GET OVER IT: Washington’s growing obsession: The 25th Amendment.

The conversation about Trump’s fitness to serve is ongoing — and gaining steam after Trump’s tweet this week taunting the leader of North Korea with my-nuclear-button-is-bigger-than-yours bravado.

“Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” the president wrote online Tuesday night.

The tweet resuscitated the conversation about the president’s mental state and the 25th Amendment, which allows for the removal of the president from office if the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet deem him physically or mentally “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

Trump drives Washington crazy, which they then project back onto him.

NATO: Where is the Maritime Suwalki Gap?

The ground and air forces have moved their lines east, but what are we doing on the maritime side of the house to buy space and time against a re-invigorated Russia looking west again?

In the last few years, many have realized that our Cold War barricade to the Atlantic at the GIUK Gap was gone. Jerry Hendrix, as one would expect, in May of last year was at the front re-starting this conversation outside the conference rooms. Jerry is also starting to think beyond once was but lost, but moving our maritime defensive lines east. In this case, discussing what was once a Warsaw Pact asset, Gdansk.

Moves in the right direction have already started. USA is planning to refurbish and return to Keflavik. The Royal Air Force is getting back in to the air-ASW fight again. These are good, but it is just scratching back to a shadow of our old defensive lines. We need to think like our ground and air counterparts.

When you look at the Baltic – not an easy place for any maritime asset in war – work needs to be done. The most effective Baltic maritime capability for NATO in the Baltic – IMAO the small conventional submarine is not in good shape. The Danes no longer have submarines. The German U-boat force – when it can get underway – is in caretaker status. The Poles (now on our team) have the desire, but their submarine force is ancient. Sweden, though not an ally, is struggling like the UK just to defend their home waters.

The West is paying the price for believing that ’90s nonsense about history being over.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER AWARDS CEREMONY: Trump Announces He’ll Hand Out ‘Most Corrupt and Dishonest’ Media Awards on Monday.

Uncouth? Possibly. But still more entertaining and honest than Jimmy Kimmel hosting the Oscars.

VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: This time, we will not be silent on Iran.

In the wake of the demonstrations and the regime’s brutal attempts to suppress them, President Barack Obama repeatedly failed to express America’s solidarity with the Iranian protesters. As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I recognized the lack of action for what it was: an abdication of American leadership.

The United States has long stood with those who yearn for freedom and a brighter future, and yet the president declined to stand with a proud people who sought to escape from under the heavy weight of a dictatorship, issuing only a delayed response condemning the regime’s violence. At the same time, the United States was failing to confront the leading state sponsor of terrorism — a mistake that endangered the safety and security of the American people and our allies.

The last administration’s refusal to act ultimately emboldened Iran’s tyrannical rulers to crack down on the dissent. The Green Revolution was ruthlessly put down, and the deadly silence on the streets of Iran matched the deafening silence from the White House. To this day, many Iranians blame the United States for abandoning them in their hour of need.

Today, the Iranian people are once again rising up to demand freedom and opportunity, and under President Trump, the United States is standing with them. This time, we will not be silent.

Good.

MERDE: Macron proposes new law against fake news.

“When fake news are spread, it will be possible to go to a judge … and if appropriate have content taken down, user accounts deleted and ultimately websites blocked,” Macron said.

“Platforms will have more transparency obligations regarding sponsored content to make public the identity of sponsors and of those who control them, but also limits on the amounts that can be used to sponsor this content.”

Sites that distribute fake news would face punishment and media regulators would have more power to fight them.

Bureaucrats deciding what people should be allowed to read — what could go wrong?

EVERY VOTE COUNTS: Virginia Official Pulls Republican’s Name From Bowl to Pick Winner of Tied Race.

And with that, the GOP holds its slender majority House of Delegates.

BRIDGET JOHNSON: DACA Fix Hinges on Border Security Agreement That Schumer Says Must be ‘Reasonable.’

Meanwhile, Bridget’s unexplained and unacknowledged Twitter banishment remains unexplained and unacknowledged by Twitter management.

WHY ARE PROGRESSIVE CORPORATIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF… WELL… THIS? Alabama newspaper exec accused of spanking female workers.

In reports published in Alabama news outlets, at least three women say H. Brandt Ayers, who became a nationally known voice of Southern liberalism during his tenure as editor and publisher at The Anniston Star, assaulted them in the mid-1970s, once using a metal ruler. The women and other former newsroom employees say Ayers had a reputation for spanking other women.

Ayers — now 82 and chairman of Consolidated Publishing Co., which operates six papers including The Star — issued a statement saying he “did some things I regret” when he was a “very young man with more authority than judgment.”

