WHISKEY: The alcoholic drink that’s even better for you than wine.

The article doesn’t say whether 12-year-old-and-up single-malt scotches are even better for you than everyday whiskeys, but I say why take chances.

RICHARD POLLOCK: George Soros Makes Massive Financial Investments On Fossil Fuels.

In the last quarter of 2017, Soros Fund Management reported investments in eleven new fossil corporations totalling nearly $160 million, according to his company’s December 31, 2017, filing before the Securities and Exchange Commission reviewed by TheDCNF.

His investments in fossil fuels undermines his public pledge to use his money to eliminate the oil, gas and coal industries, claiming they threaten the planet by accelerating climate change.

The billionaire’s most recent political efforts to warn about climate change was his underwriting of the organizations behind the April 29, 2017, “People’s Climate March” that marked the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s administration. Soros donated $36 million to 18 of the march’s 55 steering committee organizations between 2000 to 2014, according to the Media Research Center.

He also agreed to give former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection $10 million over a three-year period.

Further, Soros founded and operates his own climate change advocacy group called the Climate Policy Initiative. He pledged to give at least $100 million in 2009 to the institute over ten years and in 2015 he gave $26.5 million to the group, according to his latest filing with the Internal Revenue Service.

But without flagrant hypocrisy, where would Soros get the money to finance his progressive political causes?

SECDEF MATTIS: Service Members Need to be Deployable or Find Another Job. “If you can’t go overseas … carry a combat load, then obviously someone else has got to go. I want this spread fairly and equitably across the force.”

“IMPEACHMENT OR BUST”: What if ‘Resist!’ makes it harder for Democrats to take back the House?

Finally there’s Mr. Trump. Even with his recent bump in the polls, he remains divisive. But he’s not the only divisive politician who will figure in this election. The most recent Politico/Morning Consult poll suggests that Nancy Pelosi has pulled off a largely unheralded achievement: In the Age of Trump, she is arguably the most unpopular politician in America.

What does that mean for impeachment? Well, in 69 House districts surveyed by the Congressional Leadership Fund (a super PAC devoted to maintaining the GOP majority), Mrs. Pelosi is underwater in every one. She is also toxic among independents.

Take California’s 10th District, held by Republican Jeff Denham. Hillary Clinton carried this district in 2016, and Mr. Trump’s approval rating is at minus four. But again, Democrats are split among eight primary contenders. And the CLF survey showed that voters in Mr. Denham’s district prefer Paul Ryan as speaker to Mrs. Pelosi by 13 points. Come this fall, expect many GOP ads featuring Mrs. Pelosi calling tax cuts for workers “crumbs” and reminding voters that even if they find their Democratic candidate for the House reasonable, a vote for him will be a vote for Speaker Pelosi.

Of course it’s still early, and the polls remain volatile. The received orthodoxy may well turn out to be true, and the blue tsunami will wash over Congress in November, which will be followed by President Trump’s impeachment the following year.

Even so, the Resist! card remains a huge gamble.

All Democrats have to do is not act crazy, somebody recently quipped, and they can’t even manage that.

BLOODY NOSE? The U.S. is to deploy new attack drones in South Korea that could be used to kill North Korean leaders and launch pinpoint strikes on its missile launch pads.

The Gray Eagle is an improved version of the MQ-1 Predator, the leading U.S. medium-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle, and has both strike and reconnaissance capabilities.

With a 17 m wingspan, it is 8 m long and can fly at a maximum speed of 280 km/h for up to 30 hours. It is capable of non-stop surveillance missions and intelligence gathering in an area of a 400 km radius from an altitude of 7.6 km, which means it can target most parts of North Korea.

It could hit a vehicle carrying North Korean leaders, a missile launch site, or mobile missile launchers with four Hellfire anti-tank missiles or four Viper Strike small guided precision bombs. Each GPS-guided Viper Strike bomb weighs 20 kg and is accurate to within 1 meter so it can destroy even a fast-moving vehicle.

Last year, Beijing objected to the deployment plan, with Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying saying all sides concerned should “step on the brakes” if they want peace and stability in the region.

Deploying a drone armed with just a few, small conventional weapons doesn’t seem like a big escalation in response to a nuclear threat.

JEFF SESSIONS: FBI’s Use of Anti-Trump Dossier to Obtain FISA Warrant ‘Will Be Investigated.’

You would certainly hope so.

“JUST AN ASS-BACKWARD TECH COMPANY”: How Twitter Lost the Internet War.

