NBC NEWS: Seven Ways the Trump Administration Could Make Obamacare ‘Explode’

They left out the eighth way: Enforce it as written.

WINNING: Trump Signs Four Bills Rolling Back Obama-Era Regulations.

The president canceled the “Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces” rule, which blacklists companies from receiving federal contracts if have violated labor rules in the past, the “Planning 2.0” rule, which dealt with how to use 245 million acres of federal land and was opposed by the energy industry, and two regulations under the “Every Student Succeeds Act,” which Trump said removes “an additional layer of bureaucracy to encourage freedom in our schools.”

As he signed the orders, Trump said there was “a lot more coming” and he would “remove every job killing regulation we can find.”

Faster, please.

JAZZ SHAW: Worried liberals would like to redraw the order of presidential succession.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: GOP Lawmakers Look to Secure Travel Freedoms for Gun Owners.

FASTER, PLEASE: Intel Optane Memory has a mission: Make hard drives faster than SSDs.

PARTY OF OBSTRUCTION: Dems delay Senate panel vote on Supreme Court nominee.

THE TAO OF STEVEN SEAGAL: Explaining the lingering career of action cinema’s hardest-working lazy man.

FREEDOM CAUCUS FOUNDER: Bad Process at Core of Healthcare Bill Failure.

“They rolled it out after it was hidden away. When they rolled it out, they said it’s a binary choice, take it or leave it. Normally when you have hearings on a piece of legislation that impacts this much of our overall economy, you would bring in some witnesses and hear from some witnesses about what’s going to happen if this legislation actually becomes law,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told MSNBC this morning.

“We had none of that. We went straight to mark-up. No amendments could be offered in the Energy and Commerce Committee, the Ways and Means Committee, the Budget Committee,” he added. “And finally they took a manager’s amendment at the last hour to try to get people to vote for it.”

Meanwhile, the actual repeal legislation continues to languish in committee.

MAYBE IT’S MAYBELLINE: Rachel Dolezal Still Identifies as Black, Blames Media for “Warping” Her Life Story.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Iran’s Supreme Leader Takes Fresh Shot At Gender Equality.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

STOP: Uber slams on the brakes, stops self-driving car tests.

Uber has suspended autonomous car tests in the US following an incident in which one of its self-driving cars was involved in a collision in Tempe, Arizona.

The ride-hailing service’s tests in both Arizona and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania have been stopped following the high-impact crash, in which photos on Twitter reveal an Uber car on its side while another vehicle is behind, laden with dents, scratches, and smashed windows.

As reported by Bloomberg, the vehicle involved in the collision is a self-driving SUV, one of a fleet being tested by Uber.

An Uber spokesperson confirmed the crash, saying that tests have been paused while the ride-hailing service completes an investigation into the situation.

“We are continuing to look into this incident and can confirm we had no backseat passengers in the vehicle,” the company said. In other words, there was a driver behind the wheel of Uber’s SUV when the incident occurred.

According to Tempe police, Uber was not at fault and the crash was due to another car failing to yield, which led to Uber’s Volvo ending up on its side.

Despite the collision being ruled out as Uber’s responsibility by law enforcement, the company will not conduct any more testing until its own internal investigation has concluded.

I’ve found that the best way to avoid an accident is to imagine the stupidest thing each driver around you could possibly do in each instant, and then to count on them actually doing it. (This method prevented me, barely, from being forced into a concrete highway divider just yesterday by a careless driver in a black Nissan Murano.) But can Uber or anyone else create an algorithm for cynical imagination?

KELLY RIDDELL: Why the rape that escaped the media and national attention must not be ignored.

Rape stories, when they can be used to vault social-justice issues into the nation’s psyche, get exhaustive coverage and opining by the mainstream media, regardless of whether they’re even true.

But if a 14-year-old girl gets gang-raped while attending high-school by two illegal immigrants?

Crickets. That’s a narrative that doesn’t need to be advanced. Lord forbid, it may even help persuade some that President Donald Trump’s positions on illegal immigration may be correct.

The bias is almost too much to bear.

The news media’s ultimate power is the ability to suffocate stories they disagree with, and fan the flames of narratives they want to advance. And in many cases, those narratives are false.

Whoopi Goldberg said it best — there’s rape and then there’s rape-rape. What she left out is that it’s only rape-rape when it advances the narrative, and that’s regardless of whether it happened.

LOVE TRIUMPHS: Huma Abedin Giving Pervert Weiner Another Chance.

You have to wonder if Abedin would be so forgiving if she were busy running the Clinton White House.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Well, as long as they remain married, they can invoke spousal privilege, so they’ve got that going for them anyway, which is nice.

PAYMENT DUE UPON RECEIPT: Trump Reportedly Handed Merkel a $374 Billion Invoice for NATO.

One German minister did not hesitate to qualify the invoice as “outrageous,” saying the intent was clear. “The concept behind putting out such demands is to intimidate the other side, but the chancellor took it calmly and will not respond to such provocations,” the minister said.

Although no one confirmed how much the total invoice was for, a calculation by the Times suggests the total was around $312 billion for the shortfall in spending and around $62 billion in interest.

I’m sure that, unlike Hillary Clinton’s infamous “Reset” button, this was not meant to be taken literally.