GM RECALL: What You Should Know About Airbag Stats: Just because an airbag didn’t deploy doesn’t mean it was supposed to.

SPYING: NSA: Don’t Blame Us, Blame Google!

INSTAVISION: Crisis In Ukraine: What’s Next?

ROGER SIMON: “Whatever you think of Rand Paul, he’s actually doing something that politicians rarely do — talking at length to audiences who don’t usually agree with him. And winning over new friends in the process.”

Plus:

The country is changing. Whole new groups are ripe for the picking, most obviously the young who are being so completely raked over by the Obama administration via Obamacare and the rest of the entitlements so many of them know they will never see. They were ready to applaud at Berkeley.

And African Americans — when, since the end of Jim Crow, have they done worse than under the Obama administration with its record black unemployment numbers and horrifying statistics on out-of-wedlock births in their community? Consciously or unconsciously, Democrats have been waging a “War on Blacks” since the days of the Great Society. It’s been a disaster for African Americans, a nightmare, in truth.

But where are the Republicans, the party of Lincoln, on that? They should be in the black communities talking to them about it, suggesting ways to make things better. Instead, they just sit around getting annoyed when the Democrats call them racists. Play offense, not defense.

Indeed. Especially as the Dems have lots of experience on offense, not so much on defense.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Our criminal justice system has become a crime.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 315.

WE WILL BE INVINCIBLE: “Young Invincibles” Are Killing ObamaCare.

As the clock ticks down to the end of open enrollment for health coverage, one thing is becoming clearer: what the final demographics will look like. Demographics matter a lot because they will help determine whether the health insurance market goes into a death spiral (or requires hefty federal subsidies to keep it from doing so). Young healthy people, and a lot of them, are needed to keep the market stable and premiums low. As we head into the final few weeks, we have a pretty good idea of how many young healthy people there will be, and the answer is: a whole lot fewer than the health-care wonks were expecting.

But wait a minute! I hear you cry. We don’t know any such thing! After all, everyone expects a lot of young healthy people to wait until the last minute! Are you saying they’re wrong?

Not exactly. I too expect the demographics of March enrollment to skew younger than prior months. But at this point, unless that enrollment is truly massive, I don’t think that will be enough.

Especially since a lot of them can just stay on their parents’ insurance.

EDUCATION: The Myth Of The STEM Shortage: American students need to improve in math and science—but not because there’s a surplus of jobs in those fields.

AT AMAZON, it’s the big Easter Sale.

Plus: trade in your gear for Spring Cleaning season!

BECAUSE WEAKNESS IS ABOUT WILL AS WELL AS CAPABILITIES: Victor Davis Hanson: Why do weak nations like Russia provoke stronger ones like the United States?

LIZ PEEK: How Europe and Obama Lost Leverage with Putin: Putin was changing the map while Europe was saving the climate.

WHY DOES EZRA KLEIN’S VOX NATE SILVER’S 538 THINK IT’S FUNNY when toddlers have their penises crushed? (Sorry, got my new ventures by juiceboxers mixed up.)

MICHAEL AUSLIN: Why Did Russia Invade Ukraine? Because The West Is Weak.

The toxic brew of negative perceptions of Western/liberal military capability and political will is rapidly undermining the post-1945 order around the world. Reduced military budgets, global perceptions of American and European weakness, the outright dismissal of presidential redlines, and memories of total inaction like during the 2008 Georgian invasion or Syrian civil war have set the stage for future opportunism. . . .

A world in which dissatisfied powers seek to redraw old maps or restore national “honor” will be immeasurably more dangerous when they correctly gauge that the West can offer only moral outrage and little else. Neither China nor Russia may be so reckless as to act aggressively without any cause, but there are myriad “causes” out there, many of which we dismiss because they don’t fit our definition of rationality or national interest, and onto which Beijing, Moscow, Tehran and others can latch.

Policymakers and analysts too little take account of the poisonous connection between perceptions of Western credibility and the festering disputes that can be used as a casus belli for those seeking advantage.

Yes.

REMINDER: In 2009, President Obama “Joked” About Targeting His Enemies With Tax Audits.

I’LL BELIEVE IT’S A CRISIS WHEN THE PEOPLE WHO TELL ME IT’S A CRISIS START ACTING LIKE IT’S A CRISIS: Senate Democrats talk about climate threat, increase risk.

