GOVERNMENT AGENCY OR CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY? New emails show IRS delayed witness interview in criminal probe.

Lawyers for the Internal Revenue Service attempted to stall a criminal investigation by waiting nearly a month before giving an agency employee permission to meet with investigators, despite the employee’s willingness to testify, emails showed.

The emails, obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request, revealed frustration with IRS lawyers over their reluctance to approve a meeting between federal prosecutors and an unnamed tax agency employee who was prepared to give investigators information.

“[W]e find it amazing that they didn’t immediately respond giving us the green light to meet with you,” the IRS employee’s attorney, whose name was redacted, wrote of the IRS counsel in a June 12, 2013 email to Justice Department officials.

Yeah, I don’t.

GIVEN THE CORRELATION OF ANTI-VAX SENTIMENT AND WHOLE FOODS, THIS JUST MIGHT WORK: Could we stop the anti-vaxxers if we said measles contains gluten?

Especially given that most hipsters don’t actually know what gluten is.

IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, Judith Shulevitz on Campus Rape Hysteria.

What explains the nearly universal lack of confidence in these proceedings? Universities share some of the blame, but there’s another culprit too: the United States government. People often wonder why college administrators try to adjudicate these fiendishly difficult cases, rather than putting them in the hands of the criminal justice system.

The reason is that the Department of Education has very forcefully told schools to handle sexual grievances themselves and given them very detailed instructions about how to do so. A report last year from a White House task force on campus sexual assault underscored the importance to a university of following that advice. Even though the D.O.E.’s instructions are presented as recommendations rather than law, its Office for Civil Rights can put any school that fails to follow them on the list of colleges under investigation and even take away its federal funding.

There’s no doubt that on many occasions colleges have not treated sexual-assault accusations as seriously as they should have. Nor did they do enough to ensure that women felt completely safe on campus. But in the past half-decade, the civil rights office has tried so hard to correct that problem that it is now forcing schools to go too far in the other direction, which has made campus procedures seem even less credible. Schools are being told to disregard what most Americans think of as the basic civil rights of a person accused of a heinous act.

The schools haven’t mounted much in the way of principled resistance, I have to say. But read the whole thing, which suggests that good sense may be making a comeback.

UNEXPECTEDLY! How A High Minimum Wage Closed Down a San Francisco Bookstore.

IF YOU’VE EVER SEEN HIM INTERVIEWED, YOU CAN TELL BRIAN WILLIAMS ISN’T ESPECIALLY BRIGHT. If he were, he’d have followed this approach: Blog Game: Sound Like a Badass Without Committing Yourself to a Lie.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, RACISTS WOULD BE OPPOSING INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! State senator says all white people are racist and ‘polluted’ his blood.

Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers said all white people are racist and that his blood was “polluted” by white people last week while filibustering a bill and lambasting a state education board member who has rejected calls for his resignation after his blog called the president a “half-breed.”

Chambers, a 77-year-old African American senator who is the state’s longest serving lawmaker, made the comments about race while filibustering a bill that would increase the fee for marriage licenses.

Boy, those people who warned me about voting for Mitt Romney sure were smart.

TWITTER JUXTAPOSITION OF THE DAY:

TWITTER RUMOR HAS IT THAT HE’LL BE SNEAKING INTO SYRIA TO “FINALLY SETTLE ISIS’S HASH.” Brian Williams Stepping Away From NBC Nightly News.

SULTAN KNISH: The Ghosts of Auschwitz in the Middle East.

Auschwitz just shows us the final stage. It doesn’t show us the sympathy for the Nazis, the willingness of some on the left to see them as allies in overturning the existing system and the anger at the selfishness of the Jews in putting their own desire not to be killed ahead of world peace.

Auschwitz requires more context than just Hitler. It requires that we understand why so many countries and so many world leaders enabled him. And it is not a difficult thing to understand. All we need to do is look at the response to Muslim attempts to kill Jews before and after the Holocaust.

