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“An ex-hacker running for national office would have been unimaginable just a few years ago,” Reuters’ Joseph Menn writes this morning. Thanks to Robert “Beto” O’Rourke and his shadowy past in “hactivist” circles, that moment has been thrust upon us. In an interview with Menn, O’Rourke admits to his membership in a notorious hacking collective known as the Cult of the Dead Cow, which created hacking tools targeting Microsoft Windows as well as engaged in political activism through their hacking.

At least for now, everyone seems interested in downplaying O’Rourke’s contributions to the CDC collective. I wonder why …

The hugely influential Cult of the Dead Cow, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, is notorious for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running Microsoft’s Windows. It’s also known for inventing the word “hacktivism” to describe human-rights-driven security work.

Members of the group have protected O’Rourke’s secret for decades, reluctant to compromise his political viability. Now, in a series of interviews, CDC members have acknowledged O’Rourke as one of their own. In all, more than a dozen members of the group agreed to be named for the first time in a book about the hacking group by this reporter that is scheduled to be published in June by Public Affairs. O’Rourke was interviewed early in his run for the Senate.

There is no indication that O’Rourke ever engaged in the edgiest sorts of hacking activity, such as breaking into computers or writing code that enabled others to do so. But his membership in the group could explain his approach to politics better than anything on his resume. His background in hacking circles has repeatedly informed his strategy as he explored and subverted established procedures in technology, the media and government.

“There’s just this profound value in being able to be apart from the system and look at it critically and have fun while you’re doing it,” O’Rourke said. “I think of the Cult of the Dead Cow as a great example of that.”

Former members of the CDC spoke with Menn as well, painting a picture of mostly harmless teenage rebellion. The narrative spun here is more War Games than an online Antifa, and everyone takes care to emphasize that O’Rourke had retired from the group when its more notorious activities took place. Or so they say, anyway; the group has been fiercely protective of O’Rourke, keeping silent about his connection throughout his political career until now.

It’s worth noting, however, that the group committed crimes even in its early days with O’Rourke’s participation. Beto acknowledges, for instance, defrauding the telephone company to keep from paying for its services. Even direct fraud of that kind against the utility itself constitutes a felony if it involves more than $1500 loss, and it’s clearly a felony if they fraudulently used the accounts of others in the scheme. O’Rourke’s predictably fuzzy on those details, although it was also three decades ago. In one incident, the CDC posted instructions on making explosives, which led to an incident in Canada that maimed a teenager.

This is all water long under the bridge, of course. The statutes of limitation ran out decades ago on any of these potential crimes, which is one reason that O’Rourke and his CDC friends can feel at ease discussing them. According to the narrative, O’Rourke gave up his CDC engagement when he went to college, which makes this a part of the teen rebellion at hand in those days, if true. It’s easy to paint O’Rourke as a product of his generation — disaffected, bored, and looking to change the system, man. Menn paints quite the romantic picture of that rebellion, too.

That prompts a very good question. Does an admission of potentially felonious conduct by a politician automatically act as a disqualifier from higher office? Especially when said politician already has another incident of arguably felonious conduct on his public record?  Or will O’Rourke’s history of taking it to the man make him an even bigger darling of the progressive Left regardless of the character questions it might raise?

I know how I’m betting on this. Consider this in the context of Bill Clinton’s draft evasion, Kamala Harris’ marijuana championing, and Donald Trump’s entire pre-political career, and get ready for Betomania 2020.

In 2016, Clint Bolick became an associate justice on the Arizona State Supreme Court, making him one of the most influential—and consequential—libertarians in today's legal world.

That appointment is merely the most recent career highlight for the 61-year-old activist, author, and policy wonk. Bolick worked under Clarence Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the 1980s before moving to the Justice Department. While he was there he published his first book, which argued that the civil rights movement should focus on removing government barriers to economic opportunity.

In 1991, Bolick and Chip Mellor founded the Institute for Justice, the country's premier libertarian public-interest law firm. In 2007, he became vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute, Arizona's leading free-market think tank, where he took on restrictive licensing, zoning, and business regulations—and became a nemesis to Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed "toughest sheriff" America.

