REFILL THE SWAMP: Biden Muscles Out Chicago Prosecutor Hot on the Heels of Powerful Dems.

President Joe Biden is forcing Chicago’s top federal prosecutor to resign amid ongoing criminal probes of powerful Illinois Democrats and their associates.

U.S. attorney John Lausch is prosecuting close confidants of Democrat boss Mike Madigan, an ally of former president Barack Obama who resigned from the state legislature Thursday after a decades-long reign in Springfield. Lausch’s office will also prosecute Chicago alderman Edward Burke (D.), an influential figure accused of strong-arming businesses into retaining his law firm.

Lausch’s abrupt removal has drawn bipartisan criticism from Illinois lawmakers who say he should be allowed to finish his work or depart on a longer timeline to ensure an orderly transition.

When the corruption is so bad that even Illinois Democrats want the investigation to continue…

FROM THE MAN WHO BROUGHT YOU MICROSOFT ‘BOB’: Bill Gates says cryptocurrency is one innovation the world could do without.

NOPE. We need national summer school to help kids recover from learning lost in COVID pandemic.

A friend writes: “Speaking as a parent who had to drastically reduce his own work hours (and earnings) to substitute-teach for free all year while the school system sat largely unused and teachers and administrators still drew a salary funded by the reduced earnings of families statewide; i’m sure I speak for many parents when I say: they can shove this summer school idea up their nonessential asses.”

Public schools have gone a long way to convince parents that they’re (1) nonessential, and (2) composed of and run by people who have contempt for parents and taxpayers. This is a huge opportunity for Republicans. If they’re smart, that is.

AN OFFERING OF SQUIRRELS: The legacy media is losing its ability to present plausible distractions from news stories it doesn’t want to cover.

If Cuomo didn’t offer a future presidential prospect, he would surely be someone to throw under the bus. He’s a gubernatorial Biden — a shameless clown devoid of credibility or competence who represents everything regular Americans despise about the political class. Cuomo is the very picture of our coastal elites: his success owes almost completely to the name he inherited from his father Vito, er, Mario Cuomo and his membership in the ruling-class club. Cuomo spouts all of the pieties of the managerial elite, and he’s mastered the art of faking sincerity when he does so. His abject corruption and incompetence in office is easy to paper over — the Cuomos have run so much of New York’s middle class out of the state there are no longer enough of them to ever vote a Democrat out of office, and therefore their party has perfected at the state level the Weaponized Governmental Failure that’s usually reserved for Democrat machines in the cities.

And of course, brother Fredo — sorry, Chris — hosts a show on CNN when he’s not engaged in pugilism with less-than-adoring viewers or faking a COVID quarantine. CNN’s management actually thinks it’s cute to have Fredo interviewing Sonny on its air despite the breathtaking affront to journalistic integrity that represents. That occasional moment of on-air fraternal bliss suddenly lost its luster when the G-Men began covering the set.

These things don’t really require a squirrel. Just a stone face and a shut yap when the public sees them and asks a question that rhymes with “Cut the duck?”

But when the G-Men show up and the background music begins to signal that Sonny is approaching the proverbial toll-booth, now it’s time for a squirrel.

Appropriately, quite a significant hullaballoo recently broke out over a Texas politician’s Mexican vacation.

Exit quote: “None of this is complicated, and certainly none of it is new. Nor are the squirrels going back into the trees anytime soon, because it won’t be long before the Democrats and their compliant minions in the news media and pop culture recognize the urgency of air cover for all kinds of coming disasters.”

Related: Cruz Cancun trip gets four times more airtime than Cuomo nursing home cover-up. Squirrel!

EMBARRASSMENT REQUIRES A SENSE OF SHAME: Cuomo Revelations Should Embarrass Media.

JOSH BLACKMAN & SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: If Donald Trump is Convicted of Violating 18 U.S.C. § 2383, Will He Be Disqualified From Serving As President? “We’ve written that the phrase ‘office . . . under the United States’ refers to appointed positions in the Executive and Judicial Branches, and also includes appointed positions in the Legislative Branch. This phrase does not extend to elected federal positions, i.e., the President, Vice President, and members of Congress. . . . Congress can add statutory qualifications for appointed positions. In other words, Congress can add statutory qualifications to the positions it creates (i.e., appointed federal positions), but Congress cannot add qualifications to positions created by the Constitution (i.e., elected federal positions).”

“Our position here was not created in the wake of January 6, 2021. In 2016, Tillman publicized a similar analysis in regard to a hypothetical conviction of Secretary Clinton under 18 U.S.C. § 2071, the Federal Records Act.”

BLOWBACK: ‘We demand not to be coddled.’ UChicago students’ new publication fights cancel culture, supports free speech.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: University of Kansas eliminates two degrees, one department.

MARK JUDGE: Morning Bombhole: Joe Scarborough and Our Broken Media.

Bombholing is the practice of splashing wild and unsubstantiated stories all over the media. Then sending those same stories down the memory hole when they don’t pan out. Finally, media immediately distract viewers and readers with a new “bombshell,” which makes people forget the old “bombshell.” Viewers are lead “from mania to mania.” Goaded into focusing on today’s outrage, people quickly forget the previous “bombshell,” which was a dud.

