NO THERE THERE

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ANDREW MCCARTHY: In Clinton Caper, Comey Was the Most Visible Player, Not the Most Consequential.

THE END OF REFORM? Federal Court Rules Firing of Felon Phoenix VA Director Unconstitutional.

DIVERSITY: Alumni, others deliver petitions demanding historically black university drop Betsy DeVos as commencement speaker.

Before becoming Secretary of Education, DeVos helped devise Detroit’s charter school system, about which one study concluded:

Based on the findings presented here, the typical student in Michigan charter schools gains more learning in a year than his TPS counterparts, amounting to about two months of additional gains in reading and math. These positive patterns are even more pronounced in Detroit, where historically student academic performance has been poor. These outcomes are consistent with the result that charter schools have significantly better results than TPS for minority students who are in poverty.

You’d think that Bethune-Cookman University alums would welcome the woman who helped so many students improve their grades enough to have hopes of attending a school like Bethune-Cookman University.

GOVERNMENT TEAT: Australian Senator Becomes the First to Breastfeed in Parliament: ‘Women Can Be Both Parliamentarians and Moms’

TICK-TOCK:

Significant and worthwhile tax reform might get voters excited enough for the GOP to beat the historical norm and keep the House next year. But based on the record so far this year, I’ve been working under the assumption that the norm holds and the House returns to the Democrats.

Unless things change, the GOP is going to look back on 2017-2019 as a wasted opportunity, which is exactly opposite of how Democrats remember 2009-2011.

REVEALED: The secret deal the Associated Press made with the Nazis during WWII.

The report includes documents recently declassified at the request of AP’s management, including letters of approval from a wartime censorship office run by an ex-AP editor who reported to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As part of the arrangement, AP shared pictures of U.S. war operations and Allied advances, which were reviewed by Hitler and published in Nazi publications.

“With one known exception, the AP images that appeared in German publications through this arrangement were unaltered by the Germans, “ the report said, “but captions were rewritten by the Germans to conform to official Nazi views.”

U.S. counterintelligence agents unaware of the approval found “definite proof” that the AP was “engaged in operations coming within the purview of the Trading with the Enemy Act,” according to a document referenced in AP’s report. The case wasn’t pursued.

In an interview this week, AP officials strongly defended the arrangement, saying it was conducted in neutral countries, and that there was tremendous news value in offering its newspaper customers photos of Hitler and German military activities — even if the photos were taken by Nazis, who were expert propagandists.

Nothing sinister here, just an unusual — but White House-approved — arrangement for getting news out of a hostile totalitarian regime during wartime.

FEW NEW TAX IDEAS EVER DO: Why the Carbon Tax Is An Idea That Won’t Go Away.

HMM: Senate GOP fails to repeal Obama’s methane rule.

The resolution of disapproval will now have one day to be reconsidered for repeal and get it to the president’s desk for signature.

The House passed a similar resolution using its authority under the Congressional Review Act back in February. Under the review act, the Senate only has until Thursday to pass the rule.

The rule is considered duplicative due to an EPA rule already in place that requires drillers to control their methane emissions from natural gas and oil wells.

Rules within rules within rules…

TURNABOUT: CNN’s Chris Cuomo is trending after ‘mansplaining’ to Kellyanne Conway.

CHANGE: U.S. energy independence is not coming anytime soon, but North American energy independence may improve dramatically by the end of the decade.

Canada and Mexico make much better energy trading partners than, say, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

BYRON YORK: To fire Comey, Trump team waited for Rosenstein.

Roger Simon was on this angle last night.

SCIENCE: Liberals Are Less Tolerant Than They Think.

BEGUN, THE ETAIL WARS HAVE: Amazon strikes back again at Walmart’s free 2-day shipping offer.

ARCHEOLOGY: Primitive Humanlike Species Lived More Recently Than Expected.

Homo naledi is primitive in some ways, with a small brain and other physical features reminiscent of our early ancestors. But it also walked upright, and had hands that may have been capable of making tools.

This perplexing combination of features raised questions about when the animal walked the Earth. But in new research published Tuesday in eLife, scientists have come to the conclusion that it lived between 335,000 and 236,000 years ago. That’s only about a tenth of the age some experts previously predicted.

It suggests that this humanlike creature may have lived alongside early humans, or Homo sapiens. “It’s a much more complex picture of human evolution that is rising,” lead author Paul Dirks of James Cook University and the University of Witwatersrand tells The Two-Way.

