MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: Comey’s Memos Indicate Dossier Briefing Of Trump Was A Setup.

Keep in mind that nothing we now know about the dossier had been reported at the time. It wasn’t yet reported that it was used by the FBI to provide a substantial basis to wiretap at least one Trump affiliate despite the fact it was unverified. It wasn’t yet reported that the product was bought and paid for as a Hillary Clinton campaign operation, or that it was secretly funded by the DNC using a law firm as a pass-through to hide its provenance in federal campaign filings. It wasn’t yet reported that its author’s working relationship with the FBI was terminated because he had lied to the agency about how he wouldn’t talk to the media.

After nearly a year of wrangling, the seven memos written by Comey were finally handed over on Thursday to Congress, which oversees the operation and funding of the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ). The memos purport to show Comey’s version of his interactions with the president before Comey was fired last May. According to Daniel Richman, the original recipient of Comey’s leaks who now claims to be his personal attorney, Comey gave him four memos. Four of the seven memos are classified, meaning that at least one of the memos he leaked was classified. By his own account, Comey orchestrated these leaks to the media in order to launch an aggressive special counsel to avenge his firing by Trump in May 2017. The memos given to Congress on Thursday were quickly leaked to the media.

Read the whole thing.

TIDE POD CHALLENGE ACCEPTED: Booker on Lowering Voting Age to 16: ‘I Want to Consider It.’

BILL GERTZ: PACOM Pacom Nominee Says China Military Islands Now Control South China Sea. “Admiral urges rapid U.S. buildup of hypersonic and medium-range missiles to counter China threat.”

WAR: UAE forces intercept Iranian drone carrying explosives intended for Yemen targets.

JIM GERAGHTY: James Comey’s Stellar Windiness.

Comey mentions that the New York Times editorial board called Bill Clinton’s pardon of Rich “a shocking abuse of federal power,” and he adds that Clinton’s pardon of a fugitive was, to his knowledge, unprecedented. But he also writes, “In the end, we did not find sufficient evidence to bring any charges and closed the case.” From his mention of the Times editorial and the unprecedented nature of the pardon, we get a vague sense that Comey disapproved of Clinton’s pardon, but no real elaboration about how this shaped Comey’s perspective on him.

He moves on to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and quickly swats away the claim from Clinton defenders that this was merely a harmless mistake. “There were thirty-six e-mail chains about topics that could cause ‘serious’ damage to national security and eight that could be expected to cause ‘exceptionally grave’ damage to the security of the United States if released.” But he spends a lot of time discussing the difficulty of proving intent. Does Comey really believe that every one of these emails was an innocent mistake, and that Clinton never realized what she was doing?

Comey offers a passage lamenting the absurdity of Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s request that he refer to the questioning about Clinton’s e-mails as a “matter,” not an “investigation.” But Comey went out and did it anyway, telling reporters that he was confident that “personnel assigned to the matter” would be “able to do it in a professional, prompt, and independent way.”

Comey points out that in October 2015 and April 2016, President Obama declared that Clinton had merely made a “mistake” that had not endangered national security, but laments, “To this day, I don’t know why he spoke about the case publicly and seemed to absolve her before a final determination had been made.”

It’s weird that someone who spent almost two decades relieving the Clintons of the burdens of their criminality would fail to recognize someone else doing the same thing.

BUT IS HE THE EGGMAN? NY Gov. Cuomo Says He’s Muslim, Female, and Jewish, Among Other Things.

RICH LOWRY: Why has the Republican Congress given up on doing anything?

In a gift for the ages, Republicans won all elected branches of the federal government in 2016. They had no reason to expect Trump to win the presidency, and, in fact, very few of them expected it. The initial ecstasy over Trump “signing their stuff” has given way to the reality that they don’t have stuff to send him.

Republicans couldn’t roll back ObamaCare, in part because the party hadn’t thought through what the Republican alternative was — even though anyone could have known this would be the central question if the GOP ever got a legitimate shot at repeal.

