MICHAEL WARREN: GOP’s game plan for undoing Obamacare.

It didn’t take long for Republican leadership in both houses of Congress to get over the shock of winning the election last month and start gaming out a repeal plan. The details remain under discussion, but House speaker Paul Ryan, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, and Vice President-elect Mike Pence (who is working closely with Ryan and McConnell on repeal) are already coalescing around a rough legislative framework. The plan might be summed up as: repeal, delay, replace. More precisely, Republicans plan to repeal most of the law, delay the implementation of most of that repeal for at least two years—and figure out what to replace it with in the interim.

It’s a legislative strategy adopted largely from the Heritage Foundation’s recommendations. The think tank’s health care experts Nina Owcharenko and Edmund F. Haislmaier authored a brief in November that advocated a four-step process that begins: “Maximize the reconciliation process for repeal.” According to Mitch McConnell, this will come in the form of an “Obamacare repeal resolution” on January 3, the first day of the new Congress.

Why start here and not a straightforward repeal bill? While such a repeal could pass the House of Representatives with a party-line vote, the small majority Republicans hold in the Senate (likely 52 to the Democrats’ 48) means there’s no supermajority of 60 to override an almost-certain Democratic filibuster. So the GOP plans to repeal Obamacare the same way Democrats passed it: through budget reconciliation, because Senate rules limit debate (and thereby avoid the filibuster threat) on budget legislation.

This process, however, also limits what Republicans can repeal.

Read the whole thing, although it did leave me with one nagging question: ObamaCare was passed in its entirety via reconciliation, so I don’t understand why it can’t be repealed in its entirety via reconciliation.

CAMPUS TRUMP SUPPORTERS PUNCHING BACK AGAINST BIAS AND DOUBLE STANDARDS:

Conservative students who voted for Mr. Trump say that even though their candidate won, their views are not respected. Some are adopting the language of the left, saying they need a “safe space” to express their opinions — a twist resented by left-leaning protesters.

Administrators are struggling to maintain a balance between political factions. But some college presidents have entered the fray with statements that seem more sympathetic to the left, in some cases provoking a backlash. . . .

For conservative students like Ms. Deletka, the messages from university officials, seemingly assuming that everyone on campus was upset about the election result, were particularly offensive. . . .

Ms. Delekta described how she had been offended when a classmate wondered why as a “white female,” she had not voted for Hillary Clinton. She resented what she saw as identity politics on campus.

“My identity is so much more than my race and my gender,” Ms. Delekta said. “We’re all so much more similar than we think.”

She was able to separate Mr. Trump’s policies from his personal attitudes toward women, she said later. “I’m not electing a grandpa or a babysitter,” Ms. Delekta said.

Ibtihal Makki, a self-confident senior in a pink hijab who is studying biopsychology and neuroscience and is chairwoman of a student government diversity committee, objected to conservatives on campus saying they needed safe spaces to express their views.

Of course she did. And it looks like I was ahead of the curve here. And Pres. Mark Schlissel’s really blown it at Michigan.

And students should be punching back. Despite all the talk about “diversity” and “inclusion,” many campuses — Michigan clearly among them — are marginalizing and “othering” Trump supporters and conservative/libertarian students in general.

But conservative/libertarian students are members of the “university community” too and deserve to be treated with respect, and to have their political views treated as legitimate. Students should demand this from administrators, and alumni, parents, and legislators should demand it from universities.

LOUISE MENSCH: Saudi Arabia is just “Isis with an embassy.”

Also, thanks to fracking we don’t need their oil anymore.

JAYVEE: ISIS has flooded Europe with 1,500 highly-trained terrorists ‘ready to launch attacks’, chilling EU report claims.

An estimated 5,000 European ISIS fanatics went to Syria and Iraq and 15 to 20 per cent of them died on the battlefield.

Around 30 to 35 per cent have returned with “specific missions”, while the other half remained in the battle theatre – which amounted to between 2,000 and 2,500 Europeans.

This means as many as 1,750 may have returned, based on the percentages listed in the report which EU counter-terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove will present to EU interior ministers on Friday.

The report said there were two types of ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ returning.

It warned: “It is important to share information on returnees who are already back in Europe, those that are in transit and … (those) still in the conflict zone.”

“There are largely two categories of returnees: those in the majority who will drift back and those who will be sent back on specific missions, which are of most concern.”

Add this to today’s report of 100-200 ISIS jihadis in Trinidad , and the next couple of years look to be all-too interesting.

THEY HAVE LEARNED NOTHING, AND FORGOTTEN NOTHING: Pelosi Confirms Plan to Treat Sanders Progressives as Second-Class Citizens: After Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss, the only thing Democratic elites plan on changing is their party’s marketing strategy.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, TRUMP DERANGEMENT EDITION: Lawyer: Students were caught up in Babson College ‘witch hunt’ following Donald Trump win; Attorney says college report clears students of using racist, homophobic slurs. But Babson is still pursuing a double-secret investigation, apparently. Plus:

“(Babson) cannot properly punish Parker for celebrating an election, however unwelcome that celebration or how people ‘experienced’ it. We are talking about fundamental First Amendment rights here; a college should be the very last place that indulges, let alone actively promotes, a witch hunt against students for celebrating the election of a President who disappointed groups demanding retribution regard as abhorrent.

