TED CRUZ: TRUMP CAMPAIGN BEARS SOME RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE VIOLENCE THAT DERAILED FRIDAY’S RALLIES. “Two rallies on behalf of Republican front-runner Donald Trump were derailed on Friday evening, after violence broke out in St. Louis, Missouri, and protesters took over a would-be rally in Chicago, Illinois. Ted Cruz hit The Donald on such violence, saying his campaign bears some responsibility for encouraging it.”

WHAT FAILURE LOOKS LIKE: Obamacare enrollment dropped off 25% over the course of 2015.

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HMM: Source: Clinton IT specialist revealing server details to FBI, ‘devastating witness.’

Also: Cruz: I would ‘absolutely’ go after Clinton on emails if elected.

SEVEN YEARS CAPTURED IN ONE SENTENCE: Obama to SXSW: Government Has Failed You But You Should Trust It Anyway.

WAPO: Trump’s voters aren’t authoritarians, new research says. So what are they? “Instead, Trump’s supporters are distinctive in another way: They are true populists. Authoritarianism and populism are easy to conflate, but they actually refer to very distinct tendencies.”

PERSONALLY, I LOVE DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME: Why daylight saving time isn’t as terrible as people think. If I had my way, we’d have it year-round, and double-daylight-savings in the winter. I don’t care if it’s dark in the morning, but I hate it when it’s dark before I get home from work. When it’s dark in the morning, I feel virtuous for rising before the sun. When it’s dark on the way home, I feel like I’ve worked until bedtime. Living in Knoxville, which is just a stone’s throw (almost literally, it’s like 40 miles) from the dividing line with Central time, I kinda get that already. But I’m still sad when daylight savings ends.

‘WHOA’: TRUMP RALLY IN CHICAGO REPORTEDLY CANCELLED; Update from Trump campaign; Update: ‘Absolute chaos’; Update: ‘Nazis’ vs. ‘Communists’; Update: Now going after police cars, cops; Update: Trump tells MSNBC, ‘you can’t even have a rally anymore in this country.’

UPDATE:  Alex Seitz-Wald of MSNBC tweets, “Big (unofficial) pro-Sanders group that grew out of Occupy takes credit for pro-Sanders Trump rally disruptions.” He links to this tweet by the “People For Bernie” account:

“We are the danger,” People for Bernie adds:

“Buzzfeed reporter [Tracy Clayton] celebrates Chicago chaos and intolerance,” writes Richard Grenell:

Former Comcast-NBC spokeswoman Melissa Harris-Perry sounds like she’s OK with the riot:

Question asked and answered:

UPDATE: “Hey, it’s 1968 with Internet.” And from Paul Mirengoff at Power Line, “With no sense of irony, the protesters, having successfully shut Trump down, chanted ‘this is what democracy looks like.’ Many of them also chanted ‘Bernie,’ suggesting that they really mean ‘this is what Democratic Socialism looks like.’ In so, they probably aren’t wrong.”

UPDATE (8:35 PM PST): “MoveOn. org takes credit for #TrumpRally shut down, vows more disruptions.”

THE ATLANTIC: The Remarkable Rightness Of Rudyard Kipling.

Oh, he’ll be righter still, by and by.

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IT’S MUCH MORE IF YOU INCLUDE DINNER OR HELP WITH TERM PAPERS AS PAYMENT: Six Percent of Americans Have Accepted Payment for Sex: For those ages 30-44, it rises to almost 10 percent.

Overall, slightly more people say getting paid for sex should be illegal (43 percent) than say that it should be legal (40 percent)—although with a 4.5 percent of margin of error on the study, the opposite could just as well be true. Seventeen percent weren’t sure. A somewhat larger number of respondents were in favor of criminalizing the purchase of sex, with 45 percent in favor, 39 opposed, and 17 percent again unsure.

Among the youngest cohort, however, a full 50 percent of respondents said it should be illegal to pay for sex and 46 percent said it should be illegal to accept payment for it.

The gender divide in prostitution views was also stark, with men significantly more likely than women to say that both buying and selling sex should be legal. Half of male respondents said paying for sex should be legal, a position shared by just 29 percent of female respondents. Just 37 percent of male respondents said it should be criminalized, while 52 of the women surveyed did.

The breakdown was similar for accepting payment for sex: 51 percent of men said it should be legal and 36 percent said it should be illegal, while just 30 percent of women said it should be legal and 50 percent said it should be illegal.

Like taxi drivers who oppose Uber, there’s a fair amount of protectionism here, I think.

EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: Exorcist warns vampire ritual killings ‘on the rise’ after spate of Satanic initiation murders.

REPORT: KEITH EMERSON HAS PASSED AWAY AT AGE 71.

I wasn’t a big ELP fan, but I loved “Lucky Man,” and its groundbreaking synthesizer solo. Late last year, shortly after installing Jam Origin’s MIDI Guitar plugin on my computer, I was having lots of fun playing those style licks with my Telecaster plugged into Korg’s M1 software synthesizer, which has a patch called “Lucky Guy.” But then, it seems like every synthesizer, whether hardware or software-based, has a recreation of that tone, given that Emerson’s solo is for synth players what “Stairway to Heaven” or “Smoke on the Water” is for electric guitarists.

