WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS: A Bentley SUV with a W-12 engine.

WELL, THE COUNTRY WAS TURNED UPSIDE DOWN OVER HIS “RED LINE” THROWAWAY, TOO: Revealed: Obama came up with ObamaCare because he needed a throwaway applause line in a campaign speech.

TEACHING AND LEARNING IN THE POST-LECTURE “flipped classroom.”

LOOKING FOR WORK IN JOURNALISM/PUNDITRY? Check out this notice.

IT’S AN OPPORTUNITY FOR REPUBLICANS, BUT ONLY IF THEY STOP BEING BELTWAY TOOLS THEMSELVES: Joel Kotkin: Bipartisan distrust of the Beltway. Plus, the sense that “the country’s elites – of both political parties and across the political spectrum – have been wrong on just about everything they have done since the end of the Cold War.”

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 137.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Saying Goodbye.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: “How Did Rich Connecticut Morph Into One Of America’s Worst Performing Economies?”

MY MENTION OF “WELLNESS PROGRAMS” YESTERDAY produced this email:

At University of Virginia, where I am visiting this term, it’s apparently not just answer-or-pay. It’s sign up your body for Big Insurance’s invasive eyes or pay. Faculty who don’t show up for workplace screening are penalized according to the Aetna health plan “incentives”.

Fundamentally these programs are not about individuals at all. They are about forcing people into being part of massive samples for junk “research” that will hound everyone for years to come. As you know, if you push sample sizes big enough, standard errors fall and you can find practically any point estimate statistically significant, so these huge samples mean ever more “significant” correlations to obsess over…

Anyway please leave my name out of any further discussions. the PC land of campus life could brand me an unwanted guest and I don’t want to go home yet.

It’s a pretty nice place — I visited there back in the 1990s. Though Charlottesville, I have to say, makes Knoxville seem like a sprawling metropolis. I was single then; it seemed like a better place to be married if you were on the faculty.

Meanwhile, here’s more skepticism on wellness programs. “Even more interesting is that there are no data on the program home page, in GE’s DataViz, or in the 10k or annual report on the wellness program’s ability to attenuate medical care spending or modify employee risk measures. GE does not break out medical care spending for current employees as a line item anywhere. GE does report, however, that it spent $500M on retiree health benefits in 2013, a figure it expects will increase to $600M in 2013. Ironically, the wellness program apparently is not foisted upon retirees. The only outcomes metrics explicitly cited in public GE documents and presentations have to do with participation rates, not actual changes in the prevalence of risk factors or the incidence of wellness-sensitive events in any group of GE employees. . . . GE’s half-a-loaf approach to wellness is a warning flag to every business considering a wellness program as a result of federal encouragement. If a Fortune 10 company, with effectively no resource constraints, cannot produce believable data on wellness program costs or effectiveness – or worse, chooses not to produce data because their diagnostics business depends on showing returns from diagnostic activities – what exactly does that mean? Aside from winning wellness industry accolades, which is like being in a child’s sports league where everyone finishes first and gets a trophy, despite the huge investment that they’ve made, GE cannot say definitively that its wellness strategy has brought any good things to life.”

Well, you don’t want your retirees to live longer. That costs more money. But I suspect the reason for not including metrics on actual health-cost improvement is that there aren’t any, because the programs don’t do anything. I predict that this will turn out to be a fad, with the chief beneficiaries being consultants and wellness-plan administrators.

TECHCRUNCH: The NSA Review Panel Is An Even Bigger Joke Than We Previously Thought. “So, in short, Clapper, the head of the DNI, exempted the group that he is currently housing, that is supposed to be vetting his work, from rules requiring their work to be public. Transparency!”

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WAYNE LAPIERRE ON NAVY YARD SHOOTINGS: There weren’t enough good guys with guns.

Not even a SWAT team, whose mysterious stand-down order remains unexplained.

UPDATE: Tamar Tabo: What We’re Not Talking About When We’re Talking About Guns.

(1) Contrary to some initial news reports, Alexis did not use an AR-15 assault rifle. Rather, he used a shotgun, which he brought with him, and a pistol he appears to have taken from an armed guard at the Navy Yard. So, arguments about banning “military-style assault rifles” don’t fit this particular — still tragic — narrative.

(2) Alexis had a Secret security clearance. More than a simple criminal background check, the procedure requires a few months to a year of investigation. So, the usual arguments about basic background checks for gun ownership preventing tragedies of this sort don’t fit this narrative either.

So, what does fit? What changes to law and policy can we talk about in the aftermath of this week’s tragedy?

We need to have some tough conversations about identifying severely mentally ill individuals, treating them for those conditions involuntarily if necessary, and warehousing them, if absolutely no other therapeutic option remains. Historical precedents teach that these issues can be easily mishandled. That fact, though, does not mean that we don’t need to do our best to handle them properly now.

We must also have some uncomfortable conversations about pharmacological treatment of mental illness and the liabilities that come with prescribing drugs that may affect individual patients in difficult-to-predict ways.

Indeed.

CHANGE: Egypt Bans Muslim Brotherhood Group.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Two Muslim Outrages.

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Sorry!

WALL STREET JOURNAL: The IRS Hit List Democrats Don’t Want You To See. (Video.)

PRESIDENT ASTERISK: Christian Science Monitor: Did IRS bureaucrats, liberal media help Obama win in 2012?

#WARONMEN: What’s going on in college.

REMINDER: In 2009, President Obama “joked” about having the IRS audit his enemies.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson: Goodbye Syria, On to Iran!

HOW DID I MISS THIS? Poland Confiscates Half Of Private Pension Funds To “Cut” Sovereign Debt Load.

Here’s a Reuters story. Key bit: “The Polish pension funds’ organisation said the changes may be unconstitutional because the government is taking private assets away from them without offering any compensation.” You think? I hope that if anyone even tried this here, the responsible government bureaucrats would be — literally, not metaphorically — swinging from the lampposts by the next day.

HOW TO SPLIT THE GOP AND CREATE A THIRD PARTY BY 2014: ‘Top’ DC Republicans Sent Oppo Research to ‘Hammer’ Cruz. When the leadership is trying to torpedo one of your new stars, your leadership needs to go.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Alan Greenspan: In America we are being pulled apart politically in ways unrivaled since the aftermath of the 1929 crash. “The bias toward unconstrained deficit spending is our top domestic economic problem.”

I’ve offered some suggestions here. Also here.

ORRIN HATCH: Questions For The IRS:

Frankly, at this point, there are more questions than answers about what exactly happened at the IRS.

Who conceived the idea to target groups with conservative-sounding names for extra scrutiny as the IRS processed their applications? How could that have been considered an appropriate option?

Why did targeting resume a few months after a senior manager shut it down?

And, perhaps most importantly, when did the commissioner and general counsel of the IRS, both of whom are not career civil servants, learn of the practice, and to what extent did they — or others in the Obama Administration — know about it or direct it?

We still don’t know the answers to any of these critical questions.

That is why it is vital that the Finance Committee continue to methodically examine all of the evidence to determine how this practice began, why it was allowed to continue after it was discovered, and whether the IRS truly has stopped putting conservative groups through extra layers of scrutiny.

To carry out its investigation, the committee has interviewed more than a dozen IRS employees and is reviewing hundreds of thousands of documents. In the end, all the necessary facts must be brought to light so that Congress can come up with an appropriate solution and, if necessary, hold accountable those who were responsible for any wrongdoing.

Yes. And the agency must be deterred from doing anything similar in the future.

DREAMS FROM MY BOOKER: Another self-aggrandizing Cory Booker tale blows up.