FASTER, PLEASE: Stem cell therapy could be used to help older patients recover from muscular injuries, for example from falls, or perhaps even weakness following surgery.

TEST-DRIVING THE 2014 Toyota Highlander. My 2006 Highlander Hybrid is still going strong with over 120,000 miles — though it’s now the Insta-Daughter’s car.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND “RAPE CULTURE:” Rand Paul: Democrats should be embarrassed to be seen with Bill Clinton.

ED DRISCOLL: Bauhaus of Cards.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Reining In the IRS: The House GOP unveils its plan.

The legislation, authored by Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp (R., Mich.), introduces reforms that directly address the circumstances that led to last year’s scandal. The specter of Lois Lerner looms large in the minds of many Republicans, and the plan mandates the termination of any IRS employee found to have taken official action for political purposes. The 1988 bill that restructured and reformed the IRS spells out ten actions for which the IRS commissioner must terminate an agency employee after an “administrative or judicial determination” that the employee has committed the prohibited action — among them, providing a false statement under oath on a matter involving a taxpayer and violating the rights of a taxpayer. Today’s bill would add the commission of politically motivated acts to the list.

The plan would also require the IRS to modify its interpretation of a critical provision of the Internal Revenue Code that has been used to protect the privacy of those accused of leaking confidential taxpayer records and to deny information to the victims of IRS abuse.

Under the proposed reforms, the provision, Internal Revenue Code section 6103, would require the government to disclose to victims both the status of an investigation as well as its result, including the identity of the perpetrator.

A good start, but it also needs to abolish governmental immunity for offending officials, leaving them open to civil suit.

CHESTER FINN: No (Gifted) Child Left Behind: We are neglecting our smartest and often poorest kids.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 293.

NO ONE IS SAFE, from pension disaster. “Even in the best case scenario, the delay in the increase of state contributions will make the whole process more expensive than it would have been if the state simply bit the bullet and upped its contributions immediately. We can’t help but notice, too, another example of politicians putting off contribution increases until they are safely out of office. This reminds us more than a little bit of the kick-the-can game—often played with the unions’ full knowledge and support—that got pensions into this trouble in the first place. The fact that many of these reforms are written in a way that leaves current workers’ plans untouched but hits future workers’ benefits hard does nothing to dispel this notion.”

NICK GILLESPIE: Harold Ramis and the Death of the Baby Boomers’ Dreams.

BOTH DEMOCRATS: Two senior lawmakers from Connecticut have been subpoenaed in a civil racketeering case involving nursing homes and the SEIU. It’s Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Rep. Rosa DeLauro.

TAM TAKES A BOLD STAND AGAINST FANTASY BIGOTRY: “In Dungeons & Dragons, dwarves can’t be rangers and halflings can’t be magic users, but humans can be any character class. In Star Trek, the United Federation of Planets is a galaxy-spanning polyspecies polity, but the officer’s mess on any Starfleet vessel looks more like a board meeting at Augusta National than it does the cantina in Star Wars. The most homogenous, conformist technological society on planet Earth has everything from tattooed yakuza to sumo wrestlers to lolita cosplayers, but you could title a documentary on Klingons Fifty Shades of Worf.”

AT AMAZON, deals galore on Top-Rated products.

Also, deals on select Leapers products.

Also, today only: $53.99 Seiko Men’s Automatic Watches.

POLL: 2/3 of American Voters Want A Congressional Investigation Into Benghazi.

EMPHASIS ON THE WORD “EARLY:” Rand Paul Is the GOP’s Early Presidential Front-Runner: While the establishment hopes for a governor to emerge, he is quietly putting together a formidable operation.

MICHAEL BARONE: Concealed-weapons laws have changed America regardless of national debate on gun control.

Back in 1987, some people, myself included, worried that such laws would lead to frequent shootouts on the streets arising from traffic altercations and the like. That has not happened — something we can be sure of since the mainstream media would be delighted to headline such events.

To the contrary, violent crime rates have declined drastically during the last quarter-century. I don’t think you can prove that concealed-weapons laws caused that result, but they have probably contributed to it, because would-be criminals are less likely to assault people they believe might be armed. In any case the argument that concealed-weapons laws would lead to more violent crime has been about as thoroughly refuted as an argument can be.

One lesson, I think, is that responsible citizens tend to behave like responsible citizens, even if — or perhaps especially if — they’re armed. Another lesson is that the national political dialogue can be totally irrelevant to what really happens in American life.

Indeed.

SO IS THIS ABOUT GOOGLE GLASS, OR IS IT MORE OF THE GOOGLE-HATRED WE’VE BEEN SEEING IN THE BAY AREA? Woman Wearing Google Glass Says She Was Attacked In San Francisco Bar.

THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE THEM, BECAUSE THEY MAKE HILLARY LOOK BAD: Politico’s Mike Allen: Thousands of Docs Being Withheld At Clinton Library. What other reason could there be? If they made Hillary look good, you’d know about them.

VIDEO: Rubio rips Cuba, Venezuela … and Tom Harkin. “This is Genesis Carmona. She’s a beauty queen and a student in a city called Valencia. She’s on that motorcycle because the government in Venezuela and the thug, these so-called civilian groups that they’ve armed — another export from Cuba, a model the Cubans follow — they shot her in the head. She died last week. This is the government that the Cubans support. Not just verbally, not just emotionally, but with training and tactics. This is who they export — this is what they do. And she’s dead. And this is her being taken on a motorcycle to the hospital where they were unable to save her life because she was shot in the head by Venezuelan security forces.”

JAMES TARANTO: 8960 or Fight! Can’t file your taxes? Blame ObamaCare.

Some TurboTax customers are mad at Intuit, maker of the popular tax-prep software, because they’ve finished their returns but are unable to file. Their anger is misplaced. They should blame the Internal Revenue Service, along with the 111th Congress and President Obama for enacting and signing the tax increase with which TurboTax can’t yet comply. (They could also blame George W. Bush if they’re in a jocose frame of mind.)

At issue is ObamaCare’s new 3.8% “net investment income tax.” It took effect Jan. 1, 2013, so that taxpayers are encountering it just now as they prepare their returns for last year. In effect, it applies the Medicare payroll tax to interest, dividends and capital gains.

But it doesn’t apply to all such income. If your modified adjusted gross income is under $200,000 (or $250,000 for a married couple), you don’t pay the tax at all. Further, if your modified AGI is above the threshold but your noninvestment income is below it, the tax is applied on the difference between your total income and the threshold.

If that’s hard to follow, here’s an example: Suppose you’re an unmarried taxpayer with a modified AGI of $210,000 and investment income of $20,000. Your net investment income is $10,000, the portion of your investment income above the total income threshold of $200,000. Your net investment income tax is 3.8% of this sum, or $380.

If you owe net investment income, you have to complete a single-page Form 8960 to calculate your modified AGI and the tax. But the form’s brevity belies the new tax’s complexity.

Read the whole thing.

JOEL KOTKIN: Oregon’s Sad Focus On “Happiness.” It’s all about distracting people from Oregon’s high unemployment, by substituting a different metric whose meaning is unclear.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Complaint: IRS ‘improperly withheld’ documents on new nonprofit rules.

The IRS “improperly withheld” documents to prevent a government transparency group from commenting on the agency’s new rules restricting the political activity of nonprofit groups, according to a new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) complaint.

The group Cause of Action requested four sets of communications between the IRS and administration officials to ensure that political bias did not factor into the design of the new rules. But the IRS delayed the release of the documents until after the period to make public comments on the new rules closes Thursday, according to an amendment to Cause of Action’s existing lawsuit against the IRS.

It’s sleaze all the way down.

TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: Pace of ObamaCare Signups Is Slowing in February.

Last year, before the law’s exchanges had opened, an HHS memo had projected about 200,000 more individuals would sign up in the month than in January. That memo estimated nearly 1.3 million sign-ups in February — or nearly 600,000 more than HHS claims have signed up thus far.

The open enrollment period for health insurance extends through the end of March, and the administration is hoping for a late surge in sign-ups, especially among young and healthy individuals. Before the botched rollout of the law’s exchanges, the administration had defined success as 7 million total sign-ups.

The HHS numbers include only those who have selected a plan through one of the exchanges, rather than the number who have paid — which is typically how insurers measure enrollment.

So even the phony “shopping cart” numbers are below the target.

THEY’RE NOT JUST MOVING THE GOALPOSTS — THEY’RE RIPPING THEM UP AND SELLING THEM TO SHADY SCRAP-METAL DEALERS: New Sebelius Lie: Seven Million Obamacare Enrollments Was Never Our Goal.

MIAMI HERALD: Venezuela: Local protests with a global flavor.

As student-led protests are in their second week, the body count continues to rise. By some estimates, at least 13 people have been killed — some of them deliberately by security forces, opposition groups say. And while local media coverage has been muted, the protests are taking place in one of the most digitally rich environments in the hemisphere. Shaky images of violence clog Twitter accounts that are seen as quickly in Madrid as in Maracaibo.

Isadora Zubillaga, who handles international affairs for the opposition Voluntad Popular political party, said the globalization of the protests is directly linked with the deteriorating economic and security situation at home. Venezuela saw the region’s highest inflation and lowest economic growth last year. And it’s also among the most murderous countries on the planet.

Huh. According to a bunch of celebrities, it’s a socialist paradise.