IT’S TREASON THEN: Liberal Donor Says Trump Breaking Paris Climate Deal Would Be a ‘Traitorous Act of War’

FLASHBACK: Kathy Griffin Scolds Elisabeth Hasselbeck Over Obama Question: ‘Take It Down A Notch, B*tch!’

During a segment on Bravo’s Kathy on Thursday, Kathy Griffin tore into Elisabeth Hasselbeck‘s critical question to President Obama on The View about gay marriage, where Hasselbeck asked the president how he would “move things forward any more than Mitt Romney.” With Hasselbeck’s “attitude to the president, who was a Harvard Law professor, I’m, like, take it down a notch, bitch,” Griffin said.

“That body language,” Griffin added, “I don’t like that. I don’t like Jan Brewer in Arizona going like this to the President on the tarmac. I don’t like that. When I was on The View, Barbara Walters said you respect the office.”

Indeed.

UH-OH: United under fire for allegedly flying unsafe plane.

CLAIM: Jared Kushner Didn’t Suggest Back Channel, the Russians Did.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: 6 Baltimore schools, no students proficient in state tests.

None, zero.

WOW: US Missile Defense Successfully Shoots Down ICBM in First Live-Fire Test of Its Kind.

The Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) is designed to intercept and destroy missiles during the midcourse of their trajectory through space. Tuesday’s test was the first time the system had faced a live-fire ICBM-class test, MDA said in a press release.

The interceptor launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, and its “exo-atmospheric kill vehicle intercepted and destroyed the target in a direct collision,” the release said.

“The intercept of a complex, threat-representative ICBM target is an incredible accomplishment for the GMD system and a critical milestone for this program,” MDA Director Vice Adm. Jim Syring said in a statement. “This system is vitally important to the defense of our homeland, and this test demonstrates that we have a capable, credible deterrent against a very real threat.”

I know a couple of the people involved in this test, and they’ve been working hard for years to make it a success — they must be feeling very proud this morning.

CHANGE: Trump is pulling U.S. out of Paris climate deal.

President Trump has made his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the decision. Details on how the withdrawal will be executed are being worked out by a small team including EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. They’re deciding on whether to initiate a full, formal withdrawal — which could take 3 years — or exit the underlying United Nations climate change treaty, which would be faster but more extreme.

Why this matters: Pulling out of Paris is the biggest thing Trump could do to unravel Obama’s climate legacy.

Live by the pen and phone, die by the pen and phone.

GOOD MORNING: Make it better with Liz Sheld’s morning brief.

DETERRENCE: Is it time to quit the ICBM race?

The Minuteman III was developed in the 1960s and first deployed in 1970. The nearly 50-year-old hardware is still working fine, but not without extensive maintenance.

“I look at the Minuteman III like a classic car,” said Col. Craig Ramsey, commander of the fleet’s flight test squadron at Vandenberg. “I love my 1966 Mustang, but it requires a lot of tender loving care and maintenance whether you drive it or leave it in the garage.”

At its peak in about 1990, the Air Force fielded 450 Minuteman IIs, 500 Minuteman IIIs and 50 Peacekeeper missiles, a total of 1,000 ICBMs that had more than 2,000 warheads on them. Today’s 400 Minuteman missiles each field a single warhead.

Pentagon officials want to replace almost the entire nuclear arsenal, at a cost of up to $1 trillion. But no component has raised more questions than the replacement of the ICBM fleet, which critics have said is no longer crucial to preventing a nuclear war.

The argument for eliminating ICBMs is stronger than at any time in the past. Advocates of that strategy say submarine-based missiles and strategic bombers have improved their capability and are now more than potent enough to deter an enemy attack.

Whether or not we still require a land-based missile force, that Russia and China can afford to modernize their forces while we apparently cannot, is a testament to just how broken our procurement system is.

SPENGLER: Merkel throws Trump in the briar patch.

Donald Trump and Angela Merkel now agree about the main issues in US-German relations. “The times in which we could rely fully on others — they are a way past us,” Merkel told a beer-tent rally of her political party. “We Europeans really have to take our fate into our own hands.” That is just what President Trump has been telling the Europeans since the beginning of last year’s US election campaign, demanding in particular that Europe pay more for its own defense. Both Trump and Merkel, moreover, say they want the Euro to strengthen against the U.S. dollar. That buries the two bones of contention between Berlin and Washington. Everything else is political posturing and fake news.

The German Chancellor in effect threatens to throw President Trump into the proverbial briar patch, giving him what he wants while appearing to denounce him.

Read the whole thing.

WAIT… WHAT? Nancy Pelosi Says She’s Upset Trump’s Foreign Trip ‘Wasn’t Even Alphabetical’

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The fastest way to chill your beer.

I DON’T KNOW ART… ‘Pissing Pug’ Triggers SJW ‘Fearless Girl’ Supporters.

BETTER THAN YOU DO: How Does A Narcissist Think?

CAN’T OR WON’T? Southern California can’t match nation’s new housing pace.

KEMAL ATATURK WEPT: Turkey Acquits 2 Men in Berlin ‘Honor Killing’ of Their Sister.

The sister, Hatun Surucu, 23, was killed at a Berlin bus stop 12 years ago when her youngest brother fired three bullets into her head. The brothers said the family’s honor had been offended because she divorced the man her family had forced her to marry at age 16, and then began dating and refused to wear a head scarf.

