LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Smollett arrested, charged and much, much more. “This is shameful because it painted this city that we all love and work hard in, in a negative connotation. To insinuate and stage a hate crime of that nature when he knew that as a celebrity he’d get a lot of attention … It’s despicable. It makes you wonder what’s going through someone’s mind.”

I WILL GLADLY PAY REPARATIONS TO EACH AND EVERY SLAVE I EVER HELD: 2020 Democrats Embrace Race-Conscious Policies, Including Reparations.

THIS DOESN’T COME AS A HUGE SURPRISE: The U.S. Navy Won’t Bring Back Mothballed Ships to Boost the Fleet. “Vice Admiral Tom Moore said the service had taken a look at decommissioned vessels and concluded it just wasn’t worth it. Not only are the ships old, some have been cannibalized to keep existing ships still in the fleet running.”

HMM: Canadian shelves ‘would run dry’ if U.S. imports drugs.

Importing prescription drugs from Canada has long been seen as an easy solution to skyrocketing drug prices for U.S. patients.

But now that President Donald Trump and Democrats are pushing to make those cross-border sales legal, Canadian health experts are issuing a dire warning: It could destroy Canada’s drug market.

Attempting to fill the United States’ needs with pharmaceuticals from its much smaller northern neighbor could sap supplies in Canada, creating shortages and driving up prices in a government-run health system that itself is struggling to make drugs affordable, opponents of the import proposals say. And the result, they say, would be little if any relief for high prices in the United States.

“The Canadian shelves would run dry,” said Steve Morgan, a Canadian health economist who has advised the government on pricing reform.

Supply and demand, how do they work?

FELLOW TRAVELERS: Ilhan Omar traveled with anti-US group that supports Cuban, Venezuelan socialism, wants US to return Gitmo to Cuba.

THE OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY RAN OUT: Crews to abandon two Venezuelan tankers stuck in Portugal.

The crew of Venezuelan oil tanker, the Rio Arauca, that has been stuck in the middle of the river Tagus in Lisbon for nearly two years due to unpaid debt, is set to be dismissed, managers Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement (BSM) said on Thursday.

BSM also said in a statement sent to Reuters another Venezuelan tanker, the Parnaso, which is in dry dock at the port of Setubal, south of Lisbon, will also have its crew removed later this week due to a lack of payment from owners PDV Marina, a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA.

Lisbon’s maritime court ruled to take possession of the Parnaso last August. Both vessels are under BSM management.

PDVSA had no immediate comment on the issue.

Really, what’s left to say?

MARK ELLIS: Trump’s Chances to Win in 2020 Improve with Every News Cycle.

YELLOW RIBBON PROJECT: U.S. Hostage Held by Iran on 17th Day of His Seventh Hunger Strike.

THIS IS THE 404 PAGE FOR TRUMP’S WEBSITE:

Troll level: Schadenfreudelicious.

OH: Animal-free meat might be worse for the environment.

(Hat tip, Paula Bolyard.)

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Liberty is not possible for an unarmed society.

I think it was Kurt Schlichter who said a while back that an armed man is a citizen; a disarmed man is a serf.

PRIVACY: “It’s not just the city cameras in the Jussie Smollett case that are used by law enforcement. Think about the houses that have a RING doorbell. Those are watching you and recording the surroundings of your house. And inside your house if you have indoor cameras.”

That’s Liz Sheld, complete with a flashback to this report from last month:

If you own a Ring doorbell camera system, we’ve got some bad news. The smart home company owned by Amazon, which the internet retail giant shelled out more than $1 billion to acquire, has apparently been violating its customers’ privacy in a pretty shocking way. A new report from The Intercept quotes unnamed sources who confirm that engineers and executives at Ring have “highly privileged access” to live customer camera feeds, utilizing both Ring’s doorbells as well as its in-home cameras.

All that’s apparently required to tap into the live feeds is a customer’s email address. Meaning the company has been so egregiously lax when it comes to security and privacy that even people outside the company could have potentially done this, using merely an email address to begin spying on customers, according to the report.

When I installed a couple outdoor security cameras last year (I’m not about to install some internet-connected door lock or doorbell), I bought gear from Ubiquiti which stores all the camera recordings locally. It’s a more expensive solution than letting someone else store your videos their on servers, but it’s almost infinitely more secure.

