BRANDING, AND OF COURSE THE MEDIA PROBLEM: Poll: Majority Back Republican Ideas Until They Hear that the Ideas Came From Republicans.

FUNNY, BUT THE RNC’S NEW PLANS seem designed to fend off an insurgency. But they’re predicated on having lost with perhaps the most capital-E Establishment candidate of my lifetime. In both 2008 and 2012 the anointed candidate got the nomination, and lost. I’m just sayin’ . . . .

THERE’S THAT WORD AGAIN: Homebuilder Confidence in U.S. Unexpectedly Fell in March.

BE AFRAID OF YOUR FOOD: “Vegetables are as dangerous as meat.” “If I pick up a container of blackberries in February, they’re coming from Ecuador or Guatemala. You wouldn’t eat those berries unwashed if you were in Guatemala or Ecuador, right?”

FROM MY COLLEAGUE WILLIAM MERCER: At the Intersection of Sovereignty and Contract: Traffic Cameras and the Privatization of Law Enforcement Power.

A FISH, A BARREL, A SMOKING GUN: Taking On The Liberal Media Lie About CPAC. “Speaking of questions: Is there any joke that anyone could make about any Democrat that the Huffington Post would not deem ‘questionable’? Of course not. The entire mission of Arianna Huffington’s organization, which she sold for more than $300 million to AOL a few years ago, is to help Democrats and harm Republicans. Yet HuffPo is considered a ‘mainstream’ news operation, while Fox News is consistently demonized by the same allegedly objective journalists who view HuffPo as entirely legitimate and respectable.” They’re not journalists, they’re Democratic operatives with bylines. Or, in the case of the Crowder hit-piece, without even that.

CHARLIE MARTIN: 13 Weeks: Jailbreak! “Remember the advice in Shangri-La: Moderation in all things — including moderation.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Guess Who Brought A Gun To The Treaty Fight?

Negotiations begin tomorrow for a UN treaty that would track global arms sales and shipments aimed at stopping the flow of weapons into conflict zones. The NRA’s lobbyists have been working overtime recently to oppose domestic gun control legislation, but they are preparing to open up an international front to oppose this treaty. Though the lobby expects the treaty to pass at the UN, they are prepared to kill it when it returns home for ratification.

American history is full of examples of internationally minded, humanistic types coming up with good ideas for treaties—which the US Senate never ratifies. The classic example was Wilson’s Treaty of Versailles which set up the League of Nations. This one may very well be heading down the same well-trod path. Treaties take the support of a 2/3 majority of the Senate to be ratified, and there are almost certainly 34 senators to be found who are ready to stand with the NRA against the UN.

To an administration, doing things like this can appear to make sense: pander to the idealists and the Wilsonians, and get international brownie points for trying to go along with the ‘global consensus’. But this one could be a real loser: the belief that the Obama administration is trying in some way to give the UN control over Americans’ right to bear arms will galvanize the Jacksonian vote in 2014 in a big way.

Obama’s smart diplomacy and deft touch at co-opting his domestic opponents will surely smooth over any difficulties.

THANKS TO READER TEES ROMANBROOK, here’s a link to that classic crunchiness vs. sogginess essay that I mentioned over the weekend. It’s a must-read.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Sandal Shop. Summer is coming.

Also, today only: Yamaha RX-V573 7.1-Channel Network AV Receiver, $299.95.

CHANGE: S&P Warns of Socially Explosive Situation in Euro Zone.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Why Silicon Valley Is Winning the Robocar Race.

CHANGE: It won’t be your father’s GOP. You can’t run on the Reagan coalition because that coalition no longer exists.

WAR ON PHOTOGRAPHY UPDATE: Illinois county to pay ACLU $600K after high court voids eavesdropping law. “In 2012, Illinois saw a rash of cases involving the Illinois Eavesdropping Act, which forbade making audio or visual recordings of people without explicit consent from everyone in the recording. In practice, the law made recording on-duty police officers a felony in the state. The prosecutions of citizens that ensued prompted the ACLU to challenge the state’s Eavesdropping Act, and it was eventually ruled unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds in the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. In November 2012, the US Supreme Court denied a request from a Chicago-based prosecutor to review the Seventh Circuit’s decision, letting it stand.”

