HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Faculty At Two Colleges Blindsided By Layoffs. I wonder if they’re laying off any administrators?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: the IRS Scandal, Day 313.

BUY LOW. SELL HIGH. The Coming Real Estate Bubble.

The point is, something insane has happened to Washington real estate prices in those intervening years. There’s a feeding frenzy over single-family homes in neighborhoods that are barely within walking distance of a metro. . . .

Of course, I can name reasons that prices should have zoomed up in 2012 and 2013. Washington’s job market is far more insulated from economic vicissitudes than the rest of the nation — indeed, the extra government spending creates jobs here (though not as many as you might think). So it’s not necessarily surprising that more affluent professionals are trying to get their hands on the one thing Washington isn’t making any more of: single-family homes.

But that doesn’t really explain why the same buying frenzy is happening in San Francisco.

OK, tech billionaires. But what about New York, where you also hear the same stories about Brooklyn neighborhoods? Finance may not have suffered as much as you wanted, but the Masters of the Universe have not become richer, or more numerous, since 2008.

Actually, what you’re seeing is exactly what you’d expect in an administration that drives wealth toward urban gentry liberals.

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH: Moms Who Don’t Work Have Healthier Babies. How could something so bad for the feminist narrative be published in a liberal publication? Because it supports the more-important Obama job-lock narrative! To wit: “Interestingly, there’s evidence that short-term reductions in income are actually good for you.”

Don’t feel bad about being laid-off and unemployed. It’s for the children!

AT AMAZON, fresh deals at the Spring Outlet Event.

Also, ’tis the season: Baseball Training Gear From SKLZ.

JAMES TARANTO: A Celeb Is Not a Cause: The kids are all right. ObamaCare’s not so hot.

Obama’s 2008 campaign scarcely deserves to be called a “cause.” It was more a cult of personality. “His entire political persona is an ingeniously crafted human cipher, a man without race, ideology, geographic allegiances, or, indeed, sharp edges of any kind,” observed Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi in 2007. “As far as political positioning goes, his strategy seems to be to appear as a sort of ideological Universalist, one who spends a great deal of rhetorical energy showing that he recognizes the validity of all points of view.”

His slogans were vapid even by the standards of political sloganeering: “Yes, we can.” “Hope and change.” “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” He was often called a “rock star”–a celeb, not a cause. It’s as if the Beatles came to America in 1964 to run for president rather than to sell records, and got elected on slogans like “Let it be,” “Please please me” and “I want to hold your hand.” Half a century later, the Beatles’ tunes have an enduring appeal to their once-youthful, now-elderly fans. Had they been forced to face the exigencies of governing, it’s unlikely a Lennon-McCartney administration would be remembered much more fondly than Johnson-Humphrey is.

Obama might have made a serviceably good president had he proved to be administratively competent and ideologically modest instead of the other way around. His personality-based campaign of 2008 diverted attention from his ideological ambitiousness, which expressed itself most forcefully in the enactment of ObamaCare. But while “health-care reform” in the abstract can be characterized as having been a “cause,” what Americans, and especially young Americans, are rejecting now is something different: a product, one that is both shoddy and overpriced. . . .

Because ObamaCare prohibits insurance companies from charging different premiums according to sex, and because women tend to use more medical services than men–a disparity that is greatest among younger policyholders–the “gender averaged” premium increase is greater for young men than for young women.

That means young men are the most disadvantaged by ObamaCare’s price controls–and, as a corollary, that they are the group on which ObamaCare’s solvency is most dependent. And the hip Mainers think the way to appeal to them is with male nudity?

Obama supporters have a quaint faith in the power of marketing. They don’t seem to grasp that persuading people to vote for one politician over another–essentially a cost-free proposition–is a far smaller order than persuading them to purchase an expensive product, especially one that offers a poor value for their money.

Indeed.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Former Gov. Edwin Edwards announces House bid.

Former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards (D) announced Monday he will enter the race to replace Rep. Bill Cassidy (R) in the state’s 6th Congressional District.

Edwards, the 86-year-old who served an eight-year prison sentence after leaving office, told a crowd in the state he would reenter the political fray despite all the reasons against it. . . . He was released from prison in 2011 after being convicted of racketeering charges in 2001.

Remember when Nancy Pelosi said we needed to “drain the swamp” in Washington? Instead, the Dems are recycling crooked pols from the Bayou State.

SO MAYBE I NEED MORE THAN JUST A GENERATOR? Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’? Well, they say the Romans’ leadership class became stupid because of lead poisoning. What’s wrong with ours?

RESISTANCE: New Yorkers Gather, Burn ‘Nearly a Thousand Gun Registration Forms.’ Draft-card burners got lots of approving national press.

LEAN IN: Negotiating While Stupid.

REIHAN SALAM ON OBAMA’S HIGHER EDUCATION PROGRAM: Don’t Just Target For-Profit Career Colleges:

Given the epidemic of underemployment among recent college graduates, it might make sense to apply the same standard to all post-secondary institutions, not just those that are explicitly labeled career training colleges.

