SMALL CITIES feed the knowledge economy.

ARE WOMEN losing enthusiasm for Obama?

MORE WOMEN ARE freezing their eggs to make babies later. Makes sense.

HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: Professor Charged With Running Prostitution Website. Best bit: “A police official said that Flory said he did not make money from the site, but maintained it as a hobby.” Academia is all about public service.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on jewelry.

WAR ON SCIENCE: “We may think the charged relationship between science and religion is mainly a problem for Christian fundamentalists, but modern science is also under fire in the Muslim world. Islamic creationist movements are gaining momentum, and growing numbers of Muslims now look to the Quran itself for revelations about science.”

Plus this: “Some of the debates about Islam and science resemble American arguments over science and religion, but there are also specific differences. For one thing, the New Atheist critique of religion is virtually absent in the Muslim world.” Even in the western world, the New Atheists tend to focus their fire on Christianity. Muslims often have a tendency to respond violently to religious criticism, and the New Atheists, though they talk a good game, are mostly chicken.

UPDATE: Reader Brian Macker thinks I’m unfair to the New Atheists:

Not at all true. The four horsemen of the new atheism, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett have all roundly criticized Islam. Hitchens is practically calling for an war on Islam. Sam Harris is on board. Other less well know new atheists such as P Z Myers have gone so far as hammering a nail in the Qur’an and burying it. I wouldn’t call that chicken.

Hmm. I seem to have missed these incidents, but I stand corrected.

EARMARK SHOCK: Audit finds fraud and waste at the James E. Clyburn University Transportation Center.

KAY HYMOWITZ ON What The Wal-Mart Case Means.

THE ICEMAN’S last meal.

DAVE WEINBAUM appreciates the A10.

IN JAPAN, fewer laws lead to better beer.

MICHAEL YON IN THE DAILY NEWS: Afghanistan is making undeniable progress, but it could all unravel.

IN THE MAIL: The Genogram Journey: Reconnecting with Your Family.

CHANGE: Home Sales Hit New Low. “Fewer people purchased previously occupied homes in May, bringing sales down to their lowest level of the year. Home sales sank 3.8 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.81 million homes, the weakest pace since November, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday. Economists say that’s far below the 6 million homes per year sold in healthy housing markets.” And what’s really telling is that some are playing this as good news.

But note this: “Another growing problem is that some sales that are under contract and almost finished are falling apart at the last minute. The Realtors’ trade group has noted that an increasing number of deals have been canceled because an appraisal came in below a negotiated price, scuttling home loans in the process.” Not a sign of a recovering market.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Glenn,

For a month I have looked for a used home in Henderson, NV.

Concerning “The Realtors’ trade group has noted that an increasing number of deals have been canceled because an appraisal came in below a negotiated price…”, I think this is half the story. The other half is the failure to pass a final inspection. Many of these homes in Las Vegas have been without maintenance for months and months. Mold and wall cracks are asserting themselves. Appraisers are willing to give the value of the home the benefit of the doubt, factoring in the labor of the new home owner to bring the home up to the value they grant to it. I have seen 20 homes recently, and most of them needed $20-25K of improvements to reach the offered price.

While appraisers need to please real estate agents for referrals, home inspectors do not. They are shutting down these deals to protect the new owners from themselves.

Like people who stay unemployed for too long, houses that stay unsold for too long lose some of their saleability.

I KEEP WARNING PEOPLE NOT TO PICK ON BLOGGERS: Righthaven Loses As Federal Judge Rules Reposting Entire Article is “Fair Use.”

The lawsuit decided Monday targeted Wayne Hoehn, a Vietnam veteran who posted all 19 paragraphs of November editorial from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which is owned by Stephens Media. Hoehn posted the article, and its headline, “Public Employee Pensions: We Can’t Afford Them” on medjacksports.com to prompt discussion about the financial affairs of the nation’s states. Hoehn was a user of the site, not an employee.

Righthaven sought up to $150,000, the maximum in damages allowed under the Copyright Act. Righthaven argued that the November posting reduced the number of eyeballs that would have visited the Review-Journal site to read the editorial.

“Righthaven did not present any evidence that the market for the work was harmed by Hoehn’s noncommercial use for the 40 days it appeared on the website. Accordingly, there is no genuine issue of material fact that Hoehn’s use of the work was fair and summary judgment is appropriate,” Judge Pro ruled.

The judge also said he took into consideration that only five of the editorial’s paragraphs were “purely creative opinions” of the author. . . . Pro’s decision came a week after a different Las Vegas federal judge threatened to sanction Righthaven, calling its litigation efforts “disingenuous, if not outright deceitful” when it came to standing. Standing is a legal concept that has enabled Righthaven to bring lawsuits on behalf of the copyrights owned by Stephens Media.

That blistering decision by U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt, the chief judge in Nevada, places into doubt Righthaven’s year-old business model, which is also under a Colorado federal judge’s microscope.

Hunt gave Righthaven two weeks to explain why he should not sanction it for trying to “manufacture standing.”

