TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 632.

JESSE WALKER: What the Hell Does ‘Politically Correct’ Mean?: A Short History. According to the leftsplainers at Vox, there’s no such thing!

Plus, the joys of undergraduate cluelessness: “In the early ’90s, a woman told me that she and her friends had often said ‘politically correct’ without any irony when she was an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr. She wasn’t happy when she started hearing people use the expression disdainfully.”

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Never Again?

“From the Jewish point of view, European anti-Semitism is a sideshow,” Charles Krauthammer writes today. “The story of European Jewry is over. It died at Auschwitz. Europe’s place as the center and fulcrum of the Jewish world has been inherited by Israel. Not only is it the first independent Jewish commonwealth in 2,000 years. It is, also for the first time in 2,000 years, the largest Jewish community on the planet.”

“The threat to the Jewish future lies not in Europe but in the Muslim Middle East, today the heart of global anti-Semitism, a veritable factory of anti-Jewish literature, films, blood libels and calls for violence, indeed for another genocide,” he adds.

Anti-semitism was temporarily eclipsed by killing a lot of people who attempted genocide. Were I the Israelis, I’d be a lot more willing to do that again. But, you know, maybe that’s just a Scots-Irish thing.

FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS: Exhausted Politico Reporter Demands a Union: “I can’t work the kind of hours I did when I was 24,” says Elk, who is 28.

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TERESA SULLIVAN IS BEHAVING UNETHICALLY, AND BREACHING HER DUTY TO TREAT ALL UVA STUDENTS FAIRLY: U.Va. president admits rape story was false; keeps restrictions on fraternities.

University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan finally admitted that she knows the Rolling Stone article detailing a brutal gang rape at the university was discredited.

“Before the Rolling Stone story was discredited, it seemed to resonate with some people simply because it confirmed their darkest suspicions about universities — that administrations are corrupt; that today’s students are reckless and irresponsible; that fraternities are hot-beds of deviant behavior,” Sullivan said during a presidential address.

Of course, Sullivan fell for the story hook, line and sinker as well. But it is her next sentence that really shows how out of touch she is.

“Working together, we have soundly refuted those suspicions through our actions over the past two months,” Sullivan said.

But have they?

Immediately following the Rolling Stone story, Sullivan extended the Greek council’s voluntary weekend ban (calling it a “pause”) on social activities through Jan. 9. And in order for Greek organizations to resume activities, they had to sign new agreements with the university that put new restrictions on their social activities.

Remember, these actions were spurred by a Rolling Stone article that has since been discredited.

The new restrictions on fraternities contradict what Sullivan said. They show that the university doesn’t trust Greek organizations, thinking they are “hot-beds of deviant behavior” with members that are “reckless and irresponsible” that need new rules that are more restrictive to save them from themselves. (Example: “Beer may be served, unopened in its original can.”)

The fraternities and sororities have been forced to adopt the new guidelines for fear of having university ties cut. They will never get an apology from Sullivan, that much is clear. But it would have at least been nice if she were straight with the students and told them that she is still acting on the “darkest suspicions” fueled by a false story about a rape.

She’s taking advantage of a false story that her office had a part in producing to do things she just wanted to do anyway. Where’s the Board of Visitors?

WHY DO THEY HATE SICK LITTLE GIRLS? Stanford threatened with lawsuit over MLK Day protest.

Stanford University received an email after the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day “Silicon Shutdown” protest threatening legal action due to the rally shutting down traffic on the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge.

The email apparently is from the attorney of a family whose 3-year-old girl was in “medical distress” and was en route to the hospital when it encountered the protesters, who were blocking their path.

This happened with the I-93 protesters in Boston, too.

REIHAN SALAM: The Upper Middle Class Is Ruining America — And I want it to stop.

You might be wondering why I’m so down on the upper middle class when they’re getting in the way of the tax hikes that will make big government even bigger. Doesn’t that mean that while liberals should be bothered by the power of the upper middle class, conservatives should cheer them on? Well, part of my objection is that upper-middle-income voters only oppose tax hikes on themselves. They are generally fine with raising taxes on people richer than themselves, including taxes on the investments that rich people make in new products, services, and businesses. I find that both annoyingly self-serving and destructive. The bigger reason, however, is that upper-middle-class people don’t just use their political muscle to keep their taxes low. They also use it to make life more expensive for everyone else.

