SO MUCH FOR “BLACK LIVES MATTER”: The WSJ has an editorial today calling NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio on the carpet for his response to the “Ferguson effect” spike in violent crimes:

“I think it’s clear that what we have primarily here is a gang and crew problem,” the mayor said last week. “You know, for those of us who were here in the bad old days—when we had 2,000 murders or more a year—a lot of everyday citizens were getting caught in those crossfires.” He added it’s “equally troubling when, you know, individual gang members shoot other gang members, but it’s a different reality.”

Translation: If young, largely minority men are killing each other over gang turf, then the violent crime revival is no big deal. It won’t hit the trendier corners of Brooklyn.

So whatever happened to Mr. de Blasio’s campaign that “black lives matter”?

It’s true that most of the New York shootings, as in Chicago or Baltimore, have been confined to poor neighborhoods. But one of the secrets of New York’s policing success from Rudy Giuliani through Michael Bloomberg is that it sought to reduce crime in the highest-crime neighborhoods. The main beneficiaries are the thousands of city residents—overwhelmingly young, black and male—who are alive today because New York’s policing reforms brought crime to record lows.

To be fair, it’s not like the progressive/liberal activists and politicians said that black lives matter all the time. It only matters for the purpose of mainstream media sensationalism, flaming racial hatred/looting for the cameras, and scoring quick political points. It makes cool-looking t-shirts, signs and an awesome hashtag!

“BAD LUCK:” Global economic growth has been incredibly slow this year, new report finds.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 755.

IT’S FUNNY HOW IT SEEMS THAT EVERY SINGLE HIGH-PROFILE CAMPUS “RAPE” CASE THEY PUSH TURNS OUT TO BE A FRAUD: The continuing collapse of ‘The Hunting Ground,’ a campus sexual assault propaganda film.

AUSTIN BAY: Confessions of a NATO Trip Wire: Why Poles and Balts Want US Trip Wire Forces.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Campus Justice: Punished Until Proven Innocent.

Northwestern put Kipnis through a lengthy process in which she wasn’t allowed to know the nature of the complaint until she talked to investigators, nor could she have representation.

But the process worked, says Justin Weinberg, because Kipnis was eventually exonerated. Weinberg, who teaches philosophy, also thinks it’s “not obvious” that writing an article about an ongoing complaint, which does not mention either the students or professors by name, is retaliation under Title IX. Like Brian Leiter, I find his summation of the facts underwhelming, and as Leiter says, “If Kipnis’s opinion piece about sexual paranoia on campus, in which the graduate student is not even named and barely referenced, constitutes adverse ‘treatment,’ then there is no right for any faculty member at any institution receiving federal funds to offer any opinions, however indirect, about any question surrounding allegations of sexual misconduct at the institution.”

But I’ll let Leiter argue with Weinberg about the case itself, because I want to take issue with this passage: “As I noted earlier, the Title IX investigation yielded no finding of retaliation against Kipnis. One can only imagine how disappointed she will be with this. It turns out that the process she had been demonizing—which of course may have its flaws—pretty much worked, from her point of view.”

I think this is deeply wrong, and for all that, it is not an uncommon sentiment. You often hear this sort of argument when people complain about the byzantine procedures that colleges use to adjudicate charges of a racial or sexual nature, or when they argue that we should always presumptively believe any rape accusation: “Well, if they didn’t do that, the system will figure it out eventually, so what’s the big deal?”

This ignores the fact that the process itself can become the punishment. Sexual assault, racial harassment and similar crimes are serious charges, that should be treated seriously. This makes being charged with such an offense a very big deal for the accused. The judicial process is time consuming, often confusing, and scary. The accused may need to pay for legal advice, even though they often aren’t allowed to take counsel into the system with them. Then there’s the worry of knowing that however crazy the charge sounds to you, the campus judicial process may have very different ideas.

The campus system is, in its own way, especially punishing: The accused has limited rights, the system is opaque, and it’s hard to even know how other cases get resolved. The system cannot send you to jail, but it can expel you with a mark on your permanent transcript that will make it harder to get admitted elsewhere, or if you work for the school, start the wheels in motion to get you fired. These are not small punishments. Some of the system’s defenders say it does not need the same due process standards as a legal charge would, because it can’t result in prison time. But I doubt these defenders would be so sanguine about this Kafkaesque process if it were directed at them, threatening their futures.

Well, I predict that more lefty professors will experience this personally, and their views will change. Remember, the entire notion of academic freedom was boosted mostly to protect campus communists. Once lefties were fully in charge, their commitment to academic freedom evaporated. If lefties find themselves in the crosshairs again, I predict a newfound movement in favor of free speech and free thought.

