WHY NOT HAVE THE FBI DO IT? OR THE TREASURY DEPARTMENT. Trump demands intel panel probe Clinton Foundation ties to Russian uranium deal.

President Trump argued in a pair of tweets Monday evening that the House Intelligence Committee should look a deal between a Russian state-owned energy company, Rosatom, and a Canadian-owned mining company with deep ties to the Clinton Foundation that had ultimately placed one-fifth of U.S. uranium interests in Russian hands. . . .

The deal with Uranium One, the Canadian company owned by Clinton Foundation patron Frank Giustra, plagued Hillary Clinton throughout the presidential race as an example of the ways her family’s foundation could have served as a conduit for larger financial and political interests. The transaction that left so much of America’s uranium production under the control of a Canadian company with extensive Clinton ties took place while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state and required the approval of an inter-agency committee that included the State Department.

Well, so long as Russian ties are on the table. . . .

STOP TRYING TO MAKE PRESIDENT HILLARY HAPPEN. PRESIDENT HILLARY IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. Hillary is not next if Trump is impeached, you guys. Amber Tamblyn Shows Why Actor Doesn’t Mean ‘Constitutional Scholar.’

I’m not surprised when actresses make fools of themselves. I’m a bit disappointed to see some people I’d considered fairly substantive engaging in all sorts of absurd fantasies about changing the line of succession, providing for a “do over” election, and other legalistic efforts to remove Trump. Not only is it not going to happen, if it did happen people would be justified in taking up arms and hanging people doing it from lampposts, because it would be a coup. There was a time when allegedly substantive people knew that it was dangerous to talk about things like that.

ROGER KIMBALL: Is Mo Brooks Our Lord Brougham?

But I like Mo Brooks’s approach to the problem, which in some ways is similar to Lord Brougham’s approach to the evil of the income tax, in some ways akin to Alexander the Great’s solution to the problem of the Gordian Knot. On Friday, Brooks filed the “ObamaCare Repeal Act” in Congress. ObamaCare itself runs to thousands of pages. Brooks’s remediation runs one sentence:

“Effective as of Dec. 31, 2017, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted.”

C’est tout. Finis. End of show.

Will it work? Ask yourself this: Do our duly elected representatives really want to repeal ObamaCare? After all, it encompasses some 20 percent of the U.S. economy. Think of the opportunities for graft, for deal-making, for influence-peddling! Think of the opportunities for extending the reach of the government into the lives of the citizens! Doctors, hospitals, other health-care facilities, pharmaceutical companies, and manufacturers of medical equipment: all now transformed into wards of the state, i.e., subject to the whims and regulations of — yep, you guessed it — those very duly elected representatives: what an opportunity! Imagine if someone had told Lord Brougham that, one day in the future in a country pretending to be a democracy, the state required its subjects to buy health care insurance on pain of a special levy if they failed to do so!

Politicians may or may not wish to repeal ObamaCare; those that do also wish to replace it, i.e., promulgate some other “government program,” i.e., opportunity for graft, influence-peddling, regulatory imposition, etc. Mo Brooks, on the contrary, seems to entertain the deeply heterodox idea of simply getting rid of the Leviathan.

Imagine that — a law you could memorize over your first cup of coffee.

Meanwhile, read the whole thing.

BOOM: UK set to formally trigger Brexit process.

Giving official notice under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, it will be delivered to European Council president Donald Tusk later.

In a statement in the Commons, the prime minister will then tell MPs this marks “the moment for the country to come together”.

It follows June’s referendum which resulted in a vote to leave the EU.
Mrs May’s letter will be delivered at 12:20 BST on Wednesday by the British ambassador to the EU, Sir Tim Barrow.

If Rex Tillerson’s State Department would get busy on a bilateral free trade deal with the UK, that would give them a better negotiating position with the eurocrats in Brussels.

SCORCHED EARTH? Islamic State shelling forces engineers to evacuate Syrian dam.

Islamic State shelled positions held by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) at the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates River on Wednesday, forcing the evacuation of engineers who were on site to open spillways, a Reuters witness said.

Nobody was wounded by at least two explosions as Islamic State fired from the southern end of the dam, which it controls. The engineers are working to open the spillways to relieve the pressure of built-up water in the dam.

ISIS will at least try and destroy anything they can’t take with them.

SPYING ON CONGRESS: Schock staffer was FBI informant, court filings reveal.