Exactly how much judgement does it take to know better than to spank your employees with a metal ruler?

ROLL LEFT AND DIE: NFL Ratings Fall at Faster Pace.

The average audience for a game was 14.9 million this season, down 9.7% compared with 16.5 million viewers for the 2016 regular season, according to Nielsen. That is a steeper decline than the 8% viewership erosion last year.

A variety of potential explanations have been cited for the ratings woes. Some viewers have said they were turned off after some players knelt during the national anthem to protest against social injustice. President Donald Trump has also criticized the protests.

Television executives don’t acknowledge that the protests had a part in the ratings decline, but they say overexposure of NFL programming is the primary cause. The NFL has increased the number of Thursday night games in recent years and added early morning Sunday games played in London.

In an interview earlier this season, CBS Sports Chairman Sean McManus said the new games “diluted the Sunday afternoon packages and affected the ratings.”

Thursday Night Football is generally awful, but the “overexposure” the NFL needs to admit to is of prima donna players who openly disdain their own fans.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Bannon’s Bomb Cyclone and Much, Much More.

HMM: Tories Don’t Want Second Brexit Vote, But Many in Labour Do.

The overwhelming majority of members of Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party don’t want there to be a second referendum on Britain’s EU membership, according to a survey published Thursday. For the other main U.K. parties, the opposite is true.

Just 14 percent of Conservatives favor holding a second vote that might reverse Brexit, according to the YouGov survey of political party members for Queen Mary University of London. By contrast, the proportions for the opposition Labour, Scottish National and Liberal Democrat parties are 78 percent, 87 percent and 91 percent respectively.

Interesting that Britain’s most statist parties all follow the European tradition of wanted to hold just enough votes to produce the desired result.

Also interesting is that the Bloomberg headline reads “Tories Don’t Want Second Brexit Vote, But Many in Labour Do,” but the URL takes a harder slant. The text there says, “tories-don-t-want-second-brexit-vote-but-everyone-else-does.”

SNOWFALLS ARE A THING OF THE PAST: Winter Weather Advisories in effect as snow blankets the DMV, Wind Chill Advisory coming.

OOPS: North Korea accidentally hit one of its own cities with a ballistic missile last year.

In April, Pyongyang launched a Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile that failed shortly after launch and ended up hitting the city of Tokchon, roughly two hours from the capital, The Diplomat reported on Wednesday.

The missile’s failure was widely reported at the time but it was not previously known that the Hwasong-12 crashed in a populated area.

I wonder exactly how the Kim Regime blamed us for another one of their failures.

THESE ARE HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS — WE JUST LIVE IN THEM: 27% of California Adolescents Identify as ‘Nongender Conforming.’

RATTLE THEIR WALLS: What Washington can do to support Iran’s protesters.

Instead of continuing to protect the supreme leader and his tyrannical regime, the White House and Congress should move in a new direction — backing policies that hold the regime accountable and siding with the Iranian people.

All regime officials and assets should be re-designated under US sanctions, immediately freezing the supreme leader’s vast business empire in all its parts.

Any person or company found complicit in the regime’s attempts to block communications between protesters should feel the enforcement of US sanctions prohibiting censorship in Iran. Key entities involved in the oppression of the Iranian people and in the diversion of resources from the people to terrorism and missiles must be targeted with maximum sanctions as well — starting with Iran’s terror-finance headquarters, the Central Bank of Iran.

Next week, Trump will have to decide whether to continue waiving sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran. With the Iranian people crying out for a new government — and given the bank’s continued involvement in terrorism, missiles and human-rights abuses — sanctions should be reimposed on this financial backbone of the regime’s non-nuclear-related illicit activities.

President Trump must also confront Iran’s regional aggression, especially by blocking Iran’s attempts to establish a permanent presence in Syria. Iran, as well as our regional partners, needs to understand that America isn’t abandoning the Middle East.

Finally, the administration should put its talk about peaceful regime change into action. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has publicly endorsed a peaceful transition in Iran and in his October Iran speech, Trump said, “We stand in total solidarity with the Iranian regime’s longest-suffering victims: its own people.”

The president should announce a comprehensive review of US assistance to the Iranian people and reallocate and increase funding to groups and activities that have the best chance of assisting change from inside Iran.

It’s probably foolhardy to get any more specific than Richard Goldberg and Jamie Fly have done here, without POTUS’s more bird-eye view of our assets and the Mullahs’ weak spots. But I would add one more generality. Whatever course Trump and Tillerson decide to take, it should be founded on the same four words Ronald Reagan said to his national security team regarding his post-detente policy towards the Soviets: “We win, they lose.”

