LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Democrats Announce Who Will Make Political Balloon Animals at the Debate.

BUFF WITH ITALIAN FRIENDS: The link headline is literally accurate. Check out the photo: A USAF B-52 flies in formation with other U.S. and Italian aircraft in an exercise over the Adriatic Sea. If you expected something else, then shame on you.

It’s actually a fine photo snapped on a beautiful day. Adriatic islands, magnificent aircraft, blue water with a boat wake. Congrats to the USAF staff sergeant who took it.

By the way, happy Flag Day.

TRADE WAR 2019:

…the Trump administration is conducting two calculated national security operations in which America’s vast, varied and flexible Economic resources serve as the administration’s primary big stick.

Talk softly while wielding a big stick — that was Theodore Roosevelt’s sound bite dictum. In 2019 we have the Trump administration, and soft-spoken it is not. But that warrants a historical reminder: TR could get loud and large, a bit like DT.

I suggest you read the entire essay. And did I mention I have a new book? Well, reasonably new. Trade War 2019 is a wicked cocktail — especially for China.

A REMINDER ABOUT HOW THE SWAMP VIEWS FLYOVER COUNTRY: “Members of the American Federation of Government Employees turned their backs on Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue on Thursday, apparently over plans to relocate them from Washington to the Kansas City area.”

Perdue announced Thursday that two of the Department of Agriculture’s research agencies, the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, will be relocated to be closer to major farming regions, according to Politico.

Kansas City? But where will they get their vegetarian meals?!

HE SEEMS NICE: AOC spokesman tweets, then deletes, F-bomb rant against potential GOP challenger.

PREPARING THE BATTLESPACE FOR 2020: Twitter Escalates Censorship of Conservative Media.

FASCINATING: Critical Projection: Insights from China’s Science Fiction. “The nature of ‘New-Wave’ SF very much reflects China’s complexity and its future aspirations. Hopes and fears are intertwined and framed by a sense of destiny. Over the past 12 years, the themes of China’s SF canon have moved away from concerns of everyday life to far loftier, and literally celestial, aspirations. Cixin Liu’s short story, The Sun of China, captures a sense of a nation capable of realising its own goals rather than have its place in the world determined by others. This resonates with a national vision which has been expressed in terms of Jintao’s ‘Chinese Dream’, the more philosophical aspects of Xi Jinping‘s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative, and the Chang’e lunar programme. China casts itself as an agent in its future and seems to have the ideological and financial capital to realise its visions.”

JUST THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVE WITH BYLINES… BECAUSE THEY ARE: ‘How to lie by omission’: James Taranto and Jeryl Bier obliterate media’s 2014 vs. 2019 ‘internment camp’ spin in 2 maddening threads.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Jury Hated Oberlin.

In my view, the main significance of the jury’s verdict is that is shows how normal people react when they are exposed to today’s campus leftism. You cannot sell to a normal person the idea that it is “racism” for a store to catch a student stealing a bottle of wine, and call the police, merely on account of the student’s skin color. Social justice warrior culture is insane, and is properly judged as such by normal people, who–luckily for them–tend not to encounter it often. The jury’s reaction to the demonization of Gibson’s bakery is, I think, a good indication of how most Americans will respond if, and when, they realize how depraved the Left has become.

Indeed. Read the whole thing.™

TAKE NOTHING FOR GRANTED: Fear of a blue Texas: New GOP group to spend millions registering Republicans.

TRUMP: SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS IS STEPPING DOWN AS PRESS SECRETARY AT THE END OF THE MONTH.

Running for governor isn’t just something Trump stuck in his tweets to be nice. According to Kaitlin Collins, Huckabee Sanders has been talking up the idea herself. Which makes sense. Between her father having served as governor for years and her own service as the face of Trump’s White House, she must have close to universal name recognition in Arkansas. How many local pols can say the same?

All she needs is for Trump to win reelection in 2020. The governor’s seat will be occupied until 2022 by Asa Hutchinson, who’s term-limited. If Trump wins a second term, she’s formidable and maybe the favorite. If Trump gets beat, eh. Maybe she’ll look like damaged goods as the GOP’s Trump personality cult transforms into something else.

Unlike George W. Bush’s press secretaries (much to his administration’s great regret, in hindsight), Huckabee was the first spokesperson for a Republican administration since the days of Spiro Agnew who actually called out the DNC-MSM media complex’s partisan biases. Or as Steve Hayward writes at Power Line, “She always treated the press with the mien of a kindergarten teacher angry and disappointed with a bunch of unruly toddlers. But the daily press briefing has outlived its usefulness. It is now mostly a forum for TV personalities like Jim Acosta to preen and prance.”

Speaking of which: ‘What bias tho?’ Andrew McCabe’s negative comment about Sarah Sanders cracks up MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.

HE’S LITERALLY HITLER™: Tim McGraw Says Americans Should ‘Quit Demonizing Each Other.’

CLOSE CALL:  On this day in 2002, a 73-meter asteroid came within 74,000 miles of Earth (approx. one-third the distance to the moon).

If you didn’t notice it, don’t feel bad.  Scientists didn’t see it either until three days later.

If it had hit us, it was capable of causing devastation on the scale of the Tunguska event, which destroyed about 800 square miles of forest in Siberia in 1908.

