PUNCTURING THE NARRATIVE WITH A SINGLE SENTENCE:

HEH: New Toyota Prius Will Remind You To Check Your Privilege Every 3,000 Miles.

MOLON LABE: Pelosi threat: Democrats could declare national emergency to enact gun control.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I guess the problem with this is that we know they’ll do this anyway if they think they can get away with it, and the press would support them regardless of what the GOP has done in the past.

HISTORY: Famed WW2 Aircraft Carrier Torpedoed in 1942 Found Miles Deep in Pacific Ocean.

The Hornet was the last US fleet carrier lost to enemy action.

Vulcan Inc., an exploration team financed by the Paul Allen estate, discovered the sunken American aircraft carrier near the Solomon Islands in late January, CBS reports. Crewmembers aboard the RV Petrel used a deep-sea sonar drone to detect the ship 17,500 feet (5,330 meters) below the surface.

A remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) was then sent down to investigate further, confirming the wreckage as belonging to the Hornet, which it did by spotting its naval designation, CV-8. The Hornet went down during the Battle of Santa Cruz Islands in 1942 after a fierce fight with ships and planes from the Japanese Imperial Navy.

Impressive find by Paul Allen’s foundation, which has been on a roll lately.

THE ENEMY WITHIN: All About the Benjamins: Omar Advances Interests of Iranian Donors.

JIM GERAGHTY: Twenty Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Kirsten Gillibrand. “Defending Big Tobacco, keeping rifles under her bed, studying with Jeanine Pirro, and having Edie Falco play her grandmother.”

BY SCUTTLING THE AMAZON DEAL, ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ JUST OPENED HERSELF UP TO A PRIMARY CHALLENGE:

This afternoon, a spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez said she would not be taking any interviews. One can see why. But the real question is whether this could hurt her politically. In fact, there is good reason to believe that this debacle has opened the door to a potential primary challenge. Given that almost the entire New York Democratic Party machine, from Mayor Bill de Blasio to Governor Andrew Cuomo were desperate for the Amazon deal; a challenge to AOC might well attract some serious backers.

And the polls back it up. According to a recent Sienna College poll, a majority of New Yorkers supported the deal, an even bigger majority in Queens, the very borough where the HQ would have been located. Moreover, 70 percent of black New Yorkers and 81 percent of Hispanic New Yorkers wanted Amazon in Gotham. Both demographic groups suffer from higher unemployment than the rest of the city. As Daily News Columnist Rob George put it in Twitter, it was “AOC vs. POC.”

Exit quote: “‘Ocasio-Cortez Drove Away 25,000 Jobs’ isn’t a bad campaign slogan.”

Related: Civil War on the Left, Ch. 65: It’s an Amazon Out There!

MARK ELLIS: The Russia Collusion Thud Heard ‘Round the World. “There was never any collusion. The entire debacle has been a Deep State plot to depose a president.”

DAVID RIVKIN & ELIZABETH PRICE FOLEY: Stop the Impeachment Fishing Expedition: Congress has no business investigating the president for conduct that occurred before he took office.

As William Barr begins his term as attorney general, House Democrats are aiming a “subpoena cannon” at President Trump, hoping to disable his presidency with investigations and possibly gather evidence to impeach him. Mr. Trump fired back in his State of the Union address: “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.” To protect the presidency and separation of powers, Mr. Barr should be prepared to seek a stay of all congressional investigations of Mr. Trump’s prepresidential conduct.

The president is not one among many, as are legislators and judges. Crippling his ability to function upsets the constitutional balance of power. For this reason, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has repeatedly concluded that a sitting president may not be indicted or prosecuted. The same logic should apply to congressional investigations.

Congress is targeting Mr. Trump’s actions before becoming president because there are well-established constitutional limits, grounded in separation-of-powers doctrine, on its ability to investigate his official conduct. In U.S. v. Nixon (1974), the Supreme Court recognized a constitutionally based, although not unlimited, privilege of confidentiality to ensure “effective discharge of a President’s powers.” In Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982), the justices held that presidents and ex-presidents have absolute immunity against civil liability for official presidential acts.

Executive immunity for prepresidential activity is less clear. In Clinton v. Jones (1997), which arose out of Paula Jones’s accusation that Bill Clinton sexually harassed her while he was governor of Arkansas, the justices reasoned that Ms. Jones’s lawsuit could proceed because the burden on the presidency objectively appeared light. Specifically, because only three sitting presidents had been sued for prepresidential acts, the justices thought it “unlikely that a deluge of such litigation will ever engulf the presidency.”

The court did, however, consider the question of whether civil litigation “could conceivably hamper the President in conducting the duties of his office.” It answered: “If and when that should occur, the court’s discretion would permit it to manage those actions in such fashion (including deferral of trial) that interference with the President’s duties would not occur.”

Unfortunately, the scenario the court called “unlikely” in 1997 now exists. Like Mr. Clinton, Mr. Trump faces an investigation by a zealous prosecutor with unlimited resources inquiring, among other things, into prepresidential activities. In addition, Mr. Trump is subject to a deluge of lawsuits and investigations, including by state attorneys general, involving his conduct before entering politics. The House Intelligence Committee has announced a wide-ranging investigation of two decades’ worth of Mr. Trump’s business dealings. The Ways and Means Committee plans to probe many years of Mr. Trump’s tax returns. By contrast, the 1995 resolution establishing the Senate Whitewater Committee targeted specific areas of possible improper conduct by the White House and federal banking regulators.

Congress has no authority to investigate or prosecute crimes; these responsibilities belong to the executive branch. It has no power to conduct fishing expeditions, and its investigatory authority is supposed to be in the service of legislation. As the Supreme Court warned in Watkins v. U.S. (1954), investigations unrelated to legislative business are an abuse of power that “can lead to ruthless exposure of private lives.” When congressional investigations seek ruthless exposure of a sitting president’s private life, the harm is not only to persons but to institutions.

