GEORGE KORDA: Single-payer healthcare: if you think the pitch makes it sound too good to be true, you’re right.

DECIMATED AND ON THE RUN: Top US admiral warns ISIS-linked militants seek new fronts in Asia.

NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF ACADEMIC DISHONESTY: How Nancy MacLean went whistlin’ Dixie.

MacLean has a very specific reason for making this claim, and she returns to it at multiple points in her book. The Agrarians, in addition to spawning a southern literary revival (the novelist Robert Penn Warren was one of their members), were also segregationists. By connecting them to Buchanan, she bolsters one of the primary charges of her book: an attempt to link Buchanan’s economic theories to a claimed resentment over Brown v. Board and the subsequent defeat of racial segregation in 1960s Virginia.

MacLean’s argument presents a challenge. Buchanan wrote very little on Brown or the ensuing school desegregation, and the archival evidence she presents from his papers is both thin and far short of the smoking gun she implies it to be. Instead, she sets out to strengthen her portrayal of Buchanan as a segregationist by tying him to other known segregationists. The Agrarians, and specifically Davidson, serve this purpose in her narrative by becoming formative intellectual influences on Buchanan.

There’s a problem with MacLean’s story though: it appears to be completely made up.

Apparently, the Left wants a certain type of rightist to exist so badly that it has been forced to invent them.

REASON RETURNS TO THE LAND OF LINCOLN: Illinois Legislature Passes Asset Forfeiture Reform.

The vote came on the heels of an investigative report from Reason earlier this month showing lower-income neighborhoods of Chicago were hit hardest by asset forfeiture.

Reason’s report, analyzing more than 23,000 property seizures over the last five years, was cited by Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx in a letter to the Chicago Tribune Saturday urging Republican Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner to sign the bill into law. Foxx wrote that civil asset forfeiture’s disproportionate impact on poor and minority communities was an “injustice.”

The bill, approved unanimously in the state senate and with only one dissenting vote in the house, would raise the standard of evidence for forfeitures from probable cause to a preponderance of evidence and bar seizures under $500 in many drug cases.

It would also abolish a requirement of residents challenging seizures that they pay a 10 percent bond on the estimated value of their property to file a petition, and expedite hearings for owners claiming innocence.

Kudos to the Illinois legislature and to Reason’s C.J. Ciaramella.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Trump And Devos Deliver One-Two Punch On Law School Loans. “For young lawyers hoping that public service loan forgiveness could be an answer to a lifetime of student debt burdens, President Trump has some bad news. Rather than remedy the problems with a program that can provide enormous help to many recent grads and the organizations for which they work, he wants to eliminate it altogether.”

That’s a good idea, actually. This is just a subsidy for the left, and one that encourages students to underestimate the damage done by student loan debt. Next, make student loans dischargable in bankruptcy, but with a portion charged back to the institutions that received the money.

SQUANDERED CAPITAL: What happens when news organizations become entertainment divisions.

BUFF MOTHERSHIP: A true blast from the past. A B-52 carries an X-15A-2 rocket plane. I want to say it was in 1959 or 1960 (third or fourth grade) I read an article about X-15 pilot Scott Crossfield. The article had a title something like “I fly the X-15.” It wasn’t very long but it was totally cool.

BREAKING: “ABC: Settlement reached in ‘pink slime’ defamation lawsuit.” These are indeed tough times for legacy media. Between CNN’s multiple woes, The New York Times’ having to correct an Op/Ed and other events, media entities are more fearful than ever of facing a jury. That’s what happens when you lose public trust.

ROGUE SWISS: “A roguish charmer, a lover of wine and women and an escaped convict…”

Obviously you should read this.

Back to the BBC article: “The people in the Swiss canton of Valais are rightly proud of their home-grown products.” Joseph-Samuel Farinet “was a 19th-Century counterfeiter and a legend in these parts, even if the myth that now surrounds him is more colourful than the reality.”

More colorful than reality. The same could be said of the colorful myths surrounding Ed Driscoll.

The entire article is a chuckle.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: ‘Progressive’ Washington’s Obamacare Train Wreck.

HAVE YOU HUGGED A FRACKER TODAY? Even Shale’s Secondary Effects Are Staggering.

Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal well drilling have given American companies access to vast new reserves of oil and gas, and have dramatically increased the production of hydrocarbons here in the United States. Since 2010, the U.S. has added roughly 5 million barrels of oil per day, and natural gas production is up roughly 33 percent over that same time period.

