OUCH: Wisconsin: This is what democracy looks like. “After Wisconsinites vote to amend the state constitution to change how the state supreme court’s chief justice is selected, Shirley Abrahamson sues in federal court to keep her position under the old provision.”

AFTER SEEING HER GO ALL CATHARINE MACKINNON ON “SEXUAL HARASSMENT” A WHILE BACK, I’M UNIMPRESSED WITH THIS; Megyn Kelly to Rand Paul: You’re coming off as pretty thin-skinned in your interviews, you know.

STACY TABB SAYS THEY’RE GOOD PEOPLE: Patriot Coffee Roasters.

WHEN WOMEN OUTPERFORM MEN IT’S BECAUSE WOMEN ARE WONDERFUL! AND MEN NEED TO BE MORE LIKE THEM. WHEN MEN OUTPERFORM WOMEN IT’S A TERRIBLE PROBLEM THAT MUST BE ADDRESSED: Reddit CEO Ellen Pao Bans Salary Negotiations To Equalize Pay For Men, Women. “‘Men negotiate harder than women do and sometimes women get penalized when they do negotiate,’ she said. ‘So as part of our recruiting process we don’t negotiate with candidates. We come up with an offer that we think is fair. If you want more equity, we’ll let you swap a little bit of your cash salary for equity, but we aren’t going to reward people who are better negotiators with more compensation.’”

REMINDER: In 2009, Barack Obama “Joked” About Siccing The IRS On His Enemies.

REASON TV: Video: Ever Wanted to Go to Mars? Mars One Candidate Talks Exploration.

WELL, THEY MAY HAVE STARTED OUT THAT WAY: Hair Regrowth Discovery Suggests Skin Cells Communicate Like Bacteria.

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SO, SORT OF A METAPHOR FOR THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY, THEN: Valet hits wrong pedal, destroys Ferrari 599 GTO.

HEALTH: 2 New Ebola Vaccines Pass Important Early Test, Researchers Say. “Two new Ebola vaccines have passed an important test, protecting monkeys against the strain of the virus responsible for the current deadly outbreak, researchers reported on Wednesday. Only one dose was needed, and there were no apparent side effects. The vaccines have not yet been tested in people, but safety trials in healthy volunteers will probably begin early this summer, said Thomas W. Geisbert, an Ebola expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and the senior author of a report published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.”

MARK RIPPETOE: Losing Bodyfat or Gaining Muscle Mass: Which is More Important? “It is not an overstatement to say that the activity that keeps muscles big is also the activity that prevents type II diabetes.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: We Are Ready To Believe You!

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And, Deal of The Week: Halloween: The Complete Collection.

HIGH INTENSITY EXERCISE: Better Before Fatty Meal.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: New scaffold for nanotechnology engineered from amyloid-like proteins.

READER BOOK PLUG: From Michele and Richard Bledsoe, The Secret Kingdom.

TECH: The Loaded New DJI Phantom 3 Drone Can Shoot in 4K: There are two new Phantom 3s, with the simpler starting at $999.

TO BE FAIR, SO DID IRAN: Scott Walker bests Obama on Iran.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why You Should Start a Brain Technology Company.

TALKING POINTS MEMO MOCKS THIS STATEMENT, BUT IT’S TRUE: GOP Lawmaker Says It’s Harder To Get A Vasectomy Than An Abortion.

I mean, if a married woman wants an abortion, they don’t demand her husband’s permission. But if a married man wants a vasectomy, well . . . .

More here. I think we need civil rights legislation banning this practice, as an infringement on men’s reproductive rights.

I’LL BE THERE DOING SOME VIDEOS FOR PJTV: PJ Media Special Coverage of the NRA Annual Meeting.

IN THE MAIL: Killing O’Reilly: A Parody.

Plus, today only at Amazon: Up to 40% Off Select SwissGear Laptop Backpacks. I have one of these as the trouble bag in my car. It seems very well made.

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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 700.

ANOTHER CULTURE-OF-CORRUPTION COVERUP? House panel wants enviro activist group’s communications with EPA’s McCarthy. “A House committee investigating the destruction of more than 5,000 official cellular telephone text messages by the Environmental Protection Agency wants a major nonprofit activist group to provide copies of all its communications with Gina McCarthy, the agency’s chief, on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. . . . Karpinski’s group has received nearly $90 million in 1,056 contributions since 2000 from liberal philanthropies and individuals, including the Tides Foundation. Tides pioneered the use of an umbrella foundation of wealthy individuals wishing to remain anonymous to funnel millions of dollars in ‘dark money’ to their favored causes.”

