FASTER, PLEASE: The US Strategy of Annihilation and Humiliation.

In his first interview as secretary of defense, James Mattis outlined the United States’ strategy. Mattis’ words carry weight because he is one of the few subordinates U.S. President Donald Trump seems to trust implicitly and to whom Trump has delegated significant responsibility. In the interview, Mattis said the war of attrition – pushing enemies out of their locations rather than destroying them completely – failed to produce the desired outcome. The U.S. will now fight a war of annihilation and humiliation against the enemy, which is not just IS but radical Islamism in general. Mattis expects the war to be a long fight, but he also expects to win.

Mattis pointed to the battles for Mosul and Tal Afar as models for how these tactics will be implemented in other places. In both cases, forces on the ground, some with U.S. help, have surrounded IS targets to try to prevent Islamic State militants from retreating and foreign fighters from leaving the battlefield to return home. The forces then advance and clear these cities block by block, a hard task that takes time. This is what Mattis described as annihilation. The Islamic State’s greatest strength on the battlefield has been its ability to retreat and regroup, and the goal of annihilation is to destroy that strength. But this strategy comes with a high price. Iraq sent its best trained and equipped fighters into Mosul first, and casualty rates were reportedly around 50 percent for some units.

Speed is an often overlooked force multiplier. The Marines used it to great battlefield (and propaganda) effect in Second Fallujah, but the battle to retake Mosul has been going on for months.

NEVER GO SWIMMING WITH A NEW TATTOO.

POLITICKING: Dems Make ‘Big Investment’ in Georgia to Turn Out Voters Who Stayed Home in 2016.

VLADIMIR PUTIN: There are many Syrian matters Turkey and Russia agree on.

“If we did not have the same view with Turkey on critical matters regarding Syria, neither would we have been able to establish a ceasefire nor would we have been able to establish de-escalation zones,” Putin said.

The Russian president said he discussed the S-400 missile defense system with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

“We have not yet produced these systems outside the country. We will discuss how and under what circumstances we will produce them with the Indian Prime Minister,” said Putin.

“Process, technology and personnel training requires great preparation. But there is nothing that is not possible. We will return again to discuss the shipment of these modern systems.”

The S-400 missile system is capable of destroying airborne targets as far as 250 miles away, and is recognized as one of the most capable Surface to Air Missile Systems.

It should also be noted that the S-400 was designed to beat NATO aircraft, and that none of Turkey’s Middle Eastern enemies (ISIS, the Kurds) posses any aircraft at all.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: What the House Subpoenas of Rice, Brennan, and Power in the ‘Unmasking’ Probe Mean.

NEW YORK VALUES: Mr. Met Gives Fan the Finger, Employee Out as Team Mascot.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED COAL WAS DEAD: Coal market threatened by glut from over production.

Australian coal prices serve as a benchmark for Asia and soared over 130% to nearly $110 a tonne last year creating huge profits for producers. These high prices caused suppliers to ramp up production flooding the market and causing prices to plummet. Despite this, the Indonesian coal industry has several major producers which are still planning major production increases for the latter half of this year.

The main question is whether producers will continue to reinvest profits creating additional production capacity. It is a simple matter to put idle equipment to work or increasing the hours for a workforce. However, if major investments are made in new heavy equipment which is put into service there will have to be a major increase in output to offset the cost. This type of increase is what could drive an already over saturated market into a glut.

Some people think the threat of the market being over saturated is being blown out of proportion. Australian coal prices have fallen but that fall came from record highs where a correction was needed and demand in the area is increasing dramatically as well.

The War on Coal is over — and coal won.

S&P, NASDAQ INDEXES hit all-time highs.

OBAMA’S SPYING: Mark Levin to Congress: Investigate Obama’s ‘Silent Coup’ vs. Trump.

Related: Video: Mark Levin on why Obama may have been spying on Trump.

Plus: WSJ: Samantha Power Unmasked: Why would a diplomat need to know the names of Trump officials?

