CHANGE: FTC considering taking ‘direct aim’ at Mark Zuckerberg as it investigates Facebook privacy lapses.

According to a report from The Washington Post, federal regulators are investigating Zuckerberg’s past statements on privacy and considering holding him responsible for Facebook’s numerous privacy lapses. According to the report, FTC veterans have encouraged investigators to “take direct aim at Zuckerberg” and put him under additional federal oversight.

The FTC has also considered requiring Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives “to certify the company’s privacy practices periodically to the board of directors.”

In past federal investigations, Zuckerberg has been spared, with documents seen by The Washington Post suggesting the FTC had considered, then backed down from specifically targeting Zuckerberg in the 2011 settlement.

FLASHBACK: Facebook shareholders are getting fed up with Zuckerberg but can’t do anything about him.

Ask and ye shall receive?

RICK MORAN: Democratic Divide on Impeachment Does Not Bode Well for 2020.

It is impeachment that will reveal where the hearts of the Democratic base truly are. Pelosi and Schumer have no illusions about the success of an impeachment effort, knowing that even if the House impeaches Trump, there is zero chance in the Senate for Democrats to get the 65 votes necessary to remove the president. They also know that an unsuccessful impeachment effort in a presidential election year is a crap shoot. It might energize their rabid base but turn off the rest of the country.

But Pelosi and Schumer aren’t exercising much control. They are passengers on the impeachment bandwagon and despite a lack of agreement among Democrats over whether what Trump did that was impeachable, the effort to remove Trump is picking up steam.

The Girondists always lose out to the Montagnards eventually, to coin an Instaphrase.

SEEN ON TWITTER:

Heh™ and Indeed™.

Our intelligence community certainly has some ‘splainin to do, but this is the least of it.

I BLOW THROUGH MY DATA CAPS EVEN WITHOUT THIS: Humans May Have Search Engine Tech in Our Brains ‘Within Decades.’

DAVID SOLWAY: Life in the Biodome: Capitalism for All Its Shortcomings Has Found a Way to Work with Human Nature. “I could not help reflecting that the biodome was in a certain sense a metaphorical surrogate for Western civilization, evolving through a long history of trial and error into a comparative haven for its cultural and national species. It provided a favorable environment for human flourishing, bestowing a degree of shelter, sustenance, leisure and freedom never before seen for those who would otherwise have found themselves in a state of nature where life, as Thomas Hobbes famously wrote in Leviathan, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The Greeks gave us the idea of the sovereign human mind and the Judeo-Christian nexus bequeathed the idea of the infinitely precious human soul. These gifts were the materials from which the biodome of the West was gradually assembled.”

Interesting piece, well worth your time.

I’ve always thought of capitalism as the non-system system, where people have enough political and economic elbow room to set up their own little systems inside of it.

MARK LEVIN: Volume 2 of the Mueller report is a 200-page op-ed that should never have been written.

Video at the link.

IF PUSHED, I BET SHE DOESN’T THINK MUCH OF FIRST AMENDMENT PROTECTIONS, EITHER: Writer Thinks Our Rights Aren’t Good Reasons To Oppose Gun Laws.

TOLERANCE ON CAMPUS: Two pro-Kavanaugh females accused of supporting ‘rapist,’ not allowed to make statement at campus townhall.

STEPHEN KRUISER: Yankees Drop Kate Smith’s Version of ‘God Bless America’ Because People Were Racist in the 1930’s.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED ALL THE BEES HAD DIED ALREADY: 180,000 bees were living on top of Notre Dame when the fire broke out – and they survived.

This is news? Can’t they just fly away?

NOT BUYING THIS STUDY EITHER: Marijuana users less likely to gain weight despite munchies, says Michigan State study.

BYRON YORK: Mueller, Trump, and ‘two years of bullshit.’

At its heart, the Trump-Russia probe was about one question: Did the Trump campaign conspire, coordinate, or collude with Russia to influence the 2016 election? Mueller has concluded that did not happen.

Everything else in the Trump-Russia affair flowed from that one question. Paul Manafort’s shady finances would not have come under investigation were it not for that question. Carter Page would not have been wiretapped were it not for that question. Michael Flynn would not have been interviewed by the FBI were it not for that question. Zillions of hours on cable TV would not have been expended on Trump-Russia were it not for that question. And in the largest sense, there would have been no Mueller investigation were it not for that question.

And now Mueller has determined there was no collusion. Not that there was no criminal collusion. Or no prove-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt collusion. Just no collusion. Mueller’s report says it over and over and over again.

Hot take: Putin must have gotten to Mueller, too.

I can has CNN gig?

ANDREW MCCARTHY: Mueller completely dropped the ball with obstruction punt.

There is evidence that cuts sharply against obstruction. The president could have shut down the investigation at any time, but he didn’t. He could have asserted executive privilege to deny the special counsel access to key White House witnesses, such as McGahn. To the contrary, numerous witnesses were made available voluntarily (there was no need to try to subpoena them to the grand jury), and well over a million documents were disclosed, including voluminous notes of meetings between the president and his White House counsel.

