WHEN YOUR BOGUS CLAIM ABOUT MASS SHOOTINGS IS DISPUTED BY A MOTHER JONES EDITOR IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, IT’S REALLY BOGUS: How Many Mass Shootings Are There, Really?

OBAMA’S ALL ABOUT EXTRACTING MONEY FROM PEOPLE WHO DON’T SUPPORT HIM, AND FUNNELING IT TO PEOPLE WHO DO: The Justice Department’s Liberal Slush Fund.

Republicans talk often about using the “power of the purse” to rein in a lawless Obama administration. If they mean it, they ought to use their year-end spending bill to stop a textbook case of outrageous executive overreach.

This scandal comes courtesy of the Justice Department, which for 16 months has engaged in a scheme to undermine Congress’s spending authority by independently transferring dollars to President Obama’s political allies. The department is in the process of funneling more than half-a-billion dollars to liberal activist groups, at least some of which will actively support Democrats in the coming election.

It works likes this: The Justice Department prosecutes cases against supposed corporate bad actors. Those companies agree to settlements that include financial penalties. Then Justice mandates that at least some of that penalty money be paid in the form of “donations” to nonprofits that supposedly aid consumers and bolster neighborhoods.

The Justice Department maintains a list of government-approved nonprofit beneficiaries. And surprise, surprise: Many of them are liberal activist groups. The National Council of La Raza. The National Urban League. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition. NeighborWorks America (which awards grants to left-leaning community organization groups, and has been compared with Acorn).

This strategy kicked off with the $13 billion J.P. Morgan settlement in late 2013, though in that case the bank was simply offered credit for donations to nonprofits. That changed with the Citigroup and Bank of America settlements, which outright required $150 million in donations. The BofA agreement contains a provision that potentially tees up nonprofit groups for another $490 million. Several smaller settlements follow the same mold.

To further induce companies to go the donation route, Justice considers these handouts to be worth “double credit” against penalty obligations. So while direct forms of victim relief are still counted dollar-for-dollar, a $500,000 donation by BofA to La Raza takes at least $1 million off the company’s bill.

Political racketeering, pure and simple.

BLOOMBERG BUSINESS: Wal-Mart Sues Puerto Rico Over ‘Astonishing’ Tax Increases.

I started to ask, “is ‘astonishing’ the new “unexpectedly?”, and then realized the story was in Bloomberg Business, where bad economic news has been invariably appearing “unexpectedly” since oh, about January of 2009.

Unexpectedly.

SLATE: What Do We Really Know About the Alleged Police Cover-Up in Dothan, Alabama? A closer look at a viral article reveals that it offers little evidence to support its disturbing claims.

Related: A Rush To Judgment In Dothan, Alabama.

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DANA LOESCH AND THE INSTA-WIFE AT BULLETS & BOURBON: Not actually sisters.

STEPHEN L. CARTER: Calling On Batman To Explain Our Dark World. “Whether facing acts of terror inspired abroad or mass murders concocted at home, we spend a lot of time flinging charges and wringing hands. The nation does not seem terribly confident just now. Our children must sense the uneasiness of the generation that’s running things — and be made uneasy by it in turn.”

Well, we’re led by crooks and idiots. That tends to produce a sense of uneasiness.

BEHIND EVERY RED-CARPET STAR: There’s a publicist with a giant handbag. An “Awards Season” Pinterest board inspired by chapter four of The Power of Glamour.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. No, Mr. President, the NRA is not to blame.

‘HUNTING GROUND’ FILMMAKERS CLAIM HARVARD LAW PROFS’ CRITICISM CREATES A ‘HOSTILE CLIMATE’: Last month, a group of Harvard Law School professors issued a press release denouncing the film The Hunting Ground as being misleading. Now the filmmakers are claiming that the professors’ criticism may constitute actionable sex discrimination in violation of Title IX. Check out what FIRE’s Samantha Harris has to say about this claim in her new article.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Attorney General of the United States Is Disgracing Herself. Also disgraced: The GOP members who voted for her confirmation.