SPACE: SpaceX, Boeing design risks threaten new delays for US space program.

Just ahead of the first scheduled un-manned test flight slated for March 2 under NASA’s multibillion-dollar Commercial Crew Program, NASA’s safety advisory panel cited four “key risk items” in its 2018 annual report earlier this month.

For Boeing, they include the capsule’s structural vulnerability when the heat shield is deployed. For SpaceX, the report mentioned the redesign of a SpaceX rocket canister following a 2016 explosion and its “load and go” process of fueling the rocket with the crew already inside the capsule. “Parachute performance” remained an issue for both companies.

“There are serious challenges to the current launch schedules for both SpaceX and Boeing,” the report said.

Two people with direct knowledge of the program told Reuters that the space agency’s concerns go beyond the four items listed, and include a risk ledger that as of early February contained 30 to 35 lingering technical concerns each for SpaceX and Boeing.

Reuters could not verify what all of the nearly three dozen items are. But the sources familiar with the matter said the companies must address “most” of those concerns before flying astronauts and, eventually, tourists to space.

Let’s get this fixed and get to launching.

OUCH: The Obama Presidential Library That Isn’t.

I say “ouch” because believe it or not this is from the New York Times:

The four-building, 19-acre “working center for citizenship,” set to be built in a public park on the South Side of Chicago, will include a 235-foot-high “museum tower,” a two-story event space, an athletic center, a recording studio, a winter garden, even a sledding hill.

But the center, which will cost an estimated $500 million, will also differ from the complexes built by Barack Obama’s predecessors in another way: It won’t actually be a presidential library.

In a break with precedent, there will be no research library on site, and none of Mr. Obama’s official presidential records. Instead, the Obama Foundation will pay to digitize the roughly 30 million pages of unclassified paper records from the administration so they can be made available online.

And the entire complex, including the museum chronicling Mr. Obama’s presidency, will be run by the foundation, a private nonprofit entity, rather than by the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency that administers the libraries and museums for all presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.

The plan was revealed, with little fanfare, in May 2017. Few details of the digitization were made public until Tuesday, when the foundation and the archives unexpectedly released a legal agreement outlining procedures for creating what is being billed as “first digital archives for the first digital president,” which they say will democratize access.

But as awareness of the plan has spread, some historians see a threat to future scholarship on the Obama administration.

Call me a cynic, but I’d wager that’s a feature not a bug.

BECAUSE SOCIALISTS: Aid is piling up on Venezuela’s border. Here’s why it’s not getting in.

Guaido has thrown all his weight behind a “humanitarian channel” that would bring tons of much-needed aid from foreign countries into Venezuela. But the plan isn’t just benevolent — it’s also a direct jab at Maduro, who for years has denied that a humanitarian crisis was happening in Venezuela.

“The impact of the humanitarian aid is highly political,” admits Juan Miguel Matheus, an MP for the opposition. “Our first and primary goal is to provide relief for the Venezuelan population, but after that, with this move we want to checkmate Maduro.

“If the aid gets in, Maduro is shown to have lost control of the situation; if it doesn’t get in, we show that Maduro doesn’t care for the suffering of the people,” he says.

Really committed socialists have been using food as a weapon since the beginning. But if you’re opposed to socialism, it’s because you’re an uncaring monster.

BRUCE BAWER: The New York Times’s Islamic Flimflam Man.

On February 18, in keeping with its apparent goal of remaining America’s most reliable source of pro-Islamic propaganda, the New York Times ran yet another op-ed by Mustafa Akyol, who seems to be replacing Tariq Ramadan (who is currently in jail awaiting trial for raping two women) not only as the Times’s house dissembler on Islam (since 2013, he has held the title of contributing opinion writer) but, more broadly, as the leading personification of “modern Islam” or “moderate Islam” in the West.

Read the whole thing.

TYLER O’NEIL Lesbian Army Vet Says Transgender Legal Victory Dehumanizes Women. “Women have to keep fighting the rise of trans misogyny.”

IT’S JUST SUCH A TERRIBLY WRITTEN AND EDITED, AGENDA-DRIVEN PAPER THAT IT WAS BOUND TO GET INTO TROUBLE: Covington Catholic High student’s lawyer says lawsuit is ‘message’ for ‘weaponized’ Washington Post.

