NEWS YOU CAN USE. How To Make Your Headlights Shine Like New.

ANOTHER SETBACK FOR GOVERNMENT MOTORS: Cadillac recalls ELR coupe over stability control problems.

BECAUSE NARRATIVE: Scott Shackford: Why Is California State Senator Leland Yee Not Yet A Household Name?

The downfall of Calif. State Sen. Leland Yee of San Francisco should be an utterly captivating, fascinating story, and the national media should be sinking its teeth into the details. I joked when Yee was first arrested about how he is destined to be parodied in Grand Theft Auto. That was before the FBI’s report was even released. Now, I’m convinced the report could be the outline for an entire Grand Theft Auto installment (have they set a game in a parody of San Francisco yet?). Yee’s story of corruption, attempted gun-running and accusations of vote-selling (an undercover FBI agent posing as a medical marijuana clinic owner wanted him to support legislation introducing new barriers to entry for potential competition) is actually just a small part of a larger story about the crime scene in San Francisco. Beyond Lee’s role, the whole story (pdf) is full of drug transactions, stolen booze fencing, a home invasion by apparently Mexican gangsters, what appears to be counterfeit credit cards supplied by a Russian hacker, and more. It has everything. There’s even a money-laundering scene that takes place inside a massage parlor. It’s part FBI report, part Hollywood pitch.

And yet, it has not captured as much national media attention as one might think. Not long after the story came out, every Republican I follow on Twitter was noting how stories about Yee’s arrest were burying the fact that he’s a Democrat. I’m not particularly interested in an argument over which party is more corrupt. In the Corruption Olympics, each party is full of stellar athletes whose gold medals were paid for by taxpayers, manufactured by a company with cozy ties to both parties, and cost 300 percent more than they would in the private market. Nevertheless, given the media coverage of every time a conservative Republican politician on the state level says something dumb or controversial, it is worth noting.

Indeed it is.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE, especially in deep-blue Massachusetts: City worker promoted one month after being charged in bank robbery.

ROGER SIMON: The Silence Of The Liberals. “They are bewildered and embarrassed. Some are even ashamed of themselves, not that they will readily admit it. The man who was their hero has now been unmasked in every direction as the worst president since the Civil War and possibly earlier. Not only is he a cheesy liar, everything he has done, domestic and foreign, has failed, sometimes to extraordinary degrees. . . . Hence the silence.”

MY USA TODAY COLUMN Takes CNN To Task Over Its Leland Yee Non-Coverage.

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 328.

DEBT-INFLATED FALSE PROSPERITY: Easier Loans: Haven’t We Seen This Movie Before?

Here are words that would warm the cockles of any financial reporter’s heart: “It’s easier to get a loan these days for a new home or new car than it’s been in five years.”

I mean, the financial crisis may have been hell on the rest of y’all, but for business journalists, it was the Full Employment for Reporters Program.

OK, so maybe we’re not headed into “Financial Crisis II: The Legend Returns.” But given all the damage done by loose loan standards, I think this is worth some heavy eyebrow-knitting.

It’s also worth thinking about the secondary effects.

Is the Fed?

PHONE SEX FOR DEAF PEOPLE — NOT AN APRIL FOOL’S: Covered California Sends Deaf Callers To Hotline Offering ‘Hot Ladies.’ Train wrecks all the way down.

POLL: BRAZILIANS THINK WOMEN IN REVEALING CLOTHES DESERVE TO BE RAPED. “Keep in mind, 66.5 percent of the respondents were women.” That doesn’t surprise me at all. Women have always been the main enforcers of rules against female sexual display.

AT AMAZON, deals on Most-Wished-For Items.

Also, Top Easter Gifts.

BOB ZUBRIN: The Folly Of Blocking Natural-Gas Exports.

NEW HAMPSHIRE: Rep. Annie Kuster’s Townhall Problem.

BUT REMEMBER, MALE TEACHERS ARE RARE BECAUSE PEOPLE THINK THEY’RE MORE LIKELY TO BE SEXUAL PREDATORS: Coerced Sex Not Uncommon for Young Men, Teenage Boys, Study Finds. “A total of 43 percent of high school boys and young college men reported they had an unwanted sexual experience and of those, 95 percent said a female acquaintance was the aggressor, according to a study published online in the APA journal Psychology of Men and Masculinity.”

