The Political Class Murders Itself

The author begins by discussing when the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire and the Caesars ruled.

Bringing us to the present:

It is a good lesson to keep in mind as the politicians in the Imperial Capital wrangle over what could be a very dangerous scandal for them.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes declared Wednesday that members of Donald Trump’s transition team, possibly including Trump himself, were under inadvertent surveillance following November’s presidential election.

The White House and Trump’s allies immediately seized on the statement as vindication of the president’s much-maligned claim that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower phones — even though Nunes himself said that’s not what his new information shows.

Democrats, meanwhile, cried foul.

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the intelligence panel, cast doubt on Nunes’ claims in a fiery statement and blasted the chairman for not first sharing the information with him or other committee members.

Schiff also slammed Nunes for briefing the White House on Wednesday afternoon given that the Intelligence Committee is in the middle of an investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, including possible collusion with the Trump team.

The political class chased Nixon out of town for talking about the use of the FBI and CIA as weapons against political opponents. The rule in politics has been that the use of the IRS or the intelligence agencies was expressly prohibited. There could be no exceptions for obvious reasons, as it would give these bureaucracies dangerous power. That was the lesson of Hoover. If the CIA or IRS are allowed to use their powers to gather dirt on elected officials, then they can control elected officials. That’s the end of democracy.

Of course, there’s another reason to take certain weapons off the table in politics. That’s self preservation. In prior ages, where the winners had the losers killed, the challengers would always have as their goal, the death of the current ruler. That prompted the ruler to get ahead of the curve and have any potential challengers killed, before they could be any trouble. This was Stalin’s game and he just about gutted the the intellectual and political elite of Russia in the process. They still have not recovered from it.

That’s what makes this so dangerous. It’s now clear what happened. The Obama people started spying on Trump once he had the nomination or perhaps even earlier. They may have started earlier with an eye on helping the Republicans knock him off in the primary, but that’s not clear. They figured that Clinton was a lock so they were not careful about covering their tracks. The Clinton people are as dirty as it gets so they were not going to be ratting on anyone over it. If anything, they would expand on it.

This is where the Russian hacking story comes into the picture. Once disaster struck and Team Obama realized they had a problem, they needed cover, so they started with the Russian hacking nonsense. They would then claim that it was all an accident and they were just trying to prevent Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale from attacking our democracy! It’s also why Obama signed a retroactive Executive Order giving cover to the intel agencies for their domestic spying activities. They were creating a cover story.

The complication is that it appears that at least one person has perjured himself over this and that one person is FBI Director Comey. There’s no way to square his testimony with these new revelations. The best he can do is split hairs and claim he was not part of the spying effort. Of course, there’s no way to touch him as he runs the FBI. In fact, there’s no way to investigate any of the intelligence organizations. This is the point where many of the robot historians of the future will say the American political class murdered itself.

Unless there is some will to address it, and that’s highly unlikely, we now have a new normal where highly politicized intelligence agencies are used by both sides to discredit one another and discredit any attempts to reform the system. It’s no longer a game of rules. It is a zero sum game of power and that cycle only ends one way, with someone marching their army on the capital and taking control. As with Rome, whoever emerges as the dictator will not have murdered the system. The system will have murdered itself.

Welcome to London: We can say we’re not afraid, light candles and make hearts of our hands but the truth is that we can’t go on like this

This is our country now.

This is what we have become.

To this, we have been reduced.

Because all the while those forgiving fools in Brussels stood with their stupid hands raised in hearts to the sky, another mischief was in the making. More death was in the pipeline.

As the last life-blood of a police officer ran out across the cobbles, the attacker was being stretchered away in an attempt to save his life.

London is a city so desperate to be seen as tolerant, no news of the injured was released. No clue about who was safe or not.

Liberals convince themselves multiculturalism works because we all die together, too.

An entire city of monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Blind. Deaf. And dumb.

These people may have left their lands. But they have brought every tension, every conflict, every bit of fight here with them.

