K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: 7-Year-Old Writes Excuse Note, Goes Home From School.

“I want Rosabella to go too dus (sic) 131 today!” the second-grader wrote on half a sheet of notebook filler paper in large print, addressing the note to the staff person underneath.

Though the girl was supposed to attend an after-school program on Monday, the note she wrote and delivered to the staff herself worked. The staff excused little Rosabella Dahu, she boarded the school bus and went home.

Charlie Dahu, her father, said Sheldon Elementary in Houston has promised him that “disciplinary action” will be taken against the caretakers from the after school program who excused the girl from school on the basis of her ‘parental’ note.

“Obviously they didn’t have proper procedures in place,” Dahu told ABC News. “This is clearly the school’s fault. How a seven-year-old can trick you, it boggles my mind.”

Public education is in the very best of hands.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Ebay Blocks ‘Draw Mohammed’ Winning Cartoon from Auction.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: The ‘New Normal’: Number Of Americans Renouncing Their U.S. Citizenship Continues To Set Records.

IT’S DEJA ‘BAM ALL OVER AGAIN!

Shot: Wait, What? ABC: Trump Is Like a ‘Greek’ God From ‘Mount Olympus.’

—Headline, NewsBusters, yesterday.

Chaser: Newsweek’s Evan Thomas: Obama Is ‘Sort of God.’

—Headline, NewsBusters, June 5th, 2009.

Trump’s columns at the Republican convention will be made of the finest extruded Styrofoam ever. You’ve never seen such luxurious Styrofoam, I’m telling you. Yuuge; classy.

NBC NEWS EXPLAINS WHY HILLARY IS UNFIT TO SERVE: Hacker ‘Guccifer’: I Got Inside Hillary Clinton’s Server. “It was like an open orchid on the Internet.”

JANE JACOBS AT 100.

Related: John Podhoretz tweets a link to a column in the New York Daily News with Bill de Blasio’s name atop it, which begins with the mayor’s ghostwriter praising Jacobs’s contributions that revitalized New York, until of course, as Podhoretz writes, “De Blasio hilariously misunderstands Jacobs’s key point, that top-downism of his kind destroys cities.”

SJW PROTESTS AS DESTRUCTIVE AS KATRINA? Hurricane Mizzou – Enrollment Plummets, Jobs Cut, Buildings Shutter.

After raucous protests last fall, the University of Missouri has “a dark cloud hanging over the institution—we can’t sugarcoat that,” vice chancellor of operations Gary Ward told faculty this week.

The university’s grave outlook became clearer Monday, as the data rolled in on freshman enrollment for the Fall 2016 semester, showing steep declines.

Compared to last year, 1,470 fewer students had paid their $300 enrollment fees by the May 1 deadline—and with cancellations rolling in over the weekend, the numbers may be even more grim, the local TV station KMIZ reports. That’s a drop of about 25% from last year’s freshman class of about 6,200.

Mizzou also reported a three-year low in grad-school applications, down 1,140 from two years ago. The number of new students shrunk even as the university has embarked on an aggressive effort to drum up interest in the school, using text messages and Skype and deploying more out-of-state recruiters.

Here’s how steep that drop is: Fox Business’s Clay Travis writes that “the only comparable undergraduate enrollment decline in recent decades that I can find at any major college or university is Tulane University the year after Hurricane Katrina.”

The steep dropoff in enrollment appears to directly traceable to the events of last fall.

You surrendered to a noisy minority, and now the silent majority is withdrawing its support.

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY:

Shot: MSNBC: ‘If All You Want Is Headlines, Check Your Twitter Feed’

Chaser: Smug MSNBC guest invokes Nixon’s mythical ‘secret plan’ on Vietnam.

Hangover: MSNBC’s Chris Matthews Caught on Hot Mic Ogling Melania Trump.

As Kate of Small Dead Animals quips, “Somebody has a brand new leg tingle coming on.”

TO BE FAIR, TENNESSEANS CAN DO PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING: A Tennessean Just Won an Indiana Congressional Seat.

