THANKS, OBAMA: The secret story of how America lost the drug war with the Taliban.

As Afghanistan edged ever closer to becoming a narco-state five years ago, a team of veteran U.S. officials in Kabul presented the Obama administration with a detailed plan to use U.S. courts to prosecute the Taliban commanders and allied drug lords who supplied more than 90 percent of the world’s heroin — including a growing amount fueling the nascent opioid crisis in the United States.

The plan, according to its authors, was both a way of halting the ruinous spread of narcotics around the world and a new — and urgent — approach to confronting ongoing frustrations with the Taliban, whose drug profits were financing the growing insurgency and killing American troops. But the Obama administration’s deputy chief of mission in Kabul, citing political concerns, ordered the plan to be shelved, according to a POLITICO investigation.

Now, its authors — Drug Enforcement Administration agents and Justice Department legal advisers at the time — are expressing anger over the decision, and hope that the Trump administration, which has followed a path similar to former President Barack Obama’s in Afghanistan, will eventually adopt the plan as part of its evolving strategy.

On Twitter, Jerry Dunleavy notes that this would be the second time Obama did such a thing: “Wow. @JoshMeyerDC broke the story on Project Cassandra — how Obama turned a blind eye to Hezbollah’s drug trade to appease the mullahs & get the Iran Deal. Looks like Obama may have done the same w/ the Taliban opium trade — shelving Operation Reciprocity… Whether Hezbollah or the Taliban, it looks like Obama was soft on narco-terrorism.”

UNEXPECTEDLY: Millionaires Flee California After Tax Hike.

Prop. 30 raised the state’s top income tax rate by more than 29%, increasing it three percentage points from 10.3% to 13.3%, which is now the highest state income tax rate in the nation. Prop. 30 also hiked the tax rate on income between $300,000 and $500,000 by two percentage points (a 21.5% rate increase), and raised the rate on income between $500,000 and $1,000,000 by three percentage points (a more than 32% rate hike).

In 2016, California voters extended the Prop. 30 income tax increases, which were originally scheduled to expire in 2019, until 2030. There will be an effort to extend those income tax hikes yet again prior to their expiration in 2030; book it now.

Varner’s new research examined taxpayers who were and were not hit by the Prop. 30 rate hikes. He found that in the two years before the Prop. 30 tax hike was imposed (2011 and 2012), net in-migration for both groups “was positive and roughly constant.” Yet following 2012 and the passage of Prop. 30, net in-migration dropped for households that were facing an effective tax increase of 0.5 percent or more. The reduction was greatest for households facing the highest effective tax hike, according to Varner and his coauthors.

This isn’t surprising for those who are familiar with other attempts to soak the rich with punitive state income tax hikes on high earners.

California already drove out much of its middle class, and now the “regular rich” are heading for the exits. That leaves the super-rich and the poor — a situation fairly described as feudal.

FALLOUT: Calif. Teachers Sue Unions to Recoup Unconstitutional ‘Agency Fees.’

D. C. MCALLISTER: No, Ocasio-Cortez Won’t Be Another Obama — Unless Republicans Let It Happen.

CRUMBY: Dems blast booming jobs report, Trump worker agenda, ‘reckless.’

“FIXED” MIGHT BE CUTTING IT A LITTLE TOO CLOSE TO THE BONE: Male Feminists Gather in Aspen to Ponder How to Fix Men — the ‘Heterosexual White Ones.’

FACEBOOK FACTCHECK FAIL: It appears the issue isn’t that I didn’t provide evidence. The issue is that they didn’t LIKE the evidence I provided.

‘MERICA: Drink beer, throw axes: Inside a new East Nashville attraction.

Having thrown axes with Glenn once before down in Texas, I’m willing to road trip down to Tennessee to try it again.

REMINDER: Here’s What Happened the Last Time the Left Got Nasty.

The first half of the article is questionable history mixed with Here-Are-My-Anti-Trump-Bona-Fides, but then there’s this:

Despite the [civil rights] movement’s historic achievements—and the success of liberals in securing scores of other major reforms—young radicals grew impatient with the pace of change, especially in Vietnam. Peaceful protests continued, but growing numbers of militants now styled themselves revolutionaries and adopted tactics to match. Groups like the Weather Underground preached and carried out violence, including lethal violence, which was deemed “as American as cherry pie” by H. Rap Brown, rendering ironic the name of the group he’d come to lead, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. (Brown, who now goes by Jamil Al-Amin, is currently serving a life sentence for murder.)

