CHANGE: Sweeping New Guidelines from DHS to Ease Deportation of Illegals.

FEMINIST SNOWFLAKE: Daddy-Daughter Dates Are ‘Everything That Is Wrong in the World’

ANALYSIS: TRUE. There Is No Solution in Afghanistan.

HIGHER EDUCATION IMPLOSION UPDATE: Rutgers Apologizes After Booting Students from Job Fair for Blue Suit, Brown Shoes.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Who Rules the United States?

Nor is Flynn the only example of nameless bureaucrats working to undermine and ultimately overturn the results of last year’s election. According to the New York Times, civil servants at the EPA are lobbying Congress to reject Donald Trump’s nominee to run the agency. Is it because Scott Pruitt lacks qualifications? No. Is it because he is ethically compromised? Sorry. The reason for the opposition is that Pruitt is a critic of the way the EPA was run during the presidency of Barack Obama. He has a policy difference with the men and women who are soon to be his employees. Up until, oh, this month, the normal course of action was for civil servants to follow the direction of the political appointees who serve as proxies for the elected president.

How quaint. These days an architect of the overreaching and antidemocratic Waters of the U.S. regulation worries that her work will be overturned so she undertakes extraordinary means to defeat her potential boss. But a change in policy is a risk of democratic politics. Nowhere does it say in the Constitution that the decisions of government employees are to be unquestioned and preserved forever. Yet that is precisely the implication of this unprecedented protest. “I can’t think of any other time when people in the bureaucracy have done this,” a professor of government tells the paper. That sentence does not leave me feeling reassured.

Opposition to this president takes many forms. Senate Democrats have slowed confirmations to the most sluggish pace since George Washington. Much of the New York and Beltway media does really function as a sort of opposition party, to the degree that reporters celebrated the sacking of Flynn as a partisan victory for journalism. Discontent manifests itself in direct actions such as the Women’s March.

But here’s the difference. Legislative roadblocks, adversarial journalists, and public marches are typical of a constitutional democracy. They are spelled out in our founding documents: the Senate and its rules, and the rights to speech, a free press, and assembly. Where in those documents is it written that regulators have the right not to be questioned, opposed, overturned, or indeed fired, that intelligence analysts can just call up David Ignatius and spill the beans whenever they feel like it?

Read the whole thing, but the answer to the headline question is in the question itself. The people of the United States are to be governed, not ruled — and lightly governed, at that.

But the Permanent Bureaucratic Class feels doesn’t see it that way.

As Trump Visits Boeing, Senators Take Aim at Contractor’s Iran Air Deal.

As President Trump made the rounds with Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg at the aerospace giant’s plant in Charleston on Friday, Republican senators were introducing legislation to require the president to report to Congress on Iran’s potential use of new Boeing aircraft to further terror.

After sanctions were eased following implementation of the Iran nuclear deal, Boeing struck an 80-plane deal with state-owned carrier IranAir worth at least $8 billion. President Obama’s State Department lauded the agreement in June as “the type of permissible business activity envisioned in the JCPOA.”

The news drew immediate reaction from Reps. Pete Roskam (R-Ill.) and Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), who wrote Muilenburg to explain “Iran’s commercial aviation sector is deeply involved in supporting hostile actors.”

Well, good.

Meanwhile, the art of another deal: Trump hints at ‘big order’ of F/A-18 Super Hornets instead of some F-35s.

The F/A-18 is built by Boeing, the same company which struck that 80-plane deal with Iran.

HMM: F-15s scramble to intercept unresponsive aircraft over restricted airspace over West Palm Beach.

IT WAS MY UNDERSTANDING THERE WOULD BE NO MATH: McDonald’s Re-Engineers Straw Using Fibonacci Formula To Let You Enjoy Shamrock Shake More.

According to the company, the straw will have to deliver the chocolate and mint flavor in equal ratio whenever you take a sip. It appears that the traditional straw is incapable of such feat, so JACE and NK Labs were brought in.

“It was a puzzling assignment but one with an ambitious goal,” Seth Newburg, principal engineer and managing partner at NK Labs, stated. “From a physics perspective, it’s actually quite difficult to deliver a proportional amount of both chocolate and mint flavors with each sip.”

The engineers were able to develop the Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal (the STRAW), which is claimed to be capable of showcasing the marvel of fluid dynamics. It is a J-shaped affair that was built with the help of the Fibonacci sequence, an integer sequence attributed to the mathematical genius Leonardo Fibonacci.

