WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Dallas DA says he won’t prosecute ‘low-level’ crimes like theft and felony drug possession.

Creuzot, a Democrat, has angered local and state officials, and importantly police unions, with his decree that his office will no longer be prosecuting what he has non-technically referred to as “low-level” crimes. As a recent Dallas Morning News op-ed put it, “shook” the people tasked with law enforcement and government. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he has them “shook.”

The new agenda for the new district attorney is, he says, aimed at ending “mass incarceration” and jail time for “technical” violations which aren’t a threat to public safety. That includes a lot drug offenses, and although his letter informing the county residents of his overall plan was only published a week ago, he’s already dismissed more than 1,000 drug possession cases since taking office this year.

I’m all in favor of decriminalizing drug use, but refusing the prosecute theft seems like a very bad idea.

BUT WHO’S COUNTING? Liberal Media Mentions ‘Impeachment’ 309 Times in the 24 Hours After the Mueller Report.

A media with any respect for their viewers or themselves might be expected to say, “Man, can you believe we yammered on about impeachment for two years?” at least 309 times after the Mueller Report was released.

But no.

THERE THEY GO AGAIN: NYT Times Article: Jesus Was Likely A ‘Palestinian,’ Not White. “History lesson for NYT editors: Palestinians are Arabs. Arabs didn’t conquer the area until 700 years after Jesus was crucified. Jesus was not an Arab.”

KAROL MARKOWICZ: The case for cultural appropriation in food.

Cultural appropriation, especially when it comes to food, is good. It’s what we should want in our big, crazy melting pot.

It’s so boring to argue over whether food is exactly the way it’s been made for centuries or whether the chef has blood pure enough to make it. What do the culture police win at the end of it? The same food made the same way until the end of time?

Or is it really just about finding a way to berate white people?

Last week a new Chinese food restaurant in New York City called ‘Lucky Lee’s’ was the subject of a ‘cultural appropriation’ brouhaha because its owners aren’t Chinese. And a few days ago, Gordon Ramsay’s new ‘Asian eating house,’ Lucky Cat in London, got slammed for its lack of authenticity.

Yet nobody seems to care that many sushi restaurants are owned by Chinese people or that nearly all the Indian restaurants in New York are owned by Bangladeshis. There was no uproar when ‘Korean tacos’ became a thing. No, ‘cultural appropriation’ is only used as a cudgel by progressives with an agenda. It gets old.

If it tastes good, do it.

DON’T GIVE UP: The man who decided to give up everything but beer for Lent has ended his fast.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Sayonara Ohio: The Democrats’ Buckeye Blues. “Ohio is the swing state which might not swing left anymore — and Democrats have no one to blame but themselves.”

BENDGATE II FALLOUT: Samsung’s Galaxy Fold Smartphone Release Delayed.

The Galaxy Fold phone—priced at nearly $2,000 and the industry’s first mainstream foldable-screen device—was slated to hit shelves this week in the U.S. But problems with phones being used by reviewers have changed those plans, the people said.

The new rollout is expected in the coming weeks, though a firm date has yet to be determined, they said.

Though the company’s internal investigation remains ongoing, the Galaxy Fold phone’s reported issues stem from problems affecting the handset’s hinge and extra pressure applied to the internal screen, the people said.

Even if they sort out what’s causing the line down the middle of the screen, and fix the screen’s protective layer which practically begs users to peel it off, Samsung will still be left trying to sell an extremely thick, $1,980 folding phone which doesn’t even fold flat.

YOU DON’T SAY: Renewable energy mandates are costly climate policies. ” The study indicates that such mandates do reduce carbon emissions — but at a far higher cost than more market-oriented policies like a carbon tax, said Greenstone, former top economic adviser to President Obama.”

Interesting that this is coming from a former Obama hand, and published by Axios.

CHANGE: Boris Johnson pulls 17 points clear of closest Tory leadership rival in latest survey of Conservative Party members.

VIDEO: Michael Moore Crashes Beto Rally, Crowd Turns On Moore.

SARAH HOYT: Shhh… Someone Did Something to ‘Easter Worshippers’ in Sri Lanka.

It’s impolite to use the C-word, apparently.

WELL, YES: U.S. Will Import Less Latin American Oil No Matter What Happens To Venezuela.

“WORLD EDITOR” AT BUZZFEED NEWS:

Well, that’s a take.

BILL GERTZ: U.S. Intelligence Institutionally Politicized Toward Democrats. “John Gentry, who spent 12 years as a CIA analyst, criticized former senior intelligence leaders, including CIA Director John Brenan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former deputy CIA director Michael Morell, along with former analyst Paul Pillar, for breaking decades-long prohibitions of publicly airing their liberal political views in attacking Trump.”

PRIVACY: That mental health app might share your data without telling you.

By intercepting the data transmissions, they discovered that 92 percent of the 36 apps shared the data with at least one third party — mostly Facebook- and Google-run services that help with marketing, advertising, or data analytics. (Facebook and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.) But about half of those apps didn’t disclose that third-party data sharing, for a few different reasons: nine apps didn’t have a privacy policy at all; five apps did but didn’t say the data would be shared this way; and three apps actively said that this kind of data sharing wouldn’t happen. Those last three are the ones that stood out to Steven Chan, a physician at Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, who has collaborated with Torous in the past but wasn’t involved in the new study. “They’re basically lying,” he says of the apps.

