SO RATHER THAN CONFRONT THE ACTUAL ANTISEMITES INFESTING THEIR PARTY, THE DEMOCRATS INTRODUCED A WATERED-DOWN, DO-NOTHING RESOLUTION — AND HOW DOES POLITICO SPIN IT? Republican leadership splits, and party splinters over hate resolution.

Well, Politico.

21ST CENTURY REPRODUCTION: Parents of dead West Point cadet retrieve his sperm.

UPDATE: Sure, yuk it up in the comments, but this was a tragedy where parents lost a son, and fellow cadets lost a friend. Watch this memorial video.

PEGGY NOONAN: Get Ready for the Struggle Session. “In America, and even more so on Twitter, there’s a whiff of China’s Cultural Revolution in the air.”

Mao unleashed university and high school students to weed out enemies and hold them to account. The students became the paramilitary Red Guards. They were instructed by the party to “clear away the evil habits of the old society” and extinguish what came to be known as “the four olds”—old ideas and customs, old habits and culture. “Sweep Away All Monsters and Demons,” the state newspaper instructed them.

With a vengeance they did.

In the struggle sessions the accused, often teachers suspected of lacking proletarian feeling, were paraded through streets and campuses, sometimes stadiums. It was important always to have a jeering crowd; it was important that the electric feeling that comes with the possibility of murder be present. Dunce caps, sometimes wastebaskets, were placed on the victims’ heads, and placards stipulating their crimes hung from their necks. The victims were accused, berated, assaulted. Many falsely confessed in the vain hope of mercy.

Were any “guilty”? It hardly mattered. Fear and terror were the point. A destroyed society is more easily dominated.

It does have a familiar feel, particularly on social media. Looking forward to Glenn’s book on it.

AT AMAZON, save on Cookware.

ELIZABETH WARREN: Break Up Tech Giants.

Me, several months ago: Donald Trump must bust Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google monopolies like Teddy Roosevelt.

How long before she pushes the Revolving-Door Surtax, and starts agitating to repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts?

GO BROKE, GET WOKE? Shares of LaCroix maker National Beverage crater 16% after blaming poor earnings on ‘injustice.’

SPACE: SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down in Atlantic to Cap Historic Test Flight.

HAVEN’T DISASTER-RECOVERY PEOPLE BEEN DOING THIS FOR A WHILE? Doctors Are Saving Lives by Writing Their Names on Their Scrub Caps.

SONNY BUNCH: Lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre movie about a cosmically powered white woman. “Captain Marvel is a big bowl of mediocrity, a soup comprised of an underwhelming, lightweight lead saddled with poorly edited action scenes that’s set to a disastrously-on-the-nose soundtrack in service of a script that offers little in the way of deviation from the comic book movie mold, with a few winning bit performances that keep the thing from being a total waste of your time.”

Even my young, Marvel-loving sons are pre-soured on this one.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 47 Tips That Will Keep You Away From My E.R.

SISTER TOLDJAH: Paul Krugman Says Something Dangerously Stupid About “Brands Of Anti-Semitism”, Gets Flattened In Response.

I’m (just) old enough to remember when Krugman was a not-very-political economist with interesting or unexpected things to say, but those memories are growing dim.

ILHAN OMAR: Obama’s “hope and change” was a mirage:

Recalling the “caging of kids” at the U.S.-Mexico border* and the “droning of countries around the world” on Obama’s watch, she argues that the Democratic president operated within the same fundamentally broken framework as his Republican successor.

“We can’t be only upset with Trump. … His policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was,” Omar says. “And that’s not what we should be looking for anymore. We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.”

In 2016, Bernie Sanders campaigned under the premise that the “real unemployment” rate under then-President Obama was 10.5 percent. AOC’s “Green New Deal” is premised on the notion that Obama’s own green-obsessed “New New Deal” (as Time magazine dubbed it) accomplished nothing. Just as Hillary campaigned in 2016 with a paradoxical ‘90s nostalgia while rejecting all of her husband’s policies that made the stable economy of that decade possible, it will be fascinating to watch the left campaign simultaneously rejecting Obama’s policies and/or telling us what a failure they were (because Democrats have to keep moving further and further to the left), while wanting his blessings on the campaign trail.

* Curiously, the DNC-MSM didn’t highlight those stories much until Obama left office.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: A drone builder claims he invented the smallest flying car in the world — the Koncepto Millenya.

Video at the link. It looks really cool, but so small there doesn’t seem to be room for a bag of groceries.

GOVERNMENT IS JUST A WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER, EVEN WHEN WE DIDN’T GET TO CHOOSE THEM AND GOVERNMENT DID IT WITHOUT US: Feds Pay Millions for Lobster Tail, Booze, Toys in End of Year Spending Binge.

A new analysis released by OpenTheBooks.com found 66 agencies spent $97 billion last September, the final month of fiscal year 2018. The end of the year taxpayer-funded spending spree included contracts with Coors, millions on iPhones, furniture, and CrossFit equipment.

