SO YESTERDAY I MENTIONED THAT TRENT LOTT AND JOHN BREAUX ARE LOBBYING FOR A RUSSIAN BANK AGAINST SANCTIONS, and in the comments someone suggested that they should be shunned. Perhaps constituents should ask their Senators and Representatives if they’re meeting with Lott and Breaux.

IF IT WEREN’T ABOUT A REPUBLICAN, IT WOULD COST HIM HIS JOB: Frank Rich tweets prison rape joke about former Va. Gov. Bob McDonnell. But it’s nice when these people show their true selves.

UPDATE: What is it about liberals and prison rape? Remember Bill Lockyer (Cal. Dem. AG)?

Yes, I do remember Bill Lockyer. My guess — liberals like for people to submit to the state, and for their opponents to be humiliated. So prison rape for Republicans is a twofer. The relationship of this to their political philosophies and personal behavior I leave as an exercise for the reader.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal. Day 485.

OUR FRIENDS, THE SAUDIS: Saudis Raid House Church, Arrest 27 Christians.

EUGENE VOLOKH HAS WRITTEN ABOUT SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS TO CARRY NON-LETHAL WEAPONS, and I talked about the subject as well in my Second Amendment Penumbras piece. Now Eugene presents this: Amicus brief supporting the Second Amendment right to own and carry a stun gun in Massachusetts.

I’m delighted to report that Michael Rosman and Michelle Scott of the Center for Individual Rights, Lisa Steele of AWARE (Arming Women Against Rape & Endangerment), and I have filed an amicus brief on behalf of AWARE in Commonwealth v. Caetano, a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court case dealing with the Second Amendment and stun guns.

Massachusetts is one of the several states that bans stun guns (including Tasers) — the others are Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin, plus the Annapolis/Baltimore area in Maryland, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and several other cities. I hope that this case will change that; indeed, the Michigan Court of Appeals recently struck down the Michigan stun gun ban on Second Amendment grounds.

I think that’s how it should go. The Second Amendment, as the Court has noted, is in large part about a right of self-defense — not just about guns as such.

UPDATE: Link to Eugene’s post was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry! One day I’ll master cut-and-paste.

HOME COOKING and the Left’s resentment of effort. If you’re poor, you should be preparing most or all of your food. It’s much cheaper. Plus:

I am a man who does most of the everyday cooking for my family. I don’t mean that I share the cooking; I do virtually all of it. Nor do I mean that I’m a stay-at-home dad. I work full-time, and then some. I bring home the bacon and cook it up in a pan. (And I look just like the guy in the stock image above. Really.) So I can say a little something about this supposed “tyranny.”

Which is, obviously, no big deal. Everyone does it and has been doing it since man first tamed fire. It’s not a hardship any more than any other aspect of life. You might as well write an essay on how difficult it is to get out of bed in the morning, or do the laundry, or mow the lawn, or keep track of the bills, or do a thousand other things that people do every day. Cleaning toilets is a real bummer, you know, so maybe that’s tyranny, too.

Well, you’ve just outlined the next month of Amanda Marcotte columns.

WELL, AMERICAN LABOR MARKETS WERE TRADITIONALLY LESS RIGIDLY REGULATED. NOW, NOT SO MUCH. America’s famously flexible labour market is becoming less so. “The spread of occupational licensing, for everything from horse massage to hair braiding, has raised barriers to entry for occupations that once required little or no training. American employers used to be free to sack workers more or less as they pleased, but that “employment at will” doctrine has been eroded somewhat by court decisions that have established an implicit contract between employee and employer. That makes firms less likely to fire people, and therefore to hire them.”

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OOPS: Less Than 3 Weeks After Declaring Syria Chemical Weapons Free, Obama Admin Says They Hid Weapons.

I thought we had “smart diplomacy” covering this.

