HOPE AND CHANGE: Bulgaria to use army to help guard border in migrant crisis.

YOU KNOW MY NAME (LOOK UP THE NUMBER). Sometimes history does eventually rhyme, or as Mark Twain once said, “no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often:”

By the late 1950’s, the majors began to come around to ”all that,” and, by 1964, when the Beatles stormed America, the new world was ready for them. The older artists and their songs had largely disappeared from the record stores and the air waves. It was a world for the children, by the children and of the children. Nat Cole worked easy, and those who knew him said it went with his nature. Tony Bennett recalls sitting around a Las Vegas dressing room with Cole one day in 1964, a few months before he died. The King picked up the phone and called his record company, Capitol. A minute later, he slammed down the receiver and walked around the room in a quiet rage.

”What happened?” Bennett asked. Cole didn’t answer for what seemed to Bennett like an eternity. Finally, he hissed: ”The girl picked up and said, ‘Capitol Records, Home of the Beatles.”’

—Sidney Zion, “Outlasting Rock,” the New York Times, June 21, 1981.

Hmm. That “best new artist” thing really has a short shelf life — or so Paul McCartney and crew learned Monday night when they were denied entry to a Grammys after-party at the Argyle.

The 18-time Grammy winner, who has on his resume minor honors including 1964’s new artist trophy when he was part of a little band called the Beatles and the 1967 album of the year win for the niche release “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” wondered, “How VIP do we gotta get? We need another hit … ” as he, six-time Grammy winner Beck and others in their group were told to talk to the hand outside Tyga’s celebration in Hollywood.

—“Paul McCartney turned away at Tyga’s Grammys party: ‘I don’t control the door,’ rapper says,” the L.A. Times on Wednesday.

(Classical reference in headline.)

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1015.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1016.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Replacing A Justice Shouldn’t Be So Excruciating.

Running more and more issues through the appellate courts, rather than struggling through the legislative process, has two terrible effects. First, it federalizes more and more issues, in an era when values and ideologies tend to be sharply partisan and geographically divided. If you were a pro-lifer in Alabama, you probably wouldn’t get on a bus to Albany to protest New Yorkers’ more liberal abortion laws. But when federal courts decided that abortion law would be substantially the same everywhere in the country, proponents of abortion rights and opponents of abortion became locked in a battle over the court that sets the rules. (And also still squabble at state and local levels, of course.)

The second problem is that by putting any issue beyond legislative debate, deeming it a decision for judges alone, you leave a large number of Americans who are passionate on certain issues feeling like they have no democratic recourse. It’s a recipe for extreme reactions, like voting for Donald Trump or worse.

Of course, when matters of such great importance are at stake, it’s very tempting to do an end run around politics, and avoid those unsatisfying compromises, by putting the question in the hands of unelected people who are, by design, removed from the passions of democracy and representative government. They can therefore rule much more sweepingly than legislators would.

But this doesn’t fix the political problem. It only moves it to the question of how the justices are picked, a question that is about to catapult our political system into a new, and more dangerous, level of crisis. For if you leave people no way to work through the system, they are apt to start working against it instead.

The political class — which includes the judiciary — is much better at seizing power than it is at relinquishing it.

YAWN. Harvard Law Students Occupy Wasserstein Hall To Protest Lack Of Inclusiveness.

PUBLISHING: Indie Author Chris Nuttall Says All but Biggest Authors Are Driven to E-books. A very interesting interview. I’ve enjoyed Nuttall’s Ark Royal books.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Slouching Toward World War III: Abandoning the helm and allowing Putin to have his way, Obama has turned the Cold War clock back.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● “Snow and ice expected to cause chaos for rush hour commuters.”

—Headline, London Independent, yesterday.

● “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.”

—Headline, London Independent, March 20th, 2000.

SNAILS GUFFAW AS STATE DEPARTMENT CLAIMS IT NEEDS 18 MONTHS TO DO A TWO-PAGE LIST: It’s not just any list, to be sure. It’s a list of the estimated 60 State Department employees granted the same Special Government Employee status as was enjoyed by Huma Abedin, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. The SGE designation allows the designee to draw paychecks from other sources outside the government.

In Abedin’s case, besides her government paycheck, she was also on Clinton’s personal payroll, the Clinton Foundation payroll and the Teneo payroll. The latter is an international consulting firm with deep ties to the Clintons personally and the Clinton Foundation. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock asked for the list of all State Department SGEs in a Freedom of Information Act request in July 2015.

“The estimated completion date (ECD) for this case is: December 2016,” the department told TheDCNF earlier this week. They defended the delay, saying “given the high volume of FOIA requests, in addition to a backlog which the department is working diligently to reduce, there is presently a delay in the completion of FOIA requests.”

Given the growing evidence that Clinton used the department as a conduit for generating and channeling money – much of it from foreign sources – to the foundation, two questions must be asked: Was Abedin’s SGE status somehow related to such efforts, and were other Clinton aides also designated SGEs and for what purposes? The answers to either of those questions may explain why the State Department is loathe to cough up that two-page list. They may also shed light on why the FBI has a second investigation separate from the probe of Hillary’s email and focused specifically on the foundation.

HMM: Law Profs Continue To Publish After Tenure, But In Less Competitive Outlets.

Well, that’s because, once you’re established, the law review brand benefits from association with you, not the other way around. If I know nothing more about an unknown scholar’s piece than that it’s in, say, the Columbia Law Review, then that tells me something (maybe not a lot, but something) about its probable quality. On the other hand, when I see an article by, say, Randy Barnett or Eugene Volokh, I don’t care where it’s published because I already know it’ll be good.

And in the era of SSRN, that’s even more true. My Second Amendment Limitations paper has over 3500 downloads, which is more than the circulation of all but maybe one or two law reviews. My most-downloaded piece, Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is A Crime, has over 20,000 downloads. No law review offers more than a fraction of that much actual readership.

I still advise young scholars to play the placement game — which in law means multiple submissions and, once you get an acceptance, calling the higher-ranked law reviews and trying to parlay that into an acceptance with them, something that would be regarded as highly unethical in other fields but is the norm in law, where wasting student editors’ time isn’t a bug, but a feature. Once, when I was a young scholar, I started with an acceptance at Connecticut, parlayed that into an acceptance at Michigan, and then from there made it into Columbia. And that was worth it then, but I would never invest that much time today, though I’d encourage unknown and untenured scholars to give it a shot.

UPDATE: The reason why law review submissions work differently than submissions to, say, medical journals is that law reviews are student-edited. Multiple submissions to peer-reviewed journals waste the time of peers. Law review editors, on the other hand, are reading manuscripts as part of their education, so their time is never really wasted.

MSNBC: DON’T WORRY, OBAMA DOESN’T PICK ‘BOMB THROWERS’ FOR COURT.

Nahh, he just began his political career in a former bomb thrower’s home.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

“Obama says he’s partly to blame for Washington’s very partisan environment because he could have reached out more to Republicans during his time in office, LA Times reports, citing interview.”

—“Obama Says He Could Have Reached Out More to Republicans,” Bloomberg News, February 11th.

Unable to resist the urge to give one last snub to the Supreme Court justice who opposed him at every turn, President Obama will not attend the funeral of Antonin Scalia on Saturday.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest would not say if the president had anything else planned for that day.

—“President Obama Refuses to Attend Scalia Funeral,” Rick Moran, PJ Media, yesterday.

THIS IS GOOD ADVICE: Justice Scalia’s Advice To Law Profs: Your Legacy Is Not Your Scholarship; ‘What Endures Is What Happens In The Classroom.’

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Barbarism on Display at Vassar College.

Read the whole thing.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE from Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times:

A U.S.-backed agreement on a “cessation of hostilities” in Syria is supposed to take effect at the end of this week, but there’s been no sign of hostilities slowing — let alone ceasing.

Instead, Russia’s air force, Bashar Assad’s ground forces and even neighboring Turkey have all escalated attacks on the rebels whose five-year-long uprising against Assad is faltering. In northern Syria, missiles and bombs have hit two hospitals in the past week. With Russia’s help, Assad’s forces have nearly surrounded Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and the rebels’ most important base. Meanwhile, Turkey has been shelling Kurdish rebel forces that are allied with the United States.

And even after the non-truce formally goes into effect, both Russia and Syria have served notice that they will continue to attack rebels they consider “terrorists,” a label they have applied to almost anyone opposed to the regime.

As an attempt to stop the war, it’s fair to say that the cease-fire — reached after energetic negotiation by Secretary of State John F. Kerry — has already failed.

The last major deal Kerry brokered wasn’t signed by one side or ratified by the other, yet still achieved its unstated goal of welcoming Iran’s terror-sponsoring regime into the community of nations. Perhaps similarly Kerry was hoping to get a ceasefire to stick amongst parties with no interest in sticking to a ceasefire.

DNC OPERATIVE WITH BYLINE HAS A SAD: Andrea Mitchell Frets Over ‘Painful’ and ‘Insulting’ Attacks on Obama.

STARBUCKS CEO WARNS THE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS ARE TURNING INTO A ‘CIRCUS.’

Yes, if this keeps up, he’s going to order his young baristas to write their personal race-based cri de coeurs on customers’ cups. Best to keep things dignified and orderly — like Saudi Arabia.

NEWS YOU CAN USE. New York Times, 1987: Party That Won the Senate Has ‘Every Right to Resist’ the President’s Supreme Court nominee.

REMEMBER THE HEALTHCARE.GOV LAUNCH? Apparently so did some hackers:

“To improve the quality of our health care while lowering its cost, we will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that, within five years, all of America’s medical records are computerized,” President Obama said. “This will cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests.”

While the shift Obama and many others pushed may have improved care, electronic medical records led to quite the unique hostage situation in Los Angeles this week. There, a hospital fell prey to a cyberattack — and the hospital has escaped its plight by paying hackers a $17,000 ransom.

Government mandates and electronic security don’t seem to be a very good mix.

IF THE LEADERSHIP HANDLES IT RIGHT, IT COULD BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER: Liz Peek: A Fight Over Scalia’s Seat Is Just What the Fractured GOP Needs.

Hence, the angst in Democrat circles over the appointment of a justice to fill the spot vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia. We now face a prolonged, ugly battle over Obama’s right to nominate a justice and the Senate’s duty to confirm the nominee. The liberal media will attempt to portray GOP resistance as typical chronic obstructionism. They will warn senators like Kelly Ayotte and Rob Portman, who face serious reelection challenges that their chances will dim. Let them.

Republicans need to counter that narrative with this: President Obama has acted unlawfully for years, with only the Supreme Court as a brake on his push towards unpopular programs. If the American people want to dismantle our energy industries, or open our borders indiscriminately, they can vote in Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. The people will have a chance to choose. Heaven help us if they don’t choose wisely.

Indeed.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: No, Iran is Not a Democracy.

But isn’t that obvious — if it were, then why would the radical chic Obama administration be so eager to nuzzle up to it?

BLUE ON BLUE: White House rips Schumer’s ‘credibility’ on national security.

I’m not sure why Chuck is so worried — after all, Mr. Obama assures us that the nation can “absorb” another terrorist attack.