SICK BURN: Ann Althouse takes apart Jeffrey Toobin and, in the process, Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

Toobin calls that a “civics lecture”? I think what he means is that the demand for a text is so basic that to talk about it is to sound as though we are back in high school, and that’s either an insult to the old folks on the Court who should be presumed to already know such things or it’s an implicit criticism of them for failing to live up to the standards that of course Gorsuch knows they know.

Here’s the transcript of the oral argument, where you can see that Gorsuch followed the “civics lecture” with one more question: “Aren’t those all textual indications in the Constitution itself that maybe we ought to be cautious about stepping in here?” Gorsuch was suggesting that the particularity of the constitutional text about voting rights with respect to race, sex, and age — in the Fifteenth, and Nineteenth, and Twenty-sixth Amendments — means that a more particular text is needed to find a right to be free from political gerrymandering. . . .

And Gorsuch wasn’t silenced: He was the next Justice to ask a question. But speaking of feeling as though you’re back in high school, Toobin sounds like a schoolboy muttering “oh, burn.”

And yet, Ginsburg, like Gorsuch, only asked a question. It’s a question that resonates with the old Edwin Meese distinction: She doesn’t need to go back to the constitutional text because she’s already moved on to constitutional law. “One person, one vote” isn’t in the Constitution. It’s judge-written text from old cases, so if Gorsuch wants to know the connection to the text, he can just consult the old cases and stop wasting the adults’ time. . . .

Toobin is so dismissive of the idea of going back to the constitutional text that he didn’t even bother to check to see if Reynolds v. Sims and Baker v. Carr were based on “the First and Fourteenth Amendments.” But neither of those cases even mentions the First Amendment.* Those cases are based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Period.

Read the whole thing, which makes plain that you’re better off reading Althouse’s blog than the New Yorker.

TRAGIC: Woman Who Thought She Was a Man on Transgender Treatment: ‘It’s Not a Cure at All.’

VIRGINIA POSTREL ON HOW TO BREAK THE PLASTIC SURGERY TABOO:

Jane Fonda took offense last week when Megyn Kelly asked her why the actress had said she “wasn’t proud” that she’d had plastic surgery. “We really want to talk about that now?” the annoyed star shot back, giving Kelly a disdainful look that quickly became an internet meme.

* * * * * * * *

Contrary to the critics, Kelly’s mistake wasn’t that she introduced a trivial question into a serious discussion. It’s that she naively assumed she could hijack what amounted to a video press release with a legitimate reportorial inquiry. Kelly didn’t stick to the Hollywood script.

Read the whole thing.

DRAIN THE SWAMP: Fannie Mae charged taxpayers $250,000 for a chandelier.

DARK MONEY: Hidden Donors of Anti-Trump ‘Resistance’ Group Revealed.

The Center for Community Change, a Washington, D.C.-based 501 (c)(3) progressive community organizing group that does not reveal its donors, has been involved in direct action against President Donald Trump and Republicans before and after the November elections. The organization’s members sit on the boards of other prominent liberal activist groups.

The Free Beacon has obtained the group’s unredacted 2015 tax forms that shed light on its funders, who provide millions of dollars in assistance. The group appears to rely heavily on a few major liberal foundations, organizations, and unions.

The Center for Community Change’s largest contribution was $3,000,000 from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which was initially created by Will Kellogg, the food manufacturer and founder of Kellogg Company. The Ford Foundation, which was first created by the founders of the Ford Motor Company, added a $2,350,000 donation. The Open Society Foundation, a foundation run by liberal billionaire mega-donor George Soros, gave $1,750,000 to the Center for Community Change.

Other donors to the organization include the California Endowment, which gave $524,500; the Marquerite Casey Foundation, which gave $515,000; Fidelity Charitable Gift, which donated $505,100; and the National Immigration Law Center, which gave $316,000.

The Center for Community Change Action, the “social welfare” (c)(4) arm of the group, additionally relies on a handful of donors for almost all of its funding, according to its documents that do not include the privacy redactions.

Donors to its “social welfare” arm in 2015 included Every Citizen Counts ($1,750,000 contribution), a nonprofit that was created by allies of Hillary Clinton to mobilize Latino and African-American voters; the Open Society Policy Center ($1,475,000), another Soros group; the Sixteen Thirty Fund ($610,000), a progressive advocacy group; Center for Community Change ($150,000); Services Employees International Union (SEIU) ($150,000); Atlantic Philanthropies ($75,000); and the Tides Foundation ($50,000), the largest liberal donor-advised network, among other funders.

The Center for Community Change has been involved with anti-Trump campaigns for some time now. The group’s members also sit on the advisory boards of other prominent liberal organizations.

Sounds shady.

DEPENDS ON HOW CYNICAL YOU ARE: Is it strange that we have heard nothing about whether the Las Vegas shooter was a Republican or a Democrat?

FIGHTING GERRYMANDERING WITH FAKE EINSTEIN QUOTES. What I notice is that when Democrats did it, gerrymandering was just one of those funny shenanigans that politicians engaged in. Now that it might hurt Democrats, instead of help them, it’s suddenly a constitutional crisis.

