TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 255.

“YOU LIE:” Dallas Morning News: As Wendy Davis touts life story in race for governor, key facts blurred. This “strong independent woman” had her education paid for by a man. Then she divorced him when her education was paid off. It’s Potemkin villages all the way down with these people.

UPDATE: Reader Chuck Allen writes: “You also have to love that Davis’ first marriage was to ‘Frank Underwood.’ I am sure the producers of ‘House of Cards’ could work this into a script somehow….” Yeah, I noticed that. Heh.

CHANGE: Amazon Workers Opt Out of a Union.

Last month I wrote about an attempt by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers to unionize technical workers at an Amazon.com Inc. warehouse in Delaware. This was my take back then: “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that if unions manage to make substantial inroads at Amazon, it will be the greatest advance that the labor movement has experienced in decades.”

Well, on Wednesday night, workers voted to reject the union. So far, the citadel of the new economy remains unbreached. The vote wasn’t even close. . . . This is not the last time that the labor movement will try to unionize Amazon. It’s an obvious target. Amazon’s workers are more productive than, say, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and compared with a major retail company, it has only a handful of locations — and employees — where unions can focus their organizing efforts.

That said, 21 to 6 is a very bad sign. The union says it lost because the employer put too much pressure on employees, but the union always says that; this description is notably short of specific allegations of illegal union-busting. The union’s definition of “intense pressure” may include firing people who supported the union, but it tends also to include things such as calling meetings on company time (the union campaign has to meet outside of work) and pointing out that the union cannot guarantee you a raise — or indeed a job. Obviously, unions would rather that employers weren’t allowed to say anything at all, but I’m not sure this really qualifies as “intense pressure.”

Just as a success would have been a major advance for the union, this is a blow. They failed to organize a small group of workers by a wide margin. It’s a good sign of just how difficult a comeback will be for organized labor — and why progressives may need to look elsewhere for a 21st-century labor movement.

Well, good.

ARIANESPACE’S BUSINESS MODEL IS IN TROUBLE, because it was designed to compete with the Space Shuttle.

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Also, top Valentine’s Day Deals.

Plus, today only: 40 Kindle Romance Books, $1.99 or Less Each.

ED DRISCOLL: Let’s All Help Harvey Weinstein Keep His Promise.

BLUE ON BLUE: #WhiteWomanPrivilege meets Festivus: The airing of bitter intra-feminist racial grievances.

AND THE OSCAR FOR BEST TAX BREAK GOES TO The Wolf Of Wall Street.

Although Oscar nominations were announced yesterday, one winner has already been determined: the Oscar for Best Tax Break (not a real Academy Award). Among the nine films nominated for Best Picture, The Wolf of Wall Street received the largest state tax incentive, a 30 percent tax credit from New York State. In effect, New York State taxpayers paid for a third of its $100 million in production costs.

I’ve written about these subsidies before.

What can I say, except: Repeal The Hollywood Tax Cuts!

SORRY BUT ROMNEY SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN INTIMIDATED. Obama is not, actually, a great debater. It’s a poor reflection on Romney’s candidacy that he thought otherwise.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Is the American School System Damaging Our Kids? Education has become an American institution—of the worst kind.

Most students—whether A students, C students, or failing ones—have lost their zest for learning by the time they’ve reached middle school or high school. In a telling research study, professors Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeremy Hunter fitted more than 800 sixth through 12th graders, from 33 different schools across the country, with special wristwatches that emitted a signal at random times of day. Each time they received a signal, the students filled out a questionnaire indicating where they were, what they were doing, and how happy or unhappy they felt at the moment. The lowest levels of happiness, by far, were reported when the children were in school, where they were often bored, anxious, or both. Other researchers have shown that, with each successive grade, students develop increasingly negative attitudes toward the subjects taught, especially math and science.

As a society, we tend to shrug off such findings. We’re not surprised that kids are unhappy in school. Some people even believe that the very unpleasantness of school is good for children, so they will learn to tolerate unpleasantness as preparation for real life. But there are plenty of opportunities to learn to tolerate unpleasantness without adding unpleasant schooling to the mix. Research has shown that people of all ages learn best when they are self-motivated, pursuing answers to questions that reflect their personal interests and achieving goals that they’ve set for themselves. Under such conditions, learning is usually joyful.

