ROGER KIMBALL ON UNIVERSITIES TODAY: “You Are Now Leaving The American Sector.”

EFF DIDN’T BACK DOWN: A patent lawyer who sued the Electronic Frontier Foundation for defamation for writing about his invention in a “Stupid Patent of the Month” blog post has dropped the lawsuit.

ENGINEERING THE PERFECT POTATO. “A genetically modified potato that could resist destructive blight, defend itself against parasitic worms, avoid bruising, and cut down on the accumulation of a suspected carcinogen during cooking would be worth many billions of dollars per year to potato producers across the world. It could also serve as a model technology for addressing issues that affect many different crops.”

AUTOMATION: Robotics For Food Processing. “Once robots can do food prep, cooking, packaging, and even delivery to tables then human employment in food services will plummet.”

SOME OF MY FRIENDS IN TEXAS ARE SUSPICIOUS OF THIS WHOLE AFFAIR: What Waco Police Still Won’t Reveal About the Biker-Gang Shootout: Two weeks after the fight between rival outlaw motorcycle clubs, cops won’t answer even the most basic questions about what transpired.

ROGER SIMON IN IOWA: Welcome to Des Moines, Company Town. “Des Moines’ (and Iowa’s) business at the moment is government, or should I say elections.”

HE’D RATHER BLAME REPUBLICANS THAN FIX IT: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says President Obama will veto any Obamacare backup plan Congress passes.  This makes sense, as Obama is clearly more interested in scoring political points, by blaming Republicans, rather than fixing his signature legislation. As with all things Obama, it’s his way or the highway, and Congress’s desires are irrelevant.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the Obamacare subsidy case, King v. Burwell, at the end of June. If the Court rules that individuals in States without state-established health insurance exchanges cannot obtain Obamacare subsidies, some believe the GOP needs to have a legislative “fix” available.  The Hill has reported that GOP leaders are hinting at extending the subsidies, at least temporarily, combined with repeal of the individual and employer mandates:, an idea originally floated by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI):

While working on their own ideas, Freedom Caucus members are also open to something like Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-Wis.) idea to temporarily extend subsidies.

Johnson’s plan would extend ObamaCare subsidies through August 2017, when he hopes there will be a Republican president, while also repealing the law’s individual and employer mandates.

His bill has 31 Republican co-sponsors in the Senate, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). It has not received the same welcome in the House, though; Ryan’s working group is still publicly undecided on the question, and House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) came out in opposition to the idea last month. . . .

Republicans acknowledge they will face pressure to do something if the court rules for the challengers. Figures from the Obama administration released Tuesday show 6.4 million people would lose subsidies that help them afford insurance.

Of course, why Republicans would be to blame for the Supreme Court upholding Obamacare as written by Congress is inexplicable, other than by the fact that the mainstream media has repeatedly said so.  No Republicans–none–voted for Obamacare, and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi admitted that the bill was not read carefully, because Congress had to pass it so we could find out what’s in it.  As David Harsanyi observes:

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the 37 states that have declined to set up exchanges would see an average spike of 287 percent should the King v. Burwell decision not go the Obama administration’s way. It would be 650 percent in Mississippi — an amount that only proves that exchanges have not made insurance markets more competitive or more affordable as promised. Actually, the cost of insurance in federally run exchanges is already 287 percent higher. The difference is picked up by taxpayers. . . .

So you can imagine the overwhelming appeal to emotion that Democrats and the media would roll out if millions were to lose their subsidies. The fight would be over whom the public blames for whatever chaos would ensue. The culpability for that chaos would belong in one place.

Yep, intelligent individuals know who is to blame for Obamacare and all its warts. But the problems is that low information voters have swallowed the progressive/liberal mainstream media’s storyline, which of course blames the Republicans for the harsh, natural consequences of an ill-considered bill they never supported in the first place.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 758.

