OH FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD: Mom Asks Baby’s Consent Before Picking Him Up…Because Rape or Something.

Waah means waah.

JACOB SULLUM: Philando Castile Video Shows a Cop Who Panicked and Killed an Innocent Man.

Having watched the original Facebook Live video and now this, it’s difficult to see how anyone could conclude otherwise.

BITTER TEARS II: ‘Our Brand Is Worse Than Trump’

By fiercely contesting a congressional race in the conservative Atlanta suburbs, Democrats had hoped to make an emphatic statement about the weakness of the Republican Party under President Trump. Their candidate, Jon Ossoff, raised about $25 million, largely in small donations, and assertively courted right-of-center voters with promises of economic development and fiscal restraint.

But as the returns came in and Mr. Ossoff remained stubbornly behind Karen Handel, a veteran local officeholder, Democratic frustrations burst into full view. Lawmakers and strategists fretted about the party’s inchoate message, and some called the race a sign that Democrats should not bet too heavily on converting red-tinged suburbs to win a majority in the House.

Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, who has been a vocal critic of his party’s overarching political strategy, said Democrats needed to recognize that they were “toxic” in huge parts of the country.

“Our brand is worse than Trump,” said Mr. Ryan, who urged Democrats to make forging a clear economic agenda an urgent priority. “We can’t just run against Trump.”

They can’t keep running against their own constituents, either.

SHOT: FBI says baseball shooter had list of 6 names.

CHASER: FBI says Baseball shooting of Republicans not terrorism.

I don’t see how both of these statements can be true.

FINALLY: Rosé Deodorant Exists Now.

For when you just can’t decide between a white or a red.

ZHE DRIVES ME CRAZY: Will Oregon’s Gender X Driver’s Licenses Start a Trend?

KREMLIN TOOLS: Former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson says DNC refused our help after hacking.

STEPHEN MILLER: Ossoff’s Loss Shows Things Could Get Much Worse for Democrats. “The only thing Democrats won recently was the congressional baseball game, while the only way Democrat voters can seem to get Republicans out of Congress is by shooting them. And they can’t even do that right.”

Ouch.

LYNDA CARTER: Men Can’t Legislate Without Women.

Men used to be pretty good at just that, once upon a time.

MIKE BLOOMBERG: Democrats Will Lose In 2020 Because “Party Is Going To Be Torn Apart”

Until the party can admit to itself that Barack Obama was the worst party leader perhaps ever, and that Hillary Clinton was the least-capable standard-bearer since Mike Dukakis, then they’re going to have to continue pinning the blame for their losses on racist/sexist/phobic American voters.

And that’s no way to win an election.

THEY’RE OFTEN A GATEWAY TO QUITTING: E-Cigarettes Are Not a Gateway to Smoking.

In this past week’s MMWR, the CDC reported that e-cigarettes were often the most common “introductory tobacco product” among teenagers who use actual tobacco products. But this is misleading for two reasons.

First, as explained above, just because a current smoker first started with e-cigarettes does not mean that e-cigarettes caused that person to smoke. It’s probably true that teenage tobacco users also consume alcohol and caffeine. According to the CDC’s faulty logic, therefore, we could also conclude that beer and soda are gateway drugs.

Second, labeling e-cigarettes a “tobacco product” is meant to be emotive rather than scientifically accurate. E-cigarettes contain nicotine (which may not be much worse than caffeine) but none of the tar and other chemicals that make cigarette smoke so dangerous. Referring to e-cigarettes as tobacco products is analogous to calling a BB gun a firearm.

The CDC admits in the report, “During the past 3 decades, cigarette smoking among youths has declined substantially.” Isn’t that the real story here? And given other data which shows that e-cigarettes help smokers quit cigarettes, isn’t it perhaps likely that e-cigarettes might have played a role in this decline?

It seems from this report that the CDC is more interested in scaremongering about e-cigarettes than it is celebrating a win for public health. That’s a shame.

It’s about control — and budgets.

BITTER TEARS TASTE SO SWEET: Angry Democrats in Blame Game After Georgia Defeat.

“One important lesson is that when they go low, going high doesn’t f**king work,” tweeted Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, referring to Michelle Obama’s maxim from the 2016 campaign.

Jill Filipovic, call your office.

PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION: Prof. Calls Whites ‘Inhuman A**holes,’ Tells Blacks to ‘Let Them F*cking Die’

JUSTICE DELAYED: Texas Couple Exonerated 25 Years After Being Convicted of Lurid Crimes that Never Happened.

Fran and Dan Keller were each sentenced to 48 years in prison for the alleged sexual assault of a 3-year-old girl who was an occasional drop-in at their home daycare center on the rural outskirts of Austin. The child initially accused Dan of spanking her “like daddy” used to, but under intense and repeated questioning by her mother and a therapist, the story morphed to include claims of rape and orgies involving children. From there, the number of children alleging abuse increased and the accusations grew even more lurid and confounding: The Kellers had sacrificed babies; they held ceremonies in a local graveyard; they put blood in the children’s Kool-Aid; Fran cut off the arm of a gorilla in a local park; they flew the children to Mexico to be sexually assaulted by military officials.

When I began reinvestigating the case in 2008 for the Austin Chronicle, I was stunned to learn that police and prosecutors who had worked the case back in the early ’90s still believed some of the most outrageous allegations leveled against the Kellers. The Austin Police Department refused to release its investigative report on the case, forcing the Chronicle to take the agency to court. We ultimately won the right to full, unredacted access.

After reading the report, it was not hard to understand why the department had fought to keep it secret. It was an ALL-CAPS, run-on-sentence fever dream full of breathless accusations and absent any actual investigation that could prove or disprove the claims.

Read the whole thing.

KNOWN WOLF: Brussels bomb suspect was Moroccan and ‘known to police’

Also:

The only thing better than a dead terrorist is a dead incompetent terrorist.

HAVE YOU HUGGED A FRACKER TODAY? Plunging oil prices ‘could go even lower for even longer’

Falling prices could temporarily constrict the rapid growth of U.S. oil production, but energy industry experts don’t expect a significant pullback. American oil producers cut costs during the last downturn spanning from late 2014 to early 2016, which keeps them profitable even at lower oil prices that might have previously shut down wells.

The possibility of what the energy industry calls a “lower-for-longer” scenario is gaining ground. It could accelerate the auto industry’s transition from fuel-efficient cars to thirstier sport-utility vehicles and give Americans unexpected savings in their summer travel budgets, while also raising the prospect of energy worker layoffs if prices dip further.

The price of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark crude, dipped below $43 per barrel in afternoon trading Tuesday, a level not seen since last August. It settled at $43.23, down 97 cents on the day.

Less than a month ago, oil was trading above $50 and experts were projecting prices of $60 to $70 later this year. That now looks unlikely.

“We had no idea it would be this low for this long,” said Patrick DeHaan, a petroleum analyst at GasBuddy.com. “It could go even lower for even longer.”

The key takeaway here is that innovative American frackers are learning to prosper at $45 and under, while otherwise-useless petrostates see their gravy trains start coming off the tracks at anything much under $60.

THANKS, OBAMA: How the New Cuba Travel Regulations Hurt Cubans and Help the Castro Regime.

It’s Ron Radosh reporting after his recent visit to Cuba, so read the whole thing.

AVNER ZARMI: The Perils of the Tribal Echo Chamber.

WE MAY NEVER KNOW HIS TRUE MOTIVE:

Full story here.

QUESTION ASKED: What If Donald Trump Doesn’t Sink The Republican Party?

David Harsanyi:

Trump’s approval rating in the sixth district is at the national average of 35 percent, which is to say exceptionally low for a Republican area. Trump had won the district by less than two percentage points back in November. According to a recent Atlanta Journal Constitution poll, the majority of Republicans surveyed (55 percent) said “expressing their opinion on Trump wasn’t a factor in their decision-making.”

Now, I realize that neither Ossoff nor Handel mentioned the president much during the race — which, in itself, bolsters the theory that Trump might not be as consequential in these races as Dems hope. But the race was nationalized. Its implications were national. The coverage was national. The parties treated the race as one that would have national implications. Certainly, the money that poured into the race was national. One imagines that every Georgian Republican who went to the polls understood what this race meant for the future of the parties. When you nationalize races, Republicans will take more than the president into account.

We already know that an electorate can be happy with a president and dislike his party. Why can’t the reverse be true? Barack Obama, for example, carried healthy approval ratings for the majority of his presidency, yet voters decimated his party over six years. What if there’s a faction of Republican voters who don’t like Trump but still don’t like Obama’s policies?

If? That’s exactly why a sizable fraction voted for Trump in November, certain that Hillary would nail down Obama’s legacy while adding an entirely new layer of Clinton corruption on top.

BUT CAN THEY DO ANYTHING TO HELP MY SINGING VOICE? AI and machine learning will make everyone a musician.

Just as the drum machine was loathed and feared by many when it first hit the mainstream in the 1970s, AI’s role in the creation of art has sparked similar fears among critics. Eck, who admits that he was initially among the drum machine haters, explains that it took an entire generation of musicians to take the technology and figure out how to take it forward without putting good drummers out of work. He envisages a similar process of misunderstanding and eventual acceptance for AI-based music tools.

Given its flexible nature, it’s likely that musicians and other artists of the future will all use AI differently, according to Freya Murray, program manager at Google Arts & Culture Lab.

“Some will collaborate with machine learning, others will use it as a tool and for others it will be their creative process and that’s the case throughout the history of art,” she told WIRED.

My only concern is that like Autotune, AI will quickly go from tool to crutch.

RETRO DOWNLOADS: SEGA’s new SEGA Forever collection brings classic games to mobile for free.

FRANK SANTARPIA: The Progressive Tea Party that Never Was.

A Progressive mirroring of the Tea Party Movement is the thing I feared most after the election of Donald Trump, and for obvious reasons. We saw in 2010 what a difference-maker an “enthusiasm gap” could be, and watched with delight as Progressive attempts to blunt the Tea Party tsunami with rallies of their own flopped miserably. We saw that such a level of engagement could change the face of Congress. And finally, candidate Hillary Clinton saw firsthand that such a gap could not be overcome despite her “inevitability.”

Progressives could have started such a movement — there is no disputing they have the numbers. But they didn’t, and here’s why: what passes for the Progressive Movement in the United States today lacks any real message, which is one of the principle reasons their candidate was on the short end of an enthusiasm gap in the first place. We protested the abuse of the Constitution and espoused the rule of law — not the election of Barack Obama. That then, is the chief difference. We objected to the man’s actions; they object to the man.

Well, that’s the inevitable result of losing an election for a movement which believes in a nation of men, not laws.

BLM FOUNDER: Acquittal in Castile Shooting Further Evidence That System is Broken.

IT WAS NEVER THEIRS TO LOSE: How The Guardian Lost America.

In September 2016, Guardian US announced it was slashing 30% of its workforce.

The retrenchment necessitated a change of scenery, too. At the meeting, Guardian US editor Lee Glendinning announced that the company had signed a lease agreement to move to a smaller Brooklyn office.

It was a room full of journalists, so the questions flew. Where? What’s the address? According to multiple people at the meeting, one reporter remarked that Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser, owned some buildings in Brooklyn. Was this one of them?

A rattled Glendinning said sharply that it wasn’t, according to the attendees. Reporters pulled up news articles, raising their phones to show that it was indeed property owned by Kushner, who divested some of his family real estate empire’s holdings to join the White House.

“You see the cerebral cortexes trying to process this information,” one reporter present told BuzzFeed News.

Or as John Podhoretz tweeted, “Every detail in this story is about a mass delusion funded by oceans [of] non-profit Commie money.”

And then the other people’s money ran out, which is always when things get ugly.

(Hat tip, Will Collier.)