KURT SCHLICHTER: Trump Charges the Liberal Hacks’ Latest Ambush.

It’s equal to a death sentence, but then it’s a Trump associate so there are apparently special rules. And you’ll notice few of the Dems whining about this say this is an appropriate sentence – at least not with a straight face.

They did it to make Trump react. They knew the establishment and its submissive media would freak out. They thought they could derail his most epic run ever.

Well, Trump reacted. He tweeted the manifest and undeniable truth – that the liberal persecutors were treating Lady Justice like Harvey Weinstein treated eager starlets, except without the sop of a minor supporting role in a Gwyneth Paltrow flick.

Trump charged right into the ambush.

The reaction was predictable, especially after the DOJ brass realized these punks had bait and switched their sentencing recommendation. The DOJ promised to revise the recommendation and the media and liberal pols went nuts. This is the same media and the same liberal pols who want actual criminals to go free, who think arresting illegal alien thugs is a crime against humanity, and who want to close our prisons and turn them into Billy Jack-esque Rainbow Schools to teach hugging and climate paranoia to children.

Then he questioned the judge’s impartiality, which you are not allowed to do because of reasons unless its Gorsuch or Kavanaugh. Then it’s totally principled, the principle being “the elite gets its way.”

It’s not Trump who’s wrecked out institutions. But his opponents are discovering that the rubble doesn’t make for great cover, or even concealment.

Related: Juror 1261 In Roger Stone’s Case: Was Justice Undone? “If this information was withheld by Hart, it raises a question about the veracity of her testimony and, more importantly, the fairness of the trial. It certainly seems Hart had no place on the Stone jury.”

CORONAVIRUS UPDATE: China reports 105 new deaths from coronavirus on mainland on Feb. 16.

Coronavirus cases rise again in China’s Hubei province.

China coronavirus cases pass 70,000 as WHO mission gets underway.

Coronavirus Cruise Ship Americans Being Repatriated. “At least 40 US citizens are infected and will be treated in Japan.”

US Official: Americans Infected With Coronavirus on Quarantined Japan Ship ‘Will Not be Evacuated.’

Passengers from a coronavirus-infected cruise ship may be quarantined at Camp Roberts.

Singapore downgrades 2020 economic forecast amid coronavirus outbreak.

Japan manufacturers remain pessimistic as coronavirus fears grow.

IF PURDUE CAN DO IT, WHY CAN’T EVERYONE ELSE? Purdue President Mitch Daniels announced Saturday night the university would freeze tuition for the 9th straight year, holding it at 2012 levels through 2021-22.

AT AMAZON, save in Blu-Ray and DVD.

Plus, deals on bestselling Pet Food and Supplies.

SILENCING: ‘This may be the last piece I write’: prominent Xi critic has internet cut after house arrest.

OF COURSE: New York Times Has An Issue With Trump’s Daytona 500 Appearance: The crowd loved him. So, of course, media decided it was improper.

OPEN THREAD: It’s all about you.

SPACE: SpaceX Crew Dragon arrives at launch site for the 1st orbital crew flight from US soil since 2011.

LOOK, FAT! Joe Biden should do town halls forever.

Working out which of Biden’s town hall broadsides was most astonishing will keep teams of historians busy for decades to come. Who among us can say they didn’t watch slack-jawed when, last December, the unhinged septuagenarian unloaded on a voter in New Hampton, Iowa. In response to a question about his son’s ‘work’ in Ukraine, the former VP said, ‘You’re a damn liar man, that’s not true.’ He continued:

‘I’ve been around a long time and I know more than most people. And I can get things done. That’s why I’m running. And you want to check my shape? Let’s do pushups here together, man. Let’s run. Let’s do whatever you wanna do. Let’s take an IQ test.’

As far as we can tell, the voter did not ask to ‘check’ Biden’s shape. Biden then appeared to call his questioner ‘fat while giving off a heroic Michael Douglas in Falling Down vibe. This correspondent will not be shocked when Biden fires off a few RPG’s at the next voter to say the word ‘Ukraine’ within a five-foot radius of his person.

In Iowa, Biden appeared to think he was still the vice president. He also believed that 40 students were shot dead at Kent State, not four. At another event he remembered the assassinations of RFK and MLK occuring a decade after they happened. In August, he was unable to name the prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Over the years, Biden’s racked up thousands of these micro-gaffes and mini-controversies, accumulating over deep time like the fossil record. He provided a memorable summa to his cake-soft campaign, when he said at another campaign stop over the summer, ‘we choose truth over facts’. Biden has chosen an agonisingly senile and very public detoriation over a relaxing retirement.

