AT LAW AND LIBERTY: Kurt Lash: Safe Harbor Originalism.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 644.

THE SPLC AS INCITER OF MURDER? Under the SPLC’s Own Logic, It’s Guilty In The Chapel Hill Killings. “Somehow, if he had liked Sean Hannity and the Southern Baptist Convention instead of Rachel Maddow and the Freedom from Religion Foundation, I don’t think we would witness the media restraint we’re seeing when it comes to connecting this killer’s politics to his terrible deeds. And again, I would note the irony of his fondness for the Southern Poverty Law Center. By the SPLC’s own logic, the SPLC shares responsibility for another hate crime. Now that the SPLC has been hoisted by its own petard twice in a few years, I hope it and other liberal groups act more responsibly the next time they want to blame a tragic crime on someone’s personal politics.”

Related: SPLC apologizes, removes Dr. Ben Carson from its “Extremist” list.

Also related: Of Double Standards and Triple Homicides: Media Malpractice and the North Carolina Murders. “It is ironic that in the wake of President Barack Obama’s remarks about a ‘random’ attack by a Muslim terrorist on a Kosher supermarket — note that the White House will not call it a jihadist attack on Jews — in the case of the victims in North Carolina, again from the start they were identified as Muslims. Randomness is clearly in the eye of the beholder.” To be fair, this killer had some pretty suspicious associations, what with Facebook “likes” for the SPLC, HuffPo, Rachel Maddow, etc.

REMINDER: MOST OF THESE CITIES ARE DEMOCRATIC PARTY STRONGHOLDS. Cities Dig for Profit by Penalizing the Poor.

During last summer’s riots in Ferguson, Missouri, reporters began to highlight one reason that relations between the town’s police and its citizens are so fraught: heavy reliance on tickets and fines to cover the town’s budget. The city gets more than $3 million of its $20 million budget from “fines and public safety,” with almost $2 million more coming from various other user fees.

The problem with using your police force as a stealth tax-collection agency is that this functions as a highly regressive tax on people who are already having a hard time of things. Financially marginal people who can’t afford to, say, renew their auto registration get caught up in a cascading nightmare of fees piled upon fees that often ends in bench warrants and nights spent in jail … not for posing a threat to the public order, but for lacking the ready funds to legally operate a motor vehicle in our car-dependent society.

So why do municipalities go this route? The glib answer is “racism and hatred of the poor.” And, quite possibly, that plays a large part, if only in the sense that voters tend to discount costs that fall on other people. But having spent some time plowing through town budgets and reading up on the subject this afternoon, I don’t think that’s the only reason. I suspect that Ferguson is leaning so heavily on fines because it doesn’t have a lot of other terrific options. . . .

Let me be clear: Using the court system as a revenue source is a terrible way for a town to make money. But it’s not surprising that towns turn there when they are out of all the good ways to do so. Public order violations have a lot of attractive features for a desperate town council, including the fact that you can collect them from people who don’t live there.

To reiterate, I’m not saying that this is OK. I don’t think that court fees should be assessed in criminal cases, unless maybe in the case of egregious repeat offenders who clearly aren’t trying to avoid a day in court. Law is the price of a decent and orderly society, and therefore that price should be paid collectively. If Ferguson cannot balance its budget without a Kafkaesque system of fines and penalties, then it should cut spending.

But that would mean less money for the apparat.

ED MORRISSEY: The Spectacular, Too-Big Failure Of Dodd-Frank. “One of the factors driving that consolidation was ‘economies of scale,’ the GAO found in an earlier study. The FDIC noted that was a particularly strong factor for banks that did more than $100 million a year in lending. Dodd-Frank actually made this worse, thanks to the massive amount of new regulation and its attendant compliance costs. The impact fell hardest on community banks, which made them less competitive and more likely to be consolidated.” Funny how whenever they roll out something that’s supposed to help the little guy, it winds up giving more money and power to Wall Street and the big banks.

LATEST WAPO REVELATION: Scott Walker Once Ate Two Cookies at Recess When He Was Supposed to Eat Only One.

