JOURNALISM: Guardian ‘changed Iraq article to avoid offending Apple.’ Plus:

The Telegraph also understands that there are concerns within The Guardian about funded journalism on its website.

It confirmed that it is in discussions with the European Climate Foundation “regarding the funding of journalism projects”. The foundation lobbies for climate and energy policies to reduce emissions.

The Guardian is facing further questions over a section of its website sponsored by the Go Ultra Low Group, a group of vehicle manufacturers promoting low-emission vehicles.

The section includes 11 articles devoted to the benefits of low-emission cars, including one entitled “miles of smiles” and another “driving into tomorrow, today”.

At no point do the sections or the article disclose that the content has been sponsored by the Go Ultra Low Group, a £2.5 million campaign supported by seven international car manufacturers.

I wish US media reported on each other this way.

WASHINGTON POST: A very good demonstration of how not to elevate the political debate with Rudy Giuliani, courtesy of Rep. Steve Cohen.

Two things: First, you never look to Cohen to elevate any debate. Second, his version of the 3/5 compromise is, as is common with constitutional/historical illiterates, exactly backward. It was the slaveholders who wanted slaves to count the same as a white person (because that would have gotten them more seats in Congress) and the anti-slavery people who didn’t want slaves to be counted for purposes of Congressional representation at all, since they were, you know, slaves.

I always tell my Constitutional Law students that whenever anyone trots out this “the Framers thought a black person was only worth 3/5 as much as a white person” trope, they can safely disregard whatever else that person says about the Constitution, since it’s a classic hallmark of lazy-thinking ignorance.

Meanwhile, judging by the foaming-at-the-mouth response from Democrats, Giuliani’s remarks hit a nerve. They did so because Obama has given people plenty of reason to doubt how he feels about America — at least, America as it actually is — and because Giuliani’s remarks represent the end of people treating Obama with kid gloves. In this, Giuliani’s remarks are comparable to Jonathan Chait’s It’s Okay To Hate George W. Bush piece, a signal that opened up the floodgates of liberal negativity toward Bush.

SPYING: SIM card makers hacked by NSA and GCHQ leaving cell networks wide open.

ASHE SCHOW: Reimagining Bill Clinton’s Accusers In Today’s Society. Would a President Clinton in 2020 get away with her 1990s victim-blaming?

In the 1990s, with her husband’s political career on the line, Hillary Clinton and other supporters engaged in one of the most famous and well-orchestrated victim-blaming campaigns in recent history.

Would she and the Clinton machine get away with it today?

In today’s society, women who make sexual assault allegations are supposed to be believed outright. Men accused are considered guilty until proven innocent. In this environment, would a Hillary Clinton presidency be able to handle a Bill Clinton allegation the way it was handled nearly two decades ago?

For powerful Dems, the old rules still obtain.

WHAT TOUCHSCREENS LOOKED LIKE in 1982.

JIM TREACHER: If You Know About Marie Harf’s Bumbling, You Don’t Rely On Network News. “State Dept. Rush Chair Marie Harf has had a tough week. She’s spent the last few days blaming Islamic terrorism on a lack of good-paying jobs, explaining why you’re too dumb to understand why that’s true, and then going home to eat raw cookie dough straight out of the tube. Okay, that last part may or may not be true. But the poor kid sure deserves some comfort. Fortunately for her, the big three networks have got her back!”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 652.

MICKEY KAUS: If there are two pro-amnesty nominees — especially if they are Jeb and Hillary — isn’t that a recipe for a third-party candidacy (which would probably threaten the GOP more than the Democrats)? Have the Republican donors backing Bush taken that into account? Plus: “As alert reader J. notes, the share of Americans who want more immigration has been holding steady — at 7%. Yet that 7% has captured the leadership of, not one party but both parties?”

MEGAN MCARDLE: Learning About Education the Hard Way.

Another possibility is that “Undergraduates are central to our mission” is a kind of polite public fiction within the university community, the sort of thing that everyone believes ought to be true but often isn’t, like “America is a great melting pot.” And I think there is some evidence of that. Consider, for example, the way faculty are hired and retained.

