MY USA TODAY COLUMN OFFERS A SOLUTION TO ROBOCALLS: If You Want My Attention, Pay Me.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: My latest Observer essay. Congress must investigate the spurious Syrian chemical weapons deal Obama made with Vladimir Putin.

RELATED: Russia’s Syrian air defense system didn’t work as advertised. Apparently it’s reminding many Russians of the Kremlin’s hollow Cold War-era boasts.

THE SIMPSONS TAKES ON SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS AT YALE. They’re no match for Montgomery Burns and Homer.

BAD CALL: Trump Congratulates Erdoğan on Sweeping New Presidential Powers.

FROM THE BBC: North Korea promises to test missiles on a weekly basis.

Why?

Its aim is to be able to put a nuclear warhead on an intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach targets around the world, including the US.

By George the Beeb has got it!

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related: The Unexpected Return of Duck and Cover.

HMM: 2020s To Be A Decade of Disorder For Oil.

MICHAEL BARONE: Advice to Democrats: Don’t let California vote early in 2020.

What will it mean for Democrats if California votes right after Iowa and New Hampshire? For one thing, it will require Democratic candidates, who constantly inveigh against the evils of money in politics, to raise very large amounts of money up front.

That’s probably the only way they’ll be able to get their messages across to California’s 5 million-plus Democratic voters. Trying to organize the state precinct by precinct sounds impossible. Another likelihood is that California’s public employee unions will become the kingmakers. This will help Democrats if you think they need a candidate who backs hugely higher government spending; not so much if you don’t.

To appeal to Hispanic voters, Democratic candidates will have an incentive to get very close to an open borders and amnesty immigration policy, which may not help in other states. As for appealing to white non-college voters, the group which arguably defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, California won’t be much help; there aren’t very many of them in the state. High taxes and high housing costs have driven hundreds of thousands of non-affluent whites to leave California. . . .

California Democrats argue that California, with its huge size, should have more clout in determining the Democratic nomination. That’s a reasonable enough assertion. But you can’t argue, these days, that California is typical of the nation demographically or politically, as it was from the 1940s to the 1990s.

California’s electorate, according to fivethirtyeight.com, is 26 percent non-college white, compared to 42 percent nationally. California is 6 percent black, compared to 13 percent nationally. California is 24 percent Hispanic compared to 13 percent nationally. California is 14 percent Asian compared to 5 percent nationally.

You get the idea. The only group which is similar-size in this state and the nation is college-educated whites: 29 percent of California, 31 percent of the nation. But evidence suggests—take a look at those San Francisco Bay Area election returns—that California’s college-educated whites are much more left-wing than the rest of the nation’s.

And so is California, of course.

If California goes early, we might get Bernie as the nominee this time!

TODAY’S BOSTON MARATHON, FROM THE HERALD:

And here’s video: Marine Veteran runs Boston Marathon with American flag and inspires others.

UPDATE: A reader writes: “Btw: Staff Sgt. Jose Luis Sanchez was running for the Semper Fi Fund, supporting wounded vets: semperfifund.org.” (Bumped).

OH, SNAP: UK Prime Minister Theresa May to seek early election.

May, who commands only a slim majority in parliament’s lower House of Commons, said that a new mandate would strengthen her hand in negotiations in Brexit talks.

Her decision is a reversal of policy — since taking over as Prime Minister, May had repeatedly ruled out an early election.

A general election would end the attempts of opposition parties and members of the House of Lords to thwart her Brexit plans, she said. “If we do not hold a general election now, their political game playing will continue,” she said.

Probably not just a coincidence that yesterday’s YouGov poll showed the Conservatives with a 21-point lead over Labour. And the pro-Brexit U.K. Independence Party is showing renewed strength at 10 percent.

ALSO SENATE MEMBERS. AND JOURNALISTS. Opinion: House Members Should Take Civics Tests.

Hell, I’d be happy if they’d just take civics.

JUDGES SHOULDN’T PARTICIPATE IN RALLIES ON TOPICS THEY ADJUDICATE: Arkansas Supreme Court removes Arkansas judge from death penalty cases after protests.