The effects of this energy revolution have been felt the world over—they’ve brought gasoline prices down for American drivers while remaking the global oil market. But here in the U.S., they’ve been an enormous boon to an industry most Americans are likely unfamiliar with: petrochemicals. As the WSJ reports, cheap petrochemical feedstocks (a byproduct of oil and gas drilling) are pushing the U.S. petrochemical industry to new heights. . . .

That’s a lot of money, and it’s a staggering number of jobs. This is one of the unheralded consequences of this new energy renaissance that the U.S. finds itself in, and it’s creating a rosier economic outlook for years to come.

This big win for America has also produced a number of losers, namely Middle Eastern petrostates who in years past had looked to petrochemicals as an important industry to help them diversify away from simply pumping and exporting crude oil and natural gas. But thanks to cheap shale-sourced petrochemical feedstocks, the lion’s share of new investment money in the industry is heading the United States’ way. Once again, shale is lifting the U.S. up even as it puts petrostates in peril.

Good.

OMINOUS PARALLELS? Why Germany Is Once Again a Threat to the West.

Nikolaas de Jong:

It is important to point out that the popular image both of Angela Merkel and of modern Germany is deeply flawed. Because far from representing a negation — or a misguided attempt at negation — of past German policies and attitudes, the modern German mentality is in many ways a mutation or an update of the same mentality that has guided Germany since the eighteenth century, and especially since the unification of the country in 1870.

Let us begin with the more obvious parallel: German support for further European integration. Despite all the German talk about subordinating narrow national interests to the European project, careful observers must have noticed the coincidence that the Germans always see themselves as the leaders of this disinterested project, and that the measures deemed to be necessary for further European cooperation always seem to be German-made.

Are the Germans really such idealistic supporters of the European project? It is more probable that in reality they see the European Union as an ideal instrument to control the rest of Europe. Indeed, in 1997 the British author John Laughland wrote a book about this subject, The Tainted Source: the Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea, which is still worth reading for anyone who wants understand what kind of organization the EU actually is.

Intersting piece — read the whole thing.

FASTER, PLEASE: Solar Costs Are Hitting Jaw-Dropping Lows in Every Region of the World.

How low can you go? Mind-blowingly low 65-cents-per-watt solar system pricing emerges in India.

This may sound a little repetitive, but it’s impossible to ignore: The decline in solar costs is not slowing down.

GTM Research expects a 27 percent drop in average global project prices by 2022, or about 4.4 percent each year. Those improvements are not limited to the U.S. They are occurring globally, and in some cases resulting in even sharper price declines than those America is experiencing.

Perhaps no commercial good adds more to human wealth, health, and happiness than cheap and abundant energy.

Well, except in California.

THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED, PRIVILEGED WHITE PEOPLE WOULD FEEL FREE TO ABUSE IMMIGRANTS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT: Nikki Haley: People Said ‘Hateful Things to Me and My Family’ at NYC Pride Parade. It’s as if they’re just a front group for the left.

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REPEAL REPLACE RESTORE: Club for Growth Attacks Senate Health Care Bill: ‘It Restores Obamacare’

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Dissident officer steals helicopter, fires shots and throws grenades on Venezuelan government buildings.

The chopper pilot was identified as Oscar Perez, an official with CICPC, Venezuela’s equivalent of the FBI. The helicopter belonged to the CICPC and was stolen from La Carlota air base in eastern Caracas.

Perez also flew a banner from the aircraft that read “350 Liberty,” a reference to a Venezuelan constitutional clause that gives citizens the right to ignore the commands of oppressive governments, a reference to the Maduro administration. The flyover was perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of discontent in a once prosperous nation racked by protests against a government opponents denounce and inept and corrupt.

After the incident, Maduro spoke to a group of journalists at Miraflores, the Venezuelan equivalent of the White House, saying the four grenades thrown from the helicopter could have caused dozens of injuries but apparently harmed no one. The government said 15 rounds were fired from the helicopter as well.

A futile gesture, but perhaps he will inspire others.

WHEN ORGANIZED CRIME CONNECTS TO TERROR: My latest Creators Syndicate column.

DO ECONOMIC SANCTIONS REALLY DAMAGE NORTH KOREA’S DICTATORSHIP?: According to a high level defector, they do.

“Economic sanctions, if continued, will erode the North Korean regime’s grip on power, create more opportunities for market activities and stir all kinds of corruption and disorder in the country,” said Ri Jong Ho in his first public interview since his defection in late 2014. “That loosening of government control will strike at the very foundation of the [top-down] leader-based system.”

Ri is a defector and a major defector. At one time he was in charge of overseeing North Korea’s economic production and trade. The VOA interview is his first public statement since he defected in 2014.

MICHAEL BARONE: On travel ban, the Supreme Court provides adult supervision for lower courts gone wild.

Adult supervision: that’s what the Supreme Court provided for a federal judiciary, or part thereof, run amok, when it issued its unanimous opinion overturning the preliminary injunctions of President Donald Trump’s executive order banning entry of persons from six countries — the so-called travel ban. The court’s unsigned per curiam opinion brushes aside, with virtually no comment, the argument of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that the executive order violated the Constitution’s bar of an establishment of religion and the assertion of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that its judgment on national security was better than the president’s.

The court did provide a glimmer of support to these lower courts by retaining the injunctions against barring the specific plaintiffs in each case and to other “foreign nationals who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States,” but rather tartly added that “a nonprofit group devoted to immigration issues may not contact foreign nationals from the designated countries, add them to client lists, and then secure their entry by claiming injury from their exclusion.”

There was nothing in the court’s unanimous opinion about inferring the president’s motivation, as the Fourth Circuit did, by analyzing his statements along the campaign trail. “The Government’s interest in enforcing §2(c) [the executive order], and the Executive’s authority to do so are undoubtedly at their peak when there is no tie between the foreign national and the United States,” it wrote. “To prevent the Government from pursuing that objective by enforcing §2(c) against foreign nationals unconnected to the United States would appreciably injure its interests, without alleviating obvious hardship to anyone else.” That’s a solid rebuke to the preposterous notion that foreign nationals somehow have a constitutional right to enter the United States.

Justice Clarence Thomas, in a separate opinion joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, wrote, “I agree with the Court’s implicit conclusion that the Government has made a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits — that is, that the judgments below will be reversed. The Government has also established that failure to stay the injunctions will cause irreparable harm by interfering with its ‘compelling need to provide for the Nation’s security.'” Thomas noted the likelihood of “litigation of the factual and legal issues that are likely to arise” by foreign nationals claiming pre-existing relationships enabling them to enter the United States, and that such cases “will presumably be directed to the two District Courts whose initial orders in these cases this Court has now — unanimously — found sufficiently questionable to be stayed as to the vast majority of the people potentially affected.”

It’s interesting, and probably significant, that no other member of the court chose to write separately challenging Justice Thomas’s forecast that the lower court decisions will be reversed. The federal district and appeals court judges that have hurled verbal thunderbolts at Donald Trump and his administration have enjoyed the adulation of hundreds of editorial writers and, undoubtedly, the congratulations of the people they encounter in social settings. That may continue. But their actions — the injunctions they issued and the Trump administration obeyed — have been almost entirely overturned by a court whose members are obviously taking their responsibilities seriously.

Trump’s presidency has shown that neutral professionalism is largely a myth. This will do long-term damage to the professional classes.

RIP: Michael Nyqvist, ‘Dragon Tattoo’ Star, Dies at 56.

What a shame. He was quite good.

BECAUSE PEOPLE LET THEM GET AWAY WITH IT? Why You Can Expect Increased Violence When The Left Is Out Of Power.

TAKE MY SUBSIDIZED POWER — PLEASE! California invested heavily in solar power. Now there’s so much that other states are sometimes paid to take it.

On 14 days during March, Arizona utilities got a gift from California: free solar power.

Well, actually better than free. California produced so much solar power on those days that it paid Arizona to take excess electricity its residents weren’t using to avoid overloading its own power lines.

It happened on eight days in January and nine in February as well. All told, those transactions helped save Arizona electricity customers millions of dollars this year, though grid operators declined to say exactly how much. And California also has paid other states to take power.

And this next bit is especially rich:

No single entity is in charge of energy policy in California. This has led to a two-track approach that has created an ever-increasing glut of power and is proving costly for electricity users. Rates have risen faster here than in the rest of the U.S., and Californians now pay about 50% more than the national average.

California has so much energy that no one can afford it, except for neighboring states who sometimes get paid to take it.

Free markets tend to self-correct problems like this — if they ever crop up in the first place. But California’s lunacy is mandated by law.