record of knocking workers without a college education from the middle-income jobs that once supported a middle class. But it would be different if workers were retiring anyway.

In a study of several advanced economies from 1990 to 2015, the economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo found that aging was actually associated with rising living standards. As workers became scarce, businesses invested in automation to replace them, as well as in other new technologies, all of which raised productivity and incomes.

ISIS FOR IRISH-AMERICANS:

If you're an Irish-American Catholic, as some 13 million of us are, chances are fair that your father or your grandfather or your Uncle Pat was in a bar or social club in the Bronx, Chicago's South Side, or Dorchester, Massachusetts, on at least one occasion in the 1970s or 1980s when the hat came around with a somewhat coercive suggestion: "Make a donation for the lads, won't you?" The "lads" meaning, of course, the Irish Republican Army, which from 1969 to 1998 fought a bitter war against Protestant loyalist paramilitaries and the British Army--all for the quixotic goal of reuniting the six counties of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland, which didn't want them.

In Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe provides an intimate--and terrifying--account of what the "lads" were up to with their ArmaLite rifles and revolutionary pamphleteering. He constructs an entire moral atmosphere, centered around 1970s-era Belfast, and asks us to consider basic questions about the combatants' warfare. Who has the right to call oneself a soldier? What may a soldier do that is not permitted to a civilian? In the lawless Belfast of that period, paramilitaries sorted out those questions for themselves. What Radden Keefe discovers is a young, charismatic, and morally arrogant IRA, whose members later struggled with the memories of their violent deeds.

Say Nothing focuses on one of their many murders--the killing of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten children, who was removed from her apartment by the IRA for the crime of being a "tout," or British Army informer. McConville was blindfolded, driven to a remote location, tortured, executed, and buried in a shallow grave. Her body was not found for over 40 years. [...]

Say Nothing's first half explores the IRA's secretive culture and shadowy operations. The prose, while thrilling, also induces uneasiness when humanizing the would-be revolutionaries or describing their physical courage. Just as it seems that Radden Keefe is ready to mythologize the IRA, however, his account pivots sharply to the achievement of peace with the Good Friday Agreement, ratified in 1998. In subsequent years, those rebels who once crossed moral boundaries for the cause were left with two sets of contradictory feelings: guilt for having killed women, men, and even their fellow IRA members; and betrayal at the hands of past Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, whose perceived abandonment of the cause of a united Ireland rendered their personal sacrifices and anguish meaningless. Radden Keefe found that many former revolutionaries had descended into alcoholism, depression, and joblessness.

Perhaps even more than McConville, Adams is the figure who haunts Say Nothing. Now retired from public office, he refused Radden Keefe's interview requests and did not participate in "The Troubles," a Boston College oral-history project from which the author drew research. Radden Keefe concludes that Adams, ever elusive, is a sociopath--arguably a fair assessment of a former guerilla leader endowed with intellect, discipline, patience, and ruthlessness.

IT'S AN IMPEACHMENT REFERRAL:

"I think we are clearly there with the results of the special counsel team," McCabe said. "There are so many witnesses who could provide important, essential testimony to Congress that can only be done in the scope of an impeachment inquiry."

"Action should be taken immediately," he continued, and it is "beside the point" whether the inquiry results in articles of impeachment.

McCabe was fired from the FBI last year after an internal report found he was not forthcoming with investigators.

He responded that his dismissal was part of a larger effort by the administration to discredit the FBI and the special counsel's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Mueller's report detailed numerous contacts that Trump associates and campaign members had with Russian figures during the 2016 race.

THERE IS NO CHINA:

The risk for the Hong Kong government is that the public, particularly the young, may develop the impression that the only way to stop unwanted policy initiatives is through violent protests. With each successive major issue since Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997, the level of violence at protests has risen before the government has relented and changed course.

As many as a million people marched peacefully a week ago against the extradition bill. But the government's stance did not begin to shift until a smaller demonstration unfolded on Wednesday. It began peacefully until some protesters pried up bricks and threw them at police officers, and police responded by firing rubber bullets and tear gas.  [...]

The extradition bill debacle underlines Beijing's central dilemma in Hong Kong. It wants to retain complete control, and so does not want to allow full democracy in the semiautonomous territory.

[W]ithout democracy, a succession of Hong Kong governments have blundered into political crises by underestimating or ignoring the public's concerns -- and each time, Beijing gets some of the blame.

TOO BAD WE DEPOSED SADDAM, EH?:

ALL THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

A new poll out Friday suggests more trouble for President Donald Trump's reelection hopes in Michigan, with the survey showing him 11 percentage points behind former Vice President Joe Biden in a head-to-head race.

The poll by EPIC-MRA of Lansing also suggests, for the second time since March, that a majority of Michiganders support replacing Trump or would consider voting for someone else. Less than a third said they would definitely reelect him.

AND THOSE ARE THE SYCOPHANTS:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

If you've been exasperated for years by that one self-righteous, yoga-obsessed friend, take note: Regular yoga practitioners experience inflated egos after a session of yoga or meditation, according to a forthcoming study in the journal Psychological Science.

Researchers found that yoga and meditation both increase "self-enhancement," or the tendency for people to attach importance to their own actions. In the first phase of the two-part study, researchers in Germany and England measured self-enhancement by recruiting 93 yoga students and having them respond to questionnaires over the course of 15 weeks, Quartz reports. Each assessment was designed to measure three outcomes: superiority, communal narcissism, and self-esteem. In the second phase, the researchers asked 162 meditation students to answer the same questionnaires over four weeks.

Participants showed significantly higher self-enhancement in the hour just after their practices. After yoga or meditation, participants were more likely to say that statements like "I am the most helpful person I know" and "I have a very positive influence on others" describe them.

DUH?!:

Gun violence is lower in U.S. states where people must get a license before buying a gun, according to a new paper from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

Before buying a gun, states require residents to pass a federally mandated background check (if purchasing from a licensed dealer) and, depending on the state, obtain a permit or license. To obtain a gun license, states typically require people to submit fingerprints, apply for a permit, and, in some cases, complete a firearms safety course.

"Licensing differs from a standard background check in important ways," Cassandra Crifasi, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research and study lead author, said in a news release. "Comprehensive background checks are a necessary component of any system designed to keep guns from prohibited persons, but they are insufficient to reduce firearm-related deaths without a complementary system of purchaser licensing."

In addition to strengthening the screening process, licensing laws could also help to reduce gun homicides and suicides by preventing impulse purchases.

THANKS, UR!:

THE HIGH COST OF NOT ACCEPTING THE NATURAL ALLIANCE:

Tensions in the Gulf are an eerie echo of the tanker war that erupted in the late eighties during the eight-year conflict between Iraq and Iran. The tanker war was launched in 1984, when Iraq attacked Iran's oil terminal and oil tankers at Kharg Island, in the northern Persian Gulf. Iran responded by striking tankers--initially from Kuwait and later from other nations--that ferried Iraqi oil. In 1987, as the tanker war threatened to disrupt global oil supplies, the Reagan Administration intervened. It re-registered Kuwaiti ships under the American flag, which allowed the U.S. Navy to provide military protection. Operation Earnest Will became the largest U.S. naval convoy operation since the Second World War. It included carrier battle groups from the Navy, Air Force AWACS surveillance planes, and U.S. Army Special Operations Forces. At one point, some thirty ships were deployed to escort tankers from the volatile Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.

The U.S. intervention to protect tankers also led to direct military action with Iran. In September, 1987, U.S. aircraft spotted the Iran Ajr pushing mines into Gulf waters. Helicopter gunships opened fire. By the time the attack was over, four Iranian sailors were dead, the rest of the crew had abandoned ship (and were picked up by the U.S. Navy), and the ship was scuttled.

The timing of the U.S. attack was particularly painful for Iran. Khamenei, who was then Iran's President, was in New York for the U.N. General Assembly--the first visit by a top revolutionary leader since the 1979 upheaval that overthrew the shah. His trip followed the first covert contacts between Washington and Tehran in what became known as the arms-for-hostage swap during the Reagan Administration. In 1986, top White House officials led a secret mission to Iran. Although that diplomacy collapsed, Khamenei's trip in 1987 was designed to signal Tehran's willingness to engage with the world. Instead, the visit was overtaken by Iran's mining misadventure.

GONNA NEED MORE UMBRELLAS:

The Trump administration's flailing efforts to reduce the flow of migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border have long been a source of public spectacle. In this instance, after a few days of deep uncertainty, Mexico and the US announced that they had reached an agreement whereby Mexico would take steps to stem the flow of migrants, and the US would refrain from imposing tariffs. Precisely what actions Mexico would take went largely unspecified, or had already been promised months earlier.

Nonetheless, Trump, resembling British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after his return from Munich in 1938, waved a piece of paper in front of reporters, claiming that it held proof of Mexico's commitment to accede to US wishes.

ALL THE NUMBERS ARE STILL PRELIMINARY:

Australia and most other countries date their economic expansions using the rule that defines a recession as two or more consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. The US is almost alone in using a less mechanical process that includes employment and a variety of other economic indicators, in addition to the core criterion of GDP. (Japan's government also departs from the automatic two-quarter rule and considers other indicators.)

Troughs and peaks in the US economy are dated by the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). (I am a member of this committee, but I do not speak for it, and I am writing here in a personal capacity.) The NBER's dates are regarded as official: the US Commerce Department and other government agencies rely on them in their own reporting and analysis of economic data. [...]

Assuming the current US expansion continues in July, it will break the record of ten years set in 1991-2001. But if the dates of American business cycles were determined by the rule that most other countries apply, the US recession of March to November 2001 would be erased. (It did not include two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, but rather two negative quarters separated by a positive one.) Under that interpretation, the US record, it seems, would instead be the 17-year expansion from the first quarter of 1991 to the fourth quarter of 2007. And the current recovery would still have a long way to go to top that.

CHOOSING SIDES:

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) blocked an effort by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) to pass a bill via unanimous consent requiring campaigns to report any offers of foreign assistance to the FBI.

"A LIGHT RINSE SUFFICED":

[Yeonmi Park] is a North Korean defector who escaped from North Korea with her mother at just 13 years old.  [...]

Park spoke with The World's Carol Hills about her thoughts on the summit, Trump and the current state of North Korea. 

Carol Hills: Do you think that the summit in Singapore and the fact that Kim Jong-un was out on the world stage -- do you think that maybe that's affected him and made him have a better approach to human rights in North Korea? 

Yeonmi Park: Wow. No. North Korean human rights, it's never been this worse, this oppressed than ever before under any Kim previously. The persecution for anybody in North Korea now is so much worse than before. 

So, you think that the summit in Singapore last year gave Kim Jong-un credibility that he doesn't deserve? 

Absolutely. Trump gave him a platform to put on a show for us to watch, and Kim Jong-un is a master at brainwashing people. He's a master at manipulation and that is what he's been doing to the rest of the world too. North Koreans are not the only ones who are brainwashed, then being manipulated. The rest of the world is following his direction of believing this guy and believing this dictatorship, and somehow think this guy is doing the right thing. 

ONLY NIKKI ESCAPED INTACT:

A federal government oversight office has called for the removal of Kellyanne Conway as President Donald Trump's advisor and key mouthpiece.

The recommendation comes from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel and is not related to related to Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian influence in the 2016 election. The office sent a letter to Trump's office Thursday saying Conway violated the Hatch Act numerous times by criticizing 2020 Democratic presidential candidates while speaking in her official capacity during TV interviews and on social media, Politico reported Thursday.

"Ms. Conway's violations, if left unpunished, would send a message to all federal employees that they need not abide by the Hatch Act's restrictions," the letter reads. "Her actions thus erode the principal foundation of our democratic system--the rule of law."

AMEN:

"I do not see Trump as worthy of any message exchange, and I do not have any reply for him, now or in future," Iranian state media quoted Khamenei as telling the Japanese premier.

60-40 NATION:

House Democrats appear at odds with the party's 2020 presidential candidates over using taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions.

The Democrat-led House of Representatives is reportedly backing away from repealing the Hyde Amendment, the 1976 policy that has prevented federal funding for abortion. Democrats have debated sneaking a repeal of Hyde into the $190 billion Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations bill. If it were to pass, federal taxpayer dollars could directly be used to pay for abortions. But supporters have run into opposition from within their own ranks. [...]

A recent Marist poll found that 54 percent of Americans oppose taxpayer funding of abortion, with only 39 percent supporting it.

OUR TWO REPUBLICAN PARTIES:

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in early June found that many Democrats were strongly opposed to the sweeping tariffs Trump proposed - and then canceled - on goods imported from Mexico as a way to stem illegal immigration.

The poll found seven out of 10 Republicans supported the tariffs, compared with seven out of 10 Democrats opposing them. [...]

"Democrats have done a poor job making the liberal case for trade," said Christina Davis, a professor at Harvard who specializes in trade and foreign relations.

The decline of organized labor's influence could open opportunities for Democrats to develop new positions, she added. [...]

Business groups in Washington are watching what Democratic presidential candidates say on the campaign trail.

Ahead of a vote on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) - which would replace NAFTA - candidates serving in Congress like Warren may be forced to take a more definitive stance. So far, Democrats have been blocking a vote because of opposition to labor provisions, a nod to their union base.

"That very much is going to be a test," said a Washington business lobbyist who asked not to be identified. "It's very difficult for a member of Congress to say they're pro-business and then vote against USMCA. In fact, I don't think you could do it."

THE OCCUPATION ONLY RETARDED DEBAATHIFICATION...:

The only sign that Sunni-majority Mosul's newest and busiest marketplace is in Shi'ite Muslim hands is a small plaque in the office of its leaseholder from Baghdad.

"The Imam Hussein Market," it reads, dedicated to the Prophet Mohammed's grandson and most revered Shi'ite imam.

