KURT SCHLICHTER: We’re Doing Grant, Not Patton, But Neither One Had A Goof Like Ryan Screwing Things Up.

We know the strategy – grind out win after win, big and small, over time until the liberals are broken. It’s the tactics that Ryan has botched; he’s shown no aptitude for the basic blocking and tackling of legislating and consistently falls back on the errors of the past. Here’s how healthcare should have gone. Paully, starting the morning of November 9th, you should have orchestrated an inclusive effort to create a bill based on a consensus that incorporated every stakeholder with the ability to icepick it (the transition team, the Freedom Caucus, the squishes, the think tanks, and most vitally, the Senate). Once you had something everyone agreed on – and 216 sure votes in the House and 51 in the Senate – you all appear with the Prez in front of the cameras to announce it before you actually put out the document, thereby cementing in the narrative about why the people should dig it before the haters can hate it into little pieces. Then you pass it and win.

But what did we get? A tactical clusterflunk. Seven years in and Ryan wasn’t ready. He putzed around with no sense of urgency until there was a sense of urgency. Who was expecting this dog’s breakfast to drop when it did? And it just dropped on us out of the blue – one day, suddenly, there’s this whole plan out there. Surprise! I listened to Hugh Hewitt the morning after it was released; he was stunned that he couldn’t get any of the Republican House leadership [sic] on his show to talk to his conservative audience about the biggest piece of legislation in Trump’s first term.

Paully, you gave the enemy precious hours to set the narrative, and the bill never recovered.

In all fairness, it’s there was just no good strategy for selling ObamaCare Lite to a GOP constituency who had been promised, again and again, ObamaCare Zero.

That aside, somebody really does need to write Legislation for Dummies and give the first copy to Ryan.

BONUS: Kurt coined the word “jebcanned” for this piece, so you’ll definitely want to read the whole thing.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Sex may be key to a happy marriage, study finds.

Hey, “maintenance sex” has saved many a marriage. Including, as you can see, some InstaPundit readers’.

FROM SPENGLER, a review of Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option.

I think it’s more likely that we’ll see an Urban Option down the line.

AIPAC REPORT: Netanyahu Says ‘We Appreciate’ No Cuts to Israel in Trump’s Lean Budget Request.

ANTICIPATION: The most common cells in the brain help us anticipate rewards.

I COULD SEE DOING THIS: Going Under the Knife, With Eyes and Ears Wide Open. “More surgery is being performed with the patient awake and looking on, for both financial and medical reasons. But as surgical patients are electing to keep their eyes wide open, doctor-patient protocol has not kept pace with the new practice. Patients can become unnerved by a seemingly ominous silence, or put off by what passes for office humor.”

Related: Watching my surgeon cut into my knee.

BERLIN: Germany didn’t receive NATO invoice from Trump.

“Reports that President Trump had presented the federal chancellor with a kind of bill with a concrete billion sum are not true,” spokesman Steffen Seibert said at a press conference.

That’s an awfully specific denial.

TERROR: Laptop ban on planes came after plot to put explosives in iPad.

The UK ban on tablets, laptops, games consoles and other devices larger than a mobile phone came into effect on Saturday. It applies to inbound flights from six countries – Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Turkey. Six UK airlines – British Airways, EasyJet, Jet2, Monarch, Thomas Cook and Thomson – and eight foreign carriers are affected.

It follows a similar move in the US, which applies to flights from 10 airports in eight countries – Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

The security source said both bans were not the result of a single specific incident but a combination of factors.

One of those, according to the source, was the discovery of a plot to bring down a plane with explosives hidden in a fake iPad that appeared as good as the real thing. Other details of the plot, such as the date, the country involved and the group behind it, remain secret.

Clearly, the laptop ban is some kind of racist act.

THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: We Were Wrong – the Testes Are Connected to the Immune System. We’ll have to rewrite the textbooks… again.

NEW FRONTIERS IN FAKE NEWS: Study finding: “39% of responding institutions reported a decline in international applications, 35% reported an increase, and 26% reported no change in applicant numbers.”

New York Times report: “Amid ‘Trump Effect’ Fear, 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applicants.”

Related: NY Times Publishes, Then Retracts, Fake News. “A prominent theme is that Republicans don’t care about truth. . . . So it must have been embarrassing when, this morning, the Times had to admit that Bazelon’s article included an important piece of fake news. . . . Bazelon’s fake news has been seamlessly airbrushed away, in a paragraph that begins by accusing the Trump administration of being ‘starkly at odds with reality.'”

