"The Democrats' talk of impeachment is partly about 2020, but it's mainly about 2016, and their adolescent psychic need to believe that the presidential election that brought Donald Trump to the White House was illegitimate rather than an opportunity they simply blew. The theory that the election was thrown by Russian trolls posting dank memes on Twitter is hard to take seriously. If we had a list of every voter whose mind was changed in 2016 by an anonymous social-media account with a Cyrillic bio, then disenfranchising those voters would be a good start on improving things for 2020. Alas and alack, we don't do that sort of thing. But the argument that bot-executed shenanigans nullified democracy in 2016 amounts to the Democrats protesting: 'These trolls robbed us of the support of our natural base: morons!'

"There's no quality control in social media -- and less quality control in ordinary news media than there used to be. Lies, distortions, exaggerations, and pure inventions are going to be out there in the intellectual marketplace, whether they originate in Moscow or in Brooklyn. That's a real problem, but it doesn't invalidate the outcome of the 2016 election.

"There are many reasons to oppose an impeachment at this time: One is that no one has made a very persuasive case for one, all of the Democrats' arguments up to this point having been transparently pretextual. Another is that the Republican majority in the Senate all but ensures that the process would be purely symbolic, an exercise in chaos for pleasure's sake. A third is that it normalizes the invocation of a procedure that should be reserved for extraordinary circumstances in the service of ordinary short-term partisan interests. For comparison, consider that there was no serious impeachment talk when Barack Obama authorized the assassination of U.S. citizens without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress -- or when he took executive actions that he himself had described as unconstitutional only months before. That suggests a pretty high standard -- and if 'I think that guy is a fink!' ends up being a common rationale for impeachment, then you'd better make your peace with anarchy, because Washington is going to be a ghost town.

"But the most important reason for forbearance here is that a political judgment already has been rendered on Donald Trump's character -- and, if you don't like how that came out, there's another chance right around the corner."

"Text messages between former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page indicate they discussed using briefings to the Trump team after the 2016 election to identify people they could 'develop for potential relationships,' track lines of questioning and 'assess' changes in 'demeanor' -- language one GOP lawmaker called 'more evidence' of irregular conduct in the original Russia probe.

"Fox News has learned the texts, initially released in 2018 by a Senate committee, are under renewed scrutiny, with GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley and Homeland Security Committee chair Ron Johnson sending a letter Thursday night to Attorney General Bill Barr pushing for more information on the matter.

"'Any improper FBI surveillance activities that were conducted before or after the 2016 election must be brought to light and properly addressed,' the senators wrote.

"President Trump, speaking to Fox News' 'Hannity' Thursday night, responded to this report by unloading on Strzok and Page.

"'They were trying to infiltrate the administration,' Trump told Sean Hannity. 'Really, it's a coup. It's spying. It's hard to believe in this country we would have had that.' Trump called the news 'very disconcerting,' and emphasized that the Justice Department's watchdog previously faulted Strzok's communications with Page."

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"SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook said on Wednesday that it expected to be fined up to $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations. The penalty would be a record by the agency against a technology company and a sign that the United States was willing to punish big tech companies.

The social network disclosed the amount in its quarterly financial results, saying it estimated a one-time charge of $3 billion to $5 billion in connection with an 'ongoing inquiry' by the F.T.C. Facebook added that 'the matter remains unresolved, and there can be no assurance as to the timing or the terms of any final outcome.'

Facebook has been in negotiations with the regulator for months over a financial penalty for claims that the company violated a 2011 privacy consent decree. That year, the social network promised a series of measures to protect its users' privacy after an investigation found that its handling of data had harmed consumers.

The F.T.C. opened a new investigation last year after Facebook came under fire again. This time, the company was accused of not protecting its users' data from being harvested without their consent by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm that was building voter profiles for the Trump campaign. Facebook also suffered a data breach that exposed the personal information of nearly 50 million users."

"President Donald Trump opened a new flank in his battle against illegal immigration on Monday when he ordered his administration to crack down on 'visa overstays' -- foreigners who legally enter the country but remain in the U.S. after their visas expire.

"The president signed a memorandum ordering the secretary of state and the secretary of homeland security to submit plans within four months to crack down on overstays, such as punishing countries whose citizens have high rates of overstays and requiring foreign travelers to post 'admission bonds' that would be repaid once they leave the country.

"The order is the latest example of Trump's renewed push on immigration, following a shakeup of the Department of Homeland Security and his increasing frustration with the rising number of Central American migrants entering the country.

"Members of both parties have long complained that overstays are just as problematic as undocumented immigrants who cross the southern border. More than 1.2 million foreigners overstayed their visas from 2016 to 2017, according to the most recent Homeland Security data."

"The credibility of the Democratic Party is now at issue.

"If Mueller could not find collusion, what reason is there to believe Rep. Jerry Nadler's judiciary committee will find it, and then convince the country that they have discovered what ex-FBI Director Mueller could not.

"With conspiracy and collusion off the table, and Mueller saying the case for obstruction is unproven, the renewed attack on Trump takes on the aspect of a naked and desperate 'deep state'-media coup against a president they fear they cannot defeat at the ballot box."

"'The people want someone to articulate their rage for them,' says the fictional network programmer played by Faye Dunaway in the 1976 movie classic Network. She then unleashes on audiences a newscaster named Howard Beale, who electrifies the country with his manta 'I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore.'

"Increasingly, voters are plumping for reality-TV stars to express their anger and seek solutions to intractable problems. Donald Trump, who used his NBC show The Apprentice to catapult himself into the White House, is the most obvious example. But look at Ukraine: This nation of 44 million people just saw a comedian who plays a fictional Ukrainian president on TV win 73 percent of the vote and become, as of today, the president-elect."

Read entire article here.

Happy Easter to you, your family and friends!

"The clever people in the Democratic party have turned their attention to Senator Bernie Sanders, the creepy Brooklyn red who for some reason represents Vermont in the Senate, functionally as a member of the Democratic party, an equally creepy political organization to which he does not belong but whose presidential nomination he nonetheless is seeking a second time.

"Stop Sanders! is the cry of the moment from Cambridge, Mass., to Tiburon, Calif., and everywhere that clever Democrats gather. The worry is that Senator Sanders's grumpy-Muppet shtick will not discreetly charm the bourgeoisie, that his disheveled populism and his unmade bed of a mind will not be a smash hit with well-heeled swing voters in the moneyed suburbs of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida -- which, the clever people inform us, is where the real action is going to be in 2020. They aren't out there screaming 'A vote for Sanders is a vote for Trump!' just yet, but they are scheming behind the scenes, and the moneymen of the party already are so alarmed that they are making approximately the same sound that Donald Sutherland makes at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg oversaw plans to consolidate the social network's power and control competitors by treating its users' data as a bargaining chip, while publicly proclaiming to be protecting that data, according to about 4,000 pages of leaked company documents largely spanning 2011 to 2015 and obtained by NBC News.

"The documents, which include emails, webchats, presentations, spreadsheets and meeting summaries, show how Zuckerberg, along with his board and management team, found ways to tap Facebook's trove of user data -- including information about friends, relationships and photos -- as leverage over companies it partnered with.

"In some cases, Facebook would reward favored companies by giving them access to the data of its users. In other cases, it would deny user-data access to rival companies or apps."

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"There is no doubt that the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign. As Barr made clear, the real question is: What predicated the spying? Was there a valid reason for it, strong enough to overcome our norm against political spying? Or was it done rashly? Was a politically motivated decision made to use highly intrusive investigative tactics when a more measured response would have sufficed, such as a 'defensive briefing' that would have warned the Trump campaign of possible Russian infiltration?

"Last year, when the 'spy' games got underway, James Clapper, Obama's director of national intelligence, conceded that, yes, the FBI did run an informant -- 'spy' is such an icky word -- at Trump campaign officials; but, we were told, this was merely to investigate Russia. Cross Clapper's heart, it had nothing to do with the Trump campaign. No, no, no. Indeed, the Obama administration only used an informant because -- bet you didn't know this -- doing so is the most benign, least intrusive mode of conducting an investigation. ...

"The fact that spying had occurred was too clear for credible denial. The retort, then, was misdirection: There had been no spying on Donald Trump or his campaign; just on a few potential bad actors in the campaign's orbit.

"It was nonsense then, and it is nonsense now."

Read entire article here.