K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: HS Athletic Director Lets Everyone Make Cheer Team After 1 Parent Complains.

SULTANS GOTTA SULTANATE: Erdoğan vows fresh military action against Kurdish militants.

“In the new term, Turkey will add new operations to the Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch operations,” Erdoğan said, in reference to a 2016 cross-border offensive in Syria and to the Afrin assault. “The operations will continue until not one terrorist is left.”

The elections are hugely important as they will transform Turkey’s governing system into an executive presidency, a constitutional change that was narrowly approved in a referendum last year. As part of the changes, the office of the prime minister will be abolished and its powers transferred largely to the president.

An alliance of opposition parties argue that the new system will lead to one-man rule and have vowed to return Turkey to a parliamentary system with strong checks and balances.

Wish them, and the Kurds, all the luck in the world.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: School severs ties with ‘Unmasking Whiteness’ conference.

IT TOOK SOME A FEW DECADES TO DISCOVER THAT THERE WAS MUCH TO LIKE: Learning to Like Ike.

I NEVER DOUBTED IT: Yes, Pluto is a planet.

The process for redefining planet was deeply flawed and widely criticized even by those who accepted the outcome. At the 2006 IAU conference, which was held in Prague, the few scientists remaining at the very end of the week-long meeting (less than 4 percent of the world’s astronomers and even a smaller percentage of the world’s planetary scientists) ratified a hastily drawn definition that contains obvious flaws. For one thing, it defines a planet as an object orbiting around our sun — thereby disqualifying the planets around other stars, ignoring the exoplanet revolution, and decreeing that essentially all the planets in the universe are not, in fact, planets.

Even within our solar system, the IAU scientists defined “planet” in a strange way, declaring that if an orbiting world has “cleared its zone,” or thrown its weight around enough to eject all other nearby objects, it is a planet. Otherwise it is not. This criterion is imprecise and leaves many borderline cases, but what’s worse is that they chose a definition that discounts the actual physical properties of a potential planet, electing instead to define “planet” in terms of the other objects that are — or are not — orbiting nearby. This leads to many bizarre and absurd conclusions. For example, it would mean that Earth was not a planet for its first 500 million years of history, because it orbited among a swarm of debris until that time, and also that if you took Earth today and moved it somewhere else, say out to the asteroid belt, it would cease being a planet.

To add insult to injury, they amended their convoluted definition with the vindictive and linguistically paradoxical statement that “a dwarf planet is not a planet.” This seemingly served no purpose but to satisfy those motivated by a desire — for whatever reason — to ensure that Pluto was “demoted” by the new definition.

The science is at last settled.

BECAUSE THEY’RE TAUGHT TO BE: Why Are So Many Campus Feminists Anti-Male?

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Will Trump’s Obama voters become a durable part of the Republican Party? The Republicans can hold onto the 2016 election sea change by opening up to black voters and emphasizing loyalty to country over differences.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Will Trump Tap Out of the Iran Deal and Much, Much More. “‘If the President decides to leave the deal, it’s hardly the end of the world — or even bad,’ said Jim Phillips, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. ‘Instead, it should be seen as a necessary step to confront one of the deadliest threats Americans, Israelis, and Gulf Arabs face’.”

WAIT, THATS NOT THE NARRATIVE: April was best month in history for U.S. budget, according to CBO figures.

The federal government took in a record tax haul in April en route to its biggest-ever monthly budget surplus, the Congressional Budget Office said, as a surging economy left Americans with more money in their paychecks — and this more to pay to Uncle Sam.

All told the government collected $515 billion and spent $297 billion, for a total monthly surplus of $218 billion. That swamped the previous monthly record of $190 billion, set in 2001.

CBO analysts were surprised by the surplus, which was some $40 billion more than they’d guessed at less than a month ago.

Analysts said they’ll have a better idea of what’s behind the surge as more information rolls in, but for now said it looks like individual taxpayers are paying more because they have higher incomes.

Unexpectedly!

LIFE AMONG THE DEMOCRATS: Schneiderman called me his ‘brown slave,’ would slap me until I called him ‘Master.’

UPDATE: She’s right:

ANOTHER UPDATE: From the comments: “Toxic masculinity is always descending on the Right but somehow always lands on the Left.”

PEOPLE GOT TO BE FREE: Deregulation Causing Debate Among Some Virginia Hair Stylists.

A new law that goes into effect at July 1st clarifies hair braiding is not cosmetology, and therefore does not require a license.

Virginia deregulated hair braiding licenses in 2012 saying it was limiting job opportunities in an already struggling market. The results have been positive – increasing salon growth by 7 percent – but, teaching professionals don’t necessarily agree with the law.

Virginia Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation found in 2012 that hair braiding showed “no evidence of public harm.” So the state got rid of the nearly 200 hours of training and licensing fees. That deregulation is seen as a victory in the African-American community.

“This is a cultural thing, this is passed down. This is something that we need for our hair so, it’s totally unfair to be charging people to do something like this,” said Destinee Wright with Luxie Hair Services LLC.