The FBI wired a congressional staffer and turned him into a secret informant during its investigation into former Rep. Aaron Schock’s (R-Ill.) alleged misuse of government and campaign funds, Schock’s attorneys said Tuesday in federal court filings.

The staffer, who is not named, secretly taped conversations with Schock and people working in his office while Schock was still a member of Congress, according to a 30-page motion and attached memo that cites documents from the court discovery process.

The informant took documents from Schock’s Illinois district office, including from another staffer’s desk and email inbox, and provided them to federal investigators, the documents say.

Schock was indicted last year on 24 counts related to alleged misuse of government and campaign funds. His trial is set to begin this summer.

Have they ever put a wire on a Democrat’s staffer?

THEY WERE ALL FINE BEFORE NOVEMBER 8: Barbra Streisand, Lena Dunham Shouldn’t Blame Trump for Their Own ‘Neuroses’

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Society Of American Law Teachers Opposes ABA Proposal To Allow Adjuncts To Teach More Law School Courses.

The American Bar Association is considering deep-sixing a rule requiring full-time faculty to teach at least half of every law school’s upper-level courses—a proposal likely to ruffle the feathers of professors who fear it would allow schools to essentially outsource the second and third year to adjuncts.

Eliminating the requirement would provide law schools more room to experiment with how they deliver classroom instruction and would also allow them to cut costs, according to the ABA committee that proposed the change. “This is another way in which the standards are moving toward looking at outcomes rather than inputs,” said Barry Currier, who oversees the ABA’s section of legal education. “What if a school graduates 100 percent of its students and 100 percent of them pass the bar? Should the accreditation standards say, ‘Sorry, still no good because you don’t have a majority of your upper years taught by full-time faculty?’”

But at least one organization of law professors has already said it will oppose reducing the amount of course offerings that must be taught by full-time faculty in order to preserve the quality of students’ educational experiences. “Students need to have access to faculty members outside of classroom time to be able to go over things that confuse them, to be counseled on how their education fits with their career aspiration and things like that,” said Denise Roy, the director of externships at Mitchell Hamline School of Law and co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers, the largest group of law faculty in the country. “Adjunct faculty typically are not available on campus outside their teaching hours.” …

Some professors see potential in the idea of rolling back full-time faculty requirements, however. Law schools wouldn’t have to change their teaching models should the ABA do away with the upper-level full-time teaching requirement, wrote University of Alabama School of Law professor Paul Horwitz in a post on PrawfsBlawg, but they would have new flexibility to do so. “If some law schools adopt a more practice-driven approach and rely more on practitioners to achieve it, while others are or can afford to emulate the model of a few elite schools, so much the better for institutional diversity and student choice,” Horwitz wrote.

Prof. LePetomane is calling a meeting.

QUESTION ASKED: Why Is the Democratic National Committee “Embattled”?

I’m so old, I can remember when the DNC-MSM’s standard mantra was that it was the GOP that was on the verge of imploding.

WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY STATE BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: Oregon Seeks To Regulate ‘Dangerous, Preventable’ Cow Farts.

(Classical reference in headline.)

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Plus, browse the deals in Industrial and Scientific.

WELL, THAT’S BECAUSE ANTIFA IS A BUNCH OF SORRY-ASS COMMIES: Antifa activists disrespect the Victims Of Communism Memorial. Also here.

TONIGHT IN IMMIGRATION NEWS: Father of Maryland rape suspect arrested for being in US illegally.

ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN: Why We Still Need Statutes of Limitations for Rape: Momentum is gaining to end criminal statutes of limitations for sex crimes. But this betrays both victims and those accused.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Leaked DHS Document Is Another Democratic Party Scandal. “So it appears that what happened here is that Democratic Party activists in the Department of Homeland Security either created a bogus document or dug up a poorly-researched draft document that had never been issued, and fed it to Democratic Party activists at the Associated Press. The Democratic Party activists at the AP published a story based on the anonymous document, which two Democratic Party activists on the bench used as a pretext for orders enjoining the president’s travel order. Those orders should be viewed as purely political acts that have no basis in any valid judicial reasoning or authority.”

The judges who are striking down Trump’s actions because they doubt his adherence to his oath of office are playing a dangerous and unwise game. Their oaths are no more unquestionable, and their branch has neither the sword nor the purse. Do they want to set Trump up to ignore them?