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Bolick in Phoenix to talk about his legal philosophy, the politics of immigration, the most interesting case he's encountered on the bench so far, and why he sports a scorpion tattoo on what he calls his "typing finger."

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See what I did there? One of the more accidentally enlightening moments of last week’s circus in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing came during Sheldon Whitehouse’s questioning of Brett Kavanaugh. The Rhode Island Democrat focused like a laser on Kavanaugh’s credibility by grilling him on, er … entries from his high-school yearbook nearly forty years earlier.

That led to this exchange on the word “boofed,” a singular moment in the history of American jurisprudence:

WHITEHOUSE: … Judge, have you — I don’t know if it’s “boufed” or “boofed” — how do you pronounce that?

KAVANAUGH: That refers to flatulence. We were 16.

(LAUGHTER)

WHITEHOUSE: OK. And so when your friend Mark Judge said the same — put the same thing in his yearbook page back to you, he had the same meaning? It was flatulence?

KAVANAUGH: I don’t know what he did, but that’s my recollection. We want to talk about flatulence at age 16 on a yearbook page, I’m — I’m game.

For some reason, Kavanaugh’s critics have latched onto this boyhood slang as a lever by which Kavanaugh can be impeached as a jurist. Writing in today’s Politico, the two co-founders of the anti-Kavanaugh effort Demand Justice have now demanded a specific kind of justice. Brian Fallon and Christopher Kang want an in-depth investigation by the FBI into the meaning of “boofed,” arguing that “small lies matter” when you want to be on the Supreme Court:

As the Federal Bureau of Investigation reopens its background check investigation into Brett Kavanaugh, the scope of its review must go beyond the serious allegations of sexual assault made by Christine Blasey Ford and Debbie Ramirez.

For its investigation into Kavanaugh to be comprehensive, the FBI must also get to the bottom of what “boofing” means.

The term was one of several, raunchy references in Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook. When questioned at last week’s hearing about the exact meaning of these inside jokes, Kavanaugh conveniently had an innocent explanation at the ready for each. None, however, was credible. …

But in Kavanaugh’s case, the yearbook references are relevant. Since facing sexual assault allegations, Kavanaugh has tried to cast himself as a choir boy during his high school and college years, stressing his time spent attending church and performing service projects. But the yearbook offers a glimpse of the Kavanaugh that Blasey Ford and Ms. Ramirez remember – a young man who drank to excess and found humor in the disrespecting of women.

Fallon, it should be remembered, served as a key aide to Hillary Clinton. His argument of “small lies matter” seems to be of recent vintage, in other words. Clinton’s serial prevarications, especially regarding her unauthorized use of a private e-mail server to transmit classified data, seems a much better fit for the conclusion than does “boofed”:

After all, if Kavanaugh can’t be trusted to tell the truth about even the minor stuff, why should we trust him on anything else?

Tell us again about the Tuzla Dash, pal.

At any rate, all of this might be taken seriously if the dispute over terms had to do with, oh, a legal case Kavanaugh handled. With “boofed,” however, we’re being asked to take seriously the notion that a teenage boy’s attitude about sex has anything to do with a 53-year-old man’s approach to judicial review or even the opposite gender. And that assumes that “boofed” doesn’t actually refer to flatulence, as Kavanaugh testified, which Fallon and Kang argue isn’t “credible.” Nowhere, however, do they supply a credible explanation for their assumption about the term, let alone any evidence that Kavanaugh is deliberately lying about it.

Mollie Hemingway called the advocates of this pet theory “boofing truthers,” but I prefer the better meter of “boof truthers.”