USA TODAY: Bernie Sanders’ ‘rape essay’ raises eyebrows.

BOWLING ALONE, FOREIGN POLICY EDITION: Edwin Corr and Elliott Abrams have a terrific oped in the WSJ today, “Allies Beware:The U.S. is a Fair Weather Friend:”

It may be dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, but in recent decades it often has been almost as risky to be a friend. There was Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of South Vietnam, overthrown and assassinated by his army in 1963 after losing American support. Or the thousands of Iraqis and Afghans who assisted American troops a decade ago but are still waiting for the visas for safe haven in the U.S. The uncomfortable truth is that America has too often treated former allies as expendable.

The drama that played out this year around Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova is a reminder of what can happen when time passes and Americans forget. Gen. Vides was El Salvador’s minister of defense in the government of José Napoleón Duarte in the 1980s. Duarte was an American favorite, with plenty of backing from the Reagan administration and Democrats who understood his commitment to democracy and human rights. . . .

Mr. Vides moved to the U.S. in 1989 because his safety in El Salvador could not be protected. He has since lived in Florida, and his children and grandchildren are all U.S. citizens. . . .

An immigration judge ruled on Aug. 16, 2012, that he should be deported under laws allowing such treatment for human-rights abusers. On March 11, 2015, Mr. Vides’s initial appeal was rejected and he was given 30 days to depart. He decided he would leave the U.S. and return to El Salvador while his attorneys appealed the case.

But allowing him to take a commercial flight home, where his brother stood ready to meet him, was too dignified for the U.S. government. Two weeks later Mr. Vides was pulled over while driving near his home, arrested, shackled hand and foot, and transported to the immigration jail in Jena, La. His car was left at the side of the road. After days of complaints by his attorneys he was finally taken back to El Salvador on April 8 aboard a special Department of Homeland Security flight at taxpayers’ expense.

A person of Vides’s stature can be shackled and forcibly removed from the U.S., yet somehow millions and millions of illegal immigrants cannot, supposedly because it would be a violation of “human rights,” even if those illegal immigrants have committed violent crimes.  Sounds rational to me. With friends like the U.S., who needs enemies?

LIFE IN OBAMA’S AMERICA: Probe targeted threats to behead police officers.

The FBI and Boston police shot and killed a knife-wielding Roslindale man known for extremist views and arrested another person at an Everett home yesterday as part of an anti-terrorism task force investigation into threats to behead law enforcement officials, the Herald has learned.

The two-state probe by the Joint Terrorism Task Force included a raid of an Everett triple-decker and an investigation in a Warwick, R.I., neighborhood, all within hours after police say 26-year-old Usaamah Rahim came at cops and an FBI agent with a military-style knife and was shot twice in a Roslindale CVS parking lot around 7 a.m.

More: “The Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center said its security firm hired Rahim as a security guard for a month in mid-2013. Executive director Yusufi Vali said Rahim didn’t regularly pray at the center and didn’t volunteer there or serve in any leadership positions.”

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF: Why Is It a Crime to Evade Government Scrutiny? Prosecutors may suspect Dennis Hastert of serious misconduct, but charging him with trying to avoid surveillance risks criminalizing harmless behavior. Yeah, that’s not so much a “risk” as a deliberate intention. But say, why not make it a crime for government officials to evade public scrutiny? Yeah, I know, that’s crazy talk. . . .

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TO BE FAIR, WHILE SHE’S THE ONLY 2016 CANDIDATE WHO VOTED FOR THE IRAQ WAR, HER VOTE WAS ENTIRELY A MATTER OF POLITICAL CALCULATION: Tim Cavanaugh: Hillary is more vulnerable on Iraq than any Republican candidate.

ADDING TO THE VIBRANT YOUTH AND DIVERSITY OF THE DEMOCRATIC FIELD: Lincoln Chafee expected to announce longshot presidential bid.

The face of America’s future?

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Inspector General: IRS Ignored Recommended Security Upgrades That Would Have Prevented Last Week’s Hack Of 100,000 Taxpayer Accounts.

Related: IRS Risks Data Breach Repeat While Expanding Online Services.

SO I GUESS I NEED TO BUY SOME WELLIES: The Miami Herald has an editorial, “The End of Florida?,” which echoes the Al Gore/Barack Obama doom and gloom predictions about global warming climate change:

But as bad as hurricanes are, they do not pose existential threats to Florida, or to our future. The recurring peril of windstorms has certainly not stopped the influx of millions of new residents that began in the post-war years and has turned Florida into the third most populous state in the union.