ADAM GARFINKLE: Politics As Bloodsport: The troubling remark everyone missed in Tom Friedman’s interview with President Obama—and some ruminations on the sad state of American political discourse.

Our public discourse, even over matters that used to be and still should be above partisan politics, has become increasingly less rational, less responsible, and less civil. For every veteran Bush-hater out there we have now an equal and opposite Obama-hater. Some personal experiences, if I may, to illustrate the point.

It has become embedded in “common knowledge” on the Left in the United States, and certainly abroad, that the Bush Administration generally, and Colin Powell in particular in his February 2003 speech to the UN Security Council, knowingly lied about weapons of mass destruction stockpiles in Iraq. It is simply beyond discussion that Administration principals actually worried about that subject; it was all allegedly mere pretext. I have even had people look me in the eye and declare that there is no difference, morally or otherwise, between knowingly lying and simply being mistaken about some point of fact. Such is the underwhelming capacity for moral logic among true Bush haters.

Obama haters are equally certain that the President actually despises his own country and its history, and a certain subset of haters is as certain that he hates Israel and Jews and has conspired from the start to do irreparable harm to Israeli security and well-being. Thus all that the President said about Israel in the Friedman interview, and by implication his explicit acknowledgement of the anti-Semitism of the Iranian leadership, has to be out and out duplicitous to such haters. He is indeed lying through his teeth, they are sure.

Hmm.

TEACH THE CHILDREN WELL: My Little Pony To Children: Marxism Is Not Magic.

WELL, GOOD: University of Michigan Relents, Will Show American Sniper as Originally Planned. And Paddington Too!

UPDATE: Backstory here. Nice to see a coach standing up against PC for a change.

LIFE ON CAMPUS: New O’Keefe Video Shows Support for ISIS, Hamas & Hezbollah Across California.

POWER: New Designer Drug Flakka Gives Users Super-Human Strength.

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USUALLY, IN A JOURNALISTIC FRAUD OR PLAGIARISM SCANDAL, THE FIRST CASE YOU FIND OUT ABOUT IS JUST THE FIRST CASE YOU FIND OUT ABOUT: Ashe Schow: Has the Rolling Stone gang-rape author EVER corroborated a story?

In the wake of Rolling Stone’s refusal to fire the author behind its now-retracted and now infamous University of Virginia gang-rape story, one has to wonder if this is a rare mistake or a pattern of behavior.

There are some big hints that it is the latter.

Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author in question, actually has a history of writing articles based solely on one person’s account, with no indication that she even tried to corroborate the story or hear any other potential side. . . .

Every story Erdely writes begins the same way — with a story about her main source’s experience written as if Erdely witnessed it herself. From there the article only seeks to bolster the source’s account — all with a credulity that lends itself more to fiction writing than journalism.

The question is whether Rolling Stone will do what the New Republic did in the wake of the Stephen Glass controversy — that is, to review Erdely’s past work and decide whether she should continue to be trusted as an author.

Well, I know the answer to that question already, but yeah.

OUR OLIGARCHS ARE A POLITICAL MONOCULTURE: National Journal: The Secret Republicans of Silicon Valley: In an industry where only liberal ideas are “allowed,” many libertarians and conservatives keep their political views secret.

See, I think that the Republicans in Congress should regard them as enemies. Because, you know, they are.

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

GOOD: IRS Workers Are Miserable and Overwhelmed.

THAT’S BECAUSE WE’RE GIVERS: Men More Likely Than Women To Go Back In Time And Kill Hitler: Moral Judgments Study. “Women were more likely to fall into the deontology camp and agonize for a long time over a decision, while men were somewhat more likely to lean toward utilitarianism and make a quick decision, the researchers found. That leads to a gender difference in making a moral decision, they say, with a stronger emotional aversion to harmful action being seen among women.”

You know, I felt better about the 19th Amendment before I knew that women, given a choice, would let Hitler live.

DAVID BERNSTEIN: The hypocrisy and dishonesty of attacks on Connecticut College professor Andrew Pessin.

Andrew Pessin is a distinguished philosophy professor at Connecticut College. He is also, as I understand it, the only Jewish professor at the college who regularly speaks up on behalf of Israel in an intellectual climate that is often dominated by left-wing and foreign students hostile to Israel.

This made him the target of one Lamiya Khandaker, a student who took his intro to philosophy class without incident last Fall. In February, she sent him an email complaining about a Facebook post from the previous August, in which used the metaphor of a rabid pit bull to describe the situation in Gaza, to wit, “One image which essentializes the current situation in Gaza might be this. You’ve got a rabid pit bull chained in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape.”

