ISN’T IT ROMANTIC? Need to Ensure the Sex You’re about to Have Is Consensual? There’s an App for That. “LegalFling is the first blockchain-based app to verify explicit consent before having sex.”

Or as Antonin Scalia said, “The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches.”

CHANGE? Wonder Woman 2 will be the first production to adopt new anti-sexual harassment guidelines.

BLUE STATE BLUES: Idiot CA Legislators Demand Corporations Give Fed Tax Savings Back To State.

Richard Fernandez noted on Twitter that “The only solution progressives can come up with in the emerging two tier world is to tax the skilled and put everyone else on welfare.”

The solution to the failures of big government is always bigger government.

HMM: New California law will automatically register illegal immigrants to vote.

In 2015, the state passed a law called the California New Motor Voter Act to increase voter rolls by simplifying the process to register to vote.

The legislation, which goes into effect April 1, will automatically register people who apply for a new driver’s license or new state ID at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

California has long provided driver’s licenses to anyone who claims to be in the country legally, whether they provide proof or not, which means illegal aliens will be registered to vote, WND reports.

The only way a person won’t have their information at the DMV automatically sent to the Secretary of State’s Office for registration is if they opt out.

The does seem ripe for abuse, which I suppose is the entire point.

THEY WEREN’T ALL “LOST”: New Strzok/Page Texts Suggest Lynch Knew About Clinton Exoneration Well Before Comey Announcement.

TOM HICKS: Democrats will destroy America just to spite Trump.

If you think the headline is overwrought, look at the cities where Democrats have ruled uninterrupted for decades, and you’ll realize that they don’t need Trump as an excuse.

ALICE STEWART: On shutdown, Democrats have a lot of explaining to do.

Chuck Schumer blames the GOP generally and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell specifically, saying the Democrats are happy to compromise, but “we will not be bullied.”

The reality is that Democrats chose protections for recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients over funding the government. They will have to explain that to the American people.

The fact is that, while there is tremendous support for protecting Dreamers, 56% of Americans, according to a recent CNN poll, said approving a budget to avoid a shutdown was more important than continuing DACA. Thirty-four percent thought renewing DACA was more important than preventing a shutdown.

President Trump has been clear on his goal for dealing with immigration. Along with a DACA fix, he wants increased security at the border, an end to chain migration, and an end to the visa lottery program.

With that in mind, Congress should have addressed first things first: fund the government now and address DACA by its March deadline. It’s shameful that our military and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) will suffer due to the reality show known as Congress.

But if the GOP can’t get the Democrats to pay a political price, then you can expect more of the same.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: SHUT DOWN City, ‘Missing’ FBI Records and Much, Much More.. “Are the same morons who built the Obamacare website responsible for IT at the FBI?”

It’s a fair question.

FAUXCAHONTAS: Elizabeth Warren’s Native American problem goes beyond politics.

There’s also discomfort on the left and among some tribal leaders and activists that Warren has a political blind spot when it comes to the murkiness surrounding her story of her heritage, which blew up as an issue in her victorious 2012 Massachusetts Senate race. In recent months, Daily Show host Trevor Noah mocked her for claiming Native American ancestry and the liberal website ThinkProgress published a scathing criticism of her by a Cherokee activist who said she should apologize.

As Warren is mentioned as a serious presidential contender in 2020, even some who should be her natural allies say Warren has displayed a stubborn unwillingness to address the gap between the story she was told of Native Americans in the family tree and a dearth of hard evidence to back it up.

It’s a disconnect that has lingered unresolved in the public sphere for more than five years.

Coming from the Boston Globe, that’s one helluva tacit admission that Warren’s been lying.

CHANGE: Pentagon says confronting Iran now tops terrorism concerns.

The new National Defense Strategy envisions America’s military focusing on combating authoritarian ideals rather than the protracted global war on terror. The announcement comes as the Donald Trump administration has made clear in recent days that it plans to keep 2,000 US troops in Syria indefinitely to help usher in a political process to replace President Bashar al-Assad and confront Iranian influence in the country.

“To those who would threaten America’s experiment in democracy: If you challenge us, it will be your longest and worst day,” Mattis said in a speech at Johns Hopkins University. “We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists, but great power competition — not terrorism — is now the primary focus of US national security.”

In broad terms, the blueprint lays out a three-pronged approach for America’s military to deal with the looming threat from Iran, which the administration has already framed as the primary competitor to US interests in the Middle East in Trump’s National Security Strategy released last month. Mattis said he aims to build a more lethal force, strengthen alliances and reform the Defense Department’s business practices to help the United States keep up with Russia and China as they continue to beef up their military might.

