MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Government can’t get us off sugar: Policies promoting sugar, in no small part, got us into this mess.

Inspired by my reading of Gary Taubes’ The Case Against Sugar.

ROGER SIMON: WHAT’S BEHIND THE ACCUSATIONS THAT TRUMP IS ANTI-SEMITIC?

ABOLISH THE ATF: A.T.F. Filled Secret Bank Account With Millions From Shadowy Cigarette Sales. “Working from an office suite behind a Burger King in southern Virginia, operatives used a web of shadowy cigarette sales to funnel tens of millions of dollars into a secret bank account. They weren’t known smugglers, but rather agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The operation, not authorized under Justice Department rules, gave agents an off-the-books way to finance undercover investigations and pay informants without the usual cumbersome paperwork and close oversight, according to court records and people close to the operation.”

Laws and rules are for the little people.

FAKE NEWS, THE EARLY DAYS. After the ‘Cronkite Moment,’ LBJ doubled down on Viet policy: “One of the most cherished stories in American journalism is also a tenacious media-driven myth,” W. Joseph Campbell writes.

As was often the case with Walter Cronkite, “that’s the way it is” usually wasn’t, as his left-leaning biographer reluctantly admitted a few years ago.

ED MORRISSEY: How Trump Could Spark a New GOP Split – or Maybe a Love Fest. It all depends on whether people will be mature, or will let childish primary antagonisms live on.

INSULARITY COMBINED WITH A SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT WILL DO THAT TO YOU: Academia Is Its Own Worst Enemy.

The campaign for more intellectual diversity in higher education just got an eloquent and influential new champion: John Etchemendy, Stanford University’s provost from 2000 to 2017. In a recent speech to the elite university’s trustees, Etchemendy said that while many on campus perceive higher education to be under siege from right-wing populists, he believes that the greater danger is that academia destroys itself from the inside through its own stifling intellectual orthodoxies. . . .

Over the course of Etchemendy’s career, academia has indeed become more of a monoculture, with the overall ratio of liberal to conservative faculty increasing from 2:1 in 1990 to 5:1 in 2014, and with conservatives virtually without representation at many elite social science and humanities departments (one study found that Democrats outnumber Republicans at top 40 history departments by a more than 33:1 margin). And there is no sign the trend is abating; younger American professors are even more uniformly liberal than the older cohort.

Etchemendy’s speech calls for efforts to bring in more faculty with heterodox views—not as a kind of spoils system for conservatives, but because a greater diversity of viewpoints is likely to increase the rigor of scholarship overall, no matter the viewpoint of the person conducting it.

Plus: “It is telling that Etchemendy chose to deliver this speech once his tenure as provost was over; perhaps he thought that it would generate too much political blowback if he was still Stanford’s number two administrator. Hopefully his fellow academics take note.” Oh, they’ll take note of the fear of blowback, for sure.

STOP THE DEMOCRATS’ WAR ON WOMEN AND NATIVE AMERICANS! Schumer to GOP: Stop promoting Elizabeth Warren as the face of Democrats.

Why is Chuck Schumer such a misogynistic anti-imaginary-diversity reactionary?

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook Suspends Christian Homeschool Mom’s Account for Citing the Bible. She should sue them for religious discrimination. Bake that cake, Zuckerberg!

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KURT SCHLICHTER: From Here To The Left’s Fascist, Maybe Violent, Endgame.

PRIORITIES: California budget guts middle-class aid, keeps scholarships for illegals.

HMM: Rigged gig? Perez dodges Cuomo three times at DNC chair debate.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE! Teen charged with lying about being raped by college football players. “Nikki Yovino, 18, of South Setauket, NY, has been charged with second-degree falsely reporting an incident and tampering with or fabricating physical evidence in connection to an incident at a Sacred Heart University football party in October, the Connecticut Post reports. When pressed about inconsistencies in her original statement, Yovino admitted that she made up the rape allegations against the two football players in hopes of gaining sympathy from another man — a prospective boyfriend, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.”

