HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: Campus President Rebukes Limbaugh-Supporting Professor: U. of Rochester intimidates a professor and allows students to disrupt his class. “Most worrisome, however, is the fact that UR allowed its students to disrupt Landsburg’s class without any consequences, despite the fact that campus security was on the scene. What happened in Landsburg’s class is a textbook example of ‘mob censorship,’ where a group of people silence or drown out a speaker with whose views they disagree. A classroom is perhaps the least appropriate place for something like this to happen, and the fact that UR did not see fit to clear the heckling students out of the class is disturbing.”

It’s particularly disturbing when administrators side with the mob and, indeed, seem to employ the mob to chill dissent, but that’s not uncommon on campuses. Rochester President Joel Seligman should be ashamed.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Obama Campaign Not Looking All That Confident. “While the media cluck their tongues at social conservatives and obsess over the rather boring and predictable Republican primary, can we pause for a moment to observe just how panicked President Obama seems to be about his reelection? . . . Since he lacks a significant and popular domestic achievement, the president seems to have concluded that the way to a second term is through the mobilization of key constituencies rather than a broad-based appeal to middle America. He combines these appeals with cheap gimmicks to generate publicity and deflect attention from the Republican primary. Now that his job is in trouble, the man who enthralled millions during the campaign of 2008 has been reduced to just another transactional political panderer. The gloss is off. Even the liberal Washington Post writer Dana Milbank says White House hiring practices make ‘a joke of the spirit of reform he promised.'”

Yes, and pointing out that contradiction will be a major part of the 2012 campaign.

JAMES TARANTO ON JOEL SELIGMAN AND THE UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER: The Privilege to Dissent: How academic freedom coexists with stultifying conformity. “To begin with, one statement Seligman makes (which Landsburg does not address directly) is so misleading as to be scurrilous.”

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HEH: “The first thing on [The New Republic’s] web site at the moment is a lot of high-minded blather in honor of the new owner (‘we will continue the great tradition … since 1914 …etc. ….’) immediately followed by ‘Is Female Masturbation [really] the last taboo?’”

Plus: “You can now get your Christina Hendricks topless photos on the distinguished web site Slate.com. Except not quite. It’s all empty foreplay with these intellectuals!”

MICHAEL TOTTEN: An American in The Den of Assad.

WAIT, ISN’T THAT WHAT’S HAPPENED UNDER OBAMA? Romney: Regulators Should Make ‘Friends’ With Business.

JAMES HUDNALL REVIEWS JOHN CARTER: “I really enjoyed it. I can’t understand why some critics have been so hard on the film except it shows how much George Lucas swiped from Burroughs, who wrote the Mars books 100 years ago.”

PROF. JACOBSON: “Louis C.K. is just the start. All it takes is a little sunshine.” And you wouldn’t want President Obama to have to explain these people to Sasha and Malia.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is the American Association of University Women (AAUW) a Hate Group? By the definitions in common use today, probably.

CONSISTENCY, LIKE PAYING TAXES, IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Chu chooses a BMW over a Volt. “The big news yesterday was that Energy Secretary Steven Chu does not own a car. But his wife owns a 2002 BMW 325i, which gets 21 MPG, according to the Daily Caller. Why did Chu not get her to trade in the Beamer for a Chevy Volt? Also, as a Cabinet secretary, he gets a security detail that drives him around in an SUV, most likely a Cadillac Escalade. We can mince around with words over whether he owns a car or not, but he is not taking public transportation, walking or riding a bicycle to get everywhere.”

MORE IRS QUESTIONS: The Hill: Key GOP senator lashes out at Dems over tax-exempt advocacy groups.

A key Republican senator is accusing Democrats of playing politics with the IRS, over a request that the agency implement tighter controls on tax-exempt groups playing a role in politics.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said in a Friday statement that Democrats were putting the IRS in an uncomfortable situation by reportedly asking the agency to do more to stifle tax deductions for donors to politically inclined tax-exempt groups.

“Sending the IRS on a politically-motivated witch hunt is simply unacceptable and could have a chilling impact on the constitutionally-protected right to free speech,” said Hatch, the ranking Republican on the tax-writing Finance Committee. “I expect the IRS not to succumb to this type of political posturing.”