Stricter libel laws would help.

SHE’S THE BEST: Dolly Parton Gives America a Whole New Reason to Love Her.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Stanford prof: ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ is racist.

BIDEN’S RETURN TO NORMALCY: U.S. Capitol Police Suggest Leaving Razor Wire Fences Up Until Fall.

GRIFTING PREDATORS ARE SAD: The Lincoln Project’s Implosion Has Derailed Its Founders’ Plan for a Media Empire.

LEADERSHIP: Tom Cotton’s Bold Strategy to Fight the New ‘Cold War’ Against China’s ‘Evil Empire.’

ACTUALLY, SO DO I: USC Prof: I Like Teaching On Zoom.

I didn’t like it at first, but once I set up my multicamera studio it was much better.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Media’s censorious gatekeepers are mad — because they’re losing power.

UPDATE: Related: Trust in Media Hits New Low. If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy. But that’s a heavy lift for people who are more concerned with power and posturing.

Prediction: Getting CEOs to “visibly embrace the news media” isn’t the way to do it. It’s hilarious how this piece completely ignores the possibility that people don’t trust the press because they’ve noticed a lot of lies, or that strictly factual reporting without political bias might help.

TEXAS VS. CALIFORNIA.

HERE’S FEDERALISM IN ACTION: HT to Thom McKee and The Daily Gouge:

RECOUPLING: How Oracle Sells Repression in China. “Oracle representatives have marketed the company’s data analytics for use by police and security industry contractors across China, according to dozens of company documents hosted on its website. In at least two cases, the documents imply that provincial departments used the software in their operations. One is the slideshow story about Liaoning province. The other is an Oracle document describing police in Shanxi province as a “client” in need of an intelligence platform. Oracle also boasted that its data security services were used by other Chinese police entities, according to the documents — including police in Xinjiang, the site of a genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic groups.”

MICHAEL BARONE: Will Biden’s payoff to teacher unions repel suburban parents?

AND WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THEY CARE ABOUT THE DISABLED?: The various bills pending in Congress to raise the minimum wage to $15 will also eliminate the special provision in the law that allows Down Syndrome and other seriously disabled adults to take jobs at less than the minimum wage.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report a few months ago endorsing that move (despite receiving comments from thousands of parents of Down syndrome workers pleading with us not to). My colleagues either (1) don’t understand that a $15 minimum wage for Down syndrome workers will be a huge job killer; or (2) don’t care. My dissent is here.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Derangement Syndrome Hits Pathetic New Low. “Now that the Democrats have failed to keep Trump from running for president again they’re living in abject terror of him returning in 2024 and ruining their long term ugly designs on the United States. Couple that with the fact that they can’t really sing Biden’s praises and it’s easy to see that we’re in for a few more years of this snot bubble toddler fit of theirs.”

NEWS FROM GRIFTERLAND: Lincoln Project Founder Paid Off Mortgage Days After NYT Reported on Weaver Scandal: Rick Wilson dogged by history of unpaid taxes prior to founding profitable Super PAC.

GOODER AND HARDER: Minnesota Nasty.

If there is one thing Minnesota Democrats can count on, it’s this: You ain’t never woke enough. Somebody can always out-woke you. Running for reelection, Hodges finished third in a field of five in 2017 and was replaced by Jacob Frey, the doorknob currently serving as mayor, a white-shoe radical lawyer who was buffaloed into letting rioters run amok and burn down his city. He tried to finesse his way to a third-way solution in the face of demands to defund the police but in the end signed a budget imposing millions of dollars of cuts on the police department in order to appease the Left.

The department now has hundreds fewer officers than it says it needs to do its job. With violent crime soaring, the city council unanimously voted to approve funding to hire more officers — but three of its members are working on a plan to abolish the police department entirely, replacing it with a new “public safety” agency that would provide social services in addition to law enforcement with progressive characteristics. A left-wing coalition comprising groups ranging from the Sex-Workers Outreach Project of Minneapolis to the Minnesota Youth Collective (“founded by young, queer, female-identifying people who practice intersectionality in organizing”) is working on a ballot initiative to the same end.

A  great deal is going to depend on the upcoming trial of Derek Chauvin. In February, the New York Times reported that Chauvin had offered to plead guilty to third-degree murder in the death of George Floyd but Attorney General William Barr had scuttled the deal, believing that that agreement was too lenient. (Federal sign-off was required because the deal would have included an assurance that Chauvin would not be brought up on civil-rights or other federal charges in the future.) The trial is imminent, and the outcome is uncertain.

Thirty-Eighth and Chicago, the intersection at which Chauvin pinned down Floyd with his knee, remains closed to traffic. It won’t reopen until after the trial, if it ever does. Office workers downtown already are being told not to come to work during the trial. The state already has budgeted millions of dollars for security and anti-riot measures, and the National Guard will be called out to protect the courthouse precincts.