CHANGE: Oil Rallies as Canada Fire and Libya Violence Threaten Supply.

“The difference today compared with a year ago is the market is starting to price in supply disruptions, whereas in a market that is totally oversupplied, you don’t care about losing half a million barrels a day (in production),” Petromatrix strategist Olivier Jakob said.

“The market is becoming much more sensitive to supply disruptions.”

How long before some desperate petro-state hires terrorists to attack foreign oil facilities to boost its income?

YOU STAY CLASSY, AP: In a classic example of guilt by association, “AP Uses Soldier’s Death [in Iraq] to Smear His Grandfather,” Tom Blumer writes at NewsBusters; the grandfather in question being the late Charles Keating Jr.

Related: “Associated Press retained access to Germany during Hitler’s rise to power by cooperating with Third Reich: study,” the New York Daily News reported in March.

REVOLT AGAINST THE MASSES: Don’t want to take migrants? Then you pay.

A top aide to Italian Premier Matteo Renzi says Rome supports a proposal by the European Union’s executive to fine nations for refusing migrants they were supposed to accept.

Fewer than 600 of 40,000 asylum-seekers who were supposed to be relocated from Italy to other EU countries have been transferred since October.

On Thursday, the European Commission proposed that countries refusing to accept migrants should face fines of 250,000 euros ($287,000) per person rejected.

That could turn out to be a bargain.

THE WEAKNESSES THAT DOOMED TED CRUZ:

“He’s got the whole establishment p**sed off at him, so they didn’t rally to him as the alternative,” says former Virginia representative Tom Davis, who has endorsed John Kasich. “They sat on the sidelines with their hands in their pockets.” That’s because, according to the GOP aide, supporting him “would establish a new model for how ambitious young senators would behave in the Republican party that’s totally intolerable for the establishment-senator types.”

At a press conference on Tuesday morning, his final day on the campaign trail, Cruz let loose on Trump, calling him a “serial philanderer” and a “pathological liar” and concluding, “Morality doesn’t exist for him.” But the Republican establishment and the party’s voters knew that, and they chose Trump over Cruz anyway.

Read the whole thing.

IT BEGINS: CNN/ORC POLL: HILLARY UP OVER TRUMP BY 13.

THE HILL: Federal judge opens the door to Clinton deposition in email case.

A federal judge on Wednesday opened the door to interviewing Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton as part of a review into her use of a private email server while secretary of State.

Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia laid out the ground rules for interviewing multiple State Department officials about the emails, with an eye toward finishing the depositions in the weeks before the party nominating conventions.

Clinton herself may be forced to answer questions under oath, Sullivan said, though she is not yet being forced to take that step.

“Based on information learned during discovery, the deposition of Mrs. Clinton may be necessary,” Sullivan said in an order on Wednesday. [READ THE ORDER BELOW] Discovery is the formal name for the evidence-gathering process, which includes depositions.

“If plaintiff believes Mrs. Clinton’s testimony is required, it will request permission from the Court at the appropriate time.”

The order, which came in the course of a lawsuit from conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, leaves open the possibility that Clinton will be forced to answer detailed questions on the eve of her formal selection as the Democratic presidential nominee about her creation of the server.

Any deposition would surely roil the presidential race and force her campaign to confront the issue, which has dogged her for a year.

Prediction: After her stalling for two years, any move to depose Hillary before November will be met with objections that it’s too close to the election.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: Why Trump and Clinton Voters Won’t Switch: It’s in Their Brains:

To win the White House, candidates in the presidential race will need to change minds. Bernie Sanders may try converting Hillary Clinton’s superdelegates to gain the Democratic nomination. If frontrunner Clinton gets it, she and Republican Donald Trump will need to win over reluctant voters who supported their competitors.