You have not only a First Amendment right, but a Due Process right to record the police.

LAW SCHOOLS RANKED BY average starting salary for recent grads.

HE’S BAA-AACK! ‘Weiner is still fuming over his downfall, and he blames Nancy Pelosi.’

TEXAS LOOKING AT CHANGES TO PROSECUTORIAL IMMUNITY:

With more than 300 exonerations across the nation of people convicted and imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, we all have witnessed the limits of a criminal justice system flawed by human error — be that unintentional or intentional.

Nowhere more than in Texas has the weight of those imperfections been felt in cases that have tested public confidence in the criminal justice system and spurred big changes at the Legislature. That was true in the Timothy Cole case and is proving true in the Michael Morton case.

Morton’s testimony last week before the Texas Senate helped steer Senate Bill 825, prompted by his case, over a crucial hurdle. The bill aims to hold prosecutors accountable if they hide or suppress evidence from defendants. Morton’s lawyers claim prosecutors failed to turn over key evidence supporting Morton’s claim of innocence. Clearly, current laws are too lenient in punishing such practices, which not only are unethical, but illegal. The Legislature should pass the bill.

No one can give back freedoms, dignity or time stolen from people wrongfully convicted and imprisoned. But the Legislature can improve an imperfect system. It took action in the Cole case after the tragic details of Cole’s case went public. Cole, who died in prison in 1999 while serving a 25-year sentence for a rape he didn’t commit, was posthumously pardoned in 2010 by Gov. Rick Perry after DNA evidence cleared him and implicated another man who confessed to the crime.

In such cases, prosecutors should face imprisonment for the length of the defendant’s sentence, as well as being liable for money damages.

THE NEW UNMARRIED MOMS: We’ve reduced teen pregnancy, but now childbearing outside wedlock is exploding among 20-somethings. “In fact, a key part of the explanation for the struggles of today’s working and lower middle classes in the U.S. is delayed marriage. . . . Among college grads today, only 12% of first births are outside marriage. For high-school dropouts, who tend to be the poorest population, 83% of first births are outside marriage, the CDC data show.”

My USA Today column for tomorrow is on a related topic.

DAMON ROOT: A History Lesson From Clarence Thomas: Correcting a liberal smear about the conservative Supreme Court justice. “Many of his critics may be too ignorant to know it, but Thomas’ writings are steeped in African-American history and grapple repeatedly with the long shadow cast by slavery and Jim Crow. He may not be a modern liberal, but there is no question that Clarence Thomas is part of a civil rights tradition that started with Frederick Douglass.”

You can get away with a lot of ignorance, so long as you advance The Narrative.

BRUCE SCHNEIER: The Internet Is A Surveillance State.

BRITAIN’S PRESS REGULATION EFFORT would go after blogs, too.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Sorry, Folks: One Way or the Other, You’ll Never Be Able to Completely Count on Retirement. “We’re just picking how we want to take our risk, not whether we want to take it. And if there’s one thing we should have learned from the financial crisis, it’s this: the minute we decide that we don’t have to make that choice–that we have figured out some way to get rid of the risk altogether–is generally the moment that the universe decides to give it to us, good and hard.”

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: “The financial system, thanks to dissembling traders and bumbling regulators, is at greater risk than you know.” Bottom line: “We already know that banks of JPMorgan’s size are also too big to be allowed to fail and too big to prosecute. Such banks are too big to regulate and apparently too big to manage. So how much more evidence do we need that banks like JPMorgan are simply too big a risk for taxpayers to bear?”

OBAMA TO NAME THOMAS PEREZ FOR LABOR SECRETARY. I expect he’ll get a lot of questions about the racialist dysfunction in his department at DOJ identified by the Inspector General recently.