And:

Homo naledi’s age and other recent discoveries complicate previous ideas of how humans evolved. “Traditionally, not all that long ago, human evolution was pretty much viewed as a linear sort of progression towards larger-brained animals,” Dirks says.

But the finding that this creature is young enough to have lived alongside early humans means “the whole evolutionary process may have happened slightly differently than a simply linear process,” he says. “There may have been a number of different species evolving side by side.”

Findings like these have me wondering if early man didn’t kill off the the very same branches they evolved from and with.

VENEZUELA ROUNDUP FROM BATTLESWARM BLOG: It’s worse than you think.

THIS IS NOT NEWS TO INSTAPUNDIT READERS: OPEC is out of options.

PROMISE BROKEN: Trump won’t move U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Trump’s pursuit of the “peace process” is likely to blame.

MORE PROBLEMS AT ESPN: The worldwide leader in politically-correct sports coverage is still creating headaches for owner Disney.

ESPN recently announced a new round of layoffs and [Disney CEO Robert] Iger, despite his liberal views, might be particularly impatient for a turnaround at the network—and not just because he wants to deliver robust earnings growth for Disney shareholders. A recent report from the website Axios claims that Mr. Iger is contemplating a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. Such a run would be premised on his business success, so Disney has to be thriving for him to make a Trumpian leap into politics.

Mr. Iger may be so eager to spruce up his tarnished cable operation that he’ll consider the analysis by former ESPN and current Fox Sports journalist Jason Whitlock that ESPN’s embrace of leftist ideology is partly to blame for driving away former fans of the sports giant.

Progressives across social media have been in an uproar since the Journal published Mr. Whitlock’s op-ed on Sunday night. Mr. Whitlock wrote that ESPN is “diverse on its surface, progressive in its point of view, and more concerned with spinning media narratives than with the quality of its product. The channel has become too handcuffed by politics to protect its most experienced and loyal employees. It’s a massive symbol of everything that fueled Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency.” Mr. Whitlock also opined that ESPN had been highly influenced by attacks from the leftist website Deadspin to adopt its current politicized approach to sports coverage.

Iger can either take the progressive politics out of ESPN and please his stockholders, or he can continue to use ESPN to please the Democratic base and help him win the nomination, but he likely can’t do both.

SANCTUARY SCHOOLS: In ‘act of non-cooperation,’ Los Angeles Unified School District bolsters protections for immigrant students, families.

BRUCE BAWER RESPONDS TO MICHAEL VAN DER GALIEN: Yes, Marine Le Pen’s Party Is Bad, But Islamization Is Worse.

TWITCHY: ‘Calm down, Skippy’ Sen. Brian Schatz declares full-fledged constitutional crisis after Comey firing.

I’m so old I can remember when Comey needed to bet fired for spoiling Hillary Clinton’s surefire election win and/or handing the White House to Vladimir Putin.

BUT THE NARRATIVE! For all the conspiracy theorists who believe former FBI Director James Comey was fired in order to shut down the Russia investigation, the ongoing grand jury has escalated with subpoenas issued to associates of Michael Flynn.

PERSPECTIVE: Mexico’s drug-war death toll in 2016 reportedly exceeded murder levels in many countries mired in war.

With nearly 23,000 intentional homicides in 2016, Mexico’s murder tally was second only to war-torn Syria’s 60,000, said Antonio Sampaio, one of the authors of the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ “Armed Conflict Survey 2017.”

The report deals a blow to to President Enrique Peña Nieto’s efforts to end Mexico’s deadly drug war, which has dragged on for more than a decade.

Iraq had roughly 17,000 murders, while Afghanistan had 16,000 last year, Sampaio added, noting that Mexico’s militarized drug battle increasingly resembles an armed conflict.

Good lord.

CHANGE: South Korea’s Moon Jae-in sworn in vowing to address North.

South Korea’s new President Moon Jae-in has been sworn in, vowing to address the economy and relations with the North in his first speech as president.

He said that he would even be willing to visit Pyongyang under the right circumstances.

Mr Moon took his oath of office in Seoul’s National Assembly building a day after his decisive win.

The former human rights lawyer and son of North Korean refugees is known for his liberal views.

The only suspense is over how much Kim Jong-un will take him for.