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BREAKING: Jim DeMint out at Heritage.

FASTER, PLEASE: Zinc Battery Breakthrough Could Mean Safer, Lighter Cars and Smartphones.

WELL, YES: Lawyer for Berkeley Republicans: University Engaged in ‘Clear Censorship’

Anyone talking about “safe spaces” is trying to hide their opposition to free speech. Anyone threatening violence isn’t even bothering to hide it.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: Tax Policy In The Trump Administration.

CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN: Can California hit 1.5M zero-emission vehicles by 2025?

TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAY: The Democrats’ First 100 Days.

Matthew Continetti:

Democrats feel betrayed. The Electoral College betrayed them by making Trump president. Hillary Clinton betrayed them by running an uninspiring campaign. James Comey betrayed them by reopening the investigation into Clinton’s server 11 days before the election. Facebook betrayed them by circulating fake news. This sense of resentment isn’t so different than the sort Democrats attribute to Trump supporters: irritation at a loss of status, vexation at changed circumstances. The despondence of a liberal is alleviated when he sees throngs of protesters, hears Samantha Bee, scrolls through Louise Mensch’s tweets.

Makes him feel better. But his party is in tatters, reduced to 16 governors, 30 state legislative chambers, a historically low number of state legislative seats, 193 members of the House, 46 senators. The Democrats are leaderless, rudderless, held together only by opposition to Trump. The most popular figure on the left refuses to call himself a Democrat while sitting alongside the newly elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee. That chairman, dirty-talking Tom Perez, represents a professional, technocratic class that supports Wall Street and globalization as long as there is room for multiculturalism and social liberalism. That is a different strategy from both the 50-state approach of Howard Dean, Rahm Emanuel, and Schumer that brought Democrats control of Congress in 2006, and the anti-Wall Street, protectionist, single-payer left of Bernie Sanders. Perez fights with Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi over whether there is room for pro-lifers in the party—Perez thinks not. Pelosi enjoys the distinction of being an American political figure less popular than Donald Trump.

What is the Democratic agenda?

The question can be answered with just three words: “Resist we much.”

FOLLOW THE MONEY: Shale investments have surged by $100 billion, Rystad says.

Norwegian consultancy Rystad Energy estimates $100 billion in investment funds has flowed into the U.S. shale industry over the past year, propping up domestic drilling by 60 percent. So-called completion activity – procedures like hydraulic fracturing that stimulate shale wells – has gone up 30 percent, Rystad said.

And there’s no sign things will slow down. Shale investments could climb another 50 percent this year, Rystad analyst Espen Erlingsen said in a written statement.

A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.

TO BOLDLY GO WHERE MARTIN HEIDEGGER HAS GONE BEFORE: Roger Simon asks, Will Fascism Come to America through Its Colleges and Universities?

ANDREW MCCARTHY: Does Judge Orrick Think President Obama ‘Fundamentally Transformed’ Executive Orders?

THE ISLAMIC STATE: Gets a little help from its enemies — unfortunately.

While on paper ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) seems doomed in Syria this is not the case. No, what is keeping ISIL alive are growing disagreements among the many nations and factions mobilized to crush ISIL in Syria. This is a sad situation but also so typical of the region.

DO-NOTHING CONGRESS: Republicans Fail In Second Attempt To Repeal Obamacare.

Late on Thursday night, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy confirmed that, as expected, the GOP leadership would not bring up a revised ObamaCare repeal bill to the floor this week, after it became clear Thursday night that the 216 GOP votes needed to pass the healthcare bill had not materialized. At least 21 Republicans had come out against the bill, with many more undecided. Leaders can only afford 22 GOP defections.

After a two-hour meeting in Speaker Paul Ryan office in the Capitol, McCarthy told reporters that the GOP had again failed to whip enough support for the bill: “we are not voting on healthcare tomorrow or Sunday.”

