HOWIE CARR: Don’t Cry For Chelsea Clinton:

Last week, in the Los Angeles Times, someone named Ann Friedman laid out the former First Spawn’s credentials as a modern Democrat in good standing. Chelsea is oppressed, as opposed to, say, another first daughter with blond hair.

“Chelsea,” Friedman wrote, “like her mother, never gets a break — unlike Ivanka and her father.”

You don’t say. Now that I think about it, it really must be arduous being Chelsea Clinton. This L.A. Times op-ed appeared a day after it was reported that after a nationwide search, she’d been added to the board of Expedia, a travel company owned by Clinton-connected billionaire Barry Diller.

The pay: $250,000 a year in stock options, plus $45,000 cash. It’s her second no-heavy-lifting director’s gig at a Diller company — she also grabs $299,936 a year for sitting on the board of something called IAC Interactive. Nice work if you can get it.

Chelsea Clinton. How did her father’s aide, Doug Band, describe her?

A “spoiled brat.” In the WikiLeaks emails, Band said she had dipped into Clinton Foundation funds for “her V.I.P. wedding,” which he described as “not smart.”

But then, how could a graduate of such lofty institutions as Stanford, Oxford and Columbia possibly concern herself about such mundane matters as the provenance of money.

“I was curious,” she was once quoted as saying, “if I could care about (money) on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t.”

What exactly are Chelsea’s credentials? She made $600,000 a year “working” for NBC News alongside anchor-fraud Brian Williams. Somebody did the math on her on-air packages (put together by a producer, of course) and discovered that she was paid $26,724 for every minute she appeared on NBC.

Chelsea Clinton was born on third base and thinks she hit a triple — can I actually say that about a member of a protected class (Democrats) and not be brought up on hate-speech charges? Of course, when the exact same thing was said, and rightly so, of George W. or Jeb! Bush, it was marvelously droll and speaking truth to power.

This Ann Friedman can’t understand why the spawn of Bill and Hillary is so resented for winning the lucky sperm contest.

They’re grooming her for office, which means she must be insulated from criticism.

STOP: Uber slams on the brakes, stops self-driving car tests.

Uber has suspended autonomous car tests in the US following an incident in which one of its self-driving cars was involved in a collision in Tempe, Arizona.

The ride-hailing service’s tests in both Arizona and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania have been stopped following the high-impact crash, in which photos on Twitter reveal an Uber car on its side while another vehicle is behind, laden with dents, scratches, and smashed windows.

As reported by Bloomberg, the vehicle involved in the collision is a self-driving SUV, one of a fleet being tested by Uber.

An Uber spokesperson confirmed the crash, saying that tests have been paused while the ride-hailing service completes an investigation into the situation.

“We are continuing to look into this incident and can confirm we had no backseat passengers in the vehicle,” the company said. In other words, there was a driver behind the wheel of Uber’s SUV when the incident occurred.

According to Tempe police, Uber was not at fault and the crash was due to another car failing to yield, which led to Uber’s Volvo ending up on its side.

Despite the collision being ruled out as Uber’s responsibility by law enforcement, the company will not conduct any more testing until its own internal investigation has concluded.

I’ve found that the best way to avoid an accident is to imagine the stupidest thing each driver around you could possibly do in each instant, and then to count on them actually doing it. (This method prevented me, barely, from being forced into a concrete highway divider just yesterday by a careless driver in a black Nissan Murano.) But can Uber or anyone else create an algorithm for cynical imagination?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: UC-Hastings Dean: The California Bar Exam Flunks Too Many Law School Graduates. On the one hand, yes, California’s bar pass rate is absurdly low, and it’s that way purely as a barrier to entry, protecting California lawyers from competition. On the other hand, California law school deans didn’t care much until it started imperiling the flow of warm, tuition-paying bodies to their institutions. . . .

KELLY RIDDELL: Why the rape that escaped the media and national attention must not be ignored.

Rape stories, when they can be used to vault social-justice issues into the nation’s psyche, get exhaustive coverage and opining by the mainstream media, regardless of whether they’re even true.

But if a 14-year-old girl gets gang-raped while attending high-school by two illegal immigrants?

Crickets. That’s a narrative that doesn’t need to be advanced. Lord forbid, it may even help persuade some that President Donald Trump’s positions on illegal immigration may be correct.

The bias is almost too much to bear.

The news media’s ultimate power is the ability to suffocate stories they disagree with, and fan the flames of narratives they want to advance. And in many cases, those narratives are false.

Whoopi Goldberg said it best — there’s rape and then there’s rape-rape. What she left out is that it’s only rape-rape when it advances the narrative, and that’s regardless of whether it happened.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Princeton Seminary Revokes Award To Tim Keller Because Of His Traditional Theological Views.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Colossal GOP failure and not just on health: Why aren’t bills on infrastructure, tax reform and free speech lined up like planes on a runway?

