IT ISN’T JUST ABOUT PRIVACY: Please break up Facebook, cofounder asks regulators.

While consumers and experts alike wonder if Facebook’s size and outsized global market power are what allow it to play fast and loose with user data and privacy, Wu and Hemphill argue a much more basic case of good old-fashioned unfair anticompetitive behavior.

Through “serial defensive acquisitions,” they say, Facebook has prevented competitors from entering the marketplace and cut off innovation before it can flourish.

In other words, when a small company looks promising, Facebook leaps in and snaps it up, eliminating competition and reaping profit from other developers’ innovations.

I’ve come around to Paul Romer’s idea for a tax on targeted advertising. Here’s a FAQ for his proposal.

FLASHBACK: NeighborhoodScout’s Most Dangerous Cities – 2019.

Baltimore is #6, and there isn’t a city or town on the list with a Republican mayor in the top (?) ten.

THERE’S A SHORTAGE OF KULAKS, TROTSKYITES, COUNTERREVOLUTIONARIES, AND JEWS: Maduro spends millions to rewrite history — and wrongly blames Trump for Venezuela’s collapse.

Amid the worst humanitarian crisis in Latin America’s recent history — with widespread shortages of food and medicines, and millions fleeing the country — Venezuela’s dictatorship is hosting an international meeting of radical leftist movements “to show the achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution.”

This is not a joke.

Well…

DON’T TELL HIM; YOU’LL RUIN IT: Nadler’s Trump Hunt Is Dead and He’s the Only One Who Doesn’t Know.

BREAKING: Supreme Court Says Trump Can Proceed With Plan to Spend Military Funds for Border Wall Construction.

PLUS: Trump reaches ‘landmark’ immigration deal with Guatemala.

Yuge day for POTUS.

TYLER O’NEIL: Feminist Says ‘Twitter Is in the Business of Protecting [Trans] Predators and Silencing Women.’

OH: Washington Post Fact Checks Only Republicans During Mueller Hearings.

DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: Ilhan Omar made false, racist claim about killings. “The Post’s Glenn Kessler should have given four pinocchios to Ilhan Omar, not to Marco Rubio.”

SOMEBODY HAD SOME INSIDER KNOWLEDGE: Armed robbers steal at least $30 million of gold and precious metals in Sao Paulo airport heist.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: It Can’t Be Friday Without Florida Man. “In the #MeToo era, it’s just good legal sense to get written consent before smashing a lemon cream cake in someone’s face.”

Indeed.

WAPO: House Dems Grudgingly Admit Mueller Stunt Backfired — Big Time.

Safe to click — goes to Ed Morrissey, not WaPo.

MIGHT AS WELL START SMOKING AGAIN AND HAVE LOTS OF UNPROTECTED SEX: We don’t have 12 years to save the climate. We have 14 months.

Previously:

Where’s the press after a century of bad climate predictions?

Al Gore’s 10 Global Warming Predictions, 13 Years Later — None Happened!

Climate Alarmists Have Been Wrong About Virtually Everything.

Yeah, but this time…

WELL, GOOD: New PM Boris Johnson supports calls for a nuclear renaissance. “I believe passionately that nuclear must be part of our energy mix and she is right to campaign for it and it will help us to meet our carbon targets.”

Johnson is much more serious about carbon emissions than most any American “environmentalist.”

AND THEN SOME PEOPLE DID SOME THINGS: Rashida Tlaib: ‘We Didn’t Have ICE Years Ago Before 9/11 … We Were Fine.’

HEH: RBG Praises Kavanaugh, ThinkProgress Writer Has a Meltdown.

EMBRACE THE HEALING POWER OF “AND”: Is the United Nations a Circus? Or an Insane Asylum?

I would have gone with “treacherous hive of scum and villainy.”

HMM: Mueller collapse raises more questions.

The fallout from Wednesday’s disastrous performance by Robert Mueller in the Capitol includes a nearly 450-page report now in question. We don’t know who wrote it. We don’t know who really ran the investigation. We do know that several investigators on Mueller’s team were rabidly anti-Trump and pro-Hillary Clinton.

In fact, the Justice Department’s voluminous Inspector General report featured the political musings of the investigators. The Office of Inspector General, “Discovered text messages and instant messages between some FBI employees on the investigative team, conducted using FBI mobile devices and computers, that expressed statements of hostility toward then candidate Donald Trump and statements of support for then candidate Clinton.”

Members of the team attended Clinton events, donated to her campaign and even legally represented some of her associates.