Turkey might be the real wild card in all this, as Ankara and Tehran share mutual interests in subduing the Kurds, humiliating the Arabs, weakening the Israelis.

LINDSEY GRAHAM: Support ‘Amnesty’; Hispanic Community ‘Should be Our Voters.’

AXIOS: Venezuela’s economic collapse, by the numbers.

• Venezuelans are forced to contend with completely arbitrary daily withdrawal allowances. Pozzebano’s report details his attempt to get cash in the Venezuelan capital, ultimately getting 10,000 bolivars — that day’s allowance — after visiting four banks over four hours. That day, 10,000 bolivars equaled six U.S. cents.

•The country’s government assistance program gives citizens bags of essential goods at subsidized prices. Those goods have been shrinking in both size and quality as foreign investment in Venezuela collapses, but even they cost 30,000 bolivars each.

•Bloomberg notes that, according to its Cafe con Leche Index, the price of a cup of coffee in Caracas has risen from 5,500 bolivars to 45,000 bolivars in just 12 weeks. That pace, should it continue unabated, indicates an eye-watering annualized inflation rate of 448,025%.

More:

•Venezuela’s GDP contracted by 40% in per capita terms from 2013 to 2017 — and that’s based off estimates as Maduro stopped reporting economic data in 2015. A recent filing with the SEC by the Venezuelan government indicated that its economy had contracted by 16.5% in 2016 alone.

•To make things worse, the decline in Venezuela’s oil production and decreased global demand of Venezuela’s chief export — which greatly subsidizes its socialist regime — resulted in a 51% drop in national income from 2013 to 2017.

•The minimum wage declined by 88% from 2012 to 2017 when compared against the black market exchange rate.

•Venezuelans making that minimum wage cannot afford to feed a family of five, even when their entire income is devoted to purchasing the cheapest available calories.
Income poverty jumped to 82% in 2016 — a shocking increase from 48% in 2014.

Shocking — to whom? Certainly not to anyone who has been paying attention to Venezuela since it turned socialist.

RELATED: Corporate America’s nightmare in Venezuela is getting worse. “Venezuela has more crude oil than any other nation. But the crisis there is so bad that even oil companies are losing big money. The world’s largest oil service provider, Schlumberger, announced Friday that it wrote down $938 million of its holdings in Venezuela. It already took a $460 million loss last year because of unpaid bills from the Venezuelan government and its state-run oil company.”

ALLIES: Turkish military enters Syrian province after days of airstrikes.

Turkish officials said the troops entered the Afrin area a day after Turkish jets pounded targets there in an attempt to drive US-allied Kurdish militia from the area. “Operation Olive Branch is ongoing as planned and the ground operation has started,” the Turkish armed forces said in a statement.

The land operation comes hours after Turkish jets targeted US-backed, Syrian-Kurdish YPG militia in the area, killing at least eight people and injuring 13, according to the Syrian Democratic Forces General Command.

The military incursion is likely to raise tensions between Turkey and the United States, which supports and openly arms Kurdish militias fighting ISIS.

Turkey said it launched what it dubbed Operation Olive Branch on Saturday to target “terrorist organizations” including YPG forces.

Operation Olive Branch?

HMM: China, Unhampered by Rules, Races Ahead in Gene-Editing Trials.

In a hospital west of Shanghai, Wu Shixiu since March has been trying to treat cancer patients using a promising new gene-editing tool.

U.S. scientists helped devise the tool, known as Crispr-Cas9, which has captured global attention since a 2012 report said it can be used to edit DNA. Doctors haven’t been allowed to use it in human trials in America. That isn’t the case for Dr. Wu and others in China.

In a quirk of the globalized technology arena, Dr. Wu can forge ahead with the tool because he faces few regulatory hurdles to testing it on humans. His hospital’s review board took just an afternoon to sign off on his trial. He didn’t need national regulators’ approval and has few reporting requirements.

Dr. Wu’s team at Hangzhou Cancer Hospital has been drawing blood from esophageal-cancer patients, shipping it by high-speed rail to a lab that modifies disease-fighting cells using Crispr-Cas9 by deleting a gene that interferes with the immune system’s ability to fight cancer. His team then infuses the cells back into the patients, hoping the reprogrammed DNA will destroy the disease.

In contrast, what’s expected to be the first human Crispr trial outside China has yet to begin.

China has been working diligently to make the move from fast follower to innovator, and they’ve been scoring some impressive achievements in supercomputing, lasers, and now perhaps medicine.

