LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Cohen Squealing Like a Pig and Much, Much More. “The meeting in question lasted 20 minutes and Fusion GPS client Veselitskaya offered no ‘dirt’ to the campaign but instead spoke about the Magnitsky act. Now ‘suddenly’ Cohen remembers Trump was told about this meeting. Silly stuff.”

BECAUSE SOCIALISM. NEXT QUESTION? Venezuela could eventually have 1 million percent inflation. How is that possible?

WE’LL BE LUCKY IF THE TRUE FIGURE ISN’T AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE LARGER: Watchdog says U.S. wasted more than $15 billion in past 11 years in Afghanistan.

FALLOUT: Facebook shareholders try to fire Mark Zuckerberg as chairman because of the ‘mishandling’ of recent privacy and election meddling scandals.

My understanding is that Zuckerberg structured the company’s shares in such a way, pre-IPO, that he can’t be ousted from his company like Steve Jobs was from Apple in 1985.

But can anything protect a CEO from a 100,000,000,000-dollar loss?

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: Media Gaslighting Can’t Hide Fact Trump Campaign Was Spied On.

Whatever you think about Trump’s reaction to the release of the FISA application, the media reaction to the story was disingenuous and even more hyperbolic than the president’s tweets. After a year of continuous and alarming revelations, the media are still more interested in proving the Trump campaign treasonously colluded with Russia than wrestling with the fact that the FBI spied on a presidential campaign, and used dubious partisan political research to justify their surveillance.

The media reaction to both the redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap applications and President Trump’s tweets was pure gaslighting. They claimed the FISA applications hurt the critics’ case. It wasn’t that they reported the news that critics of the FISA application felt vindicated while defenders of the wiretap applications also felt vindicated. They wrote as partisans in a war with those skeptical of FISA abuse.

It is a war, albeit thankfully one without brigade combat teams moving around the map.

H. W. CROCKER III: America’s Next Civil War Will Be Worse Than Our Last.

North and South venerated the Founders. They shared the same language, the same religion, and, in large part, the same general stock. Most of all, they shared what Jeff Sessions was recently rebuked for calling an “Anglo-American heritage” of liberty under law, stretching from the mists of medieval England — even before Magna Carta — to our own Bill of Rights.

Today, however, our divisions are so deep and fundamental that Americans cannot even agree on what marriage is or what a man or a woman is (which is pretty darn fundamental).

The lunatic self-righteousness of the Left (and yes, I’m afraid one must point fingers here), where disagreement is bigotry to be prohibited by law or even condemned and prosecuted as treason, is a consuming, destructive fire that will not be easily quenched, and cannot be reached by cool waters of rational argument.

Read the whole thing.

HUMPTY-DUMPTY COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Is the Syrian Civil War Finally Over? “Bashar Assad has won…what?”

CLASSY ACTION: Facebook Lawsuits Loom — Tens of BILLIONS on the Line.

SOMEBODY GOT TAKEN QUIETLY ASIDE: Never Pelosi Democrat Caves: ‘I Will Support Whoever the Democratic Party Puts Forward.’

SCANDAL: CNN ‘Catches’ Trump Asking Politely For A Coke.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Why Facebook’s Stock Market Pain Is Necessary—And Will Continue.

Here’s what CFO David Wehner said on the fateful earnings call: revenue growth will probably “decline by high single-digit percentages from prior quarters” and “we are also giving people who use our services more choices around data privacy which may have an impact on our revenue growth.” Wehner also noted that Facebook is trying more to promote its users’ personal Stories timelines, which currently bring in less money—this is as opposed to users’ Newsfeeds, which is where all those problematic fake news issues fester.

So, is this bad? I think journalist-turned-investor Kim-Mai Cutler hit the nail on the head when she noted on Twitter that “the last three to six months have been reporters screaming about [Facebook] to take more civil, public accountability (which I support). So maybe the headline should be that it’s OK [for Facebook to take] a $142B hit to resolve really serious, long-term structural issues.”

The fact is that the changes wrought by the GDPR and the Cambridge Analytica affair were long overdue. Facebook has been able to achieve its mammoth scale largely through its free exploitation of people’s data, and those people are now both wise to the implications and—in Europe and soon California—able to do something about it.

Facebook shares are down about 19% today, wiping out three months of big gains.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Six Reasons Why Barack Obama Is the Worst President in History.

