NOTHING CREEPY ABOUT THAT: NY Times Launches Its Jew-Tracker.

NEWS ALERT: DEMS BLOCK BILL OPPOSING IRAN DEAL.

BEING A CLINTON APOLOGIST IS A HARD LIFE: At the Politico, veteran center-left media critic Jack Shafer writes, “From the outside at least, being a friend of the Clinton’s looks like a demeaning occupation. You defend them, you defend them some more, you lie down in front of tanks for them and then—when you least suspect it—they reverse gear and betray you:”

[Hillary] also used the ABC News interview to apologize for previous, inadequate attempts to explain her conduct. “I really didn’t perhaps appreciate the need to do that,” she said. But even in this minor act of self-criticism, Clinton reflexively added the qualifying word of “perhaps” to pave an escape route should she need to abandon the apology six months from now. “I take responsibility,” she added, which is politician-speak for, “Now, will you leave me alone?”

You can decide for yourself how sincere these devious and dissembling comments by Clinton are. What interests me is how dramatically this turnaround ditches the surrogates who rushed to the airwaves and to defend her conduct. In early March, when the story broke, Clinton defenders (and intimates) David Brock, Lanny Davis, Maria Cardona, Jennifer Granholm, James Carville and Karen Finney advanced with absolute certainty that the Clinton email/server story was, in Granholm’s words, “just a nothing burger.” Brock’s pro-Clinton advocacy organization Correct the Record called the email affair a “manufactured controversy” and a “tempest in a teapot.” Carville called the email dispute “made up” and Clinton a victim of a double standard (“Colin Powell does the same thing. Jeb Bush does the same thing.”). About the emails, Davis said, “All preserved. And if deleted you know they can be found.” Cardona had so much faith in Clinton that she said, “I don’t think she needs to say anything more until she actually announces her campaign.”

Clinton has now conceded on national TV that the email story is not quite a nothing burger. It’s actually a Royale With Cheese—maybe a Double Royale With Cheese and Pineapple. Nothing was “manufactured” and indeed, yes, some of the emails were deleted. In recognition of these facts, will these Hillary loyalists volunteer to return to the TV chat shows to acknowledge their errors? Better yet, will the shows revisit the issue to illustrate how Clinton’s proxies attempted to roll them? Nah, but it would make great TV, wouldn’t it?

As Mark Steyn likes to say, “When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: ‘Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life.’”

But then, some friends are more willing than others to serve as kamikaze crash test dummies. Which brings us to this fun blue-on-blue attack starring David Brock pounding his highchair that the New York Times has “a special place in hell” due its being an anti-Hillary “megaphone for conservative propaganda”…despite endorsing Hillary in 2008 and being court stenographer to her husband’s administration.

Please, please Gray Lady, take Brock’s advice and move even further to the left. Make de Blasio and Bernie Sanders look like members of the VRWC – you can do it!

I’M SURE IT’S JUST A COINCIDENCE:

● Al-Qaeda Tries to Recruit Black Activists in New Magazine Issue.

● Law Enforcement Agencies On High Alert For 9/11 Attacks Following Threats From Black Militants.

Curious how the goals of radical Islam and the radical left always seem to “unexpectedly” connect, isn’t it?

I ALWAYS WANTED ONE OF THESE: Remembering The M-19 Annihilator.

YOU CAN TRUST GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES WITH YOUR DATA, BECAUSE THEY’RE TRAINED AND RESPONSIBLE: City Of Boston Left License Plate Data Unprotected And Unencrypted. “If you want a rough estimate on how much respect law enforcement agencies (and the contractors they hire) have for your personal information, all you have to do is take a look at how well they protect the vast amount of data they slurp up.” Abolish government immunity.

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THE INSTA-WIFE ON the female psychopath.

COULD ALZHEIMER’S BE spread via blood?

WOMAN WHO ABANDONED HER CHILDREN TO JOIN OCCUPY WALL STREET SUES NYC FOR ALLEGED POLICE BRUTALITY: “‘Somebody grabbed me by my hair and dragged me . . . behind the police officers, said Stacey Hessler, 42, in Manhattan federal court,” the New York Post reports. “But city attorneys said in their opening statements that Hessler had blocked pedestrian traffic during the November protest, then refused to move when cops politely asked her to make way. She also allegedly tried multiple times to escape when they finally moved to arrest her.”

