MICHAEL TOTTEN: “Cuba isn’t a developing country; it’s a once-developed country destroyed by its own government.”

SO WHY IS IT WORSE TO GET YOUR MORAL INTUITIONS FROM VIDEO GAMES than from, say, novels or movies? Or, worse yet, from philosophers?

JOKING ABOUT DATE RAPE: “She might get some flak here, since she’s joking about raping women.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 369.

IS THERE A HILLARY BRAIN-DAMAGE COVERUP? “The overreaction makes me suspicious that there really is a problem. I don’t like this how-dare-you-even-ask attitude. It makes me skeptical.”

Meh. When it comes to Hillary and brain damage, what difference, at this point, would it make?

CHANGE: Breaking the Federal Monopoly on Higher Ed Accreditation.

The federal government’s hold over higher education accreditation may be growing shaky, and that’s great news for students. The Heritage Foundation reports that Representative Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has introduced a new proposal in the House under which states could allow virtually any organization—from colleges to companies to nonprofits—to “credential individual courses.” As of now, only the federal government and federally sanctioned regional bodies can accredit institutions and programs. But the new proposal would offer greater flexibility for students. . . .

Changes to the accreditation laws will be staunchly resisted by traditional colleges and universities, which want to keep their protection racket in place. But their influence may be waning. If it does, transforming the accreditation process could be the first step in a broader transformation of higher ed.

Mike Lee has a similar bill in the Senate. And, if I may say so, all is proceeding as I have foreseen.

HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): In Syria, Tehran Declares Victory. Enough is enough: Hashtag ’em!

UPDATE: Eliot Cohen: A Selfie-Taking, Hashtagging Teenage Administration: The Obama crowd too often responds to critics and to world affairs like self-absorbed adolescents.

As American foreign policy continues its long string of failures—not a series of singles and doubles, as President Obama asserted in a recent news conference, but rather season upon season of fouls and strikes—the question becomes: Why?

Why does the Economist magazine put a tethered eagle on its cover, with the plaintive question, “What would America fight for?” Why do Washington Post columnists sympathetic to the administration write pieces like one last week headlined, “Obama tends to create his own foreign policy headaches”? . . .

Often, members of the Obama administration speak and, worse, think and act, like a bunch of teenagers. When officials roll their eyes at Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea with the line that this is “19th-century behavior,” the tone is not that different from a disdainful remark about a hairstyle being “so 1980s.” When administration members find themselves judged not on utopian aspirations or the purity of their motives—from offering “hope and change” to stopping global warming—but on their actual accomplishments, they turn sulky. As teenagers will, they throw a few taunts (the president last month said the GOP was offering economic policies that amount to a “stinkburger” or a “meanwich”) and stomp off, refusing to exchange a civil word with those of opposing views.

In a searing memoir published in January, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates describes with disdain the trash talk about the Bush administration that characterized meetings in the Obama White House. Like self-obsessed teenagers, the staffers and their superiors seemed to forget that there were other people in the room who might take offense, or merely see the world differently. Teenagers expect to be judged by intentions and promise instead of by accomplishment, and their style can be encouraged by irresponsible adults (see: the Nobel Prize committee) who give awards for perkiness and promise rather than achievement.

If the United States today looks weak, hesitant and in retreat, it is in part because its leaders and their staff do not carry themselves like adults.

Indeed. Related:

Obama doesn’t act presidential. Presidents act presidential not because they’re stuffy or out-of-touch, but because experience shows that when you don’t act presidential, it often winds up handing opponents a club to beat you with. Obama might know this if he had had significant experience in national politics before running for President, but he didn’t. His staff, alas, is taking its cues from him, instead of remedying his deficiencies.

Which are becoming increasingly apparent.

SATANISTS WIMP OUT AT HARVARD: Black Mass Cancelled Amid Uproar As Cultural Studies Club Withdraws Sponsorship.

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IN USA TODAY, TAXPROF PAUL CARON ON THE ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE IRS SCANDAL: The media ignore IRS scandal: We need to get to the bottom of it by giving Lois Lerner full immunity in exchange for her testimony.

Related: The IRS scandal for dummies.

Now with the warrant of Caron’s column I add my usual reminder. Nixon’s efforts to misuse the IRS were futile. They went nowhere. Nixon and his henchmen desired the IRS to “screw” their political opponents, but their efforts were a pathetic failure.

Nixon henchman Jack Caulfield astutely complained that the IRS was a “monstrous bureaucracy…dominated and controlled by Democrats.” As we have come to see, Caulfield was on to something. By contrast with Nixon’s failures to misuse the IRS, the IRS have very effectively “screwed” Obama’s political opponents, and we have yet to learn what the president knew and when he knew it.

Indeed. Though it’s possible that the IRS is so politicized that its employees needed no explicit instructions to go after Obama’s enemies. Arguing against that, however, is the White House’s stonewalling.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: IowaHawk: “If I understand college administrators correctly, colleges are hotbeds of racism and rape that everyone should be able to attend.”

JAMES TARANTO: Starr Turn? Not only Republicans have called for an IRS special prosecutor.

The House has approved a resolution calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor in the Internal Revenue Service scandal. This isn’t just a Republican idea. Last week’s 250-168 vote was bipartisan, with 26 Democrats joining 224 Republicans in voting aye. And one of the first to suggest a special prosecutor, almost a year ago, was a liberal columnist, Bill Keller of the New York Times. . . .

Obama initially paid lip service to the seriousness of the scandal, commenting a year ago tomorrow that the abuse of the IRS was “outrageous, and there is no place for it, and they have to be held fully accountable. . . . I have got no patience with it, I will not tolerate it, and we will make sure that we find out exactly what happened on this.”

By this February he had changed his tune utterly, telling Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly that while the agency might have made “some boneheaded decisions,” there was “not even a smidgen of corruption.” He cited “multiple hearings on this” but didn’t mention that congressional investigations were stymied by ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s refusal to testify and by the IRS’s failure to turn over documents.

The House also voted last week, 231-187, to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress (only six Democrats were with the Republicans on that one). The next day, the IRS told Rep. Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, that “it will hand over all the Lerner e-mails related to the scandal,” a New York Post editorial notes. In March, the IRS had said “it ‘would take years to produce’ all the data Congress demanded.”

By now it seems clear that Obama is very much among those Democrats who, as Keller put it, “are not so much looking for ‘the truth’ as trying to change the subject.” As for “governing,” a report in the Washington Post suggests that in Obama’s view it is completely subsumed by electoral politics.

It always has been.

Plus: “At any rate, it’s a safe bet that Attorney General Holder–who has himself been held in contempt of Congress–will neither appoint a special prosecutor nor follow up on Lerner’s contempt citation. Which means it will be left to congressional investigators to get to the bottom of the abuse of the IRS.”

SENATE SHAMBLES: Roll Call: Energy Bill Filibustered, Keystone Pipeline in Limbo After Reid Blocks Amendments.

SO, ACCURATE REPORTING, THEN: Glenn Thrush makes the reporters assigned to the 2008 Hillary Clinton campaign sound like a bunch of mental patients and drug addicts. But if the Hillary press corps was bad, how much worse was the corps covering Obama?

USA TODAY: College rape tribunals fail students.

A system run by university employees will always face the temptation to put the school’s interest above the interest of victims. . . .

As bad as schools are at providing justice for rape victims, they might be worse at protecting the rights of the accused.

Across the country, accused students don’t have the right to see all the evidence against them, and administrators can find a student guilty based on low levels of proof, rather than “clear and convincing evidence.” Protecting the accused is no small matter when 2% to 10% of rape accusations are found to be false and many more are riddled with uncertainty.

Until colleges and local government find a way to bring the full power of criminal courts to bear on sexual assault among students, campus courts will remain second-class justice for both rape victims and those who are accused.

It’s a kangaroo-court system that’s not adequate when the rape is real, and that’s way too heavy handed and unfair when it’s not.

THE HILL: Bill Would Prohibit Lawmakers From Flying First Class.

WHEN UNIONIZATION IS THE ENEMY OF DIVERSITY:

The stagnation of the industry also means there are few opportunities to increase diversity. “The staff here is unionized, which means there is little job turnover,” says Richard Kim, executive editor at The Nation, who is Asian American and gay. “We only get to make a hire every four or five years.” Among the progressive publications I examined, The Nation scored the lowest, with slightly over 4 percent of its staff hailing from ethnic minority groups.

So, if we value diversity we should oppose unionization, then.

WASHINGTON: Insurance lobby AHIP hires up John Boehner aide Brendan Buck.

Another argument for my revolving-door surtax!

IN USA TODAY, TAXPROF PAUL CARON ON THE ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE IRS SCANDAL: The media ignore IRS scandal: We need to get to the bottom of it by giving Lois Lerner full immunity in exchange for her testimony.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: When Courthouse Janitors Make More Than Prosecutors.

WELL, A FEW OF THESE ARE USEFUL: 13 Cooking Hacks Every Chef Should Know. But overall, I think the list is a bit oversold.

SHAMEFUL CONFESSIONS, 21ST CENTURY STYLE: True Story: I’m A Travel Writer Who Has Never Had A Vacation Hookup.

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NO PAIN, NO HURT, WE’LL GO DREAMING: Electrical stimulation of brain alters dreams. “Scientists on Sunday said they had used a harmless electrical current to modify sleep so that an individual has ‘lucid dreams,’ a particularly powerful form of dreaming.” I’d like a dream about Kirsty Hawkshaw, please.