HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student loans: Taking away the free ride for colleges.
Archive for 2014
July 2, 2014
TRANSPARENCY: Another federal judge tells IRS to explain itself on lost emails.
IRS attorneys will be even busier than normal next week, because another federal judge has told them to show up in court July 11 to defend the federal tax agency.
They will have to explain to U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton why the IRS shouldn’t be required to let an outside expert evaluate whether emails on the computer hard drives of former IRS official Lois Lerner and six colleagues really are lost forever, as the agency recently told Congress.
Responding to a motion filed Monday by True the Vote, a Houston-based conservative nonprofit at the center of IRS targeting during the 2010 and 2012 campaigns, Walton issued an order Tuesday to hear arguments next week.
The IRS recently told Congress that a mysterious crash of the hard drives last year irretrievably destroyed nearly two years of emails to and from Lerner and the others to and from people in other federal agencies, including the White House.
But True the Vote wants a digital forensics expert from outside the IRS to assess the evidence.
I don’t think it was all that “mysterious.”
IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Lois Lerner, Colonel Mustard and the Blue Screen of Death. “It would help to have more information from the IRS about what went wrong. Presumably it has those records in its help desk ticket system, so hopefully they’ll be released soon. Meanwhile, we’ll just have to keep wondering what the heck happened.” Yeah, I’m pretty sure I know.
JOHN HINDERAKER: More On The IRS’s Illegal Destruction Of Evidence. “Under federal law, a party has a duty to preserve data that may be relevant to any actual or likely lawsuit. This duty arises from the party’s own knowledge; it is not necessary for a court to tell it not to destroy information, or for an adverse party to make such a request. The fundamental, shocking fact that is emphasized in True the Vote’s brief is this: at the time of Lois Lerner’s hard drive crash in June 2011, the IRS was already under a legal duty to take steps to ensure that information was not lost, and had been under such a duty for nearly a year, at a minimum. . . . But, according to IRS representatives who have testified before Congressional committees, the IRS ignored the law. Instead of making sure that relevant information was preserved, the IRS blithely continued erasing back-up email tapes every 90 days. Further, the IRS continued its policy of assigning each employee a ridiculously small space on an email server, and then authorizing employees (like Lois Lerner) to delete at will to keep space open. And, finally, when Lerner’s hard drive crashed ten months after the Z Street case was commenced, the IRS made no effort to preserve it, but rather, by its own account, recycled the hard drive in a business-as-usual manner.”
July 1, 2014
FOX INVESTIGATES HENHOUSE: NCAA Reopens Investigation Into UNC Academics. Seems like it’s the accrediting agency that should be investigating a matter of fake classes and unearned credits/grades. For UNC, that would be the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Why aren’t they investigating?
JIM TREACHER: Has Hillary Clinton Apologized Yet To The Rape Victim She Dragged Through The Mud And Laughed About? “I realize this question doesn’t narrow things down. Specifically, I’m referring to that 12-year-old Arkansas girl in the mid-’70s, whose assailant Hillary got released with time served.” Hillary’s defenders say she was just doing her professional duty. But there was no professional duty to gloat and laugh.
A LOOK INTO WORLD CUP BROTHELS. With a cameo by lying NGOs.
JAMES TARANTO NOTES THE NEW YORK TIMES’ INCONSISTENCY:
“Three years ago the Supreme Court threw away decades of precedent and watered down the religious liberty of all Americans. . . . By radically changing the ground rules for deciding claims of religious liberty, the Court alarmed organized religion, civil liberties organizations of all stripes and Senators as different in outlook as Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Orrin Hatch of Utah. . . . The Religious Freedom Restoration Act reasserts a broadly accepted American concept of giving wide latitude to religious practices that many might regard as odd or unconventional. The bill deserves passage. . . . With the Restoration Act, Congress asserts its own interest in protecting religious liberty. It’s a welcome antidote to the official insensitivity to religion the Court spawned in 1990.”–editorial, New York Times, Oct. 25, 1993
“The Supreme Court’s deeply dismaying decision on Monday in the Hobby Lobby case swept aside accepted principles of corporate law and religious liberty. . . . It was the first time the court has allowed commercial business owners to deny employees a federal benefit to which they are entitled by law based on the owners’ religious beliefs, and it was a radical departure from the court’s history of resisting claims for religious exemptions from neutral laws of general applicability.”–editorial, New York Times, July 1, 2014
Well, the tone of blustering moral superiority is consistent.
IT SEEMS TO ME THAT WE’RE SEEING MORE DIRECT POPULAR ACTION AGAINST GOVERNMENT: Protesters force buses carrying undocumented immigrants to leave Murrieta. “A group of 140 Central American migrants who entered the United States illegally were flown from Texas to Lindbergh Field on Tuesday and then bused to a U.S. Border Patrol facility in Murrieta, where crowds of angry protesters prompted authorities to take them instead to San Ysidro.”
