AT AMAZON, bestsellers in biography and memoirs.

WILL DEMOCRATIC SENATOR MARIA CANTWELL get a free ride in 2012?

THE KENNETH GLADNEY BEATING CASE GOES TO TRIAL TOMORROW. Will we see justice, or a coverup?

LARRY TRIBE RESPONDS TO Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

AT AMAZON, an outlet sale on watches.

“FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS” HORROR STORIES. When I was single, I found FWB relationships quite congenial and I have to say there were no horror stories. But it requires a certain degree of maturity on both parts to make it work.

VERONIQUE DE RUGY: Stimulus Spending And Unemployment.

MARK STEYN: Selective Shaming: If Only Government Were As Accountable As British Tabloids.

We’re not talking about hacking a schoolgirl’s cellphone here. Real people are dead. Yet nobody’s going to close down any wing of the vast spendaholic DEATFBI hydra-headed security-state turf-war. And while Eric Holder, the buccaneering attorney general at the center of this wilderness of mirrors, doesn’t yet have as many Distinguished Public Servant of the Year awards as Beverly Hall, judging from his cheerfully upfront obstruction of the congressional investigation, he’s not planning on going anywhere soon.

So, at the News of the World, every single employee is clearing out his desk. But, at the Atlantic Public Schools, at the DEATFBI, life goes on. A curious contrast. The striking feature of Big Government, from Athens to Sacramento, is its imperviousness to any kind of accountability — legal, fiscal, electoral, popular. A media mogul, a bank chairman, an oil executive, a corporate-jet depreciation-claimant are easily demonizable: As President Obama cautioned CEOs a couple of years back, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

More fool us. Our pitchforks are misdirected.

Indeed.

MORE ON EATING INVASIVE SPECIES. They can be delicious!

ROGER KIMBALL: Time for tea, or, What would Wilkins Micawber think? “There is no point in trying to imagine what a $1.5-trillion deficit means. For most of us mortals, it is simply unimaginable. All the more is a total federal debt of $14.3 trillion (and counting). And I haven’t even broached what I think of as the Williamson Warning (after Kevin Williamson, who gave prominence to the dour fact), namely that the real out-the-door, all-in price of U.S. debt is something closer to $130 trillion, a sum that, if you can bear to think about it, is Book-of-Revelations, Seventh-Seal, Four-Horsemen-of- the-Apocalypse scary.”

Plus the answer: “Stop spending. Live within your means.” Some people may fear that it’s too late for that.

PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS of ocean-floor mining.

SAN FRANCISCO’S CRIME CAMERAS zoom in on the innocent.

THIS WEEK IN THE FUTURE.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Will Boehner pull a ‘Reagan at Reykjavik’ and walk? Yep.

ECO-FAIL? Report: Imperfect fuel-saving tech contributed to Ford’s fall in quality.

JIM TREACHER: PANDA-LOVERS MUST BE STOPPED.

BEACH READING: I just noticed that Charlie Stross’s Rule 34 is now out. I read an advance copy a couple of months ago. Here’s what I said then: “It’s like the perfect InstaPundit novel — there’s a burst higher-education bubble, talk of the Singularity and artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and even home-based fab/maker technology. What’s not to like?”

IN THE MAIL, The Next Wave: On the Hunt for Al Qaeda’s American Recruits.

DEBT-CEILING UPDATE: The Rose Garden Collapse. “The White House dished out the spin that suddenly the Tea Party crowd had nixed a deal. In reality, the White House had upped the ante on taxes.”

Republicans need to respond with my revenue-enhancement ideas.

UPDATE: Reader Steve Barns emails: “I want money taken from any multigenerational family trust to be taxed as ordinary income. Twice that rate if a family member has ever been a Senator or Congressman.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader James Becker writes:

If I were Boehner, I’d offer a full repeal of all Bush era tax cuts in return for repeal of Obamacare.

Then – after Obama nixed the deal, I’d spend the next 100 interviews talking about the evilness of Obamacare.

