BECAUSE “COLONEL JAMES T. KIRK” IS JUST WRONG: Why the Space Corps needs to use naval rank.

FBI TARGETS L.A.’S CITY HALL, DEPARTMENT OF WATER AND POWER IN SCATHING INVESTIGATION:

FBI agents descended on Los Angeles’s City Hall and a public utilities agency Monday amid a wide-ranging federal probe into the local government, according to a new report.

Federal agents targeted City Hall, law enforcement sources told the Los Angeles Times, with an FBI van spotted outside the section that houses City Attorney Mike Feuer and several other government departments.

A rep for Feuer refused to say whether agents had come into the city attorney’s office, the Times said.

But the FBI publicly acknowledged that its investigators, armed with a search warrant, were at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power on Monday.

Related: “‘It looks bad,’ said Jaime Regalado, professor emeritus of political science at Cal State Los Angeles. ‘Nobody wants to believe that their city is going down a dark path. There is a point where the voting public will start to wonder, ‘What else will these investigations turn up?’’”

To be fair, Los Angeles has been “going down a dark path” for quite some time.

AT AMAZON, Summer Deals on Men’s Athletic Shoes.

THE MONOPOLY MONEY THEORY OF GOVERNMENT:

Print it, and they will spend.

Sadly, there’s nothing new or uncommon with this kind of thinking.

ASSEMBLING THE SQUAD WAS ROGER STONE’S GREATEST POLITICAL DIRTY TRICK EVER: Ilhan Omar Seems Determined to Make Minnesota Vote Republican.

Related: Omar is living the smug life: “So today, I forgot to condemn al Qaeda, so here’s the al Qaeda one. I forgot to condemn [female genital mutilation]. Here that goes. I forgot to condemn Hamas. Here that goes.”

More: Judicial Watch files ethics complaint on Omar.

BY LYING: How the Left Turned Words Into ‘Violence,’ and Violence Into ‘Justice.’

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Plus, deals on Office and School Supplies.

CHECK YOUR SOURCES: Pulitzer Columnist Cites SPLC in Branding the GOP a ‘Hate Group.’

MEDIA MYTH ALERT: ‘Johnson is said to have said’: Squishy attribution, thin documentation, and the ‘Cronkite Moment.’

A credulous reference to the “Cronkite Moment” appeared the other day in a column by the Los Angeles Times television critic, who waxed nostalgic about TV coverage of the first manned mission to the lunar surface 50 years ago this month. (“We went to the moon on television,” the column declared.)

The column also stated that in 1968, Cronkite “took time on the CBS Evening News to declare Vietnam ‘a stalemate,’ which some credit as turning the tide of public opinion against the war: ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite,’ President Johnson is said to have said, ‘I’ve lost Middle America.’”

There’s much to unpack in that sentence.

Read the whole thing.

EVERYTHING IS PROBLEMATICAL: Ivanka Trump’s New Dog Is Supposedly A Sign Of Her White Supremacism.

IMPORTANT NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: The First Major Review of Menstrual Cups Has Just Given Its Verdict.

HEH: Sanders Campaign Raises Pay To $700 Per Hour By Laying Off Everyone Except Bernie.

Note to Snopes: It’s the Babylon Bee, so this is satire — or is it?

GOOD CALL: Drug case to blame for Pence’s canceled NH trip.

The CEO of a New Hampshire drug treatment center Vice President Mike Pence was set to visit earlier this month said one of his staffers has been fired for pleading guilty to trafficking in fentanyl.

That staffer, a former offensive lineman for the New York Giants named Jeff Hatch, was reportedly the reason Pence never landed at the Granite Recovery Centers headquarters in Salem, N.H., according to Politico.

Granite Recovery Centers CEO Eric Spofford said in a statement to the Herald Monday night that he has taken immediate action.

“I am shocked and disappointed to learn today that Jeff Hatch has pled guilty to a drug offense. Granite Recovery Centers terminated Jeff’s employment today immediately upon learning about this matter,” Spofford said.

Politico reported Monday that Pence abruptly canceled his trip to Manchester, N.H., July 2 when he learned of Hatch’s drug case, with Air Force Two never leaving the ground.

No big conspiracy or secret crisis — just avoiding embarrassing optics.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Don’t kid yourself. This is just the cover story: We all know it was aliens.

