"President Obama, who this week has issued a flurry of environmental rules, is planning to unleash another set of 'midnight regulations' right before he leaves office that will cost Americans $6 billion.

"Obama has already broken all past records on creating federal regulations and red tape, and his new adds will boost the overall price tag to over $1 trillion."

"Contrary to the expectations of many people, President-elect Donald Trump has been filling his cabinet with serious, no-nonsense conservatives. The Left will confront appointees who would make Ronald Reagan proud. None may be more important than Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. ...

"Sen. Jeff Sessions knows where the alligators sleep, so he'€™s one of the best people to help 'drain the swamp.'"

"[L]ost amid the left-wing hatred of Trump and the conservative Never Trump condescension is that so far he has shattered American political precedents by displaying much more political cunning and prescience than have his political opponents and most observers.

"Key is his emperor-has-no-clothes instinct that what is normal and customary in Washington was long ago neither sane nor necessary. And so far, his candidacy has not only redefined American politics but also recalibrated the nature of insight itself -- leaving the wise to privately wonder whether they were ever all that wise after all."

"Under such undistinguished chiefs as careerists Mike Morell (2011-2013) and current Director John Brennan, the CIA has become a partisan, politicized agency that exists primarily to tell Obama what he wants to hear -- which is to hear and see no evil from the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the National Security Agency, which largely deals with signals intelligence, was badly stung by traitor Edward Snowden, who made off with bushels of secrets and decamped to Russia. Even the fiercely independent FBI came under intense political pressure from the Justice Department during the recent investigation of Hillary Clinton's e-mails.

"Several recent presidencies have foundered on wishful, willful blindness to reality -- Lyndon Johnson with Vietnam, Jimmy Carter with the Soviet Union and Iran, Obama with Islam. Others have suffered the consequences of faulty field work and institutional rivalry, such as George W. Bush in Iraq; by the end of the Bush administration, the White House was relying more on the Department of Defense than what insiders sometimes call the Langley Home for Lost Boys, so untrustworthy did Bush and his advisers deem the CIA that had badly burned them."

"Fake news is making news.

"Warnings are going up about phony stories raging across the internet and influencing our politics. One implication is that false reporting helped do in Hillary Clinton, and are another reason Donald Trump is not the legitimate president.

"Like so many things, fake news seems to be in the eye of the beholder. The leaked Clinton campaign emails, for example, may have been despicably obtained and strategically released, particularly if it was the Russians who purloined them, but they appear genuine. ...

"Many of those sounding the loudest warnings about fake news are also its biggest purveyors. Clinton recently lectured America about what she called an epidemic of fake news. Yet there may never have been a phonier story than the one she sold to the American people claiming an anti-Muslim video triggered the deadly Benghazi embassy attacks."

"Since the election, Democrats have really been down in the Trumps. Despite the tantrums and protests, it strikes me that Democrats must be okay with this state of affairs. Sure, they claim he's Hitler with a spray tan, and on some level they might even believe this. But short of establishing that half the country are total masochists -- the safety word is 'MAGA' -- why are they doing everything in their power to make sure he runs roughshod over them and wins so much he gets sick of winning? Because that's what Democrats are doing.

"If I wanted to discredit an entire political party, I'd do exactly what Democrats, grassroots and party bosses alike, are doing: whining and making excuses at every opportunity, right up to insisting there must be some fantastical way to overturn a decisive electoral drubbing.

"The first step here should be to shut up and do some meaningful self-reflection about why Democrats lost. Yet precious few smart and influential Democrats are actually doing this. To paraphrase Mark Twain, it's better to remain silent and be thought a loser than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

"The world has turned itself upside down. Only yesterday the liberals and the left (the 'progressives,' as they want to be called) regarded the CIA as the locus of evil, the gang that couldn't shoot straight, forever poisoning gentle minds with a diet of conspiracy and tall tale.

"In those gloomy days of the Cold War, where every day was seasoned with a sharp wind and a cold rain, it was the Democratic intellectuals who were forever chiding the rest of us that the Soviet Union was not so bad, the Russians just wanted to be understood and maybe deserved an occasional cuddle. It was the Republicans and other conservatives who were mindless rubes who imagined there was a mad Russian under everybody's bed.

"Now the CIA, in the liberal/left's fevered dreams, is the last bulwark of the republic, the last remaining hope to turn the 2016 election result on its head and deprive Donald Trump of the victory he won. The Russians, it now turns out, are just as bad as the conservatives said they were."

"'Miss Sloane', the gun control thriller starring Jessica Chastain, over the weekend posted one of the worst performances of the past 35 years for a movie in wide release.

"The movie pulled in $1,167 on average at the 1,648 theaters across the country it was shown in. It made $1,922,300, meaning it was the 11th-highest grossing movie in the country. It is number 79 on Box Office Mojo's list of Worst Opening Weekend by Per-Theater Average since 1982.

"That means 'Miss Sloane' earned less money per theater than 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies', 'Shaun the Sheep Movie', 'Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace', and 'Gigli'."

"Donald Trump had barely finished announcing his pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency before the left started listing its million reasons why Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt was the worst nomination in the history of the planet: He's an untrained anti-environmentalist. He's a polluter. He's a fossil-fuel fanatic, a lobbyist-lover, a climate crazy.

"Mr. Pruitt is not any of those things. Here's what he in fact is, and the real reason the left is frustrated: He's a constitutional scholar, a federalist (and a lawyer). And for those reasons he is a sublime choice to knock down the biggest conceit of the Obama era -- arrogant, overweening (and illegal) Washington rule. ...

"If Mr. Pruitt does this successfully, and on the way crushes the current president's legacy, Mr. Obama will have only himself to blame. His abuse of federal power helped elect a new generation of state attorneys general and Washington Republicans passionately devoted to a states' rights agenda. They'll be advising Mr. Trump not just on environmental policy, but on health care, labor policy, entitlement reform. Say hello to the federalist revival."

"[W]hat really makes Reid stand apart is his nihilistic pursuit of victory at all costs, with no regard for anyone else's good name, and certainly none for his own.

"The Senate and political Washington are worse for Reid's service. We'll be ready to regret his departure from Capitol Hill when the nation no longer has reason to regret that he ever arrived there."