CHRISTIAN TOTO: Is This the Taylor Swift vs. Joe Rogan Election? “Close elections can swing on any number of issues. Could 2024 come down to two pop culture superstars?”

EVEN MORE CORN, POPPED: A Fresh Setback for Fani Willis as Leaked Recording Emerges.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE BUT FACEBOOK WANTS TO MEDDLE: ‘A Starting Point’: Meta Oversight Board Member Says 2020 Election Interference Was ‘Not Enough.’

In an interview with Wired published Friday, board member Pamela San Martín claimed that as the tech platform enters 2024, “even though we’re addressing the problems that arose in prior elections as a starting point, it is not enough.”

“Between the U.S. election [in 2020] to the Brazilian election [in 2022], Meta had not done enough to address the potential misuse of its platforms through coordinated campaigns, people organizing, or using bots on the platforms to convey a message to destabilize a country, to create a lack of trust or confidence on electoral processes,” she added.

Really? With the encouragement of intel agencies, Facebook engaged in plenty of election interference in 2020.

Much more at the link.

CUE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN: Stacey Abrams’ Grievance Racket Is Running Out of Money.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Former Trump official critically wounded by gunman in deadly DC carjacking spree. “Mike Gill, who served as chief operating officer of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission while Donald Trump was president, was critically injured in the shooting and remained in the hospital Tuesday night, his family told Fox5 Washington DC.”

CORN, POPPED: Did Obama Just Get Trump Off the Hook? “Just when you thought 2024 couldn’t possibly get any weirder — yes, I know it’s still only January — a secret Barack Obama memo could prove the undoing of special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump.”

THIS SEEMS LIKELY: The Fed will cut rates fewer times and start them later than market hopes, according to CNBC Fed Survey. “Just 9% see the Federal Reserve cutting rates in March. Fifty percent see a cut in May and only in June is there a majority of 70% predicting that rates go down. Futures markets, meanwhile, place a 37% probability on a March cut and around an 84% chance in May. And while futures markets have priced in between five and six rate reductions this year, survey respondents, on average, see just a bit more than three.”

HER NEW LOW FOR NOW: Karine Jean-Pierre Hits a New Low.

CHANGE (IT BACK): GM To Reintroduce PHEVs In North America. “Let me be clear, GM remains committed to eliminating tailpipe emissions from our light-duty vehicles by 2035, but in the interim, deploying plug-in technology in strategic segments will deliver some of the environmental benefits of EVs as the nation continues to build its charging infrastructure.”

The charging infrastructure will improve — throwing enough tax dollars at a problem always solves it, they keep telling me — but EVs will still have weaknesses and limitations that hybrids don’t.

HMM: Trump’s Lawyer Walks Back Conflict-of-Interest Accusation in Carroll Case.

COMPUTING IN SPACE: It turns out NASA’s Mars helicopter was much more revolutionary than we knew.

“The processor on Ingenuity is 100 times more powerful than everything JPL has sent into deep space, combined,” Tzanetos said. This means that if you add up all of the computing power that has flown on NASA’s big missions beyond Earth orbit, from Voyager to Juno to Cassini to the James Webb Space Telescope, the tiny chip on Ingenuity packs more than 100 times the performance.

A similar philosophy went into other components, such as the rechargeable batteries on board. These are similar to the lithium batteries sold in power tools at hardware stores. Lithium hates temperature cycles, and on the surface of Mars, they would be put through a hellish cycle of temperatures from -130° Fahrenheit (-90° C) to 70° (20° C).

The miracle of Ingenuity is that all of these commercially bought, off-the-shelf components worked. Radiation didn’t fry the Qualcomm computer. The brutal thermal cycles didn’t destroy the battery’s storage capacity. Likewise, the avionics, sensors, and cameras all survived despite not being procured with spaceflight-rated mandates.

“This is a massive victory for engineers,” Tzanetos said.

Indeed it is. While NASA’s most critical missions, where failure is not an option, will likely still use space-rated hardware, Ingenuity’s success opens a new pathway for most science missions. They can be cheaper, lighter, and higher-performing in every way. This is almost unimaginably liberating for mission planners.

Exciting, too.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The UN Is a Great Starting Point for Adding to the Terror Watch List. “One of the main reasons that pro-UN American officials give for remaining part of the organization is that it does a lot of good humanitarian work, which is occasionally true. UNRWA, however, is one of those alleged humanitarian agencies run by the UN, and now it’s complicit in one of the most heinous terrorist attacks in history.”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: The Real-Estate Downturn Comes for America’s Premier Office Towers.

Owners of the most elite buildings escaped this fate for a while by convincing the market they had created a new class of office tower—one that surpassed the traditional Class A building at the top of the pecking order.

These landlords persuaded blue-chip tenants that reluctant workers would return if only their offices sparkled with lush roof decks, fully loaded gyms and food prepared by Michelin-starred chefs. Owners invested heavily in these properties, which were usually new developments with the best locations, views, air quality and modern designs.

But that strategy is losing steam as more companies have accepted the reality of hybrid work schedules and, for the most part, have given up on compelling workers to be in five days a week.

“The ship has sailed on full return to the office for most companies,” said Rob Sadow, chief executive of Scoop Technologies, a software firm that developed an index that tracks workplace strategies. “They’re not going to go from three days a week to five days a week by making their space nicer.”

