IN ONLY THE QUALITY MIGHT IMPROVE BY A SIMILAR PERCENTAGE. WELL, THERE’S ROOM! Marc Andreessen Thinks the News Business Is About to Grow 1,000 Percent. “The very platforms that killed newspapers, he says, have amped up news consumption, creating more news readers (compared with broadcast systems used 30 years ago) and intensifying the habits of existing news consumers. Andreessen believes that the quantity of news consumed is now growing even faster than the quantity of news produced — that demand now far exceeds supply.” Well, that’s certainly true on the quality front, too. . . .

JOURNALISM: Ed Driscoll: Say, Maybe TMZ Could Open A Branch In DC. “Will journalists ever return to raking the muck in DC as aggressively as TMZ and other showbiz outlets cover Hollywood? Sure they will — just as soon as Republicans recapture the Senate and, especially, the White House.”

JONAH GOLDBERG: By the way, lefties, Nazis are still socialists.

21ST CENTURY RACISM: CNN’s Don Lemon: “You Weigh How Much You Should Criticize The President Because He’s Black.”

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THE “CONNECTED CAR:” Connected To Trouble? “By 2020 pretty much all cars will be connected, except for collector’s items. In the internet of things, the connected world, cars are really interesting.”

FREE SPEECH UPDATE: Election law experts join in the denuniciation of IRS’s attempt to curb free speech.

JOEY, DO YOU LIKE MOVIES ABOUT GLADIATORS? Gladiator School Dating to 2nd Century AD Discovered in Austria.

AN INTERESTING AND WORTHWHILE NEW PIECE FROM MICHAEL HIGDON: Marginalized Fathers and Demonized Mothers: A Feminist Look at the Reproductive Freedom of Unmarried Men. I don’t think it’s any surprise that feminist notions of “reproductive freedom” aren’t applied to men.

I also recommend his earlier piece, Fatherhood by Conscription: Nonconsensual Insemination and the Duty of Child Support.

SECRETS: British Hacker Faces Extradition To US, Not To Mention Five Years’ Imprisonment In UK For Failing To Hand Over Encryption Keys.

FLASHBACK TO 2012: Dan Abrams: “uh oh. New Romney gaffe. He just called Russia the ‘number one geopolitical foe’ of the United States. @wolfblitzer called him out.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: California Dems block expulsion of legislator convicted of 8 felonies.

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader William Leslie, Rock Star Down (The Psychic Registry).

NOT SURE IF I’D WANT TO DIVE IN THIS OR NOT: The “Exosuit”: A wearable submarine for visiting deep water.

EUROPE: Rome Days From Bankruptcy: Eternal city warns it will go bust for the first time since it was destroyed by Nero.

A NEW WAVE OF IPAD INJURIES ON THE WAY? I sharpen the edges of mine, so that in an emergency I can throw it like Odd-Job’s hat.

ROGER SIMON: How Conservatives Can Take Back (Some of) Hollywood for Oscar Time. “If conservatives give up Hollywood, they give up the country. Game over.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 295.

#GREENFAIL: Germany’s Energiewende: A Path to Economic Self-Destruction.

More bad news for Germany’s green dreamers: Two reports published this week highlight some fundamental flaws underlying the Energiewende, Germany’s radical set of energy policies.

The first, by the Commission for Research and Innovation (EFI), states that the subsidies by which green power producers in Germany are paid guaranteed, above-market prices to put electricity on the grid aren’t a cost-effective instrument for climate protection. Nor are they producing a measurable effect on innovation. “For both these reasons, there is no justification for a continuation of the EEG [the Renewable Energy Law],” the report concludes.

Those are devastating blows against the Energiewende’s legislative cornerstone, which has been in force since 2000. The special path on energy cost taxpayers €22 billion last year alone—and that figure doesn’t include residual costs to the economy. . . .

The second report, by Information Handling Services (IHS), calculates that Germany lost €15 billion in exports last year from having to pay a premium for electricity compared with international competitors, and a total of €52 billion in the six-year period from 2008–13. As the Financial Times points out, smaller companies were disproportionately affected, because, “unlike heavy energy users such as BASF and ThyssenKrupp, small companies are not eligible for exemptions from the energy bill surcharges that cover the costs of the move to clean energy.”

When you do what the greens want, it’s a disaster.

PAUL RAHE: Putin’s Folly: “The current Russian leader is pathetically and dangerously intent on refighting the Cold War. It is, I suppose, the only thing that he knows.”

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: All the President’s IRS Agents: The targeting of groups opposed to the Democratic agenda has not ended—it’s gotten worse.

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CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: “Evidence is accumulating of a corrupt bureaucratic culture in many, if not all, federal agencies.”

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Roll Call: IRS Uproar Intensifies. “As thousands of negative comments flood the Internal Revenue Service on the eve of a Feb. 27 deadline, GOP leaders are moving on several fronts to block the proposed IRS regulations that would curb political activity by tax-exempt groups. . . . The administration has denied knowledge of the IRS targeting, which Obama has attributed to incompetence, not malicious intent.” Yeah, I don’t believe that.