BERKELEY EDUCRATS MAKE CLEAR THAT diversity isn’t about diversity, it’s about discriminating against straight white men.

My friends (anonymous!) in the UC system report that the criteria are clear and the word is out: Don’t try to be clever. Don’t quote Martin Luther King, on judgement by content of character rather than color of skin. Don’t write vibrant essays on the importance of ideological, political or religious diversity. Don’t quote federal anti-discrimination law, the 14th Amendment, and the UC’s own statements of non-discrimination in hiring. Don’t write about class diversity, diverse experiences of immigrants, such as people born under communism in Eastern Europe or the amazingly diverse experience of the colleague you just hired who came from a small village in China. Don’t write about the importance of freedom of speech, or anti-communist loyalty oaths in the 1950s. Are you thinking of writing about your hilbilly elegy background, your time in the military, your support for gun rights and Trump, and how this background and viewpoint would enrich a faculty and staff that likely has absolutely zero people like you? Don’t bother. We all know what “diversity” means. And, heaven forbid, don’t express distaste for the project. The staff are on to all these tricks, and each of these specifically will earn you a downgrade. For an example of what not to do, see UCLA Professor Stephen Bainbridge’s (UCLA law) posted diversity statement. Let’s see if he gets that raise.

This calls for lawsuits, and an investigation by the Department of Education.

Related: The university’s litmus test is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: A Reminder That Newsweek Is Very, Very Bad News Site.

Though their headline on the Virgin Galactic space plane doing twice the speed of light is big, if true. Zefram Cochrane, call your office!

THAT SEEMS WISE: Pence Delays Trip to Preside Over Senate Tax Vote. “Vice President Mike Pence will remain in Washington next week to preside over the Senate’s vote on the Republican tax overhaul bill, his chief spokeswoman said, a signal GOP leaders expect to thread the needle. . . . The questionable attendance of Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Thad Cochran of Mississippi, who both face health complications, raises doubts about whether the GOP will have the requisite votes.”

APPARENTLY NOT: Tylenol Isn’t So Safe, But At Least It Works, Right?

I’m not a big fan of Tylenol, which becomes rather obvious if you read the first part of this two-part series. For a drug that is so widely used, it is quite easy to consume enough, accidentally or otherwise, to take enough to suffer a toxic overdose due to irreversible liver damage.

But drugs cannot be judged by safety alone. Both the good and the bad – benefits and risks – must be taken into account to get the true measure of the quality of a drug. So if Tylenol isn’t all that safe, you might expect that, at the very least, it should work well. Otherwise, why would so many people be taking it?

That’s the $64,000 question, and here’s the answer. In reality, Tylenol doesn’t work very well at all, and there is plenty of evidence to back this up, especially in systematic Cochrane Reviews – highly regarded, evidence-based reviews that carefully evaluate the quality of data in multiple studies.

I don’t keep Tylenol in the house because of its deleterious effects when combined with alcohol — and unlike Tylenol, alcohol is an effective painkiller.

HEALTH: Scientific evidence grows for e-cigarettes as quit-smoking aids.

Researchers at University College London (UCL) analyzed the latest data on smoking and quitting in England – including details on smokers who worked with the health-worker devised Stop Smoking Services to set a quit date.

While they found no direct evidence that e-cigarettes prompted more people to make the decision to try and quit, the team did find that as more people used e-cigarettes, more people also successfully stopped smoking.

In a separate scientific analysis also published on Tuesday, researchers at the Cochrane Review found that the overall weight of evidence on e-cigarettes suggests they can help people stop smoking and have no serious side-effects.

Nannystaters however see e-cigarettes as important sources of revenue and scolding, rather than a source of pleasure and improved health.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Back to Bedlam.

Chicago had a harbinger of its current depolicing situation in 2012. Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy had disbanded a city-wide, anti-gang task force that advocates had criticized for allegedly making too many stops in minority neighborhoods. Homicides soared, ultimately reaching 500 that year. South Side residents begged for the reconstitution of the task force and the resumption of stops. “We have had enough,” the grandmother of a murder victim told the Telegraph, afraid to give her name for fear of retribution. “The older folks are terrified. We need the police to crack down on them. Responsibly yes, but forcefully.” A local city councilman, Willie Cochran, said that his constituents “wanted a more aggressive force engaging these terrorists on the streets.” His community was “ready to stand by the police” in the face of complaints about “racial profiling,” Cochran added. McCarthy reconstituted the unit in 2013 and the shooting epidemic cooled. (This connection between depolicing and crime has been repeatedly confirmed empirically, most recently in a study of Justice Department police consent decrees.)

