REPORT: ASIA SINGER JOHN WETTON WHO SANG “HEAT OF THE MOMENT” HAS DIED AGED 67.

For me, Wetton’s best moment was his powerful vocal performance on King Crimson’s 1974 album Red.

Crimson’s co-founder Greg Lake died last year at age 69.

READER BOOK PLUG: From Jay Mueller, The Remarkable Adventures of Hamish the Cat.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS…

MORE COUP-TALK: I guess my paper on military coups is just getting more and more timely. Though that’s as much because of hysteria as anything.

IT’S AN IMPORTANT QUESTION AFTER EIGHT YEARS OF “SMART DIPLOMACY:” How far away would you need to be to survive a nuclear blast?

Related: The Unexpected Return of “Duck and Cover.”

TRUMP SEEMS MORE NORMAL EVERY DAY: PETA Wants Toymaker to Remove Plastic ‘Fur’ From Plastic Figurines.

BUT THE NARRATIVE! Muslim Americans Fire Back at Anti-Trump Protesters With a List Of Things They Should Be Doing.

KATHY SHAIDLE ON MARY TYLER MOORE AND HER EPONYMOUS SHOW: I Hate Spunk.

AA DENSE-PACK: Tesla’s Battery Revolution Just Reached Critical Mass.

Three massive battery storage plants—built by Tesla, AES Corp., and Altagas Ltd.—are all officially going live in southern California at about the same time. Any one of these projects would have been the largest battery storage facility ever built. Combined, they amount to 15 percent of the battery storage installed planet-wide last year.

Ribbons will be cut and executives will take their bows. But this is a revolution that’s just getting started, Tesla Chief Technology Officer J.B. Straubel said in an interview on Friday. “It’s sort of hard to comprehend sometimes the speed all this is going at,” he said. “Our storage is growing as fast as we can humanly scale it.”

The new battery projects were commissioned in response to a fossil-fuel disaster—the natural gas leak at Aliso Canyon, near the Los Angeles neighborhood of Porter Ranch. It released thousands of tons of methane into the air before it was sealed last February.

With all due credit to Elon Musk for his partly taxpayer-funded battery revolution, batteries are merely a means of storing energy. Somebody, somewhere still has to do the sometimes unpleasant business of producing energy — a business California progressives want no realistic part of.

So they’ll take the batteries and the tax credits that come with them, but actual energy producers are “Not our kind, dear.”

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Scientists Create A New Kind Of Matter: Time Crystals.

REPORT: Trump bringing Supreme Court favorites to Washington.

The two judges who have been considered the top finalists to be President Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court — Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman — are being brought to Washington ahead of tonight’s White House announcement, sources tell CNN.

The move comes as there were increasing indications that Gorsuch will be Trump’s choice, sources briefed on the White House deliberations tell CNN.

One source said that Gorsuch was told it was likely him. Those close to the process warn that until it is announced, Trump could change his mind.

Gorsuch is in Washington, according to one source close to the process. Hardiman was seen by a CNN producer leaving his Pittsburgh neighborhood Tuesday morning and driving east towards Washington.

Another one of the sources, familiar with the White House plans, said the administration is taking extraordinary measures to build suspense and keep the final selection under wraps for as close to the 8 p.m. EST announcement as possible.

Well, he’s certainly accomplished that much.

LESS THAN IT SEEMS: Dems Try to Stop Trump’s Order in Congress, Rally at Supreme Court.

In the House, Republicans blocked immediate consideration of an effort by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and John Conyers (D-Mich.) to defund Trump’s executive order; they named their bill the Statue of Liberty Values Act.

Lofgren said her bill “states that President Trump’s executive order will have no effect or force of law and states that no funds or fees shall be used to implement the order.”

In their evening rally outside the highest court in the land, congressional Dems surrounded by a crowd of demonstrators sang “This Land Is Your Land” while waiting for someone to fix the microphones.

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen the video.

