EMILY SMITH: How to Find Meaning in the Face of Death.

THAT WOULD BE NICE: Trade commission should act to stop Chinese from spying on American consumers.

THIS RUNS CONTRARY TO THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: The Democratic Party is facing a demographic crisis.

For instance, there is a common misconception that Trump was ushered into power by old, white, economically disenfranchised men. However, according to the exit polls, Trump actually did worse than Romney among whites and seniors, but outperformed him among blacks, Asians, Hispanics and young people.

While the Democrats lost a lot of support among low-income Americans, I think it would be a mistake to interpret these as Trump’s base. He won a plurality of every income bracket above US$50,000 as well. He also won more non-Christian and nonreligious voters than any Republican since the 2000 election.

However the biggest surprise of 2016 probably relates to gender. The first major party female candidate for president, running against a notorious misogynist, captured the Democrats’ lowest share of female voters since 2004. And although Trump also got a lower share of female voters than his last three Republican predecessors, he nonetheless won over a majority of white women.

Granted, Trump’s candidacy and campaign were exceptional. However, it would be a mistake to think of these outcomes as aberrations rather than the culmination of a long-running trend. Contrary to the emerging Democratic majority thesis, there does not seem to be any demographic category with which Democrats are progressively improving.

“Blacks, Asians, Hispanics and young people” for the most part did horribly under eight years of Obama, and last year enough of them — if I may borrow the trendy word for this — “woke” and helped put Trump in the White House.

STILL NOT TIRED OF ALL THE WINNING: Under Trump, an Already Depleted I.R.S. Could Face Deep Cuts.

Another round of cuts, tax experts say, could put one of the few federal departments that pay for themselves on life support.

“This is an agency that has had every last drop squeezed out of it,” said Dennis J. Ventry Jr., a member of the I.R.S. advisory council and a law professor at the University of California, Davis. “I don’t know how it’s going to sustain itself.”

The White House budget office has proposed a 14.1 percent cut to the I.R.S. for the fiscal year that begins in October, reducing the agency’s budget to $9.65 billion; six years ago, it stood at $12.1 billion ($13.6 billion when adjusted for inflation).

If approved, the cuts would happen when the number of audits is down and customer service complaints are up as a result of the drop in funding.

If we can’t fire or impeach wrongdoers at I.R.S., the least we can do is starve them out of harassing conservative groups.

FROM THE ANGRY STAFF OFFICER: No More Task Force Rogue Ones: A Tactical Analysis of the Raid on Scarif.

I WOULD REALLY LIKE TO SEE WHAT’S IN IT BEFORE THEY PASS IT: G.O.P. Accused of Playing ‘Hide-and-Seek’ With Obamacare Replacement Bill.

While Republicans discussed details of the health care bill, Democrats went from office to office, hunting for a copy. Lawmakers were told that Republican members of the Energy and Commerce Committee could inspect the bill on Thursday in the basement of a House office building. When Democrats arrived, they were directed to a room on the first floor of the Capitol.

The House Democratic whip, Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, and Representative Paul Tonko, Democrat of New York, went to that room, but could not find the bill there.

Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who has criticized the repeal bill, also tried and failed to see it.

“I have been told that the House Obamacare bill is under lock & key, in a secure location, & not available for me or the public to view,” Mr. Paul said on Twitter as he set off in search of the document, carrying a portable copy machine and trailed by television cameras and a pack of journalists.

Mr. Paul supports repealing the Affordable Care Act, but said the measure described publicly by House Republican leaders included “Democratic ideas dressed up in Republican clothing.”

You want to lose your majority? Because this is how you lose your majority.

ObamaCare slaughtered Congressional Democrats just months after it was passed, but this simple fact seems to be beyond much of the current GOP caucus.

DISGRACED FORMER LEFTY REPORTER charged with threatening Jewish Community Center. Hey, Trump’s right — the media are the enemy! His Twitter bio: “You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker”

ANDREW MCCARTHY: There Is No Such Thing as an Independent Counsel.

SCHER-LY YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS: Bill Scher’s Serious Case for Oprah 2020.

IT DOESN’T MATTER, IT’S ABOUT DELEGITIMIZING HIM, AND TRUMP: Did Sessions Commit Perjury? Let’s Talk It Out.

Now, I don’t know whether Sessions has been in contact with Russian officials or not about the election; neither the senator nor Kislyak have chosen to confide this information to me. But let’s assume for the nonce that he wasn’t. Was his response to Patrick Leahy’s letter reasonable? Eminently. It is reasonable even if, in the course of a meeting on some other topic, the ambassador idly asked how the campaign was going.

Sessions was an early Trump surrogate, and it would have been unsurprising for the ambassador to ask about the race in passing; if Sessions then replied with campaign boilerplate little different from what he was saying in public, that is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a meaningful contact with a foreign power. Anyone at the Kremlin could have gotten the same information by turning on CNN.

But what about the exchange with Franken? This was what really seemed to seize the imaginations of Twitter this morning, where cries of “perjury” were flying left and right. Well, OK, mostly left, actually. I don’t think, however, that those charges are going to stick.

Franken offered a lengthy preamble suggesting that the Trump campaign had been exchanging information with the Russians, then asked him what he’d do if there was information that someone in the Trump campaign had communicated with the Russians. In the time-honored tradition of congressional hearings, Sessions said he hadn’t had any such communications, had no knowledge of such communications, and therefore wouldn’t speculate about the hypothetical.

If you read the latter part of this exchange extremely strictly, chopping off the preamble, then you can argue that Sessions was technically untruthful. The problem is that this is not how verbal communication works. The left is attempting to hold the attorney general to a standard of precision that is appropriate for written communication, where we can reflect on preceding context and choose exactly the right word.

Oral language is much looser, because it’s real time. Real time means that we don’t have 20 minutes to puzzle over the exact phrasing that will best communicate our meaning. (For example: Reading this column aloud will take you perhaps five minutes. It took me nearly that many hours to write.) On the other hand, our audience is right there, and can ask for clarification if they are confused.

Demanding extreme clarity from an oral exchange is unreasonable. Moreover, everyone understands that this is unreasonable — except, possibly, for the chattering classes, who spend their lives so thoroughly marinated in the written word that they come to think that the two spheres are supposed to be identical.

Well, also the chattering classes hate Trump and Sessions. Now if you want to judge Sessions the way the chattering classes judged Obama, Eric Holder, and Loretta Lynch . . . .

OOPS: How a typo took down S3, the backbone of the internet.

On Tuesday morning, members of the S3 team were debugging the billing system. As part of that, the team needed to take a small number of servers offline. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended,” Amazon said. “The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.”

The subsystems were important. One of them “manages the metadata and location information of all S3 objects in the region,” Amazon said. Without it, services that depend on it couldn’t perform basic data retrieval and storage tasks.

After accidentally taking the servers offline, the various systems had to do “a full restart,” which apparently takes longer than it does on your laptop. While S3 was down, a variety of other Amazon web services stopped functioning, including Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which is also popular with internet companies that need to rapidly expand their storage.

Amazon said S3 was designed to be able to handle losing a few servers. What it had more trouble handling was the massive restart.

Paula Bolyard emailed to tell me that PJM (Instapundit included) experienced a brief slowdown, but that “our tech team was able to create a quick workaround and regular service was restored almost immediately.”

We apologize, of course, if there was any inconvenience.

WHAT GOES ON BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: Hillary Clinton speaks at Wellesley College in a private, closed-to-the-press program.

The event was closed to the media, and a previously scheduled livestream was canceled “to ensure this remains a private Wellesley event,” according to the student newspaper, The Wellesley News.

According to the newspaper’s posts on Twitter, Clinton told the audience that as a woman running for office, “You know you’re going to be subject to unfair and beside-the-point criticism.”

She also answered questions from the audience, the newspaper reported. When a student asked, “What would you change about your campaign?” Clinton replied, “I’d win.”

Slow learner.

POLITICAL VIOLENCE: Former Black Lives Matter Supporter Claims Group Planned to Burn Down MN State Capitol.

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IRINA MANTA: Choosing Privacy. “How does one balance national security and civil liberties when they are essentially incommensurable values?”

Well, it’s not always a tradeoff. You can get less national security and less privacy if you have the wrong policies.

TRUMP WAS RIGHT: Large Amounts of Actionable Intelligence Found in Yemen Raid.

SAD! “It is embarrassing that even left-wing UK newspapers are better than any US newspaper regarding coverage of US politics.”

BILL WHITTLE: Dreams Of Madam President.

Bill has found a collection of 2016 presidential “art” which will haunt your dreams and your waking hours.

WHAT IF GPS DIES?: Navigating without Global Positioning Satellites.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: NALP: Summer Associate Hiring Was Flat in 2016.

TEXAS: Vandals target historical markers, stick poor people with the bill.

I THINK WE NEED A SPECIAL PROSECUTOR TO INVESTIGATE THIS: Report: Obama officials spent final days purposely pushing Russia allegations.

Officials in the Obama administration reportedly spent Barack Obama’s final few days in office spreading their message internally that President Trump’s associates had maintained inappropriate ties to Russian officials during the campaign, an allegation that neither the Obama administration nor the Trump administration has publicly substantiated.

Yeah, like that’ll happen. We won’t even get an investigation of Bill Clinton’s tarmac meeting with Loretta Lynch.

WAS BEE-MAGEDDON FAKE NEWS?: This article suggests the NY Times and other mainstream media don’t do a very good job covering agricultural issues.

Covering food and modern farming has not been the Times strong point. Journalist and foodie Michael Pollan’s articles on the virtues of organic food and the dangers of ‘industrialized agriculture’ have been a Times’ staple since the early 2000s. In 2013, he bragged in a video interview with a fellow activist that he long has exploited the willingness of his editors to forego traditional vetting because they share his reflexive anti-industry perspective:

The media has really been on our side for the most part. I know this from writing for the New York Times…. [W]hen I wrote about food I never had to give equal time to the other side. I could say whatever I thought and offer my own conclusions. Say you should buy grass feed beef and organic is better, and these editors in New York didn’t realize there is anyone who disagrees with that point of view. So, I felt like I got a free ride for a long time.

It’s startling that a reputable journalist would boast about manipulating editors who shared a reflexively and uncritical anti-industry—and in this case, an anti-science—world view.

The article is long and involved — just like the subject.

HMM: Conflicting French Polls Show Macron In Either First Or Second Place.

With the Fillon campaign in shambles following a raid of his home by corruption investigators and the subsequent resignation of both his spokesman and campaign manager, and with the republican party now reportedly preparing to replace Fillon with former PM Alain Juppe, the big winner from the ongoing chaos, at least according to one poll, is the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron. The former Rothschild banker reportedly consolidated his status as favorite for the French presidency after an opinion poll published by Odoxa showed Macron coming first in the first round, pushing far-right leader Marine le Pen into second place for the first time since the line-up of candidates became clear.

Odoxa put Macron on 27 percent in the first round on April 23 with Le Pen behind him on 25.5 percent and Fillon on 19. In a scenario where Juppe was to stand in Fillon’s place, Odoxa put Juppe in front on 26.5, with Macron on 25 and Le Pen out of the contest on 24 percent. Odoxa did not present a second-round scenario, but daily polls have consistently shown any candidate beating Le Pen in the May 7 second round.

What actually happens is anybody’s guess.