They passed a tax cut that included important reforms that even the Democratic repeal bills don’t want to completely undo and that are boosting the economy.
That’s all to the good. But tax cuts aren’t a magic political elixir.

First, Trump is right, as he said at an event a couple of weeks ago when he tossed away his script, that they are boring. They don’t have the emotive appeal of issues like trade and immigration. Second, there are limits to how effectively you can run on the one big thing you accomplished last year (and as of this November, it will be almost exactly a year ago).

This is the truly extraordinary aspect of the current situation. Republicans are content not to do anything else of significance in Congress this year. They passed an omnibus spending bill that was rightly denounced as a disgrace by Trump even as he signed it, and the Senate is working to confirm Trump appointees.

That’s pretty much it.

I keep saying the GOP should legislate like there’s no tomorrow. Instead, they’re legislating (or rather, not legislating) like they don’t care if they have a tomorrow.

PROCUREMENT BLUES: Russia’s Shipbuilding Program: Postponed Blue-Water Ambitions.

Russia’s shipbuilding program for 2011–2020, under which the country plans to build over 100 new warships (Military Paritet, February 7, 2012), is reportedly causing “a very bad feeling” among some Russian naval experts (Topwar.ru, August 10, 2016). They describe the current status of the Russian Navy as a “ceremonial fleet” and have suggested that one third of the shipbuilding program has resulted in little more than a “donut hole” (Nezavisimoe Voennoe Obozrenie, December 22, 2017; March 3, 2018). The ongoing production difficulties appear linked to insufficient naval shipbuilding capacity and a problematic manufacturing process.

Forget a blue-water navy, Russia can’t even afford more than a couple hundred of its new T-14 tank, and is instead concentrating its efforts on further modernizations to its existing (and ancient) T-72 and T-90 models.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Comey Memos Released and Much, Much More. “What’s the big deal with these memos? Trump comes out looking pretty good which is the big deal. If your goal is to destabilize, undermine and de-legitimize the Trump administration, these memos throw a wrench in that plan.”

I’M OK WITH THIS: Mammals are smaller than they used to be, and it’s our fault. “Human dispersal coincided with a reduction in the average body size of mammals.”

In Africa at the dawn of human dispersal, mammals were already smaller, on average, than those living elsewhere in the world, with a mean body mass about half that of Eurasian mammals. Smith and her colleagues say that was probably the legacy of thousands of years of interactions between hominins and other African mammals, which drove larger species extinct and exerted pressure that reduced the size of the surviving species. Not only modern humans, but also our ancestors, had a major impact on mammal populations.

“This finding suggests that the homogenization of natural ecosystems was a consequence of hominin behavior in general and not specific to H. Sapiens,” Smith and her colleagues wrote.

But as humans spread into Eurasia around 120,000 years ago, mean mammal size there decreased by half. And it dropped by an order of magnitude shortly after humans arrived in Australia between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago. But nothing changed in the Americas until the terminal Pleistocene, between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago—and humans didn’t get there until sometime around 15,000 years ago.

Making your competition (and potential predators) smaller is a good survival strategy, even if it’s inadvertent.

BLUE ON BLUE GOES BLUE: Bernie Sanders may sing Cardi B’s praises — but sex workers say he’s no ally.

That’s a Salon link, just so you know.

SOLVING MYSTERIES: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. What Bitcoin Is Really Worth May No Longer Be Such a Mystery. “It’s somewhere between $20 and $800,000, according to economic theory and a night of drinking.”

Well, I guess that’s settled then.

YOU DON’T SAY: In the wake of a gun ban, Venezuela sees rising homicide rate.

In 2012, the communist-dominated Venezuelan National Assembly enacted the “Control of Arms, Munitions and Disarmament Law.” The bill’s stated objective was to “disarm all citizens.” The new law prohibited all gun sales, except to government entities. The penalty for illegally selling or carrying a firearm is a prison sentence of up to 20 years. Despite criticism from the democratic opposition, the bill went into effect in 2013.