Watch: Oops! That was awkward… Pelosi, Schumer lead a protest against Trump, and it doesn't quite go as planned pic.twitter.com/HhuzXCKig2

— TV News HQ (@TVNewsHQ) January 31, 2017

UPDATE: Please clap.

ANOTHER UPDATE (From Glenn): My favorite part is “Where are the real people?”

A GOOD START: Trump Halted $181 Billion in Regulatory Costs on First Day in Office.

“On day one in office, President Trump’s Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, signed a memo to all executive agencies imposing a regulatory moratorium,” wrote Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy for the American Action Forum. “This may sound like an extraordinary action, but President Obama’s then-Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, penned an almost identical memo eight years ago.”

“According to American Action Forum (AAF) research, this memo put a hold on $181 billion in total regulatory costs, including $17 billion in annual costs, and 5.5 million hours of paperwork,” Batkins wrote. “This moratorium freezes 22 rulemakings with annual costs above $100 million and 16 measures with more than $1 billion in long-term costs.”

The Trump administration memo stopped the publication of new rules in the Federal Register, withdrew regulations that were sent for formal publication so they can be reviewed, and postponed recently finalized regulations for 60 days.

Longer, please.

JACK GOLDSMITH: Quick Thoughts on Sally Yates’ Unpersuasive Statement.

IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN OBAMA DOES IT: Dem Congresswoman Forced To Face Her Own Voting History After Calling Trump’s Travel Ban ‘Horrifying’

Democratic Rep. Elizabeth Esty from Connecticut launched a tweetstorm Monday afternoon against President Donald Trump’s travel ban, but quickly backtracked after followers confronted her on her visa-related voting history.

Esty co-sponsored H.B. 158 on Dec. 3 2015, a bi-partisan bill that enabled the executive branch led by the the Department of Homeland Security to severely limit or curtail visas from countries like Iran and Iraq.

If it weren’t for double standards…

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Joe Bob Briggs’ Brief History of the Redneck.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: Thank Obama for Iranian Missile Tests.

No, really — he’s done enough already.

FAKE NEWS: Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter attempts legal analysis on Steve Bannon and the NSC, gets NUKED by Laurence Tribe.

UPDATE (From Ed): I’m so old, I remember when Alter had to be reminded of the language of the Constitution – by Tom Brokaw and the late Tim Russert, when Alter became Bush Derangement Syndrome Patient Zero at the end of the interminable election night of 2000.

ROGER SIMON: Should Sally Yates Be Indicted?

WINTER WAR: Russia’s slow war in Ukraine heats up.

Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed rebels clashed heavily for a third straight day at a flashpoint town Tuesday, as thousands of locals remained without power after a deadly surge in fighting.

The industrial hub of Avdiivka came under attack on Sunday from insurgents seeking to wrest back territory controlled by Kiev during the nearly three-year war.

It’s cold. “…temperatures drop to -15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Farenheit) at night and the homes in Avdiivka are in dire need of heating.”

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko “is worried that Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election and praise for Russia’s Vladimir Putin may add fuel to a conflict that began shortly after Ukraine’s 2014 ouster of its Moscow-backed leader and tilt toward the West.”

There are back and forth accusations over which side started the fighting in Avdiivka but “An AFP reporter saw the separatists shell the town of about 20,000 people with repeated rounds of Grad multiple rocket systems and artillery fire from the early morning.”

RELATED: The EU says the fighting in Avdiivka is a blatant violation of the Minsk ceasefire accord.

France and Germany helped broker the Minsk accords with Moscow and Kiev, and European Union leaders tied implementation to a series of sanctions, including very damaging economic restrictions, against Russia.

Fighting in eastern Ukraine has waxed and waned since then, with Brussels insisting repeatedly there can be no change to the sanctions regime until the accord sticks.

Another supposedly indefinite ceasefire went into effect December 23, 2016. But it hasn’t been respected.