Del Harvey, Twitter’s resident troll hunter, has a fitting, if unusual, backstory for somebody in charge of policing one of the Internet’s most ungovernable platforms. As a teenager, she spent a summer as a lifeguard at a state mental institution; at 21, she began volunteering for Perverted Justice, a vigilante group that lures pedophiles into online chat rooms and exposes their identities. When the group partnered with NBC in 2004 to launch To Catch a Predator, Harvey posed as a child to help put pedophiles in jail. In 2008, she joined Twitter, then a small status-updating service whose 140-character quirk was based on the amount of alphanumerics that could be contained on a flip-phone screen. She was employee No. 25, and her job was to combat spam accounts.

Harvey’s bildungsroman is legend inside Twitter, where she now serves as vice president of trust and safety, effectively commanding a massive, never-ending war between the company’s censors and a legion of Russian bots, sexual harassers, neo-Nazis, and Turkish hackers who have, at times, seemed to overwhelm the platform. For the past decade, she has been at the forefront of that battle, winning the loyalty of Twitter employees who respect her deep institutional knowledge. But as Twitter has grown from a small messaging platform with no revenue to a $25 billion public company, many company insiders have come to a frustrating conclusion: it’s a war that Harvey is losing.

You’ll notice that, at least based on the list presented here, Harvey is doing nothing to battle progressive trolls — of which there are plenty.

Related:

Enough of these anti-Second Amendment bots have sprouted up just since Friday that it’s easy to spot the template, but it remains to be seen what — if anything — Harvey will do about them.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER? Venezuela cryptocurrency to draw Turkish investments.

“On Tuesday, there will be quite a few announcements about the start of the process,” Venezuelan Cryptocurrency Superintendent Carlos Vargas said on the sidelines of a political meeting in Caracas.

“And there will surely be a lot of investors from Qatar, Turkey, and other parts of the Middle East, though Europeans and Americans will also participate.”

He did not elaborate.

That sounds less like Turkish investment plans and more like wishful thinking in Caracas.

PITY THE KURDS: Turkey’s president says Turkish troops involved in an offensive to drive out Syrian Kurdish militiamen from a Syrian enclave will soon begin a siege of the city of Afrin.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan told his ruling party’s legislators on Tuesday that the month-long offensive into the northwester enclave of Afrin has so far been progressing slowly.

He says Turkey is not there “to burn and destroy” the enclave but to ensure it becomes a “safe and livable place.”

Erdogan said that, however, “in the coming days, the siege of Afrin city center will commence at a more rapid pace.”

Turkey launched its offensive to clear Afrin of the Syrian Kurdish militia it considers a “terrorist” organization and an extension to its own outlawed Kurdish rebels fighting within Turkey.

Turkish troops have so far seized border regions encircling Afrin, including strategic hills.

The fate of Syria’s Kurds is the Levant’s next humanitarian crisis — on top of all the others.

TYLER O’NEIL: The Worst Presidents Everyone Forgets About.

CHANGE? Democrats Hoping for a Shocker in Trump Country. “Conor Lamb is running as a pro-gun, pro-union, pro-drilling Democrat in a region where voters have defected from the party en masse. Republicans hope that tying him to Nancy Pelosi is all that’s needed to hold onto this seat—and perhaps the House majority.”

Josh Kraushaar:

This slice of western Pennsylvania is filled with politically homeless voters, once-reliable Democrats who have grown alienated by their party’s drift leftward. Many of these up-for-grabs constituents don’t fit any neat political typologies: They’re gun-owning seniors who want to make sure their entitlement programs are protected. They champion the fracking boom that has revitalized the region’s economy, but also care about clean air and water. They’re compassionate towards immigrants, but want them to learn English and assimilate into American society. A majority voted for Walter Mondale in 1984, but became Donald Trump supporters in 2016.

These are the type of voters that Democrats need to win back if they hope to hold governing majorities into the future. And these Pennsylvanians will soon be rendering a critical verdict that will be heard around the country in a closely watched congressional election on March 13: Can the party win back some of these blue-collar voters that have been drifting unmistakably towards Republicans?

Running “moderates” all across the nation helped the Democrats win the House in 2006 — moderates who went on, by and large, to vote in favor of ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, etc.

HMM: With Nowhere Else to Turn, Syrian Kurds Will Have to Embrace Assad’s Army.

With the understanding that they don’t really have anyone to rely on in their struggle against the Turkish forces that invaded northern Syria’s Afrin district in January, the Syrian Kurds will have to do a back flip and embrace the Syrian military. The army forces and those Syrian militias that have been helping President Bashar Assad’s regime are prepared to go into the Afrin district and even into the city itself to restore the regime’s control over the area, erect a defensive wall against the Turkish forces and perhaps later even expand Assad’s control over the other Kurdish districts in northern Syria.

The leadership of the Afrin district, one of the three autonomous Kurdish districts, denies it has reached any agreement with the regime, but judging by the movements of the regime’s army and the vague responses of the Kurds, this will be the next move. If indeed the Syrian military takes control of the district and positions military outposts along the Turkish border, it would be an important achievement for Assad that could have crucial consequences for the diplomatic process aiming to resolve the Syrian crisis.