I suspect that the confusion here involves a similar but separate slang prevalent during my high-school years, which overlap a bit with Judge Kavanaugh’s on the other side of the country: boffing. That definitely meant sex, at least on the West Coast in the late 1970s. For flatulence, we generally just used fart, but poot was in use too, which resembles boof a bit. Cut the cheese was even more popular. Like sex, though, adolescent boys had a whole range of slang for flatulence, at which we had lots more experience than with sex, and which we found even more entertaining. (Some of us still do, which explains the inexplicable resilience of “pull my finger” gags with children and grandchildren.)

However, this is all besides the point, even if it makes us all giggle. There is no connection between a high-school yearbook reference to boofing or boffing and Kavanaugh’s qualifications for the Supreme Court. It’s not a crime to joke about flatulence or sex, in high-school yearbooks especially, and the FBI has better things to do than to spring speculative perjury traps over teenage bodily-function slang. This is a despicable argument, setting up a standard for public service that no one could possibly meet: Did you ever joke about sex? How dare you!

The fact that this argument is being taken seriously, to the point of getting a platform at Politico, is all the evidence one needs to see that the politics of personal destruction has now been mainstreamed in American life. My advice to graduates next year: Burn your yearbooks, and protect yourselves from the Boof Truthers to come.

There are more changes coming to Austria as they struggle to deal with the European migration crisis and the constant threat of Islamic terrorism on the continent. The nation is currently led by the government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, coincidentally the same guy our own German ambassador recently called a rockstar. In a move which seemed to come as a surprise even among some of his own supporters, Kurz will be closing more than half a dozen mosques and ejecting dozens of Imams suspected of supporting radical theology, along with the disbanding of other Islamic organizations. (Daily Mail)

Austria’s right-wing government plans to shut down seven mosques and expel up to 40 imams in what it said was ‘just the beginning’ of a push against Islamist ideology and foreign funding of religious groups.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said the government is shutting a hardline Turkish nationalist mosque in Vienna and dissolving a group called the Arab Religious Community that runs six mosques.

His coalition government, an alliance of conservatives and the far right, came to power soon after Europe’s migration crisis on promises to prevent another influx and clamp down on benefits for new immigrants and refugees.

None of this is particularly new territory for Kurz and his allies in Austria. They’ve been concerned over the rising tide of Islamic influence in their part of the continent for some time now and have taken steps to mute it. Austria already has the burqa ban in place, along with several other European countries. (The Danes were the latest to join that club.) And as soon as Kurz took office he had already begun cracking down on incoming migrants, particularly from primarily Muslim nations.

Of course, there will be people up in arms over this, calling Kurz an Islamaphobe, accusing him of suppression of religious freedom or whatever. But this is an apt juncture to remind everyone that our European allies don’t enjoy the same type of fundamental rights and protections from their government as we enjoy in America. That includes freedom of speech, the right to keep and bear arms and, yes… religious freedom. The governments of virtually every European nation retain the right to take some much more, shall we say… direct actions when they feel threatened.

You can accuse the Austrians of being “nationalists” if you like (that’s an increasingly meaningless word these days, given how it’s being distorted). But Austria has been around for at least 1,000 years. Its people are electing leaders who want to preserve their identity, protect their borders and stave off what they credibly view as a present threat. Don’t be shocked if this isn’t the last country where we see such steps being taken.

The United Kingdom has been on a nanny-state bender lately. Already this year, British authorities have cracked down on Nazi dog videos, pocket knives, and sectarian songs. And now the current Conservative government has announced plans to ban plastic straws and stirrers.

"Plastic waste is one of the greatest environmental challenges facing the world," said British Prime Minister Theresa May in a statement released today. May vowed a national plan of action to rid the country of "avoidable plastic waste" by the year 2042, promising that Environment Minister Michael Gove would develop a plan this year to ban straws.

Banning straws is something of a pet issue for Gove, who this year pledged to cut down on his own plastic use for Lent. He even supported Brexit on the grounds that it would make a prohibition of plastic straws easier to achieve.

Unsurprisingly for a man of such passions, Gove has employed near-apocalyptic rhetoric to sell a ban, describing straw usage as a "scourge on our seas" and "a symbol of society's damaging addiction to single-use plastics and our throwaway culture."

