INSIDE SPACEX: Life After The Space Shuttle.

KEITH HENNESSEY: Understanding The McConnell Debt Limit Proposal.

The debt limit now works as an only if proposition: the debt limit is increased only if Congress votes affirmatively to authorize an increase. Increasing the debt limit therefore requires a majority of the House and Senate to cast a difficult aye vote, plus a Presidential signature. The McConnell proposal would invert this into an unless proposition: the debt limit would automatically be increased unless Congress voted to stop it. And by changing the key vote to a veto override, you would need only 1/3 of either the House or Senate to take a tough vote to allow the debt limit to increase.

In exchange for this significant increase in Presidential authority, the President would take most of the political heat for the debt limit increase, and he would be required to propose difficult spending cuts of an equal or greater amount.

Read the whole thing.

UNHAPPY WOMEN: “Burnt Out,” Or Just Working Like A Man?

Related: “Manorexia” is on the rise.

HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE GOT YOU DOWN? Fight Back With Science!

MEGAN MCARDLE: What’s The End Game for Republicans?

Podhoretz reads a Quinnipiac poll showing that by a margin of 48-34, the public is going to blame Republicans and not Obama if we don’t raise the debt ceiling, and joins the ranks of the Washington sellouts . . . . Voters are telling pollsters they’re going to blame the Republicans for the shutdown. And the spending cuts you’re going to do won’t even be that popular with the tea party, who aren’t much more enthusiastic about Medicare/Medicaid cuts than the rest of the country.

To me that sounds like “huge Democratic victory in 2012”. I know, I know–if it’s so “great for Democrats”, why aren’t they urging this course? Well, one school of thought says that they are–and neatly maneuvering the blame onto the GOP, thanks to the tea party’s very vocal intransigence. But if that’s a little too Machiavellian for your taste, the simpler answer is that this can be lose-lose. If we shut down the government, key social programs get hurt, the economy contracts, and the Democrats have to cut spending in a recession in order to make the budget balance after this little contretemps raises our interest rates. But the fact that the Democrats are worse off doesn’t mean that the Republicans are better off. The Democrats can lose while the Republicans lose even bigger.

Read the whole thing. One lesson here is that there is no substitute for air superiority — i.e. control of the master media narrative — and that the Democrats still have it when it really matters. But the GOP should pass a one-year extension so that Obama has to confront spending again just before the election.

Because this isn’t working so well for the Democrats, either: Gallup: U.S. Satisfaction Slides to Two-Year Low: Decline to 16% in July from 20% in June mainly the result of drop among Democrats. “The new poll was conducted July 7-10 as Congress and Obama were engaged in heated negotiations over a bill to raise the nation’s debt ceiling.”

UPDATE: “Republican Candidate” Extends Lead vs. Obama to 47% to 39%. “Registered voters by a significant margin now say they are more likely to vote for the ‘Republican Party’s candidate for president’ than for President Barack Obama in the 2012 election, 47% to 39%. Preferences had been fairly evenly divided this year in this test of Obama’s re-election prospects.”

Like I said, this isn’t working so well for Democrats, either.

CHANGE: One Cheap Pill Protects Healthy People From HIV.

TODD ZYWICKI: The Truth About The Auto Bailouts:

Last month, President Obama barnstormed through Ohio, unveiling his surprising decision to claim credit for the success of the multi-billion dollar government bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler.

Why surprising?

Because despite the efforts of the administration and its willing accomplices in the media, the belief that the auto bailouts were a success is simply a myth. Leave aside the obvious point that the government still stands to lose billions of dollars on its investment as well as many billions more from the preferential tax treatment of the reorganizations. Not only was the bailout unnecessary to save the American automotive industry but the politicized bankruptcy process left both General Motors and Chrysler in a weaker competitive position than if they had simply reorganized in a standard chapter 11 process.

In addition, the politicized bankruptcy process — particularly the shafting of the secured creditors — did long-term structural economic damage.

BEYOND PARODY: The Obama administration’s latest effort to stem sexual abuse on college campuses borrows heavily from the onetime iPhone slogan: “there’s an app for that.”

“Today the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, with the Department of Health and Human Services, announced a contest to develop a smartphone app to help students better protect themselves in risky situations. The effort is dubbed Apps Against Abuse. . . . The competition calls for developers to build an app that lets women designate friends or emergency contacts and check in with them during at-risk situations. The app would also provide fast access to information and resources for dealing with sexual assault or dating violence.”

Wait, just women? Isn’t that sexist?

While the White House is busy focusing on the important issue of student sexual misbehavior, maybe we need an app to protect male students against false rape accusations, too? As Emily Bazelon said after the Hofstra bogus-rape incident: “The weird lesson for men who have group sex in bathrooms: Film it on your cell phone.”

UPDATE: Important Advice For College Women.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Inspector General: IRS Fails to Properly Notify 36% of Taxpayers Whose Personal Info is ‘Inadvertently’ Released.

HOW TO land your kid in therapy.

LITIGATION OVER THE SEIZURE OF a photographer’s camera. This is a good time to plug Morgan Manning’s article on photographer’s rights again.

IT JUST GETS BETTER: Righthaven Fined $5000 For Misleading Court.

