CHANGE: Trump becomes schmoozer-in-chief.

Trump, a Washington outsider, is hoping to build the kinds of relationships that can lead to cooperation with Republicans and Democrats that would advance his agenda.

Lawmakers who felt shunned at worst or tolerated at best by former President Barack Obama are hopeful for the change.

“We’re a couple days in but it’s going to be way better than what we’ve had during the last eight years,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said in an interview. “He’s a builder and he wants to bring people together.”
Trump so far has appeared to relish joking around with lawmakers at informal and formal events, and he’ll take his effort on the road Thursday, when he will speak about his agenda in front of House and Senate Republicans’ joint retreat in Philadelphia.

But it’s unclear how far the new president’s charm offensive will get him.

Well, it’s early yet. But Trump’s effort stands in contrast to Barack Obama, who kept Congress at arm’s length even when his own party held both chambers.

And the thing about elected officials is, most of them enjoy schmoozing and being schmoozed.

BUT OF COURSE — ALL THE WAY AROUND: Donald Trump Rightfully Calls Chelsea Manning a ‘TRAITOR,’ Washington Post Takes Offense.

U.S. GENERAL: Iraqis Prove to be ‘Formidable Fighting Force’ with ‘Monumental Achievement’ in Mosul.

Quite an achievement, but the shame of it is that ISIS — the “jayvee” — was allowed to metastasize into such a potent force and over such a large area.

TRUMP TO MEXICAN PRESIDENT: Better to cancel our meeting.

YOU CAN’T FIRE ME; I QUIT! Mexican President Pena Nieto says he canceled meeting with Trump.

Boy, that escalated quickly.

BREAKING: The State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.

Washington, home of the self-licking ice-cream cone, has just invented the self-draining swamp.

YEAH, HE PROBABLY IS: Elon Musk may actually be serious about tunneling under L.A.

Billionaire innovator Elon Musk declared early Wednesday that he’s ready to move ahead with his recently formulated ambitions to bore holes, possibly under the city.

“Exciting progress on the tunnel front,” Musk tweeted. “Plan to start digging in a month or so.”

Digging just where and how, no one knows. Coming from anyone else, such a declaration might brushed off as a joke.

But given that Musk is the entrepreneur who, with a team, reshaped mobile payments (PayPal), sent rockets into space (Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX) and launched an electric-car company (Tesla Motors), the tweets are unlikely to be dismissed. He is, after all, being taken seriously about a possible Mars mission.

Whatever you might think of the merits of Musk’s various projects, he thinks big and he writes big checks.

RAHM EMANUEL’S CHICAGO: 6 Shot at Gun Violence Victim’s Memorial.

Meanwhile, John Kass says that Donald Trump has “turned Mayor Rahm Emanuel into a sympathetic figure.”

We’ll see.

DIVIRSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Two Afghan migrants revealed as those arrested over horrific three-hour rape streamed on Facebook Live in Sweden.

According to this FrontPage Mag report from 2013, “Sweden has continued to treat rapists more leniently than pretty much every other country in the Western world.“

POLITICO: Trump’s flashy executive actions could run aground.

Former President Pen & Phone was not reached for comment, apparently.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Oral Arguments to Begin in Minnesota Case of Mother Suing Her Transgender Child.

Anmarie Calgaro’s lawsuit alleges that healthcare providers treated her 17-year-old as an emancipated minor without her consent when the teen began receiving transgender medical and mental health services.

While the lawsuit centers largely on the state’s lack of a clearly defined legal process for emancipation, Calgaro’s unnamed teen daughter earlier told Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid attorneys that her mother had “made it known to him [sic] that she no longer wishes to have any contact with him,” according to court documents.

The resulting emancipation notice allowed the teen to make her own healthcare decisions. But, as it states in the complaint, Calgaro denies neglecting her child.

In a video of Calgaro’s press conference the day the lawsuit was filed, she began to tear up while talking about the “shock” she felt upon discovering that her child was receiving gender-affirming medical treatment without her parental consent.

Gender-affirming?

QUESTION ASKED: Is President Trump Launching a ‘War on Science?’

This morning’s previous item is certainly related.

SAMIZDAT:

President Trump faces two problems, probably intractable, in his efforts to control communications from Federal agencies.

The first is, it can’t be done. The second is, he’ll make “heroes” out of these “rogues” who resist.