The Afghans hate the Somalias who loathe the Eritreans. As it was before, it is now. London is a city of ghettos behind a thin veneer of civility kept polished by a Muslim mayor whose greatest validation is his father's old job.

Son-of-a-bus-driver Sadiq.

I see him now, penning a missive about how London is a beautiful and tolerant city, how we are united by shared values and understanding, and how we will not be cowed by terror.

Sure enough, there he was, saying exactly that, just now. Fool....

The patriots of the rest of England versus the liberals in this city. The endless tolerance to those who harm us, (while the Home Office tries to shift the focus of public fear to white terror) — versus the millions like me who face the truth, with worried families and hopeless hearts, who feel the country sinking.

We are taken under the cold water by this heavy right foot in the south, a city of lead, so desperately wedded to the multicultural illusion that it can only fight those who love the country the most, blame those who are most proud to be British, and shout racist at the 52%.

Please, no hashtag, no vigil, no tea lights. I am begging you not to light up Parliament in the colours of the Union.

Because we are not united. We are wrenched asunder.

Waiting ...

Hey, rabbis: Stop dividing us in the name of fighting hate

Too many rabbis and other Jewish leaders are linking the threats against JCCs and other Jewish spaces — like the Brooklyn Jewish Children’s Museum — to President Trump. Sure, you stand against anti-Semitism, and that’s good. But you do it under the umbrella of groups like Get Organized Brooklyn, groups with openly political leftist aims. Your fight against anti-Semitism is part and parcel of your fight against the president. It shouldn’t be.

After all, if there were no Donald Trump, there would still be anti-Semitism, and as a leader in the Jewish community, you need to say so — loudly and often. It only serves to downplay the scourge of anti-Semitism to pretend it’s an invention of Donald Trump or his followers.

Think about it: The two people arrested so far for making bomb threats against Jewish centers have turned out to be nothing like we may have imagined they’d be. They’re not white supremacists from states you’d probably never visit. No, on Wednesday, an American-Israeli Jewish teenage citizen was arrested for making some of those threats. A few weeks ago, Juan Thompson, a Hispanic leftist writer, was charged with making some.

At a time when we need to stand together, you have to know you are fostering an atmosphere that is working against that goal. When you infused the Purim spiel with your opposition to Donald Trump, do you know that you alienated people? I don’t mean people in faraway red states — I mean people in your own congregations.

I didn’t vote for Donald Trump myself, and, in fact (as some members of your shuls could tell you), I tried my best to stop him. Ironically, people in your liberal New York world weren’t too worried about a Trump win; Hillary was a lock, they said. But I was worried.

Still, I’m a conservative, and people know that. So fellow congregants who did support Trump felt safe confiding in me about that. Yes, though it may surprise you to learn, these are people in your own congregations — people who voted for the man you so openly oppose. Your efforts to pretend these people don’t exist, or don’t matter, or are on the wrong side, don’t do anything to bridge any divides.

Indeed, it’s fair to ask: Is your purpose to make people feel unwelcome? Certainly your e-mails, filled with calls for vigils and pleas for peace, as if Trump were the great evil facing Jews (if not the whole world) and Jews have a duty to stand up to him, suggest that. But why can’t you live up to the values you write to me about weekly — most notably, tolerance for people with different points of view?

Yes, we need to take anti-Semitism and threats to our community spaces seriously. Being a Jew can never mean sitting back and hoping for the best. There’s a reason we’ve had cinder blocks outside so many of our Manhattan buildings, metal detectors at our doors, security guards at every entryway.

But this didn’t begin with Donald Trump, and it won’t end with him. Now is the time to admit this and to stand together in opposition to anti-Semitism.

It’s time for Jewish leaders to disentangle their justified concern for the safety of Jews from their desire for a different president. Weakening Jewish unity and politicizing threats to Jews won’t do anyone much good.

Moral trumpeters are legion.

For them, it is an arcane ritual, designed to alleviate them of guilt, of a peculiar form of original political sin. It also gives them hierarchy to compete against. The person who takes the most wealth from one person and gives it to another is the pinnacle of proper Progressivism, the greatest of their moral agents.

