EBOLA UPDATE: Nearly Halted in Sierra Leone, Ebola Makes Comeback by Sea. “Public health experts preparing for an international conference on Ebola on Tuesday seem to have no doubt that the disease can be vanquished in the West African countries ravaged by it in the last year. But the steep downward trajectory of new cases late last year and into January did not lead to the end of the epidemic. . . . The wharf, Tamba Kula, is an informal settlement where hundreds of people live in shanties made of reclaimed wood and corrugated metal roofs. At the slum’s entrance, a towering sign displays an image of the Statue of Liberty, an advertisement for daily British Airways flights with connections to the United States that were canceled when the Ebola outbreak was declared.”

Plus: “I feel like these people, they aren’t ready to end Ebola yet.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: America’s High-Risk, High-Reward Higher Education System.

The wage premium attached to a BA is higher than ever, and AA’s have considerable labor market value as well. This is the “high reward” part.

But for too many others, it’s a risky investment. Many who start higher education never finish a credential. Just 31 percent of those students from the bottom income quartile who start college finish a bachelor’s degree. Recent data suggests that the returns to “some college” have essentially fallen to zero. Even among those who do finish, there’s a risk that the investment won’t pay off. One study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show that the 25th percentile of bachelor’s degree recipients earn no more than a high school graduate, and haven’t since the 1970s.

Yes, that’s why the simplistic defenders of “a college degree” are being naive — or dishonest. There’s no such thing as a generic college degree, and the return on investment varies a lot. What’s more, there are many risks that are, from the standpoint of an 18-year-old college applicant, imponderable.

TEST DRIVE: 2015 Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe Nighthawk.

But if you’re going to read about that car, you should read P.J. O’Rourke. “One will be sold to Puff Daddy, and the rest will go to the Persian Gulf.”

MARK CUNNINGHAM: What Our President Should Say About Islam. This is clearly something Obama doesn’t want to say, though. Why not?

WHAT FREEDOM LOOKS LIKE: I built an AR-15 in my kitchen. “Buying this kind of rifle is the modern version of getting a Corvette during your mid-life crisis—but cheaper and probably less dangerous.”

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Quartering Spyware Troops In A Digital Age: Why Your Home Should Be Your Castle.

ANN ALTHOUSE: “Obamacare threatens to end John Roberts’s dream of a nonpartisan Supreme Court.” “Just one headline that I’m quoting to stand in for all the articles I’m seeing that seem to be mostly only about scaring/manipulating/massaging the Supreme Court into feeling deep down inside that it simply must not ruin Obamacare. To my eye, this effort seems so transparent and desperate that it heightens a perception that the text of the statute just won’t work for what they really, reeeeeally need it to do.”

YEAH, I DON’T GET IT. What’s Eating Joe Scarborough? Host Grows Testy After Saying He’s ‘Available’ To Moderate GOP Debates. I, too, got an angry DM from Scarborough, just for RTing it, but couldn’t respond because he doesn’t follow me. And I’m still mystified. I didn’t think the story reflected badly on him, particularly, and it was just one RT out of the hundreds (or more) I do in a day. And, as everyone knows, RTs aren’t endorsements. Anyway, Joe, if you’re reading this, sorry!

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 662.

SALENA ZITO ON JOURNALISM: Arrogant media elites mock Middle America. Most of these media folks come from flyover country, and their main source of self-regard lies in feeling superior to the rubes they left back home, who never properly appreciated them in high school. . . .

PUTIN WON’T BE PLEASED: Is American LNG Ready to Help Europe?

When Russia threatened to cut off gas to Ukraine last year, policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic began to call for American gas producers to start exporting some of the enormous new quantities of shale gas to Europe as a way to help allies reduce dependence on Gazprom. At the time we pointed out two flaws in that strategy: first, constructing the requisite infrastructure on both ends of the supply chain takes years, so this would be no quick fix; and second, Europe would only receive American LNG if it outbid Asia, which at the time was ponying up a great deal.

That latter reasoning no longer holds, which changes the calculus somewhat. Already Europe is on track to double its LNG imports this year, though it’s still not sourcing that from America. That’s because the American LNG export infrastructure is still under construction. Just a few short years ago we were building import terminals; turning that completely around is neither cheap nor easy, and it won’t happen overnight.

