I HAD BEEN ASSURED THAT VOTER FRAUD IS A MYTH: 670 ballots in a precinct with 276 voters in Georgia’s primary.

Update: Link was missing before. Fixed now — sorry!

HMM: ‘Exculpatory Evidence’ Found in Classified Docs Should Have Been Presented to FISA Judge, Nunes Says. “Also, keep an eye on Bruce Ohr — he’s about to become a more important figure.”

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Time to Ground the Blue Angels? A Navy Flier Responds.

The Seattle Times published an opinion piece entitled Time to Retire the Blue Angels, which argued that the U.S. Navy demonstration team should not fly at Seattle’s annual Seafair exposition. The author, Patrick Pilcher, wrote that he found the display “in poor taste,” that the air show was a waste of money and a “display of military muscle-flexing that seems a bit outdated.” Pilcher also believes that flying the jets is insensitive, since they “can be a reminder of the terror of death raining from the sky in the form of cluster bombs or other weapons” for “many recent immigrants from war-torn countries.”

The author of the Seattle Times article fails in a huge way to recognize what these flight demonstrations do for the nation. Not only the Blue Angels, but the USAF Thunderbirds, Canada’s Snowbirds, and numerous other flight demonstration squadrons and organizations show the public what their tax dollars are producing. In a time of cynicism and waste, the professionalism, training, and dedication of these men and women are, as the saying goes, some if the best this country has to offer to the world. The visits to schools, hospitals, veterans groups and organizations the pilots and maintainers of the Blue Angels perform at nearly every air show belies the waste this author claims exists. And since he wants the Navy to engage in community service, well, that’s exactly what the Blue Angels do.

Indeed. Although I suspect the real motive, or at least one important motive, behind efforts like these is to damage the military’s esprit de corps.

RASMUSSEN: Voters More Likely to Credit Trump for Economy Over Obama.

Weird how Obama didn’t get his Recovery Summer until he’d been out of office for a year and a half.

CYA: Journalism Org Sends Out Tutorial Explaining How to Delete Offensive Tweets.

THE REALITY IS IT’S MOSTLY HYPE: The Reality Behind Voice Shopping Hype.

Amazon and Google both tout voice shopping—the ability to make purchases and check on the status of orders with verbal commands—as significant features of their smart speakers. Some forecasts call for annual voice shopping sales to reach $40 billion in just a few years.

But it appears that only a small fraction of smart speaker owners use them to shop, and the few who do try it don’t bother again. The Information has learned that only about 2% of the people with devices that use Amazon’s Alexa intelligent assistant—mostly Amazon’s own Echo line of speakers—have made a purchase with their voices so far in 2018, according to two people briefed on the company’s internal figures.

Echo speakers are so inexpensive, it’s a good guess that Amazon sells them break-even at best, hoping to make the money back on extra spending or on consumer lock-in. But even that premise seems dubious, if this report is correct.

BLUE WAVE? In Deeply Blue New Jersey, an Unexpected Battle for Senate.

Facing a deep-pocketed Republican challenger, a blitz of negative ads and lingering concerns over a lackluster performance in an uncontested primary, Mr. Menendez’s race has started to concern some Democrats. After weathering a criminal indictment and a harsh ethics rebuke from his Senate peers, Mr. Menendez may find himself in a tough enough re-election fight that will force the party to devote money and energy needed in other races critical to the party’s quest to retake Congress.

In theory, Mr. Menendez, 64, should win easily: Registered Democratic voters outnumber Republicans by nearly 900,000; President Trump remains deeply unpopular; contested congressional races are energizing Democrats; and he has the backing of a Democratic machine that still has enough clout to deliver victory.

But despite the advantages, Mr. Menendez has shown signs of weakened support.

I wonder why that is…

In any case, don’t get cocky.

WOW: China’s hypersonic aircraft, Starry Sky-2, could be used to carry nuclear missiles at six times the speed of sound.

The Starry Sky-2, which is an experimental design known as waverider – for its ability to ride on the shock waves it generates – completed its first test flight on Friday at an undisclosed location in northwest China, the China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics said in a statement issued on Monday.

The aircraft was carried into space by a multistage rocket before separating and relying on its own power. During independent flight it conducted extreme turning manoeuvres, maintained velocities above Mach 5.5 (five-and-a-half times the speed of sound) for more than 400 seconds, and achieved a top speed of Mach 6, or 7,344km/h (4,563mph), the statement said.

On completion of the flight, which was deemed a “huge success”, the aircraft landed in a designated target zone, the academy said.

Be wary of Communist press releases, but maybe we ought to be treating China’s aerospace advances as a new Sputnik moment.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Jeff Sessions and Much, Much More.

WALTER DURANTY, CALL YOUR OFFICE: The New York Times stands by its error.

Max Fisher of the New York Times has taken to Twitter to defend his claim that David Ben-Gurion “emerged from retirement in July 1967 to warn Israelis they had sown the seeds of self-destruction.”

Fisher sourced this story to a recollection by the late Arthur Hertzberg, a noted Conservative rabbi. Hertzberg, writing in the New York Review of Books in 1987, claimed to have heard the grim prophecy during an encounter between Ben-Gurion and American Conservative rabbis at Beit Berl (near Kfar Saba) in July 1967.

As it happened, a few months ago I’d grown suspicious of this story, and so I tracked down the transcript of Ben-Gurion’s remarks in his archives. I found no evidence of his having said anything of the sort. I published my findings back in April, so imagine my surprise when Fisher ran with a lede repeating a fable I’d just debunked. My blog doesn’t have quite the circulation of the New York Times, but it’s where I pointed to the problem, and that brought it to the attention of Fisher and his newspaper.

