YOU WON’T BELIEVE THE REASON BOWE BERGDAHL GIVES FOR DESERTING HIS POST.

REPORT: Sanders concedes Missouri to Clinton, won’t seek recount.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Real Reason You’re Addicted to Cracking Your Knuckles.

QUESTION ASKED AND (POSSIBLY) ANSWERED by Michael Ledeen: What’s Putin Up To in Syria?

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Supreme Court picks need diversity, compromise: Why should only lawyers get to interpret the laws that govern us all?

CHANGE: U.S. Army Begins Testing Tech to Enable Self-Driving Convoys This Summer.

THE ONION RUNS PHOTOSHOP OF A BLOOD-SPLATTERED MITCH McCONNELL HOLDING ALOFT MERRICK GARLAND’S SEVERED HEAD, while standing on the steps of the Senate.

So just to confirm, Sarah Palin’s printer-registration marks clip art is the end of the world, but The Onion running an image of the Senate Majority Leader holding up the severed head of the president’s Supreme Court nominee? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Yet another reminder that as Andrew McCarthy noted earlier this month, “Trump Is the Effect, Not the Cause — A sick society breeds gutter politics.” And as Jonah Goldberg wrote in August of 2011, after the left’s self-imposed new civility timeout had ended and they were back to referring to the Tea Party as suicide vest-wearing members the “Hezbollah faction” of the GOP, “to hell with you people.”

Here’s the link to the Onion, which I was tempted to withhold, given that Paul Krugman and three quarters of the left would have melted down if such an image came from the right. It’s also screencapped here, in case it’s deleted.

Related: From last month, Ace on “What The Onion Looks Like Under the Ownership of a Hillary Backer.”

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Will medical 3D printing advance nanotechnology?

MIZZOU MUSCLE PROF ATTEMPTS OTTER’S ANIMAL HOUSE DEFENSE IN THE WASHINGTON POST. Link safe; goes to a post at Prof. William A. Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection blog titled “Mizzou Muscle Prof: We want people to take chances, don’t we?”

Click writes:

As a Media Studies scholar, I understand how the increased surveillance resulting from advances in technology like digital recording and wireless broadband has come to mean that our mistakes will be widely broadcast — typically without context or rights of rebuttal — exposing us to unprecedented public scrutiny.

But I do not understand the widespread impulse to shame those whose best intentions unfortunately result in imperfect actions. What would our world be like if no one ever took a chance? What if everyone played it safe?

Sites like YouTube and Twitter host forums in which everyday people are subjected to the kinds of excoriation we have typically reserved for politicians and celebrities — those whose public and private actions, due to their vocations, are judged within the public sphere.

In recent years, however, earnest mistakes made by ordinary, unknown people have increasingly become national topics, their errors invoking astonishing amounts of political fury and having unanticipated impact on their careers, families, and futures.

Reaction to the footage containing my errors has resulted in months of scrutiny and most recently the loss of my job….

Whose interests are served when our drive to combat societal imperfections is defeated by fears of having our individual imperfections exposed?

And what value do our rights as citizens have in a culture increasingly ruled by snap judgments and by regulations that are easily rewritten to suit changing political interests?

We should all be concerned about the larger issues my situation raises.

As Jacobson quips in response, “Click writes that she was just stressed that day and Social Justice!” Given that Click is a self-described “Media Studies scholar,” I’m sure she’s studied this legendary media moment:

Otter: Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our female party guests — we did.

Otter: But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg — isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!

[Leads the Deltas out of the hearing, all humming the Star-Spangled Banner]

Was it over when the Germans dropped some muscle on Pearl Harbor?

SHOCKINGLY, NOT ELIOT SPITZER: Prosecutor known for fighting prostitution charged with paying for sex hundreds of times. 14 paragraphs in, we discover that he’s a Democrat.

O’PALOMINO! Pelosi on St. Patrick’s Day: Legalize Illegal Irish Immigrants: “They are not here, shall we say, fully documented, and we need to change the law, comprehensive immigration reform.”

BUT MORE CAPABLE IN MANY WAYS: Boeing Echo Voyager Unmanned Submarine is similar in length to WW2 German U-boats.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Some Modest Proposals For Reforming Supreme Court Picks.

‘IRONY EVENT HORIZON’: Salon, Media Matters highlight lack of ‘liberal version of Breitbart, Drudge.’

What a doubly-odd argument for Salon to be making, since in 2014 they called for the nationalization of the news media under socialist principles.

THAT’S TERRIBLE! HOW CAN WE IMPOSE NEW REGULATION IF THINGS ARE GETTING BETTER ON THEIR OWN? Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions Have Now Been Flat for Two Years Running: The International Energy Agency says emissions growth has decoupled from global economic growth.

TREATING DEPRESSION WITH meditation and running.

I TRIED A ROOMBA OVER A DECADE AGO WITH POOR RESULTS. MAYBE I SHOULD TRY AGAIN: iRobot’s Braava Jet Mopping Robot Is Small, Smart, and Not Round.

PENTAGON CONTRACT MANAGEMENT IS TRAPPED IN THE DIGITAL DARK AGES: How else to explain that answering this simple question would cost $660 million and take 15 million man-hours. HT: Center for Public Integrity.

GALLERY: The 51 Coolest Cars Of The Last 50 Years. No Lamborghini Miura? A guy up the street from my dad had the Citroen SM; it looked nice but caught fire one day going up the hill and burned to a shell.

PAUL RAHE: The Power Of The Purse. “The truth is that modern liberty depends on the power of the purse. All of the great battles in England in the 17th century between the Crown and Parliament turned ultimately on the power of the purse. The members of Parliament were elected at least in part with an eye to achieving a redress of grievances, and that redress was the price they exacted for funding the Crown. Our legislature has given up that power. Our congressional leaders claim – once the election is over – that they have no leverage. If that is really true, then elections do not matter, and a redress of grievances is now beyond the legislature’s power. Absent that capacity, however, the legislature is virtually useless. Absent that capacity, it is contemptible — and let’s face it: the President and those who work under him have showered it with contempt.” Which is why we have Trump.

SO MUCH FOR “DON’T DO STUPID SHIT” AS A FOUNDATION FOR FOREIGN POLICY: Former Defense Secretary Says Obama Went Against the ‘Entire National Security Team’ on Egypt Coup.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Pick A Non-Lawyer For The Supreme Court.

ASSAD WILL SQUAWK BUT ERDOGAN WILL GO BALLISTIC: Kurds to declare federal state northern Syria despite challenges.

On Wednesday, 200 delegates from parties and organizations from Syria held a conference in the oil-rich town of Rumelan in Hasakah province to discuss the establishment of a federal political system in Kurdish areas of Syria, also known as Rojava.

The meeting, titled ‘federal Syria is a guarantee for a common life and brotherhood of nations’, included Kurdish, Arab, Christian and Armenian delegates.

Speaking to ARA News, Idris Nassan, a Kurdish official from the local administration in Kobane, said that federalism is one of the key demands of Kurds in Syria.

George W. Bush should have made an Independent Iraqi Kurdistan the price for Turkish intransigence during the buildup to the Iraq War. Now things are even more complicated, and some Kurd groups have started leaning towards Putin, who unlike us doesn’t have to try and keep Ankara happy.

SO TRUMP SUCCESSFULLY TROLLED BOTH HILLARY AND PUTIN WITH ONE 15-SECOND AD? Kremlin Says Trump’s Video ‘Demonises’ Russia.

Here’s the ad, in case you missed it: