HMMMM: Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez suspended after tweeting a link to a 2016 story about Kobe Bryant’s rape case just hours after he died in helicopter crash — as she says 10,000 people have sent her ‘abuse and death threats.’

Related: Ratio’d WaPo reporter defended tweeting out a 3-year-old article on Kobe Bryant’s rape case but then deleted them all for some strange reason.

THE SADNESS OF MAUREEN DOWD: “My phone isn’t ringing. Nobody cares. It’s the saddest thing ever.” Plus, Mitt Romney as a “pompous ass.”

AT AMAZON, save on Business and Industrial Supplies.

Plus, Winter Savings in Automotive.

THE SIMPSONS PREDICTS EVERYTHING: The Simpsons prediction of the Chinese bio weapon that is hitting America today.

TAMARA KEEL: A Changing SCCY.

WHY IS THE IVY LEAGUE SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM? Harvard says Asians have bad personalities; judge agrees.

To the fun-loving bureaucrats running Harvard, personality is measurable by your skin color and your sex life. They believe that good personalities are found in blacks, Hispanics, gays, transgenders, whites and just about everyone else, in roughly that order.

Except Asians. Harvard says Asians have bad personalities. And so to be admitted, Asians need an SAT score about 140 points higher than whites and about 450 points higher than blacks.

You might reasonably ask: How did Harvard decide that Asians have bad personalities?

Plenty of objective personality tests are out there, but Harvard doesn’t use them. It instead uses a subjective evaluation of the applicant by one of those fun-loving bureaucrats. At an in-person interview, the bureaucrat takes note of whether the applicant is Asian has a bad personality.

I suppose it’s a lucky thing for Harvard that Asians have bad personalities. Because otherwise their high merit would get more of them admitted at the expense of lower-merit whites, blacks, Hispanics, gays and transgenders.

The result would be too many Asians at Harvard, according to social engineers with low SAT scores who are constructing our campus racial utopias because they couldn’t get through college calculus in order to be real engineers.

Harsh, but fair.

WELL, OBAMA WAS THE PARTICIPATION TROPHY PRESIDENT, AND SHE WAS HIS FIRST LADY. I Totally Called It: Michelle Obama Wins Grammy Award for Reading Her Own Book. “Hillary Clinton won a Grammy. too. Just sayin’.” Between this and the sexual assault scandals, I don’t feel so bad about letting my Recording Academy membership lapse.

OPEN THREAD: Speak friend, and enter the comment section.

I SWEAR TOM NICHOLS CAN STEP ON A RAKE FASTER THAN ANYBODY:

Presidents have been back-channeling and working around the foreign affairs bureaucracy forever, because the foreign affairs bureaucracy has consistently sucked.

I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC: After Trump’s spiritual adviser calls for ‘all satanic pregnancies to miscarry,’ she says it was a metaphor.

This Washington Post article is being reposted by the San Francisco Chronicle, which has religious issues of its own, urging parents in 2008 to throw “less is more birthday parties,” and quoting the founder of an organization called “Washington state’s Progressive Kid,” who declared that “There is nothing more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party.”

Perhaps that’s why they have so few of them there: “San Francisco has the lowest share of children of any of the largest 100 cities in the U.S.,” the Atlantic noted last year.

WELL, A BERNIE, LIZ, OR BIDEN VICTORY WOULD HAVE THE REVERSE EFFECT: Trump 2020 win could turbocharge US economy: Wall Street.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST:

● Shot: Cut Back on Email If You Want to Fight Global Warming.

—Bloomberg News, yesterday.

● Chaser: Did you know that your hand lotions, cosmetics and detergents could be creating as much air pollution as your car?

—The Hill, Monday.

● Hangover: Campaign crunch time forces progressives to eye private jets.

—The AP, yesterday.

● The D.T.s: Environmentalists make good movie villains because they want to make your real life worse.

—Sonny Bunch, the Washington Post, January 3rd, 2019.

(Classical reference in headline.)

