HMM: Whoever wins this second referendum, Scotland loses.

Why now? Well, the First Minister, with breathtaking casuistry, insists that Scotland should make its choice once the outcome of the Brexit negotiations is clear. But that is, of course, only one part of the package – it gives us no time to look at what comes next for the UK, the replacement deals, the evolving nature of its economy and society, the evolution of the EU, before us Scots have to make what will this time surely be a final and irrevocable decision.

She’s rushing us, because she thinks that gives her the best chance of winning: while all is chaos and uncertainty, with the UK’s reputation at a global low, when the economic predictions are at their most gloomy, and with, as she put it today, the Tories looking like they’ll be in No 10 till 2030.

The Nats have done their prep work and covered the angles. Ms Sturgeon is a much more attractive and conciliatory salesperson than was the toadish Mr Salmond. She promises a “frank” evaluation of an independent Scotland’s prospects, the lack of which did them so much damage in 2014.

She says that at a moment as definitive as Brexit, it is not for her, one politician, to decide Scotland’s future, it is for the Scottish people: a great line. And the separatists hope the “take back control” mood that drove Brexit will equally persuade Scottish voters to overlook the very real economic challenges of an independent state in favour of a vote based on culture, place and power.

That could be a powerful appeal, and, for good or ill, feels more in tune with our times.

EMILY ZANOTTI: Life After Ryan: Sen. Cotton May Soon Be Congress’ New Bossman and No. 1 Heartthrob.

Now, though, these two Congressional heartthrobs are locked in a battle that goes beyond the mere size of their biceps: a struggle over how the Republican Party will handle repealing, replacing or reforming the Affordable Care Act.

Ryan has, of course, proposed the American Health Care Act, which accomplishes some of the GOP’s campaign goals—like ending the healthcare mandate, for example, and guaranteeing right of free exercise for religious health care workers. But it is far from perfect, or even palatable, to most Republicans.

The Administration waffles on the plan daily, saying sometimes that “it’s just the first of a three-part” legislative series, and then pinning the blame for the bare-bones bill squarely on Ryan.

Sen. Cotton, however, has been riding to the rescue of concerned conservatives—perhaps the only one in the GOP badass enough to halt a train going swiftly off the tracks.

Ryan hasn’t exactly covered himself in glory, much less badassery, with the AHCA.

IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN WE DO IT: GOP Senators Ask State Dept. to Investigate Obama Admin’s Meddling in Foreign Elections.

IT’S COMPLICATED: Russia conflicted on how to mark 100 years since revolutions.

THEY ONLY TALK ABOUT IT WHEN THEY AREN’T RUNNING FOR OFFICE: Democrats’ Sudden Amnesia about Obamacare’s Many Ills.

CALCAID HERE WE COME: Gavin Newsom adds a new plank to his 2018 campaign for California governor — a statewide universal healthcare system.

With the proposal, which is modeled on a city program he supported while mayor of San Francisco, Newsom is trying to stake a claim to an issue that may become pivotal in the contested race, especially among his biggest Democratic rivals.

Newsom told the Bee he’s consulting with healthcare leaders to craft a statewide system.

Healthy San Francisco, the first-in-the-nation, city-run universal healthcare effort he conceived, is funded in part by an employer mandate and covers uninsured adults living in San Francisco. Launched in 2007, the plan enrolls all residents without health insurance, regardless of their income, immigration status or existing medical conditions.

The California Legislature already has started exploring the idea of a adopting a state-run “single-payer” system that would operate similar to Medicare.

A similar plan was rejected in November by Colorado voters by a four-to-one margin. Something about doubling state taxes and spending in the first year didn’t seem to sit well with voters. And as reported last week, California’s top marginal income tax is already the highest in the nation — at 13.3% it’s nearly one-third higher than second-place Maine — so “soaking the rich” doesn’t seem like a viable way to raise the necessary funds. Complicating things, Health and Human Services already consumes nearly a third of California’s spending, $53,828,602,000 out of $170,862,847,000.

But California Democrats enjoy supermajorities in the Assembly and the Senate, so if Newsom takes over for Jerry Brown (as seems likely right now), there won’t be much even slowing them down from enacting “universal” coverage — aside from a few internal fights over how to divvy up the loot.

They’d probably call it “CalCaid One” or something similar, but “Venezuela del Mar” has a nice ring to it.

IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN’T DO? How Alcohol and Caffeine Built Civilization.

