WHY REPUBLICANS need to chillax. “Here’s the bottom line. I have no dog in this fight. My candidates either didn’t run or imploded on impact. I’m not comfortable with Romney’s apparent weaknesses, and despite his ability to articulate conservatism my gut tells me that a Gingrich nomination and subsequent Presidency would end in heartache as well. But the main point is this, neither one of these men, whether they’re really conservative or not, whether they’re a rino, liberal, progressive, or just opportunistic, is Barack Hussein Obama. And that’s enough for me. Certainly it would have been nice to have a strong, conservative candidate with populist appeal to take the fight to Obama. But who the challenger in this race ends up being may mean less than perhaps it ever has in history for the simple reason that the incumbent will be Barack Obama. That one fact in itself may be our biggest asset.”

#HIGHSPEEDFAIL: Tea Partiers Rallying Against California’s High-Speed Rail Boondoggle. “If California’s Gov. Brown is looking for a legacy, perhaps we should take up a collection and have a statue made and placed on the Capitol grounds.”

Plus, an online poll at HuffPo.

SHE’S WORTH 8 FIGURES, but Elizabeth Warren Says She’s Not In The 1%.

Hard to see how Warren wouldn’t be, by most standards, wealthy, according to the Personal Financial Disclosure form she filed to run for Senate shows that she’s worth as much as $14.5 million. She earned more than $429,000 from Harvard last year alone for a total of about $700,000, and lives in a house worth $5 million.

She also has a portfolio of investments in stocks and bonds worth as as much as $8 million, according to the form, which lists value ranges for each investment. The bulk of it is in funds managed by TIAA-CREF.

Warren would not, of course, be particularly wealthy by the tony standards of the Senate. But she’s also unlikely to draw the sort of popular identification with her financial status that might attach to Marco Rubio, whose home is underwater.

And efforts to pass herself off as one of the 99% for whom she aims to speak appear likely to backfire.

Scott Brown should just keep pointing out that she’s a blue-blooded Harvard type.

K.C. JOHNSON: “The dysfunctional world of the Durham DA’s office continues. A hearing on her case will take place on Feb. 13, assuming she does not resign first. Given Cline’s delusional approach to affairs over the past several months, I’m not counting on an early resignation.”

JAMES TARANTO: Happy Enroniversary! Did the company’s collapse turn out to be a “greater turning point” than 9/11?

“I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.” It’s one of our all-time favorite quotes, and it was published 10 years ago this Sunday. As former Enron adviser Paul Krugman might say, this statement is false.

It was, of course, Krugman who wrote that statement, in his Jan. 29, 2002, New York Times column. It took chutzpah, considering that, as Glenn Reynolds reminds us, his column just four days earlier had been a testy defense of Krugman’s past position on Enron’s advisory board. While serving in that capacity–before joining the Times, whose strict ethics rules prohibit such moonlighting–he had written a puff piece about Enron, “The Ascent of E-Man R.I.P.: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” for Fortune. . . . That of course raises the question: Was Krugman deceived, or was he a deceiver? Possibly both, but the absence of any introspection in the Jan. 29 column was the second most striking thing about it.

The most striking thing, of course, was the 9/11 comparison, obviously designed to be provocative, even offensive. This was a scant 4½ months after the attack, and it seemed, at the time, churlish to diminish a national wound that was very far from healing. Time heals all wounds, and the comparison no longer seems invidious, just false.

Like a lot of what Krugman says.

THE SOPA FIGHT IS OVER, but the ACTA Fight is still on.

MEET THE MARRIAGE KILLER: It’s More Common Than Adultery and Potentially As Toxic, So Why Is It So Hard to Stop Nagging?

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: Worries about Fourth Generation Thermonuclear Weapons.

LIFE AMONG THE .001%: Dylan Ratigan Hosts “30 Million Jobs Tour” From Glamorous Miami Beach 5-Star-Resort. “This, as Ratigan promotes his tome ‘Greedy Bastards’ — a book, about rapacious banks ripping off the common man.”

MICHAEL YON’S MEDEVAC STORY is getting more attention.

MARK LEVIN: Newt did more for the conservative movement than virtually all of his critics today.

MORE ON THE NEW CIVILITY: Obama fanatic threatens to kill Arpaio.

A “fanatical supporter” of President Barack Obama is the prime suspect in an investigation into an Internet death threat against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Adam Eugene Cox, 33, was arrested in Tennessee Friday on an unrelated warrant for assault.

Working with MCSO, deputies in Knoxville, Tenn., served a search warrant and seized evidence from Cox’s home on Friday after an investigation into the death threat came to light in October.

In that threat, Cox stated Arpaio and his family would be killed, according to MCSO. His postings read, in part: “I plan to kill Arpaio first. He will be filled with a thousand bullet holes before the year is out. I promise you this. He won’t [expletive] with Obama. He will be buried 10 feet under and his whole family will be murdered along with him.”

Well, given the President’s extremist, eliminationist rhetoric, this sort of thing was bound to happen, I suppose.

SPEECH: Twitter’s new censorship plan rouses global furor.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Fixing Student Loans: Let’s Give Colleges Some ‘Skin in the Game’. I’ve made a similar proposal myself.

EATING MCNUGGETS AT EVERY MEAL: Downside: Vitamin Deficiency. Upside: She’s Slim and Pretty.

AT AMAZON, up to 50% off on cordless drills.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Porn And Condoms: How Will The New Law Impact The Industry? “We’ll look for other areas that are more welcoming. And we’ll take the thousands of jobs we create along with us. If we leave the state, those dollars and the tax dollars will go along with us.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Free Courses, Elite Colleges.

Udemy, a company that allows anyone to create and sell courses through its online platform, has announced a new area of its site, called The Faculty Project, devoted to courses by professors at a number of top institutions, such as Colgate, Duke University, Stanford University, Northwestern University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia, Dartmouth College and Vassar College. While Udemy is a for-profit enterprise, the Faculty Project courses will be free.

The goal is to “elevate the brand,” according to Gagan Biyani, Udemy’s president and co-founder. The company says it has no immediate plans to monetize the Faculty Project, and would never do so without the input and permission of its faculty contributors.

Read the whole thing.

LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: AALS President: Law Professors Should Be “Cheerleaders” for “Our Way of Life.”

DIGITAL SPIES: The Alarming Rise of Digital Espionage.

RAND SIMBERG: Newt’s Lunar Base.

SCIENCE: Men can intuitively decode women’s menstrual cycles.

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Self-Help.

IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO WIN AN IPAD in the PJ Media Nostradamus Contest.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A “Disrupted” Higher Education System?

The “disruption” of the higher-ed market is a popular refrain these days. Rising tuition prices and student debt have left many wondering if the current model is indeed broken and whether those like Harvard’s Clay Christensen are right when they say that innovations in course delivery will eventually displace established players.

What exactly those innovations will look like remains a matter of debate. One view from Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, envisions a future in which every industry will be disrupted and “rebuilt with people at the center.” . . . While amenities and services on campuses have been redesigned in the last decade with students clearly at the center, the core of the academic experience for students today is almost exactly the same as it was for their parents decades ago. While other industries have been able to find productivity gains without sacrificing quality, on most college campuses we still have professors at the front of a room or at a table with an average of 16 students in front of them.

The biggest — and fastest — savings, however, are to be found in reforming administration. Those will be politically more difficult, however, as higher education administration provides a lot of jobs for people who reliably vote Democratic, and who have a lot of free time for politics.