Even if Obama approved of the deal (fat chance), it would be a win for liberty.

Indeed.

SALENA ZITO: Unemployment Issue Could Cost Obama His Job. “Polls at the beginning of July showed President Obama in an increasingly hazardous position with voters on jobs and the economy.”

U.S. AND RUSSIA stir up political tensions over Arctic.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Great Madness of 2004-2010. “For about seven years the nation lost its collective mind—and was only partially coming to in November 2010.”

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Is Obama Getting Ready To Snooker Boehner On Taxes?

HOW BIG A SCANDAL? “Obama Sold, Tracked, Same Guns To Cartels He Hoped To Ban Because They Were Tracked From Cartels.”

CONGRATULATIONS: Blogger Ric Locke’s Temporary Duty is now up to #5 among bestsellers in science fiction. It’s gotten good reviews from InstaPundit readers.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on Bestsellers In Electronics.

IT’S TUESDAY: Craig Huey vs. Janice Hahn: Your CA-36 special election guide. “From what I’ve learned while here, Janice Hahn is the exact kind of party-machine power-hungry politician we need less of these days. It’s not so much her political orientation that bothers me — she’s comparatively ‘moderate’ on the liberal/progressive scale — but rather that she’s unapologetically corrupt.”

UPDATE: Will The Race Card Finish Janice Hahn?

BUT BLACK VOTERS STILL HEART OBAMA: After decades of hard-fought progress, black economic gains were reversed in Great Recession. “Since the end of the recession, the overall unemployment rate has fallen from 9.4 to 9.1 percent, while the black unemployment rate has risen from 14.7 to 16.2 percent, according to the Department of Labor.” And yet:

Some see a bitter irony in soaring black unemployment and the decline of the black middle class on the watch of the first black president.

“I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone,” Princeton professor Cornel West told truthdig.com recently.

He said Obama had sold out the poor and become “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats … I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama.”

Yet many jobless blacks do not blame their plight on the president.

I wonder how long that will last? Probably past 2012, anyway.

THOMAS BALL UPDATE: Dad leaves clues to his desperation. “Face it boys, we are no longer fathers. We are piggy banks.”

BYRON YORK: House asks: Did Obama’s auto bailout chief say, ‘I did this all for the unions’? “Investigators for the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform are asking the White House official who oversaw the government bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler whether he told the truth in recent testimony before the committee. Ron Bloom, Assistant to the President for Manufacturing Policy, is quoted in a 2009 newspaper account and a 2010 book saying of the auto bailouts that he “did this all for the unions.” But when Bloom appeared before the committee on June 22, he flatly denied ever saying those words. Other White House officials have reportedly defended Bloom by suggesting that he did indeed say those words but was joking. And that has led committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa to ask what is going on.”

“WE CAN MAKE THIS DISAPPEAR FOR A FEE.”

HEY, HERE’S AN IDEA: STOP GIVING GUNS TO MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS! Six Months After Tucson Shooting, White House Readies Gun Control Stance.

THE HILL: Boehner backing away from grand compromise on debt, tax reform.

TIM FERRISS REVIEWS CDBaby founder Derek Sivers’ Anything You Want.

SURE, WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Hitting Americans With Automatic Wage Deductions To Pay Down The National Debt?

BAD NEWS: Bad As They Were, Friday’s Anemic Jobs Numbers Were Probably Inflated.

HAS NANCY PELOSI BEEN MARGINALIZED IN THE DEBT DEBATE? One can only hope.

DON SURBER:

Michele Bachmann supports slavery?

Really?

That is the Democratic Party’s plan to save Barack Obama and the Senate?

George Soros should demand his money back.

They’re out of bullets.

WHO PROVIDES SECURITY AT THE SECURITY CHECKPOINTS?

ON SALE: The Prisoner: The Complete Series, for $25. Reduced from $99.95.

MEGAN MCARDLE CORRECTS JAMES FALLOWS: Herbert Hoover Was No Budget Cutter.

Hoover did raise taxes on high earners quite a bit in 1932, and perhaps this is what my colleague is thinking of–though as this did not produce any immediately noticeable increase in tax revenue, it’s hard to say how much of a fiscal contraction this actually represented. (Even if it were, outside of the odd Cato paper, Hoover’s name is never invoked to warn against the mortal dangers of what he actually did: raised taxes on rich people in the middle of a recession.)

Instead, he is associated in the public mind with slashing spending. But there doesn’t seem to be any question that Herbert Hoover raised both spending and government deficits by rather a lot, and quite bravely considering that his critics–a group led by a fellow named Franklin Delano Roosevelt–”accused the president of ‘reckless and extravagant’ spending, of thinking ‘that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible,’ and of presiding over ‘the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.’ Roosevelt’s running mate, John Nance Garner, charged that Hoover was ‘leading the country down the path of socialism.’

So he was kind of a 1930s Barack Obama.

A YOUNG FEMALE JOURNALIST gets a happy ending.

A NEW FLARE-UP in the light-bulb wars.

Hey, it’s not too late to stock up!

JONAH GOLDBERG ON SELECTIVE OUTRAGE: “Good Lord this is just one of the dumbest ‘gotchas’ in modern memory. I can only assume the adults at TPM regret running this in the first place. They probably got seduced by an exclusive ‘story’ and ran with it before thinking it through. That it hasn’t been picked up outside the more feverish leftwing blogs — so far — is a sign that TPM stepped in it. At least I hope that’s the case. Regardless, I think it reveals a certain level of desperation and panic on the left side of the aisle.”

Indeed. And, of course, it just lets people on the right side of the aisle issue reminders like this: Libs Outraged Over Paul Ryan’s $350 Bottle of Wine… But Were Silent When Nancy Pelosi Pounded Down $101,000 of Booze On “Pelosi One” …Update: And Obama Served $399 Bottles of Wine to Chi-Coms.

Which, in neither case, was paid for out of their own pockets, but rather by taxpayers. Unlike Paul Ryan’s wine. Which does make a difference.

THE WARDROBE MALFUNCTION seen ’round the world.

IN 1956, a mega-political event at ORNL. I’m struck by how much a young Albert Gore, Sr. looks like today’s Rand Paul.

IS THE CHOICE financial repression vs. financial insanity? Seems to me we’re well on the way to having both at once.

“WE ATE INVASIVE SPECIES, AND WE LIKED IT!” My next Popular Mechanics column will be on this topic.

DAVE PRICE ON taxing regulatory capture.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS is unhappy with the state of legal scholarship today, saying that it’s not particularly useful to lawyers or judges. It’s a fair cop, for the most part.

BEING GOOD WITH SOCIAL MEDIA isn’t so tough.

AT SLASHDOT, A REVIEW OF Susan Landau’s Surveillance or Security: The Risks Posed By New Wiretapping Technologies.

NITA GHEI: The unstimulated economy: Presidential spending binge brings more unemployment, not less.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on office electronics.

JOHN NOBLE WILFORD: 3, 2, 1, and the Last Shuttle Leaves an Era Behind. People wonder why I haven’t written more about the last Shuttle launch. The truth is that, while the Shuttle is cool in many ways, thinking too much about how it all worked out just makes me sad. I prefer to look ahead.

Related: Farewell To The Space Age As We Knew It.

ERICK ERICKSON gets mean. Maybe it’s something in the water in Macon.

My thoughts here.

CHINA’S BUMPY RIDE AHEAD. “There’s a good deal of turmoil simmering beneath the surface of China’s miracle.”

COFFEEMAKER UPDATE: So I’ve had the Keurig for several weeks now, and it’s working out quite well. I’m particularly fond of the Newman’s Own, Double Black Diamond, and Dark Magic blends.

Two cups of the Newman’s Own helped me power through the rough part of a book chapter I’m working on just yesterday.

NEW YORK POST: CLUELESS ABOUT JOBS.