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT. Russia and Venezuela’s Plan to Sidestep Sanctions: Virtual Currencies.

In Venezuela, the idea has come from the top. President Nicolás Maduro laid out a plan last month to create a homegrown digital currency known as the Petro, which would be similar to Bitcoin but backed by the government’s oil and natural resources.

In Russia, officials under President Vladimir V. Putin have floated the idea of a Bitcoin-like crypto ruble.

“When it comes to state-sensitive types of activities, this instrument suits us very well,” one of Mr. Putin’s aides, Sergei Glazyev, said last month in a conversation about the crypto ruble, according to several Russian news outlets. “We can settle payments with our business partners all over the world regardless of sanctions.”

Economists and virtual currency experts have given Venezuela’s Petro and the crypto ruble from Russia low probabilities of working in the way the governments seem to anticipate. That’s because Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are decentralized systems with no one in charge, while the Russian and Venezuelan plans would give the leaders of both countries a measure of control over the new currencies.

Another hurdle: Both Russia and Venezuela are low-trust societies. One is a oligarchical kleptocracy, the other is a “democratic” socialist state on the verge of failure.

Putin and Maduro can put all the high-tech gloss on that they want, but their underlying structures are still rotten.

BUBBLE: Blockchain announcement sends stock of Hooters franchisee soaring.

“Eating a burger is now a way to mine for cryptocoins,” said Dennis Becker, CEO of Mobivity, the company that’s helping Chanticleer jump on the cryptocurrency bandwagon. “Every meal enjoyed at any Chanticleer Holdings brand will accrue currency for the consumer that can be used for future meals or traded with other consumers.”

Chanticleer Holdings owns a number of different brands, most of them burger-related. These include Little Big Burger in the Northwest, American Burger Co. on the East Coast, and the national BGR chain.

Evidently, the stock market believes that putting these restaurants’ reward programs on the blockchain raises their value by around 50 percent.

What’s the advantage of blockchain-based rewards?

“Mobivity Merit is real cryptocurrency, leveraging the same infrastructure and principles of bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, litecoin,” Chanticleer CEO Michael Pruitt says in the company’s press release. Rather than being locked into one specific rewards program, customers will be able to transfer their reward points across multiple restaurants. Meanwhile, the Mobivity blockchain will help companies track their customers’ preferences, allowing them to provide more personalized service.

So it’s really about advertising then.

LAUREN SPAGNOLETTI: 10 Best TV Shows That Were Canceled Too Soon.

Good list, but swap out Studio 60 for… almost anything else. That’s one show which didn’t get canned nearly as swiftly as it should have.

HMM: Fire in Clinton Chappaqua Home.

It was in the bedroom.

MARK RIPPETOE: From Heart Patient to Lifter.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Get Your iPhone’s Battery Replaced at Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider.

IT’S OVER: Text of President Donald Trump’s statement on Steve Bannon.

Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself.

Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.

We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.

Ouch.

DC MCALLISTER: The Time’s Up Now Campaign Is Mostly Repackaged Feminist Garbage.

UH-OH: More Bad News Expected for Tesla.

In October, Tesla reported that it produced 220 Model 3 vehicles in the third quarter. CEO Elon Musk had previously said the company would produce more than 1,600 Model 3s by September.

Munster isn’t the only analyst to doubt Tesla’s fourth-quarter Model 3 production. KeyBanc analyst Brad Erickson reduced his fourth-quarter Model 3 production target by two-thirds, cutting it from 15,000 to only 5,000.

According to Munster, Tesla investors may need to wait several more quarters for the Model 3 story to play out. “We predict a breakout year for the Model 3 in 2019 which means, until then, other elements like solid Model S and X production numbers, increasing energy deployments like the South Australia installation, and future vehicles (Roadster, Semi, Model Y, and pickup truck) will stoke investor optimism,” he says.

As Instapundit readers have long known, Elon Musk promised Tesla would produce 500,000 Model 3 sedans in 2018 — and has accepted refundable $1,000 deposits on nearly that many. At current production rates, it will be years before pre-orders are filled.

The Model 3’s good will and good reviews won’t matter much if Tesla can’t ramp up production, which even bulls like Munster believes is running at least a year late.

NO, RESPONDING TO IT IN KIND IS: Under Trump, nuclear brinkmanship is the new normal.

We’ve tried Mr. Nice Guy, and all we got for it is a nuclear-armed North Korea.