WORST. WARMONGER. EVER. Soon to be revealed Trump peace plan for the Middle East and the thaw in Israeli – Arab relations on the Arabian Peninsula may force Iran’s hand.

An all-out war on the Arabian Peninsula, even if won by the Sunnis, which is far from being a foregone conclusion, is unthinkable in terms of the damage it would cause to the oil production and other infrastructure, infrastructure that took many decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build. No, Iran must be contained, it must be put in a place where military adventurism is simply unthinkable. And who can accomplish this goal? The only Middle Eastern country with a fully functional nuclear arsenal equipped with second strike capability via its fleet of nuclear armed submarines (all according to various foreign sources). So what the Saudis and their smaller neighbors on the peninsula want from Israel is not just the hoisting of their technological base into the 21st century, but also the extension of its nuclear deterrence umbrella over the holiest of hollies of the Islamic faith.

A deal that would fully and openly ally Israel and the guardians of the Islamic holy places in Mecca an Medina would be an event that would change word history. It would be an event that leads to stability and prosperity not only in the Middle East, but around the Globe and most importantly, it would inevitably spell the end of the Mullah rule in Iran, finally allowing that large and important country to rejoin the family of civilized nations.

It’s never smart to pin too many hopes on peace in the Middle East, but if anyone is “crazy” enough to pull off an official Arab-Israeli entente cordiale, it’s Trump.

CNN: Republicans pay the price for Trump’s wall crusade.

Shouldn’t we wait until, I don’t know, something actually happens before making big pronouncements?

THE MORE LEFTIES CALL TRUMP “UNSTABLE,” THE GREATER THE CONTRAST BETWEEN THE NATION’S ACTUAL PEACE AND PROSPERITY, AND THEIR NONSTOP HYPERVENTILATING: Bill Weld launches GOP presidential exploratory committee.

And a guy who’s just switched to the Liberatarian Party “for life” and then back to the GOP out of opportunism maybe shouldn’t talk about stability. Weld is just yet another case of how our political class is trapped within narcissistic fantasies of its own making.

HMM: Did AOC put her boyfriend on the public payroll?

Plus more details here from Paula Bolyard.

Developing, as they say.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): You’re not allowed to question AOC’s ethics, because she’s one of Twitter’s Protected People.

Have I mentioned that Twitter — and the people who run it — are garbage?

OUR CREDENTIALED ELITES: Sex Therapist Claims Trump Supporters Have a ‘Homoerotic Attraction’ to the President. “‘Hopefully, they’re not literally going after their daughters in bed,’ says ‘Dr.’ Susan Block.”

AAF WANTED COLIN KAEPERNICK, BUT $20M PRICE TAG WAS TOO HIGH:

[Alliance of American Football] co-founder Bill Polian told The Athletic that CEO Charlie Ebersol reached out to Kaepernick, but nothing came of it.

“I don’t know what transpired, but he’s obviously not playing,” Polian said.

According to the Associated Press, Kaepernick wanted $20 million or more to consider playing with the league, which opened with its first set of games last weekend with the likes of former Jets Christian Hackenberg and John Wolford, and former Toledo standout Logan Woodside owning starting QB jobs.

Kaepernick does fit the description of an Alliance player — one looking to entice NFL teams — though his contract demands are astronomically higher than the league norm.

Players earn $225,000 over three years in the Alliance. They are free beginning in May to pursue NFL careers, but should they not land a job there, they are obligated to return to the AAF.

“If you truly wanted to play quarterback wouldn’t you want to dominate in a minor league and force a team to sign you? Kap and his supporters are such a joke. He doesn’t want to play because then he isn’t a martyr,” Clay Travis tweets in response.

As I wrote last year regarding the NFL, “Does Kaepernick actually want to be signed? Unless he delivers Johnny Unitas-level talent to whoever he plays for, actually suiting up and riding the pine each week as a backup, or a return to his mediocre performance during the 49ers’ 2-14 season in 2016 would be anti-climactic. Kaepernick has become the athletic equivalent of Michael Moore’s deception in his first movie, Roger & Me. Then-General Motors CEO Roger Smith had met with Moore — reportedly twice — during the shooting of his agitpropumentary, but Moore wouldn’t have a movie if he actually included that footage. Similarly, Kaepernick needs to remain permanently off the gridiron, to keep his uber-woke SJW pose alive.”

ROGER SIMON: The Only Way to Save the FBI Is to Expose Everything.

HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): Feminist Attacks Pro-Trans Twitter as a ‘Boys Club.’ “Men threatened her, and a biological man got her banned.”

TEAR IT DOWN! Beto O’Rourke Wants To Knock Down Existing Border Wall.

Brit Hume notes that O’Rourke inadvertently pointed out that walls work:  “he says existing walls and fences have forced illegals toward the most dangerous places to cross, which means they are indeed a deterrent. His sympathies as expressed here are entirely with those crossing illegally. He clearly wants to make it easier for them.”

I DO: US forces have 1,000 ISIS detainees — and don’t know what to do with them.