Most important, the special counsel found that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that the president’s frustration wasn’t over fear of guilt — the typical motivation for obstruction — but that the investigation was undermining his ability to govern the country. The existence of such a motive is a strong counter to evidence of a corrupt intent, critical because corrupt intent must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt in an obstruction case.

In his report, Mueller didn’t resolve the issue. If he had been satisfied that there was no obstruction crime, he said, he would have so found. He claimed he wasn’t satisfied. Yet he was also not convinced that there was sufficient proof to charge. Therefore, he made no decision, leaving it to Attorney General William Barr to find that there was no obstruction.

This is unbecoming behavior for a prosecutor and an outrageous shifting of the burden of proof.

That was the whole point: In absence of any evidence of criminal wrongdoing, to hang an albatross of uncertainty around Trump’s neck. More than anything it’s an indication of just how desperate the Mueller team was to do something, anything to harm the Administration. The media’s willingness to go along with this obvious charade is just more proof that they’re no longer watchdogs against government overreach, but mere cogs in the Democrat-Media Complex.

RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES: Joe Biden Is Running For President, Will Announce Next Week.

UGH: El Al Flight Attendant Who Contracted Measles Now in a ‘Deep Coma.’

JOHN SOLOMON: Ten post-Mueller questions that could turn the tables on Russia collusion investigators.

The process of meting out accountability has begun.

Horowitz, my sources tell me, has interviewed between 50 and 100 witnesses in his exhaustive probe. Graham and his predecessor as Judiciary chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), laid out the most important investigative issues they saw in a letter last year. This month, former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) sent a letter to DOJ identifying eight potential criminal referrals. His committee last year also released a memo on abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that may have occurred during the Russia probe.

And President Trump reportedly is readying an order to declassify five key buckets of documents on alleged FBI abuses.

My sources agree these 10 questions are the most important to be answered in the forthcoming probes.

Click on over.

YES. It’s time to get the federal government out of education.

OH, CANADA: F-35 or Not: This Country Needs 88 New Fighter Jets Before Its Air Force Falls Apart.

Canada for the third time in a decade is trying to replace its aging F/A-18A/B Hornet fighter jets. With every year the acquisition effort drags on, the condition of the Royal Canadian Air Force’s fast-jet fleet grows direr.

Saab, Airbus, Boeing and Lockheed Martin all are in the running, respectively offering the Gripen, Eurofighter, F/A-18E/F and F-35A. The manufacturers will have until the end of 2019 to submit bids, CBC News reported. But the RCAF hardly can wait.

The RCAF acquired 138 F/A-18A/Bs from McDonnell Douglas starting in 1982. In early 2019, 85 of the original Hornets, all more than 30 years old, comprise Canada’s entire fighter fleet. The Canadian Hornets are unreliable and lack modern systems.

Criminal neglect.

#IGNORE: Russia Truther Eric Swalwell Calls on AG Barr to Resign.

BUT OF COURSE: Venezuela skirts U.S. sanctions by funneling oil sales via Russia.

Under the scheme uncovered by Reuters, Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA has started passing invoices from its oil sales to Rosneft.

The Russian energy giant pays PDVSA immediately at a discount to the sale price – avoiding the usual 30-to-90 day timeframe for completing oil transactions – and collects the full amount later from the buyer, according to the documents and sources.

“PDVSA is delivering its accounts receivable to Rosneft,” said a source at the Venezuelan state firm with knowledge of the deals, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Major energy companies such as India’s Reliance Industries Ltd – PDVSA’s largest cash-paying client – have been asked to participate in the scheme by paying Rosneft for Venezuelan oil, the documents show.

Rosneft, which has heavily invested in Venezuela under President Vladimir Putin, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Venezuela’s oil ministry, its information ministry, which handles media for the government, and PDVSA did not respond to questions.

With the coming flood of exportable oil from Texas, I wonder how much longer it will still make sense to risk end-running the sanctions. Venezuela’s extraction is expensive and increasingly unreliable. The same isn’t true of Texas, or for that matter, most any OPEC state other the Venezuela.

CLAIRE LEHMANN: A College President Stands Up for Academic Freedom.

POLITICO: ‘Game Over’: Republicans Rejoice After Mueller Concludes.

I read the piece — it took three people to write it — and it turns out “Republicans rejoice” is just a variation on “Republicans pounce.”

Saved you a click.

#WALKAWAY: Jews have strong grounds for a new exodus — from the Democratic Party.

It’s not as outlandish as some may think. Just look to how British Jews have handled Jeremy Corbyn, who has brought a once-honorable and philo-Semitic Labour party into league with the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah.

This month, the Jewish Labour Movement passed a no-confidence motion against Corbyn’s leadership. As The Guardian newspaper reported, Labour and Corbyn both “were dealt a blow” when the acting general meeting of the JLM “voted to describe the party as ‘institutionally ­anti-Semitic.’ ”

Sad to say, but the US Democratic Party is sliding toward a similar fate. Soon, “institutionally anti-Semitic” could serve as an apt description for the Democrats, as well. Consider: Just this week, Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in government, sat down with . . . none other than Corbyn.

ALSO: Pelosi defends Omar: ‘No taint’ of anti-Semitism in Democratic Party.

Run, don’t walk.

MUST-SEE TV: Bill Whittle on Notre Dame.