KURT SCHLICHTER: Enough Of The Precocious Conservakids. “This is not a criticism of young people; it’s a criticism of us grown-ups, and a recognition of reality that keeps biting us on the Jeb. We need to dispense with the cute kid conservative novelty acts and understand that our ideology – unlike liberalism – is not based on feelings and preferences but is instead drawn from a wisdom and understanding of human nature that comes only from hard-won life experience.”

“Biting us on the Jeb.” Heh.

MACLEAN’S: The chilling effect of a McGill University tweet on its scholars. “By thinking like a crisis management team instead of a university, however, McGill lost sight of the core principles by which it ought to be governed.”

ANOTHER DEAN BITES THE DUST: Provost Removes Cincinnati Law School Dean Less Than Two Years Into Her Five-Year Term. This supports my theory that there was more going on than a few faculty in a snit over travel paperwork, though I don’t know exactly what.

I CERTAINLY HOPE NOT: Are the F-15 Eagle’s days numbered? Top generals say maybe.

Between the F-15 2040C “Advanced Eagle” and the F-15SE “Silent Eagle” the USAF already has two excellent prototypes for keeping the F-15 around as the new low-end of a 21st Century “high-low mix.”

I FIGURE THE ANSWER IS YES, AND THAT’S WHY DEMS ARE DOUBLING DOWN ON THE TRUMP/RUSSIA THING AS DISTRACTION: Lawsuit: Did Hillary’s secret email ‘damage national security?’

A government watchdog group Tuesday demanded that the nation’s intelligence czar and State Department determine if former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s secret email server damaged national security.

In a lawsuit against the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and State, Judicial Watch demanded that they conduct an assessment of the damage and report it to the public.

“The Obama administration conspired with Hillary Clinton regarding her emails, so it is no surprise that Obama officials wouldn’t want to hold her to account for her mishandling of classified materials,” charged Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “This lawsuit is an opportunity for the Trump administration to get back to basics on the Clinton email scandal and find out what damage was done to our national security as a result of her illicit email practices.”

The suit cited a 2014 rule requiring a damage assessment if there is a suspicion that classified information was compromised and damaged national security.

Judicial Watch cited FBI Director James Comey’s statement on July 5, 2016, that Clinton’s unsecure email system contained classified information.

The people have a right to know, and a charge this serious demands an investigation.

DEPLORABLE: Death Rates Rise for Wide Swath of White Adults, Study Finds.

Mortality has been rising since the turn of this century for an even broader swath of white adults, starting at age 25, the researchers found, driven by troubles in a hard-hit working class. Death rates for white non-Hispanics with a high-school education or less now exceed those of blacks overall, the pair said—and they’re 30% higher for whites age 50 to 54 than for blacks overall of that age.

Blacks have long had a much higher death rate than whites, but that rate has dropped steeply since the beginning of this century, while the rate for whites has crept up.

Driving the uptick are increases in “deaths of despair”—from drugs, alcohol-related liver diseases and suicide, as well as a slowdown in progress against death in middle age from heart disease and cancer, the nation’s biggest killers, wrote Anne Case and Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton, her husband. The pair examined more than 15 data sets, including government health statistics, death certificates and various economic indicators.

The analysis paints a portrait of a gradual “collapse of the white, high-school-educated working class after its heyday in the early 1970s,” whose health, mental well-being, and attachment to the labor force have become successively worse for people born after 1945, they said.

What changed for high school graduates starting in the mid-’60s?

ROGER SIMON: Time To Investigate Obama, Not Just Trump.

The facts are what they are.

What appears at this writing is that Trump transition team members and possibly Trump himself had their identities revealed, were “unmasked” in the parlance, while foreign diplomats were being surveilled. The identities of American citizens were not sufficiently “minimized,” as they are required to be by law. This is a crime one would assume would put the perpetrators in prison. So far it hasn’t. More than that, such behavior is a grave threat to a free society, to all of us.

In effect, Trump was wiretapped — if not in the corny, old sense of the word, something very close. Technologically, he was wiretapped, as were several (actually many) others.

A fair amount of this happened not long before Barack Obama suddenly changed the rules regarding raw intelligence, for the first time ever allowing the NSA to share its data with 16 other intelligence agencies, thus making the dissemination of said data (i. e. leaking) many times more likely. That was done on January 12, 2017, just three scant days before Trump’s inauguration. Why did the then president finally decide to make that particular change at that extremely late date, rather than on one of the previous seven years and three hundred fifty-three days of his presidency? You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes or Watson to smell a rat.

Read the whole thing.

REPORT: Koch Network Is Spending Millions to Stop GOP Health Care Bill.

I’m so old I can remember when the Koch brothers were heading up a shady network of rich women-hating racists to deny Hillary Clinton the White House.

REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE SAID COMMUNISM WAS BETTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT THAN CAPITALISM? Exposed: Soviet cover-up of nuclear fallout worse than Chernobyl. I do remember people blaming Bhopal on capitalism, but there was much more accountability there.

