NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Lesser-Known (But Still Valuable) Wisdom of Benjamin Franklin.

ARE GENDER ATTITUDES CHANGING?

Using a survey that has monitored the attitudes of high school seniors for nearly 40 years, the sociologists Joanna Pepin and David Cotter find that the proportion of young people holding egalitarian views about gender relationships rose steadily from 1977 to the mid-1990s but has fallen since. In 1994, only 42 percent of high school seniors agreed that the best family was one where the man was the main income earner and the woman took care of the home. But in 2014, 58 percent of seniors said they preferred that arrangement. In 1994, fewer than 30 percent of high school seniors thought “the husband should make all the important decisions in the family.” By 2014, nearly 40 percent subscribed to that premise.

A different survey found a similar trend, in this case concentrated mainly among men. In 1994, 83 percent of young men rejected the superiority of the male-breadwinner family. By 2014 that had fallen to 55 percent. Women’s disagreement fell far less, from 85 percent in 1994 to 72 percent in 2014. Since 1994, young women’s confidence that employed women are just as good mothers as stay-at-home moms has continued to inch up, but young men’s has fallen. In fact, by 2014, men aged 18 to 25 were more traditional than their elders. . . .

It’s not just the youngest millennials who seem resistant to continuing the gender revolution. Overall, Americans aged 18 to 34 are less comfortable than their elders with the idea of women holding roles historically held by men. And millennial men are significantly more likely than Gen X or baby boomer men to say that society has already made all the changes needed to create equality in the workplace.

Hmm.

NOT AN APRIL FOOL: Hillary Clinton Had Astonishing Access to Top Secret Documents After She Left State Department. “And it wasn’t just Clinton who kept the power of top secret access. It was six of her former staffers, who went by the tag of ‘research assistants.'”

ANDREW MCCARTHY: Flynn’s Reported Immunity Request.

The object of the Left’s game is to nullify Trump’s presidency, whether by impeachment or withering rebuke. The best way to get there is to demonize his associates, such that they are criminals and their crimes are his crimes. On that list, it doesn’t get higher than Mike Flynn.

Long before riding the front of the Trump Train, Flynn made himself the bête noire of the intelligence community, accusing it of politicizing intelligence analyses and concealing the ineffectiveness of Obama’s approach to jihadist terror – claims which, to the great embarrassment of Obama’s spy chiefs, have been corroborated by intelligence agency operatives. Like Trump, moreover, Flynn – brash, unpolished, and erratic – has a knack for making enemies on all sides, such that Washington is now full of two kinds of people: those out to get Flynn and those who whisper that he has it coming.

Read the whole thing.

THE HILL: The Congressional Review Act and a deregulatory agenda for Trump’s second year.

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!

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THE PROBLEM WITH CHATTERING-CLASS TALKING POINTS IS THAT THEY MOSTLY RESONATE WITH THE CHATTERING CLASSES: So What if Mike Pence Won’t Dine Alone With Women, Say a Surprising Number of People. Well, to the chattering class, banging an intern in the oval office is a private matter within a marriage. But not cheating is a problematic question of governance.

Entirely, 100% unrelated: “Acacia Friedman, from San Diego, was charged with engaging in prostitution. Friedman, pictured left with former President Bill Clinton, is a student at the University of Miami.”

BYRON YORK: 11 key points about Trump-Russia and Obama-Hideously Illegal Spying On Political Opponents.

Yes, the column has “Trump-Russia” in the title but it addresses Trump-Russia and Obama-Hideously Illegal Spying On Political Opponents.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: WSJ: 100 Colleges Offer Loan Repayment Assistance To Graduates, As Do 100 Law Schools. But it’s the graphic of total student loan debt that’s scary. If only there had been some sort of warning.

BUT OF COURSE: Germany rejects US pressure for Nato spending rise.

Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said it was “quite unrealistic” to believe Germany would spend 2% of its economic output on the military.

Other spending such as development aid, he said, should be taken into account.

However, Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg echoed US calls for member states to pay an equal proportion.
“Diplomacy, development aid, economic co-operation can be important to help stabilise a region,” Mr Stoltenberg told a news conference after Nato talks in Brussels.

“We have international targets, guidelines, for development aid, 0.7% of GDP [gross domestic product], and then we have a Nato agreement on moving towards 2%. But those are two different things… It is not either development or security, it is development and security.”

Soft power is the kind word. Hard power is the gun. Even Al Capone knew you need both.

THE LAW IS THE LAW (VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY WHIM): Dems Move to Ban ICE from Arresting Illegal Immigrants in ‘Sensitive Locations’

Nicholas Ballasy has the full story.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Everyone graduates? It’s ‘just a fantasy.’

