FROM STEPHEN GREEN, it’s This Week In Blogs.

A KIDS’ LITERATURE roundup.

CHILDHOOD PERSONALITIES stable 40 years later.

NOT SO HAPPY with the Chevy Volt.

MATT WELCH: Can We at Least Have Some Elementary Journalism in Budget-Cut Scare Stories? “None of this is new, just continually irritating, and (from a journalistic point of view) embarrassing.”

PRICE PRESSURE: Report: Nissan dealer expected to sell Leaf $1,000 below MSRP.

OH, GOOD GRIEF: Juan Williams Plays Race Card: Old White People Voted For Prop C (Video). He’s playing the innumeracy card, too, since I rather doubt that 70% of Missourians are old, white people. The truth is, ObamaCare is wildly unpopular among voters. It’s just the political classes who like the idea.

How unpopular? This unpopular: “Democrats’ talking points for summer campaigning don’t even mention health care reform. Wow. . . . What does it say about the President’s salesmanship that his party doesn’t dare bring up what he spent the first half of his term accomplishing?”

UPDATE: A reader emails: “Here in Colorado, none of the democrats seeking office (or seeking retaining their seat) mention health care in their TV ads. Some of the Republicans do mention repealing Obamacare. The democrats are instead talking about ‘cleaning up Washington’, which is funny because they (Michael Bennet and Betsey Markey in particular) voted FOR Obamacare. I think voters understand that cleaning up Washington means repealing Obamacare.” Do they?

ADMIRING A 1979 Corvette.

THE ASSASSINATION OF King Coal.

MICKEY KAUS: Michelle Obama’s vacation at three levels of analysis.

IN THE MAIL: From David Cristofano, The Girl She Used to Be.

JOEL KOTKIN ON CALIFORNIA: The Golden State’s War On Itself.

California is in danger of becoming, as historian Kevin Starr has warned, a “failed state.”

What went so wrong? The answer lies in a change in the nature of progressive politics in California. During the second half of the twentieth century, the state shifted from an older progressivism, which emphasized infrastructure investment and business growth, to a newer version, which views the private sector much the way the Huns viewed a city—as something to be sacked and plundered. The result is two separate California realities: a lucrative one for the wealthy and for government workers, who are largely insulated from economic decline; and a grim one for the private-sector middle and working classes, who are fleeing the state.

If only that view were limited to California. But the charts that go with this piece are damning.

A CHALLENGE TO INSTAPUNDIT READERS: Reader John Steakley writes:

Staggering deficits. Exploding national debt. Grossly underfunded public pensions. Aging populace. Social Security on track for insolvency. Investors running for precious metals. Higher education bubble. Stagnant economy. Massive new government healthcare program. Words like “unsustainable” in CBO reports.

I have racked my brain and debated with anyone who was willing. I can’t come up with a way out of this that doesn’t involve printing vast amounts of cash, double-digit inflation and interest rates, and the end of the dollar as a global currency because we “soft default” trillions of the national debt. What productive capacity we have left would be gutted by the tax increases needed to honestly pay what we are going to owe. And the people we owe (China, seniors, public pensioners, etc) aren’t going to just write off the debt like a bank short-selling a beach house.

So my challenge to your readers is this: “How do we get out of this WITHOUT printing money?”

Any ideas?

UPDATE: Charlie Martin writes:

I wrote abot this a couple of years ago in PJM. There are a nearly infinite number of solutions, but the key is this: if the rate of GDP growth is greater than the rate of government spending growth, everything will come out.

John Taylor at “Econ 101” shows how this works with Ryan’s plan.

Taylor’s second chart shows it clearly: the Obama plan has spending increasing linearly (or faster) with a positive slope. It runs away from revenues. Ryan’s plan is just barely negative over all, it doesn’t run away. But if you assume the rate of growth in GDP is larger, the lines cross and we’re back in surplus sometime in the future.

So the short answer is “it’s not the taxes, it’s the spending”.

Indeed.

Here’s the graph Charlie’s talking about.

