LAYERS OF EDITORS AND FACT-CHECKERS: New York Times Kills ‘Public Editor’ Slot, Offers More Buyouts To Reduce Edit Ranks.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: The Left’s Unilateral Suicide Pact.

Since liberals and progressives will not allow a rethinking of open borders policy, perhaps they would support improved intelligence capacity so as to detect terror attacks in the planning stages? Nope. The Left still decries the modest expansions of surveillance power under the 2001 Patriot Act as the work of totalitarianism. Former New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly sought to gather publicly available information about dense Muslim neighborhoods in New York in order to monitor potential radicalization; his discontinued initiative is still denounced as anti-Muslim oppression. Internet companies protect encrypted communications from government access, to the applause of civil libertarians and the mainstream media. The National Security Agency’s mass data analysis, done by unconscious computer algorithms, is still being challenged in court.

What about using ordinary police powers to try to hinder terrorism? Islamic terrorists in Europe have moonlighted as crooks, engaging in drug dealing, robberies, vandalism, and theft. The U.S. should have zero tolerance for any criminal activity committed by aliens: break the criminal law and you’re out of here. Deporting alien criminals is both an anti-crime and an anti-terrorism strategy. Yet mayors and police chiefs in sanctuary jurisdictions across the country continue to release alien criminals back into the community from jail in defiance of requests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold the criminals briefly for removal proceedings. The New York Police Department defied every ICE detainer request it received in the first four months of 2017, instead releasing 179 alien criminals back into the streets, according to the New York Post.

So what does the progressive and liberal bloc offer? Treacly bromides, combined with fatalism about the necessity of adjusting to future attacks.

Read the whole thing.

WELL, GOOD. BUT IT’S JUST A STOPGAP AT BEST IN ITSELF: Researchers amplify antibiotic of last resort hoping to halt superbugs.

HIGH CRIMES AND WHATEVERS: A majority of those who want Trump impeached agree there is no concrete reason to impeach him.

I’D SAY TRUMP TOOK HER SCALP, BUT I’M NOT SURE THERE’S MUCH OF THAT LEFT AFTER ALL THE FACELIFTS: CNN Fires Kathy Griffin From New Year’s Show After Donald Trump Beheading Stunt.

RETAIL BLUES: Michael Kors plans to shutter 100 to 125 stores.

Michael Kors said Wednesday it will close 100 to 125 full-price stores over the next two years. The company had 827 retail locations as of April 1.

The closures are intended to improve profitability, Michael Kors said. The retailer anticipates ongoing annual savings of $60 million as a result of this plan but will record a $125 million charge.

Michael Kors, among many of its peers in the retail space, has been hurt by lagging sales and dwindling foot traffic as more shoppers choose to ring up purchases online. Further, the retailer has had a difficult time marketing its products at full price.

That’s a sure sign that a designer has lost his cachet.

DISPATCHES FROM OLD MEDIA:

Shot: BREAKING: Reports Say Pelley Has Lost ‘CBS Evening News’ Job.

— Curtis Houck, NewsBusters, last night.

Chaser: America Learns Of Someone Named Scott Pelley.

—Jim Treacher, the Daily Caller, today.

According to Page Six, “Insiders tell us that CBS News president David Rhodes ‘is making [Pelley] move to ‘60 Minutes,’ and that the pair ‘don’t get on.’” Houck notes that the basic details of Pelley being exiled fulltime to 60 Minutes has been confirmed by multiple sources.

I’m not sure why the brother of Obama’s infamous former Middle East “advisor” and failed novelist Ben Rhodes is upset with Pelley — he’s been totally objective and unbiased in his role as newsreader to the elderly. Totally.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Should you be eating organs?

Related item here.

SKYNET SMILES: Robots Wielding Water Knives Are the Future of Farming.

HMM. I BELIEVE IT WAS AN EARLY ANTIBIOTIC CANDIDATE, TOO: Common antioxidant may slow symptoms of aging in skin. “Methylene blue improved physical, biochemical and genetic aging markers in experiments with human skin cells and simulated skin tissues.”

IS THIS LOVE FOR TRUMP, OR DISGUST WITH THE ESTABLISHMENT? AND DOES THAT EVEN MATTER?

That’s fitting, since Indiana is the setting for Indian Country, Kurt Schlichter’s prequel to his excellent first novel, People’s Republic.

YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW: Here’s What Federal Regulations Cost Your Family This Year.

JOHN STOSSEL: Noam Chomsky’s Venezuela Lesson.

Chomsky, whose anti-capitalist teachings have inspired millions of American college students, praised Chavez’s “sharp poverty reduction, probably the greatest in the Americas.” Chavez returned the compliment by holding up Chomsky’s book during a speech at the U.N., making it a best-seller.

Is Chomsky embarrassed by that today? “No,” he wrote me. He praised Chavez “in 2006. Here’s the situation as of two years later.” He linked to a 2008 article by a writer of Oliver Stone’s movie who said, “Venezuela has seen a remarkable reduction in poverty.”