Most activists stopped short of planting bombs and shooting police officers. But many still blew past the boundaries of what nearly everyone considered legitimate protest. Demonstrators not only directed chants of “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” at President Lyndon Johnson; they also accosted officials of his administration when they set out in public. In 1967, when Secretary of State Dean Rusk tried to attend a banquet of the Foreign Policy Association in New York, a radical group called Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (often called “the Motherfuckers” for short) threw eggs, rocks and bags of cows’ blood, though Rusk slipped into the hotel unscathed. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was spat upon in an airport and called a baby killer; on a visit to Harvard, a hostile mob encircled his car and rocked it back and forth until police spirited him to safety via a tunnel. Antiwar radicals even tried to set fire to McNamara’s Colorado vacation home—twice. A few years later, after he’d left government, someone tried to throw him off the Martha’s Vineyard ferry.

The confrontations continued after Johnson yielded the presidency to Richard Nixon.

I’d argue that the Left got nasty 16 years ago, and that Donald Trump is the long-simmering result. I’d also argue that the Left, or at least a significant fraction of it, has already decided to double down on nasty.

EXCUSE-MONGERING: Understanding the Conflict in Nicaragua: the Long Battle Against US Imperialism.

CALEB HOWE: Maxine Waters Incited ‘Very Definition of Mob Violence,’ Says Group Filing Ethics Complaint with House.

WINNING: U.S. gains 213,000 jobs in June; unemployment rises to 4%.

When unemployment goes up while the economy is adding jobs at a healthy clip, it’s great news. It means that people who had dropped out of the labor force and had stopped being counted as “unemployed,” feel confident enough to start looking for work again.

DAILY CALLER: Marxists And Extreme Radicals Seek To Take Over The Democratic Party.

Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Tom Perez said the 28-year-old socialist “represents the future of our party” on Tuesday.

What Perez didn’t mention is that the group behind “the future” of the Democratic Party is teeming with radicals openly dedicated to dismantling and overturning the economic and social foundations of the United States.

“As a DSA chapter co-chair I just wanna set the record straight for a minute: communism is good,” Portland DSA co-chair Olivia Katbi Smith wrote on June 30. Other DSA chairs quickly followed her lead.

The DSA’s Charlottesville chair quoted Smith’s tweet and wrote, “as a DSA chapter co-chair, I would like to cosign this pro-communist statement.” DSA chairs in Seattle and Hudson County, New Jersey added their support as well.

The tweets were first pointed out by Far-Left Watch, a website that tracks left-wing extremism.

The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to the DSA for a statement on the chairs’ endorsement of communism, as well as for clarification of the DSA’s position on communism, but a DSA spokesperson declined the request.

A deeper look into the beliefs of the DSA’s members reveals that a communist faction isn’t an outlier in the group.

Members of the DSA espouse a kind of radicalism that has not been represented in mainstream American politics for generations.

A review of various subgroups, or caucuses, within the DSA and statements by its members show an organization more closely aligned with extreme Marxist views rather than Nordic social democracies.

The constitution of the DSA proclaims its members are “socialists because we reject an economic order based on private profit, alienated labor, gross inequalities of wealth and power.”

Ocasio-Cortez is a dues-paying member of the DSA’s New York City arm, which demanded an end to national borders and private profit during a June 29 march — just three days after her victory.

Read the whole thing.

THE NEW RULES: Woman Who Asked Pruitt to Resign in Restaurant Hopes Confrontation Now ‘Empowers Everyone.’

HERE WE GO AGAIN? Athens keeps apprehensive eye on Erdogan and Dodecanese islands.

We are fortunate in Europe in the sense that we haven’t had a major military conflict since the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian-Serb conflict of the 1990s. Maybe we are also fortunate that the refugee crisis is making us aware of wars elsewhere and the need for conciliation and mutual respect.

But there are invisible wars continuing: wars of attrition, wars of diplomacy, economic wars which don’t need bombs, gas masks or even verbal abuse but which thrive on factors which are just as insidious as ethnic cleansing, terrorism and religious prejudice.

Turkey may not officially be at war, but the narrow victory of President Recip Erdogan in last month’s elections will certainly increase the levels of aggression on which he, as executive president, will be able to operate. At home, Erdogan has not only effectively declared war on the opposition (imprisoning dissident academics, teachers and journalists) but makes no secret of his determination to suppress, if not exterminate, the Kurdish minority.

Greece is watching Erdogan’s success with apprehension. He has already carried his arguments into the enemy camp during his state visit here last December when he spoke of rescinding the international treaties under which the Dodecanese islands (including Rhodes, Kos and Patmos) became part of Greece in 1947.

Twice in the past 30 years, Greece and Turkey have been on the brink of war over the ownership of such islands.

Saner minds prevailed then — but are there any of those left?

WELL, GOOD: Army Quietly Begins Pounding ISIS in Syria from New Fire Base.

HMM: China Could Have the World’s Most Powerful Naval Gun by 2025.

“China’s railgun was first seen in 2011 and underwent testing in 2014,” sources told CNBC.

“Between 2015 and 2017 the weapon was calibrated to strike at extended ranges, increasing its lethality. By December 2017, the weapon was successfully mounted on a warship and began at-sea testing, a feat no other nation has accomplished.”

