NO. NEXT QUESTION? Was the moon landing FAKED? Buzz Aldrin appears to admit he never visited the lunar surface.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: ‘Bigfoot Erotica’ Stimulates Intense Congressional Debate.

THAT WOULD BE TERRIBLE: Trump is going to use America’s strong economic numbers to ensure a GOP midterm victory.

MEDICARE FOR ALL TO COST $32 TRILLION: “If Bernie Bro were a language, how would you say ‘sticker shock’ in it?”

Also at the PJM Live Blog: Jeff Sessions casts shade on the SPLC.

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: When No One Is Looking, Many Women Are Watching Gay Porn. This is nothing new. When I was in DC I had a girlfriend was was into gay porn. Her explanation: “It’s twice as much of what I like.” I mean, it’s not as if men watching lesbian porn is anything unusual.

COVERING THE IMPORTANT STORIES: Katz’s Deli, secrets behind keeping a 130-year-old business alive.

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)

MICHAEL LEDEEN: Why the CNN Reporter White House Ban Doesn’t Bother Me.

When I worked in the Reagan administration—first at the State Department, later at the White House—I talked to plenty of journalists. I never spoke “off the record” and I still don’t believe in it (if you don’t want to discuss a subject, just shut up. If you do, put your name on it). There were some unpleasant moments, one with William Safire of the New York Times, who once asked me about a diplomatic matter of some sensitivity. He asked a question that suggested he had been misinformed, so I said he needed some background. He wouldn’t listen, and insisted I just answer his question. I said if I did that, he would be misled, so I declined, and thereafter refused to talk to him. I didn’t think he was entitled to set the agenda, nor did I think he had some sort of “right” to use my time as he saw fit. So I locked him out. Note that I wasn’t at all hostile to Safire’s politics. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I feel the same about the exclusion of a CNN reporter from a White House event.

Read the whole thing.

SHARYL ATTKISSON: Whatever happened to the ‘unmaskings’ probe?

Every day brings new stories about Russian interference in the 2016 election, whether Donald Trump played a role, and alleged abuses by our intelligence agencies.

One of the deepest, darkest, most important issues in the whole mess has to do with the massive number of “unmaskings” of U.S. citizens. It potentially opens a can of worms squirmier than many other issues.

Indeed it does.

NOTORIOUS: Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I’ve got ‘at least five more years.’

Ginsburg was speaking in Manhattan following the performance of a play about the late Justice Antonin Scalia when she made the estimate.

“I’m now 85,” Ginsburg said, according to CNN. “My senior colleague, Justice John Paul Stevens, he stepped down when he was 90, so think I have about at least five more years.”

Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993.

Glenn’s state-based idea for dramatically increasing the size of the court would reduce the influence of judges who remained on the bench past their prime — if any.

IGNORANT COMMIE ANTISEMITES ARE PRETTY RANCID, YEAH: At last… his MPs face up to the rancid reality of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour revolution.

RASMUSSEN: Democrats Like Socialism But Say ‘No’ to Becoming A Socialist Party. “Democrats are less likely to know what socialism is compared to other voters but have a much more favorable opinion of it.”

That last line really says it all, doesn’t it?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Academic journal duped by author of ‘dog rape culture’ article. Well, it’s not as if there was anything there to raise suspicion.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Fights with the Gray Lady and Much, Much More. “Follow this logic with me: Trump’s rhetoric against the media is contributing to rising threats against journalists therefore the media’s rhetoric, fake news, unhinged attacks on Trump are leading to rising threats against FILL IN THE BLANK. See how that goes both ways? The media started it and they are upset because for the first time in forever and unlike his weak, sissy Republican predecessors and elected officials, Trump fights back.”

CHANGE: US re-establishes 2nd Fleet to counter ‘competition.’ “The US Navy has announced it would re-establish its 2nd Fleet after disbanding it to save money in 2011. The fleet will once again patrol the North Atlantic where Russian navy has been flexing its muscle.”

CONSEQUENCES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: The IRS Has Rehired Hundreds of Fired Employees.

NOT EXACTLY MAKING RUSSIA GREAT AGAIN HERE, VLADIMIR: Russia GDP Growth Slows to 1.1 Percent in June From 2.2 Percent in May.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS, THEY’D HAVE NO STANDARDS AT ALL: Mark Levin: Interrupt Obama and reporters are racist, interrupt Trump and they’re heroes.

Hall of Fame conservative radio host Mark Levin is blowing the whistle on what he sees as a double standard over the Trump administration’s move last week to bar a CNN White House reporter from an event after she shouted several questions at the president inside the Oval Office.

On his top-ranked radio show, Levin mocked media that has “circled the wagons” around CNN’s Kaitlan Collins who asked Trump, sitting with European Union Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker, about tapes the cable network had of the president allegedly talking with his former lawyer about payments to a Playboy model.

The White House claimed the questions were rude and came after the press pool was asked to leave the Oval Office. As a result, they barred her from a subsequent event, prompting most media including Fox to defend Collins.