Who the wealth is taken from, and who it is given to, doesn’t really matter from any moral perspective (it matters in other ways), so long as the wealth is taken. You might take millions from a man who cured cancer, and give it to a bunch of barbarian slavers in the Third World, but all is good because the millions were taken.

The middleman gets all the credit, of course. Lesser Progressives must bow to his superior morality, that he managed to steal more from one to bribe another to do his political bidding. The taxpayer is insulted for not giving more of his wealth to the government. There is no gratitude. The media is most moral, and the guy living in the sticks least moral, for no matter what he might do for the poor, no one is there to see it, therefore it isn’t moral.

If a person helps another, and the cameras aren’t there to record it, it is as if it never happened.

Competitive morality requires that you trumpet your moral achievements to the world. Stephen Colbert shows us how it is to be done:

 

Here Stephen Colbert is telling us that we are not Christians, and do not follow Christ, if we don’t want to give our earnings to the government. This is designed to wound a genuine Christian, by calling him a poor follower of Christ, and elevate himself as a superior agent of morality at the same time.

Mr. Colbert would be well-advised to read Matthew 6:2:

Therefore when you give your alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

Stephen Colbert and his ilk are revealed for what they are: hypocritical trumpeters of their charity.

Comey Is Now the Most Powerful Person in Washington

One of the most important things we learned Monday from the House Intelligence Committee hearings on Russian influence of the 2016 elections was that the hackers may have wanted to get caught. FBI director James Comey said Russia's cyber intruders were "unusually loud," as though they "wanted us to see what they were doing."

That's counterintuitive. The Russians have officially denied taking active measures in the 2016 election. They have complained that the toxic environment in Washington has scuttled any chance for a reset in the relationship with the U.S. So if Kremlin proxies were meddling in the U.S., why would they want us to know?...

After Monday's marathon hearing we are left with more questions than answers. Why did Comey, for example, confirm an ongoing investigation into Trump's associates, but remain mum on whether the bureau would look into who leaked Flynn's monitored phone calls to the press? Why couldn't Comey shed any light on what James Clapper, former director of national intelligence, told NBC earlier this month? He said he knew of no evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Why did Comey opt not to inform Congress about the Trump investigation in the summer or fall, when he held out the prospect that the Clinton probe would be reopened?

We have a Comey problem.

  NUNES: FBI IS NOT COOPERATING WITH OUR INVESTIGATION INTO TRUMP CAMP SURVEILLANCE

NUNES: FBI IS NOT COOPERATING WITH OUR INVESTIGATION INTO TRUMP CAMP SURVEILLANCE

The FBI is not cooperating with the House of Representatives' investigation into the NSA's surveillance of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, the chairman of the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), said today.

During an explosive press conference outside the White House, Nunes told reporters that communications from the Trump team were picked up and disseminated within the government during the 2016 campaign. Nunes said sources within the intelligence community presented him with the information. He spoke to the press after briefing the administration.

"We don’t actually know yet officially what happened to General Flynn," Nunes said of how communications from Gen. Flynn's calls were leaked to the press. "We just know that his name leaked out but we don't know how it was picked up yet. That was one of the things that we asked for in the March 15th letter, was for the NSA, CIA, and FBI to get us all the unmasking that was done."

"And I'll tell you, NSA is being cooperative," Nunes continued, "but so far the FBI has not told us whether or not they’re going to respond to our March 15th letter, which is now a couple of weeks old.”

Democrats have been demanding proof of Trump's claims that he was wiretapped. But what happens if he orders government agencies to provide him with information ... data from the Deep State ... and the Deep State does not follow orders? What we have here is a mutiny ... a coup by the bureaucracy. This can't be allowed to go on or the republic will fall.

What Fake Hate Crimes Reveal About the Left’s Bubble

After fumbling around in court for nearly three months, Michigan resident Halley Bass admitted recently to faking a hate crime against herself in November, following Donald Trump’s surprise presidential victory.