He promptly then downplayed the adverse healthcare development, saying leaders had been discussing the short-term stopgap funding bill to avert a government shutdown.

“We’ve been making great progress, and when we have the votes we’ll vote on it.” Just not yet.

So yes, another embarrassing failure for the president and House speaker.

In 2009, the Democrats set out to “fundamentally transform” health coverage, and were willing to sacrifice the House to get it done. They assumed, and apparently rightly so, that the ratchet effect would remain in full force and that the Republicans would never dare undo what they had done.

Until the GOP is as bold, they will continue to fail. Embarrassingly.

STILL NOT HITLER: 100 Days in and the Reichstag Hasn’t Burned Yet.

With President Trump’s 100 day mark approaching, those prophesying apocalyptic doom have not come out looking so good.

There have been no mass arrests of peaceful protestors. Federal judges rule against presidential orders, the President sputters in indignation—and the rulings stand. Putin hasn’t been offered the code to the nuclear football. Late night comics excoriate the president and the Gestapo doesn’t knock at their door. The grifters and mountebanks who hopped on the campaign wagon back when nobody in the establishment was willing to help the Trump operation are either learning to play in the big leagues or being edged toward the exits. The stock market is strong; the economy hasn’t tanked. An avalanche of leaks hasn’t exposed the collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign that so many people were sure was going to lead to impeachment.

In other words, life in our constitutional republic is still rolling on much as usual—or at least, closer to usual than any of the hyperventilators predicted. Congress and the courts are functioning as they did before; the powers of the President are still limited by the rule of law. . . .

But the Trump-Hitler folks made buffoons of themselves with paranoid fantasies and steamy, overheated scenarios of impending doom. Some will be big enough to admit their mistake, look hard at what they got wrong and why, and emerge as smarter and more creditworthy participants in the national conversation. Others, many others, will try to act as if nothing has happened, and will wonder why nobody listens the next time they cry “Wolf.”

Yep. Flashback: Perhaps we should require reading “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” in journalism schools.

THOMAS FRANK: The Democrats’ Davos ideology won’t win back the midwest.

I am a midwesterner too, and I like to think I share the values and outlook of that part of the country. I have spent many of the last 15 years trying to understand my region’s gradual drift to the political right. And I have spent the last three weeks driving around the deindustrialized midwest, visiting 13 different cities to talk about the appeal of Donald Trump and what ails the Democratic Party. I met labor leaders and progressive politicians; average people and rank-and-file union members; senior citizens and Millennials; sages and cranks.

Along the way I gawked at abandoned factory complexes and at Gothic-style water filtration plants. I visited affluent college towns and crumbling relics of twentieth-century prosperity. I ate pork tenderloins in Iowa and ribeye steaks in Indiana and “fast-casual Italian offal” (as a friend called it) in a bohemian zone of Chicago. I saw countless old fighter planes mounted on pedestals. I stood in a union hall in Indianapolis and breathed in that glorious odor of industrial beer mixed with decades of cigarette residue, the sweet fragrance of my youth.

And what I am here to say is that the midwest is not an exotic place. It isn’t a benighted region of unknowable people and mysterious urges. It isn’t backward or hopelessly superstitious or hostile to learning. It is solid, familiar, ordinary America, and Democrats can have no excuse for not seeing the wave of heartland rage that swamped them last November.

They don’t like that America anymore, and the feeling has become mutual.

ROGER KIMBALL: Annals of Academic Fatuousness, Yale Edition, Part 9876.

GIRLS GONE WILD: Inside the Secret NSFW Female-only Facebook Group ‘Bad Girls Advice.’ “There are countless other pictures of penises being shared in this secret, female-only Facebook group. In an age where men are rightly condemned for sending unsolicited pictures of their genitalia to women, it seems women sharing pictures of men’s penises with each other is fair game — even if the men have not consented.”

Women have sexual rights. Men, not so much. Thus, when men share naked pics of women without consent, it’s “revenge porn” and demands draconian laws, while if women do the same thing, well, men should be more careful who they share nudes with.