CESSPITS OF MISOGYNY (CONT’D): Committee Calls for GAO Probe on ‘Pernicious Problem’ of Sexual Harassment in Science Community.

OH, CANADA: Bonuses, performance pay for government executives rose in Trudeau’s 1st year.

Spending on bonuses and other performance pay for top federal government executives increased by more than double the rate of inflation in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s first year in office, CBC News has learned.

The 3.2 per cent increase in spending for 2015-16, the most recent year available, was also more than twice the 1.25 per cent pay increases the government has negotiated with many of its public sector unions.

Spending on performance pay for top executives increased to $75 million from $72.6 million the year before with wide fluctuations in the percentage increases — or decreases — in many departments.

Trickle-up economics.

BLUE STATE BLUES: That New York Condo Just Got a Lot More Expensive. “Apartment buyers in New York are pausing to figure out how the new tax law will affect ownership costs.”

After four consecutive months of increases, the number of contracts signed in December declined both for new condo buildings and older co-ops and condos.

Overall the number of contracts signed in December, the month the tax overhaul was finalized, declined 12% from the same month in 2016, according to real-estate listing and data site UrbanDigs.com.

Brokers said it was too soon to tell whether the pullback is temporary or may be the beginning of a reassessment of the value of homeownership in light of higher after-tax ownership costs.

If New York is genuinely interested in affordable housing, they could start cutting taxes and regulations.

ENFORCING THE LAW WILL BE NOT BE TOLERATED: ‘We will prosecute’ employers who help immigration sweeps, California AG says.

YES, PROVIDED YOU’RE ALREADY WELL-OFF: Does the California Model Really Work?

There’s a new data point to inform the debate that hopefully will be more difficult to ignore: California is the poverty capital of America.

The Census Bureau has come up with a new and better way to measure poverty. The standard model doesn’t take into account all sorts of factors that matter in the real world — the overall cost of living, including food, housing prices, utilities, medical care, and taxes.

This is just common sense. The median household income in Mississippi is about $41,000 per year. In California it’s about $65,000. Does anyone doubt that $41,000 goes a lot further in Biloxi than in Los Angeles?

According to the standard poverty measure, Mississippi ranks first in the nation with a rate of 20.8 percent. California ranks 16th. The Census Bureau’s “Supplemental Poverty Measure” places California first in the nation with a poverty rate of 20.4, and Mississippi falls to fifth.

Wealthy liberal Californians can be quite smug about how they can afford their strict land-use policies, draconian environmental regulations, and high taxes. And wealthy Californians can afford them — but poor Californians are paying the price.

Trickle-up economics.

FAITH MOORE: The Lie of Modern Feminism Is Beginning to Bite Feminists in the Butt.

LOOKS LIKE WE DRILLED OUR WAY OUT OF THAT PROBLEM:

And despite many learned assurances to the contrary, too.

UGH: Spectre CPU patches can cause unwanted reboots, Intel warns.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Employee Lawsuit Reveals Google As Intolerant Race Cult.

HEADLINES FROM 2016: Jimmy Kimmel jumps the partisan shark.

For whatever reason, Kimmel on Wednesday night felt qualified to lecture a low-level Paul Ryan aide on Twitter about a short-term, stop-gap continuing resolution with an attached six-year reauthorization of the Children’s Health Insurance Program but without permanent reform to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Or as Kimmel oversimplified, making kids “a bargaining chip.”

Altogether Kimmel got somewhere around fifty-thousand likes and retweets for his platitudes because apparently the public thinks it’s normal to get parliamentary analysis from comedians. But they got duped.

Whether Kimmel realizes it or not, the shutdown drama surrounding DACA and CHIP has nothing to do with sick kids or immigrant kids without papers. It has everything to do with politics. The statements and the subsequent silence of the senior Democrat senator from Ohio bear this out.

Shortly before Christmas last year, Sen. Sherrod Brown declared that CHIP reauthorization was “ready to go” and added that if Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “put it on the floor today, it would pass. There is no excuse for this delay that is hurting families.” Less than a month later, that legislation is rolled up in the CR and waiting. Brown is conspicuously silent.

That’s what passes for comedy gold these days.

YOU DON’T SAY: The Media Has a Very Different Attitude Toward Donald Trump’s Health Than Hillary Clinton’s.

Devastating video put together by the Free Beacon’s Andrew Kugle, who tweeted, “I had 6 minutes of extra clips that I had to cut from this.”. I believe that’s known as riches of embarrassment.

Also at the link, video of MSNBC’s “incredibly defensive” coverage of Clinton’s campaign fainting spell.