Take a seemingly small example—occupational licensing. In North Carolina, teeth-whiteners without expensive dental degrees would like to be allowed to sell their services but are opposed by the state’s dentists, as Eduardo Porter noted in a recent New York Times column. Are the good dentists of North Carolina fighting the teeth-whiteners because they fear for the dental health of North Carolinians? It doesn’t look like it. A more plausible story is that dentists don’t want to compete with cut-rate practitioners, because restricting entry into the field allows them to charge higher prices. We often hear about how awesome it is that Uber is making taxi service cheaper and more accessible for ordinary consumers but how sad it is that they are making life harder for working-class drivers who drive traditional cabs. Notice that upper-middle-class credentialed professionals like dentists, lawyers, and doctors rarely get Uber’d to the same degree. Even when innovative services try to do things like, say, offer a free alternative to expensive insurance brokers, state and local governments will often step in to say, “Oh, no you don’t.” Want to offer a low-cost, high-quality education by, say, replacing expensive professors with Filipino instructors who teach calculus over streaming video? Sorry, pal, you first have to get approved by an accreditation body controlled … by the existing schools you’re trying to out-compete, which employ upper-middle-class people who don’t take any crap.

Or take immigration policy: Dean Baker of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research has called for increasing the number of doctors, dentists, and other professionals allowed into the U.S. while limiting the number of less-skilled people, like would-be retail clerks, custodians, and housekeepers. The reason is that high-skilled immigrants squeeze the wages of upper-middle-class professionals, who can afford to take a hit while lowering the cost of various services for poorer people by giving them the option of going to cheaper doctors and dentists. By contrast, bringing in retail clerks, custodians, and housekeepers makes life cheaper for the upper-middle-class professionals while squeezing the wages of working people, particularly immigrants who already live in the U.S. Want to guess how popular the idea of increasing the wages of nannies is with the upper-middle-class people who employ them? I’d love to know, but I’m sorry to report that upper-middle-class pollsters have yet to ask the question.

Yes, but I know the answer. Plus: “Even more egregious is the way that upper-middle-class NIMBY-ism pushes for strict land-use restrictions that drive working- and lower-middle-class people out of the country’s most desirable and productive cities.”

Also: “The upper middle class controls the media we consume. They run our big bureaucracies, our universities, and our hospitals. Their voices drown out those of other people at almost every turn.”

THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE: VIDEO: Feminist activist wears plastic bags over shoes to mock female Senator Joni Ernst. “While attending a pro-abortion celebration this past weekend, the secretary for Florida’s National Organization for Women chapter was caught wearing plastic bags over her shoes in an attempt to mock Sen. Joni Ernst (R). In her GOP response to the State of the Union, Ernst, a freshman senator from Iowa, recalled wearing plastic bags over her one good pair of shoes in order to keep them from getting ruined on rainy days. . . . Several women also attending Roe on the Rocks: Celebrate Choices over the weekend complimented Axler on her Target bags. The celebration featured Diane Price Herndl, professor and chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies department at the University of South Florida, who also delivered a speech at the event.”

Let’s just say that the plastic bags aren’t the only questionable sartorial choice displayed here. But feminists mocking poor people isn’t surprising. Feminism has always been a movement of the upper middle class, which is very eager to distinguish itself from the lower middle class.

BLOWBACK: Targeted By Obama, Bibi Surges In Israeli Polls.

THERE SHOULD BE ZERO TOLERANCE FOR WRONG HOUSE RAIDS. EVERY TIME IT HAPPENS, THE PERSON IN CHARGE SHOULD BE FIRED.

The feds still won’t reveal what an internal investigation determined about a Deputy U.S. Marshal’s raid on the wrong Sarasota apartment, but the nurse terrorized there just got good news.

The U.S. Department of Justice has agreed to pay Louise Goldsberry and her boyfriend $90,000, according to her lawyer, in connection with the botched July 2013 action by the U.S. Marshals Services’s Fugitive Task Force.

The city of Sarasota, which had a police officer assigned to the federal unit, has agreed to pay another $3,000, according to Goldsberry’s lawyer, Andrea Mogensen.

Goldsberry, as you might recall, was washing dishes in her kitchen — after dinner with her visiting boyfriend and a day on the job as an operating room nurse — when she saw an armed man.

He was pointing a gun toward her, through her kitchen window.

Goldsberry screamed, ducked, and crawled to her bedroom. She and her boyfriend were further shocked when another man began banging on the front door, demanding to be let it. He claimed to be a law officer.

From what Goldsberry had seen, that seemed unlikely. While the man at the door cursed and threatened to break in, she grabbed her small pistol from her bedroom and cowered in the hallway, thinking it was a home invasion.

Instead of directing Goldsberry to call 911 to confirm that law officers were at her door, Deputy U.S. Marshall Matt Wiggins kept yelling and then opened the front door, while protected by a tactical shield. He aimed a blinding flashlight and a gun at the panicked woman.

She would have been within her rights to shoot them. And if she had, they’d have made something up to pretend it was her fault. There isn’t nearly enough accountability for this sort of thing. And that lack of accountability produces this sort of sense of entitlement:

Wiggins confirmed afterward that he had threatened to shoot Goldsberry if she did not drop her gun and come out. He told me she should feel grateful he did not do so and, for that matter, grateful that he did not arrest her.

