LEAKED: Michelle Nunn’s Campaign Plan.

PROPOSING “SOLUTIONS” THAT WILL COMPOUND THE PROBLEM: Student Debt On The Campaign Trail. From the comments: “Student loan money goes into the general fund, which subsidizes excessive administrative spending and athletics. Put a cap on administration expenses that can be subsidized and pop the athletic bubble, then loans over a four-year period will be reduced by several thousand dollars.” Indeed.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Supreme Beings Of Leisure: As technology advances, human work may become increasingly irrelevant.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 445.

SOMEHOW, I THINK THIS ROBERT HEINLEIN QUOTE IS WORTH REPEATING ONE MORE TIME:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

You know?

THE TYPICAL AMERICAN HOUSEHOLD has seen its net worth decline by a third.

But look how these members of Congress have done.

AT AMAZON, New Markdowns on Men’s Shoes. Casual, dress, and athletic.

Plus, deals on Bestselling Casual Watches. Casual watches are the way to go: I love my cheap Timex Ironman, which I even wear when scuba diving. And the Indiglo means I’m never without a light.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Supreme Beings Of Leisure: As technology advances, human work may become increasingly irrelevant.

TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: Plan to simplify 2015 health renewals may backfire.

MICKEY KAUS: Boehner’s Bad Coach. “A good football coach thinks several plays ahead. Rep. Salmon seems incapable of thinking one play ahead. By passing any immigration change now — even a desirable one — Republicans open themselves up to a protracted negotiation, perhaps into a lame duck session, with the massed forces of Obama, Haley Barbour, the Chamber of Commerce, (and Rupert Murdoch), all angling for one part of ‘comprehensive’ reform or another. That might be good for GOP fundraising — lobbyists can be generous when they really want something — but this isn’t a fundraising game (or a PR game, let alone a football game). What is at stake is the fundamental policy of the nation.”

I say revisit it in 2017. Until then, in Bob Dole’s memorable phrase, remember that sometimes a little gridlock can be a good thing.

And remember this from (immigrant!) Eugene Volokh:

I think, though, that the “Pilgrims = Illegal Aliens” equation illustrates the exact opposite. The whites immigrated to America — and took over the place. (I’m glad they did, but I can surely understand why the Indians might have disagreed.) Likewise, Jews immigrated to Palestine (adding vastly to the numbers already present), sometimes illegally — and eventually there were more Jews in some parts than Arabs, so Jews started running the place. Now Israelis are sensibly objecting to Palestinians’ asserted “right of return” to their and their parents’ homes, because if enough Palestinians are allowed to immigrate into Israel, they’ll start running the place.

The bottom line is that for all the good that immigration can do (and I’m an immigrant to the U.S., who is very glad that America let me in, and who generally supports immigration), unregulated immigration can dramatically change the nature of the target society. It makes a lot of sense for those who live there to think hard about how those changes can be managed, and in some situations to restrict the flow of immigrants — who, after all, will soon be entitled to affect their new countrymen’s rights and lives, through the vote if not through force.

I sometimes pose for my liberal friends a stylized thought experiment. Say that they live in a country of 3 million people (the size of New Zealand) where 55% of the citizens are pro-choice and 45% are pro-life (1.65 million vs. 1.35 million). Now the country is facing an influx of 1 million devoutly Catholic immigrants, who are 90% pro-life. If these immigrants are let in and become citizens, the balance will flip to 2.25 million pro-life to 1.75 million pro-choice (56% to 44% pro-choice); and what my friends might see as their fundamental human right to abortion may well vanish, perfectly peacefully and democratically.

It’s unlikely that any constitutional protection will stand in the way: Even constitutions can be amended, and new judges can be appointed. Nor can one rely on “education” or “assimilation” — what if the immigrants simply conclude that their views on abortion are just better than the domestic majority’s? I think many of the current residents may rightly say “We have nothing against Catholics; but we don’t want our rights changed by the arrival of people who have a different perspective on the world than we do.”

Letting in immigrants means letting in your future rulers.

If today’s immigrant wave were likely to vote Republican, all right-thinking people would be demanding deportations and a mile-wide belt of barbed wire and minefields along the border.

CATHY YOUNG: Stop Fem-Splaining: What ‘Women Against Feminism’ Gets Right. “The charge that feminism stereotypes men as predators while reducing women to helpless victims certainly doesn’t apply to all feminists—but it’s a reasonably fair description of a large, influential, highly visible segment of modern feminism.”

COLOR ME SKEPTICAL: WaPo: Here’s what the IRS told a federal court about Lois Lerner’s hard drive.

EXCEPT THEY LOOK DOWN ON THOSE BLUE-COLLAR PEOPLE: Joel Kotkin: To Fight Inequality, Blue States Need To Shift Focus To Blue-Collar Jobs.

Conservatives may not have the answers but it’s clear that a progressive regime has not worked either.

The net worth of blacks and Hispanics has declined relative to whites. The black poverty rate stood at 27.2% in 2012, and for Hispanics, 25.6%. At the same time as poor kids are flocking here from Central America, child poverty among Latinos has risen sharply, from 27.5% in 2007 to 33.7% percent in 2012.

One would think these statistics would make someone question at least somewhat boilerplate progressive polices, which certainly have not worked better than standard brand conservatism. But often the common answer to these trends has been a call for more “progressive” social policies that would seek to redistribute wealth and to enforce racial equity in everything from housing to university admission. Given Republican control of the House, these racial and class politics are increasingly most keenly felt in the states and cities.

