Watching the media trying to create a post-Trump bogeyman/woman is entertaining. Cratering ratings focus the mind.

— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) February 6, 2021

Ideologues refuse reality for the personal comfort of preconceived notions. Trump’s policies are bad because they hate him. Obama’s policies are good because they love him. Everything else be damned.

Biden’s Drive to War in the Middle East

Caroline Glick:

“…On Monday, Iran tested a new rocket. The Zuljanah rocket is a 25-meter (82-foot) three-stage rocket with a solid fuel engine for its first two stages and a liquid fuel rocket for its third stage. It can carry a 225 kg (496-pound) payload.

The Zuljanah’s thrust is 75 kilotons, which is far more than required to launch satellite into orbit. The large thrust makes the Zuljanah more comparable to an intercontinental ballistic missile than a space launch vehicle. The US’s LGM-30G Minuteman-III land-based ICBM for instance, has 90 kiloton thrust. The Zuljanah can rise to a height of 500 kilometers for low-earth orbit or, if launched as a missile, its range is 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) – far enough to reach Britain from Iran.

Israeli missile experts estimate that Iran has paid $250 million to develop the Zuljanah project. Monday’s rocket launch itself likely cost tens of millions of dollars.

Iran is in deep economic distress today. Between the COVID-19 global recession, Iran’s endemic corruption and mismanagement and US economic sanctions, 35% of Iranians live in abject poverty today. Iran’s rial has lost 80% of its value over the past four years. Official data place the unemployment rate at 25% but the number is thought to be much higher. Inflation last year stood at 44% overall. Food prices have risen 59%.

When viewed in the context of Iran’s impoverishment, the government’s investment in a thinly disguised ICBM program is all the more revealing. With 35% of the population living in utter destitution and food prices rising steeply, the regime has chosen ICBMs over feeding its people…

…On June 18, Iran will hold presidential elections. President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif will both leave office. All of the current viable candidates hail from the Revolutionary Guards Corps and they can all be guaranteed to abandon the JCPOA. So at best, the JCPOA’s remaining shelf life is four months.

Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, Malley and their colleagues all must be aware that this is the case. The fact that they are moving ahead with their failed strategy all the same indicates that they are ideologically committed to their plan and will stay with it even as it drives the region to war.

This brings us to Israel. During the Trump years, Israel and the US were fully coordinated in their joint and separate actions to undermine Iran’s nuclear program and its operations in Syria and Iraq. As a senior official in Trump’s National Security Council explained recently, “Working together the intelligence agencies of both countries were able to accomplish more than they could on their own.”

Obviously, those days are over now. And as Biden’s team makes its presence felt fully, Israel’s options for blocking Iran from becoming a nuclear power are diminishing.

When IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi announced last month that he had ordered the relevant IDF commanders to prepare operational plans to strike Iran’s nuclear installations, most commentators assumed his target audience was the Iranian regime. Others argued he was issuing a warning to the Biden administration. The former claimed he sought to force Iran back from the nuclear brink. The latter argued he was demanding the Biden administration take Israel’s positions seriously before it moves ahead with abrogating the sanctions.

But in the face of the Biden team’s strategic fanaticism and Iran’s race to the nuclear finishing line, it’s at least equally likely that Kochavi’s intended audiences were neither the Iranians nor the Americans. Instead, he may well have been telling the Israeli public to be prepared for what is coming. And he may also have been telling Israel’s regional partners that the time for joint action is now…”

Nevada governor touts proposal to allow tech companies to create local governments.

Ilhan Omar Kept Husband’s Consulting Firm Afloat: Campaign payments to her husband’s firm accounted for nearly 80 percent of its 2020 cash haul

CATCH-AND-RELEASE: Career Criminal Arrested in Deadly San Francisco Crash.

“…Let’s recap: While out on “supervised release” on a theft conviction, Lyons was arrested Dec. 6 driving under the influence in a stolen car. Within a month, however, he was back on the streets and arrested again for driving under the influence on Jan. 5. You might think that two DUI arrests in less than a month would be enough to put somebody in jail and keep them there, but this is California, where the “catch-and-release” policy turns criminals loose as soon as they’re arrested.

Remember, this is the state that elected Kamala Harris to the U.S. Senate. All the sane people left California a long time ago, and the entire state is now basically an open-air lunatic asylum, with murderous psychopaths roaming around looking for victims to rob, rape or murder…”

.@TheBabylonBee ftw pic.twitter.com/fzu1M8mDNc

— Nate Fischer (@NateAFischer) February 6, 2021

Secretary of Defense orders defense leaders to host ‘discussions’ with employees about ‘extremism’

FBI criminal complaint on Capitol incursion used Photoshopped 4-chan hoax picture as evidence

Thomas Lifson:

“…Just when you thought the FBI couldn’t fall any further, the Bureau utterly, hilariously, and luridly beclowns itself. In a formal document, a criminal charge. Using a Photoshopped picture from 4-chan, the reviled (by all people who abhor wrongthink) website where a wag substituted a lurid picture for the official portrait hanging on the wall of the US Capitol in the background of a shot of the Viking horn helmet guy and others who stormed in on January 6, 2021.

Seamus Hughes was the eagle eye who spotted it, though the arrow in his picture on the following tweet directs the eye away from the object of humor:

https://twitter.com/SeamusHughes/status/1357459933818720263

Here is a blurry enlargement of the key detail:

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