TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1403: Should Koskinen Remain, Resign, Or Be Fired?

TRUMP THE JOBS PRESIDENT: CNN’s Political Director on Trump: ‘The Business Community Could Not Be More Enthusiastic.’

NATE SILVER: You Know, There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble.

It’s hard to reread this coverage without recalling Sean Trende’s essay on “unthinkability bias,” which he wrote in the wake of the Brexit vote. Just as was the case in the U.S. presidential election, voting on the referendum had split strongly along class, education and regional lines, with voters outside of London and without advanced degrees being much more likely to vote to leave the EU. The reporters covering the Brexit campaign, on the other hand, were disproportionately well-educated and principally based in London. They tended to read ambiguous signs — anything from polls to the musings of taxi drivers — as portending a Remain win, and many of them never really processed the idea that Britain could vote to leave the EU until it actually happened.

So did journalists in Washington and London make the apocryphal Pauline Kael mistake, refusing to believe that Trump or Brexit could win because nobody they knew was voting for them? That’s not quite what Trende was arguing. Instead, it’s that political experts aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself until and unless there’s very compelling evidence for the contrary position. Social media, especially Twitter, can amplify the groupthink further. It can be an echo chamber.

Can be, and is.

BETTER HIM THAN DIFI: He’ll Be Back? Arnold Schwarzenegger Eyes Senate Run After Tweaking Trump.

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DEEP STATE UPDATE: Former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell: CIA leak ‘absolutely’ an ‘inside job.’

Former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell said on Saturday that the WikiLeaks’ dump of documents it claims are from the top-secret CIA hacking program is “absolutely” an “inside job.”

Speaking with “CBS This Morning,” Morell said the spy agency should be asking itself whether the leaker was a staff employee or a contractor, and whether there were any “red flags” that were missed.

When asked whether its clear to him that this could have been an inside job, Morell answered, “Absolutely.”

More of the politicization of the bureaucracy that is Obama’s toxic legacy.

L.A. TIMES WONDERS: Why Don’t Voters Hate Trump As Much As We Do?

FLASHBACK: How (then-) U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara Stiffed Reason’s Free Speech.

CHARLIE MARTIN: NARAL Misses the Point on Health Insurance.

THE ACLU IS A NON PARTISAN NONPROFIT, RIGHT? ACLU to teach anti-Trump ‘resistance training.’

CHANGE: While Democrats Fume, Trump Becomes the Jobs President.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Want to Raise Successful Boys? Science Says Do This (but Their Schools Probably Won’t).

News flash: Most boys are rambunctious. Often they seem like they’re in a constant state of motion: running, jumping, fighting, playing, getting hurt–maybe getting upset–and getting right back into the physical action.

Except at school, where they’re required to sit still for long periods of time. (And when they fail to stay still, how are they punished? Often by being forced to skip recess–and thus they sit still longer.)

It’s not just an American issue. Researchers at the University of Eastern Finland recently tried to document whether boys actually achieve less in school when they’re restricted from running around and being physically active.

They studied 153 kids, aged 6 to 8, and tracked how much physical activity and sedentary time they had during the day. Sure enough, according to a report by Belinda Luscombe in Time, the less “moderate to vigorous physical activity” the boys had each day, the harder it was for them to develop good reading skills.

But schools don’t care about raising successful boys. It’s all about grrl power now.

AS IT SHOULD: The American Political Science Association Condemns Violence at Middlebury College on March 2. Academics Come to the Defense of Free Speech.

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NEWS YOU CAN USE: Your brain fills gaps in your hearing without you realising. But note this: “The brain doesn’t seem to use the context of a conversation to improve the accuracy of its guesses.” That actually makes sense, as context-sensitive fill-ins would be much more computationally expensive, with recent words held in a rolling buffer and linked to likely accompanying words and phrases.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Colorado Switchblade/Gravity Knife Bill passes. Please contact Governor’s office and urge him to sign.

ERDOGAN’S PROJECTING LIKE HE’S PAUL KRUGMAN: Turkey’s Erdogan Calls Dutch `Fascists’ After Minister Grounded.

T-BONE COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Cory Booker tells SXSW that he is on front-lines in fight with fake news.

OF COURSE THEY DO: Even Khloé Kardashian’s Lady Parts Have a Beauty Routine.

JOHN NOLTE: RussiaGate: Six Months. No Evidence — It’s Time for the Media to Put Up or Shut Up. “The media has not only found less than nothing, what has been found is a Team Trump behaving responsibly and appropriately in their dealings with Russian officials. Best of all, the only real scandal that appears to have been uncovered involves highly-inappropriate Obama Administration surveillance of a political rival, felonious leaks from an out-of-control intelligence community, and an extra-legal federal bureaucracy.”

FAKE NEWS: Daylight Saving Time Is Like Sex in the Spring.

TRUMP’S FINEST HOUR: “President Trump’s decision to fire 46 United States prosecutors may yet go down as his finest hour. He hasn’t explained the timing. In and of itself it’s not unusual for an incoming administration to ask for the resignations of the U.S. attorneys of the previous regime. Mr. Trump’s action, though, comes amid a broad campaign among his political adversaries to nullify the vote in November. The president may simply have concluded that the country needs to be fully confident that prosecutors are free of political hostility.”

Faster, please.

JAKE TAPPER AT SXSW: TRUMP REQUIRES MORE FACT CHECKING THAN OBAMA DID.

Translation into plain English: Now that there’s a Republican in the White House, we don’t have someone to act as a blocking back for, and invite kids on air to sing his praises and ask for socialized medicine.

DON’T SWEAT THE BIG STUFF: Near the end of his 1979 film Manhattan, Woody Allen, playing a TV writer who quits his day job to concentrate on his novel, talks into a tape recorder to begin outlining his book: “An idea for a short story about, um, people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real, unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves ‘cause it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe.” Which neatly summarizes the theme of the movie we’ve been watching.

In real life, what do “Progressive” politicians do to create unnecessary problems for themselves to avoid solving the simpler more mundane problems they were elected by taxpayers to solve? Invoking another neurotic controlling Manhattan lefty, Victor Davis Hanson warns that they employ “the Bloomberg Syndrome:”

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg used to offer all sorts of cosmic advice on the evils of smoking and the dangers of fatty foods and sugary soft drinks. Bloomberg also frequently pontificated on abortion and global warming, earning him a progressive audience that transcended the boroughs of New York.

But in the near-record December 2010 blizzard, Bloomberg proved utterly incompetent in the elemental tasks for which he was elected: ensuring that New Yorkers were not trapped in their homes by snowdrifts in their streets that went unplowed for days.

The Bloomberg syndrome is a characteristic of contemporary government officials. When they are unwilling or unable to address pre-modern problems in their jurisdictions — crime, crumbling infrastructure, inadequate transportation — they compensate by posing as philosopher kings who cheaply lecture on existential challenges over which they have no control.

Meanwhile on the west coast, “Schwarzenegger’s successor, Jerry Brown, warned of climate change and permanent drought and did not authorize the construction of a single reservoir. Now, California is experiencing near-record rain and snowfall. Had the state simply completed its half-century-old water master plan, dozens of new reservoirs would now be storing the runoff, ensuring that the state could be drought-proof for years…Governors who cannot build a reservoir have little business fantasizing about 200-mph super trains.”

And if you’re curious about how that neurotic obsession of Brown is coming, the Ace of Spades blog has you covered. Exit question: “If you build a train station, will trains come?”

Only if you provide a sufficient amount of magical thinking first.