TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1041.

I’M SURE THE PRESS WOULD CHARACTERIZE THIS AS A VIOLENT PROVOCATION: A journalist reader writes: “You know what would be fun? If a bunch of Trumpites went to a Bernie rally in their Make America Great Again hats and just sat there politely. You know, feelin’ the Bern. . .”

SHOULD WE SAVE ‘ENDANGERED’ CULTURES? “According to a trio of academics, the answer is ‘yes.’ Moreover, the team recently published evidence that shows seven different isolated tribes in South America to be critically endangered.”

Isn’t preserving them as human lab rats to be studied the ultimate form of what blogger Val Prieto once dubbed “omnipotent tourist syndrome,” when their health and standard of living could be raised a thousand fold?

(Via Maggie’s Farm, who believes we should stick to Star Trek’s “prime directive,” which the captain of both Enterprises invariably seemed to find a reason to violate each week.)

VIRTUE-SIGNALING IS NOT A POLICY: Merkel’s Twilight Begins:

The recent regional elections in Germany, in which the anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party exceeded all earlier projections of voter support, have delivered a powerful blow to Angela Merkel’s government. AfD’s gains have been accompanied by a massive surge in voter participation in Germany as citizens rallied overwhelmingly around a single issue agenda: Merkel’s heretofore open policy on migration. Judging from exit polls, the governing establishment parties (both Merkel’s CDU and her coalition SPD) have taken a serious beating across the board. More importantly, the results in these mid-term Land elections could be a predictor of what is to come in the next German federal balloting in 2017.

This election in Germany, more so than intra-EU squabbling over obligatory quotas of MENA migrants or the effort to cut a deal with Turkey to slow down the flow, marks a turning point in Europe’s political power distribution. It impacts not just how the European Union will ultimately handle the migration crisis, but also how the whole European project moves forward hence. The Merkel government, which not long ago was able to dictate the terms in Greece, set the azimuth on the future of the eurocurrency, and demand immigrant resettlement quotas, has just lost some of its ability to shape its own domestic political agenda.

The ripple effects of the German voter rebellion against Merkel’s open-door immigration policy will rapidly be felt across the continent. . . .

A weakened German government at a moment when the European Union project is reeling from multiple crises is bad news all around. For starters, it augurs a much more inward-looking Germany going forward. Some will rejoice perhaps that “Europe’s Iron Lady” has been cut down to size by her own people. But the larger question of a lack of leadership at the EU level and a deepening drift in Europe should be an urgent concern as much in Washington as it is today in Europe’s capitals. There is one enduring lesson from Angela Merkel’s political troubles that is worth repeating on both sides of the Atlantic: This is what happens when you don’t listen to your citizens.

Indeed.

LAME DUCK UPDATE: Why Credibility Matters: It’s not just a Washington fetish, as Obama suggests.

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WHY ARE LEFTIST-DOMINATED INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF SEXUAL PREDATION? Berkeley to Fire Assistant Coach for Sex Harassment.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Bill Ayers’ successors will go after any Republican this fall.

Related: Anti-Gun Protesters Storm Stage at Ted Cruz Rally.

I GUESS THIS IS WHY HILLARY’S GETTING SO MANY MINORITY VOTES OVER BERNIE: “Entrenched anti-Semitic views” very rare among whites and Asian Americans, common among blacks and Latinos.

IN THE FUTURE, EVERYONE WILL BE JFK FOR 15 MINUTES: Obama Compares Kerry to ‘the Original JFK from Massachusetts.’

But isn’t everyone with a (D) after his name?

● 2008: Caroline Kennedy compares Obama to JFK.

● 2007: The Hill: Draft Al Gore, The True Heir to FDR and JFK.

● 2004: AP: Links between Kerry, JFK are unavoidable.

● 1994: Bill Clinton circulates film of meeting JFK in July of 1963.

● 1988: “In buoyant, celebratory joint appearances here, both Democrats repeatedly cited what Bentsen called the ‘Boston-Austin axis’ and repeatedly invoked memories of the election 28 years ago when Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy and Texas Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson regained the White House for the Democrats,” the Washington Post, in a piece titled “Dukakis Chooses Texas Sen. Bentsen as Running Mate.” Later it would be revealed that Bentsen lied about being friends with JFK after attacking Dan Quayle.

● 1987: “If there is a single subject on which Gary Hart is, well, passionate, it is the Kennedys. It was John Kennedy’s 1960 campaign that inspired him to a vocation in ‘public service,’ as he always puts it,” E.J. Dionne Jr. wrote in a 1987 New York Times profile of Hart. “John Kennedy made politics legitimate, and Hart’s excitement over the campaign prompted him to go to Yale Law School after he finished Yale Divinity School. When the talk turns to Robert F. Kennedy, Hart, the political outsider, lights up.”

Never mind that JFK, the staunch cold warrior and tax cutter would be unelectable today and as early as 1968, RFK was running against his brother’s sunny New Frontier optimism; all that matters is having the right hair and/or, like John F. Bravo, looking good in the suit.