SEE, IF ALL FINES WENT TO THE STATE’S GENERAL FUND, THIS WOULDN’T HAPPEN: How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty. “Some of the towns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts. A majority of these fines are for traffic offenses, but they can also include fines for fare-hopping on MetroLink (St. Louis’s light rail system), loud music and other noise ordinance violations, zoning violations for uncut grass or unkempt property, violations of occupancy permit restrictions, trespassing, wearing ‘saggy pants,’ business license violations and vague infractions such as ‘disturbing the peace’ or ‘affray’ that give police officers a great deal of discretion to look for other violations. In a white paper released last month (PDF), the ArchCity Defenders found a large group of people outside the courthouse in Bel-Ridge who had been fined for not subscribing to the town’s only approved garbage collection service. They hadn’t been fined for having trash on their property, only for not paying for the only legal method the town had designated for disposing of trash. . . . Residents of these towns feel as if their governments see them as little more than sources of revenue. To many residents, the cops and court officers are just outsiders who are paid to come to their towns and make their lives miserable. There’s also a widely held sentiment that the police spend far more time looking for petty offenses that produce fines than they do keeping these communities safe.”

Big opportunity for libertarians and liberty-leaning Republicans here. And this piece, by Radley Balko, is really great in looking at the big picture of how this makes poor communities poorer while enriching a parasite political class.

SLATE: The Dark Secret of Juvenile Detention Centers: Nine out of every 10 reporters of sexual abuse are males victimized by female staffers. “Women, meanwhile, typically make up less than half of a juvenile facility’s staff.”

Popular culture, I think, takes a somewhat romanticized view of female sexuality.

MATT RIDLEY: Whatever Happened To Global Warming: Now come climate scientists’ implausible explanations for why the ‘hiatus’ has passed the 15-year mark.

On Sept. 23 the United Nations will host a party for world leaders in New York to pledge urgent action against climate change. Yet leaders from China, India and Germany have already announced that they won’t attend the summit and others are likely to follow, leaving President Obama looking a bit lonely. Could it be that they no longer regard it as an urgent threat that some time later in this century the air may get a bit warmer?

In effect, this is all that’s left of the global-warming emergency the U.N. declared in its first report on the subject in 1990. The U.N. no longer claims that there will be dangerous or rapid climate change in the next two decades. Last September, between the second and final draft of its fifth assessment report, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change quietly downgraded the warming it expected in the 30 years following 1995, to about 0.5 degrees Celsius from 0.7 (or, in Fahrenheit, to about 0.9 degrees, from 1.3).

Even that is likely to be too high. The climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began. First the climate-research establishment denied that a pause existed, noting that if there was a pause, it would invalidate their theories. Now they say there is a pause (or “hiatus”), but that it doesn’t after all invalidate their theories.

Alas, their explanations have made their predicament worse by implying that man-made climate change is so slow and tentative that it can be easily overwhelmed by natural variation in temperature—a possibility that they had previously all but ruled out.

When the climate scientist and geologist Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia wrote an article in 2006 saying that there had been no global warming since 1998 according to the most widely used measure of average global air temperatures, there was an outcry. A year later, when David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London made the same point, the environmentalist and journalist Mark Lynas said in the New Statesman that Mr. Whitehouse was “wrong, completely wrong,” and was “deliberately, or otherwise, misleading the public.”

We know now that it was Mr. Lynas who was wrong. Two years before Mr. Whitehouse’s article, climate scientists were already admitting in emails among themselves that there had been no warming since the late 1990s. “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998,” wrote Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Britain in 2005. He went on: “Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”

If the pause lasted 15 years, they conceded, then it would be so significant that it would invalidate the climate-change models upon which policy was being built. A report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) written in 2008 made this clear: “The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more.”

Well, the pause has now lasted for 16, 19 or 26 years—depending on whether you choose the surface temperature record or one of two satellite records of the lower atmosphere. That’s according to a new statistical calculation by Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Canada.

What’s funny is that I see stories by “science journalists” all the time attributing all sorts of new events to “climate change” even though the global warming pause is now widely acknowledged, without ever addressing the contradiction.

Meanwhile, had the science here been more, well, scientific and less politicized and arrogant, I’d feel more sympathy.

PETER BERKOWITZ: U.S. Colleges’ Sexual Assault Crusade. “Our universities’ assiduous efforts to transform men into monsters who can’t be trusted with rights and women into frail creatures who bear no responsibility for their deeds represents educational malpractice.”

