JONATHAN TURLEY: FBI’s Tanked Clinton Email Probe ‘a Legitimate Matter of Congressional Concern and Investigation’

Well, yes.

SHE POKED THE BEAR: Alaska Reporter Who Quit On Air in Support of Marijuana Legalization Facing 24 Years in Prison.

Charlo Greene went viral two years ago when she quit her reporting job on-air after advocating the legalization of marijuana. “Fuck it, I quit” she said, signing off for the last time.

Greene, an Alaska native, moved from journalism to marijuana legalization advocacy. Voters approved a ballot measure that year to legalize marijuana, but now Greene is being criminally prosecuted for her marijuana-related work, The Guardian reports.

After her resignation, the Alaska Cannabis Club, which she revealed to be the founder of in her last on-air segment, appeared to become a primary target for law enforcement authorities in Alaska, who conducted six undercover purchases and two raids of the club, which gave members marijuana in exchange for donations, and two raids in a five month period after her resignation. Marijuana legalization went into effect in February 2015. Greene, who spoke with The Guardian, faces eight drug-related charges that could cost her up to 24 years in prison, and described her experience as a “modern day lynching.”

As our drug laws move towards decriminalization and legalization, there ought to be pardons for nonviolent offenders like Greene.

MAYBE IT’S WITH HER MISSING EMAILS: Hey, what happened to Hillary Clinton’s middle-class tax cut?

So why isn’t Hillary campaigning hard on her own middle-class tax cut, as Leonhardt suggests? One theory: Clinton long ago assumed she would be the 45th POTUS, and has been running on more of a governing agenda. No need to “pander” so much.

And along those lines, perhaps she sees infrastructure spending as a better use for taxpayer dough than pricey middle-class tax cuts. Perhaps she buys the reasoning of Democratic economist Larry Summers: “In the short run, expanded infrastructure investment would put people to work, create demand, and move the economy forward. In the medium run, it would expand the economy’s capacity, and reduce [debt] burdens on my children.”

Cutting taxes allows people to keep more of their own money, and decide how to spend it themselves. “Investing” in ill-defined infrastructure keeps the decision-making power with our betters in Washington.

SYRIAN CEASEFIRE UPDATE: Syria military says it retook hospital, refugee camp in Aleppo.

The military said its forces captured the Kindi hospital and were strengthening their positions in the Handarat refugee camp, the Associated Press reported.

The state-run SANA news agency said that government soldiers retook buildings in Aleppo including Aleppo Club, the electricity department and a garage.

Doctors without Borders called on the Syrian government and its allies to “stop indiscriminate bombing in Aleppo.”

Awful as the Syrian assault is, it seems to be a more effective method of ending a war than President Obama’s weak attempts to talk Assad out of power.

Aleppo is the rebels’ last major stronghold, and the Turks are helping Damascus by clearing the north of Syria of ISIS and Kurdish forces. Assuming the dust ever settles, Russia and Iran will have strengthened their hand across the Levant, and the U.S. will have shown that we’re incapable of finding new friends in the Middle East (among the rebels) or supporting the friends we already have (the Kurds).

But Obama will still have his Nobel Peace Participation Trophy.

INCREDIBLE: Tennessee school counselor talks student with gun out of shooting.

A 14-year-old boy went to Sycamore Middle School on Wednesday asking to speak with counselor Molly Hudgens, according to WKRN-TV.

Authorities said he told her he was having problems and was going to kill teacher and a police officer, but no students; he told her she was the only one who could talk him out of it.

She did.

Read the whole thing.

THE NEW CIVILITY: Obama Cabinet Official Says It’s A Good Thing Justice Scalia Died.

It’s a good thing for labor unions that Antonin Scalia died earlier this year, Tom Perez, President Obama’s Labor Secretary, said on Thursday.

Perez, a progressive whom Hillary Clinton considered choosing as her running mate, was answering questions during a session at the Washington Ideas Forum when he was asked about strategies to increase labor union membership.

“Well, I think you have all these — there’s an unmitigated assault on labor unions across a number of states and there was a case that went before the Supreme Court recently, and frankly if Justice Scalia had not passed away it would have really made it very difficult for public sector labor unions to organize and that would have been one step in a very transparent and well-choreographed set of objectives from folks on the far right to eviscerate the labor movement,” Perez told the audience.