EDWARD NIEDERMEYER: Where Does The UAW Stand On Fuel Economy? “The United Auto Workers have proven that they’ll come out in support of greenhouse gas regulation when they think it’s in their interests, but what happens now that the union-built green-car future isn’t turning out to be the jobs-loaded utopia they predicted? With CAFE standards of 56.2 MPG by 2025 being proposed, the union has a choice to make: back the government that saved it or the automakers it’s currently negotiating with for jobs? Unless, of course, there’s some kind of principle here…”

THE FALL OF THE FACULTY: This diagnosis sounds plausible to me:

In his polemic, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (Oxford University Press), Benjamin Ginsberg, David Bernstein Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, takes stock of what ails higher education and finds a single, unifying cause: the growth of administration. Ginsberg bemoans the expansion over the past 30 years of what he calls “administrative blight” as personified by what he characterizes as an army of “deanlets” and “deanlings.” By virtue of their sheer number and their managerial rather than academic orientation, Ginsberg argues, these administrators have served to marginalize the faculty in carrying out tasks related to personnel and curriculum that once sat squarely in their domain.

The Goldwater Institute found something similar in tying “administrative bloat” to the rise of college costs. But Ginsberg appears to go beyond the cost issue alone: “The larger result, he argues, is that universities have shifted their resources and attention away from teaching and research in order to feed a cadre of administrators who, he says, do little to advance the central mission of universities and serve chiefly to inflate their own sense of importance by increasing the number of people who report to them.”

Interview at the link.

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste emails:

It’s one of Parkinson’s Laws: “All bureaucracies grow 3% per year, unrelated to the job they are supposed to perform.”

Indeed. And as proof of its universality, here’s another email:

Please withhold name and company:

I’m a senior manager at a Fortune 100 company. I read your post, “The Fall of the Faculty” and just shook my head. The administrative bloat is happening everywhere, not just education. Just this morning I was reviewing the number of Human Resource indicators/measures/reports, etc. being pushed to executives and technical managers throughout our company. If you were to guess 100 metrics, you would be under calling it by a long shot. We actually have 50+ measures on diversity alone. And our HR and IT groups are proposing even more. Truly, we are burdening our technical managers with so much bureaucracy, they must either reduce focus on future technology and work more on bureaucratic policies that benefit only regulators/policy makers; or work even more ungodly hours to continue the path forward. Disgusting.

Some of this is the fault of regulation and excessive litigation, which tends to empower internal bureaucracies. Some of it’s just Parkinson’s law at work.

OPERATION MAKE-LIFE-TOUGH-FOR-RICK-PERRY-TIL-2012 COMMENCES: Power Plant Shutdowns, Slowdowns May Follow New EPA Regs in Texas. “As predicted, expected and forecast, now that the EPA has included Texas in its cross state emissions regime — despite its own science to the contrary — a major power plant owner is weighing several drastic and negative consequences to its business.”

AARON RENN: Let’s Face It: High Speed Rail Is Dead.

WASHINGTON D.C. NEEDS A GUN DEALER: DC WON’T ENTER FFL BUSINESS FOR NOW. “Washington, DC had been thinking about getting into the firearms business. Only now they’re not. And the district’s de facto gun ban rolls on. Which, again, is just the way the city government likes it. The DC councilman who had proposed that the city provide FFL services pulled the bill from consideration. His reason? The mayor is helping the city’s only licensed FFL (the one who lost his lease in April) find a new location for his business. Like that’s going to happen soon…”

WILL THIS MEAN HIGHER INSURANCE PREMIUMS? Cars.com needs $14,187 to repair its wrecked Chevy Volt. “The difficulty in repairing this Volt, it seems, lay in the vehicle’s additional cooling systems and complex engine control module. According to Ryan Tamblyn, the man in charge of repairing the long-term Volt, the damaged plug-in had no fewer than five heat exchangers that had to replaced as well as an engine control module that needed reprogramming. All told, the Volt underwent nine weeks of extensive automotive surgery before it was ready for action.”

$35,000 A COUPLE OBAMA BIRTHDAY FUNDRAISER scheduled for the day after the debt-ceiling deadline. Maybe he really is bluffing, as that would be rather “bad optics,” as the PR folks say, if he were simultaneously stopping senior citizens’ Social Security checks.

FOURTEEN CITIES that are being eaten alive by public sector workers.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: Hanging With The Muslim Brotherhood.

GUNRUNNING SCANDAL: Justice Department Tampering With Witnesses? “Darrell Issa and Charles Grassley demand to know about contact DOJ has had with committee witnesses. Also, a source tells PJM: DOJ has picked a new fall guy to target after they failed to topple ATF Director Ken Melson.” Unless his first name is “Eric,” I don’t think it’ll be enough.

BLOOMBERG FOUNDATION pushing gun control in Memphis? “Memphis’ $4.8 million will be used to revive areas of the city cut off by highway construction and approach handgun violence as a public health crisis, according to Mayor A C Wharton. Other recipients of grants are the mayors of Atlanta, Chicago, New Orleans and Louisville, Ky.”

“Handgun violence” isn’t a public-health crisis. It’s a criminal-behavior crisis. The public health people need to be addressing things within their area of expertise, like bedbugs – how ya doin’ on that one, Mayor Bloomberg? — or maybe that incurable strain of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea.