OH FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD: Militant Anti-Christian Group Demands Arrest of Edwards AFB Commander over Public Professions of Faith.

THIS IS A RIDICULOUS COMPARISON: The average American takes less holiday time than a Medieval peasant, economist reveals.

Anyone want to trade places with a serf?

OH: ‘Mystery pooper’ will get more than $100K from school district.

Under a separation agreement, Thomas W. Tramaglini, the former Kenilworth Public Schools superintendent, will be paid his full salary through the end of September in addition to two months severance pay and $23,827 in unused vacation time, NJ.com reported.

Tramaglini, 42, was suspended with pay from his job in May following his arrest for allegedly defecating in public, lewdness and littering.

His arrest followed weeks of employees finding feces on a “daily basis” near or on the Holmdel High School football field and track.

Kenilworth voters should remember this story, the next time the district claims they need more money.

GOOD QUESTION: Omarosa’s Trump ‘N-Word’ Narrative Is Falling Apart, Where Are The Tapes?

SPENGLER: The Left’s Loonie Foreign Policy. “There’s a benchmark test for basic sanity in world affairs, and that’s your attitude towards Israel.”

POLL: Majority of GOP agrees news media is ‘enemy of the people.’

BACKHANDED COMPLIMENT: China is really not happy with Trump’s $716 billion defense spending bill.

The bill received widespread bipartisan backing in Congress, amid a growing acknowledgment that the U.S. is facing an increased threat from Russia and China.

The bill is considered particularly tough on China, targeting several areas of concern for the Pentagon, including the increased Chinese military activity in the South China Sea, Beijing’s pursuit of cutting-edge U.S. technology and the spread of Communist Party propaganda at American institutions.

China’s commerce, defense and foreign ministries all issued statements slamming the bill’s proposals.

The commerce ministry focused on a ban on Chinese telecommunications giants Huawei and ZTE. The U.S. government and government contractors will now largely be blocked from using the companies’ products in the future, though in non-critical systems some products will still be allowed.

China’s foreign ministry pointed out that the act was passed despite Beijing’s strong objections, and it was dissatisfied with the “negative content related to China.”

I remember the Kremlin protesting Reagan’s defense budgets, and look how that turned out.

ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN: I find myself in agreement with Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Omarosa’s Media Tour, Election Results, and Much, Much More. “#metoo candidate Keith Ellison won his race. ‘Somali-born hijab-wearing refugee’ Ilhan Omar won the MN-5 democrat primary and in Vermont, Christine Hallquist, a transgender candidate, won the democrat nomination for governor. Also notable, Tim Pawlenty lost his primary to a more Trump-friendly candidate.”

IT’S QUIET… TOO QUIET: DNC Suuuure Seems Quiet On Deputy Chair’s Domestic-Violence Allegations.

RISE AND FALL AND RISE AND FALL: A move in crude oil to $50 could come as quickly as a surge above $100, says veteran oil investor.

I’ve been thinking prices are due for for a sharp fall, based on growing US inventories of crude and the coming end of peak summer demand for gasoline. But with a strong economy, and Venezuela’s and Iran’s troubles, you never know.

OH, GROW UP: Researchers identify 31 types of anti-atheist microaggressions.

Examples of microaggressions the MANIRS assesses include: “Others have assumed that I am religious,” “Others have acted surprised that I do not believe in God,” and “Others have included a blessing or prayer in a public social gathering.”

Microaggressions are also said to occur if “Others have teased me because of my non-religious identity,” “Others have assumed I have no morals,” or “Others have suggested I am too sensitive about discrimination to against non-religious people.”

“Having this microaggression scale can empower non-religious individuals to talk about their experience with prejudice,” the researchers assert, suggesting that it could help clinicians to “better understand the types of prejudices that their non-religious client experience in their everyday lives” while also making clients feel more comfortable “discussing these subtle experiences of bias with their therapists.”

Some of the most macro-aggressive people I’ve encountered were militant atheists — including me, back in the day.

FASTER? PLEASE! Air Force Doubles Down on Hypersonic Weapons Development with 2nd Contract.

“We are going to go fast and leverage the best technology available to get hypersonic capability to the warfighter as soon as possible,” said Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson.

Leaders from the Defense Department, Missile Defense Agency, Air Force, Navy and Army signed a memorandum June 28 to cooperate and help develop “hypersonic boost glide” technology, the release said.

“The joint team requires the right mix of agile capabilities to compete, deter and win across the spectrum of competition and conflict,” said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein. “We must push the boundaries of technology and own the high ground in this era of great power competition and beyond.”

It’s pretty clear that hypersonic weapons are going to create a new MAD situation, provided of course both sides get them around the same time.

NOW THAT’S REAL SOCIALISM: UN says an estimated 2.3 million people have fled Venezuela.

Severe shortages of basic medicines and medical supplies in Venezuela “have led to a sharp deterioration of the quality of hospitals.”

U.N. officials say more than 100,000 HIV patients are at risk due to lack of access to necessary medication, the U.N. spokesman said. Formerly eradicated diseases including measles, malaria, tuberculosis and diphtheria “are present and on the rise,” he added.

As a result of the dire economic and health care situation, rising numbers of Venezuelans are joining in an exodus that has set off alarms across Latin America.