Let’s hear more about what Trump said a couple decades ago about a beauty pageant contestant.

FISHING FOR PAGEVIEWS: Media Says Netanyahu Totally Booed At ‘Hamilton,’ Video Says Otherwise.

Video of non-booing at the link.

TOO BIG TO FAIL, JUST NOT TOO BIG TO FAIL ITS CUSTOMERS: Wells Fargo Troubles Mount With Penalty for Soldiers’ Loans.

The bank has previously been accused of not adhering to the military lending law, which Congress approved decades ago to protect soldiers from legal hassles while they’re on active duty. Wells Fargo agreed to compensate borrowers as one of five mortgage servicers sanctioned for improper home foreclosures, paying $28 million for so-called non-judicial foreclosures that didn’t pass through courts and $59 million for those handled in the judicial system, according to statements issued by the Justice Department last year. The bank didn’t admit or deny the allegations.

In the Santander case, the Justice Department was tipped off by the U.S. Army’s legal assistance program that vehicles might have been repossessed illegally.

Charming.

GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE: Veterans With Cancer Died After Delays at VA Hospital.

Dozens of veterans who tested positive for colorectal cancer at the New Mexico VA Health Care System in Albuquerque were not notified of their results in a timely manner, according to the inspector general report released this week, which faulted a lack of oversight from the system’s leadership.

Colorectal cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. Screening can detect the cancer in its early stages, making it easier to beat.

Nine veterans who sought care at the New Mexico VA hospital in fiscal years 2013 and 2014 and who were eventually diagnosed with colorectal cancer “experienced delays and, in some instances, significant delays that may have affected the patients’ clinical outcomes,” investigators found.

Abolish the V.A. and give vets a voucher for the health insurance plan of their choice — or would that not provide enough opportunities for graft, featherbedding, and parochialism?

RED BULL GIVES YOU DUI: Non-alcoholic energy drinks that give you wings linked to drunk driving.

In a six-year study following 1,000 college students, researchers found that the more non-alcoholic energy drinks a person reported throwing back, the more likely they were to drive drunk. The finding squares with past studies that have linked alcoholic energy drinks to such dangerous behaviors. However, the study, published Tuesday in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, is the first to decouple the bad effects of alcohol from those of the energy drinks alone.

“[The] results shed light on the complexity of the relationship between [energy drink] consumption patterns and an important public health problem: drunk driving,” noted the authors of the study, led by public health researcher Amelia Arria of the University of Maryland.

How exactly a non-alcoholic beverage correlates to more drunk driving—which obviously involves alcohol—is not yet clear from the survey data, the authors note. However, the researchers speculate that drinking energy drinks prior to or alongside alcoholic ones may allow a drinker to become “wide-awake drunk,” paving the way for more drinking and risky behavior such as drunk driving.

Legal or otherwise, it’s never a good idea to mix uppers and downers.

VIDEO: NY Governor Raises Possibility NJ Train Crash Was Work Of ‘Our Enemies’

“I would like to take this opportunity to say that these are difficult times over these past weeks and months between terrorist attacks and natural disasters,” Cuomo told the gathered crowd of reporters. “We have had our hands full in this country. We have had our hands full in the Northeast.”

“I want to thank the linden police who did an extraordinary job in apprehending Rahami in connection with the Chelsea bombing, and they did a fantastic job,” he continued. “I want to thank the coordination and the cooperation of our neighbors and partners in making that happen.”

“Today is another situation for us to deal with, but, I also believe as many challenges as Mother Nature sends us, or our enemies send us, we are up to handling them,” he noted. “We’ll handle them one at a time, but when we work together, there is nothing that we can’t accomplish and nothing that we cannot over come.”

Accident or terrorism, one way or the other we’d better figure it out quickly.

GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: Watchdog knocks administration for misusing Obamacare funds.

In 2014, the industry-funded reinsurance program was supposed to provide $10 billion to insurers and $2 billion to the federal Treasury. But when total collections from insurers amounted to only $9.7 billion, the Department of Health and Human Services opted to funnel all of the money toward insurers. The agency paid insurers $7.9 billion in claims for 2014, the first year of exchange coverage, and held over the remaining $1.7 billion for future payments.

