BRYAN PRESTON: Has Beto Already Blown It? Here Are His Three Biggest Blunders.

JOSH KRAUSHAAR: Democrats Are Boosting Trump’s Re-election Prospects.

When you look at the polls breaking down the actual Democratic electorate, you’ll find limited support for such socialist-minded schemes. Broaden out to the overall electorate, and it’s easy to see how Democrats could be giving President Trump a lifeline to a second term despite his widespread unpopularity.

“We are on an out-of-control roller coaster going 100 miles-per-hour, and we have no functioning brake,” said one liberal Democratic strategist who is alarmed by the rising tide of socialism within the party. “No one is leading and that void could not be more clear.”

What’s so remarkable about this rapid leftward shift is that it’s working against the party’s best interests—both for the individual candidates and their chances of defeating Trump next year.

All the Democrats had to do was not act crazy, but instead they’ve become the party of Florida Man on Bath Salts Running Naked Down the Interstate Chewing Off His Own Face.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: The 10 Most Insane Requirements Of The Green New Deal.

LISTEN TO THEM, THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT. WHAT MUSIC THEY MAKE! Liberal activist groups howl over ‘Monster Markup’ of Trump judicial nominees. “Lindsey Graham wields the hammer as the new Senate Judiciary Committee Chair to move through 44 renominated nominees.”

RANKINGS: These are the 50 worst cities to live in America.

About one in nine Americans live in California, but one in five cities on this list are in California.

THE NEW JACOBINS: Off With Their Heads! Lefties Believe Billionaires Should Be ‘Eliminated.’

WHERE ARE THE FUNNY MOVIES AT? ‘Blazing Saddles’ at 45: The Movie That Couldn’t Get Made Today.

Blazing Saddles seems to send up almost everything. And it does it brilliantly. The humor employed if filled with what today would be known as triggers for the emotionally weak, politically correct, Social Justice Warrior crowd.

Ethnic jokes abound. There is enough juvenile sexual humor to keep a thousand generations of pubescent boys entertained. The movie also has the most memorable fart joke scene ever.

Throughout, the what would now be taboo humor is used to lampoon racism, politicians, entertainers, and too many more things to remember offhand. It is brilliantly done, but only if one is from an era when the majority of the population wasn’t perpetually seeking to be aggrieved.

If you had told me in the early ’80s that one day we’d look back fondly on the ’70s, I’d have glared at you though knock-off Wayfarers then turned my Walkman up to 11 just to drown out the silliness.

HOW MUCH HAVE YOU GOT? How Much Will the Green New Deal Cost?

As it happens, a team of Stanford engineers led by Mark Jacobson outlined just such a plan back in 2015. Jacobson’s repowering plan would involve installing 335,000 onshore wind turbines; 154,000 offshore wind turbines; 75 million residential photovoltaic systems; 2.75 million commercial photovoltaic systems; 46,000 utility-scale photovoltaic facilities; 3,600 concentrated solar power facilities with onsite heat storage; and an extensive array of underground thermal storage facilities.

Assuming steep declines in the costs of each form of renewable electric power generation, just running the electrical grid using only renewable power would still cost roughly $7 trillion by 2030. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation calculated that the total cost of an earlier version of Jacobson’s scheme would amount to $13 trillion. And based on how fast it has taken to install energy generation infrastructure in the past, Jacobson’s repowering plan would require a sustained installation rate that is more than 14 times the U.S. average over the last 55 years and more than six times the peak rate.

Where is the money to pay for this massive transformation going to come from? The headline over at The Week sums it up pretty well: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to pay for her Green New Deal by essentially printing more money.”

What could go wrong?

BUSINESS: Amazon just quietly confirmed it is competing with UPS and FedEx.

Amazon’s annual reports usually first highlight the “intense competition” the retail juggernaut faces. In 2017, that predictably included “retail, e-commerce services, digital content and electronic devices, and web and infrastructure computing services.”

This year, Amazon added another industry in which they’re facing competition — “transportation and logistics services,” as CNBC’s Eugene Kim reported on Feb. 5.