NEW YORK TIMES: How Hillary Is Like John McCain.
NEW YORK’S HIGHEST COURT strikes down “cyber-bullying” law. “As we have recently made clear, the First Amendment protects annoying and embarrassing speech, even if a child may be exposed to it, so those references would also need to be excised from the definitional section. And, the First Amendment forbids the government from deciding whether protected speech qualifies as ‘legitimate,’ as Albany County has attempted to do.”
ROGER SIMON: In Memoriam – Paul Mazursky.
UPDATE: Roger and Lionel Chetwynd’s 2009 Poliwood interview with Mazursky is now on YouTube:
[jwplayer player=”1″ mediaid=”191136″]
THIS SOLAR MAXIMUM: Underwhelming, but not in Maunder Minimum territory.
In 2006, at the end of the previous solar cycle, Mausumi Dikpati, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., undertook an ambitious endeavor — a computer model using the basic physics of the sun to forecast what would happen next. Her model made two main predictions: The cycle would start slowly, and it would be a big one, one-third to one-half stronger than the last one.
Her first prediction came to pass. The lull stretched for four more years, leading to some speculation that the sun was on the cusp of another Maunder Minimum, the sunspotless era of the 1600s.
(Although the Maunder Minimum coincided with the Little Ice Age, it is not known whether the intensity of a sunspot cycle could influence the earth’s climate. The difference in the amount of the earth-warming radiation coming from the sun between solar minimum and solar maximum is minuscule.)
But her second prediction was wrong.
In part, that was because the model did not capture the sun’s split personality this time around.
Science, not settled. Plus:
“We’re getting better, and we argue,” he said. “That’s how we do science.”
Well, except climate science, where the models are already perfect, and anyone who argues is a Denier.
MERE “FANTASY ROLE-PLAY.” ‘Cannibal Cop’s Conviction for Plotting to Kidnap & Cook Women is Overturned. But read this story closely, and you’ll quickly figure out that the answer is to elect Hillary President!
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law grad employment rate lowest in 22 years but starting salaries rise.
F.I.R.E. IS ON THE JOB: In Major Announcement, FIRE Says It Will Sue Every College With a Speech Code Until Speech Codes Die Forever. “During a Q and A session, Lukianoff was asked why he thought now was the time for such a litigation effort. He explained that the massive expansion of college bureaucracy poses a grave threat to students’ rights. There are now more administrators on campuses than ever before—far more bureaucrats than teachers, in fact—which has led to a ‘mindless application of ridiculous rules,’ he said.”
Good for them. More here. And if you want to donate, go here.
JONAH GOLDBERG: Obama, Quit Crying ‘Crisis.’ Crises give politicians more power, but actually Americans are doing pretty well.
Politicians and journalists have a common interest in crises. When there’s a crisis, people buy newspapers and turn on the news to learn how our political leaders will fix the problem. Indeed, crises give politicians more power, which is why so many politicians are fond of the phrase “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
President Obama has been particularly fond of fomenting a sense of crisis — environmental, economic and social — because he thinks doing so will advance his agenda. But every now and then, the truth comes out.
This spring, President Obama visited Malaysia. While talking to a group of young people, he repeated to them what he also tells the White House interns.
“I always tell them that despite how hard sometimes the world seems to be — and all you see on television is war and conflict and poverty and violence — the truth is that if you had to choose when to be born … now would be the time.” Optimism is warranted he continued, “because the world is less violent, it is healthier, it is wealthier, it is more tolerant and it offers more opportunity than any time in human history for more people than any time in human history.”
Obama was right. Just look at the numbers. Since 1990, child mortality globally has fallen nearly in half (48%). Maternal deaths have dropped almost a quarter, and the pace of improvement is accelerating. . . .
Indeed, at times it seems as if there’s an inverse relationship between the scope of a problem and the hysteria around it. For instance, today, college campuses are in a panic about a “rape epidemic.” Meanwhile, forcible rapes are down 80% in the U.S. since 1973.
Another source of anxiety these days is “white supremacy.” No doubt there is still racism in America — both structural and intentional — but can anyone outside the hothouse of racial paranoia at MSNBC really dispute that there is less today than there was at any other period in American history? And let’s not even dwell on a “war on women” that is largely defined as opposition to unnecessarily subsidized birth control.
Never let a crisis go to waste, even if you have to invent it.
POST-OBAMACARE, WE SURE ARE HEARING THAT A LOT OF PROCEDURES THAT USED TO BE PUSHED AS ESSENTIAL ARE ACTUALLY UNNECESSARY: Guideline Calls Routine Pelvic Exams Unnecessary.
TEST DRIVE: 2015 Hyundai Sonata Sport 2.0T.