Republicans, who asked the GAO investigate the issue, hailed the GAO’s finding as vindication for their longstanding claims that the Obama administration is wrongly prioritizing insurers over taxpayers.

“This new opinion from the government’s top watchdog confirms that the Obama administration is not above the law,” said Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a statement. “The administration needs to put an end to the Great Obamacare Heist immediately.”
HHS told the GAO that its funding decision was within its discretion under the Affordable Care Act. But the GAO ruled otherwise, finding that the statute clearly requires that the Treasury get a share of the funds.

Hey, insurance companies had to get some kind of payback for all the support they gave ObamaCare in the early days.

That is, the support they gave the law before they were losing hundreds of millions selling ObamaCare policies, and started pulling out of the exchanges.

FASTER, PLEASE: Scientists fix fractures with 3-D printed synthetic bone.

The team found that when used in spinal injuries in rodents and to mend the skull of a monkey, the hyper-elastic bone, made mostly of a ceramic and polymer, quickly integrated with surrounding tissue and began regenerating bone.

It swiftly mended bones in the spines of the rats and healed the monkey’s skull in just four weeks, with no signs of infection or other side effects, the scientists said.

“Another unique property … is that it’s highly porous and absorbent – and this is important for cell and tissue integration,” said Ramille Shah of Northwestern University’s department of material science, engineering and surgery, who co-led the work.

“Even when it’s deformed or squeezed into a space, it still maintains high porosity, and this is also very important for blood vessels to infiltrate the scaffold so that it can further support cell and tissue growth.”

Human trials are scheduled to begin “within five years,” but given that my younger son’s favorite activity is throwing himself off of things, I do wish they’d speed that up.

UH-OH: New Galaxy Note 7 reportedly explodes in China, burns customer’s fingers.

A Chinese customer has reported that a Note 7 that he bought this week exploded within 24 hours of acquiring it from an online retailer, causing minor injuries to two fingers and damaging his Apple MacBook.

“We are currently contacting the customer and will conduct a thorough examination of the device in question once we receive it,” the Korean company said in a statement sent to Bloomberg. Samsung, following an earlier Note 7 fire in China, had previously reported that there were no issues with the batteries used in Note 7s sold there.

The story doesn’t make clear whether this particular phone was manufactured pre- or post-recall, but if you have a Galaxy Note 7 subject to the recall, you’ll want to trade it in immediately.

THANKS, FRACKERS! OPEC’s Prospective Deal May Not Create a Lasting Oil Rally.

Oil prices surged after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries said late Wednesday that its members proposed to curb output, the first major agreement since the oil bear market began in 2014. But despite the surprise outcome, the price of crude was slightly lower on Thursday and many banks, including Goldman Sachs, Société Générale, Jefferies and UBS, are standing pat on their oil-price forecasts for the coming months.

Every time OPEC stops a pump, another one starts in North Dakota.

WRONG TARGET: Team Trump Pivots To Bill Clinton’s Scandals.

How’d that work out for the Republicans in 1992 and 1996?

MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS: Our corner of the Milky Way may be bigger than previously thought.

Some galaxies are near perfect spirals, with two or four arms starting at the center of the swirling stellar mass and entirely encircling it as the arms stretch outward. But not our galaxy. According to new research, the Milky Way galaxy is more of a patchwork spiral galaxy.

The evidence lies in our own galactic neighborhood. The section of the Milky Way that contains our solar system is actually a substantial spiral arm, not just a small spur as previously thought.

But the Local Arm, as our corner of the galaxy is called, does not fully encircle the galaxy as a perfect spiral arm would. Instead, it extends about 20,000 light-years around the galaxy, while some of the other arms extend five to six times that length, scientists report in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

If only there were some way to take a galactic selfie.

CHOOSING THE STRONG HORSE: Philippine leader to end drills with U.S. that “China does not want”

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said he was giving notice to the United States, his country’s long-standing ally, that joint exercises of Filipino and American troops next week will be the last such drills.