YET THEY FOUND THE MONEY FOR EVERYTHING ELSE AND THEN SOME: Congress Fails to Fund Trump’s ‘Space Force’ in Defense Budget Bill.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Lena Dunham poses in underwear while giving her support of Cynthia Nixon for NY governor.

SHORT TIME PASSING: Where have all Roger L. Simon’s Twitter followers gone?

Plus: Is the American media colluding with Russia?

PATRICK POOLE: After ISIS Claims Credit for Toronto Attack, NYT Reporter Says Killer Could Not Have Been Pro-ISIS. “Terror group that literally recruits for suicide attacks can’t support suicide, can they?”

OH: Clinton fixer engineers Michael Cohen’s turn against Trump. “The PR blitz orchestrated by Lanny Davis is calculated to present Trump’s longtime attorney as someone who will tell truth to power.”

PROCUREMENT: New Details About the F-15X That Boeing is Pitching the US Air Force.

The X variant would benefit from upgrades funded by allies who have bought F-15s: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Singapore and South Korea, which have collectively spent about $5 billion to develop new technology for their jets, the sources said. Compared to the Air Force’s existing F-15s, the new ones would have better flight controls, displays, and radars, and more powerful engines that allow the planes to carry a larger payload.

Like the air-to-air F-15C, and unlike the Strike Eagles, the new F-15X would have just one seat. Large digital display screens would replace the analog dials inside older F-15s. The planes could carry all of the existing equipment, like targeting pods, used across the existing Eagle fleet. The F-15X will also be able to carry anti-ship weapons that allies have paid to test and install. In all, the plane could carry 29,000 pounds of weapons.

The F-15’s range, speed and payload separates it from other fighter jets in the U.S. military. “There’s really nothing like it,” said Richard Aboulafia, vice president for analysis at the Teal Group, a Virginia-based consulting firm.

The F-15C used to be the high end of the Air Force’s old “high-low mix” of Eagles and Falcons. The F-15X might make a nice low end fighter going forward, and could help fill in the range gap left by the F-35’s shorter legs.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Da’ Trade Warz and Much, Much More.

SICK: ObamaCare Is Robbing Medicaid’s Sickest Patients. “The law’s incentives push states to spend more on new enrollees, and less on the disabled and ill.”

What seems to have happened is this: Recall that for the pre-ObamaCare Medicaid populations—those disabled and sick folks—states must pay up to half the cost. In an era of tightening budgets, they appear to have set capitated payments lower than the actual cost of care. Then when it comes to the able-bodied people covered by the ObamaCare expansion, the feds cover nearly the whole tab, so the states are profligate.

In other words, Medicaid is now encouraging insurers to spend more money caring for people who don’t need it and less for those who do.

So that whole “eliminate waste and fraud” promise turned out to be a fraud.

COLLUSION: Pompeo declares US won’t recognize Crimea as part of Russia.

GREGG JARRETT: Comey and Strzok — Two key players in the scheme to clear Clinton and frame Trump.

Based on Comey’s finding, Clinton should have faced a multiple-count criminal indictment, since the FBI discovered that she had stored 110 classified emails on her unauthorized, private computer server. Other people had been prosecuted for similar conduct that jeopardized national security in violation of the law. Yet, Comey – despite characterizing Clinton’s actions with the clear language denoting violation of the law – saw to it that no charges were ever brought against Clinton.

Under questioning, Comey admitted to the Inspector General Michael Horowitz that he authored the May 2 statement and penned every word of it himself. But then he offered the implausible claim that “he did not recall that his original draft used the term ‘gross negligence,’ and did not recall discussions about that issue.”

Comey’s amnesia is preposterous. He would have us believe that, as FBI director, he memorialized in print his decision that the leading candidate for president of the United States had committed crimes, yet later could not recollect anything about the most important decision of his career.

That’s just the start, so read the whole thing.

AMERICA: Identical twins run for US office — for rival parties.

This would make a great premise for a sitcom, and the Tyson twins seem almost custom-made for TV…

CHRISTIAN JOSI AND BRIAN DARLING: Brennan, Hayden and Clapper Deserve to Lose Security Clearances – at a Minimum. “Proceedings to revoke the security clearances of the deep state Three Musketeers is long overdue.”

SLATE: Climate Is ‘Complicated’ and ‘Influenced by Many Factors.’ “Is the Left finally backing down from the climate panic?”

If so, then they must have a new panic all packaged up and ready to go.