THAT SOUND YOU HEAR IS THE NARRATIVE BLOWING UP: No Extinctions’: Polar Bears Survived Periods When The Arctic Had No Ice.

THEY JUST WANT THEIR SNAKE BACK: Thief stuffs python down his pants at pet store.

IN THE BACK HALLS OF GEEK HIGH: Rumors Are Flying That We Finally Found Gravitational Waves .

WAIT, WHAT?  WHY WOULD YOU EVEN? Your penis pics are bush league.  Video. Probably not safe for work. It played jumpy for me, so I might have missed something, but you’d still be at serious risk of bringing your co-workers running if you laugh as hard as I did.

SAYS THE MAN WHO OBVIOUSLY DOESN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT CANCER IS: ‘America can cure cancer’: Obama announces national effort to fight disease.  Also, Biden is supposed to head a new moon shot.  Seriously, who has slipped him the Onion and told him it’s America’s paper of record?

YOU MEAN YOU CAN MAKE PERIOD DRAMAS: Without posturing as superior to our ancestors from the height of our Marxist class consciousness?  I thought that was a Gullag-worthy crime now. A Kinder, Gentler British Empire?

SPEAKING OF NARRATIVE: Hillary’s “White Privilege” Self-Abasement.

TOOK THEM LONG ENOUGH: MoveOn.org moves on beyond the Clintons.

LIES, D*MN LIES AND LEFTIST NARRATIVE: Jane Mayer and the New York Times Dive Into the Gutter.

FROM LARRY CORREIA: Into the Storm.

FIRST AS THE MINORITY REPORT, THEN AS TRAGEDY: The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat ‘score’.

LIES, DAMN LIES AND GOVERNMENT STATISTICS: The breakdown of December’s extremely misleading job report.

FOR MOST OF THEM THIS DOES NOT CONSTITUTE ENTICEMENT: Feminist Activists Encourage Women to Trade Sexual Favors for Votes.

I HAVE IT ON GOOD AUTHORITY YOU CAN’T BE RIGHT WING AND AUTHENTICALLY GAY:  By good authority I mean, of course, lefty blogs, usually when talking about Milo.  And as for who administers the tests of authenticity for gays, and what the tests are, I don’t even want to know. Out, right-wing — and in office: An Israeli lawmaker moves beyond identity politics.

WHAT HAPPENS AT THE CANYON STAYS AT THE CANYON: Watchdog uncovers long history of sexual harassment among Grand Canyon employees.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Jane Mayer and the New York Times’ Dive Into the Gutter. It’s more of a wallow than a dive, these days.

Plus: “Now we learn that Ms. Mayer his written a book called Dark Money. (In the leftist lexicon, ‘dark money’ is money spent on conservative causes rather than liberal ones.)”

HOLY COUNTERFACTUAL, BATMAN: What if Hillary Were a Republican?

REALLY? WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CLUE? Obama’s foreign policy far from victorious. Though to be fair, to judge whether he’s succeeding, you have to know what he’s trying to accomplish.

Related: Nick Gillespie: Obama’s Final SOTU Is a Dud, Like His Presidency. Domestically and abroad, he has set more fires than he put out. “He promised a short speech but then droned on for what seemed like a hell of a long time. He said he wouldn’t give a laundry list and instead just sort of dumped laundry on the table. There were feints toward the sort of optimism—the hope and change—that energized his original victory, but nobody in or out of the Capitol was energized by it.”

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FASTER, PLEASE: Return of incandescent light bulbs as MIT makes them more efficient than LEDs.

MOONSHOT — DRINK!

Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer. Last month, he worked with this Congress to give scientists at the National Institutes of Health the strongest resources they’ve had in over a decade. Tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done. And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us, on so many issues over the past forty years, I’m putting Joe in charge of Mission Control. For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.

“All you need to know about the SotU speech: Barack Obama intends to put Joe Biden in charge of curing cancer.”

Earlier: “‘Moonshot’ Medicine Will Let Us Down,” says…The New York Times?

A doubly-interesting source, considering that Thomas Friedman was the origin of Obama’s other favorite outer space State of the Union cliche, “The Sputnik Moment.”

UPDATE: Steve Green concludes his SOTU drunkblogging with a quick one (appropriately enough):

This was Obama’s Al Bundy speech, the lowly shoes salesman desperately trying to get everyone to remember that time he scored four touchdowns in the one game.

Er, that is President Obama wanted us to forget most of the last seven years he’s actually been President, and instead remember that time Candidate Obama gave those big speeches everybody loved.

I’d say even by that modest measure, tonight’s speech was worth of an Al Bundy nap.

But like Al Bundy, Obama will be perpetually on cable TV starting next year, when he’s finally free to be what he’s always dreamed of being, a host on MSNBC.

Exit Quote: “I’m really touched by a soliloquy on cynicism by a guy who doesn’t acknowledge 10 US sailors in Iranian custody.”

THE JOYS OF WORKING FOR PLAYBOY. “If there is a better opening line for a journalist on the road than ‘Hi, I work for Playboy magazine,’ I have yet to encounter it.”

GENTLEMEN, GIRD YOUR LIVERS: Steve Green is Drunkblogging the Final Obama State of the Union Address.

YES, HE’S THE REAL VICTIM HERE: NBC’s Andrea Mitchell Frets Iran Seizing Sailors Has Created ‘Frantic’ Scene for Obama’s SOTU.

Why do these bad things keep happening to him — him — of all people?