He told the Filipino community in Hanoi late Wednesday night that he will maintain the military alliance with the U.S. because of the countries’ 1951 defense treaty. But he added next week’s exercises will proceed only because he did not want to embarrass his defense secretary.

Duterte said during a two-day visit to meet Vietnam’s leaders that he wants to establish new trade and commercial alliances with China and Russia, and that the war games were something Beijing does not want.

“I would serve notice to you now that this will be the last military exercise,” he said. “Jointly, Philippines-US, the last one.”

I could have sworn we pivoted to Asia.

IT’S BECAUSE SHE’S A TERRIBLE POLITICAL CANDIDATE AND NOT A VERY LIKABLE PERSON: Why Clinton hasn’t put Trump away.

Sorry for the spoiler.

I HAD BEEN TOLD THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: New record extends global temperatures back two million years.

Most of the paper is solid, telling us new things about the recent history of our planet. But there appears to be some significant issues with one aspect of the analysis: the part that attempts to calculate how sensitive our climate is to rising greenhouse gasses. Unfortunately, that’s the aspect that’s most relevant to non-scientists, and it’s the detail likely to attract the most attention.

Yes, it would be most unfortunate if the American public understood that scientists still don’t understand greenhouse gasses, upon which so much public policy is made.

THE NEW NORMAL ANEMIA: Final Q2 GDP Comes At 1.4%: US Set To Grow At Slowest Pace Since Financial Crisis.

If the Obama “recovery” had done no better than match the postwar average, the US economy would be more than two trillion dollars richer than it is — which translates to thousands of dollars per American household.

Heckuva job, Barry.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS KILLS: “…Without political correctness, we might not have a terror problem AT ALL…”

PRAETORIAN GUARDS GOTTA GUARD: Nothing James Comey Says About The Hillary Clinton Investigation Makes Any Sense.

David Harsanyi:

FBI Director James Comey, who testified in front of two congressional committees this week, still maintains he was unable to recommend that the Justice Department charge Clinton with mishandling classified documents because of insufficient evidence proving “intent” — although the actions themselves are irrefutably illegal.

Well, how exactly did he anticipate gathering this proof when the Justice Department had proactively shielded the five people tasked with setting up the private system and then destroying it? Was he hoping to extract a confession directly from Hillary?

Why would, for instance, a Clinton functionary like Cheryl Mills help prosecutors once she’d already secured safeguards against any criminal prosecution? While testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee, Comey claimed Mills was already “cooperative” and the Justice Department had assured the FBI she had done nothing wrong. Hence the deal.

If she was accommodating and completely innocent, why would she seek, and be given, immunity? A lawyer for Mills and Heather Samuelson had already admitted the deal was struck to protect her clients from potential prosecution arising from “classification” on their laptops. Apparently, the Justice Department was more convinced of their innocence than their lawyer was.

It’s not like Clinton or her staff had done anything truly criminal, like calling Comey a weasel.

YOU DON’T LIKE ME, YOU REALLY DON’T LIKE ME: Clinton campaign in ‘panic mode’ over Florida black voters.

Democrats are beginning to worry that too many African-American voters are uninspired by Clinton’s candidacy, leading her campaign to hit the panic button this week and launch an all-out blitz to juice-up voter enthusiasm.

Bill Clinton, once nicknamed the “first black president,” embarks on a North Florida bus tour Friday in an attempt to draw African-American crowds. At the same time, Clinton herself will host events in Broward and St. Lucie counties, which have black populations higher than the statewide average.

That follows the events of this past weekend, when black mothers who have lost children to gun violence hosted a Clinton organizing event in Jacksonville and a voter-registration drive in Opa-Locka, a majority black city near Miami. The group, Mothers of the Movement, includes Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin, whose 2012 shooting death near Orlando became a flashpoint for racial division and gun violence.

Coming soon: President Barack Obama, who’s expected to campaign here at least twice before Election Day. First Lady Michelle Obama — more popular than her husband — will likely visit Florida as well, in addition to the ad she cut for Clinton that’s currently airing on Florida radio.

Maybe if next time around the Democrats don’t rig the nomination process, they’ll have more enthusiastic voters.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Gowdy Rips FBI Director Comey: This is ‘Not the FBI That I Used to Work With.’

It’s certainly more weaselly than it used to be.