YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER ACRONYM: You Might Be Part of LGBTQQIAAACPPF2K Without Even Knowing It.

JAMES BOVARD: FBI objections lacked credibility given bureau’s shady past.

The FISA court complained that, in the final years of Obama’s presidency, the NSA was guilty of “an institutional lack of candor” connected to “a very serious Fourth Amendment issue;” naturally, the gory specifics were kept under wraps. Regardless, one of Obama’s last actions as president authorized NSA to share its vast trove of data on Americans with other federal agencies. If political abuse of data seized via FISA has not yet occurred, Obama’s “shovel-far-and-wide” bureaucratic bonanza makes it far more likely in the future.

The FISA court has always done a dismal job of overseeing the vast surveillance regime it helped spawn. FISA provided a stamp of legitimacy for perpetual deceit and perhaps the worst trampling of constitutional rights in American history.

Not to mention what looks increasingly like an attempt, first to rig an election, and then to effectively overturn the results of it.

HMM: The Comey-Isikoff-Twitter connection.

Link was missing before. Fixed now — sorry!

CORRECTION: Deb Heine conflated Isikoff with Ignatius, so just ignore this one.

DENIAL, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: Alan Grayson Gets Into Scuffle with Politico Reporter Asking Questions About Domestic Abuse.

RELATED? PolitiFact thought Alan Grayson could help its ‘trust’ and ‘credibility’ until Twitter chimed in.

PolitiFact announced it hired former politician Alan Grayson to critique its work in an effort to improve trust and credibility on Thursday… but that decision lasted about three seconds.

“It has become clear our choice of Alan Grayson did not meet that threshold to many,” PolitiFact executive director Aaron Sharockman tweeted on Thursday after the initial tweet that he was hired received an onslaught of criticism from respected media members.

Sharockman said Grayson was called “a short while ago and informed” that PolitiFact would cancel the agreement for him to write for the site. PolitiFact bills itself as “a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics.”

Grayson represented Florida’s Democratic-leaning 9th Congressional District from 2012 until he announced he would not seek re-election in 2016 because he eyed a Senate seat.

“A fact-checking outfit hiring Alan Grayson is like a church hiring Charlie Sheen to run their youth group,” National Review columnist Dan McLaughlin tweeted.

Politico’s Jake Sherman asked, “Is this a joke?”

No, but PolitiFact has become one.

STOP ME IF YOU THINK YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE: Subprime Auto Debt Is Booming Even as Defaults Soar.

ANDREW FERGUSON: The Final Hagiography of the Obama Team.

When I think back over the Obama administration, I have the enduring impression of articulate, well-credentialed people talking, talking, talking. The stars of The Final Year are among the most skilled Obama talkers. When Kerry releases little bubbles of gas like “We have to be realistic about the challenges we face” he is taking a cue from the master, the president, who can say “It’s ultimately where politics, government, diplomacy has [sic] to be rooted—in that belief in a common humanity” and say it slowly, thoughtfully enough to almost persuade you he’s saying something substantial. “Bearing witness is both an instinct and a responsibility,” says Samantha Power, without clarification. Obama’s foreign policy, says Rhodes, is “engagement-focused.”

The manipulation of high-toned, empty tropes was both a cause and a consequence of Obama’s foreign policy. The most touching sequence in The Final Year concerns the “ceasefire” that Kerry negotiated with the Russians and Syrians in September 2016. The movie portrays Kerry as a clueless and oddly endearing popinjay who lurches from photo-op to photo-op, shaking hands with one international grifter after another, getting his pocket picked all the while. He spends dozens of hours “brokering” the ceasefire with those friendly Russians. Then he is astonished and crestfallen when it falls apart, after Russian and Syrian aircraft bomb a U.N. humanitarian convoy headed for Aleppo, killing more than 20 aid workers and destroying food supplies meant for 75,000 starving people.

“It’s so frustrating,” Kerry tells the camera. “Because we had an agreement that could have worked! But some people didn’t want to cooperate.”

It’s almost as though the Russians were our number one geopolitical foe all along.

DEBRA HEINE: Key findings in the FISA Abuse memo.

MAX FISHER: In Afghanistan’s Unwinnable War, What’s the Best Loss to Hope For? “Few modern wars have raged this long, this destructively and with this much outside intervention. If there is an obvious way out, history does not provide it.”

Other than Fisher’s necessarily tragic conclusion, quoted above, there’s no good way to excerpt his article — so just read the whole thing.

MY COUNTRY TIS OF XHE: Canadian National Anthem Revised With Gender-Neutral Language.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s Health Care System Ready To Collapse Amid Economic Crisis.

Marcos Carvajal, a 34-year-old former pitcher for the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins, died of pneumonia on Tuesday. He fell sick in December, but the antibiotics needed to treat the illness were hard to find. Drugs for Carvajal eventually were sent from abroad but he relapsed, returned to the hospital on Monday and died the next day.