YA THINK? The White House and Equifax Agree: Social Security Numbers Should Go.

The administration has called on federal departments and agencies to look into the vulnerabilities of employing the identifier tied to retirement benefits, as well as how to replace the existing system, according to Rob Joyce, special assistant to the president and White House cybersecurity coordinator.

“I feel very strongly that the Social Security number has outlived its usefulness,” Joyce said Tuesday at a cyber conference in Washington organized by the Washington Post. “Every time we use the Social Security number, you put it at risk.”

Joyce’s comments came as former Equifax CEO Richard Smith testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the first of four hearings this week on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers from both parties expressed outrage over the size of the breach as well as the company’s response and grilled Smith on the timeline of the incident, including when top executives learned about it.

Smith said the rising number of hacks involving Social Security numbers have eroded its security value.

Equifax needs to go, too, but they just signed a multimillion-dollar “fraud-prevention” contract with the IRS.

THE REMNANT: Jonah Goldberg kicks off a new solo podcast series with an interview with Ben Sasse and homages to both Albert Jay Nock (check the title) and legendary disk jockey Johnny Caravella Sunshine Fever: Booger.

THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG: Catalonia to move to declare independence from Spain on Monday.

Pro-independence parties which control the regional parliament have asked for a debate and vote on Monday on declaring independence, the source said. A declaration should follow this vote, although it is unclear when.

Catalan President Carles Puigdemont earlier told the BBC that his government would ask the region’s parliament to declare independence after tallying votes from last weekend’s referendum, which Madrid says was illegal.

“This will probably finish once we get all the votes in from abroad at the end of the week and therefore we shall probably act over the weekend or early next week,” he said in remarks published on Wednesday.

Well, the vote almost certainly was illegal — but once a people decide to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, it becomes difficult-to-impossivle to restore those bands.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Men Who Ejaculate More at Reduced Risk for Prostate Cancer, Studies Suggest.

CLEANING UP THE EPA MESS: Reuters has seen the EPA’s proposal to replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan that was a major part of the last administration’s war on coal. That unlawful power grab would have raised the price of energy for most people and shuttered power plants to achieve a reduction in global warming of 0.02 degrees C by 2100. However, as EPA is actually following the law on regulations, which takes time, the various court cases could do the job before the administrative repeal winds its way through the process.

WAR ON WOMEN UPDATE: OJ’s lawyer blasts Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as ‘stupidest person the planet’ and a ‘b*tch’ after her attempts to block Simpson from being paroled in the Sunshine State.

DANIEL PAYNE: Dear Jimmy Kimmel: Stay Out Of The Gun Debate If You Can’t Be Honest.

Mr. Kimmel, you clearly do not like the NRA, for whatever reason. You’re certainly entitled to your political opinion But that does not allow you to make things up to further your own political ends. For instance, you claim that “In June of last year, the NRA fought to make sure people on the no-fly list can buy guns.” This is a lie, plain and simple.

What the NRA was fighting against last summer was not a provision barring people on the no-fly list from buying guns; it was a provision barring innocent Americans who had been placed on the terror watch list from buying guns. And they were right to stand against such a measure! The terror watch list is an overly broad, slapdash document that has regularly encompassed innocent American men and women who are guilty of no terrorist activity whatsoever.

Maybe you’re okay with innocent Americans losing their constitutional rights because they’ve been placed on an accountable secret government list for no reason. Most people aren’t, however; even the American Civil Liberties Union agreed with the NRA on this. You owe it to your audience to tell the truth about the matter.

Mr. Kimmel, you also level an incredible charge at President Trump, claiming that “in February, he…signed a bill that made it easier for people with severe mental illness to buy guns legally.” This is a gross and intellectually shameless distortion of what that bill actually accomplished.

Read the whole thing.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Save for Retirement Before You Even Think About the Kids’ College Fund.

After all, when you get on a plane, what does the chirpy instructional video tell you? Attend to your own oxygen mask before you turn to your kid. This is not because airlines care less about kids than they do about the passengers with the credit cards. It’s because someone who has passed out from anoxia is not much use to their kid or anyone else. Taking care of yourself is part of being a good parent. If you don’t do it, your kids will have to, and they may not be up to the job.

This is simply common sense. But the evidence suggests that this bit of common sense is eluding a lot of parents.

The T. Rowe Price survey is, of course, just one data point — but it mirrors conversations I have had over and over in my years of writing about personal finance. “We’ll save for retirement as soon as the kids are out of college,” says someone whose last kid will graduate when they are 57. Or “I’m just not going to be able to retire,” they say with a shrug. “I’ll have to work until I die, but at least the kids will be started off right.”

This is magical thinking. Fifty-seven is a good age to start planning what you will do in your retirement, but it is a terrible age to start saving for it. You have almost no time for the money to grow, which means that to enjoy a decent standard of living over a 20-year retirement, you would effectively need to be saving more than your salary each and every year. This is not a viable plan.

True.