Though Emerson used to tell the story that by the ’90s, he forgot how to play it himself! In an interview with Keyboard magazine he said, “I’d played that solo many years before but knew what was expected of me. I actually got help from your magazine! I called up [then editor] Dominic Milano and said, “Dominic, you might think this is very funny, but I need a transcription of the ‘Lucky Man’ solo, because I’m damned if I can get it off the record!” RIP, as yet another legendary rock pioneer has left the stadium.

UPDATE (5:45 PM PST): Emerson “died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, Santa Monica police confirmed to the BBC. His death was being investigated as a suicide, police added.”

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: What Men and Women Want From Sex Robots Is Very Different. Of course, if you consider a vibrator a sex robot, many, perhaps most, women have sex-robot experience already.

Related: Feminist double standards and some classic thoughts from Eugene Volokh.

DISPATCHES FROM THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: Every modern revolutionary movement has sought to change the language. Campus leftists are hardly the first.

WHAT IF OBAMA DID WHAT TRUMP DOES?, Andrew Klavan asks:

Grove’s sources further report that Lewandowksi apologized to Breitbart’s Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle, and said to Boyle “that he and Fields had never met before and that he didn’t recognize her as a Breitbart reporter, instead mistaking her for an adversarial member of the mainstream media.”

So again, Substitution Game: How would Trump supporters react if Obama’s guy said he had roughed up a reporter because he thought the lady was with Fox News?

Now Lewandowski is saying he never did it at all. If Obama’s guy said that, after reportedly apologizing, would you believe him?

Look, Trump has repeatedly called for violence against hecklers — and violence against hecklers and protesters has followed. In the video above (around the 8:30 mark) Megyn Kelly shows a man sucker punching a black protester who is being escorted OUT of a Trump event. Afterward, the thug explains that the protester wasn’t “acting like an American,” and that “the next time we see him, we might have to kill him.” This is not an isolated incident, but one of a number of such outbursts, which Trump and his people have repeatedly excused.

Substitution Game: what would the Trumpians say if a black man devoted to Obama had cold-cocked a white protester at an Obama rally? Especially after Obama had instructed his followers to “knock the crap” out of anyone who might oppose him. Use your imagination.

Or reverse the races and recall the disgusting details of Kenneth Gladney being roughed up by thugs wearing SEIU t-shirts when Gladney dared protest Obamacare in 2009 at a town hall meeting hosted by then-Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-MO), after Obama and his colleagues had throughout his campaign the year prior instructed supporters to “argue with neighbors, get in their faces,” “punch back twice as hard,” and as Obama told a crowd in Philadelphia, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun. Because from what I understand folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.”

A headline at the Washington Post today is titled “It’s not just Trump. Authoritarian populism is rising across the West. Here’s why.” No. Here’s why:

I’ve had fun over the past several months pointing out comparisons of our current reality show president and his would-be successor. But it’s truly disgusting to see these sorts incidents where Trump’s goons and his more zealous fans stoop to the level of Obama his enablers.

OH, THAT EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Can Leftist Student Activists Survive Without Their Professional Babysitters and Allies?

THE NEW ZAPRUDER FILM: Who grabbed Michelle Fields’ arm after the Trump rally?

UH OH: Sexual Transmission of Zika More Common than Previously Believed: The more scientists learn about the mosquito-borne virus “the worse things seem to get.”

MY USA TODAY COLUMN Don’t underrate how far we’ve come. Plus, a warning:

Things aren’t perfect today, of course, and there are still plenty of things to worry about. But it’s worth noting just how far we’ve come. It’s also worth noting that most of these advancements are the result of free enterprise and open markets, and worth remembering that politicians, for their own selfish purposes, might stop this progress at any time. Free markets are great, but they don’t offer the opportunities for graft and personal aggrandizement that un-free markets do. And to politicians, that’s a bug, not a feature.

Consider yourself warned.

GARRY KASPAROV: Hey, Bernie, Don’t Lecture Me About Socialism. I Lived Through It.

GOOD ADVICE: Don’t Post About Me on Social Media, Children Say.

NOBODY EXPECTS THE VAST RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY! Leftist Professor Fired by Leftist University for Threatening Leftist Press at Leftist Rally Blames…Conservatives.

Some days, I really do wish the VRWC was a force as vast and as all-powerful as it exists rent-free in the minds of the far left. And yes, Stephen Kruiser’s post at the above link is referring to exactly who you think it’s referring to.

Related: Mizzou Faces 25% Enrollment Drop, $32M Budget Deficit After Racial Protests.

AUSTIN, BEWARE: POTUS Descends on South By Southwest: If you can’t beat’em, confuse’em, tax’em and protect your special interests!

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Researchers Seek Source of Frequency Fluctuations in Nanoresonators.

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HOW TO THROW a hurricane party.

AUSTIN BAY: The Problematic Five: Events With the Power to Reshape the 2016 Election.

DIGESTING JOS:

Once shoppers get used to buy-one-get-one-or-more deals, as they had at Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, they stop coming back when the promotions end.

Jos. A. Bank’s parent, Tailored Brands Inc., found that out as it attempted to fold the former Maryland-based retailer into its Men’s Wearhouse portfolio and move away from discounting, perhaps too quickly.

After ending the year with slumping sales and a $1 billion quarterly loss, the company is preparing to close 250 stores, including about 140 Jos. A. Bank locations.

The staggering problems facing Tailored Brands suggest that its corporate predecessor, Men’s Wearhouse, paid too much for Jos. A. Bank in the $1.8 billion acquisition in 2014 and overestimated its ability to integrate the chains quickly, several experts said Thursday.

Jos A. Bank used to be a place where, if you knew which lines to choose from and when to shop, you could get a good-enough suit for a great price. Then the Great Recession hit, and Jos became the place where you could buy four or five pretty bad suits for the same price.

The decline in quality may have as much to do with the store’s troubles as ending the massive discounts did.

TOM MAGUIRE: The Michelle Fields Assault: The Plot Thickens. Something that should have been dealt with via an apology and a bought drink has now turned into a semi-major issue. Unimpressive.

SPYING: Surprise! NSA data will soon routinely be used for domestic policing that has nothing to do with terrorism. Who could have seen this coming?

CHANGE: America’s Air Supremacy Is Fading Fast.

As regards the much higher performance F-22, only about ninety are available for global air supremacy tasks. This is arguably too small for winning air supremacy in one theatre, let alone both Europe and the Pacific. Ongoing peacetime training attrition is further gradually reducing this small fleet. The 2009 decision ceasing F-22 production early was based in part on beliefs that it was irrelevant to countering Islamic extremists or the counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Events have now overtaken this perspective.

Scaling back American power is a feature, not a bug, to those who never believed in American exceptionalism.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law School Debt Hits Minorities Hardest. This goes along with revelations that poor students with low LSAT scores — who are unlikely to graduate or pass the bar — have the highest debt, as law schools admit them to keep tuition revenues flowing. Funny that higher education — one of the most left-leaning industries in America — is so exploitative with regard to minorities and the poor.

PASSING THE BUCK: Obama Says European distraction led to Libya “mess.”

In a profile published Thursday in The Atlantic, the President told author Jeffrey Goldberg that British Prime Minister David Cameron became “distracted by a range of other things” after the operation. Cameron, along with former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, took the brunt of Obama’s criticism.

Although Obama thinks the intervention went as well as it could, he views Libya today as a “mess.” Privately, according to the article, he refers to the troubled state as a “sh*t show.”

It’s always anybody’s sh*t show but his.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED JOHN KERRY HAD NEGOTIATED A CEASEFIRE: Syria opposition to go to peace talks, says Assad escalating war.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN Don’t underrate how far we’ve come. But beware of politicians who will screw up further progress out of greed.

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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1037.

WILL ANYONE ASK OBAMA ABOUT THE CAMPUS BULLYING HE HAS ENCOURAGED AMONG HIS FOLLOWERS? Protesters Bully Pro-Life Students, Grab Their Flyers, Retreat to Safe Space: UC-Davis Women’s Center creates safe space for hecklers. “But if anyone needed a safe space, it was probably the pro-life students. After all, pro-choice demonstrators grabbed their materials and threw them on the ground. This interaction was caught on video, and generated widespread applause. A campus security officer talked to the aggressor, but did not discipline her.”

This Obama culture of encouraging his fans to “get in their face” and “punch back twice as hard” doesn’t get much media commentary. Then they wonder why Trump supporters think it’s okay to shove people around.

A LOUSY POLITICAL CLASS BEGETS LOUSY POLITICS, WHICH BEGETS LOUSY SITUATIONS: An Avoidable Catastrophe: How Europe’s infectious institutionalization of irresponsibility is perpetuating the migrant crisis.

Europe’s migration crisis has mostly been covered from the “human interest” perspective, with the perverse proliferation of tragic images and emotive narratives amplified by social media. This collective content stream has made it seem primarily a humanitarian crisis. But that is false.

Instead, what we are seeing is the unending monetization of human misery, a phenomenon as complete as it is cynical. By necessity, it has been complemented by an infectious institutionalization of irresponsibility–something that has not failed to affect geopolitics. This is why the ramifications of the migration crisis are so serious for Europe, America, and many other countries.

Countless reports have shown ways in which migration is monetized. Everyone gets something: the human trafficking networks that provide transport; the criminal networks that sell forged (and real) travel documents; the governments and humanitarian NGOs that receive handsome donations from both public and private funds; the media that attract huge audiences (and advertising revenue) by publishing images of human despair; the clever villager who sells a bottle of water for fifty cents extra.

Another money-generating scheme—and one that has been particularly associated with the Islamic State–is antiquities smuggling. Slovenian police recently discovered three small figurines dating from 3000 BCE in a migrant camp. They had been smuggled in from the Middle East on the “Balkan route” from Greece into Macedonia, Serbia, and Croatia. While there are no reliable figures for the amount or value of cultural treasures exported via illegal migration, one thing is clear: the end destination. Such valuable antiquities inevitably reach the private collections of wealthy people, most often Europeans and Americans.

When virtue-signaling is elevated to a top priority, it’s a safe bet that actual virtue is considerably more scarce.