CHINA DEBATES NORTH KOREA: According to Japan Times “…the party-state in Beijing is completely at a loss today in coming to grips with the North Korea problem.” The Trump Administration is coming to grips with North Korea. Strategic patience is over.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: PUTIN LOOKING SHAKY:

A week ago I wrote that “if Putin is the world’s puppet master he’s not doing very well. Russia’s economy has been in crisis since 2014, with no end in sight. The Kremlin has been in the doldrums for two reasons: the continued decline in oil prices and economic sanctions imposed on Moscow for its incursions into Ukraine.”

Those trends continued and indeed worsened in 2017. Despite predictions the Trump administration was eating out of Putin’s hand the evidence was he would soon have his hand out unless oil prices rose and the US military buildup eased. “It is reasonable to suppose that puppetmaster Putin would prefer 1) less US oil production; 2) lower American defense spending; 3) a free hand in Syria; 4) lifting of sanctions,” I wrote “but there is precious little evidence he is getting any of it. On the contrary Putin is doomed if current trends continue.”

Today the headlines were dominated by news of unrest in Russia. “Hundreds of people were arrested across Russia on Sunday as protests erupted against corruption there, according to multiple reports,” reported Politico. Although Putin may well survive the opposition’s efforts to unseat him — what relief is in sight? Public discontent probably reflects elite discontent that in turn is a reflection of a declining GDP.

Putin’s a bad guy. But whoever replaces him will probably be no improvement.

LOVE TRIUMPHS: Huma Abedin Giving Pervert Weiner Another Chance.

You have to wonder if Abedin would be so forgiving if she were busy running the Clinton White House.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Well, as long as they remain married, they can invoke spousal privilege, so they’ve got that going for them anyway, which is nice.

MARY KATHARINE HAM is not here to entertain you.

PAYMENT DUE UPON RECEIPT: Trump Reportedly Handed Merkel a $374 Billion Invoice for NATO.

One German minister did not hesitate to qualify the invoice as “outrageous,” saying the intent was clear. “The concept behind putting out such demands is to intimidate the other side, but the chancellor took it calmly and will not respond to such provocations,” the minister said.

Although no one confirmed how much the total invoice was for, a calculation by the Times suggests the total was around $312 billion for the shortfall in spending and around $62 billion in interest.

I’m sure that, unlike Hillary Clinton’s infamous “Reset” button, this was not meant to be taken literally.

GOVERNMENT IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE THINGS WE DO TOGETHER: Rogue East Cleveland Cops Framed Dozens of Drug Suspects. “The Cleveland-area victims are among thousands of people who have been exonerated in cases involving police graft over the last three decades country wide, from California to Texas, and from Jersey to Ohio. In Philadelphia, more than 800 people have had their convictions dismissed. The Rampart scandal in Los Angeles in the late 1990s led to at least 150 or so tossed cases.”

CHANGE: Trump order to undo Obama emissions plan coming Tuesday.

President Trump will issue an executive order on Tuesday to begin undoing former President Obama’s rule on carbon emissions, Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt said Sunday.

“This is about making sure that we have a pro-growth and pro-environment approach to how we do regulation in this country,” Pruitt said on ABC’s This Week.

The order, he said, “will address the past administration’s efforts to kill jobs across this country through the Clean Power Plan.”

He has a pen and a phone.

HMM: White House Opens Door to Democrats in Wake of Health-Bill Failure.

Days after the House GOP health bill collapsed due to a lack of support from Republicans, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus brought up the idea of working with Democrats multiple times, leaving little doubt that the White House intended to send a message to the hard-line Republican flank.

“This president is not going to be a partisan president,” Mr. Priebus said on “Fox News Sunday.” He said that while “I think it’s time for our folks to come together, I also think it’s time to potentially get a few moderate Democrats on board as well.”

President Donald Trump could face hurdles in enacting his agenda if he can’t broaden his coalition, even though Republicans control both chambers of Congress. Markets have rallied since his election on the prospects that he would drive through tax cuts, boost infrastructure spending and cut regulations, giving a jolt to the economy.

The unraveling of the health bill last week calls into question how easily that broader agenda will be achieved, and could lead some investors to moderate their enthusiasm.

Why would the White House keep pushing on ObamaCare when there are so many other conservative legislative actions on its agenda?

ANDREW MALCOLM: The GOP’s Obamacare retreat: Another circular firing squad.

Coming one day after the troubled plan’s seventh anniversary, the legislative retreat appeared to be a major victory for minority House Democrats, though they did absolutely nothing to bring it about.

