I EXPECT WE’LL SEE THIS SORT OF THING IN A LOT OF STATES: Knox legislative delegation calls for hearings on UT diversity office.

What’s really notable here is that this is UT’s delegation; many of their constituents work for UT, and these are the legislators UT goes to when it wants things from the legislature. This indicates two things, I think: (1) That they have a lot of leverage over the university; and (2) that their constituents, maybe even those who work for UT, don’t feel impelled to support the diversity office. I suspect that’s a more widespread phenomenon, too. Diversity offices are not especially popular with most people who work at universities, though of course you’re not supposed to talk about that.

WITHOUT LIES AND DOUBLE STANDARDS, COULD MODERN FEMINISM EXIST AT ALL? Feminist organization still defending Rolling Stone rape hoaxer.

The National Organization for Women must be hurting for publicity and must also adhere to the old saying that there is “no such thing as bad publicity,” because their recent decision to come to the defense of the woman who lied about being gang raped to Rolling Stone is otherwise astonishing.

Police found no evidence to back up the allegation (although they haven’t officially closed the case). The accuser, Jackie, named the man she claimed took her to a fraternity party and initiated the gang rape — and no one by that name was a student at the University of Virginia or even existed in the United States.

There was no party at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house on the night she claimed to have been raped. Her story changed in material ways over the years. At one point, she claimed he had been forced to perform oral sex on five men. At another, she said she had been raped by seven, including with a beer bottle. Every detail she provided to Rolling Stone was either absolutely proven false or cast into very deep doubt — from her bloody and torn dress to the way her friends and a university administrator treated her after she came forward.

Despite all of this, NOW is calling Jackie a “survivor” and condemning the U.Va. dean who is suing Rolling Stone and requesting documents to prove she was defamed by the magazine.

Well, they fundraised a lot off this. If they admit it’s bogus, people might want their money back.

WAR ON WOMEN: Ashe Schow: Democrats’ disgusting sexism toward Republican women continues.

Any time a Republican woman is elevated — whether in the media or to a position of power within the party — those on the Left roll out the red carpet of sexism to denigrate her accomplishment.

This year, the “honor” goes to South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was selected to give the Republican response to President Obama’s final State of the Union speech. As soon as Haley was announced, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz sprang into action, implying the successful governor was merely a token.

“It’s pretty clear that Nikki Haley is being chosen because the Republican Party has a diversity problem,” Wasserman Schultz said on a conference call Monday.

This attack also misses the main point about why Haley was likely selected. She has always been considered a possible vice presidential pick, and responding to the State of the Union is a great way to showcase her charisma and conservative record of governance. It angers the Left that so many of the Republican Party’s rising stars aren’t old white men.

Haley, who was born to Indian immigrants, has been seen as a GOP star since her election as governor. She is the first female and first minority governor of South Carolina (as well as the youngest governor in the country). She oversaw a drop in the Palmetto State’s jobless rates to record lows, enacted education reform and, more recently, signed a bill to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse after a mass shooting. . . .

But this is nothing new for the Left when it comes to successful Republicans who don’t fit the “old, white man” narrative. Last year, when incoming Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, was selected to give the State of the Union response, the leftist group EMILY’s List called her “window dressing.” During Ernst’s election in 2014, Wasserman Schultz called her an “onion of crazy.”

It’s one thing to disagree with someone’s views on the issues. But the Left is using that disagreement to dismiss someone based on her sex and/or race. For a political party that claims to be tolerant, it sure seems to drop all fidelity to the word when a woman or minority Republican succeeds.

Seems to.

AN OFTEN-RELIABLE ELECTION YEAR TEST IS, WHICH CANDIDATE IS WINNING “THE FUN INDICATOR.”

Two guesses as to which candidate that is this year, and the first doesn’t count.

SO SEPARATE — BUT EQUAL — TO COIN A PHRASE: Oregon State University to Hold Segregated Workshops on Race.

Democratic National Committee member Bull Connor would certainly have approved. Presumably, the workshops would also be approved by former Obama mentor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who noted that “African-American children have a different way of learning” in his speech to the 2008 NAACP national convention, which then Time-Warner-CNN-HBO spokeswoman Soledad O’Brien dubbed “a home run.”

