AWKWARD: Judge denigrated by Trump as ‘Mexican’ will hear key deportation case.

SO THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY HAD A DEBATE TODAY (I WAS MODERATOR) ON THE DRUG WAR, between Sullivan County District Attorney General Barry P. Staubus and Radley Balko. Radley was supposed to drive over from Nashville but got detained, and so appeared as the Big Giant Head via Zoom. It worked nicely, though, and the large crowd of students asked good questions.

THAT’S FUNNY, BECAUSE WHEN I WAS TALKING ABOUT THIS WITH MY STUDENTS THEY SEEMED TO TRUST THEM LESS THAN I DID: The younger you are, the more likely you are to trust autonomous cars.

YES: How Late-Night Comedy Fueled The Rise Of Trump: Sneering hosts have alienated conservatives and made liberals smug. Comedians used to appeal to broad audiences with actual humor. Now they’re just Democratic Party operatives with punchlines. Well, sometimes they have punchlines.

I’ve also thought a good deal about the boy on Samantha Bee’s program. I thought about the moment her producer approached the child’s mother to sign a release so that the woman’s young son could be humiliated on television. Was it a satisfying moment, or was it accompanied by a small glint of recognition that embarrassing children is a crappy way to make a living? I thought about the boy waiting eagerly to see himself on television, feeling a surge of pride that he’d talked about church and Bible study. And I thought about the moment when he realized that it had all been a trick—that the grown-up who had seemed so nice had only wanted to hurt him.

My God, I thought. What have we become?

We? And Caitlin Flanagan’s right here, but she goes out of her way to make sure you understand that she has nothing good to say about that beastly Donald Trump fellow.

CHANGE: President Trump Takes First Step to Give Veterans More Choice in Health Care.

TAMARA KEEL: Cartridge of the Century Part 2: .38 Special, The Golden Years.

FASTER, PLEASE: President Trump Should Run, Not Walk, Away From The Paris Climate Treaty.

REVEALED: Richard Spencer’s Racist Little Secret.

Following the donnybrook that happened in Berkeley, Calif., last week, every media outlet prepared for another showdown between his supposed legion of neofascists and students opposed to his nonsense. I even went to bear witness to the expected tumult.

After his appearance, headlines everywhere documented the thousands of protesters, the brief skirmishes and the First Amendment legal battle that paved the way for his speech. There is one thing they all failed to mention about the brouhaha that ensued:

No one really cared.

That’s right. The whole “celebrity founder of a nationwide ‘alt-right’ movement” narrative is a scam. Richard Spencer is simply an overhyped, racist, Kardashian-like curiosity. He is a media-driven drama queen starring in a reality show that no one cares to watch. He has very few fans and almost no devotees. Richard Spencer is a hoax.

Indeed.

Read the whole thing.

(Hat tip, proud Auburn alum Will Collier.)

QUESTION ASKED: Do You Want Reagan’s Economy or Obama’s?

How is this even a question?

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 1442: Editorial Calls For Firing IRS Commissioner Koskinen.

SHOCKER: Castro Addicted to Power More Than Communism, Recalls Ambassador Who Fled.

If it’s not too presumptuous, I’d remind the ambassador that Communism is nothing but a pretext for seizing power — and everything else.

ROGER SIMON: Is O’Reilly’s Firing Really about Trump?

SO SHATTERED REVEALS SOME DEEP DISHONESTY ON HILARY’S PART ABOUT EMAILS, AS HUGH HEWITT NOTES:

HH: Jon Allen, you sly dog, throughout the course of the writing of this thing, you’ve been on my show a number of times, but we’ve had a number of cigars. We’ve lit up a couple of cigars and had long talks about the campaign. You never gave away any of the bigs. And I must tell you the biggest of the bit, and you know, I’ve read this thing, and I’m looking at it objectively as a reporter, is that Hillary autopsied her own server from 2008, and you never ever gave me a blinking look into that story, you bozo. How, you all along knew that had to be the lead, right?

JA: You know, that’s what we thought. We thought that was something that people would really latch onto. I’m surprised it hasn’t, you know, I’m not surprised that you latched onto it, but I’m surprised it hasn’t been more prominent in some of the reviews and the stories since the book has come out, although it’s only a day old. Yeah, she basically at the end of the 2008 campaign instructed one of her close aides to download the emails of some of her top campaign advisors to figure out who’d been talking to the press, who’d been doing the backstabbing, or presumably if anybody had been talking bad about her, and because she felt that this loyalty was a huge problem for her in 2008. So what she did was figured out how to get all these emails. Now you know, a few years later, she’s making the argument that she didn’t understand what she was doing in setting up a private server outside the State Department system. But it’s very hard to, it’s very hard to reconcile the idea that she understood well enough that she could download her own aides’ emails, but didn’t understand that by putting a server outside the State Department, she was basically preventing people from getting her information during a campaign season, unless of course as happened, there was a court order to retrieve those emails.

HH: Amie Parnes, the implications of this revelation in Shattered are actually very enormous. And if in fact she ever comes before either a prosecutor or a Congressional committee again, they will be going to intention, management of her server as a result of this autopsy. Can you explain a little more at length while Duane redials up Jon to get a better connection? What actually happened here after the campaign of 2008 vis-à-vis her campaign server?

AP: Basically, she wanted to know what happened in her campaign. She wanted to know, obviously, leaking was a problem, a huge problem on her campaign. And she wanted to know exactly who was doing what. And she had this crazy, it was this enormous sort of autopsy that she did, a post-mortem where she met with lots of people, wanted to basically find out exactly what went wrong. This was part of it. So she ordered up one of her staffers to kind of go through, read all these emails and find out who was leaking what and where it all went wrong. And this was part of all of that. This was part of her post-mortem.