UPDATE (From Glenn): Trump is a genius with mass media, but it’s not clear that he’s as expert at dealing with this stuff. But the Army-of-Davids response to this Army-of-Davids behavior wouldn’t come from Trump, but from Trump fans, who might set up fake “Rogue” sites pumping out nonsense, or something like that. There are a lot of Trump fans out there on social media. . . .

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Obama Era Precedents Haunt Media.

Noah Rothman:

“Don’t recall ever seeing a WH do this,” remarked Huffington Post White House reporter Christina Wilkie. “Some might call it Propaganda,” NBC News’ Katy Tur averred. “I didn’t totally expect the 1984-esque dystopian future to be so soon, but life comes at ya fast,” snarked the Center for American Progress’s economist Katie Bahn. But this, too, is not an unparalleled abuse of the public trust; at least, not for those who remember how the Obama administration sold the public on the Iran nuclear accords in 2015.

The Obama administration’s “blog” content (now maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration), which includes former Press Secretary Josh Earnest’s “Regional Roundup: What America’s Newspapers are Saying About the Iran Deal.” The blog consisted entirely of favorable headlines from around the country reciting verbatim (and false) administration claims about the nuclear accord. “The Iran Deal” even had its own Twitter account which disseminated not only favorable press mentions but also crafted insipid pop culture memes to get the millennial generation jazzed about nuclear non-proliferation. Imagine the anxiety among journalists when the Trump White House mirrors this tactic.

If it weren’t for double standards…

BREAKING:

In response to “Where the other 11 [TPP] countries go from here,” I wrote, “They’ll come here. To sign bilateral trade deal with us, the world’s most prolific consumers.”

And getting that started took all of two days.

THE TIME FOR MULLING IS PAST: Shaken by Trump’s Criticism of NATO, Europe Mulls Building Own Military Force.

That our NATO partners to live up to their commitment to spend a measly 2% of GDP on defense is not too much to ask.

HMM: Trump’s Immigration Revamp to Include Plans for Safe Zones Inside Syria.

A separate order also would lay the groundwork for an escalation of U.S. military involvement in Syria by directing the Pentagon and the State Department to craft a plan to create safe zones for civilians fleeing the conflict there, those familiar with the plans said. Mr. Trump has said such safe zones could serve as an alternative to admitting refugees to the U.S.

News of the actions, which are expected Thursday, was met with distress across the Middle East. They point to a dramatic reshaping of America’s relations in the region by a president just days in office, when the U.S. is engaged on multiple fronts in the fight against the Islamic State terrorist group.

The initial step on the safe-zone proposal represents another policy reversal from the administration of Barack Obama, who long resisted pressure for such an approach from Congress and U.S. allies in the Middle East because he believed it would draw the U.S. too deeply into another war.

This looks like the first serious test of Rex Tillerson’s State Department. Making safe zones work will require acquiescence — at the very least — from Syria’s current power brokers, and neither Russia, Iran, nor Turkey has much reason to do so.

DEMAND, MEET SUPPLY: Metro Denver apartment rents drop for second quarter.

Average rents decreased and vacancy rates increased in all six of the metro counties covered in the survey, which is the most comprehensive available with 120,000 units measured.

“In 2010, only 498 new apartment units were built in the entire city. Fast forward to 2016 and we’re seeing that same number being delivered every three weeks in Denver,” Teo Nicolais, a Harvard University instructor who specializes in real estate, said in the report.

Nicolais counted 9,962 new units coming into the market in 2016, the highest total ever constructed in metro Denver in a year.

Memo to California: This is what happens when you let builders build.

ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS THE NARRATIVE: Facebook Updates ‘Trending’ Feature To Fight Fake News, Removes Personalized Topics.

Facebook’s trending topics software will now only feature topics that have been covered by a significant crowd of trustworthy publishers starting Wednesday, Jan. 25, a transition that’ll diminish fake news stories by virtue of prioritizing information sources that have been around longer.

Moreover, trending topics will no longer be a personalized array with respect to individual Facebook users but will instead be a wide coterie of different topics so as to puncture the proverbial bubble — and by extension, the echo chamber that perpetuates isolated views — and expose Facebook users’s different areas of interest.

When the former Obama Administration engaged in this sort of behavior, they called it “nudging.”