WELL PLAYED: Speaker Paul Ryan invites nuns to Rep. Keith Ellison’s ‘Bring Your Own Muslim’ night. “Ryan instead chose as his guests the Little Sisters of the Poor, the nuns who have been alternatively winning and losing their fight against the Obamacare mandate that they provide, against their religious beliefs, birth control (including abortifacients) as part of their health plan.”

ANDREW McCARTHY on Obama’s Insane Iran Policy.

Khamenei’s consistent message? Death to America. Obama’s consistent message to Khamenei? “Hey, we can work it out.”

CUBA: North Korea With Palm Trees. “Like North Korea, Cuba maintains a distribution system in which citizens pay a low cost for inadequate rations of staple foods. (At one state shop, the provisions, listed on the blackboard, were grains, washing soap, bathing soap, toothpaste, sugar, salt, coffee, evaporated milk, eggs, and oil.) As in North Korea, archaic laws prevent the private sale of commodities that have been deemed strategic to the nation. Fishing is limited in both countries on the grounds that the bounty of the seas is the exclusive property of the state.”

Hang your rulers, and live a better life.

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HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law Schools Have Shed 1,206 Full-Time Faculty (13.3%) Since 2010.

EXCLUSIVE: BOMBSHELL: EXPOSED: Donald Trump Played Soccer in High School.

“Most patriotic Americans stop playing soccer at around age nine, because it’s lame and rewards weakness. It’s also very popular in Mexico.” It really is a low-energy game. The scoring opportunities aren’t very yuge, either.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Free Play Creates Emotionally Stable Children in an Unstable World.

I WAS HOPING FOR AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: As U.S. Modernizes Nuclear Weapons, ‘Smaller’ Leaves Some Uneasy. “The B61 Model 12, the bomb flight-tested last year in Nevada, is the first of five new warhead types planned as part of an atomic revitalization estimated to cost up to $1 trillion over three decades. As a family, the weapons and their delivery systems move toward the small, the stealthy and the precise.”

The way things are going, I fear we’ll be wanting the large, the obvious, and the indiscriminate.

JAMES TARANTO: Brooks Borks Cruz:

Yesterday we had a mischievous thought: What if Donald Trump, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, were to announce (or merely suggest) that if elected, he would nominate Ted Cruz to the next vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court? Such a move would give some Cruz supporters a reason to switch while reassuring other conservatives nervous about the soundness of a President Trump’s judicial nominees.

Trump could even use the occasion to reinforce his current Cruz-directed mischief. After all, nobody can claim that Cruz’s Canadian birth would pose an obstacle to a Supreme Court appointment. Several early justices were born in England and vicinity; Justice Felix Frankfurter was a naturalized immigrant from Vienna; and Justice David Brewer was born as far away as Turkey.

Is David Brooks thinking along similar lines? We ask because his New York Times column today looks an awful lot like a pre-emptive borking.

Read the whole thing.

LYNDON B. OBAMA: “When it comes to offering progress reports on his war against ISIS, Barack Obama is beginning to sound like a previous wartime Democratic president. It is not a flattering comparison,” Richard Benedetto recently noted at Real Clear Politics:

Over the past few weeks, Obama has issued several upbeat statements crafted to assure an uneasy American people that the fight against terror is going well, only to have the facts come back and bite him.

He is starting to develop a “credibility gap,” faced by Lyndon Baines Johnson during the Vietnam War. LBJ and his commanders kept telling the nation that the war was going well when it really was not.

“We are pleased with the results we are getting,” Johnson said in an impassioned November 1967 press conference. “We are inflicting greater losses than we are taking.”

Johnson added that it was “an encouraging sign” that decreasing numbers of Vietnamese were living under Communist control. “Overall, we’re making progress,” he added. “We’re satisfied with that progress.”

Sound familiar?

Very much so, especially today, when the capture of two Navy ships by Iran sounds eerily reminiscent of the Pueblo incident, which took place this month in 1968, when the North Koreans temporarily captured the USS Pueblo, “a Navy intelligence vessel…engaged in a routine surveillance of the North Korean coast when it [was] intercepted by North Korean patrol boats. According to U.S. reports, the Pueblo was in international waters almost 16 miles from shore, but the North Koreans turned their guns on the lightly armed vessel and demanded its surrender.”

No word yet if the US sailors detained in Iran will be flashing “the Hawaiian good luck sign” at their captors, but it would certainly have double meaning this time around.

Related: Report: Obama Ordered the CIA Not to Support Green Movement in Iran in 2009.

And this is the thanks we get today from the mullahs — why it’s as if they mean it when they say they’re really America’s enemies or something.

REVIEW: The Lexus LC500 Coupe.

NEW YORK TIMES USEFUL IDIOT DAVID BROOKS: TED CRUZ ISN’T JESUS-Y ENOUGH AT WORK:

Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy. Instead, his speeches are marked by a long list of enemies, and vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them. When he is speaking in a church the contrast between the setting and the emotional tone he sets is jarring.

Of course, if his speeches — or even those of his mentors — really were filled with “pagan brutalism,” Brooks would be a true admirer of Cruz and/or his pants.

Related: Four Problems With Media Confusion Over Ted Cruz’s Quoting Of Scripture.

HEADLINES FROM 1942: Young woman visiting Paris receives number tattooed on arm: “Why I left the Paris Climate Summit with an activist tattoo.”

