NONEMPLOYED: The Vanishing Male Worker: How America Fell Behind. “Men today may feel less pressure to find jobs because they are less likely than previous generations to be providing for others. Only 28 percent of men without jobs — compared with 58 percent of women — said a child under 18 lived with them.”

Gosh, who could have seen this coming?

JUST WATCH OUT FOR THE GURNING: Special K, a Hallucinogen, Raises Hopes and Concerns as a Treatment for Depression.

SEEMS LIKE WE USED TO BE BETTER AT THIS SORT OF THING: Why Seattle’s Huge Tunnel-Boring Machine Is Still Stuck.

ASHE SCHOW: Advocacy groups must believe rape accusers without evidence, others should not. “We now live in a society where the search for the truth — things like facts and evidence and true investigation — is labeled as victim-blaming and an impediment to justice. A society where an accuser’s word — and sometimes, a university’s made-up version of the accuser’s word — becomes gospel, and evidence provided by the accused is ignored. A society where false statistics are repeated and those who disagree are disparaged as ‘rape apologists.'” It’s not about helping rape victims. It’s about protecting a racket from dangerous scrutiny.

Related: Triple Jeopardy and No Lawyers at SMU.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 582.

IT’S BEEN A BAD COUPLE OF WEEKS FOR HARVARD, and Howie Carr puts the boot in.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Lessons From The Rolling Stone Debacle.

When questions first emerged, a number of people treated quashing those questions as the moral equivalent of war, attacking the questioners as if being skeptical of a story was itself wrong — rather than exactly the spirit of inquiry that makes science, and public debate, work. Others pointed out that trauma victims often have fragmentary or contradictory memories, which is generally true of all eyewitnesses, not just trauma victims, and not really sufficient to explain the gaping holes in this particular story. When we get wedded to our narratives, we become blind. That is true of everyone — the people who were appropriately skeptical of this story as well as the people who weren’t — and we all need to be on guard against it all the time. . . .

Before the problems emerged with the Rolling Stone story, I saw a lot of people talking as if this story somehow represented a broad and pervasive problem on college campuses rather than a single incident. Even if the story had held up, this would have been a vast overstatement. All sorts of horrific crimes happen in America, and the legal system does not always get the justice we would like. They are not necessarily representative of American culture, or even flaws in our institutions; they are reflections of the fact that we live in a big country, and like any big country, we have some bad apples.

But people who are worried about the problem of false rape accusations are now in danger of making the same mistake. If Jackie’s story is a hoax, it is no more representative than it would be if it were true. It is one story. Were reporters and editors excessively credulous because of the nature of the accusation? That seems likely. But that doesn’t mean that most accusations of rape are false, or that feminists are happy to tell fake stories in order to advance the cause.

Well, I don’t know. I’ve seen a lot of evidence for that last proposition. Or if not “fake stories,” certainly “too good to check stories,” told with reckless disregard for whether they’re true or not.

JOURNALISM: Leaked Emails Reveal Maureen Dowd Promised To Show Sony Exec’s Husband Column Before Publication. “The end result was a column that painted Pascal in such a good light that she engaged in a round of mutual adulation with Dowd over email after its publication. It also scored Pascal points back at the studio, with Sony’s then-communications-chief calling the column ‘impressive.'” And note that it’s two elite women working together to complain about being kept down by a conspiracy of “white males.”

It’s pathetic hacks all the way down. This would be a firing offense at some papers, though.

KANGAROO SEX COURT FLASHBACK: What Yale and the Times Did to Patrick Witt.

Related: The Sexual Harassment Policy That Nearly Ruined My Life. #MensLivesMatter.

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CIRCLE DANCING: The President Of Smith College Slips Up, Says Something Inclusive. “University presidents such as McCartney are usually already so leftist themselves that their ‘surrender’ isn’t really a surrender at all, merely an acknowledgment of a momentary slip-up in an otherwise seamless web of leftist PC thought, from administration to professor to student and back again, everyone dancing in a ring.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Dumpster Diving Into the ABA’s 509 Information Reports (Statistics + Graphs).

Holy precipitous decline Batman! Just look at all that red. I had to make this chart gigantic to fit the huge declines the schools have been facing. Again, it’s much, much worse at the bottom ranked schools, but a few things stand out.