“In the final month of the fiscal year, federal agencies scramble to spend what’s left in their annual budget,” OpenTheBooks.com said. “Agencies worry spending less than their budget allows might prompt Congress to appropriate less money in the next fiscal year. To avoid this, federal agencies choose to embark on an annual shopping spree rather than admit they can operate on less.”

Resulting government expenditures included $4.6 million on lobster tail and crab; $673,471 on golf carts; $1.7 million on pianos, tubas, and trombones; $9.8 million on workout and recreation equipment; and $7.7 million iPhones and iPads.

A Wexford Leather club chair cost taxpayers $9,241. The government spent $293,245 on rib eye, top sirloin, and flank steak.

Show up at your nearest federal agency with a bag of charcoal and demand your fair share.

DEMOCRATS FAIL THE TOLERANCE TEST: Josh Krasuhaar: Make no mistake: Omar and her progressive allies won this battle. 

With any luck, this will turn out as well for the Democrats as the McGovern campaign.

YELLOW RIBBON PROJECT: 12 Years in Captivity for America’s Longest-Held Hostage. “What kind of hell must he be living in, that both our government and the Iranian authorities have allowed him to live in for so long?”

THE DEMOCRAT CRACKUP. In the Wall Street Journal, Kimberley Strassel writes:

Mrs. Pelosi this week accomplished the remarkable feat of sidelining Mr. Trump and owning most of the unpleasant headlines herself. House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler explained that his sprawling Trump investigation was primarily designed to convince voters that Democrats were “not just trying to steal the last—to reverse the results of the last election.” This required his colleagues to deny furiously that the party has already decided on impeachment.

Then there was the crackup between House party elders who wanted Democrats to condemn the anti-Semitism of Rep. Ilhan Omar, and woke freshmen who wanted to turn smears against Jews into a fuzzy discussion of hurt feelings. Members battled for days, only for Mrs. Pelosi on Thursday to roll over to the progressive left’s demand that any resolution condemn “hate” in general and not anti-Semitism specifically. Even CNN described all this as “chaos.”

* * * * * * * * *

The reigning political wisdom is that none of this will matter in the end. Democrats will brawl, but their anti-Trump fervor will ultimately unite them around a standard-bearer. Then again, these are not usual political times. And it seems equally possible that the same anti-Trump contempt will push them to overreach in their investigations and indulge in policy prescriptions that prove too extreme for a center-right country.

It’s too soon to know. For now, all we can do is sit back and enjoy the Democratic show.

As a blogger, watching the train wreck, it’s been a content-rich environment, although “enjoy” is obviously the wrong a word. Because as an American, watching Ilhan Omar bring Corbynism to the Democratic Party, as Bret Stephens wrote yesterday, it’s been a particularly painful week. In the 1975, Milton Friedman wrote:

I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.

Sadly, as with the 1970s, these are not those times.

UPDATE: AOC’s “Democratic Socialists of America” Chant for the Destruction of Israel.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: High School Student Suspended for Posing With Pro-Trump MAGA Flag and Sweatshirt. “The school let her come back after 3 days, but kept the suspension on her record.”

COLD WAR II: New photos show North Korea rocket site back to ‘normal operating status.’

“These actions amount to a ‘snapback’ from the moderate dismantlement undertaken by the North Koreans at the Sohae launch facility after the Singapore Summit in June 2018,” according to an analysis by Joseph Bermudez and Victor Cha of Beyond Parallel, a research project funded by the think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

The images taken on March 6 show activity that “speaks to the ease with which [North Korea] can reverse steps it might take toward denuclearization in the future,” Bermudez and Cha wrote.

A team of researchers from 38 North, which is affiliated with The Stimson Center in Washington D.C., arrived at the same conclusion that the Sohae facility “appears to have returned to normal operational status.”

Sanctions can snapback, too, you know.

I REMEMBER WHEN THE AAUP SUPPORTED CAMPUS FREE SPEECH. IT WAS, LIKE, 2016. Higher ed labor union AAUP slams Trump’s free speech executive order.

FORCE MULTIPLIER: Air Force completes first flight test of Valkyrie unmanned fighter jet.

The flight test is a major step forward for an experimental “loyal wingman” concept that envisions small robotic drones accompanying fighter jets into combat, scout ahead or absorb enemy fire. Military experts have suggested such systems would be useful in a war between two rival nations, something that aligns with the Pentagon’s increasing focus on competing with China and Russia for military dominance.

The Pentagon has yet to commit to the idea. But the Air Force Research Laboratory is among several military agencies dabbling in such technology, partnering with a San Diego-based company called Kratos Defense and Security Solutions to develop the Valkyrie.

Faster, please.

THIS IS CNN: Fox News Defended CNN Against The White House — CNN Didn’t Return The Favor Over DNC Ban.

FRUITS OF JANUS: Lawsuit Fights ‘Coerced’ Mandatory Texas Bar Membership. “Three Texas lawyers say they have no desire to be members of the State Bar of Texas and do not support its ‘diversity’ initiatives or other programs aimed at assisting immigrants who have crossed the border illegally or those based on lawyers race, gender and sexual orientation.”