Reading the post, it’s ambiguous whether the rabid pit bull analogy is meant to apply to Hamas, Hamas and its Palestinian supporters, or Palestinian residents of Gaza more generally (whoever heard of a hastily-drafted, unclear, FB post?). However, I have seen his previous Facebook posts on the Gaza war last Summer, and they are full of criticism of Hamas, and don’t say anything nasty about Palestinians more generally, suggesting that he was, in fact, referring to Hamas.

In any event, Khandaker suggested that she found the post racist. Pessin clarified in response that he was not referring to Palestinians in general, but to Hamas and why its behavior provides a rationale for the Israel blockade of Gaza.

Khandaker is an idiot. Palestinians aren’t a “race.” They aren’t even a nationality. But, of course, the vast majority of campus “racism” complaints are just dishonest political hit-jobs.

Plus:

Speaking of animal analogies, Hamas’s charter calls Jews the “descendants of apes and pigs.” Pro-Hamas activists who gin up phony racism controversies like this one would like you to forget that.

Shame on the Connecticut College faculty for feeding the digital lynch mob rather than standing up for their colleague, or at least wallowing in ignominious silence.

How much per year does Connecticut College cost to attend? Why spend that on an environment in which political hit-jobs are met with “ignominious silence?”

DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES UPSET AT INSUFFICIENT KOWTOWING: Media pile on Rand Paul after aggressive response to NBC’s Savannah Guthrie.

They’re your enemies. Treat ‘em like Obama treats Fox News. And you have to laugh at this: “Rand Paul thinks he knows how to be a journalist better than you do.”

Here’s a hint: He does. Because it’s not that hard to be a better journalist than Savannah Guthrie, and most of her peers. The truth is, they’re not very good at what they do, but so long as they function as Democratic operatives with bylines, they don’t have to be. And that’s the real problem.

UPDATE: Republican strategists — and FOX producers — should probably click through and read the comments here. . . .

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Campus Rape and the ‘Emergency’: It’s Always an Excuse for Authoritarianism.

Want to make the “emergency” go away? Make the “cure” something that campus administrators don’t like.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Secret Service manager put on leave during probe of alleged assault.

A STALIN RERUN FROM PUTIN: “‘Russian Paper Removes Article About Soldier Wounded In Ukraine,’ Radio Free Europe reports. Did the Russians use Photoshop, or go old school, Stalin-style, and breakout the airbrushes? No — they used a far cruder technique: scissors. On 50,000 newspapers.”

IT’S LOOKING INCREASINGLY AS IF NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN MIGHT REPRESENT A BEST-CASE SCENARIO: “Let us hope that Mr. Obama does not become the Neville Chamberlain of our time.”

BILL STRAUB: What Have the 2016 GOP Hopefuls Done in the Senate? Here’s what Rubio, Cruz, Paul and Graham have been up to in the 114th Congress.

ROBERT TRACINSKI: The Hugo Awards: How to Fight Back in the Culture War. (Let me note, however, that the Hugo fight is not an “outgrowth” of GamerGate — it’s been going on for several years and just finally reached the breakthrough point.) “This year, the Sad Puppies campaign (and a related slate of recommendations called Rabid Puppies) swept the field. The response was a total meltdown among the leftist elites who had assumed, in previous years, that they (and their favorite publisher, Tor) basically owned the Hugos. So they did what the Left always does: they smeared everyone who disagrees with them as racists. Correia notes that on April 6, eight different news sites, from Entertainment Weekly to The Guardian, all published suspiciously similar hit pieces describing the Sad Puppies campaign and its organizers as racist and misogynist. Clearly, someone was feeding these sites the new official narrative, and they all swallowed it without any attempt at basic research.”

And then had to humiliatingly retract.

DAVID FRENCH: Social-Justice Warriors Aren’t So Tough When Even ‘Sad Puppies’ Can Beat Them. “Correia, Torgerson, and their Sad Puppies allies are living arguments against cultural defeatism. With humor and verve, they’ve taken on the allegedly unstoppable Left, stopped it, and thrown it into spasms of impotent rage and amusing disarray. In its rage and self-righteousness, the Left always overreaches. Always. I’ve seen that reality in 20 years of on-campus battles, we’re seeing that reality as their hate campaign against Memories Pizza helped make the owners a pile of money, and we saw it when we watched unhinged rhetoric help turn American Sniper into the top-grossing movie of 2014.”

REMEMBER, IT WAS PERFECTLY TIMED TO GO WITH A WHITE HOUSE CAMPUS-SEX-OFFENSE CAMPAIGN: How Deep Is This Education Official’s Involvement In The Rolling Stone Hoax?