PHILLY RESIDENTS WOULD LIKE A WORD ABOUT THIS VIOLENT CRIME SPIKE:

This year, things are off to an even worse start. The city recorded 30 homicides in the first 21 days of the year, continuing to average more than one killing per day. Other violent crimes, including rape and assault, were up across the board as well.

As we discussed earlier this month, the burden of addressing this violent crime epidemic falls on the shoulders of Mayor Jim Kenney. He was elected in 2016 on a platform of RESISTing Donald Trump, raising soda taxes, setting up supervised, public drug injection sites and getting the police under control. But rather than improving things, residents have seen the murder rate in the city climb significantly under Kenney’s tenure, going from 277 in 2016 to 356 last year.

And what has the Mayor done in response? Well, he held a gun turn-in event that produced a whopping total of six firearms of dubious quality that most self-respecting gang bangers wouldn’t be seen with in public. But Mayor Kenney wanted this job and he got it. Now it’s time to do the right thing.

Philadelphia’s last Republican mayor left office at the beginning of 1952.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. NO. Harvard student demands you stop making fun of her field of study. Frankly, it’s a good sign that she’s getting enough criticism and mockery — at Harvard — that she feels compelled to demand that you stop mocking her major in Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

NEWS YOU CAN USE? How to beat Twitter cellar-dwellers at their own game.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

DEVELOPING: NBA Legend Kobe Bryant, 41, dead in California helicopter crash. “Bryant’s wife, Vanessa, was not among those aboard the chopper, according to reports. Bryant’s 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, was also among those killed, according to TMZ.”

UPDATE: ‘I really don’t know what to say:’ NBA players, professional athletes weigh in on the passing of Kobe Bryant.

Related: Felicia Sonmez, “Washington Post national political reporter,” is going for the mother of all Twitter ratios:

Update (6:04 PM EST): Death toll now nine people in crash of Sikorsky S-76 carrying Kobe Bryant, and daughter.

Update (6:29 PM): MSNBC’s Alison Morris issues grovelling apology after gaffe that sounded very much like the N-word announcing Bryant’s death:

If a Fox News host had made a similar gaffe, it would garner wall-to-wall coverage on MSNBC, the network that spent the election year of 2012 hearing racist dog whistles being uttered by Republicans via words such as “golf” and “Chicago.”

Update (6:50 PM): Sonmez deletes above tweet, but not before her ratio topped over 23 thousand replies to 605 retweets.

Update (7:32 PM): “Orange Coast College baseball coach John Altobelli, his daughter Alyssa Altobelli and wife Keri Altobelli were on the helicopter with Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna when it crashed in Calabasas, California, a relative tells CNN.”

Update (8:19 PM): Media mangle and mishandle details of Kobe Bryant’s death.

(Updated and bumped.)

HARSH, BUT FAIR:

JOHN HINDERAKER: The China Myth Exposed.

From early in our nation’s history, America’s intellectuals have mostly looked down on their own country and yearned for it to be like someplace else–someplace more sophisticated, and more in tune with “modern” intellectual currents, whatever they might be at the moment. That is a long history, which I will skip over. In our own time, American intellectuals have claimed that Soviet Russia, Germany and Japan were harbingers of the future that the U.S. needed to imitate. In each case, the point was that we had to shed our archaic freedoms and enter the brave new world of central planning under the control–benign, of course!–of intellectuals and bureaucrats. Strangely, however, American free enterprise has managed to outlast and surpass all of those supposedly more advanced challengers.

Most recently, China has been the favored nation of the future. It has the advantage over Germany and Japan of being straightforwardly authoritarian (if no longer exactly Communist), which endeared it to anti-democratic liberals like Tom Friedman. . . .

I could be wrong; it has happened once or twice. But I suspect that the current public health crisis spells the end of China envy among American intellectuals. The context, of course, is the Trump administration’s standing up to China’s dictators. Like Toto, Trump has pulled back the curtain on the Chinese fraud. To coin a phrase, one might say that China’s economic “juggernaut” is in fact a paper tiger.

Someday, China may be a free country with a free economy. Until that day comes, the only lesson we can learn from the Chinese government is what to avoid.

Trump has pulled aside a lot of curtains.