CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Secret Service officials allowed to participate in probe of leak by agency. “Legal experts and former government investigators said the approach threatens the integrity of the investigation of who at the Secret Service uncovered and leaked material showing that Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) — chairman of a House committee overseeing the agency — had once been rejected for a job as an agent. Chaffetz has been an outspoken critic of the Secret Service, which has been rocked recently by high-profile security breaches. Secret Service staff members — inspectors from the agency’s internal affairs office who examine possible misconduct among employees — sat in on interviews with some of the more than 40 agents and officers questioned about the unauthorized disclosures, the people said. In some cases, the Secret Service inspectors contacted witnesses directly and questioned them along with investigators from the DHS Inspector General’s Office headed by Roth, who is responsible for examining alleged wrongdoing across the breadth of Homeland Security. . . . The service’s involvement in investigating itself is problematic, experts say, because top officials at the agency had an incentive to embarrass Chaffetz. The participation of the service’s inspectors also could deter internal whistleblowers from coming forward with additional allegations of misconduct for fear of retribution by their bosses, the experts said.”

Ya think?

DONALD, MARCO, JEB & BEN PRESENT ‘THE TAXMAN:’ Ya say you want a revolution? As Roger Simon notes, Donald, Marco, Jeb and Ben all want you to see their plans.

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY HAS BECOME A RACKET — AND A DANGEROUS ONE, notes the London Telegraph:

It allows companies to parade their virtue, and look good, while internal standards are allowed to slip. In fact, the social responsibility of companies is very simple – to make good products, to honour their contracts and to pay their staff and suppliers on time. Everything else is just a smokescreen.

It remains to be seen what happens to VW, and whether it can recover from the emissions scandal. The early signs are hardly promising. It took several days for the chief executive to be removed, and even then he was replaced by an insider – there was little sign the company had worked out it needed a clean sweep of its management. In the wake of that, there has been plenty of discussion about whether it signals the death of Germany Inc, or indeed the death of diesel. We will see. One thing it should certainly signal the death of, however, is the corporate social responsibility movement.

Volkswagen was as progressive, inclusive and caring as any multi-national is meant to be these days.

Live by the Gleichschaltung, die by it as well.

RUNNING OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Illinois Lottery Can’t Pay Off Big Winners But It Is Still Selling Tickets. Quoth one unpaid winner: “If I was the one selling raffle tickets and I didn’t pay, I would be sued or in jail or both.” Laws are for the little people.

ASHE SCHOW: Court ruling shows limits of campus sexual harassment expulsions.

A three-judge panel on the Kansas Court of Appeals ruled that a university couldn’t expel a student based on disparaging comments the student made about his ex-girlfriend on the social media platform Twitter.

The student, Navid Yeasin, had been expelled for allegedly violating the University of Kansas’ sexual harassment rules because he sent tweets that called his ex-girlfriend a “psycho” and a “b—-,” among other things. The appeals judges ruled on Friday that while the tweets were “puerile and sexually harassing,” in their opinion, the school couldn’t expel Yeasin because the communications didn’t fall under their jurisdiction.

The appeals court ruled that the school could not expel the student for comments made off-campus (the school provided no evidence that the tweets were sent on campus) or not in connection with any university activity. The school’s code of conduct doesn’t cover comments made in tweets and other social media platforms.

To be sure, this is a narrow ruling, as schools across the country are repeatedly adjudicating cases of alleged sexual assault that occur off-campus and are unconnected to any school activity. Kansas’ code of conduct stated at the time (it has since been updated): “The university may not institute disciplinary proceedings unless the alleged violation(s) giving rise to the disciplinary action occurs on university premises or at university-sponsored or supervised events, or as otherwise required by federal, state or local law.”

The school argued that the mention of “federal law” included Title IX, the anti-discrimination law that was reinterpreted in 2011 to require schools to adjudicate felony sexual assault outside the criminal justice system. The judges noted in their ruling, however, that the code of conduct provisions that led to Yeasin’s expulsion didn’t refer to federal law, only on-campus conduct.

“It seems obvious that the only environment the university can control is on campus or at university-sponsored or supervised events,” the judges wrote. “After all, the university is not an agency of law enforcement, but is rather an institution of learning.”

This debacle may be drawing to an end. At least, there are a few glimmers of good sense. And, by the way, Title IX doesn’t require campuses to adjudicate sexual harassment. That’s just the rather absurd position of the Department of Education.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Moody’s Predicts College Closures To Triple By 2017.

Who could have seen this coming?

HOWARD KURTZ: WASHINGTON POST’S TAKE ON CARLY FIORINA A ‘MISFIRE:’

Shot:

Fox News’s media reporter Howard Kurtz has weighed in on a fact-check published last week by the Washington Post and declared it a “misfire.”

The fact-check in queston was about Carly Fiorina’s work history. Fiorina has claimed several times she went from secretary to CEO, shorthand for her rise in the business world. In their fact-check last week, the Post awarded “Three Pinocchios” to that claim, saying it was “bogus.” Kurtz looks at the same facts and says the Post’s fact-check deserves “Four Pinocchios.”

Chaser: “‘Doctor, heal thyself’: WaPo’s Chris Cillizza blames distrust in media on WHAT?”

IMMIGRATION: A small town in Slovakia held a vote on accepting refugees; 97 percent said no. “’We’re not haters,’ said Zoltan Jakus, one of the organizers of the vote. ‘But I think this will end badly.’ . . . The people of Gabcikovo say they are not cold-hearted or racist, but they are clearly worried, and many of them are asking the same questions as other Europeans who feel uneasy about the rising numbers of war refugees and economic migrants.”

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES: It’s Not Your Imagination, Single Women: There Literally Aren’t Enough Men Out There.

There simply aren’t enough college-educated men to go around. For every four college-educated women in my generation, there are three college-educated men. The result? What Birger calls a “musical chairs” of the heart: As the men pair off with partners, unpartnered straight women are left with fewer and fewer options—and millions of them are eventually left with no options at all.

Huh. Why would men be avoiding college? I mean, really, why?

ROSS DOUTHAT: Carly Fiorina, Abortion, And Lies:

If the scene in question literally did not exist, which is what the language of her critics consistently suggests — if Fiorina had conjured up a vision of an intact fetus with a working heart and twitching limbs having its brains harvested out of her hyperactive pro-life imagination — well, that would merit liberal shock and outrage. But she didn’t conjure or invent it: It’s very easy to figure out what scene she’s talking about, and the discrepancies between what’s in the documentary and her description aren’t wild or incredible or weird. There’s no outright fabrication here, in other words, and what Lithwick calls “the big lie about the kicking fetus and the brain harvesting” is a roughly-accurate summary of what the film actually shows. (A twitching, dying fetus? Check. A firsthand description of harvesting a brain from an intact fetus? Check again.)

So for Fiorina to actually be proven as wildly misleading and fundamentally dishonest as her critics keep suggesting, they would need to marshal evidence beyond just a parsing of her words, and demonstrate that the thing she’s describing is an inaccurate depiction of what happens inside abortion clinics that double as tissue procurement centers.

Well, they can’t do that — or, more likely, they don’t want to know whether it’s true or not and so must simply assume it’s false. Meanwhile, the comments are exactly what you’d expect.

FIORINA POPS THE LIBERAL BUBBLE: “It has been impossible to miss the shift in tone among liberals when criticizing Carly Fiorina. The timbre of their opposition to the surging Republican candidate has evolved from dismissive and aggravated disappointment to disproportionately seething rage.  Among liberals, Fiorina has inspired passionate resentment, and it isn’t hard to see why. She has rather deftly infiltrated the left’s comforting and previously impenetrable habitat of fictions, and they vehemently resent the contamination of the fragile artificial environment they have constructed for themselves,” Noah Rothman writes at Commentary:

For two weeks, Fiorina has been made to answer for what the political press has universally dubbed not merely the conflation of B-roll footage with actual events – an honest and deserved critique of her characterization of the Planned Parenthood videos – but a willful misrepresentation of the specifics. There is a reason for this: the image of the moving, likely viable fetus out of the womb – an infant born alive during a failed abortion attempt – is so grossly disturbing that it has the potential to move the cultural needle. Those images present an existential threat to those who would advocate for unrestricted access to elective abortion. The videos themselves cannot be discredited in the absence of an investigation, but the Republican candidate who has become their chief evangelist can be. In that way, the liberal activist and journalistic classes can perhaps vicariously delegitimize the bombshell Planned Parenthood videos.