FRANK CAGLE: Conservatives should remember they can hate Al Gore, but still be for clean air, water. Just not as excuses for social control.

HALTING GLOBAL WARMING by burning coal.

OBAMA ON THE DEBT CEILING INCREASE: “We’ve got to get our fiscal house in order here in Washington. I’m not sure it’s going to happen under the current leadership.” Okay, he said that in 2006. But it’s just as true today!

ETHANOL FOLLIES? Automakers to void warranties on older cars burning E15 gas. “Fuel with a 15 percent concentration of ethanol is headed to America’s pumps soon and buyers with older vehicles may want to steer clear. Pumps dispensing E15 will be identified by a large orange sticker and the fuel is only approved for use in vehicles that are from the 2001 model year or newer. Using the 85-percent gasoline mix in older cars, lawnmowers or boats is prohibited by law because the fuel may cause damage to vehicle systems. That’s pretty rough, but according to Consumer Reports, that’s still not enough for many car companies. According to the institute, nine automakers thus far have made it clear that they won’t honor warranties of older vehicles found to be running E15 through their systems. Toyota, General Motors and Chrysler are all among those manufacturers.”

If I owned a gas station I’d be reluctant to sell this, figuring that someone would sue me if their warranty was voided.

STUDY: “ROMANTIC FICTION” BLAMED FOR SEXUAL HEALTH PROBLEMS.

Blaming romance novels for unprotected sex, unwanted pregnancies, unrealistic sexual expectations and relationship breakdowns, author and psychologist Susan Quilliam says that “what we see in our consulting rooms is more likely to be informed by Mills & Boon than by the Family Planning Association”, advising readers of the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care that “sometimes the kindest and wisest thing we can do for our clients is to encourage them to put down the books – and pick up reality”.

Her comments follow a recent claim that romance novels can “dangerously unbalance” their readers, with Christian psychologist Dr Juli Slattery saying she was seeing “more and more women who are clinically addicted to romantic books”, and that “for many women, these novels really do promote dissatisfaction with their real relationships”.

Hmm. That’s the same kind of thing women have been saying about Internet porn for years.

WIRETAPS UP 34% IN 2010: “As Glenn Reynolds says, they told me if I voted for John McCain, Big Brother would be snooping more and more — and they were right!”

THE CARNIVAL OF SPACE IS UP!

MORE ON THAT ATF GUN-SMUGGLING SCANDAL: The government’s gunrunners. “ATF agents essentially stood by and watched — as one critic put it, US law-enforcement agents essentially provided security for gun smugglers working for Mexican drug cartels. That such weapons are turning up in drug cases north of the border is hardly surprising.”

IN THE MAIL, From Janet M. Cromer, Professor Cromer Learns to Read: A Couple’s New Life after Brain Injury.

FRED UPTON SHOWS US how not to repeal the light bulb ban. Fred, if you don’t get this repealed, you’ll still be blamed no matter how much lip service you give to free markets. Results are the only thing that counts here.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: “In what appears to be a gross Obama administration oversight, former Bush administration political officials are still receiving taxpayer-funded credit cards in the mail.” Kind of a metaphor, isn’t it?

ECONOMIC NUMBERS: TIME FOR AN INSTA-POLL!

ROBERT SAMUELSON: That Awful Jobs Report.

The question now is whether the meager job creation heralds prolonged stagnation. Many economists have predicted a rebound in the second half of the year: Zandi expects the economy to grow at a 3.5 percent annual rate, up sharply from the estimated 1.9 percent for 2011′s first half; Gault is slightly below that. Both are sticking to their forecasts. They expect the negatives of the first half to reverse: lower gasoline prices will bolster consumer spending; restored supply chains will raise auto production; better weather will permit more construction spending.

But the bleak job market raises the specter of much worse. It could trigger a vicious circle.

Plus, whenever Obama opens his mouth, an industry dies. . . .

I THINK WHAT REALLY OFFENDS THEM IS THAT HE PAID FOR IT WITH HIS OWN MONEY: Newsflash: Rich Man Drinks Expensive Wine. It’s kind of like how corporate jets are evil, but flying around on taxpayer-provided Gulfstreams is fine.

