TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 962.

HMMM….KIM DAVIS’ TEAM DECLARES VICTORY ON SAME-SEX MARRIAGE LICENSES:

Davis vaulted from her little county clerk’s office in Rowan County, Ky., to an international stage when she defied a federal court order to sign a marriage license for a gay couple, following the Supreme Court ruling in June 2015 that legalized gay marriage.

The ACLU filed suit against Davis, representing four of the couples who were turned away in Rowan County.

Davis never knuckled under. Why would she? Davis steadfastly maintained she was acting “under God’s authority.” That adherence to Biblical principle cost the 50-year-old woman five days in the county jail.

While she was released from her cell to a hero’s welcome, Davis faced a future that seemed to include continued court action — and legal bills — thanks to the ACLU and other proponents of LGBT rights.

However, Staver, whose Liberty Counsel team represented Davis in court, said her legal odyssey is finally over.

“Kim can celebrate Christmas with her family knowing she does not have to choose between her public office and her deeply-held religious convictions,” Staver said. “What former Gov. Beshear could have done but refused to do, Gov. Bevin did with this executive order.”

But maybe her journey is not over?

Few culture wars ever are.

BLUE MODEL CRACKUP: Oregon Wrestles with Public Pension Costs.

Oregon’s major business groups want lawmakers to start dealing with rising public pension costs as early as the session that opens Feb. 1.
Although those costs start to kick in with the 2017-19 budget cycle — 18 months away — advocates say it’s not too early to whittle down an unfunded liability projected at $18 billion over the next few decades.

“If we do nothing, 100 percent of the burden falls on taxpayers, government services and their ability to undertake reinvestment in budgets going forward,” says Tim Nesbitt, currently a consultant for the Oregon Business Plan. […]

Cheri Helt, co-chair of the Bend-La Pine School Board, says pension costs will jump from the current 16 percent of payroll to 20 percent in 2017-19, and to 25 percent in the cycle afterward.

Plus: “The question of how America’s state and local governments dig themselves out of their massive pension hole will be one of the great (and underrated) fiscal and political questions of the next generation. As the article implies, the process of divvying up resources to fund the pensions will not be pretty, pitting key Democratic constituencies—public employees (producers of services) and citizens who consume public services—against one another in a blue civil war. The reckoning can only be put off for so long.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Elites and media really hate Donald Trump’s voters, Michael Walsh writes:

In the movie business, there’s something called the “cheer moment,” when the long-suffering hero finally decks his tormentor with a satisfying right cross. What the Beltway Republicans fail to understand is that their conservative base — which gave them stunning congressional victories in 2010 and 2014 and has nothing to show for it — has been longing for precisely that moment since Reagan crushed Mondale 49-1 in 1984.

The Trumpkins are sick of winning and having nothing to show for it, and their vengeance will be terrible. Maybe the Establishment should stop belittling them and listen instead.

See also: past hatred of establishment GOP and DNC-MSM for libertarians, Tea Party voters, Perot voters, and any group whose goal is the most radical of all: for government to leave you the hell alone. I’m not at all sure that’s Trump’s goal for government, but then, as Glenn has noted, “Trump and Sanders are just symptoms. The real disease is in the ruling class that takes such important subjects out of political play, in its own interest. As Angelo Codevilla wrote in an influential essay in 2010, today’s ruling class is a monoculture that has little in common with the rest of the nation.”

CONTAINED: Stabbing of 9-year-old Staten Island boy eyed as ‘ISIS audition.’ “An alleged jihadist arrested in June on charges that he plotted to blow up Times Square may also be the fiend who stabbed a 9-year-old Staten Island boy in the neck five months earlier in what some investigators now believe was a botched ISIS audition. But NYPD detectives investigating the Jan. 9 knife attack have been frustrated by the feds, who won’t give them access to terror suspect Fareed Mumuni, said a source familiar with the probe.” Why not, feds?

THIS WHOLE THING STINKS TO HIGH HEAVEN: Waco Blunders Through Its ‘Biker Shootout’ Investigation: At least four of the victims appear to have been shot by police—and the criminal charges some bikers face are highly dubious.

