Bob McManus:

“…Is there a classier lady anywhere than Shannon Slutman, widow of FDNY firefighter Christopher Slutman — killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan while serving as a US Marine Corps reservist?

No, there is not.

Meanwhile, is there a bigger dope than Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, the pandering jerk from Greenwich Village who was hard-pressed to find a few bucks to help send Gold Star kids to college — while lavishing millions on scholarships for the offspring of New York’s legion of illegal, um, ­arrivers?

Alas, probably. . . .

New Yorkers who are old enough, and not named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, understand the exquisite pain that attends a death in service to America.

The FDNY’s 9/11 agony — 343 dead in a flash of rolling fireballs and collapsing skyscrapers — would have been unbearable save for a 136-year tradition of allegiance to duty in the face of lethal peril. All give some, some give all is a hoary catchphrase for most — but a sustaining ethic for others.

Shannon Slutman understands this. How could she not?

Her husband was a firefighter, and he was a Marine — another organization that stares down mortal danger every day, but at a price.

She, too, is a hero — suffering exquisitely in the moment but at the same time thinking of ­others.

“The girls and I thank you for the outpouring of love and support,” she wrote last week. “My husband was a humble man . . . passionate about his family as well as being a firefighter and a Marine. Above all, Chris was a man of integrity and a gentleman in all he did. In honor of Chris, please . . . do something kind for another.”

Do something kind for another. Wow.

Now the skirling pipes and the muffled drums will be for Chris Slutman, an echo from the weeks and months following 9/11 — and the universally recognizable sound of heroes being laid to rest.

Fast forward to Deborah Glick and her colleagues, caught last week short-changing Gold Star families while sprinkling $27 million in tuition aid on so-called dreamers…”

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Note Beto’s response to a question on his charitable giving that arose because he released his tax returns for the last ten years. The salient part is in the last half of his response. According to Beto, Beto is so awesome that Beto is his own form of charitable giving. Beto’s only regret is that Beto has but one Beto to give. You’re welcome, America.

Most media steadfastly refuse to report on the nexus between the DNC, Clinton Campaign, Fusion GPS, FBI, and DOJ. Can you guess why?

Nick Short:

“…When the FBI was in contact with Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy who compiled his infamous dossier smearing then candidate Donald J. Trump, was it aware that his employer, Fusion GPS, was allegedly simultaneously working as an unregistered agent for Russian interests? This question among many others have yet to be answered. The following is a short timeline of earlier questions and important revelations from 2017 involving the Russia hoax which exposed the connections between Fusion GPS, the FBI, and the media. Many, if not all, of these remain unanswered to this day…”

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The left tries to silence people because it cannot win on the merits of an argument.

“…A Federal Court judge has ruled James Cook University acted unlawfully when it sacked physics professor Peter Ridd after he publicly criticised the institution and one of its star scientists over claims about the global warming impact on the Great Barrier Reef.

Professor Ridd last night welcomed the decision and called on the university’s council, its governing body, to make vice-chancellor Sandra Harding accountable for the legal defeat.

“The university has broken the law. What is the university council going to do about this? The vice-chancellor has brought the university into disrepute,” he said.

In his verdict, judge Salvatore Vasta said the university’s grounds for dismissing Professor Ridd — that he breached the university’s code of conduct — were improper. He found that all 17 findings used by the university to justify the sacking were unlawful. . . .

Judge Vasta also said the university had misunderstood “the whole concept of intellectual freedom”.

“In the search for truth, it is an unfortunate consequence that some people may feel denigrated, offended, hurt or upset,” he said.

A penalty hearing will be set for a later date…”

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Conrad Black:

“…My guess is that Biden can still win the nomination, but it will be a pretty unenthused campaign. If he doesn’t make his move fairly soon, Klobuchar may gradually rise as the presentable alternative to sirens of the left. Trump will get an improved trade arrangement with China, the North Korean discussions will at least not have descended back to nuclear saber-rattling, and there may be progress in the Middle East, as the Arabs don’t want the Palestinians muddying the waters while the Turks and Iranians are crowding the Arab powers. Trump will have got enough done with the southern border to satisfy the national concern on that subject, will have a full-employment economy, and will conduct an extremely flamboyant campaign flailing the Democrats with all the Trump-collusion nonsense. Incumbent presidents have been defeated only twice since the Great Depression — Jimmy Carter was not a very effective president, and George H. W. Bush allowed the political charlatan Ross Perot to split his party and take 20 million votes. Trump will have the strongest first term to run on since Reagan, or even Nixon, and they both carried 49 states. Trump won’t do that, but he hasn’t made a seriously unfortunate public utterance for months and looks stronger each week…”

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Mapping San Francisco’s Human Waste Challenge – 132,562 Cases Reported In The Public Way Since 2008

I am so old I can remember when the smart people in politics and media told us we had reached peak oil and it was all down hill.

“…That anticipated gusher of oil production growth in Texas has the industry planning to spend billions of dollars on building out the necessary infrastructure to move more barrels to global markets. Enterprise Products Partners is one of several companies working on oil pipelines in the region. The company is currently in the middle of converting an existing natural gas liquids line to oil service, which will help move additional Permian barrels toward the coast. Meanwhile, Canadian oil pipeline giant Enbridge (NYSE:ENB) is working with MLP Phillips 66 Partners (NYSE:PSXP) and refiner Marathon Petroleum (NYSE:MPC) to build the Gray Oak pipeline. That roughly $2 billion-system will move 900,000 BPD of crude from both the Permian as well as the Eagle Ford to refineries and export facilities along the coast of Texas.

As these and other export projects come online, they’ll enable the country to ship more oil overseas. According to Enterprise Products’ forecast, the U.S. is on track to exceed Saudi Arabia’s export capacity by 2024…”

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Pelosi rips AOC, says her posse in Congress is ‘like five people.’

The state of modern media and journalism

JOHN HINDERAKER:

“…It is almost unbelievable that the Democrats and their media adjunct are trying to deny that the Obama administration spied on the Trump presidential campaign. Are they unaware of the multiple FISA warrants obtained to spy on Carter Page? Do they not know that the fake Fusion ‘dossier’ was the basis for those FISA warrants, thus eliminating any question about whether the point was to spy on the Trump campaign? Are they unaware of many news reports of federal agencies recruiting multiple human intelligence assets to report on the Trump campaign? And if they are aware of those generally-acknowledged facts, what on God’s green Earth are they talking about? The issue has almost become one of epistemology. The Democrats and the liberal press are committed to a narrative that turned out to be wrong. Nevertheless, facts that run counter to the cherished narrative somehow turn into a ‘debunked conspiracy theory.’…”

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Roger Kimball:

“…As I have been saying for a couple of years now, this is the biggest scandal in American history. It dwarfs Watergate. Indeed, it challenges the fundamental integrity of our democratic—i.e., accountable—institutions. It challenges, too, the sacrosanct ideal of the separation of powers. Finally, it challenges the presumption of basic fairness and open competition without which our republic could endure in name only. . . . Some people think that it would be best if we put this whole episode behind us, that we sharply limit any investigations into wrongdoing and that, especially, we refrain from punishing the highly placed actors who leaked, lied, and conspired against the president. I am not of their number. What just happened in the United States represented an existential threat to the integrity of our institutions. It happened because highly placed individuals had cultivated a sense of entitlement and presumption of higher virtue—what James Comey called a ‘higher loyalty’—which they believed exempted them from the constraints and procedures that the rest of us must observe. They broke the law because they believed that they answered to a ‘higher’ law. Out of such convictions are revolutions born and countries destroyed…”

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Florida dominates this weeks nut-jobs!