FASTER, PLEASE: Revolutionary ‘Artificial Pancreas’ Is Proving to Be Incredible For Type 1 Diabetics.

BLUE WAVE? Arizona Senate Race Heating Up – Blue, not Red.

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: Comey’s Memos Indicate Dossier Briefing Of Trump Was A Setup.

Keep in mind that nothing we now know about the dossier had been reported at the time. It wasn’t yet reported that it was used by the FBI to provide a substantial basis to wiretap at least one Trump affiliate despite the fact it was unverified. It wasn’t yet reported that the product was bought and paid for as a Hillary Clinton campaign operation, or that it was secretly funded by the DNC using a law firm as a pass-through to hide its provenance in federal campaign filings. It wasn’t yet reported that its author’s working relationship with the FBI was terminated because he had lied to the agency about how he wouldn’t talk to the media.

After nearly a year of wrangling, the seven memos written by Comey were finally handed over on Thursday to Congress, which oversees the operation and funding of the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ). The memos purport to show Comey’s version of his interactions with the president before Comey was fired last May. According to Daniel Richman, the original recipient of Comey’s leaks who now claims to be his personal attorney, Comey gave him four memos. Four of the seven memos are classified, meaning that at least one of the memos he leaked was classified. By his own account, Comey orchestrated these leaks to the media in order to launch an aggressive special counsel to avenge his firing by Trump in May 2017. The memos given to Congress on Thursday were quickly leaked to the media.

Read the whole thing.

ASKED AND ANSWERED: Why Does Russia Build So Many Doomsday Weapons?

TIDE POD CHALLENGE ACCEPTED: Booker on Lowering Voting Age to 16: ‘I Want to Consider It.’

BILL GERTZ: PACOM Pacom Nominee Says China Military Islands Now Control South China Sea. “Admiral urges rapid U.S. buildup of hypersonic and medium-range missiles to counter China threat.”

WAR: UAE forces intercept Iranian drone carrying explosives intended for Yemen targets.

NOT THE ONION: Democratic Party files suit alleging Russia, the Trump campaign, and WikiLeaks conspired to disrupt the 2016 election. Someone must think this is good for fundraising.

JIM GERAGHTY: James Comey’s Stellar Windiness.

Comey mentions that the New York Times editorial board called Bill Clinton’s pardon of Rich “a shocking abuse of federal power,” and he adds that Clinton’s pardon of a fugitive was, to his knowledge, unprecedented. But he also writes, “In the end, we did not find sufficient evidence to bring any charges and closed the case.” From his mention of the Times editorial and the unprecedented nature of the pardon, we get a vague sense that Comey disapproved of Clinton’s pardon, but no real elaboration about how this shaped Comey’s perspective on him.

He moves on to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and quickly swats away the claim from Clinton defenders that this was merely a harmless mistake. “There were thirty-six e-mail chains about topics that could cause ‘serious’ damage to national security and eight that could be expected to cause ‘exceptionally grave’ damage to the security of the United States if released.” But he spends a lot of time discussing the difficulty of proving intent. Does Comey really believe that every one of these emails was an innocent mistake, and that Clinton never realized what she was doing?

Comey offers a passage lamenting the absurdity of Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s request that he refer to the questioning about Clinton’s e-mails as a “matter,” not an “investigation.” But Comey went out and did it anyway, telling reporters that he was confident that “personnel assigned to the matter” would be “able to do it in a professional, prompt, and independent way.”

Comey points out that in October 2015 and April 2016, President Obama declared that Clinton had merely made a “mistake” that had not endangered national security, but laments, “To this day, I don’t know why he spoke about the case publicly and seemed to absolve her before a final determination had been made.”

It’s weird that someone who spent almost two decades relieving the Clintons of the burdens of their criminality would fail to recognize someone else doing the same thing.

