FBI DIRECTOR COMEY SELLS OUT RULE OF LAW: Mr. Comey’s cowardly decision will go down as one of the government’s worst assaults on truth. (BUMPED)

After describing clear evidence of extensive mishandling of classified national security information, FBI Director James Comey announced that the FBI will not recommend indicting former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. This is naked crony government, ugly and exposed.

Column 5 in the WAR ON HONESTY series, a weekly column examining and deploring “examples of media and government lying” for “…mendacity by commission and omission, which favors a particular political party in an election year—is savage falsehood that damages free societies.”

BLUE ON BLUE: The Wolves of Silicon Valley: how megalomaniacs in hoodies became tech’s answer to Wall Street.

The Economist recently identified 99 listed tech companies in Silicon Valley with market values over $1 billion. Together, they account for 6% of all corporate America’s profits. Meanwhile, a new report published by the California Budget and Policy Center revealed middle-class families now make up less than half of households in the area and while the state has more billionaires than any country except the US and China, San Francisco has the highest levels of homelessness in the US.

“There are literally shanty towns underneath most highway overpasses in the city,” says Martínez. “But that techie kid who goes and gets his $5 single-origin, cruelty-free pour-over in some trendy coffee shop? He doesn’t give a s***. He just wants to get some liquidity around his shares and steps over the homeless guy en route to his yoga class.”

And he’s a Democrat, but you have to get to the very end of the article and read between lines to figure that out.

GOOD VIRUS DEFEATS BAD VIRUS: Fascinating study conducted by University of Texas researchers.They’ve dubbed it Virus Wars. A “therapeutic virus” blocks the spread of a lethal virus.

“Our suggested approach is thus futuristic, but it is only a few steps from current practices.” The authors suggest that therapeutic viruses could one day be designed to prevent viral infections or even to destroy malicious viruses upon entry.

ASHE SCHOW: The 14 most damaging things said about Clinton’s emails at the FBI press briefing.

BLOWBACK: Now FBI director faces congressional probe.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: IRS Allegedly ‘Determined’ To Hide Records Revealing White House Collusion.

I THOUGHT THE CABAL WAS SETTLED: The imploding cabal to criminalize climate dissent.

BIG MEDIA IS GASLIGHTING YOU:

Shot: Modern Media Has Turned the USA Into the Divided States of America.

—John Ziegler, Mediaite, July 4th.

Chaser: Partisanship and tribalism are ruining our conversations about art.

—Sonny Bunch, the Washington Post, June 30th, 2016.

The demassified TV industry needs divisiveness to bring ratings, and the movie industry needs films that bring out large groups of the same tribe (American Sniper on the right, feminist Ghostbusters on the left) when it doesn’t have an old mass media-era franchise (such as Star Trek, Star Wars, James Bond and films with familiar comic book stars like Batman, Superman and the Marvel gang) to promote. That both methods lead to bad programming is secondary to the continued survival of media that are long past their sell-through dates.

NATO’S JULY SUMMIT IN WARSAW CONFRONTS RUSSIAN BELLIGERENCE: The summit (which begins July 8) is the subject of my Creators Syndicate column this week. NATO’S Warsaw meet up has been preceded by a lot of political and military signaling –signals directed at Moscow. This month-old Observer essay on NATO’s June 2016 war game in Poland is something of a companion piece to the new column. Today I read an essay the Atlantic Council just published advocating a NATO Black Sea command. My column mentions Bulgarian, Turkish and Romanian concerns about increased Russian military activity in the Black Sea region. My column also mentions NATO naval modernization. The detailed Atlantic Council essay tells you why that matters in the Black Sea.

CHANGE: The Great Arab Implosion and Its Consequences.

A no less and possibly more significant player is Iran, which ever since 1979, under its own Shiite brand of populist Islamism, has repositioned itself as a main contender for regional domination. Carefully cultivating downtrodden Shiite populations across the Middle East, Iran has successfully replaced their former Arab allegiances with a Shiite sectarian one. A pointed illustration of this shift is the recent report that Iran-supported Iraqi Shiite militiamen assaulting the IS-held Sunni Arab city of Fallujah had plastered their artillery shells with the name of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, the prominent Shiite Saudi cleric executed earlier this year by the Saudi regime.

