IN OTHER NEWS: Judge denies mistrial in Menendez bribery case. “Prosecutors say Menendez pressured high-level officials in the Obama administration and other career diplomats to help Dr. Salomon Melgen resolve his business disputes in exchange for political contributions, free rides on Melgen’s private jet, and a posh hotel suite at the Park Hyatt in Paris.”

FIRST SUSAN COLLINS, NOW THIS: Democrat Doug Schoen Calls for Special Prosecutor in Hillary Uranium One Deal.

OH: Bill Gates Tacitly Admits His Common Core Experiment Was A Failure.

“Based on everything we have learned in the past 17 years, we are evolving our education strategy,” Gates wrote on his blog as a preface to a speech he gave last week in Cleveland. He followed this by detailing how U.S. education has essentially made little improvement in the years since he and his foundation — working so closely with the Obama administration that federal officials regularly consulted foundation employees and waived ethics laws to hire several — began redirecting trillions of public dollars towards programs he now admits haven’t accomplished much.

“If there is one thing I have learned,” Gates says in concluding his speech, “it is that no matter how enthusiastic we might be about one approach or another, the decision to go from pilot to wide-scale usage is ultimately and always something that has to be decided by you and others the field.” If this statement encompasses his Common Core debacle, Gates could have at least the humility to recall that Common Core had no pilot before he took it national. There wasn’t even a draft available to the public before the Obama administration hooked states into contracts, many of which were ghostwritten with Gates funds, pledging they’d buy that pig in a poke.

But it looks like this is as close to an apology or admission of failure as we’re going to get, folks. Sorry about that $4 trillion and mangled years of education for American K-12 kids and teachers.

Read the whole thing.

WELL, IT JUST MIGHT WORK: People Are Accusing Kevin Spacey Of Announcing He Is Gay To Deflect From Sexual Misconduct Allegations: “Coming out as a gay man is not the same thing as coming out as someone who preyed on a 14-year-old. Conflating those things is disgusting.”

GARY WOLFRAM: Private Health Care Would Be Less Expensive for All.

It is important to realize the current system is not particularly market-based. The Affordable Care Act imposes thousands of pages of regulation, and the federal government is the largest purchaser of health care. It spends over $1 trillion on Medicare and Medicaid alone. No wonder other countries have better health outcomes.

A quick look at how well veterans and Medicaid recipients fare under government health care might cause you to think twice about adopting Senator Sanders’s plan. Only about 70 percent of physicians will accept Medicaid patients.

What’s more, government insurance has led to inefficiencies in the use of resources in health care due to the incentives of the system. Since the patient will ask if Medicare or Medicaid pays for the service rather than how much the service costs, providers have a strong incentive to engage in activities that are very costly and only marginally advance patient health, but that will be paid for by the government.

A solution much more likely to aid the poor is for the government to move Medicaid and Medicare to a form of health savings account. It would provide complete coverage for catastrophic care, and fund an account for recipients that they could use on health care spending. This would cause people to ask “How much does that test cost here versus another clinic?” This in turn would incentivize places like Wal-Mart having to employ nurse practitioners at their pharmacy who can provide health care at reasonable prices. Additionally, it would also spur innovation in medical techniques and pharmaceuticals that make people healthier at lower costs.

Well, yes. But if Walmart gets people healthy, then how will politicians take the credit for spending even more of other people’s money on a pretense of solving a spending problem they created?

And don’t forget about the opportunities for graft, even if the DNC-Media Complex would rather you did.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Karl Marx, not Adolf Hitler, was the most destructive German ever born, and Western intellectuals will go to extreme lengths to deny it.

If you’re interested in the question of whether morality can exist without God, you might enjoy Arthur Allen Leff’s discussion in Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law. Or, in shorter and more pungent form, his treatment in Memorandum From The Devil. Also, these — especially the latter — are two of the best-written law review articles ever.

THEN BY ALL MEANS LET’S GIVE IT TO THEM: Marines Want a Truck-Mounted Rocket-Launcher that Fits in an Osprey.

What’s really needed is a missile launcher that fits on the hood of a midsize SUV.

OUCH: On Behalf of The LGBT Community, Fuck Off, Kevin Spacey.

We don’t respect a man of his age and standing refusing to be open about who he is, but we respect his right to make that choice. But we vehemently reject the use of the standard celebrity coming-out announcement to distract from the fact that serious allegations have been made against him. Worse, the statement made it sound like feeling up 14-year-olds is just a thing that happens when gay men – pardon us, men who “choose to live as a gay man” – get drunk.

In case there’s any confusion on this matter, please allow these two longstanding gay men to clear it up for you:

Alcohol does not make gay men fondle teenage boys.

That one’s all on you, Kev.

Compare this Tom and Lorenzo column with the soft-hands treatment Spacey is getting from ABC and NBC.

TYLER O’NEIL: 5 Things to Know About Paul Manafort’s Arrest in the Mueller Trump-Russia Probe.

And don’t let this get lost in this morning’s huge news shuffle:

NOTE: Don’t trust Adam Schiff’s constitutional analysis of the pardon power.

But do read my recent, timely paper, Congressional Control of Presidential Pardons.

BILL ROGGIO: U.S. Military Hits Islamic State in Yemen.

