TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 855.

WHY DOES COLORADO DEMOCRAT JARED POLIS HATE COLLEGE-AGED MEN? Campus sexual assault hearing applauds witch-hunt mentality.

At a congressional hearing on campus sexual assault, Colorado Rep. Jared Polis suggested that expelling students based solely on the idea that they might have committed a crime is an acceptable standard. And the hearing audience applauded him.

Polis, a Democrat, was discussing due process and standards of evidence as they apply to colleges and universities adjudicating sexual assault. Currently, colleges must be only 50.01 percent sure that an accusation is valid before punishing an accused student (more on that later). Polis began advocating for allowing colleges to use a lower standard than that.

“I mean, if there’s 10 people that have been accused and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, seems better to get rid of all 10 people,” Polis said. “We’re not talking about depriving them of life or liberty, we’re talking about their transfer to another university.”

For this, the audience applauded.

Well, since there’s at least a 20% chance that Polis is a corrupt hack, let’s just boot him from Congress and disqualify him from holding any future office. After all, it’s not like we’re putting him in jail or anything.

And forget Jared Polis. Why do the Democrats in general hate college-aged men?

MY THOUGHTS, originally posted about this time 14 years ago. They’ve held up pretty well, alas, as have these thoughts from Prof. Brannon Denning. And note this, too.

A BAD SIGN: Intel Cuts $300m In Jobs, Research, Education And Talent… To Fund Fashionable Feminist Nonsense.

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CAROL BROWN ON THE SURRENDER TO IRAN: The world just changed forever, but you’d hardly know it from the media. Remember, the main point of journalism today is to ensure that people don’t hear about — or, at least, don’t think too much about — things that might discourage them from voting Democrat.

A WIN FOR CONGRESS AND A SETBACK FOR OBAMACARE: My latest oped, with David Rivkin, on the significance of the House of Representative’s initial, trial court victory in its lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of two key aspects of Obamacare implementation.

RELATED: “Standing Up for the Constitution“: The Wall Street Journal editorial board explains the larger, potentially historic impact of this early stage legal victory in a lawsuit some pundits labeled “frivolous.”

SO NOW IT’S THE 14TH ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11. Back then, InstaPundit was shiny and new new. Now it’s not, and some people have been warning of “blogger burnout.” But I’m still here. On prior 9/11 anniversaries, I’ve given shooting lessons to a Marine, I’ve taken the day off from blogging, and I’ve even gone to a Tea Party with Andrew Breitbart.

This year, as in most past years, it’ll be blogging as usual. And here’s a link to my original 9/11 coverage — just scroll on up. At this late date, I don’t have much new to say on 9/11. But these predictions held up pretty well. Which is too bad.

The picture above is by my cousin-in-law Brad Rubenstein, taken from his apartment that day. You might also want to read this piece by James Lileks.

And here’s a passage from Lee Harris’s Civilization And Its Enemies.

Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.
…
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.

They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.

The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours.

I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating today.

One thing I guess I didn’t believe 14 years ago is that America would elect such a feckless President in 2008, and stand idly by while he flushed our global position, and security, down a left-wing toilet. But we did, and we’ll be paying the price for a long time.

God bless America. We need it.

FLASHBACK: To Protect Clintons, ABC Censored and Buried ‘Path to 9/11′ Miniseries.

Also: 60 Minutes: President Clinton didn’t kill Bin Laden when he had the chance.

USA TODAY: ISIL haunts 9/11 anniversary: 14 years ago, Americans learned they can’t ignore the terror of extremists.

SIL represents the embodiment of evil in the modern world, and it mustn’t be allowed to establish a foothold from which to plot attacks against the United States or to inspire so-called lone wolf sympathizers to do so. But the U.S.-led effort to “degrade and ultimately defeat” ISIL has shown underwhelming results.

The effort’s seemingly deliberate pace is of little comfort to those being raped, shot and beheaded while the West figures out how to take on a group that has attracted an estimated 20,000 fanatical foreign fighters and defied predictions that it would never get this far.

It’s almost as if Obama doesn’t really want to stop them.

LOOKING FOR WAR ON TERROR NEWS? Check out Fred Pruitt’s Rantburg.

FOREIGN POLICY: Obama, Open Your Eyes: The dead children washing up on Turkey’s shores are a direct result of the Obama administration’s failure to stop Bashar al-Assad’s killing machine.

So are the refugees flooding Europe.

BARACK AND THE DONALD—SEPARATED AT BIRTH (SORT OF): “Barack Obama and Donald Trump have more in common than once favoring single-payer national health plans,” Roger Simon writes. “They are both thin-skinned. Neither ever says he’s sorry or expresses regret. Instead they blame and deride others…Maybe it’s time to amend one of Hollywood’s more famous lines:  Self-love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

At times, you do sort of expect one of them to pull off his mask, Mission: Impossible style, and reveal the other man lurking underneath.

SEE, I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE POINTING THIS OUT. EVEN IN THE FRIENDLY NEW YORK TIMES, FROM FRIENDLY COLUMNIST ROGER COHEN, WE GET THIS: Obama’s Syrian Nightmare.

Syria will be the biggest blot on the Obama presidency, a debacle of staggering proportions. For more than four years now, the war has festered. A country has been destroyed, four million Syrians are refugees, Islamic State has moved into the vacuum and President Bashar al-Assad still drops barrel bombs whose shrapnel and chlorine rip women and children to shreds.

For a long time, those who fled waited in the neighborhood. They wanted to go home. They filled camps in Turkey and Jordan and Lebanon. When it became clear even to them that “home” no longer existed, nothing could stop them in their desperate flight toward the perceived security of Europe. The refugee crisis is the chronicle of a disaster foretold. . . .

American interventionism can have terrible consequences, as the Iraq war has demonstrated. But American non-interventionism can be equally devastating, as Syria illustrates. Not doing something is no less of a decision than doing it. The pendulum swings endlessly between interventionism and retrenchment because the United States is hard-wired to the notion that it can make the world a better place. Looking inward for long is a non-option for a nation that is also a universal idea. Every major conflict poses the question of how far America should get involved.

President Obama has tried to claw back American overreach after the wars without victory in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Actually, we had won in Iraq until Obama threw it away. And Syria, alas, is not Obama’s only debacle. What’s missing from Cohen’s column? Hillary’s complicity. And Joe Biden’s.

Plus:

Elsewhere, however, he has undersold American power. In Syria and Libya he has washed his hands of conflicts that the United States could not turn its back on. Such negligence comes back to bite America, as its experience in Afghanistan since the 1980s has shown. Nobody loves a vacuum like a jihadi. And nobody likes American wobbliness like Vladimir Putin.

In 2011, Obama said, “The time has come for President Assad to step aside.” At that time, as events have shown, the president had no policy in place to achieve that objective and no will to forge such a policy. His words were of a grave irresponsibility.

In 2013, with France poised to join the United States in military strikes on Syria, Obama walked away at the last minute from upholding his “red line” on the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons. In so doing, he reinforced Assad, reinforced Putin, declined to change the course of the Syrian war, and diminished America’s word in the world — setbacks of far greater significance than ridding Syria of chemical weapons. This was a mistake.

Like Carter’s weakness with Iran, we will be paying for Obama’s criminal negligence for a long time.

I WOULDN’T KNOW, I’M JUST HOLDING THE FORT: Since that day they wounded New York. “Did you go crazy, or did you report?”

NO TIME TO GET WOBBLY: ‘No, America Isn’t Moving Left’.

YOUR DOSE OF LEVITY FOR THE NIGHT: I guess Caitlyn Jenner really is conservative!