AT AMAZON, save in Arts Crafts and Sewing.

Plus, deals on Bestselling Jewelry.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: GWU prof slams sororities offering ‘snowflake’ students coloring books, stress balls to ‘decompress.’

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)

NEWS YOU CAN USE: This gory medical case shows why you should never, ever swallow a toothpick. “Of the poor souls who somehow ingest one of the wee daggers, 79 percent will end up with stab wounds [to] their innards. Ten percent will die from their toothpick-inflicted injuries.”

NINA BOOKOUT AT VICTORY GIRLS: Theme Of Trump’s State Of The Union Speech: “Choosing Greatness.”

AT AMAZON, save on bestsellers in Patio Lawn and Garden. Spring is coming.

AN AMAZING THEORY OF WHY ED GILLESPIE’S “CAMPAIGN” MISSED NORTHAM’S BLACKFACE/KKK PICTURES:

During the 1992 campaign, I was a military aide to an assistant secretary in one of the cabinet departments and all of my counterparts were Bush Schedule C appointees. Through them, I became acquainted with some senior people on the Bush campaign team. There was tons of oppo on Bill Clinton and his horndogging and the fights between Bill and Hillary on the campaign trail and some really salacious stuff on Hillary’s extra-curricular activities but the Bush campaign elected not to use it in large part because Bush was still stinging from the Willie Horton ad. So finding a GOP campaign acting against its own interests for the sake of being a noble loser isn’t new. I would submit the 2008 McCain campaign had as its objective to be a gracious loser to the first viable black presidential candidate. I’ve never really been convinced Mitt Romney wanted anything more than to lose cleanly in 2012.

As to the denials, if you’d had the images and chosen not to use them because you wanted to take the high road and protect “muh principles,” knowing what you know today, would you admit to not using them? My guess is that you would deny knowing anything about them and take the hit for being merely incompetent.

“Democrats sure got it good,” John Nolte likes to say. If you’re on the left, you can tell then-President Obama to “Go for the throat,” and then pose afterwards as an objective Sunday morning talk show moderator. If you’re on the left, you can say the most racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic statements imaginable, and wind up with a sweet gig at NBC. Your “spiritual advisors” can utter racist statements, which are first praised as solemn truths and then airbrushed away when they become inconvenient gaffes.

As Glenn has written, Trump is “a symptom of how rottenly dysfunctional our sorry political class is. Take away Trump and they’re just as awful and destructive. He just brings their awfulness to the fore, where it’s no longer ignorable. Now they’re willing to play with fire, risking the future of the polity over little more than hurt feelings, in a way that would have been unthinkable not long ago.” He’s “not the cause of Washington’s decline. He’s a symptom, the wrecking ball that many Americans think was required.”

CHANGE: Bad discipline forced the Army to redesign basic training. “The U.S. Army will soon launch a redesign of Basic Combat Training intended to build more discipline after many commanders complained that new soldiers often show up to their first units with a sloppy appearance and undisciplined attitudes. By early summer, new recruits will go through Army BCT that’s designed to instill strict discipline and esprit de corps by placing a new emphasis in drill and ceremony, inspections, pride in military history while increasing the focus on critical training such as physical fitness, marksmanship, communications, and battlefield first aid skills.”

What, less diversity training? Plus, this is troubling: “We are finding that there are a large number of trainees that come in that quite frankly just physically don’t have the capacity to throw a hand grenade 20 to 25 to 30 meters.” American soldiers used to excel at this compared to other forces, but that was when almost everyone played baseball. Soccer doesn’t build the same skills.

MAROON 5 FRONTMAN HINTS SUPERBOWL HALFTIME SHOW WILL BE HIP-HOP KNEELING FEST.

As Clay Travis wrote a month ago, “NFL ratings up 5% [in 2018]. Congrats to ESPN, Fox, NBC & CBS for finally realizing no one wants wokefootball. Far left wing politics mixed with sports is always a loser.”

Will Roger Goodell choose to end the season by going backwards to 2016 and 2017?

HMM: Medical scribes may improve emergency room care. My allergist/immunologist uses one of these just for regular appointments.

TRUMP, AHEAD OF SUPER BOWL, SAYS HE WON’T ENCOURAGE SON TO PLAY FOOTBALL.

Once again, as with the second round of national anthem protests last year, by forcing the reactionary left to circle the wagons to defend the NFL, Trump may have just added decades to the increasingly troubled league’s lifespan.

FLASHBACK TO 2013: Virginia Dem Lieutenant Gov. Nominee Ralph Northam Refuses To Shake Hands With Black GOP Opponent.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): When you go to vote in Virginia . . .

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Buy A Hot Tub. I love mine.

JOHN HAWKINS: The Five Biggest Widely Accepted Lies in Politics.

As G.K. Chesterton said in 1930, “Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: San Francisco — where drug addicts outnumber high school students.

San Francisco has more drug addicts than it has students enrolled in its public high schools, the city Health Department’s latest estimates conclude.

There are about 24,500 injection drug users in San Francisco — that’s about 8,500 more people than the nearly 16,000 students enrolled in San Francisco Unified School District’s 15 high schools and illustrates the scope of the problem on the city’s streets.

It’s also an increase of about 2,000 serious drug users since 2012, the last time a study was done.

That’s no surprise, since for almost 15 years, variations on this 2017 SF Gate headline, “San Francisco has the lowest percentage of kids of any major U.S. city,” have been commonplace. Back in 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle hectored its readers over the “bacchanalian” environmental damage of childrens’ birthday parties, and evidently, either their subscribers took that advice to heart, or more likely, the Chronicle was once again preaching the leftist gospel to the choir.

CATERPILLARS GOOD, BABIES BAD: A few days old, but the most telling thing I’ve seen in years. No matter where you stand on late-term abortion (or if you prefer, infanticide) the pretzel logic of the unthinking is stunning. Kathy Tran, the Democratic Virginia delegate who sponsored a bill in the Virginia House of Delegates that would allow the termination of a pregnancy up to 40 weeks old, is also the chief patron of a bill that would protect the lives of “fall cankerworms” during certain months.

Tran earlier pulled a Pelosi, admitting that she actually hadn’t read the abortion bill in full. Had it mentioned caterpillars, perhaps she’d have paid closer attention. Perhaps another explanation is that she only received $2,792 from Planned Parenthood in donations, but $7,236 from the Sierra Club.

I guess she charges more to actually read a bill she sponsors.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Did I say that besides me helping her, she helped me? I honestly don’t think I would have made it through my first grueling run for mayor without her smarts and support.

She loved me, and I loved me. It was a perfect relationship.

—“Kamala Harris learns the perils of presidential front-running,” by former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, the San Francisco Chronicle, yesterday.

Related: “A Kinsley gaffe occurs when a political gaffe reveals some truth that a politician did not intend to admit. The term comes from journalist Michael Kinsley, who said, ‘A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.’”

—Wikipedia’s page on notable political gaffes.