TODAY’S MODIFIED LIMITED HANGOUT FROM TEAM HILLARY: Withholding of Emails Just ‘Over-Classification Run Amok.’

WELCOME TO THE TWITTER ELECTION, FEATURING SNARK AND MORE SNARK:

Although this post focuses on Twitter, it’s not only Twitter. I’ve noticed over and over—on blogs, on television, in comments, in life—that snark has become the dominant conversational style, the coin of the realm these days. And the phenomenon is only growing.

Nearly everything is irony or mockery, coming from what appears to be a very deep public cynicism, fed in turn by the constant cynicism and mockery. No one is really laudable any more. Elect a narcissistic con man? Why not? They’re all narcissistic con men, so let’s back the conny-ist and most narcissistic con man of all. And let’s laugh about it, and taunt the opposition. Integrity is for suckers, and only saps would believe that anyone smart has it. Except, paradoxically, the snarky, who show the depth of their integrity by the depth of their mocking cynicism.

You might say in response that their cynicism is deserved: we’ve been betrayed by everyone, in government especially, Republicans and Democrats, they’re all lying thieves, yada yada yada. I’m not at all sure it’s that much worse than it used to be. But even if it is, it’s certainly not everyone, and what I see is an incessant, petulant, nit-picky fault-finding on the part of a public that rejects good (or good enough) people in public life for one mistake, one bad judgment, one intemperate remark, and tars them as forever beyond the pale.

The public wants—as I put it a while ago—madder music and stronger wine. Trump gives it to them today, but it needn’t be Trump—next cycle it will be someone else. It’s not about Trump, it’s about what the public has come to be interested in, and what the public demands.

As Allan Bloom noted a quarter century ago in The Closing of the American Mind, American intellectual life and pop culture is already a colonial outpost of the Weimar Republic. What’s next? Idiocracy, or something worse?

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: The Bear From ‘The Revenant’ Speaks Out About Having His Face In Leonardo DiCaprio’s Butt.

CREEPING SJW-ISM AT ROAD & TRACK? Though he denies it. But who’s the editor who thought Road and Track readers wanted to read about how men treat women in one of the few magazines that writes about something other than how men treat women?

HILLARY CLINTON’S HANDLING OF CLASSIFIED MATERIAL ISN’T AS BAD AS YOU THINK — it’s as bad as it’s possible for you to think:

EXCLUSIVE: The intelligence community has now deemed some of Hillary Clinton’s emails “too damaging” to national security to release under any circumstances, according to a U.S. government official close to the ongoing review. A second source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, backed up the finding.

The decision to withhold the documents in full, and not provide even a partial release with redactions, further undercuts claims by the State Department and the Clinton campaign that none of the intelligence in the emails was classified when it hit Clinton’s personal server.

Hillary Clinton, as I’ve been telling VodkaPundit readers since last summer, belongs in jail.

ACK! HERE COME PRESIDENT TRUMP’S FIRST 100 DAYS: “If you listen carefully, the Donald will tell you exactly what he’d do on stepping into the Oval Office… Of course, who knows? We’re only taking him at his word.”

FUSION NEWS: Jaeyoung Park confirms publication of patent filing for Polywell Fusion and promises more technical disclosure in interview with Nextbigfuture.

DARRELL ISSA: ‘FBI director would like to indict Clinton and Abedin.’

So what happens if and when Hillary isn’t indicted? As Roger Simon noted last week, “The most obvious part is that the rule of law will have, for all intents and purposes, ended in the United States. Equal justice flew out the window.  How does the public react to that?”

JOEL KOTKIN: The Politics Of The Next Recession: How A Bust Could Impact The 2016 Elections. “How the public perceives the economy will have a major impact on this year’s elections. That most are already discouraged cannot be denied; the negative sentiment has propelled the rise of such seemingly marginal political figures as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. But will the economy prove a bother to the Democrats? A lot depends on where you live and what you do. Much of the country is not doing so well; despite a strong two-year run in job creation, some 93 percent of U.S. counties still have not gained back all the jobs that they lost in the Great Recession, according to the National Association of Counties. Yet many liberals believe the economy is shipshape.”

Well, if the press covered the economy the way they would if there were a Republican in the White House, there wouldn’t be a Democrat left in office.

NOAM CHOMSKY, PARTISAN HACK.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Government Cuts Projection Of 2014-2024 Lawyer Jobs By 41%: 16K Lawyer Jobs For 37k Law Grads Each Year. “Combined with slow growth and high turnover rates, things do not look good for law students, even if there are fewer of them.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Make a Drill Using Only Sticks and Stones: When the apocalypse hits, these are the kind of skills you want to have.

SPYING: Cops Getting Free License Plate Readers In Exchange For 25% Of The ‘Take’ And All The Driver Data Vigilant Can Slurp. The ruling class sees us as cattle to be milked.

STEVE GREEN: How to Read the News Like a Pro.

YA THINK? The leader of the National Security Agency’s hackers says that putting industrial control systems online has made America less secure.

Related: How Long Could the U.S. Go Without Electricity?

Also: Disaster prep using inverters. More here. And here’s a roundup of related disaster-preparedness posts.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: A Turning Tide In The War On College Men?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 995.

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: The Disastrous New Urban Agenda.

YOU MAKE THE CALL! Made-Up Nonsense or ‘Best Quote’ From Davos?

POPEHAT’S KEN WHITE: How the government is charging Ammon Bundy and his self-styled Oregon militia members.

After debacles like Waco and Ruby Ridge, it seems the federal government has finally learned how to handle self-styled insurrection. If the rebels extend an invitation to a violent, headline-grabbing siege, politely decline. If they frame the dispute as a fight between liberty and tyranny, brush your shoulders off.

Just as the arrest was cautious, so is the charge. In the federal criminal complaint – which the FBI didn’t obtain until after the arrests – the U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon charges the eight defendants with a single count of conspiracy to impede an officer of the United States. That federal criminal statute doesn’t see much use, and it’s not one of the Justice Department’s big guns: Its maximum penalty is only six years. To prosecutors, the virtue of such conspiracy charges are their flexibility: The government need only prove that two or more of the defendants agreed to prevent some federal employee from discharging his or her duty by force, intimidation or threat. Prosecutors don’t have to prove they were successful.

It used to be hard to prove what defendants agreed to do: You had to infer it from their actions, or find a snitch to repeat their conversations, or wiretap them. But this is 2016, and we arrange our affairs in the open. The government’s 31-page affidavit in support of the complaint against the eight occupiers is chock-full of their own words: statements in press interviews, statements in videos posted to YouTube, statements in widely distributed emails. It’s enough to make a defense attorney weep.

If you’re a serious revolutionary, this sort of behavior should be avoided.

FURTHER CONFIRMATION THAT ESPN IS JUST MSNBC WITH BETTER VIDEO. Charles Barkley: ESPN Turning Super Bowl 50 into a ‘Black Versus White’ Race Battle.

Earlier: 10 Reasons ESPN is MSNBC With Better Video.

SCOTT WALKER: OUT OF THE RACE, BUT STILL SITTING ON A THRONE OF SKULLS.
“Union membership in Wisconsin collapsed in 2015, falling well below the national average for the first time… and thinning the ranks of the labor movement by tens of thousands of workers in one of its former bastions.”

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: “The American public doesn’t talk enough about nuclear war.”

Related: The Unexpected Return of “Duck and Cover.”

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