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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Futuristic Data Security With A Pen And A Pad. “If I were running an intelligence agency, I’d have all my important stuff done in handwriting or on mechanical typewriters (the old kind that type over the same fabric ribbon multiple times) and distributed in sealed envelopes. If I were setting up a voting system, I’d use paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines. And if I were running a hospital, I’d seriously consider doing everything on paper.”

OH, NOW HE’S PISSED?!? A LEFTIST GETS SHAMED BY FELLOW LEFTISTS: “The intolerant student Left has even turned on me – a lifelong civil rights campaigner,” someone named Peter Tatchell shouted in the London Telegraph noted in an article I linked to at Instapundit last week. Wikipedia describes Tatchell as an “Australian-born British human rights campaigner best known for his work with LGBT social movements,” as well as being a member of the far left Green Party and formerly, the Labour Party. With socialist bona fides like that incapable of calming Tatchell’s fellow members of the outrage mob, Scott Ott, Bill Whittle and my fellow Insta-co-blogger Steve Green pick up on the story and ponder who will be devoured last:

HMM: Ebola nurse Pauline Cafferkey admitted to hospital. “Health officials said she had been admitted for further investigations after routine monitoring but did give specific details of her condition.”

THE SOCIALIST DESIRE NAMED STREETCAR: Washington, DC’s Streetcar Nightmare, Then and Now (Video).

ROBBY SOAVE: How Political Correctness Caused College Students To Cheer For Trump. “For these students, Trump is not the leader of a political movement, but rather, a countercultural icon. To chant his name is to strike a blow against the ruling class on campus—the czars of political correctness—who are every bit as imperious and loathsome to them as the D.C.-GOP establishment is to the working class folks who see Trump as their champion.”

BERNIE VS. HILLARY: The Democratic Party’s Battle Of The Sexes:

In Nevada, more Democratic women than men voted in the caucus, and they voted heavily for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Fifty-six percent of Democratic Nevada caucus goers were women, and 57 percent of them voted for Clinton. Forty-one percent voted for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Democratic men broke for Sanders, 53 percent to Clinton’s 44 percent, a narrower gap. Exit polls haven’t been breaking down by gender and age, so it’s unclear whether young women voted for Sanders while older women voted for Clinton.

Hillary: The “Aunt Bea candidacy.” Though that’s probably unfair to Aunt Bea.

SO IF YOU DON’T JOIN IN THE GROUP-HATE OF SCALIA, IT’S A MICROAGGRESSION OR SOMETHING: Black Georgetown Law Students ‘Shaken And Angry’ At Conservatives’ Response To Scalia’s Death: #WhitePeopleProblems Of Scalia Mourners. Grow up, kids.

NO. NEXT QUESTION: Does Anybody Believe the FBI Isn’t Out to Defeat Encryption?

MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE FIELDING MELLISH AGAIN! The White House Reaches Peak Esposito.

ROLL CALL: More Ready for Kwan Than Clinton.

Hillary Clinton won the Nevada caucuses on Saturday, but she still has a gaping weakness with the young voters that helped delivered the White House to President Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2008. If your presidential campaign had just lost the youth vote by 70 percent to a wild-haired, 74-year-old socialist in two states, you would deploy Michelle Kwan to do something about it too.

Kwan is an accomplished (five-time World Figure Skating Champion), brilliant (Stanford grad), politically astute (she worked as an envoy in the Obama State Department and married the grandson of a senator) daughter of immigrants (the New American Majority!). More important than any of that, she is beloved by young women who once adorned their bedroom walls with posters of Kwan and are now old enough to vote for Hillary Clinton.

But at one of four college events that Kwan headlined for Clinton last week in South Carolina ahead of Saturday’s primary, even Kwan couldn’t get the 30-or-so people who came Ready for Hillary.

And it’s not because she didn’t try.

It’s a tough sell. Hillary is boring, old, and kind of mean. Also extraordinarily corrupt.

Related: Bernie Sanders & Hillary Clinton Are Running For President of Geritol Nation.

