A NEW BOOK FROM MICHAEL TOTTEN: Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Woman performed sex acts on a 7-year-old boy, police say. “An Albuquerque woman photographed herself engaging in sex acts with a 7-year-old boy and told police she couldn’t promise to not do it again, according to a criminal complaint filed in Metropolitan Court. Gwendolynn Lindgren, 34, was charged with criminal sexual penetration, among other things, after her husband told police he found photographs of her and the boy in emails on her cell phone.”

NO CONTEST: Jake Tapper vs. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) on “Irrelevance” of Gruber Comments.

Plus, related thoughts from Howie Carr.

Do you realize that every last one of the many disasters that has befallen this nation in the last half-century can be traced right back here to the banks of the Charles River?

C’mon down, Jonathan Gruber, economics professor at MIT. He’s the moonbat who, after engineering the ongoing fiasco that is Obamacare, then took a nationwide victory lap in which he repeatedly described the American people as “too stupid” to realize the Democrats were destroying their health care.

Maybe he’s right about our stupidity. After all, he cashed in $392,000 worth of federal no-bid contracts to wreck the best health care system in the world, plus another $1.6 million or so in various state wrecking-ball contracts.

This goober, I mean Gruber, now says that when he sneered about how stupid Americans are, he made a mistake. Oddly, he made the same “mistake” five times (and counting). When you say something publicly five times, it’s part of your stump speech.

The Unaffordable Care Act — from the same Beautiful People who gave you Vietnam, the War on Poverty, the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, global warming, SSI, busing, gay marriage and gender reassignment.

Asked about Prof. Goober, Nancy Pelosi said, “Who he?” Then some video was produced of Madame Botox citing his no-bid brilliance. A moonbat in-the-satchel reporter from Vox pooh-poohed the goober’s role as “mostly number-crunching.” Two years earlier this same bumkisser said he “pretty much wrote Obamacare.”

The first place this moonbat millionaire’s obnoxious comments turned up was on a website of the University of Pennsylvania (which made fake Indian Granny Warren an affirmative-action hire back in the 1990s).

As soon as Penn realized that its video might be causing consternation to Dear Leader, it excised the footage.

Nothing to see here, comrades. Move along.

I’m beginning to lose confidence in the idea that the Ivy League is a net plus for America.

GALLERY: Angular Sports Cars of the 1970s & 1980s.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS UP EARLY: 1 small shirt for a man, 1 giant leap backward for women: How feminists took a major scientific event and made it all about what people were wearing.

UPDATE: Ann Althouse says I’m wrong. Her commenters seem unpersuaded, though. “He got attacked and you say ‘Of course, look at what he was wearing.'”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 555.

FORMER CNBC JOURNALISTS: WE WERE SILENCED. “When I was at CNBC, I pointed out to my viewers that the math of Obamacare simply didn’t work. Not the politics by the way; just the basic math. And when I did that, I was silenced.”

I was writing about this in 2009, but it’s worth reporting now. And maybe people need to show up at shareholders meetings again.

IT’S BARRELFISHING, BUT I GUESS SOMEONE’S GOTTA DO IT OCCASIONALLY: Correcting E.J. Dionne.

He is, of course, talking about the George W. Bush presidency. When I examine the actual facts surrounding the Bush election and the installation of the two Supreme Court justices he mentions — John Roberts and Samuel Alito — I’m happy to report that yes, E.J., there is an American democratic republic.

Start with Dionne’s timeline, which is just a mite compressed. He omits the 2004 election, which returned Bush to the White House with a solid majority of the popular and electoral votes. Then Bush appointed Roberts and Alito to the court. That seems quite democratically legitimate to me. Is Dionne arguing that the Supreme Court unjustly deprived the Democrats of the 2004 election as well?

I suppose you could argue that Al Gore would naturally have taken the White House in 2004 had he been elected in 2000. But I’m rather skeptical. Since World War II, guess how many times a president has been succeeded by a two-term president of his own party. That’s right: never. The longer your party is in office, the more the scandals and the discontent accumulate. Had Al Gore succeeded Bill Clinton, a Republican might well have succeeded him in 2004. And because justices tend to wait to retire until a president of their own party is in office, the results would not have been any different than they were.

But that’s actually not the biggest problem with Dionne’s argument. The biggest problem is that there’s really very little evidence that the Supreme Court ruling in Bush v. Gore that put an end to the recount actually changed the outcome of the election.

No, seriously, pick your jaw up off the ground and go through the timeline yourself. I did it last year for the Daily Beast. Basically, under most realistic scenarios, Bush would have won the election anyway. To think otherwise, you have to think that absent the court’s ruling, a statewide recount would have occurred, that all the counties would have counted “overvotes” (where a ballot was cast for more than one candidate but the second candidate was a write-in of the first candidate’s name), and that they would have counted those votes in the specific way that the newspaper consortium did. The Florida Supreme Court’s ruling had them counting undervotes (incomplete marks for a presidential choice), not overvotes, and though one judge has said he would have, a local paper has said that only a few counties were considering counting the overvotes — not enough to have put Gore over the top.

Moreover, political scientist Chris Lawrence has made a pretty convincing argument that the case would have ended up at the U.S. Supreme Court in the end anyway, even if it had let the (really bad, and in my opinion, nakedly partisan) original ruling by the Florida Supreme Court stand.

That the Dems are reviving their “selected not elected” slogans from 2000 isn’t a good sign.

IT’S BECAUSE MATT TAYLOR TOOK OFF HIS “LUCKY SHIRT:” Comet lander Philae connection lost after download.

SMART DIPLOMACY, THE REAL THING: Harper Uses Handshake to Tell Putin to ‘Get Out of Ukraine.’

