DEAL OF THE DAY: Carhartt Men’s Midweight Cotton Blend Sock 3 Pack. #CommissionEarned

BANANA REPUBLIC: Biden’s DOJ Goes Easy on Trans Lunatic Who Vandalized Church.

EVOLUTION IN ACTION: Politics may have affected U.S. birthrates during pandemic.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Taxing Wealth: Another Terrible Idea.

THIS WEEK IN WHITE HOUSE NEWS:  Joe Biden has declared this “Black Maternal Health Week.”  If you haven’t seen it already, you might want to take a look at my dissent in the Commission on Civil Rights’ Report on Racial Disparities in Maternal Health.  This issue is getting a lot of attention these days.  As usual, a lot of what you hear is wrong.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Credit Crunch Crisis Carpocalypse. “Dealers are overexposed right now. They have paid way too much for their inventory and now they are having a hard time selling it.”

ELON MUSK IS VERY SMART. REPORTERS BY AND LARGE ARE NOT. Elon Musk owns BBC reporter. Musk also has the advantage that he’s, you know, right.

BLACK SWAN: Howie Carr: RFK Jr., the outcast Kennedy, has Dems reeling.

He began slowly drifting off the Democrat plantation years ago, but he always had that Kennedy thing going for him, especially the famous name of his martyred father.

But then he committed the ultimate blasphemy – he profaned the sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci, wrote a best-selling expose about him. And after that he was, well, unclean. He was shunned by all the Beautiful People.

To understand just what a pariah RFK Jr. has become to state-run media and the Democrat party (but I repeat myself), check out the recent story about his candidacy from the Associated Press, a semi-official organ of the deep state.

For starters, they said he was “once” a best-selling author. But that was before he became “fixated” on vaccines, and because of that, he “prospered” during the Panic. (As did the Democrat party, for that matter, not to mention its subsidiaries, the welfare-industrial complex and Big Pharma.)

Then the AP mentions his 2021 book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” which by the way was a big bestseller. . . .

But whatever you say about RFK Jr., he never drowned a woman, like his uncle. He never crippled one, like his brother. He never raped an underage babysitter, like another of his brothers. He’s never been accused of raping a woman, like one of his cousins, or beating a teenaged neighbor girl to death with a golf club, like another of his cousins.

Come to think of it, his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Joe Biden, has been accused of rape, by his former aide Tara Reade. And unlike Biden, none of Bobby’s daughters have ever written in their diaries that Daddy used to take long showers with them when they were 11 years old.

Compared to Joe Biden, in fact, Bobby Kennedy Jr. is a paragon of virtue.

I know, he doesn’t have a chance. He’s running against a master politician, a silver-tongued devil who, when asked about the Easter egg roll at the White House the other day, predicted he’d be around for a long time.

“I’ll either be rolling eggs or you know, being, you know, the guy who’s pushing ‘em out.”

The Democrats are the party of no-info voters, but even for them, Biden’s senescence is getting hard to overlook. Kennedy may be a quack and a lunatic and a nut, but who would you take in a one-one debate – Brandon or Bobby Jr.

For Kennedy right now, the old saying is true. Every knock a boost.

Incumbents who face a serious primary challenge often lose. Look at Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy. Biden can’t debate him, and he’s willing to point out the emperor’s nakedness.

WELL, MARKETING: Well, Well, Well… Bud Light’s Marketing VP Turns Out to Be a Total Hypocrite.

HEY, YOU CAN’T MEET THE WOMAN IN “NAKED MAJA” EITHER: People Are Actually Selling AI-Generated Nudes on Reddit: “At the end of the day, if they’re not real, who really cares?”

THAT’S WHY THEY’RE CENSORING THEM: John Stossel: The Media and Politicians Keep Trying To Censor Things That Turn Out To Be True.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER? Google drops global vaccine requirement to enter buildings, says ‘world is in a very different place.’

PASSOVER MEANS FREEDOM FROM SLAVERY: The core message of Passover may be more than three millennia old, but it should never be forgotten. The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz explains why this is an enduring lesson for every man, Jew and Gentile, who wants to be and stay free.

OR MAYBE YOU WILL: You Won’t Believe What Trump Said About America’s Hardest-Left Governor. “Before you start ranting on social media about the latest outrage about what this guy said or that gal said… watch the whole clip and not just the excerpt.”

MATT WELCH: Democrats Choose to Advertise Failures of Single-Party Democratic Rule by Holding the 2024 DNC in Chicago.

The Windy City has been run by Democratic mayors for 93 consecutive years. The 50-member City Council currently includes zero Republicans. The Cook County Board of Commissioners has 17 seats; 16 are filled by Democrats. So totalizing is the city’s unipartisan political culture that recently vanquished mayoral finalist Paul Vallas, a lifelong Democrat, could not overcome the campaign criticism that he was a “Republican in disguise.”

So what has all this unobstructed Democratic governance produced? Population flight, for starters. From a peak of 3.6 million residents in 1950 the city has tumbled down to an estimated 2.7 million in 2021. What for a century had been the “Second City” in the United States has been #3 since the 1980s; what was the fifth-largest metropolis in the world in 1900 is now #5 just in North America.

And those U-Haul trucks are leaving behind a mess. Chicago’s public pensions have a larger combined total of unfunded liabilities – north of $46 billion – than 45 states. The funding shortfall, due to decades of Democratic mismanagement, has swallowed up most of the city’s many tax hikes.

But other than that, unfettered Democrat rule has been great for Chicago.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: U. Florida K-12 teaching course emphasizes ‘oppression, power, and privilege.’

WATCH: Pentagon Official Confronted Over Military’s 5 Consecutive Failed Audits.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: REPORT: Psych prof revises lecture after categorizing conservatives as ‘guilty, anxious, and unable to handle stress.’

QUESTION ASKED: IS TRACKING HIGHER ED DATA BY RACE ACTUALLY HELPFUL? One of the most harmful things is how selectively it’s tracked. Anyone working with those accused of Title IX offenses will tell you that minority students appear to be wildly overrepresented among the questionably accused. I’ll give you one guess about what racial stats the Department of Education doesn’t make schools track.

THE RETURN OF “THE GREAT GAME”: China Unveils ‘Grandiose Plan’ For Central Asia.

Since Russian President Vladimir Putin began his ill-advised “special military operation” against Ukraine a year ago, China has taken advantage of Russia’s rising wartime distraction by discreetly attempting to increase its influence in Central Asia, far from the front lines. Beijing can now offer Central Asia what Russia cannot—that is, massive potential foreign direct investment (FDI). In contrast, the Russian Federation’s main economic contribution to Central Asia is now primarily serving as a destination for the region’s economic migrants, whose remittances continue to form a significant part of Central Asia’s economies.

On February 16, Xi sent a message to the participants at the First China–Central Asia Forum of Industrial and Investment Cooperation, convening for three days in Tsingtao, in which he reaffirmed China’s readiness to expand economic ties as well as industrial and investment cooperation with the countries in the region. The largest economic enticement offered by Xi was not only access to China’s massive market but also its highly developed industrial system and advanced technologies to deepen business cooperation in achieving mutually beneficial results and promote the qualitative development of the Central Asian economies (Vzglyad, February 16). The Chinese enticements appear even more alluring in light of a lack of similar proposals from Russia.

Putin can’t afford to annoy Beijing — or do much of anything else, really.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Biden White House Is So Polluted With Sleaze It Should Be a Superfund Site. “The worst aspect of this Constitution-shredded presidency has been the way it transformed the Federal Bureau of Investigation from being a domestic security agency to a taxpayer funded organized crime goon squad. What little faith conservatives had in government has been shattered by that and it’s not going to be coming back.”

OH, YOU HAVE NO IDEA: John Hinderaker: How Low Can Blue Cities Sink? “Americans are fleeing blue states, and especially blue cities, in historic numbers. Can things possibly get worse? They can, indeed they can.”

It’s fascinating and depressing to me to see so much decay resulting from the failure to do things that, just a few years ago, were bipartisan matters of taken-for-granted basic governance.

HMM: Former Obama staffer calls for Senator Dianne Feinstein to resign. “There’s no nuance in that, is there? It looks like Lovett is joining a growing number of Democrats calling for Feinstein to resign since she has been home recovering from shingles. Her recent hospitalization for shingles and her time at home now is holding up work that is of interest to him, like judicial nominations. There is no indication of when or if she will be back to work in person in the Senate. Lovett also points a finger at her staff, as though they control their boss’s schedule for when she will leave office.”

Some people are calling her “Fetterman West,” since they’re both unfit to serve and holding up business. But why should she resign if Fetterman won’t?

LET IT? MORE LIKE HELP IT: Joel Kotkin: China wants to vassalize the West — Trudeau and Biden want to let it. They have more freedom to rule as they wish if they work for China than if they work for their own citizens.

THEY’VE GOT HALF A DOZEN WAYS TO GET YOU: Yes, intelligence agencies work against their own governments. Including the Mossad’s efforts to topple Bibi Netanyahu.