Ostensibly, the motive for gun prohibition was Venezuela’s out of control violent crime. In 2015, Venezuela’s homicide rate was the world’s highest, with 27,875 Venezuelans murdered that year. More broadly, the Bolivarian Republic is the only South American nation with a homicide rate that has steadily risen since 1995. In the year prior to Maduro’s disarmament initiative, the Venezuelan capital of Caracas had a homicide rate of 122 per 100,000 inhabitants, nearly 20 times the global average of 6.2.

By comparison, the U.S. homicide rate in 2015 was 4.9; the U.S. gun homicide rate was 3.03 (based on calculation from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports).

Wait… the homicide rate for gun-happy Americans is 20% lower than the global average? But the narrative!

PRIVACY: Facebook to put 1.5 billion users out of reach of new EU privacy law.

Facebook members outside the United States and Canada, whether they know it or not, are currently governed by terms of service agreed with the company’s international headquarters in Ireland.

Next month, Facebook is planning to make that the case for only European users, meaning 1.5 billion members in Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America will not fall under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which takes effect on May 25.

The previously unreported move, which Facebook confirmed to Reuters on Tuesday, shows the world’s largest online social network is keen to reduce its exposure to GDPR, which allows European regulators to fine companies for collecting or using personal data without users’ consent.

Facebook’s entire business model is extracting as much data from its users as possible for free, then selling that data for as much as possible to its actual customers: Advertisers.

So of course Mark Zuckerberg will go to Congress and talk a good game about privacy, while continuing the same-old same-old everywhere he can.

SO IT GOES: Six Months in, #MeToo Has Become Infantilizing and Authoritarian.

#MeToo has become an orthodoxy intolerant of criticism or even question. Women who have suggested that it may have gone too far, that conflating rape with crude flirtation risks trivializing serious incidents and falsely demonizing innocent men, have been hounded for thought crimes. Katie Roiphe prompted outrage when it was rumored she might go public with a list of “shitty media men” that had been widely circulated among writers and journalists. Roiphe recalls that “Before the piece was even finished, let alone published, people were calling me ‘pro-rape,’ ‘human scum,’ a ‘harridan,’ a ‘monster out of Stephen King’s “IT”‘ a ‘ghoul,’ a ‘bitch,’ and a ‘garbage person.’” Catherine Deneuve and over 100 other prominent French women were met with a similar tsunami of name-calling and criticism following their public letter comparing #MeToo to a witch hunt. The result has been a censorious closing down of debate through a crude division between “good women” who stick to the #MeToo script and “bad women” who digress.

Criticism of the wrong kind of women respects no limits. Film producer Jill Messick, best known for her work on Mean Girls and Frida, committed suicide in February. Messick worked for Weinstein’s Miramax between 1997 and 2003 and was manager for Rose McGowan in the late 1990s. As #MeToo gained ground, McGowan alleged she was raped by Weinstein and that Messick knew but did not take appropriate action. Messick was reportedly already suffering from depression; it seems unlikely that finding herself caught between McGowan and Weinstein, between claim and counterclaim, can have done much good for her mental health. The speed with which Messick was written out of history makes clear that to the #MeToo activists, some people’s lives are worth more than others.

#MeToo is a moral crusade where facts are readily sacrificed for the greater good of the cause. When it comes to declaring rape, sexual assault, or harassment, what matters to activists is not objective evidence that can be proved or disproved but the subjective feelings of the accuser. #MeToo has redefined sexual misconduct as unwanted behavior. As the case against actor Aziz Ansari showed, defining abuse as unwanted behavior takes us into the realm of the bad date. Leaving a restaurant too early, pouring wine without asking, even attempting a kiss might all be considered rude, but they are only violations in the mind of the most zealous #MeToo crusaders. Women in such scenarios are robbed of all agency; apparently unable to say no, they are forced to rely on men’s presumed mind-reading skills to protect them from the unwanted. Not only does this pave the way for miscarriages of justice, it makes all interactions between men and women inherently risky.

