OUT: DON’T BE EVIL. IN: HEY, BEING EVIL’S KINDA FUN! The Google Blacklisting of the American Spectator.. “Apparently Google wants to protect the American people from our polysyllaborated words and occasional long sentences. and in the course of doing so, they lied to Congress. And we may be looking into them in the near future.”

Plus: “Mr. Pichai looked a congressional committee in the eye and insisted that ‘we don’t manually intervene on any particular search result’ — while the Daily Caller revelations revealed that ‘Google does manipulate its search results manually, contrary to the company’s official denials, documents obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller indicate.’ There is a name for doing that. It’s called lying to Congress. A federal crime with jail time attached.”

BILL GERTZ: China Using OPM Records for Spying.

China is mining intelligence from an estimated 23 million records of American federal workers, including intelligence and security personnel, stolen in cyberattacks against the Office of Personnel Management, according to a member of Congress.

Rep. Chris Stewart (R., Utah) said the Chinese are easily gaining information from the stolen records.

“They can run through those 23 million names in a heartbeat and connect dots in a heartbeat,” Stewart said during remarks to a meeting of the Committee on the Present Danger: China.

“Have we seen evidence that they’ve done that? Absolutely,” said Stewart, a former Air Force B-1 bomber pilot who is currently a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

He declined to provide further details.

The OPM hack was considered one of the most damaging breaches of personnel security for the U.S. government ever. The operation by China took place in 2014 and was discovered in June 2015. China’s role was kept secret during the Barack Obama administration.

Thanks, Obama.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Federal $30,000 scholarships granted to zero self-described conservatives in 2018: Program is billed as nonpartisan but stats show otherwise.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: There was spying and much, much more. “Yesterday, an exchange between Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and AG William Barr during a Senate Appropriations hearing tore the space-time continuum for the institutional left. What appeared to careful observers of the Trump-RUSSIA collusion fable as a simple statement of fact, was an earth-shattering, scandalous, shocking blasphemy to those invested and implicated in the greatest political scandal in American history.”

THIS IS PROBABLY A LOW-END ESTIMATE: U.S. Prisoners Have Lost a Combined 20,000 Years of Life to False Convictions.

EVERYTHING IS FINE AT HARVARD: Harvard Sophomore Arrested for Assaulting Tutor, Two HUPD Officers.

GOOD: RNC, freed from consent-decree limits, goes on ballot security offensive.

A federal court consent decree, ended last year, had prohibited the RNC from engaging in ballot security activities for nearly 40 years. The aggressive new step, Fox News is told, is meant to level the playing field with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) as close elections increasingly become litigious and, in turn, bring discord, division and fiery talking points.

In Georgia, for example, defeated Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has claimed democracy “failed” in that contest, though she lost by more than 50,000 votes and had previously criticized President Trump for suggesting he would not accept an unfavorable election outcome.

And as Senate and gubernatorial races in Florida headed to a prolonged, flawed and confusing recount process last year, Republicans warned that a swarm of Democratic lawyers were descending on the state in a deliberate effort to “steal the election.” In Texas, there were allegations on noncitizen voting.

In California, where Republicans suffered major defeats in the fall, Democrats changed the law to permit “ballot harvesting” — letting campaign operatives take residents’ ballots to the polls on their behalf. And in North Carolina, a new election is scheduled in a race that was initially won by a Republican, but that an investigation found to be marked by fraud.

The Republicans need to play just as hard at this as the Democrats always have.

ON THE CONLAWPROF EMAIL LIST, which I’m no longer on, a professor asks where you’d put Trump on a list of world leaders. The professor is generous enough to put Trump ahead of Stalin, but not much else. Seth Barrett Tillman replies:

Professor ZZZ asks: “[W]here [would] you put Trump?”

No new, major land war(s) in Asia—so Trump is ahead of LBJ.

No missile crisis risking an exchange of nuclear weapons with a superpower—so Trump is ahead of JFK.

No wars of national conquest—so Trump is ahead of Polk (Texas) and McKinley (Philippines, Cuba).

No move to war after foreign power made full, reasonable efforts to amicably settle reasons for dispute—so Trump is ahead of Madison (War of 1812). Under Madison, we burned down the capital of British North America (York/Toronto), and they returned the favor in Washington. So Trump beats Madison.

No wars against native American tribes—so Trump is ahead of [fill in the blank—many such presidents could be listed here].

No wars based on poor intelligence or to prop up foreign absolute monarchies—so Trump is ahead of both Bush I and Bush II.

Trump has not interned 100,000s of US citizens based on race—so Trump is ahead of FDR.

Trump has not allowed a U.S. state or territory to go into civil war and then allow its government to be hijacked by the brigands who engineered the civil war—so Trump is ahead of Buchanan (Bleeding Kansas).

I still don’t know why President Clinton blew up an aspirin factory or why Secretary Clinton permitted NATO forces and materiel to blow up Libya—so Trump probably comes out ahead of both of them too.

Trump is ahead of Woodrow Wilson: World War I, and! his resegregation of the federal civil service. I grant you that being ahead of Wilson is not saying much…but then, the nation survived Wilson, and no one today thinks of Wilson as having lowered the bar vis-a-vis future presidents. Professor ZZZ seems to be worried about this. He wrote: “Having a POTUS so publicly awful along those lines lowers the horrible bar so dramatically that we will pay for years to come.” Really?—Will we pay for it in years to come, or is this just a shabby slippery slope-type argument?

I cannot say I see much sense in Professor ZZZ’s references to Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn’s permanent claim to fame is his association with McCarthy and aggressive anticommunism. Trump, by contrast, has been criticized for being too close to Putin. It is not exactly the same; actually, the two are not alike at all.