“This is about the character of our nation,” Fiorina warned from the debate stage. To her credit, she has refused to back down even amid a withering assault on her credibility from the left. The intellectual self-deception that they have summoned in order to contend that Fiorina made her claims from whole cloth is borne more out of fear than frustration. Their bubble has been popped.

While the now-interlocked stories of Fiorina’s presidential bid and her impact on Planned Parenthood are still very much playing out in real-time, at the moment, it reminds of the way Tom Wolfe described the fury to which the left responded to the arrival of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to America in his 1976 article “The Intelligent Co-Ed’s Guide to America:”

The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, however, was a wholly unexpected blow. No one was ready for the obscene horror and grotesque scale of what Solzhenitsyn called “Our Sewage Disposal System”—in which tens of millions were shipped in boxcars to con­centration camps all over the country, in which tens of millions died, in which entire races and national groups were liquidated, insofar as they had existed in the Soviet Union. Moreover, said Solzhenitsyn, the system had not begun with Stalin but with Lenin, who had im­mediately exterminated non-Bolshevik opponents of the old regime and especially the student factions. It was impossible any longer to distinguish the Communist liquidation apparatus from the Nazi.

Yet Solzhenitsyn went still further. He said that not only Stalinism, not only Leninism, not only Communism — but socialism itself led to the concentration camps; and not only socialism, but Marxism; and not only Marxism but any ideology that sought to reorganize morality on an a priori basis. Sadder still, it was impossible to say that Soviet socialism was not “real socialism.” On the contrary — it was socialism done by experts!

Intellectuals in Europe and America were willing to forgive Solzhe­nitsyn a great deal. After all, he had been born and raised in the Soviet Union as a Marxist, he had fought in combat for his country, he was a great novelist, he had been in the camps for eight years, he had suf­fered. But for his insistence that the isms themselves led to the death camps — for this he was not likely to be forgiven soon. And in fact the campaign of antisepsis began soon after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. (“He suffered too much — he’s crazy.” “He’s a Christian zealot with a Christ complex.” “He’s an agrarian reaction­ary.” “He’s an egotist and a publicity junkie.”)

Solzhenitsyn’s tour of the United States in 1975 was like an enormous funeral procession that no one wanted to see. The White House wanted no part of him. The New York Times sought to bury his two major’ speeches, and only the moral pressure of a lone Times writer, Hilton, Kramer, brought them any appreciable coverage at all. The major tele­vision networks declined to run the Solzhenitsyn interview that created such a stir in England earlier this year (it ran on some of the educa­tional channels).

And the literary world in general ignored him completely. In the huge unseen coffin that Solzhenitsyn towed behind him were not only the souls of the zeks who died in the Archipelago. No, the heartless bastard had also chucked in one of the last great visions: the intellec­tual as the Stainless Steel Socialist glistening against the bone heap of capitalism in its final, brutal, fascist phase. There was a bone heap, all right, and it was grisly beyond belief, but socialism, had created it.

Fiorina has exposed yet another socialist bone heap – naturally the left wishes nothing more than to consign her to it as well.

HE’S ANGLING FOR A LOVE NEST IN THE HAY-ADAMS HOTEL INSTEAD: Hillary Clinton not sure if Bill Clinton would get West Wing office.

Hillary Clinton isn’t sure if former President Bill Clinton would have an office in the West Wing if she is elected president.

“He’s a pretty busy guy, I don’t know anything like that,” Hillary Clinton said after MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked her what role Bill Clinton might play on her team.

“I’m not counting my chickens before they hatch. I just want to be sure that we get the chance to earn the votes of the American people and to win the White House back,” Hillary Clinton said in response to a question about Bill Clinton having a West Wing office.

In the interview airing on MSNBC’s “MTP Daily,” Clinton lauded her husband as a “great advisor” who “knows as much about the economy and how to get jobs created and how to help people see their incomes rise as anybody that I could talk to.”

