HOUSE CONSERVATIVE CAUCUS CHAIRMAN: Senate Should End Legislative Filibuster to Help Trump.

What, and risk taking ownership of their longstanding campaign promises?

MARTIN RODIL: It’s Time to Cut Off Venezuela’s Black Gold. “Tough sanctions on Venezuela’s national oil company will hit the Maduro regime hard, and may save the Venezuelan people.”

State socialism has once again proven to be a colossal failure. Private businesses have been looted by the criminal Maduro regime. Once profitable businesses lie in ruins, as the ruling party’s cronies are given jobs in state-run enterprises. Mismanagement is therefore a core principal of this regime, trickling down throughout the heavily centralized crooked system. When graft is ubiquitous, the people suffer. And the Venezuelan people are suffering.

The medical system has now completely collapsed with every public hospital in the country suffering from woeful shortages of medicine, anesthetic, and any semblance of hygienic equipment. Women are forced to give birth in the streets or in stairwells of hospitals. HIV drugs are almost non-existent. Diarrhea has once again become a serious killer of children across Venezuela.

In the meantime, the economy has completely imploded. Inflation is out of control. There is no food on the shelves, and basics like toilet paper are almost non-existent.

But would an oil embargo give Maduro a plausible scapegoat?

PERHAPS SARAH HOYT WILL LET ME BORROW HER SHOCKED FACE: Climate Change Overreported by Media.

The way the media operates today does not help increase the public’s trust. Day after day, the media publishes biased news to push a one-sided agenda. Recently, The New York Times printed a front-page, headline-grabbing story alleging that a draft climate change report had been leaked supposedly to prevent the administration from hiding it. Further investigation revealed that this draft of the report had been public for months. In an interview, multiple authors of the report said they had not heard or seen any sign of suppression or censorship by the White House.

So what exactly was The New York Times reporting? It appears the only purpose of this false story was to push the alarmist view that the world is doomed unless Obama-era regulations are enforced. The media is spewing alarmist rhetoric and scare tactics to intimidate Americans into believing their bias. Americans deserve better than to be misled about important issues such as climate change. Instead of painting a dire future, media outlets should accurately report all the varying climate scenarios, not just the worst-case, catastrophic ones.

Perhaps no one is better at reciting false claims about climate change impacts than former Vice President Al Gore. In his 2006 movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Mr. Gore made many predictions about the impact of climate change that have failed to materialize.

Deceitful alarmism has hardly been inconvenient for Gore’s net worth.

THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURING OUT HOW I’D HOPED: Attorneys discuss rights to pooping in public after “Mad Pooper” video release.

And the right to poop in public is a penumbra emanating from what, exactly?

STEPHEN KRUISER: Football Fans Voice Displeasure But NFL Isn’t Listening.

AND FASTER, TOO, PLEASE: The U.S. Navy Needs to Build More Attack Submarines.

There is an absolute requirement to modernize both the SSBN and SSN fleets. The Los Angeles-class boats are reaching the end of their nominal 33-year service life although life extension of 5 – 10 years is possible. The oldest of the Los Angeles-class SSNs, the USS Bremerton, was commissioned in 1981 and the youngest, the USS Cheyenne, was commissioned in 1996. So even with the most optimistic predictions about the Los Angeles class’ service life, the remaining 36 boats will have to be decommissioned over the next two decades.

The problem for the submarine force is that the need for attack boats is rising precisely as the Los Angeles class is being retired. According to recent Congressional testimony, U.S. Pacific Command operates about half the number of SSNs it requires and this is in peacetime. At the same time, both China and Russia are building large numbers of advanced conventional and nuclear-powered attack and cruise missile submarines.

The Navy once believed that 48 SSNs as part of an overall force level of 308 ships would be enough into the middle of the century. The Navy’s new goal is to maintain a 355-ship fleet, of which 66 would be SSNs. Unfortunately, the Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan does not build enough Virginias even to meet the prior, lower goal for the SSN force.

The oceans aren’t getting any smaller, and the Virginia-class attack boats have been a rare procurement success story for the US Navy — now coming in ahead of schedule and under budget.

GIVE US THE HOUSE, THEY SAID… GIVE US THE SENATE, GIVE US THE WHITE HOUSE, TOO: The Republican Fight to Repeal Obamacare Is ‘Dead as a Doornail.’

“We don’t have the votes,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who along with Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina drafted the latest attempt at scrapping the seven-year-old law. “Am I disappointed? Absolutely.”

Senate leaders said the issue wasn’t the content of the Graham-Cassidy bill, which would have dismantled Medicaid expansion and other Obamacare provisions and hand the funds from those programs over to states via block grants. Graham and Cassidy were insistent that they will eventually get the votes needed to pass the legislation. Leaders said the process through which they were trying to pick the bill through, however, had given a handful of senators pause, including Arizona Sen. John McCain.

“There are 50 votes for the substance,” said Graham. “There are not 50 votes for the process.”