One of my favorite professors at the University of Pennsylvania, a truly gifted and amazing teacher, failed to get tenure the year I was a senior. After a grassroots campaign by his adoring students, the department reconsidered and gave him an extra year, after which he again failed to get tenure, and he went off to the West. I eventually got to ask someone else in the department why he’d been let go, and the answer was simple: His scholarly work was not impressive enough. So arguably the best and most beloved teacher in the department, the one whose class I have carried with me lo these 20 years and more, wasn’t good enough to teach undergraduates at Penn because he wasn’t publishing enough groundbreaking research.

Does that sound like an institution where educating undergraduates is central to the mission? Not really. Or at least: It is not central to the mission of the faculty, because if it were central, it would carry more weight in deciding who to hire and retain. Most of the professors I know who are trying to get tenure seem to spend a lot of time worrying about getting enough publications in the right journals, and comparatively little time worrying about whether their teaching skills are good enough to get them that golden ticket.

Compared to other institutions, university departments barely attempt to evaluate a professor’s skill at educating undergraduates — they do not, for example, spend much time supervising classrooms or trying to figure out how much the undergraduates have learned. Yes, they often look at student evaluations, but those are arguably better for measuring whether the teacher is good-looking or an easy grader than they are at measuring whether the students are, y’know, being educated.

So to people outside, teaching undergraduates seems like a nice thing that the faculty would like to do, or at least persuade someone else to do, rather than an overriding priority. Individual professors may consider this central to their own mission, but the faculty as a body don’t seem to focus on it much.

Indeed.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Hillary Clinton’s ties to corporate donors, lobbyists while secretary of state scrutinized.

MICHAEL BARONE: Barack Obama’s ‘reckless disregard’ of the law. “Reckless disregard. It’s a phrase in legal writing that means ‘gross negligence without concern for danger to others.’ And it’s a phrase that characterizes much of the attitude toward law of an administration headed by a man sometimes described as a constitutional scholar.”

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UNSOLVED: LawProf Dan Markel’s Death Remains a Mystery Seven Months After Shooting.

AUSTIN BAY: “Islamic State leaders are convinced their organization’s sensationally barbaric execution videos serve two distinct but, from their calculated perspective, useful purposes.”

BLOWBACK: Attacks on Koch brothers contributed to Democrats’ midterms losses, party officials say.

Democratic officials are second-guessing the party’s obsession with attacking the Koch brothers, saying it bears some of the blame for last year’s devastating election losses as the focus on the conservative billionaires diluted a party message already struggling for clarity.

Doubts about the relentless attacks on the Koch brothers surfaced as the Democratic National Committee held its annual meeting Thursday in Washington, where state party officials from across the country mulled what went wrong in 2014.

Led by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrats repeatedly shifted attention during the 2014 election cycle to Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch, who spent more than $100 million supporting conservative candidates through their various political organizations, most notably Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners Action Fund.

Mr. Reid, Nevada Democrat, accused them of “trying to buy America” and cited the brothers by name hundreds of times in speeches on the Senate floor. Democratic campaigns, meanwhile, begged supporters for donations to combat the Kochs’ money.

But some Democratic officials at the DNC meeting said the message doesn’t resonate with voters.

“It raises money for sure. But is it good to motivate a voter? No,” said a state party executive director who said he didn’t want to publicly criticize the national party leaders.

Good thing he didn’t do that!

CREEPY UNCLE JOE GETS IT RIGHT: Biden: Middle Class ‘In Worst Shape Since 1920s’, Is Currently ‘Being Killed.’

SIMPLE JUSTICE: Did Loretta Lynch Dig Herself Into The Swartz Hole?

Had Lynch given a response like this to a judge, I would hope the judge would have ripped her a new one for being outrageously non-responsive. This was a politician’s answer, not a lawyer’s. I reject the proposition that she didn’t appreciate the question; she knew. She chose to string together all those words for the sole purpose of saying nothing. And nothing is exactly what she said. . . .

We may accept such circumvention from politicians, but the office of Attorney General demands a lawyer, and as such, confirmation should demand a lawyer’s response.

