TOM MAGUIRE: Obama And Saddam: No Foolish Consistency Here. “So getting rid of an evil dictator with no credible plan to replace him was not so great an idea in Libya. Nor was it a great idea in Iraq, but it would be just the thing to do in Syria. An arguable difference was that Saddam was not actively quashing a rebellion at the moment in time we invaded – that was earlier, after which we imposed no-fly zones over parts of the country, something Obama refuses to do in the course of opposing Assad. Still, if our friends on the left are only willing to support military action under their ‘responsibility to protect’ concept, they might want to assess the impact of providing the rebels we back with nothing more than pretty speeches support, creative hashtags and ineffectual handwringing. Encouraging rebels to fight when they lack the means to win is not doing them a favor.”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT SEXUAL HARASSMENT! Deutsche Bank Executive Wrongly Fired on `False’ Sex Complaints.

A former Deutsche Bank AG executive fired when female colleagues accused him of sexual harassment won a discrimination lawsuit after London judges ruled the women had lied, exaggerated and used lewd language themselves.

Konrad Joy, who was chief operating officer in the global risk department, reached a settlement with the bank after the London Employment Tribunal ruled in his favor. The decision, issued in December and only released this week, criticized the bank’s handling of the complaints.

Many of the accusations were “simply accepted at face value, not investigated further,” the judges said, and the bank’s investigation had been “very poor.”

Who do they think they are, the University of Virginia?

THE HIGH COST OF HEARING LOSS: “Eventually, I stopped going to social gatherings. Even driving, I couldn’t hear what my daughter was saying in the back seat. I live in the country, and I couldn’t hear the birds singing.”

Plus: “One person in three older than 60 has life-diminishing hearing loss, but most older adults wait five to 15 years before they seek help, according to a 2012 report in Healthy Hearing magazine. And the longer the delay, the more one misses of life and the harder it can be to adjust to hearing aids.”

DOES THIS MEAN HE’S NO LONGER PAYING WOMEN WHO WORK AT THE WHITE HOUSE LESS THAN HE PAYS MEN? Obama Tackles Poverty and Sexism in U.N. Speech.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN: “The revolutionaries place themselves in the pedigree of Americans who accept risk because of the ideas at stake. They aren’t sunshine patriots. They love America and fear for it in ways that the comfortable class in Washington doesn’t seem to appreciate.  All of this might sound silly to some, but go ask John Boehner what he’ll be doing next.”

Read the whole thing.

JEFF SABATINI: Save The Car From The Crossover.

PILLOW TALK: In the Future, How Will We Talk to Our Technology?

Reminder: Don’t date robots!

AT TAXPROF, a roundup on Donald Trump’s tax-reform plan.

STILL WAITING FOR MOLECULAR COMPUTERS.

SUPPORT FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS BY SIGNING ON TO THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO STATEMENT – Today, FIRE is launching a national campaign asking colleges and universities to adopt the free speech statement produced by the Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago earlier this year. The announcement comes after the Sunday Washington Post published an op-ed by FIRE’s Will Creeley and Geoffrey Stone, the current Dean of the University of Chicago Law School and one of the authors of the statement, urging universities to protect academic freedom and free speech:

Backed by a strong commitment to freedom of expression and academic freedom, faculty could challenge one another, their students and the public to consider new possibilities, without fear of reprisal. Students would no longer face punishment for exercising their right to speak out freely about the issues most important to them. Instead of learning that voicing one’s opinions invites silencing, students would be taught that spirited debate is a vital necessity for the advancement of knowledge. And they would be taught that the proper response to ideas they oppose is not censorship, but argument on the merits. That, after all, is what a university is for.

The Chicago statement guarantees “all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn,” and makes clear that “it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.”

If you want your alma mater to endorse the free speech statement, I encourage you to sign FIRE’s pledge and write to your alma maters or local institutions. And make sure to check out Geoffrey Stone and Will Creeley’s Sunday Washington Post op-ed.

WELL, THE WORLD MAY BE LURCHING TOWARD ARMAGEDDON, but at least we’re in a “golden age” of opera performances. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.

EASY DISASTER PREP: “The waterBOB is a water containment system that holds up to 100 gallons of fresh drinking water in virtually any bathtub in the event of an emergency.”

YUGOSLAVIA’S WARNING TO AMERICA: “Rewriting history, to show certain ethnic groups as victims and others as perpetrators of race-based crimes, took its toll, since Yugoslavs knew this was too simple, and was being used as a political weapon by the authorities. Aggressive ‘affirmative action’ in education and employment — Belgrade termed it the ‘ethnic key’ — was another perennial sore-spot for many citizens, since ethnic status and ties often mattered more than competence. Needless to add, this hardly helped the economy either. Perhaps worst of all, by preventing any honest discussion of ethnic matters, the Communists had a perverse knack of making each of Yugoslavia’s many ethnic groups feel that it was uniquely aggrieved.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Go To Mars And Back On One Tank Of Fuel. This is an ion drive. It’s just a (reportedly) significantly more efficient ion drive. High specific impulse means higher efficiency, but ion drives have low thrust.

WE USED TO HAVE A MUCH QUICKER DEVELOPMENT CYCLE: America’s Next Tanker Is Finally Going to Fly: The sooner the better—the KC-46 is replacing a 60-year-old plane.