THE END OF RESPONSIBILITY: From homeowners to government, the buck stops nowhere.

THE VIEW OF OBAMA From the Conde Nast Tower.

PRIORITIES: DoJ’s Civil Rights Division Is Out of Control:

Two unpleasant topics of conversation most of us avoid are the epidemic of HIV/AIDS among prison inmates and a variety of sometimes violent events resulting in transmission of the disease. Some states long ago implemented policies to protect the uninfected part of the prison population while providing exceptional medical treatment and counseling to the infected population.

In South Carolina, it has worked so well since 1998 that there has only been a single transmission of HIV/AIDS to a noninfected prisoner. All that may change, however, thanks to a threat from Eric Holder’s Justice Department.

South Carolina received a letter from the now-infamous Civil Rights Division that the policy of keeping infected inmates at a designated facility, instead of scattered across the state in the general prison population, may unfairly stigmatize infected prisoners.

Well, that’s dumb, but probably no dumber than the DoJ’s “civil rights” attack on the Kindle-textbook experiment.

SCANDAL OF THE WEEK: Undocumented Imam’s Refusal to Perform Interracial Gay Handicapped Wedding Leads to Charges of Racism. You might think it’s a parody, but you probably thought that this was a parody, too . . . .

MEGAN MCARDLE: Krugman Is Wrong on Ryan and the CBO. Plus this: “I emailed Ryan’s people around noon to ask whether my recollection was correct that he was unable to get staff time from the JCT. Within 30 minutes on a Saturday morning, I had emails from two staffers, one of whom was on vacation. They affirmed that he asked the JCT for an analysis, and was turned down. Which tells us a few things: first, that Paul Ryan’s people are exceptionally hard-working and responsive. Second, that Paul Ryan did his best to get the revenue side as well as the spending side scored. And third, that Paul Krugman could easily have gotten answers to his questions if he had wanted them.”

ANOTHER CHEAP EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE ON SALE. Whatever you do, back up your stuff now, before it’s too late. . . . .

THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND, if you were off, you know, having a life or something:

My Sunday Washington Examiner column: Further Thoughts On The Higher Education Bubble.

Victor Davis Hanson: What Did You Expect?

On the economy, a coming “panic attack?”

“What Was Michelle Obama Thinking?” “Whether or not people should resent it, they will, and his party’s already in big enough trouble without reinforcing the Red State sense that this administration is full of out-of-touch elites. I’m astonished that Obama’s advisors gave this trip the green light.”

What we can learn from beer deregulation.

Aristocratic pretensions.

Ezra, Coordinate! Ezra, Coordinate!

New York Times: The Coming Class War Over Public Pensions. Mine, alas, is not so gold-plated.

Celebrating Peace Through Victory Day!

“Does disgraced historian Michael Bellesiles deserve a second chance?”

“President Obama is a bigot, because he opposes same-sex marriage.”

And, of course, the ever-popular razorblogging!

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Bill Gates: In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web.

Gates is talking about college. What about K-12, asks Andrew Coulson.

SO WITH TIGER WOODS’ GOLF GAME NOW SUCKING LIKE A BILGE PUMP, can we entertain the hypothesis that his prior slutting around was actually essential to his performance?

HAROLD FORD, JR.: Rangel ethics woes will have ‘political impact’ for Democrats. Probably true. But there’s this: “Meanwhile, banker Vincent Morgan, one of Rangel’s Democratic primary challengers, is Ford’s cousin.”

JIM TREACHER: Haiku Is Never Funny.

MICHAEL BARONE: Faced with chance of winning, GOP asks, ‘Now what?’ “There is an assumption in the political world that spending cuts will be unpopular: Americans, it is said, are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal. But there is some evidence that voters will back governors who cut spending, such as Mitch Daniels, re-elected while Barack Obama was carrying Indiana in 2008, and Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie, elected in Virginia and New Jersey in 2009 and now enjoying good job ratings. One reason is that as candidates they let voters know what they would do.”