A TRIUMPH OF ENVIRONMENTALISM OVER ENVIRONMENTALISTS: The Pacific’s Salmon Are Back — Thank Human Ingenuity. “This year, the number of salmon caught in the northeast Pacific more than quadrupled, going from 50 million to 226 million. In the Fraser River, which only once before in history had a salmon run greater than 25 million fish (about 45 million in 2010), the number of salmon increased to 72 million.”

You’d think that environmentalists would be happy, unless you’d read Bob Zubrin’s book.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: How the revolving door lets Hollywood shape Obama’s trade agenda. “The revolving door between industry groups and the Obama administration’s trade shop has been busy lately. Earlier this month, we learned that assistant US Trade Representative Stan McCoy has accepted a new job with the Motion Picture Association of Europe, Middle East, and Africa, a Hollywood lobbying group. The announcement came a few weeks after the Obama administration announced it was naming a former software industry lobbyist to be deputy U.S. trade representative.” Yet another argument for imposing my Revolving-Door Surtax.

JESSE WALKER: Four Great Myths Of The McCarthy Era.

The great radical myth of the Red Scare is that it was nothing but a scare—that the Americans accused of being Russian agents were virtually all innocent. (It’s hard to maintain that position now that the Venona files have been released and some of the left’s biggest causes célèbres have come crumbling down—at this point even Julius Rosenberg’s children have acknowledged that he was a spy—but some folks still hold onto the dream.) The great conservative myth of the period, meanwhile, is that the espionage justified the witch-hunts. People like Ann Coulter and M. Stanton Evans have taken to declaring that McCarthy was right without acknowledging that the bulk of his accusations were false, and that this was true of many other red-hunters too. And then there’s the great liberal myth of the period: the idea that the libs of the day managed to plot a course between the Soviet apologists and the paranoid hysterics, striking a delicate balance between protecting the country’s liberties and protecting its security. In fact, the Red Scare, like the Cold War itself, had liberal fingerprints all over it. . . . Speaking of Kennedy: His brother Bobby, later a liberal heartthrob, was a counsel for the McCarthy committee, and McCarthy was godfather to Bobby’s first child.

If you don’t like the history you’ve got, just rewrite it!

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Obamacare: Debate Over? High enrollments offer no assurance that this plan will work. A lot of those “enrollments” — in Georgia, half of them — remain unpaid.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UNC Fake-Classes Whistleblower Resigns After Meeting With Chancellor. “Willingham confirmed her imminent departure after an hour-long meeting with Carol Folt, the university’s chancellor. UNC described the encounter as ‘productive,’ but Willingham indicated it had been acrimonious.” From the Chancellor’s perspective, she got rid of a troublemaker. That’s productive enough to be worth a little acrimony.

HEY, KIDS: TRY GOING TO A REAL COLLEGE WITH A REAL PRESIDENT NEXT TIME. An open letter to the students of Azusa Pacific University. “Azusa Pacific’s administration wants to protect you from earnest and nerdy old guys who have opinions that some of your faculty do not share. Ask if this is why you’re getting a college education.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 348.

IT’S COME TO THIS: A gun control law that even the Massachusetts attorney general’s office thinks is unconstitutional (as applied in two cases).

SUPREME COURT upholds state power to ban affirmative action.

OBJECTIFIED BY SOCIETY’S ARTIFICIAL STANDARDS: Hollywood Actors: Six-Packs That Speak Lines.

Via Outside the Beltway, I see that Men’s Journal has a lengthy article on what it takes to be a male movie star these days. The short answer: 3 to 4 percent body fat, an incredibly carved six-pack and lovingly sculpted musculature. Because that combination does not normally occur in nature, the long answer involves nutritionists, traveling weight trainers, and more-than-occasional injections of testosterone and human growth hormone.

In other words, a Hollywood star is not so much an actor, or a body. It is a nearly starving body that has been stripped of almost all its naturally occurring subcutaneous fat, then artificially bolstered with various supplements and medical technology to make it look like a statue rather than a famine victim.

Nanotechnology will take care of that, eventually, at which point, not being difficult and rare, the look will go out of style. Meanwhile, I’m reminded of this article from back when Salon didn’t suck.

“NEOLIBERALISM WORKS:” Mickey Kaus reminds us that Welfare Reform succeeded.

HEH: Man’s White Male Privilege Squandered On Job At Best Buy.

AT AMAZON, IT’S the Kindle Daily Deals.

Also, 50% off on Office Supplies.