Mueller himself bragged about his disinterest concerning such matters at the hearing Wednesday. “We strove to hire those individuals that could do the job,” he declared. “I’ve been in this business for almost twenty-five years and in those twenty-five years I have not had occasion once to ask somebody about their political affiliation. It is not done. What I care about is the capability of the individual to do the job and do the job quickly and seriously and with integrity.”

Two years for a report Mueller doesn’t seem to have read (much less written), put together by people whose partisanship was glaring… that’s a triple-fail on a job that was supposed to have been done “quickly and seriously and with integrity.”

And do read the whole thing.

SO WERE DEMOCRATS: Republicans aware of Mueller ‘frailty’ ahead of hearing.

“There were some House Republicans in our prep sessions patting themselves on the back about that and feeling optimistic about assertions he might not be all there,” the Florida Republican told The Washington Times.

He said he hadn’t believed those colleagues and had warned to expect a razor-sharp Mueller, but “it turned out the rumors we’ve been hearing about his condition seemed accurate.”

“I told my colleagues to expect him to be like a wolverine and they better know every chapter and verse and citation for every question,” he said.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, who wasn’t part of the questioning of Mr. Mueller, nonetheless said he was aware of Mr. Mueller’s frailty ahead of the hearing.

“I know he’s in a weakened condition,” the South Carolina Republican told The Times.

He said the Democrats never should have pressured Mr. Mueller to testify, given “his condition.”

What a nice sendoff Mueller received from House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Democrats Turn to Conspiracy Theories for Dud Mueller Performance. “It’s not out-of-character for these lefties to buy into conspiracy theories, we are still living among corporate media and political partisans that maintain President Trump is an agent of RUSSIA. Now comes poor Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.). He says that someone ‘got to’ Robert Mueller, who bombed in his ‘one night only’ performance of the Democrats’ stage production of ‘The Mueller Report: Orange Man Forever Bad’.”

LOVELY: Statues lowered into ocean for veterans underwater dive memorial.

WELL, THAT’S A TAKE: National Health Care Is Free.

If we had a national health care plan today, we would spend about . . . $3.8 trillion. The only difference would be in how we pay it. We could make employers pay a head tax. We could take employers out of the picture altogether and pay for it via income tax or a VAT or a payroll tax. Or we could invent some insane Rube Goldberg system of raising the money, which is probably what would happen in real life.

There are, of course, optimists out there who think that national health care would save us money. These people are dreamers. You see, the vast bulk of health care spending goes to providers. This means that the only way to reduce spending is to pay doctors less, pay nurses less, pay drug companies less, and pay device manufacturers less. This will not happen, and anyone who’s serious about national health care would be insane to try. Why put up an enormous barrier to success, after all?

The one thing we probably could do is get rid of insurance companies, which would save a bit of money—probably about enough to make up for the cost of adding the remaining uninsured to the system. So in the end it comes out even after all.

I guess what Kevin Drum is saying here then that it’s somehow better — and cost-free! — if the money travels through Washington on its way from patient to provider.

VIDEO FLASHBACK: Boris Johnson explains how to speak like Winston Churchill.

Under six minutes and a joy to watch.

WELL, VOX: The left-wing outlet Vox’s defamation of a University of Pennsylvania law professor is lazy and dangerous, and they should apologize.

KRUISER: Too Rich: Bernie Is Complaining About Bias at MSNBC.

HMM: Once A Democratic Bastion, Minnesota Trends Red Heading Into 2020. “When it comes to elections, swing states are always crucial, but in 2020, this blue state could be turning red for Trump.”

Its 10 electoral votes alone could offset a possible Rust Belt loss. The mainstream media has barely covered Trump’s remarkable gains in Minnesota, a state that historically is the bluest of the blue.

How blue? Even during the Reagan landslide victories of 1980 and 1984, the Gopher State remained a bastion of New Deal liberalism and economic populism. In fact, the last time the GOP captured Minnesota was during Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972, nearly a half-century ago.

Yet Trump, with his own brand of populism, nearly captured the state in 2016. He carried 78 of the state’s 87 counties, double the number carried by President Barack Obama in 2012. Overall, the margin between Trump and Hillary Clinton was a mere 1.5 percent — just 44,000 votes — the weakest Democratic tilt in decades.

In fact, Trump might well have won Minnesota in 2016 had he made the state more of a priority. On the advice of the GOP mainstream, which had watched Mitt Romney make a foolhardy play for Minnesota in 2012, Trump didn’t visit the state until the waning days of the campaign, a decision he came to regret. “One more big rally, and we would have won,” he lamented later.

Trump’s taking no chances this time.

He isn’t getting cocky.