21 REASONS TO NEVER EVER STEP INSIDE A WHOLE FOODS AGAIN: “I need to read the numbers on the barcode aloud to you. I don’t want any lasers touching my food.”

Found via “Cloud People And Ground People,” which Sarah linked to in the wee small hours, and is equally worth your time. (Though a much more sobering read.)

TODAY’S TOP ISSUES: We Need to Stop Calling Breast-Feeding Natural. “Martucci and Barnhill also point out that to describe breast-feeding as natural is to make a number of assumptions about gender roles and family life. Are two gay dads raising their child unnaturally if they formula-feed?”

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN Don’t underrate how far we’ve come. Plus, a warning:

Things aren’t perfect today, of course, and there are still plenty of things to worry about. But it’s worth noting just how far we’ve come. It’s also worth noting that most of these advancements are the result of free enterprise and open markets, and worth remembering that politicians, for their own selfish purposes, might stop this progress at any time. Free markets are great, but they don’t offer the opportunities for graft and personal aggrandizement that un-free markets do. And to politicians, that’s a bug, not a feature.

Consider yourself warned.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Governor Cuomo wants to stop funding one-third of CUNY four-year colleges’ budget. Where will the money come from? Stupid red-state Republican yahoos, slashing money for . . . wait, what?

Related: More on the University of Wisconsin’s new tenure rules.

All is proceeding as I have foretold.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Our unfounded obsession with safety is costing us our freedom.

(Via Maggie’s Farm, which dubs it “The Safety-Industrial Complex” at work.)

#NEWYORKVALUES: Gotham embraces insanity; poised to abandon 25 years of successful public policy.

WHY ARE LEFTIST INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF SEXUAL PREDATION? UC-Berkeley Law School Dean Resigns After Being Sued For Sexual Harassment.

THE COLLEGE THAT WANTS TO BAN ‘HISTORY:’ “Students at Western Washington University have reached a turning point in their campus’s hxstory. (For one thing, they’re now spelling it with an X—more on that later.),” Reason’s Robby Soave writes at the Daily Beast:

At the heart of this effort lies a bizarrely totalitarian ideology: Student-activists think they have all the answers—everything is settled, and people who dissent are not merely wrong, but actually guilty of something approaching a crime. If they persist in this wrongness, they are perpetuating violence, activists will claim.

The list of demands ends with a lengthy denunciation of WWU’s marginalization of “hxstorically oppressed students.” The misspelling is intentional: “hxstory,” I presume, was judged to be more PC than “history,” which is gendered, triggering, and perhaps violent. It’s easy for me to laugh at these clumsy attempts to make language obey the dictates of political correctness—but I laugh from a position of relative safety, since I am not a WWU professor.

On the other hand, if a member of campus were to insist on the proper spelling of the word, would he or she (or xe) have to answer to the Committee for Social Transformation?

Of course, Western Washington University banning history is on top of most colleges replacing traditional history courses with what Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey dubbed “Black Armband History,” where it’s nothing but grievances all the way down. But it sounds like Western Washington University has left that behind as it enters into “Starting From Zero” territory, as Tom Wolfe would say. At some point, the great relearning Wolfe promised will begin – and the longer it’s delayed, the more painful it’s going to be.

ROGER SIMON: Trump, Israel, and Islam.

THE NEW WASPs, as spotted by Kevin D. Williamson:

It is strange, and more than a little perverse, that this part of California is one of the nation’s great hotbeds of progressive anti-capitalism, and that is remains in thrall to the superstition that a society in which markets are allowed to operate freely and capital is permitted (and encouraged!) to find its best use must also be a society that is cruel, callous, indifferent to the poor and the vulnerable, selfish, and vulgar. The good people of the San Francisco area live smack dab in the middle of what must surely be the world’s greatest living example that the truth is exactly the opposite.

Read the whole thing.

BUT OF COURSE: Four Out of Five of Obama’s Supreme Court Finalists Are Obama Donors.

GOOD FOR LAMAR: Senator grills acting education secretary over agency overreach.

Did the Education Department overstep its authority when it threatened to withhold funding from schools by changing the law regarding campus sexual assault?

This was the question Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., attempted to get to the bottom of during an Appropriations Subcommittee hearing. During the hearing, Alexander grilled the department’s acting secretary, Dr. John B. King, about a non-legally binding document issued by the department that has actually carried the force of law.

Alexander kept asking King if the department’s “Dear Colleague” letters carried the force of law, to which King kept replying that they did not, and that the documents were merely his department’s “interpretation of the law and regulations, which are binding.”

Except, as Alexander went on to point out, colleges and universities are treating the “Dear Colleague” letters as the law for fear of what the department would do if they did not comply. Currently, schools face federal investigations and a loss of federal funding if they do not comply with the alleged “guidance” documents.

“In 2011, the Department put out a guidance and basically said ‘equitable resolution cannot mean either clear and convincing evidence or preponderance of the evidence, it’s got to mean preponderance of the evidence,’” Alexander said. “So that would mean to me that the U.S. Department of Education could today initiate an action and say to a school: ‘You’re violating Title IX if you use the standard of clear and convincing evidence.’ Is that correct?”

King reiterated that his department made clear that the guidance does not have the force of law.

“We do believe that equitable resolution means preponderance of the evidence—” King began to say before Alexander interrupted.

