ANALYSIS: TRUE. Hey Walmart, Amazon is eating your lunch.

A MAJOR SMACKDOWN:

DISPATCHES FROM THE HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE: Jennifer Bard Resigns Cincinnati Law School Deanship, Receives Two Year Sabbatical ($300,000/Year) And Will Return To Tenured Faculty In 2019-20.

In late March, Bard said ‘small cabal’ of tenured faculty was seeking her ouster because of her attempt to balance law school’s budget.

TWO-YEAR MISSION: Mysterious military spacecraft lands in Florida causing sonic boom.

The Air Force posted tweets that the X37B spacecraft landed Sunday morning at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral after 718 days in orbit.

Multiple media outlets reported that the 29-foot-long spacecraft’s return caused a sonic boom that rattled central Florida and could be heard as far away as Tampa and Fort Myers.

It’s the spacecraft’s first landing in Florida. Previous X37B missions have landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

In a statement , officials said the X37B spacecraft is “an experimental test program to demonstrate technologies for a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the U.S. Air Force.” Another mission is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral later this year.

Just what was it doing up there all that time?

WELL, THAT’S UPSETTING: Deadly Tick Disease Has Experts Issuing Dire Warnings.

BUT OTHER THAN THAT… House Conservative: Congress ‘Lacks the Intellect or Lacks the Backbone’ to Avoid ‘Debilitating Insolvency’

Update: Judging by the early returns in the comments, I should have gone with “EMBRACE THE HEALING POWER OF ‘AND’.”

I regret the error.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Jailed Venezuelan opposition leader says ‘we can’t stop’

“We can’t stop until we achieve our freedom. I’m on the streets with you, in mind and spirit,” he said, according to tweets from his wife Lilian Tintori.

Tintori relayed her husband’s words after she visited him on Sunday at a prison outside Caracas
Lopez, a speaker and leader of the opposition, has been detained since 2014 after he was accused of terrorism and inciting deadly anti-government protests.

His family’s visit comes days after the government released a video on state television in an effort to dispel rumors about his health condition.

The family had been denied access to the prison for about 35 days.

His wife said Lopez was not aware of the political turmoil and mass protests happening across Venezuela in recent weeks until she filled him in about the unrest during her visit.

“He is good… He is fit and well…. He is isolated. He resists. It is hard but he resists,” Tintori said outside the prison.

Over the weekend, the White House called for a “quick, peaceful conclusion to unrest,” but it’s almost certainly too late for that.

HOPE: Survivors of the caliphate savour simple freedoms after witnessing acts of depravity.

The fighter stared uneasily out across the front beyond the village of Ruwayyan, 20 kilometres northwest of Raqqa, to where a sandstorm approached, stretching from ground to sky. “The first thing they do when they see us is tear off their veils.”

Thousands of women have crossed these lines, fleeing Raqqa and its surrounding villages as the so-called caliphate begins to collapse. Local authorities in Rojava, Syria’s self-administered northeast, say that more than 100,000 people have escaped in the past three weeks alone — an exodus all but unseen by the outside world.

The desert north of Raqqa is filled with these displaced, escaping on foot or by tractor, pulling their most treasured belongings, seizing the chance to escape caused by recent SDF advances and Isis’s weakening grasp.

Many have moved numerous times during Syria’s six-year conflict, smuggling themselves and their families across one front line after another as each new sanctuary becomes riven with violence. The lives of the women became ever more restricted the deeper into Isis territory they travelled.

Few of these women waste any time, and hurl away their dark clothes as soon they reach the first positions of the SDF, the American-backed units now approaching Raqqa from three sides.

An apparently necessary reminder of what oppression really looks like.

NBC NEWS: Crucial for Americans to Resist ‘Hate,’ Obama Says in Rare Address.

His previous rare address was two weeks ago.

STRIKE A BLOW FOR EQUALITY: ISIS widow now on a high-priority terrorist ‘kill list’

Sally Jones has recently become a “high priority” on the “kill list” of wanted terrorists, the Sunday Times of London reported.

Jones, 49, has been implicated in two horrific, but foiled, plots to spill the blood of innocent Americans.

The first was an attempt to live-stream the murder of a US veteran; the second was a plotted mass shooting at a North Carolina concert, the British newspaper reported.

Jones also is believed to have joined in a failed plot targeting Queen Elizabeth in 2015, during V-J Day celebrations in London.

Now Jones, originally from Kent in southeast England, is believed to be in Iraq or Syria, where she hopes to avoid the fate of her late ISIS hubby.

The husband, Junaid Hussain, a computer hacker from Birmingham, England, was killed by a US drone in the then-ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, Syria, in 2015.

We don’t want women receiving unequal treatment, do we?

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Dusting off “Duck and Cover” Training in Response to North Korean Nukes.