Banners of Shi'ite leaders that militiamen erected after helping drive out the Sunni extremists of Islamic State two years ago have been removed amid fears of renewed sectarian tension.

Iraq's second city, once a recruitment center for Sunni officers in Saddam Hussein's army, became an al Qaeda hotbed after the 2003 U.S. invasion that toppled the dictator, and later the base from where IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate in 2014.

Iranian-backed Shi'ite paramilitary groups that played a crucial role in driving out IS have since become dominant in the city, if less visibly than before.

"WHO IS WILLING TO DESTROY A PIECE OF HIS OWN HEART?:

Probably the worst thing President Franklin Roosevelt ever did was Executive Order 9066, which ordered the arrest and incarceration of about 120,000 Japanese-Americans, nearly two-thirds of whom were American citizens. The motivation was purest paranoia and racism -- holding innocent civilians, most of whose families had lived in the United States for two or three generations, responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor.

For many years, it was thought this was a historical aberration -- an indulgence of the worst human instincts brought on by war fever. President Carter opened an investigation into the story in 1980, and in 1988 President Reagan signed a bill granting reparations of $20,000 to each camp survivor.

But President Trump is following a similar path much further than Roosevelt ever did -- indeed, his administration recently announced they would incarcerate 1,400 children at an Oklahoma army base that was part of the Second World War camp system. Trump's immigrant gulag is already one of the greatest moral atrocities in American history, and there is every sign it is going to get worse if he isn't stopped.

THE SHARIA COMPLIANT ANGLOSPHERE:

The Islamicity Indices, compiled by the Islamicity Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit, measure world governments by how well they adhere to the Islamic principles set forth in the Quran, including adherence to interest-free finance, equality of education, property rights and animal rights, among others. They don't include the personal duties required of Muslims, like prayer, fasting and pilgrimages.

In the most recent survey, the highest-ranking country with a Muslim majority is the United Arab Emirates at No. 45. (The U.S. ranks at No. 23.) The lowest-ranked country is Yemen, where Islam is the state religion. New Zealand has no official religion and nearly half of the country's 5 million people identify as Christian, but it scored high in several areas tracked by the index, including anti-corruption laws and provisions to alleviate poverty.

MAKING bIRTHRIGHT BETTER:

PIKER:

TRUMPIAN OR CHRISTIAN:

I begin with an intentionally polemical anecdote. On December 7, 2015 - a day that will live in infamy - the presidential campaign of Donald Trump issued a "Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration." That statement said that "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." The statement went on to quote Trump himself:

"...it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life. If I win the election for President, we are going to Make America Great Again."

While the language is characteristically opaque and the standards of evaluation borderline nonsensical, this statement is just one among innumerable instances in American and global politics today where a right-wing leader consolidates a base of support by identifying a foreign scapegoat and uniting opposition against that scapegoat. It is clear that this rhetoric does not accurately depict the nature of the threat it stands against. If it did, then the Trump Campaign may have identified a real threat, instead of a scapegoat.

But the antipathy toward Muslims is out of proportion with the threat of Islamist attack in America. One source noted that of domestic killings in America, "from 2009 through 2018, right-wing extremists accounted for 73 percent of such killings, according to the Anti-Defamation League, compared with 23 percent for Islamists and 3 percent for left-wing extremists. In other words, most terrorist attacks in the United States, and most deaths from terrorist attacks, are caused by white extremists." And it is pedantic to observe that this current form of populism in America has not been attended with warnings about right-wing white extremism the way they have been attended with paranoia about Islamic terrorism. Therefore, the current populist response to domestic violence in America is skewed, and it is skewed in a predictable direction: toward the identification and ostracization of scapegoats.

This populist logic of scapegoating is the subject of this essay, and the main theorist I will use to understand this phenomenon is Rene Girard. Girard's argument, in short, is that populism almost never exists in the world without scapegoating, and scapegoating is not a Christian form of politics.

SIC TRANSIT TRUMPONOMICS:

The U.S. budget deficit widened to $738.6 billion in the first eight months of the fiscal year, a $206-billion increase from a year earlier, despite a revenue boost from President Trump's tariffs on imported merchandise.

The shortfall was 38.8% more than a year earlier, the Treasury Department said in its monthly budget review released Wednesday.

COAL MINERS DODDER:

The reality is that coal dominance of the U.S. energy sector ended a long time ago--more than 60 years ago, to be exact, when it was surpassed by natural gas. Now a new report suggests cheaper and more abundant renewable energy is knocking coal down a peg, too.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's most recent numbers found that in April, renewable energy--including wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and hydroelectric--surpassed coal in energy generating capacity for the first time in American history. 

WHILE THE CHRISTIAN/SHI'A VISION FOR THE ARAB DICTATORSHIPS IS INSTABILITY:

Sisi said during his speech that the security of the Arab Gulf constitutes a cornerstone for Egypt's national security. He said any attack on Arab national security necessitates wise and deterrent confrontation of any enemy and that the Houthi attacks on the Saudi oil regions and the naval attacks in the UAE reflect blatant terrorism and a threat to Arab national security. Arab leaders have the responsibility to face this terrorism, he added.

Abdul Menhem Said, former director of the independent Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, told Al-Monitor by phone, "Sisi's statement that Gulf security is part of Egyptian national security during the summit reflects a relatively new expression in his vision, and it's not common among Egyptian political leaders."

"There is no emergency. It's phony, it's made up, and it's an abuse of the law -- once again, attempting to cut Congress out of the whole picture," said the committee's chair, Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y. "This is not a dictatorship. We don't rule this country by fiat ... Remember when you were in school and you learned checks and balances? Congress is a coequal branch of government."

The committee's highest-ranking Republican, Rep. Mike McCaul, called the move "unfortunate" and said he was blindsided by it after talking to National Security Adviser John Bolton a week prior to the emergency declaration. He and Engel both questioned how it was an emergency if the transfer of most of these weapons would take months, if not years in some cases -- and why the administration didn't give Congress a formal 30-day notice instead to allow it to vote on the sales.

ORANGE IS THE NEW ORANGE:

A large majority of voters, or 57 percent, believe Trump "committed crimes before he took office," according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.

And, a whopping 69 percent of voters say that sitting presidents should be subject to criminal indictment if there is evidence they committed crimes, the poll found.

ALL OF THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

"In 2018, we got hammered not only in the urban areas but in the suburbs, too," Cornyn, 67, told the Washington Examiner. The third-term senator, who has sounded the alarm about the dangers of taking Texas for granted, described with a sense of relief the "substantial focus and investment, now, that will be made on voter registration."

Texas has not elected a Democrat to statewide office in more than two decades, and Trump defeated Hillary Clinton there three years ago by 9 percentage points.

But the midterm elections saw a significant shift. The Democrats captured two traditionally Republican, suburban seats in the House of Representatives, and Democrat Beto O'Rourke, now a presidential candidate, came within 2.6 points of ousting Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. Recent polling suggests Trump could be vulnerable in the state in 2020, a product of continued resistance in the suburbs of Austin, Dallas, and Houston.

Some Republicans have attributed the outcome last fall, in which the GOP also suffered losses in state legislative races, to Cruz's unpopularity and the resources invested by O'Rourke and his allies, a feat Democrats are unlikely to repeat in a national presidential contest. Senior Republican strategists in Texas are warning against that line of thinking.

"Everybody thinks it was a Cruz-Beto thing. But it's a mess," a GOP adviser said, requesting anonymity in order to speak candidly. "Independents are behaving like Democrats -- like they did in 2018."

WHEN YOU IGNORE THE DATA:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

When my father was 50, he was run over by a drunk driver. He was very badly damaged, literally upgerisen--sliced apart--and he was brought to the Hospital for Joint Diseases in Manhattan for seven months to put him back together.

When his friends came to visit, they would see him with one leg in a Hoffmann device and the other suspended from the ceiling, like in the cartoons. What did they do? They would regale him with jokes. "You know what's Zionism?" they would ask. "It's when two rich Jews get together to send a third one to Israel." Or this: "The only thing two Jews can agree on is how much their friend should give to charity. Afterward they would ask, "Reb Chaim, does it hurt?" He would say, "Only when I laugh." For some reason he thought this was funny and he pumped and squeezed his beautiful eyelids in laughter until he would cry.

When a man is bashed up bad, a modern hospital provides a plethora of doctors--and specialists. There were the orthopedic surgeons, the plastic surgeons, the neurologists, the urologists, the infectious disease people. They moved in caravans, these medical nomads, and traipsed through his room at all hours of the day and night. I frequently slept at his side, so I saw this firsthand.

The doctors were very fine fellows, Jews of the assimilated sort. They lived uptown and in Westchester, but they hailed from the Bronx, like him--they had gone to De Witt Clinton High School or Bronx Science or some other such place. But I noticed something. When they came to examine him, they would tell jokes, too, and these jokes were of a Jewish sort. They usually had to do with a rabbi, a wonderworker caught in a compromising position, or they were about the foibles of Jewish men and the various deals that human beings make with their gods. One of his doctors, a man of generous nature and a great mind, a plastic surgeon named Lester Silver, would kibitz his way through the examination, often he made reference to arcane Talmudic minutiae, strange Halakhic rulings and the like, throwing in an occasional Yiddish word.

One of the doctors told this joke: A rabbi needs to break away from his shul. Finally, he takes a plane to Paris and checks into the Ritz and lives it up. The next day, after a stroll in Paris, he sits down for lunch in a fancy restaurant and orders suckling pig with a big juicy apple in its pisk. The rabbi's mouth waters as the waiter brings it to the table. Suddenly, the shul president and his cohorts appear. "Rabbi, Rabbi what are you doing here? Have you betrayed us?" they ask, pointing to the pig. The rabbi shrugs and says, "Will you look at how these silly Frenchies potchke up a baked apple?"

These Jewish doctors, buttoned up, credentialed to the hilt, couldn't stop themselves from kibitzing. The chief of orthopedic surgery--the late Herman Robbins--began a 13-hour surgery with my father, bone saw in hand, by saying to all staff present, "Nu, rabbi, lomir makhen hamotzi?" (Shall we make the blessing over bread?) My father remembered hearing this verbatim, even though he was under deep anesthesia.

IT'S A 75-25 COUNTRY:

U.S. District Judge Raner Collins declared a mistrial Tuesday evening after a jury in Tucson, Arizona, couldn't agree on whether Scott Warren, a 36-year-old geology teacher and border aid volunteer, had broken the law by helping a pair of Central American migrants crossing a treacherous stretch of Arizona desert. Warren's lawyer, Greg Kuykendall, said eight jurors wanted to find Warren not guilty on all three federal counts and four jurors thought him guilty. 

WHAT DO THEY HAVE BUT PAID TROLLS?:

"It's completely unacceptable that American taxpayer dollars supported a project that attacked Americans and others who are critical of the Trump administration's policy of escalation and conflict with Iran," a senior Congressional aide told The Independent, on condition of anonymity. 

"This is something that happens in authoritarian regimes, not democracies."

One woman behind the harassment campaign, a longtime Iranian-American activist, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the State Department over the years to promote "freedom of expression and free access to information."

The campaign relentlessly attacked critics of the Iran policy on social media, including Twitter and Telegram messaging app, accusing them without evidence of being paid operatives of the regime in Tehran. 

A spokeswoman for the State Department told reporters on Monday that funding for the "Iran Disinformation Project" had been suspended and is under review after it was reported that it went beyond the scope of its mandate by veering from countering propaganda from Iran to smearing domestic critics of White House policy.

State Department officials disclosed to lawmakers they had granted $1.5 for Iran Disinfo, which repeatedly targeted, harassed and smeared critics of Trump's tough stance against Iran on social media.

Among those targeted were American activists, scholars, and journalists who challenged the Trump administration's "maximum pressure campaign" against Iran.

The revelation that US taxpayer money was being used to attack administration critics has now sparked a flurry of queries.

WHICH IS HOW THE WALL SHOULD WORK:

The viral crowdfunding effort to build a wall on the southern border aimed at deterring immigrants from crossing illegally was only recently completed, but on Monday the newly installed wall suffered a major setback -- a large gate built into the barrier was ordered opened by officials.

The controversial half-mile wall constructed along the US-Mexico border near Sunland Park, New Mexico, was erected earlier this month after organizers raised more than $23 million on GoFundMe, the online crowdfunding site. But We Build the Wall organizers failed to obtain the required authorization to build the barrier on federal land, cutting off access to waterways and a public monument.

"This is normally done well in advance of a construction project," said Lori Kuczmanski, a spokesperson for the International Boundary and Water Commission, the agency that addresses waterway issues between the US and Mexico. "They think they can build now and ask questions later, and that's not how it works."

In response, IBWC officials on Monday afternoon propped open a large gate installed in the wall. 

LEAVING NO TRACE BEHIND HIM:

IT'S NOT COLLUSION WHEN IT'S PUBLIC POLICY:

U.S. President Donald Trump took a public stance against the use of CIA informants to spy on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Tuesday, saying it would not happen on his watch and possibly taking away a valuable tool of the U.S. intelligence community.

JUST TO CLEAR UP THE CONCENTRATION CAMP CONFUSION:

The Trump Administration has opted to use an Army base in Oklahoma to hold growing numbers of immigrant children in its custody after running out of room at government shelters.

Fort Sill, an 150-year-old installation once used as an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II, has been selected to detain 1,400 children until they can be given to an adult relative, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

NOW DO MAXINE V. DONALD:

2020 National GE:
Biden 53% (+13)
Trump 40%
.
Sanders 51% (+9)
Trump 42%
.
Harris 49% (+8)
Trump 41%
.
Warren 49% (+7)
Trump 42%
.
Buttigieg 47% (+5)
Trump 42%
.
Booker 47% (+5)
Trump 42%@QuinnipiacPoll 6/6-10

— Political Polls (@Politics_Polls) June 11, 2019

THE BEST OF US:

Representatives for the Charles Koch Institute and the Anti-Defamation League will join executives from tech companies which currently include Eventbrite, Mozilla, Pinterest, Patreon and Airbnb.

