YES: Does Trump have a point about Obama and Russia?

What’s the penalty for breaking Betteridge’s Law of Headlines?

WE’LL VIRTUALIZE IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE: Oculus Rift slashes prices for second time in four months.

The harsh reality for Facebook-owned Oculus is that sales of its premium Rift virtual reality headsets have not taken off. Will a second price drop for the Rift in just over four months make a difference?

On Monday, Oculus announced this latest drop, a six-week “Summer of Rift” promotion in which the combined price of Rift headgear and its optional Touch hand controllers falls to $399, down from the previous combined price of $598. Oculus vice president of content Jason Rubin says Oculus is trying to “prime the pump and make sure there’s plenty of people coming to VR.”

In early March Oculus lowered the Rift-Touch combination from $798 to $598.

“It doesn’t appear the (initial) Rift price drop has made a big difference, but the first half of the year tends to be pretty slow in gaming at least,” says Lewis Ward, IDC’s research director, for gaming and VR/AR. According to “preliminary” worldwide data from IDC, consumers have bought about 520,000 Rifts through the first half 2017, compared to 1.6 million units for the rival Sony’s PlayStation VR system and 770,000 for the HTC Vive system.

Rubin insists Oculus is not holding a fire sale. He explains that the new promotion “is really about building that ecosystem of users.”

Until virtual reality doesn’t require a massive device strapped to your face, and even its own room, it’s going to remain the next big thing.

IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Capitalism Averts Alleged Beepocalypse.

AT AMAZON, fresh New Releases, updated hourly.

Plus, today’s new Kindle Daily Deals.

And shop the Digital Deals of the Day.

And going live tonight at 9 pm: Amazon Prime Day 2017 – 30 Hours of Deals.

VIDEO: President Trump Picks Up Marine’s Fallen Hat. (Bumped).

Related: Valerie Jarrett Screeches At Marine.

Plus: How CNN will cover it.

RE-RESET: Lawmakers Rip ‘Dangerously Naive’ Trump Plan to Work with Russia on Cybersecurity.

The idea appears to be a non-starter, anyway.

THIS NEVER GETS OLD: “The Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Related: The Latest Russia Non-Bombshell.

RUN, CHELSEA, RUN!

FLASHBACK: Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal.

AND THIS SEEMS RELEVANT: Chelsea Clinton used foundation to help pay for wedding.

ANNALS OF GOVERNMENT HEALTHCARE: Mother of Terminally Ill British Baby Child Charlie Gard Says Trump, Pope Attention ‘Saved’ Son. When health care is controlled by politicians, all health care decisions will be controlled by politics. Sometimes that works for you, usually it works against you.

RANDY BARNETT DELIVERS AN OLD-FASHIONED FISKING to a critic of originalism.

RETAIL BLUES: The Cosmetics Counter Was Long Immune to Discounting. Not Anymore.

A decade ago, shoppers would have been hard-pressed to find any Estée Lauder lipsticks, Bobbi Brown mascara or Shiseido blush on sale. These “prestige” brands are sold mainly at department and specialty stores and tend to be pricier than the so-called mass cosmetics sold at drugstores.

Department stores have long given prestige cosmetics prime space on the ground floors of their stores, and the brands confined their distribution to these emporiums.

But the retail landscape has shifted. Shoppers are increasingly skipping the mall to buy online. Specialty chains like Sephora and Ulta Beauty Inc. are siphoning away customers. Brands such as Estée Lauder, Clarins and Dior now sell to such chains as well as through their own websites.

Department stores have cut the fat. Now they’re cutting the meat.

BILLIONAIRES PLEADING POVERTY: Bezos, Slim, and Buffett, Publicly Pleading Poverty, Ask Congress for Help With Their Newspapers. Sad! “In respect of the Times, it’s particularly comical, because, as an editorial matter, the paper generally favors stricter antitrust enforcement.”

I’D RATHER NOT: Learning to live with a North Korean ICBM.

JOHN HINDERAKER ON SARAH PALIN’S LAWSUIT: The New York Times Is In Trouble. “Ms. Palin can make a strong argument that the Times editorialists knew that their smear was a lie, based on reporting done by the Times itself. (The editorialists’ defense likely will have to be that they don’t read their own newspaper.) But at a minimum, it seems that the Times editorial was published with reckless disregard for whether it was true or not.”

CRACKS IN THE COALITION: Dem support for ‘Kate’s Law’ angers Latino group.

“Kate’s Law is named after Kate Steinle, a woman who died after being shot in San Francisco, allegedly by an undocumented immigrant who had been deported five times.

The measure would expand maximum sentences for foreigners who attempt to re-enter the country, legally or illegally, after having been deported, denied entry or removed, and for foreign felons who attempt to re-enter the country. It appears unlikely to pass the Senate, where Democrats have vowed to filibuster it.