“Well who gave you the right to believe that?” Alexander said.

Give ‘em hell, Lamar — though I believe that the universities were happy to roll over in a way that they wouldn’t have if this had been a GOP administration using similar reasoning to make them do something their internal constituencies opposed, instead of a Dem administration pressuring them to do something internal constituencies supported.

REPORT: ILLINOIS HAD A BANNER YEAR FOR CORRUPTION IN 2015. “We are so lucky Barack Obama doesn’t know anything about Illinois corruption!”

The country’s in the very best of hands.™

FALLACIES DO NOT CEASE TO BE FALLACIES BECAUSE THEY BECOME FASHIONS, as G.K. Chesterton said: “Now that the Oregon legislature has hiked the minimum wage, effective this July, colleges and universities in the state have a decision to make: hire fewer student employees, cut the school’s budget, or raise tuition.”

Too bad they no longer study Chesterton or Kipling there, as the Gods of the Copybook Headings wouldn’t be at all surprised at this “unexpected” development. (aka “Bad Luck,” as Heinlein would say. I doubt he’s read much there either, at least in class.) As Richard Samuelson notes on Twitter, “If students didn’t expect $15 minimum wage to hurt jobs, University should fire entire econ dept.”

Hey, the New York Times has a Nobel-winning economist (and former Enron consultant) on staff, and Bloomberg was started by a former general partner at one of Wall Street’s biggest bond trading houses, and since January of 2009, they’ve been constantly surprised by “unexpectedly” bad economic news; why should their junior wannabe counterparts in college be any different?

MICHAEL BARONE: Why did Michigan blacks vote differently from Southern blacks?

ROLL CALL: Bernie Sanders’ Superdelegate Chutzpah.

Bernie Sanders and his legions are furious about the possibility that superdelegates could help Hillary Clinton win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. There’s a word for that: chutzpah.

For several decades, Sanders chose to set himself apart from the Democratic Party. He held himself up as a paragon of non-partisan virtue and has charged that leading members of the Democratic Party, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, are essentially corrupt, inept or both.

Now that the Democratic Party’s nomination rules favor his rival, Clinton, the #Bern crowd is angrily denouncing the way Democrats select their nominee. The vast majority of the 4,700-plus delegates to the Democratic convention are pledged to support the choice of primary and caucus voters in their state or district. But there’s a set of 714 “superdelegates”— elected Democrats, party officials and party elders — who vote for the candidate of their own choice at the convention. In at least one case, a Clinton-backing superdelegate has reported receiving harassing messages from Sanders supporters.

While Sanders and his official campaign have been careful to walk a fine line on the question of superdelegates — after all, his very narrow path to the nomination would likely require him to flip a substantial number of them to get a majority of the overall delegate pool — his allies are attacking the system. And he’s done nothing to contradict them.

Obama was able to flip the superdelegates because he was black, and there was a lot of enthusiasm for electing the first black president. What does Bernie bring to the table that will compare?

“BOOM. Putin intimate defects to USA, cooperates with FBI, gets brutally murdered. Whatever could have happened?,” the New York Observer’s John Schindler rhetorically tweets.

WASTING AWAY AGAIN IN AN OBAMAVILLE: San Francisco mulls state of emergency over homelessness. But will it help?

If past history is any indication, the answer is no. Next question?

IMMEDIATE TWITTER CONSENSUS: Marco Rubio ‘En Fuego’ with Cuba #GOPDebate Response.

REAPING WHAT MERKEL HAS SOWN: Nationalist party set for gains as 3 German states vote.

Alternative for Germany, or AfD, formed three years ago, is wooing voters with slogans such as “ENOUGH!” and “Secure borders instead of borderless crime.”

It’s expected to enter legislatures Sunday in the diverse regions: prosperous Baden-Wuerttemberg in the southwest, neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate, and relatively poor Saxony-Anhalt in the east. Other parties won’t share power with it, but its performance could complicate efforts to form state governments — particularly in Saxony-Anhalt, where polls give it up to 19 percent support.

Germany registered nearly 1.1 million people as asylum-seekers last year as Merkel insisted “we will manage” the challenge, a stance lauded by many but that drove others into AfD’s arms.

What remains to be seen is whether AfD is just an outlet for angry protest voters, or harbinger of the future of German politics.

ACTUALLY, IT KINDA IS, YOU ALINSKYITE DIVIDER YOU: Obama: Trump’s rise not my fault. You gleefully tore down all sorts of bipartisan traditions, from the filibuster to bipartisanship for important legislation to meaningless ritual courtesy to opponents, and those traditions opened the door for Trump, who’s really just you in orangeface mostly anyway. And you, and a lot of people, will be repeating the Eisenhower-era phrase “have you no decency?” after displaying none, and after, for decades, treating the Eisenhower era as some sort of low point for America. Well, that era was Peak Decency, and lefties have been going out of their way to tear all that hokey old-fashioned stuff down. Now you’ve got Trump — and, much more frightening, whatever comes after Trump.

And the Gods Of The Copybook Headings smile.

WHATEVER YOUR IDEOLOGY, YOUR OPPONENT’S WORLDVIEW IS OFFICIALLY DEAD:

Shot: MSNBC Fires Melissa Harris-Perry. Is Left-Wing News Dead?

