NO CHANCE THE DEMS GO FOR THIS: Republican plan would raise minimum wage to $10 but only if businesses are required to ensure worker legality.

WHY DON’T WE KNOW WHO KILLED ASHLI BABBITT? Somebody knows.

AND YET THE PRESS BLAMED A HATE-FILLED RIGHT-WING “CLIMATE OF OPINION.” Lee Harvey Oswald ordered to kill JFK by Soviets, ex-CIA chief claims.

WHY THE TEXAS BLACKOUT HAS THE GREENS SO SCARED:

Why does the media (and entire global warming establishment) find it so important to blame global warming for the current cold spell? Why is it so important to exonerate green power for the debacle in Texas? The inhabitants of this country, from kindergarten on, are being indoctrinated to believe in the supposed existential crisis of a warming planet. Evidence that cooling means warming has to be quickly marshaled lest the public come to credit its lying eyes and, a terrifying prospect, start to question the unfalsifiable dogma it has been told is “rock solid science.” It might even ridicule the now decades old claims by climate scientists, like David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia that snow would all but vanish in a few years.

If the public could be reassured that the cold spell was merely another manifestation of global warming, believers in the prevailing doomsday scenarios would have their faith reinforced and possible doubters derailed before their doubts crystallized.

As for deflecting blame from green power, this is a crucial moment in the battle to phase out fossil fuels. The Biden administration talks of mandating a total reliance on renewables within a few decades. The public must consider this a promising goal, offering a better life. If people decide it means unreliable energy, sitting in the cold and dark for days or weeks, energy prices through the roof (the price of gas rose by 100 times in Texas at one point), they may clamor to prevent an existential crisis around the corner in preference to avoiding one forecast in a far future by unproven computer models.

Most worrying to climate elites, people are angry. In Texas, reporters found the man in the street incredulous that in the number one energy producing state, he was not only without electricity and heat but without safe drinking water. The media, so heavily invested in global warming, recognizes it is essential that the average citizen “seeking answers” find a target for his wrath. Heaven forfend that he should blame the media, politicians, even the scientific community, for foisting man-made global warming on him, with its insistence that man must change the climate by substituting unreliable renewables for tried and true fossil fuels.

And speaking of Texas and the Biden administration’s eco-obsessions:

THE BUREAUCRATIC MENTALITY IS THE ONLY CONSTANT IN THE UNIVERSE: Pharmacists Wonder: When Are We Going To Stop Throwing Out All These Vaccine Doses?

Ever since the vaccines began rolling out, we’ve heard far too many stories of large numbers of doses being discarded. Some cases have been from intentional spoilage by bad actors and conspiracy theory junkies. Others have been caused by refrigeration equipment failures or just simple human error. But it turns out that an even larger number of doses are going into the waste bin every week without any of those things happening. NBC News has a distressing report out this week revealing that healthcare workers are increasingly dismayed by the high number of doses that wind up being discarded while people are still waiting on line for a jab. The reason is that when they get down near the end of a vial, they are not allowed to use a process known as “pooling” to avoid wasting the precious liquid. The result is that for every shipment of 80 vials, forty full doses of the vaccine wind up in the trash. And they’re blaming the FDA.

“Get the hell out of my way!” the wise man once said.

GO FIGURE: Biden backlash: ‘Immigration Index’ shows rejection of open borders.

FIREBOMB A COP CAR, GET A PLEA DEAL: Apparently, that’s how it works for radical lefty lawyers in New York City these days, reports Washington Free Beacon’s Kevin Daley.

HOW BAD IS THE DEMENTIA? Say, Why Are House Dems Calling On Biden To Give Up Full Control Of Nuclear Weapons? “Which answer do you want first — the fun answer, or the better answer?”

IT’S COME TO THIS: Amnesty Pulls Aleksei Navalny’s ‘Prisoner Of Conscience’ Status Over ‘Hate Speech.’

Amnesty International has reportedly withdrawn its recent designation of Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny’s as a “prisoner of conscience” over his alleged advocacy of violence and discrimination and comments that included hate speech.

Aleksandr Artemyev, the rights watchdog’s media manager for Russia and Eurasia, confirmed the decision to Mediazona on February 23 after the news was first reported by U.S. journalist Aaron Mate.

RFE/RL was unable to independently confirm the reports.

Artemyev wrote that Amnesty, which named Navalny a prisoner of conscience after his arrest in Moscow in January, decided to retract the designation “in light of new information” stemming from “old videos and social media posts in which Navalny made controversial pronouncements.”

