IT’S COME TO THIS. Report: Gay NPR commentary contributor charged with assault in Betsy DeVos fracas was an Afghan refugee whose family fled the Taliban.

L.A. TIMES EXPLAINER: Where is Lake Oroville and the Oroville Dam?

California residents might want to forward this to their Assemblycritters in Sacramento.

NATURAL ANTIOXIDANT could prevent liver disease. I’ve been taking PQQ for a couple of months for its reported cardiac benefits. This is a plus. It’s cheap. I take it with NAC, and, of course, CoQ10. The CoQ10, by the way, is the supplement that seems to have the biggest impact. Everyone I’ve gotten to try it, from the Insta-Wife and Insta-Daughter to my younger brother says they have noticeably better energy levels with it.

TOM KNIGHTON: University Officials Still in Denial Over ‘Black Bloc’ Students.

REVENGE OF THE CRONIES? Trump rumored to be preparing to resurrect the Ex-Im Bank.

The word on the hill is that Donald Trump has been listening to some voices among the Democrats and has been “convinced” that the bank should resume operations. (Government Executive)

Long criticized by Republicans as an agency dispensing “corporate welfare,” the Export-Import Bank on Thursday got some good news after two senators reported that President Trump is abandoning his campaign-trail position that the bank must die.

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., announced that Trump “agreed with her on the need to get the Export-Import Bank up and running and said he will soon nominate someone to serve on the Export-Import Bank Board.”

The five-member board has been below quorum for a year because former Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., had blocked consideration of all of President Obama’s nominees to the bank.

You may recall that on the campaign trail Donald Trump stated unequivocally that he was an opponent of the bank’s continued operation. And that wasn’t just a campaign promise made to win votes. As recently as December he was still saying that the banks days were probably numbered. So why the change now?

As you might have been able to guess, Boeing likely played a large part in the decision. Current reports indicate that Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp was whispering in Trump’s ear but he was also in talks with executives from Boeing. As we’ve long known, the airline giant is one of the largest beneficiaries of the bank’s peculiar form of corporate welfare. Coming from a big business background and being used to making deals of this magnitude, we probably shouldn’t be terribly surprised if Boeing found someone able to speak a common language with the president and convince him that the art of the deal should go their way this time.

Disappointing, if this pans out.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Were Comedians Cowards During the Obama Years?

Just think of them as Democrat operatives with punchlines, and it all makes sense.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: After Declines Of 40% In Enrollment And 10 Points In 25th LSAT Percentile, Does Hofstra’s 100% Application Surge Signal Better Times Ahead For Law Schools? One swallow does not make a summer.

ARIEL EZRACHI AND MAURICE STUCKE: How Online Competition Affects Offline Democracy.

NO LESSONS LEARNED: Campus Intolerance Intensifies in the Trump Era.

Panelists raised, implicitly, the question whether higher education has become out of touch with Donald Trump’s America. They fretted over their belief that the current social and political climate is a threat to the liberal arts and, in a time of “fake news,” to the pursuit of truth itself.

The Association’s president, Lynn Pasquerella, concluded that it is the average American—giving in to the alleged anti-intellectualism of the day—who is misguided.

Higher education leaders, she argued, must therefore work to “destabilize the attitudes at the basis of proposals that devalue education.”

While there were some speakers who called for tolerance and understanding—including Wesleyan University president Michael Roth, who advocated greater respect for “traditional conservative religion and thought”—they were a mere footnote during the four-day gathering.

Rather, workshops such as “Reclaiming the Racial Narrative,” case studies on implementing progressive agendas on campus, and strategies on how to engage students in support of “racial and social justice” dominated the conference’s agenda.

Unfortunately, in these early days of Trump’s presidency, similar politicization seems to persist throughout much of academia. Many leftist students, faculty, and administrators pay only lip service to the notion that higher education should be a marketplace of ideas. They now seem to view themselves as combatants in an ideological war.

Well, that’s just more of the Gramscian Damage. But if you want more Trump, by all means double down. Because that’s how you get more Trump.

ANALYSIS: HALF-TRUE. DNC chair candidates say Clinton lost because she talked too much about Trump.

To be fair, she didn’t have much else to talk about.