But climate change — specifically, sea-level rise caused by global warming — poses a challenge of another order of magnitude. A hurricane hits our shores like a big bang. It’s here and then gone, leaving disaster in its wake. We clean up, we move on.

Sea-level rise is something else: an insidious attack, slowly gnawing away at our beaches, our coastline, our coastal cities. It doesn’t go away.

And it’s here already. Look at the flooded streets in Miami Beach. Or, further up the coast, the 450-year-old city of St. Augustine, whose streets already flood about 10 times a year, and homes built on sand dunes teetering over open space as the Atlantic encroaches on the foundations. All of Florida’s coastal cities face similar threats. Over on the Gulf side, the Tampa/St. Pete area is deemed particularly vulnerable to rising seas because roads and bridges weren’t designed to handle higher tides. . . .

These are not wild guesses or alarmist warnings. They’re predictions, based on accepted science. . . . We don’t think the end of Florida is inevitable, or even likely. But the end of Florida as we know it is certainly possible, and growing more likely every year as the state’s once limitless future erodes along with the vanishing beaches and shrinking shoreline.

Um, the flooding of streets in Miami recently was caused by heavy, slow-moving thunderstorms, not global warming climate change. And St. Augustine has always flooded because 90% of the city is located in an historic floodplain and the development of barrier islands has reduced the ability of the land to absorb the brunt of storms entering from the Atlantic side.  It has nothing to do with global warming climate change.

I live in Key Largo– one of the most “vulnerable” little islands in the Florida Keys. I have lived here for many years, and I can tell you that I haven’t noticed even the slightest change in sea levels. The tide comes in; the tide goes out. Sometimes the tide rises higher and our street floods near our boat basin. Other days it doesn’t. It ebbs and flows, as tides do. Rainy season comes and goes. When it rains a lot, we have some minor flooding. When it doesn’t, we don’t. Yes, the climate changes–every single day, minute by minute. But this isn’t a reason to fundamentally transform the energy sector, taxation policy or the global economy.

These scaremongering tactics are just that. And it’s far from “accepted science” that global warming climate change is an “existential threat” to Florida, or anywhere else.

ASHE SCHOW: Hillary Clinton needed men to rescue her ‘women-only’ event.

Hillary Clinton tried to hold a “just for women” fundraiser on Monday, but few women signed up, so she had to open up the event to men in order to fill seats.

The $2,700-per-person event was supposed to attract 125 women, but only 50 bought tickets by the Sunday morning deadline, so the deadline was extended and opened to men, according to Page Six.

Clinton took photos with guests and spoke for 30 minutes about topics such as America’s drug problem and “mental healthcare for college kids,” according to Page Six.

If that wasn’t embarrassing enough for Clinton, CNN released a new poll showing Clinton’s favorability rating plummeting since November. Back then, she was only hinting at a presidential campaign, and her approval rating was at 60 percent. But since she announced (and has been in the news for scandal after scandal), her approval has dropped 14 points to 46 percent. . . .

As I wrote back in March, Clinton’s biggest problem comes from being in the spotlight. She’s much more popular when the focus is not on her. Once the focus is on her, people see that she’s just not a likeable person. And coverage of her scandals is far outweighing any positives she may have (the “first woman president” cheer only goes so far).

Yes, the “Vote Vagina” approach appears to have its limits.

EUGENE VOLOKH: Prof. Alice Goffman, ‘On the Run,’ and driving a gang member around, looking for a mutual friend’s killer. Note that this discussion deals with the criminal and ethical issues of what Goffman did, but not with Lubet’s charges of fraud.

STACY TABB’S GOOD PEOPLE — SHE DESIGNED THE INSTAPUNDIT SITE — and you can help her out by voting for her here if you’re so inclined.

STRANGELY, THIS DOESN’T INCREASE MY CONFIDENCE IN OBAMA: Obama confident in the TSA despite failure to detect explosives.

President Obama has confidence in the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) despite the ease with which undercover agents were able to smuggle explosives into airports, the White House said Tuesday.

“The president does continue to have confidence that the officers of the TSA do very important work that continues to protect the American people,” press secretary Josh Earnest said.

A report released Monday found TSA employees failed to find fake explosives, weapons and other prohibited items in 95 percent of internal tests. The undercover agents successfully evaded security in 67 of 70 tests at major airports.

The report prompted Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to remove the agency’s acting director, Melvin Carraway, who had led the TSA since the beginning of the year.

