NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Airstrikes Resume Amid Shaky Syria Truce

The Syrian regime and its Russian allies stepped up airstrikes on opposition-held territory Sunday on the second day of an internationally backed cease-fire after a lull in violence a day earlier, according to antigovernment activists.

The areas struck Sunday are largely controlled by rebels who have agreed to the partial cease-fire, the activists and residents said. Extremists who are excluded from the cease-fire are also active in some of the same areas.

Rebels backed by backed by Western and Arab states fear the airstrikes will be used to attack them under the guise of striking the extremists; the Syrian regime considers all antigovernment fighters terrorists. Rebels have said such continued attacks could torpedo an already shaky truce.

All is proceeding exactly as I have foreseen.

IN THE CITY OF KNOXVILLE, an unconstitutional ban on indoor shooting ranges. I don’t see how this withstands scrutiny under the Tennessee Constitution, to say nothing of the federal Second Amendment. Luckily, there’s a challenge in the works.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Don’t Surrender To The Government War On Cash: Cash Is The Currency Of Freedom!

DO NOT TRUST CONTENT FROM SILICON VALLEY: The stealthy, Eric Schmidt-backed startup that’s working to put Hillary Clinton in the White House.

SAN FRANCISCO PUTS SANCTUARY BEFORE FUNDING, Debra Saunders writes at Real Clear Politics:

City Hall refused to kill the 2013 Sanctuary City policy. If conservatives want something, the board of supervisors will block it. Citizen safety be damned.

The Republican Congress is not of like mind. The new chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that oversees the Department of Justice, Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, is poised to use Congress’ power of the purse to withhold federal law enforcement funds from sanctuary cities. He told me, “There will be no more Kate Steinle murders, if I can help it.”

Faster, please.

WHY IS ANYONE SURPRISED? THAT WAS THE BASIS OF HER ENTIRE CAREER: Melissa Harris-Perry Throws Away TV Career, Petulantly Plays Race Card From Bottom of the Deck.

AND TRYING TO ACHIEVE THAT WAS A BIG MISTAKE: #FreeStacy Won’t Shut Up. “Well, who is silencing whom, Ms. Sarkeesian? Who is being ‘excluded’? Not you, but rather your critics, who are never permitted to reply directly to your dishonest accusations about a ‘culture of sexism.’ Anita Sarkeesian has never engaged in a dialogue with anyone who disagrees with her dangerous ideology, and why? Because feminism is always a lecture, never a debate.”

TRUMP PREFERENCE CASCADE CONTINUES: “Six reasons Trump is still better than Clinton,” says…Hugh Hewitt, astonishingly enough.

“As plebes make the Donald increasingly acceptable,” Glenn predicted in USA Today last week, “expect elite Trump supporters to come out of the closet.”

(To be fair though, “Better than Hillary” is an awfully low hurdle to leap.)

SOMEHOW I MISSED THIS LAST WEEK: Even Arch-Warmist Michael Mann Now Agrees That We’re In a Global-Warming Pause.

Fallen Angels was just a science fiction novel, right guys? Right? Guys?

HILLARY CLINTON’S FAILED, UNCONSTITUTIONAL, WAR OF CHOICE: Hillary Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall.

Mrs. Clinton was won over. Opposition leaders “said all the right things about supporting democracy and inclusivity and building Libyan institutions, providing some hope that we might be able to pull this off,” said Philip H. Gordon, one of her assistant secretaries. “They gave us what we wanted to hear. And you do want to believe.”

Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a “51-49” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.

The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton’s questions have come to pass.

In a saner political culture, this would have disqualified her from further high office, and certainly from the Presidency.

BLUE ON BLUE: Ed Schultz crushes longtime Clinton crusader David Brock.

No word yet if Brock appeared on camera from his secret base deep within Metaluna via interocitor.

MICHAEL BARONE: Honey, They’re Shrinking The Democratic Primary (Cont’d):

I’m not the only one who has noticed that Democratic caucus and primary turnout so far has been down as compared to 2008 and that Republican caucus and primary turnout has been up as compared to either 2012 or 2008.