Hey, says the NYT, that’s our job!

PATRICK POOLE: 60 Minutes Whitewashes Massive FBI Failure in 2015 ISIS Texas Terror Attack.

The good news is, January 20, 2017 may have brought an end to media whitewashing.

WHY WOULD YOU MEET WITH A GROUP WHOSE PLATFORM IS “ZERO TOLERANCE FOR OPPOSITION?”

ECHO CHAMBER: Is Twitter Now Censoring Drudge Report?

In an extraordinary development, Westmonster has found that the world famous Drudge Report has been marked as “sensitive material” by Twitter, with some users now having to OPT IN in order to see tweets. Hardly any tweets from Drudge were visible today when we first logged in.

Westmonster goes on to note that, seemingly the only way to be able to view the content is to log in to the ‘privacy and safety’ section of the Twitter website, where buried at the bottom is the option to opt in to ‘sensitive content’

“Sensitive” in this context means “facts or opinions I may not like.”

OUT: WOMEN ARE JUST AS TOUGH AS MEN. In: Italy Could Soon Offer Women Paid ‘Menstrual Leave.’

NAILBITER? It Could Be Close: Counting To 51 On The Nuclear Option.

The question now is whether there are 51 votes in the Senate Republican caucus to support the nuclear option. While most Republicans seem prepared to back the measure, a handful of consensus-oriented veterans may be recalcitrant to change the rules and further escalate the judicial confirmation wars.

The most likely candidates in this regard are GOP Sens. Susan Collins, John McCain, and Lindsay Graham. All three were members of the “Gang of 14,” a bipartisan group of senators that reached an accord on confirmed Bush-era nominees without invoking the nuclear option in 2005. Other Republicans with something of a moderate streak, like Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Jeff Flake, might also oppose such a dramatic change.

Collins is the only Republican senator to express misgivings about the nuclear option thus far.

The question is whether Senate Republicans are about to acquit themselves as embarrassingly as House Republicans did last week.

NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS: Political Sex Pistol: Johnny Rotten backs Brexit and Trump! “Having built a career on his anti-establishment views, he didn’t shy away from talking about todays political landscape. Lydon came out in support of Brexit claiming the working class had spoken and that he would stand by them.”

IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT: Democrat Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards Pays Women $12,000 Less Than Men.

Edwards has spent the past year pushing for a state gender discrimination law. Earlier this month, Edwards and his wife held an “Equal Pay Summit” after Louisiana ranked last in Bloomberg’s gender-equality ratings.

Salary data obtained through Louisiana’s Department of State Civil Service, however, shows that Edwards has his own gender pay gap, as women working in his office make just 82 cents for each dollar earned by men.

The analysis found that the median salary of the 43 women working in Edwards’ office is $55,000, which is $12,000 less than the median salary of $67,000 earned by the 23 men employed there.

Edwards’ female employees should stage a public walkout, on principle.

FROM THE NETWORK THAT BROUGHT YOU RATHERGATE: CBS’s Ted Koppel views Sean Hannity and “all these opinion shows” as “bad for America:”

“You have attracted people who are determined that ideology is more important than facts,” said Koppel to Hannity.

“That’s sad, Ted,” said Hannity to Koppel. “You’re selling the American people short,” he added, describing Americans as broadly able to discern between facts and opinions.

Koppel described the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine – a former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) policy mandating news media broadcasters’ coverage of “controversial issues” be fair per the FCC’s opinion – as facilitating the creation of “two separate worlds” of politics via the ascendance of Rush Limbaugh.

Advocates for the Fairness Doctrine described the federal government’s control of political and partisan editorializing among news media broadcasters as serving “the public interest.” They credited the Fairness Doctrine with allowing Americans a “reasonable opportunity [to consume] the presentation of contrasting viewpoints.” “The right of the viewing and listening public to suitable access to the marketplace of ideas,” they added, “justifies restrictions on the rights of broadcasters [to determine their own editorial perspectives].”

Wow, somebody tell Koppel that in addition to broadcast television and terrestrial radio, there’s this new-fangled communications medium called the Internet as well, with [CUE SAGAN VOICE] Billions and Billions of Websites to match the worldviews and tones of a diverse multicultural readership. Why, it’s as if there’s more to journalism in the 21st century than just three commercial networks, a couple of big city newspapers and radio these days! Someone alert Ted!