DIET COKE GIRL A FAKE?: Gateway Pundit reports that Tahera Ahmad, the Muslim activist who recently cried religious discrimination against United Airlines has been called a “liar” by a commenter at FlyerTalk who says she was a witness to the ordeal:

She [Ahmad] ordered a coke zero and a hot green tea with a Splenda. The flight attendant handed her a full diet coke with a cup on top and then told her that the green tea would take a few minutes and she would get it to her ASAP. The lady said very rudely and condescending to the FA that she ordered a coke zero and basically pushed the soda back to the flight attendant. The FA said she was sorry and attempted to find a coke zero for her (which she did not have many of) and told her that she could only give her a portion of the can not the full can. This is when the lady in question started to freak out and told the FA “What do you think I will use this as a weapon?! Why can’t I have the whole can? I think you are discriminating against me. I need your name….” The lady just kept yelling to her “I need your name… I am being discriminated against.” This is when a few passengers told her to calm down and one guy told her to “shut her mouth and she is being ridiculous over a can of coke”. No one ever said anything anti-Muslim to her at all. . . . This person is a liar plain and simple and is just pulling the discrimination card.

The commenter was anonymous, so there’s no way (yet) to confirm whether he/she was actually a witness to the event. But it does raise questions that should be explored as to whether this was all just a publicity stunt. The question is: With Muslim activists being so aggressive, will any of the witnesses be willing to publicly come forward and tell their story, or will they be intimidated into silence?

United has fired the flight attendant. I hope she sues them.

WHY THE OPM DATA BREACH is so significant. As I noted before, now China knows who to blackmail. And, probably, how.

BECAUSE “SOCIAL” SCIENCE IS OXYMORONIC:  Scientific Fraud and Politics:

Last year UCLA political science grad student and maybe soon-to-be Princeton professorMichael LaCour released stunning findings from a field trial on gay marriage called “When Contact Changes Minds.” He found that a 20-minute conservation with a house-to-house canvasser could convert huge numbers of opponents into supporters, at least if the canvassers explained they were gay and told personal stories.

The study quickly became a media sensation, the most talked-about poli-sci paper in years, and it led gay-rights activists including some working on the Ireland referendum to retool their voter outreach.

The problem is that Mr. LaCour stands accused of faking everything from start to finish. Ph.D. candidates at Berkeley David Broockman andJosh Kalla tried but failed to replicate Mr. LaCour’s results. They then noticed unusual statistical irregularities in Mr. LaCour’s survey panel. He now says he pulled a Hillary Clintonand deleted his raw data. But the canvassing firm he claimed to have employed has never heard of the project—and there is no proof anyone was ever contacted, much less changed their minds. . . .

The larger question is why anyone invested Mr. LaCour’s paper with the authority of “science.” Experience and common sense suggest that persuading people to reconsider their opinions is difficult. An uninvited nag carrying on about politics on the front porch sounds like one of the less successful approaches.

Then again, the study flattered the ideological sensibilities of liberals, who tend to believe that resistance to gay marriage can only be the artifact of ignorance or prejudice, not moral or religious conviction. Mr. LaCour’s purported findings let them claim that science had proved them right.

Similar bias contaminates inquiries across the social sciences, which often seem to exist so liberals can claim that “studies show” some political assertion to be empirical. Thus they can recast stubborn political debates about philosophy and values as disputes over facts that can be resolved by science. President Obama is a particular aficionado of this bait and switch.

Calling social science a “science” is, frankly, laughable. And these days, even the “hard” sciences have become so politicized that one often cannot trust the “peer review” process to weed out errors, as is so often the case with global warming climate change data.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Clinton Support Has Nowhere To Go But Down.

By allowing Clinton to take the lion’s share of the fundraising dollars and the media attention, the party has left itself without a plausible alternative candidate. That seemed dandy as long as she was easily trouncing Republicans in polls. But those polls were always going to narrow, because the early polls were basically measuring whether people recognized the candidate’s name, not whether they were going to vote for her more than a year hence. As the GOP race sorts out, and the front-runners achieve more public awareness, you’re going to see our highly partisan electorate lock into much narrower margins.

Moreover, Clinton will have less room to improve her margins than whoever the Republican is. The Clintons have been around for a long time, which is a help in many ways — great name recognition, a beloved politician who can campaign for her, the ability to promise that the boom times under her husband will come back if only we give her our vote. But it also means that the public’s ideas about Clinton are pretty well fixed. A scandal can drive them down, but they are not going to suddenly soar as the public finds her surprisingly more likable than they expected.

