WE SHOULDN’T ALLOW BACON, THOUGH, BECAUSE IF YOU GET BACON ARE YOU REALLY EVEN BEING PUNISHED? After firestorm, pork roast is back on the menu at federal prisons. “Federal officials had said that the ban on pork was not influenced by objection from Muslim inmates. But some Muslim groups reported receiving angry e-mails and social media posting following the decision.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, ROOSEVELT UNIVERSITY EDITION.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

FOR THE LEFT, IT’S ALWAYS TIME FOR A NEW NEW DEAL: The day after the Democrats’ debate, I mentioned the irony of Hillary promoting a “New, New Deal” on Time-Warner-CNN-HBO’s “news” channel when its print division ran this cover immediately after their presidential candidate was elected in 2008:

But like a jukebox that can only play one song, the left seems incapable of anything other than New New Deals — in his latest G-File, Jonah Goldberg writes that for self-described “Progressives,” it’s “New Deals for as Far as the Eye Can See:”

You can explain all day how the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression and they won’t care. They’re like our new canine visitor Pippa, who apparently thinks every moment is the best moment for a New Throw of the tennis ball.. After 9/11 Chuck Schumer raced to the pages of the Washington Post to explain that terrorism requires a new New Deal. After Katrina, liberals said “Aha! This proves we need a new New Deal.” Thomas Friedman has a shortcut macro on his keyboard that allows him to vomit up a column arguing that pretty much everything (but especially climate change!) requires, nay demands, a new New Deal.

They don’t always use the phrase “new New Deal.” Often, they use the hackneyed language of the “moral equivalent of war” instead (see this latest installment at The Atlantic of this ancient trope). But, as I’ve written 8 trillion times, that’s the same frickin’ argument.

The real appeal of the New Deal wasn’t its alleged success, it’s that the New Deal is synonymous with a time when progressives had nearly unfettered political power to do what they wanted. Liberals don’t really worship the New Deal, they worship themselves. The New Deal is just a talisman in their undying faith in their own ability to guide society and make decisions for others better than people can make for themselves.

And, at a fundamental level, the desire for an unending string of New Deals going on forever, is indistinguishable from socialism. Liberals used to be honest about this point, as when Arthur Schlesinger let slip in the pages of Partisan Review that “There seems no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.”

It’s all just so exhausting. And I guess what I resent most of all is the fact that I will spend the rest of my life arguing with people who not only think that their faith in progressivism and the State is smart and modern, but that their opponents are the ones who are stuck in the past. And in the process, they’ll keep making the country worse, with every failure providing the latest evidence that now, now, is the time for a new New Deal.

And concurrently, for the left, it’s always time for more gun control — but in past election years, Democrats were always better at lying about this particular goal, given how radioactive the topic is. This past week though, Hillary completely dropped the mask, and as Jazz Shaw writes at Hot Air today, Hillary’s gun confiscation proposal is going to backfire in a big way.

Unlike Kerry’s last minute “can aaah git meh a huntin’ license here” shtick in 2004, and Obama lying four years later that “I am not going to take your guns away,”  voters in 2016 can’t say they haven’t been given ample warning that Democrats plan to “take things away from you on behalf of the common good,” to coin a totalitarian phrase.

I BLAME MICHELLE OBAMA: Lunch Lady Blues: A report from the General Accounting office finds students are sneaking salt shakers onto campus and creating a clandestine market for potato chips. “Five years after Congress passed the Healthy Hungry-Free Kids Act, an offshoot of first lady Michelle Obama’s ‘Let’s Move!’ campaign aimed at curbing childhood obesity, participation in school lunches across the US has declined by 4 percent – or 1.5 million kids – food wastage has gone up, and growing numbers of lunch rooms are operating in the red.”

REPORT: Scenes From An Intifada.

SPACE: Check Out Cassini’s Awesome New Images of Enceladus.

AT AMAZON, Fall Deals on Men’s Boots. Winter is coming.

Plus, October deals galore for Scrapbooking Month.

NEWS FROM THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: “Nobody can stop this flow without shooting.”

LARRY LESSIG: I’m All In. “America gave birth to the idea of a representative democracy. We don’t have one now. And all the promises about what the next Democratic administration will do don’t mean squat diddly if we don’t fix that fact. Now.”

Well, I agree with Lessig’s statement of the problem.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Number Of Law Schools Interviewing Faculty Candidates At Meat Market Is Up 10% Over Last Year (But Down 37% From 2012).

I LIKE TIPPING, BECAUSE I ENJOY PAYING MORE FOR GOOD SERVICE, AND LESS FOR BAD: Tipping Is Strange, and Strangely Hard to Get Rid Of.

PLANNING TO CARRY MORE OFTEN? Amazon has holsters.

WHAT MIRACULOUS RECOVERIES tell us about beating cancer.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: So the Party Needs To Have a Nemesis: How To Create a Proper RPG Campaign Villain.

WHEN YOU TREAT FENCING OUT MIGRANTS AS SOMETHING COMPARABLE TO THE HOLOCAUST, you’re devaluing the Holocaust.

