ANALYSIS: TRUE. Chelsea Clinton Is the Last Thing the Democratic Party Needs.

Instead of moving on—and being better off for it—another Clinton in public office would broaden the party’s disconnect with working and middle class voters. Electing Chelsea to a major role among Democrats would do little to convey a message of change and progression.

The Washington Post recently reported Chelsea Clinton has begun to show an interest in politics. “In recent days, we’ve noticed a different Chelsea Clinton—one more than willing to speak out, often a bit bluntly. And she’s speaking out specifically against President Trump, using his preferred medium: Twitter.”

Business Insider further dramatized Chelsea Clinton’s recent activity on Twitter by hyperbolically dubbing it a “crusade against Trump.” “Very grateful no one seriously hurt in the Louvre attack …or the (completely fake) Bowling Green Massacre. Please don’t make up attacks,” Chelsea tweeted on February 3 in regards to Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway’s “Bowling Green” gaffe. Conway responded to Chelsea by citing Hillary Clinton’s infamous “Bosnia Sniper Fire” lie and noted Clinton lost the election, to which Chelsea Clinton didn’t bother to retort back.

She’s not very good even at Twitter, and if you saw her during her brief career as a highly-paid “reporter” for NBC, you know she has very little camera presence. Nevertheless, if she wants to run, the Democrats will probably make room for yet another Clinton.

POLITICO: ‘The Senate is coming apart’

Senate Democrats — the last line of Democratic defense — are slow-walking the installation of Trump’s Cabinet to a historic degree, so much so that Republicans haven’t even started yet on Trump’s legislative agenda. Republicans will eventually win all these confirmation battles, but it will be time-consuming and ugly.

How ugly has it gotten? Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) voted against the nomination of Elaine Chao for secretary of transportation. Chao happens to be the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Chao was approved easily — the vote was 93-6 — but Schumer’s “no” vote infuriated many Republicans. Yet it was also the embattled Schumer’s way of sending a message to both his base and GOP counterparts — I will do whatever it takes. He joined the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker in voting against Chao.

“The Senate is coming apart,” said Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.).

“It’s not a good time. It’s not a good time,” added Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Democrats, many of whom openly loathe Trump and are furious over his refugee crackdown — which Democrats describe as a “Muslim ban” — and other executive actions, have used all the procedural arrows in their quiver to slow down confirmation of Trump’s Cabinet nominees. They’ve boycotted committee meetings, refused to let panels meet in the afternoon, dragged out votes as long as possible, and refused to agree to even normal floor requests. They are voting against Trump’s Cabinet picks in unprecedented numbers, arguing that Trump doesn’t deserve even a patina of partisan support.

And their tactics have been partly successful.

The Senate’s confirmation of Trump’s Cabinet is the slowest in modern history, spanning back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Schumer and his tantrum-prone caucus are giving Mitch McConnell every excuse he needs to deploy the Reid Option.

USE GMAIL? Update Your Version of Chrome.

THAT’S NOT FUNNY: Lesbian ‘Comedian’ Bullies First Son in ‘Barron Trump, Up Past Bedtime’ Show in Chicago.

The kids are supposed to be off-limits, period.

TOILET SNAKE SHOCK: How One Family Found Out Their Home Was Infested With Rattlesnakes.

A MAN’S GOT TO UNDERSTAND HIS LIMITATIONS: Man’s daily vodka intake calcified his pancreas.

After drinking a half a pint of vodka every day since he was 35, a 50-year-old man in Pennsylvania went to the emergency room vomiting blood. He complained of abdominal pain and “foul-smelling diarrhea” that had been plaguing him for two months, per a report on his case in the New England Journal of Medicine.

He was diagnosed with chronic pancreatitis, which is most often caused by alcoholism and means his pancreas was inflamed. In this case, a CT scan found “extensive calcification of the pancreas,” the doctors who treated him report.

I suspect he may have been drinking more than his claimed daily half-pint.

OR WAS THE SERVICE JUST LOUSY? Restaurant Fires Rhode Island Legislator for Political Talk.

Classic Cafe owner Raymond Burns said Thursday he warned Providence Democratic Rep. Moira Walsh that her “vocal political discussions” during her shift were interfering with her work. He said the final straw was a scathing online review of the restaurant that complained about Walsh.

Walsh denied that she had been warned against talking politics with customers and said the negative review complained about her political beliefs, not her service. The review discouraged men from patronizing the Providence breakfast spot because of what it described as “anti-male” views she had expressed on the radio and on social media.

Walsh said she got the job as a teenager and worked there for eight years before her firing last week.