UPDATE: Michael Walsh: They Always Tell You Whom They Fear — and the MSM Is Terrified of Scott Walker.

IT’S STILL A GEM, and that Keynes vs. Hayek rap video from 2010 now has over 5 million views.

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COLLEGES’ SEX HYSTERIA WILL BE GOOD FOR TRIAL LAWYERS, and one of my former students who has a firm in Nashville is running the ad shown below already — although, amusingly, the Vanderbilt student newspaper refused to run it for fear of encouraging lawsuits against Vanderbilt. You may have to click on it to get the animated .gif to run on InstaPundit.

ASHE SCHOW: Flashback: Joni Ernst’s predecessor, Tom Harkin, actually did lie about his military service.

Decades ago, in 1979, then-Congressman Harkin said during a round-table discussion that he “spent five years as a Navy pilot, starting in November of 1962” and that “one year was in Vietnam.”

His words were quoted in the book Changing of the Guard, and transcribed in a 1991 Wall Street Journal article that is no longer available free online. At the time of the WSJ article, Harkin was engaged in a presidential bid.

“That clearly is not an accurate picture of his Navy service,” the WSJ wrote at the time. “Though Mr. Harkin stresses he is proud of his Navy record — ‘I put my ass on the line day after day’ — he concedes now he never flew combat air patrols in Vietnam.”

Harkin’s lie resurfaced in 2004 when he accused Vice President Dick Cheney of being a “coward” for not serving in Vietnam.

And the bylined Democratic operatives of the press covered for him both times.

FIFTY SHADES AGAINST GENDER NEUTRALITY. Gender neutrality’s problem is that it’s boring.

SONNY BUNCH STANDS UP FOR FREEDOM:

Look. I’m not going to lie to you. We live in dangerous times. Times that demand we stand up and say “no more!” Times that try the souls of men. Freedom is under assault every day in America. A war is brewing. A war threatening our very way of life. A war we must win.

I’m talking, of course, about the war on yoga pants. . . . What is this, Footloose?

The post is lavishly illustrated. Because freedom!

ROLL CALL: Boehner on DHS: Senate Democrats Need to ‘Get Off Their Ass.’

House leaders emerged from a Republican Conference meeting Wednesday with a persistent refrain on Department of Homeland Security funding: The House has done its job; it’s time for the Senate to act.

During the weekly Republican leadership news conference, Speaker John A. Boehner repeatedly called on the Senate to take up the House-passed funding bill for the DHS, which Senate Democrats have repeatedly blocked the chamber from considering.

“You know, in the gift shop out here, they’ve got these little booklets on how a bill becomes a law,” a fired-up Boehner said as camera shutters clicked. “The House has done its job! Why don’t you go ask the Senate Democrats when they’re going to get off their ass and do something?”

When Boehner was asked if this standoff with the Senate was how he planned for the DHS bill to play out — Senate Republicans now insist it’s on House Republicans to send over a new bill — Boehner said the process was working “exactly” the way he envisioned it.

“The House did its job,” Boehner said. “We won the fight to fund the Department of Homeland Security and to stop the president’s unconstitutional actions. Now it’s time for the Senate to do their work.”

But if it doesn’t, would the speaker throw the chamber a lifeline?

“The House has done its job,” Boehner repeated. “It’s time for the Senate to do theirs.”

Given the importance of this bill, I think Majority Leader McConnell should consider abolishing the filibuster. After all, we used to hear all the time about how undemocratic and un-American the filibuster is.

IT’S BLOWBACK FROM “HILLARY CLINTON’S WAR IN LIBYA:” Rand Paul: ‘I blame’ Clinton for ISIS conflict.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Wednesday accused former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of helping to spur unrest in the Middle East that led to the current battle against militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

“One of the people I blame for a lot of this, frankly, is Hillary Clinton,” he said on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom.” . . .

“I think Hillary’s war in Libya and then Hillary’s admonition, the president’s admonition, and frankly some Republicans’ admonition to get involved in the Syrian civil war has actually now created a bigger problem, which is ISIS,” he said.

