YOU MIGHT NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG, BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOU: The SPLC Wants You to Talk About Microaggressions … in First Grade.

CYBERSECURITY: Brace yourselves: exploit published for serious Magento bug allowing card skimming.

Attack code was published on Friday that exploits a critical vulnerability in Magento e-commerce platform, all bug guaranteeing it will be used to plant payment card skimmers on sites that have yet to install a recently released patch.

PRODSECBUG-2198 is a SQL injection vulnerability that attackers can exploit with no authentication required. Hackers could exploit the flaw to take administrative control of administrator accounts, assuming the hackers can download user names and password hashes and crack the hashes. From there, attackers could install the backdoors or skimming code of their choice. A researcher at Web security firm Sucuri said Thursday that company researchers reverse-engineered an official patch released Tuesday and successfully created a working proof of concept exploit.

Be careful out there.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? An Obamacare Rematch With John Roberts?

Ramesh Ponnuru:

In the current case, opponents of Obamacare are challenging the law on the basis that Congress, in 2017, got rid of the tax on people who go without insurance. The opponents’ theory, endorsed by one judge, is that if the coverage mandate was saved only by relabeling it a tax and then the tax was eliminated, the provision has to be struck down; and if it is struck down, the rest of the law has to be nullified, too, since Congress would not have adopted it without the provision.

It is a screwy case. By choosing to eliminate the tax without touching the rest of the law, Congress in 2017 separated the issues, and the courts, one would think, should follow its lead.

But Biskupic’s story about Roberts’s handling of the Obamacare case seven years ago tells us something more about today’s challenge. It suggests that Roberts is reluctant to move against Obamacare even when considering a case that he thinks has real legal merit.

It sure would be nice to have justices who rule purely on the merits, but as Ponnuru wrote earlier in his piece, “Biskupic’s story makes it sound as though Roberts, and to a lesser extent Breyer and Kagan, engaged in unseemly politicking without much relation to constitutional logic.”

COCAINE MITCH: McConnell sets stage for ‘nuclear option’ to change rules on judges.

McConnell filed cloture — a motion to cut off dilatory debate — on a motion to proceed to Senate Resolution 50, which would dramatically reduce the amount of time Trump’s nominees have to spend on the floor and let Republicans confirm more of his picks.

The resolution would reduce the amount of floor time that must elapse between when the Senate votes to invoke cloture on a nominee and when a final vote is held from 30 hours to two hours.

Faster? Please!

ERIC HOLDER: “When I hear these things about ‘Let’s make America great again,’ I think to myself: ‘Exactly when did you think America was great?'”

I can think of an eight-year span when I started having some doubts, based solely on upper-level management in the Executive branch.

OH: Pelosi calls Barr’s letter on Mueller probe ‘condescending.’

FLASHBACK:

NOTHING TO SEE HERE. MOVE ALONG. Report: John Brennan Met with House Democrats on Capitol Hill Wednesday. “Coordinating a new narrative?”

HMM: Is Mitch McConnell Going All Wobbly on ObamaCare? “At the very least, Politico would like you to think so.”

SANCTIONS: U.S. orders foreign firms to further cut down on oil trades with Venezuela.

The U.S. imposed fresh sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry earlier this year but some companies have continued to supply the country with fuel from India, Russia and Europe.

Washington is particularly keen to end deliveries of gasoline and refined products used to dilute Venezuela’s heavy crude oil to make it suitable for export. Jet fuel and diesel would be exempt for humanitarian reasons, the sources said.

The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced a ban in early February on the use of its financial system in oil deals with Venezuela after April.

But as recently as this week, the U.S. State department has called up foreign firms to say that the scope of the sanctions is wider.

The sources said that the State Department made clear that any kind of oil trade, whether it be direct, indirect or barter, would be considered a breach.

It wouldn’t be a bad thing to help hurry along the demise of Chavismo, but longterm I still wonder if sanctions will prove to have been a mistake.

CHANGE: House Committee Approves Marijuana Banking Bill. “The bill seeks to expand marijuana businesses’ access to banking services.”

BREXIT MADNESS: Will Parliament Vote To Let May Quit? “The defeats of the other alternatives might open the door for reconsideration of May’s deal, especially with her pledge to remove herself from further negotiations. That Withdrawal Agreement comes up for a third vote tomorrow, but Commons speaker John Bercow initially left it a mystery if it would be in order. Bercow insisted that the Commons cannot return to a measure that has already had a vote simply because some MPs might have changed their minds.”

MPs might not be given a second chance to vote the “right” way, but it’s looking more likely that the British people will be.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Yank Schiff’s security clearance and much, much more. “Schiff is the chairman of the powerful committee and he has been parading around the media for two years, squeaking about all the secret information he has seen that we dirty, unwashed dummies have not, and about how his secret information shows that Trump colluded with RUSSIA. Schiff is a punk. We know from the Barr letter on Mueller’s findings that this is not true. Mueller had infinitely more resources than Schiff and he didn’t manage to confirm Schiff’s hallucinations.”

But the media won’t push back on Schiff’s obvious nonsense, so to him it’s “working.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Justin Amash Wants To Kill the Zombified Remains of the Export-Import Bank.

BILL WHITTLE: The Mueller Investigation: Mission Accomplished.

Watch the whole thing.