"Now more than ever is the time to create communities that value diversity, inclusivity and positive change," Michael Signer, the former mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia and the founder and chair of the Communities Overcoming Extremism Project, said in a statement. "We're excited to assemble with these forward-thinking tech leaders to explore what positive outcomes we can gain from an event full of powerful conversations."

UNLIKABLE:

Warren, who has established herself as one of the top 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, is as likely to be viewed favorably (46 percent) as unfavorably (46 percent) with the voters who know her best in the Suffolk University/Boston Globe survey. In comparison, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker was viewed favorably by 69 percent of respondents, with just 15 percent viewing him unfavorably. Sixty-six percent said he should run for a third term.

When asked who they would support in the 2020 Democratic primary, Massachusetts voters picked Joe Biden (22 percent) over Warren (10 percent) by a significant margin. 

THANKS, UR!:

DONALD WHO?:

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine claims "nothing has changed" after President Trump seemed to question the space agency's plans to return humans to the Moon in a tweet last week.

OUR TWO REPUBLICAN PARTIES:

Democratic leadership on foreign relations is symbolized in no small part by Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, as the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and Representative Eliot Engel of New York, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. And both of these individuals, while they have opposed the Trump administration's arms sales to Saudi Arabia, are closer to the Trump administration on some matters of foreign policy than one might expect. Menendez was against the Iran Deal when it was announced, believing the coordinated sanctions that were used to get Iran to the table could still coerce more concessions. Engel was also against the Iran Deal, claiming that it would not stop Iran's "destabilizing influence" in the region.

After Donald Trump, who campaigned on repealing the Iran Deal, was elected, the sanctions bill that in fact reinstituted sanctions on Iran was the "Countering Iran's Destabilizing Activities Act of 2017," which instituted sanctions on Iran and Russia at the same time, and was pushed through the House with only three Republicans voting against it based on Constitutional issues. (In the Senate then Republicans tacked on further sanctions on North Korea.) The writer of that bill was Representative Engel. On the Senate floor, Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, the temporary ranking member for the Democrats credited Senator Menendez as the "leader on Iran sanctions," and Menendez said this was about sending a message to Iran about "violating the international order."

This wide-ranging piece of legislation put sanctions on North Koreans and their state-run businesses, Russian government officials and affiliated oligarchs for their activity in Ukraine, and Iranian nationals involved in the ballistic missile program and fighting in Syria. Every Democratic representative in the House voted for the bill. The only Democratic lawmaker to vote against it was Senator Bernie Sanders, who spoke on the floor of his fear that sanctioning Iran would lead Iran to exit JCPOA. While many media figures understandably, in the wake of the election, focused on the Russia sanctions the bill included, the Iranian sanctions furthered undermined Iranian-American relations. One year later Trump unilaterally pulled out of the Iran Deal, saying the deal did not address Iranian ballistic missiles or its destabilizing behavior in the region. On this subject, Democratic lawmakers were closer to the current administration's views than Obama's: In fact, the twelve conditions Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that Iran would have to meet before the United States is willing to withdraw sanctions bore remarkable resemblance to those mentioned in the Countering Iran's Destabilizing Activities Act, including withdrawal from Syria and ceasing the ballistic missile program.

Senator Menendez also opposed President Obama's "Cuban Thaw," something he called naïve. "There is no reason that Cuba will reform just because the American president believes that, if he extends his hand in peace, the Castro brothers will suddenly unclench their fists," he wrote in USA Today in 2014. He applauded Trump's rollback of Obama's diplomatic achievement in 2017 but even claimed it didn't go far enough in punishing the "Castro regime": The United States, he argued, "was enriching a dictator at the expense of democracy and basic human rights."

This Cold War view of Latin America seems to extend to Venezuela as well. Both Menendez and Engel have sided with the Trump administration in backing of Juan Guiado as the rightful president of Venezuela. Neither have objected to the choice of Elliot Abrams--who helped coordinate right-wing, human rights-violating paramilitaries in Latin America in the Reagan administration--as new special envoy to Venezuela. They have stopped short of allowing an authorization for military force, and have spoken "with concern" about new extreme sanctions that Trump administration have put on Venezuela's oil companies. But they have also called for Maduro's resignation, and have not backed Bernie Sanders' or Representative Ro Khanna's proposals for a negotiated settlement and new elections. Menendez has criticized Sanders' refusal to call Maduro a dictator, a label in that in the establishment thinking allows for forced regime change.

TRUMPWORLD REQUIRES DENYING REALITY:

After being briefed on a devastating 17-state poll conducted by his campaign pollster, Tony Fabrizio, Mr. Trump told aides to deny that his internal polling showed him trailing Mr. Biden in many of the states he needs to win, even though he is also trailing in public polls from key states like Texas, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And when top-line details of the polling leaked, including numbers showing the president lagging in a cluster of critical Rust Belt states, Mr. Trump instructed aides to say publicly that other data showed him doing well.

Mr. Biden seems to have gotten into the president's head...

SO MUCH WINNING!:

By Monday, the president's victory lap had screeched to a halt.

As news outlets began chipping away at the agreement's veneer, pointing out that it wasn't the game-changer that Trump made it out to be, the president started lashing out, painting himself as a victim and insisting that he's not getting the credit he deserves.

In the span of three days, he fired off more than a dozen angry Twitter messages complaining about media coverage. He promised there was more to the deal than meets the eye, teasing a "very important" part of the agreement that will be "revealed in the not too distant future." And he called into CNBC for a 27-minute, impromptu interview in which he bashed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for criticizing his approach to trade negotiations while offering few new details about the deal. [...]

"He has this insatiable need to impress people and demonstrate accomplishments and notch achievements," a former White House official said. "When he feels like he's done something that should be recognized as a success and people are not recognizing it that way, it poses an existential threat to his sense of self -- and this is what you get."

THE BLACK BART STRATEGY:

The threat of imposing an immediate 5 percent tariff on Mexican goods, and then gradually ratcheting up the rate to 25 percent, was never real. The stock market hated it. The Chamber of Commerce and other U.S. business groups hated it. American consumers hated it. American manufacturers and farmers hated it. Even Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz hated it.

The prospect of Trump dropping that stink bomb into the U.S. economy in the run-up to a presidential election year was always a non-starter. Not even Trump is that stupid.

And the Mexican government isn't stupid, either. They fully understood that Trump's only way out of the box he had put himself in was to find a way, any way, to withdraw his tariff threat by claiming that it had successfully forced Mexico to negotiate an immigration deal favorable to the United States.

But far from creating negotiating leverage, Trump's threat did the opposite: It immediately handed all of the leverage to Mexico.

While Trump might have created some leverage with his tariff threat had anyone believed he would follow through on it, everyone--including the Mexican government--knew he couldn't. They knew that Trump had to find a way to declare victory to give himself political cover for when he inevitably withdrew the threat.

Which meant that Mexico had Trump over a barrel. Trump's had two choices: to agree to whatever cosmetic arrangement Mexico was willing to offer; or to follow through on a threat that would be tantamount to political suicide.

YOU KNOW YOU'RE HATED WHEN...:

A Siena College poll showed that 29 percent of New Yorkers view de Blasio favorably, with 53 percent viewing him unfavorably. Trump was viewed favorably by 34 percent, although he had a higher unfavorable rating at 63 percent. Only 3 percent didn't have an opinion on Trump, while 17 percent didn't have one on de Blasio.

TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT:

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

The U.S. Justice Department has agreed to provide evidence gathered during Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation to lawmakers who are considering whether to launch impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, a top Democrat said on Monday.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said he will hold off on a threat to bring criminal contempt charges against Attorney General William Barr, as long as the Justice Department continues to provide materials sought by his committee.

TRUMPIST OR CHRISTIAN?:

Speaking at a black church Sunday (June 9) in a city that is nearly 75% percent African American, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, J.D. Greear, said white Christians who are racially insensitive are disregarding the gospel.

"I do not need to tell this church the church of the West has had a horrible history of racism," Greear, a pastor in North Carolina, told Sixth Avenue Baptist Church.

"And there's one primary reason that that happened: Christians lost touch with the gospel."

Greear, who had come to Birmingham for the upcoming annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, cited a verse from the New Testament book of Galatians in which he said the Apostle Paul issued a rebuke about "segregated eating," when some Christians from Jewish backgrounds stopped dining with Christians from Gentile backgrounds.

"The gospel teaches us that there's only one kind of person: human," said Greear. "We've all got the same problem: sin."

IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

But EAET, she learned from her clinical psychologist, Laura Payne, is a different sort of psychotherapy. It's one of several behavioral therapies (among other interventions) included in a report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services titled "Pain Management Best Practices." According to the report, published May 9, "Research indicates that EAET has a positive impact on pain intensity, pain interference, and depressive symptoms."

EAET was developed in 2011 by psychologist Mark Lumley at Wayne State University and his colleague Dr. Howard Schubiner. It combines some techniques from traditional talk therapies (such as probing a patient's life experience for insight and context) with those of cognitive behavioral therapy, which focuses more on skills training and changing harmful patterns of behavior.

It's an emotion-focused treatment, Lumley says, aimed at helping people who are in widespread, medically unexplained pain.

THERE'S A REASON HE WORSHIPS DICTATORS:

Photos from a Border Patrol processing center in El Paso showed people herded so tightly into cells that they had to stand on toilets to breathe. Memos surfaced by journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement's failure to provide medical care was responsible for suicides and other deaths of detainees. These followed another report that showed that thousands of detainees are being brutally held in isolation cells just for being transgender or mentally ill.

Also last week, the Trump administration cut funding for classes, recreation and legal aid at detention centers holding minors -- which were likened to "summer camps" by a senior ICE official last year. And there was the revelation that months after being torn from their parents' arms, 37 children were locked in vans for up to 39 hours in the parking lot of a detention center outside Port Isabel, Texas. In the last year, at least seven migrant children have died in federal custody.

 

Preventing mass outrage at a system like this takes work. Certainly it helps that the news media covers these horrors intermittently rather than as snowballing proof of a racist, lawless administration. But most of all, authorities prevail when the places where people are being tortured and left to die stay hidden, misleadingly named and far from prying eyes.

There's a name for that kind of system. They're called concentration camps. You might balk at my use of the term. That's good -- it's something to be balked at.

The goal of concentration camps has always been to be ignored. The German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, who was imprisoned by the Gestapo and interned in a French camp, wrote a few years afterward about the different levels of concentration camps. Extermination camps were the most extreme; others were just about getting "undesirable elements ... out of the way." All had one thing in common: "The human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead."

"Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler's collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed ... Hitler's speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist," Marie Brenner wrote. [...]

When Brenner asked Trump about how he came to possess Hitler's speeches, "Trump hesitated" and then said, "Who told you that?"

"I don't remember," Brenner reportedly replied.

Trump then recalled, "Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of 'Mein Kampf,' and he's a Jew."

Brenner added that Davis did acknowledge that he gave Trump a book about Hitler.

"But it was 'My New Order,' Hitler's speeches, not 'Mein Kampf,'" Davis reportedly said. "I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I'm not Jewish."

OUR TWO PRO-LIFE PARTIES:

[A]ccording to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 40,000 Americans died by gun violence in 2017, the highest number recorded, with the majority of those -- nearly 24,000 -- being deaths by suicide.

But gun control advocates have reason for at least a sliver of optimism: Public sentiment is finally changing around the issue. According to Pew Research Center, for the first time in 10 years, more Americans support controlling gun ownership (52% ) than support protecting gun rights (44%). Moreover, gun control advocacy groups were more mobilized in the 2018 election than pro-gun groups.

The gun control movement was largely catalyzed after the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School. Since that tragedy, we've seen a spate of advocacy groups spring up, including Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, Giffords Courage to Fight Gun Violence, and Sandy Hook Promise. (We've also, and not coincidentally, seen a spate of atrocities, with, by some accounts an average of one mass shooting per week in the years since then.) Through their outreach and legislative efforts, these organizations have helped change the national dialogue about guns. They've also arrived as a much-needed counterbalance to the goliath of the gun rights movement: the National Rifle Organization. [...]

For the first time, the campaign political activity of gun control groups swamped that of the NRA in the 2018 cycle. What's more, the gun control advocacy movement has morphed into a multi-headed behemoth capable of challenging the NRA in the legislative, judicial, and state politics arenas, and advocating for stricter gun laws with alacrity and sophistication not seen before in the gun control movement.

Many gun control groups were created in response to specific gun violence events. Notable among these are the organizations created by Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, herself a victim of gun violence, whose Giffords PAC spent nearly $18 million in the 2018 election cycle in direct and soft money expenditures. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Everytown for Gun Safety and its super PAC, Independence USA spent another $70 million in 2018 supporting candidates who support gun control.

Their efforts appear to be working. Public support for curtailing gun access is increasing. A recent poll found near unanimous support for universal background checks, finding that 97% of Americans support the measure. At least 15 Republican candidates with A-ratings from the NRA in 2018 lost their House bids, in part due to spending and campaigning from gun control groups.

THE PURITAN GAME:

For Noë, the self-reflective nature of the game is brought out most clearly in the act of scorekeeping, whereby a scorekeeper must make judgements about, for example, what counts as a hit (versus an error) or a wild pitch (versus a passed ball). These are questions that can only be answered within the context of the game of baseball. In order to make those decisions, we must think carefully about what a hit is, or what an error is. Such decisions require judgement.