WOW: Thousands Demonstrate in Paris and Across France Against Surging Antisemitism.

The show of solidarity with French Jews in the capital was replicated across the country, with rallies against antisemitism being held in more than 60 cities and towns, including Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse and Strasbourg — the city in eastern France near which only on Tuesday morning dozens of graves in a Jewish cemetery were found defaced with swastikas and antisemitic slogans.

The vandalism at the cemetery came following a week of high-profile antisemitic incidents, including the daubing of a Jewish-owned bakery with the slogan “Juden!” and the abuse hurled at the French-Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut last weekend by protesters affiliated with the populist “yellow vest” movement.

Under the floodlit statue of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, the demonstrators who gathered at dusk in Paris held signs declaring “Ça suffit!” (“That’s enough!”), as well as the greeting “Shalom, Salaam, Salut.

I hope this is the start of something larger.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: FBI lawyer thought Hillary should have been prosecuted and much, much more. “My original belief — well, after having conducted the investigation and towards the end of it, then sitting down and reading a binder of her materials, I thought that it was alarming, appalling, whatever words I said, and argued with others about why they thought she shouldn’t be charged.”

HMM: Iran unveils submarine that can launch cruise missiles.

Iran shows off a lot of domestically produced military gear which, if it isn’t pure propaganda vaporware, never seems to work as advertised. Here’s what Tehran is claiming this time:

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani showed off the semi-heavy sub dubbed the Fateh, or Conqueror, on Sunday to thousands at the port city of Bandar Lengeh.

“We will not bow down to the hegemonic power. We are ready to sacrifice ourselves and spill our blood to protect Iran,” Rouhani said at the ceremony, according to Al Jazeera.

The submarine was unveiled one week after the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.

“There are definitely messages, which are being conveyed to Washington, D.C.,” Maysam Bizar, a Tehran-based journalist, told Al Jazeera, noting it is an “old tradition” to show off its new military equipment during the revolution anniversary.

The 660-ton sub was entirely produced domestically, according to Rear Admiral Amir Rastegari.

The manufacturing process began on March 21, 2008, which “is a record since the average time in the world is between 12 to 15 years,” he said.

Two American shipyards produce two Virginia-class nuclear attack subs every year, with a time between being laid down and launched of about 18 months each.

BLACK MARKETEERS TO GAIN THE MOST: Marijuana Tax in New Jersey? It Could be $42 an Ounce.

POPULAR MECHANICS: The U.S. Air Force Is Buying New F-15s After All. “The F-15X will complement the F-22 and F-35 in tomorrow’s aerial battlefields.”

This item serves as a decent primer on what’s new in the F-15X.

MAKE ARMS SALES GREAT AGAIN: Lockheed Martin Offers India Enhanced F-16 Block 70 Multirole Combat Aircraft Dubbed “F-21.”

TOM COBURN: Washington’s paralysis requires a constitutional convention.

For years now, angry Americans have been lashing back at Washington overreach. That is the genesis of the Tea Party movement. But it’s even worse than we thought. The ultimate evil of the bureaucratic state, Howard argues, is that Americans no longer feel free. Americans no longer breathe the fresh air of freedom but the stale air of bureaucracy.

Doctors and nurses spend up to half the day filling out forms no one reads. Teachers are told never to put an arm around a crying child. Small business can’t even know, much less comply with, the thousands of rules that apply to them. Getting a permit requires running a legal gauntlet of multiple agencies with overlapping requirements. We go through the day looking over our shoulders, asking ourselves, “Can I prove that what I’m about to do is legally correct?”

While Washington is happy to micromanage Americans, it is not happy to make the hard choices necessary to secure our future. With thousand-page rulebooks, it has no interest in keeping its own house in order. The “law of the land” is more like a legal junk pile. Deficits soar because Congress lacks the discipline to set priorities or abolish obsolete laws, regulations, and programs. These trillion-dollar deficits are not just bad policy but immoral. How can we justify making our children pay tomorrow for our profligacy today?

What can we do about it? Washington will never fix itself. But Trump’s election signifies that Washington’s current political establishment is on its last legs.

The Senate would be a better body if Coburn were still a part of it.