Related: Turkey has warned the Syrian government not to help Kurds fighting against Turkish forces in northern Syria.

And: Moscow calls on US not to play with fire in Syria.

So we have US friends teaming up with a regime the US wants gone to stop a US ally from killing US friends while the Russians accuse the US of messing things up in the Middle East.

Sounds about par.

CHANGE: China’s J-20 stealth fighter jet has officially entered service.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Gun Control Talk Continues, Mueller Eyes Jared, and Much, Much More. “The media continues to overlook the failure of the FBI to act upon a specific tip warning the agency that the Florida shooter was violent, armed and ready to shoot up his school, in favor of their own progressive political agenda.”

Never let a crisis go to waste, as the man said.

IT’S THE SPENDING, STUPID: Here Is Goldman’s Chart Showing Why The US Is Headed For “Banana Republic” Status.

Earlier today we discussed a report by Goldman Sachs which, when summarized, suggested that unless something significant changes in the coming years, the current US fiscal policy will lead to a debt catastrophe. In an unprecedented warning, the bank which spawned Trump’s chief economic advisor Gary Cohn, ironically the architect behind Trump’s fiscal strategy, warned that “the continued growth of public debt raises eventual sustainability questions if left unchecked.”

It is worth highlighting that for Goldman to warn that the US fiscal and debt trajectory is unsustainable is quite unprecedented, especially since it is the bank’s former President and COO who has put the US on that path.

And while we urge readers to get acquainted with Goldman’s list of concerns, all of which are very troubling, there is one specific chart which lays out clearly why the US is now headed for “banana republic” status amid developed economies when it comes to US debt sustainability, or in this case lack thereof.

That chart is below, and it shows total projected US Federal Debt on one axis, and US interest expense as a % of GDP on the other. The result is the red dot in the top right.

This year, doing nothing more than paying the interest on the already-accumulated debt will consume nearly every dollar of revenue generated by corporate taxes, excise taxes, and tariffs. And we’re not many years away from the vig growing larger than the defense budget.

And this spending spree is absent an economic downturn or a shooting war with a near-peer adversary.

CHANGE: Most Americans now support GOP tax law.

More money in your pocket will do that — money that the Democrats either voted against, derided as “crumbs,” or both.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR FAKE NEWS WE’D HARDLY HAVE ANY NEWS AT ALL:

OH: CNN Host Frets Fox News Will Be Critical of Guest Comparing Russia Interference to Pearl Harbor.

CNN host Brian Stelter fretted Sunday that a Fox News host would be critical of his guest’s comparison of Russian meddling efforts in the U.S. election to Pearl Harbor after she made the reference on his program.

The hot topic on “Reliable Sources” Sunday was the handing down of 13 indictments of Russian nationals on Friday for illegal “information warfare” efforts through social media trolling, identity theft and other malfeasances as part of a systematic effort by the Kremlin to interfere in the 2016 election.

President Donald Trump has downplayed and even denied in the past that Russians meddled in the election and has called the notion his campaign colluded with the Kremlin a “hoax.” The White House said the indictments—which did not implicate any Americans—showed there was “no collusion.”

Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty criticized Trump and his allies for talking about what was not in the indictments rather than address the Russian efforts to interfere in American politics. Trump tweeted Sunday “they are laughing their asses off in Moscow” at the Russia investigation.

“The obvious reaction is to look at the what the indictment says and then to say, ‘How are we going to deal with this? How are we going to address this?'” Tumulty said. “You look at the president’s tweets this morning, and try to imagine if Franklin D. Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor had gotten on the radio and said that Tokyo was laughing at us … That is not what is called upon a president to do right now.”

One was a sneak attack on the heart of our Pacific Fleet, resulting in thousands dead. The other was a low-rent social media buy with no discernible effects.

Surely, this is a comparison that will live in infamy.

I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Is the Yellowstone supervolcano close to erupting? Scientists detect more than 200 earthquakesin just 10 DAYS after warning that magma below the surface is showing signs of strain.

When I was growing up in St. Louis, we were taught that the New Madrid fault in southeast Missouri was overdue for a Big One — and that was 35 years ago.

BUT THE NARRATIVE! Judge Orders Mueller to Provide Flynn’s Attorneys With ‘Any Exculpatory Evidence.’

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Trump vs. Oprah: The Matchup We Deserve?

NOT AT MY HOUSE, THERE ISN’T: There really is a tequila shortage.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Connecticut Professor Latest Victim of ‘Microaggression’ Claim.

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: Reagan, Obama Beat Lincoln and Washington in List of ‘Best Presidents.’

JAZZ SHAW: How A Union Sank A Mom And Pop Company Overnight.