BILL WHITTLE: Afterburner: World Gone Mad.

ANN ALTHOUSE BUSTS FRANK BRUNI FOR DISHONESTY ON RAPE:

Reading the line quoted above, what I found myself wondering — darkly wondering? — is whether Bruni should have noted that he is gay and thus not susceptible to the “ineradicable predatory streak” that he imagines leads to the sexual assault of young women. Is it wrong to write something like that about men and not address his own exclusion from the category he’s derogating? Maybe. There’s added authority in running down one’s own kind.

A more serious omission here, however, is that sexual assault in the military happens to men even more than to women. If homosexual encounters are a big part of the problem, then Bruni is protecting his own kind, and the eclipsing of his exclusion from the heterosexual group he insults becomes much more problematic.

Ouch.

BUT THEY GET LESS CREDIT: Politico: Republicans Better at ‘Diversity’ than Democrats.

ONE STEP FORWARD FOR DIY HEALTHCARE.

The California Supreme Court has ruled that public schools can give insulin injections to students without bringing in nurses. Prior to the ruling, some schools in the state required that shots only be given by licensed professionals, but the skewed nurse-to-student ratio was hampering children’s ability to get routine care. Parents with diabetic children sued for relaxed standards, and in the higher court, they won. . . .

This is small victory worth celebrating in its own right, but it’s interesting primarily for the disintermediation of healthcare that it points to. As the ACA exacerbates the doctor shortage and tech empowers people with lower (or no) training to administer more care, we’ll see more and more stories like this.

Some powers previously belonging to doctors will get devolved to nurse practitioners or nurses, while other powers will be given to unlicensed staff or ordinary laypeople. . . .

Although we feel for those medical professionals concerned for their future in a tech-heavy world, the best response is to work on creative and empowering ways to adapt to this new world, rather than fighting it. Doctor shortages mean that we’ll have to find new ways of delivering care, and med tech’s ability to kick basic care down the line will ultimately help lower costs without sacrificing quality.

In fact, there’s some sign we’re turning that corner now. My biggest worry about ObamaCare, in fact, is that it will short-circuit some of that technology.

ANOTHER OBAMACARE CHEERLEADER defects.

GETTING AWAY WITH A LOT, IN “CLINTON WORLD:” If voters ever elect Hillary president, America will get a team of longtime Clinton loyalists too. And that may be a bad thing. “If elected, could Hillary bring competence without complications? Almost certainly not. What the profile of the Clinton Foundation clarified is that Hillary Clinton would enter the White House with all the complications of a two-term president — at the end of her eight years.”

Also, in her term as Secretary of State she showed no particular sign of competence, just complications.

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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 98.

GEORGE WILL: Obama’s unconstitutional steps worse than Nixon’s. “President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality. . . . Serving as props in the scripted charade of White House news conferences, journalists did not ask the pertinent question: ‘Where does the Constitution confer upon presidents the “executive authority” to ignore the separation of powers by revising laws?’ The question could have elicited an Obama rarity: brevity. Because there is no such authority.”

UPDATE: Did Obama Flout the Law by Delaying Obamacare? Yes. Next question?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Donald Sensing: Why Law Does Not Matter To Obama. “The goal of the entire Democrat party is to be the permanent, sole political authority in the country. This is the actual transformation that Barack Obama promised to great applause in his 2008 campaign. And we are getting transformed good and hard. . . . Obama can do this not because the Constitution or law authorize it. Most definitely they actually prohibit it. He is getting away with it because there is no one who can stop him and almost no one who wants to stop him. No one, and I mean absolutely no one, in the Democrat party is in the slightest interested in reining in Obama’s expansion of executive diktat because they know what few of the rest of us are awakening to: the Democrats are never going to lose that executive authority again. Let me be clear, with a promise to elucidate another day: there is never going to be another Republican president. Ever. The media will not examine Obama’s imperialist manner because they do not want to. They agree with it. The courts are literally unable to enforce their rulings contra this administration; Obama ignores them at will and without consequence.”

Of course, you might have said the same thing during the New Deal, and yet Republicans did return to power.

ROGER SIMON: End The Civil Rights Movement. “It’s a relic of the 1960s about as relevant as bell bottom trousers. When we are debating Oprah Winfrey’s right to buy a thirty-five thousand dollar purse or whether Barack Obama’s dog should be flown to Martha’s Vineyard in the canine’s own private state-of-the art military transport, you know it’s finished. Or should be.”

ACCOUNTING TODAY: GAO to Probe IRS Audits of Tax-Exempt Organizations.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: ‘Young Invincibles’ Better Off Without ObamaCare. “Nearly 4 million young people will be much better off financially if they refuse to buy an ObamaCare insurance policy and instead pay the fine for going without coverage next year, according to a study released Thursday by the National Center for Public Policy Research.”

