APPLE WORKING ON iPhone 4 signal issues?

FIGHTING CRIME AT HOME: Blount County man catches alleged thief, holds him at gunpoint.

THREATENING BLOGGERS IS GENERALLY A BAD IDEA: Legal Threats Aimed At QuackWatch.

DAN RIEHL: “I’m done giving the benefit of the doubt to the GOP establishment.”

WHAT DID THE POST KNOW, and when did they know it?

CHANGE: Munis Underperform Treasuries as Default Speculation Mounts.

OBAMA GOES TO WISCONSIN — but where’s Russ Feingold?

GATEWAY PUNDIT: Obama Travels to Wisconsin to Tote Disastrous Stimulus Bill… Tea Party Breaks Out (Video).

HEH. I can’t think of a more pointless assignment.

POLITICO: Oil Spill Visits Get Partisan: Dems Block GOP Oil Spill Visits.

HOMEOWNER KILLS BURGLARS: “Both of the men killed during an alleged South Knox County home burglary Sunday night had criminal records, according to the Knox County Sheriff’s Office.”

MARKDOWNS ON Men’s And Women’s Watches.

REASON TV: Citizenship And The Pursuit Of Happiness.

GOVERNMENT HEALTHCARE: VA hospital may have infected 1,800 veterans with HIV.

THE HAZARDS OF DISTANCE LEARNING.

DOG BITES MAN: Andrew Sullivan busted for hypocrisy on privacy issues. The thing to remember about the “have you no decency” hypocrites is that the rules are whatever they say they are and they’re only what they say they are until they say they’re something else.

UPDATE: The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent lauds Sullivan for defending the confidentiality of The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein’s “JournoList” media-collusion email list. No home cooking here!

But I’ve got a question: The Washington Post’s David Weigel called on the other journalist members of The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein’s JournoList to refrain from sending traffic to The Washington Post’s competitor, The Washington Examiner. Is there any sort of antitrust liability there? Because if there is — and especially if there were other statements like this on the list from The Washington Post’s employees who participated — then I can see why The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent would like to see The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein’s JournoList archive kept “private.”

BACK TO THE FUTURE: Best To-Do List Manager: Paper.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Growth only way to avoid U.S. economic collapse.

Lucky this baby didn’t land during the G20 meeting! America’s fiscal judge, the Congressional Budget Office, has produced another nightmare report. The bad news: U.S. debt-to-GDP will hit 858 percent by 2080, roughly ten times today’s level. The “good” news: The economy would implode long before. But avoiding that fate requires just the right balance now between austerity and a push for real, private-sector led economic growth.

The Administration seems to be pursuing the opposite strategy, for some reason. At least, if you were trying to kill private-sector led economic growth, it’s hard to see what you’d do differently.

STANDING UP FOR CIVILIZATION.

EMILY DICKINSON’S dark secret.

HOLDER UPDATE: Former Justice Department Lawyer Accuses Holder of Dropping New Black Panther Case for Racial Reasons.

As Tom Smith said the other day, if this kind of thing happened in a Republican administration, every legal talking head in the country would be going on about it nonstop.

Much more here.

SOME USEFUL boating safety tips.

TRAILER: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I.

I’VE MENTIONED NAT ROBB’S BOUTIQUE CAYMAN DIVING OPERATION, InDepth Water Sports before. Here’s an article on his future plans, from the Cayman Compass. I had hoped to be there for the sinking of the USS Kittiwake, but the schedule just kept changing.

BARBIE ON the consent of the governed.

CAN THE GOVERNMENT TELL YOU what to eat?

Ann Althouse writes: “The clip is taken out of context, and now it has a vigorous life of its own.”

LEADERSHIP: The Swedes have decided that the case for more nuclear power is too strong to ignore. You’d think that electing Obama would have made the U.S. more like Sweden. . . .

COOL: Zapping Titan-like atmosphere with UV rays creates life precursors.