There are numerous signs of this, including Seattle’s $15 an hour minimum wage and similar proposals in other cities. The thrust of New York Mayor Bill De Blasio’s administration seems to be to provide ever more succor to the city’s large, heavily minority, poor and working-class population through early childhood education and more subsidized housing.

As an old Democrat, I am sympathetic to the concerns. But it’s dubious the deep blue cities have found a solution. Let’s start with the gap between rich and poor. For the most part the regions and states with the widest gap between the classes are overwhelmingly dominated by modern progressivism.

The capital of blue America, New York City, has easily the worst levels of inequality in the country, with an income distribution that approaches that of South Africa under apartheid, notes demographer Wendell Cox.

But New York is hardly the only progressive stronghold with searing inequality. A recent Brookings report found that of the regions with the greatest income disparity only one, Atlanta, is located in a red-leaning state. These include San Francisco, Miami, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York, Oakland, Chicago and Los Angeles. The lowest degree of inequality was found generally historically more conservative cities like Ft. Worth, Texas; Oklahoma City; Raleigh, N.C.; and Mesa, Ariz. Income inequality has risen most rapidly in the probably the most left-leaning big American city of luxury progressivism, San Francisco, where the wages of the poorest 20% of all households have actually declined amid the dot-com billions.

The more they talk about equality, the more they push policies that make insiders richer and everyone else poorer.

WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS A FAILURE OF LEADERSHIP: Why Is the World Becoming Such a Nasty Place? Poor Obama. So much bad luck.

WHY ABSOLUTE JUDICIAL IMMUNITY SHOULD BE ABOLISHED: 6th Circuit Court: Ex-Judge Wade McCree’s conduct ‘reprehensible’ but immune from lawsuit.

Disgraced former Wayne County Circuit Judge Wade McCree, who had an affair with a woman while presiding over her child custody case, got some good news from a federal appeals court this week: He can’t be sued by the child’s father.

That’s what the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded in a 24-page decision Monday, stating that while McCree’s actions were “often reprehensible,” he is immune from lawsuits under the long-held doctrine of judicial immunity.

The ruling rubbed one attorney the wrong way: Joel Sklar, who is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court for help in loosening up the doctrine that says judges can’t be sued for decisions they make on the bench.

“There should be no immunity for what happened here,” said Sklar, who said he believes McCree improperly used the judicial immunity doctrine “as a shield for self interest” so that he could have a sexual relationship with a woman who appeared before him in a child custody case.

Sklar represents the child’s father, Robert King, who is fighting for the right to sue McCree, alleging he denied him access to a fair and impartial judge: McCree was having an affair with his child’s mother, sexted her from the bench and gave her thousands of dollars.

At the very least, if judges are to enjoy absolute immunity from lawsuits over misconduct, that immunity should come from the legislature. Right now, it’s a judicially-created doctrine, which is self-serving in the extreme.

This case isn’t the worst misconduct shielded by judicial immunity, but it’s pretty bad.

And speaking of self-dealing, this doesn’t look good: “McCree is the son of the late Wade Hampton McCree Jr., who was the first black person appointed to the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals and the second black solicitor general in U.S. history.” Though the doctrine is so absolute that it doesn’t really matter. And did I mention that this rule of absolute immunity for judges, no matter how serious their misconduct, was created by . . . judges?

CHANGE: House, Senate Negotiators Reach Deal On Veterans Bill.

THE GENERAL CRISIS OF THE 21ST CENTURY: Michael Barone: Fighting parasitic bureaucracies and crony capitalism.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Halbig and Hammurabi: Disdain for the letter of the law is complexly intertwined with the progressive imagination.

BUT THE LEFTY REVISIONISM NEVER STOPS: Ex-’60 Minutes’ Producer Is No Hollywood Hero.

CNN POLL: Americans really wish they had elected Mitt Romney instead of Obama.

Americans are so down on President Obama at the moment that, if they could do the 2012 election all over again, they’d overwhelmingly back the former Massachusetts governor’s bid. That’s just one finding in a brutal CNN poll, released Sunday, which shows Romney topping Obama in a re-election rematch by a whopping nine-point margin, 53 percent to 44 percent. That’s an even larger spread than CNN found in November, when a survey had Romney winning a redo 49 percent to 45 percent.

Two years ago, Obama won re-election with about 51 percent of the vote.

Well, I mean, look around.

NICK GILLESPIE: “Given the general level of exhaustion with conventional right-wing and left-wing ideology, with Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, there’s a real interest in something different. To the extent that we’re providing an alternative way to view politics and culture, we’ll bug the hell out of folks who feel like we’re making ‘major inroads’ into what they took to be their own captive audience.”

IS BARACK OBAMA JOHN GALT? “Now, Barack Obama has decreed that the American Atlas should shrug. Weary of its burdens and tired of being blamed for the world’s problems, America is withdrawing from its global leadership role. And the result, as in Atlas Shrugged, is disaster.”

Could’ve saved the world a lot of trouble by just reading a John Birmingham book or two instead.

BYRON YORK: The Democrats’ Impeachment-Themed Fundraising Extravaganza. The GOP won’t impeach Obama. Nobody wants a President Biden. And even if you could Agnew Biden out of the way, you’d just get . . . President Boehner. Nobody wants that, either. . . .

Related: Rep. Scalise Calls Out Obama: ‘First White House In History Trying To Start Narrative Of Own Impeachment.’ ““Look, the White House will do anything they can to change the topic away from the president’s failed agenda. . . . People are paying higher costs for food, for healthcare, for gas at the pump. And the president isn’t solving those problems. So he wants to try to change the subject.”

THAT’S OKAY, WE’VE GOT “SMART DIPLOMACY” ON THE JOB: Scotland’s bid for independence puts White House in awkward diplomatic spot.