ON NON-CITIZEN VOTING, An “Extraordinary Beat-Down” for the DOJ.

DEMS STRUGGLE TO EXPLAIN AWAY SCOTUS HYPOCRISY.

Just invoke Marxism – Groucho Marxism – “These are my principles, and if you don’t like them, well, I have others.” That’s always worked before for Democrats.

ADVICE FROM A CORPORATE LAW EXPERT: Professor Bainbridge: Using @Twitter’s own risk factor analysis to force it to respect viewpoint diversity.

READER BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Lucy Jewel recommends Jeff Gramm’s Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism.

RACIAL SEGREGATION IS BACK, Brendan O’Neill writes in the Australian:

What we’re witnessing, not only in Australia but in other Western nations too, is the reawakening of the segregationist mindset. Segregationism has been given a makeover, turned from something that once made us wince — try looking at photos of an American “Coloured Drinking Fountain” without feeling horrified — to something that is treated as acceptable, even good: a “special measure” that can benefit certain groups.

The fashion for PC segregation is especially strong on Western campuses. In the US, students who think of themselves as decent, right-minded, left-of-centre people are openly demanding segregated spaces.

At Oberlin College in Ohio, student protesters are agitating for “safe spaces” for “Africana-identifying students”. At New York University, a student campaign is underway to create “an entire floor of the mixed-use building… to be dedicated to students of colour.” Students at UCLA want a floor of the student union building to be made African-American-only, on the basis that there needs to be a “safe space for black students”.

* * * * * * *

So now we’re expected to treat people as “racial/cultural beings”. We’re expected to “acknowledge” a person’s race. This grates against the great, progressive gains of the late twentieth century, especially of the American civil-rights movement, which encouraged us *not* to treat people as racial beings, and to *refuse* to acknowledge race.

Indeed, Martin Luther King’s great vision was a world in which his children, and everyone else’s, would “not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”. That dream is being demolished. Now people are elevating colour over character, seeing others as racial beings rather than simply beings.

O’Neill’s column is headlined “Segregation staggers back to life,” but it’s not that new a trend.  On American college campuses, segregation was revived by the left concurrent with political correctness as far back as the 1990s; as I’ve stated before, Michael Graham spotted these trends nearly 15 years ago in Redneck Nation. But as with PC itself, thought dead by the late 1990s – certainly immediately after 9/11 – Democrats’ return to embracing segregation in academia and rejecting the notion of a colorblind society has accelerated dramatically over the last decade.

THE SECRET TO TRAVELING HEALTHY WHILE TRAVELING: Drink Bottled Water, Take Pepto Bismol, and Avoid Hungry Lions.

HOW DID THIS SLIP THROUGH THE SYSTEM? Minnesota-Issued “FMUSLIMS” Vanity Plate Prompts Outrage.

THE LEGAL QUESTION at the core of the Apple encryption standoff.

IT’S JUST THE GOPe’S LATEST DELUSION: Sahil Kapur at Bloomberg examines “Four Problems With the ‘Winnowing’ Theory of Trump’s Downfall.”

Jeb Bush’s decision to drop out of the presidential race after a dismal fourth-place finish in South Carolina sped up a process that Republican elites have long been praying for: a winnowing of the field that could thwart the candidacy of Donald Trump.

The theory is that Trump, who notched his second consecutive primary victory on Saturday, is a factional candidate with a “hard ceiling” of support limited to the one-third of the party. . . .

Trump, however, bristled at that argument during his victory speech Saturday night.

 “A number of the pundits said, ‘Well, if a couple of the other candidates dropped out, if you add their scores together it’s going to equal Trump,'” he said in a mocking tone. “But these geniuses—they don’t understand that as people drop out I’m going to get a lot of those votes also. You don’t just add them together.”

Trump has a point, and a close examination of Republican voter data shows that the “winnowing” theory has four serious flaws.

1. It’s unclear Trump loses a three-person race

An Economist/YouGov national survey released last week tested the theory that Trump would suffer in a three-person race with his two chief rivals. It found Trump winning with 46 percent of the vote, ahead of Marco Rubio with 28 percent and Ted Cruz with 26 percent. . . .

2. Trump’s ‘hard ceiling’ is overrated

. . . . One way to test this, pollsters say, is to gauge what percentage of voters could see themselves supporting a candidate.

