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.