Steve Gunderson, president of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the trade association that represents the for-profit higher education sector, observes in a tart press release that “if the regulation were applied to all of higher education, programs like a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University, a law degree from George Washington University Law School and a bachelor’s degree in social work from Virginia Commonwealth University, would all be penalized.”

My reply to Gunderson would be that, well, yes, let’s penalize these programs too. It makes perfect sense to establish a regulatory floor to protect consumers from the least effective post-secondary programs, whether they’re at vocational schools or standard-issue colleges and universities.

The answer, of course, is that traditional “nonprofit” schools are among Obama’s biggest sources of donations and support.

CHANGE: Former Obama groupie burns her 2008 campaign T-shirt.

WHEN IS SEXUAL ASSAULT MERE “BULLYING?” When it happens to a boy, and Hanna Rosin writes about it for XX Factor at Slate. And the main focus of sympathy in the article is how it might make a woman feel inadequate as a mother.

THE 1930S ARE CALLING, and asking for their piece of paper back.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CAREER ADVICE EDITION: Should I Give Up On Being A Professor And Try To Get A Job In The Government Or The Private Sector Instead? “Universities trade on our hopes, and on the fact that we have spent many years developing skills so specialized that few really want them.”

UH OH: What if all the lights go out? The U.S. is at risk of a nationwide blackout — and policymakers and industry have known this for years. “Given that there are tens of thousands of substations on the national grid, PG&E’s experience may not seem so alarming. But according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission study disclosed by the Journal, a few dozen of the substations are so important to the flow of energy that knocking out just nine of them would cause a metastasizing blackout that stretched from coast to coast. And replacement transformers for these substations can take more than a year to build, deliver and install, in part because most are made overseas.”

So, a natural-gas backup generator that can also run off of a propane tank, I guess. . . .

WELL, GOOD: Canadian invention to clean hospital rooms may save 10,000 lives a year.

SPRING CLEANING: Some recommended items. First, Barkeeper’s Friend. I love this stuff — it cleans almost everything well, and in particular I go over our stoneware with it every now and then to remove knife marks and make it look like new. It’ll even get the carbon buildup off of chrome exhaust tips.

Also, the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser is so awesome that when I mentioned it at the BlogNashville conference I got spontaneous applause. Good for baseboards, nasty messes — when the InstaDaughter was young, it got dried red nailpolish off of white bathroom cabinet doors without hurting the finish of the doors — and all kinds of other stuff. It’s good for cleaning creosote off glass fireplace screens, cuts the scum off of shower curtains and bathtubs, and, really, does a great job on almost everything.

And our Bissell carpet spotcleaner has paid for itself several times over, to the great sorrow of the folks at Stanley Steemer. Recently, some workmen in our house left ground-in dirt that the InstaWife was sure had ruined the carpet, but I had it out in minutes. We had a Hoover SteamVac some years ago, but this thing cleans much better — I don’t know if it’s the gadget, or the cleaning solution, but whatever it is, it’s impressive.

ROGER KIMBALL: Aristotle On Crimea. “It’s all starting to unravel, isn’t it?”

ROBOTS REPLACING REPORTERS: QUAKEBOT!

Schwencke is a digital editor on the Times’ data desk, where he is a reporter and a programmer. Using parameters he set, Quakebot will write a story based on details from seismic events with a “newsworthy magnitude,” put a post into the Times’ CMS, generate an image based off Bing maps and tell copy editors the story is ready. Quakebot also shares info from USGS about revisions to the event — if the agency downgrades a quake’s magnitude, as happened today, or if sensors in California mistakenly pick up a quake elsewhere.

Gosh you could replace most of the rest of ’em with something that did the same thing with White House press releases. . . .

IF ONLY IT CAME WITH WINDOWS XP. Razer’s Slim Yet Crazy-Powerful Laptop Inches Closer to Perfection.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: The Navy’s Plan to Beam Down Energy From Orbiting Solar Panels.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Put The Sex Back In Sex Ed.

Fertility is the missing chapter in sex education. Sobering facts about women’s declining fertility after their 20s are being withheld from ambitious young women, who are propelled along a career track devised for men.

The refusal by public schools’ sex-education programs to acknowledge gender differences is betraying both boys and girls. The genders should be separated for sex counseling. It is absurd to avoid the harsh reality that boys have less to lose from casual serial sex than do girls, who risk pregnancy and whose future fertility can be compromised by disease. Boys need lessons in basic ethics and moral reasoning about sex (for example, not taking advantage of intoxicated dates), while girls must learn to distinguish sexual compliance from popularity.

Above all, girls need life-planning advice. Too often, sex education defines pregnancy as a pathology, for which the cure is abortion. Adolescent girls must think deeply about their ultimate aims and desires. If they want both children and a career, they should decide whether to have children early or late. There are pros, cons and trade-offs for each choice.

For a 15 year-old in our society, pregnancy may be deeply undesirable, but 15 is the beginning of peak fertility years. Meanwhile, 35 is kind of late to start thinking about a kid, especially if you want to have two or more.

IS HALF A BIKE better than one?