THIS COULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED BEFORE SEVEN FAILED VOTES? Backroom Dealing May Save McCarthy’s Bid for Speaker.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China is expanding its Wenchang spaceport to host commercial and crewed moon launches.

THE WAR ON HEALTH: Whistleblower Exposes Coke’s Efforts to Paint Opponents of Sugary Drinks as Racists. “Means also alleges that the FDA funneled money to universities, as well as conservative and liberal think tanks, to claim that soda did not cause obesity. He also states that soda manufacturers have been ‘deeply embedded’ in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, of all places, which led to the concept that there was no such thing as “bad foods” only ‘bad diets.’ It also meant that in 2007, soda was kept in the SNAP government nutrition program.”

JUSTICE: Loudoun County Dad Arrested For ‘Trespassing’ At Local Public School Board Meeting Found Not Guilty.

HMM: Shocking Brand New Research: Testosterone in Total Freefall, May Account for Explosion in Transgenderism.

Previously: Testosterone: Going… Going… Gone! “More reliably, other researchers have implicated estrogen-mimicking chemicals, which leach into the environment from plastics (BPA). . . . It is very possible, even likely, that the feminization of society over the past 20 to 30 years is changing males, body and mind. It is very possible that the subliminal stress involved in sublimating one’s essential nature is producing less manly men.”

NOT NEARLY GOOD ENOUGH: Alena Buyx, chair of the German Ethics Council, warns against assigning blame for pandemic failures, would prefer instead “honest retrospection” & “learning” because that sounds much nicer.

Among the failures serving on the Ethics Council is its chairwoman, a medical ethicist and professor named Alena Buyx. Like Emily Oster, Buyx is an archetypal Head Girl – highly conscientious, deeply conformist, mildly intelligent, and totally bereft of all originality and independence of thought.

Also like Emily Oster, Buyx has decided that it would be better not to blame anyone for the hell that the Corona brigade has put all of us through. Her most pointed remarks to this effect come in a long and otherwise unremarkable New Years interview she gave to Die Zeit.

People aren’t generally in a forgiving mood about the biggest power and money grab in world history, nor should they be.

SO STOP SENDING SO MANY SQUISHES TO WASHINGTON: A Significant Majority of Republican Voters Agree With the GOP Rebels.

GARBAGE PERSON, GARBAGE TAKE: Cori Bush says black House Speaker nominee Byron Donalds is a ‘prop’ ‘upholding and perpetuating white supremacy.’ “The comments from Bush come as, for the first time, 2 black people were nominated for Speaker of the House, with House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries being the other. Republicans who oppose nominee Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) nominated Donalds (R-Fla) as their candidate.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Biden Is Kicking Off 2023 by Pretending to Care About the Border. “It feels like Biden’s handlers are angling for a photo op to pimp amnesty under the guise of — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — ‘comprehensive immigration reform.'”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Mortgage demand falls in December to the lowest level since 1996. “Mortgage rates have haunted the housing market into 2023. With rates above 6%, buyers continue to find homeownership unaffordable.”

When government spending and regulation are so out of control that the only way to goose economic growth is with easy money, it’s no puzzle what happens when inflation makes the easy money policy impossible to sustain.

What we need are deep and sustained cuts in both regulation and spending, but that’s at least two years off, if ever.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Who Is to Blame for the Hundreds of Russian Casualties at Makiivka?

THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT GAS PRICES MIGHT NOT RISE SO MUCH. THE BAD NEWS IS…: Oil Prices Fall on Concerns the Global Economy Is Weakening.

SOMEBODY REMIND GRANDPA NOT TO EAT THE BROWN STATINS: Biden Says ‘The World Is Not a Patch in Our Jeans.’

PAULA BOLYARD: Don’t Buy the Establishment’s Spin on the House Speaker Fight.

KEEP YOUR KIDS OFF SOCIAL MEDIA: How a child abduction suspect groomed his victim on Twitter.

IT WILL COME BACK UNDER A DIFFERENT NAME: MMT Is Dead. It Must Now Be Buried for Good. “We are all Keynesians because the government’s out of control spending has forced us to be. In the latter sense, we are not Keynesians because that spending has decimated our financial well-being. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is essentially an offshoot of Keynesianism in that government can spend ad nauseam and commensurately print money without any ill effect. With the historic inflation we are now experiencing, MMT has been thoroughly repudiated. MMT is dead–it must now be buried.”

ENDORSED: Dear Restaurants: Shove Your Damn QR Codes. “And while I’m ranting about things that infuriate me, having you rate your transaction when ordering at the counter, before you’ve even received your food, is so unacceptable that I always give them the lowest rating possible when they make me do that.”

FALLOUT: Japan’s ‘anti-Russian course’ makes treaty talks impossible – TASS.

Russia and Japan have not formally ended World War Two hostilities because of their standoff over islands, seized by the Soviet Union at the end of the war, just off Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido.

The islands are known in Russia as the Kurils and in Japan as the Northern Territories.

“It is absolutely obvious that it is impossible to discuss the signing of such a document (a peace treaty) with a state that takes openly unfriendly positions and allows itself direct threats against our country,” Rudenko told TASS in an interview.

“We are not seeing signs of Tokyo moving away from the anti-Russian course and any attempt to rectify the situation.”

Tokyo has gone more than 77 years without a formal peace treat with Moscow — I think they can wait a while longer.

WATCH: Fetterman’s Painfully Awkward Swearing-in Renews Doubts About Ability to Serve.

DETAILS, DETAILS: A Mad Rush to Build More EV Factories, But Where are the Minerals?

If you hand out enough free money and incentives you can spur the building of nearly anything.

If people balk at buying the cars we will need still more free money to entice them to do do.

And then when the complaints come in there are not enough charging units, we will need to give away more free money.

Where we get the Lithium, nickel, cobalt, Manganese, and graphite to build all the batteries for the EVs without driving up the cost is a mystery.

Hint: There is no mystery. The plan, such as it is, is to price most Americans out of private vehicle ownership.

REP. MIKE GARCIA: ‘Day One of Being in the Majority Feels an Awful Lot Like Being in the Minority.’

NOT THE BEE: You’ll understand why big companies have gone woke after you read this fascinating thread about Coca-Cola and the DC Swamp. “We (Coke) will give you money. You need to paint opponents of us as racist.”

PAULA BOLYARD: Here’s the Line That Brought Down the House During Ron Desantis’ Inaugural Speech.

GARBAGE PEOPLE SHILLING FOR GARBAGE PERSON: Media Creates Trans Martyr Out of Death Row Inmate Who Stalked, Raped, Murdered GF.

PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.

Rick Moran: The ‘Right Side of History’ Argument Is a Crock. “Every time you hear some left-wing blowhard tell you or conservatives that they’re on the ‘right side of history,’ you have history’s permission to tell them they’re full of crap.”

Matt Margolis: 5 Power Grabs Democrats Will Never Stop Trying. “Democrats didn’t just lose their majority in the House of Representatives in November; they lost their opportunity to secure their power in the federal government in perpetuity. With only a slim majority in the House, and a 50-50 split in the Senate, they knew they had a small window of opportunity, and while they failed, they showed us their hand, and we know exactly what they will try to do the next time they regain one-party control.”

Yours Truly: Verdun Turned Inside Out. “The Battle of Verdun has spent weeks dancing around the edges of my mind as I read about the mutual slaughter going on at the Battle of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine.”