WHY, INDEED: The Obama Administration Bugged Rep. Kucinich & Sharyl Attkisson, So Why Not Trump?

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT: Federal Judge Blasts Unprofessional Behavior of Justice Department Lawyers. “Here we go again. Another federal judge has scalded the unprofessional conduct of Justice Department lawyers inside the Civil Rights Division. The first time it was perjury. After that, it was unethical conduct in a trial against New Orleans police officers. Now it’s unprofessional behavior and bigotry toward the South in a federal court trial challenging Texas legislative districts. . . . It’s behavior Attorney General Jeff Sessions will notice and should address.”

Quoth the court: “It was obvious, from the start, that the DoJ attorneys viewed state officials and the legislative majority and their staffs as a bunch of backwoods hayseed bigots who bemoan the abolition of the poll tax and pine for the days of literacy tests and lynchings. And the DoJ lawyers saw themselves as an expeditionary landing party arriving here, just in time, to rescue the state from oppression, obviously presuming that plaintiffs’ counsel were not up to the task.”

And J. Christian Adams comments: “This attitude is in keeping with what Hans von Spakovsky and I have reported here on the pages of PJ Media. An ideological hiring campaign took place during the Obama years where Every Single One of the lawyers hired into the Civil Rights Division were committed leftists. When the DOJ Inspector General recommended that hiring criteria be changed to eliminate this perceived bias, then Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez rejected the recommendation.”

Plus: “Here’s my bet: Voting Section management hasn’t alerted political managers of this misconduct in court. If they have, Section managers will downplay the behavior or defend it. Or, Section managers will have done utterly nothing to reprimand the person involved. They will recommend absolutely nothing be done. That’s why the misconduct occurred—because a culture of misconduct and ideological zeal took hold—from hiring decisions to litigation. Whichever lawyer was responsible should be removed from all future litigation.”

Nope. They should be fired for fostering such a climate of bigotry and hate. And Attorney General Sessions should replace them with attorneys who will enhance the office’s diversity. We need a Civil Rights Division that looks like America!

U.S. ATTORNEY PREET BHARARA REFUSES TO RESIGN, Trump fires him. As Nick Gillespie comments: “As Katherine Mangu-Ward noted last fall, it’s true that the Trump administration asked Bharara to stay on for a while. But that was then and this is now. And there’s something truly disturbing about a DOJ appointee who refuses to take a powder when asked, especially when there’s no larger question about executive-power overreach. What is it that Barack Obama used to say? ‘Elections have consequences.’ Presidents get to staff this level of service the way they want to. I don’t expect Donald Trump to be a champion of free speech, but removing Bharara from office is a small step in that direction.”

Here’s what I wrote back when Bharara subpoenaed Reason for its commenters’ names, and then put them under a gag order: “I continue to think that this is a case of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara doing one (or both) of two things: (1) Attempting a sort of brushback pitch regarding people talking smack about federal judges, to the effect of saying that we can’t punish you under the First Amendment but we’ll go after you anyway; and/or (2) doing a ‘favor’ for a judge before whom he has a lot of cases. Both seem like abuses of power to me.”

Likewise, Bharara’s grandstanding here is basically an effort to ingratiate himself with anti-Trump Democrats on the way out, presumably in the expectation of reaping political or professional rewards. It is, thus, a species of corruption, and deserves to be called such.

CAREFULLY? How Japanese Snowplow Crews Clear Five Stories of Snow From a Mountain Road.

LIBERAL BULLIES ON CAMPUS: A Case Study. “St. Olaf is an expensive school. Do parents know that they are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars so that their children can be subjected to irrelevant political tirades? My daughter was among those who were threatened with violence.”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Historic ruling grants custody to dad and mom — and mom.

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I AGREE, BUT I THINK IT SHOULD BE YEAR-ROUND. Shut Up About Daylight Saving Time, It’s Actually Great. Yes, it messes up your schedule for a few days. But it gives you eight months of significantly more sunlight in your life. “In fact, studies actually estimate that we could save about 366 more lives per year if we extended DST all year round.” If it saves just one life, it’s worth it.

IT COULDN’T IT BE ANY WORSE THAN CELEBRITY APPRENTICE: 5 Reasons a Senate Run by Arnold Schwarzenegger Won’t End Well.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL WINNING! The Saudis Won’t Like This: Massive Oil Discovery Made in Alaska.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: High-Intensity Interval Training Could Be Your Best Bet for Keeping Your Cells Young.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The ISIS Endgame.

ISIS doesn’t have a chance. American air and ground forces, working with local proxies, are about to terminate its existence as a state. “Crushed,” to paraphrase President Trump. A just—and popular—cause.

But that won’t be the end. Recent events suggest that the military defeat of ISIS is just the beginning of a renewed American involvement in Iraq and Syria. And whether the American public and president are prepared for or willing to accept the probable costs of such involvement is unknown. That is reason for concern.