“During that discussion, one of you said that you understood my point because you ‘wrote my thesis on the right of Nazis to march in Skokie.’ Respectfully, that is not what we are talking about here, and that such a comparison could be drawn by a Babson official indicates that something is severely out of control at Babson, and elsewhere, when it comes to this matter,” Robbins wrote.

Alumni, parents, and students need to push back against this sort of behavior — as does the Department of Education once the Trump Administration is in place.

Annual cost of attending Babson College: $58,692.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Second Amendment challenge to New York state stun gun ban.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Washington Post now relying on Badger Pundit to fact-check its articles.

GOING… GOING… South Korea President Park Geun-hye, country’s first female leader, impeached in stunning fall.

Once formal documents are handed over to the presidential Blue House later Friday, Park will be stripped of her power and her No. 2, Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn, will assume leadership until the country’s Constitutional Court rules on whether Park must permanently step down.

Park did not immediately comment, but she convened a Cabinet meeting for later Friday where she was expected to speak publicly. The hand-over of power prompted the prime minister to order South Korea’s defense minister to put the military on a state of heightened readiness to brace for any potential provocation by North Korea. No suspicious movements by the North were reported, however.

The Constitutional Court has up to 180 days to decide on Park’s fate. She will be formally removed from office if at least six of the court’s nine justices support her impeachment, and the country would then hold a presidential election within 60 days.

JAYVEE: ISIS in the Caribbean. Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

In a recent paper in the journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, John McCoy and W. Andy Knight posit that between 89-125 Trinidadians—or Trinis, to use the standard T&T idiom—have joined ISIS. Roodal Moonilal, an opposition Member of Parliament in T&T, insists that the total number is considerably higher, claiming that, according to a leaked security document passed on to him, over 400 have left since 2013. Even the figure of 125 would easily place Trinidad, with a population of 1.3 million, including 104,000 Muslims, top of the list of Western countries with the highest rates of foreign-fighter radicalization; it’s by far the largest recruitment hub in the Western Hemisphere, about a four and a half hour flight from the U.S. capital.

How did this happen?

I’m guessing that dismissing the terror group as “jayvee” for a couple of years and then taking our own sweet time on a half-assed effort at rooting them out didn’t help.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: American Dream Collapsing For Young Adults, Study Says, As Odds Plunge That Children Will Earn More Than Their Parents.

SELECTED NOT ELECTED II: Clinton blasts ‘epidemic’ of fake news.

Hillary Clinton on Thursday decried the spread of fake news online, calling it an “epidemic” that Congress should take action against.

“The epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year — it’s now clear the so-called fake news can have real-world consequences,” Clinton said during a speech on Capitol Hill.

Some Democrats have argued the spread of anti-Clinton fake news online contributed to her electoral loss to Donald Trump.

Emphasis added.

This is all about discrediting Donald Trump, and the First Amendment be damned. Besides, it isn’t like Democrats haven’t tried at least once in recent years to repeal free speech.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Trump should troll the Democrats by taking this seriously, then announcing he’s going to act against fake news, then listing all the bogus stories about him from the New York Times. . . . Or maybe the GOP Congress should invite Hillary to testify on the subject. How long before she smells the trap? I mean, normally when one has lost the Executive and Legislative branches to the other party is not the time to call for government censorship of political speech on vague and mutable grounds.

PARTY OF OLD WHITE PEOPLE: Dems attend Harry Reid’s portrait unveil and this hilarious photo happened. Spot anything?

NOT THE ONION: It Wasn’t Me: Obama Blames ISIS On Bush, Climate Change and the 2nd Amendment.

SOMETHING I DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT JOHN GLENN: “Glenn flew 149 combat missions in World War II and Korea, where his wingman and eventual lifelong friend was baseball legend Ted Williams.”

MEMORIES PIZZA: WHERE THE TRUMP REVOLUTION BEGAN? “I don’t know that I ever would have recommended watching a Milo video, but this one is genuinely informative, even moving. The interview with owners Kevin O’Connor and his daughter Crystal doesn’t start until the nine-minute mark, so fast-forward. They are gentle, kind, normal, small-town people. This interview really amplifies the horror of what the Social Justice Warrior mob did to them. It’s a relief to see that their business still thrives. Milo points out in the interview that the O’Connors have no problem serving gay clientele — they served him, after all. He also says in the interview that he believes the liberal mob descending on their heads is one of the events that shocked a lot of Americans into voting for Donald Trump. Trump was not a candidate at that point, of course; what he means is that seeing what the left can and will do to the little guy, all in the name of #LoveWins™, helped radicalize a lot of middle-American people towards Trump.”

Related: “Actually, ‘Love Wins’ Wants Hate to Win — It’s just another attempt to equate ‘good’ with ‘left.’”

BEN STEIN: They’ve Gone Insane: And hating Trump hasn’t made them any nicer either. “The media powerhouses and the morons on college campuses cannot accept that someone with views different from theirs will be president. They riot. They burn Old Glory. They stop speaking to me. This is exactly the opposite of how a free country should be run. . . . The real problem is not Trump. The problem is the big, spoiled, sulking babies of the left who cannot believe that America made up its own mind instead of following their orders. They are the control freaks, not Trump.”

Related: I accidentally slept with a Donald Trump supporter. Naturally, he was, well. . . : “He showed up at the bar, and he was super handsome. Like, really tall—six-foot-four or something absurd. We were wearing matching leather jackets. His Triumph Bonneville was parked outside. This guy looked badass.”