Still, if Asian demand remains slack, Europe’s medium-term energy future looks brighter. Diversifying away from Putin’s gas supplies is obviously a top priority there, and American gas can help.

The more energy America produces — and exports — the more it hurts our various enemies around the world.

ANA MARIE COX: Why I’m Coming Out As A Christian.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Quartering Spyware Troops In A Digital Age: Why Your Home Should Be Your Castle.

ROGER KIMBALL: The Lessons Of Culture, Benjamin Netanyahu Edition.

Here we are on the eve of Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to both houses of the United States Congress. The Obama administration is acting like a petulant twelve-year-old —how dare the Prime Minister of Israel come to the United States and speak before Congress when he wasn’t invited by us? — and the rancid Pelosi-Reid contingent of the Democratic Party has promised to take their marbles and go home: they won’t even listen to what he has to say.

The ostensible issue is Iran, with which the Obama administration is currently capitula—er, negotiating. The presence of a Jew, and a Jew from Israel, in the nation’s capital (and Capitol) is sure to offend the Mullahs in Teheran and it might just upset the delicate diplomacy by which Obama privately assures that Iran gets nuclear weapons while publically pretending to prevent that eventuality.

Back in 2001, when Barack Obama was in the Illinois State Senate and still battening on the wisdom of the “Reverend” Jeremiah (“God-Damn America”) Wright, Netanyahu was more forthright, and more percipient, than most politicians about the Islamic terrorist attacks of 9/11. Those attacks, he said, were part of “a war to reverse the triumph of the West.”

Netanyahu was right then, and he is still right.

Well, that’s why so many lefties sympathize with the terrorists. They want to reverse the triumph of the West too.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “Lately liberalism has gone from psychodrama to farce.” Plus: “The liberal left got what it wanted in 2009 with a supermajority in the Senate and large majority in the House, a subservient mainstream media, the good will of the American people, and the most liberal president in American history. It only took that the liberal hierarchy six years to erode the Democratic Party to levels that we have not seen since the 1920s. Almost every policy initiative we have seen — whether climate change, foreign policy, health care, or race relations — has imploded. The answer to these failures has not been introspection, humility, or reevaluation why the liberal agenda proved unpopular and unworkable, but in paranoid fashion to double-down on it, convinced that its exalted aims must allow any means necessary — however farcical — to achieve them. The logical result is the present circus.”

MIA LOVE: The Idea Of A Republican War On Women Is Absolutely Ridiculous.

Love, who spoke to the Washington Examiner after a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., said that the real issues facing Americans are not “gender specific,” but affect everyone.

“As a woman, I believe that I have the ability to … pay for and decide my own healthcare,” Love said. “I don’t need Washington to do that for me.”

She added: “I think that it’s actually insulting to claim that women can’t make decisions on their own, that they need a centralized government to make those decisions for them.”

In that respect, Love said, the war on women is really coming from Democrats.

“It comes from the idea that they’d like to separate us based on social status, gender, race, income levels,” Love said. “And we as Americans can’t allow that.”

Divide and rule has always been their strategy. Plus:

Love knows a little something about rising up from having nothing. Her parents emigrated to the U.S. from Haiti in the 1970s after fleeing from a ruthless dictatorship. They spoke no English when they settled in New York and, according to Love, had $10 in their pockets. Her father has expressed pride that he and his wife were able to support their family without welfare — just help from family members. It is that idea of community support, rather than government dependence, that resonates with Love today.

“I think that we, as Americans, need to trust people again,” she said.

Nonsense. We have Hillary — richer than Jeb Bush! — to tell us how to help the downtrodden. Hey, she’s worth 9 figures now, but she was “dead broke” in 2001. She knows about rising from nothing!

JOEL KOTKIN: The Empire Strikes Back.

In his first six years in office, President Obama has performed well for those who wrote those checks. He brought in Wall Street insiders such as Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers to concoct his economic policy, which brought a recovery to the financial plutocracy before virtually anyone else. Wall Street was back by 2009; the rest of us have had to wait for 2015.

