BALTIMORE MAYOR LANDED SWEET DEAL SELLING HER SELF-PUBLISHED BOOKS:

Going [the self-publishing] route doesn’t always work out for people because it’s hard to run up sales without the PR muscle of an established publishing house. Recent revelations indicate that Pugh found a way around that obstacle, however. She managed to arrange for the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) to purchase tens of thousands of copies of her books over a period of eight years, netting her at least half a million dollars. Also of note is the fact that she’s been a board member of UMMS for most of that time. And you’ll never guess which facts failed to be reported in her financial disclosure forms and ethics disclosure documents.

The late Jim Wright could not be reached for comment.

Baltimore’s last Republican mayor left office at the start of 1967.

WELL, A SMALL NUMBER OF LEFTY WOMEN WHO WRITE FOR LEFTY PUBLICATIONS, BUT THEN AGAIN, THAT’S WHAT “WOMEN” USUALLY MEANS IN TODAY’S DISCOURSE: Beto O’Rourke’s Candidacy Is Already Making Women Uneasy.

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN RECORDED HISTORY, NOBODY KNOWS: Who Is a Woman for Purposes of Women’s Only Spaces?

WALL STREET JOURNAL: Socialism? Yes, Be Afraid: The next Democratic president will come from a zombie army of anti-capitalists. I plan to emigrate to what will by then be the free-market paradise of Venezuela.

ROD DREHER: Radicalization and Degeneration. “It seems clear to me that it in no way requires one to endorse Tarrant’s vile crimes to recognize that like splitting the atom, the unwinding of Western civilization is going to release some extreme energies. It already is.”

FRANCE: Yellow vest ‘ultimatum’ rally turns violent in Paris. “We have been patient but now we want results.”

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: New Zealand Attack Shows Us That Tribal Score-Settling Has Infected the West. “The attack on the mosques, like Anders Breivik’s murderous rampage in idyllic Norway, happened in New Zealand, ironically rated in 2017 the safest country in the world after Iceland. It’s a sad reminder that no place is exempt from ethnic conflict. Et in Arcadia ego sum, whether Arcadia is Africa, Burma, or Western China. Wherever populations mix under pressure there’s the potential for volatility. As a New York Times article reminded its readers in 2014, the Rwandan massacre had its roots in the population policies of European governments.”

Plus: “The old devils are on the loose and the problem is what to do now. One option is to deliver even higher doses of political correctness and demographic replacement. But perhaps the absolute worst thing politicians can do is respond by collecting guns, imposing hate speech restrictions, and announcing open borders. In the current atmosphere of distrust toward authority, such actions can destroy the only asset a state faced with ethnic conflict has: the public belief that it is above the fray and won’t sell anyone out. That quantity can itself run out and therein lies the danger.”

OPEN THREAD: Make this one yours.

I’M SURPRISED IT’S ONLY 30%: Tumblr Traffic Tanks 30% After Banning Booty. I mean, as far as I could tell, Tumblr was equal parts moody pierced purple-haired teenagers, and porn. And who wants to see moody pierced purple-haird teenagers?

ACADEMIA’S REPUTATION HAS TAKEN A REAL HIT: ‘This time, they got caught.’ Cheating scam rankles, doesn’t surprise.

THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST: Steele admits he used posts from ‘random individuals’ on CNN website for Trump dossier. “The FBI was able to obtain several FISA warrants based on the dossier. Was the FISA judge told that some of the information was from an internet crank?”

The people involved in this should go to jail, just for sheer stupidity. And the FISA court is looking more and more pathetic.

JEB WHO? Jeb Bush: President Trump needs a GOP primary challenger.

He’d rather throw the presidency to the socialist Dems than deal with losing the last election.

VEGAN IS JUST A POLITE WORD FOR EATING DISORDER: Alma-Jade Chanter, from Bristol, was a committed vegan but she now blames the diet for ruining her health.

AT AMAZON, save in Car Care.

Plus, bargains on bestsellers in Beauty and Grooming.

CNN’S RATINGS ARE SHOCKINGLY LOW:

It’s not just the fact that Fox News is stomping the crap out of CNN in prime time where, for example, Tucker Carlson’s 8 p.m. ET audience (3.14 million viewers) is three times larger than Anderson Cooper’s (1.03 million). CNN’s ratings are so low that no show on the network rates higher than 28th in all cable news programming.

You see that the highest-rated hour on CNN (Chris Cuomo at 9 p.m. ET) has an audience of 1.11 million, which is not only dwarfed by Sean Hannity’s audience (3.3 million), but is also smaller than, for example, the 7 a.m. hour of Fox & Friends (1.47 million). The audience for CNN’s morning programming is microscopic — New Day, hosted by Alisyn Camerota and John Berman, gets barely half a million viewers.

How can words convey just how pathetic CNN’s numbers are? You’re talking about a national network, with anchors earning millions annually, supported by a vast staff of reporters, producers, editors and technicians. And at 8 a.m. ET, Camerota and Berman are viewed by an audience of 567,000. By comparison, Olivia Jade Giannulli, the vapid airhead whose mother cheated to get her into college, has 1.9 million YouTube subscribers. That’s right — this idiot teenager can post a makeup tutorial that gets more than twice the viewers of CNN’s New Day.

Sad. Especially when you consider how many of those CNN “viewers” are involuntary airport views.

SOHRAB AHMARI ON THE DESCENT OF MAX BOOT.

BUREAUCRATIC INTERFERENCE WITH THE ELECTED GOVERNMENT: Sen. Lindsey Graham demands answers from the Justice Department.

JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: “How Reuters uncovered Beto O’Rourke’s teenage hacking days…Members of the group, which calls itself Cult of the Dead Cow, protected O’Rourke’s secret for decades, reluctant to compromise the former Texas Congressman’s political career. After more than a year of reporting, Menn persuaded O’Rourke to talk on the record. In an interview in late 2017, O’Rourke acknowledged that he was a member of the group, on the understanding that the information would not be made public until after his Senate race against Ted Cruz in November 2018.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): As always. . . .

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE, CULTURE OF CORRUPTION EDITION: Behind the bribery: US university admissions favor the rich.

EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL:

● Shot: Students globally protest warming, pleading for their future.

—Actual headline by the Associated Press yesterday.

● Chaser:

A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco- refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.

He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.

—“U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked,” the Associated Press, June 29, 1989.

(Classical reference in headline.)

AFTER AOC’S RECENT REMARKS, THIS SEEMS MORE PLAUSIBLE: Fat models on magazine covers — we’re being prepared for the “hungering.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Democratic Party’s Anti-Semitism Problem Is Obama’s Legacy.

ISN’T THAT SEXIST OR TRANSPHOBIC OR SOMETHING? Bill Maher To Dems Ducking Fox News Primary Debates: “Grow A Pair.”

“YELLOW VEST” UPDATE: The Latest: French protesters slam Macron’s ’empty words.’ “Paris police say more than 100 people have been arrested amid rioting in the French capital by yellow vest protesters.”

Plus, “Yellow vest protesters say they have turned out in increased numbers in Paris on Saturday to show President Emmanuel Macron their disappointment after a two-month national debate ended Friday.”

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!

HMM: New evidence links fatal Ethiopian Airlines, Lion Air flights. “All we can say definitely is that the trim was in a position similar to the position found on the Lion Air airplane and it would cause the nose to go down.”