—PJTV, March 7th.

Chaser: The Conservative Era Is Over.

—Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, March 8th.

As I wrote back in the run-up to the 2010 midterms when alternating headlines declaring “The Death of Neoliberalism,” “The Obsolescence of Barack Obama,” and “The Death of Conservatism” were being put into circulation by pundits of all political stripes, “Whatever Your Ideology, Your Opponents’ Worldview Is Officially Dead.”

Of course, in early 2016, it is safe to say that, as Jim Geraghty writes, “Both Parties Are Coming Apart at the Seams:”

Will the Democratic and Republican parties break up? The enormous logistical challenges of building a new nationwide party from scratch make it unlikely that any faction will want to completely break away. But with such intense and irreconcilable divisions about the role of government, policy priorities, and just what the country needs, the two parties are already broken. And neither one looks likely to be genuinely united any time soon.

For over a century, the “Progressive” goal has been to transform America into Europe Lite. As Geraghty suggests, that could well mean fractious multiparty squabbles could become the norm here as well. How did we get here? Why, it’s as if the guy who said in 2004…

The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

…was lying through his teeth about his ultimate goals. Nahh — heaven forfend.

SO, SECOND LOOK AT BERNIE? Sanders isn’t true friend to environment. His plan would undermine Obama emissions progress.

If he wins another primary, perhaps Hillary will sic Loretta Lynch on him.

ROGER SIMON ON TRUMP, ISRAEL AND ISLAM:

When CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked Trump after the debate whether he meant all of Islam hates us, Donald simply replied “A lot of it.”    How politically incorrect can you get — and undoubtedly how accurate.  What a long way we have come from George W. Bush’s “religion of peace.” It’s hard to even know whether George, in those days, knew the real translation of Islam was “submission,” something far from peace, indeed the opposite of peace — at least until everyone becomes Islamic.  And that is what we have been witnessing across the globe.

Whatever one thinks about Trump, and I certainly don’t always agree with him, he is the first major American politician (something he clearly is now) to name directly the entity that seeks to destroy Western Civilization.  He didn’t even cloak it in “radical Islam.”

We’ll see if this moves the Overton Window, as Trump’s earlier, highly-un-PC comments on immigration did last year. Faster, please, as my colleague Michael Ledeen would say. Read the whole thing, though more sensitive socialist souls should heed the Trigger Warning first…

FRIEND OF THE WORKING MAN: Clinton Foundation Hires H-1B Guest Workers in Place of American Graduates.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Walmart’s customers are too broke to shop. Fundamentally transformed!

Related: A Message From Trump’s America: Working-Class Whites Have Been Ignored By Both Parties And They’re Dying From Despair.

On the losing side of automation, globalization and the “rural brain drain” our community was powerless to stop furniture factories from closing down or Wal-Mart from coming in. And after decades of decline folks were too beaten down and disorganized to fight back when pharmaceutical companies flooded the area with OxyContin. As a result, Wilkes had the third highest overdose rate in America in 2007 and busted 50 meth labs in 2013. [Overdose rates dropped 69 percent by 2011 after North Carolina responded to the crisis.]

Now, I walk into the courtroom every week and see the faces of childhood friends in a town where 23 percent of the population lives in poverty and 25 percent never finished high school.

So if there are winners and losers in America, I know the losers. They lost jobs to China and Vietnam. And they’re dying younger, caught in an endless cycle of jail, drug charges and applying for disability to pay the child support bill.

They lost their influence, their dignity and their shot at the American Dream, and now they’re angry. They’re angry at Washington and Wall Street, at big corporations and big government. And they’re voting now for Donald Trump.

My Republican friends are for Trump. My state representative is for Trump. People who haven’t voted in years are for Trump. He’ll win the primary here on March 15 and he will carry this county in the general.

His supporters realize he’s a joke. They do not care. They know he’s authoritarian, nationalist, almost un-American, and they love him anyway, because he disrupts a broken political process and beats establishment candidates who’ve long ignored their interests.

Read the whole thing. At this point, a lot of Americans hate our political class more than they love America, and that’s not a good thing, but at this point, it’s also kind of understandable, no? I’ve been warning for a long time about the consequences of having a lousy political class.

Now other people are noticing. “The rise of Trump, love him or hate him, conveys an inescapable message: The United States’ political institutions are in decay, and voters are angry at a government that they perceive (correctly) to be broken.”

That’s true. The solution there isn’t very well thought out, nor is the anger at “tax cuts” (where’s mine?) but here’s a thought: When you have a society that can’t do things that need to be done because every change threatens somebody’s rice bowl or offers insufficient opportunities for graft, you’ve got a society that is due for a reset, not for incremental change.

The thing is, resets are often kind of ugly.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Swastikas on Campus: Anti-Semitism Blamed on Anti-Israel Academics.

THEY CHOSE POORLY: Both Trump and His Campaign Manager Now Say Michelle Fields Is Lying.

TURNS OUT AT THIS POINT IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE: Hillary Has a Benghazi Mom Problem.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: The Obama Administration’s Idea of a Crime…

WHAT CAN’T GO ON: Cloud People And Ground People.

