THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FAKE NEWS AND FAKE FAKE NEWS IS THAT FAKE FAKE NEWS HAS TO MAKE SENSE: Fake ‘Fake News’ Edition of WaPo Hits DC Streets. “It’s Salvador Dali’s world and we’re just living in it.“

VIDEO: Rep. Ilhan Omar Claims Trump Is Blackmailing Lindsey Graham. “He is somehow compromised to no longer stand up for the truth.”

Whatever Graham’s orientation may or may not be, and I don’t know or pretend to care, these unsubtle gay smears from Democrats are as revolting as they are unsurprising.

COLLUSION: Top Mueller Officials Coordinated With Fusion GPS Spouse In 2016. “The Department of Justice’s Bruce Ohr claimed he repeatedly said information was not verified, risked bias, and had been obtained under political circumstances.”

A senior Department of Justice official says he repeatedly and specifically told top officials at the FBI and DOJ about dossier author Christopher Steele’s bias and his employer Fusion GPS’ conflicts of interest, information they kept hidden from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. These conversations involved high-level officials, including some who are now senior officials in the special counsel probe. And the conversations began taking place in the earliest days of August 2016, much earlier than previously revealed to congressional investigators seeking to learn the facts about the FBI’s decision to spy on the Trump campaign.

Testimony from Bruce Ohr, the demoted associate attorney general at Justice, informs a years-long partisan debate about the role he played in funneling information to the FBI from the terminated source.

Read the whole thing.

HEALTH: Flavored E-Cigs Help Smokers Quit Toxic Cigarettes. “Regulating flavors could keep people smoking.”

I don’t vape, but really wish vaping had been around during the three years it took to quit smoking and stay quit.

THEY DON’T WANT TO LOSE REELECTION AFTER ONE TERM LIKE THE DEM FRESHMAN CLASS OF 2008: Pelosi Struggles to Keep Dems United During Government Shutdown. “Moderate, freshman Democrats open to deal.”

Although as we saw in 2009-10, Pelosi isn’t afraid to offer up young Democrats as sacrifices to her cause.

TONI AIRAKSINEN: APA’s ‘Masculinity’ Guidelines Now Facing Title IX Challenge.

PRIVACY: Shareholders ask Amazon to halt sales of facial recognition tech. “They want to assess whether it could violate human rights.“

AN IMPORTANT REMINDER: Dear Shutdown Alarmists, the Economic Growth Already Happened. “Governments can’t stimulate economic growth with spending; rather their spending is only possible because of economic growth. Applied to the partial shutdown of the federal government, what limits government spending logically cannot limit economic growth. Figure that if there were a permanent cessation of a quarter of federal activity, the result would be trillions worth of extra resources for private actors to put to work.”

A man can dream.

CYBERSECURITY; Monster 773 million-record breach list contains plaintext passwords.

COMMUNIST FRONT CORPORATION: US pursuing criminal charges against Huawei for alleged theft of trade secrets.

ONLINE POLLS ARE MEANGINLESS EVEN WITHOUT STUNTS LIKE THIS: Michael Cohen says he paid tech firm to rig online polls ‘at the direction of’ Trump.

Rigging an online poll is like rigging the results of my World’s Greatest Dad coffee mug.

DOWN BUT NOT OUT: Four Americans Killed in Suicide Bombing in Syria. Has ISIS Really Been Defeated?

WHAT CRUEL NEW COLONIALISM IS THIS? Toto’s ‘Africa’ to play ‘for eternity’ in Namibia desert.

GREASED LIGHTNING II: The F-35 was once trounced by F-16s in dogfights, but it just proved it can out-turn older jets.

In exercises where F-35s got “trounced,” they were using earlier controller software which, due to the development process, purposely cut the jets’ performance envelope almost in half.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: No SOTU, New Caravan and Much, Much More. “Roughly 2,000 people from the Honduras are marching to the U.S.-Mexico border. I expect more and more people will be joining them as they march so we are looking at thousands and thousands of people lining up at the border. Some of the Mexicans who live near the border are not happy about this latest group of American hopefuls.”