HOT OFF THE PRESS!: Today, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is releasing a new report on school discipline at the intersection of race and disability. Just one example of its many errors: The report claims that students of different races misbehave at the same rates. That would be great if true it were true.  But it isn’t true.  And it isn’t doing students any favors to pretend.

If you prefer truth to the Commission’s many errors, please read my dissent.

Local control of schools is important.  The Commission’s majority is trying to justify federal control.  Don’t let them.

MICROBIOME NEWS: Gum Disease Bacteria a Novel Treatment Target for Alzheimer’s?

GOOD COP/BAD COP: Why Trump keeps Bolton. “Trump has a strongly held theory of Bolton’s value, according to senior administration officials and advisers to the president, including people who have privately recommended to Trump that he fire Bolton. Seven sources who have discussed Bolton with Trump told me the president says having Bolton on his team improves his bargaining position and gives him a psychological advantage over foes like Iran and North Korea.”

Some nice reporting from Axios, but this conclusion has been obvious since the beginning of their relationship, yes?

DE BLASIO SUGGESTS GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER OF CON-ED AFTER HEAT FORCES SHUTDOWN.

Socialist proposes seizing the means of energy production. That invariably ends up just swell.

OH: South Bend Cops Warn of ‘Mass Exodus’ as Morale Plummets Over Buttigieg’s Mishandling of Shooting.

SORRY, I CAN’T HANDLE BEING ANY MORE ATTRACTIVE. Men look more attractive, trustworthy after plastic surgery, study shows. I’d be a babe magnet, and I’m already so busy.

Related: ‘Daddy-do-overs’: Men increasingly getting plastic surgery.

UNCOOPERATIVE WITNESS: Ilhan Omar Marriage Flummoxes Media Fact-Checkers.

After reviewing the dearth of evidence collected by those suggesting that Elmi was Omar’s brother, Diaz assigned two reporters to come to a conclusion.

“We felt as journalists, if there was smoke, it’s our job to look behind it to see if there’s fire,” Diaz said.

The paper’s biggest impediment to finding the truth was Omar, Diaz added.

“What’s really made it hard is that she’s been unwilling to address any of these questions,” Diaz wrote. “That has fueled the controversy.”

“We’ve asked her these questions, and also asked her to make her father available. We’ve tried to reach Elmi. We’ve tried to reach her sisters. Her family could put this (the question of Elmi’s relationship to Omar) to rest easily. No one will talk to us. I wish we could send a reporter to Mogadishu (Somalia) but we don’t have the bandwidth.”

Diaz currently says there is “circumstantial evidence that begs for some kind of explanation from a member of Congress,” but his team is unable to reach a conclusion either way without more information from Omar. The Free Beacon has also been unable to come to a conclusion.

That’s an awful lot of smoke.

RIP: Chris Kraft, NASA Mission Control’s Founding Father, Dies at 95.

Perhaps the New York Times’ obit for Kraft was already written, as it curiously fails to explore the seething hotbed of sexism and white supremacy that was the early NASA, according to the latest reporting by the New York Times.

YES:

I hear this line of criticism fairly often from people who are not very bright or well-informed; in truth, I have never complained of “being silenced.” As I have written and said probably 200 times, the mob-mentality culture of conformism and homogeneity is a relatively minor problem for people like me — people who are in the controversy business, for whom this sort of thing is only a vexing professional hazard — but it is a very large problem for people who are not employed in writing and speaking about public affairs but nonetheless threatened with educational or employment sanctions for holding unpopular views. You hear about people like me because we are media figures, but the people who really have to worry about this sort of thing are Starbucks managers in Philadelphia and Silicon Valley nerds who are dumb enough to believe that the bosses at Google mean it when they ask them for their opinions.

Which brings us to the problem of trying to have a productive conversation with people who are caught up in the vast sprawling electronic apparatus of self-moronization. It does not matter what anybody actually has said or written. The rage-monkeys have an idea about what it is they want you to have said, or what people like you are supposed to think about x or y. . . .

The fundamental problem is that what’s going on in “conversations” such as these is not conversation at all but a juvenile status-adjustment ritual. These people do not care about ideas — they care about who sits at which cafeteria table in the vast junior high school of American popular culture.

Someone should write a book on this.

IT’LL BE A NICE TEST JAUNT FOR OUR FIRST OPERATIONAL ORION CRAFT: 6 Challenges We Need To Conquer on Our Way to Mars. The boom-boom one, not the boring space capsule one.