Good morning! If you get bored today swiping through normie, human social networks, give Moltbook a try. It's basically Reddit for our new AI overlords. Thankfully, some of the creepier posts about the clankers getting sad or conspiring against us meatbags may not be genuine. But … y’know, maybe start being more polite to your AI buddies. Just in case.

FINANCE

💵 Trump picks Warsh to lead central bank

If you also get annoying news notifications on topics you care nothing about, you may have seen the big news. President Trump announced his pick for Fed Chair on Friday, and banker Kevin Warsh is the big winner.

Kevin Warsh lost the battle last year to become Treasury secretary. But he may have won the war in the end by securing the more powerful, potentially longer-term gig as Chair of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. He won't get his name on money. But he will get to lead what Canada's prime minister just called "the world's most important central bank."

• Warsh previously served on the board from 2006 to 2011 during the financial crisis.

• As you might expect, he’s rich. But his wife, Jane Lauder, is richer. She’s a billionaire thanks to a lil family business started by her grandma, Estée.

The situation: Current Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s term expires in May. He was appointed by Trump in 2018 and given a second four-year term by Biden in 2022. There’s no limit to the number of terms a Fed chair can serve, and they’re often renominated by presidents of different parties. But Trump’s no longer a Powell fan, so he’s sending Powell off to a nice, roomy bank upstate.

• Technically, Powell is also serving a 14-year term on the Board of Governors that he leads.

• That doesn’t expire until 2026. But most chairs retire when their time in charge ends.

Why does this matter? The Federal Reserve has a side gig of regulating banks, but its main job is monetary policy. If the Fed were a business, its product would be the U.S. dollar. Decisions made by the Federal Reserve help set the interest rates we all pay for our cars, homes, and DoorDash orders.

• The Treasury prints the actual cash, but the Fed has major control over the money supply (the total amount of dollars floating around out there).

• They do that with financial wizardry that often involves buying government bonds from banks and clicking a magic little “up” arrow on the bank’s Fed account.

Confirmation: To take the job, Warsh will need the Senate’s approval. Republicans are in charge there, and Fed chairs usually win big bipartisan majorities. But some Republican senators aren't thrilled with Trump's Department of Justice criminal investigation of Powell. Banking Committee chair Thom Thillis says he’ll block a vote on Warsh until the Powell situation is resolved.

GOVERNMENT

💧 At a meeting with seven governors in his office in D.C. on Friday, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum stepped into the middle of a seven-state brawl over water rights in the West. On one side are the downstream states of California, Arizona, and Nevada. On the other are the upstream states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming. At issue? The Colorado River and who gets to use how much of its water. The river supports life for 40 million people in the region, along with millions of acres of farmland. But it ain’t supplying what it used to. And nobody can agree on how much to cut back or who has to do the cutting. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation manages water rights in the region and has given the states until February 14 to come to a new water-sharing agreement.

🏥 The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is about to begin a large reorganization effort. Secretary Doug Collins told Congress last week that employee and veteran demands are driving the reforms. He said the VA currently has too many layers, too many (non-hospital) regional offices, and generally too many chefs in the kitchen. His plan involves cutting admin staff but reportedly will not involve layoffs. Collins is, however, pursuing staffing caps, which appeared to cause members of Congress some concern. The previous idea, he said, of throwing more employees at the problems hasn’t worked. Instead, he wants more investments in the VA's actual hospitals, which are run by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA).

☢️ The Department of Energy (DOE) exempted many new nuclear energy plants from environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The reviews often run thousands of pages and take years to complete. The DOE says the NEPA process is redundant. Every reactor already undergoes extensive safety reviews at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The DOE oversees America’s nuclear arsenal, but the independent NRC is actually the primary regulator of nuclear power.

FIRST AMENDMENT

🍋 DOJ wants to send Lemon to the slammer

The news world erupted in fury on Thursday when the feds arrested Don Lemon, who, despite his name, is not an actual lemon, for taking part in a protest inside a Minneapolis-area church last month. Is this a brazen attack on freedom of the press? Or a dumbdumb playing a stupid game and winning a stupid prize?

Who is this guy? Don Lemon is a journalist who used to work at CNN. He had a primetime show there until 2022, when he was demoted to the morning slot. In 2023, he got canned for alleged misogyny.

• As is tradition with fired journos these days, Don’s now an independent newsman with his own Substack.

What happened? On January 18, a group of protestors stormed into a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota, because one of the pastors was associated with ICE. Church leaders asked the group to leave, but protestors refused.

• Don Lemon filmed the event from start to finish and entered the church alongside the protestors.

So what’s the problem? According to the Department of Justice’s indictment, Lemon and other participants violated the FACE Act. That’s a 1994 federal law that heavily restricts protests at two places: abortion clinics and houses of worship.

• Protestors are forbidden from using physical force to obstruct, injure, intimidate, or interfere with anyone at a protected location.

A few years back, Republicans accused President Biden of weaponizing the FACE Act against pro-life protestors. Now, a new president is in charge, and everyone’s switched sides on this thing.

Churchgoers say protestors screamed at them, screamed at their children, blocked them from accessing their now-crying children, and blocked them from leaving the building. One woman even broke her arm trying to escape.

