CABINET OFFICIAL: Americans Are Unruly Children. Oh, dude, you have no idea how unruly, do you?

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh: “It may well be that your bosses act like teenage kids, but if you say it, chances are that you’ve forgotten that they are your bosses.” I aim to misbehave.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: The Secret Glamour of the Tin Man.

THE FUTURE OF AIR TRAVEL? It doesn’t look that appealing.

LAMAR ALEXANDER: U.S. to lag in power generation without nuclear plants. “The rest of the world has overcome its fear of nuclear energy and the United States will fall farther behind in reliable power generation and industrial capacity if it doesn’t build 100 new nuclear plants in the next 20 years, Sen. Lamar Alexander told a conference of international business leaders today.”

HEH: Post Reporters Deny Using Questionable Tactics To Entrap Nixon.

ROUGHING UP THE MIDDLE CLASS. “For decades there has been debate about how to help the poor without discouraging work, saving or marriage. Yet with almost no notice just such disincentives have crept up the income ladder, observes economist C. Eugene Steuerle, a former Treasury official and expert on the taxation of families. . . . Work isn’t the only middle-class virtue that is getting punished. The system penalizes savings, too–not just through taxes, but also through programs that reward debtors, the profligate and college families that show up at the financial aid office with empty pockets. Yet another series of tax and benefit rules penalizes marriage. ‘This is a big social experiment. We really don’t know what the long-term effect of all these incentives is going to be,’ Steuerle says.”

My prediction: You’ll get more of what you reward, and less of what you punish. But maybe the political class is okay with that. “They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.”

BEHOLD, Saturn!

POWER LINE: “We have not heard anything from Washington Post reporters Darryl Fears and Carol Leonnig in response to ‘Sliming James O’Keefe: A case study.’ I think it’s fair to conclude that Fears and Leonnig have no quote from O’Keefe to support their imputation of racial motives to him, and that what the Post has done to O’Keefe is disgusting.”

IN THE MAIL: From Michael O’Hanlon, The Science of War: Defense Budgeting, Military Technology, Logistics, and Combat Outcomes.

PJTV: Steve Crowder undercover at Berkeley.

TAXPROF: California Tax Plan Draws Fire.

“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Wrecking things in Honduras.

MEGAN MCARDLE: There are no villains in financial crises.

What about this guy? He’d do, if just one thing about him were different . . . .

“SHAKEN BABY SYNDROME:” A bogus diagnosis? “The research implies that human beings simply cannot shake a baby to death without an accompanying impact to the head. SBS cases, however, frequently show no external injuries. This suggests that other causes are at work. . . . In other words, there are almost certainly a significant number of innocent people in prison today who were wrongly convicted of shaking a baby to death.” But read the whole thing.

JOHN TIERNEY: Longevity Gap Isn’t About Health Care.

The conventional answer to this question has been: anywhere but the United States. With its many uninsured citizens and its relatively low life expectancy, the United States has been relegated to the bottom of international health scorecards.

But a prominent researcher, Samuel H. Preston, has taken a closer look at the growing body of international data, and he finds no evidence that America’s health care system is to blame for the longevity gap between it and other industrialized countries. In fact, he concludes, the American system in many ways provides superior treatment even when uninsured Americans are included in the analysis. . . . Perhaps most important, they used to be exceptionally heavy smokers. For four decades, until the mid-1980s, per-capita cigarette consumption was higher in the United States (particularly among women) than anywhere else in the developed world. Dr. Preston and other researchers have calculated that if deaths due to smoking were excluded, the United States would rise to the top half of the longevity rankings for developed countries.

As it is, the longevity gap starts at birth and persists through middle age, but then it eventually disappears. If you reach 80 in the United States, your life expectancy is longer than in most other developed countries.

Read the whole thing.

JOHN SCALZI: It’s a wonderful life.

ALL SHAM, NO WOW: Rand Simberg’s quip is now a bumper sticker! I love the Internet.

Plus, the SlapChop President?

CHANGE: CBO predicts Social Security cash deficits in 2010-11. “Just last year, the CBO — under the direction of Peter Orszag, now budget director in the Obama administration — claimed that the first cash deficits in Social Security would not come until 2019. Now, however, the CBO has determined that Social Security will run cash deficits next year and in 2010, and by 2017 will be more or less in permanent deficit mode. . . . The situation at Social Security is much worse than this administration and Democrats in Congress want to admit.”

JEFFREY HARRISON: What Rents are Law Professors and Law Schools Seeking? “At least thieves and monopolists fight over something that exists. And they often internalize the cost of that effort. Law professors and law schools, on the other hand, may be worse. They do not know what the prize actually is; they just know they should want more; and the costs are internalized by others.”

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: The Lucrative Business of Israel-Bashing.

DO NOT BE ALARMED: Tin cans are changing.

SMART GIRL POLITICS: The Insta-Wife interviews Robin Smith who’s running for Congress in Tennessee. Er, no relation.

RON RADOSH: The conservative debate over Glenn Beck. Love him or hate him, he’s accomplished more than the anointed leaders, that’s for sure. There’s a lesson in that, too . . . .

But note these comments from Mark Levin.

EMILY BAZELON: The lesson we’re not learning from the Hofstra date rape that wasn’t. “The weird lesson for men who have group sex in bathrooms: Film it on your cell phone.” And a question: why doesn’t she publish the accuser’s name, now that the rape is admittedly fake? You’re not protecting a victim now, Emily, you’re protecting a perpetrator. Her name is Danmell Ndonye.

How many innocent men are in jail because of similar false accusations? We’re told that such situations are rare, but nobody really knows. And in your piece, Emily, you’re still making excuses for her. I’ll note that — as in this case — many of those innocent men in jail are probably black, and they’re there in part because white feminists have made even the notion of skepticism unacceptable in the discussion of rape allegations.

Ann Althouse adds: “I think, on the whole, women would be better off if they stepped up to the adult work of taking responsibility for themselves. The men in this incident were awful too, but ladies, say no to awful men. Don’t let men define what good sex is. And certainly don’t let them act out their idea of good sex and then decide that you wanted something nicer.” Though apparently what triggered this false charge wasn’t so much regret for an insufficiently nice sexual experience as a desire to keep people from thinking she was a “slut.”

“As I was about to leave, she comes up and she has no shoes on, she is holding them in her hands. She looked like she just finished hot sex,” he said. “I said, ‘Where were you? What were you doing?’ She told me, ‘Nothing.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, nothing?’ ”

Ndonye then dropped a bombshell.

“I said, ‘Don’t lie to me, what’s going on?’ And she said, ‘Oh, I just got raped,’ ” he said.

“It didn’t seem real to me. She was calm,” he continued. “Then she started crying and saying, ‘I was raped.’ She lied to me. I think she was embarrassed. I said to her, ‘You have to call public safety.’ She hesitated. It seemed like she didn’t want to.”

She then tried to backpedal.

“Oh, you know, no, it’s OK,” she told him, but he was incredulous.

“How could it be OK that you just got raped?” the boyfriend said.

So she relented — and a four-day nightmare began for four innocent men. . . . “She probably felt like, ‘They’ll think I’m a slut,’ ” her boyfriend, who asked not to be identified, told The Post.

Nothing wrong with being a slut — it’s one of those personal sexual choices we’re supposed to celebrate, right? — but there’s a lot wrong with making false rape charges.

And shouldn’t Hofstra apologize for suspending these guys and banning them from campus on the strength of an unsubstantiated allegation? It seems to me that there are a lot of lessons to be learned here.

UPDATE: A reader says that false rape allegations are not rare.

DRIP, DRIP: Tax problems for Acorn?