LAWS AND ACCOUNTABILITY ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Report: 80% of Chicago cops purposefully destroyed or hid dashcam mics. Why are Democrat-run cities such cesspits of official lawlessness?

OVERTRAINING IS INSIDIOUS: Ryan Hall’s Overtraining: A Cautionary Tale. “Researchers have known since the late 1980s that chronic and extreme endurance training has a tendency to lower testosterone levels, causing depression, fatigue, and lack of motivation. More recently, however, exercise-induced low testosterone has been recognized as one of many common biomarkers for a more systemic breakdown: training that is so hard, frequent, and long, and with such inadequate rest along the way, that fitness, performance, energy levels, and mood all fall off a cliff.”

This can happen with weight training, too. One thing I do — like the old bodybuilders who, like me, didn’t use any steroids — is to take a clean week off every 8-10 weeks, when I don’t do more than walk for 30 minutes now and then.

VIDEO: Jefferson Airplane Plays on a New York Rooftop; Jean-Luc Godard Captures It (1968). A blast from the past. As a friend commented on Facebook: “Pearl Harbor Day. 1968 was closer to 12/7/41 than to today. 27 years versus 47+ years. For that matter, they were closer to Pearl Harbor than to the 9/11 attacks. (32 years, 9 months, 4 days excluding the end date.)”

AT AMAZON, $5 off the Fire TV Stick. I like mine.

Plus, Deals Galore in Amazon Video.

“GUYS LIKE TED CRUZ WILL NEVER MAKE A DEAL.”

WELL, THAT SOUNDS ABOUT RIGHT: Danish Journalist: Europe’s tragedy: Too much Angela Merkel, too little masculinity.

BLUE-ON-BLUE #BERNIEBRO FIGHT SHOWS HOW THE SAUSAGE IS MADE.

Hey, that DNC-MSM narrative doesn’t advance itself, you know.

NEW POLL: Franklin Pierce-Herald Poll: Rivals need Iowa win to catch Trump, Sanders in N.H. If Hillary loses in both Iowa and New Hampshire, is she finished?

VIDEO: Korean Girls Try American Barbecue for the First Time.

IN IOWA, ROGER SIMON INTERVIEWS CARLY FIORINA: Fiorina Running for Prez to Highlight Hillary’s Corruption.

TIME FOR SMOD TO UP HIS GAME: Andromeda smash-up: distant galaxy is rushing towards Earth at one million mph — with no hope of deviation.

(Andromeda Smash-Up would have been an excellent name for a late-’70s Gary Numan-style synth band, by the way.)

IDIOCRACY: OMG! NAACP leader uses F-word to apologize for using T-word after N-word meeting.

WELL, THAT’S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK: Equation shows that large-scale conspiracies would quickly reveal themselves.

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PROTON PUMP INHIBITORS: Study Finds Growing Reason to Be Wary of Some Reflux Drugs. “Older people should probably pay special heed. They are more likely to experience reflux, Dr. Semla explained, in part because the muscle that prevents stomach acid from rising into the esophagus weakens with age. Older adults are therefore more likely to take these drugs, and also more vulnerable to the diseases and disorders associated with them, especially with long-term use.”

WHICH IS AN ACCOMPLISHMENT OF SORTS: The New York Times Is Dumber Than I Thought.

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Legal Issues Relating to (Former) Secretary Hillary Clinton’s Candidacy.

MORE ON QUERCETIN: So I mentioned a while back that I’ve been taking it and it helped with my sinuses. I went off of it for a couple of weeks, found I was waking up congested and having to take an occasional Sudafed, went back on it and that’s no longer the case. Now the Insta-Wife is trying it too and thinks it helps.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Tears and Bewilderment in Brazilian City Facing Zika Crisis. “The Zika epidemic has spread much faster than science’s understanding of it. Researchers here believe that the virus made the leap from Polynesia to Brazil during the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament. Since then, as many as 1.5 million people in Brazil are believed to have been infected, and the virus has spread to more than 20 countries and territories in the Americas.”

Related: Vaccine for Zika Virus May Be Years Away, Disease Experts Warn.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 10 Tips for Making Long Flights (Somewhat) Bearable.

One tip references onboard Wi-Fi, but in the past few months of taking regular flights to DFW, I’ve been astonished at how slow Gogo is these days; it’s become much less usable then when the service debuted, in contrast to land-based broadband, which generally seems to have increased due to the demand Netflix and other streaming services place on it. Why is Gogo increasingly a no-go these days?