The activists’ standard charge against cops in the post-Ferguson era is that they are peevishly refusing to do their jobs in childish protest against mere “public scrutiny.” This anodyne formulation whitewashes what has been going on in the streets as a result of the sometimes-violent agitation against them. Cops are routinely cursed and screamed at; sometimes bottles and rocks are thrown. “In my 19 years in law enforcement, I haven’t seen this kind of hatred toward the police,” a Chicago cop who works on the South Side tells me.

Read the whole thing. But it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a return to ’70s-style policing and attitudes towards law enforcement would bring a return of ’70s violence.

PUSHBACK: Professors, rights groups write letter defending student due process rights.

Professors from across the country, as well as several rights groups, have written a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee condemning the evisceration of due process rights for college students.

The letter, addressed to Sens. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., and Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., describes the example of Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis, who earlier this year faced a Title IX investigation for writing an article condemning current campus sexual assault policies. Title IX is the federal law that bans gender discrimination and has been used in recent years to justify adjudicating sexual assault as campus disciplinary matters.

The letter points out that it was the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights that reinterpreted Title IX as an adjudication tool, and the signees believe OCR violated the Administrative Procedure Act when issuing its directive for schools to apply this.

“The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) requires that all proposed regulations undergo a review-and-comment process to solicit public input,” the signees wrote. “Unfortunately, the OCR has repeatedly sidestepped the APA requirements by misleadingly portraying its Dear Colleague Letters as ‘guidance,’ not regulations. By definition, a guidance document consists of recommendations that are suggested, not required, and are meant only to interpret preexisting laws and regulations.”

The “guidelines,” which are currently the law of the land, “have served to frustrate congressional oversight efforts and to vitiate the principle of public accountability,” the signees wrote.

Law is for the little people.

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? The thing is, the NRSC went all-in to deep-six Milt Wolf in favor of doddering nonresident Pat Roberts. Now Roberts faces a “tough re-election fight,” with this observation: “It’s difficult to see how Milton Wolf would have done appreciably worse in this case, and he might have held the Republican base together better.” Especially as the NRSC pissed off — and pissed on — the base in backing Roberts.

As with Mark Foley and Thad Cochran, a better-run party would have found quality replacements for these weak incumbents, instead of encouraging them to stay in and — in Cochran’s and Roberts’ cases — killing off primary challengers. But whatever the folks running the GOP, and in particular the NRSC, are getting paid, it’s too much.

THE HILL: Untamed Cruz refuses to play nice with GOP campaign arm.

The defiant Republican’s brutal criticism of Sen. Thad Cochran’s (R-Miss.) reelection campaign on Tuesday — and the involvement of a group he is technically a vice chairman of, the National Republican Senatorial Committee — is just the latest example of the Tea Party hero refusing to play nice.

That brazen approach has exacerbated already fragile relations with establishment Republicans, who believe the freshman senator is intentionally undercutting them for no reason other than furthering his own political career.

Meanwhile, his conservative base is rejoicing that he’s refusing to be cowed.

The NRSC’s base is the minority of Republicans in the Senate. And the NRSC has been ham-handed all year, going out of its way to alienate supporters with dumb race-baiting that Dems have picked up on. This isn’t smart.

JAMES TARANTO: Cantor Defeats Truman: The political surprise of the year.

“Eric Cantor’s margin of victory Tuesday could have national GOP repercussions,” according to the subject line of a self-promotional email we received from a political writer last night. It was an update of an earlier analysis, and the text correctly noted that the House majority leader had lost. Half an hour later, the writer, whom we won’t name because we’re a nice guy, sent out a new email with a “corrected subject line,” referring to Cantor’s “primary loss.”

The error was consistent with much of the pre-election analysis. “Challenger David Brat looks almost certain to lose, but the margin may say something about the potency of the issue,” blogged The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Meckler an hour before polls closed.

