AVNER ZARMI: The Perils of the Tribal Echo Chamber.

WE MAY NEVER KNOW HIS TRUE MOTIVE:

Full story here.

FROM MICHELLE MALKIN: No, they don’t look very happy, do they? A picture is worth a thousand words.

QUESTION ASKED: What If Donald Trump Doesn’t Sink The Republican Party?

David Harsanyi:

Trump’s approval rating in the sixth district is at the national average of 35 percent, which is to say exceptionally low for a Republican area. Trump had won the district by less than two percentage points back in November. According to a recent Atlanta Journal Constitution poll, the majority of Republicans surveyed (55 percent) said “expressing their opinion on Trump wasn’t a factor in their decision-making.”

Now, I realize that neither Ossoff nor Handel mentioned the president much during the race — which, in itself, bolsters the theory that Trump might not be as consequential in these races as Dems hope. But the race was nationalized. Its implications were national. The coverage was national. The parties treated the race as one that would have national implications. Certainly, the money that poured into the race was national. One imagines that every Georgian Republican who went to the polls understood what this race meant for the future of the parties. When you nationalize races, Republicans will take more than the president into account.

We already know that an electorate can be happy with a president and dislike his party. Why can’t the reverse be true? Barack Obama, for example, carried healthy approval ratings for the majority of his presidency, yet voters decimated his party over six years. What if there’s a faction of Republican voters who don’t like Trump but still don’t like Obama’s policies?

If? That’s exactly why a sizable fraction voted for Trump in November, certain that Hillary would nail down Obama’s legacy while adding an entirely new layer of Clinton corruption on top.

WILL COLLIER ON TWITTER: “So it’s time for some post-runoff Gaming Theory, from an actual resident of GA06.”

Related: “Herein lies the Democrats’ problem, just as it was a problem when Hillary Clinton bellowed about a basket full of deplorables during the 2016 campaign. The Democrats and their base (Hollywood) think the key to winning elections is to insult voters. ‘They don’t vote for us because they are bigots’ is not a strategy I would employ as a campaign manager but they are welcome to keep trying this, and they are welcome to keep losing.”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Will has ported his self-described “Twitter rant” on GA06 over to his blog, which should be a bit easier to follow.

BUT CAN THEY DO ANYTHING TO HELP MY SINGING VOICE? AI and machine learning will make everyone a musician.

Just as the drum machine was loathed and feared by many when it first hit the mainstream in the 1970s, AI’s role in the creation of art has sparked similar fears among critics. Eck, who admits that he was initially among the drum machine haters, explains that it took an entire generation of musicians to take the technology and figure out how to take it forward without putting good drummers out of work. He envisages a similar process of misunderstanding and eventual acceptance for AI-based music tools.

Given its flexible nature, it’s likely that musicians and other artists of the future will all use AI differently, according to Freya Murray, program manager at Google Arts & Culture Lab.

“Some will collaborate with machine learning, others will use it as a tool and for others it will be their creative process and that’s the case throughout the history of art,” she told WIRED.

My only concern is that like Autotune, AI will quickly go from tool to crutch.

RETRO DOWNLOADS: SEGA’s new SEGA Forever collection brings classic games to mobile for free.

FRANK SANTARPIA: The Progressive Tea Party that Never Was.

A Progressive mirroring of the Tea Party Movement is the thing I feared most after the election of Donald Trump, and for obvious reasons. We saw in 2010 what a difference-maker an “enthusiasm gap” could be, and watched with delight as Progressive attempts to blunt the Tea Party tsunami with rallies of their own flopped miserably. We saw that such a level of engagement could change the face of Congress. And finally, candidate Hillary Clinton saw firsthand that such a gap could not be overcome despite her “inevitability.”

Progressives could have started such a movement — there is no disputing they have the numbers. But they didn’t, and here’s why: what passes for the Progressive Movement in the United States today lacks any real message, which is one of the principle reasons their candidate was on the short end of an enthusiasm gap in the first place. We protested the abuse of the Constitution and espoused the rule of law — not the election of Barack Obama. That then, is the chief difference. We objected to the man’s actions; they object to the man.

Well, that’s the inevitable result of losing an election for a movement which believes in a nation of men, not laws.

BLM FOUNDER: Acquittal in Castile Shooting Further Evidence That System is Broken.

ROGER SIMON: Hollywood YUUUGE Loser in Georgia Sixth.

(Bumped.)

IT WAS NEVER THEIRS TO LOSE: How The Guardian Lost America.

In September 2016, Guardian US announced it was slashing 30% of its workforce.

The retrenchment necessitated a change of scenery, too. At the meeting, Guardian US editor Lee Glendinning announced that the company had signed a lease agreement to move to a smaller Brooklyn office.

It was a room full of journalists, so the questions flew. Where? What’s the address? According to multiple people at the meeting, one reporter remarked that Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser, owned some buildings in Brooklyn. Was this one of them?

A rattled Glendinning said sharply that it wasn’t, according to the attendees. Reporters pulled up news articles, raising their phones to show that it was indeed property owned by Kushner, who divested some of his family real estate empire’s holdings to join the White House.

“You see the cerebral cortexes trying to process this information,” one reporter present told BuzzFeed News.

Or as John Podhoretz tweeted, “Every detail in this story is about a mass delusion funded by oceans [of] non-profit Commie money.”

And then the other people’s money ran out, which is always when things get ugly.

(Hat tip, Will Collier.)