DANIEL SHUCHMAN: Thomas Piketty Revives Marx for the 21st Century: An 80% tax rate on incomes above $500,000 is not meant to bring in money for education or benefits, but ‘to put an end to such incomes.’ As Megan McArdle noted a while back, the threshold for “earning too much” is just above what a two-earner journalist or academic couple can plausibly make.

AT SCOTUSBLOG, a preview of the Aereo case.

Meanwhile, it’s very lame that the Supreme Court has lifted ScotusBlog’s press credentials. It’s the first place I go for Supreme Court news. I mean, Linda Greenhouse got credentials, for goodness’ sake.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: IRS revokes group’s tax exemption over anti-Clinton statements. More battlespace preparation. Somebody should round up statements from OFA and Media Matters and send them to the IRS. . . .

JAMES TARANTO: Purdy Grievances: Scenes from the class struggle in the faculty lounge.

In an essay for the Daily Beast, Purdy, now a law professor at Duke, brings us up to date on his life: “Born and raised in West Virginia, way out in the country, I tested and wrote my way into elite schools, and now I teach at one. I’m surrounded by very smart people who work very hard, and get rewarded.”

That doesn’t sound so bad. But he writes to inform us that America is still in Trouble. His piece is titled “We Need More Class Traitors: Solving America’s Meritocracy Problem.”

Purdy endorses French economist Thomas Piketty’s argument “that Americans are intoxicated by ‘meritocratic extremism’–an impulse to pick ‘winners’ and reward them enormously.” Piketty is the author of a new book, “Capital in the 21st Century,” that has drawn rave reviews from left-liberal scholars and commentators fixated on “income inequality” as the ultimate social ill.

The most revealing aspect of Purdy’s analysis is his classification of meritocracy into two different “generations.” “First-generation meritocracy pivoted on tests like the SAT,” he explains. “It channeled high scorers into elite schools and positions. . . . The iconic beneficiary of this meritocracy was the Iowa farm kid or child of segregated Charlotte who was plucked up and admitted to Harvard.”

Purdy disapproves much more strongly of “second-generation meritocracy, which has been accelerating since the 1980s.” This is the meritocracy of the commercial marketplace. “The idea is that money follows quality, so those who attract money must be the best: they must deserve it. Any other test looks spurious: if you’re smart, why aren’t you rich?”

Well, “rich” is a relative term. If you’re a successful first-generation meritocrat like Purdy, chances are you enjoy a solidly upper-middle-class income and lifestyle. He acknowledges as much: “I’m grateful for the way first-generation meritocracy put me in a place to be writing this essay.”

Yet that question “if you’re smart, why aren’t you rich?” seems to carry quite a sting.

All the talk about inequality is basically journalists and academics wondering why they don’t make as much money as the lawyers and investment bankers they went to school with.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGE STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Moving in with parents becomes more common for the middle-aged: The number of Californians 50 to 64 who live in their parents’ homes has surged in recent years, reflecting the grim economic aftermath of the Great Recession. Wait, I thought we were in the sunny uplands of the Obama Recovery. . . .

ASHE SCHOW: The ‘Twitter gap’ is one Democrats don’t want to talk about. “Democrats are supposed to be the party that all the young, hip people are crazy about. But when it comes to Twitter, Democrats have actually fallen behind Republicans in several important metrics.”

HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: U. of Colorado Violated Faculty Rights in Philosophy Dept. Scandal, AAUP Says.

I CAN’T PREDICT THE FUTURE, BUT I CAN TAKE A HINT: The Hill: Obama taps veteran of Clinton investigations for chief counsel.

President Obama on Monday said he has selected W. Neil Eggleston to become chief counsel, adding the expertise of a veteran attorney who was involved in some of the most heated legal battles of the Clinton administration.

Eggleston, a white-collar defender who is now at Kirkland & Ellis, will replace departing White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler in mid-May.

“Neil brings extraordinary expertise, credentials, and experience, to our team,” Obama said in a statement. “He has a passion for public service, is renowned for his conscientiousness and foresight, and I look forward to working closely with him in the coming years.”

Eggleston worked as a White House lawyer under Clinton, handling politically explosive issues like the Whitewater controversy, and later represented the former president during the investigation into the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Lawyering up.

UPDATE: From the comments: “The term ‘war time consigliere’ springs to mind.”

WELL, FOREIGN RELATIONS ARE A SPECIALTY OF HIS: Roll Call: Sen. Menendez Not Staying Quiet On Foreign Relations.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Brooklyn Law cuts tuition by 15 percent.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: The case for killing law school. Or at least making it shorter. I don’t know, I found the notion that law professors are overpaid to be absurd. In fact, it is definitionally impossible for me to be overpaid.