NEWS YOU CAN USE: What It’s Like to Live on a Ship Sailing Through the Antarctic Ice.

COUPONS GALORE in Grocery & Gourmet Food.

Also, today only: SINGER 9960 Quantum Stylist 600-Stitch Computerized Sewing Machine, $249.99 (64% off).

MICKEY KAUS ON IMMIGRATION: Schumer’s Odd “70+” Strategy.

PETER INGEMI: Benghazi Story Advances; New Hampshire Democrats Hardest Hit. Yes, Kelly Ayotte was ahead of the curve on this scandal, though people are still trying to ignore that: “Morning Joe led with Benghazi & the Kidnapping today. For some reason that speech by Ayotte above wasn’t included.”

Related: WaPo Fact-Checker Rowing Back Previous Support For Hillary, White House.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges Retreat In Tuition Showdown.

Private U.S. colleges, worried they could be pricing themselves out of the market after years of relentless tuition increases, are offering record financial assistance to keep classrooms full.

The average “tuition discount rate”—the reduction off list price afforded by grants and scholarships given by these schools—hit an all-time high of 45% last fall for incoming freshmen, according to a survey being released Monday by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

But cutting prices via “financial aid” perpetuates price-discrimination, which is the main point of “financial aid” anyway.

Much more here.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Menendez Asked Justice to Delay Merger Opposed by Donor.

SOUNDS LIKE HE’S RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT: Christie reveals secret stomach surgery to lose weight.

STEVEN MALANGA: Rise of the Republican Governors: A new liberal era? Not according to these reformers.

Shortly after Barack Obama won reelection in November, New Jersey governor Chris Christie pointed out that Republicans’ cloudy political prospects had a bright silver lining. “One of the reasons you have 30 Republican governors in America, and why we’re the only organization to add Republican strength,” Christie said, “is because people see us getting things done.” Christie’s stance countered most of the elite postelection commentary, which gleefully pronounced the Republican Party’s political irrelevance. But the governor was right. Since Obama first took office in 2008, Republicans have picked up a net nine governorships, bringing their total to 30 states, which hold nearly 184 million Americans. In 24 of those states, containing 157 million Americans, Republicans also control the legislatures. Democrats boast similar power in just 12 states, with a population of 100 million. Even Republicans’ unimpressive national showing last November didn’t reverse their state-level momentum.

The next-wave Republican governors have ignored proclamations that President Obama’s victories have vaporized fiscal conservatism and opened a new era of American big government. At a time when Washington policymakers seem paralyzed by our toughest problems, these state-level revolutionaries have restrained government growth and radically reformed local tax codes. They’ve made their states friendlier to business, reshaped government-employee pension systems to reduce state debt, and restrained the power of public-sector unions over state and local budgets. Some have even proposed eliminating income and corporate taxes.

Read the whole thing.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Boom and Bust in California. “No one is more upset than I about the direction of California — valued citizens exiting the state, high taxes, poor services, terrible public education, substandard infrastructure, contempt for the law, liberal sermonizing coupled with boutique apartheid, shameless ethnic identity politics, and public union bullying. But that said, as I’ve written, California is hard to destroy in a generation.”

SLOW DOWN: House Hits Brakes on Internet Tax Passed by Senate.

PETER BEINART: Yes, Democrats Can Be Racist. And at the moment, they appear to be in denial about it.

If Dick Harpootlian were a Republican, liberals would be jumping over one another to call him a bigot. In 2002 Harpootlian called Lindsey Graham, then running for a South Carolina Senate seat, “light in the loafers,” thus fueling a nasty whispering campaign about Graham’s sexual orientation. Last Friday he struck again, telling activists to “send Nikki Haley”—South Carolina’s Indian-American governor—“back to wherever the hell she came from.”

But Harpootlian isn’t a Republican. Until he retired last Saturday, he was chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. He made his comments about Haley at the party’s annual dinner, just before Joe Biden took the stage. And as a result, the liberal response has been muted. So far, neither Biden nor Elizabeth Colbert-Busch, whose candidacy for a South Carolina congressional seat has gained national attention, has repudiated Harpootlian’s comments. And for now, at least, conservatives are just about the only ones asking them to.

That’s a problem, because unless offenses like Harpootlian’s are slapped down hard, Democratic Party bigotry is likely to get worse. The reason is simple: the Republican Party is getting more diverse.

Also, Democrats are traditionally the party of racial bigotry. Bull Connor, remember, was a member of the Democratic National Committee.

IN THE WEEKLY STANDARD, JOHN MCCORMACK CALLS FOR a federal ban on late-term abortions. But while such a ban wouldn’t violate the Roe/Casey framework, it would nonetheless violate the Constitution because it is outside Congress’s enumerated powers. As Dave Kopel and I argued in Taking Federalism Seriously: Lopez And The Partial-Birth Abortion Act, back in 1997, regulating abortion doesn’t fall within Congress’s commerce power — a conclusion that is strongly supported by the commerce-clause discussion in the Sebelius decision. It is conceivable that Congress could regulate post-viability abortions under its 14th Amendment Section 5 powers, but that seems quite iffy to me in light of recent Supreme Court caselaw.