And to change opinions, candidates will have to contend with neurobiology. Scientists say there’s a tension in the brain between responding to new information and resisting overwhelming amounts of conflicting data—and the latter can prevent opinion change. Altering opinion depends on using different psychological methods tailored to different types of belief, according to research. “There’s not much convincing people,” even when the beliefs in question are purely false, says psychiatrist Philip Corlett of Yale University School of Medicine.

At some point, for many on both sides of the aisle, politics transcends the rational, and becomes a substitute religion.

HOW GOOD IS TRUMP? HE JUST HAD HILLARY PAY FOR HIS FIRST PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN AD:

Very nice of Hillary Clinton to run a pro-Trump ad, too? https://t.co/lYGCyHb7BA

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) May 4, 2016

Build a wall, deport illegal immigrants, stop schools from being defenseless against terrorists, end federal support of Planned Parenthood, repeal Obamacare, get tough with terrorists overseas — in short, Make America Great Again. Thanks Hillary, for spreading the word!

Earlier: Scott Adams on Clinton Versus Trump – Persuasion Scores.

PUBLIC HOUSING AUTHORITY EXECS MAY SOON BE THE MOST POWERFUL FEDS IN TOWN: They’re already among the best paid, with 80 of them making more than $200,000 annually and at least 340 getting $150,000 or more every year. And did we mention those sweet bonuses? Four of these lucky guys got bonuses of more than $75,000 and 74 of them received checks for more than $25,000.

But what makes these figures of particular interest is that the feds running America’s 4,000+ public housing authorities may soon be telling the rest of us where we must live and who must be our neighbors. That’s thanks to a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in June 2015 that upheld the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s power to take action against neighborhood discrimination even when there’s zero evidence of it other than demographics.

Julian Castro, President Obama’s HUD Secretary, has the regulatory regime in place to do this in a program called “Affirmatively Affirming Fair Housing.” Castro is prominently mentioned as a potential Clinton running mate. With or without Castro, however, Clinton can be expected to push the AAFH. Remember this next year when the folks from your local public housing authority suddenly show up in your neighborhood. They won’t be bringing welcome baskets.

SMUGNESS ABOUT ONE’S PHOTO IN THE NYT MAGAZINE IS A FEELING, AND I’M PRETTY SURE HE FEELS THAT: Milo Yiannopoulos Doesn’t Have Feelings. Excerpt:

You’re one of the loudest, most provocative voices at Breitbart News, and you’re currently on a speaking tour of college campuses, railing against “P.C. culture.” You once admitted in a profile that your public persona started out as a comedy character that you created because “I didn’t like me very much.” What didn’t you like about yourself?

I’ve wrestled with being religious and being conservative and being gay, but the reason I felt like that is because of other gay people. The only real shaming I’ve ever experienced has been from other gay people when I reveal my politics or my religion.

Read the whole thing.

AL SHARPTON TO PJM: ‘NOT GOING TO UNDERESTIMATE’ WHAT TRUMP WOULD DO AS PRESIDENT.

AT AMAZON, Shop new 2016 bats, gloves, bags and more from Wilson & DeMarini.

Plus, Save on Dockers For Men.

Also, Up to 65% Off Vipertek Personal Defense Products.

THE ANCHORESS FROM 2005: The Art Of The Painless Coup. “Believing that the rest of us, now disillusioned, are no longer clinging to romantic ideals of honor, or truth or nobility, these always-restless First Children, devoted to deconstruction, believe they are about to take down the presidency, the churches, the ‘old’ government and even the ‘old’ media. They expect to put into place something ‘brand new.’ But believe me when I tell you what they are building is older than dirt. And up from it. Which is why they will need their fortresses. Castro lives in one, too. They’ve been practicing all of this, by the way, perfecting the Art of the Painless Coup so thoroughly that most ordinary folks do not even realize what has occurred.”

BLOG COMMENT OF THE DAY: “Once you’ve allowed the barbarians through the gates, any swashbuckling ruffian who is willing to pick up a sword and push them back out again is an ally.”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Loud sex finally too much for cancer-stricken neighbors.

WELL, WELL: Exclusive: President Fox Apologizes, Invites Trump to Mexico.