THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Treasury investigator led life of lies, government dependence.

A high-ranking investigator in charge of rooting out fraud by Treasury Department employees was himself fraudulently drawing simultaneous salaries from both the military and the Treasury.

The same investigator then petitioned the government for a full disability retirement.

But wait, there’s more!

He also pretended to be a peace officer and lied about it, all while racking up massive debts and filing for bankruptcy, according to documents obtained by the Washington Examiner.

The very best.

SUSAN SMITH REDUX? ‘Our Mom Is Trying to Kill Us!’: Hero Recounts Ocean Rescue.

“Help us — our mom is trying to kill us!” a young child screamed as a pregnant woman drove her minivan — with three young kids children inside — into the ocean in Florida, a trucker who waded into the frigid Atlantic waters to rescue them said Wednesday.

Tim Tesseneer, a truck driver and former volunteer firefighter visiting from North Carolina, was one of the first men to reach the van Tuesday in the heavy surf. He and other passersby dived in to pull the children — two girls and a boy, ages 3, 9 and 10 — to safety through a window and a hatchback.

The children, who weren’t badly hurt, were treated at a hospital and were in state custody, Volusia County Sheriff Ben Johnson said Wednesday. The driver, identified as Ebony Wilkerson, 32, of Cross. S.C., was undergoing a mental evaluation Wednesday, and no charges had been filed.

Hmm.

SMART DIPLOMACY^TM STRIKES AGAIN: Hillary Clinton: I’m Not Comparing Putin To Hitler, I’m Just Saying He’s Acting Like Hitler.

AGEIST! Jonathan Alter tells Hugh Hewitt that Hillary Clinton is old news.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: For the public-schools-as-child-abuse file: School forces half-naked, sopping wet student to stand outside, frostbite results. “A Minnesota public high school was so committed to obeying its fire drill policy to the exact letter of the law that it forced a female student–dressed only in a swimsuit, and sopping wet–to stand outside in the freezing cold for ten minutes. As a result, she suffered frostbite. Administrators wouldn’t let the student retrieve her clothes, sit in a car or wait inside another building, according to WCCO. . . . It was 5 degrees below zero in St. Paul that day. With the windchill, it was 25 degrees below zero. Hagen-Tietz asked to wait inside an employee’s car, or at the elementary school across the street. But administrators believed that this would violate official policy, and could get the school in trouble, so they opted to simply let the girl freeze.”

These people shouldn’t be allowed around children. In fact, they shouldn’t be permitted to breed.

IS THIS REALLY A “Risk-Free J.D.?” “Beginning this spring, if a J.D. student decides not to continue law school after completing the first year of studies, the student can graduate with a Masters in Legal Studies (M.L.S.) degree, without taking any additional courses.” Because, you know, it’s not a J.D.

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Also, 20% off Select Swimwear. Summer is coming.

THE NEW MCCARTHYISM: Mediate: The Democrats’ Crusade Against ‘Un-American’ Activities.

The moral righteousness of resistance to Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-WI) and his House Un-American Activities Committee remains vibrant in the imaginations of modern progressives. McCarthy’s myopic campaign to expose communists in high-profile areas of American life was opposed by liberal dissenters who viewed his investigation as an infringement on their rights of free association, speech, and even thought.

The modern progressive movement admires their predecessors’ stand against McCarthy so deeply that references to that inauspicious period of American history are regularly deployed in liberal publications and media outlets.

Those noble principles apparently go right out the window when Democrats face what increasingly appears to be a catastrophic political landscape heading into the 2014 midterm election cycle. Political handicappers beginning to suggest Republicans have better than even odds of recapturing the upper chamber of Congress in November as Democratic officeholders struggle to defend the political millstone that has become of the Affordable Care Act. Rather than surrender to their fates, Democrats have taken to identifying their own shadowy boogeyman wrecking America from within: the libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. . . .

That strategy came alive on February 26, when Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) was driven to rhetorical excess arguably unseen since U.S. Army Counsel Joseph Welch pointedly asked McCarthy whether he had “left no sense of decency.”

Taking to the floor of the U.S. Senate, Reid called these two private American citizens “un-American” for exercising their constitutionally protected rights of free expression. . . .

The modern Democratic Party’s origin myth is so closely tied up in their opposition to McCarthyism, they may not be able to objectively view how these actions reflect on them. If they could look objectively in a mirror, they might see that they are becoming precisely what they once opposed.

I think they only opposed it then because it was hurting their party. I don’t think they ever really minded the tactic.

NOTHING SHADY HERE: Police Contract With Spy Tool Maker Prohibits Talking About Device’s Use. “A non-disclosure agreement that police departments around the country have been signing for years with the maker of a cell-phone spy tool explicitly prohibits the law enforcement agencies from telling anyone, including other government bodies, about their use of the secretive equipment, according to one of the agreements obtained by an Arizona journalist. The NDA includes an exception for ‘judicially mandated disclosures,’ but no mechanisms for judges to learn that the equipment was used. In at least one case in Florida, a police department revealed that it had decided not to seek a warrant to use the technology explicitly to avoid telling a judge about the equipment. It subsequently kept the information hidden from the defendant as well.”

OVERSOLD: The Facebook and Instagram Gun Speech Ban Issue:

Facebook has released their statement on the effort by anti-gun groups to ban speech & photos by gun owners. The other side is going to declare a win because they are recognized by Facebook for their efforts. In reality, the only impact is that if a post gets “reported” as being any kind of regulated product (not just firearms) for sale, the poster will be reminded that they should follow applicable laws.