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: “I don’t join the gym, drink Coke or adopt fad diets,” I said, wondering if I could market this as a multimillion-pound fitness regime.

LET’S PLAY THE ‘BLAME ISRAEL GAME’ WITH THE NEW YORK TIMES: “No matter how hard the Times tries, it can never quite find the elusive answer to the question of why Palestinians keep murdering Jews.”

Related: Anti-Israel movement hijacks MLK Day again.

HEH: Clinton Ominously Tells Iowan Supporters To Mark Front Doors With Campaign Logo Before Sundown.

ANALYSIS: TRUE: “Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them,” from a 2013 article titled, “David Bowie: What I’ve Learned.”

Also true: “With a suit, always wear big British shoes, the ones with large welts. There’s nothing worse than dainty little Italian jobs at the end of the leg line,” although I prefer American-made Alden shoes myself. (Though wearing size 12D, any shoes are going to be Potemkin-sized on my feet.)

IT’S COME TO THIS: “Roberts doesn’t go down the rathole of why it was wise, and I’m not going to do his links for him. I’ll just guess ‘bitch-slap’ has been deemed offensive to bitches.”

OCD AND Y.O.U.: Crafting in Computer RPGs: “Addictive is not always fun,” Moe Lane warns.

IN THE MAIL: From Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.

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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 997.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Tax Cuts Don’t Motivate The Republican Base Anymore.

Yesterday, in discussing the lower- and middle-class workers who have been increasingly displaced by automation and trade, I wrote that both parties are simply reiterating longstanding policy preferences that are far more geared to the desires of their respective elites, than to the difficulties these people encounter in their every day lives. In another column soon, I’ll talk about why the standard Democratic economic package is not making more inroads with this group. But today, I’m going to talk about why what the Republicans have been offering — tax cuts and deregulation — falls so flat.

I’ve been urging Republicans to find an agenda beyond tax cuts for a while, with no notable success. Mostly I’ve focused on the budget logic, which is simply this: we’ve run out of our ability to cut taxes without substantial cuts to entitlements, and the collapse of Bush’s Social Security reform illustrated that Republicans have absolutely no stomach for cutting entitlements.

But that’s boring fiscal nannying, easy for both parties to ignore as long as debt markets are still willing to lend the government money. So today let me point out why the political logic fails as completely as the budget math — why the Trump voters, and indeed, Trump-hating social conservatives like Rod Dreher, are not much moved by Republican promises to get those marginal tax rates down even further.

To do so, I want to go back to a time when tax cuts did work politically, a period which starts with Ronald Reagan.

I’d still like my taxes cut, but I don’t think I’m part of the demographic she’s describing.

WHAT HAPPENS when women have no boundaries.

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ROGER SIMON Is On The Ground In Des Moines.

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Muslim extremists’ ‘campaign of lies’ to undermine the government’s fight against terror.

Islamist activists linked to Cage, a group known to sympathise with terrorists, are using coordinated leaks to mainstream news organisations, including the BBC, to spread fear and confusion in Muslim communities about the Government’s anti-terror policy, Prevent.

Investigations by the Telegraph reveal that several widely reported recent stories about Prevent are false or exaggerated – and many of the supposedly “ordinary Muslim” victims are in fact activists in the campaign, known as Prevent Watch. The stories include a claim which became a cause célèbre for Prevent’s opponents – that a Muslim schoolboy from London was “interrogated like a criminal” for using the phrase “ecoterrorism” in class. The boy’s mother, Ifhat Smith, who took the story to the media, presented herself as a traumatised ordinary Londoner. She is in fact an activist in the Prevent Watch campaign and a key figure in the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which believes in replacing secular democratic government with Islamic government.

This is no surprise. And neither is the press’s gullibility.

IT’S JUST “WAR ON WOMEN” ELECTIONEERING: Employers to get new rules to prove mythical gender wage gap.

The gender wage gap is due mostly to the choices women make in their careers and family lives, not to discrimination. Yet the myth persists that women earn 78 cents to the dollar that men earn for doing the exact same job.

On Friday, President Obama announced a new regulation that would force employers to “collect summary pay data by gender, race and ethnicity from businesses with 100 or more employees.”

Because even though the discrepancy is due mostly to the choices women make, why not set about trying to prove that it’s all about discrimination?