THE STORY ADVANCES: The National Enquirer article on the Gore accuser is out. With stained pants in a ziploc bag. John Edwards was unavailable for comment.

FED UP WITH the booze and cigarette police.

A WAR AGAINST station wagons?

THE EXCITEMENT WAS ELECTRIC: Tesla Raises $226 Million in IPO, Stock Gains 40% on First Day.

OBAMA’S Oil Spill To-Do List.

IN THE MAIL: The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane.

DAILY CALLER: Free Press’s schizophrenic relationship with the FCC.

THROW A SHOE AT BUSH AND YOU’RE A HERO. Throw a shoe at Erdogan and you’ll get three years in jail. I think this disproportionate response is clearly a human rights violation. Prosecute the Spanish judge in an international court!

YOU DON’T SAY: Podesta clan’s close ties to Obama pay off big.

COMING: “Monster” money-printing by the Fed? What could go wrong?

MEGAN MCARDLE ON AUSTERITY HORROR: “If Ireland hadn’t done the austerity budget, it might now be more like Greece–in danger of default without massive intervention from the rest of the European Union. Intervention that might well not be forthcoming, if it became clear that too many countries were going to require it. . . . Austerity is an expensive form of insurance against a true fiscal crisis. And though it doesn’t necessarily seem like it when you’re not having one, fiscal crises are much, much worse than austerity budgets. Fiscal crisis means that rather than unpleasant cuts, you have sudden, unmanageable collapses in things like public pension plans. The resulting suffering is not unpleasant; it is disastrous.”

Plus, from the comments: “The pols dream up all sorts of way to piss away money when times are good, then are forced into ‘austerity’ when times are bad. If they hadn’t dreamed up the garbage spending in the first place, they wouldn’t need the ‘austerity’. Take a look at our worst states. Their problem is all related to incredible jumps in spending over a period of 25 to 30 years. Now it’s caught up to them.”

JONATHAN ADLER: Kagan, ACOG and the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban.

DANIEL SCHUCHMAN: Will Elena Kagan Allow Books to be Banned? Understanding the Supreme Court nominee’s chilling argument in Citizens United. Listening to that audio from her argument, it’s certainly easy to see why she lost.

FROM SUSANNAH BRESLIN, The War Project.

“AND JOINING HANDS, THEY MADE A METAPHOR.”

In sum total, what you people did was drive someplace where there wasn’t a problem, complain about something you don’t fully understand, get in the way of people who may actually be performing a function, and then do nothing, en masse, except hope that someone else notices your little snit and makes it all better.

Heh.

CASH FOR CLUNKERS: A RETROSPECTIVE. Top-down industrial policy carried out through the sheer force of incentives is welcomed by behavioralist Washington.

UPDATE: Reader Paul Jackson writes:

Before the first piece comes out that postulates “Where it all went wrong for Obama”, may I be the first to say: when he took that ill-fated trip to Copenhagen in order to secure Chicago’s 2016 Summer Olympic bid. That was the first time the public at large sat up and thought it was amateur hour at the White House. They haven’t done much since to dispel that notion.

On an unrelated note, given the consistent media phrasing of “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression”, high unemployment, mortgage failures galore, how come Whoopi/Robin/Billy haven’t done an HBO special for the homeless/out of work? Surely there must be more homeless people than ever in our recent history? Did we, without my knowledge, already solve that problem? I know, I know, doesn’t fit the narrative.

It’s all about the narrative.

DON’T CRITICIZE THEM — THEY MIGHT BEHEAD YOU: Iran: “In Iran, the Bahais play much the same role that Jews do elsewhere: the canary in society’s coal mine. What is emerging in the Islamic Republic today is noxious indeed.”

WHO’S THE BOSS: Steve Carell leaving The Office.

MORE ON ANDREW BREITBART’S OFFER OF $100,000 for the JournoList archives. My thoughts:

(1) If, as Jonathan Chait says, there’s nothing there, why not relieve Breitbart of his bucks?