Consider the strike zone. Noë makes a fascinating argument about role of umpires, particularly when it comes to judging balls and strikes. The strike zone, he says, is not so much a three-dimensional space as it is a "zone of responsibility." A "strike" is a pitch that the hitter should be able to hit, so we can therefore fault him for not hitting it. A "ball" is a pitch that he should not reasonably be expected to hit, so we therefore don't fault him for not hitting it. That an umpire must render judgement for every pitch--and that players, managers, and fans often argue about those decisions--is appropriate for a sport that invites self-scrutiny.

Scorekeeping--the thing that I and my teammates did all those years ago--is fundamentally an act of assigning blame (a "forensic activity") for what happens on the field. The scorecard itself captures an interpretation of what has happened. "Baseball is about what people do, about what they accomplish in the social setting of the game," Noë writes. Determining what players have done--committed an error, failed to swing at a strike--is something that requires human judgement about questions of intent and effort, no different than how a judge or jury must decide whether a victim's death was murder or manslaughter or something accidental.

Noë is quick to point out that baseball is not alone in raising questions about itself and interpreting human intent. Other sports offer a similar opportunity for self-reflection, as do many or even most complex activities--activities that Noë has elsewhere described as "organized activities."

"It is the hallmark of all characteristically human activities--language, the law, other sports--that they are, in the sense I am trying to understand, baseball-like," Noë writes.

If baseball is unique, it's because the game makes explicit this loop of practice and interpretation through the act of scorekeeping. It formalizes the process of thinking about and commenting upon the game, which in turn affects the way the game is played. Keeping score is important work. It is a "knowledge-making activity," and one that every baseball fan, in theory, participates in.

Making judgements, interpreting actions--these are skills that require attention, knowledge, and a familiarity with the larger practice in which they take place. In other words, they require work. And they are not--I repeat, not--something that can be automated, nor should we want them to be. Looking outward to other "baseball-like" activities, Noë observes, "It would be a dark consequence of life in the digital age if we forgot that keeping score is more than keeping track, and that each of us has the power to keep score."

CERVANTES TEXT BACKFIRED ON HIM....:

What is beautiful is more than simply true and intelligible, although that is necessary; it must also be pleasing. In agreement with Aquinas, French philosopher Jacques Maritain writes that a beautiful thing is inherently desirable: "Therefore by its nature, by its very beauty, it stirs desire and produces love, whereas truth as such only illuminates."[4] Beauty is fundamentally composed of truth and attraction, both of which must be recognized for the object to be seen as beautiful.

When he esteems chivalry as highly as he does, Don Quixote is exhibiting a similar view of "the beautiful." The habit of chivalry is based in truth, for it deals with the essence of things, viewing women as women, men as men, and monsters as monsters. Chivalry is more than this, however; it is an expression of love, that other requirement for beauty. When the object of chivalry is loved, it draws its lover to itself, sharing of its beauty. We see that this principle can also find a deeper expression than chivalry, for the perfection of love is found in God, its source. God knew and loved and pursued us, the most beautiful creation, to the point of becoming one of us, and we love and pursue Him and in that degree become deified and beautiful in Him. Imitating the motion of divine love, then, Don Quixote sees things that are true, sees them as beautiful, and in pursuing them, rises to partake in them.

The lover becoming more like his beloved is the basis of our knight's defense of chivalry, which he offers to the canon of Toledo:

It is clear that any passage from any history of a knight errant is bound to delight and amaze anyone who reads it.... you will soon see how they banish any melancholy you might be feeling, and improve your disposition, if it is a bad one. Speaking for myself, I can say that ever since I became a knight errant I have been courageous, polite, generous, well-bred, magnanimous, courteous, bold, patient... (DQ, 458).

Chivalry and tales of it, therefore, dispose man to virtue, drawing him into closer union with the people and things which he loves, the things which "delight and amaze" him. To the extent that a chivalric knight becomes more like a beautiful thing and begins to understand it for what it really is, he cannot help treating it well and virtuously, as a part of himself which is good and noble.

IT'S BEEN RULED A SUICIDE:

[T]he tree came from a northern French forest where 2,000 US Marines died during World War II.

But a few days later, the tree was nowhere to be seen, having disappeared into quarantine.

"It is a quarantine which is mandatory for any living organism imported into the US," Gerard Araud, then the French ambassador to America, wrote on Twitter, adding that it would be replanted later.

But it was never replanted: the tree died during its quarantine, the diplomatic source said.

MUST LISTEN RADIO:

On Thursday, New Hampshire authorities held a press conference where they identified three victims who had been killed by a serial killer in the late 1970s or early 1980s. The case was the subject of New Hampshire Public Radio's true crime podcast Bear Brook, and it played a small role in helping to identify the victims. [...]

According to Moon, this latest break from two unrelated efforts. An online investigator named Becky Heath had been following the case for more than a decade, trawling through an Ancestry.com forum where people were looking to reconnect with long-lost loved ones and comparing their stories against the profiles of the Bear Brook victims, hoping that a family member might have posted about them.

In 2017, she came across a name: Sarah McWaters. A woman had posted on the forum, noting her husband and his family had been looking for his half-sister and two family members, who had vanished in the 1970s. Heath was able to match the birthdates to the rough age ranges of the Bear Brook victims, but never followed up on the tip, until she began listening to the podcast. "I don't know why I didn't pursue it more the first time," Heath told Moon on the podcast. "I didn't really get feedback from anyone, so I didn't really pursue more." But when she began listening to the podcast last fall, she went back to her findings, and realized that she was onto something, and reached out to the author of the post, learning that Sarah's mother was married to a man named Rasmussen. She soon submitted a tip to law enforcement.

At the same time, a genetic genealogist named Barbara Rae-Venter had been working on trying to find some usable DNA from the victims. She was the one who had used DNA databases to link Rasmussen to the Bear Brook murders in 2017, and had used the same techniques to help identify the Golden State Killer last year.

But while she had been able to identify Rasmussen's identity, the bodies recovered in Bear Brook were badly decomposed. Forensics experts had been able to extract mitochondrial DNA from the remains, but to utilize Rae-Venter's techniques, they needed autosomal DNA. Rae-Venter learned of a new set of techniques that were pioneered by a UC Santa Cruz researcher named Richard Green, which would extract autosomal DNA from rootless hair.

EVERY MAN A ROCKEFELLER:

ANTI-IMMIGRANT IS AS ANTI-IMMIGRANT DOES:

ICE deported veterans while "unaware" it was required to carefully screen them, report says https://t.co/FJDAK6pWcr

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 9, 2019

THANKS, UR!:

Yet another mock gravestone bearing the name and image of President Vladimir Putin has appeared in Russia -- this time in the southwestern city of Voronezh.

"Incredible thief and liar. Political corpse," read the accompanying text featuring Putin's surname, initials, and birth year, and listing 2019 as the year of death.

Images of the installation appeared on June 5 on the Twitter account of Agit Rossia, a group that calls itself a "federal channel of agitation, news, and street protests in Russia."

THANKS DONALD!:

The American public is in the mood for "big government." According to the distinguished political scientist James Stimson's "Public Policy Mood estimate" -- a widely respected tool for measuring shifts in ideological opinion across time -- the U.S. electorate is more sympathetic to left-wing economic policy today than at anytime in the past 68 years (which is as far back as Stimson's data goes).

DEMOCRATS ARE NOT THE ENEMY:

IN FLORIDA DONALD WOULD BE CHARGED WITH "CULPABLE NEGLIGENCE":

EAGLE PASS, Tex. -- The 19-year-old pregnant migrant waded toward the American shore, deep enough in the Rio Grande for waves to splash against her waist. Pushing through the river's current, and mindful of an alligator lingering upriver, she guided her friend's crying 10-year-old boy toward a Border Patrol rescue boat.

As the boat carried them on the final leg of their journey last month to the United States from Honduras, the young woman waved back to a group on Mexico's riverbank cheering her rescue.

The day before, Border Patrol agents at the Eagle Pass river crossing in South Texas had found the body of a man too decomposed to be easily identified. A couple of days earlier, a video of a man desperately trying to swim against the current before going limp and sinking circulated in Mexican news media.

And in early May, Border Patrol agents at Eagle Pass pulled the body of a 10-month-old baby from the Rio Grande after a raft carrying nine migrants overturned. Only five survived.

"The sad moments are the deaths. Unfortunately, we've seen some of those," said Bryan Kemmett, the Border Patrol agent in charge of Eagle Pass, a town of 29,000 about an hour from the larger Del Rio, Tex. "The more troubling ones, the ones more recently, are the small infants. When you see the small infant and you hear the infant dying, you think about your own children."

THERE IS NO lEFT:

[W]hen should the Left expect to make electoral progress among European workers and reformist sections of the middle class, if not now? There is an urgent need to explain the Left's disastrous failure to do this. Four reasons come to mind -- certainly, there are more.

The first and most basic reason is the seemingly total absence of a realistic anticapitalist, or at least anti-neoliberal, left-wing political strategy related to the European Union.

There is not even a debate on the crucial issue of whether the European Union can at all be a vehicle for anticapitalist politics. Instead, there is a naïve or opportunistic acceptance -- and it's hard to say which is worse -- of the feel-good "Europeanism" so popular among young people and so useful for both Green electioneering and European technocrats seeking legitimacy for their neoliberal regime.

In particular, on the Left, there's no mention of the way in which the European Union's de facto constitution limits the political space for any anticapitalist or even pro-labor program, with its safely enshrined free markets (the "four freedoms"), the de facto dictatorship of the European Court, and the balanced budget provisions under European Monetary Union, imposing austerity on countries and citizens.

In particular, any critical discussion of the European Union's central social policy -- the free movement of labor between the now economically extremely different member countries -- is strictly avoided, combined with hints of sympathy for open borders generally, including those with the outside world. This does nothing but validate the image spread by the Greens and the center-left middle-class parties of Europe being mainly about young people traveling without border controls and not needing to change money.

Moreover, this goes in tandem with entirely illusory policy projects, for example a European minimum wage. Only after insistent questioning is it admitted that a European minimum wage would in fact have to be differentiated by country. Predictably, this proposal has found no support whatsoever either in the poor countries of the union, where people find it too good to be true, or in the rich countries, where workers in particular fear that somehow they are the ones who will have to foot the bill for the Left's "European solidarity."

...AND CHEAPER...:

California set two renewable energy records last week: the most solar power ever flowing on the state's main electric grid, and the most solar power ever taken offline because it wasn't needed.

There's no contradiction: As California utilities buy more and more solar power as part of the state's quest to confront climate change, supply and demand are increasingly out of sync. The state's fleet of solar farms and rooftop panels frequently generate more electricity than Californians use during the middle of the day -- a phenomenon that has sent lawmakers and some climate advocates scrambling to find ways to save the extra sunlight rather than let it go to waste.

But for ratepayers, an oversupply of solar power might actually be a good thing.

New research published in the peer-reviewed journal Solar Energy suggests California should embrace the idea of building more solar panels than it can consistently use, rather than treating oversupply as a problem to be solved. It sounds counterintuitive, but intentionally overbuilding solar facilities -- and accepting they'll often need to be dialed down in the absence of sufficient demand -- may be the best way to keep electricity prices low on a power grid dominated by renewable energy, the research found.

In a study published in March, New York-based researchers Richard Perez and Karl Rábago argue that solar power has gotten so inexpensive that overbuilding it will probably be the cheapest way to keep the lights on during cloudy or overcast days -- cheaper than relying entirely on batteries. Solar power can meet high levels of daytime electricity demand without energy storage, the researchers say, as long as there are enough solar panels on the grid during times when none of them are producing at full capacity.

ONLY GETTING STARTED:

The televised Watergate hearings that began in May 1973, chaired by Senator Samuel Ervin, commanded a large national audience -- 71% told Gallup they watched the hearings live. And as many as 21% reported watching 10 hours or more of the Ervin proceedings. Not too surprisingly, Nixon's popularity took a severe hit. His ratings fell as low as 31%, in Gallup's early August survey. 

The public had changed its view of the scandal. A 53% majority came to the view that Watergate was a serious matter, not just politics, up from 31% who believed that before the hearings. Indeed, an overwhelming percentage of the public (71%) had come to see Nixon as culpable in the wrongdoing, at least to some extent. About four-in-ten (37%) thought he found out about the bugging and tried to cover it up; 29% went further in saying that he knew about the bugging beforehand, but did not plan it; and 8% went all the way, saying he planned it from beginning to end. Only 15% of Americans thought that the president had no prior knowledge and spoke up as soon as he learned of it.

Yet, despite the increasingly negative views of Nixon at that time, most Americans continued to reject the notion that Nixon should leave office, according to Gallup. Just 26% thought he should be impeached and forced to resign, while 61% did not.

A lot of key scandal events were to follow that year and into 1974, but public opinion about Watergate was slow to change further, despite the high drama of what was taking place. For example, October 1973 was a crucial month as the courts ruled that the president had to turn over his taped conversations to special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and subsequently Nixon ordered for the dismissal of Cox in what came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre. The public reacted, but in a measured way. In November, Gallup showed the percentage of Americans thinking that the president should leave office jumping from 19% in June to 38%, but still, 51% did not support impeachment and an end to Nixon's presidency.

In the spring of 1974, despite the indictment of top former White House aides, and Nixon's release of what were seen as "heavily edited" transcripts of tapes of his aides plotting to get White House enemies, the public was still divided over what to do about the president. For example, by June, 44% in the Gallup Poll thought he should be removed from office, while 41% disagreed.

Only in early August, following the House Judiciary Committee's recommendation in July that Nixon be impeached and the Supreme Court's decision that he surrender his audio tapes, did a clear majority - 57% - come to the view that the president should be removed from office.