That’s a clear warning shot to UPS and FedEx. Both transportation companies have long claimed Amazon is just a good customer.

I’d grown frustrated with Amazon Prime, due to increasing reliance on USPS delivery, which is my town ranges from “merely unreliable” to “reliably awful.” But they’re doing a lot less of that, and delivering more often with their own vehicles — and often earlier in the day, too.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: It Ain’t Easy Being Green and Much, Much More. “Explains AOC: ‘I think one way that the right does try to mischaracterize what we’re doing as though it’s like some kind of massive government takeover,’ Ocasio-Cortez said on MSNBC’s ‘MTP Daily.’ ‘Obviously it’s not that because what we’re trying to do is release the investments from the federal government to mobilize those resources across the country’.”

I hope that clears things up for you.

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

BUT THE “BIG LIE” CAN WORK: Starving Venezuelans’ Warnings To The US: “Socialism Is A Big Lie!”

UPDATE: F-15X Will Come In Two Variants, And No, It Won’t Cost $100M Per Copy.

The December report from Bloomberg said there would be $1.2B set aside in the 2020 defense budget proposal to procure a dozen F-15X aircraft. This led many to believe the price of each F-15X would be $100M. This is more than the unit cost of an F-35A, which is slated to hit $80M apiece in the not so distant future.

According to sources close to the discussions, this is flat out incorrect. The money being set aside in 2020, possibly around $1.1B, will include an initial order for F-15Xs—likely eight aircraft—with the rest of the money being spent on non-recurring costs, including setting up and managing the program and to pay for a relatively tiny amount of development work needed to bring the aircraft’s systems and software in line with the USAF’s exact specifications.

The big question then is how much will these jets cost? Our sources familiar with the discussions say they will cost “less than an F-35 is ever forecast to cost, best case,” let alone what it is priced at now. This indicates that Boeing is going to cut the USAF one hell of a deal on these jets, which will help keep the F-15 production line open and Boeing’s historic St. Louis plant building fighters well into the latter half of the next decade. This assessment is based on the Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation’s (CAPE) numbers, not just some blue sky pitch from Boeing.

Good to know.

Plus:

Maybe what’s more important, is that the F-15X is being designed specifically to slot directly into the USAF’s deeply established F-15 infrastructure, even down to seamless pilot conversion. Our sources say it will only take one or two flights per F-15C pilot to convert to the F-15X for the air superiority mission, saving millions on retraining aircrews, not to mention ground crews, that are already intimately familiar with the Eagle.

It looks like the F-15X could help the Air Force fulfill its planned increase in fighter squadrons, affordably, and without the logistical strain of bringing in F-35s more quickly.

OH: Rep. Adam Schiff Had Secret Meeting Fusion GPS’ Glenn Simpson. “The meeting occurred this past July at a Security conference held in Aspen Colorado. Solomon found pictures of the two together at the event. He didn’t publish the photos but he confronted the offices of the two using the images as proof of the meeting. Per Solomon, the pictures show ‘Schiff meeting at the event with Fusion GPS Founder Glenn Simpson, one of the key and most controversial figures in the Russia collusion scandal. Both men insisted to me through spokesmen that they met only briefly last July”.”

Much more at the link.

MICHAEL WALSH: Bury My Heart at Wounded Pride. “Time for Fauxcahontas to pack up the wigwam and slink away in disgrace.”

EVERYTHING IS PROBLEMATICAL: Gordon Ramsay under fire for plans to open ‘authentic Asian’ restaurant.

STONER NATION:

Why not fly the farting cows away on the airplanes?

DOING SO WOULD GIVE TRUMP ADDITIONAL LEVERAGE IN TRADE NEGOTIATIONS, WHICH IS WHY PELOSI WILL REFUSE: GOP Senators Ask Pelosi to Invite Taiwan President to Speak to Congress. “Address would infuriate China, ‘send a powerful message that the United States and the American people will always stand with the oppressed, and never the oppressor’.”

HMM: The Air Force wants to buy more F-15X jets, and it’s a huge mistake.

DAVID CATRON: Pelosi Outsmarted Herself on the SOTU.