The Hatch statement comes a day after The New York Times reported that six Democratic senators were reaching out to the IRS to ask that the agency to keep tax exempt-groups from mostly doing political work.

How about just abolish tax-exempt status entirely, except for hospitals, orphanages, and the like?

Related: Harry Reid: ‘I don’t know’ if my relationship with Media Matters violates its tax-exempt status.

FEELING THREATENED: NY Times Backs IRS Efforts to Out Donors to Tea Party, Other 501(c)(4) Groups.

HANS BADER: Higher Education Bubble May Explode In Taxpayers’ Faces. May?

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: “The media elite did in fact vet this president, but they covered up what they found. And now that citizen journalists are digging it up, they’re trying to rebury it.”

THAT’S LIKE, WHAT, TEN DOLLARS PER VIEWER? Ed Schultz Paid Nearly $200,000 By Unions in 2011, According to Labor Dept. “All told, Schultz has been paid $337,490 by unions in the last seven years, according to the Labor Department. These same records show no payments from unions to Schultz between fiscal years 2000 to 2004 — before Schultz became such a passionate advocate for unions over the airwaves.”

THE AUSTERITY MYTH:

The specter of austerity lies heavy on America. Hardly a day passes without another warning from New York Times whiner and erstwhile economist Paul Krugman, his colleague Nicholas Kristof, and the legion of other progressive apologists that “austerity” is threatening the U.S. recovery and destroying Europe.

Where is this austerity? It is certainly not anywhere to be found in the federal budget. Total spending in 2011 was $3.598 billion in 2011, higher than the stimulus-bloated total in 2009, and 21 percent higher than the year of the Bush administration. Austerity?

It’s austerity when people aren’t getting everything they want, right now!

HISTORY: The Day That Andrew Breitbart & Company Came To Tucson.

HEH: What’s after ‘Jumping the Shark’? “I almost feel sorry for the humorless, clueless commissars at the Southern Poverty Law Center. . . . Now, piggybacking on the two minutes’ hate against Limbaugh, they’ve found a new arena of hate groups, comparable to neo-Nazis and the skinheads: the ‘manosphere’ of misogynist web sites, including, among others, ‘Roosh Vörek . . . a Maryland-raised PUA (“pick up artist”) whose specialty is sex with foreign women.’ As if that weren’t funny enough, one of their sources of information is — I am not making this up — something called manboobz.com.”

BILL MAHER is sounding nervous. How many people have canceled HBO? Not enough.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Chicago Democrat Obama congratulates Russia’s Putin on fraudulent election.

POLITICS: Illegal robocalls accuse Republicans over Rush Limbaugh and ‘slut’ slur. And desperation. “A group calling itself “The Women of the 99 Percent” is making robocalls across the United States in an attempt to link Republican members of the House of Representatives to ‘the war on women led by Rush Limbaugh’. The automated calls are illegal because they do not state who they are from (there is no known group called The Women of the 99 Percent) or provide a callback number, as required under the US Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991.”

Compliance with the law, like paying taxes, is for the little people.

UPDATE: Reader Rich Reilly emails: “Shouldn’t ‘The Women of the 99 Percent’ be outraged that the federal mandate on contraception doesn’t mandate means testing to exclude wealthy women?”

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT:

MICKEY KAUS responds to my criticism of Congress for finally passing a stimulus bill now that we don’t need a stimulus bill anymore. Well, actually he takes exception to my suggestion that Congress is thus unqualified to criticize corporate executives for their economic acumen, citing the dot-com bust as an example.

Well, there were plenty of dumb dot-com ideas, though I think that the big injection of liquidity in late 1999 — which was a Fed phenomenon, not a market phenomenon — encouraged some of that. But notice the difference: folks in the market arena generally pay a price for getting things wrong; folks in the political world generally don’t. Just one example: Arthur Andersen is in danger of bankruptcy because it’s hemorrhaging clients. It’s hemorrhaging clients because people don’t trust it. People don’t trust it because it turns out to have been untrustworthy. So far, the market system has punished Andersen more swiftly, and more effectively, than the political system.

Well, some things don’t change.

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BREITBART TV: Lou Dobbs Mocks Soledad O’Brien’s Interview Fail.