ILYA SOMIN: How The Legal System Often Ignores The Rights Of Parents. Not enough tar and feathers?

SOCIAL-JUSTICE-WARRIOR HAZING: Army Cadets on Campus Forced to Wear Red High Heels and Raise Awareness of Debunked ‘Rape Culture.’

Those who did their homework in 2008 knew that when Barack Obama was elected, all aspects of American society would suffer unprecedented levels of left-wing lunacy, but did anyone think it would come to this?

Patriotic young cadets — America’s future warrior — pressured to walk around in bright red high heels on campus — against their will – or face retribution.

I don’t even know what to say.

I do, but since this is a family blog I’ll leave it at this: Punch back twice as hard.

THE HILL: White House Won’t Call Armenian Killings Genocide. They’re still trying to make nice with Erdogan, but he’s basically our enemy now. They just don’t want to acknowledge that, since then they’d have to do something.

MICKEY KAUS: Hair Trigger Sneer:

In the Washington Examiner, the otherwise estimable Philip Klein sneers at Scott Walker for saying that he’d worry about wages and job prospects for American workers when setting levels of legal immigration. According to Klein this shows Walker is “just telling conservatives what he thinks they want to hear” (which is entirely possible) and that he doesn’t understand “the broader philosophical or policy implications” and isn’t “able to make the transition to the big leagues,” which seems snotty.

Why isn’t what Walker understands this: If we’re not going to have open borders, we have to set the level of legal immigration somewhere. In making that decision, it’s surely reasonable to take into account labor market conditions and wage levels.

P.S.: What Walker said seems quite consistent with standard conservative plans (pushed by GOPs who support and GOPs who don’t support “comprehensive” reform) to give more immigration slots to higher-skilled workers and fewer to the low-skilled workers who bid down wages at the bottom, since it’s wages at the bottom we worry about most.

You can’t be worried about wages for low-skilled workers, and simultaneously favor importing more low-skilled workers.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Americans Don’t Want More Immigration — And They’re Right. “In 1970, less than 1 in 21 residents were foreign-born; today it is almost 1 in 7. The annual rate of immigration is almost double its level from the Reagan years and more than triple its level from the post-WWII boom years. Meanwhile, while 1 in 15 men aged 25-54 were not working in 1970, it is now 1 in 6; the total number of women aged 16-65 not working has increased 30 percent while their population has increased less than half that amount.”

It’s also hard to figure on assimilating that many immigrants when the folks in charge of assimilation don’t really believe in — or even much like — the country they’re supposed to be helping immigrants assimilate to.

TEACH PROSECUTORS NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE: Jury awards $2.3M to man falsely held as ‘Charles Village rapist.’ “A federal jury has awarded $2.3 million to a Baltimore man who was held for 15 months on charges he raped a Charles Village woman until investigators acknowledged DNA evidence they had most of the time he was in custody did not link him to the crime. . . . Humbert consistently maintained his innocence while in pretrial solitary confinement, according to the lawsuit. No physical evidence from the crime scene “even hinted” that Humbert might be a suspect, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit alleges he should have been released after a month after two lab reports excluded Humbert as a possible suspect based on DNA evidence. But Humbert was not exonerated until August 2009, 14 months after investigators first obtained the DNA evidence, according to the complaint.”

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I’LL BE THERE, CELEBRATING WITH YOU: You’ve Won Against the Gun Bullies—Here’s Where to Celebrate.

IT’S NOT JUST WISCONSIN: Democrats Defend Political Persecutions in Texas. The Deep State is doing its best to frustrate the voters. “When a governor can be indicted for vetoing a bill, when a university regent can be threatened with criminal prosecution for exposing corruption, and when you have armed men kicking down your door because you signed the wrong petition, you don’t live in a free society—you live in a police state. And that is what Democrats are building, from Austin to Milwaukee to Washington.”

Punch back twice as hard.

BILL NYE, THE UNCONSCIOUS-IRONY GUY:

I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

STEPHEN GREEN: Bringing The Sexy Back: “I’d add that conservatives already do outbreed the left — which is why the left is so determined to maintain its iron hold on education, K-through-12-through-infinity. If they can’t (or won’t) breed more lefties, they know how to make them. That’s why homeschooling frightens them so much. That’s why they fight so hard against their own strongest constituents in the effort to prevent school choice and teach accountability.”

