One ticket in Illinois won the $393 million Megamillions jackpot on Friday . . .

That's 2.6% of Illinois' unpaid bills totaling $15 billion.

Good luck collecting, buddy.

We're not in Skokie anymore, Toto: Another local police department sides with the violent left

But I repeat myself.

Was Seth Rich, murdered five days later, the DNC leaker after all?

From the DNC inside job story in The Nation, here:

Forensicator’s first decisive findings, made public in the paper dated July 9, concerned the volume of the supposedly hacked material and what is called the transfer rate—the time a remote hack would require. The metadata established several facts in this regard with granular precision: On the evening of July 5, 2016, 1,976 megabytes of data were downloaded from the DNC’s server. The operation took 87 seconds. This yields a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second. ... 

Time stamps in the metadata provide further evidence of what happened on [Tuesday] July 5. The stamps recording the download indicate that it occurred in the Eastern Daylight Time Zone at approximately 6:45 pm. This confirms that the person entering the DNC system was working somewhere on the East Coast of the United States. In theory the operation could have been conducted from Bangor or Miami or anywhere in between—but not Russia, Romania, or anywhere else outside the EDT zone. Combined with Forensicator’s findings on the transfer rate, the time stamps constitute more evidence that the download was conducted locally, since delivery overheads—conversion of data into packets, addressing, sequencing times, error checks, and the like—degrade all data transfers conducted via the Internet, more or less according to the distance involved.

Pat Lawrence in The Nation concludes the so-called Russia hack of the DNC was instead a leak, an inside job

Here:

There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.

It's a red letter day when the left complains about the indefensible corrupt manipulations of language

Affordable care, comrades.

Here in The Nation:

All this was set in motion when the DNC’s mail server was first violated in the spring of 2016 and by subsequent assertions that Russians were behind that “hack” and another such operation, also described as a Russian hack, on July 5. These are the foundation stones of the edifice just outlined. The evolution of public discourse in the year since is worthy of scholarly study: Possibilities became allegations, and these became probabilities. Then the probabilities turned into certainties, and these evolved into what are now taken to be established truths. By my reckoning, it required a few days to a few weeks to advance from each of these stages to the next. This was accomplished via the indefensibly corrupt manipulations of language repeated incessantly in our leading media.

Gotta love Alabama: Judge Roy "10 Commandments" Moore widens lead to +12 in latest poll

Here.

The Judge has been endorsed by Phil Robertson and Chuck Norris, but notably not by President Trump.

h/t Real Clear Politics

National Review notices that "North Korea just commits some random, unprovoked act of aggression every once in a while"

Here, but doesn't get that it's North Koreans' quintessential view of themselves.

I wonder how many artillery rounds of nerve agent, which Fat Boy used to kill his half-brother, are stockpiled for the much feared "conventional" attack on Seoul.

Laugh of the Day: Hillary's newest cause

Seen here.

You say Korans, I say Koreans . . .

Newt Gingrich is full of crap: Mitch McConnell promised immediate repeal in January 2017 in December 2016

This morning on The Laura Ingraham Show, hosted by Raymond Arroyo, Gingrich criticized Trump for making this too personal.

Laugh of the Day 3.0: Norwegian feminist feels guilty his Somali rapist was deported after serving his sentence

“I am afraid that no girls want me and that other men laugh at me. Afraid that I'll be perceived as anti-feminist when I say that young men who are struggling should get more attention."

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Stockholm obviously exports its syndrome. I wonder how much they make off that? Good thing they're not in NATO or they'd enervate the entire alliance, not just Norway.

Laugh of the Day 2.0: G&%lag, exporting censorship one search at a time

Laugh of the Day 1.0: G&%gle Diversity

Rush features Dinesh D'Souza blaming Democrats for DIRECTLY inspiring Hitler

Here, discussing points from his forthcoming book:

Hitler got the idea [of German expansion in Europe] from the Jacksonian Democrats of the 19th century [who violated the treaties with the American Indians and drove them west]. ...

[O]ne of the Nazis ... who happened to have studied in America, basically told the Nazis ... you can’t start the world’s first racist state because the Democrats in the American south have already done it. ... [A]ll the things we’re talking about — outlawing intermarriage, segregation, discrimination — they already have these laws; they exist. So what we have to do, he said, is take the Democratic laws, cross out the word ‘black’ and write in the word ‘Jew’ and we’re home free. So the Nazis then began a detailed examination of the Democratic Party laws. ...

