WASHINGTON POST OP-ED: DONALD TRUMP, BEN CARSON ‘UNFIT FOR THE OVAL OFFICE.’

Hey, those objective nonpartisan straight-shooters at the Post totally championed the right guy in 2008. We should definitely trust them again in 2016.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: “Even as the U.S. military denies reports that American troops were told to ignore Afghan child abusers, an 11-year Green Beret who was ordered discharged after he confronted an alleged rapist was informed Tuesday that the Army has denied his appeal.”

(H/T: Iowahawk.)

SHADY LADIES AND “PENIS PROPAGANDA:” The VD Posters of World War II.

THE WAGES OF IRRATIONAL FEAR: When Fear Of Radiation Is Deadlier Than The Radiation:

This spring, four years after the nuclear accident at Fukushima, a small group of scientists met in Tokyo to evaluate the deadly aftermath.

No one has been killed or sickened by the radiation — a point confirmed last month by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even among Fukushima workers, the number of additional cancer cases in coming years is expected to be so low as to be undetectable, a blip impossible to discern against the statistical background noise.

But about 1,600 people died from the stress of the evacuation — one that some scientists believe was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels at the Japanese nuclear plant.

Keep calm and carry on. Meanwhile, here’s an interesting rulemaking. People have been talking about radiation hormesis for years, but it’s getting more attention.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Dear Parent, Your Child Has Had a Psychotic Break.’

Related: College kids have too much privacy.

A few years ago, an acquaintance received a stunning phone call from her daughter’s former college roommate. The conversation went something like this:

“I thought you should know your daughter never graduated from college.”

“What? She claimed she was just skipping the ceremony.”

“Well, the truth is she didn’t attend classes the last two years.”

The parents were shellshocked, concerned and ultimately furious at the school. “Why didn’t they tell us?”

The answer is FERPA.

Passed in 1974, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act is an unwieldy piece of legislation affecting all institutions that receive funding from the Department of Education. Although it has been amended over the years, the law’s bottom line remains: “Once a student reaches 18 years of age or attends a postsecondary institution, he or she becomes an ‘eligible student’ and all rights under FERPA transfer from the parent to the student.”

This essentially means that you have no right, as a parent, to know what or how your children are doing in school. They can binge-watch True Detective rather than attend classes, never disclose their grades, maybe become seriously anxious or depressed, and you have to take their word for it when they say “everything’s fine.”

For sons and daughters who move through college in four efficient years, the law has little consequence. Unfortunately, even kids who never played hooky, told a lie or got less than a B in high school can become socially and academically lost in a distraction-filled, unfamiliar setting.

FERPA isn’t for the benefit of the student. It’s a way for the universities to avoid accountability to the people who are actually paying the bills. Note how sometimes students are treated as adults, and sometimes as children. Note, too, that the way they’re treated is always the way that’s most useful to the university.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Men Most Attracted To Women In Their Early Twenties.

EXPLORING the lost tunnels of Liverpool. “Of all the engineering projects that ever took place in the industrial centre of Liverpool – like the world’s first exclusively steam-powered passenger railway – the building of the Williamson Tunnels in the early 19th Century must be the most mysterious. The patron of the tunnels, tobacco merchant Joseph Williamson, was extraordinarily secretive about their purpose. Even today, no one is sure exactly what they were used for. Nor does anyone know for sure even how many of the tunnels there are, scattered underfoot beneath the Edge Hill district of Liverpool in northwest England.”

HMM: Leaked docs show Air Force’s talking points on F-35 boondoggle. “What makes this surprising is that it contradicts some of the Air Force’s own internal documents found in July, which blasted the F-35 for multiple failures.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 867.

SUSAN BROWNMILLER DEPARTS FROM THE SCRIPT:

As author of the enormously influential book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, feminist writer and activist Susan Brownmiller has done more than almost any living person to combat the scourge of sexual violence. So when she critiques the excesses of today’s rape-crisis activists, you might think the activists would listen—that is, if today’s anti-rape movement were actually an open-minded, reality-based effort to combat a very real social problem rather than, as Christina Hoff Sommers memorably described it, “a panic where paranoia, censorship, and false accusations flourish.”