UPDATE: A harsh take from Ann Althouse: “How much does Prof. Feinberg weigh? I’d like to calculate her level of intoxication. A woman who’s drunk half a bottle of wine and gets emotionally overwrought after calculating the price of items consumed at another table by a politician she loathes should probably restrain herself from going over to that table to tell him off. . . . TPM should be ashamed of itself passing along this embarrassing story and for the way it presented this material. In the middle of the piece, TPM informs us of Congressional ethics rules barring expensive gifts from lobbyists. I was thinking: Oh, maybe this is a serious problem. But if you keep reading, much further down, you see that Ryan paid for the meal with his own credit card, and TPM saw the receipt. Ridiculous! What hackery from the once-respectable Talking Points Memo!”

Well, their name has always kind of given the game away.

NOTE TO CHARLIE RANGEL: Jesus Would Have Paid His Taxes. Instead of taking Rangel’s “taxes are for the little people” approach. If you’re going to talk about the value of federal spending, how about rendering unto Caeasar, chuckles . . .

Jesus probably wouldn’t have gotten sweetheart treatment from the IRS, either.

UPDATE: Reader Kevin Greene emails about Rangel’s comments: “Didn’t they warn you that if you voted for John McCain that America would be turned into a religious theocracy? Why yes, yes they did.” Guess I should’ve listened!

THE HILL: Think Tank To Obama: Defense Budget Not Your Domestic ATM.

TODAY ONLY, a sale on biometric safes. Suitable for guns and other small valuables.

AMY ALKON: When Women Confuse Being Asked Out With Being Raped At Knifepoint In An Elevator. So we’ve gone from No means no, to No means you shouldn’t have asked.

Plus, from the comments:

The irony of this entire story for me is that this is a community of skeptics.

Yet if anyone within the skeptic community is skeptical of Rebecca Watson’s interpretation of events and hence calls into question her interpretation, they are immediately branded a sexist or a misogynist.

Apparently there are some things you aren’t allowed to be skeptical of within the skeptics community.

They use up all their skepticism on one topic. There’s none left for others.

And, as always, wisdom from XKCD.

SO I WAS JUST LOOKING AT AMAZON’S bestsellers in science fiction, and I noticed that Ric Locke’s Temporary Duty was at #7. Congratulations, Ric!

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY ON THE ATF’S GUNRUNNING SCANDAL: The Stimulation Of Murder.

Clearly somebody is lying here. At a House oversight hearing last month, three federal firearms investigators testified they wanted to “intervene and interdict” the guns at the border, but were repeatedly ordered to step aside and let the traffickers proceed.

Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson, in closed-door testimony in front of Rep. Darrell Issa’s committee, said administration officials sought to control and limit his communications with Congress, including withholding documents that made Melson “sick to his stomach” after he reviewed them.

On Dec. 14, Terry was fatally shot in the Arizona desert while patrolling one of the region’s most dangerous drug- and human-smuggling corridors. He was shot in the back with an AK-47 assault rifle. Two weapons that were allowed to cross the border as part of Project Gunrunner were found at the scene.

The evidence suggests that Agent Terry’s death was financed by the president’s stimulus package with the full knowledge and support of Attorney General Holder.

Is it time for a special prosecutor?

DAVID LEONHARDT: “The main problem with the job market is the lack of hiring by private employers. Above all, they aren’t sure what the future will bring.”

Well, how can they be when the Administration lurches around, driven by whatever makes a convenient sound bite? Alas, Leonhardt seems to have missed that aspect.

OBAMA BOAST BLASTED:

Time is running out on President Obama’s self-imposed deadline to rescue the nation’s slumping economy by his third year in office or risk losing re-election — a cavalier pronouncement punctuated yesterday by dismal jobless figures that prompted even Democrats to second-guess the president’s audacious 2009 assertion. Obama told TV titan Matt Lauer during a Feb. 1, 2009, MSNBC interview that he would be “held accountable” to improve the economy by the American public and, “If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”

“He said it. He can’t go back and un-say it,” declared Washington, D.C.-based Democratic consultant Tom Ochs. “(The Obama campaign is) going to have to fight to the death on the economy, and I think they know that.”