Obama and the Democrats in Congress also handed the big banks a nice gift in the form of the Dodd-Frank Bill which helped them achieve that “too big to fail” status and has accelerated the growing consolidation of the American financial system. Indeed, since Dodd-Frank was passed smaller banks’ share of banking assets has dropped twice as quickly as before, notes a recent Harvard Kennedy School of Government study. Smaller and community banks – historically more likely to loan to small businesses – have seen a 50 percent drop in their share of lending while the the five largest banks now control over 40 percent of lending, twice their share 20 years ago.

The big banks were saved as well by Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision not to engage in tough prosecutions of Wall Street’s biggest malefactors, in part, he explained, due to their enormous size.

Essentially, he has argued the giant banks, nurtured by the government, are too big to not only fail but see their executives placed in the docket.

To be sure, President Obama’s occasional populist rhetoric did offend many on Wall Street, which in 2012 shifted much of its support to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who, after all, was one of their own. Obama still did fairly well on Wall Street. In his two campaigns he ended up raising almost twice as much from Wall Street as his predecessor, George W. Bush.

Now that there are no new campaigns to fund, Holder is beginning to discuss prosecutions of grandees again, no doubt unsettling some on Wall Street and its associated hangers-on. But, even so, Treasury remains under the thumb of yet another insider, former Citibank executive Jacob Lew.

Yeah, if you want the big banks controlled, you’re better off voting for a non-establishment Republican.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Tuition at Top Law Schools Surpasses $55K Per Year. Bear in mind that this is “sticker price” with most students getting discounts disguised as financial aid.

IT’S BASICALLY A 21ST CENTURY REEFER MADNESS, AIMED AT COLLEGE MEN: Emily Yoffe: The Hunting Ground: The failures of a new documentary about rape on college campuses.

Any professor who shows it in class should probably be reported for gender bias, and creating a learning environment hostile to male students.

JONATHAN ADLER: The “censorious thuggery” of Ohio Judge Tim Grendell. “If you were a judge, would you threaten to hold people in contempt of court because of things they said about you in private conversations? As a VC reader, I am sure you wouldn’t. Alas, the same cannot be said of Ohio judge Tim Grendell of the Geauga County Court of Common Pleas Probate and Juvenile Division. And that’s only part of the story.”

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: At least, not if you’re the Washington Post’s Phillip Rucker. Ed Driscoll schools him on Reagan, Patco, and foreign affairs.

Note this from Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Schultz: “‘One of the most fortuitous foreign relations moves he ever made.’ It was in no way a popular move with the American public but it showed European heads of state and diplomatic personnel that he was tough and meant what he said.”

WELL, I HOPE SO — BUT HE SURE WIMPED OUT LAST TIME: The Hill: Is Supreme Court’s chief justice ready to take down ObamaCare?

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts faced a conservative backlash after casting a decisive vote to save ObamaCare in 2012.

Now he must weigh in on the law once again.

The case of King v. Burwell, set for arguments before the Court on Wednesday, threatens to gut the law by invalidating subsidies to help millions of people buy insurance in the roughly three-dozen states relying on the federally run marketplace.

While it is legally far different than the 2012 case — a question of interpreting the text of the law rather than ruling on its constitutionality — Roberts faces the same kind of scrutiny.

After Roberts’s surprise ruling in a 5-4 decision to uphold the law the last time, conservatives denounced him as a sellout. Conservative host Glenn Beck printed T-shirts with Roberts’s picture above the word “COWARD.” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, now a possible Republican presidential candidate, said Roberts was “just playing to the editorial pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times.”

CBS reported after the decision, citing two anonymous sources, that Roberts had switched his vote to uphold the law and withstood a fierce lobbying campaign from the conservative wing of the Court.

A more accurate account would note that he caved to a fierce lobbying campaign from Democratic academics and pundits.

LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: Political reporter ponders why people hate political reporters.

But being lazy, prejudiced political tools, eager to embrace the (Democratic) narrative of the day uncritically — the way so many of you jumped on the easily-debunked Jezebel Scott Walker story, because of course Republicans are Pro-Rape — might be part of the problem. Just sayin. . . .