GREAT MOMENTS IN MEDIA VICTIMHOOD: The Daily Beast Launches a “Your Twitter Followers Hit a Girl” Attack on Elon Musk.

Erin Biba is a freelance “science writer.” I put science writer in scare quotes because Biba goes to some lengths to obscure what her credentials are. The science writers who have worked for me were PhDs with bench science chops who had decided that tenured faculty positions were unlikely to materialize. They were very good writers but they were actual scientists who understood what they were writing about. Biba got pushback from a lot of people and did what journalists do: retaliate in print.

How dare your followers push back against me! Don’t they know that only we in the media are allowed to sic the social media mob on people?

Related: “Think we figured out why she deleted her entire tweet history… As an editor can you explain why it was OK for your journalist to repeatedly publicly insult someone who would go on to be the subject of an article smearing them using guilt by association? Hardly impartial is it?”

JIM BOVARD: After pointlessly groping countless Americans, the TSA is keeping a secret watchlist of those who fight back.

Naturally, the TSA’s official definition of troublemaking goes well beyond punching its officers. According to a confidential memo, any behavior that is “offensive and without legal justification” can land a traveler on the list, as can any “challenges to the safe and effective completion of screening.” Anyone who has ever “loitered” near a checkpoint could also make the list. So could any woman who pushes a screener’s hands away from her breasts.

The memo would be more accurate if it stated that anyone who fails to unquestioningly submit to all the TSA’s demands would be found guilty of insubordination. As an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, Hugh Handeyside, told the Washington Post, the policy gives the agency wide latitude to “blacklist people arbitrarily and essentially punish them for asserting their rights.” Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-New Jersey) expressed similar worry. “I am concerned about the civil-liberty implications of such a list,” she said.

The watchlist would seem less perilous if the TSA were not one of most incompetent agencies on Earth.

It isn’t like Jim to be so generous in his evaluation of government agencies.

Related (From Ed): Reason TV’s Remy performs “The Longest Time (TSA Version):”

THE MORE PEOPLE POSTURE AS DO-GOODERS, THE MORE LIKELY IT SEEMS THEY WIND UP DOING SOMETHING OTHER THAN GOOD: UN knew for over a decade about sex-for-food scandal involving 15 top charities, leaked report claims.. “An 84-page report on ‘food-for-sex’ practices in West African refugee camps was compiled and handed over to the UN in 2002, but was never published. It claims that workers at more than 40 aid organisations, of which 15 are major international charities including Save the Children and Médecins Sans Frontières, sexually exploited young refugees. . . . It comes after revelations that Oxfam covered up that several of its senior aid workers had been paying survivors of the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake for sex.”

To be fair, at least they paid them instead of just out-and-out raping them like UN troops do.

THIS IS CNN: Trump whips up immigration storm over children.

Meanwhile: New York Times asks, “Did the Trump Administration Separate Immigrant Children From Parents and Lose Them?”

And: Republicans’ inhumanity at the border reveals their grand scam.

However: Trump Falsely Slammed for Obama-Era ‘Baby Deportation Bus’ and Photos of Children in Cages.

And Rich Lowry explains: “As usual, the outrage obscures more than it illuminates, so it’s worth walking through what’s happening here.”

For the longest time, illegal immigration was driven by single males from Mexico. Over the last decade, the flow has shifted to women, children, and family units from Central America. This poses challenges we haven’t confronted before and has made what once were relatively minor wrinkles in the law loom very large.

The Trump administration isn’t changing the rules that pertain to separating an adult from the child. Those remain the same. Separation happens only if officials find that the adult is falsely claiming to be the child’s parent, or is a threat to the child, or is put into criminal proceedings.

Who’s whipping up what?

AMERICA’S WORST UNIVERSITY FOR FREE SPEECH: Places like Berkeley or Evergreen State get all the press (and it’s often richly deserved), but as the student journalists at DePaul University’s student newspaper revealed this week, there is an ever-growing list of reasons that FIRE puts DePaul at or near the top of any list of the very worst schools for free speech. The reports we get from DePaul are consistently appalling. Please, stay away from there.

YOU DON’T ALWAYS GET THE TYCOONS YOU WANT, BUT SOMETIMES YOU GET THE TYCOONS YOU NEED: My USA Today column: Be thankful tycoons like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are focused on space and moon bases.