And don’t get him started on FDR, television, and the 1929 stock market crash.

SOLID STATE:  New Book Provides In-Depth Look at the Making of the Beatles’ Swan Song, Abbey Road.

My latest, over at Ed Driscoll.com.

(Bumped.)

I LOVE HOW THIS STUFF ISN’T EVEN EXCITING NEWS ANYMORE: Inside The Pentagon’s Secret UFO Program. “With the wealth of data collected by BAASS, and almost assuredly more information being gathered by AATIP, it raises the question: Is the UAP issue being closely guarded because we don’t believe it’s real, or because we’re afraid we can’t understand it?”

The truth is out there.

MY FORMER LIFE AS A RADICAL:

From the Bolsheviks’ Red Terror to Germany’s murderous Red Army Faction (RAF), the radical Left has a long and bloody history of justifying violence and inhumanity. Even today, many radical leftists and anarchists condone violence as a political tool. They consider themselves to be at war with the capitalist system and, as Saul Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, “in war the end justifies almost any means.” This dangerous mindset makes radicals prone to another pernicious fallacy—that their enemy’s enemy is their friend.

Initially, the September 11^th attacks, which killed 2977 people, elicited in me a feeling not of horror but of excitement. After all, a devastating blow had been dealt to American hegemony. My moral compass was completely thrown off by the notion that the terrorists’ jihad was best understood as a liberation movement against Western capitalist imperialism—the chickens had come home to roost. This view was quite common among radicals. A friend of mine even got a tattoo of the burning World Trade Center captioned “FWT”: Fuck World Trade. At the time, this didn’t strike me as particularly obscene.

When it finally dawned on me that the jihadists’ goal was diametrically opposed to my own idealistic vision, I briefly endorsed the then-fashionable conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an “inside job” executed to provide a pretext for the suspension of civil liberties and the waging of wars. This sentiment was captured in slogans like “Bush is a Nazi,” which implied that American democracy under George W. Bush was tantamount to fascism. False equivalencies of this kind allow radical leftists and anarchists to hide behind the guise of antifascism. I participated in a number of “antifascist” protests myself, some of which escalated into riots and violent confrontations with law enforcement. Often, however, the targets of these protests weren’t fascists as commonly defined, but political adversaries who had simply been branded as fascists. This meant that they were fair game. As Mark Twain said, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

Lengthy, but well worth a read.

THINK OF THE PRESS NOT AS BRAVE FIREFIGHTERS, WHICH THEY’RE NOT, BUT AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, WHICH THEY ARE, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Media silence on voter registration attack deepens our divide.

In the hours and days after Gregory Timm plowed his vehicle into a tent of Republican Party volunteers registering voters in the parking lot of Kernan Village Shopping Center in Jacksonville, Florida, national coverage of the event has been alarmingly lacking.

Local news channel WJXT reported days later on the arrest report, which showed Timm telling the sheriff’s office his “disapproval of Trump” was the motivating factor for the attack. He showed the sheriff’s office a self-recorded video of him driving straight at the volunteers, expressing frustration that the video cut out before “the good part.” Even then, as I write this, the best the New York Times could muster was wire coverage.

No teams of reporters were sent to uncover his dark motivations, upbringing, or political leanings. No psychological profiles have been written up, nor have any experts weighed in on how this is a growing threat. These are all tools that would have been used by an army of reporters if Timm had been a Trump supporter plowing into Democratic Party volunteers registering voters.

The problem isn’t that Timm’s attack on the GOP wasn’t covered by most of the media. It’s that it wasn’t covered with the same voracious appetite news organizations have whenever someone who is even peripherally associated with the Right does something to a Democrat.

This isn’t whataboutism; this is realism. . . . There would have been a week’s worth of cable news coverage, several nationwide protests, and someone calling for a national conversation by now had the victims of Timm’s attack been supporting anyone but Trump.

It’s simply a fact that the journalistic class for the most part sees Republicans as deplorables whose death, silencing, or oppression is largely to be approved of, or at least not made a big deal of. This is why the deplorable class, in turn, regards the press as enemies of the people. Because they’re the people the press is inimical to.

Flashback: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Mike Bloomberg’s contempt for rural America is real:

Flashback: RESET THE VOX COUNTER: Vox “Journalist” Tries To Clown On Trump, Ends Up Exposing How Ignorant He Is.

Sometimes it’s best to just not say anything. Vox’s Aaron Rupar, purportedly a “journalist,” hasn’t learned that lesson.