In her response to what appears to be a deadly, ISIS-motivated domestic terror attack, Attorney General Loretta Lynch has offered an almost Onion-level self-parody of liberal pieties. Per Obama administration protocol, the attorney general was determined to never let a crisis go to waste. There is now a “wonderful opportunity and wonderful moment to really make significant change,” Lynch declared the day after 14 innocent Americans were murdered and 23 injured at the hands of a Muslim couple who’d reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS. And what is this change? New gun-control measures, of course, including stripping the constitutional rights (without due process) of Americans often arbitrarily placed on the vastly over-inclusive terror watch list.

This is all just “stray voltage” meant to distract from Obama’s failure to protect America.

UPDATE: Somebody here at Bullets & Bourbon credited me with the “stray voltage” term, but that’s actually not a term that originated with me.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 940.

JON GABRIEL RESPONDS TO THE NEW YORK TIMES: End The Islamist Epidemic In America. “It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that Islamists can commit acts designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are acts of war, barely concealed and deliberately promoted as tools of religious intolerance and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for jihad’s victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on radical Islam, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about gun control. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, violent crime.”

YES, BUT THE POINT IS TO GIVE THE PRESS SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT BESIDES OBAMA’S COLOSSAL FAILURES IN THE WAR ON TERROR: Why The Gun Control Push Is Futile.

Another mass shooting, another round of liberal venom hurled at people who oppose further gun control measures. In the wake of the slaughter in San Bernadino, the charges were particularly shrill. “Dear ‘thoughts and prayers’ people: Please shut up and slink away. You are part of the problem, and everybody knows it,” said one liberal Washington Post columnist, in a representative tweet.

Most gun control advocates know that the push for federal gun laws is futile. Public support for gun rights is near historical highs, the structure of the U.S. Senate favors pro-gun forces, and—as many observers pointed out at the time—if the tragedy at Sandy Hook couldn’t get gun legislation through the Congress, nothing can, at least for the foreseeable future. But liberal decision to make the San Bernadino massacre a story about gun control is more than futile—it is fundamentally disconnected from the role the Second Amendment has played in American political thought, and therefore might be even less effective than past efforts.

Remember, when we’re talking about gun control, we’re not talking about how Obama told us us that ISIS was the JV team, or how he’s importing lots of poorly “vetted” middle eastern Muslims, or how he has botched Syria and Libya, or how his hashtag campaign against Boko Haram failed, or how the domestic protections against terror are looking porous and ineffectual, or how . . . well, you get the idea. Plus, gun control is a tribal rallying cry for uninformed Obama supporters. Or, to be less redundant, Obama supporters.

IT WAS PROBABLY TRIGGERED BY POSTPARTUM DEPRESSION: Obama still won’t say Calif. shooting was terrorism.

NARRATIVEFAIL: Sorry, Green Team: Bakken oil production hasn’t inflicted environmental catastrophe in North Dakota.

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OH, GET OVER YOURSELF, YOU RACIST TWIT: “For me, whiteness is not an identity but a moral problem.”

KYLE MCENTEE: What Will The ABA Do To Restore Trust In Law Schools?

On Friday, the Council for ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar meets in Atlanta. My organization will ask the Council to address trends in law school admissions and retention policies. We already asked the Council to instruct the Accreditation Committee to enforce the non-exploitation standard based on the plain text of Standard 501(b). Now we are asking that the Council reignite the Standard 316 revision process.

At the Standards Review Committee‘s last meeting, the committee indicated that it will wait on the Council for further instructions on the minimum bar passage standard, Standard 316. The Council should instruct the SRC to submit a revised Standard 316 after its February meeting. After the Council’s March meeting it should put the revised Standard out for notice and comment so that it may approve it during the June 2016 meeting. If the ABA starts the process now, we can easily have a real bar passage standard by August 2016.

But what’s wrong with Standard 316?

Standard 316 requires schools to pass one of two tests. A school passes the first test with an “ultimate bar passage rate” of 75% over the last five years. A school passes the second test with a “first-time bar passage rate” that is within 15% of the state average.

