SURPRISED HOW LITTLE MEDIA COVERAGE THERE IS OF WHAT’S GOING ON IN VENEZUELA: Cuba training armed government groups attacking and killing protestors in Venezuela.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University Administrative Glut Worse Than We Thought.

Over the last 25 years the number of administrative employees at U.S. colleges and universities more than doubled, according to a joint study by the New England Center of Investigative Reporting and the American Institutes for Research. The ratio of nonacademic positions to faculty positions doubled at both public and private institutions. Overall, the industry has added an average of 87 administrative positions per day, a rate has scarcely slowed since the economic downturn, despite tuition increases. Even more surprising, academic institutions have added more administrative employees despite part-time faculty taking on more teaching duties than full-time professors. . . .

Administrative hiring shouldn’t come at the cost of delivering quality, cost-effective college educations. The more evidence we see, the worse the problem looks.

Public choice theory says that institutions are run for the benefit of the people who run them. Universities are run by administrators.

THE DAWN OF THE AGE OF artificial intelligence.

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THE NEW YORK POST: Calling Lois Lerner:

The American people still need to hear from Lois Lerner. That’s a point that can’t be made often enough.

Remember her? She’s the IRS official who gave a statement before Congress declaring herself innocent of any wrongdoing — and then promptly took the Fifth.

Recently, Congress unearthed another IRS e-mail on which she was copied, talking about taking “off-plan” a discussion about how to harass the 501(c)4 groups the IRS had targeted. Meanwhile, leaks from officials involved in the investigation claim the FBI has not found ­anything criminal.

That’s an amazing finding, given the statement by the American Center for Law and Justice, which represents the IRS targets, that the FBI hadn’t interviewed a single of the center’s 41 ­clients.

Congress has been trying to get to the bottom of things with hearings, but it has not had much help from the administration. That’s partly because the Department of Justice is hiding behind the idea that it can’t do anything that might jeopardize an ongoing criminal investigation.

We believe this gets priorities backward.

The Constitution does not hold government agencies such as the IRS accountable to the FBI. The Constitution holds the government accountable to the people, acting through their elected representatives in Congress.

Read the whole thing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UC Riverside Business School Slashes Tuition.

MORE GUN JOBS MOVE SOUTH: Remington Outdoor Company to announce major expansion to Huntsville.

REPORT: NSA Eavesdropping on Lawyers’ Privileged Conversations. If we had a Republican in the White House, the American Bar Association would be making a huge stink.

UPDATE: But see this from Orin Kerr. “If you unpack the story and ignore the opening spin, the story ends up delivering considerably less than it promises.”

MONEY AND POLITICS: Mark Tapscott: It turns out the ‘Evil’ Koch Bros are only the 59th biggest donors in American politics. Can you guess who is number one? “So, if money is the measure of evil in American politics and the Evil Koch Bros only come in 59th, who is really the most evil donor ever? Turns out it’s Act Blue, with just short of $100 million in contributions during its lifetime, which only started in 2004, 15 years after the Evil Koch Bros in the OpenSecrets.org compilation.”

UPDATE: An explanation:

I think it’s like the way 15 is 105 in dog years. $18 million — the Koch total — should be understood in “conservative” dollars when ranking “most evil” donors. Let’s use the “dog years” multiplier of 7, to demonstrate the concept. $18 million is $128 million in conservative dollars. So, understood properly, the Koch Brothers actually do rank #1 on the most evil donor ever ranking.

Sadly, that makes sense.

TURNING SAN FRANCISCO into San Antonio. Why would that be such a bad thing? . . .

NO WONDER THEY WANTED CARD CHECK: Mickey Kaus: UAW Crushed — What Comes Next?

I remember, toward the end of the last Bush administration, whippersnappers all the confident young Dem policy warriors repeating labor’s talking points about the need to allow the secret ballot in union recognition elections to be replaced by “card check,” a system in which workers sign cards in the presence of union organizers. Without card check, management would “coerce” workers by pointing out the downside of unionization in mandatory propaganda meetings.