It will likely turn out to be a most compelling piece of evidence that the GOP’s current political dominance in Washington will not last long. Since 2010 the House staged dozens of symbolic Obamacare repeal votes, which they knew full well were futile as long as what’s-his-name had his feet up on the Oval Office desk.

Repeal was torpedoed by a rump pack of Republicans themselves who’ve shown a keen interest in policy-strutting but none in the actual teamwork of governing.

It’s worse than embarrassing. After seven long years of Obamacare opposition, Republicans couldn’t agree on what to repeal and what to substitute. Seriously?

To a candidate, Trump down to the smallest-minded GOP House member, made “Repeal and Replace” the premier political promise of 2016. Trump himself with characteristic emphasis promised it would be, “Immediate. Immediate!”

Democrats spent 14 months putting ObamaCare together and — this should be in a book called Legislation for Dummies marketed to Republicans — putting together the votes to get it passed.

It should also be noted that Democrats were perfectly willing to sacrifice their majority to get ObamaCare passed, knowing that they had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to concentrate more money and power in Washington.

The has GOP has shown no such dedication to its stated principle of returning money and power to the people.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: From the American College of Trial Lawyers, a White Paper on Campus Sexual Assault Investigations.

F.I.R.E. has more. I’m glad that good sense is beginning to assert itself here.

VIDEO: Bill Maher’s Classic Putdown of Islamist Apologists. “Every time some bomb goes off, before it goes off, somebody yells ‘Allahu Akbar!’ I never hear anybody go ‘Merry Christmas! This one’s for the flying nun!’”

Indeed.

IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED: White House fence jumper from Everett arrested again.

Thirty-eight-year-old Marci Anderson Wahl of Everett, Washington, was arrested after an alarm sounded about 2:15 a.m. Sunday. Officials say she scaled a fence at the Treasury Building, next to the White House. She was charged with unlawful entry and contempt of court.

Wahl was first arrested Tuesday after trying to jump the White House fence. She was charged with unlawful entry and released on her own recognizance after being ordered to stay away from the area.

She was rearrested Friday after officers saw her near Lafayette Park. She was released again on her own recognizance after a Saturday court appearance.

It doesn’t appear that the courts are wising up any faster than Wahl is.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, IT’S HARD TO GET GOOD HELP EDITION: SUNY-Buffalo Law School Dean Finalist Charged With Embezzling $7 Million. “The former UB Law School dean, Makau W. Mutua, resigned in 2014 [amidst perjury allegations in lawsuit by former professor].”

JOE BIDEN: ‘Do I Regret Not Being President? Yes’

ANDREW MCCARTHY: The Question Is Not Whether Trump Associates Were Monitored.

The reported intelligence collection efforts raise four separate questions that are too often conflated in the commentary:

1) Should the communications of Trump associates (all of whom are U.S. citizens, so far as we know) have been intercepted in the first place?

2) Regardless of whether the interception was proper, should the identities of the American citizens have been “masked” in order to protect them from, among other things, being smeared as subjects of government investigations?

3) Regardless of whether masking was called for, should the fact that the American citizens’ communications had been collected and reviewed in connection with investigations — presumably, intelligence investigations, not criminal probes — have been disclosed throughout the “community” of U.S. intelligence agencies?

4) Should that fact have been publicly disclosed, including in leaks to the media? (Spoiler alert: As my use of “leaked” indicates, public disclosure is a major no-no. In fact, it’s a felony no-no.)

Read the whole thing.

ROGER KIMBALL: The Art Of The Possible In An Age of Recrimination. “Why wasn’t Trump more upset about this? The chihuahuas were barking their heads off—Republicans can’t govern! Woof!—Trump is a loser! Woof Woof!—Trump’s entire agenda is in shambles! Woof Woof Woof! But there he was, Mr. Imperturbability.”

ILYA SOMIN: Gorsuch is right about Chevron deference.

Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s jurisprudence is his opposition to “Chevron deference”: the doctrine (first imposed by a 1984 Supreme Court decision) that requires judges to defer to administrative agencies’ interpretations of federal law in most cases where the law may be “ambiguous” and the agency’s position seems “reasonable.” In what is probably his best-known opinion, Judge Gorsuch denounced Chevron deference as “a judge-made doctrine for the abdication of the judicial duty.” He’s absolutely right about that.

Much more at the link.

CLAUDIA ROSETT ON THE UN’S PALESTINIAN-WOMEN SHAKEDOWN RACKET:

Any real remedy needs to start with cutting off the American money that helps bankroll this monstrous sham. And as far an anyone’s aim is really to help Palestinian women, it’s hard to think of a better place to begin than by doing everything possible to remove from their lives  — as well as ours — the pervasive and too often pernicious presence of the United Nations.

Faster, please.