If there is yet another round of riots, Minneapolis may take a long time to recover. Or it may never recover. Cities such as Detroit and Newark never really recovered from the riots of the 1960s, and probably never will. Even in Minneapolis itself, the once-thriving commercial corridor along Plymouth Avenue was utterly destroyed by the 1967 riots, and it never came back. The shopping and dining district around Nicollet Mall, recently spruced up with a $50 million revitalization project, is boarded up. The number of Minneapolis establishments that were torched in the riots is shocking: the ice-cream shop on Cedar Avenue, the chiropractor on East Lake Street, travel agencies, mobile-phone shops, grocery stores, an advertising agency, a dentist’s office, a barbershop, gas stations. Retailers from Kmart to jewelry shops were looted. The list goes on and on. A city doesn’t just bounce back from that.

Or to flowchart the progression:

OH: Facebook knew for years ad reach estimates were based on ‘wrong data’ but blocked fixes over revenue impact, per court filing.

Some more internal emails Facebook really doesn’t want you to see: Turns out in 2017 COO Sheryl Sandberg had already known for years there were problems with a free ad planning tool the company offers to marketeers to display estimates of how many people campaigns running on its platform may reach, per newly unsealed court documents.

The filing also reveals that a Facebook product manager for the “potential reach” tool warned the company was making revenue it “should never have” off of “wrong data”.

The unsealed documents pertain to a U.S. class action lawsuit, filed in 2018, which alleges that Facebook deceived advertisers by knowingly including fake and duplicate accounts in a “potential reach” metric.

Facebook denies the claim but has acknowledged accuracy issues with the “potential reach” metric as far back as 2016 — and also changed how it worked in 2019.

Read the whole, ugly thing.

CONSUMER PROTECTION: Legislation Would Force Kansas Colleges To Give Students 50% Tuition Refunds For Classes Shifted Online Due To COVID-19.

INCENTIVES: Wuhan Lab Eligible to Receive US Taxpayer Funding Through 2024, NIH Confirms. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is authorized to receive taxpayer funding for animal research until January 2024, the National Institute of Health told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The WIV is at the center of widespread speculation that COVID-19 could have entered the human population in China due to an accidental lab leak. Researchers at the lab were studying bat-based coronaviruses prior to the outbreak, a project partially backed by $600,000 in U.S. taxpayer funds routed to the lab through the nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance.”

UNITY! Democrats Introduce a Bill to Punish Trump When He Dies.

QUESTION ASKED: At What Point Do We Realize Bill Gates Is Dangerously Insane? “What this comes down to, though, is that Bill Gates has been so rich for so long that he’s spent the bulk of his adult life without anyone telling him he’s wrong. That has the same corrosive effect on character and sanity that you see in the case of kings and dictators. People want some of Bill Gates’ money, so they constantly suck up to him and tell him his ideas are great even when they’re atrocious, and the guardrails normal people live between don’t exist in his case. So he throws money around at insane things. That he isn’t outwardly off his rocker like Howard Hughes was is small comfort; Hughes mostly kept to himself in that hotel suite in Las Vegas as he descended into madness. Gates is everywhere. . . . Perhaps it’s time to start taxing charitable foundations which engage in public policy-related activities. That could easily devolve into a mess, but the alternative could be that we increasingly have to live under the cracked worldview of out-of-touch billionaires like Bill Gates.”

Related: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Behind ‘Anti-Racist’ Math Push.

BEFORE I INTRO THE BOOK BY MARGARET BALL: About 3 (?) years ago, during a rambling post about women writers I liked, I hapened to mention one written by Margaret Ball. Keep in mind, I knew she was older than I, because I was reading her when the kids (now grown up) were tiny.  This doesn’t always hold true, of course, some people just get published younger. But since I had read her years and years ago, and she didn’t have anything new out, I assumed she had died perhaps suddenly.
By some miracle, she was searching for her name on the net that day, and came onto my blog to see why she was being mentioned. More surprisingly (or not, considering the industry had side lined her) our political beliefs are simpatico.  After hanging out on my blog a while, and hearing about indie she thought she’d try it.

The thing is, she’s worse at publicity than I am (but as good a writer as she ever was.)  So:

FROM MARGARET BALL:  A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1).

Thalia Kostis will be the first to tell you it’s not magic, it’s theoretical math when she walks a Möbius strip through walls to her office at the Institute for Applied Topology. CIA Case Officer Bradislav Lensky doesn’t care what it is, as long as she can help track down a smuggling ring and the terrorists in their safe house in Austin. The other magicians nearby don’t agree, and don’t care for new rivals either!

Now Thalia and the rest of her misfit crew are in a race against time, terrorists, common sense, grackles, and their graduate advisor to save the day!

EVERYTHING THEY TOLD YOU ABOUT JANUARY 6 WAS FALSE: Between liberal journo Glenn Greenwald’s nuking of the New York Times’ “beaten to death with a fire extinguisher” fairy tale and this damning editorial from Issues & Insights, how can anybody ever again believe what they read in the mainstream media?

OKAY. IT’S A BIT RANTY:  Strong Women.

EVERY DAY, IN EVERY WAY, THEY’RE COMING FOR US:  Today’s blacklisted American: The sci-fi publishing company Baen Books.

