OFFICIAL: No terror connection in Capitol Hill traffic stop.

The chase of the female suspect appeared to have followed a traffic stop gone bad. A police official briefing reporters said the investigation is in “preliminary stages” but there appears to be “no nexus to terrorism.”

“This incident appears to be criminal in nature,” the official said, adding that the standoff started as a “traffic stop.”

TOM KNIGHTON: Catholic Archdiocese in Mexico Says Aiding Border Wall ‘Traitorous’ “Of course, he takes no stance on Mexico’s own tough immigration laws.”

It’s different when they do it.

HMM: Shots fired near Capitol after driver crashes into police car.

A suspect struck a Capitol Police car and tried running over officers on foot, ABC News reported. The report said the suspect was taken into custody and nobody was hit by the suspect’s car.
“Everyone’s okay but someone tried to hit one of our guys with a car,” one officer told The Hill, adding that there were five shots fired.

“There is ongoing Police activity at Washington and Independence Avenues SW,” read a notice sent by Capitol Police to all congressional offices, warning staffers and lawmakers to stay away from the area.

“The U.S. Capitol Police and the House Sergeant at Arms are aware of and are monitoring the situation. Details will be provided as they become available and as the situation warrants.”

Developing…

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Is the US Producing Too Much Oil?

TRIGGERED! Conservative Canadian MP photographed firing ‘Nazi-era’ handgun.

JAZZ SHAW: Killing that online digital privacy rule will come back to bite the GOP.

We’ll get to the stunningly bad optics of this move in a moment, but it’s first worth keeping in mind how transparently thin the arguments against this rule are. The entire idea of “adding costs and stifling innovation” is laughable on the face of it. We’re talking about a rule which doesn’t impact the amount of data which is available and collected or any of the normal processes involved in providing internet service to customers. It simply forces the provider to proactively obtain the permission of the user (“opting in”) before all of their personal data can be scooped off and auctioned off for marketing and advertising purposes. The fact that virtually no sane person who doesn’t wish to be further bombarded with spam advertising or have their private online activity shipped around with even more chance of it being hacked would ever want to opt in for that tells you all you need to know.

And what data are we talking about? An editorial piece from Motherboard provides some of the chilling details.

Financial and medical information. Social Security numbers. Web browsing history. Mobile app usage. Even the content of your emails and online chats.

These are among the types of private consumer information that House Republicans voted on Tuesday to allow your internet service provider (ISP) to sell to the highest bidder without your permission, prompting outrage from privacy watchdogs.

Unlike Google, Facebook and other so-called “edge providers” (who can already see far too much of your data), the ISPs have direct access to everything that passes through their portals when you are connected to the web. And allowing them to gather all that data up, parse it, package it and sell it to marketers and advertisers is an intrusive nuisance at a minimum and a severe security risk in worst case scenarios.

I don’t find myself agreeing with the Democrats in Congress all that often, but Massachusetts Congressman Michael Capuano asked the correct and not terribly subtle question when he said, “What the heck are you thinking?”

ObamaCare is left untouched, but this the GOP manages to get through?

President Trump is expected to sign the repeal.

Dumb.

THE LAW IS THE LAW: Mass. Sheriff: Arrest City Officials Who Harbor and Conceal Illegal Aliens.

CIVIL TRADE WAR? A trade war is brewing inside the White House between rival camps.

Soon after President Trump took office, an executive order was quietly drafted to suspend talks with China on an obscure but potentially far-reaching treaty about bilateral investment.

After eight years and two dozen rounds of negotiations, the treaty terms were almost in final form. Pulling out after so much time and effort would send a clear message that the Trump administration meant to take a new and tougher approach to China.

But the executive order never even got to the president’s desk. It was quietly shelved, according to sources inside and outside the White House, at the behest of former Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn, now Trump’s top economic advisor.

Killing the order was a small victory for a White House faction that supports free trade and the global economy. But it was only an opening skirmish in what promises to be a long and bitter struggle over trade policy that so far is being waged behind the scenes in the Trump administration.

“Personnel is policy,” but like in any Administration, not all of Trump’s personnel support the same policy.

NOW THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: Domino’s Will Begin Using Robots to Deliver Pizzas in Europe.

Domino’s Pizza Enterprises Ltd., the world’s largest franchise licence owner of Domino’s Pizza, with operations in markets across Asia and Europe, has formed a group called Domino’s Robotic Unit to oversee the project.

