NEWS YOU CAN USE: Ed Driscoll: 48 Reasons To Despise And Distrust The Media.

ROGER SIMON: ‘Nation Building’ —The Big (Phony) Taboo of Election 2016.

ANNALS OF NEUROTIC ATTENTION-SEEKING: Columbia mattress girl carries her bed on stage at graduation.

Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student who has carried a mattress around campus as part of an art project for the past year, has graduated. And she carried that mattress across the stage during the ceremony — to much applause.

Paul Nungesser, the man she accused of raping her, and who was cleared by a campus hearing and the police, was forced to watch, having walked across the stage just a few minutes earlier.

Nungesser is now suing Columbia for facilitating a harassment campaign against him. He alleges in his lawsuit that by allowing and even praising Sulkowicz’s mattress project, the school was complicit in defaming him.

The harassment “significantly damaged, if not effectively destroyed Paul Nungesser’s college experience, his reputation, his emotional well-being and his future career prospects,” the lawsuit alleges.

On Monday, Columbia circulated an email banning students from bringing large objects to graduation. It appeared at the time that Sulkowicz was being disallowed from carrying her mattress across the stage. But evidently, that was not the case.

Allowing Sulkowicz to carry her mattress may have helped Nungesser’s case in court, as the school made clear that large objects were banned but then did nothing to stop Sulkowicz.

Nungesser’s lawyer, Kimberly Lau, told the Washington Examiner that Columbia’s acceptance of Sulkowicz’s graduation stunt was “absurd” and would help her client’s case.

This goes beyond mere facilitation; they have now granted a special exception,” Lau said.

Guilt is irrelevant. Men must be punished.

UPDATE: But there is some pushback.

RAMADI: Obama Snatched Ramadi Defeat from Bush Victory.

FLYING THE UNFRIENDLY SKIES WITH QUEEN HILLARY: MSNBC: Even when flying with the public, Hillary Clinton keeps it private. “Hillary Clinton has traded private jets for seats on commercial airlines as she embarks on her second, humbler presidential run. But even in this relatively more democratic mode of transit, the former secretary of state is mostly kept apart from the everyday Americans her campaign wants to champion. Clinton does not fly the commercial the way you fly commercial.”

THIS SEEMS LIKE A WINNING ISSUE FOR 2016! Roll Call: Hoyer Supports Pay Raise for Lawmakers.

House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., agreed Tuesday morning that congressional salaries should increase.

Rep. Alcee L. Hastings, D-Fla., made the case for a lawmaker pay raise during a Rules Committee meeting Monday night, arguing that the high cost of living in the District of Columbia will lead to a situation where only wealthy people can afford to serve in Congress.

“I agree with Mr. Hastings,” Hoyer said in his weekly pen-and-pad briefing with reporters Tuesday morning. He echoed Hastings’ argument, noting that the current salary “dictates the only people who can serve are the rich. I don’t think that’s what the Founding Fathers had in mind.”

Hastings, the second poorest member according to CQ Roll Call’s Wealth of Congress rankings, said Monday the institution is on the road to becoming one removed from those of moderate means and that current members with children realize the salary is not sufficient to send their children to college.

Hastings and Hoyer make good faces for the Democrats.

YA THINK? Austin Bay: Media Gotcha Distorts National Security Challenges.

Determining actionable intelligence, assessing threats (current and emerging), implementing lines of operation to counter threats and forestalling damaging surprise (a process that includes accounting for enemy deception operations) are persistent national security challenges every presidential administration, from George Washington’s to Barack Obama’s, has confronted.

Some administrations have confronted them more effectively than others. Effectively addressing these challenges demands many things from a commander in chief, but steady leadership is foremost.

Steady leadership eludes checklist definition, but its key traits are sound judgment, morale-sustaining presence in crisis and the ability to focus on essential goals. Abraham Lincoln is a case study in steady.

You can bet your life the next president will confront these challenges, as well. In fact, you do bet your life. Sept. 11’s damaging surprise demonstrated America has violent enemies. Because intelligence gathering and analysis are imprecise arts, assessing a threat and organizing resources to counter it are imperfect endeavors.

Betting your life is a good reason to demand more from media than “knowing what we know now” gotcha questions regarding past national security decisions.

The worst gotchas are framed to elicit a simplistic answer that reinforces or advances a political narrative. To do this, the talking head must either drastically simplify the past (a relatively benign act) or erase the inconvenient past (a deceitful act).

The latter comes more naturally to some politicians than to others.

THE HILL: Feds charge six Chinese citizens with spying on Silicon Valley.

The Obama administration announced charges Tuesday against six Chinese citizens suspected in a long-running espionage plot aimed at stealing U.S. technology on behalf of their government.

The action, revealed in newly unsealed indictments, reflects an aggressive push to tamp down on the foreign theft of U.S. trade secrets and, in particular, sends a strong message to Beijing — a top competitor on technology.