I’D FORGOTTEN THERE WAS ONE: Boycott of N.C. Over Bathroom Bill Dies With a Whimper.

FINGERS CROSSED! Turkey’s Referendum Could Backfire on Erdogan.

Only one campaign is in sight less than a month before the April 16 referendum that would give Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vast new powers.

Building-size billboards feature a giant likeness of Mr. Erdogan urging the nation to vote “Yes.” On TV networks, government officials brand those opposing this executive presidency plan as traitors or supporters of terrorism. Finding any evidence of the “No” campaign can be mission impossible.

And yet, despite such a charged environment, a referendum victory for Mr. Erdogan looks surprisingly uncertain. Opinion polls keep showing a nation starkly divided along the middle—with a significant part of Mr. Erdogan’s own Justice and Development Party, or AKP, electorate balking at the idea of scrapping Turkey’s tradition of parliamentary democracy.

“This is a huge problem for them: they were thinking they will easily get 60%,” says Etyen Mahcupyan, a political consultant who served as adviser to former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, a leading figure in AKP. “And if we have a surprise on election day, it will be to the benefit of the ‘No’ vote. The government has created a ‘Yes’ atmosphere and many people are afraid of admitting that they will vote ‘No,’ and are not telling the truth to the pollsters.”

The referendum is the last chance for Turkish voters to turn back from the abyss, but fortunately this has been a time of electoral surprises.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Stanford researchers show we’re sending many children to school way too early.

Parents wondering whether to wait a year to send their kids to kindergarten, take note: A new study from Stanford University shows that Danish kids who postponed kindergarten for up to one year showed dramatically higher levels of self-control.

“We found that delaying kindergarten for one year reduced inattention and hyperactivity by 73% for an average child at age 11,” Thomas Dee, one of the co-authors and a Stanford Graduate School of Education professor, said in a release.

Dee did his research with Hans Henrik Sievertsen of the Danish National Centre for Social Research, who told Quartz that the impact was strong and lasted a long time: “We were a bit surprised at how persistent the effect was.” The effect of delaying school on hyperactivity and inattention didn’t diminish over time, as they expected, but increased: in fact, waiting one year virtually eliminated the chance that an average kid at age 11 would have higher-than-normal scores on those measures.

Start kids later, start school later in the morning. . . . .

FASTER, PLEASE: Trump Lays Plans to Reverse Obama’s Climate Change Legacy.

The moves are intended to send an unmistakable signal to the nation and the world that Mr. Trump intends to follow through on his campaign vows to rip apart every element of what the president has called Mr. Obama’s “stupid” policies to address climate change. The timing and exact form of the announcement remain unsettled, however.

The executive actions will follow the White House’s release last week of a proposed budget that would eliminate climate change research and prevention programs across the federal government and slash the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 31 percent, more than any other agency. Mr. Trump also announced last week that he had ordered Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, to revise the agency’s stringent standards on planet-warming tailpipe pollution from vehicles, another of Mr. Obama’s key climate change policies.

While the White House is not expected to explicitly say the United States is withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, and people familiar with the White House deliberations say Mr. Trump has not decided whether to do so, the policy reversals would make it virtually impossible to meet the emissions reduction goals set by the Obama administration under the international agreement.

That’s from the NYT writeup, so of course they say that like it’s a bad thing, but even James Hansen — “the father of climate change awareness” — says Paris is a fraud.

DAVID HARSANYI: Democrats Shouldn’t Dismiss Nunes’ Spying Claims So Quickly.

But if we’re to believe Nunes, the names of Trump and/or associates were “unmasked,” and details “with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in an intelligence community report.” CNN is reporting that some of the communications picked up were Trump transition officials talking about the president’s family. What possible need was there for those details to be passed around in an intelligence report? Who ordered the unmasking of the people involved? Was the information properly minimized? If the investigation wasn’t aimed at collusion with the Russians, what investigation ensnared the president-elect and his transition team?

While the answers might not vindicate Trump, they are legitimate questions.

If it turns out intel wasn’t properly minimized, this is the kind of abuse that civil libertarians have long warned could undermine Americans’ privacy, a Fourth Amendment right. Many Democrats (and a few Republicans) have been warning about exploitation of 702 for years. Only last year, Minnesota Sen. Al Franken admitted that “information that we get through 702 can be misused.” The American Civil Liberties Union also opposes it (“We Must Rein in President Trump’s Spying Powers,” says a headline. Right.)

Well, it’s different when Democrats do it.

And Nunes says: FBI IS NOT COOPERATING WITH OUR INVESTIGATION INTO TRUMP CAMP SURVEILLANCE.

“We don’t actually know yet officially what happened to General Flynn,” Nunes said of how communications from Gen. Flynn’s calls were leaked to the press. “We just know that his name leaked out but we don’t know how it was picked up yet. That was one of the things that we asked for in the March 15th letter, was for the NSA, CIA, and FBI to get us all the unmasking that was done.”