The tests sound simple, but are riddled with loopholes that allow very low performing law schools to remain in compliance. More than a handful of current and former ABA Section of Legal Education insiders have remarked privately that the Standard is unenforceable.

It’s as if self-regulation is usually self-serving or something.

DAVID BERNSTEIN: Subordinating the Constitution to progressive internationalism: From Libya to climate change.

In his speech at the global climate change conference in Paris, President Obama made it clear that he would like to reach an international agreement that would mitigate the harmful effects of climate change, with each nation binding itself to targets to reduce carbon emissions. What was missing from his speech (and elsewhere) was an acknowledgement that to be binding on the United States any such agreement would need to be in the form of either an executive agreement that would require the approval of both houses of Congress, or a treaty, which would require a positive vote from two-thirds of the Senate. It’s very unlikely that either of these things would be forthcoming from the Republican-controlled Congress.

So the president may agree to a treaty that’s not really a treaty. But what power has he to agree to bind the United States to something without Congress’s assent? Jonathan Tobin of Commentary remarks, “If a climate treaty that is not called a treaty, but which will place the U.S. under these kinds of onerous obligations is put into effect without even the fig leaf of an approval process, then we will have truly taken a step toward a kind of presidential government that is utterly alien to the model of representative democracy that is the foundation of the American constitutional system. . . . Let’s concede that any deal rammed through in this manner won’t have the force of law and can be ignored or rejected by Obama’s successor. But if we allow this precedent to pass unnoticed, we will be merely reinforcing a new reality in which the whims of any president will be sovereign rather than the rule of law.”

Which raises the question of Obama’s motivation. Surely, in part, Obama sincerely believes that climate change is a huge threat to civilization, and therefore wants to do anything in his power, or even anything he can get away with that’s beyond his power, to help stop it.

But climate change (see also the Environmental Protection Agency’s creative, but legally dubious, rules on carbon emissions) is hardly the only area where Obama has preferred to govern unilaterally. Most likely, the president also feels justified in expanding presidential power because he is contemptuous of congressional Republicans, whom he believes are extremists unwilling to cooperate with him even when they know failing to do so will harm the country. But don’t take my word for it; Obama administration Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has explained that Obama sees congressional Republicans as “people that simply won’t—don’t wanna do the right thing for the country.”

Obama has contempt for pretty much everyone who opposes him. And I don’t think he has all that much respect for people who support him, either.

Plus: “The administration is indulging in a form of liberal internationalism that seeks to subordinate adherence to the American Constitution, its separation of powers, and the laws enacted under it to what its advocates consider the much more important values of international cooperation and humanitarianism, which may be undertaken efficiently and efficaciously only by a strong executive. As I explain in more detail in my new book, “Lawless,” the Libyan intervention was exactly the sort of war that liberal internationalists could love. First, the war had the implicit backing of the United Nations, as the U.N. Security Council had unanimously passed a resolution establishing a no-fly zone over Libya. It also had the backing of the Arab League, which also endorsed a no-fly zone. Second, there was no discernible American strategic interest in intervening in Libya, and American intervention was justified primarily as a humanitarian mission that would shore up the U.N.’s authority. Finally, the United States did not act unilaterally in Libya, but acted through NATO and in alliance with Qatar. As NATO, and not the U.S. military, took control of the operation, an anonymous Obama administration official proudly described the president’s strategy as ‘leading from behind.'”

Also, and not coincidentally, it was a colossal debacle for the United States, and for the people it was ostensibly intended to help.

BULLETS AND BOURBON: A good time was had by all. And it’s not over yet!

THE INSTA-WIFE: “I thought it was interesting how few people or media mentioned that one of the San Bernardino suspects is a woman.”

I DON’T KNOW ABOUT WATCHING TV, BUT BEING ON TV DOESN’T SEEM TO MAKE YOU ANY SMARTER: TV May Be Bad for Your Brain.

DON SURBER: Not A Good Day To Be Chuck Todd.