OH, HAI SHOCKED FACE: Surprise! NSA data will soon routinely be used for domestic policing that has nothing to do with terrorism.

THE MEME WILL LIVE FOREVER: Dos Equis retiring its ‘Most Interesting Man in the World’.

IT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING ABOUT HOW MANY CYLINDRICAL OBJECTS WERE IN THOSE PICTURES: The Man Who Illustrated ‘The Joy of Sex’ And Then Defined the Look of Sci-Fi.

MAGIC EIGHT BALL IS UNCLEAR. ASK AGAIN: Will the U.S. Deny the Evidence or Declare a Genocide?

A FORCE WITH UNCERTAIN MISSION AND LEADERSHIP, DRAWN FROM SOME OF THE EARTH’S HELLHOLES MISBEHAVES?  GASP.  I SHALL GO PUT ON MY PEARLS SO I CAN CLUTCH THEM: U.N. Peacekeepers Are a Sexual Menace.

WELL, THEY ARE INTELLECTUAL EQUALS:When Justin Met Barack.

THE POISONOUS FRUIT OF TOXIC POLITICS: Union Officials Admit They Let Veterans Die Rather Than Talk To Republicans.

POLL: Immigration Restrictionism May Be More Popular Than Donald Trump.

MAX BOOT: Obama’s Cringe-Worthy Presidency. I have two kinds of regrets about the past decade or so. I wish that Obama had been as tough on America’s enemies as he was on Republicans, and I wish that John McCain and Mitt Romney had been as tough on Obama as they were on . . . Republicans.

WELL, WHO AM I TO ARGUE? NPR and Harvard Say: Obamacare Is a Complete Failure.

SCOTT ADAMS: Can we agree that calling the candidate with German ancestry “Hitler” is racist? “If he were female and Asian – with exactly the same policies – would we be comparing him to Hitler every five seconds? I don’t think so.”

Well, the basic rules are twofold: First, it’s only racist if calling it racist advances the preferred narrative. And second, in the future — by which I mean the present — everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes. This was predicted over a decade ago.

MORE GOP Debate Liveblogging.

BOB MCMANUS: Bowe Bergdahl’s lame Trump gambit prompts more profound questions.

HE REALLY IS CANADA’S OBAMA: Justin Trudeau’s ‘foolish’ China remarks spark anger: ‘It seems to be that he’s not well-informed,’ Asian-Canadian says of Liberal leader. “The Liberal leader was asked which nation he admired most. He responded: ‘There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.’”

Not only is that reprehensible, it’s not even remotely true.

THE MOST INTERESTING MAN IN THE WORLD COMES FULL CIRCLE:

Dos Equis, which is owned by Heineken, isn’t halting the campaign as much as ending the tenure of Jonathan Goldsmith, the man who has played the character since 2007.

“Fans can rest assured that Dos Equis will reveal a new Most Interesting Man in the World in 2016, as this is not the end of the campaign, but an evolution,” the company said in a statement.

The final ad for Goldsmith has “The Most Interesting Man” taking a one-way trip to Mars.

In the 60 second spot, the suave Dos Equis pitchman is bid a fond farewell from the likes of bikers, monks, beautiful women, and a grizzly bear.

“His only regret is not knowing what regret feels like,” says the ad’s narrator.

Heh, indeed.™

Goldsmith began his acting career as a blink-and-you’ll miss him red shirt performing maintenance on equipment in the corridor of the Enterprise in the first regular season episode of Star Trek to be filmed in 1966, so it’s rather fitting that he’s ending his tenure as Dos Equis’ pitchman with the Most Interesting Man in the World being dispatched to the red planet.

AND YET SCHOOLS SPEND THEIR TIME MAKING KIDS SIT STILL: Out of Shape at 18, at Risk for Future Diabetes. “Both low aerobic capacity and low muscle strength at 18 were associated with a higher risk for Type 2 diabetes; poor aerobic capacity was a slightly stronger risk factor. Having both weak muscles and low aerobic capacity more than tripled the risk for future diabetes. The effect was independent of other risk factors — body mass index, family history of diabetes, education and socioeconomic status.”

WHAT DIFFERENCE, AT THIS POINT, DOES IT MAKE? Ben Carson To Endorse Trump For President. Carson stayed in the race too long.

STEVE GREEN IS DRUNKBLOGGING TONIGHT’S GOP DEBATE; virtual refreshments for all courtesy of Trump Winery!™

MEH. IF YOU BELIEVE IN THE “HYGIENE HYPOTHESIS” THIS IS ACTUALLY GOOD: Scientists: Beards Are Full Of Bacteria.

AT AMAZON, 50% or more off on Boots.

Plus, big savings on select Fishing Products.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Don’t underrate how far we’ve come.

MODEST PROGRESS, BUT PROGRESS: Georgia college students just got a little more due process.

Students attending schools that are part of the University System of Georgia will be better able to defend themselves from false accusations of sexual assault, thanks to new policies adopted by the system’s Board of Regents.

On Wednesday, the board voted to adopt new policies that would require all schools in the system to provide some due process to accused students, including the ability to have an adviser or attorney present at every stage of the investigation, hearing and appeal (accusers will also have this right). Accused students will now also receive “written notice of possible charges,” because previously they were just being made aware there was an accusation, and not the specific details thereof.

