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Speaker Paul Ryan, right, and his House Republicans are reportedly planning to introduce its Obamacare replacement bill this week.

Congressional Republicans will introduce their much-anticipated bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act this week, NBC News reports, citing a senior House aide.

Draft legislation would provide expanded tax credits and health savings accounts for individuals, while cutting spending on tax subsidies and Medicaid, NBC writes. It would also practically eliminate the employer and individuals mandates to provide and carry health insurance. That legislation may have changed but a House Republican aide earlier called it the bones of what would happen.

Also read: Trump embraces HSAs as a pillar of repeal and replace, but they will need work.

SEC nominee targeted: A coalition of progressive groups is planning to announce a campaign to derail President Trumps nomination of Jay Clayton to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Washington Post reports. Organizers say the campaign will include a six-figure digital advertising buy. As the Post says, it comes amid broader efforts by Democrats to highlight Trumps choice of finance-industry insiders for key administration positions despite his antiWall Street rhetoric when he was a candidate.

Knives out for Priebus: Politico writes that administration officials are increasingly putting blame on Trumps chief of staff, Reince Priebus, as the White House struggles to gain its footing nearly two months into the new presidency. More than a dozen Trump aides, allies and others close to the White House said Priebus was becoming a singular target of criticism within the White House.

One senior administration official said theres a real frustration among many, including Trump himself, that things arent going as smoothly as hoped for. The White House, meanwhile, pushed back on the story, with Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannon saying the presidents agenda is being implemented in record time, which shows you what a great job Reince is doing.

Also see: Opinion: With wiretapping tweets, Trump undermines the presidency.

Regulation tally: Federal agencies and the GOP-led Congress have delayed, suspended or reversed more than 90 regulations in the month and a half since Trump took office, according to a tally by the New York Times. The Times called the effort one of the most significant shifts in regulatory policy in recent decades, with dozens more rules possibly being eliminated in the coming weeks.

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Republicans to introduce health bill this week | Knives out for Reince Priebus, Trump's chief of staff - MarketWatch

President Trump and congressional Republicans are poised to roll back a series of Obama-era worker safety regulations targeted by business groups, starting with a rule that would require federal contractors to disclose and correct serious safety violations.

The Senate is set to vote Monday evening to eliminate the regulation, dubbed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule. Finalized in August and blocked by a court order in October, the rule would limit the ability of companies with recent safety problems to complete for government contracts unless they agreed to remedies.

The measure to abolish it has already cleared the House. The next step after the Senate vote would be the White House, where Trump is expected to sign it.

A half-dozen other worker safety regulations are also in Republican crosshairs, with one headed to the Senate floor as soon as this week. Many are directed at companies with federal contracts. Such companies employ 1 in 5 American workers meaning the effort could have wide-ranging effects.

This is the opening salvo of the Republicans war on workers, said Deborah Berkowitz, who was a senior policy adviser at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration when many of the regulations were crafted. It sends a signal that Congress and the administration is listening to big business and their lobbyists and they are not standing up for the interests of the American workers.

[Federal Insider: Fair-pay order for contractors under attack in Congress]

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and other leading business groups have urged Congress and the Trump administration to eliminate the regulations, arguing that they discourage businesses from competing for government contracts, thereby reducing jobs.

This is the same old playbook from the left that never changes, said Randy Johnson, the Chambers senior vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits. Any changes in employment laws proposed by the employer community is disingenuously described as an attack on workers. The left has never seen a regulation they dont like, no matter how many jobs it kills.

Hours before the Senate vote on the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released a staff report that says that 66 of the federal governments 100 largest contractors have at some point violated federal wage and hour laws. Since 2015, the report says, more than a third of the 100 largest OSHA penalties have been imposed on federal contractors.

Too often, federal contractors break labor laws while continuing to suck down millions in taxpayer dollars, Warren said in a statement.

