I DON’T SEE WHY WRITING SNARKY, PITHY BLOG POSTS WAS OMITTED FROM THIS LIST: 100 Skills Every Man Should Have.

PROF. JOHN BANZHAF IS WEIGHING IN ON THE OKLAHOMA SITUATION:

For Racist Speech – Educate College Presidents, Not Students
There Simply is no Exemption to the First Amendment for “Hate Speech”
WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 16, 2015) – At the University of Oklahoma, all members of a fraternity, including many who did not even participate in the private singing of a racist song, were summarily evicted from their dwellings, even though virtually all legal commentators addressing the issue have recognized that, in the absence of a clear and present danger, even disciplining those who led the singing is a clear violation of their constitutional rights for which the university and its president could be held legally liable.

Likewise, the University of Maryland is apparently considering disciplining a student for sending an email to a handful of other students in which he expressed his sexual preferences in women based upon their race, and used some vulgar words. That’s also strange, says public interest law professor John Banzhaf, because it is not illegal, even in a public ad or notice, to specify the race, ethnicity, and gender of a desired roommate, so why would expressing such preferences regarding a much more intimate association, and doing it in a strictly private email, trigger a major campus investigation.

For these and other “transgressions,” many are arguing that there should be mandatory educational programs – what others have called indoctrination – for all incoming students (or at least for fraternity members). But perhaps what is really needed is educational programs for college presidents, deans, and other administrators who either don’t understand or fully appreciate not only the legal protections offered to students under the First Amendment, but also that academic freedom obviously includes the right to articulate ideas which are very unpopular with the majority views at a university.

Singing songs in praise of apple pie and motherhood, or sending emails expressing preferences for sexual partners who are pretty or smart, obviously don’t need the protection of the First Amendment nor guarantees based upon academic freedom, explains Banzhaf. Rather, the guarantees of Free Speech and academic freedom are expressly established to protect speech to which most in a community very strongly object, find abhorrent, reprehensible, etc.

It may be the official view of a university – to the extent that a university, and not its individual members, has official views – that persons of all races have equal abilities, that there is nothing wrong with engaging in homosexual acts, etc. but individual students in our free society have a right to disagree and, especially in private among those with similar views, to express them.

Banzhaf, who has himself brought many successful legal actions against discrimination based upon race, ethnicity, gender, etc. notes that the proper remedy for “bad speech” is not to punish those who engage in it – especially in private – but rather to overwhelm it with “good speech,” but not indoctrination.

At Oklahoma, the president’s actions have opened the institution and its president up to law suits in federal court, seeking not just damages, but also attorney’s fees. . . .

These causes of action include violation of rights to Free Speech under the U.S. Constitution, violation of their rights to Due Process also guaranteed by the Constitution, violation of the procedural protections guaranteed by the university’s own “Student Rights and Responsibilities Code,” and legal action under any local laws protecting people from summary evictions from dwellings.

Virtually all legal authorities who have spoken out agree that a state school cannot expel students for even racist or hateful statements – “there is no hate speech exception to the U.S. Constitution” – even if the speech mentions lynching, and especially if the speech occurred in private.

Indeed.

BYRON YORK: On Benghazi, a timeline of State Department obstruction.

IRINA MANTA AND DAVID OLSON: Hello Barbie: First They Will Monitor You, Then They Will Discriminate Against You. Perfectly. I’m not so excited about “the Internet of things.”

MY USA TODAY COLUMN is on how David Boren and OU broke the law, and acted dishonorably, to avoid bad press.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 676.

THE MORE DOMESTIC OIL WE PRODUCE, THE BETTER FOR US AND THE WORSE FOR THE WORLD’S NASTY PETRO-STATES: Could Florida Be the Next Oil Powerhouse?

Florida may have a wealth of oil and gas buried just off its shores that, if tapped, could make the state one of America’s leading energy producers.

Geologists believe — and ongoing energy development in the central and western Gulf of Mexico strongly suggests — that there are vast oil and gas deposits just east of those areas, in the federal outer continental shelf off Florida’s West Coast, which Congress has declared off-limits to drilling until 2022.

U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management officials would oversee geologic exploration along the Atlantic coast from Delaware Bay to Central Florida and as far as 400 miles offshore.

The potential economic effects of unlocking this potentially massive resource are undeniable. One need only look to recession-proof Texas to understand how energy development can benefit a state.

Well, we certainly wouldn’t want a recession-proof economy for America. The proles might reach Texas levels of uppityness.

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!

IN LIGHT OF OBAMA’S NUCLEAR POLICIES, I think it’s time to rerun my “Duck and Cover” piece again.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN is on how David Boren and OU broke the law, and acted dishonorably, to avoid bad press. What’s sad are the ignoramuses in the comments arguing that free speech doesn’t involve saying things that might upset people.

FROM REMY: The New Hillary-Approved Email Server.