To glimpse the future, look at the city of Manbij in northeast Syria. Humvees and Strykers flying the American flag have appeared there in recent days. The mission? Not to defeat ISIS. Our proxies kicked them out last year. What we are doing in Manbij is something altogether different from a military assault: a “deterrence and reassurance” operation meant to dissuade rival factions from massacring one another. If you can’t remember when President Obama or President Trump called for such an operation, that’s because they never did.

And there’s a twist. One of the factions we are trying to intimidate is none other than the army of Turkey, a NATO member and purported ally. Turkey moved in on Manbij not because of ISIS but because of the Kurds. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish autocrat, opposes one of our Kurdish proxies. He says the YPG is the Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, which has conducted an insurgency against his government for decades. Yet the YPG is also the most effective indigenous anti-ISIS force on the ground. We need it to take Raqqa.

Things get even more complicated.

In the Middle East, things always do.

HOW MANY HARD DRIVES CAN SPIN ON THE HEAD OF A PIN? Scientists Store Data on a Single Atom for the First Time.

FLASHBACK: 2002: I argue with Nick Denton about the future of Europe. Sadly enough, I turned out to be right, despite being a hick from “suburban Tennessee.”

PROGRESS? Look Ma, no hands! No steering wheel needed under new Calif. car rules.

MODERN CURRENCY: Here’s what’s next for bitcoin after the SEC killed the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday rejected a proposed rule change that would’ve allowed for the creation of the first bitcoin exchange-traded fund—a decision that has followers of the world’s largest cryptocurrency wondering what happens next.

In its ruling, the SEC said it was unnerved by the lack of regulation in a market that is largely based outside of the U.S., and was worried about the potential for market manipulation.

Fortunately for investors who were hoping to buy into the fund, Friday’s decision won’t necessarily preclude the approval of other proposed bitcoin ETFs. Two other companies are vying to become the first bitcoin-focused ETF, but what might happen next is unclear.

John Galt’s “Get the hell out of my way!” remains relevant.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: All the King Kong Movies … Ranked.

I was always partial to Mighty Joe Young.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1402: IRS Locates 7,000 Documents Related To Tea Party Targeting.

TOM SHATTUCK: No lamenting liberal Liz Warren’s fall from grace. “Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is useless, teetering close to the ragged edge of pointless. Apart from starring roles in childish protests and tough-guy Twitter rants, Warren is making no difference in Washington, D.C., and is no friend to her constituents in Massachusetts.” To be fair, she’s never really cared about them anyway.

PROCUREMENT BLUES: Russia’s New PAK-FA Stealth Fighter Has A Big Problem.

Russia’s Sukhoi T-50 PAK-FA stealth fighter program has suffered another delay. Testing of the of the powerful new jet’s second stage engine, which was supposed to start later this year, has been pushed back to 2018.

“At the moment, works are being carried out within the framework of contacts with the Russian Defense Ministry,” United Aircraft Corporation, Sergei Korotkov told the TASS news agency. “Flight tests are underway. We plan to enter the second stage of trials next year.”

The new engine was expected to make its first flight installed onboard the PAK-FA in the fourth quarter of 2017. “The first flight of the aircraft with the new engine is expected in the fourth quarter of 2017,” a United Engine Corporation spokesman told TASS earlier in the year.

Engines are comparatively easy, next to stealth and the advanced avionics needed to bring it all together.

THIS DOESN’T MAKE ME FEEL ANY BETTER ABOUT IT: Key health insurer backs GOP ObamaCare replacement plan.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Republicans Should Kill Obamacare or Let It Die.

This was the problem that Democrats faced with Obamacare. Other countries, it was often observed, had a national guarantee of health insurance; surely, we could build a system very much like those. But the other countries had built their systems earlier, when there weren’t so many concrete towers already in the way. By the time Obamacare came on the scene, America already had government programs that were propping up health care for almost everyone in the country: tax-subsidized employer-sponsored health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, the VA. No one was willing to shoulder the cost of knocking those things down and designing a rational, well-built structure to take their place, so instead the administration threw up an annex next to the Medicaid edifice, and tore down the little remaining patch of ground that wasn’t government-subsidized, and threw up a new tower to hold its residents.

The planning was haphazard, the work shoddily done, and the result kept threatening to collapse.

And yet it was locked in. That whole “political concrete” thing. For the enthusiasts, the very difficulty of alteration was not a bug but a feature, because it meant that it would be hard for Republicans to undo. So we were all left with a subpar system that is difficult to either repair or replace.

That is unfortunate, but it is now a fact, and Republicans, like so many opponents of Brutalist architecture, are going to have to contend with that reality. We cannot simply get rid of what Democrats built, and then perhaps, at some more convenient date, start over with a sounder design. The old structures are gone, and will not spring back up of their own accord if we knock down what’s there now. All you get from a hasty demolition is a big pile of rubble.

That works for me. Both for ObamaCare, and for pretty much every piece of Brutalist architecture ever.

AVNER ZARMI: Is Netanyahu Actually Going to Be Indicted Soon?

THE MANY FACES OF JOHNNY CASH: Above all else, Dad was a writer and a voracious reader – his copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall was annotated, read, reread and worn.