EMOTIONAL ROBOTS: Will we love them, or hate them?

TOP CHAIR: Joel Johnson reviews two office chairs. I’ve got an Aeron myself. It’s okay.

ANN ALTHOUSE: How Palin Could Be Another Reagan.

Plus, thoughts on Palin and Obama and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

MEDIA BAILOUTS: MATT WELCH explains things to Ezra Klein. Michael Moynihan lends a hand. Hey, the press got Obama elected, it wants its payoff.

ABUSIVE LAB TEST: How tough are “ruggedized” cellphones?

TAXPROF: House Democrats to Push for Surtax on Those Earning > $250k.

UPDATE: From the comments: “I wonder if people realize yet that the real targets for all of the tax proposals circulating on the Hill are successful working women.”

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Five Stimulus Plans Better Than Obama’s First One.

IN THE MAIL: Acne for Dummies: Battle Breakouts, Reduce the Possibility of Scarring, and Keep Your Skin Healthy and Clear. You know, remedies for acne used to be largely bogus, but now they work. It occurs to me that I don’t see nearly as many pimply-faced teenagers as you used to, and I can’t think when I last saw a full-blown pizza-face, which used to be common. That’s one significant source of human misery that’s been largely cleared up. Hurray!

JOEL KOTKIN: Who Killed California’s Economy?

It took some amazing incompetence to toss this best-endowed of places down into the dustbin of history. Yet conventional wisdom views the crisis largely as a legacy of Proposition 13, which in effect capped only taxes.

This lets too many malefactors off the hook. I covered the Proposition 13 campaign for the Washington Post and examined its aftermath up close. It passed because California was running huge surpluses at the time, even as soaring property taxes were driving people from their homes.

Admittedly it was a crude instrument, but by limiting those property taxes Proposition 13 managed to save people’s houses. To the surprise of many prognosticators, the state government did not go out of business. It has continued to expand faster than either its income or population. . . . The media and political pundits refuse to see this gap between the state’s budget and its ability to pay as an essential issue. It is. (This is not to say structural reform is not needed. I would support, for example, reforming some of the unintended ill-effects of Proposition 13 that weakened local government and left control of the budget to Sacramento.)

But the fundamental problem remains. California’s economy–once wondrously diverse with aerospace, high-tech, agriculture and international trade–has run aground. Burdened by taxes and ever-growing regulation, the state is routinely rated by executives as having among the worst business climates in the nation. No surprise, then, that California’s jobs engine has sputtered, and it may be heading toward 15% unemployment.

It’s a bust-out operation! Or, at any rate, a bust. But is it a model for the Obama Administration?

LARRY SOLUM ON the rule of law.

REPORT: Chicago’s Progressive Tea Party:

Below is our full video report from Chicago’s 4th of July “Re-Tea” Party Protest. It was organized by a ballot access group called Free and Equal.

The strange thing about this Tea Party is that many of the speakers were progressives from the Green Party and Nader campaign! It was all very odd. They are against the two party system, but support national healthcare. They are against Cap and Trade, but believe in man-made global warming. They claim to be “all partisan,” but boycotted the tax day tea parties because of Republican involvement.

What they did have in common with the average Tea Party protester was a sense of disenfranchisement and anger toward a dysfunctional two party system, but is that enough to bridge the socialist divide? Watch and find out.

I think there’s a lot of that sense of disenfranchisement regarding a dysfunctional two party system out there.

CHRIS DODD UPDATE: Mozilo Meets MacBeth.

BIG BANKS don’t want California’s IOUs.

JAMES RUMMEL on the Wa$hington Po$t scandal and journalistic influence-peddling.

FABIUS MAXIMUS: Women dominating the ranks of college graduates – What’s the effect on America? I don’t know, but obviously we need to establish Men’s Centers and the like on campuses to help out a minority that seems to be doing poorly. Some earlier thoughts on the subject are here.

LEGAL ETHICS — and journalistic ethics.

BILL WHITTLE: When Politicians Go Bad.

UH OH: China’s restive west descends into mob violence.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “I have been urged to support Waxman-Markey on the grounds that we musn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good, and maybe I do. But the mediocre can also be the enemy of the good. Even if you support national healtch care, you certainly wouldn’t build Medicare in its current form. But there is path dependance in institutions: once they exist, they’re precious hard to change. Enacting a crappy climate trading system in order to do something forestalls the possibility of enacting a better design five or ten years from now. Given that this bill is universally expected to accomplish virtually no significant emissions reduction in the foreseeable future, that should worry people. Other than me, I mean.”

But the opportunities for graft are delightfully present.

OH, GOODY: In Blow to Housing, Risky Mortgage Losses Seen Rising.

MEG WHITMAN ON CALIFORNIA: “We do not have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem of epic proportions.”

KINDA PRICEY: Michelle Obama’s UC Merced visit cost school $1M. Hey, think of it as economic stimulus.

LIBEL SUITS AGAINST BLOGS HAVE BEEN IFFY — I wrote an article on that a couple of years ago — but Mickey Kaus’s discussion for some reason made me think of this New Yorker cartoon. Remember, just because “actual malice” is a tough standard to meet doesn’t mean you aren’t in big trouble if someone meets it. And Section 230 protects publishers, but the original source isn’t off the hook.

GALLUP: Nearly 4 in 10 Americans say their views have grown more conservative. “Despite the results of the 2008 presidential election, Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal, 39% to 18%, with 42% saying they have not changed. While independents and Democrats most often say their views haven’t changed, more members of all three major partisan groups indicate that their views have shifted to the right rather than to the left.” Hmm. Can this be true?

AMERICA: A fiscal train wreck? Nonsense. People have been warning of that forever.