ORANGE ALERT: The Supreme Courts yesterday agreed to hear argument on whether Donald Trump should be allowed on the Colorado primary ballot the same day Biden brought out his verbal guns and said Trump is a danger to democracy. “Democracy is on the ballot,” Biden said at a political rally in Pennsylvania, “Your freedom is on the ballot.”

  Biden went on, “Trump’s assault in democracy isn’t just a part of his past, it’s what he’s promising for the future.” He said “Trump is now promising a full scale campaign of revenge and retribution.”

  Always claiming to be the victim of political persecution, Trump appealed to the Supreme Court the Colorado decision that says he is ineligible to hold office under the 14^th Amendment because he was party to the January 6^th insurrection. It’s a question the court has never confronted in its history. Trump and his supporters have said it’s for the voters to decide whether he can be president, not the courts.

  Speaking to Republican voters in Iowa, Trump repeated his promise that he would be a dictator only on his first day back in office. The criminally indicted Trump said, “Biden’s record is an unbroken streak of weakness, incompetence, corruption, and failure.” 

GUNMAN DOWN: Wayne LaPierre, who built the National Rifle Association from a sleepy organization that encouraged Americans to learn how to shoot into a political power that fought any effort to restrict ownership of guns or reform gun laws, resigned yesterday just a few days in advance of going to trial on accusations of corruption.

  “I’ve been a card-carrying member of this organization for most of my adult life, and I will never stop supporting the NRA and its fight to defend Second Amendment freedom.” LaPierre said in a statement. “My passion for our cause burns as deeply as ever.”

  No matter what the death toll might be, LaPierre defended the right of any American to own any gun, including those designed for fighting wars.

  LaPierre did not say his resignation has anything to do with the corruption case in which the New York attorney general claims that he used the organization’s accounts as a personal piggy bank, — a $40,000 shopping trip to a Zegna boutique in Beverly Hills as well as $250,000 in travel to places including Palm Beach, Florida, Reno, Nevada, the Bahamas, and Lake Como in Italy. 

  Under LaPierre’s leadership for more than 30 years, the NRA was an organization that made politicians listen, but since 2016 revenue has dropped 44 percent and membership, once nearly six million, is down to 4.2 million.

ECON 101: Despite Republican election year complaints and “perceptions” that the economy is bad, the US added a solid 216,000 jobs in December, a sign that the economy is still growing. It was the 36^thconsecutive month of employment gains.

  The economy has added roughly 2.7 million jobs over the past year.

COPYCATS: Having scored the resignation of two major University presidents — Harvard and The University of Pennsylvania — House Republicans are promising to dig deeper into what they claim is the “moral decay” at institutions of higher learning.

  But what goes around comes around. Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman was one of the people who campaigned for the removal of Harvard President Claudine Gay. Now, Business Insider reports that Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, an architect and designer who has a PhD in design computation from MIT, “stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars and technical documents in her academic writing.”

  Ackman posted on Twitter/X that “It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family.” 

AIR SCARE: Alaska Airlines grounded its fleet of Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft after a section of fuselage blew out on a flight headed to Ontario, California. The jet with its 171 passengers and six crew landed safely in Portland, Oregon.

  Passengers near the hole said a howling wind filled the plane and they could see out into the night sky. The airline said one teenage boy lost his shirt, but no one was injured.

THE OBIT PAGE: David Soul, the blonde and square-jawed actor who was half the crime-fighting duo of detectives in the 1970s television series “Starsky & Hutch,” has died at age 80. 

  The Chicago-born son of a Lutheran minister kicked around Hollywood for a few years landing small parts on television. Playing a fierce motorcycle cop in the Clint Eastwood movie “Magnum Force” got him the attention that brought the role of Ken Hutchinson, known as Hutch, alongside Paul Michael Glaser as Detective Dave Starsky. Together, the two rode into television fame from 1975 to 1979 chasing down criminals in a red Ford Gran Torino with a swoosh painted on the side.

  Also a musician, Soul had a No. 1 hit single in 1977 with his song, “Don’t Give Up on Us.”

THE SPIN RACK: The Supreme Court yesterday agreed to hear a challenge to Idaho’s near-total ban on abortions, which the Biden administration says is in conflict with a federal statute that allowed for exceptions. The Idaho law makes an exception for abortions “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman” but not to address other threats to a woman’s health. The Supremes allowed the law to go into effect while the case is pending. — Only a week after vetoing a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine ordered a ban on gender-transition surgeries for anyone under 18 at state hospitals or clinics. Such surgeries, which are still relatively rare, more frequently involve breast removal for young females transitioning to male. 

BELOW THE FOLD: In a token of good will, China said it would send a pair of visiting Panda bears back to the US, probably to California.

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