JOANNE JACOBS: What will Arizona parents choose? “The 21st-century one-room schoolhouse could be the big winner in Arizona, which has ‘expanded the frontier of school choice,’ writes Max Eden, an American Enterprise Institute research fellow.”

NEVER HEARD OF AMBER MCREYNOLDS?: Hayden Ludwig of the Capital Research Center (CRC) explains she could be the key player in making permanent the mail-in voting “reforms” Democrats used so effectively in 2020.

QUESTION ASKED: WTH Happened to Boris Johnson?

A fascinating deep dive into what the hell is going on in the UK… And some pushback against the conventional wisdom. It seems it wasn’t one thing with Boris… it was everything: The lefty politics, the lying, the more lying and exhaustion with the drama. That’s the closest parallel to Trump America; the exhaustion many felt with the antics of the former president. But Johnson is a much deeper and sharper cookie; where Trump and Johnson are twins is in the lack of personal discipline. And both paid a heavy price.

Another key point about the Johnson term: He didn’t govern like a conservative. When you pull the proverbial lever for a candidate on the right, you expect him to, you know, be on the right. But the UK is laboring under higher taxes (the highest in half a century), labor unrest, green new deal style edicts etc. And no one wanted Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s politics without the winning smile… We jest, but not much.

But… but but but. Boris Johnson was wonderful on Ukraine, a star among leaders in his commitment to the defense of liberty and stalwart calls for more aid to beleaguered Kyiv. He also delivered Brexit, and spoke eloquently in pushing for separation from the cucumber-measuring-lawn-mower-regulating uber-bureaucrats in Brussels. That should not be forgotten.

At the end of the day, Johnson brought himself down. There’s a lesson there for all the actors on the American political stage.

Earlier: Boris Johnson Missed His Churchill Moment: The pandemic was Boris’s biggest test. He failed.

KA-BOOM: Ukraine Is Bringing a Big Gun to a Knife Fight: But U.S. and European multiple launch rockets alone aren’t enough to put Ukraine on the front foot for a counteroffensive.

And in the early telling, it’s a stage of the war that the Russians did not anticipate, experts said. Russia has used cannons to batter its enemies from afar for three centuries, and officials knew that the U.S.-made precision missiles were coming for months, even sending a formal diplomatic letter to the U.S. State Department in April to try and warn off the Biden administration. There’s a reason that the Kremlin was nervous. The truck-mounted system weighs nearly 18 tons and can fire six precision-guided missiles at a time and then can quickly skedaddle, cutting into Moscow’s firepower advantage in massed artillery that is about 3-1 in the Donbas region.

Yet Russia still left itself open to a counterpunch. Early in the war, it left long, vulnerable supply convoys that were ravaged by Ukrainian sneak attacks during the Kyiv offensive. Now, they’re facing the same sort of ambush—from afar, while the vaunted S-400 air defense systems Russia brought into Ukraine have been helpless against the low-altitude threat.

Can Russia win a Pyrrhic victory in Ukraine? Maybe, though personally I doubt it. Can it win a non-Pyrrhic victory? Nope. That window has already closed.

BEER. IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Brewery serves up refreshing take on hurricane preparedness.

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: California law AB-5 is screwing over 75,000 truckers and will make inflation worse while Dems are tanking.

Related: VDH on California’s Brylcreemed governor: Gavin Newsom’s Weird Idea of ‘Freedom.’

THIS ONE ISN’T NEARLY FINISHED PLAYING OUT: More Fallout for Democrats From 10-Year-Old Rape Victim Story.

HMM: Lifestyle, not aging, may best determine dementia risk, study says.

JOE DOESN’T NEED ANY HELP FORGETTING: What’s the ‘Sleepy Joe OG’ Weed Strain? Snoop Dogg Will Tell You. “ The cannabis case has everything – Russian, Ukrainian and Chinese flags and it reads ‘you won’t even remember what country you are in!’”

RIOTS FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME: AOC Freaks out Over Being Trolled in Public Days After Defending Harassment of Justice Kavanaugh.

Just days ago, AOC mocked the public harassment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh that ran him out of a DC restaurant.

To summarize, it’s totally cool for protesters to harass a Supreme Court justice in public, causing him to have to escape out the backdoor of a restaurant. That’s just democracy in action, and AOC is all for that. In fact, she’s so for it that she’ll make fun of anyone who complains about it. But if a comedian makes jokes about her on the Capitol steps, she wants law enforcement to arrest the guy while she becomes enraged at the fact that that type of public protest is even allowed.

Did you get all that?

