— Park City, UT

Now Fear This: While his travel and immigration ban is mired in court, President Trump says he’s going to sign a new national security order designed to prevent terrorists from entering the country, possibly as soon as Monday.
The administration still hasn’t announced whether it will appeal its case over the temporary stay to the Supreme Court, although Trump vowed to win. Trump told reporters yesterday on his way to his Florida retreat that there are “a lot of other options, including just filing a brand new order.”
Foreign Affairs: Trump is having a weekend of golf  with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, after assuring Abe that the US is a committed ally. He had been waffling.
Trump was fresh off the humiliation of telling Chinese President Xi Jinping that, after a lot of big talk, he accepts the “One China” policy that does not recognize Taiwan as an independent country. The president basically revealed to Xi that he’s a blowhard, weakening any position he may have had with the Chinese, who are tough dealers.
Also in the foreign mix, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is under fire after the Washington Post reported that, prior to Trump’s inauguration,  Flynn had conversations with the Russian ambassador to Washington about US economic sanctions on Russia. It was previously reported, but Flynn lied and said it never happened. Vice President Pence backed him up.
Flynn is a retired Army lieutenant general who was fired by the Obama administration.
It’s illegal for private citizens — which Flynn was at the time — to have diplomatic conversations with foreign powers. A NY Times editorial says, “Mr.  Flynn’s underhanded, possibly illegal message was that the Obama administration was Russia’s adversary, and that would change under Mr. Trump and that any sanctions could be undone. The result seems to be that Russia decided not to retaliate with its own sanctions.”
Kremlinology: Trump’s close counselor Kellyanne Conway has hired her own chief of staff, indicating she has a growing influence with the president. She has what are called “walk-in” privileges to the Oval Office. — Trump rejected Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s choice to be number two at the State Department. Tillerson wanted to appoint former deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams, who was convicted years ago of withholding information in the Iran-Contra scandal under President Reagan, and was pardoned by President Bush the first.
Hands Off: Ford Motors announced that it is investing $1 billion in a company called Argo AI, an artificial intelligence startup. Ford evidently is looking to get on board with self-driving cars. Part of Ford’s strategy is to move from its dependence on making cars to becoming a “mobility services” company with investments in ride sharing services, for instance, that are cutting into car sales.
Beached: Rescuers in New Zealand managed to refloat about 100 of 400 pilot whales stranded on a beach. Most of the whales died. Another 240 whales beached themselves in the past 24 hours.
The Obit Page: Mike Ilitch, the former minor league baseball player who founded Little Caesars Pizza, has died at age 87. He also went on to own the Detroit Tigers and Red Wings. Little Caesars claims to be the largest take-out pizza chain in the world. “Pizza, Pizza.”
Fiction from Fact: Humorist Andy Borowitz wrote the following for The New Yorker: “Hinting darkly that ‘there’s something going on,’ Donald J. Trump complained on Friday that he has been treated ‘very unfairly’ by the people who wrote the United States Constitution.
‘If the Constitution prevented me from doing one or two things, I’d chalk that up to bad luck,’ he said. ‘But when literally everything I want to do is magically a violation of the Constitution, that’s very unfair and bad treatment.’”

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