ASHE SCHOW: Five harsh realities of campus sexual assault from a feminist former judge.

Nancy Gertner’s feminist bona fides can hardly be questioned. A college friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Gertner is well known for her staunch defense of women in court.

She has won prestigious awards for her women’s advocacy, and called her memoirs In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate. A liberal in good standing, she was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts by President Clinton at the recommendation of Sens. Ted Kennedy and John Kerry.

So what made such a staunch feminist advocate think twice about the current climate revolving around sexual assault on college campuses? It happened when her law firm took the case of a young man Gertner believed to be wrongly accused of rape even though a grand jury indicted him. In the case Gertner described, the man was accused 10 months after the encounter by a woman whose story constantly changed and was contradicted by witnesses.

Factual consistency is an oppressive tool of the patriarchy. If a woman feels that she’s been raped, then she’s been raped, misogynists!

Related: Campus activist: Sometimes people need to ‘reflect’ before realizing they are victims.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: “Every nuclear power is spending lavishly to upgrade its atomic arsenal. Russia’s defence budget has grown by over 50% since 2007, and fully a third of it is devoted to nuclear weapons: twice the share of, say, France. China, long a nuclear minnow, is adding to its stocks and investing heavily in submarines and mobile missile batteries. Pakistan is amassing dozens of battlefield nukes to make up for its inferiority to India in conventional forces. North Korea is thought to be capable of adding a warhead a year to its stock of around ten, and is working on missiles that can strike the west coast of the United States. Even the Nobel peace laureate in the White House has asked Congress for almost $350 billion to undertake a decade-long programme of modernisation of America’s arsenal.”

Good thing we got rid of that warmongering cowboy Bush, whose saber-rattling led otherwise peaceful countries to militarize.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Hillary: A Monster Of Our Own. “Mrs. Clinton is at the moment looking somewhat short of clever. President Clinton not only survived his worst scandal but positively thrived off it, because his response hit his conservative tormentors in their most vulnerable spot: their reputation for being scolds and prudes, hypocritical sexual obsessives, etc. Mrs. Clinton’s response to the e-mail controversy, conversely, finds her repeatedly punching herself in her political nose, giving the impression that she is too old and out of touch to understand how e-mail works, that she is curdled, that she is the unslick half of the couple, that she does not have what it takes to do what her husband did to his rivals. She isn’t winning because she does not look like a winner to Democrats seeking a champion.”

ROLL CALL: Capitol Police Chief’s Relationship With Union Hits New Low.

Members of Congress have been raising questions about morale among Capitol Police officers in recent weeks, but the strained relationship between rank-and-file officers and the department’s top brass appears to have hit a new low.

Contract negotiations between the Capitol Police union and department management have hit a wall. Union leaders laid out three major sources of tension in a Feb. 23 letter to Chief Kim C. Dine obtained by CQ Roll Call. It stated the officers concurred with a Jan. 7 statement by Dine that, “contract negotiations are officially over.”

The department wants to change the disciplinary process by creating a matrix that breaks down different ranges of penalties, according to Capitol Police Labor Committee Chairman Jim Konczos. The union supports the matrix as a way to impose new checks and balances on the disciplinary system, but it wants to negotiate how the matrix will look.

A matrix.

RACE-BAITING IN AMERICA: Darren Wilson, the false face of racism in America: His actions were the spark that lit and still fuels the fire — even though he was exonerated.

We get race-baiting because the race-baiters — whether they’re George Wallace and Lester Maddox, or Eric Holder and Al Sharpton — get money and power from what they do. If you want better race relations, you have to change that dynamic.

VIDEO: Dem congressman anxious to talk about anything but Hillary emails.

WAIT, I THOUGHT THE USE OF SUCH MARTIAL METAPHORS WAS AN INCITEMENT TO VIOLENCE: Dem lawmaker to colleagues: Keep your ‘powder dry’ on Iran.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on Sunday suggested members of both parties in Congress hold off criticizing the Obama administration’s push for a deal over Iran’s nuclear program.

“I think it’s appalling to interfere in a negotiation like this that the commander-in-chief is engaged in,” Schiff said on “Fox News Sunday,” referring to the open letter from 47 GOP senators addressed to Iran’s leaders saying a deal would not hold after President Obama leaves office.

“I think that Democrats and Republicans, House and Senate members ought to keep their powder dry. Let’s see whether there is a deal. Let’s see what the terms of that deal are,” Schiff said.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the fourth-ranking Senate Republican, offered no indication on the same program that he regretted signing the letter.

“I think by signing that letter, we focused the attention where it should be, on the debate about … Iran with a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Obama plans to give away the store. He doesn’t want people calling attention to that. Hence the furious pushback against critics, including this absurd effort by the Christian Science Monitor’s Howard LaFranchi to compare Cotton to “Hanoi Jane.”