Anna Greenberg, the Democratic pollster, made the same observation on a joint American Enterprise Institute/Brookings Institution/Center for American Progress panel last Thursday. The results of the South Carolina Democratic primary Saturday confirm the trend. Total turnout was 370,000, down from 30 percent from 2008’s 532,000 (I’m rounding off figures to the nearest thousand, and the 2016 numbers may be off a little from the final returns and exit poll numbers).

Many commentators have noticed that blacks constituted a higher percentage of South Carolina Democratic voters this year, 65 percent according to the exit poll, than they did in 2008, 55 percent. But this represents not a surge of blacks into the electorate, but rather the fact that black turnout declined by only 18 percent, whereas white turnout fell nearly in half, by 44 percent.

The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging white voters. More here: “What’s happened is a flight of moderates and conservatives from Democratic contests. The number of moderates and conservatives is down 46 percent in Iowa, 38 percent in new Hampshire and a whopping 64 percent in Nevada. You might regard this year’s Democratic contests as being determined by the liberal rump of the party, with the moderates and conservatives acting as if they had been expelled.”

We’re hearing a lot more about the GOP’s problems, but the fact is that both parties are increasingly unpopular.

Also: Democrats Should Be Very Nervous About Their Terrible Turnout Numbers: Low turnout equals President Trump.

In primary after primary this cycle, Democratic voters just aren’t showing up. Only 367,491 people cast a ballot for either Clinton or Sanders on Saturday. That’s down 16 percent from the 436,219 people who came out in 2008 for Clinton and Obama. Factor in the 93,522 people who voted for John Edwards back in the day, and you can see the scope of the problem. Democrats in 2016 are only getting about two-thirds of the primary votes that they received eight years ago.

Republican turnout in the South Carolina primary, by contrast, was up more than 70 percent from 2008.

South Carolina’s turnout numbers are not an anomaly. They’re consistent with other primaries to date. Republicans are psyched. Democrats are demoralized.

Well, when you run two old white people after 7 years of saying that it’s time we quit listening to old white people. . . .

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Ben Carson Says Hillary Clinton’s Dow Chemical Scandal Is ‘Washington Run Amok.’

SOCIALISM, THE NIGHTMARE THAT NEVER DIES: “The United States within nearly a century of its founding became the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind. It accomplished this without an income tax, free university tuition, universal health care, or even Social Security. In Bernie Sanders’ lifetime, he witnessed the fall of National Socialists, Soviet Socialists, and more benign iterations of the collectivist ideology. But he imagines the command economy, rather than the free market, as our savior.”

Whatever the religious differences between Hillary, Bernie and Trump, deep down, they all take the practice of Gnosticism quite seriously.

THE HILL: Puerto Rican crisis roils 2016 race.

Years of economic decline has driven hundreds of thousands of island residents to the US mainland, and is upending the political calculus on the presidential trail.

Puerto Rican residents cannot vote for the president in the general election, but can cast votes in primary contests.

The hotly contested Republican primary now has every candidate scrambling for whatever delegates they can find, leaving Puerto Rico’s oft-ignored primary on March 6 a unique opportunity for a pickup.

Even more significantly, a huge chunk of the Puerto Ricans that fled the island resettled in Florida, presenting a new voting bloc in that critical swing state.
“Over half are going to one state, and that’s Florida. This will have an impact on the primaries and subsequent November elections,” said Amilcar Antonio Barreto, an associate professor at Northeastern University and an expert on Puerto Rican politics. “They’re a big wild card.”

Puerto Ricans occupy a unique space in U.S. politics. While on the island, they are residents of a commonwealth and cannot ultimately vote for the president. But they are also American citizens, and free to move to the mainland whenever they want, where they can vote in the general election.

And hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans have made that choice, as a massive debt crisis is forcing the island to ask Congress to let it declare bankruptcy on some of its bonds and made providing basic public services a significant challenge.

Stay tuned.

HUH – I THOUGHT THE TIMES WAS A PRO-CHOICE NEWSPAPER: New York Times can’t stand that charter schools succeed, so it must try to destroy them:

Sure, all those black and Hispanic children will then have to be returned to their dropout-factory schools in Harlem or Bed-Stuy. But then the Times’ liberal readers will no longer have to stay up nights suffering the cognitive dissonance of knowing that an education system opposed by their beloved Democratic politicians is showing outstanding, data-proven results, because that system will be wiped out. Problem solved!

Read the whole thing.

MEET THE WORST CLINTON ALLY THE MSM HAS NEVER TOLD YOU ABOUT: Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss made at least 30 contributions to U.S. political campaigns over a nine-year period, according to FEC records cited by the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock.

Wyss is also the high-dollar Clinton Foundation donor, financial patron of Clinton national campaign chairman John Podesta, bankroller of multiple environmental crusades, and multi-million dollar supporter of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress. Still, you likely have never heard of Wyss because mainstream media outlets almost never talk about the guy, even though his money and influence on the Left puts him in a class with George Soros.

Search the Washington Post for “Hansjorg Wyss,” for example, and only one reference appears – a March 22, 2015, reference to him as an “environmentally minded billionaire.” In a story strewn with links to important names, Wyss was not deemed of sufficient significance to provide such additional information.

The New York Times does a bit better on that search, showing nine entries. Two of the entries reference Wyss as a wealthy donor to CAP. The other seven references are older stories that focus on the sale of Wyss’ former company, the medical device-maker, Synthes. Incredibly, none of the seven mentions the fact five people had previously died while participating in illegal drug tests conducted by Synthes under Wyss’ orders. Four Synthes executives went to jail as a result. Wyss was not one of them.

Pollock has been exposing Wyss for several years, as in here, here, here and here. But others are noticing now, too, including Citizens United, the David Bossie-led non-profit that produced the Hillary Clinton expose that ultimately led to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision so loathed by campaign finance reformers.

Bossie’s group wants to know why four Synthes executives went to jail but Wyss did not. An obvious question is whether Wyss’ money and political connections had anything to do with his being spared from prison. Remember who was Attorney General when the decision was made? Eric Holder.

GAME ON: MARCO RUBIO MAKES FUN OF DONALD TRUMP’S ‘SMALL HANDS:’ “Calling Trump a ‘short-fingered vulgarian’ was something anti-Trump folks did on Twitter, but this is the first time (we think) that a GOP rival has used it on the stump.”

While reading reading Spy magazine and watching (in horror) the Morton Downey Jr. Show while attending NYU in the late ‘80s, I had no idea I was witnessing the first stirrings of a presidential campaign and its critics a quarter century later.

Related: “The current SnarkyMarcoFightBack push is just another doomed elite attempt to win without changing substantive appeal (on immig/M’care),” Mickey Kaus tweets.

THE CHINA SYNDROME: China cuts reserve requirement ratio for fifth time since Feb. 2015.

China is drowning in cheap money, bad loans, and industrial overcapacity. And contrary to claims by Donald Trump and others, the country’s central bank is burning through its foreign reserves in an attempt to prop up the yuan and avoid a balance-of-payments crisis.

“Socialism with Chinese characteristics” looks an awful lot like any other crony-based system right before the bottom drops out.

OH, THAT CASUAL RACISM: Democratic Congresswoman: We Need an African American On The Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas Doesn’t Count.

Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA) was appearing on a show yesterday hosted by veteran NBC anchor and Comcast spokesman Al Sharpton.

YOU DON’T SAY: Divisions within GOP over Trump’s candidacy are growing.

A campaign full of racial overtones and petty, R-rated put-downs grew even uglier Sunday after Trump declined repeatedly in a CNN interview to repudiate the endorsement of him by David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Trump had disavowed Duke at a news conference on Friday, but he stammered when asked about Duke on Sunday.

Marco Rubio, who has been savaging Trump as a “con man” for three days, responded by saying that Trump’s defiance made him “unelectable.” The senator from Florida said at a rally in Northern Virginia, “We cannot be the party that nominates someone who refuses to condemn white supremacists.”

