THANK YOU FOR SHARING: ‘Some Weird Sh*t’: George W. Bush Shares His Thoughts on Trump Inauguration Speech.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Press Ignores Amy Schumer’s Toxic Brand.

The press protects Schumer. She’s an outspoken liberal who puts her time and money behind progressive causes. That means reporters would be less than eager to ask the kind of questions that should be explored given the Barbie switcheroo.

Like:

Is Schumer’s brand too toxic now for a mainstream project?
Does her aggressively sexual shtick conflict with a family-friendly franchise?
Did Schumer calling Trump voters KKK members hurt her perceived box office clout?
Who made the final call on Schumer leaving the project? The actress … or Team Mattel?

You know who asked some of those questions following the announcement? Readers of the very sites listed above. Here’s a sample from the Variety comments section.

You know who won’t ask them? “Journalists.”

BUDGETING: Air Force might ‘have to stop flying’ for six weeks.

Air Force budgets don’t have the money to pay for any U.S. pilots to fly in the last six weeks of the fiscal year, a top general warned Congress.

“So, the last month and a half, the entire Air Force would have to stop flying,” Lt. Gen. Jerry Harris told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee on Wednesday. “But because we can’t do that, it would start affecting units almost immediately, forcing their grounding, and that turns around our readiness program.”

That message is designed to jolt lawmakers ahead of a contentious fight over government spending, which is set to run out at the end of April. If Congress can’t agree on new spending plans, they will have to avert a government shutdown by passing a continuing resolution that extends current spending levels. That might appeal to Democrats insofar as it would help stymy President Trump’s spending priorities, but it would put the military in a jam.

President Trump and the GOP leadership ought to try shaming the obstructionist Democrats into action.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: How To Make College As Bad As High School.

WELL, GOOD: McDonald’s to Switch to Fresh Beef in Quarter Pounders.

McDonald’s began testing Quarter Pounders made with fresh beef in Dallas last year and later expanded it to a larger area of North Texas and to Tulsa, Okla., after a Dallas franchisee pushed the company to try it.

The burgers are cooked as soon as they are ordered so they come out hot and fresh. McDonald’s typically makes its burgers in advance and holds them in warming cabinets so they are ready when customers order them.

I pointed out a while back that the better-quality buns and veggies on the Quarter Pounder Deluxe had the unfortunate side effect of highlighting the poor quality of the pre-cooked beef. Nice to see the company is doing something about that.

Now if they’d just put the beef tallow back in the fryers…

THESE LOOK PRETTY GOOD TO ME: Healthcare Improvements Republicans Could Make. Here are the first three:

1. Price transparency and consistency. Require all providers (hospitals, doctors, etc..) to clearly publish their prices by service and by diagnosis in advance, physically and electronically, in both human and machine-readable formats.

2. Stop gouging the uninsured. Require that providers give people who are paying out of their own pocket “most favored nation” status – giving them the best price that the provider offers to any private insurer.

3. Easier approval for generics in the US – to create more price competition in drugs and devices, and bring prices down.

Read the whole thing.

TRANSPARENCY: House Approves Bill to Force Public Release of EPA Science.

Science is the unfettered pursuit of truth, subject to public scrutiny, debate, and peer review.

You don’t want to be against science, do you?

CLAIM: Trump’s Plan Won’t Reverse Coal’s Decline.

Possibly, but the point is that the free market gets to choose instead of politicians.

REMEMBER, HE’S THE SOBER ESTABLISHMENT, AND THE PRO-BREXIT POPULISTS ARE SUPPOSED TO THE CRAZY ONES: EU Boss Threatens To Break Up United States. Though it’s not clear how often Juncker is actually sober.

Well, to be fair, that’s nothing new for Europeans, as the quoted observations by Walt Whitman indicate. “There is certainly not one government in Europe but is now watching the war in this country, with the ardent prayer that the united States may be effectually split, crippled, and dismember’d by it. There is not one but would help toward that dismemberment, if it dared.”

ASHE SCHOW: Why Is It So Impossible For The Mainstream Media To Be Honest About Guns?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1421: More On A Hidden Cause Of The IRS Scandal.

RIGHT ON CUE: LGBT Activists Slam N.C. Democrat Governor’s ‘Bathroom Bill’ Repeal.

BREXIT: UK publishes ‘Great Repeal Bill’ plan to replace EU laws.

Unveiling plans to convert EU law into domestic law, the government disclosed that 12,000 EU regulations are in force in Britain. About 7,900 “statutory instruments” — government orders — have implemented EU directives. Some 186 acts of Parliament passed between 1980 and 2009 “contained a degree of EU influence,” the government said.

What a mess to unravel.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: More of the Education World Should Look Like This.

