JOURNALISM: How AP Covers Ted Cruz. But at least they updated when challenged.

ANNALS OF CRONY CAPITALISM: New Jersey: The Latest State to Quash Tesla Sales. “Same sh*t, different state. Today, it’s New Jersey that wants to ban auto manufacturers from selling cars directly to consumers, a move that appears aimed at Tesla and its no-dealership model. The last time we reported from the Tesla wars, it was Ohio that was considering the same type of ban, with the statehouse under pressure from influential local dealerships to quash Tesla’s way of doing business. This week, while Tesla reps are in the Buckeye State working out a compromise, the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission is threatening to cut off the EV maker.”

VOTER FRAUD: Florida TV station documents ineligible voters as DoJ sues to prevent state from purging rolls.

Related: Mummified Michigan woman seemingly voted in the afterlife, records show. “Pia Farrenkopf, shown in a high school photo, on Wednesday was found mummified inside her garage of her Pontiac, Mich., home. She’s believed to have died in 2008 — but voting records show she cast a ballot in 2010.”

But voter fraud is just a GOP myth.

WELL, WHEN THERE ARE REWARDS FOR LYING, AND NOT MUCH ACCOUNTABILITY IF YOU GET CAUGHT, PEOPLE WILL LIE MORE: Gay theatre student who claimed he was beaten by homophobic thugs admits he got his injuries when he fell over (and WON’T face action for wasting police time). “We managed to recover some CCTV footage which shows the injured party falling face-first onto the pavement. We have showed him the CCTV and he now accepts his injuries were caused during the fall.”

“NOT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE:” “Alarming” Problems With Massachusetts ObamaCare Site.

WE NEED TO TEACH GIRLS NOT TO RAPE: Maryland girls tortured autistic boy, forced him to perform sex act with family pet. “The suspects recorded themselves assaulting their mentally challenged victim by pointing a knife to his throat, making him walk across a frozen pond and not helping when he fell in multiple times and kicking him in the groin, Cameron said. Perhaps the most appalling charge was a sexual act they allegedly coerced him into performing.” So now it’s not only women who make false charges of rape who are being caught up by cellphone evidence, but women who commit rape themselves.

FALSE ACCUSATIONS IN A MILITARY SEXUAL ASSAULT CASE:

Chief Serbia testified that he asked her, “Were you raped?” and she replied, “No.”

Text messages and journal entries suggest the affair was loving, passionate and consensual, the defense asserts. One of her diary entries read, “My biggest fear is that there is still something there in his marriage.” In another entry, the captain wrote, “I’m so in love with him and the idea of always being with him that I forget about large factors that would prevent that.”

Meanwhile, there’s reason to suspect that the military was more interested in producing a scalp as evidence that it was taking sexual assault seriously than in doing justice. Christina Hoff Sommers is comparing this to the Duke Lacrosse false-rape case.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 308.

BATTLESPACE PREPARATION: Ashe Schow: ‘Ban Bossy’ campaign started by Hillary Clinton donor — ahead of 2016 run. “Make no mistake, there is always a deeper agenda whenever a seemingly innocent campaign pops up overnight.” I suspect that their focus groups show that as one of her biggest negatives, so they’re trying to preemptively take it off the table. But there might be blowback: I can imagine a bumpersticker with a lined-through Hillary pic and the caption “BAN BOSSY.” Just sayin’ . . . .

UPDATE: “Does this censorship campaign make me look bossy?”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Well, that didn’t take long.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Schools Trying Everything — Except Cutting Costs.

With enrollments down and tuition peaking, many colleges are looking everywhere for way to enhance their revenue streams. A new piece in the New York Times describes the rise of “bridge programs,” which are essentially third-party companies hired by colleges to recruit foreign students to study in American schools and prepare them for a foreign educational system.

The purpose of these programs is twofold: There is an abundance of talented foreign students eager to study in the U.S., but most have only heard of the big-name schools, but there aren’t a lot of spots open. Enter bridge programs, which steer foreign students toward lesser-known schools and offer them crash courses in the peculiarities of the American learning environment.

The second purpose of these programs—boosting applications and enrollment—is of more interest to the universities.

They bring in money from foreigners who pay full freight. But that’s a stop-gap solution:

We’ve long speculated that schools will eventually be forced to make painful decisions about cutting administrative overhead and lowering prices, as American students become more price conscious. There are even signs that this is finally beginning to happen. But schools are also trying to put off the need to make tough choices as long as possible, and bridge programs, by drawing in more students willing to pay full price, are a way of doing this.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: HHS unable to determine who has paid for Obamacare health insurance plans.

AT AMAZON, spring markdowns on shoes. For men, women, and kids.

Also, bestsellers in Cookbooks, Food & Wine.

Plus, today only: Bushnell 8 MP Trophy Cam HD Max Black LED Trail Camera with Night Vision, $144.99 (59% off). Also good for home (or business) security, I’d imagine.

INSTAVISION: World on Fire: Ukraine, Russia, Syria and Venezuela Turmoil Explained with Austin Bay.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: New House Report Reignites IRS Scandal.

Also: Popehat: A Few Notes On Lois Lerner And The Fifth Amendment.

PAUL RYAN: “Working hard” to find votes on immigration.