C-SPAN pulled out this section of the scrum showing that the event was over when Collins started asking her questions. Juncker appears to be chuckling at the scene as aides try to get reporters to leave.

Levin raised the double standard and the handling of conservative press by the former Obama administration and how when they were targeted the liberal media didn’t rally for them.

He noted, for example, that three reporters from conservative outlets that endorsed Sen. John McCain’s presidential bid in 2008 were refused entry on the Obama campaign plane. “So he gets rid of the conservatives, gets rid of them, and by the way Glamour magazine and others were allowed to stay on the plane,” said Levin, the latest member of the Radio Hall of Fame.

That’s different, because shut up racist.

HEH: Union Demands Ousted Former President Pull Ad Supporting Right to Work.

Retired St. Louis Police sergeant Gary Wiegert urged voters to support Proposition A, which would ban employers from mandating union membership dues or fees as a condition of employment. Wiegert, the former head of the St. Louis Police Officers Association, criticized “out of touch union officials” for “lying to you about Prop A.”

“I’m a retired union leader. If workers like their union they can keep it,” Wiegert says in the ad, which has garnered more than 3,000 views on the National Right to Work Committee’s Facebook page. “Prop A just gives them that choice … Prop A is good for our workers.”

The association, which publicly backs rejecting right to work, took issue with the ad because Wiegert appears in a union polo shirt. The union sent a cease-and-desist letter to take down the “misleading” ad, which has aired on local radio and television airwaves.

What is it with the Left and policing what shirts people can wear on TV?

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: ‘The truth is we had to leave’: Fleeing Venezuela for Colombia.

“Colombia is a lifeline for western Venezuela,” said Rafael Velasquez Garcia, the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) head of mission in Colombia. “Every day more than 35,000 Venezuelans cross the Simon Bolivar bridge alone to purchase food and receive vital medical assistance, among other services which are not available in Venezuela. Of that number around 4,000 do not return Venezuela – many of whom are without official documentation or status.”

This number does not include those who cross through the “trochas” or trails that are often controlled by Colombian armed groups and/or organised crime groups, which charge migrants and refugees fees and expose them to the risks of recruitment and robbery.

An assessment of Venezuelans in Cucuta and Villa del Rosario conducted by the International Rescue Committee in March 2018 showed that among respondents who spent the last month in Colombia, their self-reported highest priority need was to find a job (89 percent), followed by food (80 percent), and then shelter (58 percent).

Related: On Spain’s Smartest Streets, a Property Boom Made in Venezuela.

As millions of Venezuelans wage a daily fight for survival at home, others have found a safe haven for their money across the Atlantic: Madrid’s real estate market.

During a walk around Salamanca, an upmarket district of the Spanish capital, Luis Valls-Taberner, a real-estate investment adviser, pointed out on almost every street a building that he said a wealthy Venezuelan had recently acquired.

Mr. Valls-Taberner would not identify the buyers. Some properties, he said, were purchased through investment companies based in Miami or elsewhere — but the money always came from Venezuela.

On foot or by private jet, almost everybody seems to want to escape the worker’s paradise.

OH, COME ON. GROW A PAIR. Report: US Therapists See Increase in Patients With ‘Trump Anxiety Disorder:’ A ‘symptom’ is feeling as though the world is going to end.

“Is he gonna blow us all up?”

So inquired one of Elisabeth LaMotte’s patients recently, fretting out loud about the volatility of U.S. President Donald Trump’s actions during a therapy session at her Washington practice.

It was a rhetorical question — one that predated Trump’s threats of a showdown with Iran this week. But if the question wasn’t meant in earnest, the politically induced anxiety LaMotte is hearing about from her clients certainly is, says the founder of the D.C. Counselling and Psychotherapy Center.

She refers to it as a “collective anxiety” among patients who feel on edge about how potentially dire the president’s decisions could be.

“There is a fear of the world ending,” she said. “It’s very disorienting and constantly unsettling.”

It’s also crazy. So I’m glad they’re in therapy.

DE FACTO KURDISTAN: Kurds eye decentralised Syria region in talks with Assad government.

Relations between the Syrian government of President Bashar Al Assad and the Kurdish-led administration in the northeast, the two sides that hold the most territory in Syria, have been pivotal in the course of the seven-year-old civil war.

However, while they have mostly avoided direct conflict, they have articulated sharply opposing visions for the future, with the Kurds seeking autonomy in a decentralised state, and Damascus wanting to restore full central control.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) said it and the government had decided to “form committees on various levels” to develop negotiations, end the violence engulfing Syria and chart a roadmap to democracy and decentralisation. It said it met Syrian government officials in Damascus this week at Assad’s invitation after initial meetings in Tabqa on the Euphrates river that focused on restoring local services.

The talks pointed to moves by the Kurdish-led authorities to seek a deal with Assad to preserve their autonomy as he regained most rebel areas with Russian and Iranian help.

“Molan labe” can refer to hard-won autonomy, too, which will probably be the Kurds unofficial position no matter what Assad decides about how to reconstitute the country.