RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: “CIA leaker: Clinton ‘given a pass’ for emails”

A former CIA officer serving jail time for leaking documents to the New York Times accused federal officials of setting a double standard by apparently refusing to aggressively prosecute Hillary Clinton.

Clinton was “a high ranking official who should know better, but completely given a pass, and almost an apologetic pass,” Jeffrey Sterling, who was found guilty of leaking classified information to Times reporter James Risen last year, said in an interview with the Washington Post published on Monday.

“So how should us regular citizens feel, especially with heightened concerns about national security?”

Regular people should want to keep her as far away as possible from any other positions of power and trust.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Clean Your Foggy Headlights With Toothpaste. (Warning: Loud autoplay video).

ALONG WITH PRETTY MUCH EVERY JOURNALIST, AND MOST EVERYONE ON TWITTER AND FACEBOOK: Basically Every Single Presidential Candidate Is Totally Clueless As To What’s At Stake In The Apple / FBI Fight.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: “Does feminism require vegetarianism? This is something I am asked about often.”

“Bonus question: ‘Is meat consumption a heterosexual thing?'”

“IF ONLY PRESIDENT OBAMA WERE AS TOUGH ON AMERICA’S ENEMIES AS HE’S BEEN ON HIS OWN DOMESTIC RIVALS:” Claudia Rosett on North Korea’s Nuclear Fist vs. Obama’s Over-Extended Hand.

NEWS YOUR DM CAN USE: Dealing with a Mopey RPG Player, from Moe Lane at the PJ Lifestyle section.

#FREESTACY: THE RISE OF THE INTOLERANT LIBERALS.

Related: ‘WTH is going on here?’ R.S. McCain’s book promo account also suspended.

SCIENCE: Your friends are happier, and more popular, than you are. Well, good. I want good things for my friends.

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.”

LIFE IN THE 21st CENTURY: “But a haircut is a haircut, even if I can’t point to a picture of Bart Starr from 1960 and say, ‘I want my hair to look like that.’ Not that my bald spot will ever let my hair look like that, but I can dream, can’t I? Into the chair I went when it was my turn, trying to watch the Louisville-Duke basketball game between the shampooing, the hot towel, and the neck massage. That’s when I noticed on the sign of services offered, ‘nose waxing, $5.’”

HOPE: “#FreeStacy: The Old Regime and the Twitter Revolution”

The whole thing reminds me of the book Alexis de Tocqueville wrote after Democracy in America. In The Old Regime and the French Revolution, he examined the failed promise of France’s rebellion against monarchy. What concerned him was not just the Terror and the beheadings, but the fact that the French toppled all of their institutions and tried to remake their politics, only to see all the old institutions re-assert themselves. They ended up with the same system, just under new rulers. The main similarity between the new system and the Ancien Régime was its administrative centralization, the way everything was controlled out of Paris, sapping all power and initiative from local institutions.

This strikes me as a good analogy for what’s been happening with the old regime and the Internet revolution. The impact of the Internet has been a radical decentralization, the breaking down of gateways and barriers to entry for the transmission of information. But the old imperatives for centralization and control are still there, and they’re trying to reassert themselves.

Read the whole thing.

Centralizers gotta centralize, and they have all-new digital tools for doing just that. But those same digital tools can be used against the control-freaks posing as technological liberators.

Say, didn’t someone write a book about that?

I REALLY HOPE APPLE EMULATES THIS IN THE NEXT IPHONE: Samsung Galaxy S7 Features Beefier Battery.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: ‘Resting Bitch Face’ is Real.

“So many women might be suffering without you even knowing it:”

WHY WOULD THEY SUPPORT AN OLD WHITE LADY AFTER SEVEN YEARS OF RACIALIST ESSENTIALISM? Hillary Loses Latino Vote In Nevada. The Democratic Party has gotten a lot out of its racial Balkanization strategy, but it may be approaching the point at which the white people who actually run the Democratic Party face a downside.

A DONALD TRUMP PREFERENCE CASCADE? “If a Democratic candidate were drawing in the sector of the American public that is going for Trump, they would be bragging about their appeal to the working class, the salt of the earth.” And the press would be emphasizing that.

Related: “I think Hillary is terrified of having Trump attacking her in his strange, unpredictable way. How can she prepare? How can she respond? These won’t be polite attacks to be fended off with her trademark chuckles and guffaws and claims that she was already previously vetted. It will be wild, and tremendous energy, strength, and adaptability will be needed for the fight. And part of the attack will be that she lacks the energy, strength, and adaptability to be President, so her difficulty fighting him will fuel more attacks. I’m going to guess Hillary would prefer that nice Mr. Kasich.”

Plus, from the comments: “I suspect she wants to run against the candidate least likely to prosecute her for her obvious crimes after she loses.”

TO PARAPHRASE SIGMUND FREUD, SOMETIMES A BLIMP IS ONLY A BLIMP.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1019.