COMING THIS WINTER TO BOTH MY KIDS’ STOCKINGS: This Lego tape turns anything into a Lego-friendly surface.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: FBI Deputy Director Did Not Include Wife’s Ties to Clinton Ally in Financial Disclosure Forms.

TRUMP: It’s FAKE NEWS Reporter Found My Tax Returns in His Mailbox.

So how much of a stinker is this tax thing, really? CNN is running with “Democrats urge one another not to get distracted by Trump’s taxes.” Which is probably sage advice, given that Trump paid an effective 25% rate, much higher than Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Bernie Sanders. And we wouldn’t be talking about Democrats’ tax rates at all if it weren’t for this story, which is enough to make you wonder if the “fake news reporter” wasn’t someone on the Trump payroll.

WOW: Scientists Have Created an Artificial Retina Implant That Could Restore Vision to Millions.

The retina is located at the back of the eye, and is made up of millions of these light-sensitive photoreceptors. But mutations in any one of the 240 identified genes can lead to retinal degeneration, where these photoreceptor cells die off, even while the retinal neurons around them are unaffected.

Because the retinal nerves remain intact and functional, previous research has looked at treating retinitis pigmentosa with bionic eye devices that stimulate the neurons with lights, while other scientists have investigated using CRISPR gene editing to repair the mutations that cause blindness.

Now, a team led by the Italian Institute of Technology has developed a new approach, with a prosthesis implanted into the eye that serves as a working replacement for a damaged retina.

The implant is made from a thin layer of conductive polymer, placed on a silk-based substrate and covered with a semiconducting polymer.

The semiconducting polymer acts as a photovoltaic material, absorbing photons when light enters the lens of the eye. When this happens, electricity stimulates retinal neurons, filling in the gap left by the eye’s natural but damaged photoreceptors.

To test the device, the researchers implanted the artificial retina into the eyes of rats bred to develop a rodent model of retinal degeneration – called Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) rats.

After the rats had healed from the operation 30 days later, the researchers tested how sensitive they were to light – called the pupillary reflex – compared to healthy rats and untreated RCS rats.

At the low intensity of 1 lux – a bit brighter than the light from a full moon – the treated rats weren’t much more responsive than untreated RCS rats.

But as the light increased to around 4–5 lux – about the same as a dark twilight sky – the pupillary response of treated rats was largely indistinguishable from healthy animals.

Remarkable.

Macular degeneration runs in my family, so it’s with a personal sense of urgency that I add this “Faster, please.”

JEFF JACOBY: Why are climate-change models so flawed?

‘DO YOU believe,” CNBC’s Joe Kernen asked Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency’s new director, in an interview last Thursday, “that it’s been proven that CO2 is the primary control knob for climate?”

Replied Pruitt: “No. I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no — I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

It was an accurate and judicious answer, so naturally it sent climate alarmists into paroxysms of condemnation. The Washington Post slammed Pruitt as a “denier” driven by “unreason.” Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii called Pruitt’s views “extreme” and “irresponsible” — proof of his unfitness to head the EPA. Gina McCarthy, who ran the agency under President Obama, bewailed the danger global warming poses “to all of us who call Earth home,” and said she couldn’t “imagine what additional information [Pruitt] might want from scientists” in order to understand that.

Yet for all the hyperventilating, Pruitt’s answer to the question he was asked — whether carbon dioxide is the climate’s “primary control knob” — was entirely sound. “We don’t know that yet,” he said. We don’t.

Accepting the unknown is a big part of what makes a scientist, a scientist. Pretending knowledge where there is none to advance a statist agenda is what makes a progressive, a progressive.

SPOILER ALERT: “The documents were phony.”

In the third week of January, an Israeli named Yoni Ariel flew from Tel Aviv to Rome carrying $9,000 in cash on a secret mission to bring down Donald Trump.

There, he met with an Italian businessman. Seated at a table toward the rear of a café, away from the street where they might attract unwanted attention, Ariel recalled, he handed over the cash. In exchange he was given a copy of a potentially explosive set of documents.

Its 35 pages told the story of a $1.6 billion wire transfer from petroleum giant ExxonMobil to a European office of a Chinese mining company, which a day later transferred 1.4 billion euros to the Trump Organization, the privately held conglomerate founded by President Trump.

The transfers appeared to have taken place in mid-June, at the exact same time that Exxon’s then chief executive, Rex Tillerson, was in St. Petersburg at an economic forum, which Russian President Vladimir Putin also attended. Less than six months later, President-elect Trump — victor in an election that the US intelligence community said the Russian government had interfered with — nominated Tillerson to be his secretary of state.