If words and pretty speeches are the measure of a president, then Trump comes up short. The question is whether that is the correct standard for measuring presidents in a dangerous world.

No, but words and pretty speeches are what academics are capable of evaluating.

THOSE AREN’T COVERED NOW: Bernie Sanders unveils Medicare for All proposal, suggests role of health care insurers would be reduced to ‘nose jobs.’

The move reopens the debate over his call to eliminate private health insurance and highlights Democratic presidential candidates’ disparate visions for the long-term future of health care. President Trump and Republicans have slammed the “Medicare for All” plan and say the costs are extraordinary.

Four of Sanders’ opponents in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination are co-sponsoring his universal health care plan in the Senate. They include New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, California Sen. Kamala Harris, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

The plan, Sanders told CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe, “guarantees, like every other major country on Earth, health care to every man, woman and child in this country.”

He added that Medicare for All would “get rid of insurance companies and drug companies making billions of dollars in profit every single year.”

Sanders, a self-proclaimed Democratic socialist, says his health care proposal isn’t socialism.

That’s right. It’s more like fascism.

WHEN YOU IMPORT A LOT OF ANTI-SEMITES, YOU WIND UP WITH MORE ANTI-SEMITISM: Of Ilhan Omar, Anti-Semitism, and America.

American Jews have instinctively identified with these refugees, because they see them as like their ancestors who fled to America, but in fact these refugees have more in common with the people their ancestors were fleeing.

HARSH BUT FAIR:

THERE SEEM TO BE A LOT OF LAUGHABLE DEMOCRATS LATELY: Bolton Can’t Stop Laughing at Gillibrand’s Nuclear Weapon Gaffe.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: Barr is right to review why Trump-Russia investigation began.

UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATORS NEED TO START IGNORING “STUDENT OUTRAGE.” IT’S BASICALLY JUST A FORM OF ENTITLED BULLYING. Campus Police Chief Put On Leave After Student Outrage For Liking NRA And Trump Tweets.

OK: Iran Carrier Begins Direct Flights to Venezuela.

Iran’s official IRNA news agency says Mahan airline’s first flight to Venezuela left Tehran on Monday carrying a Foreign Ministry delegation.

The United States blacklisted Mahan in 2011 after accusing it of providing support to the Quds Force, an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The carrier recently halted flights to Germany and France due to U.S. sanctions over its alleged military transport flights to Syria, where Iran supports President Bashar Assad’s forces.

I’m thinking Venezuela isn’t about to see a huge influx of Iranian tourist dollars.

IT’S THE PULITZER EQUIVALENT OF YASSER ARAFAT’S NOBEL PEACE PRIZE: Tom Kuntz: Why Last Year’s Trump-Russia Pulitzer Was No Prize. But giving each other awards for substandard performance is one of our ruling class’s favorite pastimes.

“This work is not comparable to earlier Pulitzer scandals that still haunt the Times and Post. But in a way, a lot of it is worse.”

HMM: Julian Assange Arrested. “It’ll be interesting to test US ability to apply the Espionage Act to Assange, who isn’t a US citizen and who has no duty to safeguard our secrets. Glenn Greenwald and others have contended that Wikileaks is essentially a press organization and therefore protected under the First Amendment. Certainly, the Pentagon Papers and other cases have gone the way of American news organizations who have published classified documents. I maintain that Wikileaks’ suborning of the illegal transfer of information and active ties with the Russian government make them more akin to a foreign intelligence operation than a newspaper.”

Richard Fernandez: “Does this trigger a revenge data dump? Gentlemen, start your servers.”

Plus: “It had to end this way and he had to know it would. So if he couldn’t cut a deal all this time with the Man, what was his Plan B?”

TELL ME SOMETHING GOOD: Obama had it right — a circular firing squad is on the way.

But what have swing voters been hearing from Democrats, since switching their votes in the midterms over to the Dems? Socialism, anti-Semitism, resistance, more investigations. Not exactly a platform for re-election.

And the congressional Socialists led by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez are even threatening mainstream Democrats with primaries. Yup, replacing moderates in swing districts with left-wing democratic socialists is surely the way to expand the majority. Suburbanites are clamoring for them. Higher taxes is just what hard-pressed suburban voters with lots of responsibilities are seeking.

The public face of the party today is far removed from what created a solid group of freshmen in suburban districts. And they have been bombarded with a lot more than just slogans. Ocasio-Cortez, who pulled down about 15,000 votes in a Democratic primary in a safe district, is world-renowned now for the Green New Deal — just a little program to nationalize the energy industry while promising guaranteed incomes for all; its price tag has been put at $93 trillion. It’s Ocasio-Cortez who drove Amazon out of New York, not understanding that the tax breaks for the company would have come from 10 times the tax revenue that the new jobs would have created, or that their absence blows a $27 billion hole in future budgets. Comically, she thought you could spend the $3 billion on other things.

The other new face of the party has been Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who spread her anti-Israel positions by expressing anti-Semitic tropes about how Jews in America have divided loyalties and how Jews have bought support for Israel with “Benjamins.” Despite most voters believing Omar should be off the House Foreign Affairs Committee with these views, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has kept her on this prestigious assignment while passing over moderates.

Party on.

WELL, YES: The Very Strong Case For An Asteroid Defense System.

HE WAS SPEAKING ABOUT THE FIRST AMENDMENT: Activists Disrupt Law Professor’s Talk at the University of Chicago. People who disrupt talks shouldn’t be issued “trespass warnings” and told to leave. They should be arrested on the spot.

CYBERSECURITY: Security analyst finds fake cell carrier apps are tracking iPhone location and listening in on phone calls.

GOOD LORD: Transgender Drugs Given to My Cancer-Stricken Son Are ‘Hastening His Demise.’