The traditional four-year college model puts all the risk on the consumer: Students borrow to make huge tuition payments, and may be forced into default if they can’t find a well-paying job after graduation. But a number of coding academies are experimenting with a different concept: The educational institution should have skin in the game. . . .

Cheaper alternatives to college with a guaranteed job offer? More of this, please. It’s not a serious liberal arts education, but then neither is most of the thin gruel served up at many four year, high-priced colleges. Ten months of code camp beats four years of ‘business communications’.

Indeed.

ED MORRISSEY: Deal reached to flush NC bathroom bill?

North Carolina, the first battleground of the bathroom war, may finally have found some grounds for a truce. After several days of negotiation between the Republican legislative majority and new Democratic governor Roy Cooper, the controversial House Bill 2 law will get repealed, and just within a deadline from the NCAA on championship venue awards. However, it’s not a return to the status quo ante, but the status quo ante ante, so to speak:

North Carolina lawmakers could repeal House Bill 2 on Thursday under a deal struck late Wednesday night by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and Republican legislative leaders. …

According to a statement from Berger and Moore, the bill would:

▪ Repeal HB2.

▪ Leave bathroom regulation to the state, essentially returning to the status quo before Charlotte passed a 2016 ordinance allowing transgender people to use the restroom of their gender identity.

▪ Enact a moratorium on similar ordinances until Dec. 1, 2020.

Readers will recall that the Republican-controlled state government passed HB2 in reaction to the city of Charlotte’s attempts to regulate bathroom access. Despite the above description, Charlotte’s city government had mandated that all public bathrooms, including those in private businesses, allow for transgender choice of access, a mandate to which many business owners objected. The state legislature passed HB2 and then-governor Pat McCrory signed it in part to reverse Charlotte’s action on transgender access, but also in part to create a uniform application of bathroom-access regulation. Under HB2, businesses could still have decided on their own to implement a more progressive access policy, but government did not force them to do so.

Allowing businesses to set their own policies so that customers might choose to do business with businesses which best suit their needs? Unpossible!

UPDATE: The deal looks real.

ED MORRISSEY: The Gorsuch Vote Will Show the Democrats Can’t Govern, Either. I’m fine with America being “ungovernable,” if people would just quit trying to govern us so much.

GEORGE WILL: End the Filibuster’s Power of Obstruction.

There was no limit on Senate debate until adoption of the cloture rule empowering two-thirds of senators present and voting to limit debate. This occurred on March 8, 1917 — 29 days before Congress declared war on Germany — after a filibuster prevented a vote on a momentous matter, the Armed Ship Bill, which would have authorized President Woodrow Wilson to arm American merchant ships. (He armed them anyway.)

In 1975, imposing cloture was made easier by requiring a vote of three-fifths of the entire Senate, a change the importance of which derived from what Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D., Mont.) did in 1970: He created the “two-track” system whereby the Senate, by unanimous consent or the consent of the minority leader, can set aside a filibustered bill and move on to other matters. Hitherto, filibustering senators had to hold the floor, testing their stamina and inconveniencing everyone else to encourage the majority to compromise. In the 52 years after 1917, there were only 58 cloture motions filed; in the 46 years since 1970 there have been 1,700.

Clearly, the current system is ripe for abuse and in need of reform.

TWITTER SUCKS: Twitter Censors Search Terms, Offers No Transparency and Mixed Results.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases Freshly Updated Each Hour.

Plus, Save Big on Amazon Bestsellers by Category.

And don’t miss Big Savings in the Kindle Daily Deals.

Also, fresh savings on Today’s Digital Deals.

CAN’T KEEP A GOOD JUDGE DOWN: Judge Nap Is Back and Standing by British Intel Story.

HELEN PLUCKROSE: Why I No Longer Identify As A Feminist. “I agree with Ayaan Hirsi Ali that western feminism needs to stop focusing on ‘trivial bullshit.’ I don’t have a huge amount of sympathy for women who feel traumatized and excluded by scientists’ shirts or video games.”

BECKET ADAMS: In First Big Test of the Trump Era, Media Fails Miserably. “After months of post-election chest thumping about how they could not be cowed by the powerful, reporters have reacted with a mix of yawns and giggles after the State of California announced it would pursue criminal charges against two activists who went undercover and investigated Planned Parenthood’s practice of salvaging and distributing body parts scrounged from the remains of aborted fetuses.”

Think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and it all makes sense.

OF COURSE THEY DID: Leftists Flip Off Memorial Dedicated To Victims Of Communism.

One death is a tragedy. 100 million deaths is a tasty omelet.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Marquette, a Catholic university, hosts radical communist Angela Davis as ‘distinguished lecturer.’

To be fair, it’s a Jesuit school, and the Jesuits went commie decades ago.