TODAY: Critics slam Trump ‘social media summit’ over far-right invitees.

YESTERDAY: The L.A. Times Suppresses Obama’s Khalidi Bash Tape.

That’s different because shut up — or is this a “past performance is no guarantee of future results” moment?

CESSPIT BLUES: Worldwide Twitter Outage Leaves Users Unable to Express Their Outrage.

I’M NOT SAYING IT’S ALIENS, BUT IT’S ALIENS: Two Dutch Shipwrecks From WWII Just Vanished Near Malaysia.

DAVID SOLWAY: The Republic Is Collapsing: The Time to Act Is Now.

ELECTIONEERING: Pete Buttigieg Panders to Black Voters With Intensive Affirmative Action Plan.

GREAT. SO NOW WE’RE SUPPOSED TO WORRY ABOUT THIS, TOO? Earth’s Core Has Been Leaking for Billions of Years.

HUH: Jeffrey Epstein’s Fortune May Be More Illusion Than Fact.

Mr. Epstein is routinely described as a billionaire and brilliant financier, and he rubbed elbows with the powerful, including former and future presidents. Even after his 2008 guilty plea in a prostitution case in Florida, he promoted himself as a financial wizard who used arcane mathematical models, and he often dropped the names of Nobel Prize-winning friends. He told potential clients that they had to invest a minimum of $1 billion. At his peak in the early 2000s, a magazine profile said he employed 150 people, some working out of the historic Villard Houses on Madison Avenue.

Much of that appears to be an illusion, and there is little evidence that Mr. Epstein is a billionaire.

Mr. Epstein’s wealth may have depended less on his math acumen than his connections to two men — Steven J. Hoffenberg, a onetime owner of The New York Post and a notorious fraudster later convicted of running a $460 million Ponzi scheme, and Leslie H. Wexner, the billionaire founder of retail chains including The Limited and the chief executive of the company that owns Victoria’s Secret.

ALSO FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES: Jeffrey Epstein Was a ‘Terrific Guy,’ Donald Trump Once Said. Now He’s ‘Not a Fan.’

“Now?”

Trump reportedly kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago more than 15 years ago, long before his recent legal troubles, or even those of 11 years ago:

President Trump has not said much about the arrest of his former friend Jeffrey Epstein, but court documents suggest that he made his opinion of the convicted pedophile well known years ago.

An ongoing lawsuit between Epstein and Bradley Edwards, who represented multiple underage victims in their civil suits against the convicted pedophile, reveals that President Trump banned Epstein from his private club in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago.

The reason for that, according to the filing, was that Epstein had ‘sexually assaulted an underage girl at the club.’

That “now” story was a truly shitty attempt at a hit job from the NYT’s Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman, but nothing unexpected.

THAT’S KIND OF THE IDEA: North Korea Says South Korea’s F-35 jet acquisition extremely dangerous action.

YES. THAT’S WHY DEMS OPPOSE IT SO VICIOUSLY. The Census Should Ask About Citizenship to Keep House Representation of Citizens Fair.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: After Miami charity pulls out of strip club golf tourney, Trump Doral cancels event.

Prudes ruin everything.

SATIRE… OR IS IT? Women’s Soccer Team Sues To Overturn Unjust Law Of Supply And Demand.

I’ve spent years lobbying for legislation outlawing unintended consequences, but no one in Washington will listen.

STILL SOARING: Buzz Aldrin is looking forward, not back — and he has a plan to bring NASA along.

The famed science fiction author Robert Heinlein is credited with saying, “If you can get your ship into orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere.” The basic gist of this is that, for any space mission, getting off the surface of the Earth and into free fall around the planet consumes half of your energy cost.

For this reason, a lot of aerospace engineers have long argued that deep space missions should be staged out of low-Earth orbit. And as Aldrin has thought about the current state of NASA and private industry, he has come around to this way of thinking, too. He therefore envisions building the “Gateway” not near the Moon but rather in low-Earth orbit. From this gathering point, missions could be assembled to go to the Moon or elsewhere. Aldrin calls this a “TransWay Orbit Rendezvous,” or T.O.R., because it represents a point of transferring from one orbit around Earth to another.

“This T.O.R. plan may be the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Aldrin said.

Good stuff from Ars Technica. Read the whole thing.

BIG PHARMA WINS: White House Kills Prescription Drug Rebate Plan. “Taking slush money back from well-healed groups like Cigna’s Express Scripts, CVS Caremark, and UnitedHealth’s OptumRx, and putting it in the hands of sick people… well, that’s as close to a political no-brainer as I’ve ever seen. Yet the vested interests in Washington were powerful enough to strangle it in the crib.”

WATCH: Merkel’s Health in Question as She Uncontrollably Shakes for Third Time in Less Than a Month.

THE PARTY OF DEPENDENCY: Why Do Democrats Hate Jobs So Much?

Despite the widely-understood laws of economics, and the documented history of the effects of a minimum wage, Democrats continue their “Fight for $15” as if it were a worthy objective. From their repeated actions, one could reasonably conclude their minimum-wage hikes are efforts to punish companies, from small businesses up to the largest corporations, rather than an attempt to help those at the bottom of the economic class.