A top-ranking official at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has emerged as a potentially key figure in Rolling Stone’s false article, “A Rape on Campus.”

Catherine Lhamon, who heads the Department’s civil rights wing, was identified in a letter sent last month by University of Virginia Dean of Students Allen Groves to Steve Coll and Sheila Coronel, the two Columbia Journalism School deans who conducted a review of the Nov. 19 article, written by disgraced reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

Groves’ letter was included as a footnote to the Columbia deans’ report, which was released on Sunday and cataloged the failures and lies that led to the article’s publication.

In the letter, Groves wrote that he has suffered “personal and professional” damage as a result of Erdely’s reporting and comments Lhamon made about him which were included in the article.

As the Rolling Stone article fell apart, Lhamon’s involvement has gone virtually unmentioned. But a deeper look reveals her ties to Emily Renda, a University of Virginia employee and activist who put Erdely in touch with Jackie, the student whose claim that she was brutally gang-raped by seven members of a fraternity on Sept. 28, 2014, served as the linchpin for the 9,000-word Rolling Stone article. . . . Lhamon has been invited to the White House nearly 60 times, according to visitor’s logs. Renda has been invited six times. Both were invited to the same White House meeting on three occasions.

I wonder if anyone has put in a FOIA request for her emails, and I wonder if they’ll “disappear,” you know?

THE NEW MCCARTHYISM: Academic-purity group backed by Greenpeace and AFT urges activists to “expose and undermine” professors and campus research centers that work against “progressive values.”

ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS: Exclusive: Intense Helmet Cam Video Captures American Volunteers’ Nearly Deadly Run-In With Islamic State.

BUT THERE IS ALWAYS TOMORROW: Here’s the Lamest Liberal Attack on Rand Paul You’ll Read Today.

Ryan Cooper needs to do some remedial reading.

OH, GOODY: CDC: Drug-Resistant Shigella Spreading In The US. “A group of bacteria called Shigella is responsible for 500,000 cases of diarrhea in the US every year. Now a new report says a multi-drug resistant strain of the bug is entering the country in infected travelers and causing a series of outbreaks.”

MOTIVATION: An App That Lets You See What You’d Look Like After Losing Weight.

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SHE USED TO BE HELD UP AS THIS SORT OF BENEVOLENT GENDER PIONEER, BUT WHAT SHE TURNED OUT TO BE IS A BITTER, ANGRY TAKE-NO-PRISONERS PARTISAN: After Wisconsinites vote to amend the state constitution to change how the state supreme court’s chief justice is selected, Shirley Abrahamson sues in federal court to keep her position under the old provision.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY ON THE ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY DEBACLE:

Last Monday afternoon, Entertainment Weekly posted a story in its Books section with the ominous headline: “Hugo Award nominations fall victim to misogynistic, racist voting campaign.”

Within a few hours, the headline changed to: “Correction: Hugo Awards voting campaign sparks controversy.”

That’s some correction. So what happened?

Both versions of the EW story were about the annual Hugo Awards given out to science fiction and fantasy writers. In the original version, EW’s Isabella Biedenharn claimed that “misogynist groups lobbied to nominate only white males for the science fiction book awards,” urging their followers to “cast votes against female writers and writers of color.”

Turns out that the slate of authors recommended by one of the groups, at least, did include women and minorities. Several of them, in fact.

The group’s campaign, in fact, had nothing to do with women or minorities, but an effort “to get talented, worthy, deserving authors who would normally never have a chance (to be) nominated for the supposedly prestigious Hugo awards,” according to Larry Correia, who along with Brad Torgersen, started the “Sad Puppies” campaign to bring more ideological diversity to the Hugo nominations.

“I started this campaign a few years ago,” Correia wrote on his blog, “because I believed that the awards were politically biased and dominated by a few insider cliques. Authors who didn’t belong to these groups or failed to appease them politically were shunned.”

But since the EW reporter didn’t bother to reach out to Correia, or anyone else involved, to check her facts, she apparently didn’t know this.

This story, like the now-completely discredited Rolling Stone “campus rape” article, shows the dangers of an increasingly biased mainstream news media.

Yep. And charges of racism, misogyny, etc. are almost always just political tools to defend insiders against outsiders nowadays.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University of Michigan Cancels American Sniper Screening to Protect Students’ Feelings, Will Show Paddington Instead. “College is daycare.”

The Center for Campus Involvement, an official university organization that hosts non-alcoholic events for students, had planned to screen American Sniper at a gathering on Friday night. But this plan drew outrage from a bunch of easily offended students, including the Muslim Students’ Association. . . .

