CHINA IS BECOMING A PROBLEM: Penn State severs engineering network after “incredibly serious” intrusion. “The group responsible for one of the attacks appears to be based in China, a country many security analysts have said actively hacks and trawls the computer networks of western nations for a wide range of technical data. University officials said there’s no evidence that the intruders obtained research data, but they didn’t rule the possibility out.”

THEY WANTED TO GIVE TO “CHARITY”:  Big labor groups gave over $2 million to the Clinton Foundation, with some such contributions labeled as “political contributions.”  But I’m sure that was just a typo, and the unions were giving money because they supported the Foundation’s work on climate change, HIV/AIDS, or Haitian redevelopment.

Oh, and–surprise, surprise:  those same unions also lobbied Mrs. Clinton’s State Department. But again, I’m sure that’s just a coinkydink.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Here’s a Living Concrete That Repairs Itself. I could use some right now, after the hail-and-ice damage I took this winter.

IT WASN’T US, IT WAS THE COMPUTER: That’s the excuse the Department of Homeland Security is offering to federal trial judge Andrew Hanen, who is overseeing the 26-state lawsuit challenging Obama’s unilateral executive amnesty.  Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times reports:

TheObama administrationblamed a technology glitch for why it continued to approve new amnesty applications in February, even after a federal judge issued an injunction, telling the court late Friday that they are now begging about 2,000 illegal immigrants to tear up their three-year work authorizations.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Homeland Security agency that approved the deportation amnesty applications for Dreamers despite the judge’s order, insisted it’s corrected the immigrants’ records at headquarters, but said it’s also asking the immigrants themselves to send back their three-year documents and accept two-year papers instead.

The agency also told JudgeAndrew S. Hanen that more botched cases could still be found as employees dig through tens of thousands of applications.

President Obama’s lawyers are desperately trying to head off punishment by Judge Hanen after several embarrassing missteps.

The Administration’s missteps in this case just keep getting more and more disturbing. It leaves one with the impression that either this Administration is the most incompetent or mendacious in history, or both.

And I’m sure those 2,000 illegal immigrants who “mistakenly” obtained an additional one-year work authorizations will throw them in the trash. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: THE IRS SCANDAL, DAY 738.

ISIS TAKES HISTORIC CITY OF PALMYRA:  Palmyra is a city in the middle of Syria, about 130 miles northeast of the capital of Damascus.  It is also a UNESCO World Heritage site, and has a lot of amazing Greco-Roman ruins.

HILLARY’S VIEW OF EXECUTIVE POWER:  William Jacobson has an oped in the Washington Examiner, asserting that an executive branch headed by Hillary Clinton would witness even more egregious, unconstitutional power grabs than the Obama Administration:

A President Clinton would almost certainly face a Republican House of Representatives in 2017, if not a Republican-controlled Congress.

Rather than trying to work with such a Congress, Hillary has made it clear she would be even more aggressive than Obama in expanding presidential power at the expense of Congress and the Constitution.

He’s right, of course. This is the problem with unconstitutional executive power grabs: Unless the courts or Congress can stop them, future presidents (of any political persuasion) can be expected to continue them, and consider them a baseline upon which they can “work around” Congress.

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

Also, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food.

Plus, Kindle Daily Deals.

And, Today’s Featured Digital Deal. The deals are brand new every day, so browse and save!

SHOCKER: USA Today: Stephanopoulos, ABC have not fully disclosed Clinton ties: Schweizer. “Hidden hand” journalism. (Bumped).

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: After 16%-20% Enrollment Declines, New Cardozo (‘Slight’) And Suffolk (30%) Deans Plan Further Cuts In 1L Class Size.

HILLARY’S #PRIVILEGE:  Noemie Emery has a terrific piece in the Weekly Standard, documenting the genesis of the “stacked deck of cards” that have been held by the Clintons:

The deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” Hillary Clinton has warned us, and she ought to know. Having been “at the top,” or close enough to it, since 1976, when her husband was elected attorney general of Arkansas at age 30—not the biggest job ever, but one with a whole lot of power to play with—she has leveraged every ounce that it held to bring to them ever and ever more money and power, until at this moment, 14 years after leaving the White House, she and Bill sit on a mile-high mountain of both. Their wealth is immense and their power unlimited, at least in their party. The very few viable national candidates left after the two midterm wipeouts that decimated Democratic ranks in the reign of Obama are so afraid to risk the Clintons’ wrath that she is cruising unopposed to the nomination for the first time since no one knows when. How did two penniless kids living in roughly 1,000 square feet in Fayetteville, Arkansas, reach such heights? Let us look back and see.

Read the whole thing.

VIDEO: Watch Actor Ed Helms’ Glorious 1-Minute Takedown of Rolling Stone During UVA’s Graduation.

But, you know, UVA President Teresa Sullivan uncritically accepted Rolling Stone’s fake reporting, punishing innocent students based on the unfounded assertions of a music tabloid. She deserves some blame for that.

DRILL, BABY, DRILL: USA Today: Allow Shell drilling in the Arctic.

What got lost in the avalanche of justly deserved bad publicity three years ago was that the actual drilling Shell managed to do went smoothly. This shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s largely forgotten now, but in the 1980s and early 1990s, Shell and other companies drilled about 100 exploratory wells in the Chukchi and the neighboring Beaufort Sea before abandoning the area for reasons that included low oil prices. Drilling there can be done safely.

Actually, in some ways, drilling in the Chukchi Sea is less risky than in the Gulf of Mexico, where BP notoriously lost control of its Macondo well five years ago in one of the worst spills in history. The BP well was in 5,000 feet of water, which made capping the blowout fiendishly difficult; in Alaska, Shell will be drilling in just 140 feet of water.

Well pressures will also be as much as five times less in Alaska, which lowers the risk of a blowout. Given the weather, the allowable drilling season is very short, running from July through part of October. . . .

Finally, the U.S. needs the kind of oil that could be found off Alaska. Alternative energy provided 7% of the country’s energy needs in 1990. A quarter century later, that has grown to barely 10%. Estimates of recoverable oil in the Arctic offshore run as high as 30 billion barrels, equal to some of the biggest oil fields in the world.

Producing that oil will take a decade or more, which means decisions made today will affect consumers in 2025 or later. That’s prudent planning. Shell should go ahead.

Also, many of the world’s worst actors are oil kleptocracies. The more oil we produce, the less money they have.

ADVICE ON REDUCING BELLY FAT: “The good news about fighting visceral fat is that it seems to be uniquely vulnerable to exercise.”

SPENGLER: Ted Cruz, the only Republican arrogant enough to be president. “Sen. Cruz is authentically bright, sufficiently so for the liberal Alan Dershowitz to declare that he was the best student he had ever had at Harvard’s Law School. The conservative legal theorist Robert P. George, who taught Cruz at Princeton, says the same thing. He’s so smart that he is not the least impressed by the conservative foreign policy establishment. That’s what qualifies Ted Cruz for the presidency.”

I WANT ONE: Driving to the law school in one of these would definitely be empowering.  I have a pretty big SUV now, but nothing like this one.  Sadly, I don’t think they make these anymore.

AT AMAZON, deals galore at the Men’s Denim Store.

Plus, deals on Hunting & Tactical Knives.