J.W. VERRET: Washington’s War Against Short-Term Stock Traders. Maybe we should go back to fixed commissions. . . .

DECISION TIME: Marco On The Brink: For ex-Jeb Bush backers and GOP elites, it’s deja Rubio as he stalls out after trying to take on Trump.

ROGER SIMON: GOP Should Use Trump, Not Abuse Trump.

MARC RANDAZZA: The bats have come home to rest in the empty mental belfry of academia. “Firing her was the right thing to do, but what we need to realize is that she should not have been hired in the first place.”

HMM: Poll: Cruz within 3 points of Trump nationally.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a slim three-point lead over rival Ted Cruz nationally, according to a new poll released Tuesday.

Trump has 30 percent support, according to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey, with Cruz at 27 percent.

Last month’s version of the same poll found Cruz two points ahead of Trump. It was the only poll since November to show someone other than Trump leading the field nationally.

Tuesday’s results show a tightening in the GOP field overall, with 10 points separating all GOP candidates.

John Kasich is in third place with 22 percent, with Marco Rubio behind him at 20 percent.

Kasich’s support is double the 11 percent he got in last month’s version of the poll.

Stay tuned.

THAT WAS NEVER A CONDITION OF OUR AGREEMENT: Iran fires missiles marked with “Israel should be wiped out.”

MY SECOND AMENDMENT LIMITATIONS PAPER is still at #1 on the SSRN Top Recent Downloads chart.

WELCOME TO THE UTTER UNPREDICTABILITY OF 2016: Sanders Overcomes 21-Point Polling Deficit to Win Michigan.

GOVERNMENT IS JUST A WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER: A familiar story: D.C. police conduct violent home raids based on scant evidence.

Abolish governmental immunity, make them buy insurance, and this problem will end.

ALLUM BOKHARI: Mark Zuckerberg And The New Progressive Plutocrats.

Silicon Valley inspires utopian thinking. After revolutionising everything from the media to communications to taxi services, progressive elites in the Bay Area are now eyeing up government and politics, wondering how they can “disrupt” both. Will American politics survive their delusions of grandeur?

The latest billionaire buffoon is Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. Having noticed that Jack Dorsey is out-doing him in the realm of leftist political whackery, the social media kingpin has begun to wear his progressivism on his sleeves. Facebook’s users — far more numerous than Twitter’s — are sure to suffer.

Recently, we reported that Zuckerberg reprimanded a number of Facebook employees who crossed out “Black Lives Matter” slogans and replaced them with “All Lives Matter” on the company walls. You’d think that a liberal like Zuckerberg would appreciate a message of discrimination being replaced with a message of inclusiveness, but I suppose that sort of thinking went out of fashion with Martin Luther King, Jr.

Given that Zuckerberg had to send out the reprimand to the entire company, this suggests that the slogan-writers have yet to be identified. Naturally, I hope they continue their efforts, but I can’t help being a little curious about who they are. Given the number of black Americans quietly fuming about the radical Black Lives Matter activists who try and speak on their behalf, I wouldn’t be surprised if they themselves were black.

You know, now that I think about it, wasn’t that Martin Luther King, Jr. fellow with all his inclusive rhetoric also black? Then again, as the University of California recently reminded us, he really is out of fashion in progressive circles.

The truth is, most of us prefer messages of unity over messages of division. That includes the 1 billion-plus people who use Zuckerberg’s platform, and who Zuckerberg appears strangely contemptuous of. Messages of unity bring people to the table to discuss solutions, whereas messages of division cause pointless standoffs.

Zuckerberg’s out-of-touch attempt to stamp his own, elitist politics on his employees is typical of Silicon Valley elites, whose hyper-progressive values are even more distant to those of ordinary Americans than the Washington, D.C. set.

True. As Joel Kotkin says, they’re the New Oligarchs. But wait, there’s more:

But tyrannizing his employees isn’t the worst thing Zuckerberg’s done.

That would be his Orwellian pandering to the German government, whose disastrous immigration policies he recently praised as “inspiring.” Under Zuckerberg’s leadership, Facebook has become Germany’s lapdog, acting as the terrifying new Stasi of Angela Merkel, who is desperate to contain her citizens’ anger at her failed immigration policies. Facebook has promised to work with her government to monitor “anti-migrant hate speech” on the platform, which is another way of telling ordinary Germans that, once again, someone will be looking over your shoulder if your conversation gets too politically inconvenient.

Here’s what’s more troubling: Zuckerberg isn’t just doing this to appease an overbearing government: he wants to do it.

They see ordinary people as cattle to be managed, at best. As Brendan O’Neill said:

From Obama’s writing-off of the inhabitants of industrial downs as people who ‘cling to guns and religion’ to blogging queen Arianna Huffington’s claim that ‘millions of voters’ vote with their ‘lizard, more emotional right brain’ rather than with their ‘logical left brain’, the contempt heaped on ordinary American voters in recent years has been relentless.

America’s new elites, fancying themselves superior to the rural, the old, the religiously inclined and the rest, have increasingly turned politics into something that is done to people, for their own good, rather than by people according to their moral outlook. And then they wonder why people go looking for something else, something less sneering. . . .

In both Middle America and Middle England, among both rednecks and chavs, voters who have had more than they can stomach of being patronised, nudged, nagged and basically treated as diseased bodies to be corrected rather than lively minds to be engaged are now putting their hope into a different kind of politics. And the entitled Third Way brigade, schooled to rule, believing themselves possessed of a technocratic expertise that trumps the little people’s vulgar political convictions, are not happy. Not one bit.

That’s why we’re seeing a populist wave on both sides of the Atlantic.

AND NOW FOR THE IMPORTANT STUFF: 33 Secrets You Probably Never Knew About the Making of Galaxy Quest.

PUBLISHING AND INNOVATION: Indie or Traditional?

WELL, HE IS A NATIONAL SOCIALIST: Bernie Sanders’ Anti-Foreign Crankery.

I’M NO TRUMP SUPPORTER, BUT OBAMA STARTED THIS GAME AND WAS IN EARNEST ABOUT IT.  IT’S TOO LATE TO CRY OVER SPILLED MILK: Legitimacy and Violence.

OR WHY ALL POLITICAL CONSULTANTS SHOULD BE PUT IN A VERY LARGE BARREL AND SENT OVER NIAGARA FALLS: Lanes: The Nonsense Theory of ’16.

OH, HAI SHOCKED FACE: Obama picks SXSW over Nancy Reagan’s funeral.

BOOK ‘EM, DON-O: Trump wins Hawaii.

BREAKING NEWS: Fifth Beatle dies aged 90: Ringo Starr announces death of Sir George Martin, producer for the legendary band.

The multitrack recording techniques that Martin developed to extend the Beatles’ sound are still very much in use today, as is legendary Abbey Road Studios, which Martin kitted out after a tour of the then-more sophisticated American studios of the ’50s. His 1970s autobiography All You Need is Ears is an enjoyable read for both the casual Beatles fan and someone interested in how they developed their sound, along with a look at Martin’s improbable earlier career, recording comedic acts such as Peter Sellers and the Goons, and his post-Beatles career, such as writing the soundtrack for the Bond film Live and Let Die, and arranging and producing its title song, written by Paul McCartney. A true legend in the music industry has passed; RIP.

THIS IS WHY MY DESK HAS HEAD-SHAPED DENTS: Kloppenburg Flunks History: “President Lincoln Had Slaves”.