ALL OF THE FAKE NEWS COMES FROM DONALD:

QUICK, FOR A BUREAUCRACY:

Property owners have a new yardstick for measuring their frustration over building permit requests that are lost in the labyrinth of local government bureaucracy.

Barcelona city hall has finally issued a work permit for the unfinished church designed by the architect Antoni Gaudí, 137 years after construction started on the Sagrada Família basilica.

DON'T DO THE CRIME IF YOU CAN'T PAY THE FINE:

DONALD WHO?:

This makes me wince, because it shows that our diplomats (like a lot of our national security establishment) are pretty much saying that the President has his foreign policy, and they have theirs. I understand their sentiment, but this is not healthy. https://t.co/L7zuRdEhPA

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) June 8, 2019

IN FAIRNESS, ABANDONING SHIP WAS HIS ONLY OPTION:

Mexico Never Agreed to Farm Deal With U.S., Contradicting Trump - Bloomberg https://t.co/o8rL3PDIvT

— Shannon Pettypiece (@spettypi) June 8, 2019

BARBARIANS INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE GATES:

Seems like secular liberals are really making the country hostile to Christian values. https://t.co/BoqrYkKaq0

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 8, 2019

ON THE 162ND DAY OF CHRISTMAS, MEXICO GAVE TO ME...:

The centerpiece of Mr. Trump's deal was an expansion of a program to allow asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while their legal cases proceed. But that arrangement was first reached in December in a pair of painstakingly negotiated diplomatic notes that the two countries exchanged. Ms. Nielsen announced the Migrant Protection Protocols during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee five days before Christmas.

And over the past week, negotiators failed to persuade Mexico to accept a "safe third country" treaty that would have given the United States the legal ability to reject asylum seekers if they had not sought refuge in Mexico first.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

There is a growing desire for impeachment proceedings to begin against President Trump, but Americans are still split overall on what to do after the release of the Mueller report, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll finds.

A slim majority of Americans (52%) want one of the following: to begin impeachment proceedings (22%), to continue investigations into potential political wrongdoing of Trump (25%) or to publicly reprimand him -- that is, censure (5%).

Thirty-nine percent say no further action should be taken and that the current investigations should end.

ONLY DONALD CAN SLOW THE OBAMACONOMY:

Why today's job numbers were alarming:

223k: Job growth per month in 2018

205k: Job growth per month in first four months of 2019, before today's revisions.

164k: Monthly job growth in first five months of 2019 after today's numbers.https://t.co/gKKdx5DVvh

— Neil Irwin (@Neil_Irwin) June 7, 2019

VS. THE HEEL:

What are a few examples of the kinds of satirical allusions and cultural references that are invariably lost to present-day readers, even literate ones? Orwell scholars such as Peter Davison, Jeffrey Meyers, and Bernard Crick have catalogued a wide variety. Consider, for instance:

Big Brother's mustachioed visage is a composite of Stalin and Field Marshal Lord Kitchener.

The caption "Big Brother Is Watching You" recalls the famous recruiting poster of 1914 in which a finger-pointing Kitchener glares: "Your Country Needs YOU."

Victory Square is an analogue to Trafalgar Square, and Big Brother replaces Nelson atop its column.

Newspeak, which aims to diminish the range of thought by reducing its linguistic resources, is a riff on C. K. Ogden's Basic English.

The Ministry of Truth resembles the BBC's Broadcast House during the war, where Orwell worked as the producer for the Indian section of the BBC's Eastern Service on the first floor (down the hall from Room 101).

The Floating Fortress in Oceania refers both to the Flying Fortress of the American air forces during World War II and to the Floating Island in Gulliver's Travels that breaks the will of recalcitrant individuals.

The division of the world into three rival superstates--Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia--is based on James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution (1941), a sociological vision of the near-future, post-World War II era in which a technocratic elite of totalitarian ideologues rules the globe.

The brainwashed Winston's defeatist admission that "2 + 2 = 5" alludes to the billboards erected in major Soviet cities during the 1930s that urged the citizenry to work harder and fulfill the prescribed norms of the first Five-Year Plan ahead of time (i.e., in four years, not five).

Winston's despairing line "We are the dead," which both the telescreen and Julia repeat when the couple are arrested by the Thought Police, echoes the recrimination voiced by a corpse in a poem popular during World War I, "In Flanders Fields." Written by the Canadian poet John McCrae, "In Flanders Fields" gave voice to the public outrage over the waste and futility of the Great War.

Like Communist Party members in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, Inner and Outer Party members in Oceania are called "comrade."

Sexual intercourse in Oceania is for procreation only ("Our Duty to the Party"), which nods to the puritanical, state-controlled doctrines about sexuality propagandized in Stalin's USSR.

As O'Brien tortures Winston in Room 101, he expresses with exhilaration his sadistic power hunger: "Imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever." That famous line evokes Jack London's The Iron Heel, especially its protagonist's doomsday prophecy that "the Iron Heel will walk upon our faces."

Certain examples of Orwell's satirical allusions have biographical rather than historical relevance and sometimes are private jokes or insider gossip--yet are no less important to the satire. For instance, the BBC was a division of the Ministry of Information (MOI), known as "Miniform" in telex jargon (recalling, of course, "Minitru" and "Miniluv" in Nineteen Eighty-Four). The MOI's head was Brendan Bracken, whom BBC insiders and in-the-know Londoners dubbed "B. B." Orwell would joke with fellow BBC staffers and his wife Eileen, who worked in the MOI Censorship Department until 1944, that he had never seen "B. B." and was skeptical of his existence (just as his readers are meant to doubt the reality of Big Brother).

THE DISCIPLINE OF DEMOCRACY:

Istanbul's two leading mayoral candidates have agreed to take part in a televised debate ahead of a controversial repeat election that is scheduled to be held on 23 June.

Ekrem Imamoglu, mayoral candidate for the Republican People's Party (CHP), won the elections on 31 March against former prime minister Binali Yildirim, the candidate for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), but the result was cancelled by the Supreme Election Board (YSK) on the grounds of alleged unlawful staffing at polling stations.

The idea of holding a TV debate - unprecedented in Turkish electoral history - was originally pitched by Imamoglu in March, prior to the original vote, but the suggestion was dismissed by Yildirim.

TO HATE OTHERS AS MUCH AS YOU HATE YOURSELF:

I frequently disagree with The Atlantic's Adam Serwer, but late last year he wrote a piece that should resonate with any person who's been in the crosshairs of the MAGA right. A fundamental aspect of truly Trumpist political engagement is the intentional infliction of harm on political opponents. Cruelty is the point of their interactions. That's the purpose of their communication.

I'm making a distinction here between Trump voters and online Trumpists. There are many millions of Trump voters who are kind, decent, and generous people. They're the salt of the earth and the backbone of their communities. I know them. They're my friends and family members. They're the people who help make my community a marvelous place to live. If they were the face of Trumpism, then America would be a less polarized place.

But they're not -- not by a long shot. Donald Trump's personal pugilism has been adopted, refined, and magnified by a legion of his supporters, and these individuals live to inflict misery. They don't care to win an argument. They don't care to persuade. They want to harass and swarm and mock in a carnival fun-house imitation of the online mobs generated by the woke social-justice left.

DOES DONALD EVEN EXIST?:

Looks like Trump is angry at the media for reporting the truth -- that yet again, his erratic, impulsive rage-threats made a colossal mess and he ended up with little to show for it. https://t.co/kWPJ8C8f1d

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) June 8, 2019

CITIES WERE A MISTAKE:

In California's Silicon Valley, the boom and the bust are playing out simultaneously. Tech companies have made the Bay Area one of the wealthiest places on earth. But on the streets of San Francisco and the cities around it, desperation is increasingly visible. A spiraling housing crisis has made it unaffordable for many people to live in the cities where they work. More than 30,000 people across the region are now homeless, many living in sprawling tent encampments or sleeping in their cars.

For each new millionaire household the San Francisco Bay Area has produced, there are at least four new people living below the poverty level. San Francisco's property crime rate has spiked to the highest in the nation. Many people - tech newcomers and longtime residents alike - complain of feeling unsafe.

At the same time, with little fanfare, the Bay Area has seen a dramatic drop in its homicide rate, driven by a considerable decrease in deadly shootings. [...]

In the past 10 years, tens of thousands of black residents have moved out of Oakland and San Francisco, as skyrocketing rents and housing prices have made the cities increasingly unaffordable. But in the region as a whole, the total number of black residents has remained steady, as the number of black residents living in the Bay Area's outlying suburbs has increased, according to annual census estimates.

#ALLCOMEDYISCONSERVATIVE:

FIRST IMPEACHMENT, THEN PRISON:

NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR FATHER DID:

RACISM IS AS RACISM DOES:

The Trump administration is canceling English classes, recreational activities including soccer, and legal aid for unaccompanied migrant children who are staying in federally contracted migrant shelters. [...]

One shelter-provider employee told The Associated Press the facility was notified on May 30 "that they wouldn't be reimbursing costs of providing education and other activities," throwing shelter officials into a panic over how they will cover the expenses, which they pay upfront.

DONALD WHO?:

I am pleased to inform you that The United States of America has reached a signed agreement with Mexico. The Tariffs scheduled to be implemented by the U.S. on Monday, against Mexico, are hereby indefinitely suspended. Mexico, in turn, has agreed to take strong measures to....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 8, 2019

OUR TWO REPUBLICAN PARTIES:

The 2020 election looks like the last hurrah for a certain kind of Democrat who switched from Obama to Trump in 2016. Biden is uniquely well-suited to win back that contingent, and judging by open admissions of anxiety from the White House, the president knows it. The left is on the march: in many ways they will set the Democratic agenda no matter who is president. But the 2020 race is already something of a sad story for the Democratic left. Bernie Sanders's trajectory is opposite from the one he enjoyed this time four years ago. The comeback of Elizabeth Warren, a decaffeinated Sanders, represents a tactical retreat.

Biden will continue, where he can, to run a retrograde campaign. Sure, he'll reverse and back government abortion funding here, and downplay his crime bill there. The era of post-truth is now blending into the era of post-sincerity. But Biden's reactionary résumé is also to his advantage.

Biden is the sort of Democrat that the party has all but lost, but will need again in 18 months' time: middle-class, middle of the country, and middle-of-the-road politically. Biden isn't the candidate of the base of the Democratic party, who live in America's growing cities. Notoriously, he took the train to DC. But the easiest way back to Pennsylvania Avenue remains Pennsylvania itself. Rebuild the 'Blue Wall' in the upper Midwest, into which the Keystone State is becoming functionally integrated. Headquartered in Philadelphia, Biden 2020 is 'going after those wistful suburbanites' outside the city, veteran Pennsylvania politico Charles McElwee tells me. This contingent, McElwee says, would vote for Biden if the election were held today. White House beware: Biden 'could absolutely win Pennsylvania'.

THEIR MASTER'S VOICE:

A 54-year-old Trump supporter was arrested by federal agents for threatening to kill an unspecified number of members of Congress, the Associated Press reported, using the same language in his threats that Trump himself has used in speeches throughout the years.

According to court documents obtained by the AP, Trump fan and Utah resident Scott Brian Haven made more than 2,000 phone calls over three years with threats to members of Congress.

In 2018, Haven said in a phone call with an unnamed Senate aide that there are "far more Second Amendment people than whiny, crying liberals" -- using the same phrase Trump used in 2016 when he suggested "Second Amendment people" could act if Hillary Clinton became president.

A RACE, NOT A RELIGION:

It may seem surprising, then, but conversion--born of the desires of thousands of people to become Jews--has become the fierce battleground joining Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Jews today, in the United States and in Israel. Orthodox Jewry won't recognize non-Orthodox conversions, the Israeli rabbinate won't recognize conversions done by some American Orthodox rabbis. Converts everywhere face discrimination, like comments from fellow Jews that they aren't "really Jewish." Instead of welcoming new Jews from every possible quarter, we have made a mess of how we treat aspiring Jews, even as we need them more than ever.

How did it come to this, that a people in demographic--and other--danger is mucking up the process of accepting new members? The simple answer is that we have lost their unique sense of how one might become a new Jew.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Many bacterial evolution studies have found, perhaps surprisingly, that evolution often follows very predictable paths over the short term, with the same traits and genetic solutions frequently realised. Consider, for example, a long-term experiment, in which 12 independent populations of Escherichia coli founded by a single clone, have been continuously evolving since 1988. That's over 65,000 generations - there have only been 7,500-10,000 generations since modern Homo sapiens appeared. All the evolving populations in this experiment show higher fitness, faster growth and larger cells than their ancestor. This suggests that organisms have some constraints on how they can evolve.

There are evolutionary forces that keep evolving organisms on the straight-and-narrow. Natural selection is the "guiding hand" of evolution, reigning in the chaos of random mutations and abetting beneficial mutations. This means many genetic changes will fade from existence over time, with only the best enduring. This can also lead to the same solutions of survival being realised in completely unrelated species. [...]

But what about the underlying physical laws - do they favour predictable evolution? At very large scales, it appears so. We know of many governing laws of our universe that are certain. Gravity, for example - for which we owe our oceans, thick atmosphere and the nuclear fusion in the sun that showers us with energy - is a predictable force. Isaac Newton's theories, based on large scale deterministic forces, can also be used to describe many systems on large scales. These describe the universe as perfectly predictable.

If Newton's view was to remain perfectly true, the evolution of humans was inevitable. However, this comforting predictability was shattered by the discovery of the contradictory but fantastical world of quantum mechanics in the 20th century. At the smallest scales of atoms and particles, true randomness is at play - meaning our world is unpredictable at the most fundamental level.

