QUESTION ASKED: Who’s Colluding With Whom?

Scott McKay:

But in June, [Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya] was permitted to fly back to the U.S., have the meeting with Trump Junior — at Trump Tower, no less — and then end up in the front row for a congressional hearing involving testimony from a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, then turning up at a D.C. showing of a documentary film on the negative effects of the Magnitsky Act, and later appearing at a dinner involving Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and former Rep. Ron Dellums (D-CA) who is now a lobbyist for the Russians. The repeal of that legislation is a priority item for the Russians and a personal project of Veselnitskaya’s; it, rather than any Clinton dirt, was reportedly the primary subject brought forth at the meeting with Donald Trump Jr.

All of this without a visa! Not to mention Veselnitskaya didn’t file a FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) document before acting as a lobbyist for a foreign entity, as required by law. Neither, apparently, did Dellums. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a fascinating letter Tuesday to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asking them to please find out what in the hell Veselnitskaya was doing in this country last June.

And further, it turns out Veselnitskaya was connected to Fusion GPS, the Democrat oppo research firm which employed a former British spy who used Russian contacts to produce the infamous and debunked Pee Pee Dossier smearing Trump. Veselnitskaya hired Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson to work on behalf of Prevezon, the company she was allowed into the country to represent, in its efforts to repeal the Magnitsky Act. Fusion then hired Christopher Steele, the British spy who drew on Russian sources to produce that dossier, and made him available for private briefings on the dossier with left-leaning media sources such as Mother Jones, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, the New Yorker and CNN in September.

If it weren’t for projection, all the progressive left would have is lies and hate.

SUSTAINABILITY: Monthly Federal Spending Tops $400B for First Time.

Real monthly federal spending topped $400 billion for the first time in June, when the Treasury spent a record $428,894,000,000, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.

Prior to June, the record for federal spending in a single month was held by March 2017, when the Treasury spent approximately $392,816,000,000.

In August 2012, the Treasury spent $392,408,410,000 in constant 2017 dollars

As the Treasury was spending a record $428,894,000,000 in June it was taking in approximately $338,660,000,000 in taxes—thus, running a deficit for the month of $90,233,000,000.

Washington has added more than $500 billion in new debt so far this fiscal year — absent an economic downturn or a major war.

THIS ONE WAS JUST TOO BIG TO CLEVERLY SUMMARIZE: Liz Sheld’s morning brief has everything, and I do mean everything.

TRIGGER WARNING, DEMOCRATS: Your Path To Political Revival Is Through Trump Voters.

To win again, the Democrats don’t need to adopt an alien agenda or back away from policies aimed at racial justice. But their leaders would be well advised to change their rhetorical priorities and more directly address the country’s bastions of gloom. The party has been crushed—not just in the recent presidential election, but in countless down-ballot elections—by its failure to develop a message that can resonate with people beyond the core members of the Obama coalition, and by its unwillingness to blare its hostility to crony capitalism.

The makings of a Democratic majority are real. Demographic advantages will continue to accrue to the left. The party needs only to add to its coalition on the margins and in the right patches on the map. Doing that does not require the abandonment of any moral principles; persuasion is a different category of political activity from pandering. A decent liberalism, not to mention a savvy party, shouldn’t struggle to accord dignity and respect to citizens, even if it believes some of them hold abhorrent views.

It may take a generational shift before Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark is not longer the Democrats’ brand with the white working class voters who were already fleeing the party.

Meanwhile, younger Americans are trending more conservative than is widely appreciated on economic issues. That gives the GOP an opening to pursue the youth vote — although doing so will probably require a tricky combination of accepting defeat on certain social issues (gay marriage, aspects of the Drug War) while doubling down on others (religious liberty, campus reform, and the like).

TECHNOLOGISM WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS: China’s Grip on Maps Hinders Self-Driving Car Makers.

Self-driving cars need detailed maps to help them discern their exact location, navigate tricky intersections and avoid fixed objects like buildings. But China limits the amount of mapping that can be done by foreign companies, citing national security concerns.

Global car makers already need to partner with a local company to open factories in China, but some are skeptical they will be able to find a way to operate their autonomous-car software in China because of the mapping restrictions.

Brian McClendon, an industry pioneer who helped created Google Maps and later headed up Uber Technologies Inc.’s self-driving effort, said he doubted U.S. software would ever be adopted for self-driving cars in China.

“We’re going to have a bifurcated market for self-driving—China will do China and the U.S. will do U.S. and the rest of the world will quickly choose and do one or the other,” said Mr. McClendon, now a research professor at the University of Kansas.

I’m reminded a bit of the Soviet Union’s strict controls on fax machines and photocopiers — for all the good that did them — and have to wonder if anyone outside China will trust Beijing-approved technology.