To guard against the waves of anti-Islamic violence that would surely break across campus if American Sniper was screened, administrators substituted a different movie. Students will now be able to enjoy Paddington, which hopefully will not challenge any of their political or religious views, or inform them on culture or current affairs, in any way at all.

Though I’m surprised that Paddington isn’t drawing any protests of its own. After all, the film initially garnered a “PG” rating from the British Board of Film Classification for “dangerous behaviour, mild threat, mild sex references, [and] mild bad language,” according to BBC News. The producers complained that this judgment was extreme—apparently “mild bad language” referred to a single utterance of the word “bloody”—and the final warning changed “mild sex reference” to “innuendo.”

But do the students at UM possess the fortitude to sit through a movie containing “innuendo” and “dangerous behaviour”? Nothing about them suggests to me that they do.

Is it worth six figures to attend such a place? Is it worth tax dollars to support it? Why, exactly?

APPARENTLY, IT’S BECAUSE LOS PAPAS WON’T LET GIRLS BRING BOYS HOME: Why Do So Many Young People in Latin America Hook Up in Parks?

SPACE: To Boldly Go Where No Body Has Gone Before: What to do when an astronaut dies in space.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Pentagon Moves More Communications Gear into Cheyenne Mountain: Largely abandoned a decade ago, the iconic Cold War bunker is getting an upgrade.

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GEORGE LEEF: Cheated turns over a rock, fully exposing UNC’s “student-athlete” scandal.

I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: More scientists doubt salt is as bad for you as the government says.

BOSTON: Tsarnaev Found Guilty.

PLANES WITHOUT PILOTS: “Mounting evidence that the co-pilot crashed a Germanwings plane into a French mountain has prompted a global debate about how to better screen crewmembers for mental illness and how to ensure that no one is left alone in the cockpit. But among many aviation experts, the discussion has taken a different turn. How many human pilots, some wonder, are really necessary aboard commercial planes? One? None?” Maybe we should go the other direction, and bring back flight engineers.

HORMESIS: Could Small Amounts of Radiation Be Good For You? It’s Complicated. “Other so-called hormetic effects in humans are well documented. At low levels, and in certain circumstances, physical stressors such as exercise, cold, toxins, and fasting all bring health benefits. These appear to work by slightly over-activating the body’s repair machinery, relative to a small stress, with net positive results.”

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SPACE: ESA and NASA Will Try to Smash an Asteroid Out of Its Orbit in 2022.

GEORGE WILL’S LATEST COLUMN IS ON OVERCRIMINALIZATION, and it references both Michael Cottone’s Rethinking Presumed Knowledge of the Law in the Regulatory Age, and my own Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is A Crime.

SKYNET IS NOT AMUSED: AI Doomsayer Says His Ideas Are Catching On: Philosopher Nick Bostrom says major tech companies are listening to his warnings about investing in “AI safety” research.

ROGER SIMON: Rand Paul’s Debut.

MICHAEL WALSH: Time to Rein in the Cops: Walter Scott Didn’t Have to Die. “Leave it to the New York Times to instantly racialize the incident; after all, the Narrative must be advanced at every opportunity. But this story is larger than that. Because, in this era of militarized, trigger-happy police, what officer Slager did to poor Walter Scott could happen to any of us. . . . America 2015: where everything you have, including your life, belongs to the state. Who won the Cold War, again?”

MAURICE STUCKE AND ARIEL EZRACHI: Artificial Intelligence & Collusion: When Computers Inhibit Competition.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: The War Against Religious Liberty.

IN THE MAIL: Asylum (Loralynn Kennakris Book 3).

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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 699.

SPYING: U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades. “The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.” It’s lucky that the U.S. government is so ethical that we don’t have to worry about any of this information being politically abused. Love the picture of Janet Reno and her deputy, Eric Holder.

RICHARD BRADLEY — WHO FIRST SMELLED A RAT IN THAT ROLLING STONE STORY — HAS A POST-MORTEM: In the End, It’s All About Rape Culture—or the Lack Thereof.

Again, in the spirt of full disclosure, there is one thing that bugs me about the reference to me in the report, the acknowledgment of my “early if speculative” blog posting calling Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s article into question. I’ve encountered this theme—that I was “speculating”—repeatedly since I wrote my blog, and it frustrates me. By framing what I wrote as speculation, a number of mainstream publications, such as the Times and the New Yorker, feel free to ignore my blog when detailing how Erdely’s story was dismantled by press critics.