In an interview with New York magazine last week, the 80-year-old Brownmiller suggested that the campus rape movement is narrow, elitist, and “doesn’t accept reality.” Asked what advice she would give activists, Brownmiller said, “extend your focus to the larger percentage of women and girls who are in danger of being raped. They are more important than the college kids.” She also violated the well-known taboo against drawing a connection between sexual assault and the campus culture of binge drinking: “If you drink you lose your sense of judgment. Everybody knows that. You should know that when you are going into a fraternity party, something can happen.”

The rape crisis crusaders contemptuously brushed Brownmiller’s views aside. . . .

Ironically, Brownmiller’s swift exile from the shrinking tent that is third-wave feminism confirmed one of her other critiques of the current movement: that modern activists “think they are the first people to discover rape, and the problem of consent, and they are not.”

No, but they’re both vicious and tedious at the same time, which is surely some sort of accomplishment.

JUSTIN KATZ: Bogus reporting on campus sexual assaults. “The fact that Lynn Arditi is reporting things that are simply false in the Providence Journal — and in a way that is clearly in line with activists’ intended use of the survey data — suggests that somebody has to offer a bit of leaven to the hysteria.”

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JUST LIKE LAST TIME, OBAMA WILL ABUSE HIS POWER TO MAXIMIZE THE PAIN ON ORDINARY AMERICANS: If the government shuts, don’t plan on visiting Yellowstone, financing your home or getting your tax refund.

The real problem with a government shutdown? It doesn’t actually shut down. There are just random service interruptions in support of political theater.

HEY, EVERYONE’S ENTITLED TO AN OFF DAY ONCE IN A WHILE: Leftist Who Tried to Assassinate President Ford in 1975: I WAS A PRETTY GOOD CITIZEN (VIDEO).

WELL, THEY’RE BOTH ELDERLY WHITE MALES WITH MILLIONS OF FOLLOWERS WHO BELIEVE THEY’RE BOTH INFALLIBLE: What liberal bias? ABC News compares Bernie Sanders to Pope Francis.

HOW EVOLUTION CULLS THE HERD: More people have died by taking selfies this year than by shark attacks.

NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF CAMPUS FASCISM:

Students at Wesleyan University are urging the student government there to defund the campus newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus, after it published an opinion essay written by a writer for the newspaper criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement. Calling the effort a boycott, the organizers also encouraged students to toss out copies of the newspaper that they find on campus.

So they’re thugs who don’t value free speech, but also don’t know what a “boycott” means. Cost of attending Wesleyan University: $62,798 per year.

SILLY SENATOR. CONSEQUENCES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE. Hatch wonders about IRS discipline over political scrutiny.

The Senate’s top tax writer asked Tuesday why the IRS has cleared most employees referred for potential improper political scrutiny since the agency’s Tea Party controversy erupted in 2013.

Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) noted that Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration had referred 47 employees to the IRS in recent years for potentially breaking the rules for reviewing tax-exempt applications.
The inspector general sent those referrals when it thought an employee’s actions weren’t criminal, leaving any potential punishment up to the IRS.

But of those 47 referrals, the IRS found that 20 employees had done nothing wrong, and another five resigned during their investigations.

The IRS found another eight employees could face disciplinary action for future conduct, after the agency found “no clear” evidence of misconduct. Eleven referrals are still pending, while the rest of the 47 are protected by privacy laws.

In a Tuesday letter, Hatch asked for more details about how the IRS investigates those referrals and about any role the National Treasury Employees Union plays in those inquiries.

All public employee unions should be banned. But the NTEU should be banned first.

BURDEN OF PROOF FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME: Ashe Schow: College’s hypocrisy on standard of evidence when it comes to accused students.

A Vermont college was ordered to halt the expulsion of a student who was expelled for sexual assault without being given a hearing. But what the college argued in its defense was rather interesting.

Middlebury College used a “preponderance of evidence” standard (meaning campus administrators have to be just 50.01 percent sure an assault was committed) even before the Department of Education mandated colleges to lower the bar on proof of charges against students. But when it came to defending itself from this student’s lawsuit, the college demanded the higher standard of “clear and convincing” evidence that it had wronged him.