O CANADA: Oil Sands Help Shale Stymie OPEC’s Effort to Rebalance Market.

As oil rigs in the U.S. jumped 45 percent this year, north of the border, oil-sands companies including Devon Energy Corp., Suncor Energy Inc. and Cenovus Energy Inc. have ramped up operations as well. Their thermal production sites are running as much as 30 percent above capacity this year, squeezing barrels from existing production sites to maximize revenue.

Oil sands will be second to shale as the biggest contributor to global supply growth over the next two years with half a million barrels a day of production scheduled to enter the market, according to IHS Energy. The growth seen across North America is blunting the impact of output cuts agreed to by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and other producers including Russia.

These days, everybody is drilling their way to lower prices.

FAUXCAHONTAS CHALLENGER: ‘It Takes a Real Indian to Beat a Fake One.’

But… how?

WAIT, WHAT? Trump Says We May Rejoin the Paris Climate Accord.

CRIME OF THE CENTURY: Victoria’s Secret panty thieves make off with $6K worth of underwear.

That’s a whole lot of not very much.

PUTIN’S JUSTICE: Hunter of Stalin’s mass graves on trial; friends say he’s been framed.

Yuri Dmitriev spent years locating and exhuming the mass graves of people executed during Josef Stalin’s Great Terror. Eight decades after one of Russia’s darkest chapters, it is his reputation, not Stalin’s, that is on trial.

The historian, 61, is being tried on charges brought by state prosecutors of involving his 11-year-old adopted daughter in child pornography, illegally possessing “the main elements of” a firearm, and of depravity involving a minor.

If convicted of the charges, which he denies, he faces up to 15 years in jail.

Fellow historians, rights activists and some of Russia’s leading cultural figures say Dmitriev has been framed because his focus on Stalin’s crimes has become politically untenable under President Vladimir Putin.

They say his real crime is dedicating himself to documenting Stalin’s 1937-38 Great Terror, in which nearly 700,000 people were executed, according to conservative official estimates.

His arrest followed close on the heels of the release by Memorial, the organization for which he works, of a list of more than 40,000 Stalin-era secret policemen, a move that raised an outcry among some of their descendants.

Not even the New York Times has tried to rehabilitate Stalin the way Putin has been.

HMM: Sessions Pressed on Settlement with Company Linked to Trump Jr. Russian Lawyer.

THE COST OF DOING BUSINESS WITH TYRANTS: Uber cedes control in Russian market with Yandex tie-up.

For Uber, the deal marks the exit from another big market after it sold its operations in China last year to local rival Didi Chuxing.

Yandex said in a statement on Thursday that Uber and Yandex Taxi would combine into a new company in Russia as well as in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Yandex will own 59 percent, Uber roughly 37 percent, and employees the rest. The CEO of Yandex Taxi, Tigran Khudaverdyan, will become the chief executive of the new combined company.

You can’t fight City Hall, at least not when it’s located in Moscow.

THIS MIGHT EXPLAIN THE DISCREPANCY BETWEEN MARKET SHARE AND PROFITABILITY BETWEEN THE TWO OPERATING SYSTEMS: Android users want to get pregnant, iPhone users avoid it, fertility app study shows.

EVERYBODY CAN HEAR YOU NOW: Personal Data of 6 Million Verizon Users Leaked Online.

GOODNESS: Hundreds Of Coastal Communities Could Face Monthly Floods In The Coming Decades.

A special tax on coastal development projects, devoted to carbon reduction, ought to discourage homebuilding in risky areas — and certainly our coastal elites won’t mind paying their fair share to help save the planet.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I’ve proposed just such a tax in the past, but weirdly, coastal lefties don’t seem excited about it.

KIDS THESE DAYS: Goldman Sachs relaxes dress code for techs in fight for talent.

I’ve surrendered in my one-man war to save the suit.

DO IT AGAIN: Substitute teacher, 40, who had sex with her 17 year old boy student, is rearrested for violating probation with booze and Facebook.

COLLUSION? Obama DOJ Allowed Russian Lawyer to Enter U.S. Without Visa Before Trump Team Meeting.

BEGUN, THE DRONE WARS HAVE: USAF Wants Authority To Down Drones After F-22 Near Miss.

In early July, an F-22 Raptor pilot coming in for a landing just barely avoided colliding with a small, commercial unmanned aerial system (UAS). That same week, a base security guard watched another tiny drone fly onto the complex and over the flight line before heading back out.

In neither case did the airman have the legal authority to shoot down or otherwise disable the drone.
As drone technology becomes cheaper and more commercially available, the U.S. Air Force is increasingly worried about the threats posed by small UAS such as quadcopters. But while the service is developing the tools to defend against these systems—from jamming their electronics to shooting them down—it lacks the legal authority to use them, says Gen. James Holmes, commander of Air Combat Command.

“Imagine a world where somebody flies a couple hundred of those, and flies one down the intake of one of my F-22s with just a small weapon,” Holmes said July 11 during an event on Capitol Hill. “I need the authorities to deal with that.”

China and others are taking notes, I’m sure.

NATHAN COFNAS: Look under the hood on climate change “science” and what you see isn’t pretty.

Let’s unpack this a bit, using actual science. The proportion of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is currently about 400 parts per million (ppm). The Cambrian explosion—when most animal lineages first appeared—occurred a little more than 500 million years ago when, according to all estimates, carbon dioxide levels were several times higher than today. The atmosphere of Venus is 965,000 ppm carbon dioxide, enveloped in clouds of sulfuric acid. And Venus itself is almost 26 million miles closer to the sun than Earth.

So Hawking’s claim that the earth is on the “brink” of becoming like Venus is preposterous. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explicitly notes that the Earth will not experience a runaway greenhouse effect such as might have occurred on Venus.

What is really disturbing, though, is that Hawking has flagrantly given up on even the pretense of engaging with actual science. He speaks entirely from authority: I am a scientist. Adopt this political policy that I favor or suffer fire and sulfuric acid. The threatened punishment for noncompliance substitutes sulfuric acid for the regular sulfur (brimstone) that features in old-fashioned religion. As far as the justification for the claim, there is no important difference between this and a religious statement that is supposed to be believed simply because it issues forth from a high priest.

The real concern is how far the Climate Change Cult will go to smite the wicked.

NEITHER THE FIRST NOR THE LAST: I Was A High School Student ‘Feeling the Bern.’ Then the Left Turned Me Into A Trump Supporter.

BRUCE BAWER: Burning Books in Sweden.

Pippi Longstocking had it coming.

MOVE SLOW AND SMOKE THINGS: Facebook takes down pages of some legal Alaska pot shops.

The social media giant said its standards describe what users can post, and content promoting marijuana sales isn’t allowed. The issue has popped up over the last few years in states that have legalized recreational and medical pot, often coming in waves, industry officials said.

Cary Carrigan, executive director of the Alaska Marijuana Industry Association, said the industry has been forced to fight the same battles repeatedly as marijuana gains broader acceptance nationally.

The drug is legal for recreational use in eight states, but it remains illegal on the federal level. It wasn’t clear why the crackdown in Alaska happened within the past couple weeks or what specifically prompted it.

Facebook isn’t known for transparency, particularly about what it will or won’t allow users to post.

If your business depends on a social media platform with such capricious content standards, you might want to rethink your customer outreach.

WELL, GOOD: Trump’s VA Secretary Is Off to a Fast Start.

In Shulkin’s five months on the job, the VA has been a whirlwind of activity:

The department announced last week that between President Trump’s inauguration and July 3, it had fired 526 employees, demoted another 27, and temporarily suspended another 194 for longer than two weeks.

•In April, the department launched a new website that lets veterans compare the wait times at its facilities and view Yelp-style reviews of each facility written by previous patients.

•Veterans Health Administration’s Veterans Crisis Line — designed for those struggling with PTSD, thoughts of suicide, and other forms of mental stress — is now answering “more than 90 percent of calls within 8 seconds, and only about one percent of calls are being rerouted to a backup call center.” A year ago, an inspector general report noted that “more than a third of calls were being shunted to backup call centers, some calls were taking more than a half hour to be answered and other callers were being given only an option to leave messages on voicemail.”

•At the end of June, Shulkin unveiled the world’s most advanced commercial prosthetic limb — the Life Under Kinetic Evolution (LUKE) arm — during a visit to a VA facility in New York. Veteran amputees demonstrated the technology, a collaboration among the VA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the private sector. (The name alludes to the lifelike robotic hand that Luke Skywalker is fitted with in The Empire Strikes Back.)

•In May, Shulkin said the department had identified more than 430 vacant buildings and 735 underutilized ones that cost the federal government $25 million a year. He said that most of the buildings are not treatment facilities and could profitably be closed or consolidated. Of course, if he actually attempted to close or consolidate some of the buildings, he might face a controversy along the lines of those touched off by military-base-closing announcements in recent decades.

Shulkin has also gotten some help from Congress during his short time on the job. At a time when Republican legislators have had enormous difficulty passing big pieces of legislation, they’ve made great progress on VA reform.

Drain that swamp — and read the whole thing.

THE FRIENDLY SKIES: Do I Even Need to Tell You What United Did to a $42,000 Specialty Wheelchair?