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela children left behind as parents flee to find work abroad.

Yusneiker, 12, and Anthonella, 8, are eating better thanks to hard currency remittances from their parents, according to their grandmother Aura Orozco, who is grateful for the dollars that offer a reprieve from Venezuela’s annual inflation of nearly 2 million percent.

Still, she said, they miss their parents.

When they fall sick, they clamor for their mother. Though Yusneiker has adapted, Anthonella’s grades have slipped. The dark-eyed, curly-haired girl has clammed up and often answers her grandmother by simply nodding or shaking her head.

“To this day, she will lay down and if you ask her ‘what is wrong?’ she will say ‘I miss my mommy,’” said Orozco, 48, in her home in the hillside Caracas slum of Cota 905.

Some 3 million Venezuelans have migrated in three years, putting a growing strain on the country’s children as more parents are forced into the heart-wrenching decision to leave.

But if you’re opposed to socialism, it’s because you’re an heartless monster.

JON CALDARA: Progressives should embrace their inner-Archie Bunker.

If All in the Family were rebooted today, Archie would be a progressive. Love it or leave it.

I live in Boulder, the progressive town that buys billboard space to advertise its tolerance, acceptance and diversity.

I remember being in the checkout line at my neighborhood King Soopers. The gentleman next to me stared and said, “Aren’t you that Caldara guy?” I smiled, put out my hand, “Hi, I’m Jon Caldara.” His response, “Why don’t you just (expletive) leave.” To which I could only reply, “and miss all the tolerance and acceptance Boulder has to offer?”

Horrible people.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: U.S. Navy Moves Toward Unleashing Killer Robot Ships.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Is ‘Acceptable Loss’ More Cheney Obsessed than ‘Vice?’ “This bizarre rehashing of the Bush years fuses silly geopolitics with sillier details.”

Narratives don’t maintain themselves, you know.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: The Secret Service Says Nancy Pelosi Is Lying.

DR. HELEN: The Gillette Ad: The War on Men Is a War on Trump.

PAULA BOLYARD: Oregon Could Become the First State to Require In-Home Surveillance of Newborn Babies.

NICE: USAA donates $15 million to Coast Guard families.

SPENGLER: Jordan Peterson, the Sacred and the Therapeutic. “A full 80% of Americans think that political correctness is a problem in their country, according to polling data, and a reaction against the excesses of the new Savanarolas has been gathering for some time. But why choose Dr. Peterson as the poster-boy for this reaction? I believe that his enormous and sudden popularity stems from his use of the language of therapy to attack the symptoms of a therapeutic society.”

BENJAMIN RUNKLE: ‘What a Magnificent Body of Men Never to Take Another Drink’: The U.S. Army and Prohibition.

On July 19, 1919, General John J. Pershing led the American contingent in London’s parade to celebrate the Allied victory in World War I. Behind him rode an officer bearing a large, silk, four-starred flag, followed by his chief of staff, his British liaison, and his three aides, the newest of which was Colonel George C. Marshall. Then, eight abreast at ten-yard intervals, rode thirty American generals, followed by the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) band, “Pershing’s Own,” leading the “Composite Regiment”, a select group of Regular Army officers and men – all six-feet or taller – chosen from the best U.S. troops in Europe. With at least ninety American and regimental flags in their ranks, the blaze of color was breathtaking as they marched across Westminster Bridge, through the Admiralty Arch, and up the Mall past the king and queen waiting at Queen Victoria’s Memorial. They conveyed a strong impression with their precision and sheer physical power, and Pershing called them “the finest body of troops I have ever seen in my life.” Britain’s Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, agreed, but ruefully lamented: “What a magnificent body of men never to take another drink.”

Not a legal drink, anyway.

Good history, well worth your time.