RETURN OF THE ‘BLAME AMERICA FIRST’ CROWD: Daily Caller News Foundation’s Chuck Morris reports that  Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economics professor who formed and runs the Lancet COVID-19 Commission to investigate the pandemic, thinks America is a “divisive” force on the world stage, unlike those ever-peace-loving guys running the dictatorship known as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

And in other Lancet-related news, the august medical group’s commission to study the impact of Donald Trump on everybody’s else’s health concluded thusly: “Trump exploited low and middle-income white people’s anger over their deteriorating life prospects to mobilise racial animus and xenophobia and enlist their support for policies that benefit high-income people and corporations and threaten health.”

This apparently is an illustration of that to which The Lancet is entirely devoted, “The best science for better lives: A manifesto for social change.” Uh, huh. If you have the stomach for it, the study can be read in its suffocating completeness here.

GOOD. THE COUNTRY IS OCCUPIED, BUT NOT DEFEATED:  Social media censorship legislation proposed in Kansas.

IT’S HAPPENING MORE AND MORE THESE DAYS:  When They Say The Quiet Part Out Loud.

HE’S RIGHT, YOU KNOW?  The Navy’s Greatest Failure Since Pearl Harbor.

HAVE THEY READ THE CONSTITUTION?  House Democrats introduce bill to ban “Twice Impeached Presidents” from burial at Arlington National Cemetery

Perhaps if we get someone to help them with the long words?

ABOUT TIME:  Cuomo Covid House of Cards is Collapsing.

SAYING THE QUIET PART ALOUD:  Prof. Marc Lamont Hill: Goal of Black Lives Matter is to “dismantle the Zionist project”.

THROWING MONEY TO THOSE WHO WOULD DESTROY US:  Biden to Pay $200 Million in WHO “Obligations,” Reversing Trump’s Decision.

THE LEFT IS KILLING ITS OWN CENTERS OF PROPAGATION:  Harris and Her Spokeswoman Stumble on CNN, NBC Over Questions Regarding School Reopenings.

I’M NOT SURE IT’S A DESCENT. MORE BEING PUSHED:   Our Descent Into Collective Madness?

HE’S FOUGHT THE GOOD FIGHT. NOW IT’S OUR TURN:  02-18-21 Rush Limbaugh 1951-2021.

THE FICUS ASSURES US THIS IS JUST A DIFFERENT CULTURAL TRADITION: Liberal press concealed China’s mass murder of members of Buddhist group.

UNEXPECTEDLY:  New weekly jobless claims unexpectedly rose by 13,000 to 861,000 in the week that ended February 13, the Department of Labor said Thursday.

OUCH:

IT’S ALL ONE PR MACHINE, PUSHING THE SAME NARRATIVE EVERYWHERE: TV Shows Push Gun Control Myths — in Sync With Biden. “Last week, the Biden administration promised gun control groups that it will soon roll out a massive push for limits on firearm purchases and other measures. President Biden reiterated that promise on Sunday. And the television networks aren’t waiting to lay the groundwork for this effort. CBS is in a full-court press for gun control on its evening entertainment television shows. The bad guys are always white supremacists who use machine guns — supposedly AR-15s — to commit mass public shootings. Criminals in Mexico supposedly get machine guns from the United States. A father’s desire to protect his family only leads to tragedy when his daughter gets into the gun safe and uses the weapon in a mass public shooting. And guns in the home pose a danger for children. Gun registration is necessary for solving crime. NBC isn’t to be left out, showing a woman who tried but failed to use a gun to protect herself. Instead, her gun was taken from her and used to kill a police officer. The lesson is that owning a gun will only bring you grief. And that’s just in the first six weeks of the year. Every show gives an inaccurate impression about firearms, thereby helping in this push for gun restrictions. It’s as though these shows were written by Michael Bloomberg’s gun control organizations. Indeed, the networks are working with these groups.”

BIDEN: SO BAD THAT CNN IS FACT-CHECKING HIM: Fact check: Biden makes at least four false statistical claims at CNN town hall.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Media’s censorious gatekeepers are mad — because they’re losing power.

EVEN BLOOMBERG IS EDITORIALIZING: Scrap NASA’s Space Launch System: The government’s new heavy-lift rocket is over budget, behind schedule and plagued with problems. It’s also unnecessary.

Why is the U.S. government building a space rocket? In particular, why is it building a space rocket that has cost nearly $20 billion and counting, is years behind schedule, relies on outdated technology, suffers by comparison to private-sector alternatives, and has little justification to begin with?

That’s the question President Joe Biden should bear in mind when pondering the future of the Space Launch System, the two-stage, heavy-lift rocket that aims to bring American astronauts back to the lunar surface and then — someday in the distant, hazy, not-too-specific future — to Mars.

Initiated in 2011, the SLS was the result of unfortunate compromises and unholy politics. By congressional mandate, it was built using technology and components that dated to the early space-shuttle era. That requirement all but ensured that the new rocket would be hugely expensive, heavily reliant on traditional aerospace contractors and — in all likelihood — antiquated before it ever reached a launchpad.

