JOURN-O-LISM: A Curious Coincidence In Cuccinelli Coverage. More here.

THIS PROBABLY APPLIES TO POLITICS, TOO: Overspending Has Become a Modern Form of Mating Deception. “Living beyond one’s means can make dating easier, but it leads to problems as a relationship gets more serious.”

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Penalties for politicians: We entrust an inordinate amount of power to people who don’t feel any pain when we fall down.

WHY THE MIDDLE AGES weren’t a Dark Age.

ED DRISCOLL: Obama And The IRS: Worse Than Watergate.

Fortunately, the Washington Post, which sometimes simplifies the events of the 1970s down to thinking of itself as the Paper That Brought You Watergate, is equally hard on Mr. Obama’s men and women as it was on All the President’s Men who served under Mr. Nixon. For example, check out these two recent headlines:

“A White House counsel known for her shoes”
“White House press secretary Jay Carney discusses favorite band, Guided by Voices”

In the 1920s, H.L. Mencken, described his vision of journalism as a fundamentally adversarial one, no matter who was in charge. “It is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics.”

And then there’s whatever the Washington Post is. Journalism, baby.

Ouch.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 19.

AT TOWNHALL, Lisa De Pasquale interviews the Insta-Wife, about her new book, Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters.

Yeah, that’s right — the Insta-Wife has a new book out. Not sure if I’ve mentioned that here. . . .

CHIEF COUNSEL IN PENTAGON PAPERS CASE compares Obama to Nixon. “We’ve come full circle, with respect to national security and the First Amendment. Nixon was bad on that; Obama is catching up.”

GEEK CHIC: I Love ‘The Big Bang Theory.’ And You Should, Too.

It took roughly a week of nightly viewing before I realized how impoverished my life had been for the four years that I was oblivious to “The Big Bang Theory.”

The touchstone, the lodestar, the flypaper for me at first was, predictably, Parsons. In his dervishy nerdiness, he seemed to evoke any number of classic TV neurotics or fussbudgets: Paul Lynde, Tony Randall, Pee-wee Herman. Watching Parsons’s every twitch, wiggle, full-body smirk or social paroxysm — his O.C.D. knocking on friends’ doors (three knocks/name, three knocks/name, three knocks/name), his recurring line about “I’m not crazy, my mother had me tested,” his litany of his “61 mortal enemies,” his continued rebuffing of the advances of his girlfriend, Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik) — is alone worth any half-hour spent on the show.

But as the weeks went by, the show’s many other virtues unfurled (by the end of 2011, I had seen almost all the older episodes more than once and started collecting the DVDs; some nights I would wake up after midnight just to watch the most recent episode as soon as it became available on demand). Here was a popular prime-time sitcom in which five of the seven main characters were Ph.D.’s and another had “only” a master’s from M.I.T., a hit show that regularly referenced bosons and derivatives and string theory, a show in which there were running gags about Madame Curie and Schrödinger’s cat.

The real behind-the-scenes heroes, though, are not the science advisers but the geek experts. The accuracy of the nerd oeuvre — the obsession with superheroes, “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” (before their umpteenth viewing of the movie, Howard, the M.I.T. engineer, says to Sheldon, “If we don’t start soon, George Lucas is going to change it again”), comic books and video games — is sometimes so eerie that I feel as if I’m watching a high- (or low-) light reel of my own life.

They’re so good at getting that right, they don’t answer more basic questions: Why can Penny-the-waitress afford her own apartment, while physicists Sheldon and Leonard have to share? Why doesn’t fancy engineer Howard, with a bigshot JPL job, have any money? What, exactly, do they do at CalTech, anyway? Oh, well: It’s a sitcom. And a good one.

THE EVOLUTION OF the world’s most influential technology critic.

AT AMAZON, deals and markdowns on top-rated cookware.

Also, on sale today only: Injustice: Gods Among Us.

BYRON YORK: Immigration could spoil Marco Rubio’s presidential chances.

THE FACE OF PUBLIC EMPLOYEE UNIONS.

“He eats lunch when he arrives at work at 2 p.m. Then, like clockwork, he goes to sleep with a cup of soda on the table and the straw in it,” said Marvin Robbins, a union vice president.

“Then he wakes up, looks at his watch and says, ‘I have to get out before the traffic gets bad.’ He’s usually out by 4 p.m. after being at the office two hours.”

