THE HILL: Border Patrol union boss: Drop in apprehensions ‘nothing short of miraculous.’

The large drop in apprehensions of people illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border is “nothing short of miraculous,” National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd said on Monday.

“If you look at the rhetoric that President Trump has given, it has caused a number of illegal border crossings to go down,” Judd told C-SPAN. “We have never seen such a drop that we currently have.”

Border apprehensions — long seen as the best measure of illegal border crossing attempts — have fallen more than 50 percent this year, compared to 2016.

The Department of Homeland Security has consistently reported plummeting figures of southwest border apprehensions since Trump assumed office in January.
Reported apprehensions remained on a downward trend until June, when border officials registered a slight uptick from May, contrary to seasonal trends that usually show a descent in June.

Yearly overall numbers were so low already that even with the slight rise, there were 53 percent fewer border apprehensions in June 2017 than in the same period last year.

Now prosecute a few employers and watch the numbers plummet further.

TRUTH: NRA to Washington Post: You do more to damage the country with your keyboards than our members ever have with their guns.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: How Long Do You Want To Live? “We’re probably a ways from curing aging but even modest progress in extending people’s healthy years could be enormously valuable to the United States — and many other nations — as we face a coming tsunami of pension obligations.”

SO IT’S AN UPHILL BATTLE, THEN: Liberals can win again if they stop being so annoying and fix their ‘hamburger problem.’ “As I see it, Democrats’ problem isn’t that they’re on the wrong side of policy issues. It’s that they’re too ready to bother too many ordinary people about too many of their personal choices, all the way down to the hamburgers they eat. They don’t always want to prohibit those choices. But they have become smug and condescending toward anyone who does not match the personal lifestyle choices of liberal elites. Why would the voters on the receiving end of that smug condescension trust such a movement to operate the government in their best interest?”

Why, indeed? Plus: “No item in your life is too big or too small for this variety of liberal busybodying. On the one hand, the viral video you found amusing was actually a manifestation of the patriarchy. On the other hand, you actually have an irresponsibly large number of carbon-emitting children.”

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MICHAEL WALSH: SHOULD AMAZON BE BROKEN UP TO SAVE BRICK AND MORTAR STORES?

THE SUMMER BUCKET LIST OF A 35-YEAR-OLD WOMAN. I endorse the last two items, though it may work better in reverse order.

HMM: Humans hardwired to lean to the right while kissing the world over.

THIS DOESN’T SURPRISE ME: Artificial sweeteners linked to risk of weight gain, heart disease and other health issues.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: How Long Do You Want To Live?

SO IT’S COME TO THIS: So-Called “Women’s March” Sends Birthday Shoutout to Convicted Cop Killer.

It isn’t a big step up or down to go from Linda Sarsour to Assata Shakur.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Here are the 9 Best Rooftop Cargo Carriers on Sale Today.

This one is rated Number One, but this one is on the list too and much cheaper. And there’s always this one if money is no object.

FAST-TRACK NAZIS AT WORK: Ezra Levant is in Batnaya, Iraq, and has a new video titled, “German graffiti in a church desecrated by ISIS — here’s why.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

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WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE? Rex Tillerson: Secretary of State Sabotage?

BUT OF COURSE: Bill Nye Gets Emmy Nod For Song In Un-Scientific ‘Sexual Spectrum’ Episode.

BUT OF COURSE IT DOES. CNN COMMENTARY INCORPORATES A RARE MEDIA-MYTH TWOFER, W. Joseph Campbell writes at his Media Myth Alert blog, spotting CNN combine to classic self-serving media myths – that Ed Murrow brought down McCarthy, and Cronkite toppled LBJ:

Deep in his essay, Zelizer acknowledges that it is “much too early to tell” whether anti-Trump commentary by some conservative pundits “will turn into something bigger and more sustained, or if the majority of the coverage on these [conservative] outlets remains pro-Trump.” He takes a swipe at those news outlets, citing a New York Times commentary in stating that “most of the conservative media still clings to an ‘alternative reality’ that fits President Trump’s own narrative.”

“Alternative reality”? What are media myths if not expressions of “alternative reality”?

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™

WHOA – CNN TURNED OBJECTIVIST SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED! Journalist Carl Bernstein Declares ‘Cold Civil War’ In America:

On Sunday, appearing on CNN’s Reliable Sources, Carl Bernstein, who along with Robert Woodward, broke the story of Watergate for The Washington Post,  claimed, “We are in the midst of a cold civil war in this country.”

Bernstein, who along with Woodward relied on anonymous sources to discover information related to the Watergate break-in, made his comment about a “cold civil war” to distinguish the era of Watergate from the current political climate.

I wonder if Bernstein thinks he invented that phrase – when perhaps its very first use was by Ayn Rand in a 1962 column with that same title, back when she was giving speeches and proposing book titles railing against JFK’s “Fascist New Frontier.”

(She lost her long-suffering editor, the famous Bennett Cerf, a What’s My Line panelist, over that title – but she may have been more right than she knew.)

Hit the “Continue reading” link for a lengthy look at the “Cold Civil War” phrase in the 21st century and some background on Carl Bernstein’s radical past.

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THE CIVIL WAR, PEARL HARBOR, AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION WERE JUST HICCUPS: Phil Donahue: Trump era ‘darkest political moment’ in history.

RICK PERRY: We aim for energy domination.

Washington Examiner: Shell is building a cracker plant not far from here. Is that part of the equation of creating an energy hub in this region? Explain what a cracker plant is, because when people who are not from an energy state hear “cracker plants,” they think it’s a plant that makes saltines.

Perry: (laughing) Well, this is cracking those molecules so that you can have different byproducts — ethane, ethylene — that go into the petrochemical industry, and yes, that is adding value. That is creating a hub. If you just took that gas and burned it at a power plant, it’s sort of like cooking your breakfast using $100 bills. It will cook your breakfast, but it’s a pretty expensive way to do it.

But if you take that gas, process it, crack it, send different streams different ways to be used in a lot of valued-added processing, that can happen right here in this region. So, one job becomes 10 jobs. And those are high-value jobs.

The other side of what it does, President Trump’s vision of making America dominant in the energy field — this is exactly what he’s talking about. He doesn’t want us just to be independent. He wants us to be dominant. That means that our allies, wherever they may be in the world, know that there will be a constant stream of these products that they need to develop their countries economically.

All of our allies are very interested in our being able to develop different energy sources, LNG in particular. I mean, this is a game changer.

Putin, OPEC hardest hit.

FLASHBACK: “By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place,” [Hillary Clinton] said.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Indiewire Slams “Sexist” Male Critics for “Beguiled” Pans.

Critics must not deviate from the Party line, comrades.

CHANGE: Having an Affair Is Going Out of Style: The boomers are the sexual libertines. Younger people are more into monogamy. On the one hand, that’s good. On the other hand, I’m slightly concerned that it has less to do with evolving morality, and more to do with declining libido.

On the gripping hand, maybe — and I speak from experience here — it’s about seeing their parents’ generation up close and concluding that all those affairs didn’t seem to make them happier, and did a lot of collateral damage.

RON RADOSH: Finally, Conservative Writers Accept the Truth About the Trump Campaign’s Folly.