That is one reason why few office developers are considering new ground breakings.

Good news for the remaining renters, bad news for contractors and their employees.

Plus: “Rents at the highest-end buildings have been falling, while the rate of leasing has been slowing.”

That means they haven’t found the bottom yet.

THEY DON’T HAVE TO PLAY VERY HARD: Venezuela, Like Iran, Plays Biden for a Fool and America Suffers for It.

SCOOP: Harvard’s chief diversity officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, appears to have plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large chunks of text without quotation marks and even taking credit for a study done by another scholar — her own husband.

Now she just looks like she’s copying from Claudine Gay.

DISPATCHES FROM THE SANCTUARY ZONES: Chicago Mayor Johnson Forced to Postpone Migrant Evictions.

CORN, POPPED: Bombshell Discovery Could Save Trump $83.3 Million in Carroll Case.

HMM: Biden campaign Achilles’ heel is Black voters.

Polls continue to reflect deep anger and frustration among Black voters. The president has admitted he hasn’t been aggressive enough on issues important to Blacks, who wonder whether their lives have significantly improved under his administration.

A recent survey conducted by the Atlanta Journal Constitution in the key battleground state of Georgia should put Democrats on notice. Biden won the state in 2020 with support of the urban vote but is now lacking substantial support among Black Georgians. Only 58.6% back him at this point. Meanwhile, 20.4% plan to vote for Trump, and 10% indicated they don’t plan on voting at all.

“We are an afterthought for Democrats,” Detroiter and longtime political consultant Adolf Mongo says. “Biden is going to have to come here and court Black votes. The days of relying on a relationship with two or three Black preachers to deliver the votes don’t work anymore for Black people because church attendance for most of these churches is down anyway.”

“For some reason, Democrats don’t like to spend in cities like Detroit, Cleveland and other urban areas,” he says. “But if they slip on this one, Trump will be back in the White House, and you will see what happens to our democracy.”

Don’t get cocky™, but I’d also lend this story credence since the warnings come from black Democrats who want Biden to win.

TO BE FAIR, HIS ADMINISTRATION IS INFESTED WITH TERRORIST SYMPATHIZERS: Biden STILL Appeasing Iran, Even After Its Proxy Killed Our Troops.

RACISM, STRAIGHT UP:

You won't see this clip on nightly news.

Nancy Pelosi suffers meltdown after the pro-Hamas crowd takes over her driveway, leading to a shouting match.

Nancy screams 'go back to China where you came from!'pic.twitter.com/bz6Miw6kKj

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) January 30, 2024

Assuming the audio hasn’t been doctored, this would be yuge news if Pelosi were a Republican. But she’s protecte(D).

CARPETBAGGING IS NOT A GOOD LOOK: We Are So Over Lauren Boebert. “The 4th is even more Republican than the 3rd (R+13 vs R+7 according to Cook) where she might hope to squeak her way back into office with a 1,000-vote win instead of 500. But first, she has to make her way past a crowded field of GOP competitors in the primaries — and that’s where I expect Boebert to crash and burn.”

WOEING: Alaska Airlines Plane Appears to Have Left Boeing Factory Without Critical Bolts.

Boeing and other industry officials increasingly believe the plane maker’s employees failed to put back the bolts when they reinstalled a 737 MAX 9 plug door after opening or removing it during production, according to people familiar with the matter.

The increasingly likely scenario, according to some of these people, is based partly on an apparent absence of markings on the Alaska door plug itself that would suggest bolts were in place when it blew off the jet around 16,000 feet over Oregon on Jan. 5.

They also pointed to paperwork and process lapses at Boeing’s Renton, Wash., factory related to the company’s work on the plug door.

At some point, Boeing’s lowered quality control is going to start affecting the company’s stock buybacks — and then management might notice.

ROBERT SPENCER: I’ve Been Identifying Ilhan Omar as ‘D-Mogadishu’ for Years. It Turns Out I Was Right.

DECLINE IS A CHOICE: Colorado has fallen behind in economic growth.

Up until recently, Arizona and Colorado had remarkably similar economies, with Colorado having a slight edge — from state GDP and growth trajectories to population and jobs. But something happened in Colorado around five years ago that set us on a different course. For the first time since the Great Recession, Arizona’s economy now outpaces Colorado’s, even when factoring in the impacts of the pandemic.

According to the Arizona chamber’s report, the shift in tide came after Colorado’s 2019 state legislative session, which sparked the rapid onset of new mandates, costs and regulatory burdens on the business community. As the report’s joint authors at the Common Sense Institute said, “the lesson of Colorado’s anti-business policy transformation over the past half decade shows that climates can change quickly.”

Since 2019, Colorado’s annual job growth slowed by more than 60%. Sectors that are sensitive to governmental regulation, such as manufacturing and energy resources, have been declining.

Most of the job growth we have experienced has been found in professional business services — an area that (not coincidentally) assists with regulatory compliance through human resources, accounting, and legal support.

Political pull and “regulatory compliance” assistance are the big growth industries wherever big government dominates. All three are classes of parasites.

YOU NEED TO CALM DOWN: The Biden Campaign Is Planning to Deploy a Secret Weapon to Re-Ignite Voters.