Bass claimed that a middle-aged white man had attacked her with a safety pin in an alleyway near a downtown Ann Arbor movie theater. Since she was wearing an anti-Brexit solidarity pin at the time, she told the police that she believed the man had slashed at her because her pin indicated she did not support Trump.

Although it was later revealed that Bass has mental disorders and fabricated the incident to hide the fact that she had scratched herself, fake hate crimes have become common in the wake of Trump’s presidential victory. Several other incidents occurred in Ann Arbor alone—which is home to the University of Michigan—most notably that of a female Muslim college student who claimed a man had threatened to set her hijab on fire if she did not take it off. Police later determined that this, too, was a hoax. In an even more recent incident, a Muslim man made false bomb threats against Muslim students at Concordia University in Montreal on March 2.

We can't recall a "hate crime" committed by as assumed Trump supporter that was not a hoax.

The Democrat defense of wiretapping Trump

I get caught peeping at Party B in the window. My defense is that I was really peeping at Party A and Party B just happened to pop in. I am innocent! Right?!

You were just looking to see what kind of furniture they had so you are totally innocent.

.... and then I told all my friends what Party B did, what's wrong with that? they are my friends, and then some of my friends told the press what Party B did, but this is not my fault...

and one of my friends told one of his friends who told the Wall Street Journal, und the Wall Street Journal told the New York Times, and the NYT printed it. But don't blame me for that....

Cost of being indoctrinated at Wellesley: $63,390 per year.

H/T to Glenn Reynolds.


Wellesley profs offer to act as censors to keep students from any thoughts that are not Politically Correct.

The committee recommends that those inviting any future speakers “consider whether, in their zeal for promoting debate, they might, in fact, stifle productive debate by enabling the bullying of disempowered groups,” adding that the committee would be “happy to serve as a sounding board when hosts are considering inviting controversial speakers, to help sponsors think through the various implications of extending an invitation.”

Here are the people who have turned Wellesley into a $63,390 baby sitting service.

Diego Arcineagas

Beth DeSombre

Brenna Greer

Soo Hong

Michael Jeffries

Layli Maparyan


Fascist come in all sizes, shapes, colors and genders.

If Trump has been under investigation how was that investigation done? Pat Buchanan asks the questions that the MFM will not.

These are the questions I have been asking for some time.

How could DNI Director Clapper and CIA Director Morell say that no connection had been established between Trump’s campaign and the Russians, without there having been an investigation? And how could such an investigation be conclusive in exonerating Trump’s associates – without some use of electronic surveillance?

Did the FBI fly to Moscow and question Putin’s cyberwarfare team?

More questions arise. If, in its investigation of the Russian hacking and a Trump connection, the FBI did receive the fruits of some electronic surveillance of the Trump campaign, were Attorney General Loretta Lynch, White House aides or President Obama made aware of any such surveillance? Did any give a go-ahead to surveil the Trump associates? Comey would neither confirm nor deny that they did.

So, if Obama were aware of an investigation into the Trump campaign, using intel sources and methods, Trump would not be entirely wrong in his claims, and Obama would have some ‘splainin’ to do.

Is the FBI investigating the intelligence sources who committed felonies by illegally disclosing information about the Trump campaign?

Comey would not commit to investigate these leaks, though this could involve criminal misconduct within his own FBI.

Again, the only known crimes committed by Americans during and after the campaign are the leaks of security secrets by agents of the intel community, colluding with the Fourth Estate, which uses the First Amendment to provide cover for criminal sources, whom they hail as “whistleblowers.”

Indeed, if there was no surveillance of Trump of any kind, where did all these stories come from, which their reporters attributed to “intelligence sources”?

Have the NY Times or the Washington Post denied that they leaked information gained from intelligence sources?  Where did these intelligence sources get their information?  Has the NSA been busy Hoovering up Trump Team electronic communications?

When the Twain Meet...(Mark Steyn)

Scott Adams: Trump, Comey and Wiretapping

The Diplomad's take on the Trump's collusion with the Russians / Obama spied on Trump story

 Yesterday I opined on this topic using the Bret Baier's Special Report as the hook.  Today A.B. Stoddard repeated her sad lie that Trump was not the subject of surveillance even after the FBI Head Comey said the FBI had been investigating Trump since the middle of 2016.  Stoddard makes all the dumb blonde jokes come to life.