I never imagined I would get a tattoo during the U.N. Climate Summit in Paris. Yet here it is, newly healed and permanently inked on the inside of my right wrist.

The tattoo is three numbers and a symbol: “355<” in 25-point font, styled as if from a typewriter. It’s my commitment to the people of the climate movement, to listening to and sharing their stories of climate justice.

When I was born in October 1991, the concentration of carbon dioxide — the primary greenhouse gas emitted by human activity — in our atmosphere was 355 parts per million. In the early 20th century, we topped 300 ppm for the first time in 800,000 years, beginning the destabilization of our climate and society through rising planetary temperatures.

I never knew these exact numbers before, but now that they’re printed on my wrist, I will never forget.

Huh — in the past, a lot of people with numbers tattooed on their arms uttered those last two words.

STEPHEN GREEN WILL BE Drunkblogging The State Of The Union. If I were Obama, I’d be drinking just as hard.

PENTAGON: Two Navy boats in Iranian custody but Iran tells US that crew will be returned ‘promptly.’

Huh — why would they impound our boats when we’ve become such buddies with them under Obama?

UPDATE: “US officials tell NBC that Iranian forces have seized 10 American sailors,” CNBC reports.

MORE: Glenn Reynolds tweets, “Obama’s Carterization is complete” — and on the day of his final SOTU, to boot.

THAT ’70s SHOW:

Shot:

A feeling of constant and imminent menace pervaded the country, and especially its big cities. The 1974 movie, Death Wish, captures the mood of dread. Charles Bronson plays a New York architect, a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal,” whose wife is murdered and whose daughter is raped by three thugs who force their way into the family’s apartment. The police do not catch the killers. They do not much try. They fill out forms, make some routine inquiries—and then forget about it. As a precinct captain explains, the city is suffering thirty murders a week. How could anyone investigate them all? A friend gives Bronson a gun, and he begins to prowl the streets and subways at night. Never has Manhattan looked more terrifying. The wind is chill; the streets are empty; the few law-abiding pedestrians pull their collars up around their ears, and hear and see nothing. At first by accident, then deliberately, Bronson tempts muggers to attack him. It seldom takes him long. The criminals are lurking everywhere. They approach their victims in total arrogance, without even a glance over their shoulder for the police. They know the police aren’t coming. And in fact, the only police action we see in the movie is a furious manhunt to capture Bronson, the vigilante killer.

—David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse.

Chaser: EU Gun Control: After Terrorism And Sex Assaults, European Union Cracks Down On Firearms Ownership.

Hangover: “Alain Ghozland, 73, a French Jewish politician from outside of Paris, was found dead in his apartment on Tuesday, with his body showing multiple lacerations that appeared to be stab wounds, according to reports.”

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Electron tomography reveals precise positions of individual atoms in aperiodic material.

ROGER SIMON: How Jeb Can (Still) Save His Reputation and Help America at the Same Time — If Jeb quits, he’s in a position to say the same to Hillary.

Sadly, I think Jeb would rather burn his campaign contributors’ money in a giant bonfire (QED) than admit that this isn’t his year.

IS TED CRUZ A “NATURAL BORN” U.S. CITIZEN?: According to Widener law school’s Mary Brigid McManamon, who has an oped in the Washington Post today, the answer is “no.” Her reasoning is a bit shaky:

On this subject, the common law is clear and unambiguous. The 18th-century English jurist William Blackstone, the preeminent authority on it, declared natural-born citizens are “such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England,” while aliens are “such as are born out of it.” The key to this division is the assumption of allegiance to one’s country of birth. The Americans who drafted the Constitution adopted this principle for the United States. James Madison, known as the “father of the Constitution,” stated, “It is an established maxim that birth is a criterion of allegiance. [And] place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States.” . . .

Article I of the Constitution grants Congress the power to naturalize an alien. . . . But Article II of the Constitution expressly adopts the legal status of the natural-born citizen and requires that a president possess that status. . . . Congress simply does not have the power to convert someone born outside the United States into a natural-born citizen.

McManamon’s quotation from Blackstone’s Commentaries purposefully omits key language. Specifically, Blackstone stated:

Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England, that is, within the ligeance [sic] or as is generally called, the allegiance of the king; and alien such as are born out of it.

The key to this passage is the concept of “allegiance”–whether the individual has been born with allegiance to the king, or not. Individuals born with allegiance to the sovereign are  ”natural-born” subjects; those lacking such allegiance are not. It is not, as McManamon implies from her selective portion, a question merely of being born within the geographic confines of the country. McManamon’s citation to the James Madison passage confirms this, as Madison acknowledges that “place is the most certain criterion,” but he is not suggesting that it is the only criterion, as he states unequivocally that the “established maxim” is that the ultimate criterion is “allegiance,” of which the place of birth is but one (albeit “certain”) criterion.

Article I, section eight gives Congress the authority to “establish a uniform rule of Naturalization,” and thus identify, by statute, those who must to go through a naturalization process to obtain U.S. citizenship.  Those citizens who do not need to go through the naturalization process are “natural born” citizens.  As former Solicitors General Neil Katyal and Paul Clement have recently noted in the Harvard Law Review Forum,

All the sources routinely used to interpret the Constitution confirm that the phrase “natural born Citizen” has a specific meaning: namely, someone who was a U.S. citizen at birth with no need to go through a naturalization proceeding at some later time. And Congress has made equally clear from the time of the framing of the Constitution to the current day that, subject to certain residency requirements on the parents, someone born to a U.S. citizen parent generally becomes a U.S. citizen without regard to whether the birth takes place in Canada, the Canal Zone, or the continental United States. . . .

