LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: What Your Neighborhood List-Serv Tells You About The Demise of America.

PATRIOT ACT “METADATA” PHONE COLLECTION EXPIRES JUNE 1:  The collection of cell phone “metadata”–the time/duration of calls, plus the numbers dialed (but not the content of the conversations) has been justified under section 215 of the Patriot Act, which automatically expires June 1, Unless and until Congress can agree on some legislative alterations.  President Obama is urging the Senate to reconvene from its Memorial Day recess to take up the issue again.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) staged at 10-hour filibuster over section 215 and on Saturday the Senate refused to approve a temporary extension of the program.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said he will reconvene the Senate on Sunday, May 31, for a last ditch effort at reauthorization.

REMEMBER: DON’T FIGHT THE CURRENT. Swimmer’s Death in Florida Brings New Attention to Rip Current Dangers.

IMMIGRATION INJUNCTION ALLOWED TO STAND:  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has refused (by a 2-1 vote) to stay a preliminary injunction granted by a federal trial judge that halted the Obama Administration’s implementation of its unilateral legislation executive order granting deportation amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants.  In declining to remove the injunction, the Fifth Circuit said:

Because the government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its appeal of the injunction, we deny the motion for stay.

Translated from legalese: The Obama Administration’s unilateral legislation executive action is probably illegal, so the trial judge was correct in stopping it from going into effect.  This is very good news for the rule of law.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: To Fix Higher Ed, Fire A Lot Of Administrators.

A BIG BOOK DEAL for John Scalzi.

WELL, THEY CERTAINLY MISSED THE BOAT ON EBOLA. BUT IS MORE MONEY THE ANSWER? Emergency Fund Created for World Health Agency.

ILLEGAL ALIENS AND ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE:  The Supreme Court has granted review to hear a case, Evenwel v. Abbott, brought by a group of Texas voters who challenge the apportionment of legislative districts using total population counts, rather than the total number of eligible voters.  Plaintiffs assert that voters living in districts with small numbers of illegal aliens have their votes diluted compared to voters living in districts with large numbers of illegal alines, thus violating the Equal Protection Clause and its “one person, one vote” principle.

ELECTRIC SLIDE: Review: Tesla’s new Model S P85D—double your engines, double your fun: But at $130,000 loaded, it’s hard to overlook flaws—even if the car is McLaren F1-fast.

SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING A GIRLY MAN WOULD SAY:  Why Men Shouldn’t Lift Weights.

I wondered why us guys were so conditioned to want huge muscles, even with our high school “glory days” behind us. Now, I understand that it’s more important to have a quality workout resulting in sustained energy and fitness, rather than one that focuses on repetitions and achievement-based results that diminish quickly over time.

Plus, it makes them into strong alpha males and that’s bad.

COURTS DON’T FIX “MISTAKES,” LEGISLATURES DO:  A New York Times piece designed to influence the Supreme Court in the Obamacare subsidy case, King v. Burwell, “Four Words That Imperil Health Care Law Were All a Mistake, Writers Now Say.”  How convenient–a self-serving, ex post confession by some Democrats that they didn’t read the bill, and now really, really, really hope the Supreme Court will “fix” their mistake.

YOUR FEELGOOD STORY: Sikh Man Who Removed Turban To Help Injured Boy Surprised When Friendly Strangers Return The Favor.

A VELVET FIST DICTATORSHIP:  Do they not see the irony? The New York Times published an oped over the weekend titled, “The New Dictators Rule by Velvet Fist,” penned by a couple of professors.  Their thesis:

[A] new brand of authoritarian government has evolved that is better adapted to an era of global media, economic interdependence and information technology. The “soft” dictators concentrate power, stifling opposition and eliminating checks and balances, while using hardly any violence.

Um, yeah.  Sound familiar?  Eliminating checks and balances? Anyone?  To make matters worse, the authors further elaborate on the characteristics of such “soft” dictatorships:

The new autocrats often get to power through reasonably fair elections. Mr. Chávez, for instance, won in 1998 in what international observers called one of the most transparent votes in Venezuela’s history.

Soaring approval ratings are a more cost-effective path to dominance than terror. Mr. Erdogan exploited his popularity to amend the Constitution by referendum and to pack Turkey’s Constitutional Court.

The new autocrats use propaganda, censorship and other information-based tricks to inflate their ratings and to convince citizens of their superiority over available alternatives. . . .

When their economies do well, such leaders co-opt potential critics with material rewards. In harder times, they use censorship. The new autocrats bribe media owners with advertising contracts, threaten libel suits, and encourage pro-regime investors to purchase critical publications.

They dominate the Internet by blocking access to independent websites, hiring “trolls” to flood comments pages with pro-regime spam, and paying hackers to vandalize opposition online media sites.