When Democratic voters and pundits start to suspect that this race is not, in fact, going to be the easy walk they were expecting, they will probably start to look harder at alternatives. Realistically, so far what they’ve got is … Martin O’Malley, whose signature achievement as governor was hashing his state’s Obamacare exchange so thoroughly that it had to be scrapped and replaced — along with his hand-chosen successor, who lost to a Republican in a very blue state.

So, more competent than Hillary, then.

ED DRISCOLL: New York’s Four Seasons Restaurant: Twilight of the Oasis of the Liberal Gods?

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!

TODAY IS THE 71st Anniversary Of D-Day.

UPDATE: From the D-Day Museum in New Orleans, a D-Day timeline.

ASHE SCHOW: Mrs. Rubio’s lead foot vs. Mrs. Clinton’s corruption.

The New York Times published an article Friday morning showing that Marco Rubio and his wife have – gasp – incurred 17 traffic citations over the past 18 years.

Let’s be specific: Marco received four of those 17 citations (which include speeding and driving through red lights), and his wife received 13. Is the Times blaming Marco for the actions of his spouse? I thought that was not allowed in politics.

The negative reaction from conservatives is deserved – does a speeding ticket a year disqualify someone from the presidency? Of course not, and it was a stupid hit piece to run in the first place.

But let’s remember what the Times has been uncovering about another well-known presidential candidate: Hillary Clinton. It was the Times that broke the story of Clinton using a personal email account while she was secretary of state. It was the Times who broke the story that Clinton may have greased the wheels for a Clinton Foundation donor while at State. And it is the Times that has kept up with these scandals since.

By pointing out a trivial factoid about Rubio and his wife, the Times is reminding everyone that the “scandals” that other candidates face pale in comparison to Clinton’s. They also remind everyone that Clinton hasn’t even driven a car since 1996. Which candidate is more like us?

Journalism.

DIVERSITY COMEUPPANCE:  Kate Bachelder at WSJ has a great column on “Harvard’s Chinese Exclusion Act“:

Getting into Harvard is tough enough: Every year come the stories about applicants who built toilets in developing countries, performed groundbreaking lunar research, or won national fencing competitions, whatever it takes to edge out the competition. So you can imagine that the 52-year-old Florida businessman and author Yukong Zhao is incensed that gaining admission may be even harder for his children—because of their race.

“It’s not a political issue,” he says. “It’s a civil-rights issue.”

Mr. Zhao helped organize 64 groups that last month asked the Education Department to investigate Harvard University for discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions. The allegation is that Harvard is holding Asian-Americans to higher standards to keep them from growing as a percentage of the student body. The complaint, filed also with the Justice Department, follows a lawsuit against the university last fall by the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions. . . .

This spring, 21% of the students admitted to Harvard were Asian-American; in 1993 it was about 20%. Harvard selects students based on criteria it calls “holistic,” taking into consideration subjective qualities such as, according to the university’s website, “interests,” “character” and “growth.”

Yet look how Harvard stacks up against schools that explicitly don’t consider ethnicity in admissions. At the California Institute of Technology, the share of Asian-American students hit 42.5% in 2013—double Harvard’s and a big jump from Caltech’s 26% in 1993. At the University of California-Berkeley it is more than 30%; the state’s voters banned the state schools from using racial preferences in a 1996 referendum. The trend is also observable at elite high schools with race-neutral admissions: New York City’s Hunter College High School was 49% Asian-American in 2013.

This disparity suggests “a de facto quota system” at Harvard, Mr. Zhao tells me over dinner at a restaurant near his home in Orlando, where he works for a large energy company. Racial quotas aren’t allowed thanks to a 1978 Supreme Court ruling, but in 2003 the court confirmed that colleges could use race as a “plus” factor.