The comments attributed to Navalny in the mid-2000s were not specified, but Artemyev said they were made as Navalny’s activism and challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin was gaining momentum and that their reemergence “appears to be another tactic to delegitimize Navalny’s work and criticism and to weaken public outcry about his detention.”

Back in 2003, the late Steven Den Beste compared the ACLU with Amnesty International, after the latter forgot its original mission (remember those “to freedom!” ads that ran on MTV in the 1980s?) over how its members (read: fundraisers) viewed the Iraq War:

It’s not going too far to say that many of Amnesty International’s members have approximately as strongly negative of feelings now about America and George Bush as the ACLU’s members had about the Nazis when the ACLU defended them in Skokie.

The ACLU made the principled decision and weathered the downturn in contributions. When condemnation of Iraq didn’t make AI look as if it was aligning with America, Amnesty International was willing to try to shine a spotlight on the abuses there. But now AI has suddenly gone silent. The abuses against the citizens of Iraq have not stopped; indeed they’ve gotten worse. In addition to ongoing violent repression of Iraq’s civilian population, various Iraqi military and para-military units have been directly violating the Geneva Convention by, for instance, abusing the white flag of truce, and by using protected humanitarian facilities to hold military equipment, and by using “human shields” in combat, and by directly firing at refugees, and in numerous other ways.

And what we’re seeing is that AI seems unwilling to make more than oblique mention of these things, while at the same time explicitly condemning the US for what are at best minor transgressions by comparison. Why is it more important to strongly focus attention on “censorship” while ignoring mass slaughter of refugees?

In retrospect, Conquest’s second law of politics (“Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”) dictates that it was only a matter of time before the ACLU would similarly lose the thread.

DEMOCRATS VIOLATE THE CONSTITUTION BY CENSORING SPEECH:

The letter sent by Congressional Democrats Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney does not explicitly threaten any particular penalties if their demands are not met — but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t violate the First Amendment, because it is sent on official “Congress of the United States” letterhead, and is signed by each of them in their official capacity as “Member of Congress.”

Government officials don’t need to make explicit threats to violate the First Amendment. Veiled threats or subtle intimidation will do. For example, the federal appeals court in New York ruled that a city official’s letter urging a billboard company to stop displaying a church’s anti-homosexuality billboard potentially violated the First Amendment, since the letter cited his “official authority as ‘Borough President of Staten Island’” and thus could constitute an “implicit” threat, even though the official lacked direct regulatory authority over the billboard company and did not explicitly threaten any reprisals. (See Okwedy v. Molinari, 333 F.3d 339 (2d Cir. 2003)).

Similarly, it potentially violated the First Amendment when a village official wrote a letter to the Chamber of Commerce criticizing it for publishing a businessman’s ad critical of village policies in the Chamber’s publication. An appeals court ruled the letter could be interpreted as a veiled threat of boycott or reprisal (See Rattner v. Netburn, 930 F.2d 204 (2d Cir. 1991)).

Here, there is an implicit threat that if companies like Google and Amazon don’t do what Congressional Democrats want — and restrict conservative speech — Congress will take away their protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — as many Democrats, including Joe Biden, have already suggested doing. That threat could very well violate the First Amendment.

Companies often heed Congressional demands.

That’s the Democrats’ hope.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Thank God Merrick Garland Isn’t on the Supreme Court. “When looking at Joe Biden’s various appointments and nominations here in the first month of the Grandpa Gropes Traveling Sham Presidency Circus, one can get the feeling that former President Barack Obama is running a staffing agency these days. Or a recycling center. Team Biden-Harris has been stocking up on Obama administration retreads. Perhaps Ol’ Joe doesn’t remember most of these people and his empty head thinks they’re all fresh blood.”

BRAVER THAN BIDEN: Canadian Parliament Votes Unanimously To Recognize China’s Genocide.

Well, not everyone: “Trudeau and cabinet abstain from vote.”

BIDEN’S CHOICE TO HEAD THE HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES DEPARTMENT REFUSED TO CALL FOR FREE ELECTIONS IN CUBA. “California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as a congressman in 1997 refused to call for free elections following a meeting with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and he voted ten years later to end a trade embargo with the communist dictatorship.”

#FIGHTFOR15: Philadelphia airport employs robot for contact-free food delivery. “The robot uses Bluetooth to follow an airport AtYourGate representative through the airport to the location specified by the customer, who can order their food from airport restaurants via OrderAtPHL.com.”

Prediction: The human representative won’t be needed for long.

COLLUSION: How the Editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy Colluded in the SPLC’s Dangerous Blacklist.

