MEDIA ARE PLAYING GAMES YET AGAIN WITH ANONYMOUS RUSSIA LEAKS.

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

CUE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN: Seattle Mayor Durkan Very Upset that CHOP’s ‘Summer of Love’ Has Landed On Her Doorstep.

UPDATE (From Ed): The End of the Summer Of Love? Crews begin removing barriers around Seattle’s ‘CHOP’ zone.

Related: One teen killed, one injured after fourth shooting near Seattle’s CHOP.

AMMO TECHNOLOGY HAS COME A LONG WAY: First Look: Speer Gold Dot Carry Gun Ammunition.

AT AMAZON, Shop Amazon Warehouse Deals – Deep Discounts on Open-box and Used Products.

Plus, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

I HAVE A ‘NEW COLD WAR’ TWOFER FOR OUR PJMEDIA/TOWNHALL VIP MEMBERS: Assessing China’s True Strengths.

AND: Assessing China’s True Weaknesses.

If you’ve been thinking of becoming a member, you can do so here — and don’t forget to use that VODKAPUNDIT discount code.

LANDMARK VICTORY FOR PARENTS IN U.S. SUPREME COURT SCHOOL CHOICE CASE.

I’M NOT SAYING IT WAS THE RUSSIANS, BUT IT WAS THE RUSSIANS: An Unexpected Radiation Spike Has Been Detected Over Europe.

HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Asteroid impact, not volcanoes, made the Earth uninhabitable for dinosaurs.

TYLER O’NEIL: This Might Be a Little Too on-the-Nose, Even for Robespierre…

Q&A: The Masterminds Behind Toyota’s Self-Driving Cars Say AI Still Has a Way to Go.

WALTER MONDALE, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Biden’s record-setting tax increases will take your money — and your job.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton ran for president proposing $1 trillion in tax increases. Would President Trump’s blue-collar boom ever have gotten off the ground with such a back-breaking tax burden?

But now, four years later, former vice president Joe Biden thinks he has a better idea. In his third run for the White House, Biden is proposing tax increases of nearly $4 trillion over the next 10 years. If he wins in November and these increases were to pass, they’d be the highest in American history — indeed, in world history.

Taxes aren’t the only way that Biden will ensure you have less money: Biden’s fracking ban will derail environmental and economic gains.

Classical reference in headline:

WOW, AN ACTUAL RECOGNITION OF REALITY: “It’s not coincidental that two weeks after demonstrations happen here in Miami-Dade County, a lot by young people, that we’ve had this spike.”

Not only did the demonstrations spread the disease themselves, authorities’ toleration — and even encouragement of and participation in them — convinced people that the whole social-distancing thing was unnecessary, and maybe even a fraud. Maybe that wasn’t the intended message, but it was the one that was received, and that was entirely predictable.

I REMEMBER WHEN THE NISKANEN CENTER WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A CIVIC-MINDED LIBERTARIAN THINK TANK: President Of Leftist DC Think Tank Attacks St. Louis Homeowners, Says He Would ‘Beat Their Brains In.’

Here’s the archive of his tweets.

RIP, ALAN BRADY: Carl Reiner, actor and Dick Van Dyke Show creator, dies at 98.

WHOSE LIVES MATTER? Six Chicago children shot dead in a single week.. “You know with the pandemic you had a lot of churches was closed. Everything was closed. That left our youth on the streets, that left them out there with nothing to do, a lot of time on their hands and I’ve been doing this since 2006 and I never, ever saw the violence like this.”

BATTLESWARM BLOG: Scenes From the Social Justice War. “It’s getting harder and harder to craft individual blog posts when so much news keeps coming down the pike and it’s all related to everything else. Antifa is riots is #BlackLivesMatter is #DefundThePolice is Marxist revolution is cancel culture is civilian disarmament is George Soros is mainstream media bias is the Democratic Party.”

That about sums it up.

IT TAKES RESOURCES TO FIGHT THE WOKE MOB: At Legal Insurrection, the “Summer of Love” Fundraiser.

IN TODAY’S AMERICA, MOST TALK ABOUT RACE IS EITHER ABOUT MAKING ELITE WHITES FEEL BETTER ABOUT THEMSELVES, OR HELPING THEM GET ONE UP ON LESS-ELITE WHITES: What ‘woke’ whites get wrong about blacks’ priorities. “This month’s protests started out as a black movement against police brutality, but they have a different look now. In many cases, whites have taken over.”

RADICAL CHIC: THE GERITOL YEARS. Roger Kimball: America’s current straits represent the victory of 1960s radicals.

America’s cultural revolution, launched in the late 1960s and never quite stopped, has always been a Janus-faced phenomenon. One face was the Boomers’ euphoric hedonism and disregard for the moral guardrails of tradition and authority — the “revolution” of easy sex and relentlessly bad taste that now defines our aesthetics and cultural arrangements.

The other face was dour and vicious, masking a raw hunger for power under a preening moralism. This side of the revolution could be detected in many countercultural phenomena, not least the juvenile activism and noisy readiness for ­violence that were such conspicuous features of the age.

Today, the revolution is presenting this second face to a complacent America.

In the late ’60s and ’70s, hundreds of bombs were detonated as various radical groups carried out their campaign against “Amerika.” According to The Los Angeles Times, “in California alone, 20 ­explosions a week rocked the state during the summer of 1970.’’

How many will we see in the summer of 2020? Not so long ago, the vicious radicalism of the 1960s seemed behind us. Now it seems to have come roaring back.

Read the whole thing.

HOW CONSUMED WITH HATRED DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO ROOT FOR COVID-19?: Krugman-level hatred.

TRUE, BUT HE’S COUNTING ON THE MEDIA TO HELP HIM BRAZEN IT OUT: Gov. Cuomo is in no position to brag about New York’s coronavirus response.

And if DeSantis, as Cuomo claims, “lost,” the scoreboard doesn’t reflect it. Florida has a larger population than New York state but has registered fewer than one-third as many coronavirus cases. Florida has seen 15 COVID-19 fatalities per 100,000 population; New York, 160. With 46,000 deaths between them, New York and its sibling New Jersey have combined for more fatalities than France, Spain and Italy.

Cuomo has gotten a lot of credit from the public for taking the pandemic seriously and for being calm and forthright with statistics. But he still refuses to admit error for his disastrous March 25 directive, which remained in effect until June 10, to force nursing homes to accept infected people, although he keeps changing his story about who is to blame for the death toll in those facilities. Now it’s all Trump’s fault; now it’s the nursing-home staff.

His latest gambit, to declare that New York’s alleged victory over the disease was really a case of love conquering all, while insisting the real problem lies in states where there have been nowhere near as many fatalities as in his own, delights the media, always eager to play along with a red-states-are-evil propaganda campaign. The relative death counts tell a different story.

Related: Why oh why is NY Governor Andrew Cuomo being praised for his coronavirus response? Governor Andrew Cuomo does not deserve kudos for his COVID-19 policies. He put the elderly at great risk.

TWO COUNTRIES, ONE SYSTEM: China Imposes ‘Security Law’ on Hong Kong, Bringing in CCP ‘Reign of Terror’ With ‘Secret Police.’

MASK DROPPED. Democrats’ Official Twitter Account Equates the Fourth of July and Mount Rushmore with White Supremacy:

Since deleted, but not before being screencapped by loads of conservatives on Twitter, and recorded by the Archive.Today Webpage Capture app.

UPDATE: “Perhaps Biden and Pelosi can hire the Taliban. They have experience removing monumental sculpture.”

(Bumped.)