I suspect that Obama’s mostly confident that the unionized TSA workers will vote Democratic. Which is their real reason for existing anyway.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE, THE RICH GET RICHER EDITION: Malcolm Gladwell mercilessly mocks John Paulson’s obscene $400 million gift to Harvard. I think we need to tax “excessive” endowments and spread the wealth around to other, less fortunate, academic institutions that didn’t win the academic lottery the way Harvard did. Because equality!

DISARRAY: Hoyer Urges Civility Among Democrats in Trade Debate.

Democrats attacking Democrats over trade is neither productive nor welcome, House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer said Tuesday.

At his weekly pen-and-pad briefing Tuesday, Hoyer told reporters the rancor surrounding the debate over Trade Promotion Authority, which could come up in the House as early as next week, needs to be toned down.

He specifically discussed labor’s outsized influence in pressuring members to oppose legislation that would give President Barack Obama latitude to negotiate a major trade deal with Pacific nations. The AFL-CIO in particular has threatened Democrats who support so-called fast-track authority.

“Leader Pelosi and I have … urged our friends in labor to have respect for the decisions of members,” Hoyer said. “The Democratic Party and its members have been strong supporters of working men and women’s rights to bargain collectively and organize, strong supporters of the minimum wage and unemployment insurance, strong supporters of workers generally, and I would think that that would be a major consideration in going forward in support of members.”

Hoyer also addressed the extent to which lawmakers are pressuring their colleagues, and responded to a question about a letter penned by Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., that specifically named the 18 members of the House Democratic Caucus expected to vote in favor of TPA.

“As a public service, we provide you their office numbers,” Grayson wrote to potential donors as part of his 2016 Senate campaign, according to Politico. “Call one; call them all. Call as many as you want. Exercise your constitutional right to redress your grievances.”

“I think Mr. Grayson’s actions are not helpful and I don’t think fair to other members,” Hoyer said. “Members ought to refrain from directing pressure at their colleagues. That doesn’t mean their colleagues won’t get pressure, but it ought not to be directed by other members.”

Uh huh.

MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY: New York Times lawyer outlines FOIA nightmare.

High-level journalists around Washington have engaged in a game of one-upmanship in recent years over denunciations of the transparency track record of the Obama administration. USA Today’s Susan Page perhaps takes the blue ribbon with her declaration that the Obama administration has been not only “more restrictive” but also “more dangerous” to the media than any of its predecessors.

Specific examples, however, sometimes carry more punch. On that front, New York Times Vice President and Assistant General Counsel David McCraw provides some assistance. In prepared testimony for hearings today and tomorrow of the House committee on oversight and government reform on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), McGraw notes that last year he filed eight FOIA lawsuits for the New York Times. Remember: FOIA lawsuits arise after FOIA requests stall.

One of the lawsuits was particularly noteworthy. The New York Times had asked the Justice Department for a number — how much money had the agency shelled out to pay the legal fees of FOIA requesters? (The law allows for such fees awards in cases where the requester wins FOIA litigation). McCraw: “It was a straightforward request about a budgetary matter. No FOIA exemption could possibly apply. But weeks passed without a response. Over a four-month period, we repeatedly contacted the FOIA office handling the request. We called more than 10 times and left messages. Almost all of those calls went unreturned. Finally we filed a lawsuit out of frustration.”

The lawsuit moved things along, to the point that an assistant U.S. attorney got involved in the process. “[T]he Assistant U.S. attorney ended up doing what the FOIA officer should have done in the first place,” notes the prepared testimony.

Make agencies pay a real price for delays. Otherwise nothing will happen.

IF YOU REALLY WANT TO HURT THEM, BAN ANY EXPENDITURE ON BOOZE, CONFERENCES, OR RESTAURANT MEALS: House panel moves to block State funding over Benghazi emails.

House Republicans on Tuesday unveiled a spending bill that would withhold some funding for the State Department until officials cooperate with their investigation into the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

The House Appropriations Committee’s State and Foreign Operations bill for fiscal 2016 “withholds 15 percent of State Department’s operational funds until requirements related to proper management of Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] and electronic communications are met,” Republicans said in a statement.

The bill makes good on a threat the House GOP had been considering earlier this month to use funding as leverage to obtain documents related to Hillary Clinton’s time as the nation’s top diplomat.

“The Hillary emails would be wholly contained within the net that they are casting,” said an Appropriations Committee source. . . .

Alec Gerlach, a spokesman for the State Department, warned a 15 percent cut would be “counterproductive” by making it harder to keep up with requests for documents from the public and members of Congress.

See, that’s why you go after the booze and junkets.