THE NEW YORK TIMES HAS A FEVAH, AND IT NEEDS MORE EXISTENTIAL DREAD:  The Golden Age of ‘Existential’ Dread.

We say it with abandon now, in every context, about the continued existence of big things and the continued existence of small ones. Artificial intelligence, says Elon Musk, may pose an existential threat to humanity — but also, say some medical professionals, to the significantly more limited field of human radiologists, who fear being replaced by software. Donald Trump’s control of the American nuclear arsenal, according to a psychiatrist named John Zinner, poses an existential threat to the world; to others, Facebook’s recent string of bad press presents an existential threat to a large company. (Tech businesses are rife with existential threats: Uber presents an existential threat to taxi services, but it also faces existential threats from potential regulation.) Brain injuries are an existential threat to the sport of football. Tax cuts are an existential issue for the Republican Party. Anything that has the potential to end can be matched with some factor that promises to hasten that end — and what is there in the universe that cannot, in theory, cease to exist?

Gee, wait ‘til the author discovers the 1970s.

OMNISHAMBLES: British Prime Minister Teresa May was supposed to begin the fight back against Jeremy Corbyn’s extreme leftist Labour Party in her speech to the Conservative Party Conference today. Things didn’t go as planned. A BBC comedian handed her the British equivalent of a pink slip right at the beginning (questions are already being asked about security). Then she broke out in a coughing fit that just wouldn’t stop, apparently brought on by a hectic schedule of interviews today. And to top it all, letters started falling off the slogan behind her. And for those of us who care about policy, there was a lot of interventionist “the government is here to help” in the speech, something Ronald Reagan could have warned her against. I can hear the sound of Corbyn laughing from here.

CYBERSECURITY: Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3 Billion.

The figure, which Verizon said was based on new information, is three times the 1 billion accounts Yahoo said were affected when it first disclosed the breach in December 2016. The new disclosure, four months after Verizon completed its acquisition of Yahoo, shows that executives are still coming to grips with the extent of the security problem in what was already the largest hacking incident in history by number of user accounts.

A spokesman for Oath, the Verizon unit that now includes Yahoo, said the company determined within the past week that the break-in was much worse than thought, after it received new information from outside the company. He declined to elaborate on that information. Compromised customer information included usernames, passwords, and in some cases telephone numbers and dates of birth, the spokesman said.

Several other major cyberattacks recently have focused attention on the vulnerability of big companies that possess enormous amounts of vital personal information about their customers.

An awful lot of people gave an awful lot of their personal information to companies who clearly have no idea what they’re doing.

For a few bucks a month, you can own your own domain at a small hosting company, which is a much smaller target than any of these data behemoths. Clearly, free email is actually worth far less than you pay for it.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Mizzou professor sues university over ‘gun ban’ on campus: Instructor claims university’s gun policy is unconstitutional after state passed ‘strict scrutiny’ on gun restrictions. “Royce de R. Barondes, an associate professor of law at the university, is questioning the campus’s gun policy, which states that ‘the possession of firearms on university property is prohibited except in regularly approved programs or by university agents or employees in the line of duty.’ Barondes is a concealed carry permit holder in the state of Missouri and also teaches a course on firearms law, according to The Washington Times.”

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TRUMP: ‘We’ll Be Talking About the Gun Laws.’

THIS IS THE GUY DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ AND OTHER HOUSE DEMS HAD HANDLING THEIR SECRETS: Wasserman Schultz IT Aide Allegedly Bragged He Paid Pakistani Police For Protection.

A now-indicted IT aide to various House Democrats was sending money and gifts to government officials in Pakistan and received protection from the Pakistani police, multiple relatives claim.

A Democratic aide also said Imran Awan personally bragged to him that he could have people tortured in Pakistan. Awan’s lawyer acknowledged that he was sending money to a member of the Faisalabad police department, but said there was a good explanation.

The relatives said Awan and his brothers were also sending IT equipment, such as iPhones, to the country during the same period in which fraudulent purchase orders for that equipment were allegedly placed in the House, and in which congressional equipment apparently went missing. . . .

A source close to the investigation, who was not unauthorized to comment publicly, said the FBI generated suspicious activity reports on the suspects that were hundreds of pages long, based on their large cash deposits and international transfers.

A fellow Democratic House IT aide, speaking on condition of anonymity because of concern for his career, recounted a conversation between Awan and three colleagues in a House cafeteria several years ago in which Awan seemed to relish bragging about his ability to have people harassed in Pakistan.

“He wanted to build a CRM [customer relationship management software] but he wanted to do it in Pakistan,” the aide told TheDCNF. “But the government doesn’t allow that. They have to be American, but Imran said, ‘Well, we can say that they’re American, but really they’ll be in Pakistan. I have these guys that work for the Faisalabad police department, and all we have to do is pay them $100 a month and they take them over to the police station, strip their clothes off, hang them upside down and beat them with a shoe. And that person will work hard and be loyal from then on.’ And we were all like, ‘what the fuck.’ Two other people were there. We said, ‘he’s a fucking monster.’”

Weird that Schultz and other Dem House members have been so loyal to him. It’s almost as if they’re being blackmailed.