KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Squad Goals: Israel Tells Omar and Tlaib What To Do With Their B(D)S. “At this point it is fairly safe to say that “The Squad” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley –aren’t nearly as interested in representing their constituents as they are in getting publicity for themselves. Because the Left lusts to make the U.S. a dystopian hellhole as quickly as they can, their media mouthpieces are willing to give the Squad girls as many news cycles as they need to feel pretty and popular.”

Journalisming.

IT IS UNWISE TO ASK DIFFICULT QUESTIONS, COMRADE: Why Is Trump Responsible for White Supremacist Attacks and AOC Not to Blame for Attacks on ICE?

CLARENCE PAGE: ‘Toxic Masculinity’ Plays a Big Role in Mass Shootings.

It’s toxic, all right, but there’s nothing masculine about shooting up a bunch of unarmed civilians. But for Page, it’s any hot take to further the narrative, I suppose.

THEN SHE’D BETTER FIGURE OUT A WAY TO GENERATE EQUAL REVENUES: Megan Rapinoe Says Women’s Soccer ‘Won’t Accept Anything Less Than Equal Pay.’

JOHN TAMNY: Dear Catherine Rampell, the Former Soviet Union Had Many ‘Experts’ Too.

A frequent theme in this column is one about the fallability of the brilliant. Jeff Bezos regularly acknowledges how often his experiments prove much less than great, the best venture capitalists admit that more than nine out of ten capital commitments result in bankruptcy, and then the world’s best traders note that they’re wrong almost as often as they’re right. It’s incredibly difficult to predict the future, and that’s an understatement.

This truism came to mind while reading Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell’s lament about the Department of Agriculture’s recent decision to relocate the Economic Research Service (ERS) from Washington, D.C. to Kansas City. Rampell reports that in response to the announced change, only 116 ERS employees had agreed to move. The columnist is up in arms. Rampell claims that the “small-but-mighty ERS is arguably the world’s premier agricultural economics agency. It produces critical numbers that farmers rely on when deciding what to plant and how much, how to price, how to manage risk….” Someday Rampell will admit she overreacted here.

No, she won’t. But you’ll want to read the whole thing.

CYBERSECURITY: Hackers just found serious vulnerabilities in F-15 fighter jet.

In a Cosmopolitan hotel suite 16 stories above the Def Con cybersecurity conference, a team of highly vetted hackers tried to sabotage a vital flight system for a U.S. military fighter jet. And they succeeded.

It was the first time outside researchers were allowed physical access to the critical F-15 system to search for weaknesses. And after two long days, the seven hackers found a mother lode of vulnerabilities that — if exploited in real life — could have completely shut down the Trusted Aircraft Information Download Station, which collects reams of data from video cameras and sensors while the jet is in flight.

They even found bugs that the Air Force had tried but failed to fix after the same group of hackers performed similar tests in November without actually touching the device.

This is exactly why it’s vital to hire white hack hackers from outside your own organization.

SINGLE PAYER, SINGLE DECIDER: Canadian Health Care Refused to Pay for Disabled Father’s Care, but Happily Paid for His Assisted Suicide.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. National Review: ‘There Will Be No Republican Challenger to Trump Because the Right is Satisfied.’

SATIRE: MURDERED BY REALITY. Not the Onion: U.S. Allies Using Art Therapy to Fight ISIS in Syria.

IT’S REAL, AND LARGELY ONE-SIDED: A Brief History of Election Meddling.

ADHERING TO LENIN’S “THE WORSE, THE BETTER” DICTUM: Recession Warnings Music to the Ears of Democrats.

BAKE THE CAKE, HATER: In Austria, Muslim Taxi Drivers Refuse to Transport Guide Dogs For the Blind.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED THESE WERE THE JOBS AMERICANS WOULD NOT DO: After ICE Raids, US Citizens Flock To Jobs.

MICHAEL BROWN FACT-CHECK: Murder Is What Democrats Say It Is, Or Something. “I’d have to rate PolitiFact’s fact-check: Four Muddy Waters.”

I just need a cute little icon of the blues legend, like WaPo’s Pinocchios, and I can label my opinion pieces “fact checks,” too.

THE MONEY ISN’T DARK WHEN DEMOCRATS HAVE IT: Stacey Abrams PAC Pushed $1.2 Million Over to Dark Money Entity.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Can Joe Rogan Save Journalism Before It’s Too Late?

TO ASK THE QUESTION IS TO ANSWER IT: Why Isn’t AOC Taking Blame For Violent Attacks On ICE?