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CRYING WOLF ABOUT RACISM:

Then there’s John Lewis, a legitimate civil rights hero who allowed politics to get the best of him when he stood by Andre Carson, a colleague who falsely told the press that tea party activists had repeatedly shouted racial epithets at him on Capitol Hill. The problem was that no such incident appeared on video footage. When challenged, Lewis clammed up but never apologized. Perhaps he thought that tainting political opponents with the racism label would avoid the need to argue the question of government overreach on its merits, but all Lewis did by clinging to an easily disprovable racism charge was to soil his own reputation.

Protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, after the August 9, 2014, police shooting of teenager Michael Brown, who had just robbed a convenience store. Civil rights activists claimed that police executed Brown after he had put his hands up and asked them not to shoot. Against the backdrop of such outrage, protests spread, millions of dollars in property damage occurred, and several police officers lost their lives in revenge killings in the anti-police fervor that followed Ferguson and other similar incidents. The problem was that the whole “hands up, don’t shoot” line was a myth, unsupported by eyewitnesses or forensic data.

Or to put it another way:

BIAS BY OMISSION: “Drivers get no gifts at pump,” read the headline on the front page of the dead tree edition of the San Jose Mercury yesterday, with the subhead, “While most of the nation celebrates holidays with low gas prices. Californians get a lump of coal.” The body of the article is online here; note that there’s no reference to California having some of the highest gas taxes in the country — coupled with some of the worst roads, as the Orange County Register noted earlier this month:

Transportation officials have identified about $57 billion in repairs needed for state roads in the coming decade in addition to about $78 billion needed for local roads, which are partly funded with state money.

Lawmakers in the special session, which was convened by the governor in June, are hoping to introduce a plan early next year that would fund at least a quarter of the total need. But reaching agreement has proved difficult.

Beall has introduced a plan to raise $4.3 billion annually while costing the average motorist about $130 a year, including a 12-cent increase in gas taxes. Gov. Jerry Brown proposed a more modest plan that would raise $3.6 billion a year with an average annual cost to motorists of about $84, including six cents more in gas taxes.

For a variety of reasons, average gas prices in California are already about 25 percent higher than the nation. As of Oct.1, the price in California includes about 41 cents per gallon in state and local taxes and fees, the fifth highest rate in the nation, according to the American Petroleum Institute.

And in their role as Democrat operatives with bylines, the MSM has always been in favor of more and more gas taxes — which is also missing from the Merc’s article.

JOHN HINDERAKER: The Rise In Violent Crime: Reasons and Excuses.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Students cleared of gang-rape accusation sue university that expelled them anyway.

Four male students accused of sexually assaulting a female William Paterson University student are suing the school over their expulsions.

The four students, along with a fifth who has not filed a lawsuit, are alleging their civil rights were violated, they were falsely arrested and maliciously prosecuted after campus police failed to properly investigate the sexual assault accusation against them.

Michael Epstein, an attorney for two of the accused students, said that the accused and accuser were on good terms after the sexual encounter and that police arrested his clients “based on the accuser’s report alone.” He said campus police didn’t interview other witnesses or seek cellphone records or surveillance video. They also didn’t assemble a rape kit to collect the physical evidence.

The five students were arrested and charged with aggravated sexual assault, conspiracy to commit sexual assault, criminal restraint and kidnapping. A grand jury refused to indict and the charges were dismissed, yet the school still expelled them.

A place that would do that sounds like a hostile educational environment for male students.

CRACKS IN THE LIBERAL ORDER, as spotted by Ross Douthat:

Europe’s extremes gained, in part, because in 2015 the center was unusually feckless. Angela Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders to a million Middle Eastern refugees earned her the praise of her globalist peers. But it also pushed a fast-forward button on long-term trends threatening the liberal project in Europe — the challenge of Islam, the pressure of migration from Africa, the danger of backlash in countries with little experience of mass assimilation.

In the process, Merkel handed ammunition to the argument, expressed in artistic form in Michel Houellebecq’s novel “Submission,” that late-modern liberalism might have a certain tendency toward suicide. And she did so at a moment when both the Islamic State and Vladimir Putin’s Russia were supplying evidence that the liberal project can be at least temporarily defied.

