VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Untrue Truisms In The War On Terror.

ACCOUNTABILITY: Golden Rice Opponents Should Be Held Accountable for Health Problems Linked to Vitamin A Deficiency. Imagine if we held environmental activists as accountable for their prescriptions as we do pharma companies. . . .

IT’S NOT ABOUT MARTIN LUTHER KING, but this civil rights holiday is still a good time to plug the under-appreciated Separate But Equal, a movie about the Brown case starring Sidney Poitier as Thurgood Marshall. When it came out, my old lawprof Charlie Black, who’s portrayed in the film, told me “They got Sydney Poitier to play Thurgood, and then they found some SOB who looked just like me to play me.” That was kind of unfair.

HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: In U.S. academia, fields that cherish sheer genius shun women. “The fields whose members said they most valued sheer intellectual brilliance such as philosophy, physics and math were the most likely to have fewer women in their ranks. The disciplines in which the ‘spark of genius’ was least emphasized such as education, psychology and anthropology had greater numbers of women.”

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: France, The Jews, and “Bad Luck.”

WELL, THIS IS 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Audi Is Putting a Virtual Reality Car Dealership Inside the Oculus Rift.

BOSTON REVIEW: Don’t Believe the Hype—We’re Not Even Close to Full Employment. “Measured against where these people expected the economy to be at this point seven years ago, the economy is indeed awful. Millions of people who should have jobs don’t, and those who do have jobs are working for much lower wages than would be the case in a healthy economy.”

READER BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Reader Elizabeth Hemingway recommends Katalina Gerard’s The Perfect World. It’s currently just $2.99 on Kindle.

THE NINE MOST DANGEROUS THINGS that drivers do.

DEMOCRATS EMBARRASS THEMSELVES: Ashe Schow: Response to selection of Joni Ernst for State of the Union response shows sexism alive and well. “It’s no secret that conservative women are held to a different standard than liberal women. That bias becomes most obvious when a conservative woman rises to a prominent position.” Luke Russert gets special mention.

GOOGLE GLASS IS DEAD, long live smart glasses.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 620.

STEVEN TELES: Nudge, or Shove? Cass Sunstein’s ‘libertarian paternalism’ doesn’t just sound oxymoronic; it actually is. Liberalism deserves more forthright advocacy.

Libertarian paternalism seeks to authorize a very wide range of tools by which the state might “control the governed.” But how do we ensure that a government so equipped is “oblige(d) to control itself”? Such a concern begs the prior question, too, of who deserves the right to judge individual decisions to be “failures”, or to be suboptimal from a larger social perspective in a political culture that still values individual liberty. That is the real clot of issues involved with the “politics of libertarian paternalism”, and one that Sunstein fails to address adequately. His failure is instructive, however, for it raises serious questions about the future of “big government”—in particular, what sort of big government we might want, or might ruefully think we need. . . .

This is not a mere question of political theory. Various forms of paternalism, justified by psychology and behavioral economics, are all the rage in governments in the United States and beyond. Sunstein observes that in the United Kingdom, “The Behavioural Insights Team has used this research to promote initiatives in numerous areas, including smoking cessation, energy efficiency, organ donation, consumer protection, charitable donation, and compliance strategies in general.” While economists, newly unshackled from their previous insistence on treating human beings as calculating machines, are giddily revealing innumerable deviations from rationality, policymakers across the world are using these findings as justifications for new forms of state action. The presumption here is both clear and arresting: Individuals are not value-maximizers, but governments either are or can be.

Think of the political class as a band of thieves and you won’t be far wrong. How do you “nudge” a thief?

Meanwhile, we interviewed Cass Sunstein on the late, lamented Glenn & Helen Show. You can listen to that interview here.

RICH WHITE BOSTON I-93 PROTESTERS UPSET WHEN MEDIA VISITS THEIR HOMES, DISCOVERS THEY LIVE WITH THEIR PARENTS.

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WELL, THANKFULLY HE HASN’T POSED NUDE YET: “Jeb Bush is the GOP’s Lena Dunham.”

WELL, THAT’S NICE: Chris Kyle’s Widow Overwhelmed By ‘American Sniper’ Success, Elites Unhappy.

YES, BUT IT’S SO USEFUL IN DOMESTIC POLITICS: Terror undeterred by mass surveillance.

THE HILL: Senator: Have to assume sleeper cells in US.

A key U.S. senator said Sunday that Americans have to assume there are some “sleeper cells” within the U.S. that would like to carry out a terror attack.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he was not aware of any specific cells, but noted that the recent attacks elsewhere in the Western world make it a safe assumption. Johnson is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

“What you’re seeing happen in Europe, you’re seeing how widespread that is,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I think you have to assume that that is a risk that we have to consider.”

Johnson criticized President Obama’s policy to combat terror groups, arguing the administration is insufficiently committed to the cause to battle against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

“As long as ISIS is not losing, they are perceived as winning,” he said. “We have to defeat ISIS. We can’t let them continue threatening the rest of the world for years.”

He also criticized administration efforts to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, warning that remaining captives pose a major threat to the U.S.

“The people left in Guantanamo Bay are evil people,” he said. “The people there are the worst of the worst, and they should not be released.”

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said U.S. intelligence needs to focus on the greatest threats to home.

“In some cases these are Americans that we know have been associated with these extreme groups,” he said. “It’s really important that our intelligence community focus on those that are the highest risks to the United States.”

Related: Leon Panetta: We face ‘more aggressive’ terrorism.

DAVID SOLWAY: Watching The World Fall Apart: Who Are The Real Deniers?

AT NORTHERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY, educrats hide from press scrutiny, resort to threats, intimidation, and obfuscation. Sounds like something that Michigan’s legislature, and Gov. Rick Snyder, need to look into.

HILLARY CLINTON’S Charlie Hebdo Problem.

Hillary was one of numerous Obama operatives who blamed Benghazi on a hapless YouTube video maker, whom the administration promptly had jailed. Concurrently, Hillary pushed the “video did it” theme at Dover Air Force Base, as the remains of the Americans killed by al-Qeada were returned to US soil on September 14th of 2012. . . .

But in addition to her role in the Benghazi cover-up, Hillary Clinton’s highlight reel is filled with anti-free speech moments, not the least of which was her show-stopping “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” soundbite in 1998.

In the free-speech war, she’s on the other side.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: James Taylor? Next Time, Send Slayer. Or Megadeth.