“EXTREMIST” Teenage extremist convicted of stabbing German officer.

The Celle state court said the girl, identified only as Safia S. under German privacy regulations, was sentenced to six years in prison, the dpa news agency reported Thursday.

The German-Moroccan dual citizen traveled to Istanbul a year ago hoping to reach Syria but was brought back by her mother — but not before prosecutors say IS members tasked her with conducting an “act of martyrdom” in Germany.

She stabbed the police officer with a kitchen knife in Hannover’s main train station last February.

SAYONARA? Salon Media near deal to sell big stake to activist hedge fund.

It won’t take much cash for Spear Point to buy a controlling stake in Salon. The 22-year-old digital publishing enterprise, which has been plagued by high-level turnover on the executive and editorial side — as well as declining revenue — has a market capitalization of only $6.1 million and a stock price of 8 cents a share.

At its IPO in 1999, its stock was $10.50 a share with a market cap of $105 million.

Spear Point has been quietly snapping up Salon Media Group shares in recent weeks, sources said.

If Salon gets new management, where will white progressives go for their daily dose of racial guilt?

TRUE CRIME: Mortified mum caught sneaking miniature vodka on plane dragged off easyJet flight by three security guards.

I DID THIS ONCE: Melania Took Barron to School on Monday Not Realizing It Was an Off Day.

BIG ASTRONOMY: Plasma tidal wave may tell us if black holes destroy information.

A laser-driven tidal wave could test a question that has long plagued physics: is the information inside a black hole lost forever or somehow preserved through the mysterious machinations of quantum mechanics?

The defining feature of a black hole is thought to be that anything that crosses the event horizon – the proverbial point of no return – can never escape and is lost forever.

But in the 1970s, Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes aren’t truly black. If a virtual particle pair pops into existence near the event horizon, and one falls in, the black hole must lose a tiny bit of mass in the form of energy. So black holes will radiate tiny amounts of energy – dubbed Hawking radiation – and evaporate over time. The bigger the black hole, the longer it takes to evaporate.

So what happens to everything that has fallen into the black hole? Logic dictates it, too, should be lost. But quantum mechanics holds that information must be conserved and cannot be lost – hence the paradox.

Perhaps most intriguing is the possibility that the laws of physics could allow for paradoxes.

NOTHING SHORT OF STUNNING: Judge Slams Obama DOJ’s ‘Unethical Conduct’ in Amnesty Case.

Breitbart Texas reported in May of 2016 that U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen slammed U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) officials, writing that their “conduct is certainly not worthy of any department whose name includes the word ‘Justice’.” He added, “Suffice it to say, the citizens of all fifty states, their counsel, the affected aliens and the judiciary all deserve better.” He opined that the DOJ “purports to represent all Americans—not just those who are in favor of whatever actions the Department is seeking to prosecute or defend. The end result never justifies misconduct.” Hanen issued a 28-page memorandum opinion and order and lambasted federal government officials for misleading the Court during the executive amnesty litigation.

At the time of the May 2016 order, Hanen noted that the DOJ “has now admitted making statements that clearly did not match the facts. It has admitted that the lawyers who made these statements had knowledge of the truth when they made these misstatements.” The DOJ provided only the explanation that its lawyers “lost focus” or that the “fact[s] receded in memory or awareness.” He opined that the misrepresentations were made on “multiple occasions” and started at “the very first hearing this Court held.” He said he was mislead both in writing and in statements made in open court.

The Judge issued an order that the federal government misled the Court and the plaintiff states in the amnesty case about when it would begin to implement the DAPA program and would amend the DACA program. The Court ordered the government to file by June 10, 2016, a list of every individual, their names and addresses, of those who were granted these benefits.

Hanen called the government’s conduct “intentionally deceptive” and ordered U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to file a comprehensive plan “to prevent this unethical conduct from ever occurring again.” He added, Lynch must make sure that “Justice Department trial lawyers tell the truth—the entire truth.” He also barred the DOJ lawyers who had appeared in the case from ever appearing before his court again.

The Obama Administration had a lousy court record, but this one might take the scandal-free cake.

LOVE TRUMPS HATE: 3 White Men Leave Black DC Waitress $450 Tip With Note: ‘Not Race. Not Gender. Just American.’

As someone said recently, “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.”