LEE OHANIAN AND JOHN TAYLOR: What Economic Recovery?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 132.

AARON ALEXIS: Obama Fan. “First we learned that Alexis didn’t use an evil AR-15 to kill all those people. Instead, he used a nice, friendly, Biden-approved shotgun . . . Now we learn that Alexis was a Prius-driving, African-American liberal who liked Obama. Facts aren’t much fun, eh, libs? So now the MSM narrative will magically transform this mass murder from ‘yet another damning indictment of gun-toting, right-wing racist America’ to ‘the completely isolated actions of a misunderstood victim of society.’ Just watch. It happens every time. And every time, they think we won’t notice. Meanwhile, their ratings and their circulation numbers continue to plummet, and they blame everybody but themselves.”

BUZZFEED: 9 Potential Mass Shootings That Were Stopped By Someone With A Personally-Owned Firearm.

TUNKU VARADARAJAN: Miss America, Meet India’s ‘Dark’ Side: An ugly wave of abuse greeted the new Miss America because of her origins, but in India she would be considered too dark to succeed.

The Girl Next Door can be a dark-skinned daughter of immigrants from Andhra Pradesh, a state in the southeast of India whose inhabitants speak Telugu, 13th in the list of the most-spoken languages worldwide. Take a bow, America. (Compare this country with mostly dark-skinned Brazil, which has had not a single nonwhite Miss Brazil.) . . .

In a nutshell, what Indians are saying (many openly and some with chagrin) is that Davuluri is too dark, too dusky, for the conventional standards of Indian beauty. In India a light skin—“fair” is the word most Indians deploy in the vocabulary of beauty—is prized in women, and lightness of skin is elevated above all other facial features as a signifier of beauty. It matters not one whit that Davuluri’s physiognomy is immensely pleasing to the eye, that her smile could light up a small cricket stadium, that her lustrous hair is a thing to marvel at, because her epidermis is far too many shades removed from “fairness” for her to be considered beautiful. This matter is, in the Indian dialectic of beauty, nonnegotiable. In matters of pigment, Indians can be as dogmatic as party chieftains once were in Stalin’s Moscow.

As a forensic exercise, I encourage you to Google “Miss India” and compare the complexions of the winners of the last 10 years with that of Davuluri. The preference for light skin isn’t confined to beauty pageants. It dominates the acres of classified matrimonial ads in Indian newspapers. It figures casually and brutally in schoolyard banter, where dark-skinned children are dismissed as “kallu” or “blackie” by confreres sometimes with skin barely half a shade lighter. (Imagine the lifelong impact on a girl who, from her earliest days at school, is looked upon as ugly because of her complexion.) It affects the health of young girls, who are often prevented from playing outdoor sports because being in the sun could “blacken” them. It figures, even, in the adoption business, where dark-skinned orphans and foundlings struggle to find a home. (A friend tells me of his experience with an adoption agency in Mumbai: he and his wife were looking to adopt, and months into the process, after they were close to settling on a child, the agency told them that there had been a child they could have considered very early on. But the agency had decided not to present her as an option … because she was “too dark.”)

The worst culprit of all in India’s culture of pigmentocracy is Bollywood. In all its decades of existence, there have been no more than three or four leading actresses—or “heroines,” as they are called in India—who might be described as dark. So year after year, in film after film, Indians receive the message that there can be no beauty, no glamour, without light skin: 99 percent of India’s movie stars don’t share a complexion with 99 percent of Indians.

Nonsense. Only white Americans — preferably Republican — can be racist.

THAT’S NOT FAIR: Shelter In Place: This Generation’s Duck-And-Cover? Duck and cover made sense.

TITLES OF NOBILITY: Anonymous Cop Pens Bizarre Editorial Calling for ‘End of Anonymity on the Internet,’ Says All Internet Posters Should be Forced to Register with the Government for ‘Public Safety.’ But won’t give his name. To be fair, he/she does write: “You may be reading this, flabbergasted by my own hypocrisy. I am aware that I am writing these articles through the safety of anonymity. But if you guys are willing to come forward, then so am I. Let’s break down the barriers of the Internet and come forward showing our true selves with no judgment. I can’t wait to see the national email registry!” Well, I’m already out of the closet. So it’s your turn. . . .

