CURBING CONGRESS’S CRIME ADDICTION:

The 114th Congress convenes next week and Republicans are discussing major reform from taxes to immigration. A smaller but still refreshing change would give more careful review when creating new federal crimes.

On Monday the House Republican conference will debate the rules of the chamber, including a measure to refer proposed new criminal offenses to the House Judiciary Committee. This is supposed to be the routine practice, but Members can sidestep Judiciary by adding to an existing statute.

This loophole can contribute to over-criminalization or duplicating state law. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports that 403 crimes were added to the federal code between 2008 and 2013, 39 of which weren’t referred to the Judiciary Committee. Two examples that might have benefitted from referral are the crimes for harvesting plants under the Lacey Act (the 110th Congress) and attending animal fighting events (the 113th Congress).

There are already about 4,500 criminal statutes on the federal books. Wisconsin Republican and former Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner notes that nearly half of the federal criminal provisions enacted since the Civil War have been added since 1970. The CRS researchers didn’t even count regulatory crimes added to the Code of Federal Regulations.

The Judiciary Committee convened a bipartisan task force in May 2013 to address the proliferation of criminal laws, and its work has been useful. The proposed rule change has bipartisan and cross-ideological support, from the Heritage Foundation to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

This is exactly the sort of thing that I talk about in my Ham Sandwich Nation piece. I’m happy to see some small progress on the horizon.

BUREAUCRATIZE EDUCATION AND THIS SORT OF THING IS PRETTY MUCH INEVITABLE: Branded bigots at the age of THREE: How thousands of children are being blacklisted by schools for using innocuous playground taunts such as ‘girl’ and ‘fat bucket of KFC.’

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, THE CIA WOULD ESCAPE ALL MEANINGFUL CIVILIAN CONTROL. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! After Scrutiny, C.I.A. Mandate Is Untouched.

Though, snark aside, that’s not really what’s going on here: “The scathing report the Senate Intelligence Committee delivered this month is unlikely to significantly change the role the C.I.A. now plays in running America’s secret wars. A number of factors — from steadfast backing by Congress and the White House to strong public support for clandestine operations — ensure that an agency that has been ascendant since President Obama came into office is not likely to see its mission diminished, either during his waning years in the White House or for some time after that.”

Actually, it would be just as fair to say that the CIA is doing exactly what civilians want it to.

NATIONAL JOURNAL: How Hopes For An Immigration Deal Fell Apart.

OBSERVATIONS: “Microaggressions.” “Trigger Warnings,” and the New Meaning of “Trauma.”

When victim status is rewarded, the currency of victimhood will be inflated. But follow the link for some interesting observations.

JUXTAPOSITION: Vox: Everybody farts. But here are 9 surprising facts about flatulence you may not know.

The New Statesman: Why Farting Is A Feminist Issue.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Famed attorney Alan Dershowitz fights accusations of sexual assault. He’s taking precisely the correct approach if he’s innocent. But this feels like a lefty spoiling attack. I wonder what’s about to come out? Something about Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton?

UPDATE: Related: Shhhhh – Top Obama bundler accused of child rape.

AN INSPIRING STORY OF armed self-defense in North Carolina.

SCIENCE! Neil deGrasse Tyson blows more minds with idea to prevent computer hacking.

AT AMAZON, fresh deals on bestselling products, updated every hour.

Also, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food.

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And, Today’s Featured Digital Deal.

HUCKABEE TO LEAVE FOX, consider running for President.

He doesn’t much like libertarians. Helen and I talked with him about that.

UPDATE: EXCLUSIVE! MUST CREDIT INSTAPUNDIT! Zeeba reportedly having “serious conversations” with key GOP donors.

HOW TO FIGHT THE CAMPUS SPEECH POLICE: Get A Good Lawyer:

Then, three months ago, almost a year since the original incident, Mr. Adams re-entered Mr. Mael’s life. Again he was summoned to the dean’s office without knowing the Oct. 8 meeting’s purpose. “I’m told that there are charges against me under bullying, harassment and religious discrimination,” Mr. Mael recalls. “And I’m told that I have to give a response—guilty or not guilty—ideally within 48 hours.” A guilty determination could have led to his suspension or expulsion from school. Since this was around the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, Mr. Mael was given about a week to reply.