To Ariel, who is married to an American and calls Russia’s tampering in the elections “an act of war,” the implications of these billion-dollar transfers were clear: Exxon had secretly bribed Trump to name Tillerson to the powerful cabinet post.

Just a taste more:

Not long after Trump won the election, Schorer, the former spokesman for Democrats Abroad Israel, told Ariel about the alleged Exxon payments and the documents that supposedly provide proof.

Ariel, intrigued, decided he would need help paying for trips to Rome to acquire the documents and also with authenticating them. A string of contacts, including the chairman of Democrats Abroad France, and a former Democratic National Committee operative in Washington, DC, eventually led Ariel to Brett Kimberlin, a left-wing political activist who is also notorious as a felon convicted of setting off bombs in the American heartland.

This is the same Brett Kimberlin who during the 1988 election claimed to have sold pot to Dan Quayle — attempted meddling in presidential elections seems to be something of a sideline for him.

Read the whole thing, but even at the end we still have no clue who forged the Exxon documents, or why they did just an obviously phony job of it.

SPENGLER: Why Is Iran Wrecking Its Economy to Fund War in Syria?

LET’S GO TO THE MALL: Wall Street Has Found Its Next Big Short in U.S. Credit Market.

It’s no secret many mall complexes have been struggling for years as Americans do more of their shopping online. But now, they’re catching the eye of hedge-fund types who think some may soon buckle under their debts, much the way many homeowners did nearly a decade ago.

Like the run-up to the housing debacle, a small but growing group of firms are positioning to profit from a collapse that could spur a wave of defaults. Their target: securities backed not by subprime mortgages, but by loans taken out by beleaguered mall and shopping center operators. With bad news piling up for anchor chains like Macy’s and J.C. Penney, bearish bets against commercial mortgage-backed securities are growing.

In recent weeks, firms such as Alder Hill Management — an outfit started by protégés of hedge-fund billionaire David Tepper — have ramped up wagers against the bonds, which have held up far better than the shares of beaten-down retailers. By one measure, short positions on two of the riskiest slices of CMBS surged to $5.3 billion last month — a 50 percent jump from a year ago.

Last summer I found myself across the street from the Citadel Mall in Colorado Springs for the first time in years, and the Dillard’s-end parking lot was cracked and in the process of being overgrown with weeds. Bricks-and-mortar retail hasn’t improved its position since then, so it’s difficult to see a path forward for that property — or many others just like it — which doesn’t include default.

CHARLES HURT: Democrats need to help fix the Disastercare they created.

Mr. Trump has noted that the politically expedient thing for Republicans to do right now would be just to stand back and watch Obamacare collapse and keep reminding voters that this is what happens when you put stupid, dishonest and power-hungry Democrats in charge.

But there is a wiser middle-ground approach to fixing the Obamacare debacle that Mr. Trump and Republicans in Congress should chart instead.

Yes, put together Republicans’ more market-based plans for salvaging Disastercare. Even include their crazy new tax credit entitlement program that should cause any decent conservative to break out in hives.

But — and this is crucial — demand that Democrats in Congress come to the table and support this rescue mission to fix the disastrous mess they created. Mr. Trump should play hardball with vulnerable Democrats and threaten to campaign against them if they do not support this plan.

Politically speaking, what possible inducement is there for Democrats to pull Congressional Republicans out of the hole they’re digging?

RELATED: Dems See Trumpcare Fallout as 2018 Opportunity.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: L.A. County Sheriff’s Department switches from silver to gold belt buckles at a cost of $300,000.

Sheriff’s officials are spending $300,000 on items they say would make deputies look more professional in their jobs and could help make them safer.

But the taxpayer dollars won’t go toward tools such as higher-quality ballistic vests, backup guns or body cameras, all of which are optional items that deputies have to pay for on their own.

Instead, Sheriff Jim McDonnell is spending the money on a minor cosmetic makeover of deputies’ uniforms: changing the color of their belt buckles and other metal pieces of gear from silver to gold. That way, the metallic bits — all made of brass — will match the gold-hued tie clips, lapel pins and six-pointed star badges that deputies already wear, McDonnell said.

Style over substance? How very L.A.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: A Graceless End to Preet Bharara’s Successful Tenure.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Six Ways Liberal Celebrities Can Make a Difference.

I get the feeling they won’t like any of these suggestions, requiring as they do that celebs exit the echo chamber, and give up on the cheap shots and the harangues.

SKYNET SMILES: To Make Us All Safer, Robocars Will Sometimes Have to Kill.