[Hill Republicans move to scrap Obama-era regulations]

That concern prompted the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces regulation. Among the strongest data points: Rodney Bridgett, 37, a worker at a Tysons Foods beef processing plant in Nebraska, was crushed by a piece of heavy equipment when a chain snapped on the plants kill floor in 2012.

Tyson spokesman Worth Sparkman called Bridgetts death a tragic accident and said the company aspires to have zero work-related injuries and illnesses, and continue to improve our culture related to safety every day.

OSHA investigators found that Tysons supervisors had repeatedly failed to inspect the faulty chain. While OSHA sought to fine the company, the Obama administration moved separately to target a major source of Tysonss revenue: nearly $300million a year in federal contracts.

The Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces regulation was finalized in August. Days later, the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) sued, securing a temporary injunction that prohibited the federal government from implementing it.

ABC and other business groups objected to the rules requirement that companies disclose citations for alleged safety violations that they are still challenging.

They define violations to include mere allegations and citations where the contractors havent had a chance to defend them, said Marc Freedman, executive director of labor law policy with the Chamber. We consider this a violation of their constitutional due-process rights.

David Madland of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, said the rule applies only to companies with contracts worth $500,000 or more. If the rule is eliminated, he said, taxpayers will lose alongside affected workers. One purpose of the rule was to make it easier for federal agencies to identify contractors who were not honest brokers when it came to employee pay.

People who rip off workers rip off the government, Madland said.

After Trumps election, the Chamber and other business groups added the rule to wish lists for regulations they wanted to see eliminated. Republican lawmakers quickly identified a tool to assist in those efforts the rarely used Congressional Review Act (CRA). Approved in 1996, the law had been used only once to kill a worker safety rule that would have forced companies to alter their workstations or change tools and equipment if their employees suffered work-related repetitive-stress injuries.

The CRA allows Congress to roll back recently enacted regulations by a simple majority vote. Once a rule is killed, it is killed forever. No future administration can pass a similar measure unless Congress is persuaded to pass a law instead a far more difficult task.

Reps. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.) and Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) are leading the charge to kill Labor Department regulations using the CRA. In addition to the effort to eliminate the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces regulation called the blacklisting rule by the Chamber and many Republican lawmakers Byrne introduced a measure to quash a regulation called the Volks rule.

Adopted in January, the rule responds to a 2012 D.C. Court of Appeals decision Volks Constructors v. Secretary of Labor that limited OSHAs power to issue citations for record-keeping violations older than six months. The new rule gives OSHA authority to issue citations and levy fines against companies for failure to record illnesses, injuries and deaths that date back as far as five years.

Last week, the House voted to kill the Volks rule. If the measure clears the Senate, Trump is expected to sign it.

Byrne said he does not think OSHA needs the Volks rule. If you are determined to be a bad actor, youll be a bad actor, he said. I dont think this is going to encourage noncompliance. I think that OSHA is being lazy on getting its investigations done.

Byrne also called the rule an overreach, saying the changes should have been made in law, not through regulation.

Rep. Robert C. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) is leading efforts to block the rule-killing measures. He argues that Byrnes measure to kill the Volks rule will block OSHAs enforcement efforts and create a safe harbor for those employers who deliberately underreport.

OSHA says staffing levels permit investigators to visit an American business roughly once every 140 years, unless a serious violation is reported.

Scott also defended the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule, saying that nothing in the regulation would ban a company from securing a federal contract. He noted that only companies with serious, pervasive, intentional and repeated safety violations would have to report them.

Who qualifies for that who we need to help? Scott said. If you can save money by underpaying your workers and violating OSHA, why should you have a competitive advantage over those who are complying with the law?

Leaders on both sides of the battle hold key committee assignments and have close financial ties with the constituencies they are championing. Foxx and Byrne received hundreds of thousands in donations for their 2016 reelection campaigns from employees of federal contractors and their trade groups, including ones that have been at the forefront of efforts to kill the two worker safety rules. Foxx received $7,500 from employees of ABC, while Byrne received $10,000 from ABC employees.