Wiggins said he could not see why she would be complaining to the press when she was the one who disobeyed police orders.

He was a home invader. If he had been shot, it would have been his fault. He should be apologizing most contritely. And since he doesn’t grasp this, he shouldn’t work in law enforcement at all.

SO THIS MAKES THEM HOSTAGE-TAKERS AND TERRORISTS, RIGHT? Dick Durbin: Senate Democrats will block House DHS bill. If the Dems block it, McConnell can always go nuclear on them. Because the filibuster is evil, and so are other techniques that thwart the Senate majority. We learned that last year . . .

COULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED TO A NICER GUY: CIA and Mossad killed senior Hezbollah figure in car bombing. But this was in 2008. Not much chance we’d do anything like it today.

But the big question is why this is — pretty obviously deliberately, and with high level approval — being leaked today, by a different administration. I wonder who the “lawmakers” the CIA briefed were.

IF SO, IT’S BECAUSE THEY FEARED INVESTIGATIONS BY A GOP CONGRESS: FDIC retreats on Operation Choke Point? I’ll be interested, though, to hear what people in the affected industries have to say over the coming months.

ROLL CALL: Democrats Lose Candidate and Hope in New York Special Election. “The date hasn’t even been set, but Republicans have all but won the special election in New York’s 11th District. The Staten Island-based district has swung from being a top Democratic target in the midterms all the way across the competitive spectrum to Democrats punting the opportunity to win the seat in a special election.” Fallout from the Garner case?

A MUST-READ FOR CONSERVATIVE COLLEGE STUDENTS: Jonah Goldberg explains how American progressivism was born of the same intellectual and political climate that gave rise to various European collectivist, statist and nationalistic movements – and how those mindsets are currently in control of higher education discourse today.

TRIFECTA: Are Liberals Actually Admitting Islamic Terrorists Exist?!?

OUT: NANNY STATE. In: Ninny State.

LOCKED IN: “For so many years, I was like a ghost. I could hear and see everything, but it was like I wasn’t there. I was invisible.”

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PERHAPS SOME DONORS GOT UPSET OVER THE LOONINESS: Frederick Lawrence to step down as president of Brandeis.

UPDATE: Roger Simon comments: “Nowhere in the email is there mention of the fierce defender of women’s rights and critic of Islam Hirsi Ali, nor was there reference to another controversy surrounding Brandeis student Daniel Mael and his response to tweets by still another student calling the recent murder of two NYPD officers ‘hilarious.’ Brandeis, a secular Jewish university founded in 1948 in the wake of the Holocaust, has been under fire of late for anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic statements from students and faculty.”

SO, SORT OF LIKE THE IRAN/IRAQ WAR THEN: “The obvious thing to say about Jonathan Chait’s battle against the left is that we’re rooting for casualties.”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Technology Makes It Easier To Find Sexual Partners, But This May Have Public Health Consequences.

Before the days of the internet, finding a casual partner meant putting in some effort: chatting up someone in a bar, say, or hanging about in a shady spot known to be frequented by like-minded people. Nowadays, a naughty encounter is but a click away, thanks to smartphone apps such as Tinder and Grindr and listings websites such as Craigslist. But with convenience comes less happy consequences, as a paper just published in MIS Quarterly suggests.

Jason Chan of the University of Minnesota and Anindya Ghose of New York University have looked specifically at what effects a local Craigslist site has on its state’s rates of reported HIV cases. Craigslist started life as a round-robin e-mail in the San Francisco area in 1995, but has ballooned to a 700-site network in 70 countries. The sites make their money mainly from listings for jobs or housing, but their free personal ads, which often solicit casual sexual partners, account for a big chunk of the sites’ content. These sites were rolled out piecemeal across America over several years, providing a natural laboratory to examine how their arrival affected sexual health.

Drs Chan and Ghose looked at HIV rates in 33 states between 1999 and 2008, mostly in America’s central regions (Craigslist’s spread to populous cities along coastal regions was much faster, muddying the data there). The arrival of Craigslist, they found, was correlated with an average increase of 15.9% a year in the number of HIV infections compared with what would have been expected had it not been launched; the pair estimate that the listing website was associated with between 6,130 and 6,455 extra infections a year throughout the country. That held true even after controlling for national and local HIV trends (which were often in decline), the level of urbanisation, and changing rates of people getting tested for the virus.

Although the sites also feature a section dedicated to escort services, these did not appear to be correlated with the increased infection rate. Instead, it seems, the majority of new infections result from men seeking other men.

I find all of this unsurprising.

WELL, PERSONALLY I HAVE THE BUTLERIAN JIHAD PENCILED IN FOR 2042: Bill Gates on dangers of artificial intelligence: ‘I don’t understand why some people are not concerned.’

LIFE IN THE OBAMA ERA: Corporate Profits Soar, Average Incomes Plummet.