ILLINOIS MELTDOWN (CONTINUED): “The State Can No Longer Function”

With just 10 days to go until Illinois enters its third year without a budget, resulting in the state’s imminent downgrade to junk status and potentially culminating in a default for the state whose unpaid bills now surpass $15 billion, Democratic Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza issued a warning to Illinois Gov. Rauner and other elected officials on Tuesday, saying in a letter that her office has “very serious concerns” it may no longer be able to guarantee “timely and predictable payments” for some core services.

In the letter posted on her website, Mendoza who over the weekend warned that Illinois is “in massive crisis mode” and that “this is not a false alarm” said the state is “effectively hemorrhaging money” due to various court orders and laws that have left government spending roughly $600 million more a month than it’s taking in. Mendoza said her office will continue to make debt payments as required, but indicated that services most likely to be affected include long-term care, hospice and supportive living centers for seniors. She added that managed care organizations that serve Medicaid recipients are owed more than $2.8 billion in overdue bills as of June 15.

“The state can no longer function without a responsible and complete budget without severely impacting our core obligations and decimating services to the state’s most in-need citizens,” Mendoza wrote. “We must put our fiscal house in order. It is already too late. Action is needed now.”

Say it with me: “Unexpectedly.”

PROCUREMENT: Increased Reaper Arsenal Will Enable the Reaper to Destroy a Wider Range of Targets.

By releasing a GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munition from a MQ-9 Reaper in a live weapons exercise, the Air Force made history and vastly widened the attack envelope, target set and mission scope for its workhorse drone.

The GPS-guided GBU-38 precision bomb, dropped at Nellis Air Force Base Nevada, brings new offensive strike ability to the Reaper drone – a 66-foot medium altitude aircraft often used for both ISR and precision strikes on enemy targets.

The Reaper will now fire the AGM-114 Hellfire missile, a 500-pound laser-guided weapon called the GBU-12 Paveway II, and GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munitions or JDAMs – free-fall bombs engineered with a GPS and Inertial Navigation Systems guidance kit, Air Force acquisition officials told Scout Warrior. JDAM technology allows the weapons to drop in adverse weather conditions and pinpoint targets with “smart” accuracy.

Skynet smiles.

FASTER, PLEASE: VOA News reporting on a new test in medical trials that may predict a patient’s responsiveness to new generation of tumor-fighting cancer drugs.

DAVID GREENBERG: Why So Many Critics Hate the New Obama Biography. “David Garrow had the temerity to depict Obama as a real, complicated human being. Too bad the former president’s mythmakers can’t accept that.”

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TYLER O’NEIL: 5 Take-Aways From Karen Handel’s Victory Over Jon Ossoff.

THE MEDIA HAVE ALREADY FORGOTTEN: Hodgkinson’s attempted political coup. My latest essay in The American Spectator.

MICHELLE MALKIN: The Double Murder of Otto Warmbier.

More than a year before succumbing to the unknown illness or injury that left him in a coma thousands of miles away from home, Otto Warmbier’s own countrymen murdered his reputation. His character. His humanity.

Click-hungry media ghouls knew nothing about Warmbier’s small-town upbringing, his family life, politics, personality, disappointments or dreams. But they gleefully savaged a young man who made a mistake on a doomed trip to a totalitarian hell.

Warmbier’s thoughtless taunters instantly transformed him into a bigger, badder villain than the barbaric DPRK goons who beat, starve, rape and kill enemies of the state for such offenses as listening to foreign radio broadcasts, possessing Bibles and disrespecting Dear Leader — in Warmbier’s case, by attempting to steal a propaganda sign that read “Let’s arm ourselves strongly with Kim Jong-il’s patriotism!” as a souvenir.

The Huffington Post published an acid rant by “Blogging While Black” writer La Sha titled “North Korea Proves Your White Male Privilege Is Not Universal.” She rejoiced at Warmbier’s sentence because, she gloated, it taught him that “the shield his cis white male identity provides here in America is not teflon abroad.”

White men deserve whatever happens to them, because justice.

ANALYSIS CORRECT: Trump-obsessed media ignored Obama Administration scandals.

WHY DOGFIGHTS ARE FEW AND FAR BETWEEN: Some thoughts in the aftermath of the USN’s downing of a Syrian jet.

ANALYSIS: Nancy Pelosi was a huge drag on Ossoff.

The most prominent and effective hit on the Democratic candidate was to tie him to the congresswoman from San Francisco.

Republican operatives say that 98 percent of voters in the 6th District already had an impression of Pelosi when they conducted their first internal poll, and she was 35 points underwater. When presented with the choice of whether they wanted a representative who would work with Paul Ryan or Pelosi, six in 10 picked the Speaker and three in 10 picked the minority leader.

When most of your record-setting fundraising comes from California, it isn’t difficult for the opposition to tie you to the unloved former Speaker.

ED ROGERS: The victory in Georgia’s 6th is a yuge win for Trump.

Heading into Tuesday, Democrats were prepared to bask in their self-righteous glory and proclaim an outright victory in the wake of President Trump’s political decline. They wanted to claim a successful referendum on the Trump administration and the president’s “America First” policies. But with Handel comfortably pulling through to claim her seat, Democrats are left with nothing to show for their tens of millions of dollars and full-court press.

If anything, this race proves Republicans have no reason to be defensive as a result of Obamacare’s demise, it shows Republicans have nothing to hide from in the age of Trump and it signifies that nothing about the current faux-scandal-ridden environment has produced a downdraft for Republicans.

That assessment, correct as it is, doesn’t square with the apparent mood on Capitol Hill.