A TALE OF TWO DEAD WHITE MALES. Woodrow Wilson vs. John C. Calhoun. “Unlike the Yale petition, the Princeton campaign against Wilson has gained little traction and has received no national media attention. Why? The answer surely has something to do with the fact that Wilson, the founder of the modern Democratic Party, is a progressive icon, while Calhoun is reviled as a proto-conservative.”

THE PERENNIAL QUESTION: “She said, ‘If he’s a drug dealer, why don’t I have better shoes?’”

TO BE FAIR, WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO DO THAT? If we don’t get Joe Biden, there won’t be one candidate who’s running on Barack Obama’s record.

JOE PAPPALARDO: Confessions of a Private Space Rocket Engineer. “It’s a hell of a time to be working as a young space engineer in the United States. Back in the day—and by that we mean less than 10 years ago—engineers had no options but to work inside massive aerospace firms, toiling away on small minutiae of aerospace projects that may never make it past the drawing board. And for most of their careers, they’d remain far away from any hardware that actually flew. But these days there are options—private space companies working on a plethora of spacecraft and launch vehicles.”

OUCH: O’Malley gets 4 percent support from home state.

HILLARY CLINTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: A New Way to Fight Aging in the Brain.

DAVE KOPEL: Unarmed Jews defeat mass murder: Revolts at the extermination camps. “Sometimes the only way to stop mass killers is to fight. That was the strategy attempted by the Jewish prisoners on October 14, 1943, at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland.”

I’m also reminded of the surprisingly-good miniseries Uprising, based on the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt. Here’s a review that Kopel and I wrote back when it came out. And here are some related thoughts of mine from a while back.

THESE TIMES CALL FOR A REALLY STUPID, FUTILE GESTURE. And he’s just the guy who can do it. “Today I went to my local police station and asked for them to take my guns and have them destroyed. . . . Last week, I sat in a hotel room and watched the President talk about the latest mass shooting and how they had become routine and the concern that nothing would change. I started to shrug it off and pretend in my mind that there was nothing I could do. But the idea that gun culture doesn’t bear some responsibility for these killings didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t want to be a part of gun culture anymore.”

Honestly, I’m happy to see anyone so susceptible to demagoguery disarmed.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Why the Democratic Party is squelching Larry Lessig’s message.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 886.

BRAVE SIR BARACK RAN AWAY: Has the White House Given Up on Confronting Russia?

On Friday, the Obama Administration officially announced the end of its spectacularly unsuccessful $500 million plan to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels. . . .

This latest decision is the most obvious manifestation of what Obama Administration officials have been telling the press for the past few days: the plan for Syria, in light of Russia’s intervention, is to do nothing to escalate the situation. There are no plans to send anti-aircraft weapons to moderate rebels being hit by Russian air strikes, for example. Eli Lake and Josh Rogin write that some White House advisors are even encouraging the President “to give up on toppling the Syrian regime.”

Administration officials, frustrated by years of their own inability to decisively solve the Syrian crisis, appear confident that the Russians will in due time get bogged down as well. It doesn’t help advocates of confronting Russia, of course, that the Europeans prefer “a more practical relationship,” as European Commissioner Jean-Claude Juncker said yesterday. Last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande handed Putin a not-insignificant win by agreeing to maintain the status quo in Ukraine. There is now some real doubt about whether the U.S.-led sanctions regime will hold next year.

Obama says he’s taking the long view.

I think in this context, “the long view” means “until after January 20, 2017.”

CHAMBER OF COMMERCE TO TARGET TEA PARTY CONSERVATIVES:

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace said that big-business groups are ready to target House Freedom Caucus members if they don’t “play ball” with the GOP establishment and support Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)’s (R-WI) potential candidacy for House Speaker.

Wallace said that he has been told that “there’s a lot of pressure being put on by the establishment and business groups, saying that some of those Freedom Caucus members, if you’re not going to play ball and you’re not going to get involved, you’re going to get a primary opponent.”

The Chamber of Commerce has reportedly budgeted $100 million to destroy the Tea Party this election cycle and news of the chamber’s plans came not-so-coincidentally days after House Speaker Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) announced that he would be resigning from Congress.As Roll Call noted, the chamber’s “top targets in 2016 will be right-wing, tea party candidates” and its ultimate goal is to reportedly win back “the soul of the Republican Party” for the GOP establishment establishment by helping elect more moderate candidates “in contested primaries to strengthen their hand during policy debates on the Hill.”

So apparently the Chamber and GOP establishment have come to the conclusion that continued conflict, not cooperation, with constitutional conservatives is the best path forward. And they wonder why the tea party is distrustful and angry?

RELATED: Freedom Caucus signals it could support Ryan for Speaker.

“Paul Ryan is a good man. He’s a great communicator, the kind of messenger I think our party needs,” Freedom Caucus Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said on “Fox News Sunday.” ”And certainly, if he gets in the race, I think our group would look favorably on him.” . . .

One Republican close to Ryan said that the only scenario in which Ryan might end up as speaker is if he were to be selected by unanimous acclamation, not subject to bargaining with the Freedom Caucus. This Republican demanded anonymity to discuss private considerations.

Somehow I think an attitude of “I will accept the Speakership, but only if you unanimously support me and accept that I will not bargain with you” isn’t exactly the right attitude to “unite” the House GOP.  

UPDATE: Fixed broken link (at intro).

