MICHELLE FIELDS UPDATE: Trump campaign manager arrested for battery of female reporter. “The report from the Jupiter Police Department said Corey Lewandowski was charged for intentionally grabbing and bruising the arm of Michelle Fields, a former reporter for the conservative news outlet Breitbart, against her will at a Trump campaign event on March 8.” As I said before, a bought drink and an apology could have fixed this, but they doubled down and called her a liar instead. They chose poorly.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire emails to note that “charged” isn’t really the same as “arrested,” since the latter suggests that someone was taken into custody. He’s right, and I notice that the Post has changed its headline accordingly, too.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1055.

A POPULIST REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE COULD MAKE A LOT OF HAY OUT OF THIS: How Crony Capitalism Works:

A major source of growing inequality, he says, is not an excess of capitalism, but the distortion of it: The force of market competition has been concentrated on workers and small businesses, while elite professionals and financiers (who encompass the lion’s share of the 1%) have managed to engineer protectionist rackets.

Some examples: Dentists lobby for rules that prevent dental hygienists from performing teeth-whitening; the lawyers’ guild sustains extortionate rates in part by making sure that less-credentialed workers are blocked from performing even basic administrative legal tasks; college administrators earn top-flight salaries while the federally-enforced accreditation system suppresses alternative education models; the American Medical Association strains to minimize the scope of work available to nurses and nurse practitioners; and hedge fund managers push finance regulations make sure they have a leg up on less-sophisticated investors. . . .

The essay highlights that what we at Via Meadia call the decline of the blue model—the fading of the midcentury economic system built on monopolistic cooperation between unions, government, and business—has been uneven. Some industries (media, software, entertainment) have grown more competitive and dynamic, while others (finance, law, higher education, medical services) remain heavily regulated, often through hidden channels, in ways that benefit those at the top. It’s a similar story when it comes to labor: Private sector unions have been hammered by globalization and technology, but public sector unions have captured enough state and local governments that they can still provide their workers with lavish benefits. In other words, privileged insiders have been able to retain the parts of the old blue model system that suits their material interests.

The solution to this problem is not to try to reconstruct the blue model by strengthening monopolies and jacking up taxes and regulations. Rather, it’s to introduce competition into industries that have so far been shielded from it, by, for example, undoing repressive occupational licensing rules, modernizing higher educational accreditation, and repealing hedge-fund friendly financial regulations. This project couldn’t be more urgent: At a time when working class Americans are revolting against the democratic-capitalist order, it’s imperative that elites take steps to prove that markets and competition can also work for those who don’t have access to political power.

When your position is built on graft and financial repression, though, it’s hard to do that.

AND YOU WONDERED IF THAT WAS EVEN POSSIBLE: “Like Emory University, except stupider.” Scripps College Student Body President Says ‘Trump 2016’ Whiteboard Message Is ‘Intentional Violence.’

TITLES OF NOBILITY:

I’d cut Ron some slack here if he were talking about prosecutorial judgment, but he keeps saying “legally.” Legally, it doesn’t matter whether you’re running for President, dogcatcher, or nothing. But in a world where TV talk-show hosts like David Gregory get special dispensation, it’s easy to see why Beltway denizens don’t get that.

UPDATE: Actually, I was too charitable to Ron. Here’s what the U.S. Attorney’s Manual says:

The attorney for the government should commence or recommend Federal prosecution if he/she believes that the person’s conduct constitutes a Federal offense and that the admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction ….

But wait, there’s more:

In determining whether to commence or recommend prosecution or take other action against a person, the attorney for the government should not be influenced by: The person’s race, religion, sex, national origin, or political association, activities or beliefs ….

So actually, declining to prosecute Hillary because she’s running for President would be an abuse of discretion. But follow the link to see the people who are trying to argue otherwise.

TO BE FAIR, THEY’RE TO BLAME FOR PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING: Blame Boomers For Trump & Clinton. “Throughout the campaign, boomers have provided the bedrock of support for both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Bernie Sanders may have devastated Clinton among millennial voters, by almost 3-1, but she has more than offset that gap by winning overwhelming support from older voters.”

PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION: Some Of My Best Friends Are Trump Supporters. “This study explains why many polls underestimated Trump’s support: Trump has consistently polled better on anonymous online polls than on phone surveys because some of his supporters were unwilling to identify themselves publicly. In other words, public shaming didn’t unwean Trump from his supporters but caused them to go underground. Doesn’t this also describe how the majority of Americans have felt in recent decades, being constantly shamed into silence by the ‘progressive’ media, education, and the cultural establishment?”

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: How PC culture is killing higher education: Universities like Emory trivialize education by rewarding politically correct student dictators.

RAW FOOTAGE: Inside the Capitol During Shooting.

STEVEN HAYWARD: Emory Doubles Down On Beclowning Itself.

I could go on, but the disgrace that is Dean Nair is pretty evident at this point. Besides, if you have a moment, check out the comment thread at the Inside Higher Ed link. They are uniformly negative. Our work here is done. The only question is: When is Emory president James Wagner going to put an end to this embarrassment?

According to Emory’s 2014 IRS Form 990, Nair’s base salary that year was $302,405, with additional compensation listed at $43,008. I think I can see an easy way for Emory to cut its budget.

Well, the alumni are stirring, so stay tuned. And, meanwhile, when you can get such a big reaction for so little effort, well, imitation follows: Now chalked ‘Trump’ slogans appear at Syracuse University just days after students at Emory said they were ‘scared’ and ‘in pain’ after similar messages popped up on campus.

GOOD: College trustees group applauds criticism of Title IX enforcement.

An organization made up of college trustees and alumni has praised recent criticism of the Education Department’s overreach when enforcing anti-sex discrimination.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni applauded a recent 56-page report from the American Association of University Professors that criticized the anti-sex discrimination statute known as Title IX. The statute has been used in recent years to force schools to abandon common sense and due process in the name of combatting campus sexual assault and sexual harassment.

“Sexual assault is a crime and must be treated as a crime. But we agree with AAUP that the Department of Education has unconscionably conflated ‘conduct and speech cases’ in a way that has grossly expanded the intrusion of this unaccountable bureaucracy at the expense of faculty and student constitutional rights,” ACTA wrote. “It’s time that institutions — and their boards — fought back.”

Yes, it is.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Republicans Better Pay Attention to Bernie, Roger Simon writes.

MARK LEVIN: “Anti-Establishment” is a crock — I want a Constitutional Conservative.

A CIVIL RIGHTS MILESTONE: Last Handgun Ban In An American Jurisdiction Struck Down As Unconstitutional. “The court also strikes down the ban on importing handguns, because the ban makes handguns essentially unavailable: ‘In the Commonwealth, the import ban on handguns can only operate as a sales ban on a constitutionally protected product. The import ban on handguns and their ammunition is unconstitutional and violates the Covenant; Defendants will be enjoined from enforcing it.’ And it agrees with the parties that, if the handgun ban is unconstitutional (as it is), it can’t be applied to lawful permanent residents any more than to citizens, since the 14th Amendment has been understood as generally prohibiting state discrimination based on citizenship (and thus, under the Commonwealth Charter, discrimination by the commonwealth).”

HOW DARE HE SPEAK OF HER HIGHNESS THIS WAY! Clinton aide: Sanders needs to change ‘tone’ if he wants NY debate.

A top aide to Hillary Clinton’s campaign on Monday dodged questions about setting up a debate with Bernie Sanders in New York, saying it depends on the senator’s “tone.”

“This is a man who said he’d never run a negative ad ever. He’s now running them. They’re planning to run more,” Joel Benenson, Clinton’s chief strategist, said on CNN. “Let’s see the tone of the campaign he wants to run before we get to any other questions.”

After winning a trio of states over the weekend, Sanders on Sunday called for a debate in New York ahead of that state’s April 19 primary. The Vermont senator is looking to cut into Clinton’s delegate lead and says he has the “momentum” heading into the latter half of the race.

Hillary’s looking shaky, and this makes her look insecure.

FEDS PROPOSE TO FINE SCHOOLS FOR NOT FOLLOWING MICHELLE’S LUNCH DIRECTIVES. And here you thought the First Lady had no constitutional political power.

