LEGAL WOES OF FRENCH PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES: While accurate, the AFP summary still reflects the allegations that interest European media. Still, the allegations tagging Francois Fillon are troublesome and they’ve hurt him. The European Parliament charges against Le Pen are debatable and she’s contesting them in the political arena.

RELATED: An election update that reports Hamon is “campaigning on a hard-left economic platform…” That’s for sure. (Corrected!)

THE VIEW OF THE WORLD FROM CHUCK TODD’S AVENUE: NBC News realizes they should probably cover “rural America.”

And thus Todd lives out Saul Steinberg’s classic “The View of the World from Ninth Avenue” New Yorker cover from 1976:

Exit quote: “I think it’s clear mainstream media needs to do a better job of reporting on rural America.”

Which was pretty much what the then-head of ABC News said immediately after the 2004 election. How’s the staffing of their flyover country bureaus coming?

ROOKIE ERROR. SHOULD’VE GONE WITH A BOMB POP. Thor Seeks The Meaning Of Life In A Creamsicle: A Wonderful Marvel Comic Panel From 1987. Or a Mayfield’s Brown Cow.

CHARLES HURT: Democrats need to help fix the Disastercare they created.

Mr. Trump has noted that the politically expedient thing for Republicans to do right now would be just to stand back and watch Obamacare collapse and keep reminding voters that this is what happens when you put stupid, dishonest and power-hungry Democrats in charge.

But there is a wiser middle-ground approach to fixing the Obamacare debacle that Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress should chart instead.

Yes, put together Republicans’ more market-based plans for salvaging Disastercare. Even include their crazy new tax credit entitlement program that should cause any decent conservative to break out in hives.

But — and this is crucial — demand that Democrats in Congress come to the table and support this rescue mission to fix the disastrous mess they created. Mr. Trump should play hardball with vulnerable Democrats and threaten to campaign against them if they do not support this plan.

Politically speaking, what possible inducement is there for Democrats to pull Congressional Republicans out of the hole they’re digging?

RELATED: Dems See Trumpcare Fallout as 2018 Opportunity.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student Loan Defaults Skyrocket.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: L.A. County Sheriff’s Department switches from silver to gold belt buckles at a cost of $300,000.

Sheriff’s officials are spending $300,000 on items they say would make deputies look more professional in their jobs and could help make them safer.

But the taxpayer dollars won’t go toward tools such as higher-quality ballistic vests, backup guns or body cameras, all of which are optional items that deputies have to pay for on their own.

Instead, Sheriff Jim McDonnell is spending the money on a minor cosmetic makeover of deputies’ uniforms: changing the color of their belt buckles and other metal pieces of gear from silver to gold. That way, the metallic bits — all made of brass — will match the gold-hued tie clips, lapel pins and six-pointed star badges that deputies already wear, McDonnell said.

Style over substance? How very L.A.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Blue-Collar Marriages Are Disappearing as Quickly as Blue-Collar Jobs.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: A Graceless End to Preet Bharara’s Successful Tenure.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Six Ways Liberal Celebrities Can Make a Difference.

I get the feeling they won’t like any of these suggestions, requiring as they do that celebs exit the echo chamber, and give up on the cheap shots and the harangues.

DEEP STATE UPDATE: How John Brennan and Some Brits Tried to Tip the Election to Hillary.

What other British spies joined Brennan and Steele in their anti-Trump crusade? This is another question for Congress to address next week if it is serious about looking at the interference of foreign countries in our elections. Why is it that many of the leaked stories about an Obama administration investigation into Trump-Russia ties originated in the British press (BBC, the Guardian, anti-Trump British journalist and pol Louise Mensch)? Did the Obama administration outsource some of its spying on Trump to the Brits, who had access to the NSA database?

Yes, says Judge Andrew Napolitano, who claimed on Monday that “three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command” and made use of British intelligence with its “24-hour access” to the NSA’s database.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin Powell at the State Department, is also persuaded that British intelligence was cooperating with John Brennan’s fishing expedition into candidate Trump. . . .

So it is entirely possible that both Comey and Brennan were investigating Trump simultaneously, with the FBI seeking warrants or using “traditional investigative techniques” (as Circa News put it) and Brennan using less traditional ones.

