Top of the Fold

• Team Biden’s bizarre mask fetish: Rather than bowing to a federal judge’s ruling against a third extension of Joe Biden’s transportation mask mandate, the Biden administration is instead looking to double down. On Tuesday, the Justice Department issued the following statement: “The Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) disagree with the district court’s decision and will appeal,” though with the caveat that the appeal is “subject to CDC’s conclusion that the order remains necessary for public heath.” In other words, the administration will seek to determine just how much of a political liability it is to hold onto its power grab, while painting its decision as supposedly bound by “science.” Repeated reputable scientific studies have shown that masking had a negligible impact on the spread of COVID. Meanwhile, someone should alert President Biden to his administration’s stance. “Mr. President, should people continue to wear masks on planes?” a reporter asked him. “That’s up to them,” Biden responded.

• Biden plays politics with student loans: The Education Department moved a step closer on Tuesday to bringing about the radical Left’s “free college” dream. The DOE announced its plan to forgive some student loan debt via the expansion of the government’s lower-income-based repayment program. Doing so, says The Wall Street Journal, will allow “around 3.6 million people — nearly 10% of all student-loan borrowers — to receive at least three years of credit toward eventual debt forgiveness.” Like the Pell Grant program that has done little other than make college more expensive, the government’s low-income student loan repayment program, initiated in 1992, has done little other than expand the amount of student loan debt. The Biden administration hopes to use the issue of the massive growth of student loan debt, now sitting at nearly $1.6 trillion, as a political issue over which to attack Republicans. It’s similar to how Barack Obama used high healthcare costs to push for ObamaCare. Meanwhile, working-class Americans will be saddled with paying off trillions in someone else’s student loans despite the fact that they may have never gone to college or have already fully paid off their own college debt.

• Biden’s $6 billion plan to renovate aging nuclear power plants: In a move that finally admits reality, the Department of Energy announced plans to help save America’s aging nuclear power facilities with a $6 billion allocation, the largest-ever such federal investment in commercial nuclear power. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm explained, “U.S. nuclear power plants contribute more than half of our carbon-free electricity, and President Biden is committed to keeping these plants active to reach our clean energy goals.” However, with America’s 55 nuclear plants currently producing just 20% of the country’s power generation, it will take not just the renovation of older nuclear plants but the building of at least double that number of new nuclear plants to ever have a realistic chance of even coming close to a “zero carbon” pipe dream.

• Hillary Clinton’s team sought to sic CIA on Trump: In John Durham’s recent court filing in his case against Hillary Clinton’s former lawyer, Michael Sussmann, it is revealed that Clinton’s team sought to sic the CIA onto Donald Trump following its unsuccessful bid to get the FBI to bite on its false Alfa Bank Russian backchannel claim. Filings show that in early 2017, Sussmann was able to get a meeting with CIA agents in order to peddle the false “intel” that Trump was communicating with Moscow via a Yotaphone, a rare Russian-made cellphone. In that meeting, Sussmann shared DNS location data that supposedly indicated the Yotaphone had been noticed in Trump’s presence while he was in Trump Tower in New York, as well as when he was in Michigan. It was quickly determined by the CIA that the data Sussmann gave strategically omitted details that proved Trump had not been communicating with Russia. Team Clinton, of which Sussmann was a member, was not only involved in a plot to destroy Trump via a hoax peddled to U.S. intelligence services, but it now appears it was spying on him as well.

Headlines

• WaPo’s Taylor Lorenz slammed as hypocrite for doxxing “Libs of TikTok” creator (NY Post)

• Biden restores climate red tape in key environmental law, reversing Trump (Washington Post)

• Rollback of Trump-era EPA rule will add years to some projects and double costs (PJ Media)

• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis threatens Twitter with legal action in Elon Musk dispute (National Review)

• California public school enrollment drops by 110,000 students this year (Not the Bee)

• More states move to affirm parental rights in education (Daily Signal)

• Army chooses new rifle for combat troops (Washington Times)

• Russia captures first major city in eastern Ukraine as world grapples with war’s fallout (Washington Times)

• China signs security deal with Solomon Islands, alarming neighbors (Washington Post)

• Rare Pakistan airstrikes on Taliban show tension after U.S. exit (Bloomberg)

• Policy: Why we have record inflation and it’s probably not going away fast (The Federalist)

• Humor: Judge rules that airplane passengers no longer have to pretend to eat for five straight hours (Babylon Bee)

For more of today’s editors’ choice headlines, visit Headline Report.

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