The Supreme Court has long recognized that two particularly useful sources in understanding constitutional terms are British common law and enactments of the First Congress. Both confirm that the original meaning of the phrase “natural born Citizen” includes persons born abroad who are citizens from birth based on the citizenship of a parent.

McManamon asserts that Katyal and Clement behave in an “unforgivable” fashion by “equat[ing] the common law with statutory law.” But they do no such thing. Instead, Katyal and Clement correctly note that the longstanding British legal understanding–as evidenced both by its common and statutory law–was that children born abroad to British subjects were, themselves, “natural born” subjects at birth, without the need for naturalization proceedings. As Randy Barnett succinctly put it,

England had numerous and changing legal rules governing exactly who was and who was not a “natural born subject,” which can be used to muddy the waters. But one consistently applied rule is particularly germane: The offspring of the King were natural born subjects of the King regardless of where they were born, whether on English territory or not.

As We the People–both individually and collectively–posses the sovereignty in the U.S., our offspring are the functional equivalent of he King’s offspring in England–i.e., “natural born” citizens of the U.S., regardless of where they are born.

Indeed, by the time of Blackstone’s Commentaries (published beginning in 1765), Blackstone himself acknowledged that the law of England had evolved to recognize “that all children, born out of the king’s ligeance [sic] whose fathers were natural-born subjects, are now natural-born subjects themselves, to all intents and purposes, without any exception.” 

McManamon also criticizes Katyal and Clement for placing “much weight” on the Naturalization Act of 1790, which stated that  “the children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond Sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born Citizens: provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States .  . . .”

Assuming that modern Equal Protection Clause jurisprudence would not permit any constitutional distinction of children based upon fathers versus mothers who are U.S. citizens (Cruz’s mother was a U.S. citizen at his birth; his father was not)–and there is no legal reason, today, to think that a mother who is a U.S. citizen owes less “allegiance” to the U.S. than would the father–the law existing at the time of the U.S. founding suggests that, in interpreting Article II’s phrase “natural born citizen,” children born abroad to U.S. citizens  should be considered “natural born.”

McManamon dismisses this evidence of the founding generation’s understanding of “natural born” by asserting:

The debates on the matter reveal that the congressmen were aware that such children were not citizens and had to be naturalized; hence, Congress enacted a statute to provide for them. Moreover, that statute did not say the children were natural born, but only that they should “be considered as” such.

This is specious argument. The 1790 Act reveals that the members of Congress–many of whom were heavily involved in the writing and ratification of the Constitution–understood that children of U.S. citizens who were born abroad should be “considered” as “natural born” in the sense that they did not need to undergo any naturalization process and were accordingly legally entitled to be considered U.S. citizens at the time of their birth–the same as an individual born within U.S. borders. The fact that Congress memorialized this common understanding in the 1790 Act does not, in any way, suggest that such children born abroad “had to be naturalized”; quite the contrary.

In short, while Trump and Harvard Law prof Laurence Tribe are correct that the U.S. Supreme Court has not definitively grappled with the full meaning of “natural born citizen,” the available evidence suggests that if/when the Court ultimately must grapple with it, the evidence points strongly in Cruz’s favor.

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THESE PEOPLE DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT MUCH: 4 Problems With Media Confusion Over Ted Cruz’s Quoting Of Scripture. “So if Ted Cruz is talking about the ‘body of Christ’ rising up, he certainly isn’t talking about Jesus rising from the dead. And Jesus having already risen from the dead is astonishing, yes, but it is not a teaching that Ted Cruz introduced to society. Ignorance of it 2,000 years later is indefensible. . . . When Christians refer to being members of the body of Christ, we’re saying that we all have different spiritual gifts, but we work together as one. We are one with Christ, but also one with each other. Some of us might be preachers, some of us might be Sunday School teachers, some of us might only be able to show up every few weeks and sit silently in a pew, but we’re all doing our part as members in the body. It’s a metaphor. And, just to be extra diligent here given the state of education in this country, I’ll add that a metaphor is a figure of speech that identifies something as being the same as some unrelated thing for rhetorical effect, thus highlighting the similarities between the two.”

WHY IS NARENDRA MODI SIDING WITH PIRATES? British sailors given India jail time for weapons charges on anti-piracy mission.

THE REST DIDN’T PAY: U.N. says some of its peacekeepers were paying 13-year-olds for sex. “They are preying on the people they’ve come to protect.”

A metaphor for our global ruling class.

BETTER IDEA: HAVE COLLEGES STAY OUT OF STUDENTS’ SEX LIVES. Campus Sex … With a Syllabus. Anything they teach is likely to be pernicious and bigoted anyway.

CUE THE HILLARY ATTACKS: Quinnipiac poll: Sanders surges to retake lead in Iowa.

MARK RIPPETOE ANSWERS A QUESTION FROM MILO YIANNOPOULOS: Is there a connection between low testosterone and victimhood culture?

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Powerball Meme Mathematical Illiteracy Illustrates Bernie Sanders’ Appeal; Politics suffer from a lack of numeracy among the public, and politicians.

GOOD QUESTION: WaPo: Jackie’s rape story was false. So why hasn’t the media named her by now?

News organizations have declined to reveal Jackie’s full identity since her now-discredited story appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in November 2014. Her single-name identity — just Jackie — is in keeping with a long-standing journalistic convention against identifying alleged victims of sexual crimes to protect the accuser’s privacy.