DEREK KHANNA: What the Founders Would Say About iPhone Unlock Case.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Bloody tide: Terror deaths increased 8-fold since 2010, says study. “The deadly toll of terrorism around the globe has jumped nearly 800 percent in the past five years, according to an exhaustive new report that blames the alarming expansion of Islamist groups across the Middle East and Africa. The nonprofit Investigative Project on Terrorism found that an average of nearly 30,000 people per year have been killed by terrorists since 2010, when terrorism’s death toll was 3,284. The authors of the study, which tabulated the numbers through the end of 2015, say that the exponential increase shows two troubling trends: More attacks are happening, and they tend to be deadlier than ever.”

Nice work, Barack.

HILLARY CLINTON: A UNITER, NOT A DIVIDER! Investor’s Business Daily, HuffPo Columnists Agree: Hillary Should Withdraw. “Who says that there can’t be occasional agreements across the partisan divide?”

AS THE DAVID BROOKS CROWD CLUCKS “HAVE YOU NO DECENCY?” HERE’S A USEFUL REMINDER: The Culture That Created Donald Trump Was Liberal, Not Conservative.

The man didn’t emerge, all at once and fully formed, from some hidden and benighted hollow in the American psyche. He’s been kicking around for 30 years or more, and he was promoted and schooled, made famous and made wealthy, by the same culture and economy that now reviles him, and finds his success so vexing.

After all, it wasn’t some Klan newsletter that first brought Trump to our attention: It was Time and Esquire and Spy. The Westboro Baptist Church didn’t give him his own TV show: NBC did. And his boasts and lies weren’t posted on Breitbart, they were published by Random House. He was created by people who learned from Andy Warhol, not Jerry Falwell, who knew him from galas at the Met, not fundraisers at Karl Rove’s house, and his original audience was presented to him by Condé Nast, not Guns & Ammo. He owes his celebrity, his money, his arrogance, and his skill at drawing attention to those coastal cultural gatekeepers — presumably mostly liberal — who first elevated him out of general obscurity, making him famous and rewarding him (and, not at all incidentally, themselves). . . .

If you think that sounds stupid and smug, imagine how it sounds to people out in the rest of the country. Liberals were sure the devil would come slouching out of Alabama or Texas, beating a bible and shouting about sodomy and sin. They didn’t expect him to be a businessman who lives on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. Rick Santorum was a threat, but your run-of-the-mill New York tycoon just couldn’t be, not in the same way — because even if the latter was unlikable, he was known, he was covered, he fell within a spectrum that the morning shows and entertainment press are comfortable with, much more so, anyway, than they are with what the slow learners among liberals still blithely call “rednecks.”

Want political leaders with the decorum of yesteryear? You’ll need a society with the decorum of yesteryear.

I THINK A SEVEN OR EIGHT-FIGURE AWARD IS MERITED. Yale’s Case against Montague Looks Shaky.

Max Stern, the lawyer for the expelled Yale basketball captain Jack Montague, has spoken out, announcing that he will sue Yale on behalf of Montague in April, and clarifying some details in the case, including a very surprising one: that the aggrieved female did not file the sexual misconduct complaint. In his telling, Montague had sex with the woman four times and the woman says only the fourth time was non-consensual.

The Stern statement said, “On the fourth occasion, she joined him in bed, voluntarily removed all of her clothes, and they had sexual intercourse. Then they got up, left the room and went separate ways. Later that same night, she reached out to him to meet up, then returned to his room voluntarily, and spent the rest of the night in his bed with him”

The accuser waited around a year to speak to someone from Yale’s Title IX office, but decided not to file a complaint with Yale. But the Title IX officer filed a complaint. A disciplinary hearing occurred, amidst a campus frenzy following a survey suggesting that the New Haven campus was a hotbed of violent crime.

Basically, it sounds like they expelled him to appease a lynch mob.

EMORY’S “DEAN OF CAMPUS LIFE” WRITES ABOUT TRUMP CHALKINGS, hilarity ensues. Even the commenters at Inside Higher Ed seem amazingly unsympathetic.

My favorite: “I am astonished, that it is possible to say so little using so many words.” Though to be fair, if you’re saying that it’s because you’re not familiar with the work of campus educrats.

A MAJOR INTERROGATION FAIL: “But here is the most incredible part: During those two hours of questioning, The Post reports, ‘investigators did not ask… about his knowledge of future plots.'”