“The issue” is immigration, on which Cantor had staked out a middle-of-the-road position; Brat accused him of backing “amnesty.” National Review’s Joel Gehrke reports that Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer “rushed to assure House Republicans” that “Cantor didn’t actually lose because of his gestures toward Democrats on immigration reform.”

Tweeted Pfeiffer: “Cantor’s problem wasn’t his position on immigration reform, it was his lack of a position. [South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey] Graham wrote and passed a bill and is winning big.” Graham avoided a runoff by taking 59% of the vote in a crowded field.

National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar offers a different explanation for Graham’s victory: a combination of “assiduous attention to constituent service, paying favors to his South Carolina Republican colleagues, an early and relentless focus on fundraising, and a hawkish record on foreign policy that conservatives in the military-rich state rallied behind.” Whatever the merits of the argument, one suspects Republicans will be wary of taking advice from Pfeiffer.

In a postelection report, the Journal’s Kristina Peterson and Janet Hook described Cantor’s defeat as “overturning the building narrative that Republican Party leaders and allied business groups had trampled the GOP’s tea-party wing.” A variation of that narrative, which this column put forth last month, was that the GOP had assimilated the Tea Party.

One might say this is the exception that proves the rule, but it’s actually the second exception. A week earlier, challenger Chris McDaniel narrowly outpolled Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi in that state’s Republican primary.

Read the whole thing.

EUGENE VOLOKH: Arrestee alleges government misconduct; federal magistrate orders arrestee to apologize and recant, as a condition of bail. “This seems to me clearly unconstitutional: It’s an order compelling speech, on threat of imprisonment, which would itself normally be a First Amendment violation; but on top of that, it was issued without a trial, and thus without any final factual findings supporting its validity.”

What is the name of this speech-squelching magistrate?

Related: Bold witness to alleged abuse by federal agents comes forward.

“He said, ’I don’t need to show you a F—–g warrant.’”

Branson said, “I need to see a warrant, based on the fourth amendment…”

“The agent answered ‘Oh you’re a F—–g lawyer now. We can do this the easy way or the hard way and put his finger on the trigger of his M16. That’s when I just backed up,” Branson said.

According to Branson the alleged assault to Lipsen happened in plain view, on the sidewalk in front of a residence.

“It happened outside on the sidewalk, ” stated Branson, “She wasn’t even on the property. She was standing on the sidewalk.”

Branson’s account matches reported accounts by the Lipsens and Tom Cochran. He recounts how Lipsen’s sister Arielle started asking questions. Then, things got ugly.

They were ugly from the beginning. I’d like to know the names of these agents, too.

More:

“The same guy who cussed me out comes walking up. He’s about my size in full tactical gear with an M16 strapped to his chest, with what looked like four extra clips. He comes walking up real aggressive and she starts to back off. He says, ‘You need to shut up.’

“She says, ‘What are you going to do, shoot me?’

“At that point the officer grabbed her by the neck. She flinched and said, ‘get your hands off me.’ The officer then said ‘that’s resisting.’

“He threw her to the ground.

“As she tried to get up, he grabbed her and threw her down again and her foot hit him. It wasn’t a kick. It is what happens when you get your legs kicked out from underneath you and get thrown to the ground.

“The officer said, ‘You just assaulted a police officer’ and then started choking her (with the butt of the gun). I saw it. I was standing right in front of the Purple Zone.”

I’m sure the Civil Rights Division will be right on this. But you know, as we see story after story like this, people are going to begin to doubt whether law enforcement is deserving of respect and support.

SO WE HAVEN’T RECOVERED YET? “In her first monetary policy speech as Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen said Wednesday that the nation’s economic recovery will be nearly complete within two years, but cautioned that the economy still needs the central bank’s support.” This has to be the slowest “recovery” since the Great Depression.

Related: Points and Figures: It Wasn’t A Financial Crisis, It Was A Systemic Run. “Current policy has guaranteed debt. The US has instituted program after program and the Fed has actively pursued activities that hold interest rates low. All this does is create poor incentives. Banks can game the system and run around any regulation. Regulation has also crushed competition, leaving Goliath banks. Cochrane says it plainly, ‘Too big to fail means too big to lose money, and too big to lose money means too big to compete.’”

