STEPHEN KRUISER: Twitter is Pondering Option to Let Users Flag and Report ‘Fake News.’

What could go wrong?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, THEY’RE-GETTING-WORRIED EDITION: Connecticut Battens Down The Legal Hatches:

Connecticut has passed a law protecting colleges against lawsuits alleging that they failed to provide students with a valuable education in exchange for their hefty tuition charges. . . .

But surely the services that colleges offer are so obviously worthwhile that such lawsuits should fall flat on their face…right? On the contrary, the courts are in many cases ruling for the plaintiffs in such cases, suggesting that those who argue college is often a ripoff are not so far off the mark.

But instead of doing something to make sure that colleges do provide value for money, the State of Connecticut has apparently concluded that the only way to protect college revenues from pesky lawsuits is to make it illegal for consumers to sue them on those grounds. Another sign that things are not well in American higher ed.

One of many.

FASTER, PLEASE: Islamic State Is Near Defeat in Iraq, Prime Minister Says.

“We are seeing the end of the fake Daesh state,” Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Twitter, using another name for Islamic State. “The liberation of Mosul proves that. We will not relent,” he added.

Thursday’s recapture of the ruined Nouri mosque came a week after Islamic State blew it up as Iraqi forces closed in, reducing to rubble the 12th-century building and its 150-foot minaret. The mosque gained notoriety when Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi spoke there three years ago and declared himself the head of a caliphate, or religious empire.

Col. Ryan Dillon, the Baghdad-based spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, said that Iraqi forces on Thursday cut a wedge in the middle of the area held by Islamic State, seizing the Nouri mosque and cornering the few hundred remaining fighters in half of Mosul’s Old City on one side, and an area around a hospital that has been a stronghold for the group on the other side.

And rather than simply drive ISIS fighters out and into their next stronghold — the practice of the previous Administration — U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis has a plan to kill them all.

CHANGE? In “Unprecedented Step” US Sanctions Chinese Entities With Ties To North Korea.

In an unprecedented step, the Treasury Department slapped financial sanctions on two Chinese nationals and a Chinese shipping company over their ties to North Korea stemming from its nuclear program, according to Reuters.

The Trump administration also proposed sanctions against a Chinese bank of helping North Korea launder money and cut the institution off from the US financial system, in a major step that at least on the surface, is aimed at convincing China to put more pressure on Pyongyang to abandon its missile and nuclear programs, according to the Financial Times. The US Treasury designated the bank in question, the Bank of Dandong, as a “foreign bank of primary money laundering concern” and also imposed sanctions on two Chinese individuals and one Chinese company.

The Treasury Department said in a statement it was sanctioning Wei Sun for links to the Foreign Trade Bank of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Hong Ri Li for his links to North Korean banking executive Song-hyok Ri, as well as the Dalian Global Unity Shipping Co Ltd of Dalian, China.

The moves come one week after top US and Chinese officials met for strategic talks in Washington in which the US side tried to persuade China to take more action on North Korea.

All the sanctions in the world haven’t forced any behavior changes on North Korea. Or on Russia, Cuba, pre-war Iraq, Iran…

I suppose sanctions make diplomats look as though they’re doing something, but sanctions don’t seem to do much at all.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, ADMINISTRATIVE BLOAT EDITION: UW-Madison hiring admin to ‘advance social justice’ on campus. You know what’s justice? Not making students and taxpayers sacrifice to advance university apparatchiks’ political agenda.

AT AMAZON, fresh New Releases, updated hourly.

Plus, today’s new Kindle Daily Deals.

And shop the Digital Deals of the Day.

THE HILL: Trump, Mika and Joe all show zero ability to act like adults.

My take:

VIDEO: Maxine Waters Says 700 Billion People Are About to Lose Their Healthcare.

Considering that 93 million America are shot to death each day, in about 20 years we’ll have killed off all the uninsured — problem solved!

TURNS OUT WE COULD DRILL OUR WAY TO LOWER PRICES AFTER ALL: How The US Sets Global Oil And Gas Prices.

JOURNALISM: “And this is especially interesting right now, when everyone purports to be shocked that Donald Trump tweeted that Mika Brzezinski was ‘bleeding badly from a face-lift:’ Carr says that Kellyanne Conway ‘looks like she got hit with a shovel.'”

RICK PERRY INTRODUCES THE THREE MUSKETEERS OF ENERGY:

Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Thursday that he is one of “Three Musketeers” of energy.

Perry, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt “are three individuals that do believe that the future of America is inextricably intertwined with the energy industry,” he said in opening an energy conference at his agency.

“Some call us the Three Musketeers for whatever reason that might be,” Perry added. . . .

Energy expert Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of IHS Markit, opened the first panel by saying the U.S. has moved away from the “age of vulnerability,” which is where it stood during the Mideast oil embargoes of the 1970s, to a new place of energy abundance, especially for natural gas production.

“We are not merely self-sufficient” with natural gas, Yergin said. “We are by far the world’s largest producer of natural gas and an increasingly important exporter.”

He said crude oil production also is surging, driven by the use of hydraulic fracturing and the shale energy boom of the last decade.

Talk of “energy” used to be boring and depressing, because we were losing. Now we’re winning and it seems much more interesting.

SINGLE PAYER: Devastated parents of Charlie Gard spend their last night with their baby and blast ‘heartless’ doctors for refusing to let them take him home to die before they turn off his life support later today.

Robert Bidinotto posted on Facebook yesterday:

They have already declared him, explicitly or tacitly, “brain dead” or vegetative. If they are correct — and I have no reason to doubt their medical judgment — then no issue of protecting the child’s rights or “interests” exists any longer — by their own premises.

