"WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court said Tuesday that part of a federal law that makes it easier to deport immigrants who have been convicted of crimes is too vague to be enforced.

"The court's 5-4 decision -- an unusual alignment in which new Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the four liberal justices -- concerns a catchall provision of immigration law that defines what makes a crime violent. Conviction for a crime of violence makes deportation 'a virtual certainty' for an immigrant, no matter how long he has lived in the United States, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her opinion for the court.

"The decision is a loss for President Donald Trump's administration, which has emphasized stricter enforcement of immigration law. In this case, President Barack Obama's administration took the same position in the Supreme Court in defense of the challenged provision.

"With the four other conservative justices in dissent, it was the vote of the Trump appointee that was decisive in striking down the provision at issue. Gorsuch did not join all of Kagan's opinion, but he agreed with her that the law could not be left in place. Gorsuch wrote that 'no one should be surprised that the Constitution looks unkindly on any law so vague that reasonable people cannot understand its terms and judges do not know where to begin in applying it.'"

"Colluders on the Loose ... If collusion is the twin of conspiracy, then there are lots of colluders running around Washington. ...

"James Comey himself was quite a colluder. Somehow, he managed to mislead Congress by assuring them that he had not written his assessment of Hillary Clinton before he interviewed her and supposedly had not been the source of or approved leaks to the media. He has contradicted what both Loretta Lynch and Andrew McCabe have said. He has deliberately misled a FISA court by withholding information from it, vital to any evaluation of the veracity of his writ. He probably lied when he was messaging the media that Trump was under investigation while simultaneously assuring Trump in person that he was not. He has admitted that he warped an FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server because he assumed she'd win the presidency -- an admission of politicized interference into a criminal investigation, if not a blatant confession that the FBI in felonious fashion was manipulating investigatory evidence to affect the outcome of a U.S. election. For Comey to escape legal exposure from all that required some sort of colluding help in high places. ...

"In sum, Washington lives by and for collusion. Always has. Until now, it was apparently just a creed, not a crime."

Read entire article here.

"After watching Mick Mulvaney spar with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in recent days, it's tempting to make the modest proposal that President Trump nominate Mulvaney for every administration position that has to testify before Sens. Warren, Cory Booker, D-N.J., Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Chris Murphy, D-Conn., or any of the other senators running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

"Mulvaney has earned Warren's ire because he is the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was her brainchild. While she hasn't backed down in their colorful exchanges, Mulvaney has been winning on points. ...

"But here's the serious point about Mulvaney's sparring with Warren. The Senate also deserves answers and accountability from federal agencies such as the CFPB. That's because Congress, under our Constitution, is supposed to oversee the federal government.

"That authority, however, was denied to Congress deliberately when Warren and her ilk established the CFPB. After Warren expressed frustration that the bureau wasn't answering her questions well enough, Mulvaney wrote back: 'I encourage you to consider the possibility that the frustration you are experiencing now, and that which I had a few years back, are both inevitable consequences of the fact that the Dodd-Frank ... Act insulates the Bureau from virtually any accountability to the American people through their elected representatives.'"

Read entire article here.

"President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. Postal Service to undergo an audit Thursday evening, a move that comes after president's repeated claims that Amazon is fleecing the USPS through alleged unfair business practices. ...

"According to the executive order, a task force comprise of top officials, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who would chair the group, will lead the investigation into the USPS' finances and will be required to issue recommendations and a final report no later than early August."

"Mr. Mueller is reaching the crossroads of his investigation and faces at least four critical decisions.

"One, Mr. Mueller can wind up his investigations now. He can write a report affirming that he has found no evidence while conducting his originally assigned inquiry: Donald Trump did not collude with the Russians to throw the election his way.

"Two, Mr. Mueller might pause and await Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report concerning possible Department of Justice and FBI abuses pertaining to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. If Mr. Horowitz finds credible evidence of lawbreaking, then Mr. Mueller might seek indictments based on the IG's likely actionable evidence.