THE HITS KEEP COMING: Gruber Video #6: ‘Mislabeling’ Cadillac Tax to Deceive the Voter.

HEH: “For five years, Republicans have been searching for the perfect messenger to speak out against Obamacare. They have finally found him. His name in Jonathan Gruber.”

HE HAS LEARNED NOTHING, AND FORGOTTEN NOTHING: Obama unmoved by looming Keystone XL vote: ‘My position hasn’t changed.’

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Also, check out the Kindle Daily Deals.

IT’S COME TO THIS: The near-crime of being a “socially awkward” male. Bonus points if asian! But credit to the campus police for being fairly understanding.

WHY SENDING YOUR KIDS TO PUBLIC SCHOOL MAY BE PARENTAL MALPRACTICE: LA Schools Blame Girl for Sex With Teacher — And what’s more, the district wins its civil suit.

FIGHT THE POWER: Palm Beach Libertarians plan to defy ordinance in order to feed the homeless.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Naturalized citizens and guns: A victory in Massachusetts.

I’VE KNOWN JANET HALLEY FOR A LONG TIME, AND I’M NOT SURPRISED TO SEE THIS: Law Professor Janet Halley on Why Harvard’s Sexual Harassment Policy Must Change.

The procedures, too, risk making victims of the unharmed and villains of the innocent. They deprive accused students of due process by placing the entire decision-making process in the hands of a single university officer, who has the authority to charge, investigate, adjudicate and hear appeals, all in a single case. That officer is in the impossible position of checking, testing and reviewing her own decisions.

The new policy also deprives accused students of due process by according complainants at least 14 procedural advantages that are withheld from the accused. For example, the accused is totally locked out of the inquiry into whether the alleged conduct, if it occurred, constitutes sexual harassment. These tilts go so far that the very presumption of innocence is under threat.

That isn’t by accident.

JAY ROSEN CRITIQUES A PRESS TROPE: “Republicans have to show they can govern.” No, they don’t. Please stop saying that. A reporter’s wish masquerading as an accepted fact.

These are false statements. I don’t know how they got past the editors. You can’t simply assert, like it’s some sort of natural fact, that Republicans “must show they can govern” when an alternative course is available. Not only is it not a secret — this other direction — but it’s being strongly urged upon the party by people who are a key part of its coalition.

The alternative to “show you can govern” is to keep President Obama from governing. Right? Keep him from accomplishing what he wants to get done in his final two years and then “go to the country,” as Karl Rove used to say, with a simple message: time for a change! This is not only a valid way to proceed, it’s a pretty likely outcome. . . .

Now keep in mind that for NPR correspondents like Chang, a “factual basis” is everything. They aren’t supposed to be sharing their views. They don’t do here’s-my-take analysis. NPR has “analysts” for that. It has commentators who are free to say on air: “I think the Republicans have to show they can govern.” Chang, a Congressional correspondent, was trying to put over as a natural fact an extremely debatable proposition that divides the Republican party. She spoke falsely, and no one at NPR (which reviews these scripts carefully) stopped her.

Similarly, Jeremy Peters of the New York Times has no business observing in passing that the Republicans are now a party “that has to show it can govern.” They don’t! They have other options available to them. It’s fine with me if the New York Times wants to loosen up and let reporters say in the news columns: “My take is that it’s going to be awfully hard for the Republicans to regain the White House if they don’t show they can govern during these two years.” But that’s not what Peters did. He went the natural fact route: the Republicans have to show they can govern because… because they do!

Why does this matter? Because reporters shouldn’t be editorializing in the news section? No. That’s not why.

Asserted as a fact of political life, “Republicans must show they can govern” is a failure of imagination, and a sentimentalism. It refuses to grapple with other equally plausible possibilities.

Well, this stuff gets past the editors because they share the reporters’ sensibilities. And because they like a formulation that puts an additional burden on the GOP.

BYRON YORK: Dems’ path after Obamacare: Down, down, down.

There were 60 Democrats in the Senate on Christmas Eve 2009, when they voted in lockstep to pass the Affordable Care Act. Soon there will be 46 Democrats in the Senate, or perhaps 47, if Sen. Mary Landrieu manages to eke out a win in Louisiana. In plain numbers, the post-Obamacare trajectory has not been good for Senate Democrats.

The 46 or 47 Democrats in the next Senate are a bit different from the group that passed Obamacare. Sixteen of them took office after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law. They never had to vote for it and have never had to defend voting for it.

Are those post-Obamacare Democrats as strongly opposed to changing the law as their colleagues who voted for it? Or are they possibly a little less personally invested in staving off challenges? It’s a question that will be tested in coming months.

“After [the midterms], the conditions for repeal and replace may be even better than most people think,” writes a Senate Republican aide in an email exchange. “Not only is there a fresh crop of Republicans eager to make good on campaign pledges, but a significant number of Democrats have no particular attachment to the law and may even want to be rid of it as a political issue.”

Well, why should they stick their necks out to protect Obama’s legacy? He certainly won’t do anything to protect them.

REMEMBER, FOR MANY YEARS SHE WAS SEEN AS A TRUSTWORTHY SOURCE OF OBJECTIVE INFORMATION: Linda Greenhouse’s reaction to the cert grant in King v. Burwell.

AUSTIN BAY: Mexico’s Iguala Massacre: Criminal gangs and criminal government.

KEMBERLEE KAYE: 5 Reasons “feminists” can’t complain about comet scientist’s “sexist” shirt.

Related: Why Social Justice Warriors Are Losing. “Social justice warriors have been pretty successful over the past two or three decades, but they seem to be losing their touch.”

I actually think that the term “Social Justice Trolls” is more appropriate.

UPDATE: Here’s a shirt made from the same fabric. It’s sold out.