SPENGLER: The Safest Country for European Jews? Try Hungary.

Ironic, given how much grief the Hungarian government gets from its “betters” in Berlin and Paris.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): You really have to read the opening paragraph:

Last Friday evening I put on a kippah and walked half an hour across Budapest to the Keren Or synagogue maintained by the Budapest Chabad. After violent attacks on Jews in German streets, the leaders of Germany’s Jewish community warned Jews last month not to wear a kippah or any other visible sign of Jewish identification in public. The French community issued such warnings years ago. Belgian TV could not find a single Jew in Brussels willing to wear a kippah in public. I walked across Budapest four times (for Friday evening and Saturday daytime services), and no-one looked at my kippah twice. At services I met Hasidim who had walked to synagogue with kaftan and shtreimel, the traditional round fur hat. Whatever residual anti-Semitism remains among Hungarians, it doesn’t interfere with the open embrace of Jewish life. There are no risks to Jews because there are very few Muslim migrants.

Ouch.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Former ACLU President: Obama Was ‘Terrible President’ On Free Speech Issues.

Former ACLU president and author Nadine Strossen made the remark during a phone interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation about the ACLU’s efforts with regard to free speech on college campuses going back to the 1990s.

“I still think a lot of liberals aren’t aware [of] what a terrible president [Obama] was,” Strossen told TheDCNF, alluding to the fact that the former president used the Espionage Act to pursue whistleblowers more times than all previous presidents had combined. But she also praised Obama for encouraging students to engage in discussion.

“I would say many people are more deeply engaged about politics and more concerned about their civil liberties,” the former ACLU president said, when asked to compare the state of free speech on campus under Obama to that under President Donald Trump.

People should be concerned about their civil liberties under any Administration, but the media only gets them whipped up about abuses – real or imaginary — by one side.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UMich wants more time to explain how bias response team ensures ‘all voices can be heard.’

I AGREE: Why President Trump Should Commute The Sentence Of Matthew Charles.

ALLIES: French magazine harassed for asking if Erdogan is a new Hitler. “Le Point says it has been subject to ‘insults, intimidation and anti-Semitic slurs’ over cover labeling Turkish leader ‘the dictator’.”

Police were deployed in the Pontet suburb of the southern city of Avignon over the weekend after a group of pro-Erdogan activists attempted to remove, then cover up advertisements for the magazine at newsstands.

Another poster of the front cover — a portrait of Erdogan above the headline “The Dictator. How far will Erdogan go?” — was targeted at a newspaper kiosk in the town of Valence on Sunday, Le Point said.

Donald Trump gets that or worse almost weekly, but I can’t seem to recall any police being deployed over it.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: NC Central Law School Replaces Dean, Shrinks 1L Class (By 33%), And Imposes Minimum LSAT (142) And UGPA (2.96) Admissions Requirements To Address ABA’s Accreditation Concerns. (Broken link fixed, and bumped.)

TERROR: Gunman Kills Female Police Officers, Bystander in Belgium, Allegedly Shouts ‘Allahu Akbar’ (VIDEO).

ANDREW MCCARTHY: The Obama Administration’s Hypocritical Pretext for Spying on the Trump Campaign.

It seems pretty clear that this was a political hit job from the beginning, one that’s only coming out because Trump won. And in the process, it’s revealing deep, pervasive institutional rot.

SORRY, BUT “SOCIAL JUSTICE” AND “COMPETENCY” ARE DISJOINT SETS: Western Illinois University is hosting a national gathering of higher education professionals for a “Social Justice” summit to help them “expand their social justice competency.”

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YOU DON’T ALWAYS GET THE TYCOONS YOU WANT, BUT SOMETIMES YOU GET THE TYCOONS YOU NEED: My USA Today column: Be thankful tycoons like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are focused on space and moon bases.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Babies in Cage-Prisons and Much, Much More. “Ivanka mocked for ‘tone deaf’ tweet The tweet was a picture with her and her son. It’s tone-deaf because Trump is putting children in cage-prisons, according to CNN.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Vanderbilt Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos got nearly $3M bonus after budget cuts, layoffs.. We see a lot about salary caps for CEOs, but I’d like to see salary caps for administrators at tax-exempt organizations. Why should any of them make more than a Supreme Court Justice?