Yes, ISIS probably won’t endure, and Putin’s ambitions exceed his grasp. But by pulling volunteers from Western countries and inspiring terrorists from Paris to San Bernardino, the would-be caliphate has provided a new template for revolts against modernity. And by playing power politics in his near abroad and the Middle East, Putin has helped make the Pax Americana look more fragile than at any point since 1989.

Putin’s had plenty of help from Obama, Kerry, and Hillary making the Pax Americana look fragile, of course, and I’m not sure why a CTL-F brings up no mention of Obama in Douthat’s otherwise pretty good essay. But it’s easy to be overlooked when you’re a semi-retired president who’s kicking back, chillaxing, and counting down the days until you can hit the rubber foie gras circuit and really cash in.

In the meantime, as Scott Johnson writes at Power Line, “Cry, the Schlonged Country.”

WHEN ENVIRONMENTALISTS FANTASIZE ABOUT GENOCIDE: WaPo Letter: We, Earth’s people, are a ‘bad’ virus. I hope that Alan Waters of Bethesda doesn’t work with biological agents.

TO ALLOW HIGHER TAXATION, politicians wage war against cash.

How much does a woodchipper cost these days?

COOL CLOCK, AHMED: ‘No way to treat people’: Muslim journo arriving in US upset by TSA’s scrutiny of electronic devices.

SHOT: Senior Obama officials have warned of challenges in screening refugees from Syria.

Chaser: Homeless Man Allegedly Lived In Army Barracks As Soldier For 8 Months:

“For the last 8 months, a civilian with a fake [common access] card has been living in the [Special Forces Group] temp barracks claiming to be an [explosive ordinance disposal] tech,” the post says. “So embedded he was, that he had been dropping new privates off at in-processing.”

The fake soldier (whose name remains unknown) was apparently a popular man around the base. “[He] was instantly a friend to everyone,” was skilled at dominoes, and he “knew all the cool places in Fayetteville,” the post notes. It’s unclear whether other special forces members were aware the man was a fraud.

The man was caught driving under the influence Tuesday, and his story began to fall apart. Military police searched his room, reportedly discovering stolen army equipment (including rifle ammunition and a uniform), along with “a large cache of DVD porn.” The man even reportedly had a roster full of soldiers’ personal information.

Shades of the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer keeps showing up for work at a company that never hired him, meets any number of M*A*S*H episodes.

On a more serious note, “CNN is reporting that an alleged ISIS supporter has been indicted on charges that he had planned to attack last year’s Super Bowl with pipe bombs…Abdul Malik Abdul Kareem had previously been indicted on charges of arming and training the two men who were killed by security when they fired on Pamela Gellar’s ‘Draw Muhammad’ art contest in Garland, Texas, in May.”

If Kareem’s alleged attack on the Super Bowl had been successful, would CNN be claiming that NFL fans totally had it coming, as they did when the network interviewed Geller?

GENERALLY SPEAKING, “holistic admissions” means race-discrimination hidden behind a fuzz of soft buzzwords.

THESE MISCONCEPTIONS JUST KEEP HAPPENING TO HIM SO “UNEXPECTEDLY” DON’T THEY? Obama dubbed “Muslim of the Year” by Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman.

Curiously, those grinding their teeth the loudest at Klayman’s article probably retweeted the largest number of “We Are All Muslim” hashtags last week.

ARE WE REALLY “CHOKING THE OCEAN WITH PLASTIC?” TRACING THE CREATION OF AN ECO-MYTH.

SO BETWEEN NOW AND NOVEMBER, I’LL BET THIS IMAGE GETS USED AGAIN:

RUBIO LANDS MAJOR ENDORSEMENT:  Trey Gowdy Hitting the Campaign Trail with Marco Rubio.

WORTH CONSIDERING: The myth of over-incarceration.

IT WAS NEVER ABOUT SCIENCE: The Growing Food Fight over the Government’s Nutrition Guidelines.

AND NOW EVEN MORE ANNOYING: Creationists of the Secular Kind.

WHICH IS A GOOD THING: Why Cars Are Not Only Available In Black.