The supposition that I was “speculating” misses the larger point of what I wrote;the foundation of my argument was not “a hunch,” but basic professionalism. Any decent editor who is honest with him or herself would tell you the same: Even if Jackie’s story turned out to be true, it still shouldn’t have been published as it was reported and written. Will Dana should have sent it back to the editor and writer with a note saying: “You don’t have this story. Go back and do your jobs.” It was not “speculative” to say that the story should not have been published without further reporting; it was Journalism 101, the kind of thing that they teach (I assume) in the first couple weeks at Columbia Journalism School. And I didn’t have to have access to all the fact-checker’s notes and interview transcripts to know that; any reader with some small degree of journalism experience could know that—and, frankly, should have.

My suspicion that Jackie’s story was not true was based on the idea that if it were, Rolling Stone would have shown us the reporting to back it up. Since Rolling Stone did not, one had to conclude that the evidence to support Jackie did not exist.

That’s not speculation, that’s observation. Plus:

With a story this sensitive, good libel lawyers—and I assume Rolling Stone has very good lawyers—are, or should be, very much in the mix. On sensitive stories, they become something akin to editors with a law degree. You simply could not publish such an accusatory article without having it very heavily lawyered; there is, or ought to be, a lot of discussion between the editor-in-chief and the magazine’s libel lawyer(s). That Rolling Stone won’t disclose their lawyers’ advice suggests that the magazine did not take it, or did the least amount possible to satisfy legal concerns. After all, if the lawyers argued that the magazine had done excellent work and was on safe ground publishing the story, disclosing that information would likely have discouraged any potential lawsuits—like the one Phi Psi is now pursuing against the magazine.

In other words: It’s highly likely that Rolling Stone had a prepublication warning that this story had significant problems—and published the story anyway. Because they knew it was a sexy story, and they were willing to take the risk.

Oops. That’s “reckless disregard.” Plus, sheer bigotry:

Sabrin Rubin Erdely started with a thesis and went in search of someone—and some place—that fit her thesis. She found Jackie and the University of Virginia. But, she admits, if she had discovered that Jackie was a liar, it wouldn’t have caused her to question her thesis. (To which the only response is, if that doesn’t cause you to question your thesis, what would?) Instead, she’d just go find another person who would better conform to what she already wanted to write.

And if that person proved to be a fraud as well, she’d find another…and another…

I am not a lawyer, so I don’t know if Phi Psi has a strong case against Erdely and Rolling Stone. But if the famed “actual malice” test—you are intending to defame someone—is relevant, it seems to me that Erdely has just given the fraternity some explicit evidence of such malice. Even if her “victim” was a liar, Erdely has no doubt: Frat boys are rapists.

19th Century lynch mobs were equally certain about black men. Also:

I have seen a lot of published fretting—not just in Erdely’s statement—about whether this fiasco will discourage victims of rape from going public. This sentiment, which I have seen far more of than I have seen empathy for the people Erdely falsely accused of rape, strikes me as odd. A horrific story of rape, which, following its publication in a national magazine, had an enormous impact, is discovered to be a fraud. And the response is: Well, we should all worry about the potential impact on rape victims’ ability to come forward to speak the truth.

I have a different take: Let’s agree that if you don’t lie and claim that you were gang-raped as part of a fraternity initation ritual, you’ll be treated with respect. And if people treat you disrespectfully based simply on past frauds, then shame on them.

But in the meantime, let’s remember that the only known victims of this story are members of the Phi Psi fraternity, fraternity members in general and the University of Virginia. These individuals and institutions suffered in tangible ways; you might even say that some of the fraternity members were “traumatized.” The argument that the people we should worry about first are rape victims could actually—if I may borrow a phrase from Sabrina Rubin Erdely—re-traumatize them.

But they don’t count because in Erdely’s world they’re the Evil Other. Like black men in the 19th century South.

And, finally: “Sabrina Rubin Erdely is not just a horrible reporter, she is a deeply dishonest one. According to the Coll report, two sources in the story publicly claimed that they did not say that Erdely attributes to them.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: The Left Gets It Wrong About Social Security.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Americans are underprepared for retirement. And given this sad fact, there’s a growing movement on the left saying we need a government solution, stat: specifically, an expansion of Social Security benefits.

Perhaps you are confused. Weren’t we just talking about entitlement reform so that we could spend less on the program? Why, yes, we were. But since no one, left or right, really wants to take on our vast army of retirees, that chatter has died down. Now that it has, progressives who are ideologically opposed to shrinking the welfare state and are, of course, worried about retirees have decided that the best defense is a good offense, as Jamelle Bouie chronicles in Slate. Instead of reluctantly agreeing to a compromise where Republicans let some taxes rise and Democrats agree to entitlement cuts, they’re demanding bigger tax hikes to fund bigger entitlements.