Domino’s has tested ground-based autonomous vehicles for pizza delivery in Australia and New Zealand in 2016. In November it also delivered a pizza –peri-peri chicken– by drone in New Zealand.

“With our growth plans over the next five to 10 years, we simply won’t have enough delivery drivers if we do not look to add to our fleet through initiatives such as this,” Domino’s Pizza Enterprises Chief Executive Officer Don Meij said in a statement.

Domino’s ended its old “30 minutes or it’s free” guarantee because of the danger it created for its human delivery drivers — might robots let the company bring it back?

REQUIRED READING: Here’s the epic email suspended Christian sent his Muslim professor to challenge her flawed lessons.

I’m emailing you about the first essay in your Rollins class. You recently failed me with a 52% despite the fact that I followed all the guidelines listed, covered all the topics and asked you directly about the problem areas. I specifically asked you about sources in person as a result of your request that the paper be an analysis and not research. Everything I wrote came from personal memory and research or first hand experience in my travels with the government, personal visits with friends, teaching experiences or philanthropic efforts in the Middle East.

Quite frankly the grade you assigned to me exposes your a true agenda which is to silence me in class. As I told you before I’m not interested in speaking anymore. But since you’ve decided to carry a blitzkrieg out against me, I may have to speak up in regards to your extreme bias and not necessarily to the class but to the dean. You’re one of the most incompetent professors I have ever seen in my entire life.

It’s very clear you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. You may have a college degree but you belong in a reform school.

This kid might have a future writing columns for the New York Post.

ROGER KIMBALL: Is Mo Brooks Our Lord Brougham?

But I like Mo Brooks’s approach to the problem, which in some ways is similar to Lord Brougham’s approach to the evil of the income tax, in some ways akin to Alexander the Great’s solution to the problem of the Gordian Knot. On Friday, Brooks filed the “ObamaCare Repeal Act” in Congress. ObamaCare itself runs to thousands of pages. Brooks’s remediation runs one sentence:

“Effective as of Dec. 31, 2017, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted.”

C’est tout. Finis. End of show.

Will it work? Ask yourself this: Do our duly elected representatives really want to repeal ObamaCare? After all, it encompasses some 20 percent of the U.S. economy. Think of the opportunities for graft, for deal-making, for influence-peddling! Think of the opportunities for extending the reach of the government into the lives of the citizens! Doctors, hospitals, other health-care facilities, pharmaceutical companies, and manufacturers of medical equipment: all now transformed into wards of the state, i.e., subject to the whims and regulations of — yep, you guessed it — those very duly elected representatives: what an opportunity! Imagine if someone had told Lord Brougham that, one day in the future in a country pretending to be a democracy, the state required its subjects to buy health care insurance on pain of a special levy if they failed to do so!

Politicians may or may not wish to repeal ObamaCare; those that do also wish to replace it, i.e., promulgate some other “government program,” i.e., opportunity for graft, influence-peddling, regulatory imposition, etc. Mo Brooks, on the contrary, seems to entertain the deeply heterodox idea of simply getting rid of the Leviathan.

Imagine that — a law you could memorize over your first cup of coffee.

Meanwhile, read the whole thing.

BOOM: UK set to formally trigger Brexit process.

Giving official notice under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, it will be delivered to European Council president Donald Tusk later.

In a statement in the Commons, the prime minister will then tell MPs this marks “the moment for the country to come together”.

It follows June’s referendum which resulted in a vote to leave the EU.
Mrs May’s letter will be delivered at 12:20 BST on Wednesday by the British ambassador to the EU, Sir Tim Barrow.

If Rex Tillerson’s State Department would get busy on a bilateral free trade deal with the UK, that would give them a better negotiating position with the eurocrats in Brussels.

SCORCHED EARTH? Islamic State shelling forces engineers to evacuate Syrian dam.

Islamic State shelled positions held by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) at the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates River on Wednesday, forcing the evacuation of engineers who were on site to open spillways, a Reuters witness said.

Nobody was wounded by at least two explosions as Islamic State fired from the southern end of the dam, which it controls. The engineers are working to open the spillways to relieve the pressure of built-up water in the dam.

ISIS will at least try and destroy anything they can’t take with them.

THEY WERE ALL FINE BEFORE NOVEMBER 8: Barbra Streisand, Lena Dunham Shouldn’t Blame Trump for Their Own ‘Neuroses’

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Ohio School Plans to Offer Course on Fake News and Critical Thinking.

CUE DICES? Forget potatoes: New Texas vodka uses black-eyed peas instead.