Don’t get too excited — McDonalds ordered only 2,000 of the STRAWs.

UPDATE (From Glenn): “Mathematics is the language of nature.”

OY: Jewish Groups Find Trump’s Answers to 3 Anti-Semitism Questions ‘Worrisome,’ ‘Mind-Boggling’

It was a sometimes meshuga press conference, but for the most part the crazy seems to be working.

ANNE COULTER: Trump Press Conference Makes Him ‘Head of Church’

ZEALANDIA: Geologists spy an eighth continent.

Geophysical data suggest that a region spanning 5 million square kilometres, which includes New Zealand and New Caledonia, is a single, intact piece of continental crust and is geologically separate from Australia, a team of scientists from New Zealand, Australia and New Caledonia argue in the March/April issue of GSA Today1.

“If you could pull the plug on the world’s oceans, then Zealandia would probably long ago have been recognized as a continent,” says team leader Nick Mortimer, a geologist at GNS Science in Dunedin, New Zealand.

“Zealandia” has a nice ring to it, but “Middle Earth” might catch on faster.

LOCAL ASTRONOMY NEWS: Life’s Building Blocks Found on Dwarf Planet Ceres.

WHITE HOUSE: Report of National Guard Immigration Enforcement Plan ‘Not True’

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Alphabet won’t need all those internet balloons after all.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Teacher Melts Down in Front of Class, Walks Out—Then Tries to Get Job Back.

AND: Chicago High School Pushes Left-Wing Racist Seminar Despite Parents’ Concerns.

Parents need to remember their position in big city public education, which is to pay their taxes and shut up.

TWITTER CEO JACK DORSEY: Twitter Lacked ‘Focus And Discipline’ For Growth.

On Wednesday, Dorsey offered some insight into the source of Twitter’s user growth problem, which has haunted the company for years. Speaking in a panel at Goldman Sachs’ annual technology conference in San Francisco, Dorsey, who is also founder and CEO of payments company Square , said two things were previously missing in Twitter’s approach to user growth: “Focus and discipline.”

Just last week Dorsey introduced a new anti-abuse feature so poorly thought out that it actually created a new avenue for abuse, and was quickly removed.

So it would seem that Dorsey is part of the problem he accurately described.

THIS DISDAIN FOR THE PRESS DIDN’T MATERIALIZE OUT OF THIN AIR, YOU KNOW:

TWITCHY: Touré thinks THIS is why Americans are losing ‘ability to trust media’?

Plus this important reminder from the comments:

GOOD LUCK: Dems Hope Ivanka Can ‘Convince’ Her Dad to Support Parental Leave Plan.

Trump is busy resetting foreign policy, repealing and replacing ObamaCare, rewriting a major executive order, and even just staffing up his Administration — and Democrats are pinning their hopes on a parental leave bill?

BILL GERTZ: Murder of Kim Jong Un’s Brother Comes After Book Reveals Plan to Use Him for Regime Change.

The assassination came as a recently published book by this writer, iWar: War and Peace in the Information Age, called for waging an information warfare campaign that would use the estranged brother of Kim Jong Un as a replacement leader.

Since taking power in 2011 following the death of his father, Kim Jong Un has ruled with an iron grip while carrying out ruthless purges of perceived opponents. As many as 300 officials have been killed in the purges, including Kim’s pro-China uncle, Jang Sang Taek.

Kim Jong Nam, 45, at one time was considered the heir to the late Kim Jong Il, but he ran afoul of the Pyongyang communist family dynasty after his 2001 arrest in Japan for entering the country using a false passport to visit Tokyo Disneyland.

As the Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial, Kim Jong Nam was viewed as a threat to the Kim Jong Un regime because of past comments criticizing the North Korean system. “North Korea should pay attention to reform and openness. If it continues like this, it cannot become an economic power,” Jong Nam was quoted as telling a Japanese newspaper in 2011.

Jong Nam also opposed the dynastic communist system, which he said “does not fit with socialism and my father was against it.”

He also was close to his uncle Jang, who was executed in 2013, allegedly for corruption but more likely for his close ties to the Chinese. Jong Nam’s support for Jang is an indication he favored the reform communism of China over the Stalinist North Korean model.