WELCOME TO THE PARTY, PAL: Minnesota becomes the 39th state to allow Sunday liquor sales.

Minnesota’s new law, which follows similar moves by 16 other states since 2002, takes effect on July 1. But Jim Surdyk, proprietor of Surdyk’s Liquor & Cheese Shop in Minneapolis, did not wait to exercise his new freedom. He was open for business last Sunday, prompting a $3,500 fine and threats against his license.

It is not hard to understand Surdyk’s impatience. In the 159 years since Minnesota became the 32nd state, it has never deigned to let people buy packaged beer, wine, or liquor on Sunday. Minnesotans who wanted to have drinks at home on the Christian Sabbath had to plan ahead or make a run to neighboring Wisconsin, which has allowed Sunday sales since 1874.

You might wonder whether it is constitutional to foist a religious day of rest on people who choose not to observe it. According to the Supreme Court, it is. The Court’s reasoning highlights the petty tyranny of blue laws.

In the 1961 case McGowan v. Maryland, seven department store employees challenged their criminal convictions for daring to sell people “a loose-leaf binder, a can of floor wax, a stapler, staples and a toy” on a Sunday. The Court rejected their argument that Maryland’s blue law violated the First Amendment’s ban on “an establishment of religion.”

“There is no dispute that the original laws which dealt with Sunday labor were motivated by religious forces,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the majority opinion. But he added that “as presently written and administered, most of them, at least, are of a secular rather than of a religious character.”

I’ve always been of the opinion that blue laws are less about religion and more about establishing cartels and limiting sales hours in order to reduce competition and artificially raise prices.

DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: He Got a Bad Grade. So, He Got the Constitution Amended. Now He’s Getting the Credit He Deserves.

The story begins in 1982. A 19-year-old sophomore named Gregory Watson was taking a government class at UT Austin. For the class, he had to write a paper about a governmental process. So he went to the library and started poring over books about the U.S. Constitution — one of his favorite topics.

“I’ll never forget this as long as I live,” Gregory says. “I pull out a book that has within it a chapter of amendments that Congress has sent to the state legislatures, but which not enough state legislatures approved in order to become part of the Constitution. And this one just jumped right out at me.”

That unratified amendment read as follows:

“No law varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives shall take effect until an election of representatives shall have intervened.”

Basically, it means any raise Congress votes to give itself can’t take effect until after the next election, allowing voters to decide how they felt about that.

The amendment had been proposed almost 200 years earlier, in 1789. It was written by James Madison and was intended to be one of the very first amendments, right along with the Bill of Rights.

But it didn’t get passed by enough states at the time. You see, to ratify an amendment, you need three-quarters of states to approve it.

This amendment, though it was 200 years old, didn’t have a deadline.

Gregory was intrigued. He decided to write his paper about the amendment and argue that it was still alive and could be ratified. He got to work, being very meticulous about citations and fonts and everything. He turned it in to the teaching assistant for his class — and got it back with a C.

Read the whole thing — you’ll love the happy ending.

QUESTION ASKED: General to Male Marines: ‘How Much More Do Females of Our Corps Have to Do to be Accepted?’

OH, WELL WHEN YOU PUT IT THAT WAY…

This is a silly smear effort, even for the New York Times. The first three grafs really do amount to nothing more than “lawyer did lawyering and speaking gigs for guy who can afford to pay lawyers for lawyering and speaking gigs.” The fourth graf is when we get to the really juicy stuff — Gorsuch’s radical, offensive, and possibly racist statement at one of those speaking gigs:

“They say a country’s prosperity depends on three things: sound money, private property and the rule of law,” Judge Gorsuch said at the 2010 retreat, according to his speaker notes from that year. “This crowd hardly needs to hear from me about the first two of the problems we face on those scores.”

If this is the best they’ve got, Senate Democrats would be insane to risk losing the filibuster trying to block Gorsuch.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS… WaPo Preps for Storm and Bashes Trump for Doing the Same.

The Post hypocritically bashed Trump for taking this winter storm Stella seriously just hours after the newspaper hyped the storm itself, according to tweets captured by Cameron Gray, a writer for NRA News, on March 14.

A Post Twitter account dedicated to D.C. news mocked Trump for inviting “D.C. mayor to Oval Office for storm that brought 2 inches of snow.”

Less than 24 hours before, however, The Washington Post’s main twitter account asked “Are you prepping for the Northeast Blizzard?,” and advised “here are the things you you really do need in your winter emergency kit,” and reported “more than 4,000 flights” had been canceled due to the impending storm.

It’s different when they do it.