FINE. AS SOON AS THEY TURN OVER THEIR NUKES AND MISSILES AND DESTROY THE FACILITIES UNDER U.S. SUPERVISION: North Korea seeks sanctions relief.

VIDEO: Three Ways 2020 Dems Want to Remake the Supreme Court. “All the options are on the table.”

ETAILING: Most Amazon private labels aren’t flying off the shelves yet, but the company is taking huge steps to change that.

Of the 406 brands analyzed by Marketplace Pulse, AmazonBasics — Amazon’s home and electronics brand — is the most successful, scooping up 57.8% of Amazon’s private-label sales, even though it accounts for only 5% of the new products the company has launched, the firm said.

Following that is the Amazon Collection jewelry brand, with 7.8%, and Amazon Essentials, which sells basic clothing for both men and women, at 4.8%. None of the others make up more than 2% of Amazon’s private-label sales.

Measured by sales, the products don’t fare any better. All told, sales from Amazon’s private-label brands are under $1 billion, according to Marketplace Pulse. That’s a lot taken in isolation, but it’s also just a fraction of the $122.9 billion Amazon raked in last year from direct online retail sales.

I needed a new linen shirt or two for our last beach vacation, and picked up a couple from Amazon’s “Isle Bay” house brand. For about $25 each, they weren’t bad. In fact, I’ve spent quite a bit more for similar quality.

BUDGETING: Pentagon finds $12.8 billion for Trump’s border wall.

The Defense Department has identified $12.8 billion in possible funding that it could use to fulfill President Trump’s call for a border wall.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., released the 20-page spreadsheet on Twitter Monday night.

Trump last month declared a national emergency at the border, and said he wants to use $3.6 billion for border wall projects. The Pentagon’s list said it has found possible funding sources that are “in excess of the amount needed.”

But it’s not clear which projects the Defense Department will draw from. Some states that have been allocated big chunks of money that haven’t been spent could see a hit.

California, for example, was identified as having more than $700 million in unused Army and Navy military construction that could be used. Hawaii has more than $400 million that could be used.

Blue states gotta pay their fair share.

RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! Trump-Russia-Obsessed Rep. Eric Swalwell Mulling a Run for President in 2020. “I’ll make a decision by the end of the month.”

SEEN ON FACEBOOK:

(Hat tip, Susan Speakman, who knows the true meaning of “Kennedyesque.”)

GIVE HER ENOUGH ROPE…: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Less Popular Than Trump, Hillary.

CHARLIE MARTIN: The Power of Pulp. “Once upon a time, fiction was fun to read. Maybe it’s time to bring that back.”

Some of my favorite reading as a kid was from the pulp racks at various local stores. Inexpensive books with lurid sci-fi covers, written by authors who usually delivered on the cover’s promise.

OOPS: MySpace lost all music uploaded from 2003 to 2015.

MySpace remained big with local bands long after its wider audience disappeared. I hope none of them trusted all their digital data to someone else’s platform, which is never a good idea.

GET YOUR LAWS OFF MY… YOU KNOW: Andrew Yang, Upstart Democratic Presidential Candidate, Comes Out Against Circumcision.

WHAT AN UTTERLY STUPID AND SELF-DESTRUCTIVE WAY TO BE PETTY: Germany Plans to Renege on Pledge to Raise Military Spending, Defying Trump.

If confirmed at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, the move would mark a fresh step in the gradual estrangement between the U.S. and its erstwhile loyal European ally and comes after Mr. Trump’s repeated attacks of North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders for not meeting a 2% military-spending target.

In recent months, Berlin has rebuked Washington’s demands that it limits gas purchases from Russia, ban Chinese components from its communication networks, and prevent German companies from doing business with Iran.

In another sign of Berlin pushing for Europe to chart a more independent geopolitical course, Ms. Merkel is planning an unprecedented summit between European Union heads of government and Chinese President Xi Jinping next year, European diplomats said Monday.

Ms. Merkel publicly pledged last year to increase German military expenditure to 1.5% of gross domestic product by 2024 and bring it closer to the 2% level members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have set themselves as a target. The promise followed mounting and increasingly overt pressure by Washington under Mr. Trump.