“His direct quote to me was, ‘You know, we’re very proud of everything that you’re doing up at the State House, but your political views are affecting the business and we have to terminate your employment,'” she told WPRO-AM on Thursday.

In my experience, political talk and the service industry are usually a bad mix.

JAYVEE UPDATE: ISIS amputate the hands of two boys aged ten and 12 who refused to execute two civilians in front of their families in Mosul.

AN ORNITHOPTER BY ANOTHER NAME… A ‘Bat Bot’ takes flight.

“Bats are ridiculously stupid in terms of how complex they are,” said Dan Riskin, a biologist at University of Toronto Mississauga who wasn’t involved in the study. “They have a shoulder that can move in similar ways that an insect can, but then they have an elbow, and a wrist, and fingers and a thumb that controls the leading edge of the wing membrane.”

Earlier attempts at a bat-like flying machine failed because inventors tried to replicate the entire skeletal and muscular structure. The final devices were too heavy to fly.

So researchers at CalTech and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign simplified matters by focusing on the motions of a bat wing’s base components: the shoulder, the elbow, the wrist and the tail. Their device’s wings are formed from a single super-thin membrane made of silicone. Its bones are made of carbon fibre, and its joints are 3D-printed plastic.

All of which lightens the load. Bat Bot weighs 3.3 ounces, roughly the same as a large lemon or one and a half tennis balls. The flexible wings aid aerodynamics too.

It’s certainly something to see in action, as you’ll see in the video.

THE WAGES OF SOCIALISM: Venezuela Is So Broke It Can’t Even Export Oil.

A fleet of rundown Venezuelan oil tankers carrying some 4 million barrels of oil and other fuels is wallowing in the Caribbean Sea. Not because of bad weather, or mechanical problems, but because Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela SA, doesn’t have the cash to get them to their final destinations.

Beyond the obvious environmental risks, it’s doubly bad news for Venezuela, a country in dire economic straits and full-fledged crisis, with a political impasse, looting, dangerous food and health supply shortages, and massive protests. Venezuela is massively reliant on oil exports to bankroll government services. But the cash-strapped country can’t even find the money to service the vessels that carry its exports. And Venezuela needs the exports to get the cash to service the vessels. It’s a vicious circle.

It’s a vicious circle made possible by the Venezuelan government, and nothing free markets and private ownership couldn’t fix practically overnight.

But better that Venezuelans go cold, hungry, and sick than to reduce the power of the State.

NOTHING GOOD: What’s Happening with Subprime Auto Loans?

After the financial crisis, banks tightened credit standards until performance improved. Monoline and dealer finance companies, on the other hand, continued to lend to high-risk borrowers – and it is these companies that are seeing non-performance rates shifting higher.

That might sound a lot like 2007-08, but at least this time around GM isn’t stuffing the channels with thousands and thousands of unsold vehicles.

Oh, wait…

TWEEPOTUS: Trump Responds to ‘Allahu Akbar’ Louvre Terror Attack: ‘GET SMART U.S.’

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Facebook AI Lumos Can Find Your Photos Even Those You Are Not Tagged In.

If you type your name, for example, to trigger a Facebook photo search, results will start pulling images that you are not tagged in but contain your face. The same is true for searched things such as food and even actions.

Facebook is now able to do this by weaning itself away from text-driven technology. This means that the company is no longer relying solely on tags, labels, and descriptions that users enter into the system. The downside of this old method is that those photos that are not sufficiently tagged and captioned will not surface when searched.

“That’s changing because we’ve pushed computer vision to the next stage with the goal of understanding images at the pixel level,” Facebook said in an official statement. “This helps our systems do things like recognize what’s in an image, what type of scene it is, if it’s a well-known landmark, and so on.”

At the heart of this initiative is Facebook’s proprietary AI called Lumos. The company’s engineers are developing and training it so it can better answer questions involving the elements and objects found in an image.

The AI technology draws from its deep-learning engine so it can attach more meaning to each photo in the Facebook system. The analogy is that Facebook’s new technology can “see” the images as opposed to merely crawl their descriptions so that users can quickly find images even if they forgot their details.

Lumos’s power can be demonstrated in the way it can process billions of photos to predict a set of concepts and recognize semantic meaning. As the tool rolls out, users can expect its impact on the way search image results are ranked.

Even desktop-based photo software is good enough at this stuff to save me hours and hours each year in time I don’t have to spend doing the dreary work of keeping everything organized. It isn’t perfect, but it’s probably cut my workload by 85-90%.

Facebook promises to do an even better job — but you have to be willing to trust Facebook with your photos and your data.