The January NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found that 65 percent of likely Republican voters could see themselves supporting Trump, a staggering jump from the 23 percent of voters who did last March, before he announced his presidential run. Cruz and Rubio fared modestly better, at 71 percent and 67 percent, respectively.

“The longer Donald Trump stays in the race, the more likely GOP voters are willing to vote for him,” Republican pollster Frank Luntz tweeted in response to that statistic.

By contrast, in January 2012, 59 percent of Republicans saw Romney, who went on to win the nomination, as “acceptable,” according to Gallup.

3. Trump’s support is broad-based in the party

While Rubio pitches himself as best-positioned to unite the party, Trump has a case of his own to make. Exit polls in the first three states show strong support for the New York billionaire across age groups, sexes, ideologies, income level, religious inclinations, issue preferences and candidate qualities.

Though he lost some subgroups in South Carolina—like well-educated voters, who Rubio won, and very conservative voters, who Cruz won—exit polls showed no glaring vulnerability that could undermine him. The only GOP faction that overwhelmingly views Trump as unacceptable is national party leaders and senior operatives, whose influence is diminished by the fact that they are loathed by the GOP base (a dynamic that helped give rise to Trump in the first place). . . .

4. ‘Second choice’ votes aren’t all anti-Trump

While a crowded field arguably helps Trump more than a small field, a NBC/SurveyMonkey poll released Thursday indicates that supporters of other candidates would not unify against Trump as others drop out.

The survey found that Bush backers are torn between Rubio (19 percent), John Kasich (16 percent), Cruz (12 percent) and Trump (11 percent). Kasich fans are torn between Rubio (24 percent), Trump (16 percent) and Cruz (10 percent). Ben Carson supporters split between Cruz (24 percent), Trump (22 percent) and Rubio (16 percent). . . .

Trump’s “unfavorable” ratings are not as high as many of the establishment pundits incessantly suggest. A February 10-15 Quinnipiac poll among registered voters (MOE +/- 2.7 percent) found that among Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents, Trump’s favorable rating was 62 percent, with unfavorables of 31 percent (the other 7 percent didn’t know one way or the other).

Cruz’s favorable/unfavorable rating, by contrast, was 62/23 (with 15 percent unable to say); Rubio’s favorable/unfavorable was 64/17 (with 19 percent unable to say).

One thing that is striking about the favorability numbers is that Trump’s fame translates into most Americans having an opinion of him, one way or the other (with only 7 percent not yet having formed an opinion). Cruz and Rubio, by contrast, have relatively large percentages of the public–more than two times as many–who have not yet formed an opinion about favorability (15 and 19 percent, respectively). This naturally makes the “unfavorable” ratings of Cruz and Rubio appear markedly smaller. The “favorability” ratings of all three candidates among Republicans, however, is remarkably similar, with 62 percent for Trump, 62 percent for Cruz, and 64 percent for Rubio–a virtual dead heat.

Trump’s favorability numbers among Republicans are very similar to Romney’s in February 2012 (65/28 among Republicans; not including Independents) and Trump’s favorability among Independents seems to be notably higher. Specifically, the Quinnipiac poll has Trump with a 62/29 favorability rating among Independents, whereas the February 2012 Gallup poll had Romney at 37/44 favorability among Independents. Romney’s low favorability ratings improved significantly after he became the presumptive nominee of the Republican party, a typical phenomenon that would presumably happen to Trump (or Cruz or Rubio) as well. Moreover, there is some evidence that Trump enjoys the support of around 20 percent of likely Democratic voters in a general election.

I’m not sure how accurate any of these polls are, but if one is going to attempt to rely upon them to prognosticate, the story being told about Trump’s favorability ratings leading to “unelectability” seems both exaggerated and incomplete.

RELATED: Trump’s lead grows with Jeb out of the race.

HA! I HAD A RAT PATROL LUNCHBOX when I was in second grade. It would probably be worth a lot today. But those 1960s WWII shows were about what was then history more recent than the early Clinton presidency is now, which is a sobering thought.

NOBODY SAW THIS COMING: The Rise of the Alpha-Homo: European gay men as the Right’s new heroes. “These ‘alpha-homos’ remind me very much of Oscar Wilde. When a group of rugby boys arrived at Wilde’s dormitory to destroy his blue and white china, the 6′ 3″ Wilde picked up the first boy, threw him, and knocked them all down the stairs as if he was playing a game of skittles. Wilde then said, ‘Well boys, that’s enough of that game, if you want to I shall make you toast with anchovy butter and tell you stories.’ The rugby boys meekly went back up the stairs, sat and were enraptured by his tales.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law Schools Replace LSAT With GRE To Goose Enrollment. Yes, the point is to be able to admit weaker students (and thus maintain tuition revenues), without having to report weak LSAT scores that would hurt U.S. News rankings, since U.S. News doesn’t look at GRE scores.