I could hardy contain my laughter whilst reading this.  Hmmmm… let’s see:  propaganda? Check. Censorship? Check. Co-opting potential critics with material rewards? Check. Control over media through various civil or criminal means?  Check.  As for hiring trolls to flood comments and vandalizing opposition media sites, that can all be accomplished through private groups, without the need for government fingerprints.

But hey, I’m sure that could never happen here.

THE HACKERS KNOW, BUT WE DON’T:   A screenshot from a Romanian hacker confirms that two emails sent to Hillary Clinton from Sidney Blumenthal regarding intelligence reports on Libya are “missing.”  Hmmmm… I wonder what happened to them? Nothing to see here–move along.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: To Fix Higher Ed, Fire A Lot Of Administrators.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 747.

#GREENFAIL: Electric Cars Running on Empty.

There were supposed to be one million electric vehicles (EVs) cruising America’s roads this year, but we’ve fallen well short of that 2009 goal. Today there are just 300,000 EVs in the U.S., and in March the government quietly revised downwards its EV goals for government fleets.

That nice, round target was set in the aftermath of the 2008 economic collapse. The newly inaugurated President Obama was full of hope and still promising change, and desperate auto company CEOs had been forced to beg Washington to save the auto industry with massive bailouts. Those circumstances allowed the President and his allies to set what, if we’re being kind, might be called a “stretch goal”: one million EVs by 2015. But here we are, and less than one third of the President’s 2009 target have been purchased in the past six years. By contrast, it takes Ford fewer than six months to sell as many F-150s, a single truck in its entire fleet of autos.

Consumers aren’t buying EVs, despite the generous heaping of government support such eco-friendly purchases might net them (each electric vehicle buyer gets a federal tax credit of $7,500 plus state incentives, all of which can add up to several thousand more depending on the circumstances). For its part the federal government has bought more than its fair share of electric vehicles.

It’s Potemkin villages all the way down. And, by the way, if you like electric cars for environmental reasons, you really need to support the construction of new nuclear power plants. Otherwise they’re really just fossil fuel powered cars at one remove.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT’S SLOW DEATH: George Will’s latest column explains his own opposition to the death penalty.  He elaborates:

The conservative case against capital punishment, which 32 states have, is threefold. First, the power to inflict death cloaks government with a majesty and pretense of infallibility discordant with conservatism. Second, when capital punishment is inflicted, it cannot later be corrected because of new evidence, so a capital punishment regime must be administered with extraordinary competence. It is, however, a government program. Since 1973, more than 140 people sentenced to death have been acquitted of their crimes (sometimes by DNA evidence), had the charges against them dismissed by prosecutors, or been pardoned based on evidence of innocence. For an unsparing immersion in the workings of the governmental machinery of death, read “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson, executive director and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative.

Third, administration of death sentences is so sporadic and protracted that their power to deter is attenuated. And expensive, because labyrinthine, legal protocols with which the judiciary has enveloped capital punishment are here to stay. Granted, capital punishment could deter: If overdue library books were punishable by death, none would be overdue. But many crimes for which death is reserved, including Tsarnaev’s crime of ideological premeditation, are especially difficult to deter.

While I normally agree with Will on most issues, I must disagree on this one.  The conservative case supporting capital punishment has nothing to do with the “majesty” or “infallibility” or even “competence” of government (God forfend).  Conceding that mistakes both can and will, inevitably, be made, Will wants to know how can one support the death penalty?  This is an important question, but one for which there is a response that is too often overlooked.  The best articulation of the answer comes from Clatstop County, Oregon District Attorney Joshua Marquis [full disclosure:  Josh is my brother-in-law], an elected Democrat D.A. who is one of the most prominent supporters of the death penalty:

[Often cited by death penalty opponents is a] study by Professor Samuel Gross that came out of a Northwestern Law School symposium and subsequent issue of their Journal of Criminal Law. I used Gross’ own numbers to estimate the incidence of real-life exonerations, as opposed to those in TV shows or movies. Gross cited about 390 cases from 1989 to 2003 where he and his team believed serious felony sentences were unfairly handed down against innocent defendants. . . . Gross posits there must be many more exonerations than he identified because he asserts . . . that in many cases DNA or a recantation by a key witness does not exist. So I rounded Gross’s number up to 400 and multiplied it by ten, yielding 4,000 exonerations—far more than I believe exist for the time period. I divided the 4,000 by 15 million, the number of felonies committed during the same period, yielding a “rightful” conviction rate of 99.93%. My article in the New York Times drew howls of protest, many attacking my math, pointing out that my base statistic of 15 million was all felonies.