By the time he entered the House chamber, it was already obvious that the national audience would very likely exceed last year’s larger-than-usual viewership for such speeches. This is not typical for the SOTU address. The normal pattern is a reasonably large audience for a president’s first address, followed by a gradual decline in public interest each year thereafter. This was certainly true for Trump’s predecessor. Tuesday evening’s speech, however, drew a larger audience than did the President’s 2018 address. According to a report in the Hill, broadcast TV numbers from Nielsen show the audience share was 10 percent over last year’s speech:

The four major broadcast outlets — CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox — combined for a 16.3 overnight rating during the address Tuesday night, which could result in total viewership of approximately 49 million when final numbers, to include the cable news networks and other outlets, are in later Wednesday.

Moreover, CBS and CNN conducted polls of public reaction to Trump’s words and the vast majority of viewers liked what they heard. The CBS/YouGov poll found that 76 percent of the public approved of the address, including 97 percent of Republicans and a whopping 82 percent of Independents. And a majority of viewers agreed that the President accomplished one of his primary goals for the address — improving national unity. According to CBS, “Fifty-six percent of Americans who watched tonight feel the president’s speech will do more to unite the country.” On specific issues, an unambiguous majority of viewers agreed with the President.

It isn’t just that Trump had the stronger arguments (although he did), or that the Democrats behaved badly (although they did). Almost just as important — and as subtext, probably the most important element — is that Trump looked like he was having fun up there.

That’s no small thing, especially after eight years of Obama, who never looked like he enjoyed these things (because he admittedly didn’t), and eight years of Bush, who wasn’t often very good at them.

“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?” How a Tiny Cabal Galvanized Venezuela’s Opposition.

When Juan Guaidó declared himself Venezuela’s interim president on Jan. 23 in front of a crowd of 100,000 people under a broiling sun, some leading opposition figures had no idea he would do so, say people who work with Mr. Guaidó and other top leaders. That included a few standing alongside him. A stern look of shock crossed their faces. Some quietly left the stage.

“What the hell is going on?” one member of a group of politicians wrote to the others in a WhatsApp group chat. “How come we didn’t know about this.”

The plan was largely devised by a group of four opposition leaders—two in exile, one under house arrest and one barred from leaving the country. It came together only in recent weeks, as Mr. Maduro prepared to start a second six-year term on Jan. 10 after elections widely seen as a sham. Mr. Maduro has denounced the ceremony as part of a U.S.-backed coup to overthrow his government.

The act of political skulduggery paid off. The crowd reacted ecstatically to Mr. Guaidó, and one nation after another recognized him within hours.

The strategy has dramatically altered Venezuela’s political landscape, empowering a faction led by Mr. Guaidó’s Popular Will party that has long lobbied for more direct confrontation with the Maduro regime.

A preference cascade in action.

SAD: Nancy Pelosi’s Iconic Pity Clap at the State of the Union Will Sustain Me for Life.

WHAT IS IT WITH DEMOCRATS AND BLACKFACE? And now we have the 10th liberal celebrity with a blackface problem.

CALL IT “THE OBAMA RULE”: Trey Gowdy Urges Acting AG Matt Whitaker to Blow off Congressional Testimony.

DAVID HARSANYI: The State Of American ‘Fact-Checking’ Is Completely Useless. “With a veneer of impartiality, fact-checkers engage in a uniquely dishonest style of partisanship.”

For this, take Politico’s insinuation that Donald Trump was lying to the public about abuse of women at the border. During the State of the Union, Trump claimed “one in three women is sexually assaulted on the long journey north.” This contention is only “partly true,” according to Politico, because a “2017 report by Doctors Without Borders” found that only 31 percent of female migrants and 17 percent of male migrants said they had been actually abused while traveling through Mexico.

Whether Doctors Without Borders’ scary statistic is accurate or not, is one thing. Trump, however, was being called out for asserting that “one in every three” illegal immigrants has been abused attempting to cross the border rather than “33.333 percent of women”––probably a rounding error in the poll. It is almost surely the case that every past president and every politician has used “one-third” or “one-half” rather than a specific fraction, and walked away without being fact-checked.

Narratives don’t further themselves, David.