IT’S TIME: Title IX for Men. “The complaint process is not complicated. A signed or anonymous complaint can be sent to a regional OCR office listing the questionable programs. OCR will respond about whether the allegation is timely and whether OCR has jurisdiction and will open an investigation. Also included is a stern admonition warning universities not to retaliate against the complainant. On January 14, 2021, OCR issued a Questions and Answers document summarizing its policies on such programs.”

IT’S COME TO THIS: Matt Taibbi defends Fox News against the Democrats’ censors.

The movement crested this week with a letter from California House Democrats Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, written to the CEOs of cable providers like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Cox, and Dish. They demanded to know if those providers are “planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN… beyond any contract renewal date” and “if so, why?”

The news comes in advance of Wednesday’s House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on “traditional media’s role in promoting disinformation and extremism.”

This sequence of events is ominous because a similar matched set of hearings and interrogations back in 2017 — when Senators like Mazie Hirono at a Judiciary Committee hearing demanded that platforms like Google and Facebook come up with a “mission statement” to prevent the “foment of discord” — accelerated the “content moderation” movement that now sees those same platforms regularly act as de facto political censors.

Sequences like this — government “requests” of speech reduction, made to companies subject to federal regulation — make the content moderation decisions of private firms a serious First Amendment issue. Censorship advocates may think this is purely a private affair, in which the only speech rights that matter are those of companies like Twitter and Google, but any honest person should be able to see this for what it is. . . .

Press freedoms have been in steep decline for a while. Barack Obama’s record targeting of whistleblower sources (and in some cases, journalists themselves) using the Espionage Act was a first serious sign, followed by Donald Trump’s prosecution of Julian Assange. We progressed to a particularly dangerous new stage in recent years, with oligopolistic tech companies, urged on by politicians, engaging in anticompetitive agreements to suppress political voices on both the left and the right.

The so-called media reporters at major organizations like CNN and the New York Times have mostly either been silent or have played cheerleading roles during the most eyebrow-raising recent developments: the decision by Facebook and Twitter to block access to a pre-election New York Post story about Hunter Biden, the stunning exercise in monopoly influence by Amazon and Apple in swallowing up the “free speech” platform Parler, the banning of Socialist Worker Party accounts in England and the U.S., and the shutdown of livestream capability by alternative media outlets (and the removal of celebrated footage shot from the Capitol riot by people like Status Coup videographer Jon Farina), a story that amazingly only got major play at… Fox News.

Sadly, there’s a shortage of those “honest people” in media these days.

EXACTLY WHY HE’S HATED BY THE ESTABLISHMENT OF BOTH MAJOR PARTIES: New Poll Shows Trump’s Populism Is Reshaping the Electorate.

TO BE FAIR, IT WAS NEVER ACTUALLY ABOUT KEEPING PEOPLE SAFE:

FROM DOROTHY GRANT:  Going Ballistic.

When her plane tries to come apart at apogee during a hijack, ballistic airline pilot Michelle Lauden handles the worst day she could imagine. After getting down without losing any passengers or crew, though, she finds her troubles have just begun!

The country she’s landed in has just declared independence from the Federation. The Feds intended her passengers to be the first casualties in the impending war – and they’re not happy she’s survived to contradict their official narrative in the news.

The local government wants to find her to give her a medal. The Feds are hunting her to give her an unmarked grave. As they both close in, Michelle’s running out of options and time. The only people able to protect her are an accident investigation team on loan from the Federation’s enemies… the same enemies who sent her hijackers in the first place.

And they have their own plans for her, and the country she’s in!

OF COURSE. IT’S THE PERFECT LEFTIST SOLUTION:  The myth (and phony math) of ‘green’ jobs.

Invents a problem. Doesn’t solve the problem, doesn’t do what it promises to do. Makes everyone and everything worse off.

I HATE IT WHEN HEINLEIN PREDICTED THESE TYPES OF THINGS RIGHT:  Global Warming and China’s Coming War with Australia.

WELL, WE’RE PERSONALLY DISAPPOINTED THAT JOHN KERRY KEEPS EXPORTING STUPIDITY:  John Kerry Disappointed Australia Wants to Keep Exporting Coal.

WELL, WHEN YOU CONSIDER WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED, THEY WERE RIGHT:  Intelligence Did Not Support Troops For January Six.

Look, if January sixth deserved the sort of bs they’re claiming was needed, judging by the fact the only dead were by police aggression or natural causes, then every time ANTIFA sneezes we should deploy 30k troops.
Seriously, just like the covidiocy, this is all nonsense and theater. I guess it’s the left’s way of trying to purge us. What they’re actually doing is guaranteeing a civil war.

SENDING GOOD YEARS AFTER BAD: Sunk Costs.