PRAGER UNIVERSITY: Jay Cost: What Is Crony Capitalism?

DANIEL DREZNER: Trump Is Winning Because GOP Leaders Were Dumb Enough To Believe Political Scientists. “Because the smart people said he had no chance, they presumed that they did not have to do anything. And now it’s too late.” Well, let that be a lesson to you.

MY NEXT USA TODAY COLUMN EXPLAINS THIS AS A PREFERENCE CASCADE: Brendan O’Neill: From Trumpmania to Euroscepticism: Revenge of the Plebs. “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.”

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Apple’s iPhone Blunder.

RUSSELL DAWN: Scalia’s Enemies Only Prove His Greatness.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1020.

JAMES LILEKS ON TWITTER AND #FREESTACY:

Twitter isn’t going away, but odd things are happening. (The Federalist has a round-up, if you’re not up to speed and are interested in online culture.) Shadowbanning and outright bans on people deemed unwelcome by the Trust and Safety Council — something named by dreary tin-eared little commissars — will mean that people will either self-deport or just stifle themselves, lest they be banished. I should note:

One is always obliged to note that it’s a private company and can do what it wants. You’d think that would go without saying, but that idea has been circumscribed for reasons good and ill. Always nice to see people who want to make private companies do what they want suddenly discover these principles, though. Welcome!

Heh. Or as Iowahawk tweeted on Saturday:

Read the whole thing.

THE WAGES OF “SMART DIPLOMACY:” Beijing Hurries to Cash in on Perceived U.S. Weakness:

The Wall Street Journal explains that SIPRI’s analysis suggests both that China’s military strength is growing and that it is willing to allow, and even to support, a regional arms race—one that the United States is not happy to see.

Alas, it’s not surprising to see that China has become increasing aggressive under President Obama’s tenure. It isn’t all his fault. Many Chinese read the 2008 financial collapse as a sign of the coming end of American hegemony. And, on the other side of the ledger, the pivot to Asia was launched as an attempt by the administration to assert an American presence in the area.

But as the Obama presidency has progressed, and particularly since Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rule began in 2012, it’s become clear that China’s leaders don’t consider Washington’s repeated threats very threatening. U.S. dithering on the South China Sea last year made the eventual freedom of navigation operations near Chinese-claimed islands less effective than they could have been, and it didn’t help that the first attempt may have implicitly acknowledged China’s territorial claims. Meanwhile, Beijing has been watching America’s (lack of a) strategy in the Middle East, and getting the sense that this U.S. administration isn’t any more likely to respond to challenges from Beijing than it is likely to respond to direct challenges from Moscow.

One thing that people like about Trump — as a major contrast to Obama, and also to Hillary and Sanders — is that whatever his other flaws, he appears to believe in America.

LOST, HANDED OVER, WHATEVER: How Obama Lost the Mideast to Putin: Vision, strategy, and courage might have prevented the disaster we see today in Syria. But those elements were nowhere to be found. Pretty harsh for the Daily Beast.

HE MAY HAVE BEEN EJECTED FROM TWITTER, but Stacy McCain hasn’t been silenced.

“CHARCUTERIE CHAPEAU CRIMINALIZED: In Europe, you may now be arrested for wearing a fluffy pig hat.” (Video at Tim Blair’s site.)

I’d make a Roger Waters joke here, considering he’s lugging around not just a pig hat, but a whole giant inflatable flying pig throughout European concert halls and stadiums, but I would assume he’s probably OK with this arrest.

MARK ZUCKERBERG, TAX CHEAT, OPPRESSOR OF THE LITTLE GUY: Small-town Coffee Shop Pays More Corporate Tax Than Facebook. “That is just one glaring example, Mr. Lewis and his fellow shopkeepers in Crickhowell said, of what amounts to multinational tax dodging on a gargantuan scale, leaving the little guy to pick up the tab. And their protest is one small case study of how economic populism is playing out around the world, rallying grass-roots support to challenge governments and corporate interests alike.”