UPDATE: Bad link, fixed now — sorry!

NEIGHBORS: Sixth-Grader Cited for Trespassing After Cutting Through Yards to Get to Bus Stop.

The winters I spent as a kid cross-country skiing through neighbors’ yards seem even longer ago than they actually were.

HMM: Border wall funding likely to be put on hold.

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, announced at a leadership press conference that Trump’s supplemental funding request will wait until later in the year.

He said the Senate and House leadership are very close to negotiating a bill to fund government for the rest of 2017.

Adding a supplemental spending bill requested by Trump to pay for military activities and a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border would complicate the talks and should be dealt with at a later date, Blunt added.
“We have the FY17 defense bill,” Blunt said, noting it is the top priority of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and could be used as a vehicle to pass bills funding other federal departments.

“All of the committees, the leaderships of the House and Senate, are working together to try to finalize the rest of the FY17 bill,” he added. “My guess is that comes together better without the supplemental.”

We’ll see.

GOOOOOOAAAAAAAL! Iceland’s shocking win over England evidently led to a record-setting baby boom.

BRIDGET JOHNSON: Questions About Nunes’ White House Visit, Canceled Yates Testimony Dominate Intel Panel.

WELL DONE: Dem Mayor Vetoes $15 Min Wage Bill.

The “Fight for $15” movement faced a setback Friday after Baltimore Democratic Mayor Catherine Pugh vetoed legislation which would have raised the city’s minimum wage to $15 per hour.

Citing negative economic impact of the legislation, Pugh said that the city would wait with other municipalities on the state of Maryland to act. The decision was not shocking, as the Mayor’s office has signaled that it was wary of a $15 minimum wage increase.

The council meets April 3 and could overturn the Mayor’s veto with support from 12 of the 15 members. It is unlikely that the council will veto the Mayor’s decision, with the Baltimore Sun reporting that the coalition of supporter for the bill crumbled.

In 2016, former Democratic City Council President Bernard Young warned that any initiative to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour could cost new jobs.

If common sense can break out in one of America’s bluest cities…

CHRISTIAN TOTO: 9 Sarah Silverman Tweets She Hopes You Forget.

DON’T KISS THE CHECKOUT GIRLS GOODBYE: Amazon Delays Opening of Cashierless Store to Work Out Kinks.

The store in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle uses cameras, sensors and algorithms to watch customers and track what they pick up, according to the people familiar with the matter. But Amazon has run into problems tracking more than about 20 people in the store at one time, as well as the difficulty of keeping tabs on an item if it has been moved from its specific spot on the shelf, according to the people familiar with the matter.

For now, the technology functions flawlessly only if there are a small number of customers present, or when their movements are slow, the people familiar with the matter said. The store will continue to need employees to help ensure the technology is accurately tracking purchases for the near future.

Some days you get the feeling we might just get flying cars before we get automated shopping or driving.

(Classical reference in the headline.)

HEAVY, METAL: Did Rammstein’s Mega-Hit Portend a Weakened Germany?

DAVID HARSANYI: Devin Nunes Has Absolutely No Reason To Recuse Himself.

Ostensibly, demanding recusal is framed as an effort to save the impartiality and integrity of the committee. In reality, it’s meant to create the impression that Nunes’ has done something unethical or illegal to defend Trump. It meant to proactively poison any investigation. Schiff offers two reasons for his position: 1 – Nunes shared information with the White House. 2 – Schiff got his information from someone in the White House.

Nunes has said this isn’t an inquiry into charges of Russian collusion, so what’s wrong with the House Intelligence Committee Chair sharing intelligence about the president with the president — and then letting the world know he’s done so? And, furthermore, why is it wrong for the House Intelligence Committee Chair to see classified information from a source at the White House? “If that’s where the information is, and the information is relevant, and it’s authentic, and it’s reliable, wouldn’t you go where the information was?” Nunes asked The Weekly Standard.

Even if we concede, for the sake of argument, that Nunes had been ethically compromised, does the information attained in the effort become less valid? Were the leaks that cost Mike Flynn his job any less persuasive because they were illegally obtained? Haven’t many Democrats been defending the need for whistleblowers to speak up in the name democracy? Schiff has no reason to give up the name of his source. If the NSA abused its power, and the evidence is legitimate, we should welcome the information. If not, Nunes’ credibility will be blown forever. Considering Nunes’ history, the media had no reason to assume the latter, which mirrors the concerns and goals of Democrats.

Nunes’ attitude all along has been an laudable “Apologize for what?”