Perhaps predictably, the program has been plagued with problems from the start. A report last year from NASA’s inspector general warned of “rising costs and delays,” “shortcomings in quality control,” “challenges with program management,” “technical issues,” “development issues,” “infrastructure issues,” “performance issues” and more. A watchdog report in December found “uncertain plans, unproven cost assumptions, and limited oversight.” . . .

Perhaps the oddest aspect of this entire undertaking is that the SLS is being expensively assembled just as the private rocketry business has started to boom. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has created rockets that are not only dependable but reusable, drastically reducing the cost of spaceflight. It has also disrupted an unconscionable contractor monopoly on national-security launches, spurring competitors to invest in reusable heavy-lift rockets of their own, including Blue Origin’s New Glenn launch vehicle.

A few years down the road, such competition is likely to result in more choices, lower costs and more innovation. Musk estimates that, in due course, each launch of SpaceX’s reusable super-heavy rocket will cost about $2 million — or roughly 0.1% of the cost of a comparable flight of the single-use SLS. Even if that prediction turns out to be highly optimistic, there’s simply no contest.

Right?

GUYS IN VIKING HELMETS AT CAPITOL: INSURRECTION!!! MUST BE SUPPRESSED!!! Death threats to Ted Cruz: Meh, if he wants to be safe he shouldn’t be a Republican. Sen. Ted Cruz arrives back in Texas with armed police escort.

OPEN THREAD: Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. Or is it?

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Media Informs Ted Cruz You Can Only Travel During A Crisis If You’re A Democrat.

To be fair though, it was one helluva trip!

NEW SPACE RACE: How Mars became the prize for a new space race — and why China is hellbent on winning it.

HOW IT STARTED:

During her annual State of the City address on Thursday, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf called on her constituents to open their doors and residences to the city’s homeless, as union workers picketed against her for her administration’s handling of the city’s rampant housing problem.

“Give up that Airbnb. Fix up that back unit,” Schaff said, encouraging property owners to lease apartments at more affordable rates to recently homeless individuals, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“In Oakland, we don’t step over the homeless we step toward them,” Schaaf said.

The city’s uptick in vagrants is tied to a general gentrification in the Bay Area, stemming from San Francisco, where artists and innovators unable to afford skyrocketing rents have migrated to Oakland.

In May, the Chronicle noted that a survey by Everyone Counts found that the number of homeless persons in Oakland had increased by 25 percent since two years ago.

— “Oakland Mayor Urges Residents to Take in Homeless: ‘Give Up That Airbnb,’” Breitbart.com, November 4^th, 2017.

How it’s going:

Residents living near homeless encampments, vandalized and abandoned warehouses, and lines of motorhomes and stripped-down cars say the police department isn’t doing enough, so they have formed vigilante patrols to clean up their East Oakland neighborhood.

Those living closest to the defunct plant owned by Owens-Illinois along Alameda Avenue say an uptick in crime has led them to keep watch over their streets and spend their own money to add lighting and security cameras to protect their properties.

“We’re can’t depend on the city to do it,” neighbor Denise Gray said. “It’s just getting too far out of hand.”

Records show Oakland police are called to the area surrounding the abandoned plant nearly once a day for reports of robbery, assault, auto theft and drug crimes.

Additionally, with sprawling homeless encampments adjacent to the warehouses, the fire department has responded more than 500 times in the past three years, records show.

—“’Oakland looks like a trash can:’ neighbors form vigilante patrols to curb crime,” Bay Area Fox affiliate KTVU, today.

Related (from Glenn): When the Dawn Patrol’s got to tell you twice, they’re gonna do it with a shotgun. “Anyone with a brain and a bit of historical knowledge could have seen this coming, which is no doubt why it eluded so much of our political class.”

THE HEIRS OF BUCKLEY AT NATIONAL REVIEW: “At 14 years old, I bought and enjoyed Al Franken’s book Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations.”

You’d think it would get better from here, but it really doesn’t.

SPENGLER: Mediocrity’s Envy of Genius: The Dirty Secret of Cancel Culture.

The Cultural Revolutionaries at the New York Times this week reviewed the witch hunt against classical musicians, who stand accused of racism simply because the great Western composers happened to be white. Cancel culture is despicable in all of its manifestations, but I take this particular instance personally: I trained in the school of musical analysis founded by Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935). My principle teacher was Carl Schachter, who also taught Prof. Timothy Jackson of the University of North Texas, the target of this particular witch hunt.

It’s all about envy.

Read the whole thing. As Kevin Williamson wrote in his 2019 book, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics, “David Foster Wallace argued that aspiring amateurs who envy professional athletes suffer from the ‘delusion that envy has a reciprocal.’ They believe that if only they could get themselves on the other side of the envy equation, then all of the loneliness and dissatisfaction they feel in their current situation of envy would be transubstantiated into joy and contentedness equal in weight and scope. Envy and spite are two cocktails with a heavy pour of the same brand of hatred—and both are methods for trying to make that interior pain exterior.”

CUOMO DIDN’T DO ANYTHING A BUNCH OF DEMOCRAT GOVERNORS DIDN’T DO: “Cuomo’s actions were hideous, but they were far from unique. The only reason to investigate Cuomo, but not his Democrat peers would be that his coverup was especially ugly and clumsy. But nailing a few Cuomo associates for obstructing an investigation while shrugging at the thousands of deaths would be an outrage and typical of the broken system.”