MARK STEYN: Who Lost Turkey? (Revisited). “Sultan Erdoğan – who, a mere 15 years ago, was banned from holding political office – has now succeeded in dismantling almost every defining element of the Kemalist republic. What replaces it will be a crude strongman state in service of Islamic imperialism. . . . In fairness to the new Caliph, ever since he emerged from his semi-pro footballing career to run for Mayor of Istanbul, he’s played a more cunning game than the stan-of-the-month loons. As he said in one of his most famous soundbites, democracy is a bus you ride to the stop you want – and then you get off. And he was quite happy to take the scenic route, stop by stop by stop. In the two or three years after he came to power, I was assured that he was a ‘moderate Islamist’ not merely by the all the foreign-policy think-tank ‘experts’ but even by his political rivals in the previous Kemalist government.”

THEY SHOULD HAVE WRITTEN A HAREBRAINED LETTER ASKING FOR THEIR MONEY BACK: Claremont Snowflakes Write Hairbrained Open Letter Characterizing Truth as a ‘Myth’

SARITHA PRABHU: How The Left Distorted The Immigration Debate. “One thing they did successfully was blur the distinction between legal and undocumented immigrants.”

You mean, legal and illegal immigrants. “Undocumented” is just more blurring. But yeah. Plus:

The other way progressives distorted the immigration debate was to confuse the issue on whether immigration is a right or a privilege. Does the United States have a right, like any other country, to have a say in who, how many and what kind of immigrants (low-skilled, high-skilled) to allow into the country?

Do non-criminal, hardworking, law-abiding people all over the world have a right to immigrate to this country?

In a rational, commonsense world, the respective answers to the above questions are obviously “yes” and “no.” But somehow, during the last eight years the debate shifted so much that the answers seemed to become “no” and “yes.”

Which is how you got Trump.

JUSTICE? Silicon Valley CEO Pleads ‘No Contest’ to Abusing His Wife—and Is Offered a Deal for Less Than 30 Days in Jail.

She would later be asked by a Sunnyvale police officer whether she considered getting away from her husband when he was assaulting her.

“The victim told me she did not think she could leave,” the officer would write in a report. “In the past if she did anything other than take the assault it made her husband angrier, and the assault was worse. She added that he had already assaulted her that evening, and this was the second assault. She clarified the suspect used both hands to hit her on both sides. Initially his left hand held her right ear, but then he switched to striking her with his left hand.”

By the time of that report, Rastogi had taken the video and other evidence she had gathered with her iPhone to the police. Her 38-year-old husband was arrested and ended up pleading no contest. The device she helped refine seemed to have become an instrument of justice.

But to 36-year-old Rastogi’s dismay, the top charge against Abhishek was reduced from felony assault to felony accessory after the fact, with an accompanying misdemeanor of “offensive touching.”

When did the San Francisco Bay area become such a cesspit of violent misogyny?

SO DO REPUBLICANS: Democrats welcome Bernie takeover.

Democrats previously reticent to welcoming Sen. Bernie Sanders into their fold are coming around.

More than a dozen Democrats interviewed by The Hill say the Vermont Independent has become a powerful and welcome voice for a party struggling to find its identity after a devastating defeat in 2016.

While misgivings remain about giving too much leadership to a politician who technically isn’t a Democrat, a clear warming trend is on the rise.

“It continues to drive me a bit nuts that he continues to register as an Independent, but the bottom line is that he is a good Democrat,” said Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist who supported Hillary Clinton during the Democratic presidential primary and openly worried then about Sanders’s allegiances to the party.

During the primary, some Democrats worried that Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, was pushing the party too far to the left.

Sanders doesn’t have to become a Democrat, because the Democrats have joined him as Socialists.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Spy Agency Hackers Pose As – Anybody.