ED DRISCOLL ON FARMER-HATING IOWA SENATE CANDIDATE BRUCE BRALEY: I’m Lionel Hutz, and I Approve this Scrotal Torque-inducing Spin.

JAMES TARANTO: Laboratories of What? The clichés of ObamaCare coverage.

Ironically, before ObamaCare the medical-insurance industry functioned very much according to Brandeis’s “laboratories of democracy” model. “Thanks to the McCarran-Ferguson Act, which was passed in 1945, each of the fifty states has the exclusive power to license health insurance within a state’s own borders even if, in doing so, a state directly burdens interstate commerce by shutting out-of-state insurers out of the market,” as Steven Calabresi explained in a 2013 article for the University of Cincinnati Law Review.

“The McCarran-Ferguson Act purports to allow state governmental discrimination against inter-state commerce that would otherwise violate the Dormant Commerce Clause,” Calabresi argues, referring to the doctrine that states may not regulate interstate commerce. “It is this statute that has created the state health care oligopolies and monopolies and which is the cause of all our health care woes.”

But while McCarran-Ferguson deprived consumers of the benefits of competition across state lines, it did allow states considerable leeway to experiment. Some enacted coverage mandates; others didn’t. Some imposed “community rating”–a ban on charging higher premiums to policyholders with pre-existing conditions–and some repealed that requirement when it proved uneconomical. Massachusetts established an individual mandate, which most critics concede was (in contrast with the federal version) a constitutionally permissible exercise of state police power.

ObamaCare left the state-based regulatory scheme in place while overlaying upon it a panoply of new federal mandates. One of the few policy choices states have–to opt in or out of the Medicaid expansion–was not even part of the law until the high court found, also in NFIB v. Sebelius, that Congress had exceeded its powers in threatening to cut off existing Medicaid funding to states that did not go along.

So what we have with ObamaCare is the worst of both worlds: state monopolies without the flexibility to innovate.

Too bad nobody read it before they passed it so we could find out what was in it.

PROF. BAINBRIDGE: The Failed Florida Dean search: Was Alex Acosta Rejected Because He’s a Republican?

THE SLATE COMMENTERS ARE CALLING HIM A MALE CHAUVINIST PIGOVIAN: Reihan Salam: Tax the Childless: We should slash taxes on parents by jacking them up for nonparents.

So now, as a childless professional in my mid-30s, I often reflect on the sacrifices working parents make to better the lives of their children. And I have come to the reluctant conclusion that I ought to pay much higher taxes so that working parents can pay much lower taxes. I believe this even though I also believe a not inconsiderable share of my tax dollars are essentially being set on fire by our frighteningly incompetent government. Leviathan is here to stay, whether I like it or not, and someone has to pay for it. That someone should be me, and people like me.

Who should pay more? Nonparents who earn more than the median household income, just a shade above $51,000. By shifting the tax burden from parents to nonparents, we will help give America’s children a better start in life, and we will help correct a simple injustice. We all benefit from the work of parents. Each new generation reinvigorates our society with its youthful vim and vigor. As my childless friends and I grow crankier and more decrepit, a steady stream of barely postpubescent brainiacs writes catchy tunes and invents breakthrough technologies that keep us entertained and make us more productive. The willingness of parents to bear and nurture children saves us from becoming an economically moribund nation of hateful curmudgeons. The least we can do is offer them a bigger tax break.

Raising children is not exactly a thankless undertaking, I realize. As many parents will tell you, the satisfactions of parenting can be their own reward. Parents appear to be very into the supposed cuteness of their progeny. I wouldn’t know, but that’s the word on the street. We as a culture still hold parents, and particularly working parents, in high esteem.

Yet it is also true that we’ve stacked the deck against parents in all kinds of ways. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has found that raising a child born in 2012 will cost a middle-income family a cumulative total of $301,970 over 18 years. As high as this number sounds, it is actually a massive understatement, as it fails to take into account the cost of postsecondary education. It also fails to factor in the value of forgone earnings and career opportunities.

Read the whole thing.