Good grief.

LEGAL EDUCATION’S diversity problem.

JUST ANOTHER WAY TO EXACERBATE HIGHER EDUCATION’S ALREADY GROWING GENDER IMBALANCE: Cathy Young: More government overreach — on campus sexual harassment.

OBAMA’S STRATEGY: Inducing “Scandal Exhaustion?”

I’ve wondered about this myself. But it really only makes sense if you think one of these scandals is a presidency-ender. I don’t expect that. Only one President has ever been forced out, and the unusual confluence of events that got Nixon isn’t likely to replicate. Instead of a knockout punch, these scandals are more likely to be — as various things were in Bush’s second term — more like acid rain, gradually dissolving political capital. Despite Bush’s problems, lefty fantasies of getting rid of him never materialized, but the Dems did take Congress in 2006, and set things up for victory in 2008.

Of course, one interpretation is that a “scandal exhaustion” strategy on the part of the White House indicates that they do think there’s a presidency-ender in there somewhere. And they’re in a better position to know than I am. . . .

IF “AUSTERITY” IS CAUSING OUR PROBLEMS, then where’s my freakin’ austerity?

JAY LENO: How To Close Gitmo: Have Obama Make It A Government-Funded Solar Company.

GOOD QUESTION: Why, Exactly, Was The IRS Commissioner Such A Constant Visitor To the Obama White House? And why don’t the visitor logs give more information about who he met with and why?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:

Cinder block dorms and Drake’s Cakes from vending machines? Not anymore.

Experts also blame bloated administrative staffs and skyrocketing professor salaries for why college costs are up 1,000 percent in 30 years. The admittedly rarefied Harvard Law School, which hires famous lawyers to teach, paid Warren $350,000 a year. So yes, it’s swell that Warren’s concerned about interest rates for those who won’t make $350,000 in 10 years.

But the real problem is the “hammered” middle class, good interest rate or bad, can’t afford college, period. And college now is the surest prerequisite for affording the rest of your life.

So if Elizabeth Warren wants to cast herself as a warrior for that “hammered” middle class, then she needs to go at the people who are really hammering them.

And that’s her old pals back in academia.

The problem is, the value isn’t there to justify the increased costs.

STEVEN GREENHUT: IRS Scandal Highlights the Dangers of Big Government.

FLASHBACK: How Ed Markey Embraced Financial Crisis. In this piece from Tim Noah:

“Isn’t this exciting?” Rep. Ed Markey enthused to me on Oct. 19, 1987 (“Black Monday”). A young congressional correspondent for Newsweek with nary a stock or bond to my name, even I was taken aback by Markey’s undisguised pleasure. When you stop and think about it, though, it makes perfect sense. Modern Washington owes its very existence to the 1929 crash, which occasioned a vast expansion of the federal government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A legacy of the increase in federal power during that era, largely undiminished during a 28-year electoral backlash against big government, is that Washington became Wall Street’s principal rival when it came to running the world. Which wielded more power—the financial markets or the government? Uncle Sam had the world’s largest military, but Wall Street had all that goddamned money. The mansions in Greenwich, Conn.; the trophy wives; the private jets—by comparison, the people who wielded power in Washington—including most presidents—were petits bourgeois. Even libertarian conservatives resent, on a personal level, the Wall Street swells whose interests they fight for daily. There aren’t a lot of millionaires working at the Cato Institute. . . .

Let me put it in terms a smart financial journalist like Brauchli can readily understand. On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.

Incentives matter.

Related: Ed Markey cheered gov’t witch hunt against Gibson Guitar.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Political intelligence firms set up investor meetings at White House. “Wall Street investors hungry for advance information on upcoming federal health-care decisions repeatedly held private discussions with Obama administration officials, including a top White House adviser helping to implement the Affordable Care Act. White House records show that Elizabeth Fowler, then a top ­health-policy adviser to President Obama, met with executives from half a dozen investment firms in 2011 and 2012. Among them was Kris Jenner, a stock picker with T. Rowe Price Investment Services who managed its $6 billion Health Sciences Fund. Separately, an official in the agency that oversees Medicare and Medicaid spoke in December with managers of hedge funds, pension plans and mutual funds in a conference call.”

FORBES: To the Horror of Global Warming Alarmists, Global Cooling Is Here.

Is Fallen Angels not just science fiction, but prophecy?