RUNNING KINDA LOW ON OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Potential tax hike for Illinoisans is staggering: A new report claims Chicagoans would face property-tax hikes nearing 50 percent to adequately fund city pensions.

More background here from Mark Glennon.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE: Woman faces jail after admitting making a false rape claim.

Seems like we hear more stories like this from Britain. Is it because they prosecute more false rape charges, or because British papers are more likely to report it when they do?

PAUL RAHE: Taxing Time. “This is, you see, a stealth election – deliberately scheduled at a time when next to no one is paying any attention – and its aim is to raise the sales tax rate throughout the state. If this were the work of the Democrats, I would not much mind. I do not expect better of them. They are the party of high taxation, of well-funded public-sector unions, and of poor service. Raising taxes and redistributing the fruits of our labors to free-loaders is their raison d’être. What burns me is that this dirty trick is the work of our Republican Governor Rick Snyder and of the go-along-to-get-along Republicans we elected as state representatives and state senators in 2010 and 2014.”

REPAIRING MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS DAMAGE with existing drugs.

BECAUSE DIVERSITY!:  An MSNBC pundit, Michelle Bernard, says GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson “probably went to Yale and University of Michigan for medical school because of affirmative action” and says he “drank the Kool-aid” because of his conservative views. This is becoming so ubiquitous among progressives it’s almost laughable–may as well have called him an Oreo.  I hope Dr. Carson punches back twice as hard.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: An Uber For Doctor Housecalls. “Heal is a smartphone app similar to the on-demand car service Uber, but instead of a car, a doctor shows up at your door. Users download the app and then type in a few details such as address and the reason for the visit. After adding a credit card and a request for a family doctor or a pediatrician, the physician arrives in 20 to 60 minutes for a flat fee of $99. Heal began in Los Angeles in February, recently expanded to San Francisco and is set to roll out in another 15 major cities this year.”

RISE OF THE MACHINES: First they get Harry Reid, now this: Dave Goldberg’s death points to rise and risks of treadmills in era of smartphones.

SHOULD DENSE URBAN AREAS “force their will” on entire states? “All of us who live in coastal Washington—Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative—have more in common with each other, economically, than we have with people living on Mercer Island or Queen Anne Hill. Urban voters know it. And they’re eating our lunch, in terms of development and growth.”

PEOPLE ALWAYS HAVE FEWER KIDS UNDER SOCIALISM: Bad news for older folks: Millennials are having fewer babies. “Johnson estimates that roughly 500,000 fewer babies are now being born per year than would have been the case had the higher fertility rates of the mid-2000s continued.”

EPIC FAIL:  Only 18 percent of 8th graders are proficient in U.S. history according to the new Nation’s Report Card. Asians score highest at 33%; whites at 26%; Hispanics at 8%; blacks at 6%.  The gap between public and private schoolers is large:  17% proficiency for public school students, versus 31% for private.

If you don’t know U.S. history, you simply cannot appreciate the exceptional nature of our country, which explains a lot.

WILLIAM FORSTCHEN, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Military eyeing former Cold War mountain bunker as ‘shield’ against EMP attack? Even if a bunch of electronics inside the mountain survive, how useful would it be if everything else was fried?

A while back I had a post on the missing bicycles in apocalyptic fiction. They do make an appearance in Bill Quick’s Lightning Fall, and I have to say that this one looks like it would fill the bill nicely, and leave room in your trunk. Of course, for the immediate aftermath of pretty much any apocalyptic event, you’ll want one of these.

WELL, FOR ONE THING, THE FACT THAT THEY HAD REAL JOBS MIGHT HAVE BEEN A TIP-OFF: “Who could have guessed in the mid-1980s, at a pair of otherwise forgettable McDonald’s restaurants some 20 miles apart, that two bushy-haired teenagers working the burger grills would become Wisconsin’s most powerful Republicans?”

HMM: Tesla begins selling used cars online: Now you can skip the used car dealership and buy a certified pre-owned Model S directly from Tesla’s website.

AT AMAZON, save up to 15% on select Business & Commercial Products.

Plus, holsters for Concealed Carry.

THOMAS SOWELL:  The inconvenient truth about ghetto communities’ social breakdown.

The “legacy of slavery” argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century. Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s.

Yep.  Progressivism is all about keeping groups angry, alienated and feeling powerless for political profit.

THIS IS PRETTY COOL: Amazing Photo Shows SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Just Before Crash.

