MY LATEST CREATORS SYNDICATE COLUMN: Russian covert influence operations target more than U.S. elections. Bulgaria has become a target. (bumped)

IF ONE TWEET CAN DO THIS, THE PROBLEM ISN’T THE TWEET: In One Tweet, Kylie Jenner Wiped Out $1.3 Billion of Snap’s Market Value.

THIS SUPREME COURT CASE COULD BE BAD NEWS FOR PUBLIC EMPLOYEE UNIONS: Or not. LifeZette’s Brendan Kirby looks at an AFSCME case that could give Justice Neil Gorsuch an opportunity to strike a major blow for freedom of speech.

I’M GLAD PERSIAN JEWS DID MORE THAN BAKE COOKIES: The Jewish holiday of Purim starts next Wednesday. According to the Book of Esther, the evil Haman persuaded the Persian king to allow him to murder the Jews of the Persian empire, with the Jews not allowed to defend themselves. Thanks to the heroic intervention of Mordechai and Esther, the King issued a new order permitting self-defense, and the Jews slew seventy-five thousand of those who had planned to kill them.

The actual Purim story apparently didn’t make much of an impression on one young woman, the daughter of a liberal Congressman, who is organizing people to sell traditional Purim cookies called Hamantaschen to raise money for gun control: “I think it’s a holiday that within the Jewish world, at least within more liberal Jewish circles, people take a lot of messages of social justice from, so I think with that in mind it made sense to use it,” she said.

It’s both sad and infuriating to see a three thousand year old religious tradition consistently reduced to “supports whatever the SJW cause of the moment is.” Raise money for gun control if that’s what floats your boat, but leave Purim out of it, ok?

CENSORSHIP IS ALIVE AND WELL AT CNN: That rude and raucous “Town Hall” aired Wednesday night by the cable news network formerly owned by Ted Turner is being exposed by survivors of the Florida school shooting as little more than agit-prop for gun control.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CIVIL RIGHTS EDITION: Iowa bill aims to protect belief-based student groups.

AT AMAZON, Save on Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.

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THAT’S WHO THEY ARE, THAT’S WHAT THEY DO: FL Shooting Survivor Ariana Klein: Networks Don’t Want Us To Give Our Real Opinions, “Want Us To Further Their Agendas.”

MICHAEL BARONE: Don’t take the Onion’s pessimism too seriously.

“Study: 90 percent of Americans Strongly Opposed To Each Other.” That’s the headline on a story in what on some days seems America’s most reliable news outlet, the Onion.

We laugh (or at least I did) because it strikes a chord. Americans of many different political outlooks today seem united in believing that we are experiencing the worst times in the nation’s history. Trump detractors talk about a neurotic Nazi establishing a dictatorship. Trump fans talk about a “Deep State” using secret protocols to undermine the voters’ choice.

Both sides have some cause for complaint. But their claims are overheated. Anyone familiar with the long course of American history — perhaps a smaller category than in times past — knows that, whatever our problems, things have been far worse before.

Many of us look back to a time when Americans shared a consensus on cultural values, and when we were told that high school graduates or even dropouts could easily snag well-paying blue collar jobs. That’s a reasonably accurate description of America in the 1950s on cultural values and of parts of America—the unionized industrial North—on those jobs.

President Trump’s unspecific slogan “Make America Great Again” probably strikes most listeners as a promise to restore the seemingly culturally unified America of the two post-World War II decades. Democrats’ calls for strengthening labor unions and job protections likewise evoke the 1950s, the time of peak union membership.

But this was a short period — I call it the Midcentury Moment — and the exception rather than the rule in American history. That tends to get overlooked by those lamenting polls showing low confidence in institutions. The benchmarks against which they are measured are inevitably when pollsters first asked those questions in the 1950s.

But that was a time when big institutions — big government, big corporations, big unions — had just finished leading Americans to victory in a world war and to unanticipated prosperity in the years that followed. They had arguably earned the confidence they enjoyed.

If you had been able to ask Americans those questions in the years before Gallup conducted his first poll in 1935, it’s likely that they would often have expressed low confidence, as they did starting in the late 1960s.