FROM THE GRUMPY ECONOMIST, SOME PREDICTIONS: “Forecast in three parts: The sound and fury will be over big fights on taxes and spending. They will look like replays of the last four years and not end up accomplishing much. The big changes to our economy will be the metastatic expansion of regulation, let by ACA, Dodd-Frank, and EPA. There will be no change on our long run problems: entitlements, deficits or fundamental reform of our chaotic tax system. 4 more years, $4 trillion more debt. Why? I think this follows inevitably from the situation: normal (AFU). Nothing has changed. The President is a Democrat, now lame duck. The congress is Republican. The Senate is asleep. Congressional Republicans think the President is a socialist. The President thinks Congressional Republicans are neanderthals. The President cannot compromise on the centerpieces of his campaign. Result: we certainly are not going to see big legislation. Anything new will happen by executive order or by regulation.”

Plus: “We’re still sitting on a debt bomb. Remember 2004, when a few chicken-littles were saying ‘there is trouble brewing, there is a huge amount of debt (mortgages) that is in danger of defaulting, and the banks are stuffed with it?’ And how everyone made fun of them? That is our situation now, but it’s sovereign debt.”

COULD CONJOINED TWINS share a mind? “Brain imaging is inscrutable enough that numerous neuroscientists, after seeing only one image of hundreds, were reluctant to confirm the specific neuro­anatomy that Cochrane described; but many were inclined to believe, based on that one image, that the brains were most likely connected by a live wire that could allow for some connection of a nature previously unknown. A mere glimpse of that attenuated line between the two brains reduced accomplished neurologists to sputtering incredulities.”

LYNNE KIESLING: An alternative approach to the bailout: enable fast recapitalization. Related thoughts from Alex Tabarrok. “The consensus among economists is now clear, the best strategy for dealing with the financial crisis is to recapitalize the banks that need recapitalization. Paul Krugman, John Cochrane, Luigi Zingales, Douglas Diamond, Raghuram Rajan and many others all advocate some form of recapitalization as do Tyler Cowen and myself.”

UPDATE: More on economists and the bailout.

MICHELLE MALKIN is trying to kill the bailout. Jonah Goldberg is writing about coprophagia. “The Senate managed to dress the sandwich so that it is in fact much more craptacular than the House version. Whatever defense one can muster for the wooden arrow tax breaks (take that fiberglass arrow-making scum!), it’s just bizarre from the standard of earth logic.”

UPDATE: New business opportunity: Voter Anger Management! It’s too late for this election cycle, but the bipartisan voter unhappiness might give a shot in the arm to a third-party populist movement.

Plus, an economist calls the latest version of the bill a “pinata of ridiculousness.” And yet, not as ridiculous as the Congress that produced it . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: The bailout bill has carbon tax provisions?

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Citizens Against Government Waste has released the 2008 Congressional Pig Book, and it’s full of juicy, greasy, goodness. Here’s a summary:

Some of the biggest pork projects, according to the group, include a Lobster Institute; the Rocky Flats, Colorado, Cold War Museum; and the First Tee, a program to build young people’s character through golf.

Members of Congress requested funds for all these pet projects and thousands of others last year, according to the latest copy of the annual “Pig Book” released by Citizens Against Government Waste.

“Congress stuffed 11,610 projects” worth $17.2 billion into a dozen spending bills, the group said in the report released Wednesday.

The “Pig Book” names dozens of what the citizens group considers the most egregious porkers, the lawmakers who funnel money to projects on their home turf.

Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, requested the most money, $892.2 million, according to the group. . . .

“There were several candidates for the Narcissist Award,” Tom Schatz, the president of the group said.

“But this one went to House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel for the Charles Rangel Public Service Center at the City College of New York — $1,950,000 (to a project) that he named after himself.”

Rangel, a Democrat from New York, said last summer he was “honored that City College chose to have my name attached to what is an important project, not just for the residents of my congressional district, but for New York City and this nation.”

A call to Rangel’s office wasn’t immediately returned.

Both parties came in for criticism, with the Democrats who control both houses of Congress topping the Republicans in spending.