Barack Obama in 2014 made a large to-do about his reforms of U.S. surveillance programs to “protect the privacy” of Americans. We may soon learn how that squares with his Administration’s unmasking of political opponents.

The House Intelligence Committee Wednesday issued seven subpoenas as part of its Russia probe. But the three most notable demanded that the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation turn over records related to the Obama Administration’s “unmasking” of Trump transition members.

We know that U.S. intelligence agencies routinely eavesdropped on foreign officials who were talking about or meeting with Trump aides. Much less routine is for political appointees to override privacy protections to “unmask,” or learn the identity of, U.S. citizens listed in a resulting intelligence report.

The new subpoenas seek details of all unmasking requests in 2016 by three people: former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power. Democrats claim Ms. Rice needed to unmask names to do her job, though this is questionable given that she wasn’t running counterintelligence investigations. They have a better claim with Mr. Brennan.

But Ms. Power’s job was diplomacy. Unmaskings are supposed to be rare, and if the mere ambassador to the U.N. could demand them, what privacy protection was the Obama White House really offering U.S. citizens? The House subpoenas should provide fascinating details about how often Ms. Power and her mates requested unmaskings, on which Trump officials, and with what justification. The public deserves to know given that unmasked details have been leaked to the press in violation of the law and privacy.

Meantime, we learned from Circa News last week of a declassified document from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which excoriated the National Security Agency for an “institutional lack of candor.” The court explained that Obama officials had often violated U.S. privacy protections while looking at foreign intelligence but did not disclose these incidents until the waning days of Mr. Obama’s tenure.

This is a very serious question of political abuse of intelligence agencies. I believe that there are multiple felonies — and felons — here. Whether they’ll be prosecuted, or even revealed, is another question entirely.

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Solar-Powered California Warned to Unplug for August Eclipse.

State energy officials are warning residents to click off all lights they don’t need and unplug all electrical appliances when 62 percent of the sun disappears over Los Angeles during a partial solar eclipse that is expected that day.

Nobody is warning of blackouts. But then again, nobody knows what will happen.

“When the sun goes away, so does the energy that powers our renewable solar panels. If millions of Californians turn off appliances and power strips to unplug from the grid during the eclipse, we can let our hard-working sun take a break,” said Michael Picker, president of the California Public Utilities Commission.

Pre-modern societies trembled at unforeseeable eclipses, and in postmodern California it’s pretty much the same story.

THIS IS CNN: We asked strangers to pronounce covfefe.

MIKE BLOOMBERG: Trump Heading for Re-Election in 2020. “Bloomberg, who politically identifies as independent, told New York Times columnist Frank Bruni that he thought Democrats didn’t have an effective message to win the 2016 election and could repeat that mistake in 2020.”

This is just the buildup to him offering a friendly takeover of the Democratic Party, with himself in the role of savior.

GOOD: Private sector job growth rebounds to ‘rip-roaring’ pace in May, ADP says.

BUREAUCRATIC BLOAT: Why Higher Education Is Stagnating.

One reason this problem is hard to tackle is that the Left and Right disagree on the ultimate cause of the bloat. Many progressives see it as a product of the free market: If students and parents select colleges based on the quality of student spas and diversity centers and other amenities, then of course colleges will tailor their offerings to meet that demand. The real question is how to make access to college even more universal. Conservatives, meanwhile, are more likely to point to overweening government, including unnecessary regulations, which require more staff to implement, and to federal student loan programs, which pay the salaries of well-organized bureaucrats and end up funding superfluous services that colleges might otherwise forego.

There is some truth to both of these analyses, but neither side is offering a realistic program for how to address the underlying problem. “Free college” programs, now popular among Democrats, will simply make the underlying cost even higher, even if they shift it to taxpayers rather than consumers. And GOP slash-and-burn efforts at state universities often extract theatrical budget cuts without actually excising the source of the rot. Student tuitions go up and faculty salaries are frozen, but the bureaucratic bloat isn’t actually rolled back.