“And I’ll tell you, NSA is being cooperative,” Nunes continued, “but so far the FBI has not told us whether or not they’re going to respond to our March 15th letter, which is now a couple of weeks old.”

Casts doubts on those claims that “There Is No ‘Deep State.'”

DAVID BERNSTEIN: Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on).

“Whiteness studies” is all the rage these days. My friends who teach U.S. history have told me that this perspective has “completely taken over” studies of American ethnic history. I can’t vouch for that, but I do know that I constantly see people assert, as a matter of “fact,” that Irish, Italian, Jewish and other “ethnic” white American were not considered to be “white” until sometime in the mid-to-late 20th century, vouching for the fact that this understanding of American history has spread widely.

The relevant scholarly literature seems to have started with Noel Ignatiev’s book “How the Irish Became White,” and taken off from there. But what the relevant authors mean by white is ahistorical. They are referring to a stylized, sociological or anthropological understanding of “whiteness,” which means either “fully socially accepted as the equals of Americans of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic stock,” or, in the more politicized version, “an accepted part of the dominant ruling class in the United States.”

Those may be interesting sociological and anthropological angles to pursue, but it has nothing to do with whether the relevant groups were considered to be white.

Here are some objective tests as to whether a group was historically considered “white” in the United States: Were members of the group allowed to go to “whites-only” schools in the South, or otherwise partake of the advantages that accrued to whites under Jim Crow? Were they ever segregated in schools by law, anywhere in the United States, such that “whites” went to one school, and the group in question was relegated to another? When laws banned interracial marriage in many states (not just in the South), if a white Anglo-Saxon wanted to marry a member of the group, would that have been against the law? Some labor unions restricted their membership to whites. Did such unions exclude members of the group in question? Were members of the group ever entirely excluded from being able to immigrate to the United States, or face special bans or restrictions in becoming citizens?

If you use such objective tests, you find that Irish, Jews, Italians and other white ethnics were indeed considered white by law and by custom (as in the case of labor unions). . . .

When I’ve pointed this out to people, they often rejoin that people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries often referred to the “Irish race,” the “Italian race,” the “Jewish race.” That’s true, but they also referred to the “Anglo-Saxon race,” and the “Teutonic race,” the latter two generally considered to be superior. The racist pseudo-science of the day divided Europeans into various races by nationality or perceived nationality, and often created a hierarchy among those groups. But that was a racist hierarchy within the white group, not evidence that these groups weren’t considered to be white. This point is often obscured by the whiteness studies crowd, because racism within a white hierarchy conflicts with their understanding of American racism solely being about “whiteness.”

I’m deeply suspicious of the “whiteness studies” movement.

THE PROBLEM OF BUILDING SELF-CENTERED WORLDS:What Fake Hate Crimes Reveal About the Left’s Bubble.

THE SNIPE HUNT GOES ON: Lots of smoke but no fire yet in U.S.-Russia investigation.

I DON’T BLAME THEM: And if our feminists weren’t a wholly owned subsidiary of zombie Soviet Agit Prop, they would be protesting the conditions they’re escaping nonstop, instead of demonstrating against Trump for… has anyone figured out why they’re protesting, yet? Other than his having been elected over a corrupt, crooked party apparatchik who happens to have a vagina?  Some Saudi women are secretly deserting their country.

LIVE BY PROCEDURAL TRICKS, DIE BY PROCEDURAL TRICKS: Surprise: House ready to change health-care bill after learning Senate reconciliation rules might let them repeal more of ObamaCare

FORTUNATELY THEY’RE STILL ONLY AS COMPETENT AS OTHER TOTALITARIAN REGIMES: North Korea Has Doubled Size of Uranium-Enrichment Facility, IAEA Chief Says.

WHAT IS WITH DEMOCRATS AND MEANINGLESS AWARDS?Good news: Chelsea Clinton to receive “Power of Women” award.  Apparently the power of women is to be born to politically connected crooks and utterly fail at the jobs they get you.  Good to know.

EMBRACE THE POWER OF AND: A Hot Bath Might Be As Good For You As Exercise.

IT’S ALL FOR SHOW AND POWER: Competitive Morality

The middleman gets all the credit, of course. Lesser Progressives must bow to his superior morality, that he managed to steal more from one to bribe another to do his political bidding. The taxpayer is insulted for not giving more of his wealth to the government. There is no gratitude. The media is most moral, and the guy living in the sticks least moral, for no matter what he might do for the poor, no one is there to see it, therefore it isn’t moral.

WELL, THEY SHOULD KNOW, SINCE THEY WERE WIRETAPPING HIM:Dems Claim Trump Team Not Wiretapped While Wiretapped.

ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN, AND THIS ONE HAS EARNED HER SPOT: Abused dog saves naked, abused toddler