(2) If you’re worried about your own stuff being released, you don’t really safeguard it by not selling out to Breitbart — you just ensure that if one of the 400 other members does, you won’t get the $100K.

(3) Here’s your chance to be Deep Throat — and maybe to settle some scores along the way . . . .

AL SHARPTON: 90% OF MY LISTENERS SUPPORT THE SUPREME COURT’S GUN DECISION. “I would say 90% of the calls I received yesterday were in support of the Supreme Court and people say they want to bear guns. They’re tired of the violence and it’s very very interesting. I have had a few on both sides today, but yesterday was overwhelming, it was stunning to me.” Given that disarming black people was one of the main purposes of gun-control laws, it shouldn’t be that surprising.

Some years ago we had a program at my law school where ex-Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver (with whom I went to law school) came to speak. It was heavily attended by Knoxville civil-rights veterans, and I think some of my colleagues were surprised when an elderly black preacher launched into a defense of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. I wasn’t.

JUSTICE THOMAS’S MCDONALD CONCURRENCE: His Finest Hour?

WINSTON GROOM: Anger grows along the Gulf Coast at the Obama administration’s pathetic response to the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

JOHN EDWARDS parties on.

A TRENT LOTT MOMENT for Kay Hagan? I don’t think she ever wished that Byrd had been elected President during his Klan days.

THE REAL HOSTAGES: General Petraeus’ hearings made Obama a political hostage to his new Afghan commander—but also greatly improved U.S. chances of winning.

THE ELITES DOUBLE DOWN: Fed Economist Attacks Uncredentialed Econo-blogging.

UPDATE: Reader Gord Richens emails: “Two of the field’s most celebrated academics, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton shared the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1997 – the year before they helped fly Long Term Capital Management into the ground.”

OKAY, I HAD THIS THE OTHER DAY, BUT IT’S WORTH REPEATING AGAIN: Dutch Oil Spill Response Ships Could Suck 99% of Oil From Gulf, But Can’t Get Approved, Because EPA Demands 99.9985% Purity. The 99% is an estimate, but the point holds.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: G-20 Fiddles; World Burns. “The verdict on the G-20 meeting is in. It wasn’t delivered by the spinmeisters of the global leaders hailing their bosses’ groundbreaking accomplishments. It wasn’t delivered by the clueless journalists gravely assessing whether the summit was a win for Merkel’s message of austerity or Obama’s message of spending. The verdict was delivered by the world’s financial markets and it can best be summed up by the Edvard Munch painting: ‘The Scream.’”

JAMES RUMMEL: A Blast From The Past: ‘Back in the bad old days of the Cold War, a lot of successful espionage projects run by the Soviets hinged on a certain type of snobbery. . . . I was strongly reminded of that long ago time when reading about the latest Russian spy ring that the FBI broke up recently.”

CANADIAN HEALTH CARE, IN SLATE:

Two months ago, my mother died very unexpectedly. After reviewing her medical records, my siblings and I discovered that her physician ignored test results and treated her for an illness she did not have. If she had received proper care, my mother would be alive today. This being Canada, we don’t intend to sue, although we do expect an apology from the doctor and the hospital.

Good luck with that.

DAILY KOS POLL FRAUD. Markos is suing his pollsters, who weren’t able to fake randomness.

DECRYPTING the Plato code?

JIM TREACHER: Al Gore Is Slippery: He just comes and goes as he pleases, according to KGTV in San Diego.

IOWAHAWK: I’ll Take a Cashier’s Check, Mr. Breitbart. Heh. It’s just what you expected . . . .

FASTER PLEASE: No more fillings? Gel regenerates teeth.

A BUDDING KAGAN SCANDAL? It’s pretty clearly an ACOG scandal, at least.