PETER INGEMI, covering the RNC in Boston.

DUH. BECAUSE SHE’S A WOMAN, AND SHE’S ENTITLED. Politico: Non-Clinton Dems ask: Why not me? Also, she’s got your IRS records.

“MAN OF DA PEOPLE:” Fighting for the middle class: Obama golfing, dining with Comcast CEO earns comment from Harry Shearer.

RECOVERY SUMMER! Cisco to Lay Off 4,000 Workers.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): The Hill: Obama’s approval rating on economy drops to 35 percent. “A new poll finds President Obama’s approval rating on the economy dropping to 35 percent, even as he travels across the country delivering policy speeches and pushing proposals to boost job growth and investment. The survey from Gallup, released Thursday, finds a 7-point drop in support for Obama’s handling of economic issues, down from 42 percent in June. His rating on taxes and the deficit also dropped 5 points from last month’s poll. Thirty-six percent approve of Obama’s handling of tax issues and 26 percent approve of his approach to the deficit.”

MICHAEL BARONE: Unions Hurt Detroit But Crime Killed It.

Detroit’s huge population loss (see the column for the numbers) was a response to the city’s high rates of violent crime and the inability or unwillingness of city government to reduce them drastically over the years. White flight was followed by black flight; those remaining tend to have very low incomes and property values have fallen to zero in many parts of the city. With such a dwindling tax base, it’s very difficult or impossible to afford even modest pensions for former city employees who were needed when the city was much larger. You can raise tax rates, but Detroit already has the highest income and property tax rates in Michigan, and the Detroit News, in a feat of good local coverage, found that taxes were not paid in 2011 on 47% of the properties in the city. And of course superhigh tax rates tend to drive even more people away and deter others from coming in.

Indeed.

SPECIAL FAVORS: An Alon USA Energy refinery in Louisiana was the only one—out of 143—exempted from an EPA mandate. Why?

JAMES TARANTO ON MILITARY JUSTICE: Hagel’s Science of Logic: The Secretary compounds Obama’s unlawful command influence.

Stars and Stripes’ description of the Hagel memo is accurate as far as it goes. “To be clear,” the secretary writes, “each military justice case must be resolved on its own facts. Those who exercise discretionary judgment in the military justice process must exercise their independent judgment, consistent with applicable law and regulation. There is [sic] no expected or required dispositions, outcomes, or sentences in any military justice case, other than what result from the individual facts and merits of a case and the application to the case of the fundamentals of due process of law.”

That’s exactly the ethos that ought to guide the Judge Advocate General Corps and servicemen who serve on court-martial panels. That the top man at the Pentagon has been pressured to reiterate it is a very good sign–a hint that the moral panic over sexual assault in the military may be beginning to subside.

But Hagel’s memo is far from sufficient. We now have conflicting messages coming from the top two civilian leaders of the military. And Obama outranks Hagel, so that his thesis still trumps Hagel’s antithesis. If a military judge holding the rank of colonel instructed a court-martial panel to consider only the facts before them, that would not obviate the problem of unlawful command influence from the commanding general, the defense secretary or the commander in chief. The Hagel memo poses an identical scenario several levels up the chain of command.

And Hagel’s memo is insidious as well as ineffectual. In addition to contradicting Obama’s improper statements, the secretary also offers a benign reinterpretation of them. . . . In putting forward this reinterpretation of Obama’s words, he is encouraging military judges to reject the claims of UCI that have already been raised. Thus the Hagel memo itself constitutes unlawful command influence.

Read the whole thing.

MARK HEMINGWAY: The Media’s Double Standard: Some hate crimes are less hateful than others.

The Family Research Council shooting is one of the few inarguable examples of politically motivated violence in recent years, yet looking back a year later, the incident has garnered comparatively little attention. Corkins openly admits he selected the Family Research Council because the Christian organization is one of the leading opponents of gay marriage in the country. He had Chick-fil-A sandwiches in his backpack because the CEO of the fast-food chain was under fire for publicly supporting a biblical definition of marriage. Corkins said he planned to “smother Chick-fil-A sandwiches in [the] faces” of his victims as a political statement. And in case that didn’t make his motivations transparent, right before Corkins shot Leo Johnson, he told him, “I don’t like your politics.”

