DEAR LIBERALS, STOP DEFENDING RACIST PROGRESSIVE WOODROW WILSON: “Surprisingly, the 28th president still has his defenders on the left,” Damon Root writes at Reason, although much like the MSM’s constant stream of “unexpectedly” bad economic news post-January of 2009, I’m not sure what’s “surprising” about Wilson’s sclerotic “Progressive” defenders:

Not everyone is quite so eager to see Wilson knocked off his pedestal, however. Writing at Politico Magazine this week, left-wing New York University professor Jonathan Zimmerman attempted to defend the beleaguered 28th president by reminding the ungrateful student activists about Wilson’s pioneering progressive agenda. Sure, Wilson may have been a racist, Zimmerman admitted, but “the Progressive doctrines espoused by Wilson” ushered in a new era of activist government that was ultimately “reflected” and enshrined in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Wilson was a founding father of modern liberalism, Zimmerman insisted, and therefore “deserves a good deal of credit” for improving the lives of “America’s poor and dispossessed, including minorities.”

I never cease to be amazed when I encounter this sort of liberal apologia for Woodrow Wilson. This is the same Woodrow Wilson, after all, who imposed Jim Crow on the federal government, praised segregation, glorified the Ku Klux Klan, spied on innocent Americans, censored the mail, trashed the Bill of Rights, and imprisoned multiple critics for the “crimes” of giving speeches, writing editorials, and distributing pamphlets. As H.L. Mencken once remarked about the ugly record of another unlikely liberal hero, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “If this is Liberalism, then all I can say is that Liberalism is not what it was when I was young.”

Well, it’s not — Mencken wrote that sentence around 1930; as Fred Siegel wrote in his 2014 book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, in order to put a fresh PR spin on their ideology after the horrors of the Wilson administration, the self-described “Progressives” of the 20th century’s early years began to call themselves “liberals” instead during the previous decade — a huge stolen base, considering that there’s a vast difference between the traditional laissez-faire meaning of classical liberalism and the racism, eugenics, and “moral equivalent of war” obsessions of “Progressivism.”

Apparently Hillary thought all of that baggage was forgotten by 2007, when she decided that due to the L-word’s own accumulated history from 1933 to the present, she rebranded herself as “a proud modern American progressive, and I think that’s the kind of philosophy and practice that we need to bring back to American politics.”

Mission accomplished, and then some, Hillary — a racist like Woodrow Wilson would be astonished that a black man was president, but he’d find much to admire in Mr. Obama’s own racialism, corporatism, foreign policy utopianism, and the chaos and riots that he’s sewn since 2009.

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LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Editing sperm stem cells could be the safest approach to genetically editing humans.

INSTITUTIONALIZED SEXISM: “Be aware that many legal clinics are reluctant to help fathers.”

OOPS: Inconvenient timing: On eve of Paris Climate Conference, Spain’s Abengoa Solar goes bankrupt.

TO BE FAIR, NEITHER DOES ANYBODY ELSE: Your Doctor Doesn’t Want to Hear About Your Fitness-Tracker Data.

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FOUR WAYS RUSSIA’S MILITARY is more advanced than you might think.

PREPARING FOR WORLD WAR III: “Because, like I said, America is sickly. It’s getting weaker.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 933.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 934.

ARIZONA’S END RUN AROUND THE EDUCATION SPENDING LOBBY, as charted by Ricochet’s Jon Gabriel, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

Providing more resources to teachers and students is popular with many voters; paying higher taxes to hire district paper-shufflers is not. So Gov. Ducey came up with a clever plan to draw $2 billion over a decade from the state trust lands—a constitutional set-aside, established at statehood to promote public education, that currently holds about 9 million acres and more than $5 billion. The governor wanted to put that additional money directly into the classroom, rather than funnel it through layers of bureaucrats. Even with this outflow, the governor’s estimates showed, the trust would continue to grow in the long term, and its value would be higher in five years than today.

More money for schools with no new taxes: What’s not to like? A lot, apparently. Mr. Ducey’s plan disrupted the usual coalition of teachers unions and public school districts, leading some in the K-12 establishment—those administrators and union officials who have a way of soaking up dollars while doing little for students—to take the unfamiliar position of objecting to new education funding.

The superintendent of Mesa Public Schools, Arizona’s largest district, launched an email and robocall campaign to turn parents against the proposal. He insisted he was fighting for “the children,” but he was less upfront about disclosing that his lobbying effort was funded with school-district money that could have been put into the classroom instead.

Read the whole thing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Ohio State Deans Berate Female Law Student Over Pro-Life Op-Ed After She Sought Protection After Online Threat. “‘I was so shocked. I’ve never been in a situation with people I respected and looked up to and felt so violated.’ Ms. Gesiotto knew that many of her peers at the law school would disagree with the column. She expected to take some flak. What she didn’t expect, she said, was having administrators show less interest in her safety than in tearing apart a column entirely unrelated to her coursework. . . . ‘I was there to report a threat. And then they tried to flip it around and push me into a facilitated discussion with other kids about my article. It was bizarre and very disappointing.'”

Lefties are indulged no matter how over-the-top. People on the right are told: You deserve the threats for making people angry. Also, you’re evil.

If people in the academy wonder why their stock is plummeting with the general public, it’s stuff like this.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Lessons In College Costs For Clinton & Sanders.