According to a report cited by the International Organization for Migration in April, population outflows from Venezuela “considerably increased” in recent years, with an estimated 1.6 million Venezuelans abroad in 2017 compared with 700,000 in 2015.

Of the 1.6 million, it said approximately 885,000 were in South America, 308,000 in North America, 78,000 in Central America, 21,000 in the Caribbean and the rest scattered elsewhere.

The exodus has been more dramatic this year.

Things may get a whole lot worse before suddenly falling apart.

CHELSEA CLINTON: Legalized Abortion Has Added $3.5 Trillion to the Economy.

THIS IS CNN: CNN Attacks Trump Over Tweet on London Terror Attack, Fails Miserably.

THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT HOW I’D HOPED: Brazilian Butt Lifts Are Resulting In An Alarmingly High Mortality Rate.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Republicans Need to Make the Case For Capitalism, Because Dems and Young People Reject It.

SCRAPPLEFACE: Charlottesville Rally Bust Made White Man Feel Blue.

D. C. MCALLISTER: America Is Plagued by Privilege, but It’s Not What You Think.

YUGE: Maduro to curb fuel subsidies.

Venezuela’s president has said its subsidised fuel prices should rise, to stop smugglers cheating the country out of billions of dollars.

“Gasoline must be sold at an international price to stop smuggling to Colombia and the Caribbean,” Nicolás Maduro said in a televised address.

Like many oil producing nations, Venezuela offers its citizens heavily subsidised petrol.

A fuel price rise in 1989 caused deadly riots in the capital, Caracas.

Cheap gas is one of the popular bribes employed by Venezuelan autocrats to take, maintain, and increase their political power. Under the Bolivarian Socialists, cheap gas has also helped to destroy the country’s oil industry — so the irony here is schadenfreudelicious.

LIZ PEEK: Obama’s economist grasps at straws trying to devalue Trump’s impact.

A recent Rasmussen poll showed that 50 percent of likely voters say Trump deserves plaudits for the improving economy, while only 40 percent credit President Obama.

Even in a Quinnipiac poll taken at the height of the controversy over Trump’s Helsinki summit, when the president came under extreme criticism, respondents by a 49-47 margin were positive on his handling of the economy.

Larry Summers not only disagrees that President Trump has anything to do with our improving economy, he is also reluctant to bury his gloomy “secular stagnation” theory that income and job growth will forever be severely restricted.

He is, of course, in the position of having to explain why the Obama administration, in which he served as director of the National Economic Council, failed to excite higher investment and spending and instead presided over the slowest post-recession growth in modern times.

I had been assured by all the smartest people, starting in 2009, that “business climate” was just a myth.

HE DIDN’T INHALE: British Labor Party Leader Corbyn Admits Attendance at Ceremony Honoring Munich Terrorists. “He ‘doesn’t think’ he was involved in laying a wreath at the graves of terrorists.”

BLUE WAVE? If Trump’s Voters Turn Out This Fall, They’ll Give Republicans A Big Senate Majority.

In Minnesota, where two Senate seats are in play, both Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, who replaced Al Franken, would face close votes if Minnesota’s smaller-town voters continue as they voted in 2016. Similarly, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, and Claire McCaskill in Missouri would likely lose if those voters come back this year.

Joe Donnelly looks almost certain to lose in Indiana at this point. Bob Casey’s continued career in the Senate appears to depend on his winning back the blue-collar voters who deserted Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Not every election goes by the numbers: incumbency, a willingness to chase after every voter in every village, hamlet, and farm community, and likable personalities can often give a popular incumbent a significant edge in a statewide race. The Midwestern voter shift that was so dramatic in 2016 may prove to be sharply watered-down in the 2018 midterms. However, this is not an excuse for Democrats’ campaigns to relax or become complacent.

Focusing the 2018 statewide elections on Trump may not succeed for Democrats. It certainly killed Hillary’s momentum to devote so much time to her opponent’s weaknesses, because it left so little time to emphasize her own strengths.

Considering her actual “strengths,” what else could she have done?

SALENA ZITO: Trump’s not the reason the GOP sputtered in Ohio.

Both Ohio and Pennsylvania represent the new coalition of Trump voters — Rust Belt states that were expected to swing blue in 2016 but in fact went for the unorthodox billionaire who promised to “Make America Great Again.”

So why, two years later, is the GOP having so much trouble connecting with these people? Is it Trump? The party establishment?

Ohio Gov. John Kasich said Balderson’s weak showing was a referendum on the president. “Voters here sent a message to the Republicans to knock it off,” Kasich told CBS News last week. “Stop the chaos, the division, no more of this family separation that we see at the border or taking people’s health care away. I think [people] have . . . basically had enough and they’re sending a message to the Republicans, including the Republican in the White House . . . This district is so Republican, there should never even have been an election here. And it was so close and — in one of the counties that’s so solidly Republican — where a Republican would normally win by 70 percent, it broke basically 50-50.”

But Kasich, who hasn’t yet ruled out a run for president in 2020, has got the wrong end of the stick. The GOP’s problem isn’t its president. The problem is its message.

Trump is the sun around which the solar system of American politics operates. You can’t outshine him.

And his base is solid.

I’d missed this one over a weekend long on chores and entertaining, but it’s still germane and you’ll want to read the whole thing.