Today, the Iranian regime’s tentacles are to be seen everywhere from Yemen’s Houthis (who actually belong to a different Shiite sub-sect) to Sunni populist organizations like Hamas, which it assists in anti-Israeli aggression. But the main Iranian effort has been directed at establishing Shiite hegemony in Iraq and Lebanon. If successful, this, combined with a strategic alliance with Alawite-controlled Syria, would indeed create the “Shiite Crescent” across Mesopotamia and the Levant feared by Jordan’s King Abdullah, driving a stake through the heart of the Arab world and establishing Tehran’s undisputed dominion from the Indian Ocean to the shores of the Mediterranean.

And success is by no means impossible: Iran’s military buildup, including its growing nuclear-threshold infrastructure, is today abetted by Russia—and, if opposed by the U.S. at all, only in the most desultory fashion.

Read the whole thing.

ROLL CALL: Clinton Forgot It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Cover-Up: FBI email findings further tarnish already flawed nominee.

Of course, it could have been worse.

FBI Director James Comey could have recommended prosecution of Hillary Clinton or her closest aides for being “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

But an FBI recommendation of an indictment over Hillary’s home-brew email systems would have provided the Democratic Party with an escape hatch. Since Democratic delegates to the Philadelphia convention are not legally bound, there would have been a groundswell of support for Joe Biden as a last-minute substitute nominee.

Instead, the Democrats are saddled with their most flawed nominee since an exhausted party nominated John W. Davis on the 103rd ballot in 1924. Hillary Clinton’s disapproval rating averaged 55 percent even before Comey read his statement Tuesday morning in a firm uninflected voice.

Fortunately for Hillary — but not the Democrats — heedless incompetence is not a federal crime. Comey’s cascade of carelessness is an indictment of a woman who is partly running for president on her ability to handle a 3 a.m. emergency phone call on a secure line.

Huma will answer.

BASTARDS OF PRIVILEGE: Like many of history’s monsters, the butchers of Bangladesh were scions of the elite, Theodore Dalrymple writes.

GOOD: Ryan faces GOP defections on gun proposal.

Already dealing with threats of another Democratic floor protest, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), is now facing defections from the right on a GOP gun bill that conservatives complain is unconstitutional.

The handful of Republican naysayers has raised doubts about whether Ryan can muster enough votes from his own party to pass the gun provision. Backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA), the GOP legislation was favored by Republican leaders as a more acceptable alternative to Democratic gun-control bills.

But Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), an opponent of the GOP provision, said: “I think it’s dead.”

The gun provision was part of a larger GOP anti-terrorism package that was set to hit the floor on Wednesday. But that vote was postponed to allow GOP lawmakers, returning from the weeklong July Fourth recess, more time to study and discuss the package, said Rules Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas).

“Enough members don’t have enough information,” Sessions told reporters as he left a GOP leadership meeting in the Speaker’s suite. “What we’re trying to do is work toward resolution where we’re all on the same page.”

Sessions said GOP leaders hope to reach a consensus in their conference, but he declined to speculate about when the package might be brought forward.

The House GOP gun proposal would give the Justice Department three days to convince a judge there’s probable cause that the prospective buyer would use the weapon in connection with terrorism and stop the sale.

But conservative lawmakers, including several who belong to the far-right House Freedom Caucus, argued that the legislation could violate an individual’s Second Amendment rights, based on what the government anticipates that person might do in the future.

“If the bill becomes law, it will mark a massive expansion of the government’s ability to restrict gun rights on the basis of precrime—a crime not yet committed,” Freedom Caucus member Justin Amash (R-Mich.) posted in a lengthy diatribe on his Facebook page. This bill “is the actualization of dystopian fiction.”

That describes so much these days.

HEH: “Another Woman Regrets Private Meeting With Bill Clinton.”

