FRACTURED CAUCUS: House Cancels Vote on GOP Health-Care Bill.

Mr. Trump asked Paul Ryan to pull the health care bill from the floor, an aide to the House GOP leadership said.

Mr. Ryan is scheduled to hold a news conference shortly.

And:

The House has postponed the health-care vote, a, Republican leadership aide said.

The House unexpectedly went into recess ahead of the planned vote, and is now holding an emergency GOP caucus meeting. Speaker Paul Ryan plans a press conference shortly.

Developing…

WELL, GOOD: The Harvard Crimson Condemns Campus Riots.

HMM:

KATIE HOPKINS: Welcome to London: We can say we’re not afraid, light candles and make hearts of our hands but the truth is that we can’t go on like this. The electorate is figuring this out faster than the politicians, I suspect.

A MOUTHFUL OF TROUBLE: Dental Problems In The Elderly.

BREAKING: OUTLOOK LOOKING BLEAK FOR GOP ON ‘OBAMACARE’ REPEAL BILL.

WSJ has a liveblog going, and the no votes are still trending up.

NBC’S MATT LAUER HOPES RUSSIA TIES WILL ‘MORTALLY WOUND’ THE PRESIDENCY OF FORMER NBC EMPLOYEE DONALD TRUMP (video).

I’m so old, I can remember when Rush Limbaugh was excoriated by the left for hoping a president would fail.

CLAIM: Peak oil? Sooner than you think.

To be clear, this is about peak oil demand rather than peak oil supply.

You don’t seem to read much these days about peak oil supply.

HMM: Double Filters Allow Tetrachromatic Vision in Humans. “Humans have three types of cone cells in the back of the eye to differentiate color. Some react to blue, some to green and some to red. The cones do their work by responding to the difference in wavelength of the incoming light. Such vision is known as trichromatic. In this new effort, the researchers have found a way of fooling the brain into seeing as if there were a fourth type of cone, by wearing glasses with two types of filters. The result is tetrachromatic vision. . . . The filters remove some parts of the blue light spectrum. But the filters each remove a different part. When the filters are fitted into a frame and worn like regular glasses, the wearer is able to see colors that are normally hidden—metamers. In a sense, it is rather the opposite of what occurs with people who are color blind. They might see blue and red as the same, even though there is more light information there. Adding spectrum identification to color blind eyes allows for seeing more of what is already there. With the new combined filter system, a person is able to look at what appears to be an object that is all the same color, such as purple, and see more colors in it—those normally hidden metamers.”

FREEDOM OF SPEECH FOR ME BUT NOT FOR THEE: Bus Denying Transgender Identity Vandalized in New York City.

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Miriam Davis, Axeman of New Orleans: The True Story.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Synthetic Neurons Are Advancing Computing Power.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Lice-Hunting Underwater Drone Protects Salmon With Lasers.

DAVID BOAZ: 25 Years Later, Is It Still the Hayek Century?

DR. WES FISHER shows why it’s good to have a blog.

Also, what the hell is going on with the American Board of Internal Medicine?

THAT’S REAL MONEY: $15,000 a month offered to ‘A Teams’ to fight Trump agenda.

Fight for the Future, started in 2011 as a digital activist group, on Monday issued the offer with this eye-catching opening: “Terrified about Trump? Quit your job, start an A-Team. We’ll fund it.”

“We’re currently taking applications for an initial launch of the project, and will be providing a few select teams with funding, guidance, and support,” said Evan Greer, campaign director for Fight for the Future.

Who funds the funders?

According to WikiPedia, Fight for the Future got its initial funding from the Media Democracy Fund, which the Capital Research Center says is backed by George Soros.

COUNTERING POLITICAL ISLAMISM: A “must read” assessment by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (via the Hoover Institution).

Insisting that radical Islamists have “nothing to do with Islam” has led US policy makers to commit numerous strategic errors since 9/11. One is to distinguish between a “tiny” group of extremists and an “overwhelming” majority of “moderate” Muslims. I prefer to differentiate among Medina Muslims, who embrace the militant political ideology adopted by Muhammad in Medina; Mecca Muslims, who prefer the religion originally promoted by Muhammad in Mecca; and reformers, who are open to some kind of Muslim Reformation.

