US AND THEM: Roger Waters From Anti-Israel To Pro-Russia.

BEN BARTEE: It’s Time for Trump to Pass the Torch.

I don’t agree with anything close to all of Ben’s assessment. There’s nothing more American than a comeback story and, after a mess like 2020, it would be a real thrill to see Trump make a comeback once more. But his efforts since announcing his 2024 run haven’t been very focused and certainly not forward-looking.

We’ll see what happens over the next year or so, I guess.

WELL, GOOD: Golf may help seniors improve heart health.

UGH: I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.

For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt.

All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, which had been established a year earlier.

The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus.

During the four years I worked at the clinic as a case manager—I was responsible for patient intake and oversight—around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors. The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences—including sterility.

I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.

Read the whole thing.

RIP: Burt Bacharach, legendary composer of pop songs, dies at 94.

AMERICAN REFUGEES: Joel Kotkin: How America’s ‘big sort’ will upend politics: The country is on the move — giving Republicans a historic opportunity. “Today, it’s not steel companies or gas plants that are experiencing mass layoffs, but firms such as Goldman Sachs, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Snap and Google.” And Disney.

THERE’S NO ONE TO TAKE ON THE TERMITES INFESTING THE MOUSE HOUSE: Disney Actually Just Laid Off 2.4 Million People — Including Me. “Disney shares are up Thursday on news that the company is cutting costs and letting go of 7,000 employees. But the real news is that the formerly family-friend studio lost 2.4 million streaming subscribers — and has no plan to end the woke programming that drove them away. Including me.”

OUR LYING GOVERNMENT. Holman Jenkins: A Balloon Pops D.C.’s Myth Bubble: Federal agencies have become too comfortable using disinformation.

For those who couldn’t figure out why I devoted four columns to the Pentagon UFO debate, this is why. It became clear that, whether from serendipity or design, national security agencies were using UFOs to hide something they didn’t want us to see. That something, it has slowly dribbled out since last May, was Chinese surveillance in U.S. airspace. Suspected Chinese drones have been a sometimes daily presence in U.S. military training sites going back perhaps a decade or more. We learn now of multiple balloon incursions too.

The fluffing of the UFO misdirection, despite what government officials have been telling the New York Times, was not a spontaneous public misunderstanding. Read the inquiries by Reason magazine, the New Yorker and the Times itself. Ask any of the blogging academics who assigned new merit to the alien visitation hypothesis.

As this column pointed out, foreign adversaries were also seeing the UFO snow job. To the extent that the Chinese deliberately sailed their balloon across the continental U.S., they did so in full knowledge that Chinese aerial spying was already being progressively stripteased for the American people by U.S. intelligence-community leakage. The Biden administration had apparently decided the UFO smokescreen was no longer compatible with the heightened geopolitical moment.

It should be obvious now why it was always a mistake. The Chinese profess puzzlement over what they portray as an overreaction to their known incursions. Why the fuss now? Only because the American people had been kept in the dark about China’s actions, jollied along with the UFO distraction.

The story has two parts. The U.S. government has become bad at investigating, apparently—i.e., finding and sharing truths relevant to its domain.

The Supreme Court, with the help of U.S. marshals, can’t get to the bottom of who stole and leaked a draft opinion. The IRS hasn’t solved who stole and leaked a decade of tax data on more than 10,000 U.S. taxpayers. The FBI never examined the Democratic National Committee server allegedly hacked by the Russians. It was “forensically precluded” from recovering Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. It remained even fairly oblivious to their disappearance while under a congressional subpoena.

The list goes on. Multiple leaks of highly classified intelligence related to both the Clinton email and Trump-Russia investigations remain unsolved. Though possessing for years video of Hunter Biden using illegal drugs when he claimed otherwise on a federal gun application, a Justice Department investigation proceeds inconclusively. Even the Mueller investigation of Russian election meddling was only a triumph until one of the Russian subjects showed up unexpectedly in a U.S. court. Then Team Mueller folded rather than prove its case.

We come to the second part. As its truth-finding skills apparently atrophy, the federal government has become increasingly adept at using false information to solve problems.

The FBI used “objectively false” Russian intelligence, the Justice Department’s inspector general tells us, to justify its improper acts in the Clinton email matter. It used false Steele dossier evidence to obtain a warrant on a minor Trump campaign associate. It used the same false information to stir the media’s collusion pot.

U.S. officials again promoted false information about the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020. In the latest chapter, father and son now are at odds, the dad having told voters it was a Russian job, the son claiming his authentic data was stolen by domestic partisans whom his father should prosecute.

The possibility of federal fact-finding being politicized is unmentionable until it’s not.

We are governed by crooks, liars, and incompetents, and the worst of them aren’t even the ones who have to stand for election.

PRESIDENT MANCHIN? Is This Joe Manchin’s Next Big Move? “Now that he’s given his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden is expected to announce his plans for reelection. There’s another potential candidate generating buzz, though, despite how he might not even run as a Democrat. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) again sparked chatter about a potential run on Tuesday.”

This buzz wouldn’t exist if Biden were doing even half as well as Democrats pretend he is.

BREAKING: Sen. John Fetterman Rushed to Hospital During Democrat Retreat.

FAIL, BRITANNIA: The Church of England May Go Gender-Neutral.

DEAL OF THE DAY: iHealth COVID-19 Antigen Rapid Test. #CommissionEarned

TO BE FAIR, OUR NATIONAL CONVERSATION IS DOMINATED BY THOSE THINGS, AND BY OTHER WHITE LADIES POINTING THEM OUT: “That’s such a white-lady thing to say.”

LOOKING BACK ON SOTUS: Somebody asked me earlier today my reaction to the Biden State of the Union (SOTU) address. In pondering the question, I was struck by this realization:

“I’ve been watching SOTUs since I was in high school in the 1960s. In every one of them delivered by a Democrat president, all I heard was long lists of promises, proposals for more government programs that have since failed and accusations that Republicans hate old people, hate young people, hate minorities, and only want to get rich at the expense of everybody else.

“In every one of them delivered by a Republican president, all I heard was promises to restrain the growth of government, lower taxes, restore American military strength and respect around the world, and reduce federal red tape. Reagan achieved all of those, and Trump some of them, but the others – Nixon, Bush I and Bush II – were pretty much all talk and little or even opposite actions.”

Did I miss anything?

I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER WHEN BIDEN WAS GOING TO RESTORE RESPECT FOR US ON THE WORLD STAGE: Saudis Increase Sentence for US Citizen in ‘Middle Finger’ to Biden.

FIGHT THE POWER: Oregon university faces civil rights complaint for excluding whites from campus events.

TO BE FAIR, THAT IS THEIR JOB: MSNBC Spreads Fake News About Trump and Chinese Spy Balloons.

FIGHT THE POWER: More than 100 Republicans file amicus brief arguing student debt forgiveness is unconstitutional.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: A San Francisco Man Is Facing Hate Crime Charges After Allegedly Firing Blank Rounds Inside A Synagogue. “Dmitri Valerie Mishin, 51, has been indicted on multiple charges, including making threats and obstructing exercise of religion, which prosecutors say are considered hate crimes. He was also charged with disturbing a religious meeting and five counts of misdemeanor brandishing a replica firearm in the Feb. 1 incident, prosecutors said on Wednesday.”