It was easier to appease the Nazis. It is easier to appease the Muslim world. The Jews were not seen as a canary in the coalmine; instead, like the Czechs and then the Poles and then everyone else, they were an obstacle to making a deal with the devil. Today it’s the Nigerian Christians, the Burmese Buddhists and a long list of others around the world including the Jews of Israel who stand in the way of peace.

The Holocaust and the entire war happened because everyone wanted peace with Nazi Germany and refused to accept that Nazism was innately aggressive.

Nazis. I hate those guys. The fact is, some people just need killin’. Nazis and Islamists are in that class, and deserve to be treated accordingly. When you kill enough, the rest skulk off and pretend they never believed the stuff they were shouting, and doing, when they could get away with it.

FOX BUTTERFIELD, CALL YOUR OFFICE THE WASHINGTON POST: In Virginia, Gun Sales Are Up, But Crime Is Down. “Last year, 420,829 firearms were bought through licensed gun dealers in the state. That’s a 73 percent increase over 2006. Leading the list were pistols (175,717), followed by rifles (135,495). According to the Richmond Times Dispatch, central Virginians packed more heat than anyone else, followed closely by Northern Virginians. And yet, as more firearms are sold, the crime rate has continued to drop.”

It’s a mystery.

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REASSURING NEWS FROM DEBLASIO’S NEW YORK: Bubonic Plague in the Subway System? Don’t Worry About It. “Dr. Mason said that fragments of DNA associated with the bubonic plague were found at three stations in disparate parts of the city: on a garbage can at the 103rd Street station on the No. 6 line in Manhattan; a stairway railing at the 111th Street station of the A line in Queens; and another railing at the Winthrop Street station of the No. 2 and No. 5 lines in Brooklyn.”

WHEN ELITE HIRING IS A BUBBLE, SAYS VIRGINIA POSTREL, YOU AREN’T HIRING AN ELITE: “If everyone you interview comes from the same few schools, the same social networks, the same previous employers or the same geographic regions, you aren’t really fighting for talent. And if talent matters as much as everyone seems to think it does, you probably won’t make it to the big game.”

Well, at my law school we’ve always been willing to hire people other schools passed over because they were too old, or had too much law-practice experience (yes, both of those are big negatives in law-faculty hiring generally) or had graduated from non-elite schools, and some of our best hires have come that way.

PSYCHOLOGY’S POLITICAL DIVERSITY PROBLEM. “Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity—particularly diversity of viewpoints—for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: 1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years; 2) This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike; 3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking; and 4) The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination.”

#NARRATIVEFAIL: Obama’s Drones Have Killed More People Than the Spanish Inquisition Did.

BOLOS YES, TERMINATORS NO: We Can Now Build Autonomous Killing Machines. And That’s a Very, Very Bad Idea.

AT AMAZON, deals on Top Valentine’s Day Gifts.

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I SUSPECT THIS HAS BROADER APPLICATIONS: Thermoelectric Nanowires Promise Energy Harvesting From Car Exhaust.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Adding layer to a piezoelectric nanostructure increases output voltage.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW about Sunday’s SpaceX launch.

MORE FROM MICKEY KAUS ON SOCIAL INEQUALITY VS. ECONOMIC INEQUALITY: “There are only four Koch brothers, after all. There’s a limit to how much damage they can do to our egalitarian traditions — even if they were as obnoxious in reality as they are in the Democratic imagination. But there are millions of upper middle class lawyers and consultants and doctors. If their attitudes are increasingly snobby and status-oriented, that could easily have a pervasive invidious effect on the culture. If they get rich enough to hire lots of servants, for example, that’s a much bigger deal than if David Koch makes another few billion. If they scorn people with low SATS that adds a vicious meritocratic bite to status ranking. Money trends matter, but social and technical innovations can have an independent effect, good or ill. Valet parking does more social-egalitarian damage than car elevators.”

IT’S COME TO THIS: Brian Williams’ conflicting stories about saving puppies from fires.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 639.

TO BE FAIR, HE’S A “PROFESSOR” WHO NEVER PUBLISHED ANY SCHOLARLY ARTICLES: Ed Morrissey: High horses and bull puckey: Professor Obama’s history lesson a dud.