UPDATE: Charles Murray has related thoughts.

A LOOK AT the world’s nicest prison.

SORRY, I DIDN’T SEE THE YOUTUBE VERSIONS OF THESE AND SO DIDN’T POST THEM LAST WEEK: Amber Smith: Shoot Like A Girl.

Plus, Guns, Grills, and Grand Ole Opry.

RUSH LIMBAUGH IS NAMING AND SHAMING WISCONSIN OFFICIALS OVER THE ANTI-SCOTT-WALKER PERSECUTION:

The innocent in Wisconsin were guilty because they were conservative. The left in Wisconsin was losing everything. They were losing their union domination and control. Scott Walker was decimating all the systems they had put in place.

They literally lashed out in panic, anger, and you name it to punish people who had voted for Walker, who had raised money for him, who they thought had voted for him. It was the kind of thing that Vladimir Putin does and we all laugh about because that’s what we expect in a tyrannical dictatorship like the Soviet Union or Russia. We find out that it can happen here and has happened here, and there was no mechanism to stop it. The prosecutor’s name is Chisholm, John Chisholm, and I hope his name is never forgotten. . . .

The judge, without whom this case could not have happened, is Barbara Kluka, K-l-u-k-a, and I’ll tell you what she did. She came along in the second John Doe investigation, and she approved every petition, every subpoena, every search warrant in the whole case in less than one day’s work. She enabled law enforcement to raid these innocent citizens’ homes. She’s since recused herself from this, but not before she enabled all of this to happen in the second phase of the John Doe 2 case here.

In the second John Doe case, the DA, John Chisholm, had no real evidence of wrongdoing by anybody. It didn’t stop him. Conservative groups were active in issue advocacy, which is protected by the First Amendment. It didn’t violate any campaign finance laws. Issue advocacy is politics 101. These people were targeted because they’re conservatives and liberals. As I say, what happened here in not only the treatment Scott Walker got, but everybody else, this is liberalism run amok without any checks, without any opposition, without anybody pushing back, and in its own way California is the same example.

Despite the fact that there were no violations of the law in any away, the DA, Chisholm, convinced “prosecutors in four other counties to launch their own John Does, with Judge Kluka overseeing all of them. Empowered by a rubber-stamp judge, partisan investigators ran amok. They subpoenaed and obtained (without the conservative targets’ knowledge) massive amounts of electronic data, including virtually all the targets’ personal e-mails and other electronic messages from outside e-mail vendors and communications companies. The investigations exploded into the open with a coordinated series of raids on October 3, 2013. These were home invasions,” including the ones that I have detailed previously in this half hour.

They should be shunned, protested, and humiliated whenever they dare to appear in public.

DAVE KOPEL: Guns on university campuses: The Colorado experience. “The experience on Colorado campuses since 2003, and at the University of Colorado since 2012, shows that adult students or professors who are permitted by their local Sheriff to carry a concealed handgun for lawful protection do not perpetrate unlawful aggression. . . . Colleges should respect the rights of responsible persons, such as Amanda Collins, to protect themselves. As the Sheriffs told the Colorado Supreme Court, law-abiding adults who have been licensed to carry guns throughout the state, should retain their self-defense rights when they attend or teach at a public institution of higher education.” I agree.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Best Person for the Job? Think Again. “Among the hiring myths that took root during the recession, here’s a particularly tenacious one: A person with a college degree makes a better employee than a person with a high-school diploma.”

EBOLA, LYING IN WAIT: “A growing body of scientific clues — some ambiguous, others substantive — suggests that the Ebola virus may have lurked in the West African rain forest for years, perhaps decades, before igniting the deadly epidemic that swept the region in the past year, taking more than 10,000 lives. Until recently, Ebola had been considered a threat mostly to Central African nations. Yet studies tell of possible Ebola antibodies in human blood samples drawn in West Africa long before the current outbreak. And genetic analysis suggests the West African virus broke off from a parent strain in Central Africa at least 10 years ago, possibly as long as 150 years ago.”

Related: Signs Ebola Spreads in Sex Prompt a C.D.C. Warning. “They were acting on evidence suggesting that a Liberian man who recovered from Ebola might have transmitted the virus to his female partner many months later.”