Crucially, Mr. Mael wasn’t allowed to keep a copy of the complaint. Dean Adams told him that this was routine “procedure,” Mr. Mael says. “How am I supposed to tell my parents that I’m being brought to court and by the way I don’t know what the charges are?” Mr. Mael recalls thinking. “This is antithetical to the values of our Constitution.”

In a panic after the meeting with Dean Adams, Mr. Mael consulted his friend Noah Pollak, of the Washington-based Emergency Committee for Israel, which retained the Covington & Burling law firm to act on his behalf. Yet when Mr. Mael’s lawyer initially corresponded with university counsel, he was informed that “parties involved in the conduct process are not permitted to engage legal counsel to act or speak on their behalf.”

Covington & Burling paid no heed. With the deadline approaching and still without a copy of the complaint, Mr. Mael opted to plead not guilty and request a full hearing before a jury of his fellow students.

Andrew Flagel, Brandeis’s senior vice president for students and enrollment, wouldn’t discuss the Mael case, citing federal privacy regulations, but said there is no university policy to advise students to curtail their speech online while a disciplinary case is pending. Mr. Flagel added that it is university practice not to provide the accused with a copy of a complaint but added that this is “one of the things we’ve been evolving.” Regarding the right to counsel, Mr. Flagel said: “This is not a legal proceeding, so your assumption that there is a right is not in evidence.”

By the end of October, Mr. Mael was finally provided a copy of the charges he would face. And Covington & Burling submitted to Brandies two lengthy legal memoranda blasting violations of Mr. Mael’s rights. One letter concluded: “We reserve all rights on behalf of Mr. Mael, including the right to assert claims for the reputational and other harms caused by the baseless allegations at the heart of this proceeding.” In other words: See you in court.

On Oct. 27 Dean Adams informed Mr. Mael via email that the “allegations against you will not be adjudicated through our Student Conduct Board. The accuser has withdrawn from the option to do so and therefore this case should be considered closed and without determination of fault or sanction. . . . Thank you for your cooperation.”

That’s good. But until you cost people jobs and reputations — that is, do the kind of damage to them that they’re perfectly happy meting out to others — you won’t bring this to a stop. You won’t see justice in this setting without a healthy measure of fear.

WOW: Kentucky Man Helps ‘Brave’ Girl Who Survived Plane Crash. “Wilkins called 911, adding that she walked roughly three-quarters of a mile through the woods to his home.” Yeah, I don’t think you need quotes around that “brave.”

WHO NEEDS ALL WHEEL DRIVE? Watch a formula car attack the Nurburgring in 3-degree weather…in the snow. Well, totally-focused world-class drivers don’t need it.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Sexting Just Got Easier With New NSFW Flirtmojis. Technology marches on.

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Plus, deals in Healthy Cooking.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Juveniles Sexually Abused by Staffers at Corrections Facilities: Scandal in Idaho Shines Light on Victimization of Young People by Staff.

When a local nurse’s son was sent to the juvenile corrections center here at age 15, she was upset, but relieved that he would be away from drugs and gangs. The single mother said that the “night he went in, I felt bad, but I could sleep because he was safe.”

But within months, the head of security at the state juvenile corrections center in Nampa struck up a sexual relationship with the teenager, according to police reports. Julie McCormick admitted to having sex with him three times in 2012 while he was incarcerated, the reports said.

Ms. McCormick, 29 years old at the time, told detectives that she fell in love with the boy nearly half her age. She pleaded guilty in 2013 to lewd conduct with the minor and was sentenced to five to 20 years in prison in 2014. A lawyer who represented Ms. McCormick declined to comment.

“You hear about the Boy Scouts, you hear about the Catholic Church—those kids can walk away from it,” said his mother. “My son couldn’t.”

The scandal is an instance of an issue plaguing juvenile facilities nationwide.

National inmate surveys show juveniles experience a rate of sexual victimization by staff that is more than three times that of adult prisoners. Nearly 10% of youth held in state juvenile facilities reported incidents of sexual victimization, with more than 80% of those incidents involving staff, according to a national survey of juvenile inmates published by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2013 that covered the preceding year. . . .

Staff at Nampa allegedly groomed inmates in the manner of child molesters, according to the legal claims.