This means that the broad "rules" for evolution would remain the same no matter how many times we replayed the tape. There would always be an evolutionary advantage for organisms that harvest solar power. There would always be opportunity for those that make use of the abundant gases in the atmosphere. And from these adaptations, we may predictably see the emergence of familiar ecosystems. But ultimately, randomness, which is built into many evolutionary processes, will remove our ability to "see into the future" with complete certainty.

There's a problem in astronomy that acts as a fitting analogy. In the 1700s, a mathematical institute offered a prize for solving the "three-body problem", involving accurately describing the gravitational relationship and resultant orbits of the sun, Earth and moon.

The winner, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, essentially proved that the problem couldn't be solved exactly. Much like the chaos introduced by random mutations, a little bit of starting error would inevitably grow, meaning that you couldn't easily determine where the three bodies would end up in the future. But as the dominant partner, the sun dictates the orbits of all three to an extent - allowing us to narrow the possible positions of the bodies to within a range.

This is much like the guiding hands of evolution, which tether adapting organisms to familiar routes. We may not be entirely sure where we'd end up if we rewound time, but the paths available to evolving organisms are far from limitless. And so maybe humans would never appear again, but it's likely that whatever alien world replaced ours would be a familiar place.

CRIMINALIZING HUMANNESS:

 Put aside the perjury charge (as Peterson certainly had a duty to the truth), Peterson has been charged, presumably because he was on duty, on the scene, yet did not enter the school with his own gun blazing. "Negligence" as a crime! Meaning, he can potentially go to jail, if convicted, for a long time largely because he lacked the strength of character to rush in to a field of battle -- as might a  fireman, to a raging fire - where (one can presume) he feared his own life would be in danger. And yes, he was a policeman (or was until he resigned in the wake of the ignominy over his "neglect") and was duty bound to protect the public, and especially the students. But filing criminal charges, even though the relevant statutes likely make out the crimes charged, for freezing in that moment? [...]

This prosecution is largely unusual, actually unheard of. Whether Peterson is convicted or not, it remains to be seen if it will turn out to have been a good thing for the public. No one can have sympathy for Peterson's conduct in having abandoned his post and students, particularly when he might have saved lives. Still, criminalizing not doing something, which is what this case effectively does, may put an unsustainable demand on law enforcement.

The real issue here is ultimately one of prosecutorial discretion. Prosecutors must gain a sense of vengeance for their communities. Clearly, the Florida State Attorney was confronted with truly awful facts. The families of victims and their community wanted, and deserved, appropriate retribution for what occurred. The principal offender, though, the trigger man Cruz, is being prosecuted to the full extent of the law. He is alive, and will be there to face that vengeance that is fully warranted. Must a prosecutor in such circumstances also pursue, as is happening here, a grossly flawed man whose actual "crime" was a breakdown in character for failing to protect and defend?

More U.S. Army soldiers die by suicide than in combat. There are a number reasons for that, but a study published on Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows a strong relationship between keeping a personal firearm and suicide among soldiers.

The study, the first of its kind, looked at the histories of 135 active duty U.S. Army soldiers who committed suicide between August 1, 2011, and November 1, 2013, dates coinciding with a peak in suicides among soldiers. Shootings accounted for 55 percent of those deaths. That, by itself, might not be surprising. What is remarkable, in the words of the researchers, is that having access to a loaded gun at home, or carrying one in public, "resulted in a 4-fold increase of the odds of suicide" compared to other soldiers.

The authors point to an existing psychological theory to explain why that might be so. The interpersonal theory of suicide posits that simply a desire to commit suicide is usually not enough to convince people to take their own life. The theory argues that people who have overcome a fear of death through repeated exposure either to personal pain or fearinducing experienecs, or the pain and fear of others, are more likely to commit suicide. Another study from 2012 found that men who keep loaded weapons also exhibit a reduced fear of death.

TAX COLLECTOR FOR THE ETHNOSTATE:

President Donald Trump's trade wars have already wiped out all but $100 of the average American household's windfall from Trump's 2017 tax law. And that's just the beginning.

That last $100 in tax-cut gains also could soon disappear -- and then some -- because of additional tariffs Trump has announced or is considering. If the president makes good on his threats to impose levies on virtually all imports from China and Mexico, those middle-earning households could pay nearly $4,000 more as they shell out more for a vast range of goods -- from avocados to iPhones.

THE LOGIC OF THE PRO-ABORTION POSITION:

Biden, the front-runner in the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination and a former vice president, said he had changed his long-held position on the Hyde Amendment because the right to an abortion was now under assault in many states and increasingly inaccessible for low-income women.

"I can't justify leaving millions of women without access to the care they need and the ability to exercise their constitutionally protected right," Biden said in a speech in Atlanta.

"If I believe healthcare is a right, as I do, I can longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone's zip code," he said.

A RACE, NOT A RELIGION:

[O]ne thing I know for sure is that we are instructed to love God and to love our neighbour - and that means that someone who separates children from their mothers, bans Muslims from entering his country, and countenances torture, is worthy of rebuke.

So not only is it wrong to support Trump on this basis, it is also dangerous. Dangerous because it contributes to the tribal politicisation of evangelical Christians.

The right is often found decrying identity politics, but is it possible that they are as guilty of it as anyone else? In 2000 and 2004, the evangelical Christian movement in the US allowed itself to become politicised as never before, as it lined up behind George W Bush. Though Christians' association with Bush was counterproductive, it was, however, understandable. He was a professing evangelical Christian who sought to live in accordance with the Bible's teaching.

But evangelical Christians' political marriage to Trump is much harder to fathom. In his private life the president has demonstrated a flagrant disregard for the dignity of others, an utter contempt for equality, and far more concern for his own rights and reputation than the wellbeing and care of others. His attitude to refugees and migrants demonstrates a lack of compassion and understanding for the vulnerable that at times beggars belief.

The politicisation and tribalism of Christianity is dangerous and, in the case of Trump, stands in direct opposition to the values of the saviour who Christians seek to follow. One who gave up his rights to save others rather than trampling on the rights of others to promote himself. Some Christians may believe they are bringing about God's purposes, but in reality they are causing his name to be associated with the very things he stands against.

Indeed, it is possible that this association with Trump's loveless, graceless amoralism could write Christianity out of the public square even faster than the dominance of secularism might on this side of the Atlantic. Where a Christian worldview is dismissed and derided in the UK, association with Trump means many may actively reject it in the US. In fact, the impact of the politicisation of evangelical Christians is not just damaging to Christianity in the US. Churches in Britain have been taking the word "evangelical" out of their name for fear of the association.

A RACE, NOT A RELIGION:

On the upcoming holiday of Shavuot, we will read the Book of Ruth, reminding us once again of the significant difference between conversion then and today. Speedy conversion seems to have been the norm in the days of Ruth, the woman who would become the grandmother of the ultimate king of Israel -- King David. Contrast that with the official state conversion process and the associated procedures for establishing Jewish lineage that we have in Israel today. In recent years, the high bar set by halacha, Jewish law, for gaining recognition as a Jew has been raised even higher by a disturbing trend of using genetic testing to establish candidates' Jewishness -- essentially, a "geneticization" of the Jewish people.

Currently, such tests are private initiatives, which the state's rabbinical courts are prepared to accept as evidence of Jewishness. The willingness by an official body to adopt genetic testing as proof of Jewishness marks the first step in the creation of a genetically-based Judaism and the widespread use of genetic databases. Beyond the fact that the use of genetics to prove Jewishness is distasteful, it constitutes a dramatic deterioration in the way we define the Jewish people. This is a revolution that must be nipped in the bud.

In Israel and around the world, there are hundreds of thousands of people who see themselves as belonging to the Jewish people but who would have a hard time in gaining official recognition as Jews from the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. After thousands of years in which membership in the Jewish people was largely a matter of claiming such membership, along with some halakhic evidence, the last three decades have seen the Chief Rabbinate adopting increasingly harsh procedures to establish the Jewishness of those who have immigrated to Israel. Many of these immigrants have been forced to endure a bureaucratic nightmare, for lack of the detailed documentation required by the rabbinate -- and, in certain cases, have had to undergo a full conversion process.

In recent years, with advances in genetic science and the fact that genetic testing has become affordable and widely accessible, genetic tests have become a tool for rabbis and rabbinical courts to establish petitioners' Jewishness. The rabbis' underlying premise is that it is possible to identify certain genetic markers in the genetic profiles of some Jews, and thus anyone whose cells hold these same genetic markers is undoubtedly Jewish. Currently, the existing genetic markers make it theoretically possible to establish the Jewishness of some Jews, and presumably, if sufficient resources are invested in this project for a sufficient length of time, genetic markers can be found for most of the world's Jews. Accordingly, against the backdrop of rabbinical willingness to accept genetics as proof of Jewishness, a genetic laboratory has now been set up with this very purpose, and is encouraging Jews to be tested and to add themselves to the database.

WHICH IS WHY INCREMENTALISM HAS WORKED:

Even though Americans are solidly against overturning Roe, a majority would also like to see abortion restricted in various ways. In a separate question, respondents were asked which of six choices comes closest to their view of abortion policy.

In all, 61% said they were in favor of a combination of limitations that included allowing abortion in just the first three months of a pregnancy (23%); only in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the woman (29%); or only to save the life of the woman (9%).

If you build it, he will come pic.twitter.com/TCFeP1Hpe3

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) June 6, 2019

IF HAMPSHIREMEN AREN'T A MATCH FOR THE DEVIL...:

LAFAYETTE, HE IS HERE...AGAIN:

WATCH: 97-year-old US paratrooper veteran Tom Rice, who served with the Army's 101st Airborne Division, recreates his D-Day jump in Normandy 75 years later. pic.twitter.com/qAth429XCA

— NBC News (@NBCNews) June 5, 2019

ALL OF THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

Trump remains underwater in key battleground states, according to Morning Consult.

New Hampshire: -19 net approval
Wisconsin: -13
Michigan: -12
Iowa: -12
Pennsylvania: -7
Arizona: -6
Ohio: -4
North Carolina: -4
Florida: zero

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 5, 2019

WHOSE WIFE GIVES THEM $2 A DAY?:

Recent research suggests that rates of extreme poverty, commonly defined as living on less than $2/person/day, are high and rising in the United States. We re-examine the rate of extreme poverty by linking 2011 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and Current Population Survey, the sources of recent extreme poverty estimates, to administrative tax and program data. Of the 3.6 million non-homeless households with survey-reported cash income below $2/person/day, we find that more than 90% are not in extreme poverty once we include in-kind transfers, replace survey reports of earnings and transfer receipt with administrative records, and account for the ownership of substantial assets. More than half of all misclassified households have incomes from the administrative data above the poverty line, and several of the largest misclassified groups appear to be at least middle class based on measures of material well-being.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Congressional Republicans, in thrall to Wall Street and "libertarian zealots," failed to learn from the 2016 election and never "understood and embraced the economic nationalism that was at the heart of Donald Trump's presidential victory," Carlson said. But "many of Warren's policy prescriptions make obvious sense," like buying American and encouraging workplace apprenticeships. "She sounds like Donald Trump at his best," he added.

DOING SOMETHING:

"I was sick of hanging around all day. I wanted to be doing something."

Lawrence Peter Berra was signed by the Yankees as a 17-year-old and assigned to the team's affiliate in Norfolk, Virginia, near the U.S. Navy shipyard. The 5-foot-8 prospect quickly demonstrated his prowess behind the plate and in the batter's box, once driving in 23 runs in a doubleheader. But with his country at war, Berra, like so many other ballplayers of the day, including major leaguers Ted Williams and Bob Feller, put his baseball career on hold, enlisting in the Navy when he turned 18.

"I kind of enjoyed it. We had our own boat."

The young Berra signed up to join the "amphibs," even though he didn't really understand the concept. "They asked for volunteers to go on a rocket boat," he later put it. "I didn't even know what a rocket boat was." As it turned out, a rocket boat, also known as a landing craft support small (LCSS), was a 36-foot wooden-hulled vessel with steel plating. The seamen referred to them as "big bathtubs" -- bathtubs that came equipped with 48 rockets, one twin .50-caliber machine gun and two .30-caliber machine guns. It would be the LCSS' job to fire on the beaches at Normandy to help clear the way for the landing crafts. "We called it landing craft suicide squad," Berra said.

"I'd have to say I was involved."

Berra was next stationed in Plymouth, England, where for three weeks he and his fellow seamen waited. They didn't know when they were going out or what was coming next -- and they weren't allowed to share details of anything in their letters home. Early on June 4, Berra's LCSS set off aboard the USS Bayfield, a Coast Guard transport that was the smallest craft to take part in the invasion, the largest amphibious assault in history.

"I never saw so many planes in my life. It was like a black cloud."

Berra's boat was lowered from the Bayfield at 4.30 a.m. on June 6. Most stories about the invasion focus on the troop-filled landing crafts that poured their contents onto the Normandy beaches, but the tip of the spear for the invasion was actually the 24 LCSS crafts, including Berra's, that approached the German fortifications first and were the most vulnerable to enemy fire. Berra manned a machine gun and helped load the rocket launcher, but he couldn't help marvel at the spectacle of it all. "Boy, it looks pretty, all the planes coming over," he said at one point about the Allied planes overhead. "You better get your head down in here, if you want it on," the officer on his boat retorted.

"Nothing happened to us. That's one good thing."

Berra's boat received little fire from the Germans on the beach, and the crew spent the next two weeks helping relay messages and direct new arrivals. At one point, Berra's gun crew was directed to fire at enemy planes. They shot one down ... an American plane. "The pilot was mad as hell, and you could hear him swearing as he floated down in his parachute," Berra recalled. "I remember him shaking his fist and yelling, 'If you bastards would shoot down as many of them as us, the goddamn war would be over.'"

"Being there at Omaha may have changed my life a little."

