THIS DOESN’T SURPRISE ME: Who Are The Happiest Law Firm Associates? Tax Lawyers.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Twilight Of The Vaginas.

NEW YEAR, NEW YOU: Optimize Your Laundry.

Plus, DIY in the Kitchen.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty.

For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the 2012-2013 school year were eligible for the federal program that provides free and reduced-price lunches. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen. But the WaPo has missed the big story — it’s not that so many students are poor, it’s that the non-poor students, and parents, are exiting the public schools. More attention to that phenomenon, and why it’s happening, would be useful.

MARY GRABAR: Selma and the Sanctimony of Liberals: The film’s portrayal of LBJ has the left up in arms.

The historians quoted in articles praise Johnson. David Garrow was quoted in the New York Times and then re-quoted in the Post as insisting that Johnson fully supported the Selma march and as objecting to the depiction of Johnson ordering FBI surveillance tapes of King’s extramarital trysts. Naturally, responsibility for the surveillance is placed on LBJ’s predecessor President Kennedy, and even more so on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Garrow said, “If the movie suggests L.B.J. had anything to do with the tape, that’s truly vile and a real historical crime against L.B.J.”

Yet, in The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., Garrow reported on the delight Johnson took in listening to the surveillance tapes of King (whom Garrow approvingly presented as a radical and socialist). Garrow wrote, “When one aide attempted to defend King’s sincerity on the issue of [opposition to the Vietnam War], Johnson reportedly replied, ‘Goddamn it, if only you could hear what that hypocritical preacher does sexually.’” This is a milder term of abuse for King. Johnson was known for using the racial slur that is unprintable in our respectable publications or printable only with a trigger warning as was done in an MSNBC article.

That MSNBC article acknowledges that Johnson was “a reliable member of the Southern bloc, helping to stonewall civil rights legislation” for two decades, but gives Johnson a pass as a product of his times and does not charge him with political opportunism.

The response betrays a certain insecurity.

CHANGE: Married Women Are Having More Kids. Unmarried Women? Not So Much.

American women aren’t having children the way they did before the recession, but that obscures a little-noticed fact: Married women have staged a comeback.

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that while America’s fertility rate slipped in 2013 to a record low, birth rates for married women are rising—even as rates for unmarried women continue to fall.

For every 1,000 unmarried U.S. women ages 15 to 44 in 2013, there were 44.3 births, down 2% from 2012 and 7% from 2010, CDC data show.

In contrast to unmarried women, birth rates for married women increased 1% in 2013 from 2012 to 86.9 births. In fact, they’re up 3% since 2010, after declining 5% between 2007 and 2010. (The absolute number of births among married women in 2013, 2.34 million, remained slightly below 2010’s 2.37 million.)

The divergence is “unprecedented over the last three decades,” says Sally Curtin, a demographer and statistician at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. “We’ve seen a rebound—but it’s just been in married women.”

Hmm. I guess that’s good, right?

IT’S TOO LATE TO APOLOGIZE: “At some point it became clear that I had not made a troll attempting to make comedy out of people’s reactions, but a simple bully making misery in the lives of targets she found weak.”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Teacher, 25, who had held job for a matter of months, sentenced to a year in prison for raping her male student.

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NOTE THE CLASSIC SOCIAL-JUSTICE-WARRIOR HEAD-TILT IN HER PICTURE: Boston Mayor Fires 25 Year Old “Gender & Migration Consultant” Over Her Role In I-93 Protest. Also the classic grim, humorless expression.

SULTAN KNISH: The Importance of Blasphemy.

As a deeply religious person, I have no fondness for blasphemy. My religion and its holy books are sacred to me. And I understand perfectly well why a Muslim would not relish a cartoon of a naked Mohammed.

But the debates over freedom of speech and the sensitivity of religious feelings also miss the point.

Blasphemy is the price we pay for not having a theocracy. Muslims are not only outraged but baffled by the Mohammed cartoons because they come from a world in which Islamic law dominates their countries and through its special place proclaims the superiority of Islam to all other religions.

Almost all Muslim countries are theocracies of one sort or another as a legacy of the Islamic conquests which Islamized them.

Egyptian President Sisi’s gesture of attending a Coptic mass was so revolutionary because it challenged the idea that Egyptian identity must be exclusively Islamic.

And Egypt is far from the most hard line of Islamic countries in the Middle East, despite a brief takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood in the aftermath of Obama’s Arab Spring.

Read the whole thing.

PRIVACY: How dating app Grindr makes it easy to stalk 5 million gay men: Location sharing allows user whearabouts to be tracked around the clock. Well, that’ll make it easy for ISIS when they take over.