I expect we’ll be hearing more about Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya — make that Hillary Clinton’s failed war in Libya — in the coming months.

THE CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS — WHERE ANTI-SEMITISM MEETS MIDDLE-SCHOOL PLAYGROUND BLUSTER: Charlie Rangel To Benjamin Netanyahu: Meet Me By The Bike Racks After School.

A PACK, NOT A HERD: News Anchors Stunned as Drivers Help Apprehend Robbery Suspect. Why were they surprised? Didn’t they realize they were in Texas?

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CHANGE! ER, OR NOT. No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Don’t Blame Staples: In the matter of perverse economic incentives, the perverts are in Washington.

Demand curves slope downward. Which is to say, if you raise the price of something, people will be inclined to consume less of it. Those with a choice in the matter – say, a large office-supply chain with a mess of low-skilled part-time employees who are basically as interchangeable as toner cartridges in the greater scheme of office-supply things – will in fact consume less. If the thing that is getting more expensive is manpower, it will cut employees’ hours, circulate a lot of those dopey “do more with less” memos, and look for labor substitutes, like the banks did with those ATMs that haunt President Obama’s imagination.

Sometimes, you have to go full robot.

Politicians build their careers on voters’ ignorance about supply and demand curves.

HOPEY-CHANGEY: Number of Americans Renouncing Their U.S. Citizenship Hit All-Time High in 2014.

THE DIPLOMAD ON Brian Williams And Lying Journalists In General. “There is something in the progressive mind-set that promotes, nay, requires compulsive lying. We see it in John Kerry and his fake stories of secret missions in Cambodia and his flying dog; Hillary Clinton, and her Bosnian snipers; Susan Rice and her video explanation for Benghazi; Eric Holder with Fast and Furious; and even FDR. . . . Your standard progressive activist has really done nothing very interesting, so he or she needs to get proper credentials, to show that he or she knows what’s what, and that progressivism is what the world needs to deal with “problems”–after all, isn’t life just a series of problems calling for progressive intervention? They want to see what they believe. We, hence, have progressives making up the sort of stuff that puts them, the elite, in the center of the battle, on the ramparts, in the muddy trenches and downed helicopters with the common schlubs–the sort of worldly experience that allows progressives to tell us how to live our lives. Telling lies is essential to progressivism.”

THE HILL: States Rise Up Against Washington.

State legislators around the country have introduced more than 200 bills aiming to nullify regulations and laws coming out of Washington, D.C., as they look to rein in the federal government.

The legislative onslaught, which includes bills targeting federal restrictions on firearms, experimental treatments and hemp, reflects growing discord between the states and Washington, state officials say.

“You have a choice,” said Kentucky state Rep. Diane St. Onge (R). “To sit back and not do anything or say anything and let overregulation continue — or you have the alternative choice to speak up about it and say, ‘We know what you are doing or intend to do and we do not think that it is constitutional and we as a state are not going to stand for it.’ ” . . .

Friction between the states and the federal government dates back to the nation’s earliest days. But there has been an explosion of bills in the last year, according to the Los Angeles-based Tenth Amendment Center, which advocates for the state use of nullification to tamp down on overzealous regulation.

We’ll see more, I expect.

FATNESS AS A MICROBIOME ISSUE? Turd transplant leads to rapid weight-gain and obesity. “A woman whose c.difficile infection was treated with a fecal transplant from her overweight daughter experienced rapid and dramatic weight gain as soon as her daughter’s microbial nation took hold in her gut. It’s evidence to support the thesis that obesity is linked to your gut flora, which plays an important role in regulating metabolism and in converting the food you eat to calories. What would be very interesting would be the reverse: overweight people who lost weight dramatically after getting fecal transplants from skinny people (there has been some success with this in animal models).” Well, stay tuned.

MARK RIPPETOE: Strength and Prevention of Injuries. “The higher an athlete’s absolute strength, the more force it takes to shove a joint into a position of derangement and injury, and the more likely the player is to finish the game – and the season – unhurt. Injuries will always be a part of competitive performance, but an effective strength program diminishes the risk.”