These distinctions have their origins in history. The formative period of Islam can be divided roughly into two phases: the spiritual phase, associated with Mecca, and the political phase that followed Muhammad’s move to Medina.

MORE:

By not fighting a war of ideas against political Islam (or “Islamism”) as an ideology and against those who spread that ideology, we have made a grave error.

If Islamism is the ideology, then dawa encompasses all the methods by which it is spread. The term “dawa” refers to activities carried out by Islamists to win adherents and enlist them in a campaign to impose sharia law on all societies. Dawa is not the Islamic equivalent of religious proselytizing, although it is often disguised as such by blending humanitarian activities with subversive political activities.

Dawa as practiced by Islamists employs a wide range of mechanisms to advance the goal of imposing Islamic law (sharia) on society. This includes proselytization, but extends beyond that. In Western countries, dawa aims both to convert non-Muslims to political Islam and to bring about more extreme views among existing Muslims. The ultimate goal of dawa is to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with strict sharia. Islamists rely on both violent and nonviolent means to achieve their objectives.

Dawa is to the Islamists of today what the “long march through the institutions” was to twentieth-century Marxists. It is subversion from within, the use of religious freedom in order to undermine that very freedom. After Islamists gain power, dawa is to them what Gleichschaltung  (synchronization) of all aspects of German state, civil, and social institutions was to the National Socialists.

Read the whole thing.

SO SHE’S LIKE A GIRL-VERSION OF BEN CARSON: New Role Model Alert: This Is Johns Hopkins’ First Black Female Neurosurgery Resident. Have you noticed the press holding Ben Carson up as a role model much?

PATRICK POOLE: Accused Killer Nasser Hamad Invokes ‘Islamophobia’ Defense in Double Homicide.

Pre-emptive murder?

THE EUROPEAN UNION TURNS 60: Analysis from USA Today.

Just six of the EU’s current 28 members were signatories to the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the agreement that established the European Economic Community, the EU’s predecessor. This weekend’s ceremony takes place five days before British Prime Minister Theresa May invokes legislation that starts Britain’s two-year legal path to a formal exit from the bloc.

THIS IS THE PART OF OBAMACARE THE GOP “CAN’T” REPEAL: Obamacare Regulations Drove Up Premium Costs By Up to 68%.

VIDEO: “DON’T SHUT DOWN THE JEW!” Ezra Levant turns the table on campus fascists.

CHALK ONE UP FOR THE PRESS: The Mayor Will Now Take Your Questions. Wait, Where’d He Go?

Mayor Bill de Blasio walked out on his own news conference on Thursday without answering any questions, irked that reporters were not asking what he wanted them to ask.

In an extraordinary test of wills with the City Hall press corps, Mr. de Blasio refused to respond to questions that might ordinarily be considered well within the bounds of what the mayor of New York City would be expected to address. He was asked about the murder of a black man who police said was stabbed to death in Manhattan by a white man who had come to the city to harm black people, and the arrest in Israel of a man accused of making a string of telephone threats against Jewish community centers and other sites in the United States.

The mayor had called reporters to a chilly block of East 56th Street to make a pitch about his proposal for a so-called mansion tax on the sale of apartments or houses of more than $2 million, to pay for rent relief for older New Yorkers. The plan would need approval by the state legislature and is seen as having little hope of success in a State Senate that has generally responded with hostility to both new taxes and the mayor’s initiatives.

Against the backdrop of a luxury high-rise (with a handwritten sign in one window reading, “De Blasio doesn’t care about the working middle class”), the mayor spoke about the tax over the din of construction, passing trucks and a heckler who shouted, “Everyone hates you, de Blasio!”

Then he said he would take questions on the tax proposal.

Reporters didn’t oblige — and good for them.

BREAKING: Republican leaders struggling to win GOP votes with hours left before the vote.

WHAT FEMINISM HAS COME TO: Why Guys Get Turned on When You Orgasm — and Why That’s a Bad Thing.

UPDATE (from Steve): It’s official now — there’s nothing that a determined Third Wave feminist can’t ruin. Also note the damage author Hannah Smothers (Dickens couldn’t have named her better) does to women with this piece. She’s attempting to disparage men in a way which, if successful, would make women feel self-conscious about their own orgasms.

You almost wish Cosmo would stick to its traditional beat of constitutional analysis.