Though her family is ethnically Kurdish, and originally from Turkey, Ms. Surucu had been born and raised in Germany. Her murder, after a series of similar so-called honor killings of Muslim women in Germany, sent shock waves through the country.
…
Ms. Surucu’s youngest brother, Ayhan, admitted that he had killed her and he was jailed for nine years in a German prison.

But his brothers — Mutlu, now 38, and Alparslan, now 36 — have been acquitted twice of helping him: first in Germany in 2006, and again on Tuesday when a separate trial in Istanbul found them not guilty because of a lack of evidence.

Mutlu Surucu had previously spoken approvingly of his sister’s death. But a crucial prosecution witness who might have been able to offer evidence that the brothers had cooperated in the killing — Ayhan Surucu’s ex-girlfriend — did not appear to testify in the Istanbul trial, according to Leyla Suren, a lawyer with the Initiative Against Femicide, a Turkish rights-advocacy group, who attended the hearing.

The potential witness, known in court records only as Melek A, could not be found at her last known address in Germany, and no other witnesses were able to provide clear evidence to buttress the prosecution’s case. The Initiative Against Femicide was also denied the right to testify, Ms. Suren said.

It certainly looks like the fix was in at the Turkish court, but the real shocker is that the killer was made to serve only nine years by German authorities.

BILL WHITTLE: Weaponized science.

CHARLIE MARTIN: The Rise of Jack D. Ripper, Democrat.

THEY’LL DO IT AT NIGHT: NASA to announce launch of first ever probe to ‘touch the sun’

The story says the probe will travel “a mind-boggling four million miles,” but it would seem the reporter misunderstood something.

PROCUREMENT: Air Force Tests Bolt-On Aircraft Laser Weapon.

Given that an external POD would add shapes to the fuselage which would make an aircraft likely to be vulnerable to enemy air defense radar systems, the bolt-on defensive laser would not be expected to work on a stealthy platform, he explained.

However, a heavily armed B-52, as a large 1960s-era target, would perhaps best benefit from an ability to defend itself from the air; such a technology would indeed be relevant and potentially useful to the Air Force, as the service is now immersed in a series of high-tech upgrades for the B-52 so that it can continue to serve for decades to come.

Defending a B-52 could becoming increasing important in years to come if some kind of reconfigured B-52 is used as the Pentagon’s emerging Arsenal Plane or “flying bomb truck.”

Lasers shooting down missiles is pretty much exactly the 21st Century I’d been hoping for.

PATRICK POOLE: German Police Arrest Syrian Teen Refugee Who Planned Suicide Bombing in Berlin.

MAIL BAG: Eugene Volokh responded to yesterday’s item about suicide and veterans.

Veterans have double the suicide rate of Americans generally only if you don’t control for sex and age — which isn’t that helpful, since both veterans and suicides generally are overwhelmingly male. Controlling for sex and age, there is still an elevated rate for veterans, but not by that much: “After adjusting for differences in age and gender, risk for suicide was 21 percent higher among Veterans when compared with U.S. civilian adults.”

Interestingly, the risk was 18% higher for male veterans, but 2.4 times that of civilians for female veterans — I have no idea why this would be so.

Me, either — but it certainly bears looking into.

A TRILLION HERE AND A TRILLION THERE… World’s Major Economies to Come up $400 Trillion Short on Retirement Savings.

“We’re really at an inflection point,” Michael Drexler, head of financial and infrastructure systems at the World Economic Forum, said in a phone interview. “Pension underfunding is the climate-change moment of social systems in the sense that there is still time to do something about it. But if you don’t, in 20 or 30 years down the line, society will say it’s a huge problem.”

A shortfall of about $400 trillion could be reached by 2050, the World Economic Forum said. The figure is derived from the amount of money government, employers and individuals would need to provide each person with a retirement income equal to 70 percent of his or her annual earnings before leaving the workforce.

The gap is partially driven by an aging world population. Life expectancy has risen on average by about a year every five years since the middle of the last century, and half of babies born in the U.S. and Canada in 2007 may live to 104, according to the report. In Japan, the figure is 107 years.

“In the long run, we are all dead” is starting to sound dated.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Thousands of Foreigners Registered to Vote (and Voting) in Virginia.

SUSPENDERS AND A BELT: ‘Shocked’ South Korea leader Moon orders probe into U.S. THAAD additions.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in has ordered a probe after the Defence Ministry failed to inform him that four more launchers for the controversial U.S. THAAD anti-missile system had been brought into the country, his spokesman said on Tuesday.

The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system battery was initially deployed in March in the southeastern region of Seongju with just two of its maximum load of six launchers to counter a growing North Korean missile threat.

During his successful campaign for the May 9 presidential election, Moon called for a parliamentary review of the system, whose deployment has also infuriated China, North Korea’s lone major ally.

“President Moon said it was very shocking” to hear the four additional launchers had been installed without being reported to the new government or to the public, presidential spokesman Yoon Young-chan told a media briefing.

Moon had campaigned on a more moderate approach to Pyongyang, calling for engagement even as the reclusive state pursues nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions and threats of more sanctions.

Moderation in pursuit of missile defense is no virtue.