Fisher now tweets to me that “we’ve looked into this very carefully and, after speaking with the Ben-Gurion Archives and reviewing the historical record, stand by the story.” I’m pleased that Fisher took my challenge seriously, and didn’t just blow it off. But I’m afraid he’s fallen well short of meeting it.

It’s weird how these errors almost always go in one direction, but it isn’t at all strange for the New York Times to stand by its writers providing cover for mass murderers.

CHANGE: Trump Administration Requires Hospitals To Post Standard Prices Online.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will require hospitals to update their online price list annually starting Jan. 1, reported The Hill. Before the new rule, CMS required that hospitals share prices with people who requested them.

CMS said the rule was made to “encourage price transparency,” according to The Hill. Administration officials hope the rule will help patients save money and even “encourage them to shop around,” reported the Washington Examiner.

This could be a game-changer, or at least an important step towards returning some price incentive back to the medical marketplace.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Leftist Tribalism Killed Liberalism. “Trump didn’t break the old order, the Left did.”

Daniel Greenfield:

The left resents these defections by the white working class, but it was the left that truly defected. The old lefty romance with the working class has left behind only a handful of artifacts, like mementos from an old relationship, a fondness for expensive prole wear, folk music, stories about old coal miners (not the current despised polluters), and occasional forays into trying to live on a few dollars a day. But even two generations ago, the left was trading its working-class costumes for ethnic togs and jewelry.

These days the left romanticizes race the way that it once did class. But class can be shifted, race can’t. It was one thing to demonize capitalists and another to demonize entire races. Class war could be rationalized as an effort to make society fairer by sharing the wealth, but race can’t be shared. No Communist revolution can redistribute skin color or any other fixed attribute of human biology. Tolerance and equality were liberal answers to racism, but they could never be lefty answers.

Instead of redistributing wealth, the left began redistributing racial power. It inveighed against the boogeyman of racial tribalism even as it was busy creating it.

That’s probably inevitable when your political bread & butter consists of identity politics and group grievances.

And do read the whole thing.

SPANISH REPUBLICANS POUNCE: Spain’s right whips up fear as migration surge hits Andalucian shores.

Thirty years after Spain was first shocked to find the body of a migrant washed up on its shores, and scarcely six weeks after the new government took in 630 people on the rescue ship Aquarius who had been turned away by Italy and Malta, some rightwing politicians have begun to talk of identity papers, more border controls and “millions of Africans” wanting to come to Europe.

In a country that has traditionally been pro-immigration and devoid of a significant far-right party since its return to democracy, their words have raised eyebrows and concerns. “The first thing we need to be clear about is that there’s a bit of unwarranted alarm over the arrivals we’ve seen over the past month,” said Villahoz, president of Algeciras Acoge, the local branch of an Andalucian NGO that works to protect, educate and integrate migrants and refugees.

We’ve seen how well a virtual open-borders policy has worked for Germany, where 40% of five-and-under kids are from migrant families.

(Classical allusion in the headline.)

WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS? Facebook to Banks: Give Us Your Data, We’ll Give You Our Users.

The social-media giant has asked large U.S. banks to share detailed financial information about their customers, including card transactions and checking-account balances, as part of an effort to offer new services to users.

Facebook increasingly wants to be a platform where people buy and sell goods and services, besides connecting with friends. The company over the past year asked JPMorgan Chase JPM 0.03% & Co., Wells Fargo WFC 0.10% & Co., Citigroup Inc. C 0.01% and U.S. Bancorp USB 0.04% to discuss potential offerings it could host for bank customers on Facebook Messenger, said people familiar with the matter.

Facebook has talked about a feature that would show its users their checking-account balances, the people said. It has also pitched fraud alerts, some of the people said.

Data privacy is a sticking point in the banks’ conversations with Facebook, according to people familiar with the matter.

I would certainly hope so.

SHE CERTAINLY SMART ENOUGH TO WIN ELECTIONS. GOP Conference Vice Chairman Counters Trump: Maxine Waters Is ‘Very Smart.’

IT WORKED FOR DON RICKLES: Trump Insults Anybody Who Angers Him, Regardless of Color.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UCLA To Use Student Activity Fees To Pay for Social Justice Interns.

If workers can’t be forced to pay for politicized union activities, why should students be forced to pay for this?

WHY ARE LEFTWING INDUSTRIES SO HOSTILE TO WOMEN WHO SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER? Ruth Wilson’s Character, One of the Principals of “The Affair,” Killed Off — Actress Complained About Pay Parity.

THIS IS PRETTY MUCH THE 21ST CENTURY I’VE COME TO EXPECT: Steven Seagal Appointed by Russia as Special Envoy to the U.S.

BRENT BOZELL: I Don’t Support Alex Jones, But Ban Is a ‘Dangerous Cliff.’

Indeed.

OH: Professor Slams ‘Hegemonic Masculinity’ of Homeless Men.

SCRAPPLEFACE: Trump’s Son Admits Russians Dished Dirt on Hillary.

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP: As Illinois Celebrates ‘Barack Obama Day,’ 53 Wounded In Chicago Gun Violence.

D. C. MCALLISTER: UNC Football Coach: If We Lose Football, We Lose Our Country.

BLUE WAVE? Trump Driving Both Dem and GOP Leaders in Florida Governor Race. “Immigration, healthcare, the economy and gun control are at the top of voters’ minds going into Florida’s August primary.”