A LITTLE LATE TO WORRY ABOUT THAT: Duke Students Who Hijacked Alumni Event: Punishing Us Would Hurt Us Mentally: Activists who stormed the stage were shocked when alumni in the audience dared to heckle them. “Readers may find it remarkable that these students expected the other people in the room to applaud and validate them for derailing the event.”

Entitled twits. They need to learn that their actions have consequences. Plus: “Nuzzolillo expressed disappointment that the adults ‘whose job it is to care for us’ failed to do so.” Remember when people sent their kids to college to become mature adults?

THE WORKING CLASS CAN KISS MY FOOT: From Thomas Piketty, of all sources, an illuminating graph of how parties of the working class in the USA, Britain, and France all became parties of university graduates.

How left-wing parties in France, Britain & the US went from being parties for workers to parties for university graduates

Source: Piketty pic.twitter.com/cc5ldlyYBj

— Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) April 20, 2018

(The title of this post comes from a scurrilous old British ditty about class warfare, sung to the tune of The Red Flag, which went “The working class can kiss my foot, I’ve got the foreman’s job at last.” The actual word sung may not have been foot.)

BUT IS HE THE EGGMAN? NY Gov. Cuomo Says He’s Muslim, Female, and Jewish, Among Other Things.

RICH LOWRY: Why has the Republican Congress given up on doing anything?

In a gift for the ages, Republicans won all elected branches of the federal government in 2016. They had no reason to expect Trump to win the presidency, and, in fact, very few of them expected it. The initial ecstasy over Trump “signing their stuff” has given way to the reality that they don’t have stuff to send him.

Republicans couldn’t roll back ObamaCare, in part because the party hadn’t thought through what the Republican alternative was — even though anyone could have known this would be the central question if the GOP ever got a legitimate shot at repeal.

They passed a tax cut that included important reforms that even the Democratic repeal bills don’t want to completely undo and that are boosting the economy.
That’s all to the good. But tax cuts aren’t a magic political elixir.

First, Trump is right, as he said at an event a couple of weeks ago when he tossed away his script, that they are boring. They don’t have the emotive appeal of issues like trade and immigration. Second, there are limits to how effectively you can run on the one big thing you accomplished last year (and as of this November, it will be almost exactly a year ago).

This is the truly extraordinary aspect of the current situation. Republicans are content not to do anything else of significance in Congress this year. They passed an omnibus spending bill that was rightly denounced as a disgrace by Trump even as he signed it, and the Senate is working to confirm Trump appointees.

That’s pretty much it.

I keep saying the GOP should legislate like there’s no tomorrow. Instead, they’re legislating (or rather, not legislating) like they don’t care if they have a tomorrow.

UNEXPECTEDLY! “The nation’s largest cities and metropolitan areas — home to a majority of Democratic voters — are at the forefront of the party’s most vexing racial, ethnic and class conflicts.”

PROCUREMENT BLUES: Russia’s Shipbuilding Program: Postponed Blue-Water Ambitions.

Russia’s shipbuilding program for 2011–2020, under which the country plans to build over 100 new warships (Military Paritet, February 7, 2012), is reportedly causing “a very bad feeling” among some Russian naval experts (Topwar.ru, August 10, 2016). They describe the current status of the Russian Navy as a “ceremonial fleet” and have suggested that one third of the shipbuilding program has resulted in little more than a “donut hole” (Nezavisimoe Voennoe Obozrenie, December 22, 2017; March 3, 2018). The ongoing production difficulties appear linked to insufficient naval shipbuilding capacity and a problematic manufacturing process.

Forget a blue-water navy, Russia can’t even afford more than a couple hundred of its new T-14 tank, and is instead concentrating its efforts on further modernizations to its existing (and ancient) T-72 and T-90 models.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UMN tells students that ‘privilege’ helps them ‘level up.’