STEVE HANKE: ON VENEZUELA’S DEATH SPIRAL. “I compute the implied annual inflation rate on a daily basis by using PPP to translate changes in the VEF/USD exchange rate into an annual inflation rate. The chart below shows the course of that annual rate, which peaked at 800% (yr/yr) in the summer of 2015. At present, Venezuela’s annual inflation rate is 150%, one of the highest in the world (see the chart below). To stop Venezuela’s death spiral, it must dump the bolivar and adopt the greenback. This is called “dollarization.” It is a proven elixir. I know because I operated as a State Counselor in Montenegro when it dumped the worthless Yugoslav dinar in 1999 and replaced it with the Deutsche mark. I also watched the successful dollarization of Ecuador in 2001, when I was operating as an adviser to the Minister of Economy and Finance. Countries that are officially dollarized produce lower, less variable inflation rates and higher, more stable economic growth rates than comparable countries with central banks that issue domestic currencies. Dollarization is, therefore, desirable.”

Not to Maduro, for whom it would be a humiliating admission of just how thoroughly he’s screwed the country.

THIS IS CNN: Trump moves agenda forward even as Russia controversy swirls.

If Trump weren’t still pursing his agenda, CNN would have gone with something like “Trump agenda mired in Russian swamp.”

15 YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT, FROM ASPARAGIRL: “And why do we have to keep talking about a peace process? What fucking peace? I don’t see a peace here, do you? I see Israelis getting blown up day after day after day while they’re supposed to give Arafat one more chance. This time he really means it, this time he’ll try harder, this time he’ll change. It’s like an abusive marriage; Israel gets her teeth knocked in, but stick with it honey, and maybe you and your man can work things out! He was just upset, you see, had a hard day at the office and all. And you were probably askin’ for it anyway. And if you really don’t like it, then why do you stay with the guy anyhow?”

SPENGLER: The ‘Racism’ Libel Against the Trump Administration.

The debate over America’s attitude towards the Islamic world has been bitter, even vitriolic. But no-one to my knowledge in the Republican camp ever alleged that racism motivated the opponents of the Bush Freedom Agenda — not until the odious Max Boot denounced Trump’s GOP as “the party of white nationalism” in a March 14 screed at the Foreign Policy website:

This is how the Bannons and [Rep. Steve] Kings view the modern world: The West is threatened by hordes of swarthy outsiders, especially Mexicans and Muslims, and they are lonely defenders of the white Christian race against this insidious threat. There is no evidence that Trump has given this matter as much thought as they have, but, based on his public pronouncements, he has reached similar conclusions. That helps to explain why the administration is building a border wall, expanding deportations, and trying to keep out citizens of as many Muslim countries as possible. This isn’t about fighting terrorism or crime; it’s about fighting changing demographics. And it’s premised on an unspoken assumption that only white Christians are true Americans; all others are “somebody else.”

That is the sort of race-baiting one expects to hear from the extreme left; it is a new and disgusting development to hear it from a supposed conservative (in this case a neo-conservative).

Read the whole thing.

The ongoing right-on-right warfare is a sign that either the right is incapable of governing, or that a major segment of it simply doesn’t want to — or both, depending on who you’re reading.

WHAT WE MEAN when we talk about media bias:

Issie Lapowsky at Wired has an interesting piece on Ro Khanna’s proposal to radically expand the earned-income tax credit. Lapowsky writes that this will be difficult to do, because “the Trump administration is gutting the federal budget.” Setting aside the fact that tax laws are written by Congress and not by the White House, the Trump administration’s budget proposal contains a 1.2 percent spending cut to the discretionary budget, i.e. a 1.2 percent cut to a portion of the budget that amounts to less than one-third of federal spending.

A 1.2 percent cut to 29 percent of federal spending is not “gutting the federal budget” under any plausible interpretation of those words by a reasonably literate English-speaking person. The reason these kinds of erroneous — indeed, ridiculous — claims get published is that magazines such as Wired are full of people who suffer from similar biases and who therefore never think to challenge such claims. The same holds true for all sorts of things: guns and gun laws, for example, or questions involving religion, something that Dean Baquet at the New York Times has at least acknowledged is a problem.

Fake news.

ROD DREHER: Queering Engineering At Purdue. Sample: “My scholarship currently focuses on applying liberative pedagogies in engineering education, leveraging best practices from women’s studies and ethnic studies to engage students in creating a democratic classroom that encourages all voices.”

Plus: “And there you were, thinking that the hard sciences and engineering were immune to this kind of thing, because they are about numbers. Anybody object to bringing cultural politics into the engineering classroom? Anybody think there’s something … off about using engineering courses to ‘de-center’ Western civilization? Go ahead, I dare you to object. You and your white male science privilege!”

And no, this isn’t an April Fool post.

FROM C J CARELLA: In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4).

LINKS YOU CAN USE: How To Create A Realistic Looking Head In A Jar

FROM PETER GRANT: Rocky Mountain Retribution (The Ames Archives Book 2).

THIS IS MY EXTREMELY SHOCKED FACE: Anti-Gorsuch Liberal Group Fails to Disclose Donors.

UNEASILY RESTS THE HEAD: Your pillows are just bags of bugs and their poop.

BUT IF WE PERMIT CULTURAL MISCEGENATION, WE’LL NEVER BE PURE AGAIN:How the Melting Pot Became “Cultural Appropriation”.