YEAH, I’VE NOTICED THE HYPERMASCULINITY IN VIDEOGAME FANS: Grad student: Gaming culture privileges ‘hypermasculine’ men. But he sounds kind of bigoted: “Jeremy Omori contends that the larger gamer community is littered with hypermasculine, heterosexual, cis male, and often white privilege, noting that a large gay-gaming group in Arizona is ‘very white.'” Well, “littered with” sounds like trash, and characterizing people as trash based on their race and gender used to be considered bigoted, anyway.

I hope he never finds out about the citadel of hypermasculinity that is InstaPundit. And nobody tell him about the hypermasculine recipes and cleaning tips!

BABY STEPS: Saudi Arabia will allow women to attend sporting events in stadiums.

IN WHICH I AM QUOTED. You know that I’m right.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, Updated Hourly.

Plus, new Kindle Daily Deals.

And, today’s Digital Deals.

YOU CAN READ A COPY OF THE MANAFORT INDICTMENT HERE. As Andy McCarthy sort-of predicted last night, it’s about money for Ukraine, tax fraud, etc.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Mueller Indictment, Obama and the Dossier, and Much, Much More.

GOOD RESPONSE: Realizing it faces a long-term threat from Iranian rockets based in Lebanon and Syria, Israel has permanently stationed a battalion of its Iron Dome anti-rocket systems in northern Israel.

RELATED: Background on Iron Dome.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Buzzfeed Crew Shocked To Learn They Have Low Testosterone Levels.

JOHN STOSSEL: We need private military contractors.

”We did a helicopter resupply mission,” Prince told me. “We showed up with two helicopters and eight people — the Navy was doing it with 35 people.”

I asked, “Why would the Navy use 35 people?”

Prince answered, “The admiral that says, ‘I need 35 people to do that mission,’ didn’t pay for them. When you get a free good, you use a lot more of it.”

Prince also claims the military is slow to adjust. In Afghanistan, it’s “using equipment designed to fight the Soviet Union, (not ideal) for finding enemies living in caves or operating from a pickup truck.”

I suggested that the government eventually adjusts.

”No, they do not,” answered Prince. “In 16 years of warfare, the army never adjusted how they do deployments — never made them smaller and more nimble. You could actually do all the counter-insurgency missions over Afghanistan with propeller-driven aircraft.”

So far, Trump has ignored Prince’s advice. I assume he, like many people, is skeptical of military contractors. The word “mercenary” has a bad reputation.

Congress is authorized by the Constitution to issues letters of marque and reprisal, and there was talk in the early days after 9/11 (at least in the blogosphere) of doing just that against al Qaeda. Nothing came of it, but after 16 years that looks more and more like a mistake.

BRET STEPHENS ON AIRBRUSHING COMMUNISM:

“In the spring of 1932 desperate officials, anxious for their jobs and even their lives, aware that a new famine might be on its way, began to collect grain wherever and however they could. Mass confiscations occurred all across the U.S.S.R. In Ukraine they took on an almost fanatical intensity.”

I am quoting a few lines from “Red Famine,” Anne Applebaum’s brilliant new history of the deliberate policy of mass starvation inflicted on Ukraine by Joseph Stalin in the early 1930s. An estimated five million or more people perished in just a few years. Walter Duranty, The Times’s correspondent in the Soviet Union, insisted the stories of famine were false. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for reportage the paper later called “completely misleading.”

How many readers, I wonder, are familiar with this history of atrocity and denial, except in a vague way? How many know the name of Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s principal henchmen in the famine? What about other chapters large and small in the history of Communist horror, from the deportation of the Crimean Tatars to the depredations of Peru’s Shining Path to the Brezhnev-era psychiatric wards that were used to torture and imprison political dissidents?

Why is it that people who know all about the infamous prison on Robben Island in South Africa have never heard of the prison on Cuba’s Isle of Pines? Why is Marxism still taken seriously on college campuses and in the progressive press? Do the same people who rightly demand the removal of Confederate statues ever feel even a shiver of inner revulsion at hipsters in Lenin or Mao T-shirts?

These aren’t original questions. But they’re worth asking because so many of today’s progressives remain in a permanent and dangerous state of semi-denial about the legacy of Communism a century after its birth in Russia.

Yes, and there are many, many more of them than there are neo-nazis.

JAMES BOVARD: Facebook censored me. Criticize your government and it might censor you too.

MAKING A MOLEHILL OUT OF A MOUNTAIN: “This Is A Big Problem” – North Korea Nuclear Test Site Headed For A Devastating Collapse.

A group of Chinese scientists have joined their North American peers in warning that North Korea’s Punggye-ri nuclear site could be on the verge of a dangerous collapse that could send a dangerous bloom of radiation floating over the border into Northern China.

As we’ve previously reported, China has stepped up its radiation monitoring on the border after detecting unsettling seismic activity surrounding the test site. Two weeks ago, a team of American scientists warned that the mountain above Pyungge-ri appeared to be suffering from “tired mountain syndrome” – a phenomenon commonly observed around Soviet Nuclear test sites.

And now in an effort to dissuade the North from carrying out another potentially destabilizing test, the South China Morning Post is reporting that a team of Chinese geologists warned their North Korean counterparts of a potentially catastrophic collapse of an underground nuclear test site on China’s doorstep during a briefing in Beijing last month.

Beijing should have reined in its rogue ally years ago.

WELL, THIS ISN’T EXACTLY SHOCKING NEWS: Charges against Paul Manafort and an associate: “Mr. Manafort had been under investigation for violations of federal tax law, money laundering and whether he appropriately disclosed his foreign lobbying.” Not exactly the big collusion bang a lot of Dems were hoping for.

Andy McCarthy, last night: