BLUE ON GREEN: Cannabis Industry Could Be ‘A Form Of Reparations,’ Says Cynthia Nixon.

“Arresting people–particularly people of color–for cannabis is the crown jewel in the racist war on drugs and we must pluck it down,” she said. “We must expunge people’s records; we must get people out of prison.”

As she walked off the stage, a crowd of people moved in to get Nixon’s attention. One man tried to give her a giant, multi-colored bong. (She demurred.) A woman–joint in mouth–attempted to get a selfie with her mid-puff. Her campaign staff tried to manage the crush of cameras surrounding her.

In an interview after her speech, Nixon explained that she has made cannabis a central part of her campaign because it touches on so many other issues.

“It’s a racial justice issue because we’re incarcerating people of color in such staggering numbers,” she said.

Any minute now I’m expecting Governor Cuomo to announce a new Marijuana Importation Fleet — to be staffed entirely by genderqueer persons of color.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Where Is America’s Craft Beer Capital?

COOL. NOW DO OBAMA. Calif. School Mural Depicted Aztec Warrior Carrying Out Human Sacrifice With Trump’s Severed Head.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Keeping up with the Jones Act is killing U.S. shipbuilding.

Fishermen’s Finest, an American fishing company headquartered in Washington state, commissioned the America’s Finest for $75 million from Dakota Creek Industries, a shipyard in Anacortes, Washington. Unfortunately, the process of building the vessel ran afoul of regulations under the Jones Act, which requires that ships that ply U.S. waters be built with no more than 1.5 percent foreign steel. America’s Finest contains 7 percent steel that was cold-formed in the Netherlands, a process that the Coast Guard currently interprets as “fabrication.” Thus, America’s Finest is legally unable to fish in American waters.

Fishermen’s Finest appealed to the Coast Guard for a waiver, but it chose a bad time to do so. Fishermen’s Finest intended to consolidate two other fishing permits into a permit for America’s Finest, retiring the two ships currently using those permits in the process. Those ships would be turned into “motherships,” ships which sit offshore and process fishing deliveries from fishing vessels.

The town of Unalaska currently processes the majority of fishing deliveries in the Bering Sea region, and would stand to lose if Fishermen’s Finest set up motherships in the region. Unalaska, a town with tax revenues just over $18 million in FY 2018, generated over $1 million in taxes on cod deliveries last year. Not wanting to lose out on that tax revenue, Unalaska’s mayor, Frank Kelty, has been active in petitioning first the Coast Guard then Congress not to grant Fishermen’s Finest a Jones Act waiver.

Because of this political pressure, Fishermen’s Finest failed to get a Jones Act waiver and will be forced to sell the vessel at a discount overseas. That means that the fishing jobs that Fishermen’s Finest would have provided are being, literally, shipped overseas. Meanwhile, Dakota Creek, the shipyard that built the vessel, has already laid off half its staff due to Fishermen’s Finest’s inability to receive a waiver, and its future is “uncertain.”

The irony here is that one of the most common arguments made in defense of the Jones Act is that it supposedly protects the jobs of shipyard workers.

Our competitors probably can’t believe their good luck, that American politicians are so economically illiterate, pandering, or both.

MICHAEL LEDEEN: The Issue is Iran, Not the Deal.

Iran has a long history, with moments of great achievement, but its current leaders have not enhanced its glory. Quite the contrary; Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his henchmen have ruined the place. The destruction of the country’s ecosystem brings to mind a similar ruin inflicted on the Soviet Union by its Communist rulers. If Iran were truly what Obama believed, then all that incredible talent and resources and sophistication would have enabled the Islamic Republic a great success story, instead of a basket case.

The country’s aggressive foreign policy isn’t a great success, either, unless you think that Syria is a great success. Finally, Israel’s ability to humiliate Iranian security by making off with tens of thousands of sensitive documents about the covert nuclear program gives the lie to claims about Iran’s brilliance and cleverness. Most Iranians don’t think their oppressors are very clever, which is why they are demanding the regime stop its foreign adventures and do something to help Iranians in Iran.

This offers America a seemingly tailor-made opportunity for regime change in Tehran: support the dissidents, as we did in the Soviet Union.

Faster, please.

PEAK 2018, REACHED: Huda Beauty’s Vagina-Lightening Blog Post Sparks Controversy.

CHANGE: National Shooting Sports Foundation Kicks Out Dick’s Sporting Goods… And It’s Not The Only One.

NO. Celebrities Endorse Lowering Voting Age to 16.

Instead we should raise the voting age back to 21 and lower the drinking age back to 18, giving teenagers three years to develop the skill they’ll need to exercise their franchise.

WASHINGTON KNOWS BEST: Obama’s calorie rule kicks in thanks to Trump.

Starting Monday, calorie counts will have to be posted at thousands of restaurants, grocery stores and movie theaters, representing a milestone change in how the food industry shares information with the American public. The rule, an oft-forgotten provision of Obamacare, is being pushed over the finish line by a Trump nominee, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who says the labeling requirement is simply about transparency.

“I do not see these nutrition issues as a right-versus-left issue,” Gottlieb told POLITICO, noting that the obesity epidemic is a serious — and worsening — public health problem. “Using information as a vehicle to try to inspire competition is a conservative notion.”

It was “government information” which led to our obesity epidemic.

ILYA SHAPIRO: What This Term’s SCOTUS Decisions Reveal About Neil Gorsuch.

Thomas and Gorsuch will more often agree with each other than not, and it’s the rare case where Thomas and Kennedy will be arrayed against Gorsuch and Roberts. But in areas as different as criminal procedure and unenumerated rights, there will be disagreement, with Gorsuch pushing back more on federal and state action, both executive and legislative, that impinge liberty.

Conversely, on administrative law—how much deference should judges give executive agencies?—and the proper weight of to give precedent (“stare decisis”), we can expect convergence. These are among the areas where Thomas differed most from Scalia, and where Gorsuch will likely be even more “engaged” in reining in government overreach rather than being “restrained” in the traditional conservative mode.

Good.

WELL: Here’s The F-22 Production Restart Study The USAF Has Kept Secret For Over A Year. “We finally see the study that was oddly classified on arrival and it has new relevance based on Japan’s desire for a new stealth fighter.”

Working primarily with RAND’s conclusions from 2011, the Air Force crafted the following cost estimates and assumptions for what it would take to restart F-22 production and produce 194 additional Raptors:

•Total non-recurring start-up costs over a five year period totaling $9.869 billion in 2016 dollars, equal to more than $10 billion in 2018 dollars at the time of writing.

•This included approximately $228 million to refurbish production tooling, $1.218 billion to requalify sources of components and raw materials, $5.768 billion to redesign four subsystems, and $1.156 billion in other associated “restart costs,” along with $1.498 billion in “additional government costs.”

•Two of the four subsystems needing “redesign” would be the AN/APG-77 low probability intercept (LPI) radar and the F119 engine, neither of which are still in production.

•The other two were the aircraft’s software package and an unspecified fourth system, acting as a placeholder to hedge against the Air Force discovering that other systems needed replacement during the restart process.

•The aircraft’s electronic warfare, communication, navigation, and Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) systems were among those that might also need replacement or substitution with another system.

•While the 2011 RAND study estimated an average unit cost of $266 million, this was based on a total purchase of just 75 aircraft.

•The Air Force estimated that the initial unit cost for an order of 194 aircraft would be approximately $216 million.

•This would drop to around $206 million by the time the last one rolled off the production line.

•The unit price would begin to largely level out after the service had purchased the first 100 aircraft.

•The total procurement cost would be between $40 and $42 billion, with the entire program costing a little more than $50.3 billion.

The Air Force also noted that while approximately 95 percent of the F-22-related production tooling is still available, the physical productions facilities either no longer exist or are supporting other Lockheed Martin programs, such as the F-35. After the 2011 study, the service elected to put the “primary production tooling” into a warehouse at Sierra Army Depot in California in case there was a need to make certain spare parts in the future.

So it’s merely expensive then, and not next-to-impossible as we’d been led to believe.

WELL, GOOD: Devin Nunes Says He’s Pressing to Have AG Jeff Sessions Held in Contempt of Congress.

RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Rosie O’Donnell Donated over the Legal Limit to Democratic Candidates. “All told, O’Donnell gave a total of $5,400 over the legal limit to the five candidates, using five different New York addresses, and in the Post’s words, four variations of her name.”

Sounds like she knew exactly what she was doing.

JOSH MARSHALL: Stunning Developments on Trump/Private Black Ops Oppo Targeting Obama Staffers.

We start with this story in The Guardian. It’s very hedged and key details are not included. But the gist is that aides to Donald Trump hired an Israeli security firm to dig up dirt on two prominent supporters of the Iran nuclear deal. They are Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl, both Obama administration national security hands who were involved in the negotiation. They both continue to be prominent supporters of it into the Trump era. Last night I said that it sounded like Black Cube, the firm that surveilled and ran black ops operations against Harvey Weinstein’s accusers on his behalf.

Then overnight Kahl came forward with a story from around the time the firm was reportedly hired in which someone approached his wife about investing in their children’s charter school. You can read the thread here. There was a backstory and details. But it sounded to the Kahls like an intelligence operation – not altogether uncommon for people in that line of work to see. So they eventually cut off communication.

Then a short time ago, Laura Rozen confirmed with Kahl that the purported firm which reached out to the Kahls was ‘Reuben Capital Partners’. That’s the same name used by Black Cube in the Weinstein operations, first reported in The New Yorker by Ronan Farrow last year.

How dare anyone steal from the Clinton playbook or cut in on Fusion GPS’s turf.

DAILY CALLER EXCLUSIVE: How Buzzfeed’s ‘Data-Monster’ Leveraged User Data To Fuel Super PACs, Target Voters.

BuzzFeed partnered closely with multiple Democratic and anti-Trump super PACs in 2016 to target its own users with dozens of political advertisements that were not in accordance with its own policies, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation.

Former BuzzFeed Vice President Rena Shapiro, who led the website’s native political advertising team during the 2016 election, described candidly in a pair of unearthed interviews how she partnered closely with political groups to create ads that harnessed the data BuzzFeed collects on its audience of over 650 million people to solve their “ultimate need, which is to get elected, to get their message out there, or to canvas people together to create impact around a cause.”

Plus:

BuzzFeed raised eyebrows in June 2016 when it announced it had canceled a $1.3 million advertising agreement with the Republican National Committee due to disagreements with then-candidate Donald Trump’s “offensive statements.”

Doing business with any group that supports Trump, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti said after canceling the RNC ad buy, would be “hazardous to our health.”

And:

BuzzFeed’s advertising business demonstrated in 2016 that by refusing to work with pro-Trump political groups it had skin in the political game. But Smith, the website’s editor-in-chief, insists that its news coverage of the president is rooted in the facts. He said in January that the website would have treated a Hillary Clinton presidency the same way they’re treating Trump’s.

But juxtaposing BuzzFeed’s critical coverage of Trump to that of his predecessor, President Barack Obama, suggests otherwise.

BuzzFeed’s coverage of Obama was “almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic,” according to a 2016 analysis by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), a left-leaning media watchdog group.

At this point I probably don’t have to remind you to think of them as Democrat operatives with bylines.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Nunes Targets Sessions, Mueller Gets Some Throat Punches and Much, Much More. “Why does the DOJ think it’s above the oversight process? It’s almost as if they are hiding something.”

Almost!

PRIVACY: Mark Zuckerberg apologized. Now he has to fix Facebook for real.

After two months of public beating, punctuated with a combined 10 hours of testimony before three congressional committees in Washington, Zuckerberg spent his time on the F8 stage signaling that things were going to change.

It started with his uniform. Gone was his years-old dress code of hoodies, grey T-shirts and blue jeans, swapped out for a more mature sweater and dark pants.

Zuckerberg’s announcements were peppered with a newfound restraint too. For 14 minutes, nearly half his speech, Zuckerberg talked about data privacy, election integrity and fact-checking articles posted to the site. When Zuckerberg finally got to announcing new features for Facebook, like a dating service to take on Match.com and Tinder, he immediately noted it was designed with “privacy and safety in mind from the beginning.”

He even scooped his own presentation, announcing 85 minutes before the F8 festivities began a new feature to clear people’s web and app histories from Facebook. “One thing I learned from my experience testifying in Congress is that I didn’t have clear-enough answers to some of the questions about data,” he said. “We’re working to make sure these controls are clear, and we will have more to come soon.”

Fixing Facebook “for real” would involve adopting a new business model which, given the company’s profitability, seems unlikely in the extreme.

BACK TO THE FUTURE: U.S. Navy Reviving Atlantic Fleet. “Seven years after deactivation, the U.S. Second Fleet will be patrolling the North Atlantic again.”

The oceans haven’t gotten any smaller, our seaborne trade increases every year, but our Navy is still less than half the size it was in 1989.

YOU DON’T SAY: Sixteen Democratic Senators Are Questioned On Socialized Healthcare After Alfie Evans And Go Completely Silent.