REMEMBER, WHEN LEFTIES ARE ANGRY, IT’S “PASSION:” Juan Williams: Angry White Women.

Who knew white women had become so angry?

The anger animating the divide between the GOP establishment and the GOP grassroots is always presented in terms of angry white men.

It is impossible to ignore, as The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin noted last week, that Republican media and political culture these days, both in Congress and on the campaign trail, is “perpetually angry.”

But a new poll shows that white women are the angriest of angry voters.

With reason.

THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION: She Does All This For Us, You Know.

ELDERLY WHITE DEMOCRAT CANDIDATES PARTICIPATE IN FORUM ON MINORITY ISSUES.

Which happened to run alongside the Alabama-Clemson College Football Playoff title game, to ensure that no one would see it, much like the DNC’s presidential “debates” this year.

(Unexpectedly.)

DEMOCRAT OPERATIVE WITH A BYLINE SAYS WHAT?

● “Chris Matthews a Birther Now That Target Is Cruz? Trump ‘May Have Something’ He Insists.”

—Headline, NewsBusters, last night.

Matthews asked [Trump] tonight, “Is Donald Trump honest when he says that Barack Obama isn’t a legitimate president?”

Trump repeatedly refused to answer the question, saying that once he answers it, “that’s all people want to talk about.” So no, he did not give a straight answer to whether Obama’s a legitimate president.

Matthews told him, “I think it’s a blemish––I think it’s your original sin. I’m an American, I think the president should be respected! I think there’s a little ethnic aspect to it, I don’t like it!”

—“Chris Matthews Delivers Trump’s Most Uncomfortable Interview Moment Yet,” Mediaite, December 16th, 2015.

ROGER KIMBALL: Donald Trump as a Mirror for the Republican Soul.

What’s going on? A large segment of the Republican political establishment, blindsided by Trump’s success, has decided, cautiously, in a hedging-your-bets sort of way, that Trump might just have what it takes to beat Hillary.

Three points. First, as I have argued in the space before (and here), the Trump phenomenon owes a great deal to the widespread, visceral impatience with the business-as-usual politically correct establishment, Republican every-bit-as-much as Democrat. Trump is not a conservative. As Kevin Williamson has shown in meticulous and hilarious detail, Trump “spent most of his life as a progressive Democrat, a patron of Charles Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Hillary Rodham Clinton.” . . .

True, all true. But it’s not clear that — while we are still here listening to the warm-up bands waiting for the main event — it is not clear that it matters. And while we wait, Trump is excellent entertainment. That is point two, summed up with characteristic panache by Mark Steyn a few days ago in a column called “Notes on a Phenomenon.” Reflecting on Trump’s recent performance behind enemy lines, i.e., in Bernie Sander’s HQ, Burlington, People’s Republic of Vermont, Steyn noted that “Trump has no prompters. He walks out, pulls a couple of pieces of folded paper from his pocket, and then starts talking. Somewhere in there is the germ of a stump speech, but it would bore him to do the same poll-tested focus-grouped thing night after night, so he basically riffs on whatever’s on his mind. . . . But in a strange way it all hangs together: It’s both a political speech, and a simultaneous running commentary on his own campaign.” That’s true. And it is also true, as Steyn points out that it makes for great entertainment. . . .

As I have been saying for many months now, I am not at all convinced that Hillary Clinton will be the nominee, or, if she were the nominee, that she would be elected. As the classified emails that rocketed about the world from her personal email server keep being leaked, I suspect she is edging closer to indictment or at least popular, and therefore crippling, delegitimation. Later this week, 13 Hours, a movie about what happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, will hit the theaters. The movie makers stress that it is “not political.” The names “Obama” and “Hillary Clinton” are never uttered. But the film is said to tell the truth about what happened in that consular outpost, which means that it will show how four Americans, including a US Ambassador, where slaughtered by Islamic terrorists because Washington, worried about political fallout in an election years, refused to send help that was just minutes away. The more popular that movie is, the poorer are Hillary Clinton’s chances.

But the real gravamen of my third point revolves around Ted Cruz, not Hillary Clinton. I suspect that an unstated but large consideration in the sudden shift towards Donald Trump on the part of the Republican Establishment its members are terrified of Ted Cruz. They are right to be terrified of him, for were he to become President, the gravy train that is business-as-usual in Washington would make an abrupt stop, everyone off, please, and it would be as much of a shake-up for Republicans as Democrats.