As a result, news accounts of rape or sex-related crimes almost never name an accuser without their explicit permission, making it the only class of crime involving adults in which this practice is observed.

But that standard arguably doesn’t apply in Jackie’s case. Her story has been shown repeatedly to be false, both through news reporting and an extensive police investigation. Rolling Stone has withdrawn the article, “A Rape on Campus,” and apologized to its readers for publishing an account that a Columbia Journalism School report called “a story of journalistic failure.”

Even so, Jackie has remained nearly anonymous. No mainstream media outlet has reported Jackie’s full name. Investigators for the Charlottesville police, who found no evidence to support Jackie’s story, haven’t revealed it, either. Her identity has also been redacted in documents by a court hearing one of the lawsuits against Rolling Stone.

While it’s debatable whether knowing Jackie’s full name would serve much public purpose, the collective reticence to identify her plays into an underlying discussion about the media’s responsibility in identifying accusers. In contrast, the accused are regularly identified once they are charged.

It’s almost like there’s a war on men.

SAD THAT THIS COUNTS AS A “CONTROVERSIAL” STANCE: Bernie Sanders: Law Enforcement Should Handle Campus Rape.

GARY TAUBES, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Man drops 75% of his body fat in just 12 weeks by swapping cereal for steak. Though that wasn’t the only change he made.

JAMES BOVARD: First Lady’s box should be empty at State of the Union speech: Saving seats for the dead would require a lot more room for victims of Obama’s policies.

While trumpeting the private death toll from guns, Obama on Tuesday night will likely ignore the 986 people killed by police in the United States last year according to The Washington Post’s database. Many police departments are aggressive — if not reckless — in part because the Justice Department always provides cover for them at the Supreme Court. Obama’s “Justice Department has supported police officers every time an excessive-force case has made its way” to a Supreme Court hearing, The New York Times noted last year. Attorney General Loretta Lynch recently said that federally-funded police agencies should not even be required to report the number of civilians they kill.

To add a Euro flair to the evening, Obama could drape tri-color flags on a few empty seats to commemorate the 30 French medical staff, patients, and others slain last Oct. 3 when an American AC-130 gunship blasted their well-known hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The U.S. military revised its story several times but admitted in November that the carnage was the result of “avoidable … human error.” Regrettably, that bureaucratic phrase lacks the power to resurrect victims.

No plans have been announced to designate a seat for Brian Terry, the U.S. Border Patrol agent killed in 2010. Guns found at the scene of Terry’s killing were linked to the Fast and Furious gunwalking operation masterminded by the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agency. At least 150 Mexicans were also killed by guns illegally sent south of the border with ATF approval. The House of Representatives voted to hold then-attorney general Eric Holder in contempt for refusing to disclose Fast and Furious details, but Obama is not expected to dwell on this topic in his State of the Union address. . . .

Four seats could be left vacant for the Americans killed in the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya — U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. But any such recognition would rankle the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, who has worked tirelessly to sweep those corpses under the rug. It would also be appropriate to include a hat tip to the hundreds, likely thousands, of Libyans who have been killed in the civil war unleashed after the Obama administration bombed Libya to topple its ruler, Moammar Gadhafi.

Perhaps the GOP should invite a member of the Nobel Peace Prize committee as their guest. . . .

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: The Arabic gang-rape ‘Taharrush’ phenomenon which sees women surrounded by groups of men in crowds and sexually assaulted… and has now spread to Europe.

THINKING ABOUT FLYING SOMEWHERE SOON? Might want to think about this – Improving technology is almost always a blessing but there are occasional exceptions in unintended or unexpected consequences. Take those automatic pilots on commercial airliners. A new report from the Department of Transportation Inspector General says pilots’ manual skills are declining as computers increasingly take over the bulk of flight direction.

“While airlines have long used automation safely to improve efficiency and reduce pilot workload, several recent accidents, including the July 2013 crash of Asiana Airlines flight 214, have shown that pilots who typically fly with automation can make errors when confronted with an unexpected event or transitioning to manual flying,” the IG said, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Ethan Barton. So the question is, what are the airlines and FAA doing about this development? Not much, the IG says.

A BIG WELCOME TO STEPHEN GREEN, who will be popping over here with the occasional post. He’ll still be putting the longer stuff over at VodkaPundit, but the more the merrier over here!

MARC RANDAZZA: Twitter Takes a Side in the Culture Wars – Lies About It. “If I ran Twitter, I wouldn’t be very proud of it. And, its value is rapidly plummeting, both as a website worth visiting, and in financial terms. . . . For all Twitter’s lip service to freedom of expression and prevention of abuse, Twitter believes in neither.”

IN THE MAIL: The New Totalitarian Temptation: Global Governance and the Crisis of Democracy in Europe.

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EASTERN EUROPE TO GERMANY: We Told You So.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 978.

MEGAN MCARDLE: You Can’t Be Neutral in a Public-Sector Union.

When you’re negotiating with governments, there’s never a bright line where politics ends and negotiation begins. That’s why unions, and other folks who sell goods and services to governments, spend so much money on lobbying.

Large public-sector unions, like for police and sanitation workers, wield even more influence: Every time they sit down for negotiations, they bring the threat that their large and politically active membership will vote the bosses out of office if the talks go poorly. Public-sector workers are often legally forbidden the classic tools of labor organization, such as the walkout or the “work to rule” slowdown. But this Election Day cudgel is much bigger.