ALL THE BATTLEGROUNDS ARE RED:

A new poll out Wednesday spells danger for President Donald Trump's reelection chances in one of the unlikeliest of places: Texas.

The Quinnipiac University poll shows that Joe Biden would top Trump by four points -- 48 percent to 44 percent -- in a general election matchup there, an outcome the ruby red state hasn't seen in four decades.

ATTACKS FROM THE lEFT ONLY HELP HIM:

As recently as Tuesday, Biden reaffirmed his support for Roe, telling voters in New Hampshire that it is "the law of the land, a woman has a right to choose." He added that if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade while he was president, he would "push" legislation to keep it legal.

Yet his presidential campaign confirmed to NBC News that Biden still supports the Hyde Amendment, a four-decade-old ban on using federal funds for abortion services, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the woman.

THEY ALREADY HAVE A NUCLEAR OPTION:

The great Bilderberg secret of 2019 had to do with why, suddenly, the Trump administration has decided that it wants to talk to Iran "with no preconditions".

It all has to do with the Strait of Hormuz. Blocking the Strait could cut off oil and gas from Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Iran - 20% of the world's oil. There has been some debate on whether this could occur - whether the US Fifth Fleet, which is stationed nearby, could stop Tehran doing this and if Iran, which has anti-ship missiles on its territory along the northern border of the Persian Gulf, would go that far.

An American source said a series of studies hit President Trump's desk and caused panic in Washington. These showed that in the case of the Strait of Hormuz being shut down, whatever the reason, Iran has the power to hammer the world financial system, by causing global trade in derivatives to be blown apart.

The Bank for International Settlements said last year that the "notional amount outstanding for derivatives contracts" was $542 trillion, although the gross market value was put at just $12.7 trillion. Others suggest it is $1.2 quadrillion or more.

Tehran has not voiced this "nuclear option" openly. And yet General Qasem Soleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps' Quds Force and a Pentagon bête noire, evoked it in internal Iranian discussions. The information was duly circulated to France, Britain and Germany, the EU-3 members of the Iran nuclear deal (or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), also causing a panic.

Oil derivative specialists know well that if the flow of energy in the Gulf is blocked it could lead to the price of oil reaching $200 a barrel, or much higher over an extended period. Crashing the derivatives market would create an unprecedented global depression. Trump's former Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin should know as much.

And Trump himself seems to have given the game away. He's now on the record essentially saying that Iran has no strategic value to the US. According to the American source: "He really wants a face-saving way to get out of the problem his advisers Bolton and Pompeo got him into. Washington now needs a face-saving way out. Iran is not asking for meetings. The US is."

DONALD WHO?:

Ken Cuccinelli has spent years attacking Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans. Now, it's time for payback.

President Donald Trump wants Cuccinelli, who most recently led the anti-establishment Senate Conservatives Fund, to be director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. But there may be nobody in Washington whom McConnell and his allies would take more pleasure in defeating, and the bottom line is Cuccinelli has little chance of getting approved for the job, Republican senators said.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

'Those trousers are just wrong,' Chris says. 'They've clearly been bought, and not made. They're about four inches too long. They're perfectly straight, about the same size at the top as they are at the bottom, and they're probably about 20 inches at the ankle. He probably thinks it covers up a certain amount of fatness, that if he has wide-bottomed trousers it'll disguise the width of his hips and waist. If anything, it does the opposite when they're that straight'.

'The white tie is just abysmal,' Chris reflects. 'The trousers are a similar cut to chinos. I suspect they're not high-waisted, so he's had to get an extra-long waistcoat to cover the top of the trousers. So now you've got at least four inches of white showing between the coat and the trousers. Look at Prince Charles. With proper military fashion, you don't see any white in between, and the coat is just covering the waistcoat.'

Chris considers Trump's innovative display of snowy acres of waistcoat. 'That waistcoat must be buttoned around his crotch. He's a big guy, but there's no excuse not to have something that fits. Now, a lot of men these days do wear white tie with about in inch of white showing. It can frame the coat, and it can look nice. If you're Fred Astaire, it'll accentuate the length of your legs. But not four inches.'

If Trump's trousers and waistcoat are too big, his coat is too small. 'That tail coat is appalling. The sleeves are two inches too long, the jacket body is three inches too short. The tails are five inches too short. The whole thing is just short and boxy.'

'The tails are meant to touch the back of your knees, but they're on his mid-thigh,' Chris says, more in sorrow than anger. 'The whole coat is way too short for him. Why would he do this? The whole thing is just so wrong, on so many levels. There's a fellow in the background, looking at him and smirking. I can imagine he's thinking, "What a twit!"'

Chris suspects Trump's chino-like dress trousers are inspired by his golf outfits. 'That's Biff from Back to the Future,' he confirms.

The Trumps have dressed for this trip with all the nuance and subtlety that is their trademark. After Melania flew to London dressed as Big Ben, Tiffany appears to have typed "Jane Austen World Book Day costume" into the Amazon search bar and came up with an evening gown in a shade of claret that gave her the vibe of a midwestern bridesmaid who is, like, really into Downton Abbey.

In her custom Dior Dancing on Ice dress, Melania looked like white-tie I, Tonya, but it is Ivanka who, as ever, strikes terror into the heart with her replicant-like ability to almost convincingly model modern metropolitan dress. The ghostly image of Ivanka and Jared gazing out from behind a palace curtain had every bit as much cosy warmth as Grant Wood's 1930 American Gothic portrait...

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

THE FED VS. TRUMPONOMICS:

The Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome H. Powell, said on Tuesday that the central bank was prepared to act to sustain the economic expansion if President Trump's trade war weakened the economy. His remarks sent stocks soaring as investors predicted a cut in interest rates.

HE'S NO DIFFERENT THAN DONALD:

Some Republicans in the House of Representatives are trying to get Rep. Steve King back on congressional committees, months after he was kicked off them for making offensive comments about white nationalism, Politico reported Monday.

Politico named three leaders of the effort, but noted others were involved as well. "It was unfair the way it was quoted," one of the leaders, Rep. Louie Gohmert, told Politico, referring to the January interview King did with The New York Times in which King said, "White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization -- how did that language become offensive?"

SUBLIME:

Cathy Garnaat, a Republican who supported Amash and the president said she was upset about Amash's position but wanted to hear his reasoning. She said that she will definitely support Trump in 2020 but that Tuesday night was the first time she had heard that the Mueller report didn't completely exonerate the president.

"I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn't heard that before," she said. "I've mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn't heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated."

ONLY DONALD CAN STALL THE OBAMACONOMY:

THE IRKSOME BURDEN:

Like many Americans, we have long admired the work and witness of Martin Luther King, Jr. His leadership and courage in a supremely just cause have inspired our own work. What, then, are we to make of recent revelations that he exploited his fame and status to have affairs with countless women, treating them as mere sex objects, and perhaps even stood by laughing as a colleague committed a rape in his hotel room?

We will not hide the fact that we have been devastated by these revelations. Nor will we pretend that they have not lowered King in our estimation. Having said that, we have never been under the illusion that he was faultless or sinless. It has long been known that he was sometimes unfaithful to his wife Coretta. While we have not excused his adulteries, we believed that they represented the succumbing to human weakness of a man who was frequently on the road away from his wife and family and who was, for a variety of reasons, attractive to young women. We also believed that when he sinned he knew he was sinning, did not approve of his own conduct or recommend it to others, and was genuinely--if, alas, only temporarily--remorseful about having veered from the path of virtue.

On these latter points, it now seems clear that we were wrong. As he traveled the country, he sought out women to use for nothing more than sexual pleasure; he took advantage of his stature and fame to seduce them; he participated in orgies; and, as we've noted, there is evidence that he allowed a colleague to force himself on an unwilling woman--indeed, a woman who objected to being asked to perform an immoral act.

All of this is to be condemned. It is to be condemned unequivocally--no ifs, ands, or buts. It was against the biblical Christian faith that King presented himself as holding and in whose name he spoke against racial injustice. It was against the natural moral law, which he rightly invoked in denouncing segregation and Jim Crow. It was against the Gospel proclaimed then and now by faithful Christians of all traditions and, with special force, by those of the Black church tradition which King inherited from his father, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr.

As was pointed out by the late historian Eugene D. Genovese, the principal philosophical difference between King, Jr. and King, Sr. was the former's embracing of theological liberalism--especially the denial of the historicity and literal meaning of Christian doctrines such as the Resurrection of Christ. Were King Jr.'s personal moral delinquencies underwritten in part by this theological liberalism? It is, of course, impossible to say with certainty. Yet, if we look at the Christian denominations that over the past several decades have abandoned traditional Christian moral teachings--especially on questions of marriage, sexual morality, and the sanctity of human life--they are the traditions into which theological liberalism made the biggest inroads decades before.

By contrast, Christian traditions that have resisted theological liberalism have remained faithful to traditional Christian moral teachings, including the belief that marriage is the conjugal union of husband and wife and that sex outside the bond of marriage is morally impermissible, and the teaching that the life of the child in the womb and that of the frail elderly person must be protected against the crimes of abortion and euthanasia.

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

The trigger for Israel's unprecedented repeat election touches upon one of the major fault lines in Israeli society -- the role of the growing ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in modern life.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's prospective government collapsed last week at least nominally over the issue of military draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men, a source of longtime resentment among the secular majority of Jewish Israelis who are required to serve.

The conflict over the draft law is just one of several deep disagreements over the role of religion in Israeli society. While the ultra-Orthodox parties wield significant political influence, experts say their cloistered communities are being left behind by modern society, with long-lasting negative consequences for the future of the country.

THANKS, UR!:

In October, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) encouraged states to apply for new "State Relief and Empowerment Waivers," which would allow them to sell health insurance plans that duck Obamacare regulations and use federal subsidies to make them more affordable.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Barack Obama's signature health law, requires health plans to cover "essential health benefits," such as preexisting conditions, mental health care and maternity care. The relief waivers would let people buy plans, with subsidies, that don't include that coverage.

When CMS Administrator Seema Verma announced the waivers, she told reporters it was one way for state lawmakers to "get out from under the onerous rules under Obamacare."

Almost seven months later, not one state has applied. [...]

[A]fter a couple years of trial and error, along with state intervention, "the marketplaces are fairly stable at the moment," says Corlette.

THE POLITICS OF HATING AMERICA:

DONALD AND STEPHEN WERE HOPING FOR GAS VANS:

Under the blistering Texas sun last July, 37 migrant children boarded vans for what was supposed to be a 30-minute ride. At the end of the road from Harlingen to Los Fresnos lay the promise of hugs, kisses and long overdue reunification with their parents, from whom they were taken when the Trump administration began systematically separating migrant families who crossed the border illegally.

But when the children, all between 5 and 12 years old, arrived at Immigration and Customs Enforcement's adults-only Port Isabel Detention Center, rather than seeing their parents, they saw a parking lot full of vans just like theirs, with children from other facilities who, just like them, were waiting to be processed and reunified with their parents.

It was 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, July 15, 2018.

Not until 39 hours later -- after two nights in a van -- did the last child step out of a van to be reunited. Most spent at least 23 hours in the vehicles.

YOU MEAN I'M SUPPOSED TO RUN ON TRUMPONOMICS?:

Congressional Republicans have begun discussing whether they may have to vote to block President Trump's planned new tariffs on Mexico, potentially igniting a second standoff this year over Trump's use of executive powers to circumvent Congress, people familiar with the talks said.

The vote, which would be the GOP's most dramatic act of defiance since Trump took office, could also have the effect of blocking billions of dollars in border wall funding that the president had announced in February when he declared a national emergency at the southern border, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks are private.

Trump's plans to impose tariffs on Mexico -- with which the United States has a free-trade agreement -- rely on the president's declaration of a national emergency at the border. But the law gives Congress the right to override the national emergency determination by passing a resolution of disapproval.

IF YOU CAN KEEP IT:

What has interested journalists most about Trump is his lies, and Origins does indeed contain insights into the role of lies in totalitarian movements. "What convinces masses are not facts," Arendt writes, "but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part." The application of this insight to contemporary American politics is obvious. Trump's rhetoric has substantial appeal precisely because it subordinates truth to a closed but consistent ideological system. These sorts of systems are so resilient, Arendt argued, because they appeal to both gullibility and cynicism, conditioning people to "believe everything and nothing, to think that everything was possible and that nothing was true." These are the conditions that allow a leader like Trump never to have to account for his lies. The Origins of Totalitarianism is therefore a prescient corrective to naïve claims that appeals to facts and truth can combat Trumpism.

Arendt has thus been welcomed to the #Resistance primarily as a prophetic psychotherapist, one who foretold the pathological appeal of Trumpism to the masses. It's likely that nothing would have pleased her less. Her account of the way totalitarian movements engulfed mid-century Europe was never meant to be merely descriptive. By examining how societies had become so debased that they fell prey to movements that treated every individual as utterly expendable, Arendt was taking the first steps toward articulating and recovering a positive vision of the kind of politics that might redeem those societies. In other words, her perennially popular descriptive views of the great crimes of the twentieth century (outlined most famously in Origins and Eichmann in Jerusalem) cannot responsibly be severed from her prescriptive views about the proper flourishing of politics. [...]

For Arendt, the root of freedom and therefore politics is just this kind of spontaneity, the ability of any person or group of people to initiate an unforeseen or unexpected event. How to promote and sustain this freedom is one of the slipperiest questions in Arendt's work. But even though the Hungarian Revolution was quickly crushed by the Soviet behemoth, in the five years that followed Arendt only became more convinced that this "fact" of freedom could not be stamped out from the human condition entirely. In a 1960 lecture called "Freedom and Politics," she explained why. "If one is serious about the abolition of political freedom," she declares, "it is not sufficient to prohibit what we generally understand by political rights.... One must take possession of even those areas we are accustomed to regard as outside the realm of politics, precisely because they, too, contain a political element." One recalls here Václav Havel's account of the grocer who one day simply removes the state party's slogan from his shop window, and in doing so exposes the nakedness of the regime to his neighbors. As long as necessity and coercion do not exercise complete and all-consuming rule over one's life, this kind of spontaneity, and therefore freedom, is always possible.