An “information warfare campaign” to topple Kim Jong-un seems like a long shot, at best. But Jong-nam’s connections with China and Jang were seemingly enough to earn his half-brother’s wrath.

THANKS, OBAMA: Obama Appointees Preventing Mattis From Rebuilding The Military, Says Armed Services Chair.

“I am concerned that … to fix these problems [it] is going to take a lot more money, and yet a lot of the folks who are coming up with the budget to fix them are the same people who have been fighting every step of the way against our efforts to fix these problems,” said Chairman Mac Thornberry during a Capitol Hill press gaggle Thursday.

Thornberry noted that Mattis is “alone” in his attempts to alleviate the readiness problem at the Pentagon. He added that there are some people, including “political appointees and others from the Obama administration,” who have been “trying to deny there was a problem.”

The Vice Joint Chiefs of Staff warned the armed services committee last week that the lack of military readiness across all branches was putting the military’s capabilities at risk. Their reports revealed, among other substantial problems, only three of 58 Army brigade combat teams are ready for combat, while fewer than half of the Air Force’s aging aircraft fleet is ready to fight.

Heads should roll, and the sooner the better.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: ‘Sell-By’ Dates On Food Items Will Be Replaced By ‘Use By’ And ‘Best If Used By’ Labels.

Per the Standardized Voluntary Regulations, stated by the two trade groups of the grocery industry, every manufacturer will be now be using only two labels- “use by” and “best if used by”, instead of the other 10 labels used earlier.

The “use by” label acts as the safety indicator, thus hinting to the customer the date by which the food is safe to eat and when it is not.

The “best if used by” label acts as description of quality by the manufacturer, which hints when the product should be consumed to get the best taste.

These dates, which will come from the manufacturer, actually points to one of the two – either the dates indicated to the store when the product should be stacked on store shelves, or suggest to the consumers when to consume the food item for best taste.

Good to know.

NO COMICALLY MISLABELED RED PLASTIC BUTTONS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS RESET: Tillerson Has ‘Productive Meeting’ with Russian Counterpart on First Trip

CIVIL WAR: Dem State Leaders Think Obama’s New Organizing Army is ‘Grade A Bullshit’

The nonprofit, which functions as a sort of parallel-Democratic National Committee, was founded to mobilize Democratic voters and supporters in defense of President Obama’s, and the Democratic Party’s, agenda. Instead, the organization has drawn the intense ire, both public and private, of grassroots organizers and state parties that are convinced that OFA inadvertently helped decimate Democrats at the state and local level, while Republicans cemented historic levels of power and Donald J. Trump actually became leader of the free world.

These intra-party tensions aren’t going away, especially now that OFA “relaunched” itself last week to protect the Affordable Care Act, boost turnout at congressional townhalls, and train grassroots organizers gearing up for the Trump era.

“This is some GRADE A Bullshit right here,” Stephen Handwerk, executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party, wrote in a private Democratic-listserv email obtained by The Daily Beast. Handwerk was reacting to news of OFA’s post-election retooling, which was shared “without comment” to the group of state-level Dems by Crystal Kay Perkins, executive director for Texas Democrats.

“It also to me seems TONE DEAF—we have lost over 1,000 seats in the past 8 years… all because of this crap,” Handwerk continued. “Let’s get through the next two weeks—but then we gotta figure this out and keep the pressure on. WOW.”

Others on the thread shared these sentiments.

Obama has always been about Obama, but now that he’s out of office, his fellow Democrats are free to push back.

CHARGE IT: U.S. household debt near record levels, Federal Reserve report says.

It hasn’t been this high since 2008, but the foundation might be more secure this time around:

The report indicates mortgages still make up the bulk of household debt, but student loans are now 10 percent of the total, auto loans are 9 percent of the total and credit card debt is 6 percent. Dollar amounts rose in each category in 2016’s fourth quarter. The rising debt indicates that banks are extending more credit to households.

A major difference between the 2008 and 2016 debt levels, the report said, is that fewer delinquencies were reported at the end of 2016. In last year’s fourth quarter, 4.8 percent of debts were regarded as delinquent or late in payment, compared to 8.5 percent of total household debt in 2008’s third quarter. There were also 200,000 fewer consumer bankruptcies reported in 2016’s fourth quarter, a four percent decline, compared to the fourth quarter of 2015.

That’s still a lot of debt for households to carry around.