Read the whole thing(s) — and ask your Senators and Representative if they’ll take the Earmark Moratorium pledge.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Investor’s Business Daily tells Bush not to be shy:

The Congressional Research Service issued a report last week confirming that earmarks not included in the actual bill but written into accompanying reports — which is most of them — do not have force of law and can therefore be disregarded by the president. . . .

But don’t just blame Democrats. This out-of-control, unaccountable waste and abuse of the citizens’ hard-earned money is a bipartisan disgrace. Byrd’s Republican counterpart on the spending panel, Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, out-oinked even Byrd, with $774 million in earmarks. So did Alaska’s Sen. Ted Stevens, infamous for the taxpayer-funded Bridge To Nowhere and responsible for $502 million in earmarks this time around.

Not only would the president have the Constitution on his side if he declared war on the earmark racket; he would have the vast majority of Americans with him. Most people are tired of finding out after the fact that they’ve paid for billions of dollars in projects that should have been locally financed — or maybe not built at all — due to the 11th-hour stratagems.

I hope the President does the right thing.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: And we have a winner!

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today announced the final results of its online poll for the 2006 Porker of the Year. Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) received 48 percent of the vote, with co-nominees Sens. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) and Trent Lott (R-Miss.) receiving 25.5 percent, and Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) receiving 22.9. The finalists were chosen by CAGW staff from among the 12 Porker of the Month winners for 2006.

Rep. Mollohan was named Porker of the Month in April 2006 for abusing his position on the House Appropriations Committee by securing millions of dollars in earmarks that may have benefited him personally. The New York Times (4/08/06) detailed how Rep. Mollohan directed $250 million to five nonprofit organizations that he set up. Rep. Mollohan surrendered his seat as ranking Democrat on the House Ethics Committee in April.

The competition is stiff.

TOM COBURN profiled in GQ:

The dynamic had begun almost the day he arrived in the Senate, in January 2005. While fellow newcomers like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama observed the customary “freshman silence,” Coburn’s first major move as a senator was to pick a fight with one of his party’s most venerated leaders, Ted Stevens of Alaska, a forty-year veteran of Congress who also happened to be the Senate’s president pro tempore.

The fight was over pork. As the 2006 transportation budget passed through the Senate process, Coburn noticed something odd: $200 million to pay for a bridge in Stevens’s home state—a bridge almost as long as the Golden Gate and taller than the Brooklyn Bridge, connecting an island of fifty people to the coast. In the Senate, these kinds of giveaways are not unusual; members, and especially those in a position of influence, are frequently given millions of dollars for personal spending projects back home, items that bypass the normal review process and are quietly ushered in by their peers (whose own projects get the same deal). But to Coburn, who hadn’t spent forty years in the Senate and didn’t have any of his own special projects and didn’t particularly care about keeping pacts with his new colleagues, $200 million seemed like a lot to spend on a bridge for fifty people. So he tried to take the earmark out. And that’s when Tom Coburn discovered what his life in the Senate would be like. . . .

So now there’s all this hullabaloo about the Democrats taking over—Tom Coburn is supposed to care? He’s supposed to get excited now that the peanut butter is on top and the jelly is on the bottom instead of the other way around? This is a revolution? It’s a revolution that Ted Stevens has been pushed aside as chairman of the defense-appropriations subcommittee and that in his place the Democrats have installed…Daniel Inouye of Hawaii? A man who inserted $900 million of his own personal projects into the budget last year—and who happens to be one of Ted Stevens’s best friends in the Senate? It’s a revolution that the Democrats have cleaned out the subcommittee behind the Bridge to Nowhere and replaced the chairman with…Patty Murray of Washington? A woman who personally led a campaign for the bridge and who threatened revenge against any Democrat who opposed it? It’s a revolution that Thad Cochran has been deposed as the most powerful budgetary overlord in the Senate and is being replaced with…Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia? A man who has single-handedly converted his state into a federally funded monument to himself, with no less than thirty projects named in his own honor, including the Robert C. Byrd Expressway and the Robert C. Byrd National Technology Transfer and the two Robert C. Byrd federal buildings and the Robert C. Byrd Center for Hospitality and Tourism—not to mention the actual statue of Robert C. Byrd that stands in the rotunda of the state capitol?

