TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1351: Two Federal Judges Order Five Officials To Preserve Emails Sought In FOIA Lawsuits; Judicial Watch Fears Another Lois Lerner Situation As Obama Administration Leaves Power.

OOPS: $1.9 billion Medi-Cal error adds to California deficit projection.

The administration discovered accounting mistakes last fall, but it did not notify lawmakers until the administration included adjustments to make up for the errors in Brown’s budget proposal last week. The Democratic governor called for more than $3 billion in cuts because of a projected deficit he pegged at $1.6 billion.

“There’s no other way to describe this other than a straight up error in accounting, which we deeply regret,” said H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the Department of Finance.

The agency followed its normal practice by waiting to report the errors in the governor’s next budget, he said.

Brown’s deficit projection was driven by more than just the accounting error, Palmer said, noting that California tax collections came in below expectations for most of the first half of the fiscal year.

The massive hole in the Medi-Cal budget surprised state lawmakers.

It always does.

UH HUH: Survey: 1/3 of federal workers still “considering” quitting after tomorrow. Has anyone actually quit?

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: 7th Circuit strikes ban on target practice by minors, and near-ban on firing ranges.

More here from Eugene Volokh.

ELEANOR CLIFT: Hard-Luck Hillary Clinton’s Second Case of the Inaugural Blues.

Clinton made her own luck, and Clift’s column reads like “Why didn’t she win by 50 points?”

WASHINGTON POST: Obama’s 10 Biggest Whoppers.

THIS WAS ELIZABETH WARREN’S BOGUS RESEARCH: The Myth of the Medical Bankruptcy.

Did medical bills single-handedly account for more bankruptcies than anything else? No. This is an exaggerated half-remembering of a series of studies, authored by (among others) Elizabeth Warren, that were themselves exorbitant exaggerations.

I went into detail on the problems with the work seven years ago, but the highlight reel is that these authors have an aggressive tendency to employ any technique that ratchets the count of “medical bankruptcy” upward, while not using similar techniques that would tend to ratchet up other categories and diminish the number of bankruptcies counted as medical, and to present their results in misleading ways — so as to obscure, for example, the fact that by their own accounting, the number of medical bankruptcies actually fell by hundreds of thousands between 2001 and 2007. Which is why their study tended to be presented in the media as “growing problem” rather than “shrinking threat.”

To be clear: I don’t believe that medical bankruptcies fell by hundreds of thousands between 2001 and 2007. I think this conclusion further suggests just how problematic their methodology is. So does the fact that in 2011, two of Warren’s co-authors issued a new study finding that medical bankruptcy hadn’t fallen in Massachusetts after the passage of Romneycare. These two co-authors are the co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Care Program, an advocacy group that supports single-payer in America, and they have a noticeable tendency to find that — quelle surprise — America has enormous problems with medical bills that can be solved only by a single-payer health-care system. They have a lot of latitude to get that answer, because it’s surprisingly hard to know exactly which bankruptcies are medical. Someone who bought three new cars, and also had a hernia, is probably going to blame the hernia.

It’s almost like anything that comes from Elizabeth Warren is suspect.

SCENES FROM SCOTT WALKER’S WISCONSIN: Wisconsin’s budget picture gets $714 million brighter.

Fiscal bureau director Bob Lang reported tax revenues are expected to be $455 million higher than what the Department of Administration projected in November. Also, spending in the current fiscal year that ends June 30 is expected to be $226 million lower — largely due to lower-than-expected Medicaid enrollment — and other revenues are expected to be $33 million higher.

That turns what was thought to be a $693 million deficit for the upcoming budget into a $21 million surplus, including all departmental budget requests.

It also adds more cushion to the state’s bottom line as it closes out the 2015-2017 budget cycle. Previously the net balance was about $40 million. The latest estimate has the state closing out the year with a $362.2 million ending balance.

The additional revenue helps explain why Gov. Scott Walker has been able to promise several additional spending proposals in his upcoming 2017-2019 budget proposal, such as a “significant increase” for K-12 schools, a University of Wisconsin tuition cut back-filled with state taxpayer dollars and $100 million more for local roads and rural broadband.

Wisconsin Democrats, to borrow a phrase, should be thanking him.

THIS IS CNN: Assassinating Trump Could Keep Obama Administration in Power.

ON PUTIN AND MANNING IN USA TODAY: Don’t cry over Russia hack, if you let traitors go.

S.E. CUPP: Democrats, please control yourselves: Trump derangement syndrome will not help win policy fights.

The meltdown comes to a crescendo on Friday, when more than 60 Democrats in Congress will boycott Trump’s inauguration, and on Saturday when millions are expected to gather at a Women’s March on Washington.

Snit fits about every little thing are not an effective way to oppose a President’s agenda.

Party leaders and activists don’t look defiant, resolved and unified; they look alarmingly insecure, weak and spastic.

In the immortal words of America’s poet — Miranda Lambert — “Run an’ hide your crazy and start acting like a lady.”