There were no warnings about “process” during the election campaigns of 2010, 2012, 2014, or 2016 — which makes “process” sound and awful lot like “dodge.”

LUKE ROSIAK: Awan Funneling ‘Massive’ Data Off Congressional Server, Dems Claim It’s Child’s HOMEWORK.

Democratic congressional aides made unauthorized access to a House server 5,400 times and funneled “massive” amounts of data off of it. But there’s nothing to see here, Democrats told The Washington Post: They were just storing and then re-downloading homework assignments for Imran Awan’s elementary-school aged kids and family pictures.

A congressional source with direct knowledge of the incident contradicted the Post’s account, saying that now-indicted IT aide Imran Awan and his associates “were moving terabytes off-site so they could quote ‘work on the files’” and that they desperately tried to hide what was on the server when caught, providing police with what law enforcement immediately recognized as falsified evidence and an indication of criminal intent.

The Post described the amount of data improperly flowing out of the congressional network as “massive.” One congressional source told Circa it was “terabits.”

Read the whole thing.

MEGAN FOX: Gold Star Family Shares Their Heartache Over Disrespect for Flag at Protests.

DAILY CALLER: White House Aides Are Stopping Deal With Assange, Congressman Says.

President Donald Trump is being blocked from knowing he can pardon WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in exchange for information vindicating Russia of hacking allegations, according to Republican California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher.

Trump told reporters Sunday that he has “never heard” of a potential deal with Assange.

“I think the president’s answer indicates that there is a wall around him that is being created by people who do not want to expose this fraud that there was collusion between our intelligence community and the leaders of the Democratic Party,” Rohrabacher told The Daily Caller Tuesday in a phone interview.

The Trump angle is little more than a hook — the real meat is Rohrabacher’s desire to cut a deal with Assange to get to the bottom of any DNC-Deep State-Russia connection.

YES, BUT… To Be Great the U.N. Must Defend Democratic Sovereignty.

Socialism denies that individual rights produce a private sphere safe from the control of government—so private property is always at risk, as is the individual conscience.

This corruption of democracy and lowering of the meaning of humanity sets the stage for the thuggish third world regimes who—without surprising those who understand the corrosive roots of the U.N.—seem to dominate it. This relativism is keeping, too, with Franklin Roosevelt’s conception that the U.N. would make Stalin’s Soviet Union a key member. Progressive political philosophy and economics saw increasing international order—irrespective of the means used to produce that order—as the inescapable goal of world history.

Eventually humanity would see a global administrative state that would produce human security by banishing famine, disease, and war. Of course, the elimination of war by a global entity would mean the snuffing out of “rebellions” (such as that of the Americans against the British Empire) and the establishment of what amounts to a global tyranny. It would be the sole possessor of weapons and the master of the force required to use them.

In place of this parade of horrors, President Trump’s U.N. remarks recommended America’s unique version of sovereignty, a sovereignty of the people, all created equal, against arbitrary government.

The problem of course is that the UN has no interest in greatness, and the autocrats who make up so much of its membership are all-in on arbitrary government.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: A Strange Loss, NFLOL Faces Backlash and Much, Much Moore.

ALLIES: Turkey’s President Erdogan threatens to invade Iraq and cut off oil pipeline after Kurds vote for independence.

Issuing a strongly-worded speech, Mr Erdoğan said fighting the Iraqi Kurdish bid for independence was “a matter of survival”.

The Turkish leader also suggested he could cut off a pipeline that carries oil out of Iraq, to increase pressure on an autonomous Kurdish region.

Mr Erdoğan has long struggled against a Kurdish insurgency in southeast Turkey, which shares a border with northern Iraq.

Erdogan might not be wrong about Kurdistan representing a deadly threat — but perhaps not in the way he meant. PJM’s own David Goldman noted last year:

Iran and Turkey face a demographic train wreck that will hit with full force in about twenty years. Depending on the oil price, Iran will run out of money, young people or water first—but it will run out of all three in the foreseeable future. Turkey’s Kurdish minority has twice as many children as ethnic Turks, so that it will become a majority of military-age Turks within a generation. Saudi Arabia will run out of money in five years at the present oil price, and its tumescent welfare state (as I have argued previously) will collapse.

The chart below shows that the Kurdish regions of Turkey (especially the Southeast) have a total fertility rate of 2.8 to 3.4 births per female, while the Western provinces dominated by ethnic Turks have a TFR of only 1.6 to 1.8.

And historically, the notion that the Turks might indulge in a little genocide to rid themselves of a pesky minority isn’t all that far-fetched.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Citi Is Bringing Back One of the Most Infamous Bets of the Credit Crisis.

It’s an astonishing comeback for the roughly $70 billion market for synthetic CDOs, which rose to infamy during the crisis and then faded into obscurity after nearly destroying the financial system. But perhaps the most surprising twist is Citigroup itself. Less than a decade ago, the bank was forced into a taxpayer bailout after suffering huge losses on similar types of securities tied to mortgages. Now, many in the industry say Citigroup is responsible for over half the deals that come to market, though precise numbers are hard to come by.

This time, Citigroup says, it’s doing things differently. The deals are tailored in a way that insulates it from any losses, while giving yield-starved buyers a chance to reap returns of 20 percent or more. The market today is also just a fraction of its size before the crisis, and few see corporate defaults surging any time soon. But as years of rock-bottom interest rates have pushed investors toward riskier products, the revival of synthetic CDOs may be one of the clearest signs yet of froth in the credit markets.

I have a bad feeling about this…

SPENGLER: Lesson from the German Elections: Voters See Through the ‘Equality’ Scam.

TYLER O’NEIL: 5 Things to Know About the Moore-Strange Runoff in Alabama.

AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME? How to Regulate Facebook Like a Broadcaster.

Sure, television regulation was written to curb the big broadcasters’ monopoly on airwaves but, today, Facebook enjoys an even more powerful monopoly (even if the monopoly is not built on physical scarcity).

This leaves the question of whether the government is tech-savvy or competent enough to regulate Facebook in the first place. It’s a fair concern. The current TV laws—many of which were written in the era of antennas—would serve as clumsy tools to oversee an Internet company like Facebook, and could cause bureaucrats to run amok.

The good news is Congress and regulators have pulled off something like this before. In 1998, lawmakers wrote two landmark laws to address copyright and free speech concerns on the Internet, while helping to ensure web-based companies didn’t get smothered with lawsuits about user behavior. The laws are widely regarded as a success.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is quoted as one of those “successful” laws. If the DMCA is the measure of internet regulatory success, then perhaps more thought — much more thought — is needed before Congress takes any action.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Microsoft’s new coding language is made for quantum computers.

SOMEWHAT RELATED: A Rare Joint Interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Bill Gates.

That other former CEO, Steve Ballmer, was conspicuously absent, but Gates and Nadella were refreshingly honest about quantum computing:

SS: Can you explain in one sentence to my 72-year-old mother: What is quantum computing?

SN: I don’t think so. I wish I could. But in simple terms, I think we’re reaching some limits on the foundations that have helped us get all this computing power. And the question is, What’s the next breakthrough that will allow us to keep up this exponential growth in computing power and to solve problems—whether it’s about climate or food production or drug discovery? I think that’s where quantum plays a role. It’s a natural thing for us to be investing in because we are one of the biggest spenders on cloud computing, and we think of this as our next-generation cloud.

BG: I smiled when you suggested we should try to explain quantum. That’s the one part of Microsoft where they put up slides that I truly do not understand. I know a lot of physics and a lot of math. But the one place where they put up slides and it is hieroglyphics, it’s quantum.

When my 11-year-old asked me about quantum mechanics (after I’d made the mistake of mentioning it), the best I could come up with was, “Quantum is where things get deeply weird.”

I THOUGHT MONEY WAS A TOOL OF PHALLOCENTRIC OPPRESSION: Feminist group gives students $5K to ‘fight the patriarchy.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED IN FOR A SHORT NAP: Sleep Deprivation Could Shave Years Off Your Life.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook Bans Rohingya Terror Group Behind Current Myanmar Crisis, Twitter Not So Much.

HARDBALL: GOP rep calls for McCain ‘recall’ amid cancer diagnosis, ObamaCare repeal fight.

There’s no such thing as a recall election for federal offices, as Gohmert must surely know. That aside, it sure looks as though McCain has allowed his personal animus towards President Trump to supersede his longstanding campaign promises to repeal ObamaCare.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuelan families scavenge for food to survive hunger.

Many families are now forced to scavenge for food in what was once South America’s richest country.

At a soup kitchen run by the Catholic Church in Caracas, there are rarely any leftovers. It only serves 100 children every day, so the kitchen, which runs on donations, is forced to turn people away.

“Every day, more children come. Our crisis is such that, as they say, shame has been forgotten,” Judith Arcia, a cook at the soup kitchen told Al Jazeera.

“People would rather beg for a plate of food for their children, than watch them go hungry.”

Arcia said many of the children are given a special formula after arriving, when they are found to be severely malnourished.

The parents – who are not entitled to a meal – are not so lucky.

“Sometimes my wife and I do without food so at least the children can eat twice a day,” a parent told Al Jazeera.

Chavez and Maduro love poor people so much that they made millions more of them.

RELATED: Venezuelan politicians seek refuge abroad.

“A FIRST LOVE DIES HARD”: The New York Times Is Working Overtime to Rehab Communism and Socialism in 2017.

RUN, JOE, RUN! Joe Biden’s Platform for 2020: Anti-Populism. “By criticizing the views of both Berniecrats and Trumpites, Biden is positioning himself as the antidote to populism in all its forms and flavors.”

At this early stage, you could sum up the Democrats’ 2020 presidential hopefuls with the title of an old Adam Ant song: “Desperate But Not Serious.”