An intelligent former diplomat has another explanation that makes sense.  

The Dems claim that Trump is in bed with the Russians; Trump denies it and countercharges that the Dems had him under surveillance. We have here a problem. If the Dems have official intel on Trump's connections with Russia, how did they get it? Presumably from the official intel services which then it would appear were monitoring Russian contacts with Trump's people. If there was no surveillance order given to US intel, from where did the intel on Russian contacts come? The British is apparently the Trump answer. I have a more plausible one. I think there was surveillance of Russian activity, probably by the NSA, and it found nothing to show that Trump had contacts with the Russians; the Obamistas and the Clintonistas then made up the accounts of Russian interference. In other words, they lied. That's the most charitable explanation I can develop. There, of course, are harsher ones which I hope are not accurate, ones that would show, once again, Obama's misuse of the nation's intel and enforcement capabilities.

We can hope that the truth is found in this explanation because the alternative is much, much worse.

We may never know since double-dealing in the international spying game standard work and what you see is much like a fun-house mirror.  You can't believe anything you see.

French Police Search for Clues of Motive of Man Who Attacked Orly Airport While Shouting That He Was Ready to "Die for Allah"

Via Ace of Spades

Police questioned and then released relatives of a man shot dead at a Paris airport, as investigators sought clues on why he attacked an army patrol in an incident that has pushed security to the forefront of France's election campaign.

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said late on Saturday that the man, named as 39-year-old Ziyed Ben Belgacem, had shouted he was there to "die for Allah" when he tried to seize a gun from a woman air force member on patrol at Orly airport.

After throwing down a bag containing a can of petrol and putting an air pistol to the head of the soldier, he was shot three times by her colleagues.

...A federal judge in Hawaii issued an order that Trump immediately grant this Mystery Man US citizenship and also a pilot's license.

There is no fixing stupid.

Special Report Calls Trump a Liar

Friday night Special Report with Bret Baier featured A. B. Stoddard and Charles Krauthammer both stating categorically that Trump’s allegation of being spied on is false. Stoddard is the Liberal on the panel, altering with Mara Liasson of NPR as the balance of the “Fair and Balanced” claim on FOX.

Stoddard, a child of privilege and a member of the 1%, rolled her eyes and called Trump an “international embarrassment,” accused him of levelling false allegations and threatening America’s alliances and international order. She then instructed Trump on how he should act:

“The job [of President] requires something else. Every word matters, every action, the conduct of your staff, it’s not to be blown off.”

She longs for the day when the media set the national conversation and created the limits of permissible discourse. Which, of course, is exactly the reason that Trump is President.  The media and it's bastard offspring no longer rule the public discourse except in those dark Blue spots in a deep Red country.

The media is getting hysterical about Trump’s failure to retract  or hunker down when they attack. That's what they are accustomed to from Republicans and they are deeply angry that Trump is not following the script.

Charles Krauthammer, who usually provides center-Right analysis, stated categorically that:

“It’s a farce, you know, the idea that everyone in this town – the media – the agencies – the congress – are running around chasing their tails on a story that everyone knows it’s not true, but having to pretend that it might be because he’s the President when we know how it’s going to end.”

This is absurd.

There is absolutely no way that either of these media personalities know that Trump was not under surveillance and that his team’s conversations were not recorded. They can’t possibly know and are making an assumption based on nothing except the desire to believe that the Obama administration would never do that.  The same administration that weaponized the IRS to go after the Tea Party.  The same administration that created Fast and Furious so that Mexican drug cartels would have access to American guns, "proving" that American's ability to buy guns was a danger to the world.  The same administration that brazenly lied to get Obamacare passed.  An administration that appointed a guy who supported the Communist Party as head of the CIA and who who lied to congress about the extent to which the American people are spied on.

Stoddard and Krauthammer had three choices: (1) believe Trump, (2) use reason and logic, or (3) believe the Deep State. They have chosen the latter and have shown themselves willfully blind.