That’s it. Facebook will pop up a message reminding you that you should follow the law if you post a gun for sale and someone complains to them about it. They won’t ban the speech. They won’t ban the images. They won’t even ban promotions of guns for sale at all.

The only speech-related restriction is that they say they will interpret phrases like “no background check required” as being a possible tip off that the seller may be willing to help others evade the law. They don’t require that private sellers agree to run a background check, just that they don’t make “no background check” a selling point of their firearm.

Under these rules, NRA can still do their gun contests, and local Friends committees can still promote the guns they’ll be giving away to FNRA dinner attendees. You can even still post that you’re going to sell a gun privately. The only thing is that Facebook can tell anyone who complains about the posts that they sent a reminder to follow the law.

If the anti-gunners had truly gotten what they wanted – a ban on firearm images or promotions of any kind – we would have completely pulled our personal and community Facebook accounts and no longer visited the site. I suspect that many of the millions of gun owners on the site would have done the same, and that’s not something Facebook can afford. It is, at best, a pyrrhic victory for the other side.

Related: The PR War Between The Anti-Gun Groups.

Moms Demand Illegal Mayors, or whatever the two merged groups are called these days, are declaring total victory in the Facebook/Instagram policy statement that any reported post featuring an offer to sell any regulated product privately will generate a reminder to sellers that they shouldn’t violate the law.

But the Brady Campaign swiftly sent out a letter to their supporters highlighting that the anti-gun groups didn’t get anything they demanded at all, and this is not in any way a victory. The thing is, the Brady Campaign is right on this, at least coming from a gun banner’s perspective.

Ouch.

JUDITH CURRY: Causes and implications of the growing divergence between climate model simulations and observations.

REVOLVING DOOR UPDATE: US Solicitor General’s Office, Run By Former Top MPAA Lawyer, Shockingly Sides With Broadcasters Over Aereo.

AT AMAZON, deals on Tax Software.

Also, loads of coupons in Household Supplies.

SPYING: OBAMA KNEW. Obama knew CIA secretly monitored intelligence committee, senator claims. “Independent observers were unaware of a precedent for the CIA spying on the congressional committees established in the 1970s to check abuses by the intelligence agencies.” That’s because such spying is illegal. I wonder who else, inside and outside the various branches of government, was being similarly spied upon. And what was done with the information learned. (Bumped, because this seems big.)

And note my column from a couple of weeks ago. Can I call ’em, or what?

A REVIEW of the Roku Streaming Stick. My own Roku is several generations old, but still good. I suppose I should upgrade, sometime.

LIKE I SAID, FASTER, PLEASE: Heart Implants, 3-D-Printed to Order.

SMART DIPLOMACY^TM BEARS ITS USUAL FRUIT: Report: John Kerry Confidantes Say Obama Sabotaged Mideast Peace Talks With Harsh Interview.

VEBLEN GOODS: How A Louis Vuitton Bag Can Explain The Higher Education Bubble. “In economic terms, higher education is a positional good: It is valuable to have a college degree because other people don’t have one. It is also to a significant extent a Veblen good: Sending one’s children to college, and most especially a prestigious (meaning expensive) college, is a way of signaling social status via the conspicuous consumption of a luxury good.”

PREVENTING CRUISE SHIP DISASTERS: “For the past three decades cruising has been the fastest-growing segment of the travel industry. Eleven new ships were christened last year, and almost 21 million people went on a cruise. Statistically, cruising is relatively safe, but recent failures in seamanship, emergency response, and engineering should sound an alarm. Introduce bad weather or remote surroundings into the equation and an incident like the Costa Concordia shipwreck, which made international headlines two years ago, could result in hundreds of deaths.”

My sense is that they’re a bit complacent. One would expect insurers to police things, but they get complacent too.

NO FILIBUSTER REQUIRED: Obama’s nominee to head the civil rights division, Debo Adegbile, goes down because of Democrat opposition.

UPDATE: Here’s the story from The Hill.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: The Global Achievement Gap: American students are falling behind in the international economy.

BRYAN PRESTON: Lerner Takes the Fifth, Again.

UPDATE: Lerner Lawyers Up.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 300. Congrats and appreciation to Paul Caron, for 300 days of coverage.

A HOME-SCHOOLING MODEL FOR HIGHER EDUCATION?

This may seem like a fringe proposal, but we see several advantages: for starters, more one-on-one access to professors and tailor-made lesson plans. Depending on the specific arrangements between teachers and students, there could be major cost savings as well. If the student lives at home, he wouldn’t need to pay for room, board, facilities, administrators, or whole academic departments whose halls he would never darken over four years in a traditional college. Students could boost their savings, at a relatively small cost in one-on-one time, by grouping together to hire teachers.

This approach may not be for everyone, but for many it would be a smart twist on the standard college model. To us, it sounds like an interesting way of addressing a reform goal we’ve talked about frequently: the need for colleges to move away from a system that rewards students based on the number of credit hours they rack up (the time-served model), and to move toward a system that rewards them for what they know (a stuff-learned model).

We would love to see some enterprising students or academics take a chance on this idea, or something like it. One of the keys to making it work is a standardized, college-level assessment that would make it easy to measure the performance of home-tutored college students against that of their traditional college peers.

Well, there’s the Collegiate Learning Assessment.