MAYBE, BUT IT’S A PRETTY SERIOUSLY DANGEROUS ACT: Appeals court: Man who fired laser at plane didn’t deserve 30-month sentence. “In other words, the government didn’t prove that Gardenhire knew that firing the laser at an airplane from the ground was dangerous—meaning the government didn’t demonstrate his actions were reckless. Therefore, he did not deserve the harsher sentence, the San Francisco-based appeals court wrote.”

I WAS GOING TO GO WITH “LEAVE IT IN THE BOX,” BUT I GUESS THAT’S MEAN: How to Set Up Your Apple Watch the Right Way.

Related: The Apple Watch’s Hidden Port Could Be Its Best Feature.

OBAMA LAWYERS LIE TO THE COURT:  Department of Justice lawyers have restated their apology to federal judge Andrew Hanen of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.  The DOJ admits that it checked with the White House before issuing the apology, suggesting that DOJ lawyers understood the magnitude of their misrepresentation to the court.

The apology comes in the context of the Texas-led 26-State lawsuit against the Obama Administration, challenging the second and third of the President’s three unilateral executive orders on immigration: the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) and the expanded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA+).

In February, Judge Hanen issued a preliminary injunction halting the DAPA and DACA+ programs–finding that the plaintiff-States had proven both irreparable harm and a “likelihood of success” on the merits of their legal claims.  Hanen’s issuance of an injunction should have stopped both DAPA and DACA+ from being implemented at all, but in early March, DOJ admitted that it had begun to implement DACA+, and in fact had already issued work permits and expanded deportation protection to over 100,000 additional illegals.

Hanen is currently considering whether/how to further sanction the DOJ for its transgression, though he has already ruled out striking the government’s pleadings and entering judgment for plaintiff-States.

DOJ has appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, asking that court to issue a stay of Judge Hanen’s preliminary injunction.  My guess is that the Fifth Circuit won’t interfere with Hanen’s ruling.  And Hanen ought to hold the DOJ lawyers in contempt (though I doubt he will).  Maybe he should have them write “I will not lie to the court” 1,000 times on a blackboard or walk around in front of the courthouse with a sandwich board sign.

TEST DRIVE: 2015 Mercedes-Benz CLS400 4MATIC. I love what counts as “slow” these days: “As you’d expect, a 3.0-liter turbo six doesn’t accelerate—or sound—like the forced-induction V-8. At the track, this example hit 60 mph from a standstill in 5.1 seconds, nearly a second slower than that comparison-test CLS550 but, crucially, equal to the Audi in that matchup.” I remember when a 5-ish zero-to-sixty time was unbelievably fast. Now it’s considered kind of slow — in a four-door car.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Science and technology roadmaps for nanotechnology.

STUCK IN THE 1990S: What The Clintons Haven’t Learned. “The Clintons just don’t seem prepared for the modern media world and its tendency to relentlessly pry away at the smallest details. In the end, this may be a bigger problem for the Clinton campaign than whatever Schweizer’s book reveals. . . . The Clintons clearly understood that there was a threat, which is why one presumes that Hillary’s e-mails were shielded from FOIA requests. But that also looks like a tacit confession that the Clintons didn’t really understand what they were dealing with.”

RICHARD EPSTEIN: The Real Problem With Baltimore’s Police: The Unions. “One of the major problems with the police is that they are heavily unionized. That began in January of 1962, when President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988, which ushered in a broad expansion of public unionized workers, who had not received collective bargaining rights under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The 1935 act confined collective bargaining rights to private sector industrial unions. . . . Public unions are, on average, more dangerous than private ones. . . . In Baltimore, like in Washington D.C., the government is confronted with a choice between two constituencies: unions and people in need. The tragedy of the modern progressive movement is that it prioritizes the former at the expense of the latter. The people of Baltimore deserve better. They deserve a decent education and a safe place to live.”

WE HAVE A TERRIBLE RULING CLASS. THEY ARE CORRUPT MORALLY AND INTELLECTUALLY AS WELL AS POLITICALLY AND FINANCIALLY: America’s Literary Elite Takes a Bold Stand Against Dead Journalists. “One can’t help but get the sense that Charlie critics won’t stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the newspaper not because it is undeserving—it’s tough to make the case that its journalists lacked courage—but because they can’t muster much sympathy for those who knowingly antagonize Muslims. And those who do should know the consequences.” This is either due to racist condescenscion — Garry Trudeau’s “punching down” — or fear, or a shared antipathy for Western civilization that makes angry Muslims seem like fellow travelers. All these explanations are contemptible.