ANDREW SULLIVAN: TRUMP MIGHT BE ‘MENTALLY UNSTABLE:’ “Sullivan was the leading figure in a conspiracy theory about Sarah Palin. That view, known as Trig trutherism, maintained that Palin was such a despicable character that she even lied about giving birth to her own child. Sullivan always claimed he was just asking reasonable questions about the birth, but the real world result was to turn a woman’s special needs child into a political weapon against her. Granted he hasn’t dragged Trump’s children into it (so far), but the attempt to fundamentally dehumanize a politician by claiming they are acting beyond the edge of normal behavior is similar. This is an attempt to kick off a new strain of Trump trutherism and CNN is complicit in giving this garbage air time.”

To be fair, not every Republican can be as conservative as John Kerry and Barack Obama. And note this: “A bit later [Sullivan] switches to another analogy involving living under an autocratic government.”

You mean like in 2007, when eschewing the by-then de rigueur Bush=Hitler analogies by his fellow leftists, Sullivan equated George W. Bush to Paul von Hindenburg?

ANDREW MALCOLM: Psst, here’s how political leaks really work.

Leaking in political capitals like Washington can be a sophisticated strategic game with trade-craft elements of a John LeCarre novel involving code words, secret rendezvous in person or by phone and fake messages to advance or defeat a cause and especially to detect a leaker’s identity. Remember during Watergate reporters convening with their secret source in an underground parking garage?

The Trump White House is said to be concerned about leaks involving the president’s recent telephone calls with world leaders. Thursday Sean Spicer asserted, “We’re looking into the situation, yes, and it’s very concerning.” Spicer said the leaks, not all accurate or complimentary, were of “personal concern” to Trump.

True, unplanned leaks drive some politicians crazy. President Lyndon Johnson would get apoplectic over them as personal betrayals, which they are in a way. Some officials, such as George W. Bush, minimize unplanned leaks by building strong two-way personal loyalties with senior staff.

OK, here’s the deal: We’ll never know the truth about these Trump leaks. All news consumers can do each time is evaluate the credibility of known details and the likely motives of participants.

Good advice.

Want more good advice? Read the whole thing.

SPLITTERS: Libertarians split with Trump over controversial police tactic.

The White House has riled the country’s civil libertarian wing after President Trump enthusiastically voiced support for a controversial law enforcement tool that allows an individual’s property or assets to be seized without a guilty verdict.

The president weighed in on what’s known as “civil asset forfeiture” during an Oval Office meeting last week with sheriffs. The president, who ran on a law-and-order message, said he shared their desire to strengthen the practice and even said he would “destroy” the career of a Texas politician trying to end it.

The comments revived tensions with libertarians who have been fighting the practice under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Already piqued by the selection of former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, a vocal supporter of asset forfeiture, to lead the Justice Department, the Libertarian Party itself condemned the comments.

To be fair, Big-L Libertarians have been trending more leftwards since at least the run-up to the Iraq War, and I still get a bitter chuckle out of the short-lived “liberaltarian” movement of 2009-2010.

But asset forfeiture is an unconstitutional sham, and I’m still hoping to see better out of the Trump Administration.

SHOT: Grammys Get Political Fast With Jennifer Lopez & Michael Jackson’s Daughter.

CHASER: “SNL” local rating soars, Grammys stumble.

SNL is supposed to be political.

GEORGE KORDA: Duncan says ‘no’ to a town hall meeting, and politics over principles.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: No, Those Aren’t Swastikas On Your Sidewalk.

BOMBER TRIFECTA: Stunning photo…courtesy U.S. Air Force and American taxpayers…Please forward the link to Tehran and Pyongyang.

ROGER SIMON: For the Media, the Only Jihad Is Against Trump.

BAILING OUT GREECE: The Greek government versus the IMF. It’s not quite a 2015 repeat.

Greece “significantly” beat its 2016 fiscal target, the European Commission said Monday, achieving a budget surplus before interest of 2.3 percent of gross domestic product, compared with a goal of 0.5 percent.

But note the “surplus before interest.”

ACTION: ACLU Mobilizes ‘Rapid Response’ to Fight Trump Deportations.

THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED, WE’D SEE OPEN RACISM IN AMERICAN POLITICS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Black Lives Matter Leader Says White People Are ‘Sub-Human’ and Suffer From ‘Genetic Defects.’