The researchers don’t know what these third-party sites were doing with this user data. “We live in an age where, with enough breadcrumbs, it’s possible to reidentify people,” Torous says. It’s also possible the breadcrumbs just sit there, he says — but for now, they just don’t know. “What happens to this digital data is kind of a mystery.”

You don’t have to be a user of Facebook’s or Google’s services for them to have enough breadcrumbs to ID you.

MARK ELLIS: Tea Party Memories: The Way It Was.

It was a noble movement, choked to death by hucksters, establishment Republicans, and Obama’s IRS.

UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: U.S. Authorities Arrest Ex-Marine for Anti-Kim Raid on Spanish North Korean Embassy.

CRY ME A RIVER: Clintonworld stews over Mueller report.

I couldn’t find much of anything in Alex Thompson’s Politico report that wasn’t carrying water for the Clinton camp specifically or Democrats generally, so you can safely skip this one.

SAD: US Love Affair With Cars Nearly Finished.

THAT WOULD BE NICE: Oil Could Fall To $40 If OPEC Abandons Its Deal.

Siluanov said that lower oil prices would then have a negative impact on U.S. oil production, an argument that was also made as far back as late 2014 when the Saudis sought to drive U.S. producers out of business by opening the oil production spigots in spite of an already flooded global oil market.

“(If the deal is abandoned) the oil prices will go down, then the new investments will shrink, American output will be lower because the production cost for shale oil is higher than for traditional output.” He said that prices could drop to $40 per barrel or even less for up to one full year, adding that there had been no decision on the deal yet and he did not know whether OPEC countries would be happy with this scenario.

Siluanov’s comments aren’t without precedent. Russia has hinted before that it could start to pump more oil, which would in effect cause the world’s second-largest oil producer to nullify its participation in the OPEC+ oil cut deal put in place at the start of the year to remove 1.2 million b/d of oil from the market for six months, with a review period after this time.

As American frackers keep improving efficiencies, the market price they can bear and still return a profit continues to decline. ExxonMobile is eyeing getting productions costs down in the Permian to $15 per barrel, and unlike most OPEC producers (and Russia), our domestic producers are private and don’t have as their primary mission filling the State’s coffers.

Unlike 2014, the last time the Saudis tried to cut off American frackers by opening their pumps wide, now domestic producers are much better hedged financially against another big price drop.

Perhaps the real indicator of OPEC/Russia’s desperation is that this is the first time in my memory that they’ve gone this long without cheating like mad on their production quotas.

Things like that make me think that Siluanov is mostly bluffing.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: The Mueller Report Beat Goes On and Much, Much More. “I’ve been right all along about this entire special counsel fiasco. The report is a political document, not a legal one. If you did not buy into the false RUSSIA collusion narrative, you will read the second part of the report outlining the ‘obstructive’ behavior of Trump as the actions of an angry man who was unjustly accused. You will see Trump’s behavior as that of someone who was getting absolutely pummled all day and all night in the media and by Democrats who were making it impossible to for him to govern and were undermining his legitimacy as president. Trump wanted to stop the Democrat-media harrassment not cover up a crime. You may remember the #resistence’s plan was to delegitimize Trump and the goal of the Mueller team was to wait until the Democrats took control of the House to turn the report into a political weapon if they couldn’t charge the Trump folks with RUSSIA-related crimes.”

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Should a White Man Be the Face of the Democratic Party in 2020?

Is a white man the best face for an increasingly diverse Democratic Party in 2020? And what’s the bigger gamble: to nominate a white man and risk disappointing some of the party’s base, or nominate a minority candidate or a woman who might struggle to carry predominantly white swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that both Barack Obama and President Trump won?

Obama’s race didn’t stop him from winning those states, and Trump didn’t win them because he’s white. Just enough Obama voters in those states took a chance on Trump, because they felt they’d abandoned by the Democrats — and they have been.

Stories like this one show the Democrats haven’t learned that lesson. In fact, they don’t seem to realize that there’s even a lesson in need of learning.

But let’s keep that part amongst ourselves.

CHANGE: Microsoft staff are openly questioning the value of diversity.

Some Microsoft employees are openly questioning whether diversity is important, in a lengthy discussion on an internal online messaging board meant for communicating with CEO Satya Nadella.

Two posts on the board criticizing Microsoft diversity initiatives as “discriminatory hiring” and suggesting that women are less suited for engineering roles have elicited more than 800 comments, both affirming and criticizing the viewpoints, multiple Microsoft employees have told Quartz. The posts were written by a female Microsoft program manager. Quartz reached out to her directly for comment, and isn’t making her name public at this point, pending her response.

“Does Microsoft have any plans to end the current policy that financially incentivizes discriminatory hiring practices? To be clear, I am referring to the fact that senior leadership is awarded more money if they discriminate against Asians and white men,” read the original post by the Microsoft program manager on Yammer, a corporate messaging platform owned by Microsoft. The employee commented consistently throughout the thread, making similar arguments. Quartz reviewed lengthy sections of the internal discussion provided by Microsoft employees.

“I have an ever-increasing file of white male Microsoft employees who have faced outright and overt discrimination because they had the misfortune of being born both white and male. This is unacceptable,” the program manager wrote in a comment later. The Microsoft employees who spoke to Quartz said they weren’t aware of any action by the company in response, despite the comments being reported to Microsoft’s human resources department.

Wow.

RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! Rep. Seth Moulton enters 2020 race.

OH: Former NXIVM Sex Cult Employees: Kirsten Gillibrand’s Father And Stepmother, Second Cousins, Were Very Active In Sex Cult.

Nothing to see here; no one but Democrats are involved.