Often, of course, public workers’ unions augment this with political contributions and aggressive lobbying efforts, on topics that may go well beyond wages and benefits, and into political causes that help them build coalitions with other left-wing groups.

This broad political activity is part of why public-sector unions are doing so much better than their private-sector counterparts. But it also means that “closed shop” labor arrangements effectively force people into a package deal: Want to be a teacher or a cop? Then you have to join a union and make political statements that you may not agree with.

I agree with FDR: Public-sector unions are pernicious and should be banned.

FLASHBACK: The urgent case for stopping the flow of illegal migrants across the Mediterranean. A lot of Euros wish they’d done that now, but virtue-signalling was too important then.

Related item here.

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DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: NYT fans the flames of Koch Derangement; MSNBC’s Chris Hayes gets burned.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Bengals-Steelers fans were punching women, peeing on each other.

And throwing bottles at Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger as he’s carted off field.

As Rush Limbaugh notes, “what happened in Cincinnati is the story of the year in the NFL, for what it represents, what it tells us, and what it indicates. It’s not a surprise to me that many in the media tried to downplay it as just another game where emotions kind of ran a little hotter than usual.  It was much, much more than that.  And it’s fascinating.”

UPDATE: Steelers OL Ramon Foster: Multiple Bengals Spit On Steelers, Not Just Burfict.

BETTER DEAD THAN RUDE: Anti-Islamisation PEGIDA Leader Pursued By German Political Establishment For Anti-Rape T-Shirt.

I EXPECT WE’LL SEE THIS SORT OF THING IN A LOT OF STATES: Knox legislative delegation calls for hearings on UT diversity office.

What’s really notable here is that this is UT’s delegation; many of their constituents work for UT, and these are the legislators UT goes to when it wants things from the legislature. This indicates two things, I think: (1) That they have a lot of leverage over the university; and (2) that their constituents, maybe even those who work for UT, don’t feel impelled to support the diversity office. I suspect that’s a more widespread phenomenon, too. Diversity offices are not especially popular with most people who work at universities, though of course you’re not supposed to talk about that.

WITHOUT LIES AND DOUBLE STANDARDS, COULD MODERN FEMINISM EXIST AT ALL? Feminist organization still defending Rolling Stone rape hoaxer.

The National Organization for Women must be hurting for publicity and must also adhere to the old saying that there is “no such thing as bad publicity,” because their recent decision to come to the defense of the woman who lied about being gang raped to Rolling Stone is otherwise astonishing.

Police found no evidence to back up the allegation (although they haven’t officially closed the case). The accuser, Jackie, named the man she claimed took her to a fraternity party and initiated the gang rape — and no one by that name was a student at the University of Virginia or even existed in the United States.

There was no party at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house on the night she claimed to have been raped. Her story changed in material ways over the years. At one point, she claimed he had been forced to perform oral sex on five men. At another, she said she had been raped by seven, including with a beer bottle. Every detail she provided to Rolling Stone was either absolutely proven false or cast into very deep doubt — from her bloody and torn dress to the way her friends and a university administrator treated her after she came forward.

Despite all of this, NOW is calling Jackie a “survivor” and condemning the U.Va. dean who is suing Rolling Stone and requesting documents to prove she was defamed by the magazine.

Well, they fundraised a lot off this. If they admit it’s bogus, people might want their money back.

WAR ON WOMEN: Ashe Schow: Democrats’ disgusting sexism toward Republican women continues.

Any time a Republican woman is elevated — whether in the media or to a position of power within the party — those on the Left roll out the red carpet of sexism to denigrate her accomplishment.

This year, the “honor” goes to South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was selected to give the Republican response to President Obama’s final State of the Union speech. As soon as Haley was announced, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz sprang into action, implying the successful governor was merely a token.

“It’s pretty clear that Nikki Haley is being chosen because the Republican Party has a diversity problem,” Wasserman Schultz said on a conference call Monday.

This attack also misses the main point about why Haley was likely selected. She has always been considered a possible vice presidential pick, and responding to the State of the Union is a great way to showcase her charisma and conservative record of governance. It angers the Left that so many of the Republican Party’s rising stars aren’t old white men.

Haley, who was born to Indian immigrants, has been seen as a GOP star since her election as governor. She is the first female and first minority governor of South Carolina (as well as the youngest governor in the country). She oversaw a drop in the Palmetto State’s jobless rates to record lows, enacted education reform and, more recently, signed a bill to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse after a mass shooting. . . .

But this is nothing new for the Left when it comes to successful Republicans who don’t fit the “old, white man” narrative. Last year, when incoming Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, was selected to give the State of the Union response, the leftist group EMILY’s List called her “window dressing.” During Ernst’s election in 2014, Wasserman Schultz called her an “onion of crazy.”

It’s one thing to disagree with someone’s views on the issues. But the Left is using that disagreement to dismiss someone based on her sex and/or race. For a political party that claims to be tolerant, it sure seems to drop all fidelity to the word when a woman or minority Republican succeeds.

Seems to.

AN OFTEN-RELIABLE ELECTION YEAR TEST IS, WHICH CANDIDATE IS WINNING “THE FUN INDICATOR.”

Two guesses as to which candidate that is this year, and the first doesn’t count.

SO SEPARATE — BUT EQUAL — TO COIN A PHRASE: Oregon State University to Hold Segregated Workshops on Race.

