HOLLYWOOD: Do Sony E-Mails Expose a Wider Racism?

A HEARTWARMING STORY: After family’s presents were stolen, Lexington police officers took kids shopping.

FIGHT THE POWER: Supreme Court to hear ObamaCare subsidy challenge in March.

The highly anticipated case challenging ObamaCare’s subsidies will officially reach the Supreme Court on March 4.

Justices will hear arguments in King v. Burwell in just under three months, according to the court’s schedule posted Monday afternoon.

The case, led by conservative groups, questions whether the federal government can legally hand out healthcare subsidies in 34 states that have opted out of creating their own exchanges.

The plaintiffs of the case also released their opening brief on Monday, a 129-page document that lays out their case against the subsidies.

The court announced in November that it would take up the case, surprising many court-watchers and healthcare experts. Democrats, including the authors of ObamaCare, have come to the law’s defense.

Stay tuned.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Bombshell Report: IRS Targeted “Icky” Conservative Groups.

Top IRS officials specifically targeted tea party groups and misled the public about its secret political targeting program led by ex-official Lois Lerner, according to a bombshell new congressional report.

The Daily Caller has obtained an advance copy of a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee report set to be released Tuesday morning that definitively proves malicious intent by the IRS to improperly block conservative groups that an IRS adviser deemed “icky.” (That’s right. “Icky.”)

“The Committee has identified eight senior leaders who were in a position to prevent or to stop the IRS’s targeting of conservative applicants,” the Oversight report states. “Each of these leaders could have and should have done more to prevent the IRS’s targeting of conservative tax-exempt applicants.”

Much more at the link.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The AAUP’s Ludicrous Declaration. “The truth of the matter is that American professors have gotten themselves into this pickle. They have through their acceptance of lower standards and elimination of general education requirements made college education less rigorous, more obscure, and completely haphazard.”

THE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW PUTS ROLLING STONE’S BOGUS RAPE STORY AT THE TOP OF ITS roundup of “the worst journalism of 2014.”

MICHAEL BARONE: Free speech, political correctness struggle to coexist on campus.

The total discrediting of Rolling Stone’s story on rape at the University of Virginia has shined a light on one of the least palatable features of American life: the so-called epidemic of rape on campus.

Authorities from Barack Obama on down have cited the phony statistic that one in five college women is raped. Phony, because it’s based on a 2007 survey conducted at two Midwestern schools, not of a random sample, but of a small number of self-selected respondents. The study also includes unwanted touching and kissing in its broad definition of “sexual assault.”

A Department of Justice survey released this month presents a different picture. Between 1995 and 2013, it reports, an average of 0.61 percent of female students were raped or sexually assaulted every year — 2.4 percent over four years, not 20 percent. Moreover, DOJ reports, that rate has been declining significantly in recent years, in line with a national decline in rape.

In other words, there is no suddenly raging epidemic of rape on campus. Nevertheless, colleges and universities have been scampering to comply with mandates from the Obama Department of Education to set up procedures in which campus administrators, with no legal training, act as investigators, prosecutors, judges, juries and executioners.

Accused students are not allowed to have lawyers or to confront witnesses, and legal rules of evidence do not apply. State legislatures have passed or are considering laws requiring schools to adopt (and many schools are adopting) a “yes means yes” standard, requiring express consent at each stage of a sexual encounter.

These kangaroo courts can and do expel male students, putting a blot on their records for life. No wonder dozens of them are suing universities and getting big cash settlements. No wonder 28 current and retired Harvard law professors signed a letter calling such processes “deeply unfair and undemocratic.”

Some day, I suspect, this frenzy will be seen as akin to the hysteria over satanic abuse in day care centers in the 1980s. Many people went to jail over utterly fraudulent charges based on bogus psychological research, akin to the Salem witch trials.

Administrators’ thumbs are heavily on the scales here, and it’s not on the side of free speech. As I say, this is ripe for Congressional civil rights legislation.

EUGENE VOLOKH: How many crimes can you see being committed in this anti-gun ‘public service’ ad? “I can imagine some impressionable teenager seeing what the appealing protagonist is doing, and trying to copy it, especially since the serious tone of the video seems to invite its being taken seriously. And the results could include expulsion, criminal prosecution, or even death.”

The thing about ratting out your parents adds a nice Stalinist touch.

FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS: Augustana College bans Yik Yak.