In a footnote of the judge’s decision to halt the expulsion, noticed by Samantha Harris of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the college argued for the higher standard of proof.

“Middlebury argues a higher standard — requiring Plaintiff to demonstrate ‘a clear or substantial likelihood of success on the merits’ — applies because an injunction will provide plaintiff with substantially all the relief sought and the relief cannot be undone and because plaintiff seeks to alter rather than maintain the status quo,” the footnote reads.

The reason the male student was able to get his expulsion halted was that he showed that he would have a “likelihood of success on the merits” and that he would suffer irreparable harm if the federal court did not issue a preliminary injunction.

So, to recap, when accusing students of a felony, a low threshold of evidence is okay, but when accused of unfairness, Middlebury wants the charges to clear a higher bar. Nice legal double standard, if you can get it.

Now that’s just sad.

FLASHBACK: WHEN RAHM EMANUEL CALLED FOR “RECORD DEPORTATIONS OF CRIMINAL ALIENS:”

A treasure trove of documents from former President Bill Clinton’s administration shows a young staffer — Rahm Emanuel — pushing his boss to get tough on illegal immigrants and seize crime-fighting from the Republicans as a defining issue.

The previously restricted memos from Emanuel to Clinton are among thousands of White House documents made public this year through the William J. Clinton Presidential Library. The documents were kept secret until 12 years after Clinton’s second term ended in 2001.

That was also around the time that Harry Reid was a similarly anti-illegal immigration hardliner using remarkably Trumpian language:

Reid authored the Immigration Stabilization Act of 1993 to remove asylum seekers, end birthright citizenship, expand deportations, and exclude legal immigrants from public assistance. The bill also included amendments that closed loopholes dealing with criminal aliens and mandated more cooperation between local and federal law enforcement, the Conservative Review reported on Tuesday.

“Our borders have overflowed with illegal immigrants placing tremendous burdens on our criminal justice system, schools and social programs. The Immigration and Naturalization Service needs the ability to step up enforcement,” Reid said in a statement.

“Our federal wallet is stretched to the limit by illegal aliens getting welfare, food stamps, medical care and other benefits often without paying any taxes,” Reid continued. “Safeguards like welfare and free medical care are in place to boost Americans in need of short-term assistance. These programs were not meant to entice freeloaders and scam artists from around the world.”

So just to review, despite their obvious shortcomings in regards to the First and Second Amendments (some things never do change), the Democrats of the 1990s were anti-illegal immigration, pro-welfare reform, pro-defense of marriage, took a hard regime change-oriented stance towards Saddam Hussein, and when it came to the economy, as Bill Clinton said in 1993, “We’re Eisenhower Republicans here. Here we are, and we’re standing for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn’t that great?”

And it was, in spite of Bill’s sarcasm. No wonder the 1990s are looked upon so warmly by many.

Too bad Hillary is running against all of those policies, but you can’t have everything.

THE STRANGE STORY OF AHMED MOHAMED & HIS SUSPICIOUSLY BOMB-LIKE CLOCK: Irving Texas Mayor Beth Van Duyne “later noted that the president had tweeted about the case and invited Ahmed to the White House before the pictures of the clock were even publicly available. Obama made no attempt to contact her office before making public comments in support of the Muslim teen.”

It sounds like the White House acted stupidly, to coin a law-enforcement-related phrase.

THE LONELY ROAD AHEAD FOR JOHN ROBERTS. The thing is, “judicial restraint” doesn’t mean going out of your way to uphold unconstitutional laws. Letting an unconstitutional law stand isn’t restraint, it’s dereliction of duty.

RAYMOND IBRAHIM: Ben Carson Exposes Islamic ‘Taqiyya,’ But There’s Even More You Should Know.

WOULD A MUSLIM PRESIDENT BE GOOD ON GAY MARRIAGE? “I’m never quite sure why it is that people on the left are scared to death of orthodox Christians, but think that orthodox Muslims are the bee’s knees. I suppose the answer is ‘multiculturalism.’ Or just outright bigotry. Because exactly how well would a traditional, orthodox Muslim in the White House match up with progressive politics?”