Perhaps the best hope for reducing bloat is the entrance of new types of educational institutions into the market—ones that don’t have state-of-the-art gyms and legions of guidance counselors, but that offer a high-quality education at a significantly lower price.

Huh. Somebody should really explore this idea.

SORE LOSER: Hillary Clinton Unloads on What Led to Her Election Defeat.

Speaking at Recode’s 2017 Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., Clinton gave an unfiltered assessment of the 2016 campaign that ended with her unexpected loss to Donald Trump.

“I take responsibility for every decision I made, but that’s not why I lost,” she said. “I think it’s important we learn the real lessons of this last campaign.”

She lost, she told Recode’s Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, because of unfair media coverage, an “unprecedented” campaign waged against her by a foreign adversary, James Comey’s decision to re-open her email probe, criticism of her candidacy that she claimed bordered on misogyny, and a prevailing sentiment that she would be victorious, which hampered voter turnout.

If I’m reading this correctly, Clinton’s judgement was sound, but women-hating Russians at the FBI forced her to set up an unsecured email server and prevented her from campaigning in Wisconsin.

THANK GOD WE FINALLY HAVE A PRESIDENT WHO CARES ABOUT POOR PEOPLE’S HEALTH: Donald Trump’s budget slashes government-supplied junk food.

UPGRADES: Pratt & Whitney pitches souped up version of the F-35 engine.

“It’s very attractive to the JSF [joint strike fighter] program for several reasons,” Bromberg told journalists during a media day in West Palm Beach, Florida. “It’s very common, so we could drop this upgrade into any one of the three variants. It would be compliant with the partner requirements and go to foreign partner countries. It would be cost neutral, so the upgraded JSF motor with Growth Option 1.0 would be the same price as the existing motor.”

Pratt & Whitney recently completed performance tests of an early version of the system, called the fuel burn reduction demonstrator engine, which proved that the upgrade could improve thrust by up to 10 percent and reduce fuel consumption by up to 6 percent, he said.

American aerospace firms have a history of producing world-beating jet fighters — after the first engine upgrade.

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Immigrants Attack British Truckers in Calais in ‘Extremely Violent’ Incidents.

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WHY MILLENNIALS ARE HAVING TROUBLE GETTING AHEAD: Per Capita Taxes Have More Than Doubled Since JFK.

Real federal taxes per capita have more than doubled since John F. Kennedy served as president — and argued for lower taxes.

In 1961, the fiscal year Kennedy was elected, the federal government collected about $94.388 billion in taxes, according to the Office of Management and Budget. The population that year was about 183,691,481, according to the Census Bureau. That meant federal tax revenues equaled about $514 per capita — or $4,121 in 2016 dollars.

By 1965, the fiscal year Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater, the federal government collected about $116.817 billion in taxes from a population of about 194,302,963. That year federal taxes equaled about $601 per capita — or $4,578 in 2016 dollars.

In fiscal 2016, according to OMB, the federal government collected about $3.268 trillion in taxes. That equaled about $10,114 for each of the 323,127,513 people in the country.

Per capita federal taxation in fiscal 2016 was 121 percent more than it was in 1965 and 145 percent more than it was in 1961.

Then there’s all the regulation. If the 1961 town fathers of Gardendale, Alabama had proposed requiring teenagers to get a “business license” before cutting grass they’d have been run out of town on a rail — perhaps literally.

THE MYSTERIOUS X-37B RETURNS: An update on the USAF’s unmanned orbital vehicle. One just spent 719 days in orbit. Here’s a photo of the spacecraft from 2014.

THE HOUSING MARKET IS RIPE FOR TECHNOLOGICAL DISRUPTION: “Real estate is local; knowing the neighborhood has value…” But there is “pressure on commissions” and home buyers today shop online,

OUI? NON? PEUT ÊTRE? Trump on Paris Climate Fate: ‘You’re Going to Find Out Very Soon’

TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY: ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, A COMPLETE SUCCESS!