The gender wage gape myth persists mostly because it is an easy talking point for Democrats looking to foment anger and resentment between men and women. But it also persists because the data behind the gap make apples and oranges comparisons between the careers and hours of men and women. The data do not compare “equal pay for equal work,” as Democrats claim. The White House knows this, yet continues to demonize employers and victimize women.

Well, they know a lot of stuff, and continue to say different. Because demonizing is what they do best. Related: Jay Carney addresses male/female pay gap at White House.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Police: Louisiana Teacher and Teen Girl Had Year-Long Lesbian Relationship. “Naquin, who is the daughter of the local school board president, is the third teacher at Destrehan High School to be charged with molesting students recently.”

POLITICO: Cruz’s TV ads judged most effective. “The ratings come from Ace Metrix, a television analytics company that uses large online panels to rate the effectiveness of TV commercials. The company’s political unit found that Cruz’s campaign produced five of the 11 top-scoring ads among Republican voters this election, including the single most effective ad of the GOP primary so far.”

CHANGE: “More than 1 million low-income residents in 21 states could soon lose their government food stamps if they fail to meet work requirements that began kicking in this month.”

DES MOINES DIARY #1: WATCHING TELEVISION IN IOWA. “For the next seventy-two hours or so — and possibly longer because of the impending snowstorm late caucus night — Iowa is the political capital of the known world,” and Roger Simon is on location there. Read the whole thing.

IT CROSSES ALL LINES: The rarely discussed support for gun rights among black voters. “During the power days of the Brady campaign back in the 90s, black support for gun rights was tanked at 17 to 18 percent, but if you look at the graph above it’s been slowly rising at roughly the same rate as support among whites. At the end of last year it had reached 34% at the same time that white support peaked at around 60. I won’t read too much into this, but the Howard interview definitely makes a good case as to why plenty of black voters should, if anything, be more supportive of gun rights.”

UNEXPECTEDLY: Venezuela is on the brink of a complete economic collapse.

THE WAY THINGS ARE GOING, THESE MIGHT BE NEEDED: Five medieval toothpaste recipes, plus more medieval dental advice.

BOTH FILMS CAPTURE GOVERNMENTAL FAILURES: ‘13 Hours,’ ‘Big Short’ capture why Sanders, Trump voters are furious.  Of course for that to encourage people to vote for Bernie, they must be extremely clueless people.

IT’S A GOOD QUESTION: EXCLUSIVE: Byron York interviews Donald Trump, asks him what makes him conservative.

DEEP RESEARCH AT THE SHALLOW END: Disney Princess Panic.

IT’S TWINS: Earth is actually two planets.

IT’S POSITIONAL GOODS ALL THE WAY DOWN: Elites Lament Sale of Hipster Trash Cans and Locally Sourced Food to Average Americans.

DRAINING THE OCEAN WITH A SEASHELL: David Cameron to force EU crunch meeting as migration crisis deepens.

MONEY: Why is Hollywood Pandering to Chinese Censors?

INTERNATIONAL COURTS THAT GIVE THE SAME STATUS TO CIVILIZED NATIONS AND BARBARIAN HOLES PRODUCE THIS: Legal action against soldiers could undermine Britain in the battle field.

DISABILITY DOESN’T MEAN LACK OF WORTH: Toddler with Down Syndrome Recites His ABCs, Reminds World what Joy Looks Like.

NOTHING IS SAFE FROM THE SJW’S MISSIONARY FERVOR: Oscar gets caught in the crossfire of a social-justice civil war.

THE LORE OF MY PEOPLE: Hugo History – A Guest Post by Ben Yalow.

AT LEAST THIS CONFUSION OF FICTION AND REALITY IS FUNNY: Red faces at National Archive after Baldrick poem published with WW1 soldiers’ diaries.  To be fair it wasn’t their fault.  It was his plan.  It involved a turnip.

WHO WAS GOING TO INDICT HER? Hillary escaped Whitewater indictment, compared to ‘Mafia kingpin’.

I’M NOT SURE I BUY THIS: The Surprising Health Benefits Of Clutter.

TWO FROM OBAMA, ONE LAME AND ONE DUMB: US Presidents: 30 great one-liners.

FLOWER … UM…. POWER? Flower Shell Lets You Plant Seeds Using a 12-Gauge Shotgun.  Manly gardening!

THE CONSEQUENCES OF HAVING IT ALL: Why today’s woman needs help finding female friends.

THE FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION GETS A BLOODY NOSE: Unintended Consequences.  (Liberty Zone, language warning, you’ve been told.)

BERNIE LIES: BRUTAL: The HARD TRUTH About European Style Socialism.

DELTA STEWARDESSES BRAWL AT 37,000 FEET: Delta flight “from Los Angeles to Minneapolis had to make an unscheduled landing in Utah because two female flight attendants got into a fistfight at 37,000 feet.”

I’m old enough to remember a more civilized era, when women were expected to duke it out before they get on the airplane:

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CHARLES C.W. COOKE: Tucker Carlson Misfires with his Analysis of Conservatism for Politico.

If you’ll forgive the expression, this is a post-mortem without a body. At present, Donald Trump has the theoretical support of a plurality — not a majority — of Republican primary voters. Indeed, at present, most Republicans prefer someone else. As of today, not a single vote has been cast. As of today, the nomination could go one of three or even four considerably different ways. If Trump ends up as the nominee, then it may well be fair to say that the Republican party has been proven to be “out of touch with its voters” and that, in 2016, “the party had no idea who its voters were or what they believed.” But if he doesn’t? Well, then this prediction is going to look really quite odd. It is one thing to say “there is a sizable portion of GOP voters who are unhappy with the status quo”; that much is demonstrably true, and was noted well in National Review’s recent editorial. But it is quite another thing to presume that those voters are “the GOP” per se. Unfortunately, Carlson does precisely that.

Had the GOP done its job, these voters wouldn’t be alienated and angry.

TOYOTA WANTS ITS CARS to expect the unexpected.

VICIOUS CLASH BETWEEN MONGOLS AND IRON ORDER BIKER GANGS LEAVES ONE DEAD AND SEVERAL SHOT AND STABBED AT DENVER MOTORCYCLE CONVENTION.

SPACE: The Hardiest Fungi On Earth Could Survive Mars-Like Conditions. People have long thought that to be the case, but it’s interesting to have space-based research that proves it.

WELL, THIS IS DISTURBING: American College of Pediatricians: New Concerns about the Human Papillomavirus Vaccine.

A QUANTUM OF RATIONALITY: Panicked Oxford Cancels “Completely Barking” Mad Decision to Remove Rhodes Statue After Alumni Threaten to Withdraw Millions.

The governing body of Oriel College, which owns the statue, has ruled out its removal after being warned that £1.5m worth of donations have already been cancelled, and that it faces dire financial consequences if it bows to the Rhodes Must Fall student campaign.

A leaked copy of a report prepared for the governors and seen by this newspaper discloses that wealthy alumni angered by the “shame and embarrassment” brought on the 690-year-old college by its own actions have now written it out of their wills.
The college now fears a proposed £100m gift – to be left in the will of one donor – is now in jeopardy following the row.
The donors were astonished by a proposal to remove a plaque marking where Rhodes lived, and to launch a six-month consultation over whether the statue of the college’s biggest benefactor should be taken down.

College students are behaving idiotically, and administrators aren’t any better. Time for some adult supervision from outside.

UPDATE: From the comments: “Note to college students: You are not that important. For every one of you, there are 5 more just as qualified ready to take your spot. YOU.ARE.NOT.SPECIAL.”

40,000 MILES in a 2015 Honda Fit.

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT THE WAY I HAD HOPED: San Francisco’s New Weapon on Public Urination: Open-Air Urinal.

A METAPHOR FOR DONALD TRUMP AND THE POLITICAL SYSTEM: Absurd Creature of the Week: This Toad Isn’t Eating a Bug. The Bug Is Eating It. “As larvae, beetles of the genus Epomis actually entice frogs and toads and salamanders to attack them, then whip around and sink their huge, hooked jaws into the attackers, slowly draining the life out of them. “

ROGER SIMON: Hillary Clinton and the Criminalization of America.

BERNIE SANDERS’ NEXT CAMPAIGN STOP? ‘Anti-capitalist’ campus co-op faces shutdown because renters refuse to pay rent.

VOTER SHAMING SEEMS LIKE A BAD IDEA: He Said He Was An Undecided Iowan Until He He Received This Controversial Mailer From Ted Cruz.

SO SEARCHING MY BLOG ARCHIVES LED ME BACK TO THIS PIC, which kinda made me miss my RX-8.

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MARK RIPPETOE ON “WORK SMART:” Stress Builds Character.

DOES THIS REALLY GENERATE REPEAT BUSINESS? At Some Restaurants in China, a Shortcut to Addictive Food: Poppies.

PAJAMA BOY LIVES! This guy fits right in at Hillary Clinton rally.