Hao Zhang, 36; Wei Pang, 35; and four others were charged with a range of offenses, including conspiracy to commit economic espionage, conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets, economic espionage and theft of trade secrets.

According to federal prosecutors, Hao and Wei sit at the center of an industrial theft ring that spans years.

If this is a widespread problem, maybe we should be more careful about H1B visas?

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES — AND PAYOLA — ALL THE WAY DOWN: ‘It Sure Looks Like Some Ferguson Protestors Were Paid To Do So By Liberal Organize Missouri.’

THE CRISIS OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE: Government As Faction. “The story goes on to report how the EPA worked in direct collaboration with environmental groups such as the Sierra Club to ‘stuff the public comment ballot box,’ so to speak, likely in violation of the law. Good for the Times for giving this story front-page treatment. Now it should be the turn of the House Committee on Governmental Affairs and Oversight to hold some tough hearings of senior EPA officials, whom the Times names.”

See, public comments are supposed to come from the public, not from the agency.

SEAN TRENDE AND DAVID BYLER: The GOP Is the Strongest It’s Been in Decades.

Overall, this gives the Republicans an index score of 33.8. This is the Republican Party’s best showing in the index since 1928, and marks only the third time that the party has been above 15 in the index since the end of World War II. You can see the full trend, taken back to 1928, here. . . .

Obviously, this interpretation is at odds with the prevailing theme of a Republican Party with serious demographic problems. One can argue that these problems make it difficult for the GOP to win the presidency. But those same shifts have strengthened it in the states, which is where most lawmaking takes place.

Read the whole thing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Marquette University puts up a mural honoring a convicted cop murderer who escaped from prison and fled to Cuba. “They have pandered to the politically correct, and now are embarrassed at what the politically correct have done.”

REALITY REARS ITS UGLY HEAD: Top Democrat sounds ‘alarm bells’ over Obama rhetoric on Islamic State. “A senior House of Representatives Democrat said Tuesday that the White House’s description of supposed progress in the war against the Islamic State should ring ‘alarm bells,’ and called the fall of the city of Ramadi to the extremists ‘a very serious and significant setback.'”

NECK-AND-NECK IN THE KENTUCKY GOVERNOR’S GOP PRIMARY RACE: Matt Bevin leads James Comer by 83 votes; Comer calls for recanvass.

AT AMAZON, take 20% off in the Memorial Day Sales Event.

Plus, deals on DeWalt power tools.

Also, in the TV Deal Of The Week: Yu-Gi-Oh Classic Complete Series, $88.99 (61% off).

WAGES OF HATE: Shooter: ‘I Hope I Got [Zimmerman] This Time.’

Plus: “During the investigation, I learned that Apperson has exhibited unusual behavior in which he had recently been admitted to a mental institution. It appears that Apperson has a fixation on Zimmerman and has displayed some signs of paranoia, anxiety, and bipolar disorder.” So, pretty much like all the news media, then.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER:

This editorial is what is wrong. The Democrats are an alliance of Westchester and Harlem, of Montgomery County and intercity Baltimore. Westchester and Montgomery get a Citigroup asset stimulus policy that triples the market. The blacks get a decline in wages after inflation.

But the blacks get symbolic recognition in an utterly incompetent mayor who handled this so badly from beginning to end that her resignation would be demanded if she were white. The blacks get awful editorials like this that tell them to feel sorry for themselves.

In 1965 the Asians were discriminated against as least as badly as blacks. That was reflected in the word “colored.” The racism against what even Eleanor Roosevelt called the yellow races was at least as bad.

So where are the editorials that say racism doomed the Asian-Americans. They didn’t feel sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard.

I am a professor at Duke University. Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration. The amount of Asian-white dating is enormous and so surely will be the intermarriage. Black-white dating is almost non-existemt because of the ostracism by blacks of anyone who dates a white.

It was appropriate that a Chinese design won the competition for the Martin Luther King [statue]. King helped them overcome. The blacks followed Malcolm X.

Even being an old commie apologist isn’t enough to keep you from being savaged over this badthink. But if you can’t say what you believe is true when you’re an 80-year-old professor, when can you?

IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Clinton Email Case Gets Nutty: Clinton Offers Faux Support For Faster Release… That She Could Have Done Herself.

OR YOU COULD JUST CUT TAXES AND REGULATION: Control Freaks’ Solution to Shadow Economy: Nag People and Abolish Cash: They’ll try anything but lowering taxes and reducing regulations. Well, the goal is accumulating power, after all, not helping the economy.

COMING: 5G CELLPHONE SERVICE, BOTH AWESOME AND AWESOMELY EXPENSIVE. But will people really stream 3D Ultra HD movies to their phones?

REPLACING APPENDECTOMIES with antibiotics.

JOURNALISM: “Yahoo PR has not called me back in three years, and somehow I write.”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: 8 Key Steps To Seamlessly Transition Your Kids Through Divorce.

HEALTH: Study Suggests Dense Breast Tissue Isn’t Always a High Cancer Risk.