House Democratic leaders did not whip their members against Kate’s Law, essentially allowing members who might be facing tough races next year to vote for it.

Weird. It’s like it’s pretty popular.

KURT SCHLICHTER: Liberals Can’t Deal With A President Who Takes America’s Side.

Let me throw down this marker: The West is superior to the rest of the world in every significant way, we should aggressively back our allies over our enemies, and the guiding principle of our foreign policy should always be America’s interests. No apologies. No equivocation. No doubt.

What are your questions?

Well, if you’re a normal American, you won’t have any questions – these truths are self-evident. But if you’re a progressive, you’re gonna have a little sissy snit fit like so many libs did in the wake of the President’s triumphant Warsaw speech. There’s one thing that always sets them off – uttering the truth/heresy that not only is Western civilization the best and most advanced culture in the history of humanity, but the United States of America is its greatest manifestation.

The immigrants and refugees get it. Which way are they always headed? North, to the comparative paradise of the Western world, or south, to the hellscape of the Third World? That’s a gimme. They are never headed south, and everyone knows it. Yet the left still insists that we stop believing our lying eyes and start believing the liberal Fifth Column of multicultural liars infesting America’s alleged elite.

Except our eyes aren’t lying, and now we have a President who won’t lie either. It makes them nuts.

Well, to be fair, they were nuts before. Their politics is a means of obfuscation and compensation.

TRUMP JUNIOR VS THE NEW YORK TIMES, RNC CHAIR VS DNC CHAIR VIA NBC, AND CHUCK SCHUMER VS… SNORTABLE CHOCOLATE? All that and more in Liz Sheld’s morning brief.

WINNING: Oil Exports, Illegal for Decades, Now Fuel a Texas Port Boom.

Oil exports grew slowly through most of 2016, but this year there has been a surge reaching 1.3 million barrels a day — roughly 15 percent of domestic production — which even at today’s depressed prices is worth more than $1.5 billion a month.

That may be only the beginning. In a test a few weeks ago, the French-flagged supertanker Anne, empty but capable of holding more than two million barrels of oil, docked safely at Occidental Petroleum’s year-old export terminal here. The docking of the 1,093-foot vessel, larger than any tanker to come into port previously in the Gulf of Mexico, is seen as the herald of an export boom, lifting the spirits of American oil executives despondent over the crumbling price of crude and sending ripples across global energy markets.

“This is our chance, this is our turn to prosper,” said Khalid A. Muslih, executive vice president of Buckeye Partners, a pipeline and terminal operator in the midst of a major export expansion. “We’re working our way toward energy independence. We’re grabbing market share, and we’re doing our part to rectify our imbalance of trade.”

“Get the hell out of my way!” the wise man once said.

THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: People are dropping $25,000 to get anal Botox.

ALLIES: Germany starts to withdraw troops from Turkish Incirlik base.

The motion to pull the troops out of Incirlik had been approved by the German parliament in June, after parliamentarians had repeatedly been refused access to the roughly 260 soldiers stationed at the facility. Turkey had denied German lawmakers requests to make what they saw as routine visits to the base.

A German defense ministry spokesman said on Sunday that the withdrawal from the Incirlik base in southern Turkey’s Adana province was the next step in one of several bilateral disputes between Germany and Turkey. These range from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s post-coup clampdown on dissidents to Turkey’s political campaigning in Germany in the run-up to a key referendum held in April giving Erdogan sweeping new powers.

RELATED? Istanbul rally concludes anti-Erdogan march.

Hundreds of thousands of people have gathered in Istanbul at the end of a 450km (280-mile) “justice” march against the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Large numbers have joined the march since it began in Ankara on 15 June.

Opposition and protest leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu criticised the wave of arrests and imprisonments that followed last year’s failed coup.

President Erdogan has accused the marchers of supporting terrorism.

But of course.

BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE ANY? Why Democrats are still losing the war of ideas.

THEY WILL SCORN YOUR PRUDENT WORDS: Politico Attacks Rubio for Tweeting Proverbs, the ‘Most Republican Part of the Bible.’

To be clear, Politico’s Joel Baden described Proverbs as Republican, not Rubio.

THE INSTAWIFE ON SEX DISCRIMINATION IN HIRING. “As anyone in the real world knows, it is less likely, not more likely these days that a man will get hired if his gender is known. . . . It appears that if only professional merits are considered, men come out ahead but the answer to this on the part of the academics is for public leaders to hire those who are less qualified since the women are not competing as well with the men. Why not target why and how the women lack professional merit and try to address that?”

NO, JUST THE FINALLY OPEN DEMISE: The 2016 Election and the Demise of Journalistic Standards.