As Leon Wolf of Red State noted last month about the “Black Lives Matter” crowd, the socialist far left have a curiously negative view of the police for an ideology that wants to grow government and regulation ever-larger. (It’s sort of the inverse of the relationship between wealthy “global warming” carbon-obsessed zealots and private planes, mansions and other high-energy luxuries.) As reported, Hessler’s situation sounds very much like the scene portrayed in the Libertarian Party’s 2012 ad:

ONCE MY WIFE PHONED ME TO TELL ME TO WATCH OUT ON MY COMMUTE HOME BECAUSE SOME GUY WAS DRIVING THE WRONG WAY ON THE INTERSTATE. “SOME GUY?” I REPLIED. “EVERYBODY’S GOING THE WRONG WAY!” New Bosch Technology Saves Us From Wrong-Way Driving.

Bosch, the German auto supplier, has done so with a software package that compares a car’s direction with a Web-based database of roads and quickly alerts the driver of wrong-way movement. It even goes so far as to stop the car, giving oncoming vehicles a bit more of a chance to get out of the way.

At the same time, the system alerts those oncoming cars using a cloud-based, anonymized system. It can activate roadside signage; even if such signage isn’t around, it can send an alert to drivers via their smart phones or car infotainment systems.

That’s critical because in many cases the driver who’s going the wrong way may be unresponsive to any warning. Studies have shown that such drivers are often impaired by disease, old age, or alcohol. Worst of all are the ones who go the wrong way on purpose.

According to Christain Jeschke, an engineer at Bosch, some 50 percent of all wrong-way drivers are suicidal.

That’s tacky. If you’re going to kill yourself, you should do it in a way that doesn’t endanger others.

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Jobs That Are Headed For Extinction.

REMINDER: Amazon carries shooting supplies.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE TORTURE! Woman pleads guilty in one of the nation’s first federal Animal Crush video cases after she tortured helpless puppies, kittens and chickens in sexualized videos.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Latest military lab concerns involve plague bacteria, deadly viruses.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Government Employees Outnumber Manufacturing Employees 1.8 To 1. Though to be fair, Obama is a symptom, more than a cause, of this trend.

NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN SOCIAL JUSTICE POSTURING: 5 Ways Taylor Swift Exemplifies White Feminism – And Why That’s a Problem. “Every love interest that Taylor has ever had — to my knowledge, both in real life and in her videos — has been a straight, cis, able-bodied, fit, middle-to-upper class, white dude.”

Hey, her body, her choice. Right? On the other hand, it’s hard to argue with this: “Anyone who calls themselves a feminist after learning about the movement from, of all people, Lena Dunham, is not to be trusted.”

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: It’s Not Just Syria: The Obama-Hillary Mideast Debacles.

SOME THOUGHTS ON JUDGE COLLYER’S OPINION ON THE HOUSE LAWSUIT: As I reported yesterday, federal district judge Rosemary Collyer defied the predictions of numerous pundits by ruling that the House of Representatives’ lawsuit against the Obama Administration–challenging various rules implementing Obamacare–may move forward to the merits. Now that I’ve had some time to digest Judge Collyer’s opinion, I will offer a few observations.

First, as someone who has been deeply involved in this issue, I do believe Judge Collyer’s opinion is good news. While it has always been the case that this lawsuit will take years to fully resolve–possibly even until after President Obama leaves office–those who criticize the lawsuit for this ineluctable reality misunderstand what the lawsuit is about. It is not about President Obama, as an individual, but about the constitutional obligation of the President to “faithfully execute” the laws, and his related obligation not to spend money that Congress has not appropriated. Pursuing litigation to clarify the importance of these constitutional obligations is important, regardless of when such clarification comes.

A judicial determination that a President lacks power to unilaterally rewrite unambiguous laws or appropriate money is important as a matter of constitutional principle, and will prevent future presidents from behaving in similarly unconstitutional ways.

Second, while Judge Collyer fully embraces the notion that Congress, as an institution, has standing to vindicate an injury to its constitutional prerogatives, she oddly (and in my opinion, inconsistently) concludes that the House’s claims relating to President Obama’s abuse of Congress’s appropriations power may move forward, but not its claims relating to his abuse of Congress’s legislative power. This is an artificial and unsustainable bifurcation.

