Democrats are performing what amounts to a pseudo-impeachment so they don’t have to undertake a real one…The problem with this play-acting is that it has Democrats fulminating about actions that aren’t even misdemeanors, much less high crimes. Exhibit A is Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler’s threat to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt for failing to turn over the entire Mueller report to Congress.

Having utterly failed to uphold his oath and chosen to become President Trump’s personal defense counsel, Barr has damaged his own reputation and undermined his department’s reputation and the rule of law. Impeachment of a Cabinet secretary (the first since Reconstruction) would be a fitting capstone to a career that will be defined by Barr’s rabid partisanship and disdain for the Constitution.

It seems to me like a clear case of “we are too weak/scared/unwilling to take on the president directly, so we will take on this underling.” If the goal is half-measures, the Barr approach is a good one. Pelosi can pretend to confront Trump without actually doing so — by attacking Barr, asking for Mueller to testify and demanding the full, unredacted report.

The key to the weapons’ effectiveness is not their sophistication in terms of range or precision but just the opposite. Many of the rockets are so cheap and easy to manufacture, in some cases requiring little more than metal casing and an explosive, that the groups have been able to accumulate them in significant numbers…

“The idea is to create panic, create chaos, and maybe hit something,” said Ganor.

The cost of a single Iron Dome interception is about $80,000. The cost of the batteries themselves and their operation is also high… It takes a long time to rebuild the supply of interceptor missiles because the manufacturing process is relatively slow. On the other hand, the terrorist groups use rockets that are manufactured quickly, at a negligible cost.

Israel has a critical gap in its protection system, said Yaakov Amidror, a former head of Military Intelligence’s Research Department and currently a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies. He told The Jerusalem Post that if a rocket is shot at a location less than a few kilometers away, “we don’t have enough time to intercept it.”

There was no talk of banning beef. But the aim of reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions would entail rethinking food production to some extent… Scaling back the amount of beef Americans consume would be an obvious solution, as AOC suggested… Her opponents’ insistence on equating red meat with freedom and American identity, however, shows how difficult it would be to implement even the slightest reforms to the institutions that make beef so abundant.

This Washington stir over the burger police is classic political theater, the latest tribal skirmish in America’s partisan culture wars. But livestock really do have a serious impact on the climate — and the extreme rhetoric about cow farts and rounding up ranchers is obscuring a consequential debate over the future of animal agriculture in general and beef in particular. Red meat has a greater impact on the climate than any other food…

Though perhaps extreme, the line of argument seen at CPAC is quite clever: it responds to criticism of meat production with a defense of meat consumption, about which people feel understandably sensitive. The argument starts from a kernel of truth…

HB 481 would also have consequences for women who get abortions from doctors or miscarry. A woman who seeks out an illegal abortion from a health care provider would be a party to murder, subject to life in prison. And a woman who miscarries because of her own conduct—say, using drugs while pregnant—would be liable for second-degree murder, punishable by 10 to 30 years’ imprisonment.

The fact is, so-called heartbeat legislation, which bans abortion at the moment a fetal heartbeat can be detected, sometimes as early as six weeks, places undue hardships on women who might not even know they are pregnant yet…

Some probably view life as beginning at some post-conception stage of fetal development, such as sentience or the beginning of a heartbeat. Some may view fetuses as lives, but not morally equivalent to someone already born. Others may view abortion as a mere necessary evil and a societal trade-off. But these people aren’t the ones attempting to rewrite our laws and run the free world. Those that are must be made to answer an extremely simple question: Where does life begin?

…thanks to some wildly imaginative researchers at a group of universities — including Texas A&M, Arizona State, Cal Tech and Purdue University, where I work — candidates have available for inspection a genuine Big Idea… Any idea this big faces daunting feasibility questions, but the proponents have spent a fair amount of time thinking through and costing out their plan.

Looking to solve the so-called border crisis with technical and economic solutions tends to elide the very human aspects of the borderlands. A variety of factors, from climate change to political violence, has created the northward migration from Central America that this proposal seeks to address. Those factors show no signs of changing anytime soon. And an energy corridor won’t change the fact that many of the communities that exist along the U.S.-Mexico border have been intertwined for generations.

Unlike President Donald Trump’s desired border wall, the proposed energy corridor would be a joint effort between U.S. and Mexico… In addition to the green energy benefits, border security, and job creation, the researchers make a special note of how the proposal would increase water resources in the dry region.

As neither Trump or any of his hirelings ever spoke out directly against psychedelics it is not a total shock that his administration has not gone after research in the field. But it’s remarkable that psychedelic science has actually flourished under the Trump administration.

By decriminalizing hallucinogenic mushrooms, Denver is offering itself up as a real-life case study. For both proponents and opponents of psilocybin, that’s important and will either make a case for further decriminalization efforts or sound the alarm against more permissive laws.

The Denver ballot also includes the “Psilocybin Initiative,” which would decriminalize “magic mushrooms” that cause hallucinations, panic attacks and psychosis, not unlike the effects of LSD. This one will make the increase in emergency room visits and fatal car accidents following the legalization of marijuana seem like a walk in the park.

In the year since last Memorial Day, 56 servicemen have joined the ranks of those who fell while serving in Israel’s security forces…

According to the data released by the Defense Ministry, the total number of Israel’s fallen stands at 23,741 men and women, counting since 1860 to date. The count begins in 1860 because that is when the first Jewish neighborhood was established outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. Today it is considered the beginning of the rebirth of modern Jewish presence on the land of Israel.

On Yom Hazikaron, we bow our heads in remembrance and stand in silence, to honor our fallen. In their death, they bequeathed us life. That is not a glib platitude. It is a grim reality, which we must recognize and appreciate. Israel’s complex reality is such, that it is the truth. It makes Yom Haatzmaut all the more significant. Nizkor et kulam.

The emotional switch from grief and sadness to exhilarating joy is part of the Jewish psyche. It is recorded in the Bible and in the Book of Esther, in the rebirth of the Jewish people after the Holocaust, and even during the times we live in now. Remembrance Day is marked on the 4th day of the Hebrew month of Iyar, one day prior to Independence Day, which is on Iyar 5.