Scott, meanwhile, is a long-standing champion of unions and civil rights groups who are in favor of the keeping the Obama-era rules. During Scotts 2016 reelection campaign, more than half of his donations came from union employees, including $10,000 from the United Steelworkers and $30,000 from the United Food and Commercial Workers union, according to records maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

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Republicans poised to roll back worker safety regulations - Washington Post

As a father of three children, Ive been drinking from the fire hose for a while now when it comes to collecting and sharing nuggets of wisdom that will (hopefully) serve them well as they become adults.

May the self-proclaimed people of reason and science be praised! What a tour de force of truth they offer us on a daily basis. Like the following five life lessons I want to make sure I nail down with my princess before I send her off into the world:

1. If you are ever photographed while on your knees, and a male of the leftist persuasion makes a sexual joke about you, make sure to publicly apologize for having put your feet up on the White House couch in the first place. I mean, sometimes you are just asking for it. Unless you pose partially topless while endorsing a classic childrens fairy tale. Then thats just art. And besides, real sexual harassment looks like not wanting to fund Planned Parenthood. The right to execute innocent babies shall not be infringed no matter what science says about when life begins. And as powerful as that is to contemplate in its own right, it becomes all the more compelling if you say it while wearing a pussy hat.

2. If you ever become a florist, a baker, or a nun, just plan on declaring your conscience dead from the get-go. Your God isnt wanted here. But if you must continue to insert a deity into your daily discussions, make sure your golden calf is purple and covered with glitter. Or try Islam, which is basically a get-out-of-jail-free card for pretty much everything. Not only can it magically supply you with more rights as a foreigner than someone whose descendants came over on the Mayflower, but it can also give you a really cool alibi for murder. Thats what one actor/graduate of Marie Harfs jobs program had to say about the natural consequences of Muslims not getting more acting roles: those guilty of such clear Islamophobia will turn to violent jihad as an alternative. So sayeth the religion of peace. Its all about justifiable triggers and safe spaces, really. If you are a Muslim, you get all of them. If you are a Christian, you get zero, and youre a bigot. The Constitution seems clear on that.

3. If you want to make a successful run in the business and/or entertainment world, make sure you avoid things like making money and consistently drawing an audience. Instead, get on board with a project that comes in eight parts and already bores the hell out of, if not outright disturbs, its audience after just one viewing. Because its still a win if it replaces something people actually care about watching during primetime television. Propaganda is fun like that. And if people ever take issue with your ham-fisted tactics, always remember that you have two very powerful weapons in your arsenal to defeat them: temper tantrums and violence. Because tolerance hurts darn it.

4. If you want to be president one day, and defended as bullet proof when accused of possibly wire-tapping your eventual replacement, make sure you lay a solid foundation of unassailable ethical alibis to offer you cover. Like if you like your doctor, you can keep it. Or wiretapping journalists who irritate you. Or making the IRS your rottweiler. Or winking at the sanctity of marriage just to win an election, before turning around and choking the country with your rainbow flag. Or believing you have the most magical pen and phone in the history of America. Or encouraging your secretary of state and national security adviser to lie about how and why people died in Benghazi. See what I mean? Bulletproof. The press will never cut through that curtain of integrity. Not that theyll even try.

5. Finally, if you want to tap into the unlimited potential of being created in the image and likeness of the creator of the universe, things like the Bible and the Declaration of Independence are for suckers. Who on earth would want to be guided by that which so many martyrs died a gruesome death for, or willingly sacrificed their lives, fortunes, and sacred honors? Not when you can be guided by the likes of philosopher kings like Chris Cuomo, Lena Dunham, or Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi D-Calif. (F, 10%). Look how far they are willing to stick their neck out for total depravity and sheer asshattery over and over and over again. So inspiring. In fact, Ive rarely seen such commitment except in Islam.

Unless Im feeling pretty and sick enough in the soul to deny the science dangling between my legs, then I belong on the cover of Vanity Fair. Where I will instantly become a better woman than you could ever hope to be, my daughter.

Have a nice life.