But at the very least we know that Christopher Steele and John Brennan, along with the British spies, journalists, and pols to whom they were leaking, were desperately trying to tip the election to Hillary.

Once, something like this would have been hard to believe.

JUDICIAL WATCH: DOING MORE INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM THAN THE NEW YORK TIMES AND WASHINGTON POST COMBINED. Judicial Watch Sues For Info on Bill Clinton’s Plane Meeting With Loretta Lynch.

SKYNET SMILES: To Make Us All Safer, Robocars Will Sometimes Have to Kill.

THESE PEOPLE ARE PATHETIC: The Place for Tax Woes: Nine MSNBC Personalities Had Tax Liens Filed Against Them.

WELCOME TO THE PARTY, PAL: Minnesota becomes the 39th state to allow Sunday liquor sales.

Minnesota’s new law, which follows similar moves by 16 other states since 2002, takes effect on July 1. But Jim Surdyk, proprietor of Surdyk’s Liquor & Cheese Shop in Minneapolis, did not wait to exercise his new freedom. He was open for business last Sunday, prompting a $3,500 fine and threats against his license.

It is not hard to understand Surdyk’s impatience. In the 159 years since Minnesota became the 32nd state, it has never deigned to let people buy packaged beer, wine, or liquor on Sunday. Minnesotans who wanted to have drinks at home on the Christian Sabbath had to plan ahead or make a run to neighboring Wisconsin, which has allowed Sunday sales since 1874.

You might wonder whether it is constitutional to foist a religious day of rest on people who choose not to observe it. According to the Supreme Court, it is. The Court’s reasoning highlights the petty tyranny of blue laws.

In the 1961 case McGowan v. Maryland, seven department store employees challenged their criminal convictions for daring to sell people “a loose-leaf binder, a can of floor wax, a stapler, staples and a toy” on a Sunday. The Court rejected their argument that Maryland’s blue law violated the First Amendment’s ban on “an establishment of religion.”

“There is no dispute that the original laws which dealt with Sunday labor were motivated by religious forces,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the majority opinion. But he added that “as presently written and administered, most of them, at least, are of a secular rather than of a religious character.”

I’ve always been of the opinion that blue laws are less about religion and more about establishing cartels and limiting sales hours in order to reduce competition and artificially raise prices.

DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: He Got a Bad Grade. So, He Got the Constitution Amended. Now He’s Getting the Credit He Deserves.

The story begins in 1982. A 19-year-old sophomore named Gregory Watson was taking a government class at UT Austin. For the class, he had to write a paper about a governmental process. So he went to the library and started poring over books about the U.S. Constitution — one of his favorite topics.

“I’ll never forget this as long as I live,” Gregory says. “I pull out a book that has within it a chapter of amendments that Congress has sent to the state legislatures, but which not enough state legislatures approved in order to become part of the Constitution. And this one just jumped right out at me.”

That unratified amendment read as follows:

“No law varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives shall take effect until an election of representatives shall have intervened.”

Basically, it means any raise Congress votes to give itself can’t take effect until after the next election, allowing voters to decide how they felt about that.

The amendment had been proposed almost 200 years earlier, in 1789. It was written by James Madison and was intended to be one of the very first amendments, right along with the Bill of Rights.

But it didn’t get passed by enough states at the time. You see, to ratify an amendment, you need three-quarters of states to approve it.

This amendment, though it was 200 years old, didn’t have a deadline.

Gregory was intrigued. He decided to write his paper about the amendment and argue that it was still alive and could be ratified. He got to work, being very meticulous about citations and fonts and everything. He turned it in to the teaching assistant for his class — and got it back with a C.

Read the whole thing — you’ll love the happy ending.

QUESTION ASKED: General to Male Marines: ‘How Much More Do Females of Our Corps Have to Do to be Accepted?’

JON GABRIEL: Southern Poverty Law Center Spreads Hate.

Angry protesters shouted down an eminent scholar and sent a female professor to the hospital.

A crazed gunman entered a D.C. public policy shop and shot an employee before being disarmed.

Someone mailed a suspicious white powder to a Scottsdale advocacy group, partially closing the office while a Hazmat team tested employees who had been exposed.