That “plus” factor decision, Grutter v. Bollinger, allowed the University of Michigan law school’s race-conscious, “holistic” admission program but warned:

“When using race as a ‘plus’ factor in university admissions, a university’s admissions program must remain flexible enough to ensure that each applicant is evaluated as an individual and not in a way that makes an applicant’s race or ethnicity the defining feature of his or her application. The importance of this individualized consideration in the context of a race-conscious admissions program is paramount.”

What Harvard and other “diversity”-driven admissions programs are doing isn’t giving Asian students a “plus” factor (as it is with “underrepresented” black or Hispanic students). Instead, being Asian with impeccable credentials is actually a “negative” factor that prevents such Asian students from being evaluated as an individual, which illustrates how perverse the quest for “diversity” has become.  The same can be said for white students who lose admissions seats to minority students with less impressive objective credentials.  But the incredibly high credentials of Asian students helps bolster the case that “diversity” is just progressive code for “discrimination” based on race rather than increasing educational opportunities for minority students.

ANDREA PEYSER: Bernie Sanders’ rape-fantasy essay reveals left-wing hypocrisy. He can’t be a creepy perv. He’s a lefty!

EMMA SULKOWICZ HARDEST HIT: The New My Little Pony Inflatable Sex Doll Hits The Shelves.

WHEN YOU’VE LOST JEZEBEL. . . Emma Sulkowicz’s Newest Art Project is a Disturbing Sex Tape.

Artnet has confirmed that Emma Sulkowicz, the former Columbia University student known for “Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight),” is behind the website “Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol .” The site hosts an artist’s statement from Sulkowicz, who graduated from Columbia in May of this year, and a video she filmed with director Ted Lawson several months ago over the university’s winter break. . . .

Sulkowicz warns viewers in the accompanying text: “If you watch this video without my consent, then I hope you reflect on your reasons for objectifying me and participating in my rape, for, in that case, you were the one who couldn’t resist the urge to make Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol about what you wanted to make it about: rape.”

Yawn. Your 15 minutes are up. Now it’s all over but the depositions.

JAMES BOVARD: TSA has no excuse to continue the groping: Thieving agents, racial profiling and excessive pat-downs haven’t made us safer. And Bovard really puts the boot in:

Last August, Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole attacked an article I wrote, stating that it was “Misleading, inaccurate and unfairly disparages the dedicated (TSA) workforce. … We will not sit back and allow misinformation and conjecture to malign our employees.”

Pistole resigned last December — in time to miss the uproar this week about TSA agents failing to detect 95% of the weapons and bombs smuggled past them by Inspector General testers. While Pistole is leading the PR pushback to absolve his former agency, the I.G. report is the latest confirmation that TSA continues blindly blundering and pointlessly abusing Americans’ rights and privacy.

Shortly after TSA was created in late 2001, one of its early mottoes was “Dominate. Intimidate. Control.” From the start, the TSA put more focus on browbeating hapless travelers than intelligently focusing on actual aviation hazards.

Though Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta promised that TSA would hire “the best and the brightest,” TSA was soon busy issuing blanket denials in response to employee abuses.

It’s security theater, and the act is stale.

SEE, IN AMERICA THE SYSTEM’S RIGGED SO THE BRIBES GO STRAIGHT TO THE TREASURY: Clean sweep? Ukraine cans all its bribe-hungry traffic cops.

AT AMAZON, Deals Galore in Lawn & Garden.

Plus, Take an Extra 25% Off Men’s Suiting.

THEY’RE BOUND TO WIELD IT BETTER THAN THEIR NEIGHBORS: Turkey’s Kurds find themselves on threshold of unprecedented power. “Turkey will hold elections Sunday for the 550 seats in its Grand National Assembly, the country’s parliament. The vote will determine whether the governing Justice and Development Party – known as the AKP – will win enough of a mandate to be able to push through a new constitution and give President Recep Tayyip Erdogan unprecedented executive powers. Erdogan’s main obstacle? The Kurds. If the HDP, a Kurdish-dominated party, wins at least 10 percent of the electorate — a minimum requirement for a party to enter parliament — it will command enough seats to check Erdogan’s ambitions, and enough clout to push its own agenda.”

Plus: “Erdogan has the mind set of an Ottoman emperor.”