This account of freedom corresponds to something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs; at the base of the hierarchy are subordinate, lesser freedoms--freedom from want, freedom from coercion--that must be satisfied for the best and highest form of freedom to flourish. The pinnacle is public freedom, in which individuals can fully exercise their capacity for spontaneity in full view and appreciation of their peers and equals. Arendt believed that something called politics could only correspond to the full exercise of this highest freedom, the only kind that could mean "more than not being forced."

Arendt believed that this loss of a higher, positive vision of political freedom was the result of a Western philosophical tradition that disdained politics in favor of contemplation, one concerned, as Arendt would put it, with man and not with men. For the pre-Platonic Greeks, however, politics was an end in itself: the participation in shared enterprises with their peers, the expression of their full humanity in word and deed. In a 1953 lecture at Princeton, Arendt called this a "unique, outstanding way of life, of being-together, in which the truly human capacities of man, as distinguished from his mere animal characteristics, could show and prove themselves." Even though Western philosophy utterly abandoned this conception, in Arendt's view, it could not excise it from language. Therefore, it could not excise it from thought: "To the historical belongs what is really an astounding fact...that in all European languages we use a word for politics in which its origin, the Greek polis, can still be heard."

This is one reason Arendt believed there was still hope to restore the ethos of the polis in modern times. But we need not exalt the ancient Greek polis and its attendant injustices to recover the virtues that Arendt felt it promoted. For Arendt, the essential question of modernity was how to reconcile universal equality with freedom. 

However much we may differ from one another, however many distinctions we draw among ourselves in a modern, sprawling, pluralistic society, there is one thing that binds all Americans together as moral and civic equals: the res publica, or commonwealth, under whose laws we all live and within whose institutions we can all participate to make those laws better. In the republican worldview, all Americans are "real Americans," because we all pledge allegiance to "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." As Lincoln said in his first inaugural address, "We are not enemies, but friends," because we are all members of one, all-embracing body politic. We're all in this together.

This civic conception of patriotism stands in stark contrast to the blood-and-soil conception increasingly evident on the conservative right. Conservatives today all too frequently distinguish between "real Americans" -- white, native-born, Christian, and disproportionately rural -- and the rest of the country, vowing to "take their country back" from fellow citizens they regard as the equivalent of foreign occupiers.

Such attitudes and rhetoric are utterly poisonous. They are also deeply un-conservative, given that a creedal rather than ethnic understanding of American national identity is among our oldest and most cherished political traditions. This raises some questions: Why the need for a republican turn on the right? Isn't it possible to resist populist ethno-nationalism in the name of genuine conservatism?

Of course such a response is possible, and many good conservatives are doing precisely that -- if so far with a notable lack of success. The problem is that, under contemporary conditions, the language of conservatism pulls its users naturally and almost irresistibly toward the ethnocentrism and dark divisiveness we see so much of today. In the rapid social change we've been undergoing since the 1960s, one common denominator has been a quest for civic equality by traditionally oppressed and disadvantaged groups -- blacks, Hispanics, women, gays. In these circumstances, a political right that expresses itself in terms of conservatism -- "standing athwart history, yelling Stop" -- slips all too easily into a defense of the status quo by the traditionally dominant groups. This has been a recurring, and recurringly disgraceful, theme of postwar conservatism. Opposition to school desegregation, hostility to the civil-rights movement, excuse-making for sexism, demonization of homosexuality, and most recently a rising tide of intolerance toward the foreign-born -- all are black marks in the annals of the American right. This need not be where the intellectual tradition of American conservatism points, of course. But it has too often been where the rhetoric of conservatism has been taken (and allowed) to gesture.

Making matters worse is postwar conservatism's enduring self-conception as the antithesis of liberalism. Not just its rival, its opposite number, its balance and counterweight -- no, in the conservative imagination, liberalism is too often the enemy. From the Buckleyite beginnings of the modern conservative intellectual synthesis, liberalism was presented as an alien, un-American, elitist ideology that was on the same continuum as, and acted as the enabler of and apologist for, totalitarian communism. Since the Cold War ended and communism passed from the scene, the caricaturing has now elevated liberalism to public enemy number one. Today, "owning the libs" has become an end in itself; inflicting a loss on the other side is a victory regardless of the implications for policy or the national welfare.

Obviously, people on the left routinely caricature and demonize conservatives as well. An accounting of the failings and excesses of today's left would occupy an essay of at least the length of this one. But that is no excuse for anything. This is not just a point about civility. A politics that justifies its own abuses by reference to those of its opposition amounts to little more than a negation.

And even more important, a conservatism that views itself as the negation of liberalism is actually wrong about itself, or at least about the tradition whose name it has taken. American conservatism, at its best, has been about conserving the broad liberal tradition of individualism and the rule of law -- both by promoting those essential pre-liberal attachments to family, faith, community, and nation on which a liberal order depends, and by checking both the excesses of reformist liberalism and the illiberalism of the left. Conservatives have tried to draw a distinction between old, good, "classical liberalism" and new, bad, "modern liberalism," but the distinction ignores deep and important continuities.

The misconceived blanket opposition to liberalism has made the center-right vulnerable to its own most illiberal elements, which have now remade conservatism in their own odious image. Among the repugnant lowlights: animus against the foreign-born carried to the point of orphaning and caging children; acquiescence in blatant corruption by the president and top officials; mindless trashing of the liberal international order and the global economy; restricting the franchise for some voters rather than insisting it be preserved as the bedrock of a republican form of government and confidently competing for the votes of all Americans; and systematic subversion of the rule of law to stymie investigations of foreign tampering with our elections. It will be very difficult to beat this back, to restore decency and honor to the right, using only the rhetoric of conservatism -- especially in its current degraded state.

The rhetoric of republicanism, by contrast, tilts easily in the needed direction. At its emotional core is patriotism, a fundamental moral passion of the right. But with that passion conceptualized in civic rather than ethnocentric terms, republicanism reorients patriotism away from divisiveness and instead enshrines it as a universal, unifying principle.

The conservative right's ethno-nationalism already generates intense opposition -- but from the left, where the critique is marbled with open-borders cosmopolitanism and outright hostility to nationalism of any kind and American exceptionalism in particular. The left's campaign may ultimately succeed given the trajectory of demographic change in this country, but whether it succeeds or fails, the effect on the right is to strengthen the conflation of patriotism and white identity politics.

A republican movement on the right, on the other hand, can criticize ethno-nationalism as fundamentally unpatriotic and unfaithful to American exceptionalism -- that is, in terms that carry real weight with conservatives. Republicanism thus offers an opportunity to actually weaken right-wing attachment to ethno-nationalism internally rather than simply mobilizing against it externally and hoping to outlast it.

And a republican right could do more than just give right-wing ideological arguments for abandoning white identity politics. By refashioning the right's domestic-policy agenda, republicans could also give voters new reasons to vote Republican and thus reduce the political dependence on pandering to white fears and resentments.

Conservatism, relying heavily on libertarian thinking, now often identifies "small government" as its chief desideratum of economic and social policy: lower taxes to spur initiative, fewer regulations to lighten the load on business, less government spending to reduce dependency and the need for taxes. That orientation was constructive in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s as pushback against left-liberalism's infatuation with top-down planning and hostility to the spontaneous innovations and adjustments of competitive markets.

But as liberal suspicion of markets abated, and as structural changes in the economy meant that a rising tide now lifted the rich's yachts a great deal while ordinary folks' rowboats rose little or not at all, the idée fixe of small government has risked becoming an intellectual dead end. Rising to the challenge of new conditions means embracing the need for major structural regulatory reform, not so much to unburden business as to expose it to more robust competition by removing regulatory subsidies and barriers to entry. It also means embracing the need for active government in some key arenas -- to help people develop the skills they need to thrive in an increasingly demanding labor market, and to provide social insurance that protects people against the inevitable losses and dislocations associated with a dynamic market economy.

Republican principles point the way to a new center-right approach to economic governance. The pole star for republican governance is the public interest, or the common weal -- the values that we share across ethnic, regional, sectarian, and class lines and that require collective action for their advancement. As Lincoln, the towering figure of the American republican pantheon, ably summarized the matter, "The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities." This is a statement both of the limits of government and of the uses of it.

Relative to libertarian dreams of minimal government, the public-interest standard may seem vague and permissive. But its flexibility is simply a recognition of reality's messy complexity; libertarian efforts to delineate the proper role of government within clear, bright lines are as intellectually incoherent as they are hopelessly utopian. The ideal of the public interest, informed by deep republican skepticism of concentrated power, can serve as a powerful constraint on government. Fidelity to a public-interest standard means relentless opposition to the manipulation and takeover of policymaking by insiders, as well as to policies, however well-meaning, that fail to accomplish their stated purposes. Although shrinking government just to make it smaller is not the goal, hostility toward corruption and wastefulness does push toward making government simpler and more transparent.

A new approach to domestic policy is further aided by the republican conception of liberty as non-domination. The basic intuition here is that freedom requires a level of personal independence among the citizenry, and that in turn requires a broad middle class and limited extremes of wealth and poverty. In the republican view, excessive imbalances of power and status undermine government in the public interest because both the rules themselves and their administration will end up slanted in favor of the powerful.

Opposition to domination leads simultaneously toward a deep appreciation of markets and the recognition of a vital supporting role for government. Competitive markets are a bulwark of independence because they encourage a proliferation of options; they are an important check against arbitrary power because they subject market actors to accountability at the hands of their customers. But for market competition to operate as intended, government has a few big jobs to do. First, it must provide and enforce rules that structure and sustain competition; second, it must secure the broad enabling conditions that allow people to participate successfully in the market system and protect them from the hazards of life when their participation goes awry.

These republican ideas can be developed into a rich conceptual framework for active but limited government. The public interest, as an enabling principle, frees center-right policymaking from the libertarian cul-de-sac and reorients it toward problem-solving governance. The public interest, as a limiting principle, then distinguishes center-right problem-solving from the center-left variety by directing attention to the possibility of insider capture and other unintended consequences, and by focusing on policy designs that minimize these pitfalls. An understanding of freedom as non-domination, meanwhile, pushes the center-right toward greater concern with inequality as a political (as opposed to essentially economic) problem and a clearer recognition of the realities of structural disadvantage.

Republican principles thus supply the intellectual tools the center-right needs to resume the main work of governance: helping real people to improve their lives in tangible ways. And if the center-right can better attend to the material as well as the more-than-material interests of its base among rural voters and the white working class, it will not have to rely on divisive culture-war theatrics to mobilize support.

PRESIDENT PELOSI:

The House has approved a $19.1 billion disaster aid package despite earlier objections from Republicans.

The legislation was approved 354-58. All those who opposed it were Republicans. The Senate already passed the bill overwhelmingly and it heads to the president's desk for his signature.

BY THE QUALIFIERS SHALL YOU KNOW THEM:

Nationalism's reputation was already low among intellectuals when President Donald Trump claimed the label for himself. "You know what I am?" the president said at a political rally last year. "I'm a nationalist, OK? Nationalist. Use that word."

In response, Harvard historian Jill Lepore published a column titled "Don't Let Nationalists Speak for the Nation," in which she wrote: "Nationalism is an abdication of liberalism. It is also the opposite of patriotism." Both of those claims would probably confuse the American people (not to mention me), or seem outright objectionable.

All of which raises the question: What might a sane nationalism look like -- a nationalism broadly consistent with a centrist cosmopolitanism?

I start with a primary commitment to cosmopolitanism and the notion that borders are morally arbitrary. A person is no better or worse if he or she was born on one side or the other of the Rio Grande. For most of human history, of course, such borders either did not exist or were not enforced. If I see a bystander drowning in a lake, I feel an obligation to help; it would never occur to me to first ask about citizenship. And don't tell Donald Trump, but I don't even feel compelled to root for the U.S. in the Olympics.

The plot thickens, however, when considering more practical political issues. This is a world where just about all of the habitable territory has been carved up into nation-states. Regardless of whether that is your moral ideal, it is not a system likely to change anytime soon. Furthermore, at least since the end of World War II, this system has performed pretty well. Living standards have risen greatly, progress has spread and, for the most part, liberty and democracy have expanded. The recognition of these facts follows readily from a doctrine that I call practical nationalism.

DRIVEN SNOWFLAKES:

Remember white people? Once upon a time, they dominated American life. But at some point in the 21st century, beset by low birth rates, they gradually died out.

Yes, that's an absurd notion. But new research suggests that, for some white Americans, it's a real fear--one that stimulates racial bias and political conservatism.

"White population decline does not merely trigger the threat considered in most studies of demographic change--that is, status threat," write University of Minnesota psychologists Hui Bai and Christopher Federico. "Our work suggests that it may additionally elicit fears that the in-group will actually cease to exist."

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

The owners of a luxury hotel in Panama City that ousted the Trump Organization as property managers last year accused it on Monday of evading taxes in Panama and creating a "false light" around the hotel's finances.

The accusations, made in a legal filing in Manhattan federal court, are fraught with potential diplomatic and legal complexities for President Trump, as they essentially assert that his family business cheated a foreign country's government.

TRUMPONOMICS:

The S&P 500 has performed 35% worse under Trump than under Obama.

We broke down the numbers: https://t.co/Nd2e3OgHk7 pic.twitter.com/AEAsBLMU16

— FORTUNE (@FortuneMagazine) June 3, 2019