LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: ABA Releases Statements on Law School Rankings, Placement Data Reporting.

THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND, if you were out, you know, having a life or something.

Obama’s War On Women. With bonus Jon Favreau flashback.

I dunno who John Galt is, but Breitbart Is Here!

Alexandra Pelosi, Bill Maher, Ta-Nehisi Coates and racist double standards.

Fun with Rutherford B. Hayes. It’s hip to be Hayes!

They told me if I voted for John McCain. . . NSA Building Giant Spy Center That Can Listen In On At All Your Communications.

Public Education: San Diego Student Forced To Urinate in Bucket. Related: Two More Teachers Accused of Sexing Up Students.

Whit Stillman is back.

Politico shocked, shocked to find Obama breaking health-care promises.

Politicized Academia.

Chinese don’t understand our carp crisis, see it as delicious.

The mob was angry and demanded a sacrifice.

School lunches, regulatory capture, and the Nanny State.

“Just one Potemkin village after another?”

Progressivism and the authoritarian impulse.

Some questions after reading Doug Laycock’s essay, Vicious Stereotypes in Polite Society.

Well, it does. Red Eye Panel On Al Qaeda’s Fox News Bashing: Sounds Like It Was Written By Media Matters!

Another argument for my 50% surtax on post-government income for public officials: Average Congresscritter gets 1,452% raises when they turn corporate lobbyist.

WELL, THAT SHOULD TAKE CARE OF OUR TRADE DEFICIT, ANYWAY: Chinese Leader: Cultural Revolution Coming to China.

IN GAIA’S IMAGE: Re-Making Man By Choice And Decree. Most of the truly murderous ideas in the past couple of hundred hears came from philosophers, so don’t laugh too fast at the ideas described here. Anyone who calls himself a Deep Ecologist is presumptively anti-human.

On the other hand, it’s a pretty good commercial for Bob Zubrin’s new book.

STEVE EIMERS: My Experience Being Breitbart.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Liberal Assault on Liberalism. “Conservatives are put into awkward positions of critiquing liberal ideas on grounds that they are impractical, unworkable or counterproductive. Yet rarely, at least outside the religious sphere, do they identify the progressive as often immoral. And the unfortunate result is that they have often ceded moral claims to supposedly dreamy, utopian, and well-meaning progressives, when in fact the latter increasingly have little moral ground to stand upon.”

As Stanley Fish has helpfully explained, their only real moral compass is power.

RAND SIMBERG: The Left’s Long-Time War on Women: Misogyny and male chauvinism run deep in the roots of the modern Left.

It should be shocking, by the conventional narrative, that the White House of a “liberal” president would be a hostile work environment for women, but it is not at all a surprise to anyone familiar with the history of the Democrats and the Left, going back at least to the 1960s, when a prominent Democrat politician got a pass from the media for abandoning a young woman (possibly pregnant by him) to drown in his car. The same man went on to later fame as the top slice of bread in a “waitress sandwich,” and yet was so lionized by the Left that not that long ago, at the time of his death, a woman(!) wrote that Mary Jo Kopechne might have been happy to undergo the terror as her lungs filled with the brackish water of Martha’s Vineyard had she only known what a great legislator he would turn out to be.

To see similar hypocritical Leftist misogyny, we need only go back to the last time a Democrat was in the White House. Whenever a woman came forward with allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct by Bill Clinton, the response of the Clinton defenders, both in and out of the media, was to attack her credibility, character, and virtue. Advisor James Carville famously said of Paula Jones (the young Arkansas state employee whom Clinton as governor had his state police guard procure to his hotel room for the purpose of orally pleasuring him), “Drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there’s no telling what you’ll find.” Evan Thomas of Newsweek dutifully complemented the slander by declaring her on national television “just some sleazy woman with big hair coming out of the trailer parks,” though he later was compelled to apologize in print. (One wonders how residents of trailer parks felt about that, but I guess empathy for them is for the little people.) When Kathleen Willey accused the president of groping her in the White House, and was physically threatened for her trouble, feminist icon and (former) scourge of sexual harassers Gloria Steinem said that it was no problem — he was entitled to a freebie, after which Cathy Young of Reason magazine reported on “the death of sexual harassment.”

It got worse.

Yes, it did.

OCCUPY THE AARP:

A few weeks ago, I suggested a better cause for the Occupy Wall Street protesters. My theory is that while they are right that some groups have more political power than others and right to think in terms of class warfare, they are mistaken to construe the lines only in stark economic terms (the 1 Percent vs. the 99 Percent.) There’s another war — much more important in my view — that pits one class against another and is fully the result of specific government policies: the systematic transfer of wealth from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and wealthy. . . .

By 2030, half of the entire budget will be consumed by payments for senior citizens. Other spending (red portion) — which includes a variety of mandatory programs (such as federal civilian and military retirement, veterans’ programs, and unemployment compensations) and discretionary programs (such as defense spending) — makes up a decreasing share of the budget in the future. And this data actually underestimates the amount of federal spending for the elderly. . . . According to the Pew Research Center, “In 2009, the typical household headed by an adult 65 or older had $170,494 in net worth, compared with just $3,662 for the typical household headed by an adult younger than 35,” and “the current gap is by far the largest since the Census Bureau began collecting these data in 1984. Back then, the age-based wealth gap was 10:1. By 2009, it had ballooned to 47:1.”

Read the whole thing.

THE HILL: Republicans go on offensive over rumors about tapping oil reserves. “Republicans launched a preemptive strike last week against rumored plans by the White House to tap the country’s emergency oil reserves. Releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a 696-million-barrel stockpile stored on the Gulf Coast, is a ploy to score political points amid gas prices that are nearing a national average of $4 per gallon, Republicans argued.”

It never makes much of a difference anyway.

UPDATE: A reader emails: ““Perhaps we should change the name to the ‘Tactical Petroleum Reserve’.”

THE SMARTEST PRESIDENT EVER NOT SO HOT AT NEGOTIATION:

Obama and his advisers have cast the collapse of the talks as a Republican failure. Boehner, unable to deliver, stepped away from the deal, simple as that.

But interviews with most of the central players in those talks — some of whom were granted anonymity to speak about the secret negotiations — as well as a review of meeting notes, e-mails and the negotiating proposals that changed hands, offer a more complicated picture of the collapse. Obama, nervous about how to defend the emerging agreement to his own Democratic base, upped the ante in a way that made it more difficult for Boehner — already facing long odds — to sell it to his party. Eventually, the president tried to put the original framework back in play, but by then it was too late. The moment of making history had passed.

Read the whole thing.

SARAH HOYT ON THE “WAR ON WOMEN:” “If this is war it is war on men. And I’ve had just about enough of everyone who claims otherwise.” Plus this: “If you truly believe refusing to force employers to pay for birth control is a war on women, then you are fragile little flowers who deserve to experience life practically anywhere else in the world. You are also unleashing a monster.”