But even if we assume that higher education really is too expensive, we face a second conceptual difficulty: Subsidies may not make college significantly cheaper. Although the relationship between the level of aid available to students and the level of tuition has been controversial, this study released in July by economists at the New York Fed is persuasive. The authors found fairly robust effects, with an increase of 60 to 70 cents in tuition for each dollar increase of subsidized student loans. The effect was stronger at private colleges than at public schools, and, among private colleges, was least pronounced at those accepting the smallest proportion of applicants. As these tend to be the schools with the largest endowments, the effect is not entirely surprising.

The Clinton and Sanders plans are aimed principally at public colleges, where out-of-state tuition already rises with the size of Pell grants. One reason in-state tuition doesn’t capture the subsidies is political pressure from residents. So maybe the flood of new federal money would have no effect. On the other hand, given the growing need to compete with the wealthier schools in the educational “arms race of spending” — for example, to hire or retain top faculty — there’s a fair chance that we’d see some significant increases.

Of course it’s possible (some would say likely) that the web of regulations accompanying the grants under both programs would include implicit price controls. I’m no fan of this idea, but lots of smart people think I should be.

Finally there’s the Scottish experience. In 2001, Scotland began the process of abolishing tuition, a goal essentially accomplished in 2008. In a recent Vox article, Libby Nelson pointed to research showing, among other things, that although the change led to an increase in applications, the children of the poor still attend college at relatively low rates. In other words, what has been holding them back might not be the cost.

Read the whole thing.

WHY DO YOU NEVER SEE GASOLINE TAXES ITEMIZED ON YOUR RECEIPT? “Turns out a gallon of gas in Chicago has eight taxes on it.  In Park Ridge adds two cents more.” The Illinois Policy Institute produces a facsimile of what a receipt would look like if they were all listed.

THE WORSE THEY DO, THE MORE THEY’LL YAMMER ABOUT POLITICS. OR MAYBE IT’S THE OTHER WAY AROUND. ESPN Has Lost 7 Million Subscribers The Past Two Years.

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PREPARE TO BE BLINDSIDED IN 2016: “The last month has been an object lesson in the unpredictability of politics. We began November with news of an improving economy, with a rise in President Obama’s approval ratings. We end it with America and the world on high alert, with Obama on defense,” Matthew Continetti writes. “If the situation is so fluid now, how can we say with any confidence what things will look like a year on? Elections come into focus late. Why? Because most voters don’t pay attention to politics until the balloting is imminent.”

LIARS GONNA LIE: Wikipedia founder advocates for updating policies following ‘The Hunting Ground’ controversy.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is looking to tighten his website’s rules about editors altering pages with which they have a conflict of interest.

Wales renewed interest in the policies follows a Washington Examiner report that a crewmember of “The Hunting Ground,” a one-sided film about campus sexual assault, had been editing Wikipedia pages to promote the film and conform facts to its narrative.

“I have long advocated that we should deal much more quickly and much more severely with [Conflict of Interest] editors,” Wales wrote after citing the Examiner. “The usual objections (from some quarters — I think most people agree with me) have to do with it being hard to detect them, but in this case, the COI was called out, warnings were issued, and nothing was done. Now the editor has been called out by the media embarrassing him (he deserves it), his employer (who may not), and Wikipedia.” . . .

Another Wikipedia editor, KirkCliff2, chimed in on the thread by suggesting that the crewmember didn’t break just COI rules but also Wikipedia’s rules against gaming the system and neutrality. This editor also noted how Edward Patrick Alva, “The Hunting Ground” crew member, “has also been fairly disingenuous about his actions” and had been “shamelessly plugging the movie and the ‘stars’ thereof.”

Alva had made multiple edits to the Wikipedia pages of subjects from his film, including former Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston, who was accused of rape by fellow FSU student Erica Kinsman. Some of Alva’s edits included removing information that cast doubt on Kinsman’s story and made the Tallahassee police look worse — in line with how the movie portrays the situation.

KirkCliff2, who wrote that he is “a veteran editor who rarely even weighs in on such issues” believes Alva “must be banned.”

Banned or not, his sleazy conduct should be widely publicized.

BECAUSE THINGS AREN’T WEIRD ENOUGH THIS YEAR ALREADY: #ColoradoSprings shooter’s only online documentation suggests HE identifies as a female.

The 24-hour rule applies, but the way things are going in 2015, this seems plausible. . . .

WEAK, CONFUSED AND ‘UNABLE TO GRASP:’ “Many bad things happen when a leader is weak, confused and forever in search of a credible reason to do nothing,” Wes Pruden writes:

For all his softness on Islam, Barack Obama has little insight into the men who send out mobs to cry “death to America.” He can’t imagine that men can listen to the call to evening Muslim prayer, which so captivated him as a boy growing up in Indonesia — “the prettiest sound on Earth” — and be inspired to dream of bringing down death on America.

The international order so carefully put together, and guarded so faithfully, by American presidents, Democrats and Republicans, after the Cold War was won, has unraveled under this president to the consternation of America’s most faithful allies and to the unexpected delight of the nation’s considerable enemies. The anarchy that will follow this unraveling will be the legacy he leaves behind him.

Read the whole thing.

ONLY FOUR COUNTRIES OUT OF 24 HAVE MAJORITIES WHO SUPPORT A CLIMATE DEAL: “In a similar poll before the Copenhagen meeting in 2009, eight countries had majorities favouring tough action.” This has always been an issue mostly for elites, probably because climate deals all tend to give elites more power and money.

RIDE THE PC RECURSION! Gay marriage is legal in America but not on Indian tribal lands.

Which group of what Thomas Sowell would call “the mascots of the anointed” will win out?