KURT SCHLICHTER: Hey GOP Senators, This Is It – No Hearings No Votes. “The reaction of Mitch McConnell was a pleasant surprise. After rolling over again and again, it seems to have dawned on Mitch that we conservatives are done with a submissive Senate going Gimp every time Obama demands something. Spending, Obamacare, illegal immigration – the GOP hasn’t been seemed to be able to draw a line, much less hold one, and we conservatives have been wondering why we even bothered to retake the Senate in 2014. But now our right to freely exercise our religion, our right to keep and bear arms, and even our right to criticize politicians like Hillary Clinton are at stake. There’s nowhere left to retreat to. Back, meet wall.”

A BREXIT PREFERENCE CASCADE? Boris Johnson exclusive: There is only one way to get the change we want – vote to leave the EU.

Related: Zac Goldsmith: EU referendum: The European Union has shown it is not willing to reform. It’s time for us to leave.

James Bennett emails: “Are we seeing a preference cascade for Brexit? Although many are already for it, of course, mostly they have been either old-line Tories or working-class marginal malcontents. Boris and Zac are part of the rich, well-connected, cosmopolitan London set which has always been presumed to be Europhiles. Watch this phenomenon.”

I think that when the EU ship set sail, it offered dazzling opportunities for graft and self-aggrandizement, free from tedious popular scrutiny and control. But now that it’s taking on water, the smarter members of the political class are scouting out the lifeboats.

YEAH, LIKE WE’RE GOING TO SEE THAT FROM OBAMA: Why the US Should Stand Up for Hong Kong: The UK’s Foreign Secretary has accused Beijing of a “serious breach” of its agreement over Hong Kong.

On February 12, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond blamed China for the disappearance of Lee Bo, a British citizen from Hong Kong, declaring it a “serious breach” of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the treaty governing Hong Kong’s return to communist mainland rule in 1997.
Lee is one of five men connected to the Hong Kong-based Mighty Current Media publishing house and its bookstore in the Causeway Bay neighborhood who, since last fall, have disappeared and subsequently reappeared on the mainland in official custody.

On February 4, mainland authorities acknowledged holding Lam Wing Kee, Cheng Chi Ping, and Lui Por, on unspecified “illegal activities.” On January 17, Gui Minhai, who had disappeared from his Thailand beach home in October, appeared on Chinese state television and gave an emotional “confession,” in which he said he voluntarily returned to the mainland to face responsibility for a 2003 drunk driving incident.

As for Lee, Hammond said, “The full facts of the case remain unclear, but our current information indicates that Lee was involuntarily removed to the mainland without any due process under Hong Kong SAR law.”

London has taken an important step. However, if it is serious about defending Hong Kong, it will have to ask other democracies for support that has not so far been forthcoming. Even before the formal transfer of sovereignty, but while China’s meddling was already underway, the Clinton Administration insisted its hands were tied. Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord told Congress in 1996, “The United States does not offer legal interpretations of agreements to which it is not a party,” adding, “by the way, the British have not stated their legal position.”

Now that Great Britain has said the treaty is breached, the United States must go beyond its February 1 expression of “deep concern” over Lee and the fate of the other men. It should now be more difficult for the Obama Administration to avoid implementing the key provision of the U.S.-Hong Kong Policy Act. That law directs the President to withdraw Hong Kong’s separate treatment in some economic and trade matters if he finds it to be insufficiently autonomous.

Don’t hold your breath. You can generally count on Obama to side with the tyrants in confrontations of this sort.

MARKET TICKER: Twitter Stock Heading For Zero: “Yes, that’s a bold call, although a lot of people would think not with the stock down from $53 and change to under $19 in the last year. But no, this isn’t just about how are they going to make money (which is a clean and open question) — it’s about their new-found zeal for ban-hammering anyone who’s conservative — and has the nuts to voice that. . . . It’s only a matter of time before a public company that does this sort of thing winds up like MySpace.”

If I were a Twitter shareholder, I’d be concerned that Jack Dorsey is running the place as his own little super-PAC and not focusing on maximizing shareholder value. I might even sue.

I AM QUOTED, on the subject of why rich people live longer than poor people.

Related item here: “The most significant predictor of how kids will do in school is how their parents did in school. Nothing the education system has tried so far has changed that. The latest confirmation comes from a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It assessed the data from test results in the U.K., where everyone takes a universal exam at the ageof 16. The researchers focused on the test scores of 2,321 twin pairs, who are part of a long-term study to determine the various influences of environment and heredity on behaviour and life outcomes. Their conclusion is both good news and bad news for those who think intelligence is highly overrated. They found that educational achievement does indeed depend on far more traits than just IQ. The bad news: Those traits are highly heritable, too.”

TAKE A RIDE ON VA’S BAD BOSSES MERRY-GO-ROUND. YOU ARE PAYING FOR IT: Something isn’t right when the Department of Veterans Affairs moves a $181,000-a-year senior executive to three different jobs in a few years.

But nearly 100 top VA execs were moved to at least three different jobs in separate states between 2008 and 2014, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak, who also created a cool interactive graphic to illustrate the process for each of them.

And the bad news is that VA is not unique. All federal departments and agencies do the same thing because civil service regulations make it so costly and time-consuming to fire members of the government’s Senior Executive Service. Those are the top career bosses and they are all but untouchable as a result.

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