AT AMAZON, New Fall Toys.

Plus, Dorm And Apartment Essentials.

Also, today only: Bosch Digital Distance Measurer Kit, $62.99 (67% off). “It is the world’s smallest laser-range finder.”

RACISM IN OBAMA’S AMERICA: Cory Booker supporters heckle his white opponent: “Go back where you came from!”

I hope that Booker will condemn this sort of behavior from his supporters.

NEWS YOU CAN USE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Bloomberg: How To Live Unemployed In Your Parents’ Basement.

IRS SCANDAL NEWS: IRS officials thought Obama wanted crackdown on tea party groups, worried about negative press. “IRS employees were ‘acutely’ aware in 2010 that President Obama wanted to crack down on conservative organizations and were egged into targeting tea party groups by press reports mocking the emerging movement, according to an interim report being circulated Tuesday by House investigators.. . . In the report, the investigators do not find evidence that IRS employees received orders from politicians to target the tea party, and agency officials deny overt bias or political motives. But the report says the IRS was at least taking cues from political leaders and designed special policies to review tea party applications, including dispatching some of them to Washington to be vetted by headquarters.”

Related: ACLJ: IRS corruption update — three key revelations from Lois Lerner’s emails.

WEAK HORSE: Frustrated Dems Increasingly Defying Obama. So, in other words, the Democratic Party is growing more racist?

Related: Vulnerable Dems Flee From Anti-Gun Nuts in Party: “Do vulnerable Democrats want to see this issue on the radar again? Probably not.”

EMILY MILLER: Aaron Alexis made no effort to purchase AR-15, media ‘obsessed’ with idea.

Related: Some of Piers Morgan’s bogus AR-15 claims go down the Twitter memory hole.

Also: NY Daily News called out for epic front-page fail, absurd ‘AR-15 made for murder’ column.

JAMES TARANTO: Punishment for Gluttons: Why our diets are hard to police.

The reason that gluttony is a problem–the reason people tend to crave more food than is healthy (at least in the long term) to eat–is biological. Our ancestors had no Costco or McDonald’s; conditions of food scarcity were frequent enough that natural selection favored the instinct to eat when food was available and the capacity to store nutrients as fat as a protection against lean times.

If Bruni had omitted obesity from his discussion of Costco, it would have been a paean to the glory of the free market. Not only is the average American free from worry about famine or malnutrition; he can purchase vast quantities of good food at low prices. Even an indigent American has access to plentiful food via government programs like food stamps and school lunches.

What we are describing is not a market failure or a government failure, but a massive success of both the free market and redistributionist welfare policies, thanks to which no one in America need go hungry. The problem is that the human body is not optimally designed for conditions of such plenty. If you simply follow your appetites, you’re likely to get fat. Eating healthy requires knowledge, cognitive ability and self-discipline.

Can government regulation help? Probably not much.

The people who run our governments aren’t very good at self-discipline. What suggests that they might be able to instil in others what they so thoroughly lack themselves?

USA TODAY: New Documents Show IRS Targeted Tea Party Groups Because of Their “Anti-Obama Rhetoric.

Newly uncovered IRS documents show the agency flagged political groups based on the content of their literature, raising concerns specifically about “anti-Obama rhetoric,” inflammatory language and “emotional” statements made by non-profits seeking tax-exempt status.

The internal 2011 documents, obtained by USA TODAY, list 162 groups by name, with comments by Internal Revenue Service lawyers in Washington raising issues about their political, lobbying and advocacy activities. In 21 cases, those activities were characterized as “propaganda.”

The list provides the most specific public accounting to date of which groups were targeted for extra scrutiny and why. The IRS has not publicly identified the groups, repeatedly citing a provision of the tax code prohibiting it from releasing tax return information.

Uh huh. (Bumped).

MORE PRAISE FOR MIKE LEE’S middle-class and family-friendly tax reform plan.

ROLL CALL: After Navy Yard Shooting, Ayotte Calls for Hearing on Contractor Hiring.

Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire urged leaders of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs panel to hold a hearing on federal contractor hiring practices at military installations, following a mass shooting Monday at Washington, D.C.’s Navy Yard.

In a letter to Chairman Thomas R. Carper, D-Del., and ranking member Tom Coburn, R-Okla., Ayotte said senators should have a better understanding of hiring practices for contractors at military bases so that only qualified candidates who do not pose serious threats to personnel or national security become employed.

“In the wake of this tragedy, we must thoroughly review and fix deficiencies within existing federal contracting hiring practices that the alleged Washington Navy Yard gunman exposed and exploited to ensure the safety of the rest of our service family—servicemembers, civilian workers, and contractors, alike,” wrote Ayotte, who is a member of the panel. “It is with this in mind that I request a committee hearing as soon as possible to examine these important issues.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., sent a letter to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus Tuesday demanding further answers about the Navy’s management and oversight of contractor access to Naval installations. McCaskill cited a watchdog report released Tuesday that detailed deficiencies in an independent contractor’s execution of the Navy Commercial Access Control System and failure to properly screen contract employees before they were granted access to Naval installations.

Well, in this tight job market, you can’t . . . oh, wait.

Related: Security gaps: Felons often on military bases, report finds. The country’s in the very best of hands.

DIVERSITY IN AMERICA: Book: Black donors forced nearly all-white Obama campaign to recruit black aide.

In April 2012, the Obama re-election campaign posted a photo of a staff meeting on its Tumblr account. The aides in the picture were young, casually dressed, and enthusiastic — and nearly all white. The campaign took heat on the Internet for a remarkable lack of diversity, particularly since the staff was working to re-elect the first black president in U.S. history. . . .

The lack of black staffers, both in senior and lower-down roles, proved embarrassing for the campaign, Wolffe writes. For example, with no blacks to supervise ads targeting African-American audiences, the results could be remarkably off-key. When the campaign produced its first black radio ad, one aide recalled to Wolffe, “It was like something out of Soul Train from the 1970s.” With funk music behind it, the ad played sound bites from Obama speeches followed by a chorus singing “We’ve got yo’ back!”

“It was so bad,” the aide told Wolffe. “The worst was that it started out with the president saying, ‘I’m Barack Obama and I approved this message.” In fact, Obama had not approved the message, nor was there an African-American in a senior campaign position who might evaluate it. In the end, the embarrassment was the price Obama paid for a campaign that never lived up to his own standards of diversity.

Well, I mocked ’em some at the time.

BENJAMIN WITTES AND JANE CHONG: Congress Has No Clothes: A Quick and Dirty Summary of the New FISC Opinion.

Up until now, we have had orders from the FISC requiring the production of metadata. And we have had government statements—a major speech and a white paper—in defense of the government’s (and the court’s) reading of 215. But we have not had any of the FISC opinions explaining the court’s actual reasoning regarding why this collection does not violate the Fourth Amendment and why it is consistent with the statute. Judge Claire Eagan’s opinion lays this out in a crisp, readable 29 pages.

Her opinion does something else too: It makes clear that Congress has nowhere to hide on this issue and that members cannot pretend to have had no idea of what NSA has been up to.

Nope.

MICKEY KAUS: It’s Blue vs. Blue In California:

With California Republicans seemingly stuck in permanent minority status, unable to even block laws requiring a supermajority, the future of the state depends on debates within the Democratic party, notes Ben Boychuk. School choice and pension reform are the obvious issues pitting special interests and elements of the left against what Boychuk calls “conventional liberal and business-friendly Democrats.” (No neoliberals?) At this point the smartest thing for California Republicans to do might be to become Democrats. Then at least the moderate factions within the governing party would have more troops.

Hmm.

HEH: Obama: Everybody is wrong to doubt ObamaCare. Well, okay then, champ. But I wonder if he could pass a quiz on the bill.

UPDATE: Reader Jeff Dobbs writes: “Depends. Who’s doing the grading? The same guy that wrote that 2nd Amendment entry in the AP textbook?” Heh.

JOURNALISM: New York Times gets it wrong, media obsessed with linking AR-15 with Navy Yard shooter.

METAPHOR ALERT: Obama’s Pick For State Department Security Chief Once Shot Himself In The Foot. Literally. “Starr literally shot himself in the foot when drawing an unauthorized small caliber weapon out of his ankle holster.”

A perfect pick for the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

IT’S PLEDGE WEEK AT BILL QUICK’S PLACE: I donated. Hey, he’s the guy who named the Blogosphere!