Democratic National Committee member Bull Connor would certainly have approved. Presumably, the workshops would also be approved by former Obama mentor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who noted that “African-American children have a different way of learning” in his speech to the 2008 NAACP national convention, which then Time-Warner-CNN-HBO spokeswoman Soledad O’Brien dubbed “a home run.”

REMEMBER, WHEN LEFTIES ARE ANGRY, IT’S “PASSION:” Juan Williams: Angry White Women.

Who knew white women had become so angry?

The anger animating the divide between the GOP establishment and the GOP grassroots is always presented in terms of angry white men.

It is impossible to ignore, as The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin noted last week, that Republican media and political culture these days, both in Congress and on the campaign trail, is “perpetually angry.”

But a new poll shows that white women are the angriest of angry voters.

With reason.

THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION: She Does All This For Us, You Know.

ELDERLY WHITE DEMOCRAT CANDIDATES PARTICIPATE IN FORUM ON MINORITY ISSUES.

Which happened to run alongside the Alabama-Clemson College Football Playoff title game, to ensure that no one would see it, much like the DNC’s presidential “debates” this year.

(Unexpectedly.)

DEMOCRAT OPERATIVE WITH A BYLINE SAYS WHAT?

● “Chris Matthews a Birther Now That Target Is Cruz? Trump ‘May Have Something’ He Insists.”

—Headline, NewsBusters, last night.

Matthews asked [Trump] tonight, “Is Donald Trump honest when he says that Barack Obama isn’t a legitimate president?”

Trump repeatedly refused to answer the question, saying that once he answers it, “that’s all people want to talk about.” So no, he did not give a straight answer to whether Obama’s a legitimate president.

Matthews told him, “I think it’s a blemish––I think it’s your original sin. I’m an American, I think the president should be respected! I think there’s a little ethnic aspect to it, I don’t like it!”

—“Chris Matthews Delivers Trump’s Most Uncomfortable Interview Moment Yet,” Mediaite, December 16th, 2015.

ROGER KIMBALL: Donald Trump as a Mirror for the Republican Soul.

What’s going on? A large segment of the Republican political establishment, blindsided by Trump’s success, has decided, cautiously, in a hedging-your-bets sort of way, that Trump might just have what it takes to beat Hillary.

Three points. First, as I have argued in the space before (and here), the Trump phenomenon owes a great deal to the widespread, visceral impatience with the business-as-usual politically correct establishment, Republican every-bit-as-much as Democrat. Trump is not a conservative. As Kevin Williamson has shown in meticulous and hilarious detail, Trump “spent most of his life as a progressive Democrat, a patron of Charles Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Hillary Rodham Clinton.” . . .

True, all true. But it’s not clear that — while we are still here listening to the warm-up bands waiting for the main event — it is not clear that it matters. And while we wait, Trump is excellent entertainment. That is point two, summed up with characteristic panache by Mark Steyn a few days ago in a column called “Notes on a Phenomenon.” Reflecting on Trump’s recent performance behind enemy lines, i.e., in Bernie Sander’s HQ, Burlington, People’s Republic of Vermont, Steyn noted that “Trump has no prompters. He walks out, pulls a couple of pieces of folded paper from his pocket, and then starts talking. Somewhere in there is the germ of a stump speech, but it would bore him to do the same poll-tested focus-grouped thing night after night, so he basically riffs on whatever’s on his mind. . . . But in a strange way it all hangs together: It’s both a political speech, and a simultaneous running commentary on his own campaign.” That’s true. And it is also true, as Steyn points out that it makes for great entertainment. . . .

As I have been saying for many months now, I am not at all convinced that Hillary Clinton will be the nominee, or, if she were the nominee, that she would be elected. As the classified emails that rocketed about the world from her personal email server keep being leaked, I suspect she is edging closer to indictment or at least popular, and therefore crippling, delegitimation. Later this week, 13 Hours, a movie about what happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, will hit the theaters. The movie makers stress that it is “not political.” The names “Obama” and “Hillary Clinton” are never uttered. But the film is said to tell the truth about what happened in that consular outpost, which means that it will show how four Americans, including a US Ambassador, where slaughtered by Islamic terrorists because Washington, worried about political fallout in an election years, refused to send help that was just minutes away. The more popular that movie is, the poorer are Hillary Clinton’s chances.

But the real gravamen of my third point revolves around Ted Cruz, not Hillary Clinton. I suspect that an unstated but large consideration in the sudden shift towards Donald Trump on the part of the Republican Establishment its members are terrified of Ted Cruz. They are right to be terrified of him, for were he to become President, the gravy train that is business-as-usual in Washington would make an abrupt stop, everyone off, please, and it would be as much of a shake-up for Republicans as Democrats.

What you hear people say is that “Donald Trump may have the best chance of beating Hillary Clinton.” But what that means is, “Maybe Trump can beat Hillary, assuming she is the Democratic candidate, but anyway, despite his bluster, he really is deep down a pay-to-play kind of guy, just like us. Ted Cruz, on the contrary, really means all that stuff about ending the ‘Washington Cartel’ and restoring Constitutional restraints on government. It’s OK to say that in election years, but we don’t want to elect someone who will actually try to do it.”

Hmm. As Limbaugh says, they hate Trump, but they fear Cruz.

THERE ARE SOME SECTIONS OF THE INTERNET THAT I WOULD NOT ADVISE YOU TO INVADE: Twitter Tried To Hurt Gay Conservative Milo Yiannopoulos. It Really, REALLY Backfired.