It’s worth puzzling over the inability of liberals and Democrats in particular to figure out a forward-looking set of policies. It should be a source of shame that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are explicitly anti-Uber and other elements of the sharing economy (being hypocritical about it makes it even worse). Conservatives at least have the excuse of wanting to maintain the status quo or, better yet, return to the status quo of five or 10 or 15 years ago. That’s their whole point as an ideological group and it explains their consistent resistance to virtually all forms of social change that give more power to individuals.

Liberals are at least supposed to be less hung up on the past and captivated by efficiency that makes life better for all of us, especially the poor. And yet, as Vanneman points out, their politics seem much more focused on keeping things exactly as they are for a middle- to upper-middle class group.

Earlier this year, Gallup reported that party identification for Democrats is a 27-year low, at just 29 percent (as awful as that is, it’s still better than the GOP’s 26 percent). When you look at the two presidential candidates on the Democratic side, it’s easy to understand why folks are vacating the brand. Sanders and Clinton are not simply chronologically old but, more important, ideologically ancient, proper representatives only for a Geritol Nation that has nothing but tired blood to offer.

Tired blood indeed.

BRITISH TOURIST ‘FIGHTING FOR LIFE’ AFTER BEING STABBED IN THE HEAD IN SAN FRANCISCO: “But a police spokesman, Carlos Manfredi, said muggings in San Francisco ‘happen to everyone’ and that it was unlikely the unnamed Briton was targeted because he was a tourist. ‘It happens to everybody, so every now and then there’s going to be a tourist in the mix,’ he said.”

Why are Democrat-run cities such hellholes of corruption, racism, and violence?  Perhaps a change in management is long overdue:

(He’s not on the list above, but San Francisco’s last GOP mayor left office a month before the Beatles landed in America.)

AFTER PROVOKING TRUMP SUPPORTERS, MEDIA COMPLAINS ABOUT NAME-CALLING, John Nolte writes at Big Journalism:

During a campaign rally over the weekend, Donald Trump took another one of his glorious swipes at our dishonest media. If we are to believe the reporting from MSNBC’s Katy Tur (always a risky prospect), out of thousands in the crowd, one screamed at the media, “You’re a bitch,” and another offered “the double bird.” Outraged tweets from many in our elite media soon followed.

To be clear, while the “double-bird” is kind of funny, I’m not okay with anyone calling anyone a “bitch,” especially a woman. But as you read the outrage below, keep this in mind: The DC Media started it. For years, the elite media have provoked these everyday American Trump supporters with hate campaigns and name-calling. Now watch as our media gets all wobbly when just a smidgen of the hate they dish out with mendacious glee comes home to roost:

Related: Video: ‘Yeah, I’m With the Media. Screw You.’

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA: ‘IT’S YOUR FAULT’ IF YOU DENY PRIVILEGE.

See also: Kafkatrapping.

What about “size privilege?” I’ll never deny having that!

AS I KEEP SAYING, PEOPLE ARE UNHAPPY WITH THE ESTABLISHMENT, AND THE ESTABLISHMENT REMAINS IN DENIAL ABOUT WHY: GOP fights off primary challengers in deep-red Texas.

Powerful GOP chairmen in deep-red Texas are fending off primary challengers in an election cycle dominated by the anti-establishment fervor gripping the country.

At least three of the Lone Star State’s seven House committee chairmen — new Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, Rules Chairman Pete Sessions and Science, Space and Technology Chairman Lamar Smith — are working to beat back challenges from the right ahead of the March 1 primary.

So is Texas Rep. Bill Flores, chairman of the 170-member conservative Republican Study Committee, who was swept into office during the Tea Party wave in 2010. And Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) will face off this fall with an independent candidate with no political experience.

“I’m sure when you have a chairman title, someone will say that makes you a target, that makes you part of the establishment,” said Flores, a former oil executive who’s squaring off next week with two GOP challengers, former McLennan County Republican Party Chairman Ralph Patterson and local businessman Kaleb Smith.

Sixteen-term GOP Rep. Joe Barton, the dean of the Texas delegation and a former Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, has two challengers of his own, while 85-year-old GOP Rep. Sam Johnson, a decorated U.S. fighter pilot and Vietnam prisoner of war, is defending his Dallas-area seat against three rivals. And the man taking on Rep. John Carter has questioned the powerful House appropriator and former Texas judge’s conservative credentials.

