JAKE TAPPER: I’m Amazed at How Poorly Bill Clinton Has Handled the #MeToo Movement.

What part of “Bill Clinton is a self-entitled and unrepentant user and abuser of women” is news, Jake?

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GLENN’S USA TODAY COLUMN: Blame social media for making us more hasty and emotional. Can we fix this?

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Trusts Kim, Corey Stewart Wins, and Much, Much More.

Tyler O’Neil is filling in for Liz this week.

STUPIDITY ISN’T A CRIME, BUT THIS CHARGE IS CLOSE ENOUGH: Dancing FBI agent charged with assault after dropping gun during backflip.

And remember: Firearms should only be in the hands of trained government agents.

OOOOH, THAT SMELL: US to boost nuke sniffing with modified C-130s.

(Classical reference in headline.)

LOWER, PLEASE: Food Stamp Enrollment Dips to Lowest Level in Eight Years.

THE MOST 21ST CENTURY HEADLINE YET: SpaceX Ponders Hypersonic Decelerator For Second-stage Recovery.

Recovery of the second stage poses greater challenges than either the booster or the fairings because of its greater reentry velocity, relatively large mass and inherent instability. SpaceX currently deorbits the upper stage into the South Pacific through a retroburn of the engine. However, the upper stage also “tumbles” during reentry, normally resulting in the breakup of the structure in the upper atmosphere.

To stabilize the second stage and reduce its ballistic coefficient during reentry, SpaceX is therefore looking at several options—including a hypersonic inflatable aerodynamic decelerator (HIAD), a deployable, inflatable aeroshell with a built-in flexible thermal protection system able to protect the entry vehicle through atmospheric entry. The concept, based on the idea of a packable heat shield, has been tested in recent years by NASA under programs such as the Inflatable Reentry Vehicle Experiment-3, or IRVE-3, which successfully demonstrated a 3-m-dia. (10-ft.) HIAD during a suborbital test in 2012.

Musk hinted that the company was evaluating atmospheric decelerators in mid-April when he tweeted, “This is gonna sound crazy, but . . . SpaceX will try to bring rocket upper stage back from orbital velocity using a giant party balloon.” Following a stabilized reentry behind the protection of the aeroshell, the second stage would then likely deploy airbags and a steerable parafoil, to be recovered by a vessel positioned downrange.

I was about to write “Godspeed,” but decided “Lord, please help them decelerate” might be more apropos.

HIGH EXPLOSIVE ANTI-TANK ROUND ON THE WAY: A Montana Army National Guard soldier fires an AT4-CS light anti-armor weapon in an exercise held May 15 at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska.

MEANWHILE, IN OTHER DIPLOMATIC BREAKTHROUGHS: Greece and Macedonia end The Name War. Macedonia is now Northern Macedonia.

The name will be used both internally by the government and externally when conducting foreign affairs.

Macedonia was previously only recognized by organizations such as the United Nations by the name Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

The diplomatic dispute has been going on 27 years.

This column from February has the background.

BEFORE: Turkish President Erdogan Gains Complete Control of Media.

AFTER: Erdogan Challengers Struggle for Attention in Turkey Campaign.

Funny how that works.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS… The peaceniks of the media suddenly deplore dialogue.

On Monday night, MSNBC assembled a panel of spiteful Trump critics to throw a wet blanket over the summit. The doves turned into hawks and spent much of the evening trying to peck at Trump. Most of the people on the panel are apologists for this or that communist thug—just go back and look at MSNBC’s fawning coverage of Fidel Castro’s death—but on Monday night they played hardliners. Rachel Maddow, furrowing her brow as usual, objected to Trump even holding a summit. She has finally found a communist leader she thinks America should ostracize. When Obama met with the Castro brothers, she burbled with enthusiasm. But she covered this moment of historic diplomacy like a funeral, shuddering at the thought of North Korea joining the “community” of nations.

