FIGHT SEXISM BY EXCLUDING THOSE ICKY MEN: Only women, transgenders are allowed in GW debate tournament.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Rosenstein out in March and much, much more. “Why is Mr. 25th amendment Rosenstein still hanging around the DOJ? The good news is he is supposed to be out by mid-March.”

HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? Large Asteroid Will Make Close Approach To Earth Today.

GREAT AGAIN:

TOM MAGUIRE: GA House Speaker David Ralston And The Silence of the Dogs.

WHEN THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT THINKS IT’S OKAY TO GO AFTER PEOPLE FOR “SPEAKING IN A DEROGATORY WAY ABOUT OUR INVESTIGATIVE EFFORTS.”

MY COMMENT: WHY DON’T THEY WEIGHT SSRN RANKINGS? Law Prof Commentary On The U.S. News Faculty Scholarly Impact Rankings.

REPUBLICANS POUNCE! Left-Leaning Media Runs Interference For Jussie Smollett.

SALENA ZITO: The populist sledgehammer kills Amazon jobs that Middle America would love to have.

Tito Brown can’t imagine driving a perfectly good thing out of a town that hasn’t had a perfectly good thing come its way in a very long time.

At least, a perfectly good thing the size and scope of the Amazon headquarters that ideological politics drove out of Long Island City on Thursday, when Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., danced on the grave of the deal as Amazon walked away from the New York project.

Brown doesn’t really get that. He governs a city with a declining population, a 40 percent poverty rate, and would welcome the opportunity for a project such as Amazon to have considered locating here.

“Oh, any time I can get regional and/or economic growth in my community, I would absolutely want that here,” he said. “It’s budget time.”

Ocasio-Cortez, who has become the leader of the left-wing insurgency within the Democratic Party, slammed the plan in a tweet the moment it was announced in mid-November last year.

She initially said the response to the Amazon announcement from her constituents was outrage, arguing that the tax breaks Amazon would receive should be spent by city and state officials on the subway system and communities instead of billion-dollar corporations.

Which isn’t how tax breaks work. It’s not like there is a pile of money they would hand to Amazon that could have been spent on the subway system, but that is a story for a different day.

What this moment signifies in the Democratic Party is one that has been in existence for several years, but the party establishment and ruling class have been unwilling to face: the leftist populism punching up to take the reins of the party.

And this “populism” doesn’t represent the actual working classes, but the credentialed virtuecrats of the “helping professions” and government bureaucracies. It is the same lower-tier New Class constituency that fueled the Occupy Movement. As Kenneth Anderson wrote: “It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites.” In fact, the AOC-style “populism” can be seen as an intensification of that New Class civil war.

Related: Democrats are tearing themselves apart over Amazon.

UPDATE: I really think that the intra-Left class warfare here is fascinating, and offers a significant opportunity to Republicans. Folks in the comments, however, seem interested in other things.

POTEMKIN MISSILE: Russia Tried to Con the World With Bogus Missile. “The Russians hyped a cruise missile launch earlier this year. But a briefing by the CIA and a second agency determined that it was essentially a hoax.”

The alleged Russian misdirection came just days before the United States announced that it would withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty—the treaty that Russia violated, in the U.S. view.

Almost nothing Russia showed off to support its claims at that press conference had anything to do with the missile the U.S. is most interested in, according to an assessment briefing put together by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

Earlier this month, those two U.S. intelligence agencies determined that the cruise missile canisters and launch vehicle the Russian Ministry of Defense publicly showed at the briefing were not related to the missile that the United States has argued since 2014 violates the 1987 treaty, The Daily Beast has learned.

Helmut Kohl and Margaret Thatcher stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Ronald Reagan on putting Pershing II intermediate-range missiles into Europe — a move which forced the Soviets to agree to the INF treaty getting rid of everyone’s IRBMs. It’s difficult imagining Western Europe’s current leadership doing anything of the sort.

OVER AT VOLOKH, Everything you wanted to know about anti-BDS laws, part I.

Key point: State laws that require state contractors to certify that they don’t boycott Israel-related companies and individuals are not unconstitutional infringements of freedom of speech under existing Supreme Court precedent, and it’s not a close call. Rightly or wrongly, a string of Supreme Court precedents hold that refusals to deal, even for ideological reasons, are not considered speech.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the ACLU’s jihad against anti-BDS laws is that it’s willing to risk undermining antidiscrimination laws if that’s necessary to take down the anti-BDS laws. The national ACLU has become a far left organization, and the far left’s pathological hatred of Israel overrides other considerations.

A RACIST HAT THAT PROMOTES VIOLENCE: “It reads ‘KAMALA.'”

ED POSTED A LINK YESTERDAY, but Victor Davis Hanson’s Anatomy of a Dead Coup is a terrific summing up of all the Deep State machinations against Trump to date.

CHOOSING SIDES IN THE CULTURE WAR: Surge in Ivy League anti-Trump courses, ‘imminent apocalypse,’ ‘fascism.’ If any of that were true, of course, they’d be afraid to teach those courses.

FASTER, PLEASE: Mulvaney told Trump officials their ‘highest priority’ will be deregulation.

HELL, I’M JUST SURPRISED SHE WAS ASKED AT ALL: Kamala Harris is terribly awkward when asked about Jussie Smollett. “She giggled in response to the idea of lynching!“

WHY SOME PEOPLE CHEER WHEN “JOURNALISTS” ARE LAID OFF: On January 29, Two Hate Crimes Occurred. The Media Only Covered The Fake One. Here’s Why.

COMMUNIST FRONT CORPORATION: How Huawei Targets Apple Trade Secrets.

Not just Apple:

Huawei, which recently surpassed Apple to become the world’s second-biggest smartphone maker, has been at the center of a trade fight between the U.S. and China amid accusations by U.S. authorities that Huawei steals technology. In January, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment accusing Huawei of pilfering trade secrets from wireless carrier T-Mobile USA.

U.S. companies such as Cisco Systems and Motorola have made similar claims against Huawei in civil lawsuits. Earlier this month, Chicago-based Akhan Semiconductor, which makes durable smartphone glass, said it cooperated with a federal investigation into theft of its intellectual property by Huawei. Akhan claims Huawei used the prospect of a business relationship to acquire samples of its glass, which Huawei then took apart and studied.

The Justice Department said Huawei had a formal program that rewarded employees for stealing information, with bonuses that increased based on the confidential value of the information. Huawei employees were encouraged to post stolen information on an internal company website, and they were also given an email address where they could send the information, which was then reviewed by what was known internally as the “competition management group.” Huawei assured employees they wouldn’t be punished for taking such action, the indictment said.

Other smartphone makers have accused each other of intellectual property theft. Most famously, Apple successfully sued Samsung for copying its products. But the accusations against Huawei suggest a more brazen and elaborate system of seeking out secret information.

Beijing’s unspoken pitch to Western busines interests has always been, “We’ll steal less IP from you than access to our consumers and workforce is worth.” But they’re really pushing it.

THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED WE’D SEE RELIGIOUS TESTS FOR PUBLIC OFFICE. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Left To State Supreme Court Candidate: You Can’t Be A Good Judge Because You’re A Christian.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Stupid Midwesterners Don’t Understand AOC’s Job-Killing Joy.

AND LESS AND LESS RELEVANT OR COMPELLING: Woke Capitalism On The March: Corporate Ads Are Getting Thirstier And Thirstier. Remember, wokeness is a positional good. There’s never any such thing as being “woke enough,” one must always be more woke than the last woke hero.

OH, DEAR, DEAR LORD:  How Brie Larson Can Really Impact Diversity.