But it isn’t about policy. It’s about virtue signaling and the infantile joy of throwing a public tantrum.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student debt now affects a staggering number of elderly Americans.

If only there had been some kind of warning.

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WELCOME TO THE PARTY, PAL: Liberals Prepare for President Trump with Gun Purchases, ‘Prepping’

It’s possible to applaud them for exercising their constitutional rights, while also bemoaning the fact that ammo and firearms prices might not be coming down any time soon after all.

PRESIDENT ASH CARTER: I don’t support commuting Chelsea Manning’s sentence.

RICH LOWRY: The Shameful War On Betsy DeVos. “The controversy over the nomination of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education has been, if nothing else, clarifying. We now know that working to give poor kids more educational opportunities is considered a disqualifying offense for the Left.”

NFL IMPLOSION UPDATE: Roger Goodell Afraid To Visit Patriots Stadium:

There are plenty of names Patriots fans are fond of calling NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. None is very pleasant, and with good reason.

Some of the cleaner ones with regard to his latest transgression? Roger the dodger. Roger the coward. Roger the chicken.

Given his record, why isn’t he afraid to go to every NFL stadium?

CHANGEMENT? Le Pen Moves Into Lead in French Race, Le Monde Poll Shows.

The populist leader of the National Front had between 25 percent and 26 percent support compared with 23 percent to 25 percent for Republican candidate Francois Fillon, according to an Ipsos Sopra Steria poll for Cevipof and Le Monde. In mid December, Fillon led with about 28 percent and Le Pen around 25 percent.

Since the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president on Nov. 8, the French race has been closely-watched as another crucial battle between populist and establishment forces. Under the French electoral system, the two leading candidates face each other in a run-off vote on May 7, presenting a significant hurdle to Le Pen. The poll didn’t include data for the second-round vote.

European Commissioner Pierre Moscovici, a French Socialist, said in Davos Thursday that there’s little chance of Le Pen securing the broad support needed for victory.

“I’m not worried about Madame Le Pen being president,” Moscovici said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “I don’t want Madame Le Pen in power. Never, ever in my country.”

Le Pen has pledged to take France out of the euro if she wins.

After betting the country on an inept Socialist the last time around, don’t be too surprised if French voters make an abrupt volte-face.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student group sues after members arrested for handing out copies of Constitution.

JONATHAN TURLEY: Stop Whining: Trump’s Our Legitimate President:

It is of course immaterial that Trump lost the popular vote in a system based on electoral, not popular voting. (For the record, I have long been a critic of the Electoral College.) Moreover, while references to the “Russian hacking of the election” have become common shorthand, the Russians did not hack the election. Emails were hacked and those emails were not faked or tampered with, as repeatedly claimed by DNC chair Donna Brazile. As recently confirmed by the intelligence report, they were real emails showing incredibly dishonest and corrupt practices. Although there is no question that the leak appears selective in targeting Democrats, Washington seems most aggrieved by the fact that the public was given a true insight into the false and duplicitous behavior that defines the establishment. However, according to a new CNN/ORC poll, the spin is not taking: almost 60% of voters do not believe the hacking determined the outcome of the election.

In the end, the protests are not about legitimacy. Trump is by any measure our duly elected and legitimate president. It is about a refusal to accept legitimate results. Even the title of “The Women’s March” is dubious.

While Bill Clinton insisted that his wife lost because Trump figured out “how to get angry, white men to vote for him,” the fact is that it was the Democratic leadership that secured the election for Trump. Despite long-standing polls showing that voters did not want an establishment figure, the establishment pre-selected Clinton, who is not only one of the most recognized establishment figures but someone carrying more luggage than Greyhound. She is also someone who had even higher negative polling on character and truthfulness than Trump.

More importantly, it is a well-maintained myth that Clinton was the candidate of women who overwhelmingly rejected Trump. Clinton pulled basically the same percentage of female votes as Obama did four years earlier. Indeed, Clinton actually did slightly worse this election than Obama did in the prior two presidential elections with women.

Women don’t particularly like her. But, to be fair, neither do men.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Five Reasons Conservatives Must Support ‘Patriots Day.’

JOURNALISM: Atlanta Journal-Constitution Botches Crime Stats in Defending John Lewis.

MELTDOWN: Florida man charged with threatening to kill President-elect Trump at his inauguration on Twitter was a close family friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton. “The man arrested by Miami Beach police Tuesday for allegedly threatening President-elect Donald Trump online is a member of a prominent northeast family close to Bill and Hillary Clinton. He once gave $20,000 to the Democratic National Committee, DailyMail.com has learned. . . . Puopolo reportedly admitted to posting a video to Twitter, saying: ‘This is the 16th of January 2017, I will be at the review/ inauguration and I will kill President Trump, President elect Trump today.'”

If the parties were reversed, this would be a big story, with lots of chin-pulling about “inflammatory rhetoric.”

WHO NEEDS KEITH ELLISON: Caitlyn Jenner to attend Trump inauguration. “Caitlyn has been a Republican all her life.”