The straw ban isn't the only anti-plastic measure that May wants to take. She also hopes to prohibit plastic microbeads and enact mandatory charges for plastic bags.

But for all the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, plastic straw usage's actual threat to marine health is difficult to pin down.

The U.K.-based Marine Conservation Society claims that Brits use 8.5 billion single-use plastic straws a year. That pencils out to roughly one out of every three Britons using one straw per day. Credible estimates on this side of the pond suggest about half of the U.S. uses one straw per day. (I reached out to the Marine Conservation Society to ask how they arrived at their figure but have yet to hear back.)

How many of these 8.5 billion straws actually get into the ocean is an open question.

The Marine Conservation Society is quick to point out that disposable cutlery, trays, and straws are among the top 10 most commonly found categories of items during the group's yearly coastal clean-up. Indeed, they are the tenth most commonly found item category, making up about 2 percent of all beach refuse collected. Given that straws are a subset of this category, they are less than 2 percent.

In any event, if the goal is to prevent plastic getting into the world's oceans, cracking down on plastic straw usage in rich countries is not the way to go.

A 2015 study in the journal Science estimates that anywhere from 4.8 million to 12.7 million metric tons of plastic got into the ocean in 2010. According that report, the determining factors in how much each country contributes to plastic marine waste are population size and the quality of waste management systems.

Unsurprisingly, the study found that poor countries with large coastal populations and bad waste collection systems are the biggest contributors of plastic into the oceans. China topped the list, contributing almost 28 percent of plastic inputs into the ocean in 2010. The United States was a distant 20th, contributing less than 1 percent of marine plastic waste. Looking at the dataset for the Science study, the U.K. ranks 49th, contributing somewhere from 9,456 to 26,344 tons of plastic to the ocean in 2010, or about a tenth of 1 percent of the total.

The best way to cut back on all that plastic waste, is to build up litter management systems, particularly in poor countries. It's certainly a better use of public resources than hassling people for using straws.

Honestly, I was pretty sure this story was a hoax or a piece of satire when I first saw it but it’s being reported by Fox, CBS, The Hill, NBC, HuffPost and several others. So if it is a hoax it’s one that has fooled everyone. A school district in Pennsylvania has come up with a unique response to the Parkland shooting. The district spent about $1,800 to arm all of its teachers with miniature baseball bats. From CBS News:

“It is the last resort,” said Millcreek Schools Superintendent William Hall, “but it is an option and something we want people to be aware of.”

According to Hall, the 16-inch bats were distributed to each teacher following an in-service training day on how to respond to school shootings.

“We passed them out, with the goal being we wanted every room to have one of these,” said Hall.  “Unfortunately, we’re in a day and age where one might need to use them to protect ourselves and our kids.”

Hall says the bats are primarily “symbolic”, but are now an option for teachers to use, should they need to fight back in a school shooting.

Even the proponents seem to think this is silly. On the one hand, they are saying the bats are symbolic, a reminder that in a worst case scenario people may have to fight. That’s actually a point worth making. But once you acknowledge that you might have to fight, shouldn’t you take the next step and give teachers something they could actually fight with?

And that’s where this becomes a farce. The suggestion is made that maybe these mini-bats could actually be used to fight off an intruder. Unless the intruder is threatening people with tiny baseballs, I don’t think that’s going to work out very well. Frankly, even a full-size bat isn’t going to be much help against an intruder with a handgun or a rifle.

Last month another Pennsylvania school suggested putting a five-gallon bucket full of rocks in each classroom. Frankly, that would be more useful than the bats. At least you could have multiple people throwing multiple stones at an intruder. Collectively, that might be enough to deter a shooter, but I still wouldn’t want to face down a handgun with a bucket of rocks. Looking at the bright side, one senior at that school said, “anything helps, rocks are better than books and pencils.” He’s not wrong as far as it goes.