JACK DUNPHY: Antifa Protesters Who Shut Down L.A. Freeway Complain in Op-Ed That LAPD ‘Spies’ ‘Infiltrated’ Their Meetings.

Well, I would certainly hope so.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Nearly 200 House Dems Now Support Bill Outlawing All New Semiautomatic Weapons. “Showing absolutely no clue what she’s talking about, Florida Democrat Frederica Wilson told The Hill on Wednesday, ‘Assault weapons were designed for one purpose: to kill people in war. Ordinary citizens should not own or have access to assault weapons.’ A .22 target pistol is now an ‘assault weapon.’ Good to know, Congresscritter!”

Read the whole thing, if you don’t mind me saying so myself.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Max Boot’s Dishonesty. “Such as it is, Boot’s newfound modus operandi works as follows: First, he scans entirely innocuous pieces for sentences that he can willfully misconstrue; second, he presents those misconstrued sentences as evidence of a deeper flaw with a person or outlet or institution; and, finally, he submits the conclusions he has drawn as confirmation of why he, Max Boot, convert to truth and light, is on the Right Side of History. Because Twitter is an echo chamber and the Post is one-tracked, he does this safe in the knowledge that those whom his mendacity incites to outrage will never read the primary sources he is corrupting — and that, if they do, they will never comprehend them.”

Ouch.

Read the whole thing.

ALSO: Max Boot Hits Bottom, Tunnels Down to the Hollow Earth, Falls, Somehow Keeps Digging.

HEY, BIG SPENDER: AOC ‘Quit’ Facebook in April, Spent $480,000 on Ads in 90 Days. “Torrid pace of Facebook fundraising blows past some presidential campaigns.”

Political advertising data from Facebook spanning the last 30 days shows Ocasio-Cortez spent over $130,000 on the social media network, almost all of it seeking campaign contributions, and currently has 490 active advertisements.

That level of spending made her the 47th biggest spender on Facebook in the last month, pushing her past some Democratic presidential candidates such as California senator Kamala Harris, who spent about $124,000 and former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, who spent a little more than $123,000.

Data from the last 90 days shows the AOC campaign was just shy of spending $480,000 with Facebook.

FLASHBACK: Only Ten of AOC’s Constituents Are Donors to Her Election.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: RESET DAY – Beto’s Back to Bore Us. “At least seventeen people in America feel like it’s Christmas today. Robert Francis Cassandra Mai-Lin ‘Beto’ O’Rourke is going to ‘reset’ his campaign and let us know what he’s really all about because, you know, the poor guy has gotten hardly any media attention.”

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: A nation is vanishing: Has Venezuela lost almost 20 percent of its population?

Mark Green, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), said on Feb. 16, 2019, that getting humanitarian aid to Venezuela is an effort not just of the United States, but of the whole region.

A staggering 15 to 19 percent of Venezuela’s total population has left the country amid an economic and political crisis with no clear end in sight, a new survey estimates. And those numbers are likely to increase in coming months and years if there are not profound changes in the South American country.

A recent poll by the Caracas-based think tank, Consultores 21, found that 48 percent of all families had an average of 1.6 members living abroad. Based on those numbers, the organization estimates that anywhere from 4.7 million to 6 million of the nation’s 31.8 million people are now living abroad.

Even the low-end figure is huge.

I DON’T KNOW ART, BUT I KNOW WHAT I DISLIKE: Jeffrey Epstein had a painting which appeared to be Bill Clinton wearing a blue dress and red heels hanging inside his Manhattan home.

BUT WE WON’T BECAUSE IT WOULD MAKE TOO MUCH SENSE: Why The United States Should Treat Immigration like A Job Interview.

When technical qualifications and cultural fit are suggested as elements of immigration policy, adversarial reactions far surpass the typical reflexive and groundless accusations of racism routinely hurled against conservatives. Indeed, the hysteria in such circumstances is reminiscent of the scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in which the Ark of the Covenant is opened, and the faces of Nazis melt right off.

We should be asking of applicants is whether they have a pluralist, tolerant view of others and support individual freedom and self-representative values. This would certainly hard to measure, as well as susceptible to mismanagement and fraud, but how this could be accomplished should be investigated and considered.

Such a policy would not mean that immigrants must come from societies embodying these ideals; one reason immigrants might be seeking entrance to the United States in the first place is disagreement with their home countries’ cultures, politics, and institutions. Many entrepreneurial, free-market-embracing immigrants from communist China and Vietnam are great examples of this phenomenon. Nonetheless, whether an applicant shares are our traditional values and mores is an appropriate area of inquiry.

Not just appropriate, but nearly indispensable.