The recently released WikiLeaks archives of alleged CIA hacking tools have led some cybersecurity specialists to believe that a unit called Umbrage is facilitating CIA false flag operations by acquiring and repurposing techniques – either those found online, stolen from other governments, or purchased from private security firms and illicit groups acting as brokers. Whether the CIA conducts such false flag operations remains unconfirmed. Some commentators – including WikiLeaks – have alleged that that the intention of repurposing tools is to imitate other actors, rather than that the CIA is simply improving its own arsenal. This charge rests on shaky ground at best. After all, once attacks are deployed, others can copy their techniques. A thriving market for hacking techniques has appeared in recent years. It would be surprising if government spy agencies were not taking advantage of it.

To add to the confusion, multiple actors sometimes use the same tools. For example, the 2012 attack against Saudi Aramco and the 2014 attack against Sony Pictures had in common a disk-wiping tool called RawDisk. Yet the Saudi Aramco attack has largely been attributed to Iran, while the Sony attack was blamed on North Korea – even resulting in U.S. imposed sanctions.

If a false flag operation is to be successful, it cannot rely on a single bogus lead. Some experts question whether any false flag operation can completely deceive everyone. Some false flag gambits may be meant as warning shots. “A state might try to send a signal to another state,” says Maurer, “knowing the victim state will be capable of attributing the true source, while all or most other states will not notice.”

Who can see past the false flags to fix blame for cyber attacks? The Kaspersky Lab paper argues that major signals intelligence agencies, particularly the NSA and the UK’s GCHQ, are capable of attributing attacks with certainty and confidence. The problem is, the secret agencies cannot make their cases in public. “As intelligence agencies,” the paper says, “they are blessed with the ability to see but not to publically substantiate, the gift to attribute without being believed.”

This is the kind of report which used to fill you with confidence about our spy agencies, but now makes you wonder exactly whom those tools are being used against.

LITTLE HITLERS: Students Demand Administrators ‘Take Action’ Against Conservative Journalists. “In an open letter to outgoing Pomona College President David Oxtoby, a group of students from the Claremont Colleges assail the president for affirming Pomona’s commitment to free speech and demand that all five colleges ‘take action’ against the conservative journalists on the staff of the Claremont Independent.”

If they do, I”m organizing a campaign to strip the Colleges of their accreditation, and I’m writing Betsy DeVos to ask that the Department of Education make them ineligable for federal student aid. Others are welcome to join me in this effort.

YEAH, PRETTY MUCH: Trump juggles the foreign policy balls Obama dropped.

GOOD MORNING: Make it even better with Liz Sheld’s morning brief.

LEGAL EDUCATION’S DIVERSITY PROBLEM: “How much more liberal are law professors than members of the legal profession? A new paper by Adam Bonica (Stanford University), Adam S. Chilton (University of Chicago), Kyle Rozema (Northwestern University) and Maya Sen (Harvard University), ‘The Legal Academy’s Ideological Uniformity,’ provides some answers. Their bottom line: The legal academy is significantly more liberal than the legal profession, which is notable because the legal profession itself is more liberal than the public at large.”

Plus: “Writing in opposition to a proposed measure in North Carolina that would prohibit the University of North Carolina School of Law’s Center for Civil Rights from engaging in litigation, Gene Nichol suggested the center’s critics are “nakedly ideological” because they would have no problem with law school programs enlisting students in efforts to protect gun rights or religious liberty. He might be right, but how would we know? It’s not as if UNC’s law school has any such programs, or even a critical mass of right-leaning faculty members. I agree with much that Nichol has to say in his piece, but I also suspect his arguments would be more persuasive to a Republican-dominated state legislature if there were more ideological diversity on UNC’s law faculty and within the law school’s academic programming.”

OBAMA’S LEGACY: Berkeley Descends Into Chaos Over Free Speech: This can’t serioously be the future of free discourse in America.

GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: FCC Kept ‘Obamaphone’ Fraud Under Wraps Until After It Expanded Program: Commissioners were instructed not to reveal $5 million fine until day after controversial Lifeline expansion vote.

AT AMAZON, Craft Gun Holsters.

WAIT, I’M ASSURED BY ALL THE BEST PEOPLE THAT NO ONE LIKES HIM AT ALL: Rasmussen: Trump’s Approval/Disapproval at 50/50.