NUCLEAR DEPLOYMENT: Out of Turkey and Into Poland.

Early in 2017, I wrote about the tactical nuclear imbalance between Russia and NATO regarding both quantity and deliverance capability. There are reportedly 150 deployed U.S. controlled, tactical nuclear weapons based in five European countries including Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey in contrast to the estimated 1850 Russian nonstrategic nuclear weapons. I illustrated that Russia possesses the superior tactical nuclear force and likened the imbalance to NATO playing a game of chess without a queen. I will make the case that tactical nuclear weapons controlled by the U.S. should be moved out of Turkey and into Poland. There are four points I will address that make a strong case for this strategic decision.

First is the current security and political situation in Turkey.

You hardly need four reasons when this is the first one.

JIM TREACHER: It’s Wrong To Physically Attack People For What They Say, Even If What They Say Makes You Very Angry.

AN EXCELLENT EDITORIAL FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: The Poison of Identity Politics: The return of white nationalism is part of a deeper ailment.

The White House nonetheless issued a statement Sunday saying Mr. Trump “includes white supremacists, KKK, Neo-Nazi and all extremist groups” in his condemnation. As so often with Mr. Trump, his original statement missed an opportunity to speak like a unifying political leader.

Yet the focus on Mr. Trump is also a cop-out because it lets everyone duck the deeper and growing problem of identity politics on the right and left. The politics of white supremacy was a poison on the right for many decades, but the civil-rights movement rose to overcome it, and it finally did so in the mid-1960s with Martin Luther King Jr. ’s language of equal opportunity and color-blind justice.

That principle has since been abandoned, however, in favor of a new identity politics that again seeks to divide Americans by race, ethnicity, gender and even religion. “Diversity” is now the all-purpose justification for these divisions, and the irony is that America is more diverse and tolerant than ever.

The problem is that the identity obsessives want to boil down everything in American life to these categories. In practice this means allocating political power, contracts, jobs and now even salaries in the private economy based on the politics of skin color or gender rather than merit or performance. Down this road lies crude political tribalism, and James Damore’s recent Google dissent is best understood as a cri de coeur that we should aspire to something better. Yet he lost his job merely for raising the issue.

A politics fixated on indelible differences will inevitably lead to resentments that extremists can exploit in ugly ways on the right and left. The extremists were on the right in Charlottesville, but there have been examples on the left in Berkeley, Oakland and numerous college campuses. When Democratic politicians can’t even say “all lives matter” without being denounced as bigots, American politics has a problem.

We have the worst political class in our history, and a dysfunctional political culture.

THE SCORPION STINGS THE FROG, EVERY TIME: Markos Moulitsas spreads ‘dangerous lie’ about ‘NRA and American conservatives.’

SARAH HOYT: A Message to the Children of the Revolution: Grow Up!

A COORDINATED ATTACK ON NORTH KOREA’S NUKES: And North Korea has blinked.

CATCH AND RELEASE: U.S. Lacking Strategy for Terrorists Leaving Prison.

B-52 WITH THE DESERT BELOW: Another fine B-52 photo. (Readers seemed to like yesterday’s BUFF Lightning photo.)

PERVERSE INCENTIVES: The worse North Korea acts, the more cash aid it gets.

“For Pyongyang, it pays to provoke,” Sung-Yoon Lee, a Korean Studies professor at Tufts University, told CNBC on Monday. “Whereas good behavior buys only indifference from its richer neighbors, being a bad apple buys leverage and billions in aid.”

The same countries admonishing North Korea leader Kim Jong Un for nuclear belligerence still shell out large sums of diplomatic aid under the motive of “damage-control diplomacy, i.e. getting the North to back off and stay out of the headlines for a while,” Lee said. “Exporting insecurity is [Pyongyang’s] time-tested means to reaping concessions.”

Over the past quarter-century, the pariah state has amassed $20 billion worth of cash, food, fuel, and medicine from the U.S., Japan, China and South Korea. That’s come from “repeated lies of denuclearization,” according to Lee, who has testified as an expert witness at U.S. government hearings on North Korea policy.

Maybe it’s time to try something different.

UPDATE: Something different.

