GEORGE SCOVILLE: First They Came For The Donor Lists. . . .

GOING UNDER THE KNIFE: Paul Rahe on Prostate Cancer. “If all goes as planned, I will, in fact, be going under the knife on Monday morning.”

ANOTHER “EDITING ERROR” from the news professionals at NBC. “Lawyers for Jerry Sandusky sought a mistrial before his conviction for child sex abuse on the grounds that prosecutors showed jurors an inaccurate version of a bombshell NBC News interview with the former football coach, and the mistake may now form part of the basis for an appeal.”

DAVID BROOKS: Gee, it was pretty dumb to assert executive privilege, huh?

DAN RIEHL: Priceless: WaPo blames constitutional law instructor Obama for possible ObamaCare Failure. “We can’t know for certain how the Court may rule on health care this week. But watching Washington as usual play out driven by a sense of doom is still something of a hoot. If it does go down and Obama fails to win re-election, he won’t have any positive legacy at all in the end.”

Perhaps if Obama had ever written any scholarly articles on the Commerce Clause, he’d have had a better understanding. But then, he never wrote any scholarly articles on anything. As former Obama colleague Richard Epstein said: “I like Obama but I reject the suggestion that he is an intellectual. He is an activist merely mimicking the mannerisms of an intellectual.”

UPDATE: Reader Dean Cheng writes:

As you regularly warn, “Don’t get cocky kid.”

So, everyone THINKS that the Supremes will overturn Obamacare, at least in part, and perhaps in whole.

But what if that doesn’t happen? What if, by a 5-4 decision, the Supremes decide that Obamacare is Constitutional? Shoot, what if they decide that Obama is right, and it would be politically too hard to overturn the thing? Not that they would necessarily phrase it that way in their decision, of course.

I’m not suggesting that SCOTUS will uphold Obamacare, only to hold off on the schadenfreude and celebrating and end-zone spiking until after the Supreme Court has actually RULED on the thing, AND overturned it?

Good point. Don’t get cocky, kid. Though the lefties’ pre-decisional flailing is too amusing to ignore entirely.

LEFTY DESPERATION: Don’t Like The Supreme Court’s Decision? Propose A Court-Packing Plan!

Related: James Fallows’ Paranoid Conspiracy Theories. They’re really losing it over the ObamaCare decision, which hasn’t even been announced yet.

But in the spirit of suddenly-essential Supreme Court “reform,” here’s mine: Justices to be elected to a single 18-year term, no more than 5 of the 9 to be law school graduates.

TIM CARNEY: How Orrin Hatch Forced Microsoft To Play K Street’s Game.

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STACY MCCAIN: The Silence of Mark Singer; Also: Kimberlin v. Walker Hearing Monday.

Related: Report: Matt Edelstein and #StopRush Employed Brett Kimberlin’s Pal Neal Rauhauser As Their Private Investigator. If true, that was an unwise move.

STEVE POSTREL: Marginalism and the Higher Ed Paradox.

My hypothesis is that it is precisely the dumbing down of U.S. education over the last decades that explains the increase in willingness to pay for education. The mechanism is diminishing marginal returns to education.

Typical graduate business school education has indeed become less rigorous over time, as has typical college education. But typical high school education has declined in quality just as much. As a result, the human capital difference between a college and high-school graduate has increased, because the first increments of education are more valuable on the job market than the later ones. It used to be that everybody could read and understand something like Orwell’s Animal Farm, but the typical college graduates could also understand Milton or Spencer. Now, nobody grasps Milton but only the college grads can process Animal Farm, and for employers the See Spot Run–>Animal Farm jump is more valuable than the Animal Farm–>Milton jump.

So the value of a college education has increased even as its rigor has declined, because willingness to pay for quality is really willingness to pay for incremental quality.

This is appallingly plausible. I’m not certain, but I think this trend would also be a boon to third-party certification, as a cheaper and more rigorous alternative.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Use a Roth IRA Conversion to Profit from the Presidential Election.

PUTTING WHILE ROME BURNS: Priorities: Obama plays 101st game of golf as fires burn, Egypt elects member of Muslim Brotherhood.

THE SWISS MILITARY AND “lithic disguise.”