I’M SURE TOM FRIEDMAN AND CASS SUNSTEIN WILL APPROVE: China: Harbinger Of A Brave New World. “In the system, everyone is measured by a score ranging from 350 to 950, and that score is linked to a national ID card. In addition to measuring your financial credit, it will also measure political compliance. Expressing the wrong opinion—or merely having friends who express the wrong opinion—will hurt your score. The higher your score, the more privileges the government will grant you.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 891.

MILO YIANNOPOULOS: Male Students Should Boycott “Consent Classes.”

Lads, it’s time to get mad.

For years, you’ve been demonised as sexists, misogynists, and, more recently, potential rapists. A few brave students in England have finally had enough and are starting to make themselves heard. I think the rest of you should join them. . . .

Today, in colleges all over Europe and America, men are forced to take classes, lectured about crimes they haven’t committed. They are expected to make pledges and take tests to “prove” they’re not criminals. But male students are objecting. They say it’s wrong, and it’s doing damage to the healthy sexual development of both men and women.

It stigmatizes men as rapists, and creates a hostile educational environment for men.

WELL, WHEN YOU CONSIDER THAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT POLITICS AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRAFT, IT’S DELIVERED MORE THAN THAT: ObamaCare Delivers, Just Not Very Much.

Obamacare has undoubtedly produced a large drop in the number of uninsured. But if the administration is correct, then that decline will be less than half of what was originally expected, both because of the underenrollment in exchange policies and because so many states didn’t expand their Medicaid programs. The program may be shaping up as a modest expansion of Medicaid, coupled with a more robust version of the old high-risk pools.

Obamacare’s architects can justifiably say that this is more than we had before. But it is less than anyone expected.

Oh, it’s not less than anyone expected.

AT 538, taking Ted Cruz’s candidacy pretty seriously.

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!

IN AMERICA, THE YOUNG ARE ALWAYS READY TO GIVE TO THOSE WHO ARE OLDER THAN THEMSELVES THE FULL BENEFITS OF THEIR INEXPERIENCE: A Note to Entitled Millennials in the Workplace: Give Humility a Try.

And most millennials new to the workplace have much to be humble about.

Related: “Why, given Thoreau’s hypocrisy, his sanctimony, his dour asceticism, and his scorn, do we continue to cherish ‘Walden’? One answer is that we read him early. ‘Walden’ is a staple of the high-school curriculum, and you could scarcely write a book more appealing to teen-agers: Thoreau endorses rebellion against societal norms, champions idleness over work, and gives his readers permission to ignore their elders. (‘Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures.’) ‘Walden’ is also fundamentally adolescent in tone: Thoreau shares the conviction, far more developmentally appropriate and forgivable in teens, that everyone else’s certainties are wrong while one’s own are unassailable. Moreover, he presents adulthood not as it is but as kids wishfully imagine it: an idyll of autonomy, unfettered by any civic or familial responsibilities.”

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Looking Back At The Turning Of The Century. “The coming world looks like the photographic negative of the picture the public was promised.”

ASHE SCHOW: NPR highlights struggle of wrongly accused students.

It’s taken five years, but National Public Radio finally seems to recognize the consequences of campus sexual assault hysteria.

In an article titled “For students accused of campus rape, legal victories win back rights,” NPR describes how the pendulum has swung against accused students.

“As colleges crack down on sexual assault, some students complain that the schools are going too far and trampling the rights of the accused in the process,” wrote Tovia Smith. “In recent months, courts around the nation have offered some of those students significant victories, slamming schools for systems that are stacked against the accused.”

One student who spoke to NPR said “Once you are accused, you’re guilty.” Another told the station that “We used to not be fair to women on this issue,” but now, “we’re on the other extreme, not being fair to guys.”

To many feminists, that’s not a bug, but a feature. Plus:

And while it’s great that NPR is starting to see how badly the pendulum has swung against accused students, it’s important to remember who started the media hysteria in the first place: NPR.

In 2010, NPR worked with the left-leaning Center for Public Integrity to produce a report about campus sexual assault. The report included the story of Laura Dunn, who was allegedly raped by two men she knew back in 2004. NPR and CPI present her story as clear evidence that universities and police — and the Education Department at the time — didn’t care about victims.

But the actual details of Dunn’s case present a different picture. She waited nearly a year-and-a-half to report her alleged attack (and even then she only did so after a feminist professor told all the female students in her class that they had probably been raped). At that point one of the accused students had graduated and there was no evidence to support her claim. Neither the police nor the university pursued the matter. How could they? It was a he said/she said situation from 15-months earlier with no evidence and no witnesses.

Dunn wasn’t happy, so she went to the Education Department, which sent her a letter saying there was “insufficient evidence to substantiate the allegations made in the complaint.”

The lack of prosecutions could have been the result of Dunn’s changing story. When she spoke to the dean nearly a year-and-a-half after the alleged attack, she said part of the encounter was consensual. But a few days later she told police she didn’t remember being raped by one of the men and only found out about it later after the men told her about the encounter. She also acknowledged that she continued to go to the residence of one of the accused students and engaged in “physical contact.” She even watched television with both men.

Conveniently, these details were left out of the NPR and CPI report on Dunn’s case. Philosopher and American Enterprise Scholar Christina Hoff Sommers noted back in January that the case was not accurately reported by NPR and CPI.

If journalists could be sued for malpractice, or if journalistic outlets faced product liability like pharma companies, things would be very different.