The Nazis, in the 1930s, based both their forced-sterilization laws as well as their euthanasia laws on the models that had been created by Margaret Sanger. As Margaret Sanger said, “More children from the fit and less from the unfit,” and that’s how she viewed birth control. And not as a matter of giving every woman a choice, but as a matter of convincing the sort of, the successful and the fit, to have more kids and the unsuccessful — the sick, the “imbeciles” and what she considered to be the disposable people — essentially to prevent them from “breeding” altogether.

The other idea that a California eugenicist named Paul Popenoe had proposed ... “We have all these useless people who are already born, and so it’s not enough to have sterilization. We have to have euthanasia. We have to kill these people off. The first people that they killed were not the Jews. They were the sick, the disabled, the group that was called “imbeciles.” And later, the Nazi euthanasia program was expanded into Hitler’s Final Solution.

Those footnotes better be good.

Trump is fabulous right now answering questions . . .

. . . ripping into McConnell and Republicans on repeal of Obamacare and into Bill Clinton and Obama for enabling North Korea.

He's fightin' mad.

I love it when Rush Limbaugh compares Bill Clinton to the Rosenberg spies

It's a crystal clear example of the success of Fabian socialism.

Big Dallas GOP donor closes his checkbook until Republicans pass Obamacare repeal and tax reform

Story here.

The US State Department never searched its own system for requested Benghazi e-mails

'[State] has not, however, searched the one records system over which it has always had control and that is almost certain to contain some responsive records: the state.gov e-mail server,' [Judge] Mehta wrote.

Read the whole thing, here.

To get compliance and transparency from the Obama administration, you had to spell it out for them every time, otherwise you'd get bupkis. 

That was the MO of the Obama administration: slow-walking, foot-dragging, infinite parsing and obstruction.

Obama's Defense Intelligence Agency knew about North Korean nukes in 2013, Obama tried to suppress it, and WaPo reported neither

So forgive us, Kurt Andersen, for believing in conspiracies.

His side no doubt will respond with one of their own: Trump is leaking lies in order to start a war.

From the story here:

During an April 11, 2013, House Armed Services Committee hearing, Congressman Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., inadvertently revealed several unclassified sentences from a DIA report that said DIA had determined with “moderate confidence” that North Korea has the capability to make a nuclear weapon small enough to be launched with a ballistic missile.

The Director of National Intelligence and Obama officials subsequently tried to dismiss Lamborn’s disclosure by claiming the DIA assessment was an outlier that did not reflect the views of the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

It was clear what Obama officials were doing in 2013.  The DIA report represented inconvenient facts that threatened President Obama’s North Korea “strategic patience” policy -- a policy to do nothing about North Korea and kick this problem down the road to the next president.  Obama officials tried to downplay the DIA assessment to prevent it from being used to force the president to employ a more assertive North Korea policy.

It’s worth noting that the Trump White House has not condemned the Washington Post story as a leak.  That’s probably because it was an authorized disclosure of classified information to advance President Trump’s North Korea strategy.

Kurt Andersen in The Atlantic projects his now-rejected experience of libertarianism onto all of the GOP and conservatism

Unfortunately for Kurt, he thinks recovery means doing some cherry-picking of his own, exchanging one insanity for another. It never occurs to him that while Paul Ryan found his life's inspiration in a novel, millions of young Americans today derive theirs from film. If forced to choose, I'll take active insanity anyday over passive. Kinda makes you miss the "Jesus is my favorite philosopher" president, doesn't it? And how could anyone still seriously speak of an anti-psychiatry "craze"? I must have missed that in my "Man from U.N.C.L.E." years.

In other words, it takes a kook to know a kook. In his own words Andersen expresses the affinity which exists between the insane, the left and libertarianism.

Here:

Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the ’60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists) ... Another way the GOP got loopy was by overdoing libertarianism. I have some libertarian tendencies, but at full-strength purity it’s an ideology most boys grow out of. On the American right since the ’80s, however, they have not. Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: Let business do whatever it wants and don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism. Libertarianism, remember, is an ideology whose most widely read and influential texts are explicitly fiction. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has said, “and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.” It was that fiction that allowed him and so many other higher-IQ Americans to see modern America as a dystopia in which selfishness is righteous and they are the last heroes. “I think a lot of people,” Ryan said in 2009, “would observe that we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel.” I’m assuming he meant Atlas Shrugged, the novel that Trump’s secretary of state (and former CEO of ExxonMobil) has said is his favorite book. It’s the story of a heroic cabal of men’s-men industrialists who cause the U.S. government to collapse so they can take over, start again, and make everything right.