CVS AS BORDERS: Amazon Could Probably Conquer Drugstores, Too.

Can Amazon do to the pharmacy business what it’s done to … well, everything else?

Rumor has it they’re thinking about doing just that. They’ve reportedly created a new general manager position to look into such an expansion. In May, when those rumors started floating, Bloomberg’s own Max Nisen explained why they might find the business attractive. . . .

The chief executive officer of CVS appears to be unworried, however. In a recent earnings call, he told analysts, “There are many barriers to entry when you’re looking at pharmacy.”

And true that is. Health care is one of the more heavily regulated sectors of our economy, and regulation is always one of the most reliable barriers keeping new competitors out. As with the grocery business, proximity is another major barrier: If your kid’s got strep, you don’t want to wait two days for their antibiotics to arrive.

And yet.

Over the years, I’ve listened to a lot of earnings calls with CEOs whose businesses were being threatened by Amazon. Those CEOs all had one thing in common: They were quite sure that the Amazon juggernaut was never going to roll into their business. Their business was special, you see.

If you’re relying on barriers to entry, you’re already in trouble. The question is, how loyal are your customers, and how easy are you to undercut? Do you offer service that people are willing to pay a bit more for? Or would people be willing to pay a bit more to avoid dealing with you? . . . .

UTTERLY UNNECESSARY: ‘Crotch charms’ help you bling out your lady bits.

DAILY CALLER: Former Trump Adviser Says He Will ‘Blow’ McMaster, Drudge ‘The F**k Out’ If Bannon Is Ousted.

“If Steve is fired by the White House and a bunch of generals take over the White House there will be hell to pay,” Nunberg, a longtime Trump aide who left the presidential campaign in August 2015, told The Daily Caller in an exclusive interview. His comments came after an Axios report that claimed Bannon’s job is in jeopardy due to damaging leaks against McMaster and anger over a recent book touting Bannon’s role on the Trump presidential campaign.

Nunberg told TheDC that he was “very perturbed” by the Axios story and tied in Bannon’s reported downfall to the Drudge Report, which continues to link to stories that are negative to the White House chief strategist.

“Matt should go back into his hobble hole in Miami and listen to techno,” the former Trump campaign adviser said. “Matt should understand that people like me can blow him the fook up. F-o-o-k, Conor McGregor. Blow him the fook up [sic].” (Nunberg was referencing Irish MMA fighter Conor McGregor, who pronounces “fuck” as “fook.”)

Plus: “I’ll get conservative radio to talk about how Matt Drudge pushed out Steve Bannon so McMaster can control the White House.”

That might not work out as intended.

THE WHITEWASHING OF colleges’ racist history.

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THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S FULL-COURT PRESS: Coordinating U.S. power to squeeze the nukes out of North Korea.

OWN IT: Yes, Millennials Are Narcissists, but We Can Make America Greater Than Our Narcissistic Parents.

Gen X smiles and shakes its collective head, just as Gen Z will learn to do.

GLENN GREENWALD: The Misguided Attacks on ACLU for Defending Neo-Nazis’ Free Speech Rights in Charlottesville.

Last week, the ACLU sparked controversy when it announced that it was defending the free speech rights of alt-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos after the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority refused to allow ads for his book to be displayed on public transit. Lost in the debate was that other groups the ACLU was defending along with Yiannopoulos were also censored under the same rule: Carafem, which helps women access birth control and medication abortion; the animal rights group PETA; and the ACLU itself.

For representing Yiannopoulos, the civil liberties group was widely accused of defending and enabling fascism. But the ACLU wasn’t “defending Yiannopoulos” as much as it was opposing a rule that allows state censorship of any controversial political messages the state wishes to suppress: a rule that is often applied to groups which are supported by many who attacked the ACLU here.

The same formula was applied yesterday when people learned that the ACLU of Virginia had represented the white supremacist protesters in Charlottesville after city officials tried to ban the group from gathering in Emancipation Park where a statue of Robert E. Lee was to be removed.

Related: ‘No Free Speech for Fascists’ Is a Truly Terrible Idea: The ACLU is right: Do you really want Donald Trump deciding who gets free speech?