DEEP BACKGROUND FROM AUGUST 2016: Russia is paying an economic price for the Ukraine war. That price has domestic political implications.

For example, in 2014 the government announced a $70 billion ten year program to revive the moribund Russian space program. That has since been cut to $20 billion. What a lot of Russians noticed (and discuss on the Internet) is that the $70 billion spending plan was announced right after Russia had taken Crimea from Ukraine and while world oil prices were plunging. The government apparently did not consider either of these developments would do any long-term damage to Russia. So many Russians wonder what else their leaders have misinterpreted.

Scroll through the update and you’ll find a section devoted to Ukraine. It has background on the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic — two state-lets within Ukraine the Kremlin created.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Democrats Face a Political Math Problem and Also, ‘Phallic Imperialism.’ “What we are witnessing are the effects of ‘epistemic closure’ on the Left, as the Obama era caused progressives to think of themselves as being on ‘the right side of history.’ This triumphant belief in their own moral superiority, in turn, led Democrats to believe that they no longer had to debate the merits of policies, because anyone who opposed them could be dismissed as ignorant and/or evil.”

As I say, they’re doing a better job of de-normalizing themselves than of de-normalizing Trump.

GOOD LORD: Male Predators Dressed as Animals, Lured Boy to ‘Furry Parties’ for Sex, Officials Say.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD ON FDR, THE HOLOCAUST, AND THE REFUGEE BAN:

The refugee question is not the only uncomfortable parallel between the 1930s and our own time. The real problem in the 1930s wasn’t the lack of compassion for Jewish and other refugees; it was the feckless appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the unwillingness to confront him that empowered the Nazi persecution of the Jews and created hundreds of thousands of refugees. So today the true villain of the Syria story—aside from Syria, Russia, and Iran—is the feckless Obama foreign policy that allowed a cyst to metastasize into a cancer, just as Britain, France, and America once allowed Hitler to grow into the master of Europe.

The Obama officials and cheerleaders now guilt-tripping the country over “heartlessness” toward Syria refugees are giving hypocrisy a bad name. Bad foreign policy is the cause of the heartbreak in Syria today, not bad immigration policy. The world does not need lectures from Susan Rice and Samantha Power on what we should do about Syrian refugees; the best way to deal with refugee flows is to prevent them from happening. The Holocaust was not caused by the Reed-Johnson Act; it was caused by Nazi hatred, enabled by naive liberal illusions about the “arc of history” that prevented the West from mobilizing against Hitler when he was weak and easily defeated.

What the progressives want to do now is to turn the immigration debate into a morality play with Trump cast not as FDR (who on this point he closely and even eerily resembles) but as Satan. Obama’s role (and the role of non-interventionist Democrats) in making the Syrian mess so intractable can be airbrushed out of the picture. The national conversation shall be only and always about courageous, compassionate, and deeply humane progressives resisting the forces of Republican and especially Trumpian darkness. . . .

This country needs a serious and humane immigration and refugee policy that is both enlightened and sustainable. We didn’t have it under Obama; we are unlikely to have it under Trump. Despite deporting hundreds of thousands of illegals, Obama never embraced the cause of defending America’s borders or regulating immigration in ways that clearly reassured marginalized American communities that the U.S. government was first and foremost committed to their welfare and to the defense of their way of life. And he never took responsibility for the ways in which his own repeated errors of judgment about the Middle East contributed to the mass refugee flows that he then tried to guilt-trip Americans into accommodating. Dumb cosmopolitanism leads to dumb nationalist reaction. The Obama years led to the Trump win—even as W’s years led to Obama.

Anything to distract from Obama’s disastrous foreign policy record.

QUESTION ASKED: Can the TV Industry Sustain Falling Prices?

Last year we bought the biggest TV we’ve ever owned, with four times as many pixels as our eyes can discern at a comfortable viewing distance, for about the same price as a much smaller set with a second-rate screen from just a few years ago.