What you hear people say is that “Donald Trump may have the best chance of beating Hillary Clinton.” But what that means is, “Maybe Trump can beat Hillary, assuming she is the Democratic candidate, but anyway, despite his bluster, he really is deep down a pay-to-play kind of guy, just like us. Ted Cruz, on the contrary, really means all that stuff about ending the ‘Washington Cartel’ and restoring Constitutional restraints on government. It’s OK to say that in election years, but we don’t want to elect someone who will actually try to do it.”

Hmm. As Limbaugh says, they hate Trump, but they fear Cruz.

THERE ARE SOME SECTIONS OF THE INTERNET THAT I WOULD NOT ADVISE YOU TO INVADE: Twitter Tried To Hurt Gay Conservative Milo Yiannopoulos. It Really, REALLY Backfired.

Related: Aaron Swartz’ Warning That Social Media Companies Could Censor The Net Rings Truer Than Ever.

IS THIS THE END OF THE NEW REPUBLIC? Longtime former TNR publisher Marty Peretz twists the knife after examining the wreckage of old magazine under new owner Chris Hughes, who made his fortune largely by being besties with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg:

I don’t mean this physically, but he’s a small person,” Peretz said of Hughes. “In that metaphorical way, I knew that he’s not an imaginative person.”

Referring to Hughes’s status as a co-founder of Facebook because of his college friendship with Zuckerberg, Peretz added: “I think he owes about $700 million to the Harvard housing office.”

* * * * * * * *

John Judis, one of the brand-name writers who quit the magazine amid the implosion of December 2014, wrote Monday on his Facebook page: “What’s a good saying that will allow me not to use clichés like ‘the chickens have come home to roost.’ Hughes, the first generation of Silicon nouveaux riches, didn’t know what he was doing when he bought a political magazine. He didn’t understand what a political magazine was. And now that he has gotten rid of all the original staff, blown away its readership, and tarnished a century of work by people dedicated to make the country better rather* than making a profit for the already wealthy, he’s calling it quits.”

Just as Newsweek has continued on a zombie brand name after the pre-Bezos-era Washington Post unloaded it to electronics mogul Sydney Harman for a $1.00 and his assumption of a zillion dollars worth of debt, I wonder who will acquire TNR’s brand? I can think of a few well-heeled investors  that would certainly enjoy having fun with the title.

* Well, from a certain perspective, I suppose.

JOHN HINDERAKER ON EUROPE’S RAPE COVERUPS: “What I find inexplicable is the European liberals’ lack of concern for the young women who have been violated. In their political calculations, the women do not appear to figure at all. It’s almost like they were all Kennedys or Clintons.”

Plus: “As in Europe, New York’s political class doesn’t really care what happens to citizens. It’s all about their power.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: A Framework for Thinking About Law School Affordability.

THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY: ‘Legos’ for Fabrication of Atomically Precise Electronic Circuits.

EVERYTHING FOR THE NARRATIVE: How the Media Enables Fantasy Tours to Communist Cuba.

BEYOND LEGALITY: Why the ‘wet tea leaves’ drug raid was outrageous.

MICHELLE RISTUCCIA: Premeditations.

OR, AS WE CALL IT AROUND THE HOUSE: Generation Derp.  (Like my fish.) Generation Stupid.

AH, VERSAILLES: The Vulgar Spectacle of the SOTU.

BUT THEY DIVORCED REALITY: Why should they care what it thinks? Hillary the Reality Sucks Candidate.

FROM LIFEBOAT FOUNDATION: Visions of the Future.

AND AGAIN, LOOK HOW SHOCKED I AM: Oh, wait, I’m not.  After all I’ve moved all my life in liberal arts circles.  Emphasis on “liberal.” Because that’s what they are. Social Psychology is Ridiculously Left Wing.

WELCOME TO THE CANNIBAL FEAST: The Bill Comes Due: Cosby vs. Clinton.

A CONSUMMATION DEVOUTLY TO BE HOPED FOR: Supreme Court appears skeptical of union fees — a potentially major loss for labor groups.