But she wouldn’t elaborate on the role that the former president would have in her potential administration.

Internship director.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: “JOHN BOEHNER VS. THE ‘CRAZIES’: SHOULD REPUBLICAN PARTY LET TEA PARTY WIN?”

To arch-conservatives, however, Senator Goldwater’s campaign laid the groundwork for America’s conservative revolution. His doctrine of low taxes and limited government became bedrock ideals for Ronald Reagan, who campaigned for Goldwater before becoming governor of California. The conservative Heritage Foundation calls Goldwater “the most consequential loser in American politics.”

Today, much remains to play out, and the establishment almost always has the last word. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R) of California, a Boehner protégé, is a front-runner for the speaker’s post. And the presidential election, in many ways, has barely even started.

Yet even if the establishment reestablishes some measure of control, does the Republican Party need a Goldwater moment?

With Mr. Boehner’s departure, the tea party has outlasted a man of legendary political patience.* In the presidential race, they have taken a process that the Republican Party designed specifically to help establishment candidates and emphatically done the opposite.

In other words, there is little evidence to suggest the Republican populist rebellion is going away, though seismic changes in the country since 1964 – partly as a result of the conservative revolution – mean that the underlying situation is in many ways dramatically different.

On its face, today’s Republican insurgency echoes the conservative groundswell for Goldwater in 1964. The Atlantic’s Matthew Dallek writes that “in the late 1950s and early 1960s conservatives were widely dismissed as ‘kooks’ and ‘crackpots’ with no hope of winning political power.” Today, the conservative base is looked upon even by the Republican Party as “crazies,” said Michael Needham of Heritage Action Sunday. Mr. Boehner, only somewhat more charitably, called them “false prophets.”

“Absolutely, they’re unrealistic!” he told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

So just to confirm, the editors Christian Science Monitor who signed off on this article by Mark Sappenfield, one of their staff writers, believe that those Americans who want the government to follow the Constitution, be fiscally responsible,  and generally leave them alone — are “arch-conservatives” (are there any “arch-leftists” in the CSM’s worldview?) “kooks,” “crackpots,” and “crazies.”

If you’re a subscriber to the CSM, next time the re-subscription offer arrives, at least you know what the magazine thinks of you. And this is yet another reminder, that as Glenn noted in December of 2012, instead of throwing millions of dollars of advertising money into a furnace during the election year, if conservative and libertarian bigwigs really want to influence the culture, they need to be investing in magazines and TV channels that exist outside of the right-wing echo chamber.

* Conversely, this article also speaks volumes about Boehner’s ineffectiveness as a leader when he’s being so effusively praised by the other side of the aisle.

IT’S LIKE THAT WAS THE GOAL: Rape Numbers Rise Along With FBI’s ‘More Inclusive Definition’ of Rape.

ANNALS OF SMART DIPLOMACY: After Four Years of Failure in Syria, Obama Looks to Russia and Iran for Help.

THINK HOW MANY MORE THINGS SHE COULD WRECK: How Hillary wrecked the State Department’s digital information system.

IS FAUXAHONTAS RUNNING?  Behold, the young and edgy face of the left.  And their fiery speaker against injustice. Elizabeth Warren just gave the speech that Black Lives Matter activists have been waiting for.

SCHADENFREUDE: Follow Up: Peeling the Onion of Socialism.

I TRY NOT TO LINK MY BLOG: But I had a guest post about Mars that was fascinating.

THEY STILL GET CREDIT FOR GETTING THEIR MESSAGE OUT: When the turnout they achieve is not what they expected.  OTOH for conservatives, there is no turnout big enough to get any credit.

SOME HOPE FOR A CHANGE: Larry Correia’s election predictions.

GOT A WEEK AND SEVERAL NOTEBOOKS: What’s Wrong With Common Core?

YES.  NEXT QUESTION: Do We Suffer From Adventure Deficit Disorder?

I’LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT: Some good education news for a change.

THE STEM-WORKER SHORTAGE turns out to be bogus. “Like other supposed labor shortages, if there were a real shortage, wages would be expected to grow.”