SOMEHOW THIS REMINDS ME OF THE STATE OF JOURNALISM TODAY: These Cockroaches Start Eating Each Other After Sex, And Not Because They’re Hungry. “In such cramped quarters, their wings are probably not all that useful. . . . Removing each others’ wings could therefore be the most loving act for roaches of this kind.”

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, TAKE MY ADVICE. TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS, AND BIKE ON THE ICE: Watch: This guy replaced his bike wheels with circular saws so he could ride on a frozen lake.

BRYAN PRESTON: Did Frozen Wind Turbines Impact the Texas Freeze? Here’s the Data.

JIM TREACHER: Baltimore Activist Wants to Pay Criminals Not to Kill People. “I like this idea, obviously. You can catch more flies with a carrot than a stick, or something. But why rely on the government to do it? It should be privatized. It’s up to each of us to make the world a safer place. Here’s what I suggest: Go around your neighborhood and remind everybody that it’s a nice place and it would be a shame if something… happened to it. You never know when somebody’s gonna get shot, do ya? But for a very reasonable price of $1,000 a month, you’ll agree not to shoot anybody. Is that really too much to pay to ensure your family’s safety? Who could refuse such an offer?”

Heh, indeed.™

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Donations ‘Requested’ by Newsom Exploded as His Emergency Powers Ballooned: Big businesses gave millions to Newsom’s initiatives and were rewarded handsomely.

WOKE STUPIDITY COMES TO AUSTRALIA: Governor General’s staff to be asked to do woke ‘privilege walk’ so they can identify how entitled they are while being asked bizarre questions like ‘were your parents ever addicted to drugs?’

Proper response: “I’m entitled not to be subjected to this idiocy.”

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT MONOPOLY INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM AND SEXISM? Was 60 Minutes TV’s Most Toxic Workplace?

[Ira Rosen, the author of Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at ‘60 Minutes,’] also writes that Wallace regularly peppered colleagues with questions about their sex lives; lashed out at them for no good reason; grabbed the bottoms and breasts of women who worked in the office; pulled them onto his lap; and snapped bra straps.

“The verbal harassment I experienced from Mike Wallace and other TV big shots was, in a word, criminal,” Rosen writes. He says he stuck it out for so long “in part out of fear, but mostly out of ambition.”

It is depressing to think that a “60 Minutes”-worthy story — on the ingrained culture of harassment at a cultural institution — took place at the nation’s most prestigious and most popular TV newsmagazine. The writer Sally Quinn ventured into this territory in “We’re Going to Make You a Star,” a 1975 memoir about her stint at CBS News. She wrote that Hewitt tried to sabotage her after she said no to his advances. (The reviews were vicious.)

In a 1991 article for Rolling Stone, the journalist Mark Hertsgaard reported that Hewitt and Wallace routinely harassed women in the workplace. In 2017, “60 Minutes” tried to obscure its past. Richard Zoglin, a biographer, was hired by Simon & Schuster, a publisher then owned by the CBS Corporation, to write a book on the show’s history in time for its 50th anniversary. After he started asking about the treatment of women on staff, he was replaced by a new author: Jeff Fager, who had succeeded Hewitt as the show’s top producer.

Rosen does not go into the book fiasco but does note that CBS fired Charlie Rose, a “60 Minutes” correspondent and a co-anchor of “CBS This Morning,” after a number of women had accused him of sexual harassment. He also includes the 2018 firing of Fager, whose career ended after he sent a threatening text message to a CBS reporter who was preparing a “CBS Evening News” segment that dealt with allegations of sexual harassment against Fager himself. (The problem went to the very top: The CBS Corporation also fired the company’s chief executive, Leslie Moonves, after a dozen women accused him of sexual harassment and sexual assault.)

The above New York Times review doesn’t mention if this infamous moment in Mike Wallace’s career appears in Rosen’s book. As described by the late Roger Ailes, someone else who understood the blending of theater and journalism even more than Hewitt and Wallace:

Recognize that any time you are in the presence of a newsperson, the conversation is fair game for the record. Jimmy Carter’s famous confession that he sometimes had lust in his heart for women other than his wife was uttered to a Playboy magazine journalist as he was leaving Carter’s home at the conclusion of the formal interview. Even Mike Wallace, big-game hunter of the unguarded moment, got caught in this snare. As recounted on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal by TV critic Daniel Henninger in March of 1981, Wallace:

was interviewing a banker in San Diego about an alleged home improvement fraud involving mainly black and Hispanics, who supposedly had signed contract they couldn’t understand, which led to foreclosures on their home mortgages.The bank hired a film crew of its own to record the interview with Mr. Wallace. The bank apparently left its recorder running during a break in the CBS interview, and the tape has Mr. Wallace saying, in reply to a question about why the black and Hispanic customers would have signed their contracts, “They’re probably too busy eating their watermelon and tacos.”