Virginia and Michigan, the #9 and #10 ranked schools respectively, both have had double-digit percentage decline in matriculants. Is that just tightening the belt a bit or a sign of things to come?
The bottom ranked schools, with the exception of Chapman, are having a bloodletting. New York Law School has had nearly a 50% decline in matriculants since 2011. That can’t be sustainable.
This isn’t even taking into account all the “unranked” schools listed by US News & World Reports.

All in all, it looks like the general malaise affecting law schools is going to continue.

Ouch. It’s getting less and less fun to say I told you so.

POLL: 70% Want Congress To Keep Probing IRS. “Call it a ‘kumbaya’ question, as majorities of Democrats (60 percent), independents (75 percent) and Republicans (78 percent) support lawmakers continuing to dig. The new poll also asked why the White House is refusing to release thousands of pages of documents related to the IRS targeting. By nearly three-to-one people think it’s because the administration wants to keep its role in the scandal secret (63 percent) rather than to keep taxpayer information confidential (22 percent). Even Democrats are more likely to say the Obama White House is withholding documents to hide its involvement (45 percent) rather than to protect taxpayers (35 percent).”

WELCOME TO THE CROWD, SISTER: Pelosi ‘enormously disappointed’ in Obama.

BYRON YORK: Obama opens fraud-ridden benefits programs to illegal immigrants.

President Obama’s unilateral executive action on immigration will make hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million, illegal immigrants eligible for federal transfer payments. That will be done primarily through two widely used programs — the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, and the Additional Child Tax Credit, or ACTC.

As it turns out, those two programs are already among the most corrupt and fraud-ridden in the entire federal government. A newly-released report from the inspector general of the Internal Revenue Service confirms that the EITC is plagued by fraud (which was already well known) and also reveals for the first time that the ACTC is even worse.

The two programs, intended for low-income workers, are what is known as refundable tax credits. That means they give workers a tax refund that is larger than their tax liability. So a family with a tax bill of $1,000 might receive an EITC “refund” of $5,000, meaning the family doesn’t write a check to the government but rather receives a check from the government. The ACTC works similarly for low-income workers with children.

Supported by both political parties over the years, the programs were intended to encourage work and strengthen families. Their growth has been extraordinary in recent years — payments increased 40 percent from 2007 to 2012 alone. And now both are beset by staggering levels of fraud.

To some that’s not a bug, but a feature.

HMM: Democrats’ CIA gambit backfires. “I strongly suspect Senate Democrats did not anticipate the events that played out after the release of their much-criticized report on CIA interrogation tactics. Sure, the gory details dominated headlines and delighted the antiwar left, but then conservatives and some Democrats — and most telling, current and former CIA officials — struck back. . . . Even worse, the president won’t say (!) whether he agrees with his own handpicked CIA director, John Brennan, that the information gained through enhanced interrogation techniques was useful, and he won’t criticize or endorse the Senate Democrats. Now, there’s a resounding vote of no support for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).”

AMY TAYLOR: Lena Dunham, I Don’t Believe You. “I don’t believe that you were raped or sexually assaulted. I don’t believe that you are a victim or a survivor. I believe that you are a psychopath that needs to be the center of attention.”

ROLL CALL: GOP to Bring Up Bill Blocking Obama Immigration Action — Next Year.

THE HILL: Women Flood Ranks Of GOP.

The GOP will send Capitol Hill its youngest-ever woman, 30-year-old Rep.-elect Elise Stefanik (N.Y.); its first black female Republican, Rep.-elect Mia Love (Utah); and the first female Republican senators from two states, Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) and Joni Ernst (Iowa), who is also the first female combat veteran to be elected to the chamber.

“These were strong female candidates that had to get through tough primaries, even before the general election,” a representative for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) told The Hill. “They had great backgrounds and could go tell voters what they planned to do. They were all very impressive.”

Yeah, but the Dems have Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Sheila Jackson Lee. . . .

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: How current events might play into America’s shift in favor of gun rights.

LIBEL BAIT? Boston.com: Editor designed T-shirts mocking Harvard professor. “An editor for the Boston Globe’s Boston.com who wrote an unverified story accusing a Harvard professor of firing off a ‘racist’ email is facing scrutiny for peddling T-shirts mocking him for a flap over a $4 Chinese food charge. Boston.com deputy editor Hilary Sargent designed the T-shirt, which was posted for sale for $20.95 on Internet shopping site Zazzle.com, Boston.com confirmed yesterday.”

Won’t look good if there’s a lawsuit.

ROGER SIMON: What Dianne Did.

TRIFECTA: The Lost Pleasure Of Junk Food.

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