JONATHAN TURLEY: Trump Attacks On Judges Perfectly Presidential:

When President Trump called Senior District Court Judge James Robart “this so-called judge” after the issuance of an order temporarily restraining Trump’s executive order on immigration, the response from all sides of the political spectrum was immediate and alarmed. It was called “bone-chilling” and “authoritarian.” Some even compared Trump to Hitler.

However, it was not only relatively mild for Trump but positively tame in comparison with past conflicts between presidents and judges.

That’s true, as anyone who knows any history should realize.

BLACK BLOC BACKERS HARDEST HIT: Arizona Senate votes to seize assets of those who plan, participate in protests that turn violent.

Related: More than 200 inauguration day protesters indicted for rioting: Prosecutors called out the protesters for utilizing so-called “black bloc” tactics that involve vandalism, violence and destruction.

Protests that “turn” violent are one thing. Violence that was planned from the beginning, on the other hand, is just crime.

DO TELL: Trump foreign policy surprises on the upside: His national security team is performing much better than it is being given credit for. “The brouhahas with the news media that Trump complains about are largely of his own making. But many pundits do seem more concerned about faux pas and political incorrectness rather than actual national security policies. While the administration remains full of the former, the latter are looking much better than could have been expected a few short months ago.”

THE HILL: Poll: Senate Should Confirm Gorsuch.

A plurarity of Americans say the Senate should confirm President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, who is expected to face vigorous opposition and a likely filibuster from Democrats.

According to data from a Harvard-Harris survey provided exclusively to The Hill, 44 percent say the Senate should confirm Gorsuch. Thirty-two percent say they’re unsure and 25 percent say Gorsuch should not be confirmed.

“Gorsuch is off to an excellent start in his nomination process,” said Mark Penn, the co-director of the Harvard-Harris poll. “A quarter, however, is holding back judgment for now, suggesting televised confirmation hearings could be critical for him and them.”

He should be a slam-dunk, by all appearances.

PRIVACY: Judge rejects warrant provision allowing compelled thumbprints to unlock iPhones.

HEY, ME NEITHER: Trump not planning to watch Oscars.

WHY THE PRESS IS FALLING APART:

So when does the other shoe drop? Who’s going to break the story proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the president of the United States is so deeply connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the White House has become a Muscovite colony in all but name?

Time to use some common sense—it’s not going to happen, there is no story. The narrative that Donald Trump is effectively Putin’s prison wife is an information operation orchestrated by Democratic hands, many of whom served in the Obama administration, sectors of the intelligence community, and much of the American press. The purpose of the campaign is to delegitimize Trump’s presidency by continuing to hit on themes drawn from the narrative that Russia “hacked” the election and stole it away from Clinton.

The narrative is contorted because it’s not journalism. It’s a story that could only make sense in a profoundly corrupted public sphere, one in which, for instance, Graydon Carter is celebrated for speaking truth to power with an editor’s letter critical of Trump in a magazine that has no other ontological ground in the universe except to celebrate power.

Oh, sure, there are regular hints that there’s still more to come on Trump and his staff’s ties to Russia—the big one is about to hit. But the steady sound of drip-drip-drip is the telltale sign of a political campaign, where items are leaked bit by bit to paralyze the target. Journalists, on the other hand, have to get their story out there as quickly, and as fully, as possible because they’re always worried the competition is going to beat them to it.

No, if Trump really was in bed with the Russians, the story would already be out there, and I’m pretty sure it would have had a Wayne Barrett byline.

It’s mostly Fake News, these days.

ASIA PIVOT, MOSCOW EDITION: Russia to Deploy Division on Kuril Islands in 2017.

Those are the disputed islands just north of Japan which the Soviet Union seized from the Empire of Japan in the closing days of World War II.

THIS SEEMS UNWISE: Couple Caught Having Sex On Speeding Motorcycle While Driving Down Busy Highway. Nobody tell Florida Man about this.

HEY, DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH, RIGHT? Iowa, North Carolina Bills Would Require ‘Partisan Balance’ In Faculty Hiring.

THE SAD CAFE: Auto Makers Ask EPA’s Pruitt to Reverse Fuel-Economy, Emissions Decision.

NASA’S BIG REAL ESTATE DEAL: Potentially Habitable Planets.

We’ve been seeking out new worlds for quite a while now. When do we get to boldly go?