Well, with Plouffe’s statement I think they are trying to un-say it. Or, more accurately, to signal to the still-friendly press that it would be bad form to pay too much attention to the unfortunate economic situation between now and election day.

A BREATH OF SANITY: Shep Smith: C’mon, do we really need a new law aimed at Casey Anthony situations?

“Caylee’s Law?” Really? I think we need a law against opportunistic legislators cashing in by naming bills after dead children.

GREG SARGENT TRIES TO REHABILITATE DAVID PLOUFFE, but Ann Althouse is not impressed.

Plouffe’s job is probably safe, though, as the White House doubles down.

Plus this: “You mean they now want to argue that they can get the jobless rate down to almost the level that they promised it wouldn’t exceed if we just let them spend more money?”

Also: Why Unemployment Matters.

HOW BAD ARE THOSE JOBS NUMBERS? THIS BAD: May-June Hiring Pace Just 10% That Of February-April.

Weak economic reports usually contain glimmers of hope. Friday’s jobs report was just grim.

Employers added a scant 18,000 workers in June, the Labor Department said, far below views for 80,000. May’s gain was cut to 25,000 from the initial estimate of 54,000. It’s the starkest evidence of an economic soft patch: The May-June hiring pace was just 10% of the 215,000 average in February-April.

“It was an abysmal report,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight.

The jobless rate ticked up 0.1 point to 9.2%, the third straight increase, even though the labor force declined by 272,000.

And, of course, if the trend holds these lousy numbers will be quietly revised in an even lousier direction next week.

UPDATE: Reader Laurie Borski writes: “Soft patch my foot! I suppose that Investors’ use of the term ‘soft patch’ in the title of their web article means their thesaurus did not contain a delicate term for ‘quicksand.’”

TIM CARNEY: You did know Democrats got more money from the defense industry, didn’t you?

ISP PIRACY WARNINGS: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW.

A coalition of copyright holders and ISPs like Comcast and Verizon this week signed up for the “Copyright Alert System,” which will provide notices to consumers if they are suspected of illegal downloading.

Many ISPs already provide warnings to users if sketchy behavior is detected, but the Copyright Alert System is intended to provide a standardized approach that all ISPs will use. But how does it actually work? Is my ISP going to be snooping on my Web activity to catch me illegally downloading an episode of “Dexter”? Will ISPs hand this info over to the RIAA and MPAA so they can sue me? We took a look at the new plan and some of the top questions that have emerged since the announcement.

If the Republicans in Congress were smart, they’d repeal the DMCA — socking it to Hollywood while winning plaudits from Internet users. But note the conditional here. . . .

UNEMPLOYMENT, by the numbers. “The jobs numbers could hardly have been worse. Not only did the unemployment rate rise to 9.2 percent, and the economy create only 18,000 jobs, but the percent of Americans choosing to participate in the labor force declined to 64.1 percent, the same level as in March, 1984. Over 44 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for six months or longer, making their reentry into employment even more difficult. . . . What’s needed is regulatory reform to make it easier for employers to hire workers.”

Why yes, yes it is.

ENERGY SECRETARY STEVEN CHU: “We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.” Yes, it’s much more noble to waste other people’s money.

“NEVER WALK ALONE?” From the comments: “You should walk in threes: you, Smith and Wesson.”

JOHN HINDERAKER: Our Excuser-In-Chief. “One wonders whether, when the history of this era is written, today might go down as a turning point. Americans have been steadily giving up on the Obama administration, as evidence accumulates that its policies have failed and it has no solutions to the nation’s economic problems. Not only that, its purported solutions–most of which are really just pretenses for government takeovers–have made the situation worse rather than better.”