MSNBC saw the summit as just one more occasion for obsessive anti-Trump fault-finding. The disgraced Brian Williams is still hanging around for some reason and looked like he wanted to give the summit the kind of newsy, anchormanish treatment of old, but he couldn’t pull it off in the company of jabbering Trump haters, for whom wild opining is all that counts. Plus, Williams is too reduced a figure for the cocksure Maddow to give any equal time. But Williams’s ego still asserts itself from time to time. On Monday night he fed it by asking one of the sham historians on the panel an arcane, look-at-what-I-know style question about the USS Pueblo, a ship the North Koreans captured in 1968.

The utterly contemptible Nicole Wallace, whose smugness and nastiness are beyond caricature, drove much of the shrill coverage. She was at her whiny, know-it-all worst, droning on about Trump’s lack of “preparation” and so forth. But Trump seemed perfectly at ease, getting a stiff Kim Jong Un to crack a smile. Trump had said it would only take “a minute” for him to sense if the relationship between the two countries could improve. By that measure, the summit appeared to start promisingly. Normally such friendly gestures between an American leader and an adversary would warm the hearts of liberals. Not this time. The MSNBC panel looked on coldly and muttered suspiciously about Trump’s body language.

That’s weak tea, and they know it.

BYRON YORK: On North Korea, a president who tried something different.

Have you heard people say war is not an option in North Korea, or that it is unthinkable? Trump started thinking about it. His top military officers worked through a number of scenarios for war on the Korean Peninsula. And while they were doing it, Trump escalated his anti-Kim rhetoric to unheard-of levels. Kim was “Little Rocket Man,” and North Korean aggression would be “met with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

Trump later explained he did it because he believed the old way had not worked. “Other administrations … had a policy of silence,” he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity after the summit. “That’s not the answer. That’s not what you have to do. So I think the rhetoric — I hated to do it, sometimes I felt foolish doing it — but we had no choice.”

So while Trump bellowed threats, his administration quietly planned to make good on those threats, if it came to that.

Put it together, and what seemed to some critics like a reckless strategy worked — or worked enough to pressure the North Koreans into at least temporarily stopping their provocations and wanting to talk. And when, after the talks were on track, the North Koreans resumed their provocative statements, Trump abruptly canceled them — and the North got back on board.

Will it work? Who knows? Not even the White House can say what exactly what it is that came out of Singapore.

But after three Administrations worth of failure and can-kicking, it was time to try something different.

ED MORRISSEY: The never-ending effort to dismember California continues to never end.

“At least they’ve got the conversation started,” concludes Reuters TV reporter Andy Sullivan on the latest proposal to split up California. That must qualify as dry humor, since the conversation on breaking up the Golden State seems never to have stopped at all, especially when involving Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tim Draper. After having failed to win a referendum fight to split up California into six states, Draper’s back with a proposal to make three new states out of it.

What could go wrong? Read on to find out.

NOW THAT’S REAL SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s hyperinflation at new dizzying high.

The latest figure comes from a National Assembly finance committee report looking at the period May 2017 to May 2018.

Meanwhile, the consumer price index in May surged 110.1 percent. It was the first time the index topped 100 percent in one month.

The International Monetary Fund has forecast that Venezuela’s hyperinflation will top 13,800 percent this year. Some lawmakers say that it could be worse: at least 100,000 percent and possibly 300,000 percent.

The only thing centrally planned economies never run out of is zeroes.

ONE MAN WITH COURAGE MAKES A MAJORITY: Wheelchair Bound Jewish Man w/MS Blocks Terrorist Rally in London.

Related: After singlehandedly eliminating all knife crimes in London, Mayor Sadiq Khan pivots towards the really important issues: Khan calls on Wikipedia editors to close the ‘gender page gap.’

‘MERICA: Muslims Who Face More Prejudice Are More Likely to Radicalize. “Researchers found it ‘possible that the ethnic diversity of the United States is protective against radicalization because communities are less prone to organize along binary identity categories’.”

GLENN’S USA TODAY COLUMN: Blame social media for making us more hasty and emotional. Can we fix this?

CHARLIE MARTIN: Blockchain is an answer, but its not the only answer.

OPEN THREAD: Milk the soft power dividend that is tonight’s open thread.

“NOTHING HAPPENS FOR NO GOOD REASON:” How to Read a Newspaper.