I’M OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER WHEN BARACK OBAMA SAID WE COULDN’T DRILL OUR WAY OUT OF AN OIL SHORTAGE: U.S. Oil Reserves Bigger Than Saudi Arabia’s. “The Rystad Energy consultancy has just released its new calculations of global oil reserves and estimates that the U.S. may harbor as much 264 billion barrels of oil compared to Saudi Arabia’s 212 billion barrels. Overall, world oil reserves exceed 2 trillion barrels. At current production rates, this is enough oil to supply the world for 70 years.”

The thing is, without a crisis you lose important opportunities for graft and control.

MORE ON COMEY: “Look, here are Comey’s remarks. The material needed to attack Hillary Clinton is all there. A prosecution would be very controversial AND it would cause many people to step back and allow it to take its course — with due process and the presumption of innocence. That route is closed off, but you have the evidence in front of you and can clearly see what she did.”

COULDN’T HAVE SAID IT BETTER MYSELF:

ORIN KERR: Comey’s unusual public recommendation in the Clinton email investigation.

USA TODAY: I Would Indict Hillary Clinton: FBI director’s judgment was that ‘no reasonable prosecutor’ would bring the case. I disagree.

Also: FBI’s Comey indicts Clinton character, competence: She might have been better off with a criminal indictment.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: No reasonable attorney general meets secretly with the husband of someone under investigation.

I GUESS SHE GOT SOME PUSHBACK FROM HER FANS: Dolly Parton: ‘I have not endorsed Hillary Clinton.’ “My comment about supporting a woman in the White House was taken out of context.”

Uh huh.

HUH, I THOUGHT FEDERAL LAW WAS JUST ADVISORY THESE DAYS: Court Strikes Down Obama Health Care Rule on Insurance Standards. “A federal appeals court has ruled that consumers must be allowed to buy certain types of health insurance that do not meet the stringent standards of the Affordable Care Act, deciding that the administration had gone beyond the terms of federal law.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, IT’S-STARTING-TO-LOOK-LIKE-A-RACKET EDITION: UC Berkeley’s Income Inequality Critic’s Faculty Salary Puts Him In The Top 1%.

Scholars from the University of California at Berkeley have played a pivotal role in making income inequality a major political issue. But while they decry the inequities of the American capitalist system, Berkeley professors are near the top of a very lopsided income distribution prevailing at the nation’s leading public university. . . .

Public employee compensation data allows us to measure income inequality on campus. The State Controller’s Public Pay database contains salaries for all UC employees, indicating which campus each employee is on. The Gini coefficient for the 35,000 UC Berkeley employees in the data set is 0.6600 – higher than that of Haiti. . . .

According to 2014 data from Transparent California, Center Director Emmanuel Saez received total wages of $349,350.

Its three advisory board members are also highly compensated Cal professors: David Card (making $336,367 in 2014), Gerard Roland ($304,608) and Alan Auerbach ($291,782). Aside from their high wages, all four professors are eligible for a defined-benefit pension equal to 2.5% times final average salary times number of years employed. It is also worth noting that all four are in the top 2% of UC Berkeley’s salary distribution, and that Saez is in the top 1%. … Robert Reich receives somewhat lower compensation than the four CEG economists, collecting $263,592 in pay during 2014. But Reich’s salary was likely not his only source of income in 2014. Reich makes himself available to give paid speeches through a number of speaking bureaus, charging a fee estimated at $40,000 per talk. He is also likely to receive some income from his books, movies and pensions from previous employers.

And people wonder why the working class is abandoning the Dems.

THE RETURN OF RUSSIAN ICEBREAKERS: Russia is building three new nuclear-powered icebreakers.

THIS IS INTERESTING: Zapping the brain’s visual cortex can lead to improved vision, scientists discover. “Researchers found that zapping the visual cortex of the brain for 20 minutes via transcranial direct-current stimulation offered improvements in vision lasting up to 2 hours.” I’ve heard of people experiencing tremendously clear vision — even when their ordinary vision was poor — under the influence of adrenaline surges. I wonder if these phenomena are related.