When the big one comes around–the one with Earth’s name on it–let’s be ready to spot it well ahead of time and deflect it.

OPEN THREAD: Away in paradise, but thinking of you.

ROGER SIMON: The Selective Prosecution of Kellyanne Conway.

Why is the left such a cesspit of misogyny and mansplaining?

BILL DE BLASIO, CONTINUING TO MAKE FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE:

Shot:

Chaser: New York City Landmarks Historic Bookstore The Strand Over Owner’s Objections.

New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Committee (LPC) just wouldn’t take no for an answer. The group has conferred landmark status on the 119-year-old building at 826 Broadway, which has housed The Strand Bookstore since 1956. The owners of The Strandbought the building in the late 1990s and the third-generation owner of the store, Nancy Bass Wyden, opposed the action, telling Reason earlier this year:

The Strand is not going anywhere. There’s no need to protect it. Our family’s been a great steward of the building. Landmarking would add another component of government. You add bureaucracy, you add committees, you add people having opinions about what we should do inside the store as well as outside the store. And that does not allow me the flexibility to change with the retail book environment and to serve our customers.

Bass Wyden (who is married to Sen. Ron Wyden, the Democrat from Oregon) presented 11,000 signatures to the LPC in hopes of dissuading landmark status. Such popular support for what is generally considered New York’s best bookstore cut no mustard.

—From Nick Gillespie at Reason on Tuesday.

NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO MAKE NEW FRIENDS FROM ACROSS THE AISLE: Over-the-counter birth control? Bring it on, writes Dr. Jeffrey A. Singer of the CATO Institute in today’s New York Daily News.

Earlier: Ted Cruz offers to team up with AOC to make birth control available over-the-counter.

And if you missed it from Glenn in USA Today: I’m a libertarian and I agree with AOC on over-the-counter birth control.

REP. MARCIA FUDGE (D-OH) MAKES SURPRISE IN-KIND CONTRIBUTION TO TRUMP 2020 CAMPAIGN: Fudge On House Floor: Trump Supporters Ignorant, Dumb, Immoral, Unpatriotic Racists (Video).

GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION: Ronan Farrow looks at media crowd and says he sees liars.

The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow sure knows how to get a media crowd buzzing.

The Pulitzer Prize winner accepted a Mirror Award for media reporting from Syracuse University on Thursday for his stories on sexual misconduct at CBS, including allegations that toppled the corporation’s former leader, Leslie Moonves.

Like other award winners, he saluted fellow journalists and industry leaders at the Manhattan luncheon for bravery in producing stories that keep the media honest and transparent — even at the cost of burning bridges and losing job opportunities.

At the same time, he said “I can see people who have lied to protect power.”

Perhaps he was looking into a mirror.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Libs Angry at Biden for Scolding Gender-Neutral Person.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: U.N. Chief Poses for Time Cover Off ‘sinking’ Pacific Island Nation That’s Actually Growing in Size.

Well that’s good to know. But what are the odds of the island capsizing?

THEODORE DALRYMPLE ON OPIODS IN AMERICA: Signs and Symptoms of Malfeasance.

Last year, 49,000 Americans died of opioid overdose, or (more accurately) opioid-related overdose, since in most cases the opioids were taken in conjunction with other drugs. The opioids were the necessary, if not the sufficient, cause of death, for the other drugs, easily available with or without prescription, would not have caused death if taken on their own. It is therefore reasonable to ascribe the 49,000 deaths to opioids. Since 1999, 350,000 Americans have died of such overdoses.

American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts is an account of this disaster by the Guardian newspaper’s Washington correspondent, Chris McGreal, with a special focus on West Virginia, one of the states most affected by the epidemic. Indeed, the author takes West Virginia as a microcosm of the United States, the more readily comprehensible due to its small population.

The book is ill-written, reading like an extended but not very carefully crafted newspaper article in the weekend supplement of a serious newspaper. But it is nevertheless interesting both in what it says and what it omits to say.

* * * * * * * *

However, underlying this book is an Animal Farm mentality: that is to say, four legs good, two legs bad. Those with two legs—the manufacturers, the wholesalers, the doctors, the licensing authorities—are bad, while those with four legs, the people who actually took the drugs, are good. What the author does not see is that this attitude dehumanizes the victims completely, even if his two-legged people were as bad as he says they were (and as I think they were).

Over and over again, McGreal denies any personal responsibility to the people who took the drugs. He regards addiction straightforwardly as an illness, something that strikes in the same way as, say, Parkinson’s disease. (This is the line peddled by the egregious National Institute on Drug Abuse, the federal institution that somehow managed to congratulate itself on its successes and increase its funding while hundreds of thousands died on its watch, an absurdity beyond the range of satire.)

Read the whole thing.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “Oberlin College hit with maximum punitive damages (capped at $22 million by law) in Gibson’s Bakery case. Added to $11 million compensatory damages, brings total to $33 million.”

From Prof. William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, which has been all over the Oberlin implosion. As Ed Morrissey adds though, “The Gibsons won’t spend the money yet; Oberlin will appeal the award, surely. Better yet, they might want to settle this with a sincere and heartfelt mea culpato save a few million off their endowment.”

I’m not sure that Oberlin’s administrators are actually capable of sincerity, particularly when dealing with what John Ringo dubbed the “townies.”