I witnessed this same thing in action a quarter century go, during a sexual harassment seminar required by all employees of the large corporation I was working for at the time. We were told, in no uncertain terms, that harassment was defined by the feelings of the victim. That’s no standard of justice, but it’s a great way to subjugate men to the whims of women.

HOISTED BY THEIR OWN PETARD: Muslims Inadvertently Call for Ban on Islam.

MAYBE. BUT TONIGHT FOR SURE I’M GOING TO EAT A RIBEYE THE SIZE OF A THROW PILLOW: In the future, you’ll eat ketchup slices and kelp jerky.

BARBARA BUSH: A Loud, Proud, Unapologetic Traditional Feminist.

HMM: Carver County closes Prince death investigation with no criminal charges.

Metz said county, state and federal investigators undertook an “extensive, painstaking and thorough” investigation but were unable to determine who provided Prince the fentanyl painkillers, disguised as counterfeit prescription medication, that killed the megastar on April 21, 2016.

Metz said there was no evidence that Prince or his associates knew that Prince had taken counterfeit pills marketed under the trade name Vicodin, or that anyone had conspired to kill him.

“There is no reliable evidence showing how Prince obtained the counterfeit Vicodin containing fentaynl,” he added. “The bottom line is that we simply do not have sufficient evidence to charge anyone with a crime related to Prince’s death.”

That’s that then.

MATT MARGOLIS: David Hogg Gets a Book Deal. “Just how much fame can one person milk simply for witnessing a tragic event?”

CHANGE: US steel prices up ‘dramatically’ due to Trump tariffs.

But: Ditch steel stocks as the industry nears ‘the end of the line’ despite Trump’s efforts, says UBS. “Tariffs imposed by President Trump should do little to delay a 17 percent slip in U.S. steel prices through the end of 2019, UBS wrote.”

I HAD NO IDEA THE AVERAGE AMERICAN SLEPT UNTIL 10:53 AM: The average American utters their first curse word of the day at 10:54 am, according to new data.

NANNYSTATISM: California Bill Would Force Businesses To Submit Data on Pay and Gender.

Inside Katie Couric’s Disastrous Yahoo Experiment. “She moved to online with great fanfare, but quickly became the forgotten woman of journalism. How did it all go so wrong for Katie Couric at Yahoo?”

Earlier this month—nine months after resigning from the company—Couric summed up her four years at Yahoo on a Recode Decode podcast.

“I wouldn’t say it was an unhappy marriage, but it certainly was not fulfilling for me,’’ she said. “I had all this great content, I was getting big interviews—and it was sort of like a tree falling in the forest.”

Part of the problem, according the Post’s Oli Coleman, was that Couric was fighting for traffic with one hand tied behind her back, as Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, had set up Yahoo News to be “a slave to an algorithm: If you read Kardashian stories, you’d be fed more pop culture; if you read Tom Brady stories, you’d get more NFL news.”

Unfortunately for Couric, the Yahoo algorithm bestowed no preferential status on Yahoo content. If Couric had assumed that at least regular Yahoo users—and there were of course millions of them at the service’s height—were automatically going to be seeing more of her, she was wrong, as users were much more likely to be pointed to non-Yahoo sites based on their browsing history.

That’s the kind of thing a more internet-savvy TV star should look into before making a career-changing move into a new medium.

LET’S GET FRACKING: Oil Rallies to More Than Three-Year High as Supply Tightens. “OPEC members are expected to renew their commitment to draining global inventories at Friday’s meeting.”

One of the biggest surprises in a surprising couple of years is that OPEC members haven’t been cheating (much) on their production quota cuts.