DONALD TRUMP AND THE DECLINE OF AMERICA’S MORAL ECOLOGY, as explored by Paul Mirengoff of Power Line, who writes:

Peter Wehner writes about the “cultural and moral context that allows someone like [Donald] Trump – narcissistic, crude, obsessed with wealth and fame, and who has never felt the need to ask God for forgiveness* – to emerge.” Pete believes that “it is hardly a coincidence that Donald Trump shot to the top of the polls in a nation that celebrates the Kardashians.”

I agree.

Pete ties his discussion of the cultural and moral context that fuels Trump’s campaign to David Brooks’ recent book, The Road to Character. According to Brooks:

Each society creates its own moral ecology. A moral ecology is a set of norms, assumptions, beliefs and habits of behavior and an institutionalized set of moral demands that emerge organically. Our moral ecology encourages us to be a certain sort of person.

Over the past several decades we have built a moral ecology around the Big Me, around the belief in a golden figure inside. This has led to a rise in narcissism and self-aggrandizement.

And the rise of toadying establishment stenographers who believe that some men are destined for the White House based upon the sharpness of their trouser creases.

In other words, America’s moral ecology didn’t collapse overnight with the arrival of The Donald to the campaign trail earlier this year:

* But to the best of our knowledge, never prayed in a church led by a pastor shouting “God damn America.“

STACY MCCAIN: Moving the Goalposts: What Feminist ‘Rape Culture’ Discourse Is About. “American women are now less at risk of rape than at any time in the past 40 years, and the emergence of a frantic hysteria about ‘rape culture’ on college campuses therefore seems contradictory — unless you understand how feminist theory ‘problematizes’ heterosexuality. . . . What Filipovic describes as feminist ‘disenchantment with the “No means no” framework’ amounts to an admission that the recent rhetorical fury about ‘rape culture’ is actually an attempt to move the goalposts, in such a way as to criminalize normal male sexual behavior. The confusion created by so-called ‘affirmative consent’ policies (also known as ‘yes means yes’) is understandable because most people would be shocked senseless if they stopped to consider what it actually means. . . . Filipovic’s suggestion of ‘a different social model’ as the basis for a legal standard where men are deemed guilty of rape if a woman later says did not consent ‘enthusiastically’ raises the question of how such a standard could be enforced. Preventing rape is a laudable goal, but that’s not Filipovic’s goal. Her goal is to make men responsible for women’s post-coital regret.”

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Black Americans Would Have Been Better Off Renting Than Buying: Since the start of the century, the net worth of African Americans would have increased more without a mortgage.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Why the Democratic Party is squelching Larry Lessig’s message.

THOU SHALT NOT! A Liberal’s Ten Commandments, as brought down from Mount Obama by Victor Davis Hanson.

WEBB HAS KEPT AN AWFULLY LOW PROFILE UP TO NOW: The wild card at the Democratic debate could be the guy no one’s talking about. “In an atmosphere where establishment politicians are despised on both sides of the aisle, Webb’s genuine rebelliousness could be an asset. Yet voters also want to be courted, and Webb appears to have done little wooing in the early states.”

As far as I can tell, he hasn’t done much, period. Which is kind of weird.

THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS IS JUST A NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Europeans struggle as migrant crush shuts down their train system.

A TRANSNATIONAL CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: EFF: The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared.

If you skim the chapter without knowing what you’re looking for, it may come across as being quite balanced, including references to the need for IP rules to further the “mutual advantage of producers and users” (QQ.A.X), to “facilitate the diffusion of information” (QQ.A.Z), and recognizing the “importance of a rich and accessible public domain” (QQ.B.x). But that’s how it’s meant to look, and taking this at face value would be a big mistake.

If you dig deeper, you’ll notice that all of the provisions that recognize the rights of the public are non-binding, whereas almost everything that benefits rightsholders is binding. That paragraph on the public domain, for example, used to be much stronger in the first leaked draft, with specific obligations to identify, preserve and promote access to public domain material. All of that has now been lost in favor of a feeble, feel-good platitude that imposes no concrete obligations on the TPP parties whatsoever.

Another, and perhaps the most egregious example of this bias against users is the important provision on limitations and exceptions to copyright (QQ.G.17). In a pitifully ineffectual nod towards users, it suggests that parties “endeavor to achieve an appropriate balance in its copyright and related rights system,” but imposes no hard obligations for them to do so, nor even offers U.S.-style fair use as a template that they might follow. The fact that even big tech was ultimately unable to move the USTR on this issue speaks volumes about how utterly captured by Hollywood the agency is.

If Republicans were smart, they’d make an issue of this. Also: Repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts!

BERNIE SANDERS, GUN HYPOCRITE. His views are evolving along with his campaign.

WANTED: A Tea Party Speaker.

But maybe the lesson of those struggles is that the speakership simply isn’t a job for a professional dealmaker and institutionalist at the moment. Instead, maybe it’s a job for a conviction politician, an ideologue (in the best way!) who’s also interested in governing.

Maybe, in other words, House Republicans need a speaker who’s an ambassador from the Tea Party to the G.O.P.’s K Street/Chamber of Commerce wing, rather than the other way around.

The reality is this: The only way the Republican House majority can become less dysfunctional and chaotic in the short run is if the next speaker wins the trust of enough conservative backbenchers to quell or crush revolts from the rest. And the best way to win that trust is to be seen as fundamentally on the insurgents’ side, which is a feat that Boehner, given his background and priorities, could never hope to manage.

True.

MICHAEL GRAHAM: “Let’s have a statewide ban on zero tolerance policies so schools and police can use their discretion!” Video at link.

As mentioned in Michael’s video: Panicked Parents, Cautious Cops Keep Kids at Home on 9/11: A bogus Facebook posting about a Black Panther invasion caused more than 500 middle Georgia students to miss school.