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Drone Attack Swarms Take Off From F-16.

Using fast-developing computer algorithms for autonomous flight engineered to prevent mini-drones from crashing into one-another, the swarms are intended to perform a wide-range of strategically relevant missions.

The Pentagon’s once-secret Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO), aimed at harnessing promising technologies for nearer-term development than most acquisition programs, has already launched these drones from F-16 and F-18s numerous times in testing.

The mini-drones, called Perdix, are government designed yet built with commercial off-the-shelf elements. William Roper, who reports to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter as the Director of the Strategic Capabilities Office, said the effort was showing promise for possible near-term combat advantage.

“They are expendable and fly low as a surveillance asset. You can have a lot of them for a saturation approach. Saturating has an advantage over the thing it has to defend against. Its defender has to take more time and money to defend against it,” Roper told a small group of reporters.

The prospect of facing 21st Century precision combined with mid-20th Century mass ought to give anyone pause.

FROM JOEL KOTKIN, AN IDEA SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK: Decentralize government to resolve country’s divisions.

America is increasingly a nation haunted by fears of looming dictatorship. Whether under President Barack Obama’s “pen and phone” rule by decree, or its counterpoint, the madcap Twitter rule of our current chief executive, one part of the country, and society, always feels mortally threatened by whoever occupies the Oval Office.

Given this worsening divide, perhaps the only reasonable solution is to move away from elected kings and toward early concepts of the republic, granting far more leeway to states, local areas and families to rule themselves. Democrats, as liberal thinker Ross Baker suggests, may “own” the D.C. “swamp,” but they are beginning to change their tune in the age of Trump. Even dutiful cheerleaders for Barack Obama’s imperial presidency, such as the New Yorker, are now embracing states’ rights.

As in the antebellum period, American politics sadly reflects two increasingly antagonistic nations. One can be described as a primarily urban, elite-driven, ethnically diverse country that embraces a sense of inevitable triumphalism. The other America, rooted more in the past, thrives in the smaller towns and cities, as well as large swaths of suburbia. Sometimes whiter, the suburbs are both more egalitarian and less reflexively socially liberal.

This division worsened in the Obama era, whose city-centric approach all but ignored the interests of the resource-producing regions of the country, as well as the South. In contrast, under Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, Democrats were joyously competitive in these areas, assuring that the party was truly diverse, rather than simply the lap dog of the littoral constituencies.

With the GOP now in control of Washington, the coastal areas are becoming, to paraphrase President Obama, the new clingers, whether on the environment, racial redress or gender-related issues. Now they fear, with good reason, that the very administrative state they so eagerly embraced could come back to undermine their agenda even at the local level.

The problem is, I don’t think the blue states have “learned their lesson” about big government. They’re still all for it, and will happily wield it against the Deplorable Classes whenever they manage to get back in control. Unless you can do something about that, I don’t think you can successfully sell limited government. Maybe a constitutional convention could do something.

DAVID FRUM: What Effective Protest Could Look Like.

You want to scare Trump? Be orderly, polite, and visibly patriotic.

In other words, be the Tea party. But [EDIT FOR CLARITY] copying the Tea Party has been tried already, repeatedly, without success.

More:

Trump wants to identify all opposition to him with the black-masked crowbar thugs who smashed windows and burned a limo on his inauguration day. Remember Trump’s tweet about stripping citizenship from flag burners? It’s beyond audacious that a candidate who publicly requested help from Russian espionage services against his opponent would claim the flag as his own. But Trump is trying. Don’t let him get away with it. Carry the flag. Open with the Pledge of Allegiance. Close by singing the Star Spangled Banner––like these protesters at LAX, in video posted by The Atlantic’s own Conor Friedersdorf. Trump’s presidency is itself one long flag-burning, an attack on the principles and institutions of the American republic. That republic’s symbols are your symbols. You should cherish them and brandish them.

Don’t get sucked into the futile squabbling cul-de-sac of intersectionality and grievance politics. Look at this roster of speakers from the January 21 march. What is Angela Davis doing there? Where are the military women, the women police officers, the officeholders? If Planned Parenthood is on the stage, pro-life women should stand there, too. If you want somebody to speak for immigrants, invite somebody who’s in the country lawfully.

By and large, those are the people the Left has already lost — or has driven away, or actively despises.