Berlin currently spends about €43 billion ($49 billion) or over 1.2% of GDP on defense. Under the new budget plan, unveiled by the finance ministry Monday, the spending would rise to 1.37% of GDP next year, but then decrease again to 1.33% in 2019, 1.29% in 2022 and 1.25% in 2023.

Germany has chosen preemptive surrender to Russia (for energy, which we could supply) and to China (for tech, ditto). Between Erdogan and Merkel, there isn’t much left of an effective NATO.

DAVID HARSANYI: The Gun Control Campaign Against The AR-15 Is Full Of Lies. “Efforts to outlaw the AR-15 are part of an incremental movement to ban all semi-automatic guns.”

If [Joe] Scarborough and others are proposing banning all semi-automatic rifles, then why not handguns? Why not shotguns, which are used more often in homicides than ARs. Because their contention that the AR-15s are especially “dangerous and unusual” compared to other widely-owned guns, simply isn’t true.

Then again, the very notion of “weapons of war” is silly. Every gun is designed to kill, otherwise it would be worthless. And if any weapon that kills can be categorized as a “weapon of war” then the AR has some stiff competition. John Browning designed the 1911 handgun before World War I, and it was subsequently used by the US military until 1986. Now it is one of the most popular handgun designs in the country. It was a “weapon of war.”

Gun restrictionists focus on the AR-15 because it looks like a military weapon. Once stripped of emotion, however, the argument against ARs, which feature the same mechanics as many others firearms, is that they work better. There will always be a gun that works better than other guns. Which is why we know banning them is part of an incremental push towards broader prohibitions.

Molon labe — or just read the whole thing.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: New Zealand Attack Shows Us That Tribal Score-Settling Has Infected the West. “The old devils are on the loose and the problem is what to do now.”

Ethnic conflict in the Third World is a dog-bites-man story. What is new about the New Zealand attack is that the terrible plague of tribal score-settling and grievance mongering is now in the West. Not that the West is a stranger to ethnic conflict: the Holocaust, Generalplan Ost, Holodomor, and Polish and Armenian genocides are bywords in themselves. But it was widely assumed that WW2 had seen these off (until Bosnia) and the risks of multiculturalism and mass immigration could be mitigated by immunosuppressive strategies like political correctness and demographic replacement, of which the EU project is a textbook example.

Yet events since 2016 indicate that this strategy is failing despite the suppressants. Pressure from the root causes — whether European colonialism, Islamic slave trading, 9/11, the War on Terror, multiculturalism, populism — are burning through the medication. The old devils are on the loose and the problem is what to do now.

In Europe, this Everything Old Sucks Again wound opened back up in Bosnia almost 30 years ago, and elites there proved unable or unwilling to stop it without outside (ie, American) help. Our own elites haven’t done much better in the decades since.

HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): Sex Offender Read to Kids at ‘Drag Queen Story Hour,’ Pro-Family Group Reveals.

CHANGE: Pennsylvania Senators Unveil Marijuana Bill.

Senator Daylin Leach, and co-author, Senator Sharif Street are circulating their latest proposal, Senate Bill 350, to colleagues for co-sponsorship.

The bill would allow anyone 21 and older to use recreational marijuana in Pennsylvania, and each household could also grow up to six marijuana plants at a time for personal use.

The bill also allows home delivery of marijuana.

That last part seems wise.

HMM: Is Elon Musk Osborning His Model 3?

First, a little background on The Osborne Effect:

In 1981, Osborne introduced a machine that was, in effect, the first commercially available portable computer, the Osborne 1.

Sales took off, reaching 10,000 units per month. This might not sound like much by our smartphone standards, but thirty years ago it was a truly phenomenal success.

This wasn’t enough for our fearless entrepreneur. In 1983, he told anyone who’d listen: Just you wait! I have two superior models in the works, the Executive and the Vixen.

Customers took his advice. They stopped buying the current model and waited…and waited… In 1985, the company ran out of cash and went bankrupt.

And now back to today:

The parallel with Tesla’s Model Y announcement needs little elaboration. Musk finally announces Tesla’s CUV, a model many will would prefer to the Model 3 sedan. No trouble if both are available simultaneously or in close succession. But the Model Y is promised for the “last quarter” of 2020, and the base model for “early 2021” — past Tesla performance easily explains the skeptical quote marks. First deliveries are 18 months away and manufacturing plans are glowingly vague.

This could be Tesla’s riskiest transition ever.