Even Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert, the GOP gadfly and frequent cable TV guest, has a challenger. Rancher Simon Winston has said Congress has devolved into a circus and Gohmert is “one of the main clowns.”

To be certain, all of the incumbents are favored to win reelection. They are better connected, better funded and have better name ID than their long-shot challengers.

Johnson and Gohmert have both endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz, a fellow Texan, for president — underlying their own anti-establishment credentials.

But Texas is no stranger to upsets. In 2014, Rep. Ralph Hall, a World War II veteran and the oldest member of Congress at the time, was ousted by a Tea Party-backed challenger, John Ratcliffe, a former federal prosecutor and mayor.

I think that primary challenges are good. No incumbent should feel too secure.

TWO THOMAS FRIEDMANS IN ONE! Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

When asked this past Sunday by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria why Obama should visit Cuba, the far left Timesman replied:

“It’s a great idea. Go down there, engage with the people, show them the best of America, our economic model, our political openness. Whoever out there in your audience is afraid of Cuba, Fareed, please have them raise their hand. I’m not afraid of Cuba, OK? It’s time — well past time that we ended our isolation of Cuba. It’s a lab test that utterly failed. I think the more we engage them, the more we will enhance their own move to a more open political system. I think it’s a great idea.”

Perhaps not too open;  as Friedman infamously wrote in 2009, “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”

And there’s no doubt that Friedman himself has never been afraid of Cuba; in late April of 2000, he chillingly began one of his columns, “Yup, I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez warmed my heart.”

In the 1960s, National Review famously ran a cartoon of Castro titled, “I got my job through the New York Times,” thanks to the efforts of one of Friedman’s predecessors, Herbert Matthews, who did for Castro’s PR rep among New York limousine lefties what Walter Duranty did for Stalin. So perhaps Friedman merely wanted to send Castro a potential cub reporter to show the ropes.

TWO SLATES IN ONE! Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

“Jeb Bush Tries to Appeal to Republicans by Taking Away Food Stamps From Poor People”

—Headline at Slate, January 8th, 2016.

I never expected to like Jeb. Boarding school toff. Political scion. Staunch pro-lifer. NRA favorite. Oh, and ugh, the Terri Schiavo stuff.

Still, I couldn’t help but warm to him as the campaign wore on. And then even pull for him, a little. It was partly the pathos. Jeb felt somehow more human than other candidates. Vulnerable, struggling, unable to conceal flashes of fear and melancholy.

* * * * * * *

It sure felt like a last stand. Not just for Jeb Bush’s campaign, but maybe for Jeb Bush’s basic dignity as a human being. For the tattered legacy of the Bush family. For the remnants of an embattled GOP faction. Even, one might argue, for the quaint notion of civility in public life.

—“Jeb Bush Was Not a Joke — His decency, compassion, and rigor were his downfall. What a shame.” Headline at Slate, Sunday.

And now he’s free to be used as an icon of past Republican decency by leftwing journalists happy to grant Jeb their proverbial “strange new respect,” in order to beat up the current GOP candidates — just like his brother.

K.C. JOHNSON: Ten Years Later, the Duke Lacrosse Case Still Reverberates.

Next month will be the tenth anniversary of the spring break party that triggered the Duke lacrosse case. That incident probably remains the highest-profile false rape claim in recent U.S. history—rivaled only by the claim against University of Virginia fraternity members leveled, and then retracted, by Rolling Stone.

That both of these false accusations occurred on a campus should come as no surprise. A general disinterest in due process for accused students combined with a one-sided intellectual atmosphere on questions related to gender make universities poorly suited to evaluate sexual assault allegations. The lacrosse case, moreover, added race and class to the mix.

From the standpoint of a faculty dominated by the race/class/gender trinity, the purported facts proved too tempting to resist: wealthy, white males accused of brutally attacking a poor, African-American female. And so dozens of Duke professors abandoned the academy’s traditional fealty to due process to embrace the version of events offered by Durham’s unethical (and subsequently disbarred) district attorney, Mike Nifong.

In their most prominent action, eighty-eight Duke faculty members signed a public statement affirming that something “happened” to Crystal Mangum. They actually boasted of their closed-mindedness by promising to continue their crusade regardless of “what the police say or the court decides.”

And after high-profile protests that had urged the castration of the lacrosse captains and blanketed the campus with “wanted” posters containing 43 of the lacrosse players’ photos, the Duke faculty members had a message for the protesters: “Thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard.”

Why was it so important for the protesters not to have waited until the facts were known? Not a single member of the Group of 88 has ever explained.

But perhaps the most chilling line in the Group of 88 statement was also its most banal—a notice at the bottom of the page, listing the 15 Duke academic departments and programs that chose to “sign onto this ad.” That such a wide swath of the Duke academic community officially affiliated with an inflammatory statement sent a powerful message in spring 2006.

It turned out that, with the exception of the African-American Studies Program, none of the academic departments had formally taken a vote to endorse affiliating with the statement. Yet this breach of standard academic protocol appears to have had no consequences at Duke.

An unwillingness to engage in any critical self-reflection is the foremost legacy of how the academy responded to the lacrosse case, at Duke and beyond.

Duke spent tens of millions of dollars in settlement costs and legal fees for the lawsuits filed by the lacrosse players. (Some of that money unsuccessfully attempted to force me to reveal confidential e-mail exchanges with my sources.) It’s easy to see why Duke was so eager to settle the lawsuits before all discovery material became public. Early filings in the case attached a handful of administrators’ e-mails, including an April 2006 missive from president Richard Brodhead, musing that the movie Primal Fear might be an appropriate lens through which to view the case.

In that film, a character played by Ed Norton convinces his lawyers he was wrongfully accused, only to accidentally confess his guilt in the closing scene. One can only imagine what the full archive of Brodhead’s 2006 e-mails would have revealed.

Since the ending of the lacrosse case, Duke’s trustees have conferred on Brodhead two new five-year terms as president.

Well, if you’re wondering where the “burn it all to the ground” sentiments in American politics come from, stuff like this is one source. The pervasive rot in America’s political and intellectual ruling classes is evident, it’s easy to see why some people may conclude that it’s irreversible by ordinary means. I don’t feel that way yet, but the wake-up call has been sounded, and the ruling class has hit the snooze button repeatedly. Eventually, they’re going to have to take that pillow off their head.

SUDDENLY, WE’RE NOT ALL SOCIALISTS NOW AT THE WASHINGTON POST – “WashPost Columnist: Trump’s Rise Explains How Hitler Came to Power,” as noted by Tom Blumer at NewsBusters yesterday, who spots Danielle S. Allen, “a political theorist at Harvard University and a contributing columnist for The Post,” penning a column in which she writes that America has reached – insert trademark Monty Python Spanish Inquisition giant orchestra sting here – “The moment of truth: We must stop Trump,” in which Allen asserts:

Like any number of us raised in the late 20th century, I have spent my life perplexed about exactly how Hitler could have come to power in Germany.* Watching Donald Trump’s rise, I now understand. Leave aside whether a direct comparison of Trump to Hitler is accurate. That is not my point. My point rather is about how a demagogic opportunist can exploit a divided country.

See also, the 2008 election. After which, at the beginning of 2009, Newsweek, then-still owned by Washington Post, famously declared “We Are Socialists Now.” A few months later, the Post’s E.J. Dionne pretended to be shocked, Claude Rains in Casablanca style, that some were now calling President Obama a socialist who believes in nationalization, or heck, even a National Socialist. “Media Amnesiacs Suddenly Appalled at Hitler Comparisons” Lachlan Markay of NewsBusters wrote in November of 2009, after everyone from MoveOn.org to Al Gore to John Glenn spent the last eight years comparing President Bush and the GOP to Hitler and the Nazis:

A liberal Washington Post columnist laments today of the loss of civility in the public discourse. Strange that he is suddenly outraged that Americans would dare call Obama a socialist or a fascist, given that Bush-Hitler comparisons were widespread during the previous administration.

Liberals in the media spent the summer and early fall bemoaning signs at town hall protests and tea party rallies calling Obama a socialist or communist comparing him to Hitler (incidentally, many of these signs were actually created by supporters of uber-leftist Lyndon LaRouche, as reported by Seton Motley here and here). These pundits had no such admonitions for signs at anti-war rallies during the Bush administration comparing him to Hitler and the Devil, and calling the president a fascist.