THE KREMLIN WAY: Putin Opponent’s Possible Poisoning a ‘Test for the Trump Administration,’ Says Senator.

See also, Putin’s recent actions against Ukraine.

NO, THIS DID NOT HAPPEN IN COLORADO: Man, 74, Gave Out Hash Cookies At Mass.

As detailed in a police report, seven individuals fell ill shortly after consuming Jones’s homemade cookies, which he handed out at the conclusion of a 9:15 AM Sunday service. All of the victims, cops noted, sought treatment in the emergency room of a Bloomington hospital, where their symptoms included nausea, lethargy, anxiety, elevated blood pressure, and paranoia.

One parishioner who ate an entire cookie told police that he felt as if he was “having a stroke” and described feeling “like he was dying.” The man told cops that he recently had a triple bypass procedure and worried if “whatever happened today was going to adversely affect his heart.”

There’s nothing funny about dosing people with anything.

UNREGULATED EMISSIONS: Audi Outed for Promoting Fake Equal Pay Nonsense.

NOT EVEN WITH THE EXPRESS, WRITTEN CONSENT OF THE NFL: No Drone Zone For Those Attending the Super Bowl.

Temporary Flight Restrictions will prohibit certain aircraft operations, including unmanned aircraft operations, or drones, within a 34.5-mile radius of NRG Stadium in downtown Houston, Texas on game day. The restrictions will be in effect from 4 p.m. to 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 5.

The FAA produced a 20-second video that tells people to bring their lucky jerseys, face paint and team spirit to the game – but to leave their drones at home – because the stadium and the area around it is a No Drone Zone. The agency is promoting the video on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the FAA website.

“Drones are becoming much more popular, but they also pose certain safety risks,” said FAA Administrator Michael Huerta. “We’re working closely with our safety and security partners to spread the No Drone Zone message as widely as possible.”

Thomas Harris wrote something on this 40 years ago.

FROG, MEET SCORPION: Why Is the New York Times Lying about Trump?

Scott McConnell’s piece is too long to fairly excerpt, but well worth your time.

FRIENDS IN LOW PLACES: Dutch Populist Geert Wilders Praises Trump’s Immigration Ban.

It isn’t that Trump has no friends overseas; it’s that the friends he has aren’t approved of by the establishment.

USA TODAY HEADLINE: “Machete-wielding ‘terrorist’ shot during attack near Louvre.”

“Terrorist” probably doesn’t need scare quotes when it follows “machete-wielding.”

PETER BEINART: Everyone Has a Right to Free Speech, Even Milo.

Good for Beinart for making the case.

YES HE DOES: Trump Deserves Praise for Vow to Lift Johnson Amendment.

You don’t have to be religious — I’m not — to see that banning churches from partaking in politics is historically unAmerican.

POLL: Majority of Americans approve of Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination.

Rasmussen reports that “Voters See Gorsuch in the Judicial Mainstream.”

I guess this means Senate Democrats who try to block his nomination are way out of the American mainstream.

THE NEW CIVILITY: Trump-Supporting Berkeley Student Attacked by Left-Wing Thugs in the Middle of the Day.

At least arrests were made this once.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The open war between the establishment and President Trump.

The message this establishment is sending to Trump? Conform or be destroyed. The outrage at the president’s executive order on refugees and travel was a sample of what is coming. Trump is used to fighting the media and campaign opponents, but he has little experience with the professional and supposedly nonpartisan bureaucracy. That is why his firing of acting attorney general Sally Yates was so important. She ordered her department not to defend an executive order that had been cleared by the White House counsel and her own Office of Legal Counsel. For Trump to have delayed or done nothing would have been an invitation to further subversion. He let Yates go within hours.

The blasé manner in which the media describes opposition to Trump from within the bureaucracy is stunning. “Federal workers turn to encryption to thwart Trump,” read one Politico headline. “An anti-Trump resistance movement is growing within the U.S. government,” says Vanity Fair. “Federal workers are in regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees about what they can do to push back against the new president’s initiatives,” reports the Washington Post. No one who professes support for democracy and the rule of law can read these words without feeling alarmed. The civil service exists to support the chief executive—not the other way around. And yet, when White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that career officials who disagree with White House policy are free to resign, the collective response in Washington was outrage—at Spicer!

Not only are there two Americas. There are two governments: one elected and one not, one that alternates between Republicans and Democrats and one that remains, decade after decade, stubbornly liberal, contemptuous of Congress, and resistant to change. It is this second government and its allies in the media and the Democratic Party that are after President Trump, that want him driven from office before his term is complete.

Read the whole thing.