Steve Deace is broadcast nationally each weeknight on CRTV. He is the author of the book A Nefarious Plot.

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5 lessons progressives inspired me to teach my teenage daughter - Conservative Review

It is clear that today what passes for news is essentially opinion. The left-leaning media (so called liberal) have shown more intolerance than what is essentially called right-wing by them. They hate to lose. And when they do, the savage attacks on the non-liberals show their intolerance.

Take the case of Shazia Ilmi not being allowed to speak at her Alma MaterJamia Millia Islamia on a seminar on Women empowerment. Though she was invited, the invite was withdrawn at the last minute without explanation. General Bakshi and Tarek Fatah were invited to a prestigious club in Kolkata for a seminar and Mamata Banerjee made the institution cancel the event.

None of the liberals had massive rallies against such acts against Freedom of Speech. In fact, most news channels did not even carry this.

Be it the Indian, American or British media all seem to have a markedly liberal point of view that does not allow any dissent. Talk about freedoms. Only the Left it seems has the freedom to speak and rally.

The word intolerance is used all the time when there is a blowback on whatever the liberals say or do. No matter how innocuous the subject, such as spreading yoga worldwide, the liberal left will have something unpleasant to say about it.

The people have pretty much told the liberal media that they dont rule the dialogue and the social media is, thus, thriving. Whether it is the New York Times or the New Yorker, very few read them and many think they are biased towards the extreme left.

Change in spite of the media has happened in India, Britain and USA and will follow in most European countries. One has stopped watching Indian TV news as once again there is little news but a great deal of debate. What passes for news is the opinion of the anchor or the owners of the channels who have their own agendas.

Yesterday, I watched the news briefly and saw an event, that made me think:Arun Purie congratulating his daughter for India Today TV getting the award for best English and Hindi news. To me an award is a self-perpetuating exercise by an organisation where they form a club of sorts and give each other awards. Whether it is the Oscars, Grammys, etc. They form a small cabal who decide who gets an award. Is this the peoples choice? No! The people are not consulted and mostly unaware of how and who chooses these awards.

Newspapers, magazines and such organisations pump up their reader/viewership to garner more advertising revenue, so their own statistics are always suspect. So, are these awards really relevant? Are the best reporters getting awards? Is there even such a thing as investigative reporting left in India?

I saw a portion of The big fight where the issue being debated was Is free speech being curtailed now. Well, in fact no. When the Congress realised that Modi was a potential threat way back in 2004 a sustained campaign was launched to discredit him this is a long story and much has been written on this. The US media did the same for Trump. The people lost trust and switched to social media. And voted Trump as president, in spite the hundreds of negative articles that appeared on him by CNN, New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post and many others. They switched off.

So, I looked up once again at media viewership and came up with this revealing data on TV news viewership.

Top 5 English news channels viewership (BARC data week Feb 2017):

Times Now 798,000 India Today 498,000 CNN-IBN 404,000 NDTV 376,000 BBC 184,000

Hindi News Channels (Feb 2017)

Simply put two million people watch the top five English channels put together. And 485 million people watch the top five Hindi news channels.

The conclusion is most of what we see in the English news channels is really not relevant in the context of forming public opinion. A viewership of just two million in a country of 1.3 billion is too small to be of any significance. Wake up reporters and anchors. Your air- conditioned environment plus huge salaries and popularity are at stake. Beat the streets and start feeling the pulse of all Indians not just the Liberals and their cronies.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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The liberals and their false angst on intolerance - Times of India (blog)

The first problem with these kinds of arguments is that the alt-left doesnt actually exist, at least not in the way that the lefts opponents would have it. As The New Republics Sarah Jones pointed out, the alt-rights goal, shared by neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer and the White Houses infamous Steves (Bannon and Miller), is to implement a white supremacist state. In contrast, the goals of the alt-left are not too different from that of a New Deal Democrat. Universal health care and a $15 minimum wage are not the lefts version of a Muslim ban, even if the rhetoric of the left is combative, uncompromising, and, yes, sometimes obnoxious.