Why would anyone send a daughter to those hotbeds of rape and sexism? Or a son?

TED CRUZ: Cruz: Strip citizenship from Americans in ISIS.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is slated to introduce legislation next week that would revoke the U.S. citizenship of anyone fighting or providing support to terrorist groups working to attack the United States.

Cruz said he is filing the Expatriate Terrorist Act in reaction to the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). It would provide another level of protection to prevent foreign fighters from re-entering the United States, he said.

Hmm.

ASHE SCHOW: Drew University Hosts Campus Sexual Assault Summit.

Drew is also currently embroiled in a lawsuit regarding its handling of a sexual assault claim during the Fall 2013 semester.

Former student Kevin Parisi is suing the university for what he claims is gender discrimination, stemming from the way he was treated after being accused of sexual assault. He was ultimately found “not responsible,” but had already been removed from his dorm and barred from campus except for the cafeteria and buildings where he had classes. Parisi said his grades and health suffered due to the stress of the situation.

Drew spokeswoman Elizabeth Moore told the Examiner that Parisi’s lawsuit and the summit were not linked.

I rather doubt that the conference will stress the dangers of false accusations, and the ramifications for accusers and universities. But I’m sure we’ll see conferences on those topics soon enough.

DANIEL HANNAN: “Snobbery is a well-established socialist vice. It began with Karl Marx, who could be vicious about the people modern Leftists primly call ‘the most vulnerable in our society’. The old cadger had no time for such euphemisms.”

NOT UNTIL AFTER THE NOVEMBER ELECTIONS, I’D SAY, SINCE EVEN HIS OWN BASE OPPOSES IT: When Will Obama Take Unilateral Immigration Action?

KATRINA ON THE HUDSON: Hurricane Sandy Recovery Program in New York City Was Mired by Its Design.

The night Hurricane Sandy struck, Jayme and John Galimi swam out the front door of their home in Broad Channel, Queens, into the rising waters of Jamaica Bay with their five children, the youngest clinging to his father’s back.

Almost two years later, all seven remain jammed into a three-bedroom rental. Their debt is mounting. They applied to a federally funded New York City program for help rebuilding, but that devolved into an unending loop of lost documents, aborted meetings and frustrating exchanges with temporary workers handling their application.

A low point came in January, when the couple arrived for an appointment at the intake center to hear what construction work would be covered. But they were met by blank looks.

“Nobody knew why we were there,” Ms. Galimi said. “Again.”

So it’s basically the Healthcare.gov approach to disaster recovery.

WELL, GOOD: The Lebanese ice bucket challenge has morphed into burning Islamic State flags.

LIFE IN OBAMA’S AMERICA: While the Rich Rebound, the Poor Sink. “The biggest area of concern is among nonwhite families, who saw much bigger declines in both income, and wealth, than did white non-Hispanic families.”

How’s that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Why Sally can’t get a good job with her college degree.

Wharton School professor Peter Capelli tried to figure out whether the problem in the labor market is because the jobs don’t require the skills that candidates are offering or because workers don’t have the proper skills that employers are seeking.

Here’s what he found. The main problem with the U.S. job market isn’t a gap in basic skills or a shortage of employees with particular skills, but a mismatch between the supply and the demand for certain skills. There’s a greater supply of college graduates than a demand for college graduates in the labor market.

This mismatch, according to Capelli, exists because most jobs in today’s economy don’t require a college degree. . . .

Women now earn about 60 percent of the roughly 1 million bachelor’s degrees granted each year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And about 30 percent of all women above age 25 have a college degree or more, according to the Census Bureau. (About 80 percent of women age 25 to 29 have a high school degree.)

Those degrees, however, aren’t translating into good jobs.

Which means that maybe Sally’s problem isn’t because she’s not qualified for the job, but, instead, is because Sally has skills that employers don’t want.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

NO WORRIES! “SMART DIPLOMACY” IS ON THE JOB! Foreign Policy: Putin’s Nuclear Option: Would Russia’s president really be willing to start World War III?

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ACE: Hey Remember When I Said We Shouldn’t Take Pleasure In Someone Else’s Humiliation? Yeah Forget That, I Was High.