I asked him, “Should you now say to the students who’ve learned from you, ‘Socialism, in practice, often wrecks people’s lives’?”

Chomsky replied, “I never described Chavez’s state capitalist government as ‘socialist’ or even hinted at such an absurdity. It was quite remote from socialism. Private capitalism remained … Capitalists were free to undermine the economy in all sorts of ways, like massive export of capital.”

It’s always wreckers and hoarders, and never the collectivists.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Media Mock Carolla, Prager for ‘No Safe Spaces’ Doc.

WHY DO DEMOCRATS (AND CNN) HATE CHILDREN? Barron Trump Thought Beheaded Image Was His Dad.

FINALLY: After years of empty U.S. promises, Trump arms Kurds fighting ISIS in Syria.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Forget the Paris Accords.

The defenders of the Paris Accords are as dogmatic on the science as they are on the economics. To them, it is an axiomatic truth that carbon dioxide emissions pose a grave threat to the environment, even though the putative causal chain is filled with missing links. The current practice is to assume that every adverse climate event is somehow the result of the rather smallish increases in carbon dioxide levels over the past 65 years. In order to reach that result, however, it is necessary to exclude other explanations for the adverse events. An observed rise in sea level in Florida, for example, is more likely attributable to the draining of local aquifers than to increases in global temperature. Indeed, sea level rises have, if anything, slowed down in recent years, notwithstanding increases in carbon dioxide levels. In a similar vein, the rapid melting of ice on the western part of the Antarctic is more likely attributable to underground volcanic activity, particularly given that the overall ice levels in the Antarctic are up and not down. And highly variable adverse events are probably more closely associated with changes in water vapor patterns, the recent El Niño, active sunspots, aerosol levels, and a host of other factors, some of which are well known and others of which are only dimly understood.

The situation is even more complex if one looks to the long run. Climate variability has been a constant long before human beings inhabited this earth. Of course, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that can trap energy. But so is water vapor, and its levels are far harder to track because its amount and distribution are not constant across the earth’s surface. Most crucially, observed cyclical patterns of temperature change do not correlate with slow but steady increases in carbon dioxide. Recent work by climate scientists Richard Lindzen and others shows that during the so-called Holocene period (roughly covering the last 11,000 years), there was a negative correlation between temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations—strongly suggesting that carbon dioxide levels cannot be the main driver of temperature changes. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that recent climate models that have predicted sharp temperature increases have consistently run “hot,” so much so that observed increases are less than 50 percent of those predicted. As climate scientist Judith Curry points out, the uncertainties involved are large and the role of natural forces in driving temperature change are systematically underestimated.

The Paris Accord is statism masquerading as religion gussied up as science.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Did Obama Hack The Election? The Obama administration’s illegal spying may have been worse than Watergate.

IT’S TREASON THEN: Liberal Donor Says Trump Breaking Paris Climate Deal Would Be a ‘Traitorous Act of War’

CAPITOL HILL DEMOCRATS’ PAKISTANI I.T. HACKERS: If This Were a Republican Problem, You Couldn’t Keep the Press Away.

If this was a scandal involving the Trump administration, the entire national media would be focused on it 24/7, with scoops and leaks gushing as hordes of top-drawer reporters chased a story that potentially connected government officials to major security breaches. But since the story involves Democrats, it’s apparently not that interesting to the mainstream press.

To be sure, there have been no charges and no convictions; it’s possible (as with the Trump-Russia scandal) that the wrongdoing may turn out to be relatively insignificant. But there’s enough black and oily smoke here that if this were a Republican problem, the MSM wouldn’t be able to get enough of it.

Just think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.

FLASHBACK: Kathy Griffin Scolds Elisabeth Hasselbeck Over Obama Question: ‘Take It Down A Notch, B*tch!’

During a segment on Bravo’s Kathy on Thursday, Kathy Griffin tore into Elisabeth Hasselbeck‘s critical question to President Obama on The View about gay marriage, where Hasselbeck asked the president how he would “move things forward any more than Mitt Romney.” With Hasselbeck’s “attitude to the president, who was a Harvard Law professor, I’m, like, take it down a notch, bitch,” Griffin said.

“That body language,” Griffin added, “I don’t like that. I don’t like Jan Brewer in Arizona going like this to the President on the tarmac. I don’t like that. When I was on The View, Barbara Walters said you respect the office.”

Indeed.

UH-OH: United under fire for allegedly flying unsafe plane.

BUT THE NARRATIVE: Donald Trump has a point about Dems and Carter Page.

WHERE THEY DIFFER IS THAT THE CONSTITUTION ONLY PROTECTS GUN RIGHTS, BUT OFFERS NO RIGHT TO IMMIGRATE: What Gun Control and Refugee Admissions Policies Have in Common.