So the Post’s E.J. Dionne’s complaints about the loss of civility in the debate over federal politics fit right in with the narrative liberal pundits have been pushing since last year: comparing an American president to a murderous dictator is unacceptable…if that president is a Democrat.

Wrote Dionne in The New Republic yesterday:

The most surprising and disappointing aspect of our politics is how little pushback there has been against the vile, extremist rhetoric that has characterized such a large part of the anti-Obama movement.

President Obama’s administration has largely ignored those accusing him of “fascism” and “communism,” presumably believing that restraint in defense of dignity is no vice.

Dionne quotes former Congressman Jim Leach, R-Iowa, to illustrate the horrific degradation of the national discourse:

There is, after all, a difference between holding a particular tax or spending or health care view, and asserting that an American who supports another approach or is a member of a different political party is an advocate of an ‘ism’ of hate that encompasses gulags and concentration camps.

Interesting advice. Let me know when it apply to Washington Post columnists as well.

* Buyer beware: Parents who are about to shell out $60K a year to send their kids to Harvard, here’s a heads up that they’re being taught by professors who are still “perplexed” by that whole WWII thing.

THE GROWING POPULARITY AND FOLLY OF BERNIE SANDERS’ CONCEPT OF SOCIALISM, as charted by Ron Radosh:

Bernie Sanders will not win the Democratic Party nomination. Nevertheless, he has already scored a victory by making socialism popular with Americans, especially young ones. This despite the fact that it is a social system that has failed wherever it has been tried.  There are many reasons for this, and writing in Commentary,  Ben Domenech provides a comprehensive guide to them. As he writes, “the opposition to socialism in America has drifted downward.” A Gallup poll taken in 2015 showed that 35 percent of the American populace view socialism favorably.

People are responding favorably to all the freebies Sanders offers—free college, low taxes for most, very high taxes for the wealthy, universal free medical care for all.  No wonder Gallup found that 69 percent of Americans age 18-29 would have no trouble voting for an avowedly socialist candidate.

John Sexton, who recently joined Hot Air, adds that “a newly released poll finds that Democratic primary voters in every age and demographic group are fans of socialism:”

As worrisome as the responses to economic questions were the response to questions about freedom of the press suggest Democrats are also ready to undermine the 1st Amendment to the Constitution:

Please tell me if you agree or disagree with the following statement. Most of the media in our country is controlled by corporations who are more interested in profits than telling the truth. Before a corporate owned media entity covers a campus rally for racial equality, they should first prove that they are not biased against the content of the rally.

An overwhelming 67% of Democrats agreed with that statement while just 19% disagreed. I would love to know how respondents think this would work in real time. To whom would the media outlet have to prove their even-handedness? Will some sort of administrative law judge be assigned the task of reviewing media requests to cover campus events?

Notice that the premise of the question is a kind of class struggle analysis of the media and its financial motivations. In other words, once you believe capitalism is a corrupting influence that reasoning naturally extends itself to encompass every area of private industry, media included. If it makes sense to nationalize the airline industry why stop at regulating live shots for CNN and Fox News? Shouldn’t those greedy corporations be nationalized outright?

Salon’s way ahead of you John — they were calling for nationalizing and socializing both the news media and Hollywood two years ago.

Me, I’d settle for simply repealing the Hollywood tax cuts and see how things go from there — it’s only fair, isn’t it, all you celebrity Sanders supporters?

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THEY HAVE TO HAVE SOMETHING IN STATES WHERE UNLIKE COLORADO THEY DON’T HAVE VOTE BY MAIL TO HELP FUDGE THINGS: The Obama Administration Wants to Make Sure Non-Citizens Vote in the Upcoming Election.

PERHAPS THERE IS HOPE FOR SMOD 2016! Largest fireball since Chelyabinsk falls into the ocean: Nasa reports huge explosion of seven meter space rock over the Atlantic.

SPEAKING OF INCONVENIENT STUFF PEOPLE SAY: Biden walks back 1992 blockade of Supreme Court nominees.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED: Video: Obama Cracks Joke About Scalia’s Death.