IT’S COME TO THIS: Biden Won’t Deport Illegal Immigrant Career Criminal Who Covered Union Station in Swastikas.

A ROUNDUP ON THE GEORGETOWN LAW DEBACLE: More Commentary On The Ilya Shapiro Controversy At Georgetown.

NOW OUT: Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight. #CommissionEarned

THE COUNTRY IS IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Kamala Harris on ‘What Has Gone Wrong’ at the Border: [BLANK STARE].

THIS IS CNN: Jeff Zucker, inventor of centrist panic-porn.

It would be simplistic to say that Zucker turned CNN into a centre-Left version of Fox News. What made Zucker a visionary is that he saw the potential for a centrist-branded panic industry and knew how to repurpose a legacy outlet in order to dominate this unexploited market. Before Zucker, aversion to Fox-style anger porn was a core aspect of American centre-Left identity. Consumers of legacy media insisted they weren’t as vulgar and emotional as those people. Zucker knew they were lying to themselves.

Centrists were no less angry and no less vulnerable to television-induced radicalisation — which is addictive and perhaps even sickly enjoyable for the radicalised — than any other group of people. Zucker’s coverage choices reflected this dark but in retrospect very obvious psychological insight, namely that those who prided themselves on their membership in polite society were every bit as titillated by panic and outrage as the yokels and Trumpists they increasingly despised.

Where do Zucker’s cast of characters go from here? Critics wondering why Brian Stelter still has a job after Zucker scandal. “‘Honor his legacy?’ What legacy is that? Zucker promoted his mistress, turned his network into a propaganda channel for a corrupt governor, and sunk CNN’s ratings into the dirt. By the end of Zucker’s reign, he only had one show in the top 25 — and that was Chris Cuomo’s. That’s one hell of a legacy from Zucker, and the fact that his network and its chief media critic keeps wanting to paint him as some kind of sympathetic hero speaks volumes about credibility throughout the organization.”

FINGERS CROSSED: GM declares chip crisis over — and says it’s time to let the cheap cars roll.

HE CAN STILL GO LOWER: Biden’s Poll Numbers, Like Biden Himself, Keep Reaching Appalling New Lows.

RETURN TO DECENCY: Classified State Department email declared Hunter Biden ‘undercut’ U.S. efforts in Ukraine. “In an email kept from public view for more than five years, a top U.S. State Department official in Kiev wrote to Washington superiors at the end of the Obama-Biden administration that Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine ‘undercut’ U.S. efforts to fight corruption in the former Soviet republic.”

The Biden crime syndicate thrives on corruption, not on cleaning it up.

THE POWER LINE MID-WEEK IN PICTURES: Convoy Edition.

A LITTLE LATE FOR THAT, ISN’T IT? White House moves to reset relationship with police leaders. He may bring the leaders around, but I think the rank-and-file is going to hold a grudge for a long time.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UCLA won’t explain how it used taxpayer dollars meant for research into anti-Asian discrimination.

Nearly a year after California politicians gave out $1.4 million to study hate crimes and bias incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, UCLA won’t explain what it did with its portion of the money.

The College Fix contacted the public university’s Asian American Studies Center and media team and asked how much money it received from the legislation and how the funds have been used.

Spokesperson Jessica Wolf responded and asked for a deadline on January 10 but has not provided a response and did not respond to a January 31 reminder.

Center director Karen Umemoto and research coordinator Christine Wang both have not responded to two media inquiries sent in the past month.

A news release sent out by the California university said the money would be used for studies on “hate crimes” and public policies to assist with “economic recovery efforts.”

My guess is that when they realized who was committing the “hate crimes” against Asians, they shut everything down.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON ZUCKER AND CNN: “Everyone in the office knew? Fire everyone!”

The top comment over at Fox is: “Zucker’s relationship was no secret and was not the reason he was fired. It was an excuse to fire him after programming an 80% decline in viewership in one year. There is accountability when you work for a public company.”

An interesting take on accountability, firing a person for a fake reason. If the reason given is fake, not only is CNN allowing him to evade public responsibility for his degradation of the substance of what was actually televised on CNN, but it is raising expectations that CNN is serious about the sex rule Zucker flouted. And now they’re going to have to keep enforcing it, including retrospectively.

Or they’ll just change the rules or their enforcement at a whim, which is how institutions seem to work these days.