The evidence for all of this is obvious to anyone who’s watched a child grow from infancy to school age. Through their own efforts, children figure out how to walk, run, jump, and climb. They learn from scratch their native language, and with that, they learn to assert their will, argue, amuse, annoy, befriend, charm, and ask questions. Through questioning and exploring, they acquire an enormous amount of knowledge about the physical and social world around them, and in their play, they practice skills that promote their physical, intellectual, social, and emotional development. They do all of this before anyone, in any systematic way, tries to teach them anything.

This amazing drive and capacity to learn does not turn itself off when children reach five or six. But we turn it off with our coercive system of schooling. The biggest, most enduring lesson of our system is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible. . . .

Another researcher who has documented the power of self-directed learning is Sugata Mitra. He set up outdoor computers in very poor neighborhoods in India, where many children were illiterate and most did not go to school. Wherever he placed such a computer, dozens of kids would gather around and, with no help from adults, figure out how to use it. Those who could not read began to do so by interacting with the computer and with other children around it. The computers gave these young people access to the whole world’s knowledge—in one remote village, children who previously knew nothing about microorganisms learned about bacteria and viruses through their interactions with the computer and began to use this new knowledge appropriately in conversations.

Read the whole thing.

IT WOULD BE NICE TO SEE SOME RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE TWO: Christina Hoff Sommers: Defending Freedom Feminism.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, WE’D SEE RACIST FEDERAL JUDGES. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! 8-year study: Black federal judges ‘conditioned’ to go easy on fellow blacks.

Black federal judges, inspired by racial “solidarity” and “conditioned” in life to sympathize with other blacks, side with African-Americans filing discrimination cases in significantly higher percentages than white judges, according to a first-of-its-kind study.

The California State University, Northridge study of 516 discrimination cases in federal courts over eight years found that black federal judges side with black claimants 32.9 percent of the time. For white judges it was 20.6 percent.

But when the study looked at how black and white judges ruled on discrimination claims made by “non-black claimants,” there wasn’t any difference.

Boy, those people who told me what would happen if I voted for Mitt Romney sure were smart. I guess I should have listened to them.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Do So Many Gay People Smoke? Because they’re already used to doing what they want in the face of societal disapprobation?

THE NEW MCCARTHYISM: Actress Forced Out Of San Francisco Production After Endorsing Tea Party Candidate.

MIKE BLOOMBERG NOW SITTING IN EDITORIAL MEETINGS AND STEERING COVERAGE: “Mr. Bloomberg’s dive back into the news side of the organization has not only caught employees by surprise, but it has also worried some that the division’s editorial independence could be called into question. Generally, the owners of news organizations try to avoid any appearance of influencing coverage, particularly when they have political affiliations.”

BECAUSE OF RACISM: Why doesn’t criticism of Obama get any traction.

OH, GOOD GRIEF: Professor Calls on Americans with “Jewish-Sounding” Names to Write the Senate.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED REPUBLICAN, WE’D SEE MCCARTHY-STYLE BLACKLISTS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Famed Actress Booted Out of Production for Endorsing Tea Party Candidate for Governor.

ANYTHING YOU CAN DO I CAN DO META: Ranking The Law School Rankings.

ANDREW CUOMO’S Banishment Fantasy.

AS PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH WAS NOTING ON TWITTER, just because the tabloids were right about John Edwards doesn’t mean they’re right this time.

OVER AT GOODSTUFF, nerdy fun with Big Bang Theory’s Melissa Rauch.

SOME READERS MAY REMEMBER THE EARLY DAYS OF INSTAPUNDIT, when the Cordair Gallery was a regular BlogAds advertiser. Now they’re just friends, but there’s some really cool classically representational art there. And check out this video on an interesting reproduction process.

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Plus, New Releases in Movies & TV.

FASTER, PLEASE: Heart Attack Damage Slashed With Microparticle Therapy. “When biodegradable microparticles were injected after a heart attack, the size of the heart lesion was reduced by 50 percent and the heart could pump significantly more blood. . . . The micoparticles work by binding to the damaging cells — inflammatory monocytes — and diverting them to a fatal detour. Instead of racing to the heart, the cells head to the spleen and die. The particles are made of poly (lactic-co-glycolic) acid, a biocompatible and biodegradable substance already approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in re-absorbable sutures. A microparticle is 500 nanometers, which is 1/200th size of a hair.” I don’t have a spleen, so I don’t know if it’ll work for me, though.