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I WANT TO SEE A LIST OF JOURNALISTS FUSION GPS PAID: Congress Pursues Clinton for Hiding Fusion GPS Payments.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Comey Memos Released and Much, Much More. “What’s the big deal with these memos? Trump comes out looking pretty good which is the big deal. If your goal is to destabilize, undermine and de-legitimize the Trump administration, these memos throw a wrench in that plan.”

HMM: Comey’s Memos Indicate Dossier Briefing Of Trump Was A Setup. “Newly released memos written by former FBI director James Comey indicate that an early 2017 briefing for then-President-elect Donald Trump about the contents of an infamous dossier was held so it could be leaked to media outlets eager to report on the dossier’s allegations. In multiple memos, Comey specifically mentioned that CNN had the dossier and wanted a ‘news hook’ that would enable the network to report on its most salacious allegations even though they had not been verified.”

I’M OK WITH THIS: Mammals are smaller than they used to be, and it’s our fault. “Human dispersal coincided with a reduction in the average body size of mammals.”

In Africa at the dawn of human dispersal, mammals were already smaller, on average, than those living elsewhere in the world, with a mean body mass about half that of Eurasian mammals. Smith and her colleagues say that was probably the legacy of thousands of years of interactions between hominins and other African mammals, which drove larger species extinct and exerted pressure that reduced the size of the surviving species. Not only modern humans, but also our ancestors, had a major impact on mammal populations.

“This finding suggests that the homogenization of natural ecosystems was a consequence of hominin behavior in general and not specific to H. Sapiens,” Smith and her colleagues wrote.

But as humans spread into Eurasia around 120,000 years ago, mean mammal size there decreased by half. And it dropped by an order of magnitude shortly after humans arrived in Australia between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago. But nothing changed in the Americas until the terminal Pleistocene, between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago—and humans didn’t get there until sometime around 15,000 years ago.

Making your competition (and potential predators) smaller is a good survival strategy, even if it’s inadvertent.

JOEL KOTKIN: Delusions of Justice: American Jews should wake up to which side their most dangerous enemies are on.

Since the election of Donald Trump, prominent American Jews, notably in the Reform movement and among the intelligentsia, have lamented the resurgence of right-wing anti-Semitism, seeing it as the greatest threat to their community in the United States. The rise of xenophobic and often marginally anti-Jewish parties in Eastern Europe—even with fewer Jews left there to persecute—has deepened the alarm. Yet by far the greatest threat to Jews, not only here but also abroad, comes not from zombie fascist retreads, but from the Left, which is increasingly making its peace with anti-Semitism.

This shift was first made clear to me about 15 years ago when, along with my wife Mandy, whose mother was a Holocaust survivor from France, I visited the legendary Nazi-hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld. They predicted that the primary threat to Jews in Europe increasingly would come not from the centuries-old French Right, some of whom had supported the Nazis, but from the Left, in alliance with a growing Muslim population. Time has proved their assertion to be, for the most part, on target. In Sweden, for instance, never known for its persecution of Jews, only 5 percent of all anti-Semitic incidents, notes the New York Times, involved the far Right, while Muslims and leftists accounted for the rest. Germany’s recent rash of anti-Semitic incidents has coincided with the mass migration of people from regions where hostility to both Jews and Israel is commonplace. At European universities, where pro-Nazi sentiments were once widely shared, anti-Israel sentiments are increasingly de rigueur. The growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, aimed at cutting all ties with Israel, often allies itself with anti-Jewish Islamist groups, some with eliminationist agendas for Palestine’s Jews.

Many politically active Jews, though, see themselves as leftists first, and Jews second.

BLUE ON BLUE GOES BLUE: Bernie Sanders may sing Cardi B’s praises — but sex workers say he’s no ally.

That’s a Salon link, just so you know.

SOLVING MYSTERIES: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. What Bitcoin Is Really Worth May No Longer Be Such a Mystery. “It’s somewhere between $20 and $800,000, according to economic theory and a night of drinking.”

Well, I guess that’s settled then.