While the Aaron Swartz case, ending in his tragic suicide, was not, as the Hacktivists mistakenly thought, a singular attack on a beloved geek, it did offer an important example of the failure of the CFAA and the improper use of prosecutorial discretion in enforcing this absurdly out-dated mutt of a law.

Sen. Franken’s raising this question, raising the Aaron Swartz case, raising the CFAA which may be one of the most important criminal laws going forward in the development of a technological future, was critically important. Lynch’s response to it reflected something far more disturbing than the fact that she did her job in EDNY as one would typically expect her to. If she’s to be the Attorney General, then she should be expected to deal with the tough questions, the massive legal failures of outdated laws, the issues that arise in significant cases because they have come to represent the failure of law to reflect what the public expects and demands of it.

Lynch’s response tells us only one thing: she’s more interested in being a politician than a lawyer, and she’s perfectly willing to deflect responsibility with non-responsive responses to get there. While it may be a truism that the choices range from bad to worse when it comes to the appointment of an Attorney General, Lynch’s response moved her toward the deep and ugly hole of worse.

Ouch.

MEH. MOST EVERYTHING ABOUT UNIVERSITIES IS DRIVEN BY IDEOLOGY, SO WHY SHOULDN’T IT BE THE SAME FOR THEIR CRITICS: Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings in University of North Carolina System. “An advisory panel of the University of North Carolina’s Board of Governors has recommended closing three academic centers, including a poverty center and one dedicated to social change, inciting outrage among liberals who believe that conservatives in control of state government are targeting ideological opponents in academia.”

Yeah, because ideology had nothing to do with the establishment of those centers in the first place.

Here’s a lesson: Universities are like the trial lawyers. I’m not unsupportive of the trial lawyers, and I think that some reforms are unfair to plaintiffs. But when you align yourself exclusively with one party, and weaponize yourself in that party’s cause, you’re going to pay the price when the other party is in power. That’s the price you pay for whoring yourself out.

THE HILL: Second Dem splits with Obama on ISIS label.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) on Thursday said he disagreed with President Obama’s position against labeling terrorists the U.S. is fighting as Islamic radicals. . . .

His comments come as Obama struggles to defend his rhetoric and the White House fends off conservatives attacking its terminology when discussing the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The president’s three-day summit on countering violent extremism has been overshadowed by numerous attacks from Republicans who have said the administration should not shy away from the Islamic radical label.

Another Democrat, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), slammed the president’s speech Wednesday where he said that the U.S. is “not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”

“If you look at this broad focus on countering violent extremism, which is very hard to define, it’s a diversion away from the actual threat coming from this radical Islamic ideology that exists,” Gabbard, a member of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, said on CNN’s “The Situation Room.”

“It’s so important that we recognize that these people are being motivated by a spiritual, theological motivation, which is this radical Islamic ideology,” added Gabbard, who is a combat veteran.

Leadership!

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Politico: Debbie’s damage control: Wasserman Schultz’s office said she’d switch positions on medical pot if a donor took back his criticism, emails show. “The proposal to Orlando trial lawyer John Morgan was straightforward: retract critical statements he made to a reporter in return for Wasserman Schultz publicly backing his cannabis initiative that she had trashed just months earlier. Morgan declined the offer with a sharp email reply sent to a go-between, who described the congresswoman as being in a ‘tizzy.'”

They’ll say and do whatever you want, if the money’s there. But they don’t take criticism well.

JUSTICE: Exonerated man files $40 million lawsuit against Northwestern University. “A wrongfully convicted man filed a $40 million lawsuit on Tuesday against Northwestern University, a former journalism professor, a private investigator and an attorney, accusing them of framing him for a double murder to get another man released. Alstory Simon, 64, of Ohio, claims in the lawsuit that he was the victim of unethical tactics by a team focused on freeing another man in what became a celebrated Illinois wrongful conviction case.”

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Media shocked, angry, incredulous over Giuliani comments.

Related: Wartime admiral: Obama is ‘anti-American, pro-Islamic.’

UPDATE: First link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!

TRUE: “In Washington, they are practically praying for a Christian terrorist.”

PETER VAN UHM: Why I Chose A Gun.