MARK STEYN ON THE TOMMY ROBINSON DISGRACE: “Tommy this, an’ Tommy that …an’ Tommy go away.”. “Rowan and Ross addressed recent events in the United Kingdom and in particular the fate of, er, someone whose name they weren’t permitted to mention but who, um, had been gaoled for, er, something or other… This was somewhat astonishing to me, as I’d assumed empire-wide D-notices had lapsed with the passage of the Statute of Westminster. But mein hosts circled back, cautiously, to the topic toward the end of my interview – and I observed, as I have before, how in almost the entirety of the western world, whenever anyone draws attention to some of the more problematic aspects of Islam, the state cracks down not on the problematic aspects, but on the guy who draws attention thereto. In Britain and Europe, we are an incident or two away from literally ‘shooting the messenger’.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE? How to hear (and delete) every conversation your Amazon Alexa has recorded.

First, open the Alexa app on your smart device. Tap the hamburger icon on the top left side of the screen to open the menu options. Click on the Settings menu, then find History.

Here, you’ll be able to browse all the commands you’ve ever asked of Alexa, from timers to music requests to general internet queries. You can also sort the results by date. Sometimes you may even see just a line item that says “Alexa,” for those times you may have mentioned the assistant’s name but didn’t mean to actually use it.

You may notice a few instances where the Alexa app notes a “text not available.” Click on this and you can listen to a recording of what you or someone in your household said that prompted the Echo to listen to your current conversation. In the case of our Weekend Editor, Andrew Liptak, his Echo device recorded a snippet of his mother-in-law teasing his son, saying “Alexa is going to take over your house.” In the app, Alexa concluded that the audio was not intended for the assistant, and the speaker did not return a response.

If you are uncomfortable having any particular recording in your Alexa history, you can delete it on an individual basis, or go to the Amazon’s Manage Your Content and Devices page to wipe it entirely. The company, of course, cautions that doing so “may degrade your Alexa experience.”

If I’m reading this correctly: Amazon has made it Easy for Alexa to record you, and a hassle for you to delete; and threatens reduced functionality if you do.

MICHAEL BARONE: Obama’s spying scandal is starting to look a lot like Watergate.

So much for those who dismissed charges of Obama administration infiltration of Donald Trump’s campaign as paranoid fantasy. Defenders of the Obama intelligence and law enforcement apparat have had to fall back on the argument that this infiltration was for Trump’s — and the nation’s — own good.

It’s an argument that evidently didn’t occur to Richard Nixon’s defenders when it became clear that Nixon operatives had burglarized and wiretapped the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in June 1972.

Until 2016, just about everyone agreed that it was a bad thing for government intelligence or law enforcement agencies to spy — er, use informants — on a political campaign, especially one of the opposition party. Liberals were especially suspicious of the FBI and the CIA. Nowadays they say that anyone questioning their good faith is unpatriotic.

The crime at the root of Watergate was an attempt at surveillance of the DNC after George McGovern seemed about to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, just as the government misconduct in Russiagate was an attempt at surveillance of the Republican Party’s national campaign after Trump clinched its nomination.

In both cases, the incumbent administration regarded the opposition’s unorthodox nominee as undermining the nation’s long-standing foreign policy and therefore dangerous to the country. McGovern renounced the Democrats’ traditional Cold War policy. Trump expressed skepticism about George W. Bush and Obama administration policies on NATO, Mexico, Iran and (forgetting Barack Obama’s ridicule of Mitt Romney on the subject) Russia.

Yep. The thing is, why spy on Trump when everybody expected Hillary to win? I think the answer is that they wanted to gather dirt they could use to destroy him and discredit his supporters after the election was over. See this, for example:

So I think it wasn’t so much about winning an election through dirty tricks, but about something even dirtier, looking for a way to prosecute and bankrupt Trump after he lost, as a warning to others. An awful lot of people involved in this should wind up in jail, disbarred, and unemployed.

LIVE FIRE STINGER: A Marine fires a Stinger missile at Yuma Proving Grounds, Arizona.

THIS IS CNN: CNN Contributor Dean Obeidallah Mistakes U.S. Military Uniform for ‘Nazi Outfit.’