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MATT VESPA: Harry Reid and the Crumbling Democratic Caucus.

MICHAEL BARONE ON THE BLUE MODEL’S DEMOGRAPHIC TRAP: Fewer dollars and babies threaten social programs. “When Medicare was established in 1965 and when Social Security was vastly expanded in 1972, America was accustomed to the high birthrates of the posWorld War II baby boom. It was widely assumed that the baby boom generation would soon produce a baby boom of its own. Oops.”

Related thoughts from Jonathan Last: The nation’s falling fertility rate is the root cause of many of our problems. And it’s only getting worse.

HMM: Former Minneapolis FBI director attacks Jones’ ATF nomination.

A former director of the Minneapolis FBI office sent a letter this week to members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee denouncing B. Todd Jones’ performance as U.S. attorney in Minnesota as they prepare to consider his nomination to director of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Donald E. Oswald, 54, a self-declared Democrat and supporter of President Obama, said he felt “morally compelled” to alert the committee about what he describes as Jones’ “atrocious professional reputation within the federal law enforcement community” in Minnesota.

“He was, and still remains, a significant impediment for federal law enforcement to effectively protect the citizens of Minnesota from violent gang, drug and gun activities,” Oswald wrote in an eight-page, single-spaced letter.

Oswald said he decided to go public with his concerns because active law enforcement officers in Minnesota are afraid to do so.

Read the whole thing.

“THE NEWSROOM WHERE TWO REPORTERS TOOK DOWN A PRESIDENT?” Prof. Joseph Campbell busts a recurrent media myth.

Speaking of the Post, there’s another media myth about the Jessica Lynch story.

ACCOUNTABILITY: College President Personally Smacked with $50,000 Bill for Violating Constitution.

There is great news for students from a Georgia jury today, as former Valdosta State University President Ronald Zaccari has been found liable for $50,000 in damages for unjustly kicking one of his students, Hayden Barnes, out of school for a collage he posted on Facebook.

Absurdly declared a “clear and present danger” and kicked off of campus in 2007 because of his opposition to a parking garage project that former president Zaccari saw as part of his “legacy,” Barnes filed a federal lawsuit against Zaccari and his employer in 2008.

Why did it take so long for justice to be served? The case was more complicated than many, as the court first had to determine that a state college administrator (in this case, Zaccari) was not entitled to the defense of “qualified immunity” for his actions because he should have known they were unlawful when he was doing them. Usually, public college administrators who blatantly violate the Constitution and due process rights get off scot-free even when they lose, as their employers (read: the taxpayers) get stuck with the bill for their transgressions. The thin reed of reason on which this “qualified immunity” rests is that administrators supposedly didn’t know that their actions were unconstitutional when they took them. (Yes, that’s pretty farfetched in most of the case FIRE sees, but courts tend to buy it.)

Zaccari appealed this finding, and it went all the way to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, where Zaccari lost. When the appeals were finished and the case came before a jury, the jig was up: Zaccari personally owes Barnes $50,000—and the court has not even assessed attorneys’ fees yet.

That was a disgraceful episode.

ILYA SOMIN: What to Do When Illiberal, Anti-Democratic Forces Take Power Through the Democratic Process.

Remember: Democracy is a means, not an end. It’s valuable as a means of protecting those unalienable rights that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But those rights are unalienable — incapable of being alienated, that is, bought, sold, or given away — which means that even if you live in a democracy, you haven’t surrendered them to the majority. A majority that wants to take away your unalienable rights isn’t a legitimate government. I’m gratified by how many Egyptians seem to grasp that; it’s more than I expected, though perhaps not as many as it needs to be. It’s clearly more than the Muslim Brotherhood expected, too.

LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Crop of New Law Schools Opens Amid a Lawyer Glut.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Arthur Brooks: My Valuable, Cheap College Degree.

I possess a 10K-B.A., which I got way back in 1994. And it was the most important intellectual and career move I ever made.

After high school, I spent an unedifying year in college. The year culminated in money problems, considerably less than a year of credits, and a joint decision with the school that I should pursue my happiness elsewhere. Next came what my parents affectionately called my “gap decade,” during which time I made my living as a musician. By my late 20s I was ready to return to school. But I was living in Spain, had a thin bank account, and no desire to start my family with a mountain of student loans.

Fortunately, there was a solution — an institution called Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, N.J. This is a virtual college with no residence requirements. It banks credits acquired through inexpensive correspondence courses from any accredited college or university in America.

I took classes by mail from the University of Washington, the University of Wyoming, and other schools with the lowest-priced correspondence courses I could find. My degree required the same number of credits and type of classes that any student at a traditional university would take. I took the same exams (proctored at local libraries and graded by graduate students) as in-person students. But I never met a teacher, never sat in a classroom, and to this day have never laid eyes on my beloved alma mater.