There are some illuminating contrasts between the media’s handling of the political dimensions of the Family Research Council shooting and the shooting of Representative Giffords. In the latter case, the media rushed to assume political motivations and were quick to blame, of all people, Sarah Palin. The former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate had put out a map with crosshairs over Giffords’s congressional district as part of a list of Democratic-held seats “targeted” for defeat. But Giffords’s shooter, Jared Loughner, appears to have serious mental problems. And there is no evidence whatsoever Loughner saw this map or that allegedly violent political rhetoric—even “campaign” is a term borrowed from war—was in any way a cause of the Giffords shooting. That didn’t stop serious news organizations from lending institutional credibility to the irresponsible allegations. The Washington Post ran a story headlined “Palin caught in crosshairs map controversy after Tucson shootings.” And though Giffords was shot in January 2011, as recently as this year in an article on gun violence the New York Times saw fit to remind readers that “many criticized Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential nominee, for using cross hairs on her Web site to identify Democrats like Ms. Giffords.”

By contrast, the media handled awkwardly the revelation that Corkins admitted to plotting mass murder as a means of furthering a popular liberal cause. . . . The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was once a laudable civil rights organization that sued racists and violent extremists. Now it regularly demonizes anyone who runs afoul of its knee-jerk liberal politics, and despite this it is still regularly cited by the media as a “nonpartisan” watchdog. Some of the SPLC’s newly targeted “hate groups,” such as pickup artists, are merely kooky or distasteful. Others singled out by the SPLC, including Catholics who go to Latin mass or Christian organizations similar to the Family Research Council, are well within the mainstream. Tellingly, the SPLC doesn’t just name the Family Research Council on its website—it posts the council’s address on a “hate map.” That map is still on SPLC’s website, and the organization refused calls to take it down after the Family Research Council shooting.

Why should they? It’s doing what they want, and it’s not costing them anything.

THE HILL: Rand Paul: No ‘objective evidence’ black voters being disenfranchised.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Wednesday that there was no “objective evidence” that black voters were being disenfranchised, as he entered a contentious battle over new voter identification laws in Southern states.

“The interesting thing about voting patterns now is in this last election African-Americans voted at a higher percentage than whites in almost every one of the states that were under the special provisions of the federal government,” Paul said at a forum in Louisville, according to WFPL-FM.

“So really, I don’t think there is objective evidence that we’re precluding African-Americans from voting any longer,” he added.

Nonsense. It’s always 1963. It has to be always 1963.

IS THERE ANYTHING DUMBER OR MORE DATED THAN THE “FEMINIST CASE” FOR ELECTING HILLARY? “She became recognized because of the achievements of her husband. That has nothing to do with advancing women’s rights. She’s revered? Has that been established?! But let’s assume she’s revered. What does that have to do with advancing women’s rights? Like being the wife of a powerful man, a woman’s being revered isn’t an aspect of female empowerment. The most traditional societies embrace the idea of a woman who inspires reverence, someone who’s good and worthy of respect. The Virgin Mary is revered. . . . Parker’s argument has gone from ‘She can save the world’ to ‘We could do worse.’ I can’t believe how bad this column is! Why can’t The Washington Post do better? Perhaps millions are inspired that a Woman has written a column in The Washington Post. The symbolic power cannot be overestimated!”

A lot of women of a certain age are excited by Hillary, because they identify with her. But, like Obama, the fact that a segment of the electorate identifies with a candidate is no guarantee that the candidate is competent. Certainly Hillary’s record as Secretary of State — something no one seems to want to look at too closely right now — doesn’t suggest any particular degree of competence.

AND NOBODY’S EVEN PRETENDING HE HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH BENGHAZI NOW: “Innocence of Muslims” Filmmaker Released from Prison.

How time flies. It hardly seems possible that almost a year has passed since last September’s controversy over an offensive You Tube video, “The Innocence of Muslims.” The video led to protests at American embassies in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, drew the attention of the US President (“The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam”), and had serious people questioning American free speech principles. Things have gotten much worse in the Middle East since then–in Egypt today, there are reports of massive violence in Cairo and the burning of churches across the country–for reasons that have nothing to do with a video that, one suspects, gets very few hits any longer. At one point, the US Government asserted that the video had led to the storming of the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and the murder of four Americans there, including the US ambassador. But that explanation is no longer operative, and the media seems mostly uninterested in finding out what really happened. What difference at this point does it make?

One person for whom time has not flown, however, is the video’s American producer, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, also known as Mark Basseley Youssef. He has spent the past year in federal prison. Nakoula has been in jail for violating parole on a prior fraud conviction, but there can be little doubt that as a practical matter authorities seized him because of the controversy over the video.

Justice in Obama’s America — it’s what’s convenient for the narrative at the moment.

DARN. ‘Little House’ Is Not a Big Libertarian Conspiracy. Then again, what is? Libertarians don’t make very good conspirators.