When the Los Angeles Times got wind of this indiscretion and reported it, there was at least a minor uproar from reporters and others about Wallace’s “racially disparaging joke”. Wallace ultimately pleaded “no bias”, admitting that over time he’d privately told jokes about many ethnic groups but that his record “speaks for itself”. Henninger added, “Needless to say, this has to be the most deliciously lip-smacking bit of irony to pop out of the oven in a long time. Here we have the dogcatcher cornered. The lepidopterist pinned. The preacher in flagrante delicto. This is the fellow who has imputed all manner of crimes against social goodness to a long lineup of businessmen and bureaucrats. From here on out, all future victims of Mr. Wallace can take some small comfort in knowing that although they may stand exposed as goof-offs, thieves and polluters, he’s the guy who made the crack about the watermelons and tacos.”

Eventually, as the cost of the equipment Wallace used for his stings became affordable to all, James O’Keefe and others on the right would begin to employ the same investigative techniques that 60 Minutes pioneered, only aimed at Wallace’s fellow leftists. As I wrote in 2011: Investigative Journalism: It’s All Fun and Games until the MSM Gets Stung.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Time to End Hostile Powers’ Influence Operations at American Universities.

LAYERS AND LAYERS OF FACT CHECKERS AND EDITORS: New York Times suggests that The Rush Limbaugh Show’s Bo Snerdley might not even exist. The Gray Lady “is erasing the black man who worked with Rush Limbaugh.”

To be fair, there are fewer and fewer layers each day: Getting the Hell Out of Dodge.

NASA’S PERSEVERANCE ROVER LANDS ON MARS.

Hopefully no one in mission control is wearing a problematic shirt.

SOUNDS LIKE GOOD MARKETING! He started a covid-19 vaccine company. Then he hosted a superspreader event.

BRUCE CARROLL: S.C. Democrats Throw Tantrum as Fetal Heartbeat Bill Passes State House.

DAVID MARCUS: The Reform Party Roots Of The New GOP Are Its Future. “Republican voters will not go back to the neoliberal GOP of the past 30 years, and if that means losing some elections, it means losing some elections.”

“Trumpism,” for lack of a better word, is a fusion between conservatives tired of the do-nothing GOP Establishment, and blue-collar Americans without a home in the newly Woke Democrat party.

It can be a powerful combination, and it’s here to stay.

GOYA’S DECEMBER EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: Daily Beast Editor Accuses Tucker Of Adding Googly Eyes To AOC, Turns Out It’s Just Her Face.

KIA AND HYUNDIA/GENESIS ARE BECOMING A REAL THREAT TO MERCEDES, AUDI, ETC.: Kia K8 Is an Elegant-Looking Large Sedan.

THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WENT OUT IN TEXAS: Texas Electric Reliability Council Removes Board Members From Website as Their Residencies Are Questioned. “About a third of its members don’t even live in Texas.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: School Board Mocks Parents Who Support Reopening: ‘They Want Their Babysitters Back.’

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): One thing we’ve learned from the pandemic: Not only are public school teachers not essential workers, they don’t even regard themselves as essential workers.

LIVE IN FIVE… FOUR… THREE… ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ with Kruiser, Preston, VodkaPundit.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: New ACLU Head Has a Civil Rights Problem Back Home. “The American Civil Liberties Union’s new president, Deborah Archer, is a faculty member at New York University’s law school, where she runs its civil rights clinic. But NYU Law has its own civil rights problem, which is why I filed a Title IX complaint against NYU.”

UNEXPECTEDLY! Biden Open To Considering Reparations Depending On Progress Congress Makes On Study.

Racial reparations is a widely unpopular proposal in the United States which, even immediately following the racially charged death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, only 20 percent of Americans supported.

Psaki made the remarks during an exchange with a reporter who brought up that Biden said during his campaign that he supported a study for reparations. “Does the President support the legislation?” the reporter asked. “He stopped short of saying that during the campaign. Would he sign that if it came to his desk?”

“Well, he’s supported a study of reparations, which is I believe is what’s being discussed, and studying the continuing impacts of slavery, which is being discussed in this hearing on H.R. 40, I believe it is,” Psaki responded. “And he continues to demonstrate his commitment to take comprehensive action to address the systemic racism that persists today. Obviously, that is — having that study is a part of that, but he has signed an executive order on his first day, which would begin to deliver on his commitment to having an across-government approach to addressing racial inequality and making sure equity is a part of his entire policy agenda.”

I’ve noticed in recent weeks that Democrats have been using “equity” where they usually use “equality.”

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT INSTEAD OF WINNING WARS:

A WORTHY CAUSE: Donate Ammunition for the FASTER Program.

Independence Institute’s FASTER (Faculty/Administrator Safety Training and Emergency Response) program trains armed school staffers to stop school violence quickly and administer medical aid immediately.

In order to maintain their certification, these staffers need to meet annual training requirements, and in order to do so, they need ammunition. In fact, depending on the level, FASTER classes require between 500-800 rounds of ammunition for each class member.

Economic uncertainty and the real threat of anti-gun action by the federal and state government has made ammunition scarce and unaffordable.

So, we are asking for your help to give ammunition via a first-of-its-kind Ammo Drive. Our goal is 50,000 rounds—enough to get us through the 2021 FASTER Colorado training season.

