AND JUST LIKE THAT, THE DNC-MSM NO LONGER LOVES ROMNEY: Mitt Romney’s vote to clear path for probe into Hunter Biden’s Burisma ties.

SET ASIDE THE SERIOUS NEWS FOR A FEW MINUTES: Florida Man Friday: Did Someone Say Corona?

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why the 2021 Porsche 911 Turbo S Got Such a Big Power Boost.

AT AMAZON, Shop Amazon Warehouse Deals – Deep Discounts on Open-box and Used Products.

Plus, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

DYNASTY: Lt. Gov. Attacks George P. Bush Over Alamo Project After Rumors Surface That Bush Plans to Challenge Patrick.

‘ABSOLUTELY PERFECT!’ Joy Behar agrees it’s time for a woman president (until Meghan McCain makes it awkward for her).

All of the Warren freakout stuff this week will be loads of fun to revisit during the Nikki Haley 2024 run.

SUPPORT FOR HILL AIDE PAY RAISES GROWS: Interesting coalition urges congressional appropriators to give Hill staff more pay. There are 20,000 or so mostly young men and women working for senators, representatives and committees, and their labors can be grueling.

If that thought gives you a headache, think about this: Would you rather your tax dollars go to an unaccountable bureaucrat who couldn’t care less what you think, or the Hill aide whose boss has to face voters every two or six years?

SPACE: Meet Perseverance: Mars rover gets name ahead of July launch.

KEEP AN EYE ON THIS GUY: Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC) is only in his second term in the House but he’s not bashful about challenging the Washington Establishment’s addiction to waste, fraud and corruption. He’s also a motorhead!

SHOCKER: Former Obama Admin Acting DHS Inspector General Indicted on Theft, Fraud Charges.

GOOD AND HARD: California’s Gig Economy Is Under Attack.

In December, Vox Media announced it would not renew the contracts of around 200 California-based journalists who write for the sports website SB Nation, instead replacing those contractors with 20 part-time and full-time employees. Rev, which provides transcription services, and Scripted, which connects freelance copywriters with clients, similarly notified their California contractors that they would no longer give them work.

“Companies can simply blacklist California writers and work with writers in other states, and that’s exactly what’s happening,” Alisha Grauso, a co-leader of California Freelance Writers United (CAFWU), says. “I don’t blame them.”

Gonzalez, the bill’s sponsor, responded to such complaints by tweeting, “These were never good jobs. No one has ever suggested that, even freelancers.”

But freelancers beg to differ. “I’ve been able to earn nearly three times the amount I did working a day job, doing what I absolutely love, and having more [time] to volunteer and spend time with loved ones,” tweeted Jackie Lam, a financial journalist. Kelly Butler, a copywriter, echoed those sentiments: “Thousands of CA female freelancer writers, single moms, minorities, stand to lose their livelihood due to this bill,” she tweeted. “I was told by a client because I live in CA they can’t use me. I made $20K from them this year.”

As Henry Rademacher of Americans for Tax Reform noted in December, “Vox had previously been effusive in their support of AB5. But it turned out the law’s strict classification of the terms ‘independent contractor’ and ‘employee’ made it, in their own words, ‘impossible,’ for Vox to continue using their current business model. The problems AB5 causes are by no means limited to journalism. More than 1 million workers in California will be directly affected by it, with many likely to lose their job rather than gain full time employment.”

Related: How the Dems Stole Christmas: AB5 Killing Mall Santas. From Steve, but for PJM VIP members. The VODKAPUNDIT promo code will still get you a discount, if you’ve been thinking of joining.

(Classical reference in headline.)

ENDORSED: Spock’s Vulcan salute should replace handshakes in coronavirus era.

CHANGE: Ireland records first-ever venomous snakebite.

CHANGE: U. of Washington Cancels In-Person Classes, Becoming First Major U.S. Institution to Do So Amid Coronavirus Fears.

HERE’S THE TRAILER for Tom Hanks’ new movie, Greyhound.

It looks promising. It’s based on C.S. Forester’s The Good Shepherd.

JOE BIDEN IS A NASTY PIECE OF WORK:

     [Biden] is a vicious self-serving political hack, for one thing, one whose ambition leads him from time to time into shocking indecency. You may have heard that Biden lost his wife and daughter in a horrifying drunk-driving wreck, the fault of a monster of a man who irresponsibly “drank his lunch,” as Biden puts it.

Never happened.

Biden’s wife and daughter did, in fact, die in a car wreck. That is true. It is not true that the driver of the other car was drunk, that he had been drinking, or that there was any reason to believe he was drunk or had been drinking — or even that he was at fault.

The late Mrs. Biden “drove into the path of [the] tractor-trailer,” the police report says. But Biden, like every other third-rate ward-heeler of his ilk, thinks and speaks only in terms of good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats — and if something bad happens to good people, then it must be because somebody in a black hat did something nefarious.

The driver of that truck went to his grave haunted by Biden’s lies, to the point where his children were forced to beg the vice president to stop defaming their late father. The casual cruelty with which Biden is willing to subordinate the lives of ordinary people to his political ambitions — for the sake of a petty tear-jerker line in one of his occasionally plagiarized stump speeches — is remarkable.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S A START: FISA Judge Says FBI Officials Involved in Carter Page Wiretaps Cannot Seek Other Surveillance Orders.

FASTER, PLEASE: DARPA Races To Create a “Firebreak” Treatment for the Coronavirus: Researchers working under DARPA’s Pandemic Preparedness Platform seek to create instant, short-term countermeasure.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Elizabeth Warren Iowa staffer fed up with LGBTQ pandering: ‘No one gives a f*** about a godd**n pronoun.’ ‘People want to know how you’re gonna create a job.’

HEH: Paul Krugman Tries to Diagnose Liz Warren’s Campaign Failures, Gets Sent to Burn Ward Instead.

CHANGE: Seattle traffic disappears as Amazon, Microsoft, others enforce remote work policies.

WOW: USAF Gunship Crew Awarded Medals For Nine-Hour Battle With ISIS That Saved 15 Wounded In Afghanistan.

In need of assistance, the Special Tactics operators on the ground called for an AC-130U “Spooky” Gunship, (Callsign Spooky 41) who arrived to suppress the enemy located in close proximity to the group.

As the gunship fired down on the enemy, at times less than 140 meters from the group, three medical-evacuation helicopters hovered more than an hour to safely rescue all 15 patients. The enemy was not able to get a single shot off at the MEDEVAC helicopters, due to the precise airpower strikes of Spooky 41’s aircrew.

U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Jim Slife, commander of Air Force Special Operations Command, presented two Distinguished Flying Crosses with “C” device and 12 Single Event Air Medals with “C” device to 4th Special Operations Squadron Airmen, March 2, 2020, here, for their actions in April.

“The most lethal part of any gunship is not the 25 mm, the 40 mm, or the 105 mm [weapons] sticking out of the side of this big beautiful airplane,” said Slife during the ceremony. “The most lethal part of the gunship is the crew.”

What a crew. Read the whole thing.

SPACE: SpaceX is launching a Dragon cargo ship for NASA tonight. Here’s how to watch live.

FALLOUT: Coronavirus: China’s key ports handled 20 per cent fewer containers in February.

WASHINGTON TIMES: “Meet the Cornell law professor who tracked Elizabeth Warren’s missteps.”

From William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection.