VIDEO: Why You Should Be A Skeptic.

THIS IS ONLY NEWS TO THOSE WHO HAVEN’T PAID ATTENTION — BUT THAT’S PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE IN MEDIA OR ACADEMIA OR GOVERNMENT: A new study reveals that men are often the victims of sexual assault, and women are often the perpetrators. And that doesn’t include prison:

The final outrage in Stemple and Meyer’s paper involves inmates, who aren’t counted in the general statistics at all. In the last few years, the BJS did two studies in adult prisons, jails, and juvenile facilities. The surveys were excellent because they afforded lots of privacy and asked questions using very specific, informal, and graphic language. (“Did another inmate use physical force to make you give or receive a blow job?”) Those surveys turned up the opposite of what we generally think is true. Women were more likely to be abused by fellow female inmates, and men by guards, and many of those guards were female. For example, of juveniles reporting staff sexual misconduct, 89 percent were boys reporting abuse by a female staff member. In total, inmates reported an astronomical 900,000 incidents of sexual abuse.

Yet we’re still stuck — as the Obama Administration’s new campus sexual-assault drive proves — in outdated stereotypes in which women are fragile flowers and men are vessels of barely-restrained lust. Because that suits the narrative.

NAACP CHAIRWOMAN: We Were Seduced By Sterling’s Sweet, Sweet Cash. Okay, that’s not quite how she puts it, but it’s accurate. . . .

THE DANGER OF KILLING TOO MANY GERMS. “Antibiotics have cowed many of our old bacterial enemies into submission: We aimed to blast them off the planet, and we dosed accordingly. Now we are beginning to reap the consequences. It turns out that not all germs are bad — and even some bad germs are not all bad.”

SO, PEOPLE ARE PAYING ATTENTION, THEN. In today’s NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll (PDF) there’s this:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? “The economic and political systems in the country are stacked against people like me.”

Agree: 55

Disagree: 39

Well, we’ve got insider trading at the SEC and in Congress, a tax cheat as Secretary of Treasury, Harry Reid’s accumulated millions over a career of “public service,” a bunch of “recovery” and “stimulus” spending that went straight into the hands of Obama insiders, etc., etc. etc. So, yeah. Of course, the Dems will try to spin this against the Evil Koch Brothers^TM.

TAXPAYER-FUNDED ELECTIONEERING: EPA Delayed Climate Change Regulation Until After Midterms. “The agency pushed back publishing the rule for two months, allowing vulnerable Senate Democrats to avoid a vote on the measure six weeks before voters go to the polls.”

SHARYL ATTKISSON: White House Directed Benghazi Narrative.

POLITICS IN OBAMA’S AMERICA: Taxpayer-Supported Latino Caucus Closes Door on Latino, Because He’s a Republican.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 356.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Obama Tiptoes Past The Graveyard Of His Foreign Policy:

As his reasonably successful Asia trip came to an end, The New York Times noted that President Obama sounded edgy and frustrated when defending his foreign policy against pointed questioning from reporters. . . .

It’s clear that the White House is beginning to understand that even American liberals have to work hard these days to continue to believe that the President is doing a good job in foreign affairs. Unforutnately, it is less clear that the White House knows what to do about the situation.

But neither the President nor Ben Rhodes (who is cited later in the article) appear to be taking on the reason so many of the president’s sympathizers are shaking their heads over the state of American foreign policy today. It is clear to a child of ten that the President and all the people around him totally failed to understand the first thing about Vladimir Putin and his foreign policy agenda. They were caught utterly flatfooted by his move on Ukraine. To both the average layperson and the seasoned foreign policy professional, this looks like a major misreading of a major issue. Many will wonder how an administration that was listening in to Angela Merkel’s cell phone calls could have misread Russia so comprehensively.

It’s pretty embarrassing for all those foreign-policy establishment types who supported Obama, too. To some of us, this was predictable in 2008. In fact, in terms of foreseeing how Obama would turn out on foreign policy, you’d have done better in 2008 to listen to Sean Hannity than to the Council on Foreign Relations.

IT WAS ALL ABOUT KEEPING THE LID ON A MAJOR FAILURE UNTIL AFTER THE ELECTION. CANDY CROWLEY HELPED: National Journal Writer: Obama W.H. Put Politics Before Transparency on Benghazi; Fournier: ‘It undermines their credibility.’ But other mainstream press outfits cooperated, too.

“President Asterisk,” indeed.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Education spending skyrockets year after year, but student achievement stays stagnant. “Since the early 1970s, the federal government has tracked the academic achievement of American 17-year-olds. The results have been essentially flat despite the fact that per-pupil spending has more than doubled, even after adjusting for inflation. . . . The average state has seen a three-percent decline in math and verbal test scores, and a 120-percent increase in real spending per pupil.”

AT AMAZON, get the Rawlings Official Mother’s Day Baseball.

Also, spring deals on Men’s Clothing.

WE ARE THE 1 PERCENT: Why Does 1% of History Have 99% of the Wealth?

I recommend Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity.

MICKEY KAUS: A Marxist Analysis of Hillary.

The Clinton mode of production, then, is running for office or serving in office. That is the material basis for the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton lifestyle and the whole Clinton institutional structure. In order to keep this mode of production from breaking down, the Clintons–-one of them, at any rate–-must be at least potentially in the running for a powerful office at all times. If Hillary doesn’t really want to run, she can’t admit it in public. She must maintain the facade of candidacy until the last minute–or else the Foundation will have to cut back and Ira Magaziner might need to find a job. If it looks like Hillary might not run–perhaps because of health reasons–the model would predict that another Clinton, presumably daughter Chelsea, would start making noises about launching a political career. Voila! Data point confirmed. The theory is off to a good start. …

Indeed.

JOINING ROGER SIMON, Ralph Nader says it’s time to impeach Obama. Well, whatever else he’s done, Obama’s bringing people together.

JAMES TARANTO ON JOHN KERRY: Carelessness or Candor? The “apartheid” slur has a long history.

Was Kerry’s reference to “apartheid” just a careless choice of words? That’s unlikely. Byers reports that Joseph Nye, North American chairman of the Trilateral Commission, sent Kerry a letter profusely apologizing: “I am very distressed that Mr. Rogin somehow gained entrance to the meeting room but also that he blatantly ignored the clearly stated rules we had established and under which you agreed to appear before the Commission. His actions tarnish the Commission’s excellent reputation for honoring this pledge and that of all those who attended the session and did keep it.”

The purpose of granting such an assurance of confidentiality is to encourage candor. And it is hard to believe that Kerry would be especially careless in his choice of words before such an eminent audience.

Further, “apartheid” is a loaded term when it comes to Israel. Even Barack Obama knows that–and knew it in 2008. “There’s no doubt that Israel and the Palestinians have tough issues to work out to get to the goal of two states living side by side in peace and security, but injecting a term like ‘apartheid’ into the discussion doesn’t advance that goal,” the junior senator from Illinois told Jeffrey Goldberg six years ago. “It’s emotionally loaded, historically inaccurate, and it’s not what I believe.”

The “apartheid” slur has a long history, as Joshua Muravchik explained in an article last year for World Affairs. In 1974, the U.N. General Assembly rejected the South African delegation’s credentials, “which meant that the country ‘was effectively expelled,’ wrote America’s then ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. . . . The next year, the foreign ministers of the Organization of the Islamic Conference determined to have Israel expelled in the same way.”

And now their vision occupies the State Department, if not the White House.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: EPA chief Gina McCarthy intervened to halt internal inquiry. “It’s highly unusual for an administrator or director of a Cabinet-level department to request an IG stop an investigation.”

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: GOP-connected ‘social welfare organization’ sues IRS over illegal targeting in Dallas federal court.

WASHINGTON POST: The White House’s Obamacare victory lap looking more like a false start. “Few things demonstrate how badly Democrats are losing this argument right now; even when it comes to their one big Obamacare ‘victory,’ Americans say almost three to one that it’s actually a negative.”

NOBODY MENTIONS IT BECAUSE HE’S A DEMOCRAT, BUT OBAMA HAS CREATED MORE POOR PEOPLE.

STANDING UP AGAINST INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM: FIRE Responds to White House Task Force’s First Report on Campus Sexual Assault.

Perhaps most worryingly, the Task Force appears to be enthusiastic about essentially eliminating hearings altogether for students accused of assault and harassment. The Task Force is exploring a “single investigator” model, where a sole administrator would be empowered to serve as detective, judge and jury, affording the accused no chance to challenge his or her accuser’s testimony. Tellingly, the Task Force expresses only the most meager sense of the rights necessary to secure fundamentally fair hearings, noting that it believes the single investigator model would still “safeguard[] an alleged perpetrator’s right to notice and to be heard.”

Keep in mind that in recent years, federal agencies have already ordered a breathtaking expansion of the definition of sexual harassment that cannot be squared with Supreme Court precedent. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has also mandated the use of our nation’s lowest standard of evidence in adjudicating campus allegations of sexual harassment and assault. Compounding these troubling developments, the Task Force recommends trainings that seem more likely to prejudice investigations than to deliver an impartial hearing.

Maybe I’ll buy stock in some online education companies. This seems like it will be a boon for them.

DAVID BONIOR LEAVES OFFICE, GOES INTO BUSINESS, LEARNS WHY REPUBLICANS ARE UNHAPPY WITH GOVERNMENT:

Over tasty Caesar salad and tacos at Agua 301, the mild-mannered, thoughtful Bonior — chastened by local regulators and fickle weather — sounds more born-again capitalist than fire-breathing lefty.

“Small-business people work very hard,” said the 68-year-old, who has spent most of his life in government. “If you are a small-business guy, you are out there and not as protected as a government employee. They struggle every day. A snow day, a government worker is off. A restaurant person takes a hit from that snow day. This winter was very, very tough on the [restaurant] industry.” . . .

“There are always going to be problems, and we’ve had our share.”

Bonior said if he had the power, he would lighten up on pesky regulations.

“It took us a ridiculous amount of time to get our permits. I understand regulations and . . . the necessity for it. But we lost six months of business because of that. It’s very frustrating.”

Do tell. George McGovern had a similar experience.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Getting What Students Pay For In College. “Seventeen of the 50 schools require two or fewer of seven key subjects and another 21 require only three. At many schools the grading standards have grown weak, too. Between 1960 and 2006, the University of Michigan saw its average GPA increase by 0.65, the University of Wisconsin at Madison by 0.7, and the University of California at Berkeley by 0.76–almost the whole way from a C+ to a B+ average. Across schools in the study, large increases are the rule, not the exception.”