The viciousness, toxic partisan anger and intellectual dishonesty are at all-time highs.

Analysis @ NYTimes.com, July 20

[....] After nearly nine years and 187,000 tweets, I have used Twitter enough to know that it no longer works well for me. I will re-engage eventually, but in a different way.

Maggie Haberman✔@maggieNYT

With exception of breaking news and my own stories, taking a break from this platform. No reason or prompt other than that it’s not really helping the discourse.

By Bernie Becker @ Morning Tax @ Politico.com, July 20

THE TAX RETURNS … RETURN? It’s not like Democrats have ever stopped wanting to get President Donald Trump’s tax returns out in the open, but Chuck Rettig’s nomination to be IRS commissioner sure seems to have brought that issue back to the forefront.

Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday generally praised Rettig as a solid choice to be IRS chief — before they all voted against him, as a protest of the Trump administration’s decision to stop having the IRS collect names and addresses of big donors to all sorts of political nonprofits.

Public broadcaster airs clip of PM telling Likud activists US exit came after he stood up 'against the whole world' by opposing accord

A group of young, Black conservatives on their way to a Make America Great Again “meet-up” at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC claim they were refused service by an Uber driver because of their political views.

“To me, what happened took me back to the 60’s when Black Americans were told they couldn’t sit in the front of the bus, they had to sit at the back of the bus, or eat at the same restaurant, or go to the same school or would be hosed in certain neighbors,” Matthew Handy told CBN News.

“So now we are going to discrimination not based on race but on political standing. We are gonna see people not welcome in places because they are conservative or liberal. So, that is more disturbing to me than any other aspect of this.”

oh to be a fly on the wall @ the Aspen Security Forum; we'll have to make do with

David Ignatius for WashingtonPost.com, July 19, 7:35 pm