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

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: No, You Shouldn’t Assault People for Wearing MAGA Hats (or Anything Else).

This shouldn’t need explaining, but you’ve seen what’s become of our education system.

OUT: Scott Pruitt resigns as head of EPA.

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL: American Women Have the Biggest Boobs in the World. “Many countries around the world have an average of an A-cup — not the U.S., though.”

WELL BLESS HIS HEART, TOO: Schumer tells Trump to consider Merrick Garland for Supreme Court.

MAYBE WE WON SO QUICKLY HARDLY ANYONE NOTICED IT HAD STARTED: Alex Jones’ Civil War Prediction Flops.

BUT OF COURSE: Facebook Algorithm Flags, Removes Declaration of Independence Text as Hate Speech.

BUSTED ARE THE CHEESEMAKERS*: Take Our Cheese, Please: American Cheese Makers Suffer Under New Tariffs.

BelGioioso Cheese Inc., a second-generation family company in Wisconsin, has seen sales to Mexico drop since officials there implemented tariffs of up to 15% in early June on most U.S. cheese. The levies were a response to tariffs the U.S. placed on Mexican steel and aluminum.

On Thursday, Mexico was slated to raise its levy on most U.S. cheese to as much as 25%, while China on Friday is implementing tariffs on $34 billion of U.S. goods, including cheese and whey, a dairy byproduct often fed to livestock.

“It’s a nightmare,” said BelGioioso President Errico Auricchio.

Milk consumption in the U.S. has been falling for decades, prompting dairies to turn more of it into cheese. To sell it all, farmers have aggressively marketed their products to growing middle-class populations in Mexico and Asia.

U.S. dairy exports hit a record in April, according to the U.S. Dairy Export Council. Nearly a fifth of milk produced in the U.S. leaves the country, and dairy exports have nearly doubled from a decade ago.

*Classical allusion in the headline, as Ed might say.

YOU CAN TELL PEOPLE THAT THEIR COLOR AND GENDER MAKE THEM EVIL FOR ONLY SO LONG BEFORE THERE’S A BACKLASH: White Millennials Are Leaving the Democratic Party as ‘Walk Away’ Campaign Picks Up Steam. “Young whites are evenly divided between GOP and Dems, poll finds.”

BLESS HIS HEART: Michael Avenatti floats possibility of 2020 presidential run against Trump.

HMM: Did Tesla Skip a Crucial Quality Step on the Model 3 Home Stretch?

A source familiar with the goings-ons within Fremont told Business Insider that Tesla abruptly ended brake and roll testing of near-completed vehicles. The test was cancelled at 3 a.m. on Tuesday, June 26th, the source claims. Documents sent to the publication show the range of tests involved in this step — tests no longer listed as “critical.”

Brake and roll testing ensures that vehicles leaving the factory display even braking force at each wheel, proper wheel balance, coasting drag, and speed sensor calibration. It isn’t known why this step was cancelled when it was, or who ordered it.

“To be extremely clear, we drive *every* Model 3 on our test track to verify braking, torque, squeal and rattle. There are no exceptions,” said Tesla spokesperson Dave Arnold in a statement to Business Insider. Arnold wouldn’t comment further on the test, including the question of whether Musk ordered it removed.

Tesla published some impressive production figures earlier this week — I hope they didn’t skip steps just to juice the numbers.

LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: How Socialism Can Ruin Your Life.

SAD: Behind the Scenes of Stormy Daniels’ Cross-Country Cash Grab.

CHANGE: Divorce on the rise in Iraq as wives cut ties to ISIS militants. “Being a wife of a terrorist is not honoring me, my family and it is not going to honor my kids when they grow up.”

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: The Statue of Liberty Gets Occupied and Much, Much More. “Welcome to the new normal, where every aspect of your life will be infected with politics.”

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Will the F-35 have laser weapons in the future?

The US military and its allies have allocated millions of dollars for directed energy research and development. The US Air Force is pursing laser weapon systems for installation on fighter jets as well as the AC-130J Ghostrider gunship.
The UK also recently announced its interest in demonstrating a directed energy based defence system, similar to Phalanx, for its warships.

Lockheed Martin, Notre Dame University, DARPA and the Air Force Research Lab last year started flight testing a streamlined and miniaturised airborne laser turret.