HILLARY CLINTON IS THE KINDEST, BRAVEST, WARMEST, MOST WONDERFUL HUMAN BEING I’VE EVER KNOWN IN MY LIFE.

Update: Great minds think alike!

NASA: There Is Water Flowing On Mars As We Speak. “In an article published in Nature Geoscience, a team lead by Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology confirms that seasonal flows in mountainous regions of the planet correspond with the presence of briny water. The seasonal flows were first noticed in 2010, with water the strongest suspect. Spectral observations of season data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate the presence of hydrated salts on the surface, or water mixing with a thick brine of salts.”

Related: Why I Hope There’s No Life On Mars.

THE WAR ON COLLEGE MEN: Columnist questions college ‘shadow’ courts. “The judicial system requires proof. The shadow college system embraces mere accusation.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 872.

THE MIDDLE CLASS SQUEEZE:

Go back, for a moment, nearly 30 years. In March 1987, Margaret Thatcher visited Mikhail Gorbachev, the reforming leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in Moscow. Sitting in the Kremlin, the two argued for hours. At one point, Mr. Gorbachev accused Mrs. Thatcher of leading the party of the “haves” and of fooling the people about who really controlled the levers of power. The Iron Lady had an answer: “I explained,” she wrote in her memoirs, “that what I was trying to do was create a society of ‘haves,’ not a class of them.”

In the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, those words carried conviction. There was plenty of argument, of course, about whether the means they chose were the best and about the fate of those who got left behind. But even critics reluctantly had to agree about which way history was heading: The society of “haves” in the West was growing; state socialism was imploding.

Most of the rest of the world was hoping to follow the West’s example. Two and a half years later, the Berlin Wall fell. Almost all the newly emerging ex-Communist regimes sought market freedoms for their people. Back home in the Anglosphere, the spread of ownership—of stocks and homes—and the expansion of economic and personal opportunity were the dominant themes of the age. As Mrs. Thatcher bustled around Whitehall urging on her program of popular capitalism, she used to shout: “Every earner an owner!”

In 2015, it is difficult to imagine a version of that Thatcher/Gorbachev conversation being replicated between any Western leader and the hostile and suspicious Vladimir Putin. Neither side seems to have an intelligible ideology. Besides, the confidence is not there anymore. . . .

When things go backward in nations accustomed to middle-class stability, people start to ask questions. What is the use of capitalism if its rewards go to the few and its risks are dumped on the many? The rights of property do not seem so enticing if the value of what you own collapses or if that property is trapped by debt. What is so great about globalization if it means that the products and services you offer are undercut by foreign competition and that millions of new people can come to your country, take your jobs and enjoy your welfare benefits?

Capitalism has been substantially replaced by cronyism, and the results have been exactly what you’d expect.

Related: Only Trump understands how angry the average American is. “The average American feels that the country has a sucking chest wound and everybody but Dr. Trump is telling him to treat it with a couple of aspirin.”

Also: How economic gloom is shaping the White House race. “In retrospect, the rise of ‘Feel the Bern’ and ‘Make America Great Again’ shouldn’t be all that surprising. Voters haven’t felt optimistic about the direction of the country for at least seven years, an unprecedented streak for this telltale indicator of American public opinion.”

Huh. What happened seven years ago that could account for America’s long losing streak?

KEN CUCCINELLI: “Yes, Hillary Clinton Broke the Law.”

Since there has been much evasion and obfuscation about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email use, it seems appropriate to step back and simply review what we know in light of the law. It’s also instructive to compare Clinton’s situation to arguably the most famous case of our time related to the improper handling of classified materials, namely, the case of Gen. David Petraeus.

Instead of turning his journals — so-called “black books” — over to the Defense Department or CIA when he left either of those organizations, Petraeus kept them at his home — an unsecure location — and provided them to his paramour/biographer, Paula Broadwell, at another private residence. . . . On April 23, Petraeus pled guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or materials under 18 USC §1924. Many in the intelligence community were outraged at the perceived “slap on the wrist” he received, at a time when the Justice Department was seeking very strong penalties against lesser officials for leaks to the media.

According to the law, there are five elements that must be met for a violation of the statute, and they can all be found in section (a) of the statute: “(1) Whoever, being an officer, employee, contractor, or consultant of the United States, and, (2) by virtue of his office, employment, position, or contract, becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, (3) knowingly removes such documents or materials (4) without authority and (5) with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location [shall be guilty of this offense].” . . .

While it’s possible for a private residence to be an “authorized” location, and it’s also possible for non-government servers and networks to be “authorized” to house and transfer classified materials, there are specific and stringent requirements to achieve such status. Simply being secretary of state didn’t allow Clinton to authorize herself to deviate from the requirements of retaining and transmitting classified documents, materials and information.

There is no known evidence that her arrangement to use the private email server in her home was undertaken with proper authority. . . The intent required is only to undertake the action, i.e., to retain the classified documents and materials in the unauthorized fashion addressed in this statute. That’s it.

But of course laws are for the little people, or at least (in the case of Petraeus), people whom the Obama Administration finds inconvenient or threatening.

THE EMPATHY MODULE IS A KNOWN ISSUE THAT WILL BE PATCHED IN THE NEXT UPGRADE CYCLE: Hillary Clinton Shows Zero Emotion as Mother Tearfully Recounts Son’s Suicide.