VIDEO: Obama Communications Director Doubts Hillary Would Have Won Before Comey.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Was the American Revolution such a good idea?

“We could have been Canada,” Adam Gopnik says. Well, there’s a Canada right up there for anyone who wants it.

RUN, HILLARY, RUN! Hillary’s election loss excuse means one thing — She’s running in 2020.

Michael Goodwin:

With the party demoralized and divided, and holding the fewest number of elected seats in a century, Clinton’s return will likely prolong the misery. While she’s a media magnet, she’s also a political dead end, having lost two presidential runs and ceded the future to the Bernie Sanders’ socialist wing.

It’s hard to imagine her as the party’s savior, yet, instead of going away quietly, she’ll be competing with its candidates for money and attention. Anything she gets will come at the expense of new leaders and ideas.

On the other hand, what’s bad for Dems is great for Trump. Clinton’s decision to jump back into partisan politics is a gift to the president.

With polls showing little buyers’ remorse over the election, any contrast between the sitting president and his defeated opponent favors him. Especially because Clinton is stuck in the same tiresome blame game that helped cost her the election.

Her excuse-mongering has become… deplorable.

TYPICAL BLUE-STATE RESULT: California’s Reactionary Housing Policy Burns Millennials.

The Golden State’s soaring home prices—exacerbated by NIMBY zoning restrictions, development plans that prioritize “density,” and arbitrary environmental rules—are exacting a catastrophic social and economic toll on the rising generation of young people looking to start families and lay down roots. So argues a bracing recent report from Joel Kotkin’s Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University. . . .

Kotkin and his colleagues note the high number of California millennials who are “failing to launch” due to prohibitive housing costs. While older California residents own homes at average rates, millennials own homes at lower rates than their peers in any other states except New York and Hawaii. More than half live with parents or other relatives. If home prices in California continue to rise at several times the rate of those in the rest of the country, “failure to launch” could turn into “crash and burn,” as an entire generation is denied the California dream their parents enjoyed.

This isn’t just an ordinary public policy dilemma; it is a crisis that cuts to the heart of the bargain that holds communities together.

Lefties spend a lot of time talking about “community,” but always pursue community-shattering policies.

BRING ‘EM ON? ISIS Tells Jihadists To Attack U.S. Gun Store Owners As Way To Acquire Firearms.

WHEN EVERYTHING IS PROBLEMATICAL… NOTHING IS: Chris Pine’s SNL monologue reminds us how bad Hollywood’s superhero diversity problem is.

Alternate take: Why are leftist-dominated industries such cesspits of stereotyping, racism, and sexism?

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: I wear hats to hide the electrodes on my head.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Duck And Cover, All Over Again? Our failed Iran and North Korea policies mean it’s probably time.

CHANGE: Here come Trump’s judges: President to put forward more strong judicial nominees. “The nominees make up an impressive list of highly respected jurists, attorneys and legal thinkers. Those of us who doubted Trump would take judicial nominations seriously may have some crow to eat. Especially when one looks at the names to be announced for appellate court vacancies, this is as strong a list of nominees as one could hope for.”

CHRIS MATTHEWS: ‘Went Along’ with Polls ‘Because I Used to Think They Were Honest’

SO EVERYONE’S PATTING THEMSELVES ON THE BACK ABOUT MACRON’S WIN, but isn’t this by far the best performance for the National Front ever? Macron has the chance to turn things around, but if he fails — which, to be honest, is what I expect — that trend could continue. And if the French establishment asked my advice, I’d say to drop the contempt. As Megan McArdle writes from France: “They are sick of that class, sick of being looked down upon as their old way of life disappears and their communities implode. And so they rejoice when someone is willing to transgress its edicts. What I heard from Le Pen supporters sounded an awful lot like what I heard from those Trump voters. Neither France nor the U.S. would be a better place if people felt freer to make racist remarks. But they probably would be better if no one class felt comfortable disdaining another. They would probably also be much less angry, fractured and ungovernable. Getting there probably starts by recognizing that Trump and Le Pen supporters are not simply interested in the joy of hate.”

The problem is that the coin of smugness is one of the main things dispensed by the paymasters of the left. Feeling morally superior is, for many in that coalition, the entire reason for politics. But people don’t respond well to contempt.

UPDATE: Adriana Cohen: French Ignore Signs Demanding Change, Strength. Well, such fundamental change doesn’t come overnight, and Le Pen was a flawed vessel for that sentiment.

MORE: Brendan O’Neill on Facebook: “Leftists are cheering an election in which the far right got a third of the votes, abstention was the highest it’s been since 1969, and the victor is a former banker and darling of the establishment who is devoted to the baleful status quo of an EU that heaps severe economic punishment on the working class of any nation that dares to defy it. The definition of desperate.”