At the core of their argument is a good point: Americans really do need more money for retirement. Missing, however, is a realistic discussion of where that money might come from.

That’s usually how it goes.

BREAKING NEWS FROM ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY: Rich People Are Great at Spending Money to Make Their Kids Rich, Too.

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AUSTIN BAY: Obama’s Iran Understanding: The Verifiable Facts. “Obama’s “historic understanding” has the sad woof and warp of so many of his administration’s domestic and international policy efforts: glowing, inspirational, dramatic rhetoric disguising episodic, hodge-podge, ill-considered, poorly planned and often hastily organized operations. . . . Obama has an enormous trust problem; the man does not keep his word. But his obedient, word-mongering national media corps consistently fails to call him on this grand malfeasance. So what can be verified regarding Iran? Here is a verifiable fact: Iran already possesses long-range ballistic missiles.”

WELL, THERE’S ALWAYS WOODROW WILSON: Cheney calls Obama ‘worst president’ on foreign policy. But we’ve had the chance to observe most of the fallout from Wilson’s debacles. Obama’s is still unfolding. But Cheney goes on: “I vacillate between the various theories I’ve heard, but you know, if you had somebody as president who wanted to take America down, who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world and reduce our capacity to influence events, turn our back on our allies and encourage our adversaries, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama’s doing.”

Ouch. Also, pretty much true.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Maya Angelou’s new stamp features quote that wasn’t hers.

ASHE SCHOW: Few, if any, consequences for those involved in perpetrating rape hoaxes.

When a sensational rape story is found to be fraudulent, there are few ramifications for those who perpetrated the hoax in the first place.

To take the most recent example, no one is getting fired at Rolling Stone for its fraudulent article about a brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia. The fact-checkers who failed to raise sufficient concerns about the lack of corroborating evidence, the editors who removed crucial details that would have made the article’s weaknesses clear, and the author who sought a sensational story to fit an agenda will all keep their jobs. . . .

And beyond those at RS who allowed the hoax to go forward, those who helped spread the story once it was published faced no consequences either. U.Va. president Teresa Sullivan offered no apology for her role in treating Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity accused in the RS article, as guilty from the start. Similarly, there appears to be no investigation to discover the vandals who smashed windows and spray-painted hateful messages at the fraternity house.

Jackie, the source of the false article, still has her privileged status as a victim, despite there being no evidence that she is the victim of anything.

The same was true of the Duke lacrosse hoax nearly a decade ago. Richard Brodhead is still the president of the university. Wendy Murphy, who spread lie after lie about the case on television throughout the ordeal, is still being asked for her opinion (in fact she was quoted in the now-retracted Rolling Stone article — go figure). The activists and professors who smeared the lacrosse players were never held accountable.

At least with Duke, the prosecutor who targeted the lacrosse players to advance his own personal ambitions was disbarred. The police officer who helped railroad the students was merely reassigned. (He retired in 2008 and committed suicide in 2014, although it is unclear whether his role in the hoax had anything to do with his death.) The accuser, Crystal Mangum, faced no repercussions for filing a false report, and in fact went on to write a book. But in an unrelated twist, she is now serving a prison sentence for second-degree murder.

In the case of Tawana Brawley — arguably the most famous rape hoax in modern U.S. history — she eluded paying defamation damages for 25 years. Al Sharpton, who embraced and lied about that case, has his own show on MSNBC today. Although he was ordered to pay damages as well, he refused for years before his friends finally paid his debt for him.

Meanwhile, in each of these cases, those accused in the initial hoax suffered far greater punishments than the liars who created the hoax. Phi Kappa Psi had their house vandalized and reputation greatly tarnished by the media without receiving an apology from anyone. (They’re now suing.) . . .

Even when rape hoaxes are exposed, political correctness and a demand to adhere to the ultimate “rape culture” narrative keeps false accusers insulated while the wrongly accused suffer.

Yeah, that needs to stop now.

NOT EVERYONE IS AS HAPPY TO BE LIED TO AS THE WASHINGTON PRESS CORPS: Federal judge slams Obama lawyers in immigration case. “A federal judge has issued a scathing rebuke to lawyers for the Obama administration in a case involving the president’s unilateral immigration action. In an order issued Tuesday night, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, who had put a temporary hold on the action, not only refused to lift the hold — he also came very near to accusing administration lawyers of flat-out lying to him.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Steyer Vows to Spend Big in 2016, Media Suddenly Not Concerned About ‘Money in Politics.’