HMM: U.S. Troops in South Korea Emerge as Potential Bargaining Chip.

If a peace deal can be struck with Pyongyang, would there be any need for U.S. forces on the Korean Peninsula?

The suggestion, once taboo in Washington and Seoul, comes ahead of a planned summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump, where some North Korea watchers expect Mr. Kim to raise the idea with the U.S. president.

A fringe minority of peace activists in South Korea has for decades called for the removal of the 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea, calling them an affront to the country’s sovereignty and an obstacle to peace. That is largely in line with North Korea’s consistent position in calling for their removal.

Generally in South Korea and the U.S., however, the idea of withdrawal or troop reduction has been regarded as a nonstarter. Both the White House and South Korea’s left-leaning Moon Jae-in administration have been careful to underscore the importance of the U.S.-South Korea military alliance for maintaining stability in the region.

On Friday, national security adviser John Bolton joined the Pentagon and South Korea’s presidential office in denying a New York Times report that Mr. Trump had ordered the Pentagon to look into drawing down troops in South Korea.

Even so, the debate has picked up steam in the past week as top advisers and officials in the U.S. and South Korean governments express an openness to the idea.

Disbanding US VII Corps in the wake of our twin victories in the Cold War and the Iraq War, then eventually denuding NATO of heavy American forces, accomplished little but encourage Russian adventurism.

IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE THE BATTLES OF LEXINGTON AND CONCORD: This Is The Toughest Gun Law In America. “Reformers love what Massachusetts is doing. The NRA? Not so much.”

A thirtysomething man sought to buy a rifle here last September, and if he had been living in almost any other part of the country, he could have done so easily.

His record was free of arrests, involuntary psychiatric commitments or anything else that might automatically disqualify him from owning firearms under federal law. He could have walked into a gun store, filled out a form and walked out with a weapon in less than an hour.

But he couldn’t do that in Massachusetts because the state requires would-be buyers to get a permit first. That means going through a much longer process and undergoing a lot more scrutiny.

Each applicant must complete a four-hour gun safety course, get character references from two people, and show up at the local police department for fingerprinting and a one-on-one interview with a specially designated officer. Police must also do some work on their own, searching department records for information that wouldn’t show up on the official background check.

I’ll leave it to Glenn to opine on the constitutionality of Massachusetts’ gun restrictions. But I will wonder out loud if HuffPo writer Jonathan Cohn would sound so jubilant if he had to jump through the same hoops before being allowed to exercise his First Amendment right to publish an opinion piece.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES: How Russia Lost WWII.

This week, Russia will spend millions of dollars to put up yet another WWII victory parade in the Red Square. Tanks will rumble and jets will fly overhead. Nuclear-capable ballistic missiles will slowly crawl past the same old mausoleum with the same old corpse inside. But what about the people watching? Some are clinging to old glory. Many are beginning to see the absurdity of celebrating in superpower style victory over countries that are now vastly more prosperous than their own. Russia is a poor country that does not even have the technological and business expertise to exploit its own natural resources, letting foreign powers do it instead, akin to the literal banana republics of early 20th century Central America. Russia has roughly half the population it had a hundred years ago and in many metrics such as consumer goods production has yet to reach pre-revolutionary levels or levels that were achieved by Stalin’s GULAG slave labor in the 1930’s. In all ways that count, Russia is the sole loser of the Second World War.

Nazi Germany inflicted unimaginable losses on the Soviet Union. But since 1945 all of Russia’s many, lingering wounds have been self-inflicted.

MICHAEL WALSH: In the Trump Era, Politics and Pews Don’t Mix. “This is how the Left works: by covering its attack on the past by using the values of the present in order to command the dialogue of the future.”

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

NICOLE RUSSELL: With All the Focus on Toxic Masculinity, What about the Waffle House Hero?

ENDORSED: Drinking Tequila? Ditch the Lime and Salt.

According to our guide, the whole lime and salt thing was invented back when people were drinking some pretty rough tequilas where you needed that lime/salt combo to make the drink remotely palatable.

Today, tequila has gotten a lot more refined, so that salt and lime combo isn’t really necessary. That said, if you’re going for an aged tequila like a Reposado or Añejo, then the perfect fruit to pair with it isn’t a lime, but a grapefruit. And instead of salt, sprinkle a little cinnamon on the fruit.

I’m not sold on the cinnamon, but I’ll try grapefruit with almost anything.