TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 380.

MEGAN MCARDLE: ‘Flash Deals’ Won’t Save Retail.

The flash model does seem to work better in fashion — an industry that, after all, has long relied on sales to move merchandise. But even there, I confess to a modicum of skepticism.

Look at what happened to places like Loehmann’s, which in the 1980s was a great place to find actual high-end designer fashion at amazing discounts, provided you were willing to put in your time pawing through the racks. Or outlet malls, where, in the 1990s, I scored some fantastic deals on high-end clothing and accessories. These places and their successors now sell products specially made for the discounters, with lower quality and styling. In other words, they are no longer such great deals. Oh, sure, if you’re lucky enough to live in rural Mississippi, you may be able to score some actual high-end stuff at your local T.J. Maxx. But in general, you’re buying cheap stuff at cheap prices.

It’s not that that can’t be a good business — Walmart has done a great job at it, and TJX Cos. Inc., which owns T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, is doing splendidly. But it’s a tough business. You’re always fighting for margin against other people who sell very cheap stuff to consumers who will not pay a dime more than they have to.

But the flash business is just too small for anyone to stay in for very long — and getting smaller. As manufacturing lead times shrink, excess inventory naturally also shrinks, because retailers have a much better sense of the market conditions, and restocking is a lot faster. Meanwhile, the Internet makes it harder and harder to make money on the stock you do get, because you have to sell it at the lowest price out there or customers will just go somewhere else.

Stupid Internet.

VIDEO: A Driving Tour of a West Knoxville “Food Desert.”

UPDATE: You know, this kind of verification (or de-verification) of what the government tells us — what the spy satellite guys call “ground truthing” — could be interesting in all sorts of fields.

AT AMAZON, Deals Galore at the Headphone Store.

Also, markdowns on Stanley Tools.

JAMES TARANTO: The Accidental Alien: A noncitizen voted in multiple elections, the New York Times reports.

Hernandez’s case “represents a broken immigration system,” his lawyer, Elizabeth Ricci, tells the Times. No doubt about that. But it represents something else, too: a broken voting system. According to the Times, Hernandez cast improper votes in “every major election” since 1976. That’s at least 10 of them, twice as many if it includes midterms.

Noncitizens, including legal resident aliens, are forbidden to vote in every state. States that have sought to incorporate verification of citizenship into the voter-registration process have encountered obstacles from the Obama administration and denunciations from the New York Times.

That’s because most non-citizens vote Democratic. If they tended to vote Republican, the Justice Department would mandate three forms of citizenship verification, and a DNA sample, in the name of voting rights.

ANOTHER LEFTY NARRATIVE IN TROUBLE: Facts Are Stubborn Things . . . As Thomas Piketty Is Beginning to Find Out. “The charges are devastating, and there is plenty to back them up. And again, let’s be abundantly clear: The Financial Times is accusing Thomas Piketty of dishonesty, of making up his arguments, of actively trying to mislead readers and actively trying to mischaracterize inequality trends. This mischaracterization leads to policy prescriptions on Piketty’s part that are both entirely unrealistic in their design and implementation, and, more importantly, are wholly unsupported by the actual data on inequality. The main thrust of Thomas Piketty’s book is entirely undermined, and his arguments and conclusions are annihilated. It is hard to imagine a more comprehensive refutation.”

DREAMING OF JAILING THEIR OPPONENTS: Justice Department pushed Lois Lerner to help build criminal case against nonprofits.

SENATOR PAT ROBERTS STAGES A HARRY REID INTERVENTION:

It’s good to have Senator Roberts’s contribution to the shaming of Harry Reid. It takes a helluva lot more than a village. Ross notes that at last count Reid has mentioned the Koch brothers 134 times on the Senate floor. Ross and the Daily Caller have posted the video of Roberts’s intervention (below). For the record, here it is. . . . I recommend that you hang in there with the video until you see Roberts conjuring the plagues that Reid will attribute to the Kochs in coming days. It’s worth the wait.

Perhaps having a primary challenger (Milt Wolf) has stiffened Roberts’ spine a bit.

A ROUNDUP OF this week’s Legal Education news.

PUSHBACK: Delay EPA power plant rules, senators demand. “Fifteen Democrats signed the letter, including the four seen as most vulnerable in the midterm elections: Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.), Mark Warner (Va), Mark Pryor (Ark.) and Mark Begich (Alaska).”

ROGER SIMON: The Veterans Scandal: Socialized Medicine on Trial.

Many have wondered about Barack Obama’s prolonged silence concerning the disastrous situation at the Veterans Administration hospitals and then his odd detached demeanor (well, maybe not that odd for him) when he finally did discuss it at a press conference.

The answer is simple. His lifetime dream of a free public (single payer) healthcare system for all just disintegrated in front of him. Forget the wildly ambitious and pervasive “Affordable Care Act,” the government couldn’t even handle the health of our wounded servicemen, acknowledged for years to be by far the group most deserving of medical attention in our country. With veterans dying while waiting lists are falsified, it’s hard to see government healthcare as anything but incompetent, disgraceful and quite possibly criminal.

Government has failed utterly. Does anyone have any doubt that Halliburton or even the dreaded Koch brothers could have better handled the health of our wounded warriors? Probably almost any business would have. There at least would have been some accountability. (It’s interesting to see the quaint Bernie Sanders, the one self-described socialist in the Congress, as opposed to the closeted ones, being the most outspoken defender of VA malfeasance and urging us not to “rush to judgement” on a three page bill.)

But it’s not just healthcare, although it’s certainly prominent, important and symbolic. The Obama administration has been the best advertisement for libertarianism across the board in recent memory.

Yep. The “best and brightest” are neither particularly good nor evidently bright. We have the worst political class in our nation’s history, which is the best argument for taking power away from them, not granting it to them.

JOURNALISM: The Two Faces of Michael Kinsley on Government Secrets.

ILYA SOMIN: A dubious effort to use Brown v. Board of Education to attack the current Supreme Court.

TRIGGER WARNING: When sentimentality leads to the gas chamber.

From the comments:

Time for an ’empathy bullshit’ tag?

First civility, now empathy, keep your eyes peeled for the next one.

It’s out there.

As long as people can be manipulated by emotion, they will be.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Resign, Mr. President. “I wrote in passing yesterday that if President Obama or the people of this country had any self-respect, he’d resign over the scandal of the Veterans Affairs hospitals, which needlessly sentenced an unknown number of American veterans to death through their combination of managerial incompetence, medical malpractice, and monstrously cruel indifference to their clients. Other heads of government have resigned for less. President Obama presented himself to the public as an authority in the field of health-care management and as an executive who not only would insist upon but also would in fact achieve the highest standards in transparent, honest, competent government. He has failed, comprehensively. An honest man acknowledges his failures.”

So, no resignation, then.

I LOVE AMAZON, BOTH AS A CUSTOMER AND AN AFFILIATE, but the problem with such great dominance is too much market power, which, inevitably, becomes abusive.

UPDATE: A contrary take. “It’s an absolutely ridiculous charge. What Amazon is actually doing is refusing to continue its extreme discounting on the artificially high retail price of books. Castalia House has no issue with Amazon, and Amazon doesn’t discount its prices on our ebooks much because they are already in the price range that Amazon expects: 2.99 to 4.99. But publishers that price their ebooks at $15.99 are in trouble, because no one wants to pay actual retail price for them on Amazon. . . . No wonder Amazon is unwilling to continue this arrangement. Amazon can only sell its books up to a certain price, depending upon the format and length. Due to the distribution discount system, a higher retail price means a higher distribution price, so Amazon makes half the margin on the more expensive, more steeply discounted books from the major publishers. Amazon is not only perfectly within its rights, but logically needs to stop discounting the book from what is, after all, the publisher’s suggested retail price; Hatchette’s complaint is rooted in the fact that Amazon is now selling its books for the price that Hatchette itself suggests!”

MORE GOOD REVIEWS FOR JAKE BARTON: Peggy Noonan loves the 9/11 museum. “Everything in it says the real and physical does matter, and what happened on that day—the facts of it, the meaning of it, who did what and how, who survived and died—matters. It is a true history of the day and its aftermath. You see the ruined fire truck from Ladder Company 3. The helmet of a fireman. The red bandana that Welles Crowther, a young equities trader, wore when he lost his life saving others in the south tower. There are things picked from the debris like bullets from the field at Gettysburg: a woman’s purse, her eyeglasses, the shoes a man wore as he fled the collapse.”

PARTYING WITH THE RICH AND CONNECTED. Is it just me, or does Mika Brzezinski look kinda like Claire Underwood here?

MORE PHOTOSHOPS of the Dems’ #LikeABoss graphic.

IF HOUSES WERE BUILT LIKE SOFTWARE, ONE WOODPECKER COULD DESTROY A CITY: Everything Is Broken: “It’s hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire. Computers, and computing, are broken.”

GALLERY: Photos That Will Make Your Stomach Drop. These didn’t bother me, but then, neither do heights, generally.

AT AMAZON, deals and savings in TV & Video.

Plus, bestsellers in Mysteries, Thriller & Suspense.

RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Judge Rules Conyers Can Be on Primary Ballot Despite Not Meeting Signature Requirements. Also for the Republicans: “In 2012, Michigan Republican representative Thad McCotter was kept off of the ballot because of invalid signatures.”

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Suspended Animation Goes Primetime: Say Goodbye To Death As We Know It.

As of March 29, 2014, a team of surgeons trained in this saline-cooling procedure is on emergency call at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In this field trial of the technique, patients who arrive at the hospital after having suffered cardiac arrest after traumatic injury (i.e. gunshots) and do not respond to attempts to restart their heart will be cooled with saline to about 10 degrees Celsius (50 Fahrenheit). Their cellular activity will stop. They will be “clinically dead.” But—if doctors can repair the trauma in roughly two hours—they are still capable of being revived.

In itself, this is amazing. This is two hours of suspended animation—which has been the stuff of sci-fi for almost a century. Today it’s scientific fact.

But where things get really interesting is what happens tomorrow. As the technology progresses, it is not too much of a stretch to say those two hours of suspended animation will give way to four hours and eight hours and sooner or later whole days and weeks and months—in other words, we’ll have mastered artificial hibernation.

Faster, please.