Okay, so let’s refine the numbers down to just willful homicide and forcible rape. This is narrower than Gross’s sample and amounts to about 1.5 million. Move the decimal one point and you have a “rightful” conviction rate of 99.72%. Small consolation if you are in that .28 of one percent.

The wrongful conviction rate should be lower and prosecutors can do more than anyone in the criminal justice system to make sure that happens by being very discriminating in bringing capital cases. Pharmacists and doctors separately kill 10,000 Americans—by accident—every year, but we don’t ban prescriptions or elective surgery. We try to find out what went wrong and fix it.

Garrett and his fellow opponents of the death penalty—and then true life, and then mandatory sentencing of any sort—claim they really just want to fix the problem. But, as Justice Antonin Scalia acidly pointed out in his concurrence in Kansas v. Marsh, they aren’t interested in fixing the system, but in tearing it down. I have no doubt their beliefs are sincere and deeply held, but if we are to debate such an emotional issue we should do so with context, not ignoring the stories that don’t make the front page or are relegated to the newspaper’s “airplane pages” (B-2, C-5, etc).

States are doing all kinds of things to prevent the errors  . . . better trained and paid public defenders and prosecutors, and a true national DNA bank . . . .

I can understand how libertarians generally don’t trust the government to get things right and accordingly might be even more leery of the government killing someone. Professor Cass Sunstein proposed in “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required: The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs” that if the series of nonideological studies done in the last decade are right, then having a death penalty spares between 10 and 24 innocent victims of murder. How can we abandon indisputably innocent men, women, and children to homicide?

So there is a very small “wrongful” conviction rate, (less than one-half percent) and it seems to be getting smaller and smaller due to advances in DNA and other scientific evidence, as well as a bigger, well-heeled and experienced capital crimes defense bar.  And capital punishment does have a deterrent effect— a point even Will seems to concede, albeit reluctantly.  This deterrence saves innocent lives, and overall, more innocent lives are saved than lost due to the death penalty.  And IMHO, there is an added societal bonus:  Capital punishment serves the important societal objective of good, old fashioned retribution–the recognition that crime, particularly violent crimes capable of triggering the consideration of capital punishment, are inherently harmful to the very fabric of society.  Retribution is a justification for punishment that liberals/progressives have long since forgotten/abandoned, but conservatives and libertarians should not.  (The issue of over-criminalization is a separate issue, but I will assume no one thinks punishment for murder is an example of over-criminalization).

I am content to let the people of each state decide whether the “costs” associated with the death penalty outweigh the “benefits” society derives. Each state should be perfectly free to decide whether it wishes to continue its death penalty as a matter of state law.  But as for the continuing attempts of death penalty opponents to try to “constitutionalize” their opposition, that is another question.

As a constitutional matter, capital punishment was clearly contemplated by the Framers, as the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments state that government may not deprive individuals of “life, liberty or property” without due process of law, the necessary implication of which is that “life” may be deprived by state and federal governments, provided “due process” is provided.  And the Supreme Court itself has stated, most recently in Gregg v. Georgia, that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments does not demand abolition of the death penalty for those who are mentally competent and adults.

If the death penalty is indeed going to die a slow death, it should come from a thoughtful, democratic debate within each State, not through litigation aimed at getting unelected federal judges to impose a “one size fits all” constitutional “solution” on this controversial topic.

GOVERNMENT IS JUST A WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER: Billions of Dollars ‘Making Mockery’ of Federal Law and Taxpayers at VA. “A federal whistleblower has revealed that the Veterans Health Administration may have improperly spent up to $5 billion in improper and unauthorized procurement expenditures over each of the last five years and lawmakers are demanding an explanation.” Until people routinely go to jail — or hell, even just lose their jobs — for this kind of thing, it will keep going on. There’s your explanation.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: To Fix Higher Ed, Fire A Lot Of Administrators.

MOE LANE: The Fall Of Mozilla, Continued.

ASHE SCHOW: Memorializing Mattress Girl.

Now that her 15 minutes of fame are up, what is to become of “Mattress Girl,” the Columbia University student who became famous after accusing a man of rape?

Many have wondered whether she will be able to find work after her “performance” of carrying her mattress around campus is over. I have no doubt she will, even if she was a visual arts major.

Emma Sulkowicz’s parents were prominent New York psychiatrists, she attended the best schools growing up and gained worldwide attention in school. How could she not find a job?

She’s already been speaking with sexual assault awareness groups, even appearing in the film “The Hunting Ground.” Her degree is probably superfluous at this point.

Perhaps she’ll continue working with victim’s advocacy groups or become a professor at a university. Maybe she’ll make a living through art. Maybe she’ll even be able to live off of selling the mattress project.

It hardly matters — she’ll always be a hero to those who think we should believe every accusation of rape, even when the evidence suggests otherwise.

The feminist lynch mobs, in other words.