I don’t think every teacher should be armed. People who aren’t properly trained could wind up doing more harm than good. But I do think having multiple armed guards and a few specially-trained staff members could make a difference in a worst-case scenario like the one in Parkland. The bats are okay as a reminder that hiding may not be enough, but they need to be backed up by something that could actually stop a shooter like Nikolas Cruz in a worst-case scenario. There’s really only one tool that can do that.

The White House got some help last night in fending off Michael Wolff’s dishy, gossipy book on Donald Trump — Tony Blair. The former prime minister blasted Wolff’s reporting as “a complete fabrication” on a claim made that Blair warned about British intelligence surveilling the Trump campaign. Blair expressed consternation that the uncorroborated allegations in Fire and Fury have been embraced so unquestioningly:

Wolff wrote that Blair suggested there was a possibility “that the British had had the Trump campaign staff under surveillance, monitoring its telephone calls and other communications and possibly even Trump himself”.

Wolff’s book also repeated speculation that Blair had been angling to be Trump’s Middle East envoy. …

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he said: “This story is a complete fabrication, literally from beginning to end. I’ve never had such conversation in the White House, outside of the White House, with Jared Kushner, with anybody else.”

Blair, a former Middle East peace envoy for the quartet of United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia, admitted that he had met Kushner, but not to discuss surveillance on Trump or to lobby for a role.

He said: “Of course I’ve met him and we discussed the Middle East peace process. I wasn’t angling for some job. I did the quartet role. I’m still very active on the Middle East peace process, but I’ve got absolutely no desire for an official position. I never sought one, it was never offered, don’t want one.”

Needless to say, this claim is surpassingly strange — and that strangeness has nothing to do with Trump. Why would Blair have even conceived an idea of being an American envoy to a process in which he has long participated on behalf of his own country? And why would a former PM blow any intel activities by his own country on behalf of an American candidate for whom he would have no particularly obvious affinity? Did Wolff just make this up out of whole cloth, or did he buy into some gossip around the campfire and just toss it into the book?

Either way, it opens up a wide hole in Wolff’s credibility for several reasons. One, Blair has a large amount of credibility in international media, including here in the US. Two, Blair is hardly a Trump acolyte or someone inclined to jump to Trump’s defense. Third, the “so weird it must be true” of Wolff’s reporting on Trump relies on the well-known mercurial nature of the president. No one looks at Blair and thinks he’s anything but a statesman who knows his business, and especially not a loose cannon inclined to whimsical action. If Wolff has applied the “so weird” standard this recklessly, it certainly raises questions about his reporting on all of the other weirdness Wolff wants people to buy, both literally and figuratively.

Speaking of unexpected sources, the best White House response to Wolff comes from the spokesperson who got run out of the West Wing months ago. Sean Spicer calmly dissects the credibility issues in this appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America, although one has to go to the bottom of the ABC report to find it in the print version. George Stephanopoulos pushes Spicer to admit the quotes involving him are accurate, which Spicer does — but explains that the context for them has been twisted around. The book, from what Spicer has seen so far, is filled with out-of-context quotes and imagined reporting.

“If it’s 10% or 20% or 50% or 70% that isn’t true,” Spicer argues, “the reader’s not left to know which is true and which is not.” Blair would certainly agree:

“One of the problems that we’re seeing with this book — and it’s not just Trump staffers and White House officials pushing back — but you’re seeing a lot of mainstream media members as well calling into question the sourcing, the sloppiness of how he attributes stuff, even the author’s origin note at the beginning of the book notes that in many cases he took anecdotes and rephrased them,” Spicer said.

When Stephanopoulos asks whether White House attempts to block the sale of the book run afoul of the First Amendment, Spicer side-steps that by saying that Trump has the right to defend himself from defamation. That’s true, but suing to keep the book from being published is a silly way to go about it. Trump and his team would do a lot better to find as many ridiculously untrue and highly spun allegations in the book and find ways to debunk them publicly, amplifying credible voices in that effort. Spicer may not qualify for that status after his rocky relationship with the press in 2017, but Blair’s rebuke is golden. Why hasn’t the White House highlighted that testimony more strongly?