One former inmate said in an interview that a nurse gave him perks, such as soda and candy, and flirted with him. That led to sex on several occasions in the medical clinic, he said. She gave him money, then threatened to turn him in for having contraband—the money—if he refused her advances, he said. He was 18 at the time and the nurse, who is accused of having sex with other juveniles at Nampa, was in her mid-30s.

“You’re an easy target,” said the college student, now 24, who didn’t want to be named. “You have to think, ‘Why wouldn’t they do this with some young guy in the street?’ ”

The former nurse, who is named in legal claims and no longer works for the center, couldn’t be reached for comment. Jeff Ray, a spokesman for the Idaho Department of Correction and Idaho Department of Juvenile Corrections, said, “We knew nothing of the allegations” at the time she left the job.

Perpetrators in these cases are often women. About 90% of youth who said they were victimized by staff in the federal survey were males reporting sexual activity with female staff.

Matriarchal privilege.

BECAUSE ONE IS A PORSCHE AND THE OTHER IS A TOYOTA? Why a Toyota V-6 and Porsche Flat-Six Sound So Different.

TRACKING PASSENGER PLANES MORE CLOSELY.

TECH TIME WARP: Watch John Cleese Compare a Compaq to a Dead Fish. One of my law school buddies had one of those. I had a Kaypro 4.

DAVID HARSANYI: Why Aren’t We Thanking ‘Gridlock’ For Saving The Economy?

The Obama Boom is finally here. Gross domestic product grew by a healthy 5 percent in the third quarter, the strongest growth we’ve seen since 2003. Consumer spending looks like it’s going to be strong in 2015, unemployment numbers have looked good, buying power is up and the stock market closed at 18,000 for the first time ever. All good things. So what happened?

Note: Contrasting the most severe recessionary quarter of a six-year presidency—one filled with extravagant and unmet economic promises—with its best quarter, might strike you as a bit hackish. But let’s go with it.

Axelrod isn’t alone is claiming political credit for economic success, and the Obama administration certainly isn’t the first to try and take the glory. But if activist policies really had as big an impact on our economic fortunes as DC operatives claim, I only have one question: Which policy did Barack Obama enact that initiated this astonishing turnaround? We should definitely replicate it.

Because those who’ve been paying attention these past few years may have noticed that the predominant agenda of Washington was doing nothing. It was only when the tinkering and superfluous stimulus spending wound down that fortunes began to turn around. So it’s perplexing how the same pundits who cautioned us about gridlock’s traumatizing effects now ignore its existence. . . .

Gridlock has caused an odd, but pervasive, stability in Washington. Spending has been static. No jarring reforms have passed — no cap-and-trade, which would have artificially spiked energy prices and undercut the growth we’re now experiencing. The inadvertent, but reigning, policy over the past four years has been, do no harm.

On the strength of good economic news, POLITICO reports that Obama will use his State of the Union to roll out an agenda aimed at the stagnating wages and those Americans left behind to build on the growth. I’m going to take wild guess and say that it’s going to incorporate a lot of happy talk about “infrastructure” and a fairer reallocation of wealth. We need to grow from the middle out, if you will. No doubt, politically speaking, Democrats’ fortunes are bound to improve somewhat as economic anxieties ebb. The president will surely see better approval numbers.

But let’s hear specifics. As I remember it, the administration hasn’t done anything in a long time. I know this because an incalculable number of op-eds have informed me that the president has had to contend with militant ideologues and has been unable to implement his agenda. I know this, because I’ve had to listen to years of hand-wringing about politicians’ inaction. You can’t have it both ways.

Oh, it seems as if you can.

IS EBOLA HERE TO STAY? Why scientists continue to be perplexed by how to define the outbreak that has killed 7,000. “The flu, for example, is endemic in the U.S. because various strains reappear the following year without any trouble. Yet the many Ebola outbreaks of the past 40 years are not referred to as endemic because the original source of the infection in each case is widely believed to be an animal that somehow infected a human. Changing the technical description of the current outbreak from epidemic to endemic is more than a matter of semantics. The difference between responding to an epidemic versus an endemic disease is as great as the difference between preparing for a sprint versus a marathon.”

READER BOOK PLUG: From John Bensink & Preston Pairo, The Builder.

SHE WAS DRESSED TO KILL, and it saved her life.

IT’S COME TO THIS: A Mark Rippetoe Music Video. It’s cute, but don’t quit your day job, kid.