Robert C. Byrd is going to clean up the government? This is a revolution?

Coburn smiled at the suggestion. “We’ll see how the Democrats vote on the first big earmark boondoggle that comes up,” he said. “I’m gonna try to reserve judgment.”

Read the whole thing.

HAMDAN CASE DECIDED: And Marty Lederman at SCOTUSBLOG says the press coverage is missing the biggest part of the story:

More importantly, the Court held that Common Article 3 of Geneva aplies as a matter of treaty obligation to the conflict against Al Qaeda. That is the HUGE part of today’s ruling. The commissions are the least of it. This basically resolves the debate about interrogation techniques, because Common Article 3 provides that detained persons “shall in all circumstances be treated humanely,” and that “[t]o this end,” certain specified acts “are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever”—including “cruel treatment and torture,” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” This standard, not limited to the restrictions of the due process clause, is much more restrictive than even the McCain Amendment. . . . If I’m right about this, it’s enormously significant.”

Indeed. At the very least, this should serve as a rebuke to those who have been proclaiming that we live in an era of lawless fascism and rubberstamp courts. And that’s (another) good reason for Bush not to follow advice from some quarters to disobey the ruling, a la Andrew Jackson.

Pajamas Media has a big roundup of blog reactions. And there’s an open discussion thread at Tom Maguire’s.

UPDATE: Andrew Cochran thinks this is a “huge political gift” to the Bush Administration.

Hot Air has video of Bush’s reaction.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More from Ann Althouse.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Mark Tapscott says that Senate Appropriators went hog-wild on earmarks:

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-PA, is the most frequent requester of earmarks on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, with 77 requests for such special interest spending measures between 2001 and 2006.

Specter lead the earmark fest that saw GOP members of the panel request an average of 27 earmarks during the five years. By contrast, the dozen Democrat members of the committee requested an average of 17 earmarks.

Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-CA, was the leading earmark requester among Democrat members of the appropriations committee, with 75. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, was shown with only one earmark request.

The data for this analysis was compiled for a report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, chaired by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK. The report was based on information provided by the Congressional Research Service.

Trailing Specter – who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee – among the top five GOP requesters was Sen. Mike DeWine, R-OH, with 53, Sen. Ted Stevens, R-AK, with 33, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-AL, with 21, and Sen. Thad Cochran, R-MS, with 19. Cochran is chairman of the committee.

Read the whole thing. And weep. Especially if you’re a Republican.

UPDATE: Follow the link for Mark Tapscott’s correction.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Robert Novak looks at “corporate porkbusting:”

Half a billion dollars is chump change at the Pentagon. But it is a symbol that the intensifying battle against individual lawmakers’ earmarks in spending bills is turning to corporate welfare. That category of pork until now has been inviolate, protected by a bipartisan conspiracy of silence.

The Northrop Grumman earmark was inserted by the Senate Appropriations Committee chairman himself, Thad Cochran of Mississippi. That once would have guaranteed passage without public notice, even though the Defense Department and the Navy oppose the spending as wasteful.

But pork-busting freshman Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma now scrutinizes money bills, and he caught the Northrop Grumman earmark. The company, whose revenue last year totaled $40.7 billion, has received $500 million from its insurer and is in litigation seeking another $500 million. The Defense Contract Management Agency has declared “it would be inappropriate to allow Northrop Grumman to bill for costs potentially recoverable by insurance because payment by the government may otherwise relieve the carrier from their policy obligation.” Factory Mutual Insurance Co., with 2004 revenue of $2.7 billion, then would be receiving indirect corporate welfare.

Coburn told the Senate on May 2 that the Northrop Grumman payment “sets a terrible precedent for the future.” He called it “a step too far. I believe we need to back up and let the private sector take care of its obligations.” He mentioned unspecified federal “largesse” for the company, pointing to the questionable DDX destroyer. . . .