The victims in each case were targeted by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The SPLC is a non-profit heralded for its noble history defending civil rights. Founded in 1971, the Montgomery, Ala. legal advocacy organization sued the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups in the South on behalf of victims. Big settlements and harsh sanctions were levied against the racist organizations, successfully shuttering some and scaring off many others.

But by 1986, these groups had rapidly declined. The SPLC could have declared “mission accomplished.” But since funds were still coming in, they declared a new mission statement. No longer would they fight Grand Wizards and Jim Crow, but turned instead to an endlessly expanding target of “extremism.” The change in goals was so stark, the entire legal staff resigned.

They’re a disgrace and a fraud. It’s nice to see them face such accountability in the pages of USA Today.

OH, WELL WHEN YOU PUT IT THAT WAY…

This is a silly smear effort, even for the New York Times. The first three grafs really do amount to nothing more than “lawyer did lawyering and speaking gigs for guy who can afford to pay lawyers for lawyering and speaking gigs.” The fourth graf is when we get to the really juicy stuff — Gorsuch’s radical, offensive, and possibly racist statement at one of those speaking gigs:

“They say a country’s prosperity depends on three things: sound money, private property and the rule of law,” Judge Gorsuch said at the 2010 retreat, according to his speaker notes from that year. “This crowd hardly needs to hear from me about the first two of the problems we face on those scores.”

If this is the best they’ve got, Senate Democrats would be insane to risk losing the filibuster trying to block Gorsuch.

ACTUALLY, IT’S A VERY OLD ENEMY: Erdogan and Europe: The EU Has a New Enemy.

A bitter dispute between Turkey and the European Union is spreading across the continent this week, following decisions by the German and Dutch governments to cancel Turkish diaspora rallies in Europe. . . .

Erdogan’s inflammatory accusations are not merely anti-EU posturing. Turkey and the West are undergoing an increasingly acrimonious divorce, with both sides shedding former illusions about their shared values and interests. Erdogan has locked up tens of thousands of people on the flimsiest excuses, committed extraordinary human rights abuses, and abandoned every principle that the EU believes in. More fundamentally, he has destroyed the best hope in a generation of genuinely Islamic form of democracy, and is currently stoking Islamophobia in the West and xenophobia in Turkey.

The escalating row is already increasing this mutual resentment. In Turkey, the diplomatic slights and police action against protesters have incited popular outrage, with both AK Party supporters and the opposition calling for a suspension of relations with the Netherlands, while Erdogan mulls sanctions. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders has harped on the controversy to drum up last-minute momentum for his anti-Islamic party ahead of Wednesday’s elections; France’s Marine Le Pen has similarly been demagoguing the issue. Mainstream European politicians, meanwhile, are feeling the pressure to take a hard line against Turkey to avoid being outflanked by the far Right.

Turkey and Europe are, in fact, returning to their traditional relationship as yet another postwar institutional arrangment comes to an end.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS… WaPo Preps for Storm and Bashes Trump for Doing the Same.

The Post hypocritically bashed Trump for taking this winter storm Stella seriously just hours after the newspaper hyped the storm itself, according to tweets captured by Cameron Gray, a writer for NRA News, on March 14.

A Post Twitter account dedicated to D.C. news mocked Trump for inviting “D.C. mayor to Oval Office for storm that brought 2 inches of snow.”

Less than 24 hours before, however, The Washington Post’s main twitter account asked “Are you prepping for the Northeast Blizzard?,” and advised “here are the things you you really do need in your winter emergency kit,” and reported “more than 4,000 flights” had been canceled due to the impending storm.

It’s different when they do it.

THE HOTTEST JAMS: Woman’s headphones explode mid-flight after she falls sleep listening to music.

Photos show the young woman’s face covered with what appears to be soot, with her hair and hand singed from the exploding electronics.

She says she threw the headphones to the ground when they began to spark, and eventually put them in a bucket of water for the rest of the flight.

“People were coughing and choking the entire way home” as the smell of burnt metal and plastic lingered, the woman said.

The cause of the mini-blast is believed to be the batteries in the headphones — which were not identified by brand — according to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.

The authorities really need to go public with the brand.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Campuses Are Becoming Unsafe Spaces for Conservative Students.

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WELL, GOOD: Mattis Withdraws Anne Patterson as Controversial Choice for Defense Position.

She was at best an incomprehensible pick.