The crux of this issue isn’t really about whether the FACE Act was violated. It’s about the line between journalist and participant. The DOJ says he was intimately involved with this event from the start, entered the church, helped terrorize churchgoers, and deprived them of their civil rights. But Lemon says he was there filming as a third-party observer and is protected by the First Amendment.

Which one is accurate? Who knows. But Lemon’s due to be in court again on February 9.

POLITICS

🛑 Welcome to Government Shutdown 2026™

Is anyone else starting to suspect that Congress doesn’t actually know what it’s doing? Less than three months after the longest government shutdown in history (43 days), they’ve done it again. Thankfully, it’s only part of the government this time.

The situation: Congress has already funded about half the government. Budget talks to fund the other half broke down late last month following the killing of Alex Pretti. Without an infusion of cash from Congress, the executive branch can’t operate.

• The bank accounts ran dry on Saturday, and the unfunded half of the government shut down. Unfortunately for travelers, that includes the FAA.

The problem arose due to a funding disagreement between the two houses of Congress. Both of them have to pass identical bills for the system to work.

• The House voted to fund everything for the rest of the fiscal year … and then promptly left town.

• The Senate did the same thing on Friday, but left one agency out. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) only got two weeks of cash.

Why? Senate Democrats refused to fund DHS unless they could also reform how it enforces immigration law. Republicans disagree and say some of those ideas will weaken the agency too much.

• The two-week plan is a compromise to keep things rolling while Congress works out the details on potential reforms.

Since the House was out of town, it couldn't pass the Senate's compromise, and the government shut down.

The solution: The House is back in town this week, and House Speaker Mike Johnson says he has the votes to pass the Senate's bill. If that happens, the government should reopen by Wednesday.

Future: If America’s most powerful nursing home can’t agree on DHS policy in the next two weeks, the department could shut down again. But the rest of the government should be good to go until the fiscal year ends on September 30.

Elsewhere in American politics:

1. Democrats won a big upset victory in a historically Republican Texas State Senate district on Saturday. Sure, it was a low-turnout special election. But a win’s a win.

2. The campaign arm of U.S. House Republicans — that's the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) — raked in $117 million in donations in 2025. TBD on how much the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC / “D-triple-C”) raised, but Team R narrowly beat ‘em in the Q1-Q3 race.

3. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D) is in deep. Following an indictment for allegedly stealing $5 million, the bipartisan House Ethics Committee concluded that, yes, she totally broke the law. Now, some House Republicans want to expel her from the House entirely.

TRIVIA

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was unsurprisingly angry late last week when news dropped that Trump administration officials had taken a meeting with a group of separatists from the Canadian province of Alberta.

Alberta is basically Canada’s Texas. It’s a big province out west that’s loaded with oil and constantly mad at Canada’s federal government and the more populous provinces back east. It’s home to a small but persistent separatist movement that wants to declare independence and secede from Canada. Unlike in the U.S., secession from Canada isn’t necessarily illegal. The province of Quebec nearly did it twice in the 80s and 90s.

Anyway, we’re getting off track here. The point of this whole (kinda wild, tbh) story is to serve as a very smooth intro for today’s question: How many provinces does Canada have? 

Hint: Find the number of U.S. states that border Canada. Subtract three.

BRIEFS

● President Trump, in his personal capacity, is suing the IRS and the Treasury Department for a cool $10 billion. He says they failed to protect his tax records when an IRS contractor leaked them in 2020. That guy was later sentenced to five years in prison.

● Panama’s supreme court ruled that a Chinese company’s contract to run the ports at either end of the Panama Canal is unconstitutional. The decision is a big win for President Trump’s efforts to cut Chinese influence out of the Western Hemisphere.

● An Ecuadorian man and his 5-year-old son are back in Minneapolis after a judge ordered they be released while their case works its way through the system. Meanwhile, another judge rejected Minnesota's bid to block a surge of ICE resources into the state.

● The DOJ dropped another 3 million Jeffrey Epstein docs on Friday. They’re bad news for Prince Andrew. And maybe the Clintons. They’re also embarrassing for Obama’s former WH lawyer. But the DOJ says included allegations against Trump aren’t credible.

● Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, blamed the West for Iranian protests and warned of a "regional war" if the U.S. attacks. Meanwhile, Iran and the EU are calling each other terrorists, and America’s Arab allies are getting spooked. Or are they?

● The Gaza Strip's main border crossing into Egypt is reopening today in a limited capacity. Israel has had the Rafah crossing shut since May 2024, purportedly for security reasons. The reopening is being coordinated with Egypt and the EU.

QUOTE

ANSWER

Canada is the second-largest country in the world. The place is humongous*, which makes it all the more surprising that it only has ten provinces. Here they are in order from largest to smallest:

1. Quebec

2. Ontario

3. British Columbia

4. Alberta

5. Saskatchewan

6. Manitoba

7. Newfoundland and Labrador

8. New Brunswick

9. Nova Scotia

10. Prince Edward Island

The northern half of the country has territories instead of full-on provinces. Since it’s basically a vast, frozen wasteland that makes Alaska seem warm and toasty, almost nobody lives there (none of them have more than 50,000 people):

1. Nunavut

2. Northwest Territories

3. Yukon

*Technically, if you exclude water and only look at land, the U.S. is actually a little bigger than Canada.