The GOP race began as embarrassment of riches, and now it’s just an embarrassment.

JOEL KOTKIN: Why Hillary And Trump Are Winning: Race Seals The Class Deal.

Racial divisions will shape the Democratic results Super Tuesday. The party’s Southern flank, weak in November but important now, tends to be dominated by African Americans and, in Texas, at least, also Latinos. In some states, like South Carolina, where African Americans constitute upward of a majority, Clinton has proven all but unbeatable.

In contrast, Clinton did poorly in New Hampshire (94 percent white) and barely earned a tie in Iowa (92 percent white). Generally speaking, the whiter the state, the better things tend to appear for Sanders.

These patterns may well dominate Super Tuesday results. In Texas, Alabama, Georgia and, to a lesser extent, Virginia, minority voters could well propel the former secretary of state closer to the nomination. But such heavily Caucasian states as Massachusetts (80 percent white), Wyoming, North Dakota, Minnesota (85 percent white) and Sanders’ home state of Vermont (95 percent white) seem most likely to end up “feeling the Bern.” . . .

Just as Sanders’ strategy thrives on younger white and working-class voters, Trump appeals to the mostly older part of America’s beleaguered white working class. Many belong to the growing “precariat” – people who are working, many part time or on short-term gigs, but lacking long-term security. According to one estimate, at least one-third of the U.S. workforce falls into this category, and the numbers are growing. By 2020, a separate study estimates that more than 40 percent of the American workforce – or 60 million people – will be independent workers: freelancers, contractors or temporary employees.

Trump’s class appeal spills over to racial issues. Unlike wealthier voters, poor whites compete for jobs with immigrants and also tend to live where poor minorities also settle. Overall, according to Pew, voters under financial stress tend to be more concerned about illegal immigration. They also tend to work in fields, such as construction and manufacturing, where the foreign-born constitute a disproportionate share of the workforce.

But it would be a mistake to see Trump’s anti-immigrant message as appealing only to whites. The fact that Trump won the lion’s share of Hispanic Republicans in Nevada against two Latino candidates should alter some presumptions and does not bode well for Cruz and Rubio. One possible overlooked factor: A majority of Latinos, in contrast to their open-borders-minded leadership, according to some surveys, already believe overall immigration levels are too high. What seems like racism to college professors and journalists might seem more like economic salvation to struggling families, even ones with roots in Latin America.

Still, overall, the Republican race is about white voters.

Yeah, believe it or not there are actually a lot of white voters out there. They could be an important — who knows, maybe even decisive — influence on the outcome. But there’s also this:

The predictable left-of-center analysis is that the future will be determined by an increasingly diverse, largely Democratic electorate. “(We are) facing a future in which national elections will no longer be decided by ideas, but by numbers. It will be a turnout battle between people who believe in a multicultural vision for the country and those who don’t,” Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone. “Every other issue, from taxes to surveillance to war to jobs to education, will take a distant back seat to this ongoing, moronic referendum on white victimhood.”

Taibbi’s lack of sympathy for the “moronic” struggling white working and middle classes is shockingly typical of the coastal cognoscenti, who are comfortable and benefit from the labor of minority service workers, ethnic restaurants and street culture. Yet the mouthing of “people of color” rhetoric may prove less compelling if Trump can get his economic message out, particularly against Clinton, who is rightfully seen as a well-paid tool of Democratic-leaning Wall Street, Silicon Valley and their public-sector allies.

One key factor may be African Americans, whose self-interests were submerged in service to President Obama. Trump could appeal to them with his tough stand on immigration.

Yeah, though he might want to be a little quicker to condemn white supremacists if he wants to pick up the black vote.

MICHAEL BARONE: Honey, they’re shrinking the Democratic primary!

Related: Even the Democrats are sick of their own superdelegate system.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON OBAMA: THE LAMEST DUCK.

He’s a tiny man, trapped by his own policies, as the hourglass begins to run out on his presidency.