JAMES TARANTO: Sink Sank Sunk: The ObamaCare undertow arrives on Florida’s West Coast.

Young wasn’t, Sink did, and Jolly is.

To paraphrase James Carville, it’s the eponymy, stupid. The references are to Rep. Bill Young, who died at 82 in October, and the candidates in yesterday’s special election to succeed him, Democrat Alex Sink and Republican David Jolly.

Young was a Republican, but many political observers gave Sink the edge in the St. Petersburg-area district where Barack Obama narrowly outpolled Mitt Romney. On paper, she was a stronger candidate, having been elected statewide (as chief financial officer, in 2006). Jolly is, as David Freddoso puts it, a lobbyist “with personal issues–a divorce, a girlfriend people referred to as his ‘child bride,’ and an auto accident from decades ago in which he’d killed someone.” There was also a Libertarian in the race, who pulled nearly 5% of the vote. Nonetheless, Jolly won the seat with a 48.5% plurality.

Professional political observers and journalists touted the election as a bellwether. “It’s rare in politics that anything other than a presidential contest is viewed as a ‘must win’–but the special election in Florida’s 13th District falls into that category for Democrats,” wrote Stuart Rothenberg back in January. . . .

As for the House, Freddoso reproduces the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” target map, which shows in yellow and orange some 30 Republican seats the Democrats hope to pick up.

“How many of these look like better opportunities than Florida-13 was just now?” he asks. “I’m guessing maybe 5 of them, and even that might be generous.” He names only two: California’s 31st district, an open seat “which Republicans only kept in 2012 because of a fluke in California’s goofy new primary system” (i.e., both candidates on the general-election ballot were Republicans), and New York’s 11th, whose incumbent, Michael Grimm, in January threatened to “break” a reporter “in half.”

Freddoso’s bottom line: “Democrats are probably going to lose seats in the House this year.” In unwitting support of that view, Salon’s Brian Buetler attempts to explain away the Democrats’ defeat and ends up mired in mush.

A common fate at Salon.

WHY, THAT’S CRAZY TALK! Roll Call: White House, Democrats Cry Foul Over GOP Push to Enforce Immigration, Other Laws.

ROLL CALL: Feinstein Shifts Slow-Burning Anger From Guns to Spies.

Whether to tighten the reins on the sprawling intelligence-gathering community is still an open question in this Congress. It’s one of the few debates that has GOP conservatives and Democratic liberals finding common cause against the establishment mainstream, which has generally succeeded in the post-9/11 era at giving the spymasters broad latitude and billions of dollars to combat terrorism as assertively and secretly as they see fit.

Feinstein has remained at the forefront of that effort as the volume of congressional criticism has increased in recent years. She has publicly defended the CIA’s use of armed drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen, supported the FBI’s assertive use of its new investigatory powers under the Patriot Act and praised the expansive telephone and Internet surveillance programs at the National Security Agency, which she credits with stopping terrorist attacks in the United States.

The CIA, in other words, has perhaps picked the worst possible member of Congress to antagonize. Her conversion from ally to combatant could hardly come at a worse time for the agency. That’s because she has the power to cause the biggest rupture between the Hill and the spies since the 1970s, when exposure of their cloak-and-dagger excesses prompted the birth of the current congressional oversight system.

Stay tuned.

THE HILL: Grayson’s wife drops restraining order.

The estranged wife of Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) dropped a temporary restraining order against the congressman on Wednesday.

“Ms. Carson-Grayson has apparently dropped the petition for injunction that she levied against the Congressman last week, and will no longer pursue a restraining order against him. Ms. Carson-Grayson’s complaint was voluntarily dismissed today,” Lauren Doney, a spokesman for the congressman said in a statement.

Last week, Grayson denied pushing Lolita Carson-Grayson after a judge granted a temporary protective injunction against him at the time. The two filed for divorce in January.

“While this is certainly positive news, we want to emphasize that these baseless charges should never have been brought in the first place,” Doney said.

Abuse/domestic violence charges made during a divorce proceeding are presumptively bogus, but Grayson is a hothead, so who knows?

BRITAIN’S POLITICAL CLASS HATES THE U.K. INDEPENDENCE PARTY, but they brought it on themselves through fecklessness, incompetence, and arrogance. America’s political class, take note. If you hate the Tea Party movement, you’ll really hate what comes after it if it fails.

SEND HIM THE BILL AND MAKE HIM DO IT: Obama threatens vetoes of bills requiring him to follow the law. Bad optics.

CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS: ‘Free to Be’ Boys and Girls: 40 Years After the Failed Gender Revolution. Well, boys aren’t free to be boys — that gets them Adderall or expulsion for making finger-guns. “One of the largest and most persistent differences between the sexes is children’s play preferences.”

DEMONIZATION: High School Student Suspended For Wearing NRA Shirt. Two takeaways: (1) He should sue; and (2) More reason not to put your kids in the hands of the public schools.

FORMER POLITICO REPORTER DISCOVERS THAT working retail is hard. Do tell. I worked retail all the way through college. It’s one reason I finished college and went on to law school. I still have little burst blood vessels in my feet from standing for 9am to 9 pm shifts. And, unlike him, I wasn’t working in retail because racist jokes and domestic-violence charges made me unemployable elsewhere. I did, however, manage to take pride in my work without regarding that as some sort of character flaw.