What the parents are proposing is thus no threat to the child, his rights, or his interests. It is simply to exercise THEIR right to conduct an experiment of sheer desperation, in order to see whether they can salvage their child. If that child is already medically irretrievable, then please define for me whose “interest” would be threatened by allowing the parents to exercise that right.

There is no rational or moral reason to deny them this right. The only conceivable “interests” involved are those of the denizens of the socialized-medicine regime, who do perceive a threat — not to a child they have already written off, but to their power to make and enforce life-or-death decisions over the disposition of healthcare. No, sorry: This case is not about science; it is not about the child’s rights or interests; it is about exerting state power against a perceived popular menace to the socialized medicine system, which would come from allowing individuals the freedom to exercise their rights to make their own personal medical choices.

What is happening to the Gards is just “necessary” reminder of the individual’s place in the socialized scheme of things.

PROJECT VERITAS: CNN Producer: Voters “Stupid as Sh*t.”

Deplorable, but this is CNN.

CHANGE: House panel votes to split Air Force, create new U.S. Space Corps.

As part of its version of the 2018 Defense authorization bill, the House Armed Services Committee voted late Wednesday night to create a sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces: the U.S. Space Corps, which would absorb the Air Force’s current space missions.

You could be forgiven if you haven’t been closely following the debate about creating the nation’s first new military service since 1947. Several members of the panel said they themselves were blindsided by the proposal, and staged an unsuccessful effort to block the change until it could be studied further — or at least until the full committee had held at least one hearing on the subject.

Well, there have been Very Important Hurtful Tweets to talk about. Also, some people may have met some Russians or something.

But the measure, which would also establish a new U.S. Space Command and make the new chief of the Space Corps the eighth member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has the support of both Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the chairman of the full committee, and its ranking Democrat, Adam Smith (D-Wash.) The bill language was developed by Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), the top Republican and Democrat on the strategic forces subcommittee.

All of them argued Wednesday that the creation of a dedicated service for space had been studied for years, and that the idea’s time had come. . . . The bill would order the Defense Department to establish the new corps by January 2019. It would be a distinct military service within the Department of the Air Force, in much the same way the Marine Corps operates as a service within the Department of the Navy. The Secretary of the Air Force would oversee both the Air Force and the Space Corps, but the new chief of staff of the Space Corps would be a new four-position, co-equal with the chief of staff of the Air Force. DoD would have to deliver reports to Congress in both March and August of next year on the details of how it plans to set up the new service.

I’m tentatively in favor.

SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “We still talking about some Dem media partisan getting her feelz hurt by the president? Yeah I know whose daughter she is. Big deal.”

ATLANTIC EDITOR-IN-CHIEF JEFFERY GOLDBERG: Trump Is Going To Be Responsible for Violence Against Journalists.

“The problem is, and this is what I worry about more than anything else, is that there are people in the country who don’t understand that this a cynical reality TV game,” Goldberg concluded. “And are going to hear over and over again from the president that the reporters, journalists are enemies of the state…and someone is going to do something violent against journalists in a large way, and then I know where the fault lies.

Maybe he could have waited to make that charge until Steve Scalise is out of the hospital.

HOW DARE THEY?

KURT SCHLICHTER: CNN Tries To Move Forward After Its Latest Humiliation.

OH: Congressman Warns of Terrorist Attacks If Trump Signs Sanctuary City Bill.

CHANGE MORE OF THE SAME? Centrist Republicans mobilize against draft GOP budget.

Tuesday Group co-chairman Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) is gathering signatures on a letter asking Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to intervene in House Budget Chairwoman Diane Black’s plan to cut $200 billion in mandatory spending in the GOP budget.

The Tuesday Group letter — which sources say has about 20 signatories so far — warns that the Tennessee Republican’s proposal is “not practical” and “could imperil tax reform,” according to a draft of the letter obtained by POLITICO. The letter also encourages GOP leaders to work with Democrats to reach a budget agreement setting higher spending levels for fiscal 2018 — something the letter suggests could be paired with a vote to raise the debt ceiling.

Without such a deal, some moderates may not support the budget, according to the letter.

There’s nothing “moderate” about normalizing trillion-dollar annual deficits, which is the path we’re on without entitlement reform.

UNDER THE RADAR: Trump quietly puts teeth into his ‘extreme vetting’ policy.

THE TRAVEL BAN BEGINS, THE LEFT PROJECTS (AGAIN), AND SUSAN RICE JOINS CONGRESS’S WITNESS LIST: All that and more in Liz Sheld’s morning brief.

THIS ISSUE HASN’T GONE AWAY: Is Mueller Too Conflicted To Investigate Trump Fairly?

But while Mueller mulls over that decision, more and more voices are being raised calling for him to step aside due to a serious conflict of interest that probe would represent. That conflict involves Mueller’s long-standing friendship with former FBI head James Comey.

Since Comey’s firing is one of the main reasons for the talk about obstruction, he would end up as a key figure in such an investigation. It’s Comey who claimed that Trump pressured him to ease off his investigation of Mike Flynn, and who, as some said, laid the groundwork for an obstruction charge.

Mueller and Comey both worked in the Bush administration and were involved in a dispute over whether Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft should reauthorize a post-9/11 domestic surveillance program.

“The two men backed one another in a moment etched into the legend in both the Justice Department and FBI,” noted George Washington University legal scholar Jonathan Turley.

The two have been said to be friends ever since.

Turley says that, as a result, “Mueller could not be viewed as a neutral choice by anyone on Trump’s side due to his history with Comey.”

Either Mueller needs to resign, or Attorney General Sessions needs to appoint a separate special counsel for the obstruction inquiry.