One thing that Congress clearly could do, however — even more strongly supported by the Supreme Court’s ObamaCare decision — would be to put a tax on late-term abortion, and there’s no constitutional reason why that tax would have to be a small one.

DUE PROCESS WHEN EVERYTHING IS A CRIME — no, not my article, which will be published by the Columbia Law Review next month, but this from the Wall Street Journal: Federal Offenses Series: Examining the Bloated Criminal Code.

Related: Task Force Aims to Lighten Criminal Code. There may be an opportunity for them to include some of the prosecutorial reforms I suggest in my piece.

THE HILL: Whistle-blower: Special forces could have saved Americans in Benghazi.

U.S. special operations forces in Libya could have saved Americans killed in the attack last Sept. 11 on the consulate in Benghazi but were told to stand down, a State Department whistle-blower has told congressional investigators.

The testimony by Gregory Hicks, who will appear before a House panel on Wednesday, contradicts previous testimony by administration officials who have said all U.S. forces in Libya were deployed the night of the attack.
Hicks was in Tripoli during the attack and became the top U.S. diplomat in Libya when Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed.

He said the special operations team was ready to fly after Stevens was killed but before a second attack killed two other Americans.

After Libya’s prime minister called to tell him Stevens had died, Hicks said: “The Libyan military agreed to fly their C-130 to Benghazi and carry additional personnel to Benghazi as reinforcements.”

But as the special operations team headed to the airport, Hicks said, they got a phone call from Special Operations Command Africa saying, “you can’t go now; you don’t have authority to go now.”

The C-130 ended up leaving after the attack was over and the four Americans were dead.

Disgraceful. And filmmaker Nakoula, whose YouTube video served as the basis for a lame cover story that no one believes any more, is still in jail.

UPDATE: Reader Richard Whitten writes: “How long before Obama Administration throws Hillary under the bus? They seem to have a penchant for doing that.” Right now, protecting her for 2016 is a priority, but if she looks like damaged goods they’ll sacrifice her pretty fast.

PAUL MIRENGOFF: Hillary Clinton — culpable for Benghazi from beginning to end. “When it first became clear that the CIA’s Benghazi talking points had been altered, many of us viewed the White House as the prime suspect. After all, it served President Obama’s political purposes to claim, at the height of a political campaign in which he was taking credit for the fall of al Qaeda, that the death of a U.S. ambassador was down to spontaneous outrage over a video, rather than pre-planned terrorism. It turns out, however, that the State Department was the prime culprit. It was State that pushed back hard against the original talking points. The White House, probably for the political reason cited above, took its side.”

GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTING: City Hit by SEC Fraud Charges: Harrisburg’s Public Statements Faulted. “The Securities and Exchange Commission has put local government officials on notice that it is closely monitoring the way they describe their cities’ fiscal health, charging Harrisburg, Pa., with securities fraud for allegedly failing to disclose information on its financial troubles.”

CHIP GERDES, WHO I FIRST MET VIA THE 2009 QUINCY TEA PARTY, has died.

BRIDGET JOHNSON: Dems Launch Preemptive Strikes on Benghazi Hearing: But are congressional Democrats equipped — or fully willing — to deflect the blows for the Obama administration?

SEEMS INCONSISTENT WITH THEIR ANTI-CORPORATE IMAGE: Craigslist Takes Upstart Competitors To Court.

ROGER SIMON: Benghazi Continued: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. “From what we know so far, the U. S. Department of State participated in the cover-up of an Islamist terror attack on the brink of a U. S. presidential election, implying the murders of our fellow citizens were inspired by an execrable video that nobody saw. I can’t think of anything more despicable and more disrespectful to all of us — and most especially to the families of the deceased.”

And filmmaker Nakoula is still in jail.

KIDNAPPING VICTIMS FOUND ALIVE AFTER A DECADE. “Long-missing Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight have been found alive. Berry called police Monday afternoon and frantically told a dispatcher that she was alive and free after being kidnapped 10 years ago and held captive in a house on Seymour Avenue on the city’s West Side. DeJesus was with her. A third woman, Michelle Knight, who has been missing since 2002, was also found at the house.”

DAWNING RECOGNITION: After Dismissing Benghazi as ‘Fox News’s Super-Story,’ WaPo’s Ignatius Begrudgingly Admits It’s A ‘Serious Story.’

MY USA TODAY COLUMN FOR TOMORROW: Where Are The Start-Ups?

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Don’t We Have Artificial Gravity?

SCIENCE: Creepy or Cool? Portraits Derived From the DNA in Hair and Gum Found in Public Places. “Rest assured, the artist has some limits when it comes to what she will pick up from the streets. Though they could be helpful to her process, Dewey-Hagborg refuses to swipe saliva samples and used condoms.”