THIS SEEMS LIKE A STRONG TITLE IX CASE AGAINST THE UNIVERSITY, as well as a civil suit against the students involved. Unpunished vandalism rampage inspired by Rolling Stone’s U.Va. rape story: Student activist who led vandalism attack on Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house says he has no regrets.

I also think that university toleration of lynch-mob behavior is a serious civil rights problem on campuses, and something that the next Congress should look at remedying.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Obama Palling Around With Al Sharpton Is A Disgrace. (Audio).

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: There are 186 first-year students per law school this year, down from 262 in 2010. You have to go all the way back to 1968 to find a number that low.

AMY MILLER: We should all sneer in the face of North Korean fearmongering.

LAYERS OF FACT-CHECKERS AND EDITORS: The Curious Case Of The T.V. Attorney And Twitter.

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: NYC police chief: Tensions like ’70s.

You know what else is like the Seventies? The Democratic solutions to the problems they caused: Dem: Cops should focus on gun control. These guys haven’t had a new idea since 1968.

AT AMAZON, Year-End Deals on Apps & Games.

Plus, 12 Days Of Deals Ends Today. New markdowns, but not for much longer.

LIST: The 7th Annual Poll of Conservative Websites On The Most Loved And Hated People On The Right.

POLITICO: De Blasio’s nightmare: New York’s mayor has lost the police — and maybe much more than that.

MORALITY POLICE: When it comes to alcohol laws, Pennsylvania is about as close to Saudi Arabia as you can get in America.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS UP: We Need A House Of Repeal To Prune Back Overgrown Laws.

AT Y-12: A Brown And Radioactive Burp.

MILO YIANNOPOULOS ON THE LATEST FEMINIST OUTCRY: What is ‘Manspreading’ and Why are People Angry about It?

After the numerous and well-publicised feminist fiascoes of 2014, it has become clear to all but the most ideologically determined observers that the intersectional third-wave harpies who so dominate in the American and British media and to whom obeisance has been paid for many years have nothing left to fight for and no arguments left to win.

Witness the absurd, offensive, ludicrous spectacle of inanity and stupidity currently surrounding the New York subway: a campaign to stop men sitting comfortably on public transport. We “manspread,” apparently, which observers have interpreted as “sit in such a way as not to painfully crush the testicles or penis” but which feminists insist is an expression of patriarchal authority. You could not, as British newspaper columnists like to say, make this shit up. . . .

The manspreading complaint is couched as a response to “rudeness” by men, but it is no such thing: it is pathetic feminist pipsqueakery, the last dying gasp of a movement with nothing to win and nothing to say, determined to abuse and antagonise the male sex at all costs and for whatever perceived or outright imaginary infraction it can conjure from the vicissitudes of everyday life. It is offensively trivial, and those associated with it ought to be ashamed.

Such people include the author of a New York Times story on this otiose playground jihad against men, and the subway officials who endorsed a poster campaign warning men of the social anxiety caused by their choice of sitting position. Not a word about those shopping bags, or–the real irritant for me, on the rare occasion I take the Tube–stilettoes digging into the back of my heels and capacious handbags clogging the gangways.

Is it any wonder women these days complain of being alone? They mistake their own, self-induced isolation as the inevitable consequence of patriarchy, not realising that their generation has spent a decade doing everything possible to isolate and alienate men.

Yep. You could write a whole book on that phenomenon.

Plus: “Feminism is a poisoned term. It is tainted; stained by the petty misandrist misdeeds of a thousand spoilt brats on the pages of the Guardian; an army of Jessica Valentis whinging about wrapping Christmas presents instead of objecting to the acid thrown in Indian women’s faces.”

Feminism died in 1998, and it was so obvious that even Maureen Dowd noticed. “Feminism died in 1998 when Hillary allowed henchlings and Democrats to demonize Monica as an unbalanced stalker, and when Gloria Steinem defended Mr. Clinton against Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones.” Now the corpse is just twitching.

JOHN HAYWARD: Collectivism And The Presumption Of Guilt.

TRANSPARENCY: Reprisals Against Whistleblowers In Military Hospital Care. “Physicians, nurses and medical workers at military hospitals say they have been brushed off, transferred, investigated and passed over for promotion after they pointed out problems with care.” Par for the course these days.

GEORGE WARREN FULLER, the man who crushed typhoid.