Accused students will also have the opportunity to “notify the investigator of relevant witnesses and evidence at the outset of the matter.” This sounds good in theory, but notice there is no requirement that investigators follow through with or include this information in their final report.

This lack of clarity allowed a judge to dismiss a student’s lawsuit claim that a school ignored the evidence he provided that proved his innocence (the judge in that case let many other claims stand, however). The judge ruled that the school was only required to collect the evidence and had no requirement to properly consider that evidence. The same explanation could be used to deny an accused student the ability to defend himself.

Accused students will also now have “the right to respond to the investigator’s final report in writing.” This is a good step, but one will need to see what impact such a response will have. Can the hearing panel just ignore that response? That will be the likely outcome, as these schools are still under pressure from the federal government to find accused students responsible.

Another “win” — you can sort of call it that ­— for accused students comes in the way the school will mete out punishment for alleged offenders. Georgia schools will have to adopt the low “preponderance of evidence” standard to determine responsibility, but if a student faces suspension or expulsion, then “substantial evidence” will need to be identified to support the finding.

Luckily for accused students in Georgia, State Rep. Earl Ehrhart is standing up for their rights and their futures. It was his intense pressure — and threat of a loss of state funding — that helped push the Board into adopting the new policies. This also means that if Georgia colleges and universities continue to deny fair investigations to accused students, one can bet Ehrhart will step in.

Good for him. This isn’t enough, but it’s progress.

THOSE DISRUPTIVE STUDENTS SHOULD BE DISCIPLINED, AND PERHAPS SUED: U of Texas Backs Professor in Dispute on Disrupted Event.

The University of Texas at Austin announced Wednesday that it found no wrongdoing by a professor in his actions in November when a lecture he organized was disrupted by pro-Palestinian students. The students interrupted the start of the lecture, which was on the Israeli military, with speeches of their own in which they criticized the Israeli military. The professor, Ami Pedahzur, then attempted to regain order and criticized the protesters, some of whom filed complaints accusing him of violating their rights and discriminating against them.

The university’s announcement Wednesday said that an investigation found the accusations against Pedahzur to be unsubstantiated. The university said policy bars it from releasing full reports on charges found to be unsubstantiated.

Protesting a speaker is fine. Stopping a speaker from speaking is disruption and should be punished. Abuse of process is wrongdoing and should be punished as well. And the off-campus organizations backing the students — and there absolutely are off-campus organizations backing the students — have deep enough pockets to be worth suing.

HMM: Claim: Hillary Grand Jury Called, FBI Looking Into Political Corruption. “Department of Justice officials have impaneled a federal grand jury in the Hillary Clinton email case and FBI agents have launched a second, separate investigation on political corruption involving the former secretary of state’s official activities and the Clinton Foundation, a former U.S. attorney told The Daily Caller News Foundation.”

I’d like it to be true, but although it’s a Richard Pollock story and he’s a decent guy, I think I’ll wait for confirmation.

WELL, THIS ISN’T GOOD: A mysterious infection may have killed 18 people in Wisconsin, and health officials aren’t sure why. “The Wisconsin Department of Health Services said that as of Wednesday, it had been informed of 48 people infected with a bacteria called Elizabethkingia since last November. Four of these infections were found in the last week.”

THIS IS WHY ALL PRESIDENTS SHOULD BE REPUBLICAN — BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT IT TAKES TO GET FOLKS AT THE ATLANTIC AND THE WASHINGTON POST WORRIED ABOUT PRESIDENTIAL POWER: The awesome destructive power of the next president.

See, when Obama was ramming through a complete overhaul of one of America’s biggest industries, or killing Americans with drones, or stiffing Chrysler bondholders, or implementing huge changes in college life by administrative “guidance,” it was all Ooh, Republicans are such obstructionists. But now that even the possibility of a Trump presidency looms, suddenly they’re worried.

IS THIS THE HOPE, OR THE CHANGE? “Walmart’s customers are too broke to shop,” reads a snarky, virtue-signaling headline at Yahoo:

“Walmart is facing an almost perfect storm when it comes to top-line growth,” O’Shea wrote. “Until the health of the lower-to-middle-income consumer improves, Walmart will continue to face macroeconomic headwinds in the US.”

Walmart said last month that it’s expecting virtually no sales growth in the coming fiscal year. The company had previously projected growth of 3% to 4% for the year, but lowered its guidance last month citing the impact of the strengthening US dollar. The company’s share price has lost about 16% of its value over the last 12 months.

Despite its slowing revenue growth, Walmart continues to invest heavily in employee wages and e-commerce in an effort to stay competitive with Amazon.

Well, that’s one way to put it. As Twitchy noted in January, “’Raise the Wage’ activists last year protested Wal-Mart and demanded that the retail giant raise employee pay. Wal-Mart did raise its starting wage, but an ensuing cut in worker hours soon had progressives scratching their heads,” followed by Walmart announcing it was closing over 150 stores.

Which is reminder that even the Gods of the Copybook Headings shop at Walmart.

SO, BEER WITH LUNCH THEN? For Serious Training, Hold The Carbs At Dinnertime.