America has been working on its own railgun for more than a decade. The flagship project is the Electromagnetic Railgun Innovative Naval Prototype, launched in 2005 by the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research. The goal was to develop a weapon with a muzzle velocity of thirty-two megajoules and a range of one hundred miles.

I wonder if the Chinese are developing a nuclear-powered ship to handle a railgun’s massive electricity requirements.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Will Pocahontas Take a DNA Test and Much, Much More.

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Can China Save Venezuela’s Collapsing Oil Industry?

China hopes to stem the losses at Venezuela’s Orinoco heavy oil belt. “Upgraders operated by foreign joint-venture partners in the vast Orinoco heavy oil belt are breaking down and running below capacity due to the stress associated with sourcing diluents, payment and corruption issues and staff security,” the IEA said. “Flows from Venezuela’s ageing conventional oil fields are falling fast.”

But it isn’t at all clear that China’s investment will slow the decline. For one, the sum is too small to have a significant impact. But in a broader sense, Venezuela has been taking out loans from China for years and it hasn’t led to economic progress. A report earlier this year from the Center for Strategic & international Studies argued that far from being an economic boon to Venezuela, China’s financial assistance has kept Venezuela hopelessly dependent on oil, while other sectors of the economy have been entirely hollowed out.

Moreover, as Venezuela racks up debt defaults, as seems unavoidable, China will be there to pick up the shattered pieces. The state-owned oil companies from China and Russia “will probably market a significant share of PDVSA’s exports and operate an increasing share of its production, guaranteeing the repayment of their loans,” Francisco Monaldi wrote in a report from the Atlantic Council in March. While China may offer some financial assistance, but it probably won’t lead to a rebound. The most likely outcome will be Venezuela continues to decline and is forced to hand over slices of the country’s assets to China.

If China intends to pick the bones of Venezuela’s corpse, maybe Trump asking about a possible invasion last year wasn’t all that crazy.

MAX BOOT: I left the Republican Party. Now I want Democrats to take over.

Given the choice between several conservative principles and none, Boot has chosen none. Which I suppose tells us a lot about Boot’s principles.

CLAIM: Ocasio-Cortez’s Socialism Can Work in the Midwest — With a Rebrand.

The most radical economic policy on Ocasio-Cortez’s platform — a federal job guarantee — meanwhile, actually polls quite well in “flyover country.” In a survey commissioned by the Center for American Progress, a supermajority of voters agreed that “for anyone who is unemployed or underemployed, the government should guarantee them a job with a decent wage doing work that local communities need, such as rebuilding roads, bridges, and schools or working as teachers, home health-care aides, or child-care providers.”

Critically, support for this premise was almost exactly as strong among rural-dwelling demographic groups as it was among urban ones: According to DFP’s modeling, CAP’s proposal boasts roughly 69 percent support in urban zip codes, and 67 percent in rural ones.

There are a lot of reasonable, technocratic objections to the job guarantee as a policy. But polling suggests that there is majoritarian support for a massive public-jobs program of some kind — and that framing said program as “guaranteed jobs” might be politically effective.

Other items on Ocasio-Cortez’s platform poll similarly well. A bipartisan majority of voters have espoused support for “breaking up the big banks” in recent years, while nearly 70 percent of Americans want the government to take “aggressive action” on climate change, according to Reuters/Ipsos.

Everything is popular until the bill comes due.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): There’s always been support for WPA and CCC-like programs. But the unions, which hated them even back in FDR’s day, have blocked them. Bundle this with repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act’s “prevailing wage” rule — which is basically a union subsidy — and you might have something. Of course, with today’s critical labor shortage, none of this is exactly a priority.

WINNING: The U.S. labor shortage is reaching a critical point.

LAW OF THE JUNGLE: Lions Eat Suspected Rhino Poachers On South African Game Reserve.

A ranger taking guests at the Sibuya Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape on a safari drive on Tuesday afternoon discovered human remains close to a pride of lions.

“We suspect two were killed, possibly three,” Sibuya owner Nick Fox said.

An ax and three pairs of shoes and gloves were found later when police and an anti-poaching unit arrived. The lions had been heard making a commotion in the early hours of Monday.

“We thought they must have been rhino poachers but the ax confirmed it,” Fox said. “They use the rifle to shoot the animal and the ax to remove the horn.”

No pity here.

SENATE REPORT: ‘No Politically Motivated Pressure’ Found in Assessment of Russian Election Meddling. “Intelligence Committee says 16-month ongoing investigation has revealed ‘additional examples of Russia’s attempts to sow discord, undermine democratic institutions’.”

This story from Wednesday got lost in the Independence Day hoopla.

CONSEQUENCES: Kino Jimenez, Accused MAGA Attacker, Fired by Rumble Bar.