Details on how to give at the link.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: The Texas energy blame game.

Speaking of which: Andrew Cuomo’s brother Chris Cuomo shames Ted Cruz for not being ‘present and responsive’ during a crisis.

FORGET FIXING AMERICA, LET’S KEEP TRUMP OUT OF ARLINGTON CEMETERY: That’s the mindset of the 13 House Democrats co-sponsoring H.R. 484, the “No Glory for Hate Act of 2021” that bars former President Donald Trump from being buried at Arlington National Cemetary.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: People with different personalities have different risks of dying. “The study sheds new light on why people who are more conscientious tend to live longer.”

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-MONOPOLY INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF SEXISM? Biden’s Alma Mater Bans Men From Posts And Scholarships, Just For Being Men.

PROCUREMENT: How Colombia’s drug cartels almost bought a Soviet submarine.

In 2019, footage of a U.S. Coast Guard interdiction of a homemade drug smuggling submarine took the world by storm, and for good reason. As we watched one of the baddest dudes we’re ever apt to see anywhere outside of a movie pounding on the hatch of the mostly submerged sub, many of us were shocked to learn that drug cartels actually have their own submarines.

What may surprise you more is that these amateur submarines were really a consolation prize for drug smugglers out of Colombia. Their first choice? An actual Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine. What’s even crazier, however, is that the Russians seemed to be more than happy to sell them one.

None of this is at all surprising to anyone who’s been paying attention, but many of the details are new and interesting.

GOOD: Study: New approach to 3D printing of human tissue closer to reality.

CHARLES LIPSON: Earmarks rise from the dead in the Democratic Congress.

EXTENDED LOCKDOWNS ARE SUCH A BAD IDEA EVEN THE W.H.O. HAS DENOUNCED THEM: Philadelphia study links COVID-19 lockdowns, gun violence spike.

BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’s ONLINE: Biden’s ‘Conservative’ Supporters Need To Defend His Partisan, Hard-Left First Month.

(Classical reference in headline.)

THE NEW ANTI-RACISM LOOKS AN AWFUL LOT LIKE THE OLD RACISM: NYC Principal Urges Parents to Become ‘White Traitors,’ ‘White Abolitionists.’

GOOD: British study will infect volunteers with COVID-19 to test vaccines, treatments.

WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATORS: Open schools or give the money to parents. “If a district offers only remote classes, parents could use public-school funds to move their children to a school of their choice, according to legislation introduced in Maryland, Illinois, Utah and Georgia, reports Patrick Hauf of Capitol News Service.”

A BILLION HERE, A BILLION THERE, AND PRETTY SOON, YOU’RE TALKING REAL MONEY: New ‘COVID’ Legislation Contains $300 Billion in Unrelated Spending, Budget Watchdog Warns.

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Is That a Mask in Your Pocket Or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

Insanity Wrap needs to know: Is there a point where the public’s right to know and the public’s desire to know could collide like one of those Extinction Level Event asteroids into the Earth?

Answer: Yes, and the only thing we’re missing is Bruce Willis.

Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.

• CNN gently factchecks “four false statistical claims” by Joe Biden
• Rahm Emanuel to go from CCP booster to ambassador to the CCP?
• The true threat: “Super-sized” carnivorous mice

Bonus Sanity: The disastrous truth about Texas.

And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

“IT’S THE MOST INNOCENT FORM OF WHORING I KNOW:” How Orson Welles Became the Most Infamous Pitchman in Booze History.

BECAUSE HE’LL SAY ANYTHING. NEXT QUESTION? Why Did Biden Say ‘We Didn’t Have’ a COVID-19 Vaccine When He Took Office?

CHANGE: FAA Releases Remote ID, the Largest Regulatory Change for Drones In Years.

The FAA has long wanted to equip drones with a digital license plate. The idea is that government agencies, law enforcement and the general public should be able to track drones that are flying overhead. . . .

The drone will broadcast its serial number during flight. It will also include information on the location of the drone, its altitude, speed, and direction of flight. In addition, either the takeoff location or the controller’s location will also be made available as part of what the FAA calls the “message.” Most likely, either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth will be used to broadcast the signal.

People on the ground who are equipped with a smartphone will be able to use an app to receive the message and find information about the aircraft and the pilot. The FAA, law enforcement and other federal agencies will also have the ability to cross-reference the license plate number and access the pilot’s personal information. The general public won’t be able to do that.

Most existing drones can likely receive a firmware update and be able to broadcast the signal without additional cost. Older noncompliant drones can attach a module to their drone that will broadcast the signal.

What do you think?

SO VERY WOKE: Amazon changed traffic light timing during union drive, county officials say. “As part of its ongoing fight over an Alabama warehouse’s efforts to unionize, Amazon reportedly changed the timing of a traffic light outside the warehouse, according to reporting by More Perfect Union. Union organizers at the site had previously accused the company of altering the timing so that pro-union workers would not be able to canvass workers while stopped at the light.”

BIDEN’S RETURN TO NORMALCY: Nearly 5,000 National Guard troops to stay in DC over concerns of potential violence in March.