HMM: 10 Republican AGs Threaten To Sue Trump Admin If DACA Isn’t Rescinded.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: The 6 Best Movies of 2017 (So Far).

Wonder Woman made the cut, and I’m glad to see that Baby Driver lives up to its impressive trailer.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Treasury to Run Out of Cash in Next 3 Months, Leading to Default or Delay of Payments.

On March 15, 2017, the suspension of the debt limit expired and since then the Treasury has been able to borrow additional funds without violating the debt ceiling.

“The Congressional Budget Office projects that if the debt limit remains unchanged, those measures will be exhausted and the Treasury will most likely run out of cash in early to mid-October,” the report states. “The government would then be unable to pay its obligations fully, so it would have to delay making payments for its programs and activities, default on its debt obligations, or both.”

The amount of money the government spends on programs and the amount it collects in taxes could change from the budget office projections, so the office warns that the Treasury could run out of funds even earlier.

Currently, the federal deficit stands at $693 billion, which is an increase of $134 billion than what it projected in January. The federal government has an outstanding debt of $19.8 trillion, which includes $14.3 trillion in public debt and $5.5 trillion held by government accounts.

That’s a nearly $700 billion deficit, absent a major war or economic downturn — and without serious entitlement reform, the situation only gets worse from here.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: The Army is flight testing helicopter-mounted laser weapons.

SURROUNDED: Syrian US-backed forces seize last route into Raqqa.

A spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition told The Associated Press that the Syrian Democratic Forces are now in control of all high-speed routes into Raqqa from the south. The Kurdish-led fighters had been advancing from the city’s east after they seized a major stronghold in May, and from the west and north.

“South of the Euphrates river the SDF now control all high-speed routes into Raqqa,” Col. Joe Scrocca, spokesman for the U.S-led coalition, said in emails to the AP. Moving toward the Euphrates from the east “would completely encircle the city and has been the SDF plan from the start.”

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a unit of the SDF has seized villages across the river, moving through the Kasret al-Faraj area. The Observatory described it as a “strategic” advance that completes the siege around Raqqa.

“IS has no other choice now but to surrender or fight to the end,” said the Observatory director, Rami Abdurrahman.

Perfect. U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis has a plan to kill them all.

STEPHEN KRUISER: Twitter is Pondering Option to Let Users Flag and Report ‘Fake News.’

What could go wrong?

FASTER, PLEASE: Islamic State Is Near Defeat in Iraq, Prime Minister Says.

“We are seeing the end of the fake Daesh state,” Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Twitter, using another name for Islamic State. “The liberation of Mosul proves that. We will not relent,” he added.

Thursday’s recapture of the ruined Nouri mosque came a week after Islamic State blew it up as Iraqi forces closed in, reducing to rubble the 12th-century building and its 150-foot minaret. The mosque gained notoriety when Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi spoke there three years ago and declared himself the head of a caliphate, or religious empire.

Col. Ryan Dillon, the Baghdad-based spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, said that Iraqi forces on Thursday cut a wedge in the middle of the area held by Islamic State, seizing the Nouri mosque and cornering the few hundred remaining fighters in half of Mosul’s Old City on one side, and an area around a hospital that has been a stronghold for the group on the other side.

And rather than simply drive ISIS fighters out and into their next stronghold — the practice of the previous Administration — U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis has a plan to kill them all.

CHANGE? In “Unprecedented Step” US Sanctions Chinese Entities With Ties To North Korea.

In an unprecedented step, the Treasury Department slapped financial sanctions on two Chinese nationals and a Chinese shipping company over their ties to North Korea stemming from its nuclear program, according to Reuters.

The Trump administration also proposed sanctions against a Chinese bank of helping North Korea launder money and cut the institution off from the US financial system, in a major step that at least on the surface, is aimed at convincing China to put more pressure on Pyongyang to abandon its missile and nuclear programs, according to the Financial Times. The US Treasury designated the bank in question, the Bank of Dandong, as a “foreign bank of primary money laundering concern” and also imposed sanctions on two Chinese individuals and one Chinese company.

The Treasury Department said in a statement it was sanctioning Wei Sun for links to the Foreign Trade Bank of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Hong Ri Li for his links to North Korean banking executive Song-hyok Ri, as well as the Dalian Global Unity Shipping Co Ltd of Dalian, China.

The moves come one week after top US and Chinese officials met for strategic talks in Washington in which the US side tried to persuade China to take more action on North Korea.

All the sanctions in the world haven’t forced any behavior changes on North Korea. Or on Russia, Cuba, pre-war Iraq, Iran…

I suppose sanctions make diplomats look as though they’re doing something, but sanctions don’t seem to do much at all.

VIDEO: Maxine Waters Says 700 Billion People Are About to Lose Their Healthcare.

Considering that 93 million America are shot to death each day, in about 20 years we’ll have killed off all the uninsured — problem solved!

TURNS OUT WE COULD DRILL OUR WAY TO LOWER PRICES AFTER ALL: How The US Sets Global Oil And Gas Prices.

SINGLE PAYER: Devastated parents of Charlie Gard spend their last night with their baby and blast ‘heartless’ doctors for refusing to let them take him home to die before they turn off his life support later today.

Robert Bidinotto posted on Facebook yesterday:

They have already declared him, explicitly or tacitly, “brain dead” or vegetative. If they are correct — and I have no reason to doubt their medical judgment — then no issue of protecting the child’s rights or “interests” exists any longer — by their own premises.

What the parents are proposing is thus no threat to the child, his rights, or his interests. It is simply to exercise THEIR right to conduct an experiment of sheer desperation, in order to see whether they can salvage their child. If that child is already medically irretrievable, then please define for me whose “interest” would be threatened by allowing the parents to exercise that right.

There is no rational or moral reason to deny them this right. The only conceivable “interests” involved are those of the denizens of the socialized-medicine regime, who do perceive a threat — not to a child they have already written off, but to their power to make and enforce life-or-death decisions over the disposition of healthcare. No, sorry: This case is not about science; it is not about the child’s rights or interests; it is about exerting state power against a perceived popular menace to the socialized medicine system, which would come from allowing individuals the freedom to exercise their rights to make their own personal medical choices.

What is happening to the Gards is just “necessary” reminder of the individual’s place in the socialized scheme of things.

PROJECT VERITAS: CNN Producer: Voters “Stupid as Sh*t.”

Deplorable, but this is CNN.

ATLANTIC EDITOR-IN-CHIEF JEFFERY GOLDBERG: Trump Is Going To Be Responsible for Violence Against Journalists.

“The problem is, and this is what I worry about more than anything else, is that there are people in the country who don’t understand that this a cynical reality TV game,” Goldberg concluded. “And are going to hear over and over again from the president that the reporters, journalists are enemies of the state…and someone is going to do something violent against journalists in a large way, and then I know where the fault lies.

Maybe he could have waited to make that charge until Steve Scalise is out of the hospital.

OH: Congressman Warns of Terrorist Attacks If Trump Signs Sanctuary City Bill.

CHANGE MORE OF THE SAME? Centrist Republicans mobilize against draft GOP budget.

Tuesday Group co-chairman Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) is gathering signatures on a letter asking Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to intervene in House Budget Chairwoman Diane Black’s plan to cut $200 billion in mandatory spending in the GOP budget.

The Tuesday Group letter — which sources say has about 20 signatories so far — warns that the Tennessee Republican’s proposal is “not practical” and “could imperil tax reform,” according to a draft of the letter obtained by POLITICO. The letter also encourages GOP leaders to work with Democrats to reach a budget agreement setting higher spending levels for fiscal 2018 — something the letter suggests could be paired with a vote to raise the debt ceiling.

Without such a deal, some moderates may not support the budget, according to the letter.

There’s nothing “moderate” about normalizing trillion-dollar annual deficits, which is the path we’re on without entitlement reform.

THE TRAVEL BAN BEGINS, THE LEFT PROJECTS (AGAIN), AND SUSAN RICE JOINS CONGRESS’S WITNESS LIST: All that and more in Liz Sheld’s morning brief.

BUT THE NARRATIVE: NYT Finally Retracts Russia-gate Canard.

On Thursday, the Times appended a correction to a June 25 article that had repeated the false claim, which has been used by Democrats and the mainstream media for months to brush aside any doubts about the foundation of the Russia-gate scandal and portray President Trump as delusional for doubting what all 17 intelligence agencies supposedly knew to be true.

In the Times’ White House Memo of June 25, correspondent Maggie Haberman mocked Trump for “still refus[ing] to acknowledge a basic fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies that he now oversees: Russia orchestrated the attacks, and did it to help get him elected.”

However, on Thursday, the Times – while leaving most of Haberman’s ridicule of Trump in place – noted in a correction that the relevant intelligence “assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”

The Times’ grudging correction was vindication for some Russia-gate skeptics who had questioned the claim of a full-scale intelligence assessment, which would usually take the form of a National Intelligence Estimate (or NIE), a product that seeks out the views of the entire Intelligence Community and includes dissents.

Is there anything left of Russiagate, anything at all?

UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS: Instagram Turns to Artificial Intelligence to Fight Spam and Cruel Comments.

DUE PROCESS? WE DON’T NEED NO STINKIN’ DUE PROCESS: Campus Police Adopt ‘Guilty Until Proven Innocent’ Approach To Rape Accusations.

IT WOULD BE THE WORST THING TO HAPPEN TO OBAMACARE SINCE OBAMA SIGNED IT INTO LAW: What happens if the health care bill doesn’t pass?

THE NEW CIVILITY: Washington Post Reporter Tells Fact-Checking James O’Keefe Fan to ‘Drop Dead.’

ANDREW MALCOLM: A Frustrated Tillerson Said To Erupt In White House Meeting.

Tillerson has come under criticism for slow staffing in Foggy Bottom. But many of his selections have been vetoed by the White House as Democrats or, worse, Republicans who opposed Trump. Johnny DeStafano is in charge of the clearing operation, which is standard procedure for any president.

Last Friday Tillerson’s frustrations apparently came to a head during a White House meeting in Priebus’ office, according to four unidentified Politico sources. Tillerson, the 65-year-old former emperor of the Exxon empire, blew up at the 38-year-old one-time aide to John Boehner questioning the secretary’s judgment and opposing his picks.

According to Tillerson, Trump promised him autonomy in his department appointments.

If personnel is policy, not having personnel is…?

NOAH ROTHMAN: The Syria next door.

As Maduro continues to shed the confidence of Venezuelan power brokers, the talk of a military coup has grown louder and louder. The head of a group of exiled Venezuelan officers, former National Guard Lieutenant Jose Colina, told The Telegraph that the regime’s support rests on the shoulders of a handful of politically loyal army officers. The unreliable ones are being sent to the provinces or are being disposed of in other, grislier ways. “The government is purging the armed forces as it anticipates having to use the army to repress growing street protests,” said retired Admiral Ivan Carruto.

While there are no outward signs of dissent against the government, Reuters revealed that recruiting for the military and police is becoming more difficult. The Telegraph reported that, according to exiled sources, some 5,000 officers have left the Venezuelan army and could make up the backbone of paramilitary forces in the event of a putsch. The stability of government is, however, due entirely to the fact that most of the army remains loyal to it. A coup attempt with sufficient support could fail. If it did, it would likely result in a civil war.

The prospect of a protracted Syrian-style conflict in the Americas seems an event for which policymakers in the United States are ill-prepared. Such a scenario would mean the implosion of a country rich with oil resources, a state flush with government-backed narcotics traffickers, money, and weapons.

Interesting times.

ROBERT SPENCER: When a Gay Playwright Discovers Islamic Jihad.

BETTERIDGE’S LAW OF HEADLINES SHALL NOT BE BROKEN: Will the media learn from CNN’s mistakes? Prepare to be disappointed.