And the whole degree, including the third-hand books and a sticker for the car, cost me about $10,000 in today’s dollars.

Now living back in the United States, I followed the 10K-B.A. with a 5K-M.A. at a local university while working full time, and then endured the standard penury of being a full-time doctoral fellow in a residential Ph.D. program. The final tally for a guy in his 30s supporting a family: three degrees, zero debt.

Did I earn a worthless degree? Hardly. My undergraduate years may have been bereft of frissons, but I wound up with a career as a tenured professor at Syracuse University, a traditional university. I am now the president of a Washington research organization.

We need more diversity in our approaches to education. Here’s another model.

ED KOCH IS DEAD, but still getting his licks in against the homophobic Mario Cuomo. And Andrew Cuomo, too.

WELL, TO BE FAIR, TWITTER-FOLLOWING ISN’T MUCH OF A RELATIONSHIP: Why is Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) following a very young-looking Dominican girl on Twitter?

JOHN HINDERAKER: Minnesota Democrats’ Unconstitutional Gun Grab.

NRA 3, OBAMA 0: Martin Luther King Jr. High School coach shoots attackers.

Police sources tell 7 Action News that a women’s basketball coach from Martin Luther King, Jr. Senior High School shot two men who attacked him as he was walking two basketball players to their cars in the school parking lot.

Police sources say the coach was walking the two girls to their cars when two men allegedly approached and one pulled out a gun and grabbed him by his chain necklace. The coach then pulled out his gun and shot both of them, according to sources.

Well, that turned out well, considering.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Postal Service says it’s immune from local traffic laws.

A SHORT HISTORY of tattooed women.

AND APPARENTLY, HE DIDN’T QUALIFY FOR THE DAVID GREGORY EXEMPTION: NY Vet Arrested For Empty 30-round Magazines. “He thought he had something that was legal and it turned out that they weren’t.”

Reader Steve Eimers notes that he’s raising money for his defense. He’s crowdsourced over $20,000 so far. He’ll need it, in Cuomo’s barbaric police state. . . .

DOWNTON ABBEY now streaming live for free at Amazon Prime Instant Video.

UPDATE: Virginia Postrel emails that it’s also free at PBS.org.

AT AMAZON, 20% off on select laptops.

BRUCE SCHNEIER: Power And The Internet. “When the powerless found the Internet, suddenly they had power. But while the unorganized and nimble were the first to make use of the new technologies, eventually the powerful behemoths woke up to the potential — and they have more power to magnify. And not only does the Internet change power balances, but the powerful can also change the Internet. Does anyone else remember how incompetent the FBI was at investigating Internet crimes in the early 1990s? Or how Internet users ran rings around China’s censors and Middle Eastern secret police? Or how digital cash was going to make government currencies obsolete, and Internet organizing was going to make political parties obsolete? Now all that feels like ancient history.”

LOWER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: What Uncle Sam can (and cannot) do to improve K–12 schooling: Lessons for the next four years.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Husbands who do housework may have less sex, study says: Traditional chores are linked with more sex for married couples.

Husbands who do a lot of cooking, cleaning, laundry and other traditionally female forms of housework may do their marriages some good — but, contrary to popular belief, they are not rewarded with more sex, a new study finds.

Instead, it’s the guys who do the most lawn work, car repair, driving and bill-paying – traditional men’s jobs – who have the most sex in marriage, the study suggests. The same is true for women who do the most traditional female housework, according to the study published in the February issue of American Sociological Review. . . .

In other words, the study concludes: “Men or women may, in essence, be turned on (however indirectly) when partners in a marriage do more gender-traditional work.”

There’s a caveat, though. But there’s also this.

WHO’S RUNNING Y-12? “The National Nuclear Security Administration and its primary contractor at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant are refusing to release information on who’s managing the government installation with a billion-dollar annual budget. This appears to contradict President Obama’s memo on openness and transparency, which was delivered to federal agencies soon after he took office four years ago.”

IS MCDONALD’S GETTING HEALTHIER, or does it just have good PR? Plus, the last laugh: “If you’d bought its stock in 2004, when Morgan Spurlock released Supersize Me and some people predicted the eventual death of the giant, you’d have tripled your money by now.” My own sense is that their food is better than it was a few years ago.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on cellphones and accessories.

JAPAN’S DEMOGRAPHIC DISASTER: “Recently, the Japanese government announced that the population decrease for 2012 is expected to be 212,000—a new record—while the number of births is expected to have fallen by 18,000 to 1,033,000—also a record low. Projections by the Japanese government indicate that if the current trend continues, the population of Japan will decline from its current 127.5 million to 116.6 million in 2030, and 97 million in 2050. This is truly astonishing and puts Japan at the forefront of uncharted demographic territory; but it is territory that many other industrial countries also are beginning to enter as well.”