ROLL CALL: This Budget Isn’t Dead on Arrival: Trump’s budget draws the battle lines between the parties.

The practical truth is that the president’s budget sets the tone, direction and parameters of the debate over government operations each year. While members of Congress have a stake in making the public and press think that they are in charge of their own constitutional authority to make spending decisions, they tend to follow the course of the president if he is in the same party as the majorities in the House and Senate.

Conservative spending hawks are hailing this budget because they know it is consequential in changing the nature of the debate over the government’s role in American life.

“The people in Washington have mortgages, car payments and bills to pay that depend on government not shrinking,” said Sheila Cole, a former executive director of the Republican Study Committee under then-Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana. “Much of America is tired of their sky-is-falling, big-spending mentality. President Trump is tapping into that sentiment.”

Lay off everybody who was declared “nonessential” during the last government shutdown. . . .

THE SECRET SERVICE IS JUST ONE OF MANY ONCE-REVERED INSTITUTIONS THAT TURNS OUT NOT TO BE ALL IT WAS CRACKED UP TO BE: Chaffetz: White House intruder close enough to ‘rattle the door handle.’

WHEN AGITPROP RUNS ITS COURSE: Key Democratic Officials Now Warning Base Not to Expect Evidence of Trump/Russia Collusion.

The principal problem for Democrats is that so many media figures and online charlatans are personally benefiting from feeding the base increasingly unhinged, fact-free conspiracies — just as right-wing media polemicists did after both Bill Clinton and Obama were elected — that there are now millions of partisan soldiers absolutely convinced of a Trump/Russia conspiracy for which, at least as of now, there is no evidence. And they are all waiting for the day, which they regard as inevitable and imminent, when this theory will be proven and Trump will be removed.

We’ve reached the point at which Glenn Greenwald has become a voice of sanity. But all that agitprop has borne its desired fruit: Poll: Majority of young adults view Trump as ‘illegitimate’ president.

WELL, TO BE FAIR, THAT’S PRETTY MUCH THE GOAL: How labeling my organization a hate group shuts down public debate.

ACCOUNTABILITY: Federal judge green-lights lawsuit against San Jose for failing to protect Trump supporters outside rally.

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TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Louisiana teacher gets no jail time after pleading guilty to having a sexual relationship with a female student.

Well, that no-jail-time thing won’t do it.

Related: Female teacher admits sex with two underage pupils but avoids jail. “The judge found that he had enough evidence to find her guilty but did not and placed her on a 10-year deferred adjudication probation.”

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: “Here’s what a ‘socially conscious’ NCAA bracket looks like, explains sports journalist,” CNN tweeted earlier today.

How will America survive four to eight years not having a president who reveals his NCAA bracket?

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Are Democrats Becoming Extremists?

The comparison to the Tea Party is inapt. Democrats aren’t acting like the Tea Party. They’re acting like their dishonest caricatures of the Tea Party.

WHY IS THE DNC-MSM SUCH A CESSPIT OF HATRED AND MISOGYNY? Media Yawn as Rapper Sexually Threatens First Lady.

CONSIDERING THE SOURCE, THIS SOUNDS LIKE PROJECTION TO ME: “Americans reject the advice of experts to insulate their fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong.”

It was experts that gave us the financial crisis, it was experts that gave us the Middle East meltdown, it was experts who gave us the obesity epidemic and the opioid crisis. And yet the experts pay no price for their failures, and cling bitterly to their credentials and self-esteem, while claiming that the problem lies in the anti-intellectualism of ordinary citizens.

UPDATE: These lines of David Mamet’s from The Verdict say it well. “You guys, you’re all the same. The doctors at the hospital, you, it’s always what I’m gonna do for you. And then you screw up and it’s ‘Uh, we did the best that we could, I’m dreadfully sorry.’ And people like us live with your mistakes.”

THIS SEEMS TO BE LESS ABOUT FANCY MARTIAL-ARTS MOVES AND MORE ABOUT SIZE AND FEROCITY: Video shows Mormon missionary fighting off armed attacker in Brazil. Even without size, ferocity will get you a long way. Once, to test her situational awareness, I snatched the Insta-Wife’s purse. I’ll never do that again.

And if I were the Mormons, I’d have long ago worked to establish a reputation that the “white shirt and plaque” were things you didn’t mess with. This guy certainly did his part.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “Several faculty members at Pitzer College recently discussed launching an ‘investigation’ of a student paper for accurately reporting a student’s public comments about ‘cultural appropriation.’”

Earlier: Jon Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind and How We Should Address It (Video).

GREG JOHNSON: “We are engaged in a great legal war.”

UPDATE: Dershowitz: Courts Essentially Saying If Obama Issued Trump Travel Ban, It Would Be Constitutional.

RIP: Chuck Berry, Musician Who Helped Define Rock ’N’ Roll, Dies at 90, the New York Times is reporting.

A brilliant songwriter and guitarist (who must have had the biggest hands of any guitarist to play those chugga chugga boogie piano-inspired bass note riffs up and down the fretboard), Berry also had quite a dark side, as Hail, Hail Rock and Roll, the documentary he commissioned for his 60th birthday inadvertently revealed. Director Taylor Hackford’s 2007 article for the London Independent on the making of that film is quite an interesting read. Hackford’s documentary also featured the legendary moment where Berry entered into a battle of egos with protege (and musical director*) Keith Richards over a simple guitar lick in Berry’s song “Oh Carol:”

Chuck Berry & Keith Richards – Oh Carol from Music Management USA on Vimeo.

* Or “S&M director” — “the social and musical director,” as Richards described the painful experience of working with his longtime idol afterwards.

QUESTION ASKED: Are Christians Too Nice?

As Rod Dreher likes to say, if you don’t like the religious right, you’re going to hate the post-religious right.

JOSEPH BOTTUM: Neil Gaiman’s Dream of Blood.

The word gospel occurs only once in Shakespeare—and that, as a participle, when Macbeth sneers at the hesitating murderers and asks, “Are you so gospel’d” that you would hesitate to strike down Banquo and his son?

The brilliant literary critic Paul Cantor suggests we pay careful attention whenever Shakespeare’s plays are located in borderlands: the Cyprus of Othello, set between Europe and Africa, for example, or the Elsinore of Hamlet, caught between the rough manners of rural Denmark and the Renaissance sophistication of the German universities. And so, Cantor points out, with Macbeth’s Scotland. To the northeast lie the Orkney Islands (and, beyond them, Scandinavia), where names like Thorfinn Raven-Feeder are found among praiseworthy rulers. And to the south lies England, where names like Edward the Confessor are given to reverent kings.

Or, to put the matter more exactly: The Norse gods of the Vikings press on one side of the play, while the Christian Trinity presses on the other. And the line between them doesn’t just run through the middle of Scotland. It runs through the middle of Macbeth himself, a half-gospel’d pagan, and his wife. The line between the blood-red dreamscape of the Norseman and the gospel runs through the play.

This is not the only way to interpret Macbeth, of course, but Cantor’s thesis proves fruitful. If nothing else, it reminds us that the 16th-century Shakespeare lived at a time when the eighth- to 10th-century sea-wolves, and the Christianizing of the Northern Europeans, were still living history. These days, we tend to forget what Shakespeare’s audiences could remember—that, right or wrong as a matter of cosmic truth, Christianity was the historical solution to something brutal, violent, and murderous in the winter souls of the pagan invaders, from the Germanic tribes to the Rus. Christianity was the answer to the universal problem that in England manifested itself most clearly with the Norseman. The Church was both the theoretical and practical resolution to the challenge of the Vikings.

Frankly, Europe could take a few lessons from the Vikings, these days. And the Church is — in MacBeth’s sense, if in no other — over-gospel’d these days.

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Known Wolf Terrorist Killed After Attack on Soldier at Paris Airport.

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: This is what is wrong with the American judiciary. “It is wholly ‘out of … bounds’ for an American judge to instruct litigants that their out-of-court statements are inconsistent with ‘effective advocacy.’ Even if not specifically intended, the natural, probable, and expected effect of the dissent’s language is to chill constitutionally protected speech.** It amounts to a directive, from the court*** to the lawyers before it, to instruct their clients to shut up during ongoing litigation. Bybee’s extraordinary language here demands a response from the public, the wider legal community, and the elected arms of the government.”

But there’s a small spot of good news.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Death of the Shoe Salesman, Finally.

I have some kind words for shoe salesmen here.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind and How We Should Address It. Nick Gillespie interviews Haidt for Reason TV.

Here’s the Atlantic article that Haidt and Gillespie reference, which is very much worth your time if you haven’t read it yet.

FLASHBACK: Why Malia Obama Should Study Art History. “Art history is a subject which is often studied by the children of the elite, and it doesn’t get much more child-of-the-elite than Malia Obama.”

THE BBC MORPHED INTO THE 700 CLUB SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: BBC wonders “what is the right punishment for blasphemy?”

WELL, IT’S NOT LIKE THEIR BONES EVER GET STRESSED: Many College Football Players Lack Vitamin D: Study.

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