HEH: Retreating Clinton Campaign Torches Iowa Town To Slow Advance Of Sanders Volunteers.

WOULD DONALD TRUMP CHOOSE MIKE HUCKABEE AS HIS VEEP? “It’s not as crazy as it sounds.”

I’M SURPRISED THIS TOOK SO LONG: Bosch Haptic Pedal Can Save You 7 Percent on Gas. I mean, the Nissan eco-pedal goes back to 2008.

NIKON AWARDS PRIZE TO BADLY ‘SHOPPED PHOTO, HILARITY ENSUES: “If you look closer, it’s actually an aeroplane from Minecraft”

AT BREITBART LONDON, Live Wire coverage of the European Migrant Crisis.

SCIENCE: A massive genetic study has sketched out a molecular link between schizophrenia and how the brain is shaped in adolescence.

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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Why Hillary’s Emailgate Matters.

Just what a sinkhole of secrets the Secretary of State’s office was during President Obama’s first term, when Ms. Clinton occupied that chair, is frighteningly apparent. Allegations are swirling that her staff systematically copied Top Secret Codeword information off separate, just-for-intelligence computer systems and cut-and-pasted it into “unclassified” emails. This, if true, is an unambiguous felony. There is reason to be cautious about this claim, which is unsubstantiated so far, and would indicate a complex degree of intent: moving Top Secret Codeword information into unclassified emails is not simple, rather a multi-step process, and would leave an audit trail.

Nevertheless, the casual approach of Ms. Clinton and her staff to classified information is already abundantly clear. Cheryl Mills, her chief of staff at Foggy Bottom, was using her personal Blackberry for work, including the transmission of classified email. That alone is a crime. Then, in a move worthy of a dark comedy, Ms. Mills proceeded to lose that Blackberry. This would be a career-ender, at best, for any normal U.S. Government employee. Ms. Mills, a longtime Clinton insider, naturally suffered no penalties of any kind for this astonishing security lapse. . . .

To take just the Russians: their plus-sized embassy in Washington, D.C. is conveniently located on a hill overlooking the city, with an impressive antenna field on its roof aimed downtown. That is where Ms. Clinton’s “unclassified” emails went. The Russians care so much about State Department information they’ve been caught planting bugs inside a conference room just down the hall from the Secretary of State’s office. “Of course the SVR got it all,” explained a high-ranking former KGB officer to me about EmailGate (the SVR is the post-Soviet successor to the KGB’s foreign intelligence arm). “I don’t know if we’re as good as we were in my time,” he added, “but even half-drunk the SVR could get those emails, they probably couldn’t believe how easy Hillary made it for them.”

Any foreign intelligence service reading Ms. Clinton’s emails would know a great deal they’re not supposed to about American diplomacy, including classified information: readouts from sensitive meetings, secret U.S. positions on high-stakes negotiations, details of interaction between the State Department and other U.S. agencies including the White House. This would be a veritable intelligence goldmine to our enemies. Worse, access to Ms. Clinton’s personal email likely gave foreign spy agencies hints on how to crack into more sensitive information systems. Not to mention that if Clinton Inc. was engaged in any sort of illegal pay-for-play schemes, our adversaries know all about that, as well as anything else shady that Ms. Clinton and her staff were putting in those unencrypted emails.

Blackmail fodder galore.

THX-1138, CALL YOUR OFFICE: SCIENCE!!! “Personality is a capitalist construct:”

Perkins published his findings last November in a book called The Welfare Trait (Palgrave Macmillan, £19.99), but you won’t have heard about it or seen it reviewed in any UK newspaper anywhere because his research has been judged to be off limits by the self-appointed guardians of the academic establishment and their outriders in the media. A senior editor of Nature, one of the leading academic journals, refused to consider it for review because she regards scientific research into the personalities of the long-term unemployed as ‘unethical’*, and a sociology professor whom the publishers had asked to peer-review the book refused to do so on the grounds that any book linking benefit dependency to personality must be nonsense because personality is a ‘capitalist construct’.

* Thus leaving Theodore Dalrymple with the British monopoly on the topic.

MORE EVIDENCE FOR A WELL-ESTABLISHED HYPOTHESIS: Antidepressants can raise the risk of suicide, biggest ever review finds.

NATAN SHARANSKY CONFRONTED BY SCREAMING CAMPUS GARBAGE BABIES AT BROWN:

Anyone who doubts the gravity of the threat to Israel and Jewish students on American college campuses could have stopped by the Brown University campus here on Thursday night.