Not to be confused with analyzing who reads the newspapers:

RAND PAUL’S NEIGHBOR ATTEMPTED TO SET PAUL’S LAWN ON FIRE BEFORE ASSAULTING HIM: New Court Documents Reveal Details of Yard Dispute That Hospitalized Rand Paul.

In September 2017 the junior GOP senator from Kentucky stacked a 10-foot-wide mound of branches near the line separating his property in Bowling Green from [Dr. Rene Boucher’s].

Boucher found the pile of tree limbs and other flotsam “unsightly,” according to new court documents first reported by The Associated Press. Even though it wasn’t on his property, Boucher could see the pile from his back patio.

It sat there for weeks.

In October, Boucher had the branches loaded into portable dumpsters and carried off.

But then, other piles appeared — two of them.

Boucher poured gasoline on the woodpiles and incinerated them, giving himself second-degree burns in the process.

But Paul’s autumn yard work was not complete.

The next day, the senator blew leaves into Boucher’s yard with his lawnmower. He made another branch pile in the same spot as the previous ones.

Boucher had had enough.

“As Dr. Boucher has stated throughout, he lost his temper and tackled Rand Paul as Paul was carrying branches from another location on his property and placing them on the property line,” the court memorandum from Boucher’s defense team said.

The blindside tackle left Paul with a half-dozen broken ribs and injured lungs. He later developed pneumonia and missed time in Washington to recover.

Found via Stephen Miller, who tweets, “Rand Paul’s neighbor seems like a well adjusted person.”

THINKING SMALL IN THE AGE OF GREATNESS:

The academic Left thinks big when it comes to #TheResistance. It thinks big in mounting symbolic protests such as the 2018 March for Science, the 2017 Women’s March, or the 2014 People’s Climate March. Grandiosity is never too grand. But when it comes to the substance of teaching and learning, the academic left prefers to think small. Small courses on small topics are the trend. These are followed by small academic requirements for small intellectual goals.

The Left’s taste for intellectual smallness is a relatively new thing. No one would accuse Marx or his 20th-century followers of harboring small intellectual designs. What has happened to turn the revolutionary class to a preoccupation with paper bags and plastic water bottles? What turned the rightful heirs of the Great Terror into the apostles of microaggressions? Why has the vanguard of world history and multiculturalism suddenly settled into a fascination with the equivalent of collecting intellectual lint?

It’s worth a read, but “The Left’s taste for intellectual smallness” isn’t that relatively new. Chastened by the ineffectiveness of Lyndon Johnson’s bloated Great Society, angered that the suave metropolitan JFK had been replaced by the cornpone Johnson, Democrats first turned against the Vietnam War, and then turned increasingly insular and cynical. By 1968, Robert F. Kennedy had rejected his brother’s forward-looking pro-American “New Frontier” worldview for the nascent doomsday environmentalism that would obsesses the left to this day. As I wrote in 2011 in a post titled, “Welcome Back My Friends, to the Malaise that Never Ends,” “Compare RFK’s rhetoric as he tells a classroom of young kids that they were doomed to spend their adult lives trapped in a Soylent Green-style eco-apocalypse, with the optimism of his brother, and it was clear that the end of the New Frontier was well in sight:”

CALIFORNIA MAN HAS HOME RAIDED, GUNS CONFISCATED AFTER TRYING TO REGISTER AR-15:

The issues stem from a new California gun law, one of the strictest in the country, which redefined an “assault weapon” and required anyone with a gun that fell under the new definition to register it with the state. Joe Pilkington, a court-recognized firearms expert, told the news station that California’s continually changing gun laws can be very difficult to navigate without professional help.

“Just in the last few years, there have been lots of changes in gun laws,” Pilkington told KGET. “Making an effort, a good faith effort to comply with these really complicated laws, should count for something. There is this self-registration application on the Department of Justice website, but it may be better to talk to an FFL [Federal Firearms License holder]. Someone who has a license, to talk through whatever these complications are.”

The National Rifle Association said Kirschenmann’s ordeal is proof that even those who attempt to comply with California’s gun laws can still get caught up in them.

Related: Almost Half of San Fransisco Bay Area Residents Want to Leave.