Efforts such as Coburn’s over the years have been slapped down hard, but not this time. The Coburn amendment barely lost, 51 to 48, in a rare Senate vote crossing party lines. Republicans split 28 to 27 against Mississippi’s powerful senators, with John McCain and Majority Leader Bill Frist supporting Coburn. Democrats voted 24 to 20 for Northrop Grumman. North Dakota’s twin deficit hawks, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan, voted with Coburn, but Edward M. Kennedy, Hillary Clinton and Democratic Leader Harry Reid supported corporate welfare.

The House Appropriations Committee not only rejected the Northrop Grumman payment, but asserted that federal money should not “substitute for private insurance benefits.”

Keep the pressure on.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: As Capt. Ed notes, it was a bad day for PorkBusters yesterday:

The projects that got past Senate pork hawks like Tom Coburn were a $200 million bailout of Northrup Grumman for indemnifyng the defense contractor against losses that its insurers refuse to cover. Coburn faced stiff opposition from Trent Lott, the man who apparently wants to make a career out of defying voters on earmarks, and Thad Cochran. Both Republicans insisted that the government needed to replace the loss, even though Northrup made a 7.1% operating margin in 2005, up from 6.7% in 2004 and 5.6% in 2003. That represent $2.4 billion in profit, an increase from $2.3B in 2004 and $1.9B in 2003.

Why does a corporation that made $2.4 billion in profit need another $200 million from American taxpayers to cover a loss they’ve absorbed in that same year?

Rather than focus resources on the truly needy and on real emergencies, Lott and Cochran have manipulated the relief bill to stick money into Northrup’s pockets. Perhaps folks from Lott’s home state of Mississippi should ask themselves why Lott seems more concerned about the travails of a corporation that had its best year ever than those who had their entire lives wiped out by Katrina. No wonder Lott proclaimed himself “damned tired” of constituents who question his pork-barrel activities — who’d want to keep explaining this? . . .

Congress has a rather narrow view of profit in a free-market society. When ExxonMobil makes 10.7% profit, they decry the “windfall profit” of a corporation. When Northrup Grumman makes 7.1%, they qualify for a bailout.

It’s as if there’s nothing going on but graft and shakedowns.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: More developments:

The playground bully in the Senate _ the Appropriations Committee _ actually took a loss last week at the hands of senators determined to strip so-called pork barrel projects from a bill that’s supposed to be devoted to the war in Iraq and hurricane relief.

And the House this week will vote on requiring members to attach their names to “earmarks” _ those hometown projects slipped into spending bills. The idea is that the sunshine of public scrutiny will mean fewer wasteful, silly sounding projects like $500,000 for a teapot museum in Sparta, N.C.

Lawmakers say voters are getting sick of all this pork; there’s even a recent poll that says reforming earmarks is the most important issue facing Congress. Could it be that politicians are losing their appetite for the other white meat?

Definitely not, alas. And Trent Lott is dissing Bush and bragging about how “wily” he is:

Not only is Lott not worried that Bush might for the first time in his presidency veto a spending bill, Lott thinks quite highly of himself and Sen. Thad Cochran, Lott’s colleague who happens to be Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

“Senator Cochran and I are wily guys,” Lott boasted to the newspaper.

He was referring to the emergency spending bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Gulf Coast hurricane recovery that Lott and Cochran stuffed with a $700 million earmark to move the “Railroad to Nowhere” in order to clear the way for gambling interests and other developers to construct new facilities along the Mississippi coast.

Lott and other senators pumped the bill to more than $106 billion with earmarks added to the emergency bill that originally included $92 billion. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, failed by one vote last week to secure passage of an amendment that would have stripped the $700 million out of the bill.

Who was the one vote? Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, who earlier in the day had told Bush he and others had rounded up enough senators to sustain a presidential veto.

Call me crazy, but it seems like these guys aren’t just killing their party, but actually bragging about it. That doesn’t seem very “wily” to me.

UPDATE: Reader Eric Alexander writes:

I think – really – that he would be just ecstatic if the Republicans lost control of the House and the Senate. I suspect he’s been waiting a long time to get back at the President and the party for stripping him of his leadership status over his tin-eared Thurmond remarks a few years back, and he sees his chance to stick it to them. And I think he’s especially thrilled he can do so while doing what comes naturally to him – pushing pork for his Mississippi good-old-boy cronies.

Well, that’s just another reason to think he deserved to lose his leadership position, isn’t it?