And those institutions haven’t exactly covered themselves with glory since. One problem is that the people running them care more for the high regard of their peer group than for the fortunes of the institutions they are entrusted with.

A SIMPLE NDA WOULD HAVE BEEN SMARTER: Missouri Gov. Greitens indicted for felony invasion of privacy stemming from affair. “The charge stems from a 2015 affair and allegations that he threatened to release a nude photograph of the woman, taken while she was blindfolded and her hands were bound, if she ever spoke publicly about the affair.”

SORRY, WE NEED YOUR APPLE TO BE A BANANA: FL Shooting Survivor Colton Haab: CNN Told Me I Needed To “Stick To The Script”; Entire Town Hall Scripted.

Trump’s luck is pretty amazing. The entire media sets up a week-long hatefest aimed at the NRA, culminating in that shameful fake “Town Hall,” and then the very next day it comes out that there was a police officer there who was too cowardly to do anything, and Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, who was shaming and lecturing gun owners the night before, must have known it while he was up there on stage.

Trump’s superpower is his ability, just by existing, to bring out the deep and pervasive rot in America’s institutions and the people who run them.

HARDEN THE INFRASTRUCTURE: America’s largest blackout is the best argument for grid resilience.

MEGAN BARRY UPDATE: Security Video Shows Mayor, Bodyguard During Early-Morning Cemetery Visits.

WEIRD, IT DOESN’T LOOK THAT WAY ON THE NEWS: Poll: Americans Are More Satisfied With Their Country Than They Have Been In A Decade. “Americans are more satisfied with the United States’ place in the world now than they have been in more than a decade, according to a new poll from Gallup — and that number has grown by more than 10% in the past year alone. According to the respected polling company, 45% of Americans ‘are satisfied with the position of the United States in the world,’ up 13 points from January of 2017 and, coincidentally, a 13-year high.”

BYRON YORK: McCain associate subpoenaed in Trump dossier probe.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes has issued a subpoena to David Kramer, a former State Department official who, in late November 2016, traveled to London to receive a briefing and a copy of the Trump dossier from its author, former British spy Christopher Steele. Kramer then returned to the U.S. to give the document to Sen. John McCain.

Kramer is a senior fellow at the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University. . . .

Kramer was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee on Dec. 19. The new subpoena stems from statements Kramer made in that interview.

In the session, Kramer told House investigators that he knew the identities of the Russian sources for the allegations in Steele’s dossier. But when investigators pressed Kramer to reveal those names, he declined to do so.

Now, he is under subpoena.

Other reports say Kramer took the Fifth.

MEGAN BARRY UPDATE: TBI: Nude cellphone photos, deleted chats may show evidence of crime in Mayor Megan Barry affair.

WHEN YOUR GUN CONTROL LIES CAN’T MAKE IT PAST WAPO: WaPo Gives Sanders Four Pinocchios for False ‘Gun Show Loophole’ Claim.

Sanders said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday that “We have to end the absurdity of the gun show loophole. Forty percent of the guns in this country are sold without any background checks.”

Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler was scathing of Sanders’ untruth straight from the start, noting he has addressed the inaccurate claim in the past. Kessler classified the false statistic among the “zombie claims,” false facts that keep being repeated “no matter how often we fact-check them.”

“We thought we had long ago buried this false claim,” Kessler wrote, “But it has once again risen from the dead! Let’s explore.”

The first time the Post encountered the statistic was when former President Barack Obama referred to it in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn.

Do not trust gun statistics from Barack Obama.

TELL US SOMETHING WE DON’T KNOW:  Russian bots were a non-factor in 2016.

ZUT ALORS!  President Le Trump?

GO HOME, CRUMBS, YOU’RE DRUNK:  Pelosi Goes Full Stupid: Let’s Protect the Border By Mowing the Grass!

YOU’RE SCHEDULING EVERYTHING ELSE, AREN’T YOU?  How scheduling your sex life can save a marriage.

THESE ARE THE CRAZY YEARS:  500K people live in a country that doesn’t exist.

FROM JONATHAN BAIRD:  Dark Maiden #1.

WORKING THAT SECOND JOB, THE SIDE GIG AND PILFERING COUCH CHANGE:  Americans are making more money for a depressing reason.