“GOVERNMENT” IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE THINGS THAT WE SCREW UP TOGETHER: Why the Entire U.S. Weather Satellite System is at Risk: New report finds our next-generation weather satellites are threatened by budget overruns, blown deadlines, and mismanagement.

IS THERE A CONNECTION BETWEEN working too much and drinking too much? “Self-medicating” is probably right.

ED DRISCOLL: Europe’s Partying Like It’s 1939.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 618.

THE WASHINGTON FREE BEACON exposes more sleazy behavior regarding Indiana University’s federally funded speech-monitoring project.

Internal emails reveal the university’s initial reaction to the Free Beacon’s report on the project in August, which detailed Truthy’s goals to identify “false and misleading ideas” on Twitter and “detect hate speech and subversive propaganda.” The article also revealed head researcher Fil Menczer’s support for numerous progressive groups, including President Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action, Greenpeace, and MoveOn.org.

This whole thing is a disgrace. Much, much more at the link.

KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE, YOUR ENEMIES CLOSER: Boehner Foes Get Gavels, Not Punishment: The speaker’s allies are annoyed that GOP rebels are getting top subcommittee slots.

As Republicans try to foster unity at a joint retreat here, frustration is boiling over among allies of House Speaker John Boehner that his biggest detractors are being rewarded with promotions, even after trying to overthrow him in a coup earlier this month.

The latest controversy comes as Rep. Louie Gohmert, who directly challenged Boehner for the speakership, announced on Thursday that he was given the chairmanship of the Natural Resources Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.

“This is a major slap in the face,” said one Boehner-allied GOP House member, speaking anonymously to talk candidly about the conference’s internal dynamics. . . .

Boehner’s allies have been much more eager to exact revenge against his opponents than the speaker himself has, and leadership sources have said that while Boehner is angry at his foes, he does not think public retribution is the best long-term move.

Gohmert is only the latest Boehner foe to receive a gavel. Because of that, several members described a thick air of tension within the House GOP Conference, a feeling a second Republican House member described as a blanket hanging over the GOP’s three-day retreat, which ended Friday.

Hmm.

THE OVERPROTECTED KID: A preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer. Yes.

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HE’S LIKE A ONE-MAN NARRATIVE BUSTER: That time Jonathan Gruber made the case against paid leave.

In a 1994 article for the American Economic Review on maternity benefits, Gruber wrote, “I study several state and federal mandates which stipulated that childbirth be covered comprehensively in health insurance plans, raising the relative cost of insuring women of childbearing age. I find substantial shifting of the costs of these mandates to the wages of the targeted group.”

Sherk also argued that a paid leave proposal from the Obama administration would lead to lower wages for workers, because employers would seek to keep overall compensation costs the same.

“The popularity of Obama’s paid sick leave proposal depends on workers not realizing it ultimately comes out of their paychecks,” Sherk wrote. “If the president’s proposal becomes law, many workers will lose the equivalent of seven days of pay a year.”

But why let facts get in the way of a good narrative, right?

At this point, I’m wondering if Gruber is a mole.

VALERIE JARRETT CONCURS: Obama threatens to veto new Iran sanctions from Congress.

WELL, IT’S ALSO WHERE EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING BEST ECONOMICALLY: Cities Where African-Americans Are Doing Best Are In Old Confederacy. “Today, Dixie has emerged, in many ways, as the new promised land for African-Americans. In our survey the South accounts for a remarkable 13 of the top 15 metro areas.”

TIME AND PAST TIME: It Might Be Time to Panic About Greece.

Here’s something that doesn’t exactly cheer the soul: Greece’s Eurobank Ergasias and Alpha Bank “have requested access to an emergency cash facility run by the central bank. Both said the moves were only a precaution and that neither faced an immediate funding crunch. People familiar with the matter said the banks are seeking a few billion euros between them. The move has again evoked fears over the stability of Greece’s banking system as the country lurches through another period of political uncertainty.”

It is especially cheerless when combined with two sentences from yours truly, penned a little over a week ago: “Exit may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people think it will happen, they will rush to withdraw their money from the financial system. The resulting collapse will force Germany to put more money in on easier terms, or Greece to leave the euro.”

I rush to note that we are hardly in the end days yet; bank officials told the Wall Street Journal that this was only a precautionary move, and they were not facing an immediate cash crunch. One is always pleased to hear that bankers are being cautious. But the Journal also reports that $3 billion has fled Greek banks over the last two months, and there are rumors that other European banks are reining in their lending to their Hellenic counterparts. Which means that, unfortunately, their caution seems more than warranted.

Indeed. Luckily, Europe is doing so well socially and politically that mere economic problems shouldn’t faze it.