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AND WE’RE ONLY LEARNING OF THIS IN 2017 BECAUSE…? FBI Convened a Grand Jury to Investigate Hillary Clinton in 2016.

OVER AT USA TODAY, THEY HAVE A BUNCH OF US GRADING TRUMP’S FIRST 100 DAYS. I gave him an A+. Click through to see why.

HE’S ACCOMPLISHED MUCH FOR THE GOP: The First 117 Days of Chuck Schumer.

Schumer is no dummy when it comes to reading polls and he knows that being labeled a Democrat these days isn’t what it used to be. In fact, recent Gallup tracking of party identification found just 28 percent of Americans identify as Democrats, down 11 points since Barack Obama was elected president.

In a move that can only be described as savvy, Schumer, responding to this polling, has turned over representation of the party to Sen. Bernie Sanders, who by his own admission is not actually a Democrat. Sanders is traveling the country with national party chairman Tom Perez, holding rallies and doing media interviews in which they openly fight about what policies Democrats actually stand for. CNN charitably called the tour “bumpy.”

Schumer is nothing if not responsive. With 40 percent of registered voters in a recent Harvard-Harris poll saying the party has no leader, turning the thing over to people who aren’t actually Democrats is probably the right tactical move.

Heh.

Read the whole thing.

HUNGER GAMES POLITICS: Michael Barone: Capital versus countryside in France’s election.

The election in France, which I wrote about yesterday was a contest between the capital city and the historic heartland, a pattern we’ve seen in elections in multiple countries over the past year, and often in contradiction to traditional party lines.

I first wrote about this in a Washington Examiner column last October, noting the pattern in the results of the June 23 Brexit referendum in Britain the Oct.2 paz referendum in Colombia, and in the polling in the U.S. presidential race. In a column that went online the day after the U.S. voted, I noted that the pattern held here and produced Donald Trump’s astounding victory, and in a column a week later I pointed out that the key vote shifts away from the Democrats came in the Midwest and Pennsylvania outside million-plus metro areas.

In France, there was a clear distinction between metro Paris, a baker’s dozen of cities described as economically vibrant by Christopher Caldwell in his brilliant City Journal pre-election article (a must read) and the rest of the nation. Metro Paris cast 14 percent of the nation’s votes, the 13 cities another 7 percent and the rest of the country 80 percent.

Self-serving elites have gotten excessively greedy across the world, and they have spurred a reaction.

A FORMER STUDENT NOW LAWYERING IN EUROPE EMAILS: “I keep hearing ‘Le Pen can’t win – look at the polls.’ And I say, ‘Fools, you trusted the Brexit and Trump polls!'”

JOSH KRAUSHAAR: Trump Voters’ Loyalties Run Deep.

Here’s the standout item:

Polit­ic­al cor­rect­ness is a big­ger is­sue for Re­pub­lic­ans than his policy po­s­i­tions or busi­ness back­ground. The re­cent ugly fights over con­ser­vat­ive speak­ers be­ing banned or threatened at col­lege cam­puses is front-and-cen­ter in many Trump voters’ minds. Giv­en four choices as to why Trump voters backed him, a clear 48 per­cent plur­al­ity said it was his “will­ing­ness to tell it like it is in­stead of be­ing polit­ic­ally cor­rect.” That ranked much high­er than his “fo­cus on bring­ing change to Wash­ing­ton” (21 per­cent), the fact he’s a busi­ness­man not a politi­cian (18 per­cent), or his spe­cif­ic is­sue po­s­i­tions (12 per­cent).

That’s the long version of last year’s “He fights!”

TAKING SIDES: Seattle Gives City Workers Time Off to Attend Anti-Trump Protests: The resolution also declares May Day a “day of action for worker and immigrant rights.” As a failed president once said, don’t think we aren’t keeping score, brother.