SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:52 P.M. ET:  

TROUBLE IN BALTIMORE – FROM THE BALTIMORE SUN:   The lead Baltimore police detective in the Freddie Gray investigation said she reluctantly read to grand jurors a summary of evidence provided by prosecutors that she believed was misleading, according to police records reviewed by The Baltimore Sun.  Hours later, the grand jurors issued criminal indictments against six police officers in the arrest and death of Gray.   Detective Dawnyell Taylor said in a daily log of case notes on the investigation that a prosecutor handed her a four-page, typed narrative at the courthouse just before she appeared before the grand jury.  "As I read over the narrative it had several things that I found to be inconsistent with our investigation," Taylor wrote, adding: "I thought the statements in the narrative were misquoted."  A very seedy situation.  This is what happens when mob rule dictates "justice."

AH, MORALITY – FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES:   The Nevada director of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign reportedly suggested cheating by using double-sided coins to settle ties in the state’s caucuses — and was promoted to a national post.  According to a lengthy post-mortem report by CBS News on the Sanders campaign, Nevada State Director Joan Kato floated the idea of the loaded coins in preparation for the state’s Feb. 20 caucus. The network cited staffers who said they had been told to buy them.  There had been numerous reports that Hillary Clinton eked out an advantage in the Iowa caucuses by winning a statistically anomalous number of coin flips in caucus locations that had finished tied. Some progressives at the time suggested some form of skulduggery.  Mrs. Clinton wound up winning a slight, but clear, victory in the Nevada caucuses, defeating Mr. Sanders by 5 percentage points.  After the Nevada caucuses were over, according to CBS News, Ms. Kato was not let go by the Sanders team, but instead was appointed the Sanders campaign’s national delegate director.  In a Sanders administration he'd presumably be secretary of the Treasury.

SAY WHAT? – FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES:  Leading climate doomsayer Michael Mann recently downplayed the importance of climate change science, telling Democrats that data and models “increasingly are unnecessary” because the impact is obvious.  “Fundamentally, I’m a climate scientist and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate-model output and observational climate data trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change,” Mr. Mann told the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee at a hearing.  “What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we’ve spent years developing increasingly are unnecessary because we can see climate change, the impacts of climate change, now, playing out in real time, on our television screens, in the 24-hour news cycle,” he said.  We do?  Where is this proof?  Or is "climate science" failing in its predictions, and so will be declared "obsolete"?  Do you sense a fast hustle?

June 27, 2016