Specifically, Judge Collyer concludes that “[d]espite its formulation as a constitutional claim, the Employer-Mandate Theory is fundamentally a statutory argument” that is no more than a complaint that the “Executive Branch is misinterpreting a statute . . . .” Because the employer-mandate claim is “merely” a claim that the President has “misinterpreted” a statute, Collyer asserts that “other litigants” are “free to sue” over such mere misinterpretation.

But this overlooks the fact that all federal courts–including the Seventh and Eleventh Circuits– that have considered such private-party lawsuits challenging the Administrations “mere” misinterpretation of the Obamacare employer mandate have been unable to pursue such claims, due to their own lack of standing. More importantly, if the House’s appropriations claim is sufficient to establish standing because, in Judge Collyer’s words, of Congress’s “unique role in the appropriations process prescribed by the Constitution,” then its employer-mandate claim should also be sufficient because of Congress’s “unique role” in the legislative process, and the President’s unique constitutional duty to take care that the laws passed by Congress are “faithfully” executed.

While I dispute Judge Collyer’s artificial bifurcation of the House’s appropriations-related claim as “constitutional” and its employer mandate-related claim as “statutory,” I give her much credit for recognizing that the legislative branch is not an institutional orphan, incapable of vindicating its constitutional prerogatives. To hold otherwise would be to allow the President to eviscerate the separation of powers.

Third, I also give Judge Collyer credit for rejecting the specious argument that the House lawsuit was a “political question” that is not justiciable by courts. The political question doctrine is invoked only in those rare situations when there are no ascertainable standards by which the judiciary can resolve an issue, which appears to have been textually committed by the Constitution’s text to the sole discretion of one of the two political branches (Congress or the Executive).

The PQD doctrine is not invoked merely because a constitutional question has important political ramifications–most constitutional questions do (think gay marriage, abortion, or any lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of any presidential act).  As Judge Collyer noted, the House’s constitutional claims against the President present “pure questions of constitutional interpretation” for which there are ample, “familiar judicial techniques [] available to construe the meaning . . . .” She correctly noted that, since Marbury v. Madison (1803), the federal courts have been both willing and able to “say what the law is,” even in separation of powers’ disputes among Congress and President.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 854.

SPYING: Of Course the Government Wants to Read Your Texts.

Imagine, if you will, a law that said all doors had to be left unlocked so that the police could get in whenever they needed to. Or at the very least, a law mandating that the government have a master key.

That’s essentially what some in the government want for your technology. As companies like Apple and Google have embraced stronger encryption, they’re making it harder for the government to do the kind of easy instant collection that companies were forced into as the government chased terrorists after 9/11.

And how could you oppose that government access? After all, the government keeps us safe from criminals. Do you really want to make it easier for criminals to evade the law?

The analogy with your home doors suggests the flaw in this thinking: The U.S. government is not the only entity capable of using a master key. Criminals can use them too. If you create an easy way to bypass security, criminals — or other governments — are going to start looking for ways to reproduce the keys.

Or consider another case cited by the Times, in which the government is trying to get Microsoft to give up messages stored on a server in Ireland. With today’s global networks, it’s frustrating how easily criminals can move things out of reach of the law. On the other hand, do we want the law to have farther reach? It might be kind of frightening if other governments, with weaker civil liberties protections, could get access to any of our messages, just by getting an order from their local court.

Also, I don’t trust our own government agencies not to abuse their power for the benefit of the people in charge. Well, the Democrats in charge, anyway. I’m sure there’d be whistleblowers galore if a Republican administration tried something like that.

OBAMA’S LEGACY — LAYING AMERICA OPEN TO ITS ENEMIES: Records: Energy Department struck by cyber attacks. “Incident reports submitted by federal officials and contractors since late 2010 to the Energy Department’s Joint Cybersecurity Coordination Center shows a near-consistent barrage of attempts to breach the security of critical information systems that contain sensitive data about the nation’s power grid, nuclear weapons stockpile and energy labs. . . . The National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous agency within the Energy Department responsible for managing and securing the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, experienced 19 successful attacks during the four-year period, records show.”

Attackers got root 53 times, but DoE won’t say if they got anything critical. Hint: Yes, yes they did. This is another first-order debacle, but it won’t get the attention it deserves because we’re currently in such a debacle-rich environment.

Related: What if Pearl Harbor happened and nobody noticed? In cyberwar, the U.S. doesn’t have an edge.

CAN WE GET LEGISLATION ZEROING OUT FUNDING? K.C. Johnson: Office For Civil Rights Goes After Michigan State.

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