Senate Democrats are willing to talk about climate change all night if it will please a major donor, but when it comes to casting tough votes they take a pass. Despite all the talk, no serious climate legislation is on the table in the Senate. Worse, the same Senators who claim climate change is an urgent problem support legislation to increase the nation’s vulnerability to the threat of warming-enhanced storm surges and potential sea-level rise. Just three days after the climate talk-a-thon, all-but-one of the Senate Climate Caucus voted to gut recent reforms of the National Flood Insurance Program that reduced federal subsidies for coastal development. In other words, the same Senators who say climate change is an urgent threat are happy to have taxpayers and other premium payers subsidize coastal development that lies in harm’s way.

Well, those are rich donors.

COLLEGE SUPPORT: Rand Paul, Republican presidential hopeful, finds support in Berkeley, of all places.

“He’s a serious contender,” said Bruce Cain, a political expert who directs Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West. “He can come to the Bay Area and plausibly look for money, which is not the case with Sarah Palin or some of the other people on the right.”

The younger Paul has found that money at a series of local fundraisers Tuesday and Wednesday, and will tap into his young activist base with a speech Wednesday afternoon at UC-Berkeley’s International House.

In a speech peppered with references to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here,” Paul told a crowd of about 400 that he will call for creation of a bipartisan select committee to probe and reform the intelligence community, much like the Church Committee of the 1970s: “It should watch the watchers.”

“Your rights, especially your right to privacy, are under assault,” he said, noting the National Security Agency has said its surveillance programs treat lawmakers like any other Americans. “Digest exactly what that means. If Congress is spied upon without their permission, who exactly is in charge of the government?”

Rand, you magnificent bastard, you read my book column!

OH GOOD, EVERYONE WAS WAITING FOR THIS: Lena Dunham Weighs In On Woody Allen Molestation Accusations.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases, updated every hour. Browse and save.

Also, this week’s coupons in Grocery & Gourmet Food.

ANOTHER ARGUMENT FOR MY REVOLVING DOOR SURTAX, COURTESY OF PETER ORSZAG’S DIVORCE: “New court filings show that the former Obama administration official pulled down $3.1 million in “taxable income” last year at Citigroup. Orszag expects to make nearly $4 million this year, he said in the filing. (Orszag has been trying mightily to keep these figures out of the public records.)”

REMEMBER: THE VIRTUE OF HIGHER EDUCATION IS THAT IT’S SUPPOSED TO FOSTER CRITICAL THINKING AND OPENNESS TO IDEAS.

The UC Santa Barbara Police Department has released its official report on the confrontation between Professor Mireille Miller-Young and a group of anti-abortion activists during which Miller-Young stole one of the activists’ signs, tussled with a teen girl trying to get it back, and then destroyed the sign with the help of her students.

In the report, Miller-Young, who is pregnant, said she was “triggered” by the graphic images of aborted fetuses on the large posters and said she felt the demonstrators didn’t have a right to be on the university’s campus, because their messages were upsetting to her and students. When asked by police if there had been a struggle between her and the activists when she took the poster, Miller-Young responded, “I’m stronger, so I was able to take the poster.”

Lefty thinking in a nutshell.

“IT’S A FALSE CONFIDENCE, WHICH IS MORE DEVASTATING THAN ANYTHING.”

STUART BENJAMIN: If an algorithm generated this post, is it First Amendment speech? The First Amendment is a command to Congress (and government generally) not to regulate speech or the press, not a protection for particular speakers. So why should it matter who (or what) is speaking?

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Our criminal justice system has become a crime.

THE DEMOCRATS’ GENDER GAP:

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Tuesday disputed the widely held perception that the GOP struggles to attract the support of female voters, suggesting instead his party has a problem with only a certain kind of female voter.

“There’s a little bit of a laziness on the part of the people who want to claim the Republican Party has some kind of women problem,” said Priebus, speaking at the Christian Science Monitor Breakfast. “We basically have a single women problem under 35 issue.”

The real question, the chairman said, was why Democrats struggled to appeal to so many other groups of women.

“Why does the Democratic Party have so many problems in their engagement with married women, or women with children?” he asked.

Even the Dems, meanwhile, are worried that they’re doing badly with white people.