UPDATE: Reader Aric Giddens emails: “I am an Ob/Gyn and while I am pro-choice, I do respect the position of those who are against abortion. I said at the time, however, that the ACOG statement was not true and and no basis in medical fact. It was clearly a political statement. A so called ‘partial-birth abortion’ is almost never performed and doesn’t have to be to save the life of or protect the life of the mother. I thought President Clinton was pandering to his base to opposed such a ban. I have never seen a medical need for such a procedure in 20 years in my field. Such a ban would not have endanger any woman’s life or health. While I am opposed to the government dictating what medical procedure may or may not be performed, there was not science behind the ACOG statement.”

ILYA SOMIN responds to Justice Breyer’s consequentialism.

This argument ignores social science evidence suggesting that extreme gun bans like those of DC and Chicago cost at least as many innocent lives than they save. Still, gun rights probably do cause at least some deaths that might otherwise have been prevented.

In that respect, however, they are no different from numerous other constitutional rights. Justice Breyer’s argument in McDonald is actually very similar to Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Boumediene v. Bush, where Scalia warned that giving habeas corpus rights to War on Terror detainees “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” That argument didn’t move Breyer, who voted with the majority to extend those rights.

Read the whole thing.

IS TV TEACHING US TO OVERREACT? I’m quoted in the piece, but in a passage not quoted, I suggested that it may make people more passive when they’re not in front of the TV, by getting them used to a higher level of stimulus to provoke a reaction. Kind of like how porn and violence have been good for America’s children. . . .

MARKDOWNS ON classic movies and TV shows. Even I Dream of Jeannie. Larry Hagman’s best work!

POLL: Most Germans Want To Ditch The Euro.

ED DRISCOLL: Oceania Has Never Been At War With General Petraeus.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “Regarding the Oceania/Petraeus thing, it occurs to me that BP is the administration’s Emmanuel Goldstein.” Well, one of many.

WELL, THIS WON’T HELP SPACE TOURISM: International Space Station sex ban: Commanders do not allow sexual intercourse on the International Space Station, it has been disclosed. On the other hand, this provides a market niche for the private sector!

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Where Did The Tea Party Anger Come From? “In short, sometime in the last ten years public employees were directly identified with most of what is now unsustainable in the U.S. The old idea that a public servant gave up a competitive salary for job security was redefined as hitting the jackpot. . . . Emblematic of the anger at both top and bottom was the 2008 meltdown: those who had not played by the rules still got their mortgages, then defaulted, and left the taxpayer with their bills; those who made the loans and profited without risk, took the bailout money, and left us with the cleanup. Those in between with underwater mortgages and higher taxes pay the tab.”

REPORT: Lowering homocysteine levels does not reduce heart attack risk.

FASTER, PLEASE: 5 Ways Body Scanners Could Make Fitting Rooms Obsolete.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, AFTER ALL: MIT, Harvard Researchers Create “Smart Sheets” That Can Self-Assemble Into Airplanes, Boats.

FROM JONATHAN ADLER, ET AL., reactions to the Kagan hearings.

REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.

ANDREW BREITBART IS A GENIUS: Reward: $100,000 for Full ‘JournoList’ Archive; Source Fully Protected.

Yes, the mainstream media that came together to play up the false allegations that the “N-Word” was hurled 15 times by Tea Party participants at the Congressional Black Caucus outside the Capitol the day before the “Obamacare” vote, is the same MSM that colluded to make sure the American public accepted the smear, and refused to show the exculpatory videos that disproved the incendiary charges of Tea Party racism.

Ezra Klein’s “JournoList 400” is the epitome of progressive and liberal collusion that conservatives, Tea Partiers, moderates and many independents have long suspected and feared exists at the heart of contemporary American political journalism. Now that collusion has been exposed when one of the weakest links in that cabal, Dave Weigel, was outed. Weigel was, in all likelihood, exposed because – to whoever the rat was who leaked his emails — he wasn’t liberal enough.