While some of the ISIS detainees are front-lines troops and untrained cannon fodder, a significant cohort of them are also more capable militants trained as external operation planners and master bomb makers who pose a threat to the U.S. and its allies.

“It’s closer to a thousand than it is hundreds already in detention, with more to potentially come,” Army Gen. Raymond Thomas, III, who helms U.S. Special Operations Command, said at a Senate hearing Thursday. “[It’s] a huge area of concern for us, especially because they’re being detained by the non-nation state that’s otherwise known as the Syrian Democratic Forces.”

Captured terrorists enjoy zero Geneva Convention protections, and ought to be dealt with something like pirates of old.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Arizona State students, faculty ‘intimidated’ by posters featuring Covington HS’s Nick Sandmann.

CONGRATULATIONS CHICAGO: NAMED MOST CORRUPT CITY IN AMERICA.

Chicago’s last Republican mayor left office in 1931.

REAL MONEY: US, Facebook negotiating record multibillion-dollar fine after privacy lapses. “The fine would be the largest the agency has ever imposed on a technology company, but the two sides have not yet agreed on an exact amount. Facebook has expressed initial concern with the FTC’s demands, one of the people said. If talks break down, the FTC could take the matter to court in what would likely be a bruising legal fight.”

OVER AT VOLOKH, I discuss the dangers of government by executive. Lots of people who vociferously defended Obama’s abuses of executive power have suddenly gotten religion.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Anti-Israel internship can get you credit at Syracuse.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Derp State Coup, Race Hoax? and Much, Much More. “So ‘Andy’s office’ told Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” that he and some of his derp staters want to nullify the duly elected President Trump via the 25th amendment and claim Trump was unable to fulfill his duties as president because RUSSIA. Of course, this amendment is for a president who is IN A COMA or literally incapacitated, but this is the logic coming from the agenda-driven dummies now populating the FBI and DOJ.”

Once you’ve convinced yourself that your job is to protect the proles from themselves, any foul action you take becomes excusable, or even noble. That’s progressivism in a nutshell.

ECONOMIST VERONIQUE DE RUGY AT REASON TV: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal: A Bizarre Grab-Bag of Terrible Ideas.

As Jonah Goldberg noted in response to AOC’s GND, the original New Deal was itself a bizarre grab-bag of terrible ideas:

The New Deal wasn’t a program, it was the by-product of ad hoc experimentation by people who thought their own power was self-justifying. And to look back on it as somehow more coherent than the would-be Green New Deal is to give it too much credit.

“To look upon these programs as the result of a unified plan,” wrote Raymond Moley, FDR’s right-hand man during much of his rule, “was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.” When Alvin Hansen, an influential economic adviser to the president, was asked — in 1940 — whether “the basic principle of the New Deal” was “economically sound,” he responded, “I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is.”

It was control. And wish lists. And it was ever thus.

And corporatism.

The same could be said about former President Obama’s own environmentally-themed crony corporatism, which Time magazine described five minutes after Obama won the election thusly:

Likely, they had no idea what their cover was a warning, not hagiography.

In CASE YOU MISSED IT: Russian hostile meddling backfires in northern Europe. My latest Creators Syndicate column.

RELATED: For deep background on Russian dirty tricks and narrative warfare, see Chapter 4, Cocktails from Hell: Five Complex Wars Shaping the 21st Century.

THAT SEEMS LIKE A LOT OF EFFORT TO ACHIEVE THE SAME RESULT: Computers could write full – and wrong – news stories.

DIRTY MONEY: Facebook silent on donations to Virginia ‘blackface’ Democrats.

Social media giant Facebook, which demanded that a Mississippi Republican Senate candidate return a $2,500 donation after making racially tinged remarks, has remained silent about seeking a refund from two top Virginia Democratic leaders mired in a blackface scandal.

Facebook, which has given Virginia Democrats four times as much money as it has given Republicans, has been quiet on the scandal gripping Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring, two white politicians who’ve admitted to appearing in blackface, generally seen as a racist act.

According to donor records, Facebook contributed $25,000 to Northam’s 2018 Inaugural committee and $5,000 to Herring in 2013.

The company also has been quiet about the $10,000 given to Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax’s 2018 Inaugural committee. Fairfax has been accused of sexual assault by two women.

And hypocrisy.

APACHES IN TEXAS: Good photo of 1st Air Cavalry Brigade AH-64 Apache attack helicopters training at Fort Hood, Texas.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Americans continue their march to low-tax states.

Once again, Texas and Florida were the big winners in overall population gains, with the Lone Star State gaining more than 379,000 residents from 2017-18 and the Sunshine State posting a gain of more than 322,000.

The big net losers from the report were New York, which lost a total of 48,510 residents, and Illinois, which lost 45,116.

These state-by-state population numbers will alter the makeup of seats in the United States House of Representative during the once-a-decade reapportionment and redistricting process that will commence after the 2020 census.

The redistricting battle is gonna be as lit as ever, making this an excellent time for another pitch for Glenn’s welcome wagon idea.

OUCH: Amazon Spox Blames Ocasio-Cortez For Company Scrapping Planned NY HQ: She’s ‘Never Amazon.’