DON SURBER: CBS interview with Barr shows Comey and McCabe may be targets.

THE PERILS OF PROXY WAR: The StrategyTalk podcast discusses Iranian proxy warfare and the downside Tehran now confronts. While you’re at it, subscribe to StrategyTalk.

RELATED: Iran’s proxy armies become a regime liability.

LOADING PARATROOPERS: 173rd Airborne Brigade paratroopers prepare to board a USAF C-130 Hercules at Villafranca Air Base, Italy.

ROGER KIMBALL: PC insanity may mean the end of American universities. “The economist Herb Stein once observed that what cannot go one forever, won’t. In the coming decade, we will see many so-called liberal-arts college close their doors. We will also see more alternatives to traditional colleges. Many of these will be on-line. Some will be local, ad hoc ventures. All will be rebelling against the poisonous hand of identity politics. Thoughtful citizens will want to hasten this process.”

WELL, WAR IS A NORMAL RESPONSE TO BEING ATTACKED: War Drums: 64% back US military action if Iran attacks.

BIG TECH AS BIG BROTHER: SalesForce Bans Its Customers From Selling Firearms.

THEY TEND TO TURN OUT BADLY: Green Policies Turned California A Charred Black.

THE HOUSING PRICE OF LEFTISM: Homeless People In Fremont, CA Found Living In Makeshift Tree Houses.

(Classical reference in headline.)

DAVID RIVKIN & ELIZABETH PRICE FOLEY: Congress Can’t Outsource Impeachment: Democrats want to use Mueller’s probe as cover to oust Trump. They need to bring their own facts and charges so the public can hold them accountable.

It’s as if nothing happened. Special counsel Robert Mueller and the Justice Department found no wrongdoing by President Trump, so House Democrats stepped up their calls for impeachment. Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler issued a subpoena for millions of pages of evidence gathered by Mr. Mueller, including grand-jury material, which is secret under the law. When the department didn’t comply, Democrats said there was a “constitutional crisis,” and the committee voted to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt.

Yet if there is a constitutional crisis, its source is the Democrats. They are abusing the powers of investigation and impeachment in an illegitimate effort to unseat a president they despise.

Congressional Democrats claim they have the power to investigate the president to conduct “oversight” and hold him “accountable.” That elides an important constitutional distinction. As the Supreme Court said in Watkins v. U.S. (1957), Congress may “inquire into and publicize corruption, maladministration or inefficiency in agencies of the Government.” Executive departments and agencies are created by Congress and therefore accountable to it. The president, by contrast, is not a creature of lawmakers. He is Congress’s coequal, accountable to Congress only via impeachment.

To commence impeachment, the House has a constitutional obligation to articulate clear evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” A two-year Justice Department investigation did not find that Mr. Trump had committed crimes. On the Russian collusion issue, Mr. Mueller reported that his investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Regarding obstruction of justice, Mr. Mueller “did not draw ultimate conclusions about the President’s conduct,” so the duty to do so fell on his boss, Mr. Barr—who, with senior Justice Department officials, concluded that the evidence was “not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

House Democrats claim they’re entitled to see Mr. Mueller’s underlying materials. But Congress may not use its subpoena power for a prosecutorial do-over. . . . Turnover of prosecutorial materials would allow Congress to hide behind the fact-finding and legal determinations of the other branches, thereby diminishing its own political accountability. Because the nation’s law-enforcement officials have concluded Mr. Trump has not committed any crimes, Democratic representatives cannot legitimately draft articles of impeachment accusing him of criminal conduct involving the same offenses of which he was cleared by the Mueller investigation.

The desire to get rid of Trump through non-electoral means, when a Presidential election looms next year, is literally insane. In the words of Bill Barr:

“One of the ironies today is that people are saying it is President Trump who is shredding our institutions. I really see no evidence of that. From my perspective, the idea of ‘resisting’ a Democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him, and really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president. That’s where the shredding of our norms and institutions is occurring.”

Related: “Once again, people who consider Donald Trump too impulsive, emotional, and vindictive to be President are instead revealing those qualities in themselves, and in the institutions they control and represent. So far, the defining feature of the Trump presidency has been the exposure of how hollow our institutions have become. In trying to delegitimize him, they demonstrate their own illegitimacy.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, KURT SCHLICHTER EDITION: Students, Here’s A Plan To Solve Your Debt Problem (You Won’t Like It).

HURRAY FOR TEXAS: First rare earth processing facility outside of China to be built in Texas.

UPDATE: From the comments:

8 hours ago

OPEC: “We have the world in our grasp with our control of OIL!”
Texas: “Hey look at this basin chock full of oil gas we just happen to have here”

China: “We will size control of the world by limiting these RARE EARTHS we are in control of!”
Texas: “Well shucks, turns out all our least desirable dirt is just full of those Rare Earth things!”

Come on Texas, leave a little money for the rest of the U.S.!

Heh.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: It seems like many people on the right do not understand the concept of a political battle. The left understands it. That is why when they lose a battle, they just regroup and try again and again and again until they win. The best defense is a good offense.

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Plus, deals on Kitchen Utensils and Gadgets.

HE’S RIGHT: Barr: “Resisting A Democratically Elected President” Is Destroying Our Norms And Institutions, Not Trump.

In an interview aired Friday on “CBS This Morning,” Attorney General William Barr explains why he opened an investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation. He doesn’t say what the evidence is, but Barr tells CBS News legal correspondent Jan Crawford that there is evidence that makes him believe senior government officials may have acted improperly to authorize surveillance of President Trump’s 2016 campaign. He says that led to “spying” on the campaign.

He said the hyper-politicized nature of politics today is a danger to longstanding institutions and he took the job of attorney general because he is at the end of his career. . . .

“One of the ironies today is that people are saying it is President Trump who is shredding our institutions. I really see no evidence of that. From my perspective, the idea of ‘resisting’ a Democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him, and really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president. That’s where the shredding of our norms and institutions is occurring,” Barr said.

Indeed.

HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN: “The Clintons don’t even have enough juice to draw many protesters anymore.”

IT’S WHO HE IS, IT’S WHAT HE DOES: Barack Obama Is Lying about America’s Gun Laws Again. Here’s what Obama said: “Gun laws in the United States don’t make much sense. Anybody can buy any weapon, anytime without, you know, without much if any regulation. They can buy over the Internet. They can buy machine guns.” If only that were true. . .

GOOD: Trump to Award Economist Arthur Laffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

FACEBOOK SUCKS: Zuckerberg security chief placed on leave amid racism investigation.

OPEN THREAD: Party like it’s Friday night . . . er, because it’s Friday night.

BRITAIN: Trump Comes Close to Endorsing Boris Johnson.

SPACE: Northrop Grumman Test-Fires New Heavy-Lift OmegA Rocket Stage for 1st Time.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “I’m amused by people who make a living disclosing classified information including the names of intelligence operative wringing their hands about whether I can handle classified information…. Sometimes people can convince themselves that what they’re doing is in the higher interest, the better good. They don’t realize that what they’re doing is really antithetical to the democratic system that we have. They start viewing themselves as the guardians of the people that are more informed and insensitive than everybody else. They can– in their own mind, they can have those kinds of motives. And sometimes they can look at evidence and facts through a biased prism that they themselves don’t realize.

—Attorney General William Barr, in an extended interview with CBS’s Jan Crawford.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Yes, food and medication can cause false positives on drug tests.