The Pharmaceutical Federation of Venezuela estimates the country is suffering from an 85 percent shortage of medicine amid an economic crisis also marked by severe hyperinflation and food scarcity.

The entire Venezuelan health care system is on the verge of collapse, says Francisco Valencia, head of the public health advocacy group Codevida. Some hospitals lack electricity, and more than 13,000 doctors have left Venezuela in the past four years in search of better opportunities.

“They don’t give food to the patients in the hospital,” Valencia tells Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd. “They don’t have the proper medical supplies to take care of the people who go to the emergency [room] like gloves, like every basic thing they need for an emergency.”

It seems like ages since Bernie Sanders, Michael Moore, Sean Penn, et al., commented on the Bolivarian workers’ paradise.

BUT OF COURSE: College Dems More Likely To Disinvite Trump Than a Holocaust Denier or an Anti-Semite.

TELL HIM YES ON ONE AND NO ON TWO: Should I get a flu shot? Is it too late to get a flu shot?

Don’t mess around with the flu. This year’s chest cold — which I just got over — is bad enough.

(Classical reference in the headline.)

PREVIEW: Succeed or fail, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy test sure to be a blast.

SpaceX revealed the Falcon Heavy in 2011, predicting it would fly as early as late 2013. Musk is known for his ambitious timelines, and it turned out the rocket’s design was more difficult to perfect than originally thought. Initially, SpaceX considered equipping the Heavy with a complicated propellant crossfeed system, in which the two side boosters re-fill the center booster as the rocket ascends. When the side boosters are empty, they drop away, leaving the center core with a full fuel tank. This ultimately makes the rocket more efficient.

The crossfeed feature ended up being too complex, but even without it, the Falcon Heavy was a challenge to bring to fruition. Whereas the Delta IV Heavy has just one engine for each of its three boosters, the Falcon Heavy has nine, for a grand total of 27 engines that must all ignite and work in tandem without tearing the rocket apart. SpaceX’s two disasters in 2015 and 2016 delayed things further: the 2016 accident damaged the company’s only launch pad, Space Launch Complex 40, forcing SpaceX to rush to get pad 39A operational. But since there’s a chance the Heavy flight will end in disaster and damage pad 39A, SpaceX also needed to get pad 40 operational again.

There’s actually a further bit of controversy surrounding this point. Only pad 39A is outfitted for crew flights, which are expected to start later this year (an ambitious timeline, according to the Government Accountability Office). Should the Falcon Heavy damage 39A, how will that affect NASA’s commercial crew program, which has been waiting to launch astronauts from American soil since 2011? It’s a fair question, and you can bet NASA officials will be watching this demo flight with clenched teeth.

Whatever you think of Elon Musk or his various ventures, this is going to be quite a thing to see.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Memo Day – Weasels and Liars Edition. “Rumors are that the memo will be released today, despite a heroic, often surreal effort to stop its disclosure.”

DAVID HARSANYI: The Media’s Ugly David Duke-Louis Farrakhan Double Standard.

It’s true that no politician has control over who supports him, even if politicians occasionally instigate that support. I mean, Farrakhan endorsed Barack Obama’s presidential run in 2008. Hillary Clinton was accused of passive-aggressive racism for even bringing up the topic. “I did not solicit his support,” the candidate explained at the time. “I can’t say to somebody that he can’t say that he thinks I’m a good guy.” Obama was correct, even if his antagonist policies towards Israel may have pleased the Nation of Islam leader who went to Iran to celebrate the anniversary for the Islamic Revolution a couple of years back.

On the other hand, when Obama posed for a photo with the man who claims white people are a “race of devils” and said Hitler was a “very great man” at a Congressional Black Caucus gathering in 2005, it was entirely his fault. We only found out about the picture recently — and thus the new questions — because the Congressional Black Caucus allegedly suppressed photos of Democrats hanging out with a man who spent decades spreading noxious anti-Semitic and racist conspiracies theories to African-Americans.

Obama is now gone. There are, however, 45 members in the CBC leading the resistance against Donald Trump. Four of them — Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, Al Green, and William Jefferson — can been seen here exchanging pleasantries and running through some talking points on the hurricane Katrina response with Farrakhan in 2009.

But that’s different because shut up.

DON’T GET COCKY: Trump Makes Quick Work of Re-Election Fundraising. “President and his super PAC appeal to supporters big and small to build massive war chest—faster than any prior White House occupant.”

In the past year, Mr. Trump has appealed to supporters big and small to build up a re-election war chest, held nine political rallies in states he won in 2016 and aired campaign-sponsored television commercials to promote his policy agenda. He has also embraced the political action committees and major donors he once called a scourge on governing.