Read the whole thing. And, you know, if you’ve got the emails, well . . . .

DAN MITCHELL: How To Tell When Government Is Too Big.

INVESTIGATE THIS: “This is a scandal that, thanks to Rubin, von Spakovsky, and Adams, is now hiding in plain sight. The basic facts of the case were captured in real time on video (above). Yet other than a few posts by Dave Weigel regarding the Civil Rights Commission’s hearings in the case on the Post site, I cannot find a trace of it in either the Washington Post or the New York Times. While justice has been politicized in a most disgusting manner in the Obama administration, the mainstream media have averted their eyes and moved on.”

MY THOUGHTS ON MCDONALD: The New Normal: The Second Amendment After Heller and McDonald.

SOME FLYING CAR PROGRESS. Not really the Jetsons yet, though.

CRACKING DOWN ON strategic mortgage default. “A strategic default is a valuable piece of information. It tells the bank about your attitude towards credit, and whether or not you are willing to make strenuous efforts to repay your loans. People who will make heroic efforts to repay loans at great personal cost to themselves are, in fact, better credit risks than people who act as if credit is nothing more than an exotic option, which you can repay if advantageous, or walk away if not.”

UH OH: Vuvuzelas available on Amazon now.

IMPORTANT PENIS NEWS: On The Trail of Tutankhamen’s Penis.

AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED, IT’S ABOUT TIME: Discovering the virtues of the wandering mind.

PROGRESS: Top-Down Nanotech.

TENNESSEE’S DEMOCRATIC GOVERNOR signs a tough new immigration law.

RADLEY BALKO: Police Blackout: Law enforcement agencies in Northern Virginia say you have no right to know what they’re doing. Just fund their pensions and shut up.

ECO BOOST: Ford Mustang V6 Gets 48.5 MPG Around Bristol Race Track.

GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS ABOUT THE PLUG-IN PRIUS: “So far, the Inside Line team has racked up more than 500 miles in the plug-in Prius and the experience has to be considered somewhat of a let down. The team has averaged 62 miles per gallon, a good number for sure, but one that many drivers of the more conventional Prius have easily achieved on a regular basis. . . . Given the plug-in’s slightly improved efficiency, one would have to drive 215,100 miles to make up for the additional cash laid out to start, but even that figure fails to factor in the cost of charging the Prius. Dependent upon the cost of electricity, a plug-in Prius will likely cost more to drive than its more traditional hybrid counterpart. The plug-in Prius might not be a wise investment, but Inside Line still adamently believes that it’s one of the best hybrids available.”

FROM RUSSIA with love.

HOPE: Consumer Confidence Plunges In June. “Recovery Summer, or Recovery Bummer? Economists are beginning to wonder whether we’re heading into a double-dip recession, or whether the first one ever really ended.”

Anecdotage: A woman who works at a local used bookstore told me they’re not selling nearly as many hardbacks as they used to — people won’t spring for them any more, even at the reduced prices. That doesn’t sound like a recovery to me.

NRA ON DISCLOSE ACT: We had to put the Second Amendment ahead of the First.

LET’S NOT IGNORE Al Gore’s second chakra.

Related: Feminism dies from global warming?

IN THE MAIL: John Birmingham’s new book, After America. I actually read it as soon as it came in, and it’s a worthy sequel to Without Warning.

POLITICO: Democrats quietly cheer high court gun ruling. “Democratic candidates across the map figure they have one less issue to worry about on the campaign trail. And they won’t have to defend against Republican attacks over gun rights and an angry, energized base of gun owners.”

VIDEO: Jon Stewart Asks David Axelrod: Has This Government Proven Itself Competent Enough To Regulate Industry?

NICK GILLESPIE: Libertarians write their own invitation to the party.

VERONIQUE DE RUGY: The Cost Of Public-Sector Unions.

IN MASSACHUSETTS, Democratic candidates starting to attend Tea Party forums.