Students and community members attempting to listen to a conversation about Jewish identity between actor Michael Douglas and Soviet dissident turned Israeli political figure Natan Sharansky had their event intruded on by loud chants of “free, free, Palestine” from protesters outside.

Palestine might be independent someday, but it is very unlikely to be free. Plus:

The protesters failed to stop Mr. Sharansky from delivering his message, though the noise they generated outside could be heard inside the lecture hall for what seemed like a long while.

But it’s nonetheless a sad moment for American higher education, for Israel, and for world Jewry when a campus conversation between an American actor with a Jewish identity and a human rights hero known for surviving nine years in the Soviet gulag is greeted — before it even happens — by an op-ed in the student newspaper summoning a rally “to speak out against this justification of Israeli crimes.” It’s a measure of the movement’s virulence that it targeted not an appearance by an Israeli general or a foreign policy talk but rather a discussion about Jewish identity.

Well, all this talk about “Palestine” is really just a cover for anti-semitism. And a pretty thin one at that.

Credit for “Screaming Campus Garbage Babies:” IowaHawk, of course.

WHO ISN’T? Fox News: Contacts in the FBI and DOJ are ‘Super Pissed Off’ at the White House.

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Masked marchers beat immigrants in Stockholm. “A gang of up to a hundred black-clad masked men marched in central Stockholm on Friday evening, singling out and beating up immigrants, and handing out leaflets threatening further violent attacks against unaccompanied refugee youth. The march, the most extreme reaction seen so far to the murder on Monday of social worker Alexandra Mezher worker by a Somali refugee, has been linked to football gangs and far-right groups. It was followed on Saturday morning by a demonstration at the nearby Norrmalms Torg organised by the anti-immigration Sweden Democrat party, which called for the government to resign over its handling of the refugee crisis.”

IN THE MAIL: The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism.

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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 996.

THE CLINTON DENIAL MACHINE IS NOW FULLY OPERATIONAL.

FEDS HAND OUT BILLIONS FOR RESEARCH THAT MAY BE BASED ON PLAGIARISM, FAKE DATA: Now, isn’t that reassuring! Allison Lerner is the inspector general at the National Science Foundation. She and her small team of investigators and auditors have been warning for a long time that hundreds of funding proposals submitted to NSF contain plagiarized passages and/or made-up data. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton was told by a senior NSF official that it’s impossible to know if grant recipients actually spend the funds as promised. Maybe it’s time somebody in Congress or at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue listened to Lerner?

KEVIN WILLIAMSON ON OSCARS AND AFRICAN AMERICANS:

There is a certain irony to our historical moment: At the very moment when a black American family has reached the apex of American social life — the presidency, and a cute movie about their first date! — African Americans are as a group experiencing a stressful disorientation: The racial dynamic in the United States was, for many years, effectively binary. Not any more. In an increasingly multiracial society whose most prestigious institutions are truly global, African Americans are no longer the moral yardstick by which the American commitment to our liberal founding ideals is measured. In 30 years, it very well may be the case that African Americans are no more of a significant interest group than Vietnamese Americans or Norwegian Americans, and the social and economic success of Nigerian American immigrant families, among others, complicates the meaning of “African American” as a concept, in that these communities are likely to maintain a certain distinctiveness that renders “black” devoid of clear meaning.

That is a big, attractive lever for the Al Sharptons of the world to let go of, which is why we’ll see more #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarsSoWhite rather than less, even as the question becomes less significant nationally.

Read the whole thing.

LITERALLY:

● Martin O’Malley: Clinton’s climate plan ‘would literally burn up’ the Earth.

● Amanda Marcotte: “Sorry, Rand Paul, but your support for forcible childbirth is literally treating women like farm animals.”

● The DNC: “Even as his state literally sinks, Rubio won’t acknowledge that climate change is real.”

What hath Joe Biden — and in the case of the last item, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Guam) wrought?

Exit question: Have we literally broken the English language?

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THERE IS ACTUALLY A FEDERAL AGENCY THAT IS WORSE THAN THE VA: The Department of Veterans Affairs is a bureaucratic nightmare, to be sure, but the evidence is steadily mounting that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is much, much worse. But the funny thing is, overseeing a federal department whose financial books often make no sense doesn’t seem to hurt the politicos who become HUD Secretary. Julian Castro, the current incumbent, for example, could be America’s next vice-president.

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