Today, Donald Trump gave a speech in Iowa where he hit on some of the struggles that rural Americans are dealing with as they produce much of the food you and I enjoy daily. At one point, Trump starts to discuss improvements to broadband in their areas and how many farms in Iowa don’t have the proper connectivity for their tractors. This extends to 3G/4G wireless internet coverage as well, which is incredibly spotty in the midwest.

This had Rupar thinking he had a solid own of Trump on tap. You see, he said tractors can’t connect to the internet. What a moron, am I right?

* * * * * * * *

In fact, I can remember well over a decade ago going to an uncle’s house and checking out some of the new equipment at his neighbor’s farm. At the time, GPS was being used to ensure precision plowing and planting. Today, internet connectivity in tractors at even smaller operations is becoming the norm to run all kinds of new features to keep things moving smoothly.

The lack of broadband and wireless connectivity in the areas where some of these farms are is a real problem and hurts efficiency.

Farm equipment has gotten so high-tech that, as I blogged from Las Vegas in January, John Deere displayed this yuuuuge semi-autonomous combine in the robotics and automation section of CES, the massive annual Consumer Electronics Show:

Now that’s the 21st century that Syd Mead promised me in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

TOPLESS VEGAN PROTESTS BRAINLESS BERNIE: A topless woman protested Bernie’s support of the dairy industry at a rally in Carson City, NV (Video).

(Classical allusion in headline.)

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Dutch Supermarket Implements “Chat Checkout” Where Cashiers Make Time To Chat To Lonely People.

STEVEN HAYWARD: Scenes From The Media Meltdown. “The most obvious velleities of the major mainstream media today are, first, a hatred of Fox News, and second, a primal scream at the fact that over the last 25 years old fashioned print and broadcast media have shrunk more than coal mining. Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University’s famed journalism school, took to the pages of the New York Review of Books in a recent issue to lament the sorry state of journalism and wondering if the ‘broken media’ can be ‘saved,’ but offering a perfect expression of how out of touch the media is today.”

The media is “broken” because it is dominated by graduates of journalism schools, instead of blue collar reporters who learned their trade — and it is a trade, not a profession — on the job.

CORONAVIRUS: Did coronavirus originate in Chinese government laboratory? Scientists believe killer disease may have begun in research facility 300 yards from Wuhan wet fish market.

In response to the above London Daily Mail headline, Bari Weiss of the New York Times asks: “So…@zerohedge was right?”

As this ZDNet article from February 3rd notes: ZeroHedge banned from Twitter over coronavirus bioweapon claims.

Will Twitter ban Tom Cotton also? Republican senator suggests ‘worse than Chernobyl’ coronavirus could’ve come from Chinese ‘superlaboratory.’

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: What happened when I tried to meet guys using vegan dating apps.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Bloomberg’s Bucks Will Not Protect Him From Nasty Battle for Nomination.

YOU CAN ONLY BE AVANT-GARDE FOR SO LONG BEFORE YOU BECOME GARDE: Rage Against the Machine becomes the machine.

At venues such as the Target Center, Capital One Arena, and Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse (are you getting a corporate vibe?), the cheapest nosebleed tickets will run you at least $125, plus fees to whatever corporation is selling the tickets. At some venues, such as the NMSU Pan American Center in New Mexico, a standing room-only floor ticket will cost you $750, plus a whopping $121.30 in pesky Ticketmaster fees.

The hypocrisy of astronomical prices was not missed by even the most devout fans.

To coin a Johnny Rotten-approved phrase, ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

(Classical reference in headline.)

AND SOME OF IT GETS RECYCLED AS BRIBES TO AMERICAN POLITICIANS: Capitalism Helps People in Poor Nations, Foreign Aid Helps Politicians in Poor Nations.

1990 BLOOMBERG L.P. EMPLOYEES CREATED A BOOK OF HIS OFFENSIVE QUOTES:

● The only liberal I trust is a rich old liberal. Why? Because they’re old enough to understand what they’re saying, and they’re rich enough to pay for what they say!

● If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they’d go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale’s.

● The three biggest lies are: The check’s in the mail, I’ll respect you in the morning, and I’m glad that I’m Jewish.

● If Jesus was a Jew, why does he have a Puerto Rican first name?

At the beginning of the book DeMarse wrote “Editor’s Note” that reads, “Yes, these are all actual quotes. No, nothing had been embellished or exaggerated. And yes, some things were too outrageous to include.”

Classy stuff, particularly coming from one of the most puritanical lefties ever.

WARREN REALLY HAS HER HOME STATE LOCKED DOWN: Elizabeth Warren’s struggles put Massachusetts ‘in play’ on Super Tuesday.

Earlier: Boo Hoo: Now That Liz Warren Is Losing, She’s Blaming the Media for Not Being Fair.