But CATEC Cosmetology Instructor Karen Brown says this was the wrong move: “Yes, it is a custom, but most importantly, it truly is a craft.”

She says braiders need formal training.

Paid instructor claims people ought to be required to pay for instruction — how is this worthy of attention?

Rent-seekers need to be mocked, mercilessly.

BYRON YORK: Time to end the crazy secrecy of the Trump-Russia investigation.

On Jan. 24, 2017, then-national security adviser Michael Flynn was questioned by the FBI in his White House office. The session, focusing on Flynn’s transition talks with the Russian ambassador, led to Flynn pleading guilty to a charge of lying to investigators. He is now awaiting sentencing.

But why did FBI agents go to the White House in the first place? We still don’t know precisely, because we have only snippets of information from the various Trump-Russia investigations. There’s no reason it should be a big secret, but it is.

Newly-unredacted portions of the House Intelligence Committee Republican Trump-Russia report say top Justice Department and FBI officials — Sally Yates, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Mary McCord — gave “conflicting testimony” about the “primary purpose” for sending the FBI to question Flynn.

If they’re not telling us, it’s because they don’t want us to know.

EVERYDAY HEROES: Would-be robber dead in St. Louis shootout after victim, 74, pulls own gun.

Update: Just saw this in the comments. “Retaliation gunfire hits home of elderly man who killed robber in North City.”

A neighbor who didn’t wanted to be identified because of fear for his safety, spoke to News 4.

“Two o’clock in the morning, roughly two something in the morning there was some gunfire in the house, whether it was retaliation or whatever it was,” said the neighbor.

Police gave this account of events at the home on Sunday, which may have sparked the drive-by gunfire.

Let’s hope the neighbors pass around the hat for this man.

DOES IT? DOES IT REALLY? New data casts doubt on Facebook’s commitment to quality news.

Some recent data on the best-performing news brands on Facebook seems to show that high-quality new sources are getting less engagement on Facebook and lower quality sites are getting a lot more. This is the exact opposite of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised just last week, when he said the company was working to elevate quality journalism in the news feed, while cutting down on the visibility of fake news and clickbait.

NewsWhip, a social-media metrics company, tracks the “most engaged” sites on the network as measured by likes, comments, reactions, and shares. In its ranking for April, Fox News climbed from third place to first with more than 30 million engagements, while previous leader CNN dropped to second with 24 million. The Daily Mail rose to fourth from seventh and a site called Daily Wire, which specializes in alt-right news, climbed to eighth with 14 million engagements.

“Alt-right news.” Well, the Columbia Journalism Review obviously isn’t “quality news.”

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: AIDS Runs Rampant in Venezuela, Putting an Ancient Culture at Risk. “The disease threatens an entire indigenous population, the Warao people of the Orinoco Delta, as government programs collapse.”

And, this being the New York Times:

Walter Duranty lives.

OUT TODAY: From Salena Zito and Brad Todd, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics. I’ve read it, and it’s well worth your time.

FASTER, PLEASE: Navy’s R&D Wing is Building a Lean, Mean Innovation Machine.

The article is pretty dry stuff, but most anything to untangle the mess of Navy R&D (procurement, too) is probably a good thing.

WELL OF COURSE. WHATEVER ELSE COULD IT BE? STDs in L.A. County are skyrocketing. Officials think racism and stigma may be to blame.

ED MORRISSEY: Dems Getting Pretty Dismayed Over Trump’s Success In Judiciary, Or Something.

Mitch McConnell has set up another half-dozen confirmations this week, and says he will keep the Senate in session long enough to fill as many slots as he can by the end of the year. They will have lots and lots of opportunities to vent their dismay, but little chance of doing anything about it.

Why? Reuters’ Lawrence Hurley doesn’t quite get around to explaining that:

A long-standing Senate tradition that gave senators clout over judicial nominees from their home states has been fraying for years, meaning Democrats have less of a chance of blocking appointees they oppose, as they did with some success during Republican former President George W. Bush’s administration. …

For Trump and his party, setting aside a long-standing Senate tradition may be a worthwhile price to pay to achieve what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has called a top goal: shifting the ideological composition of the federal judiciary to the right.

Ahem. Exactly who was it that set aside long-standing Senate tradition in order to force presidential nominees to the bench through to confirmation? That would be Harry Reid, who changed the rules and ended precedent unilaterally to thwart the Republican obstruction of nominees that had followed the Democratic obstruction during the Bush administration to which Hurley refers.

Kurt Schlichter warned them they wouldn’t like playing under the rules they made up, but did they listen?

DON’T BE EVIL: Every Google Search Results in CO2 Emissions, Researcher Quantifies How Much. “Data is very polluting.”

There’s hardly an environmentalist in the world who could survive a serious application of Alinsky’s Fourth Rule.

NED RYUN: China’s Clear And Present Threat.

OPEN THREAD: Did anything happen today?