TAXES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: 40 Obama White House aides owe the IRS $333,000 in back taxes.

AT AMAZON, it’s the St. Patrick’s Day Shop.

Also, markdowns in the Amazon Dress store.

And, today only: Up to 50% Off Select Logitech G-Series Peripherals.

ROGER SIMON: Al Gore’s Digital Utopia.

IT’S ABOUT TIME: First Budget in Four Years for Senate Democrats.

TAXES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE (CONT’D): 312,000 Federal Workers Owe $3.5 Billion in Back Taxes, Up 11.5% From Prior Year.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: The North is Ready to Blow. “Lebanon always looks and feels like it’s ready to erupt into armed conflict, but today it’s more ready than usual. The Syrian civil war next door weighs heavily on this place. Sunnis and Alawites are fighting round after round with no end in sight in the city of Tripoli, and now the Northern Bekaa Valley, between Mount Lebanon and the Syrian border, is likewise gearing up to explode.”

KARMA’S A BITCH: “Isn’t it amusing to picture them — somewhere in the secret passageways of power — flop-sweating and frantic over the realization Oh, my God, we’re John Yoo!?”

From the comments: “Not even. To be John Yoo, they would need to state their argument forthrightly and stand by it when questioned.”

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Paul Ehrlich’s False Gospel.

John Maddox (1925 – 2009) was for many years the editor of Nature, one of the two most important general science journals in the world. In 1972 he published a broadside against the radical pessimism then very prevalent with the title The Doomsday Syndrome: An Assault on Pessimism. In this book, which makes interesting reading today, Maddox attacked the propensity of scientists such as Paul Ehrlich and Barry Commoner to project current trends indefinitely into the future and to conclude therefrom that catastrophe must sooner or later (usually sooner) result.

Ehrlich – who is still predicting catastrophe with as much confidence as if all that he had predicted for the recent past had actually come to pass – famously, or infamously, asserted in his neo-Malthusian book, The Population Bomb, published in 1968, that the battle to feed mankind was over and that hundreds of millions of people would inevitably starve to death in the 1970s, irrespective of what anyone did to try to avoid it.

His prediction was not borne out; forty years later the greatest nutritional problem in the world is probably obesity caused by over-eating. But like those persons on the fringe of religion who predict that the world will beyond peradventure end on a certain date but whose faith is quite unshaken by the failure of that wicked world to conform to their righteous prophecies, so Professor Ehrlich continues to assert that really he was right all along: merely that he mistook the date of the great reckoning.

But most of Ehrlich’s believers would probably mock those religious people as dumb followers of superstition.

WELL, THIS IS NEWS: Fourth Circuit Denies Qualified Immunity for Botched SWAT Raid. “I still wonder why gun rights groups like the NRA aren’t more disturbed by the ubiquitous use of SWAT teams. Here, the fact that the Bellotte’s were legal, registered gun owners was used as justification for the violent, volatile entry into their home. It isn’t the first time this has happened. You’d think that’s something that might concern Second Amendment activists.”

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Sunshine Week: FOIA use grows but transparency declines despite Obama promises.

ANDREW KLAVAN: Rand Paul vs. the Harrumphies.

HOW THE DEMOGRAPHIC SHIFT could hurt Democrats, too. “It’s assumed that, as the United States becomes increasingly non-white, white Democrats will continue to support the party. But a substantial amount of social-science evidence suggests a different conclusion: As the United States becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, liberal whites might start leaning Republican.” If that happens, it will be because of the surprisingly common anti-white racism emanating from so many Democratic operatives and pundits. Given that whites are still a very substantial majority, such a shift would be devastating for the Democrats. If they can’t carry 30-40% of whites, they can’t win.

HOW TO GREEN THE WORLD’S DESERTS AND REVERSE CLIMATE CHANGE by eating more meat! Well, sort of.

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!