WELL, IT WAS STARTED BY ANTI-GUN ACTIVIST SHANNON WATTS, WHICH EXPLAINS A LOT: United’s Leggings Fiasco: The False Narrative Needs To Stop. False narratives are what she does.

Related: Flying the Undressed Skies: United Airlines defends standards—and doesn’t surrender to social-media bullying.

ALCOHOL AND HEART HEALTH: New study untangles the effects.

The researchers found that there were no heart conditions for which the never-drinkers had the lowest risk. This suggests that drinking is not necessarily bad for heart health.

They also found that, compared with people who never drank, moderate drinkers were less likely to be diagnosed with several conditions, including chest pain, heart failure, stroke and peripheral artery disease. So, score a few points for the idea that drinking does lower the risk of some heart problems.

For other conditions, there was no statistically significant differences between the groups, the study said.

Honestly, I don’t think this study did all that much untangling. Well, stay tuned.

SAD TO SEE THE NAVAL ACADEMY ALUMNI AS A BUNCH OF COLLEGE CRYBULLIES: Former Senator Jim Webb Declines to Accept Naval Academy Alumni Association’s Distinguished Graduate Award. “From conversations with the Alumni Association, including information passed down from top Navy leadership in the Pentagon, it is clear that those protesting my receipt of this award now threaten to disrupt the ceremonies surrounding its issuance. I am being told that my presence at the ceremony would likely mar the otherwise celebratory nature of that special day, and as a consequence I find it necessary to decline to accept the award.”

This is not helping the standing of Annapolis, or of its graduates. It’s childish and stupid. But I’ll say one thing for our current era: The people who have long posed as the responsible adults are rapidly revealing themselves as neither.

Meanwhile, Brendan O’Neill writes on Facebook:

What’s amazing is the patience and dignity of Brexit voters. For nine months the political elite raged against them, ridiculed them, demonised them; branded them racist, destructive, “low information”; dragged their democratic choice to the courts in the hope that some clever judge would declare it illegitimate; took to the streets to call them idiots and buffoons and unwitting slaves of demagoguery; held them responsible for economic downturn and a return of fascism; declared them unfit for serious public life, which is apparently best left to experts. And yet Brexit voters didn’t go mad or riot or crumble. They stuck to their principles (an amazing 96% say they’d vote for Brexit again) and patiently waited for their political choice to be acted upon. They kept their faith in democracy. They behaved liked the free-willed, autonomous adults that democracy needs in order to work and thrive.

It seems kinda related somehow.

REPUBLICANS IN DISARRAY — WAIT, WHAT? Embattled DNC Asks All Staffers For Resignation Letters.

Related: The Democrats’ Ditch Is Only Getting Deeper.

C’MON, LET’S GIVE HIM THIS ONE: No, Trump Didn’t Cost Colin Kaepernick a Job.

On the flip-side, American anger over Kaepernick’s sclerotic 1968-era radical shtick may very well have helped Trump at the ballot box last November.

THE U.S. ARMY AIR CORPS’ DIVE BOMBER: The Banshee. The Army’s WW2 version of the USN’s SBD-3 Dauntless dive bomber. (I’ll catch up on the photos I’ve missed in StrategyPage’s bomber series later this week.)

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Buying A Budget AR-15.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Ohio School Plans to Offer Course on Fake News and Critical Thinking.

THAT’S WHY GOD INVENTED SHOES AND ROLLED-UP MAGAZINES: Spiders could theoretically eat every human on Earth in one year. “There’s a good chance at least one spider is staring at you right now, sizing you up from a darkened corner of the room, eight eyes glistening in the shadows.”

Plus: “The world’s spiders consume somewhere between 400 million and 800 million tons of prey in any given year. That means that spiders eat at least as much meat as all 7 billion humans on the planet combined, who the authors note consume about 400 million tons of meat and fish each year. Or, for a slightly more disturbing comparison: The total biomass of all adult humans on Earth is estimated to be 287 million tons. Even if you tack on another 70 million-ish tons to account for the weight of kids, it’s still not equal to the total amount of food eaten by spiders in a given year, exceeding the total weight of humanity. In other words, spiders could eat all of us and still be hungry.”

CUE DICES? Forget potatoes: New Texas vodka uses black-eyed peas instead.

UPDATE: Bad link, fixed now — sorry!