TREASURY DEPT. REJECTS Garrett Epps’ Debt Ceiling Theories.

THANKS TO ALL THE PEOPLE WHO’VE BOUGHT through the Amazon links on this page. It’s much appreciated. And to those who’ve asked — yes, if you bookmark this link (or the one at the top of the page here where it says “Shop Amazon”) that’ll give me credit too. Thanks for asking!

JENNIFER RUBIN: What was the point of that Rose Garden speech? “Following the release of the dreadful jobs numbers, President Obama appeared in the Rose Garden this morning. However, it was entirely unclear why he was there or what his plan is for digging the economy out of the deep hole in which we find ourselves. The speech, if you can call it that, seemed to be a disconnected collage of one-liners and excuses.”

I think that was Obama’s “I’m still relevant” appearance.

ACCENTS:

“Living as you do in New York, the navel of the universe, it is easy to confuse the Midwest and the South.” John Fleischman.

Clearly Mr. Fleischman and other East Coasters with this opinion just have not paid very close attention. Drop a southerner into the Midwest and I promise you that you can tell the difference. Just ask me.

Indeed.

HOW TO ACTUALLY MAKE TEXT look interesting.

PROFESSOR JACOBSON: Obama’s Catch-2012: “The only way for Obama to stimulate the enormous private sector job growth needed to ensure Obama’s reelection is for Obama to announce he is not running for reelection, which would unleash a wave of investment and economic activity not seen since the Great Depression.” (Emphasis added).

RUTH WEDGWOOD: Obama’s Prison Hulks and Al Shabab: The Complications of the Law of War.

With rope work worthy of any cowpoke, the Obama Administration has captured itself in its own legal lasso.

President Obama came into office pledging that his view of the law would be different from George W. Bush and that he would close the prison facilities at Guantanamo within a year. But governing is always harder than the sound bites of a campaign trail. And though this is no surprise to anyone with radar, there appear to be dangerous leaders of al Qaeda and its affiliates still parked at Guantanamo, against whom there is not sufficient evidence for a criminal conviction by proof beyond a reasonable doubt, either under the restrictive common law rules of evidence in a federal district court or even in a military commission. And where intelligence was first obtained from a prisoner under unconventional circumstances, the path to trial is even murkier. Thus, President Obama may—like it or not—end up far closer to the policies of George W. Bush than some of his supporters will like.

Read the whole thing. Especially this bit: “Well, there is one rule that the White House and the Defense Department seem to have overlooked in this inconvenient instance. It is the rule that flatly forbids holding prisoners captured in war in any locale other than ‘on land’—a rule with a history that stems from the American Revolution itself, when rebellious Americans caught by the British were interned in the death-dealing conditions of British prison ships hulking in New York harbor. . . . Thus, it’s hard to see why it was adjudged as convenient to hold the al Shabab leader as a shipboard prisoner for more than two months, with intelligence officials flying in and flying out, rather than transporting him to Guantanamo.”

HOW DID I MISS THIS? Today Only Sale: Friends: The Complete Series on DVD.

STEPHEN CARTER ON liberal fears about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “It is no more the business of the president to tell a justice when to step down than it is the business of a justice to tell a president to leave office. The authority of the executive branch over the courts ends with nomination, and that of the legislative branch ends with confirmation. After that, politicians are free to complain about decisions they dislike, but they have no constitutional business trying to rearrange the court’s personnel to their liking. . . . If liberals calling for Ginsburg to step down believe that she is somehow no longer up to the job, let them say so forthrightly. Based on the best informed reports, such a claim would be nonsense. If, on the other hand, they want Ginsburg to stand aside to better serve the goals of their movement, then she has an even better reason to ignore their plea: She doesn’t work for them.”

OLD SUN SETS, NEW SUN RISES: Behind The Scenes At SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral Launch Site. “While in Cape Canaveral for the final launch of the Space Shuttle . . . PM senior editor Joe Pappalardo paid a visit to the place where SpaceX hopes to launch the next craft capable of docking with the International Space Station.”