TWO (MILLION) SCOOPS!:   . . .of raisins, taken by the federal Raisin Administrative Committee.  The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case tomorrow, Horne v. U.S. Dep’t of Agriculture, to decide whether this Committee may constitutionally confiscate–without compensation–raisins grown in excess of a quota established by the Committee.  The case is being brought (finally) by brave raisin farmers Marvin and Laura Horne, who were ordered by the Committee to hand over about 300 tons (approximately 30% of their crop) of raisins that the government decided were excessive.  The Committee is a vestige of the New Deal era, which in its wisdom, too often attempted to control agricultural prices by controlling supply.  According to today’s Wall Street Journal editorial:

The Hornes say this raisin toll is an unconstitutional seizure of their property. Under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, “private property” shall not “be taken for public use, without just compensation.” That clause is typically understood to make it illegal for the government to grab houses, cars or even raisins.

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had a different view, ruling in 2011 that “the Raisin Marketing Order applies to the Hornes only insofar as they voluntarily choose to send their raisins into the stream of interstate commerce.” In other words, if you don’t want your raisins seized, you always have the option of going out of business.

After the Hornes sought rehearing en banc, the Ninth Circuit three-judge panel withdrew its opinion and replaced it with one that said the Hornes would first have to pay the fines and then appeal to the Court of Federal Claims. In June 2013 a unanimous Supreme Court overturned that decision and remanded it to the Ninth Circuit to decide on the merits. The court should “figure out,” Justice Elena Kagan said, “whether this marketing order is a taking, or just the world’s most outdated law.”

Hearing the case again, the Ninth Circuit went on another legal flight, ruling that the Takings Clause was meant to address the seizure of land, not other personal private property. And even if the government did take raisin farmers’ property, the confiscation created raisin scarcity which raised raisin prices, so the Hornes were compensated for their property in that way.

This is rewriting the Fifth Amendment. Under the Ninth Circuit’s logic, why couldn’t the government demand that an auto company hand over 20% of the cars off its production line to give to the poor or sell overseas? How about pharmaceuticals or iPhones to maintain stable prices or serve another regulatory purpose?

Exactly.  If the government can (literally) take raisins without compensation, they can take anything else, and sellers of virtually anything can have their goods confiscated by a government intent on regulating “supply.”  This regulation of supply was one of the basic principles of Soviet collectivism of agriculture, as well as industry, in Stalin’s Five Year Plans.  It is telling to see how the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit–the most liberal federal court of appeals–has engaged in contortions to avoid honoring the Takings Clause of the Constitution.

YOU’D NEVER KNOW IT, THOUGH, FROM WATCHING THE NEWS: There’s never been a safer time to be a kid in America.

WHAT’S THE RIGHT TRADEOFF between living standard and health care?

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Also in Tools & Home Improvement.

WHAT IT’S LIKE WHEN YOU WIN: Some thoughts of mine from the NRA Convention.

JUSTICE: CSI Is A Lie: America’s shameful system of forensic investigation is overdue for sweeping reform. I’ve written about this problem since the very earliest days of InstaPundit, and I’ll repeat a story I blogged well over a decade ago: When I was in college, I interned for a criminal defense attorney who told me that although most people, including defense lawyers, assumed that the FBI lab was a gold standard, he always sent stuff to an independent lab for verification, and half the time it came back with a different result from the FBI lab. He said he didn’t understand why more lawyers didn’t do that, since a different result in itself might produce reasonable doubt.

GOVERNMENT IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER: “Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.”

HEY GUYS, CHECK OUT THIS MICRO-AGGRESSION!:  Man, it’s really bad.  I mean, bro, it’s serious.  It’s the micro-aggression of patriarchcal, male-centric words like “guys,” “mankind,” and “dude.”  And apparently, according to this self-described “very serious feminist,” it’s why us chicks pay more for deodorant and razors and other stuff — an unofficial “pink tax” against all things feminine, which is a micro-aggression of its own!

Plus, let’s not forget the daily assault of manspreading, which is a pressing microaggression that threatens all mankind chickdom personhood.

Seriously, dude, cut it out.  Because #waronwomen.