I hope these guys wind up broke and in jail. And that’s looking likelier all the time . . . .

ANN ALTHOUSE ON CARBON FOOTPRINTS: “Oh, hell! Shut up about my light bulbs. Just. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. If you people really believed in global warming in the form that you would like to foist that belief on the common folk, that quoted line above would have sounded to you as something on the moral level of first, torture a small, cute kitten.…”

Just remember, it’s not too late to stock up. Yet.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Blue State Schools: The Shame Of A Nation.

When it come to excellence in education, red states rule — at least according to a panel of experts assembled by Tina Brown’s Newsweek. Using a set of indicators ranging from graduation rate to college admissions and SAT scores, the panel reviewed data from high schools all over the country to find the best public schools in the country.

The results make depressing reading for the teacher unions: the very best public high schools in the country are heavily concentrated in red states.

Three of the nation’s ten best public high schools are in Texas — the no-income tax, right-to-work state that blue model defenders like to characterize as America at its worst. Florida, another no-income tax, right-to-work state long misgoverned by the evil and rapacious Bush dynasty, has two of the top ten schools.

Newsweek isn’t alone with these shocking results. Another top public school list, compiled by the Washington Post, was issued in May. Texas and Florida rank number one and number two on that list’s top ten as well.

There’s something else interesting about the two lists: on both lists only one of the top ten public schools was located in a blue state. . . . There were no top ten schools on either list from blue New England states like Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut. Nor were there any in the top 25. By contrast, Alabama made both the Newsweek and the Washington Post top ten.

Yet another stereotype that’s flipped.

UPDATE: Reader Tom Scott emails:

I was born and raised in Wisconsin- near Madison- and I followed closely the coverage of the recent Scott Walker protests by teachers in Madison. Ann Althouse and Meade provided outstanding coverage of that. Incidentally, I bookmarked Althouse because of Instapundit links some time ago.

This first school listed in the Newsweek list is Brookfield at 174 Brookfield…Brookfield, seems that place was in the news recently. Something about Judge Prosser.

P.S. If I were Amy Chua I might consider moving to Dallas or Bellevue.

The Wisconsin teachers, with their manifest disregard for student welfare, did not present a good face for blue-state public education. On the other hand, Wisconsin seems to be turning into a Red State, so . . . .

Meanwhile, a Blue State reader who requests anonymity emails:

Remember, you read it first at Iowahawk. With a single post he not only pantsed the whinging Krugman, he scooped Tina Brown by three months, and pre-emptively made Newsweek’s effort look silly for its failure to make a point while he was at it. Is there anything he can’t do?

The only hopeful news for blue state school systems in all this is that Iowahawk was educated in one.

A lagging indicator, that.

ORRIN HATCH in huge trouble back home. “Utah is no stranger to throwing out incumbents. In 2010, Utah Republicans threw out former-Sen. Bob Bennett in favor of current-Sen. Mike Lee.”

SUSANNAH BRESLIN: Why Radical Change Is Better Than Slow Change.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on bestselling toys and games. Including those ever-popular radio controlled helicopters.

REPORT: LulzSec Mastermind Suspect Arrested in Essex, England. Suspicion on chatboards is that they traced his Twitter posts, though it’s just as likely that someone fingered him. Don’t underestimate meatspace intelligence-gathering, even where hackers are involved.

IT’S NOT JUST GAY MARRIAGE: A reader emails to note that the White House claim that Obama’s signature on a political questionnaire wasn’t his isn’t the first time the Obama camp has done this — FactCheck busted him for a similar claim during the campaign: “Obama was being misleading when he denied that his handwriting had been on a document endorsing a state ban on the sale and possession of handguns in Illinois. Obama responded, ‘No, my writing wasn’t on that particular questionnaire. As I said, I have never favored an all-out ban on handguns.’ Actually, Obama’s writing was on the 1996 document, which was filed when Obama was running for the Illinois state Senate.”

UPDATE: Reader Pat Coleman writes: “Maybe that’s not his signature on the healthcare bill, either, and we can just consider it invalid.”

CULTURE WAR: The Hill: Dem lawmaker renews effort to end military’s NASCAR sponsorships.

AN ATF GUNRUNNING SCANDAL TIMELINE: Gunwalker: From Obama’s Inauguration to Issa’s Report.

Major scandals don’t always have the most dramatic beginnings. Andrew Johnson was impeached for replacing the sitting secretary of war; Richard Nixon’s collapse started with a breaking and entering. Bill Clinton’s infamy was guaranteed for quibbling over the definition of a common verb.

It now appears that high-ranking officials in the Obama administration may be writing the end of their careers and risking a life behind bars by arguing about the technical definition of “walking” firearms.

Read the whole thing, as some are calling this scandal “bigger than Iran-Contra.” Plus this: “U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has apparently lied to Congress about when he knew of Gunwalker, and considering the scope of the operation it is implausible that he was not involved in its implementation.” Will we see a False Statements Act prosecution?

KATIE THOMPSON: A Case For Rick Perry.