Fortunately in response, “Dana Loesch Takes No Prisoners in Fox and Friends Interview (Video):”

On Ted Koppel’s comment that Sean Hannity is “bad for America”…

“He’s the last person on Earth to accuse someone of being bad for America simply because they are offering opinion. This is the problem with so much of legacy media. This is why you see New Media come up. People are tired of these anchors and reporters giving their opinion as unfettered fact and acting as though there is no bias on their part at all whatsoever.”

The difference between Dana Loesch and Ted Koppel, according to Ms. Loesch? She’s being honest about her bias. She admits she is biased towards the “constitution and natural rights”, thus all of her opinions are seen through that prism. If only we could get those in Big Media to understand this one simple thing, it would improve their credibility almost immediately.

It’s pretty tough to be a spokesman for a channel that made its bones with Walter Cronkite warbling on about Barry Goldwater being a crypto-Nazi and global cooling, his successor cooking the books with Rathergate, and his successor reading Christmas poems to beg for Obamacare (and then having a Rathergate of her own after she left the network) and still claim – in 2017! – to a proponent of “objective” journalism.

2012 FLASHBACK: Why Obama Isn’t Backing Gay Marriage: It’s not that he’s worried about upsetting conservatives. It’s that he can’t afford to lose black voters who overwhelmingly oppose it.

INTIMIDATION FOR FUN AND PROFIT: Miami Targets Homeowners Who Opposed to Airbnb Ban.

“We are now on notice for people who did come here and notify us in public and challenge us in public,” Daniel Alfonso, Miami city manager, told the Miami Herald. “I will be duly bound to request our personnel to enforce the city code.”

Mayor Thomas Regalado reportedly suggested the same course of action while speaking to a local radio station about the city’s evolving policy on short-term rentals and Airbnb, according to Miami Herald reporter David Smiley:

Yes, everyone who spoke at the hearing voluntarily turned over their information to the city. They’re easy targets, for sure.

Still, the notion that city officials would single-out people who spoke up against a public policy—those who “challenge us in public,” as Alfonso put it—simply because they spoke up in public is quite disturbing. Instead of focusing on nuisance tenants or short-term rentals that are drawing complaints from neighbors (if there are any), they are choosing specifically to target members of the community who are engaged in the political process and are trying to make their voices heard.

Miami might be taking an ill-advised lesson from nearby Miami Beach, which has led the way in Florida’s fight against letting residents do as they please with their own property. As Reason has previously reported, the city issued more than $1.6 million in fines for homesharing last year, with individual fines running as high as $20,000.

Think of Miami’s city government as the tourism industry’s protection racket, and you won’t go far wrong.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Colossal GOP failure and not just on health: Why aren’t bills on infrastructure, tax reform and free speech lined up like planes on a runway?

HOLLYWOOD: Jessica Chastain Would Be ‘Very Happy’ if Chelsea Clinton Decides to Run for Office. “Actress in new WWII movie says U.S. ‘partly responsible’ for Anne Frank’s death.”

I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING: Spinach Leaf Transformed Into Beating Human Heart Tissue.

“The main limiting factor for tissue engineering … is the lack of a vascular network,” says study co-author Joshua Gershlak, a graduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts, in a video describing the study. “Without that vascular network, you get a lot of tissue death.”

One of the defining traits of a leaf is the branching network of thin veins that delivers water and nutrients to its cells. Now, scientists have used plant veins to replicate the way blood moves through human tissue. The work involves modifying a spinach leaf in the lab to remove its plant cells, which leaves behind a frame made of cellulose.

“Cellulose is biocompatible [and] has been used in a wide variety of regenerative medicine applications, such as cartilage tissue engineering, bone tissue engineering, and wound healing,” the authors write in their paper.

The team then bathed the remaining plant frame in live human cells, so that the human tissue grew on the spinach scaffolding and surrounded the tiny veins. Once they had transformed the spinach leaf into a sort of mini heart, the team sent fluids and microbeads through its veins to show that blood cells can flow through this system.

Video at the link.

ALL IS PROCEEDING AS SCOTT ADAMS HAS FORESEEN: Francis Fukuyama in Politico: Trump’s a Dictator? He Can’t Even Repeal Obamacare.