As a reader emails, “All of this contradicts her later statements & even testimony about how she didn’t know anything about servers.”

RUSSIA: A Land Power Hungry for the Sea.

From the perspective of the United States and its allies, the current status of the Russian navy offers both comfort and consternation. On the plus side for the West, irrespective of how much money Russia throws at its navy, no serious analyst thinks that the Russian navy can contend for control of the world’s oceans. This is eminently logical because the Russian fascination with the sea does not rest on economic necessity. Moscow never had, and still today does not have, an economy that is dependent on global trade, much less one that demands control of the seas. In addition, Russia’s stark inability to build large ships (think, aircraft carriers) ties its hands in any attempt at blue water sea control and power projection. Plus, it goes unsaid that the Russian economy is always at risk. Continued stagnation in Russian GDP growth probably is the death knell of expanding its navy.

Nonetheless, Putin’s navy continues to perform the missions outlined by Peter the Great, which should begin to offer a stew of comfort mixed with consternation. First, defense of the homeland. The Russian navy’s principal focus is on real estate close to the Russian border. Most of its operations and exercises are in waters adjacent to Russia. Think of it as high firepower potential but limited range. This, however, is comforting only if you are not a NATO member in Eastern Europe near the Russian border. Russia’s resumed deployment of ballistic missile submarines in the Atlantic could be unnerving, but is more readily construed as defense of the homeland, since these submarines, more than ever, will constitute Russia’s second strike – that is, deterrent — capability. Tsar Peter’s secondary consideration – gaining international diplomatic respect and recognition – continues to be supported by Russian Navy port visits and exercises around the world. In recent months, Russian ships have visited Namibia, the Philippines, South Africa, and the Seychelles and also conducted fleet exercises with the Indonesian and Chinese navies. While Putin has lost no ground to Peter the Great, this activity need not keep us awake at night.

Indeed. The old Soviet surface fleet was impressive on paper, but was a huge expense for a country which could ill-afford it while providing zero benefit to the Soviet economy. Its buildup and maintenance helped to bankrupt the U.S.S.R., but the Kremlin was blindly determined to have a fleet to match Western seapower.

Russia’s geopolitical position today is no different that the U.S.S.R.’s — only weaker, and even less able to maintain a power-projecting, blue water surface fleet.

Putin, the former KGB officer, knows all this, and sees himself more in the mold of Peter the Great than the failed Soviet leadership.

So, no — no sleep lost over the Russian Navy.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE VIRTUE-SIGNALLING: Gentry Liberalism in San Francisco.

Local minimum wage hikes cause restaurants to leave or shut down and deter new ones from entering, according to a new Harvard Business School study of the San Francisco Bay Area restaurant industry that contradicts the orthodox liberal view that steeply raising the cost of unskilled labor will not affect jobs or hiring.

More interesting, though, are the study’s findings about which restaurants are forced to leave by the higher wage floors. The authors compared rates of departure of restaurants across different Yelp ratings, and found that the policy hit low and mid-quality restaurants much harder than top-tier restaurants. “Our point estimates suggest that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to an approximate 14 percent increase in the likelihood of exit for the median 3.5-star restaurant but the impact falls to zero for five-star restaurants.”

While a restaurant’s Yelp rating doesn’t correlate directly with its price range, this differential effect suggests that it’s easier for rich people to ignore the deleterious effects of minimum wage hikes. Virtually all of the most expensive restaurants in San Francisco have four or more stars; the city’s business and professional elite are unlikely to see many of their favorite high-end destinations pushed out of the city. Poor or middle-income workers are less likely to have the luxury of only frequenting top-rated establishments, not to mention that they are more likely to work at the restaurants that the hikes put out of business.

Why are California liberals so heartless and cruel?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Tenured Faculty Sue To Stop Closure Of Whittier Law School.

HOARDERS AND WRECKERS: General Motors Quits Venezuela After Officials Seize Plant.

The seizure, in the country’s industrial hub of Valencia, comes amid a deepening economic and political crisis that has sparked weeks of deadly street protests.

General Motors Venezolana, GM’s local subsidiary, said it “strongly rejects the arbitrary measures taken by the authorities and will vigorously take all legal actions, within and outside of Venezuela, to defend its rights.”

The auto giant did not provide any details about its plant being seized, other than saying it “was unexpectedly taken by authorities, preventing normal operations.” It said other assets, “such as vehicles,” had also been stripped from the site.

“Unexpectedly,” GM? Really?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Study: Ivy League Universities Received $41.59 Billion in Taxpayer Funded Payments and Benefits Over Six Years.

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MORE ON SYRIA’S CHEMICAL STRIKE: The L.A. Times is reporting that the Syrian government used weapons of mass destruction in a zone created by “reconciliation deals.” Rebels in other contested regions were given safe passage to the zone if they would leave. After the rebels moved they were attacked. The attacks included attacks with chemical weapons. Well, Bashir al-Assad is a liar.

REPORT: FBI Used Dodgy Dossier to Justify FISA Warrant on Carter Page.

Much about FISA is dodgy.

MISCHIEF IS A SUPERPOWER: One of my former students is blogging about his legal experiences.

SECSTATE TILLERSON: If left unchecked, Iran could follow North Korea’s path. That’s obvious to everyone except Obama. Here’s the background on North Korea’s nuclear quest.