Musk is rightly known for escaping tight situations, so predictions might be a fool’s game.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: White supremacy alert and much, much more. “CNN/the left wants you to know that Trump did not sufficiently denounce white supremacy following the horrible massacre in New Zealand. I can’t imagine a group of people more ill-suited to address ‘white supremacy’ than the band of jokers who have reduced every person in America to their color, gender and sexual preference while elevating victimhood to the highest virtue. What did they think was going to happen when they insist people are identified primarily by their attributes?”

They thought they’d profit handsomely for it — and they have.

SORRY NOT SORRY: Sorry AOC, capitalism is not the problem.

Carol Roth has written a nice little defense of capitalism, plus this important reminder:

Despite its trust-violating actions of opening fake accounts and charging fees, Wells Fargo today, according to their most recent 10-K filing, still has $1.9 trillion in assets and services one in three households in the United States. Customers apparently just don’t care enough about their past behaviors to vote with their wallets and take their business elsewhere.

If consumers’ actions matched their words, they would be leveraging the essence of the free market. By not spending their dollars or time with companies that they didn’t value, those companies would be forced to change or be put out of business, if the companies were salvageable at all. The vote of their wallet would instead direct dollars (or time, etc.) towards companies that aligned with the important values of consumers, whether it be privacy or worker conditions or other values.

But, the reality is that consumers don’t care enough.

Like voters, consumers get what they ask for — sometimes good and hard.

GOOD LUCK COLLECTING: Venezuela Ordered to Pay ConocoPhillips $8.7B.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Google Quietly Adds Search Engine Privacy Option To Chrome – Here’s How To Enable It.

Apple’s Safari has good privacy protections built in, but it’s also clearly not everyone’s cup of tea. But I also use Brave, which is built on the same code foundation as Chrome, but with privacy features even stronger than Safari’s built right in. And you can use most Chrome extensions with it.

THERE’S NOTHING TO BUY ANYWAY: US sanctions could shut MasterCard and Visa out of Venezuela.

IS THAT A LOT? THAT SOUNDS LIKE A LOT. The Democrats’ $100 trillion agenda.

Start with “Medicare for All,” the new health care anthem of the left. It is touted as a way to make medical services “free” for everyone. The cost to taxpayers? By some estimates $32 trillion over the next decade, according to a study by the Mercatus Center. Medicare, just for the seniors it was designed to cover, is already projected to run deficits in the tens of trillions of dollars over the next four decades, according to the program’s own Trustees.

Then there is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal,” which is supposed to turn America into an eco-friendly paradise and avert the apocalypse that AOC claims will occur in just over a decade. Four presidential candidates have endorsed some or all of that agenda.

Of course, the politicians pushing these plans remain suspiciously quiet whenever they’re asked to explain exactly how much their pet projects will cost U.S. taxpayers and whether they’re worth the investment. But thanks to public-policy watchdog groups, we have some preliminary estimates. According to one recent study by the American Action Forum, the “Low-carbon Electricity Grid” proposed in the Green New Deal will cost taxpayers $5.4 trillion over 10 years, or $39,000 per household.

Similarly, a “Net Zero Emissions Transportation System,” another part of the environmental proposal, will require up to $2.7 trillion, or $20,000 per household, while guaranteed “Green Housing” would cost an additional $4.2 trillion.

The Democrat-backed welfare programs in the Green New Deal are even more daunting — according to the study, “guaranteed jobs” and “universal health care” would together cost each American family $582,000, or $80.6 trillion in total.

Then there is the loss of as many as 10 million jobs in the oil, gas and coal industries, which would add to welfare and unemployment benefit costs, let alone the severe financial hardship this would impose on millions of middle-class families whom Democrats once said they care about.

There’s more — much more, good Lord — at the link.

IT’S ALMOST LIKE THEY’RE ALL USING THE SAME WELL-FUNDED PLAYBOOK: NYT Writer Links Trump to Mosque Shooter Via ‘George Soros White Supremacist Conspiracy Theory.’

IT’S OFFICIAL: PJ Media Joins the Townhall Media Family. “We’re excited to partner with Townhall’s other excellent properties and their 15 million-strong monthly readership.”

I’ve been with PJ since the very beginning back in 2005, and am looking forward to seeing how we grow with Townhall.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 18, 2019.