What’s impossible to believe that here was no surveillance – of Team Trump or people his team was speaking to.  If there was no surveillance we have to conclude that the press lied instead of passing along "leaks" from the Deep State.  We have to believe that they made up stories out of whole cloth and lied about those "Trump and his people are tied to the Russians" stories. It's possible, the mainstream press has done it before.  But it's usually done by one author making up stories like Jason Blair who fabricated a series of stories for the NY Times.  We are unaware of multiple media organs promoting the same story using the same unnamed intelligence sources where all the reporters are lying about what they were told.  The NY Times and the Washington Post are not running any stories backing off their earlier claims that electronic surveillance showed that Team Trump was in contact with the Russians. These papers are writing as if these revelations prove that Russia was behind the Trump victory.  Of course the stories prove no such thing, but they do prove that the intelligence community is feeding information to the press.  So both Stoddard and Krauthammer are accusing the largest American media organs of lying. 

It’s absurd.

Second, the explanation given by Judge Andrew Napolitano is logically consistent. His claim is that British Intelligence has access to NSA intercepts. He accused Team Obama of going to GCHQ to get information from NSA about NSA records of Team trump conversations ... intercepted by NSA. There is no accusation that GCHQ spied on Team Trump.  There has been no denial that GCHQ and NSA share information. The British denial is pro-forma and as dismissible as our head of intelligence stating that the NSA does not have records on Americans; a lie.

Why would Team Obama take that route? Simple, it does not leave legal trails, no FISA requests, no court orders. Spooks talking to spooks don’t leave a paper trail; but perhaps they should.

The reason that people like Stoddard and Krauthammer claim that Trump lied is the same reason that neither one of them believed during the campaign that Trump would be elected. He’s just not the kind of person they see in the role of American President. Even now, months after the inauguration, they are denying his legitimacy.  Stoddard refuses to believe a President who acts like Trump is real or legitimate.  She wants the President to act like her Central Casting's image of a president.   They deny he’s the President and deny his very rational assertions that his conversations and that of his aides were recorded and disseminated to the news media in an attempt to attack him and impugn his legitimacy.

Meanwhile, anchor Bret Baier fell all over himself to make it crystal clear that Fox News is trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and Andrew Napolitano.  The word may have come down from on-high - Rupert Murdoch - or it may have been a desire by Baier or the news department to avoid anything that could conceivably be reported by Breitbart, Limbaugh or any other Conservative organ.

If Fox and Baier wants to get the approval of the MFM they are going about it the wrong way.  The Left is busy purging its ranks and any attempt by Fox News personalities to appear impartial is doomed.  Just as in the Soviet Union in the 1930s the old Bolsheviks were tried and executed by a purer, newer strain.  The Left's defenestration of it's own leaves no room for cooperation with anyone to the right of Obama.

Too bad.  I like Baier and his panel, but news and politics is now divided into enemy camps in this country.  Especially in the news industry, that there is no longer any hope that a middle ground can be found.  At this point, every source is suspect and everyone is under suspicion for "deviation-ism."

Nothing is certain except what you know personally and the press' talking heads like Stoddard and - occasionally - Krauthhammer are talking through their asses.   But the nice thing about being in the press is you believed that, like a doctor, you simply bury your mistakes and go on as if nothing happened.

Unfortunately, the Internet never forgets.

The Revolt of the Judges

Glenn Reynolds:

They are setting Trump up for a Jacksonian moment. And he knows it, too, as his wreath-laying signals. This will not end well.

Ace of Spades:

If judges aren't going to accept that Trump is actually the President and has all the powers they were more than willing to concede Obama had (way more than willing, actually), then why should Trump accept that the judges have the powers they believe they do?

Josh Blackmkan asks:

".. whether the judiciary has decided to treat Trump as if he's not really president. He says that judges who seem to be taking their cues as to how to read Trump's public statements (in the most uncharitable light possible, of course) are practicing a new judicial doctrine which might be called "MSNBC deference."