As Eric Levitz points out at New York, one of the main problems with Wolcotts piece is that he cherry-picks a number of voicesmany of whom barely intersectto speak for a perceived group. Among them are a few writers he apparently dislikes (Michael Tracey, Freddie deBoer, Connor Kilpatrick), Susan Sarandon, Mickey Kaus, and Oliver Stone. While criticisms can be made of many of Wolcotts targets, to lump them together as representative of the alt-left is nonsensical. It conflates being Loud Online with actual politics. And crucially, unlike members of the alt-right, who are being actively wooed by the GOP, these people have almost no power.

Blair is positing a more dangerous idea: that liberalism should essentially reorient itself as a globalized technocracy, in opposition to anti-elite populism.

A graver sin is the adoption of a term that was created by conservatives to smear the left and discredit criticisms of the growing clout of the racist right. Richard Spencer coined the term alt-right for his own movement. In very stark contrast, alt-left is a strawman invention of far-right websites. As The Washington Posts Aaron Blake pointed out in December, The difference between alt-right and alt-left is that one of them was coined by the people who comprise the movement and whose movement is clearly ascendant; the other was coined by its opponents and doesnt actually have any subscribers. When alt-left is deployed by the likes of Sean Hannity on Fox News, it is a form of propaganda used to conflate groups like Black Lives Matter with the Ku Klux Klan. For Wolcott to ascribe to this notion only gives this right-wing smear more credence.

Blair invokes the specter of a dangerous left for different reasons. By equating the populist lefts hostility toward big business and the 1 percent with the populist rights hostility toward migrants and people of color, he is creating a false equivalence that undermines progressivism as a whole. The ultra-wealthy patrons of the Republican Party (and, to a lesser extent, the Democratic Party) are, in fact, much to blame for deep inequality we see in the United States. Globalization did gouge the working and middle classes in the West, most notoriously during the Great Recession, even as it lifted millions out of poverty in other parts of the world. Political elites did fail us, from the Iraq War to the financial crisis.

Yet this is how Blair frames the debate over these issues:

Today, a distinction that often matters more than traditional right and left is open vs. closed. The open-minded see globalization as an opportunity but one with challenges that should be mitigated; the closed-minded see the outside world as a threat. This distinction crosses traditional party lines and thus has no organizing base, no natural channel for representation in electoral politics.

The last half of Blairs op-ed argues for achieving radical change by reaching for voters who remain in the big space in the center. Tellingly, he calls for an alliance between Silicon Valleyan industry of socially liberal economic elitesand public policy. In his closing line, Blair states that we must build a new coalition that is popular, not populist.

There are two ironies in Blairs column. The first is that Blair himself was partly responsible for his Labour Party losing a large chunk of its core working-class voters, thanks to the Iraq War and the Great Recession. The second is that huge pillars of Blairs British-style moderate liberalismsuch as universal health careare totally in line with what the American populist left is demanding. The populist left, in other words, is well within the mainstream of Western democratic tradition; it is apparently their anti-elitist rhetoric that really rubs Blair the wrong way. He is, after all, an elite himself.

One big lesson from Hillary Clintons loss to Donald Trump was her campaigns over-reliance on the mythical moderate voter. (Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer encapsulated this line of thinking in an infamously bad projection: For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two or three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It didnt quite work out that way.) Wolcott and Blair do not address this problem. In different ways, they make a case for the center based on a bad-faith argument that the populist left is the same brand of scourge as the nationalist right.

In American politics at least, the political center is the space between a functional liberal democratic party and one hijacked by white nationalists. This is not a promising ground on which liberals can build out from, as Blair puts it. Whether he likes it or not, the case remains that the Democratic Party will need its left wing to mobilize working-class and young, progressive voters; the left will need institutions like the Democratic Party if it wants to win elections. Over the next few years, there will be time for arguments over strategies and priorities. But there is no time for liberals to try to delegitimize the populist left; it will only cut their own legs out from under them.

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Liberalism Needs the Alt-Left - New Republic