“I will never understand the pearl clutching over these protests.” Perhaps she’s getting it now — or, likely not.

(Classical reference in headline.)

DO TELL: U.S. Public Health Agencies Aren’t ‘Following the Science,’ Officials Say: ‘People are getting bad advice and we can’t say anything.’ “The calls and text messages are relentless. On the other end are doctors and scientists at the top levels of the NIH, FDA and CDC. They are variously frustrated, exasperated and alarmed about the direction of the agencies to which they have devoted their careers. . . . Why are they embarrassed? In short, bad science. The longer answer: that the heads of their agencies are using weak or flawed data to make critically important public health decisions. That such decisions are being driven by what’s politically palatable to people in Washington or to the Biden administration. And that they have a myopic focus on one virus instead of overall health.”

PAULA BOLYARD: Why PJ Media’s Reporting on the 10-Year-Old Rape Victim Matters. “The important thing to understand about this story is this: The man who raped a young girl is now behind bars. While we can’t say for sure, it appears that what prompted his arrest—remember, it was the day after Megan appeared on Fox News—was Megan’s reporting and the involvement of Ohio’s attorney general.”

Read the whole thing.

THE BENEFITS OF CIVILIZATION: I’m a Midwesterner living in NYC who shopped at Publix for the first time, and I see why Southerners are obsessed.

THE USA TODAY HEADLINE: Starbucks is closing 16 stores nationwide due to personal safety concerns.

The reality: 15 are on the West Coast, one is in Washington, DC.

REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: The Feds Pile Up Vaccine ‘Adverse Event’ Reports as They Decry Scaremongering Elsewhere. “Since the Food and Drug Administration authorized the first vaccines for COVID-19 in late 2020, the government and much of the media have insisted that the medicines developed in record time are safe and effective. Those who raised questions about them have been routinely dismissed as conspiracy theorists. And yet an online database co-administered by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control has compiled more than 1.3 million reports of vaccine-implicated ‘adverse events’ running the gamut from mild to severe, including 29,000 deaths.”

All vaccines have side effects, of course, but the moralizing and self-righteous censorship regarding this vaccine has been particularly egregious. But, as with Fauci’s recent remarks, there seems to be a bit of a climb-down going on.

THEIR APPEAL IS BECOMING MORE SELECTIVE: Adios, Muchachos! Breakfast Taco-Americans Hand Divorce Papers to Woke Democrats.

READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro Wireless Earbuds with MagSafe Charging Case. #CommissionEarned

NOW OUT FROM KURT SCHLICHTER: We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.

ANOTHER CRISIS BY DESIGN: Why Biden Could Come Back From Saudi Arabia Empty Handed. “The Middle East is just the right place to go when oil supply is concerned. Unfortunately for President Biden and for consumers in America and elsewhere, the biggest oil producers in the Middle East have very little to offer in the short term to alleviate the pain at the pump. Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest crude oil exporter, may not have the capacity and/or the willingness to tap deeper into capacity despite the continuous calls from major oil-consuming nations.”

The Left’s war on American energy production is a license for OPEC — and the Saudis in particular — to print money. Why would they help Biden (at their own expense) out of the hole he dug himself?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Professor: Climate change is ‘white colonization of the atmosphere.’

Why are our universities such open cesspits of pseudo-science and frank racism?

DON’T BOTHER GRAMPA WHEN HE’S NAPPING: What Could Go Wrong Next? Nationwide Railroad Strike Looms for Monday, and Biden’s Asleep at the Switch.

INSURRECTION! Harvard Law instructor: ‘It is our civic duty to accost’ the ‘6 justices who overturned Roe.’ “Harvard Law clinical instructor Alejandra Caraballo recently took to Twitter call for the public harassment of the six Justices who voted in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade. ‘The 6 justices who overturned Roe should never know peace again. It is our civic duty to accost them every time they are in public,’ Caraballo wrote.”

I remember when higher education, and legal education, were defended as helping to promote a healthy civil society. Now they look more like producers of intellectual toxic waste.

I’M HOPING TO BE ABLE TO FIGHT THIS:  “Excusing Misbehavior Is Bad for Kids and Schools, But That’s What Biden Admin Want to do for ‘Equity.‘”  (Here’s my argument.  Oh, and here’s more … I’ve been hammering on this nail for a while.  It’s important.)

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY:

What did greens use to heat their homes before wood? Natural gas.

DID YOU HEAR? VACCINES DON’T WORK WELL AGAINST COVID: It must be true because Dr. Anthony Fauci said it.