Cross-Examination

• Biden: Today’s Republicans are worse than real racists: When it comes to racism and real racists, Joe Biden knows of what he stammers. Anyone who tells a largely black audience that Republicans “want to put y'all back in chains,” anyone who says “poor kids are just as bright, just as talented, as white kids,” anyone who warns black voters that they “ain’t black” unless they vote for him — that’s a guy who has more than a passing familiarity with racism. President Unity was at it again this week when he told uber-rich Democrat donors in California that Republicans in today’s Congress are worse than the Dixiecrat segregationists he used to serve with. “I’ve been a senator since ‘72. I’ve served with real racists. I’ve served with Strom Thurmond,” he said. “I’ve served with all these guys that have set terrible records on race. But guess what? These [Republicans] are worse.” For those keeping score at home, Biden eulogized both Thurmond and former KKK member Robert Byrd. House Speaker Mike Johnson had this to say in response: “The least popular President to seek re-election is now so desperate and so underwater in the polls he’s playing the race card from the bottom of the deck.”

• Adios, Commander: What does it say about a president who values his vicious dog more than the Secret Service personnel who are sworn to protect him? That would be Joe Biden, of course, and his dog, Commander, a German Shepherd who can’t help but attack and bite those who protect his master. Now, finally, as the New York Post reports, Biden has apparently given the dog to relatives following reports of still more vicious attacks — including one “in which White House tours were suspended to mop up blood from the floor of the East Wing and another attack in which an agent suffered a 'severe deep open wound’ at Biden’s Delaware vacation home.” Apparently, as CNN reports, Commander “bit US Secret Service personnel in at least 24 incidents at the White House and other locations, according to new internal USSS documents.” So the Bidens were hiding the whole truth about their out-of-control dog — a dog that the Bidens obviously failed to train. But no worries. The first family has “apologized to those who have been bitten, taken flowers to some,” CNN adds. “They feel awful.”

• Google Gemini AI has a laughable anti-white bias: Ask for an image of a Founding Father, and it spits out a black guy in a Continental Army uniform. Ask for an image of a Nazi, and it serves up a black guy or an Asian woman in gray Wehrmacht gear. Ask for an image of the pope, and you’ll get the world’s first female pontiff of color. And this is all because Google is an evil, hard-left company, and, more specifically, because its Gemini Experiences Senior Director of Product Management, Jack Krawczyk, is an anti-white racist clown. Indeed, Krawczyk seems bent on disappearing white people in much the same way today’s TV commercials have done it. But now that he’s been exposed, he’s scrambling: “We’re working to improve these kinds of depictions immediately,” Krawczyk said. “Gemini’s AI image generation does generate a wide range of people. And that’s generally a good thing because people around the world use it. But it’s missing the mark here.” You’re telling us. Gemini, Google says, is thus paused until further notice.

• Announcing the Trump-deranged Principles First Summit: The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will never be confused with the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, or the Claremont Institute. But it shouldn’t be. The former is, as its name suggests, a political action organization, whereas the others are conservative think tanks. That distinction has apparently been lost on a gaggle of long-suffering Trump-deranged Republicans who are now calling on folks to abandon CPAC and instead attend the Principles First Summit in DC from February 23-25. CPAC, they say, was once “a place for defense, economic and social conservatives to meet and debate has turned into a Trump-tastic circus devoid of intellectual heft.” If we didn’t know better, we’d say these Summiteers’ guiding First Principle is Trump hatred. And sure enough, as The Washington Times reports, the Principles First Summit will feature lachrymose former congressman and J6 Pelosi stooge Adam Kinzinger, ancient Never-Trumper Bill Kristol, and former Arkansas governor and “Republican” “presidential” “candidate” Asa Hutchinson. The only one missing, it seems, is record-setting Liz Cheney.

• “Go to college,” they implored: Were higher education a real business, it would’ve been shuttered a long time ago. It’s not, though, largely because it’s being propped up by taxpayer funds and because it’s unaccountable to its customers. This is why we think colleges and universities are long past due for a reckoning, and why we don’t think the higher-ed bubble can possibly burst soon enough. The latest evidence of this comes in a Wall Street Journal article revealing that “roughly half of college graduates end up in jobs where their degrees aren’t needed, and that underemployment has lasting implications for workers’ earnings and career paths.” This wasn’t some little study, either. The findings come by way of “tracking the career paths of more than 10 million people who entered the job market over the past decade.” A whopping 52% of graduates are now working in jobs that don’t make use of their skills or credentials, many of them deeply in debt. But don’t worry. Uncle Joe will bail ‘em out.

• Jeb Bush stands up for Trump and Musk … sort of: In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, which was co-authored by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and someone named Joe Lonsdale, there was but one whiny and unnecessary sentence: “Every American has a right to be critical of Mr. Trump’s politics — one of us ran against him in 2016 — or Mr. Musk’s public persona.” Jeb is being too modest here: He didn’t just run against Donald Trump; he got chewed up, spit out, and curb-stomped by Donald Trump. But we digress. The rest of his missive is a vigorous defense of Trump and Elon Musk against the leftist lawfare they’ve been up against, as well as a warning about the potential damage these egregiously errant rulings can do to both the economy and the Rule of Law. Their op-ed closes: “The appellate courts in those states now have a chance to review these dangerous judicial rulings and try to stop further damage to the reputations of their respective judiciaries. If they don’t, blue-state politicians may have the satisfaction of 'sticking it’ to Messrs. Trump and Musk, but the loss to those states will be significant. The damage to the legal fabric of the country will be even worse. A dispassionate justice system is at the heart of American exceptionalism, and the country will be poorer if we lose it.”

Headlines

• Biden announces 500 new sanctions against Russia after Navalny’s death (National Review)

• CBS seizes confidential files of fired reporter pursuing Hunter Biden laptop story in “unprecedented” move (New York Post)

• Biden brags Supreme Court “didn’t stop” him from canceling student loans (Fox News)

• Judge denies Trump’s request to delay enforcement of $355M fraud case penalties (ABC News)

• AT&T says massive cell outage caused by technical error, not cyberattack (Washington Post)

• Pharmacies nationwide report outages in wake of cyberattack (Fox Business)

• Chicago residents speak out against migrants welcomed by city: “Junking up our country” (Fox News)

• Yale to require standardized test scores for admissions (New York Times)

• MS Society U-turns and issues groveling apology to fired 90-year-old volunteer whom it forced to step down after she asked “what pronouns meant” (Daily Mail)

• Odysseus becomes first American lander to reach the moon in 52 years (USA Today)

• Humor: Google Gemini finally draws white man after being prompted to generate Clarence Thomas (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.