The Liberals in the judiciary appear to question Trump's legitimacy by questioning his motives rather than judging based on the law.  They view his as fundamentally different.  If they are right, they may not understand that Trump will not accept their legitimacy if they do not accept his.   trump is different; he's taken on the entire bipartisan Ruling Class and so far he's winning.  The judges may be creating their own nemesis.

Funny

Ha!

CNN Goes Nuts Over No Car Seats In Presidential Limo

Part of Draining the Swamp is to get rid of many of the rules that force you to live the way that Liberals want you to live, and to shut them up when they scream and whine.  This is an example of hysteria.

Apparently, there aren’t enough important things going on in the world to prevent this from becoming headline news, with CNN devoting an entire story to the possibility that this event might have transpired. “Trump-Kushner children appear to board motorcade sans car seats,” read the panicked headline that was better suited to The Onion than to a legitimate news outlet. (I don’t recall CNN ever covering such incidents when they involve Chelsea Clinton hopping in a taxi with her young daughter and no car seat.)

Never mind that it’s legal to take a child of any age in a beat-up taxi without a car seat; but CNN seems to think someone should call Child Protective Services because the Trumps let their kids ride in the safest car in the world without car seats! Even CNN was forced to acknowledge the, ahem, singularity of “Cadillac One,” writing: “The Secret Service-driven presidential limousine, known as “the Beast,” is certainly safer than the average vehicle.”

You don’t say! Maybe that has something to do with the six-inch thick windows that can stop any bullet, the doors that weigh as much as the cabin doors on a Boeing 757, or the explosive-proof fuel tank, for starters? Never mind the police escort that rides along with the car at all times, and which shuts down all traffic wherever it goes.

The attention given to this incident highlights just how extreme America has become about car seats—even one of the safest cars ever built is still fair game for the car seat police—and how bad the helicopter parents of America have gotten in carrying out their work for the nanny state.

Horrid headlines on the health-care bill are about an alternate reality

From the NY Post.

Democrats and much of the media are screaming over the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that 24 million Americans will “lose” their health insurance thanks to the GOP-proposed American Health Care Act. In fact, the CBO numbers are guesses based on an alternate reality.

Back when they wrote the ObamaCare law, Democrats gamed the system to get happy predictions out of CBO — numbers that never showed in this reality. Naturally enough, the push to replace ObamaCare now yields some scary estimates.

Proposed bill would let bosses fine you for refusing a genetic test

CBO said the Affordable Care Act would trim the deficit; reality’s been the reverse. It said 24 million people would be enrolled in the exchanges by now. Reality: below 11 million.

And the agency is still projecting the exchanges to cover 19 million by 2020 if nothing changes. In fact, enrollment leveled off this last year; at best, it’s on course to stay around 11 million. More likely, the program has begun its “death spiral,” with soaring prices prompting plummeting enrollment.

Then, too, CBO says the repeal of the “individual mandate” — the fine for going without insurance — would drive 18 million people to drop their coverage by next year. But that includes 6 million of the 11 million on the exchanges — suggesting that more than half of those people only buy insurance to avoid the fine.

Much as we hate ObamaCare, we don’t believe that — the fines aren’t high enough. And even if CBO’s right, then those people don’t really want their policies, so they wouldn’t be “losing coverage,” but fleeing it.

CBO also says 5 million would quit Medicaid — even though premiums are tiny. Anyway, everyone who qualifies can re-join Medicaid the instant they need it, so those folks wouldn’t truly lose coverage.

Plenty of other CBO assumptions are just as dubious. For example, the agency guesses that the bill would push up exchange premiums — when Health Secretary Tom Price has already started the process of pushing them down, by junking Obama-era regulations that forced every policy to cover a long liberal wishlist, from “free” contraceptives to chiropractors and other alternative medicines.

The GOP bill isn’t perfect, but it’s a realistic first step toward moving beyond a system that’s on track to implode. The scary headlines only describe a fantasy world where ObamaCare is a smashing success.

When an organization has such a bad track record on prediction, why would you believe them , unless your desperately want to.