I’ve read John McPhee’s La Place de la Concorde Suisse, and I highly recommend it.

THE ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE LAST 2,000 YEARS in one little graph.

JOURNALISM: Howard Kurtz Scolds Andrea Mitchell for Expressing ‘No Regret’ for ‘Deceptively Edited’ Romney Video.

THE INSTAWIFE: Do Boys “Swagger”? And What Does that Mean? Obviously, they haven’t been feminized enough.

I think what it means is that we’re seeing pathological behavior that 50 years ago was limited to the ghettos and similar marginal environments now spreading to mainstream society, just as high rates of single motherhood have. And the reason these changes have been tolerated (if not actually encouraged) is that they empower a politically influential constituency, one which, coincidentally, is largely female. With that in mind, note which way the suggestions in Swagger point, and ponder the likely result of implementing them. . . .

HISTORY: Hidden Cold War cache re-discovered at Auburn’s Placer High.

It was the Cold War and every community in the country had a plan in place for when the bombers arrived or the missiles started dropping. Even Auburn.

In the Earl Crabbe Gym basement, civil defense workers stored canisters of water, hard-tack biscuits and toiletries in anticipation of an attack from the skies that never came.

Over the years, the room was locked up, ignored and then forgotten.

In the past week, however, the cache of containers with the once-common “CD” civil defense emblem were re-discovered by volunteers working to repaint the high school’s weight-lifting room.

Wednesday, some of them were marveling at what they had found in a room that time appeared to have forgotten. Stacks of biscuit containers, tongue depressors, bandages, commode liners, plastic cups, and even containers of clear water were neatly stacked, all seemingly awaiting the day students would be rushed from their classes to escape a nuclear attack.

“It was always rumored that there was a bomb shelter at the high school,” Doug Randall of Auburn’s Consolidated Painting said. “Now it sets the rumor to fact.”

Randy Albright, Warehouse Paint sales representative and a Placer Class of 1983 grad, said he was surprised that the water being stored in plastic bags was still perfectly clear.

“I’m just surprised everything was in good condition after 50 or 60 years,” Albright said.

I wonder if it’s still potable, and if the biscuits are still edible.

THE HILL: Issa confident House will vote to place Eric Holder in contempt.

BEYOND THE VAMPIRE-KILLING ABE LINCOLN, Secret Histories of Other Presidents. “What most people know about Grover Cleveland is that, alone among U.S. Presidents, he served two non-consecutive terms of office. Less widely known is the reason those terms were non-consecutive. After commandeering an experimental time travel device from a young Nikola Tesla in early 1889, Cleveland spent the better part of the next four years traveling through the past, righting historical injustices. Below he is pictured during his extended stay in the late Cretaceous period.”

NO, BUT IT’S HIGHLY SUGGESTIVE: Egypt: A Muslim Brotherhood President Does Not Prove That We Are All “Chimps.”

JULIE GERSTEIN: Let’s Stop With This “Having It All” Crap. “Being able to ask if ‘you’re having it all’ comes from such a place of middle-class privilege it makes my head spin.”

Actually, it’s upper-middle-class privilege. Most of the debate about feminism is an occupation of upper-middle-class women. Which is why nobody asks — or cares — about whether men can “have it all.” (Answer: No. “The tragedy of life is that not all values can be realized.”)

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SHOCKER: Jon Huntsman Lands A Job At A Liberal Think-Tank. Hard to imagine why he didn’t get more traction in the primaries.

WHAT NOT TO SAY TO A MOM WHO KEPT HER MAIDEN NAME. The Insta-Daughter’s middle school kept assuming that her parents were divorced because of the different names. Sometimes they were slow to believe her when she insisted otherwise. You’d think people would be used to that sort of thing by now.

UPDATE: Reader Gerald Hanner writes: “It’s long been my impression that public school administrators and faculty have an alarming lack of judgment, common sense, and real world skills. What they excel at is overreaction and enforcing the politically correct mindset.” Well, a kid who’s in denial about divorced parents is probably more interesting than one whose mother kept her maiden name.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Washington Post fact checker says Obama is wrong to accuse Romney of shipping jobs overseas — but lets the WaPo itself off the hook.