Related: Aaron Swartz’ Warning That Social Media Companies Could Censor The Net Rings Truer Than Ever.

IS THIS THE END OF THE NEW REPUBLIC? Longtime former TNR publisher Marty Peretz twists the knife after examining the wreckage of old magazine under new owner Chris Hughes, who made his fortune largely by being besties with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg:

I don’t mean this physically, but he’s a small person,” Peretz said of Hughes. “In that metaphorical way, I knew that he’s not an imaginative person.”

Referring to Hughes’s status as a co-founder of Facebook because of his college friendship with Zuckerberg, Peretz added: “I think he owes about $700 million to the Harvard housing office.”

* * * * * * * *

John Judis, one of the brand-name writers who quit the magazine amid the implosion of December 2014, wrote Monday on his Facebook page: “What’s a good saying that will allow me not to use clichés like ‘the chickens have come home to roost.’ Hughes, the first generation of Silicon nouveaux riches, didn’t know what he was doing when he bought a political magazine. He didn’t understand what a political magazine was. And now that he has gotten rid of all the original staff, blown away its readership, and tarnished a century of work by people dedicated to make the country better rather* than making a profit for the already wealthy, he’s calling it quits.”

Just as Newsweek has continued on a zombie brand name after the pre-Bezos-era Washington Post unloaded it to electronics mogul Sydney Harman for a $1.00 and his assumption of a zillion dollars worth of debt, I wonder who will acquire TNR’s brand? I can think of a few well-heeled investors  that would certainly enjoy having fun with the title.

* Well, from a certain perspective, I suppose.

JOHN HINDERAKER ON EUROPE’S RAPE COVERUPS: “What I find inexplicable is the European liberals’ lack of concern for the young women who have been violated. In their political calculations, the women do not appear to figure at all. It’s almost like they were all Kennedys or Clintons.”

Plus: “As in Europe, New York’s political class doesn’t really care what happens to citizens. It’s all about their power.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: A Framework for Thinking About Law School Affordability.

THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY: ‘Legos’ for Fabrication of Atomically Precise Electronic Circuits.

EVERYTHING FOR THE NARRATIVE: How the Media Enables Fantasy Tours to Communist Cuba.

BEYOND LEGALITY: Why the ‘wet tea leaves’ drug raid was outrageous.

MICHELLE RISTUCCIA: Premeditations.

OR, AS WE CALL IT AROUND THE HOUSE: Generation Derp.  (Like my fish.) Generation Stupid.

AH, VERSAILLES: The Vulgar Spectacle of the SOTU.

BUT THEY DIVORCED REALITY: Why should they care what it thinks? Hillary the Reality Sucks Candidate.

FROM LIFEBOAT FOUNDATION: Visions of the Future.

AND AGAIN, LOOK HOW SHOCKED I AM: Oh, wait, I’m not.  After all I’ve moved all my life in liberal arts circles.  Emphasis on “liberal.” Because that’s what they are. Social Psychology is Ridiculously Left Wing.

WELCOME TO THE CANNIBAL FEAST: The Bill Comes Due: Cosby vs. Clinton.

A CONSUMMATION DEVOUTLY TO BE HOPED FOR: Supreme Court appears skeptical of union fees — a potentially major loss for labor groups.

STEPHENIE WILSON PETERSON: Nellie Nova Takes Flight (Volume 1).

SHOCKED, SHOCKED: Forty-Nine of 50 States Will See Premium Hikes in 2016.

THIS AUTHOR DOESN’T GET IT: She’s obviously never been one of the “needy.”  Right now, we can buy lottery or not, take it or leave it.  BUT when we were incredibly broke, we bought the lottery every weekend.  And we were never disappointed.  You see, we weren’t really buying a chance at millions.  We knew that was unlikely.  (My husband’s degree is Pure Math.) We were buying a chance to dream. Between whenever we bought the lottery and the drawing, we spent all that money a billion different ways, and forgot for a moment that we didn’t actually have enough spare money to buy new paperback books or, you know, buy a movie ticket, or meat for dinner. It was totally worth it. Why Big Powerball Jackpots are Bad For Us.

STEPHANIE OSBORN: Sherlock Holmes and the Mummy’s Curse: Book One of Sherlock Holmes: Gentleman Aegis.

IS THIS NORMAL: Or is it the random nature of this crime that makes it all more difficult? The haunted lives of the jurors who convicted James Holmes.

FLASHBACK: Trump’s Rise A Response To An Increasingly Isolated And Tyrannical Elite.

BOWIE. “How do you recap the career of the man who was Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and the Thin White Duke?,” asks Steve Green. “How do you sum up the music of the man who invented Glam, who recorded Alt Rock before there was an alternative scene, who with Brian Eno helped invent electronica, the Englishman who recorded great big blue-eyed soul like a Philly native, the pop crooner of twisted love songs, the hard rock frontman of Tin Machine, and who fought off his own death just long enough to release one final and haunting album? How do you define a human being whose personal life stretched from the darkest sex & drug days of the ’70s to a long and happy marriage to one of the most beautiful women in the world, from rumored dalliances with Mick Jagger to being a devoted and private family man?”

Read the whole thing — though perhaps Bowie himself summed up his multifaceted career — or at least his lyrical aims — the best: “The trousers may change, but the actual words and subjects I’ve always chosen to write with are things to do with isolation, abandonment, fear and anxiety — all of the high points of one’s life.”