The turret allows for 360 degree aiming coverage for directed energy weapons that will be flying on military aircraft in the not so distant future and is able to rapidly aim at targets and focus a directed energy burst through the atmosphere at those targets to disable or destroy them.

Now that’s the 21st Century I’ve been hoping for.

BLUE WAVE? Democrats Underperforming With Hispanic Voters. “Despite the president’s hard-line immigration policies, Republican candidates are running competitively in many Hispanic-heavy states and congressional districts.”

I’m not sure about that word “despite,” but here’s more:

Rep. Will Hurd of Texas once looked like one of the most vulnerable House Republicans, representing a border district where Hispanics make up 70 percent of the population—a seat Hillary Clinton carried by 4 points in 2016. Hurd has long been an independent GOP voice, emerging as a critic of Trump’s border-wall proposals and a supporter of a path to citizenship for Dreamers. But, as Democrats frequently bring up, he’s also a congressman whose partisan affiliation will help keep Republicans in charge of the House.

He’s in surprisingly good shape as he vies for a third term against Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones. Despite holding one of the 25 GOP seats that Clinton carried, he’s not on the list of The Cook Political Report’s most endangered 31 members. His Texas colleagues John Culberson and Pete Sessions, representing suburban Houston and Dallas districts where Republicans traditionally dominate, are in deeper trouble. It’s a crystal-clear sign that the anti-Trump anger is concentrated within whiter, affluent suburban communities, not the Hispanic battlegrounds with the most at stake.

Much more at the link.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: ADHD Boy Given ‘Award’ for ‘Most Likely To Be Distracted.’ “The student received the award in front of the whole class. Now, his mom is considering legal action.”

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Army Closer to Arming Trucks with High-Energy Lasers.

BUT OF COURSE: Rachel Dolezal Booked for Fraud Because the System Is Racist.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: ‘How Jack Became Black’ Questions Progressive Racial Politics.

GOOD COP, BAD COP: Lawmakers Urging Trump to Sign North Korea Human Rights Legislation.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why Are There So Many Robocalls? Here’s What You Can Do About Them.

With caller ID basically broken, developers have proposed a call-certifying protocol (known as STIR) and guidelines for implementing it (known as SHAKEN). The names behind these acronyms are long and confusing.

With it, an originating phone carrier could check that a caller has the right to use a number and create a digital fingerprint for the call. The carrier on the receiving end could verify that nothing was messed with in transit.

“They’re actually not saying that the call comes from the phone number. What they’re saying is this user is entitled to use this phone number,” says Jim McEachern, a principal technologist with the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, a technical working group that helped develop guidelines for this call-certification protocol.

If a bad guy tries to spoof the caller ID, the call would go through, but it wouldn’t be verified. Eventually, users would see a check mark or other indicator for verified calls.

In the meantime, I only pick up the phone when it’s the VodkaWife calling.

JAMES JAY CARAFANO: Top 5 Movies to Celebrate This 4th of July.

My alternate list includes Stripes, Captain America: Civil War, Rocky IV, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, and the most American movie ever made, Smokey and the Bandit.

TIM SCOTT: The Republican Party’s Joyful Warrior.

Over the course of a day I spent with the senator — on Capitol Hill and in Anacostia, a neighborhood in Washington, D.C. — a picture of Scott as a vocal, visionary leader came into focus. He’s the man of the hour, though he might not know it.

If he does know, he certainly won’t admit it. This spring, he and his best friend in Washington, congressman Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), co-authored a memoir on bipartisanship, Unified: How Our Unlikely Friendship Gives Us Hope for a Divided Country. One section of Gowdy’s acknowledgements is addressed to Scott’s mother, Frances:

This book was supposed to be about your son Tim and your family. It was supposed to be about your hard work, your faith, and your determination that your children would turn out as well as they did. But you raised a son too modest to write a book about himself. Maybe one day we can convince him to do that.

When I mention this snippet to Scott, he chuckles ruefully and shakes his head, as if to say, “I didn’t want him to write that, either.” Truth is, Scott never intended to take up the self-glorifying business of politics. He wanted to be a minister.

Still, even after the doors of ministry were closed to him, Scott wasn’t sure that national politics would be an option. “I had never been to Washington before I got elected to Congress,” he tells me. “I am a reluctant warrior, though I am a joyful warrior. I am thankful that it worked out the way that it has.”

Scott keeps a remarkably low profile for a Senator, but I wonder how much longer that will last.