"Three, Mr. Mueller could continue to investigate anyone close to the Trump campaign for another year. If he did that, he would confirm that his inquiry has descended into a political cause. If Mr. Mueller calibrates the release of his findings to the fall midterm elections, he will be hailed by Trump opponents as a crusading prosecutor -- despite finding nothing related to collusion. A Democratic takeover of Congress would shut down congressional investigations of FBI and DOJ wrongdoing and further empower Mr. Mueller.

"Four, Mr. Mueller could more evenly apply his investigations of lying, obstruction of justice and collusion during the 2016 campaign. That way, he would reassure the country of equal treatment of all under the law."

"It is hard to say what is more comical in this grilling of Facebook hoodie-in-chief Mark Zuckerberg by members of Congress.

"First, you have The Big Dork hissing and blistering like a screaming weenie over a Boy Scout campfire.

"'Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company,' he sniveled in his opening remarks.

"We are talking about a behemoth company that peddles personal information scraped from millions of 'users' around the planet and has the power to promote people into the presidency -- or make them vanish.

"Yeah, 'idealistic' and 'optimistic' are the exact words that come to mind -- in Newspeak maybe. ...

"Shut up. You are not. Stop lying."

Read entire article here.

"London has a problem. England's capital and largest city has seen a 40 percent increase in homicides in the last three years. There have been 53 murders already in 2018, and it is only April.

"Because it is near impossible to own a firearm legally in Britain, knives have been the go-to weapon in most of these murders. Authorities have noticed this, which is why the London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced this weekend that they would soon crackdown on anyone caught carrying a knife.

"'No excuses: there is never a reason to carry a knife. Anyone who does will be caught, and they will feel the full force of the law,' he tweeted. ...

"Go through the steps: They came for the firearms, so criminals moved on to other modes of violence, including knives. Authorities announced this weekend that they would treat knives as contraband. What do you suppose the criminal element will do now? They will move on to something equally fatal, and so on and so on until -- what, exactly? Scrutinizing blunt objects?"

"Once, the internet seemed to invite expanded access for an ever widening scope for content creators. Now, digitization appears to be hyper-concentrating media both geographically, on the coasts, and through pipelines controlled overwhelmingly by a firms like Facebook and Google. As the Guardian recently put it: 'If ExxonMobil attempted to insert itself into every element of our lives like this, there might be a concerted grassroots movement to curb its influence.'

"Ironically, the brouhaha over Russian efforts to influence the election may provide the oligarchs with the license to 'curate,' or more accurately censor, views they don't like. For the most part this censorship is being carried out under guidance developed largely by progressive groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which often labels anyone outside its ideological 'safe space' as racist bigots. What is considered hateful speech by the politically correct does not have to reflect neo-Nazi or Putin-inspired opinion; meanwhile there have been very few restraints on equally noxious voices on the left.

"Ultimately the tech moguls are following the approach described by the late radical social thinker C. Wright Mills: 'power elites' remain so by constraining debate in ways that do not threaten their core interests. The oligarchs' unprecedented wealth, married to new technologies, could help shape the nation's thinking in ways that represent a direct assault on pluralism and independent journalism. This needs to be recognized and opposed across the ideological spectrum by people committed to both pluralism and independent thought."

"A top White House aide said President Trump's threat to hit $150 billion worth of Chinese goods with tariffs is sending a message to China that Trump will stand up to China until it improves its exploitive trade practices that have cost America tens of thousands of jobs.

"'This is business, and this is the kind of business where we have to stand firm against China's unfair trade practices, unlike the previous presidents who the for last 16 years prior to this president basically surrendered over 70,000 factories to China and millions of manufacturing jobs,' said Peter Navarro, White House director of trade and industrial policy.

"Navarro said on Fox News that while Trump initially threatened tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods, but is now mulling $150 billion after China responded with proposed tariffs of its own against the U.S., including on key U.S. agriculture exports."

"We are not in a trade war with China, that war was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent, people who represented the U.S. Now we have a Trade Deficit of $500 Billion a year, with Intellectual Property Theft of another $300 Billion. We cannot let this continue!"