Update: “I call dibs on the banging-Marilyn-Monroe 15 minutes,” Iowahawk tweets. Heh.™

And after reading Nick Gillespie’s tweet linking to this post, perhaps I should have dubbed it “An Army of Vaughn Meaders.”

WELL, YES: Trump And Trump Protesters Feed Off Each Other.

College students now are growing up on campuses strongly influenced by the radicals of the 1960s, which has been fertile ground for an increasingly illiberal and disorderly definition of “peaceful protest.” . . .

Trying to silence speakers they don’t like, along with using human chains and other protest tactics to take over central spaces, violates a norm cherished all the way up to the Supreme Court: that a person who has rented an auditorium has a right to speak, no matter how atrocious the sentiment expressed.

Related: WaPo: Surprise! Voters don’t seem to hold violence at Trump rallies against him.

Exit question: If “inflammatory rhetoric” makes violence the speaker’s fault, what about all the people who are comparing Trump to Hitler? Prediction: If somebody acts on that and kills Trump, media Hitler-callers will blame his rhetoric, not their own.

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-CONTROLLED NEWSPAPERS SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM? NYT Visits Trump Campaign Office, Amazed By Presence Of Non-Whites.

ALLAHPUNDIT: “LENDING” THE REPUBLICAN PARTY TO TRUMP FOR THE NEXT SIX MONTHS MIGHT MEAN YOU NEVER GET IT BACK:

Which is why, if he cleans up [tonight], you’re going to see an explosion of pieces online like the one Ross Douthat published yesterday urging the RNC to deny Trump the nomination by any means necessary — including a rule change before the convention, if need be, that frees up delegates to vote their conscience. (“A man so transparently unfit for office should not be placed before the American people as a candidate for president under any kind of imprimatur save his own.”) A member of the RNC’s Rules Committee is already circulating a letter suggesting, contra all available evidence, that delegates are not bound on the first ballot and haven’t been in 40 years. The price of stealing the nomination from Trump after he’s supposedly clinched it would be sky high.

Read the whole thing.

WILL THE SUPREME COURT CRIPPLE THIS DEMOCRATIC SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP? Class-action plaintiffs lawyers are likely keeping a VERY close eye on whether the High Court will agree to hear a challenge to settlements that enrich counsel but provide little or nothing to alleged victims. The challenge comes from Ted Frank, director of the Center for Class-Action Fairness at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Frank’s challenge is to the decision by the U.S. Appeals Court for the 11th District to uphold the settlement in Joshua D. Poertner v. The Gillette Co., et. al. in which the trial lawyers got $5.7 million and 99 percent of the estimated 7.26 million class members got zilch. Poertner is just one of the many class-action settlements in which the plaintiffs’ lawyers get rich and the plaintiffs get … stiffed.

Rules vary widely among federal courts on the metrics for deciding whether a settlement is fair and reasonable. Frank hopes the High Court will nationalize something like the Seventh Circuit’s dictum that “the attorney award must be a fraction of the amount actually realized by the class …” Four of the justices must agree to hear the case. The decision will be made public March 21.

Democratic office-holders, candidates and campaign fund-raisers may be paying even closer attention here than the class-action trial attorneys because the latter are routinely among the former’s biggest funders. If the High Court throws a wrench in these settlement bonanzas, it could blow a huge hole in Democratic Party’s bank accounts.

MILITARY TIMES SURVEY: Troops back Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders for president.

SO WHY IS HE DOING SO VERY BADLY IN THE PRIMARIES? Rubio Ranks Only Behind Reagan as a Conservative Communicator.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Marco Rubio is the universal choice for conservatives (if he were, he’d be winning the primary instead of being in grave danger of losing his home state on Tuesday). But I am suggesting that for a segment of movement conservatives, like me, Rubio’s likely unrealized potential cannot be overstated.

Let me be frank. Ronald Reagan was the greatest conservative communicator of my lifetime. Marco Rubio is the second. I’m not sure who’s third.

I’ve always believed, going back to Reagan, that a true conservative could still win in our liberal culture and simultaneously persuade and teach non-conservatives that conservatism was the best philosophy to bring about human flourishing.

Reagan was tough and a populist but, paradoxically, he was conciliatory and cosmopolitan (the toughness was reserved for adversaries, not the public). He won over Americans by the force of his charm, and then persuaded them that his philosophy was correct. He was utterly decent, utterly defensible and utterly likable.

Why did this matter? You’ve got to understand that for my entire life, conservatism has had a bad rap. The perception has that we are mean, evil, or even racist. That’s not who I am, and that’s not what the conservatism I grew up with is. And that’s not who Reagan was, either. And I’ve always believed that dispelling this myth about the “evil, racist, Republican” was at least one of the important functions of a conservatism that wanted to grow.