Wasn’t it possible that workers who turned down unions simply looked at what Wagner Act unionism had done, say, to Detroit, and decided for themselves that this wasn’t what they wanted to happen to their company? Nah.

Now we know different: At Vokswagen’s Chattanooga factory, the UAW was actually welcomed by the employer. No union-busting propaganda sessions. VW, which already has a powerful union back home in Europe, wanted to set up German-style “works councils,” where rank and file employees could have a say in production decisions. But, according to many U.S. labor lawyers, it needed a union partner — otherwise, under the Wagner Act the works councils would be considered an illegal “company union.” The UAW seemed ready to be that partner. UAW organizers were allowed in the plant to make their case. Management didn’t argue back. . . .

The most interesting part comes next: If Volkswagen now goes ahead and starts its works councils anyway, without the UAW, will organized labor sue to have them declared illegal? That would give the Roberts Court a precious opportunity to interpret the Wagner Act in a way that actually allows non-legalistic, non-adversarial forms of worker participation in management (despite the “company union” prohibition). In effect, the courts could help VW create what those on the left have been (correctly) demanding of the right: a reasonable alternative to traditional unionism, giving workers a “voice” without subjecting every management decision to a war of bargainers and lawyers and (ultimately) the formalized pitched battle of a strike.

Now that would be a threat to Big Labor. Which is why they might not sue.

Because they’re not about helping the workers.

WHEN HEADLINE EDITORS FAIL: Cameron Diaz Encourages Women to Keep Their Pubic Hair in Her New Book. Poor modifier placement.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Obama: Average wages have barely budged in my recovery.

HMM: Expert: Iran ships a dry run for later nuclear/EMP attack; humiliate Obama.

CRONYISM: The Untouchable Profits of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

OBAMA’S POST-RACIAL AMERICA: Mob of teens film themselves attacking and robbing disabled vet while shouting ‘Knock that white boy out!’

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THOMAS SOWELL: Mascots Of The Self-Congratulatory Elites.

PETER INGEMI: Dwayne Stovall Being Andrew Breitbart.

FEMININE FOES: New Science Explores Female Competition: In the sexual trenches, women’s tenacity and competitiveness rivals men’s. This is no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention.

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I THOUGHT THIS ONLY HAPPENED IN CARTOONS: Massive Snowball Wreaks Havoc On Reed College Campus. “A colossal, 900-pound snowball ripped a dorm room’s wall apart at Reed College in Southeast Portland after a pair of math majors lost control of the icy globe, Reed Magazine reported. The shenanigans started when several students began rolling the massive blob in a campus quad Saturday night, the report said.”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: DNA test confirms two women ARE twin sisters separated at birth. “Anaïs Bordier and Samantha Futerman were both born Nov. 19, 1987, in Busan, South Korea, and adopted as babies — Anaïs grew up in France, Samantha in New Jersey. But 25 years later, they rediscovered each other over YouTube, Facebook and Skype.”

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Tom Perkins Has A Point: Our Taxation System Is Morally Insane.

Today, he is once again being locked in the stocks of public opinion for suggesting, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that people who pay an enormously disproportionate share of the taxes should have a disproportionate say in public policy. “The Tom Perkins system is: You don’t get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes,” he said. “But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?”

Cue outrage, etc.

But Mr. Perkins here has only taken a step that progressives took a few generations ago, when they embraced escalating rates of taxation as a foundation for economic justice, and applied it to a different problem. If our political liabilities — taxes — should be as a matter of justice proportional to our income, then why shouldn’t our political input be likewise proportionate?

I had some milder, but related, suggestions for tax-and-representation reform here.

YOU MIGHT WANT TO ADMINISTER THEM AT DIFFERENT TIMES, THOUGH: More evidence that red wine and aspirin protect against cancer.