PRIORITIES: Leftist Loudon County Wants to Suspend Maskless Kids, but not a Transgender Rapist.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University writing instructors are no longer grading students’ writing.

ELDER ABUSE: Biden Gets Bad Grades From Governors and Jill Leads Him off the Stage.

MEGAN FOX: Fire Whoopi! Mutually Assured Destruction Is the Only Way to End Cancel Culture for Good.

JOSH BLACKMAN: For SCOTUS Vacancy, Senators Should Give ‘Advice’ Before They ‘Consent.’

I made a somewhat similar proposal in the Southern California Law Review back in 1992.

A CESSPIT OF ABUSE, PRETENDING TO STAND FOR DECENCY: Lincoln Project Pays Six-Figure Legal Settlement to Co-Founder Who Quit Over Sex Pest John Weaver.

SCHEDULED FOR 1:13 PM ET: Watch live as SpaceX launches more than four dozen Starlink satellites today.

THIS IS CNN:

During the question-and-answer session, anchor Jake Tapper said that Mr. Cuomo hired a lawyer who seemed eager to leak damaging information about Mr. Zucker unless they gave Mr. Cuomo severance.

“An outside observer might say, ‘Well, it looks like Chris Cuomo succeeded,’” Mr. Tapper said. “He threatened Jeff. Jeff said we don’t negotiate with terrorists. And Chris blew the place up. How do we get past that perception that this is the bad guy winning?”

Well, Jake, an outside observer might say that in any CNN power struggle “the bad guy” will win, because CNN is run by nothing but bad guys. And that’s certainly how it looks here.

OH, CANADA: “It’s absolutely fascinating to watch, not just to better understand how the protest came together and what their strategies are, but also to understand why so much of what Justin Trudeau says and does makes no sense.”

CHOKEPOINT: GoFundMe freezes Canadian ‘Freedom Convoy’ page after it raises $10 million.

“This fundraiser is currently paused and under review to ensure it complies with our terms of service and applicable laws and regulations,” read a notice at the top of the convoy’s GoFundMe page, as of Wednesday evening. “Our team is working 24/7 and doing all we can to protect both organizers and donors. Thank you for your patience.”

Before being suspended, the GoFundMe page for the Freedom Convoy 2022 made more than $10.1 million since having been established on Jan. 14. That amount far exceeded the amount raised by Canada’s major political parties last quarter.

Well, there you have it.

HMM: Did a US raid take out the leader of ISIS? Biden says yes: Biden: We’ve eliminated the leader of ISIS.

TO BE FAIR, IT’S BECAUSE HE’S TERRIBLE: Biden in ‘worst president ever’ territory.

Yup. President Joe Biden has finally gone there.

Battered by horrible approval ratings and just today whacked in a Gallup survey showing that voter satisfaction has hit a “gloomy” new low, Biden in just a year is being kicked to the side of the road by voters.

Or, as Rasmussen Reports said in its latest analysis, “Most voters think President Joe Biden is one of the worst ever to hold the office, and rank him below his two immediate predecessors in the White House.”

Related: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.

UPDATE: From the comments: “The media is working 24/7 to help Biden and his numbers are this bad. What would those numbers be like if they weren’t?”

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Biden blocked the first Black woman from the Supreme Court. “Today, Biden calls the filibuster a ‘relic of the Jim Crow era.’ But he threatened to use that relic as a tool to keep a Black woman who actually lived under Jim Crow off the highest court in the land. The irony is that now he wants to get rid of the filibuster, and claim credit for putting the first Black woman on the court. There were many conservatives on Bush’s shortlist whose legal philosophy Biden opposed. But Biden only promised to filibuster the one Black woman. Why? Perhaps a clue lies in another confirmation fight that Biden helped wage. In 2001, Democrats blocked the nomination of Miguel Estrada to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. According to internal strategy memos obtained by the Wall Street Journal, they targeted Estrada at the request of liberal interest groups who said Estrada was ‘especially dangerous’ because ‘he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment.’ They did not want Republicans to put the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court. So, Biden and his fellow Democrats killed Estrada’s nomination — the first appeals court nominee in history to be successfully filibustered. It paid off when President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor as the first Hispanic justice. Democrats’ commitment to diversity is a ruse. Biden was willing to destroy the careers of an accomplished Latino lawyer and a respected Black female judge, and stop Republicans from putting either on the Supreme Court. For Democrats, it’s all about identity politics.”