It would certainly be consistent with decades of anti-business policies and rhetoric dished out by the political left.

We finish by asking a relevant question about the minimum wage that’s never posed in public: From where does government obtain the authority to force private enterprises to part with greater sums of their earnings than they otherwise would?

They took that power, and we let them.

OH: Joe Biden Used Tax-Code Loophole Obama Tried to Plug. “Former vice president structured his speaking, writing business in a way that cut his tax bill.”

Mr. Biden and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, routed their book and speech income through S corporations, according to tax returns the couple released this week. They paid income taxes on those profits, but the strategy let the couple avoid the 3.8% self-employment tax they would have paid had they been compensated directly instead of through the S corporations.

The tax savings were as much as $500,000, compared to what the Bidens would have owed if paid directly or if the Obama proposal had become law.

“There’s no reason for these to be in an S corp—none, other than to save on self-employment tax,” said Tony Nitti, an accountant at RubinBrown LLP who reviewed the returns.

I’m old enough to remember when paying your fair share was patriotic.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Leakers Say the ICE Raids Are a Comin.’ “Some resistance clowns leaked to the WAIT FOR IT….WAIT…WAIT…The New York Times that the ICE raids that were cancelled a few weeks ago will go forward on Sunday. Where are the arrests of all the people who are leaking to the corporate resistance media? I was told that there are investigations underway for the perpetrators within the Trump admin who are leaking information that is classified and/or life-threatening? Who knows what danger these ICE agents face if the criminal aliens decide to arm up and resist arrest, all of which will take place in public. What could go wrong?”

WASHINGTON IS PRETTY MUCH JUST A GIANT SLUSH FUND: FCC Dings Left-Wing Nonprofits For Using Federal Program To Finance Pet Projects.

OF COURSE HE DID: Jeffrey Epstein Moved Freely in Hollywood Circles Even After 2008 Conviction.

On March 20, 2016, guests at Warner Bros.’ Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice premiere in New York began whispering about one man mingling among the A-list crowd. No, it wasn’t the film’s Ben Affleck or Henry Cavill, or Affleck’s hulking bodyguard, who almost knocked over the studio’s former marketing head Sue Kroll as the VIP area became too crowded.

The surprised looks were aimed at Jeffrey Epstein, who was being introduced to guests by New York society doyenne Peggy Siegal. When a Warners executive was asked at the time how a highly recognizable level-three registered sex offender landed the hottest ticket in town, the executive offered no comment.

As Epstein’s July 6 arrest for sex trafficking of minors in New York and Florida dominates headlines, news outlets have focused on the billionaire’s ties to powerful government officials, including Presidents Clinton and Trump. Equally troubling are Epstein’s long-cultivated relationships within Hollywood and New York media circles, where he moved with ease well after his high-profile 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from girls as young as 14.

Nice reporting from Hollywood Reporter, but I’d take their apparent umbrage more seriously had they covered the story with this much energy any time from, say, 2009 to last Friday.

ED MORRISSEY: Who Should Really Be Worried About the Epstein Case? Bill Clinton.

Actually, what Giuffre said in 2015 (under her maiden name of Virginia Roberts) was that she’d seen Clinton around on the island, directly contradicting Clinton’s claims now. That’s a point that Fox skips in this parenthetical. Giuffre also said in the Enquirer interview that she didn’t witness him having sex with anyone, but that doesn’t mean it never happened, either. At any rate, his presence on the island with Epstein raises a lot of questions about what it was that Clinton saw — and why Clinton never spoke out about it.

And if Giuffre is correct about Clinton being on the island, it might turn out that Epstein has some pictures in his possession that would corroborate Giuffre. Or rather, Epstein might have had them in his possession, until Saturday night’s raid. Given that circumstance and the corroborated version of the conversation between Pecker, Nunberg, and Trump, one would think that Clinton’s potential risk here would be a bigger story than Trump’s single briefing about Epstein from Pecker.

I wondered out loud on a Right Angle segment (due out later this week) if maybe Hillary should be worried, too. If the DOJ is suddenly willing to press serious charges against someone with Epstein’s wealth and influence…

Still a longshot, but I can hope.

WUSS NATION: 14-Year-Old Suspended for Being Seen with an Airsoft Gun on Snapchat. “An eighth-grader was suspended from his Silver Spring, Md., private school for three weeks — and not allowed to graduate with his class.”

That’s obscene.

ME, EITHER: Ted Cruz ‘Not Remotely’ Satisfied with Big Tech on ‘Political Censorship.’

LORD, BUT SHE’S STUPID: AOC: ‘Patriarchy Has No Gender.’

BUBBLES BURST: Joe Montana Relists California Estate at 41% Discount. “Football great Joe Montana is giving up his castle—a roughly 500-acre European-style estate in California wine country—for $28.9 million, or 41% less than he first sought a decade ago.”

AOC ON COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENTS: ‘I wonder if they’re trying to keep me busy.’ “Apparently the stress of having to sit in congress, as a congresswoman, and endure congressional-type activities is cutting into her real job of being on social media and shedding fake tears over empty parking lots. She said, ‘I was assigned to some of the busiest committees and four subcommittees. So my hands are full. And sometimes I wonder if they’re trying to keep me busy’.”

Bless her heart.