Mr. Trump’s campaign and an outside group that backs him collected more than $73 million last year, according to Federal Election Commission filings and interviews with officials at America First, a part-super PAC, part-nonprofit group that routinely meets with Mr. Trump and top White House officials to discuss political strategy. The campaign’s $43 million haul is four times what President Barack Obama raised in his first two years in office, a period when he wasn’t actively fundraising.

Indeed, no president who has served under modern campaign finance laws that date back to President Jimmy Carter has held a re-election fundraiser before entering his third year in office, said Brendan Doherty, an associate professor of political science at the U.S. Naval Academy who has researched presidential campaigning. Mr. Trump had eight in his first year.

If Trump continues to deliver on jobs and wage increases to Rust Belt and Midwest Obama-to-Trump voters, that warchest will be overkill.

On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with a little overkill.

WE’RE NOT THE ONLY ONES WITH PROCUREMENT ISSUES: Auditors say Britain can’t afford its 10-year defense equipment plan.

“The Ministry of Defence is facing a minimum affordability gap of £4.9 billion. There is an additional affordability gap of £15.9 billion if all identified financial risks of cost growth materialise and the Department does not achieve any of the savings assumed in the [equipment] plan. Overall, the potential affordability gap is £20.8 billion,” the government spending watchdog said Jan. 31.

The NAO report on the affordability of the MoD’s rolling 10-year equipment procurement and support programs said it was assuming that the £6 billion of contingency funds set aside in the plan to supplement budgets will also be swallowed up by spending requirements in the 2017-2027 plan.

Optimistic project costs, exchange rate problems, failure to achieve efficiency cuts and the spiraling bill for nuclear submarine programs are some of the reasons identified by the NAO for the lack of affordability of the British equipment procurement and support programs over the next decade. The report confirms a risk previously noted by a parliamentary Public Accounts Committee investigation into the financial viability of the plan.

Even without needed reforms, a £16 billion shortfall over ten years isn’t all that much compared to £485 billion each year in social spending.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: The Wolff Who Cried, ‘Who, Moi?’

LIFE IN TRUMP’S RACIST AMERIKKKA: Black Panther advance ticket sales exceeding all previous superhero movies.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Yale Feminists Demand Frats Allow Women.

NEWS GERMANY COULD HAVE USED IN 1914: A Re-Examination of the Schlieffen Plan.

MICHAEL WALSH: In Trump, the Churlish Left Finally Meets Its Match.

As Trump’s approval ratings have risen in the wake of the stock-market rally, strong overall employment numbers, and the much-vilified tax cut, the Democrats’ pipe dream about a coming “blue wave” this fall looks increasingly like a California marijuana-induced notion. Just prior to delivering the speech, Trump had reversed Obama’s grandstanding, never-implemented executive order to close the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay. By the end of the day, the Democratic National Committee had ‘fessed up some disastrous fundraising numbers, revealing they have only $6.3 million cash on hand and are $6.1 million in debt.

And that’s just what happened yesterday.

Read the whole thing.

NOT SURE HOW TO ACCESSORIZE WITH YOUR PUSSY HAT? Seventeen Magazine Joins Dumpster Fire Culture with Vagina Nails.

These are Heinlein’s Crazy Years — we just live in them.

DO WE HAVE TO CHOOSE JUST ONE REASON? Manchin fires back after Pence attack: ‘This is why Washington sucks.’

HEATHER WILHELM: Hapless in Democratland.

Strangely, the Democratic party’s strategy for 2018 seems to revolve around reminding people how happy they are that Democrats aren’t in charge.

Witness prominent left-leaning responses to Trump’s State of the Union address, which earned an impressive 75 percent approval rating in a CBS News poll. Eight out of ten of the viewers in the poll “felt that the president was trying to unite the country, rather than divide it,” and “two-thirds said the speech made them feel proud.” Sure, we can argue about the policy implications of the address, but that’s been true for almost every State of the Union in the history of the nation. (“Free” community college! The magical “creation” of hundreds of thousands of jobs! An army of hydrogen cars!) In short, it was a well-written, well-delivered speech.

Perhaps that sounds boring to you, so it’s high time for some hyperventilation. Over to you, Democrats! CNN’s Sally Kohn called the speech “scary” and “terrifying.” Elizabeth Warren tweeted that she attended only because she wanted its horrors “burned into my eyes.” But it was perhaps MSNBC’s Joy Reid who took the cake, tweeting out a bizarre and amazing word salad trashing various American institutions: “Church . . . family . . . police . . . military . . . the national anthem . . . Trump trying to call on all the tropes of 1950s-era nationalism. The goal of this speech appears to be to force the normalization of Trump on the terms of the bygone era his supporters are nostalgic for.”

Ah, I can see the campaign posters now: “Can’t stand church and family? Neither can we! Vote for the Democrats in 2018!” It’s mind-boggling, isn’t it? I mean, come on, people. Pretending to be a normal human being can’t really be that hard.

Actually, when politicians rate at least half the country as “deplorable,” then it really is that hard.