Now, I’m not naïve enough to think that electing a Hispanic president—a Cuban-American, nonetheless—would suddenly win over Hispanics. But Rubio is fluent in Spanish, and I suspect that four or eight years of appearing on Spanish language media might not hurt.

But it’s more than that. Did you see what happened in, of all places, South Carolina when Gov. Nikki Haley (a female Republican and daughter of immigrants from India) and Sen. Tim Scott (a black Republican) endorsed him? This could be the future of the Republican Party. These are all legitimate conservatives—but a racially diverse group who illustrate the promise that conservatism is a colorblind philosophy that can uplift all Americans.

Yeah, that was a great moment. But who won, again? I mean, I’ve got nothing in particular against Rubio except that he let Chuck Schumer snooker him on immigration, but I keep hearing what a great candidate he is, and he keeps sucking in the actual votes.

TO BE FAIR, THEY’RE THE SWANKIEST, MOST LUXURIOUS BLACK FOOTER BAGS YOU CAN IMAGINE: Roger Kimball on Roderick Spode — the Real Donald Trump.

CLINTON: ‘WE DIDN’T LOSE A SINGLE PERSON’ IN LIBYA: “Clinton seems to have forgotten the September 11, 2012 Benghazi, Libya attacks that left four Americans dead.”

INMATES RUNNING THE ASYLUM: Western Washington University Demand Power to Hire/Fire Staff & Change Spelling:

Student activists at Western Washington University, a public university in Bellingham, Washington, have presented a list of demands that go much further than those of students at other universities in the rash of student protests during the 2015/16 school year. The activist group called the “Student Assembly for Power and Liberation” presented a list of demands to help the campus’ oppressed persxns (the “x” is not a typo that’s how they spell it on their document). Their demands include the creation of an entirely new school as well as hiring/firing power, and a student committee to discipline the “oppressive behavior” of faculty and staff.

It’s the Lxrd xf the Flies meets Xrwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Fxur — their versixn xf the Newspeak Dictixnary shxuld be awesxme!

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-CONTROLLED INDUSTRIES SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM? Melissa Harris-Perry Says Her MSNBC Firing 100 Percent Has Racial Implications.

LIFE IN DE BLASIO’S NEW YORK: “Roughly 87 percent of cops said the Big Apple has become ‘less safe’ since the new administration took over at the beginning of 2014, with 55 percent of those respondents describing New York City as ‘a lot less safe.'”

HIS SUPPORTERS’ ANTI-TRUMP VIOLENCE SEEMS TO HAVE HELPED HIM: Sanders gains on Clinton ahead of huge Tuesday contests.

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination is tightening, with Bernie Sanders closing in on Hillary Clinton in two important contests.

Sanders is leading Clinton in Missouri and has cut into the Democratic front-runner’s lead in Ohio and Illinois, according to a new survey the left-leaning Public Policy Polling (PPP).

All three states now look like toss-ups, with the PPP poll showing Sanders trailing Clinton by just 5 points, 46 percent to 41 percent, in Ohio.

The change is particularly notable because several polls in Ohio at the beginning of the month showed Clinton with a 20- to 30-point lead over the Vermont senator.

The race has drawn much closer since Sanders’s surprise win in Michigan; he also trailed by double-digits in that state weeks before its primary.

In Illinois, Clinton gets 48 percent in the PPP survey compared to 45 percent for Sanders.

In Missouri, Sanders gets 47 percent to 46 percent for Clinton, according to PPP.

Clinton has larger leads in two other states holding contests on Tuesday: Florida and North Carolina.

On the other hand, the polls have been particularly unreliable this cycle.

BETSY NEWMARK ON ALIENATION, THEN AND NOW:

I was starting to teach the unit on the 1950s to my AP U.S. History class and going over various words that had been used to describe the decade such as “conformity,” “complacency,” “anxiety,” and “alienation.” and making sure that the students knew what the words mean. (You’d be surprised at how students’ vocabularies have shrunk in the years since I started teaching 25 years ago as students have so many other options for entertainment other than reading, but that’s a subject for another day.) As they discussed the word “alienation” as feeling detached and isolated from a group to which one belongs, I was thinking of how that describes how I feel more and more. I just can’t relate to college students who are so upset by certain words or pieces of literature that they need a trigger warning before they can read it. I don’t understand how every little thing that someone might say or do is now called a “microaggression”necessitating all sorts of training seminars. I never did relate to all the people who cheered on Barack Obama as some sort of messianic figure to come save the country. Maybe my sense of alienation began as Bill Clinton was defended by feminists who decreed that he was entitled to one free grope or affair with an intern since he was pro-choice. I love history and read it and teach it. Increasingly, I felt that the country was a place I just didn’t recognize or relate to. Briefly, after 9/11, I could feel connected to the country and sensed that bond among us.

But more and more, that feeling dissipated.

Read the whole thing.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Social Justice Warriors, Even The Law Student Variety, Don’t Care About Due Process. The academy is eating itself. Or, to be more accurate, it has spawned the children who are eating it.