The media pretends that the Left’s benefactors aren’t really that rich, you know. Nothing like the KOCH BROTHERS FINANCIAL BEHEMOTH. In this post alone, the writer lets Steyer’s NextGen PAC play coy about how much it will spend, while quoting a NextGen memo decrying “the Koch brothers’ unprecedented campaign spending…” In reality, Steyer spent almost $69 million more than the Koch brothers in the last election cycle. . . .

Steyer’s name, on the other hand, is rarely mentioned in the media. He’s practically a publicity ghost. Hell, his name didn’t even make it into the headline of the Reuters post. They referred to him as “green donor.” In fact, the Koch brothers get mentioned twice as many times as Steyer does in the article, and it’s about him.

Tom Steyer is the $74 million elephant in the room and the press barely knows his name or acknowledges his existence.

Wise GOP presidential candidates would do well to mention him often.

Indeed.

THE HILL: Senate Dems waver on Iran bill.

The White House is trying to bottle up bipartisan legislation that would give Congress 60 days to review a final Iran nuclear deal.

The pushback may be having an effect — Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, is now undecided about the legislation after Republicans had touted him as a supporter.

Coons is worried Republicans might use the bill as a political weapon, something the White House has warned about.

“He’s reviewing and making a decision on how he’ll vote next week. He is focused on creating a responsible structure for congressional oversight. He is concerned about the bill becoming a partisan vehicle,” said Sean Coit, Coons’s spokesman.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, another Democrat floated as a likely vote to override a veto of the Corker-Menendez bill, softened his stance on Tuesday. A spokesman said it’s “TBD” if Warner will vote for the bill or support a veto override.

“Let’s first see what happens during [the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s] markup next week,” the aide said.

Claiming Coons and Warner as likely allies, the supporters of the Iran legislation believe they have 66 votes, one short of the threshold needed to override a veto from President Obama.

With the bill close to a tipping point, the White House is leaning on Democrats to withhold support.

Well, I’m sure the Menendez indictment sent a signal.

VIA JUDITH CURRY, The American Physical Society’s Draft Statement On Climate Change. “Well, their paragraph on Climate Science is a rather astonishing take on the APS Workshop. Their paragraph on Climate Change seems to come from the Guardian. Their statement on Climate Action reiterates their rather crazy statement in 2007. . . . This is an egregious misuse of the expertise of the APS. Their alleged understanding of issues like spectroscopy and fluid dynamics are not of any direct relevance to the issues they write about in this statement. The statement is an embarrassment to the APS.”

HOW THEY THINK IN THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE: Laurence Tribe considered “a traitor” for advocacy in climate change case.

CALIFORNIA: To Fight The Drought, Stop Recycling.

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THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: U.S. Advised Citizens Stuck in Yemen to Fly Out of Closed Airports, Board Ship That Can’t Dock. “Today India offered to help evacuate Americans from Yemen, including with flights out of Sana’a and ships from Aden. The first rescue flights are scheduled to leave Tuesday.”

HOWARD KURTZ: Rolling Stone scandal “one of the worst journalistic catastrophes.”

JOURNALISM: “It was almost like they were all reading off the same script.”

SHE SEEMS TO BE HITTING DEMOCRATS, AND STANDING UP FOR FREE ENTERPRISE, MORE THAN MOST: Fiorina defends Uber, Airbnb.

OUCH: Investor’s Business Daily: Hillary Clinton’s Private Server A Foreign Spy Magnet. Yes, you can be pretty sure that foreign governments know all her secrets, and will use them at the appropriate time.

SPENGLER: Some wars should be prevented, and some wars should be preempted. “Most of the great wars of the past would have been far less bloody had they begun sooner.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Deceptive Statistics 101, Courtesy Of A Law Professor And The New York Times.

Related: The Crisis In American Legal Education.

HE’S TALKING ABOUT RADICAL ISLAMISTS, NOT GREENPEACE: “The enemy is radical Islam. You can’t get around it.” Rand Paul Says He Will Do Anything to Defend America From ‘Haters of Mankind.’

DANGERS: Man, 7 children died from carbon monoxide poisoning, relatives say. Generators are perfectly safe if properly used and positioned, but if not, this sort of thing can happen all too easily. Here are some generator safety tips. And if you’re going to use a portable generator — and probably, even if you’re not, just on general principles — get a carbon monoxide alarm. In this case, the generator was reportedly “in the kitchen.” Uh, no. They need to be outside, and well away from any doors or windows.

21ST CENTURY FAME: So, one of my friends is gloating that she made it into a Buzzfeed clickbait article on breastfeeding pics.

FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS: Orthorexia: When Eating Healthily Becomes a Fixation.