IF IT MOVES, TAX IT. IF IT KEEPS MOVING, TAX IT. IF IT STOPS MOVING, TAX IT SOME MORE. Proposed NY Real Estate Tax Called ‘Disaster’ for Already Lagging Market.

The “pied-à-terre” tax, part of Democratic state lawmakers’ budget proposals, would target out of state residents and some New Yorkers who buy property valued at over $5 million. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo support the tax.

State senator Brad Hoylman, a fan of socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and co-sponsor of legislation that legalized abortion in New York up until the moment of birth, originally introduced the tax in 2014.

The proposal comes at a time of lagging real estate prices. Last year, the real estate market had its worst year since the financial crisis, as sales fell by 14 percent. In 2018 the median price for an apartment in Manhattan “fell below $1 million for the first time in three years,” CNBC reported.

The pied-à-terre tax would further cause a “dramatic drop” on real estate values in New York, according to an analysis conducted by the Wall Street Journal.

The tax ranges between 0.5 percent to 4 percent on homes valued at $5 million and above. Proponents of the tax say it would raise up to $650 million in revenue per year, though the Journal‘s analysis found it would raise just $471 million.

“The tax is a disaster,” one apartment owner told the Journal. “If you actually put the tax in place, you would massively reduce the value of real estate.”

Real estate brokers told Bloomberg a pied-à-terre tax is “class warfare” on the rich.

Nah. The rich can always just leave.

PROCUREMENT: Navy’s $7.8 Billion Destroyer Due for Delivery 5 Years Late.

Even adjusting for inflation, that’s almost Nimitz-class aircraft carrier money.

ILLITERATE AND DISHONEST — SOUNDS ABOUT RIGHT: Biden’s Attack On ‘White Man’s Culture’ Is A Mix Of Historical Illiteracy And Dishonesty. “The former vice president still owes Clarence Thomas an apology.”

Those who demand acts of contrition over “English jurisprudential culture,” seem to have a problem with ideals of blind justice and due process that stop us from sacrificing people to the whims of an aggrieved mob. Biden’s transgression against progressivism, as far as I can tell, was affirming to Thomas during the Hill hearings that, “from the beginning and at this moment, until the end, the presumption [of innocence] is with you.” It wasn’t true.

Though it’s quite puzzling why the former vice president laments the “white” cultural evils of American jurisprudence when mentioning his role in the Thomas Supreme Court hearings. Perhaps confessing racial guilt is merely a form of ritual self-flagellation these days. Then again, it was Biden, with the assistance of a bunch of other white men, helped smear a black man with an impeccable record and no corroborating evidence of wrongdoing simply because he held the wrong kind of views. It was to Biden that Thomas was responding when he famously called the hearings a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you.”

If anything, Biden should be apologizing to Thomas.

It’s never too late to say you’re sorry.

THE NEW CIVILITY: Ohio Democrat Takes Cheap Shot at Barron Trump on Facebook: May Need Special Olympics.

SILENCE IS COMPLICITY: Apple, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Disney, Other Companies Funding SPLC Silent on Racism Scandal.

SET THE WAYBACK MACHINE FOR 1973: 8 Fun (and Possibly Dangerous) Activities Enjoyed by Past Generations That Today’s Kids Will Never Experience.

AL-BRITANYIA: UK Selectively Quotes Violent Bible Passages to Deny Iranian Christian Asylum.

OK THEN: Cory Booker wants everyone to know that Rosario Dawson is “an incredible girlfriend.”

SYSTEM FAIL: The Mueller Report is an unmitigated disaster for the American press and the ‘expert’ class that it promotes.

Lee Smith at Tablet:

The special counsel lasted 674 days, during which millions of people who believed Mueller was going to turn up conclusive evidence of Trump’s devious conspiracies with the Kremlin have become wrapped up in a collective hallucination that has destroyed the remaining credibility of the American press and the D.C. expert class whose authority they promote.

Mueller knew that he wasn’t ever going to find “collusion” or anything like it because all the intercepts were right there on his desk. As it turned out, two of his prosecutors, including Mueller’s so-called “pit bull,” Andrew Weissman, had been briefed on the Steele dossier prior to the 2016 election and were told that it came from the Clintons, and was likely a biased political document.

Weissman left, or was pushed out of, his employment with the special counsel a few weeks ago, after the arrival of a new attorney general, William Barr, who had deep experience in government, including stints at the Justice Department and the CIA. Knowing what we know now, here’s what seems most likely to have just happened: Barr looked at the underlying documents on which Mueller’s investigation was based. First, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s May 17, 2017, memo appointing the former FBI director to take supervision of the FBI’s investigation of Trump. And more importantly, the Aug. 2, 2017, memo from Rosenstein outlining the scope of the investigation.

Among the scope memo’s few unredacted lines are allegations regarding Paul Manafort’s “colluding with Russian government officials … to interfere with the 2016 elections.” The only known source for those allegations is the Steele dossier. What that strongly suggests is that under those redactions are other fabricated allegations that were also drawn from the Clinton-funded smear campaign—a dirty-tricks operation that was led by Fusion GPS founder and conspiracy theorist Glenn Simpson.

And now, after all the Saturday Night Live skits, the obscenity-riddled Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert routines, the half a million news stories and tens of millions of tweets all foretelling the end of Trump, the comedians and the adult authority figures are exposed as hoaxsters, or worse, based on evidence that was always transparently phony.

Read the whole thing.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Proposed Voting Changes Are About Power, Not Principles.