Nor is investigating Mr. Trump’s prepresidential activities a legitimate exercise of the House’s impeachment power. The Framers viewed impeachment as a remedy for serious violations of public trust committed while in office. . . .

To protect the separation of powers, the president should defy all demands for information about his prepresidential activities. If Congress or private litigants seek to enforce these demands, the Justice Department should move to stay these proceedings while Mr. Trump is in office. If Democrats want to remove Mr. Trump from office, there are two legitimate ways to do so: By defeating him at the polls in 2020 or through properly conducted impeachment proceedings based on evidence of “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” committed while in office.

Well, with the Russian “collusion” narrative dying on the vine, they have to give their crazy base something to focus on until 2020.

21ST CENTURY LEFTIST RELATIONSHIPS: Has Trump wrecked our sex life? “Post-Trump Sex Disorder” is real, says sex therapist.

Related: My Woke Boyfriend and I Almost Broke Up Over a Jordan Peterson Video. “Our first political blow out happened while naked in bed after a heavy sex romp. I don’t remember how we got on the subject, but what I do remember is that when I stated that being a woman wasn’t oppressing, he became flustered and irritated.”

TO BE FAIR, THEY PROBABLY CAN’T EXPLAIN “CLIMATE CHANGE” EITHER: Green New Deal supporters can’t explain how it will prevent climate change.

AT AMAZON, deals in DVDs.

Plus, save on Software.

BOB MCMANUS: With Amazon gone, everyone sees that Emperor Andrew has no clothes.

Emperor Andrew has no clothes — and Amazon noticed.

Or perhaps Jeff Bezos was channeling George Bernard Shaw — “I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and the pig likes it” — and decided that, whatever the upside of a major presence in the Big Apple, the cost of doing business here was just too high.

Either way, arrivederci Amazon!

What’s astonishing is that the digital ­dynamo decided to come to Queens in the first place.

Isn’t the bulk of Gov. Cuomo’s economic-development varsity — including his ­as-close-as-a-brother top aide — on its way to prison because of the team’s first-term pocket-lining? Haven’t all of his grand plans flopped spectacularly, one after another and usually mired in scandal?

And then there is Mayor de Blasio, a party to the Amazon deal and a fellow who spent most of his first term under investigation for corrupt practices; who has a kindergartener’s attention span; and who nobody takes seriously anyway — to say nothing of trusts.

Why would any self-respecting company want to do business in such an environment?

That is, in a culture where a signed, sealed and delivered agreement traditionally is just a starting point for the so-called community-benefits-agreement shakedown — the process where local politicians attempt to squeeze cash and other considerations from good-faith investors.

And, sure enough, local pols began circling the deal the instant it was announced — ­piously preaching policy concerns, but clearly on the make for extracurricular advantages. It’s a tradition, don’t you know.

Thing is, when you’re one of the world’s most significant economic engines, you don’t have to play by local rules.

So Bezos bagged it.

It’s also a lesson to other pols, in other places in the future, not to get too greedy.

MY CONGRESSMAN IS NOT HAPPY:

I voted no. #disgusted pic.twitter.com/WJQhucN896

— Tim Burchett (@timburchett) February 15, 2019

UPDATE: Related:

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Valentines Cards for Democrats.

NUKE THE SITE FROM ORBIT; IT’S THE ONLY WAY TO BE SURE: 15 Devastating Quotes That Show You How Dangerous Social Media Has Become to Our Society.

DENIAL: As The Russia Hoax Begins To Unravel, The Gaslighting Begins. The media has started backing away from the Russia collusion hoax. Many seem to know a reckoning is coming.

OPEN THREAD: Did anything happen today?

SKYNET SMILES; BUYS STOCK IN THE TYRELL CORPORATION: Sexbots could crush human limbs ‘and spy on you for the government’ as fears grow over rogue robot lovers.

Well, this is 2019, you know.

SPACE FORCE: Pentagon budget proposal funds Space Force headquarters as a ‘starting point.’

MICHAEL WALSH: Leftism Is Like the Cult of Cthulhu.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think,” wrote the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft in the opening to The Call of Cthulhu, “is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” In the Lovecraftian mythos, this refers to the occult world of the Great Old Ones, eldritch gods from outer space, as old as time itself who lie beyond our ken, dead but still dreaming. If we could only grasp their existence and see how fragile our imaginary world really is, we would go mad. Thus, we go on believing in an illusion and subconsciously hope Cthulhu and Azathoth never show us their true faces.

The secret to being a successful leftist is very similar.

As they say when they’re handing out the textbooks at Miskatonic University, read the whole thing.

GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING. ABC Political Director Rick Klein Defends Green New Deal: ‘They’re Not Taking Away Your Hamburgers, Cars, Planes:’

“And if you don’t have a name attached to it and you don’t misconstrue it. If they’re not taking away your hamburgers, or your cars or your planes, you have to — if you present it accurately, maybe there’s an argument,” Klein argued.

Related:

● The Green New Deal’s War on Cows.

● Cory Booker: ‘This Planet Simply Can’t Sustain’ People Eating Meat.

● “The authors state that the GND would like to replace every ‘combustion-engine vehicle’ — trucks, airplanes, boats, and 99 percent of cars — within ten years. Charging stations for electric vehicles will be built “everywhere,” though how power plants will provide the energy needed to charge them is a mystery.”

● Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal Aims to Eliminate Air Travel.

As Jim Treacher wrote earlier this week, Apparently, the Green New Deal Runs on Gaslight.