THE “SANCTUARY CITY” SCAM: Blue Strongholds Funnel ‘Welfare for Immigration Lawyers.’

KEEP PORTLAND VULNERABLE: Sanctuary City Leaders Silent After Homeless Illegal Alien Rapes Woman in Pricey Portland Neighborhood.

WEAPONIZED INTELLIGENCE: Obama spy agencies changed rules, making it easier to unmask members of Congress.

President Obama’s intelligence chief issued revised procedures in 2013 that made it easier for executive branch officials to “unmask” the names of lawmakers or congressional staffers caught up in intelligence intercepts overseas, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Hill.

Procedures issued by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in March 2013 formally supplanted a 1992 set of rules that made the dissemination of names of intercepted lawmakers or congressional aides an act of last resort.

The new standard allowed for a lawmaker’s or staffer’s name to be unmasked if “an executive branch recipient of intelligence” believed that learning “the identity of the Member of Congress or the Congressional staff is necessary to understand and assess the associated intelligence and further a lawful activity of the recipient agency,” according to a memo released earlier this month by the DNI’s office with little public fanfare.

Under the previous rules authorized by former President George H.W. Bush and then-CIA Director Robert Gates, the CIA chief himself had to give “prior written approval” that the release of the identifying information had met “a legitimate foreign intelligence or counterintelligence need” that “cannot be satisfied in any other fashion.”

In the absence of such a finding, executive branch spy agencies had to redact or delete the name of any congressional employee from intelligence reports under a process known in the intelligence world as minimization. The minimization practice exists to protect Americans’ privacy because most spy intercepts overseas are captured without a court-approved warrant required by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.

But the change was totally non-political, you guys.

HUMAN WAVE FROM GRAY RINEHART: Walking on the Sea of Clouds. The saga of the first colony on the moon.

SUICIDE PACT: State and Local Governments Pledge to Shackle Economies Under Paris Agreement’s Terms.

BIG BROTHER IS STALKING YOU: Creepy Canadian App Gives Citizens Points for Making Government-Approved Choices.

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT: Robert A. Heinlein: The Man Who Loved Women.

VIRTUE SIGNALING UBER ALAS: JK Rowling Tweet About Trump Refusing to Shake Hand of Little Boy Gets 76,000 Retweets; Boy’s Mother Asks Her to Correct Lie; JK Rowling Refuses.

THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE:Mentally Disabled to Lose Jobs Due to Seattle’s $15 Minimum Wage.

WELL! Don’t ever call these guys dumb bunnies .

THE WAGES OF FAKE NEWS: Katie Couric Out at Yahoo News.

WHEN MARTYRDOM LOSES ITS GLAMOUR: The Islamic State’s Shock-and-Bore Terrorism.

MARK STEYN ON THE DOORS’ “LIGHT MY FIRE” AT 50: With cameos from Gil Evans, Julie London — and yours truly, astonishingly enough.

Here’s the post that Mark’s article references, on my old Ed Driscoll.com blog before we rolled it into the PJM mothership, via the Wayback machine.

Related: At Power Line, John Hinderaker links to Mark’s article, and adds to it a 1998 NPR interview with Ray Manzarek, the late Doors keyboardist, and the album-length seven minute rave-up version of the song.

THE NEW YORK TIMES MORPHED INTO THE ONION SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: “Want to Be Happy? Buy More Takeout and Hire a Maid, Study Suggests,” a Times headline that went up on Thursday actually says.

But I thought the road to happiness was to reduce our consumption to zero — how can the Times retroactively trash that “No Impact” “Year Without Toilet Paper” Fifth Avenue couple they glowingly profiled a decade ago?

(Or as I like to call such a lifestyle: Venezuela.)

EVEN THE BIG BANG THEORY ISN’T IMMUNE TO MUGGERIDGE’S LAW: As Tom Wolfe has written, “We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.”

Shot: From 2012, Raj Koothrappali, you horny transhumanist maniac you:

Chaser: Man ‘marries’ his laptop, sues for state recognition and a wedding cake.

—The Washington Times, yesterday.

THE LONELY LIVES OF NEW YORK EDITORS: The Editor Who Blames Trump for Her Love Life.

Things got a little out of hand. It’s just this war and that lying son of a bitch Johnson!

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: DNC Chair’s PAC Has Paid More in Salaries Than It Has Given to Democrats. Now it’s looking like a lot of that went to shady Pakistani IT guys. . . .

SARAH HOYT: Robert A. Heinlein: The Man Who Loved Women. “The women of feminist-offense can doubtlessly find something to complain about in everything Robert A. Heinlein – a man who loved women – wrote and said. And I hope they enjoy it. But only we Heinlein women are capable of giving birth to children who will take over the stars.”

EUROPA, EURABIA and the Last Man.

SO PROBLEMATIC. SO VERY, VERY PROBLEMATIC: The Handmaid’s Tale’s race problem*.

“Bam, you’ve been intersectionalizationalized!”, “Cuffy Meigs” tweets.

We’re getting closer and closer to peak Grauniad. I can’t wait to see how they top this!

* Newsweek, astonishingly enough, has already mentioned the show’s Scientology problem.

TO BE FAIR, THAT WOULD EXPLAIN A LOT ABOUT THE OBAMAS, CLINTONS AND GORES. NYT Op-Ed: Parents Who Don’t Send Their Kids To Public Schools Are Racist Theocrats.

Why does the Gray Lady hate Malia, Sasha, Chelsea, Albert Gore III, and other past and current attendees of Sidwell Friends so much?

THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED, WE’D SEE MORE OPEN RACISM THAN WE’VE SEEN IN DECADES. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! ‘Description of their clientele.’ Ijeoma Oluo tweets ridiculously racist tweet about Cracker Barrel.

UNDER THE RADAR BUT ON THE ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE RADAR:

South Korean President Moon Jae-in ordered discussions to be held with the United States on deploying additional THAAD anti-missile defense units following North Korea’s test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile, his office said on Saturday.

Recall Moon ordered a “re-evaluation” of the THAAD deployment. It was a sop to South Korean lefties. But he’s responding to reality.

VERY RELATED TO REALITY: South Korea may buy its own THAADs.

SHOT AND CHASER: Option 4.

HEH: