CHIACAGO’S WAR ON THE POOR: Poor Neighborhoods Hit Hardest by Asset Forfeiture in Chicago, Data Shows.

Law enforcement in Cook County, which includes Chicago, seized items from residents ranging from a cashier’s check for 34 cents to a 2010 Rolls Royce Ghost with an estimated value of more than $200,000. They also seized Xbox controllers, televisions, nunchucks, 12 cans of peas, a pair of rhinestone cufflinks, and a bayonet.

Altogether, police in Cook County performed 23,065 seizures between 2012 and 2017 using asset forfeiture, including 5,939 vehicles. Chevrolet Impalas, among the most popular rental cars in the U.S., were the model most often seized. About three-quarters of all seizures occurred in Chicago. The average estimated value of a seizure was $4,553, while the median value was $1,049. About three-quarters of all seizures were cash, not property.

Lucy Parsons Labs, a police accountability nonprofit in Chicago, obtained the data from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office (CCSAO) through a public records request and provided them to Reason. The data are unique because they include not just when and what police seized, but addresses of where those seizures occurred.

Civil liberties groups have often claimed asset forfeiture disproportionately impacts poor and minority communities.

Why are Democrat-run cities such cesspits of predation against those who are least able to fight back?

VIDEO: Joy Behar Jokes That Trump, Putin, and Priebus Are All Gay for Each Other.

Not that there’s anything funny with that.

TRIGGERED: ‘Broad City’ will bleep Donald Trump’s name in Season 4.

“We wrote (Season 4) being like, ‘Here we go! Hillary for president!’ ” Glazer tells USA TODAY. But after “this game-show host became president of our country, we rewrote a lot.”

One episode, which premiered at Colossal Clusterfest in San Francisco earlier this month, deals with the idea that “a witch is really just a woman who’s in touch with her womanhood,” Glazer says. “Ilana’s ‘powers’ are decreasing during the current administration because it’s just so hard to (orgasm) when you know so many people are in such danger. So Ilana works through her Trump-related (hang-up) and it’s wild.”

It’s billed as a comedy.

MICHAEL VAN DER GALIEN: Theresa May and Her Tories Now Opting for ‘Soft Brexit.’

We now see happening what those of us who worried about what would happen if the Tories would lose the elections feared: Brexit is coming under pressure. Yes, the government still seems to go ahead with Britain’s break from the European Union, but it’s negotiation position has been weakened tremendously. Labour may say they’re in favor of Brexit now, but it’s crystal clear that the socialists are in their hearts Europhiles. That will have an impact on the talks between the EU and Britain; Labour will want to give Brussels more than Britain should be willing to give.

Sadly the truth of the matter is that British voters voted for this: they had the chance to guarantee Brexit, a hard or a soft on, but have failed to do so.

Read the whole thing.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Zero A Rifle Like A Marine Corps Gunner.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Crumb-Free Bread Could Soon Be Made Fresh On The International Space Station.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR: Chris Cillizza challenges Twitter to name a story that is fake or incorrect; brutality ensues.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: The Parameters of Attorney General Sessions’s Recusal.

A-ELECTRIC WARFARE: Israel approves Palestinian move to pressure Hamas with electricity cuts.

DIGITAL UNDERGROUND: Bitcoin Is Helping the Pot Business Get Over Its Banking Problem.

BRIDGET JOHNSON: Paul Ryan Advice to Trump: ‘Let Robert Mueller Do His Job’

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is America Encouraging the Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurship?

In a 1990 paper, “Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive,” Baumol argued that the level of entrepreneurial ambition in a country is essentially fixed over time, and that what determines a nation’s entrepreneurial output is the incentive structure that governs and directs entrepreneurial efforts between “productive” and “unproductive” endeavors.

Most people think of entrepreneurship as being the “productive” kind, as Baumol referred to it, where the companies that founders launch commercialize something new or better, benefiting society and themselves in the process. A sizable body of research establishes that these “Schumpeterian” entrepreneurs, those that are “creatively destroying” the old in favor of the new, are critical for breakthrough innovations and rapid advances in productivity and standards of living.

Baumol was worried, however, by a very different sort of entrepreneur: the “unproductive” ones, who exploit special relationships with the government to construct regulatory moats, secure public spending for their own benefit, or bend specific rules to their will, in the process stifling competition to create advantage for their firms. Economists call this rent-seeking behavior.
…
In Baumol’s theoretical framework, depressed rates of entrepreneurship aren’t the culprit for periods of slow economic growth; rather, a change in the mix of entrepreneurial effort between the two kinds of entrepreneurship is to blame — specifically, a decline in productive entrepreneurship and a coincident rise in unproductive entrepreneurship. But is this what’s actually happening in the U.S.?

Well, for starters, we and others have documented a pervasive decline in the rate of new firm formation during the last three decades and an acceleration in that decline since 2000. In fact, we found that by 2009 the rate of business closures exceeded the rate of business births for the first time in the three-decades-plus history of our data.

Washington is diverting ever more of the country’s creative energies away from innovation and towards “pull peddling.”

Atlas Shrugged was not supposed to be a how-to manual.

BUYING FRIENDS: Panama’s Decision to Cut Ties With Taiwan.

China’s Foreign Ministry, in a statement, said the country highly appreciate(s) and warmly welcome(s)” the move. The reaction from Taipei was angry. The Foreign Ministry said Panama “caved in to Beijing … for economic gain,” calling the move “highly disrespectful.”

Panama is the latest country to switch from its recognition of Taiwan as the official representative of China. The move follows a similar one last December by Sao Tome and Principe, the African island nation, which aligned itself with Beijing.

And:

Panama’s reversal may be linked to China’s massive investment in the country; Beijing has spent billions of dollars in the area around the Panama Canal.

Flashback: John Kerry declares the Monroe Doctrine dead.

STEALTH SANCTUARY CITY: Welcome to Denver. Sorry about the smell.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: ‘Wonder Woman’ and the War on Female Empowerment.

Diana Prince never needed a safe space.

UM… Hot New Rumor: Dennis Rodman Is A Secret Ambassador For Trump.

SHIRKERS: Mattis Blasts Congress Over Defense Budget.

In his toughest language to date, Mattis — along with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joe Dunford and Pentagon Comptroller David Norquist — called on Congress to pass a budget for fiscal year 2018, on time.

“I need bipartisan support for this budget,” Mattis said of President Trump’s $639 billion funding request for the Defense Department. That includes $574 billion for the Pentagon “base budget” and nearly $65 billion for overseas operations.

Mattis repeated what other defense officials during President Obama’s years have said over and over, the military’s combat readiness is eroding, weapon modernization plans are at risk, and still, the inaction continues. And he delivered a sharp rebuke: “Congress as a whole has met the present challenge with lassitude, not leadership.

He then continued to pile on, observing that Congress has “sidelined itself from its active constitutional oversight role.”

And not just on defense spending, either.

TYLER O’NEIL: 5 Things to Know About the Virginia Governor Primary.

BLUE VS BLUE: Black Lives Matter Halts Toronto Gay Pride Parade.

OIL WARS: Saudi Arabia Cuts U.S. Oil Exports to Work Down Global Supply Glut.

The state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co. expects its sales to the U.S. will drop below one million barrels a day in June, then slide to about 850,000 barrels a day in July, according to people familiar with the matter. The July figure would be the its lowest export total to the U.S. for that month since 1988, based on figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Saudi Aramco expects its August exports to decline by another 100,000 barrels a day, these people said, which would be the lowest export amount for that month since 2009.

Many oil traders have questioned whether production cuts by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Companies have done much to reduce a persistent global supply imbalance, in part because U.S. companies have rushed to fill any void left by OPEC.

The Saudis can have market share or they can have ~$50 oil, but barring some crisis they can no longer have both.

Which leaves the question: Have you hugged a fracker today?

HMM: Trump to Cut $4.5 Million from Radio Free Asia.

The Trump administration plans to cut $4.5 million from Radio Free Asia in a move that critics say would sharply reduce Chinese language broadcasts into China by the pro-democracy radio.

The budget cuts were announced at RFA’s Washington headquarters recently and drew opposition from the staff and the radio’s supporters in Congress, according to administration officials.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the government entity that is RFA’s parent organization, defended the funding cuts to Mandarin-language radio as part of a shift to the use of social media—outlets in China that are tightly controlled by the government and explicitly ban RFA content.

“RFA will continue to focus on Mandarin through social media which is the platform the agency has determined to be most cost-effective,” the board said in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.

But given how many resources Beijing devotes to tracking social media, is the move more effective-effective?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: What You Need to Know Before Sessions Testifies at the Senate Intelligence Committee Today. “Don’t get distracted by the witch hunt.”

CRONIES: Leaked Memo Details Wind Industry Campaign Against A Major Energy Dept Study.

“Wind energy is helping diversify our energy mix and makes the power grid more reliable and secure, as well as bringing good jobs and billions of dollars of investments to rural and Rust Belt America,” the memo reads.

“That’s old news at this point,” AWEA spokesman Evan Vaughan told TheDCNF, referring to the strategy laid out in the leaked memo.

“Since then we’ve had some good meetings with the Department of Energy team working on the study, and we’re making sure they have all the facts about how cost-effective and reliable wind has become,” Vaughan said.

“That has been confirmed by our own research and by experts who run the grid every day, such as the Southwest Power Pool and Xcel Energy,” he said.

On April 15, Perry ordered Energy Department officials to see if regulations, mandates, and tax subsidies “are responsible for forcing the premature retirement of baseload power plants.”

Forcing traditional power sources offline is certainly one way to make wind power more cost-effective — just not to consumers.

PROGRESS: North Korea edging closer to launch a nuclear ICBM.

On June 4, North Korea’s state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper reported that the military would be ready to test-fire an ICBM in the near future.

This has left governments and analysts in the region more concerned that Pyongyang’s scientists have made far more rapid progress than anyone had anticipated.

“The great success of test-firing an intercontinental ballistic missile, which we are sure to achieve, will mark a historic watershed moment in the failure of the US hostile policy against us,” an editorial in the newspaper stated.

“Historically speaking, the US has never dared to go to war with a country that possesses nuclear weapons or ICBMs.”

This is new territory, because we’ve also never been faced with a country willing to commit nuclear blackmail.

SINGLE-PAYER: Is Nevada All-in with Medicaid-for-All?