RICHARD EPSTEIN: “The FDA is a bureaucratic behemoth that threatens public health, stifles drug innovation, and keeps costs high.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Time To Occupy State Pensions? “The biggest scam going in American financial life may be the collusive effort by Wall Street, the political class, and public sector unions to use union retirement money to prop up Wall Street speculation. . . . Pension funds should not be aggressively invested. Retirement funds should be conservatively managed — and that means enough has to be paid into those funds so that with moderate investment results, retirees can be sure that their promised benefits will in fact be paid. The key to this change is stronger regulation of government pension funds, to force them to observe the same requirements that apply to private sector pension funds as well. Amazingly, the same union leaders and lefty experts who call for tough regulations elsewhere in the economy want to keep government workers chained to the roulette wheel in the Wall Street casino: they are bitterly opposed to seriously prudential regulation of government pension funds.”

UPDATE: Reader Mike Nelson writes: “Funny, I remember Democrat demagogues saying Bush’s plan to allow private investment of Social Security funds was evil and would bankrupt seniors. Guess they didn’t actually believe that at the time.”

MICKEY KAUS: David Axelrod’s Firm And Big Pharma. “Evil Big Drug Companies (PhRmA) funnel money to Axelrod’s old ad firm even as they are negotiating with the Obama administration? Hello? Josh Marshall? Arianna? You there? Someone explain to me why this isn’t a scandal.”

Because it involves Democrats. Duh.

WHY PORN AND JOURNALISM have the same big problem. “Like the porn studios, big media companies have seen their own profits plummet in the face of free aggregators, amateur bloggers, and the nearly limitless competition supplied by the web. Unsurprisingly, micropayments have been a hot topic in the news industry over the past few years. But so far, they haven’t really taken off.”

ANOTHER RUBE SELF-IDENTIFIES: Frank Bruni: I’m beginning to think this Obama fellow isn’t all he was cracked up to be.

ABC NEWS: Eric Holder Contempt Vote To Be Held Thursday. “Both the Washington Post and CNN report that if the House cites Holder for contempt, it will be the first time in history that a U.S. attorney general is held in contempt of Congress.”

AT AMAZON, Top Deals in Electronics.

THE KINDLE EDITION OF THE HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE IS NOW LIVE.

POINTS AND FIGURES: Watch Out For More Deflation. “The government stimulus had a multiplier effect of 0. It did nothing for job growth or GDP growth in the US. Combine the inefficiency of US fiscal policy with the continued implosion of Europe, and you have a world wide malaise.”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Decline In Obama’s Chicago Clue To His Second Term.

Another weekend of violence in the president’s hometown, now run by his former chief of staff. If you want to see the fruits of a presidential second term, look at the decline of his city.

President Obama and Rahm Emanuel, current mayor and former White House chief of staff, brought the “Chicago Way” to Washington in more ways than one. Not only did they bring a style of bare-knuckled backroom politics of intimidation and cronyism, they brought a statist philosophy of government knows best that has left America’s Second City a second-rate city with nowhere to go but down.

Last weekend was all too typical in Chicago these days, with four dead and 29 wounded throughout a city that’s been home to one of the nation’s toughest gun laws. Chicago has become the murder capital of America with a 50% increase in violence for the past year.

Obama recently paid his hometown, where he maintains a residence, a visit. As Wayne Allyn Root, writing on FoxNews.com, noted, 35 were injured and seven killed in gun battles with the president home that weekend. Included in that violent mess was a 16-year-old girl. Three of the murder victims were killed in one hour on Sunday morning. It was the third weekend in a row with gunshot murders and injuries in the double digits.

How’s that gun control workin’ out for ya? But wait, there’s more:

Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas recently disclosed a staggering $108 billion debt tab across various governing bodies in the county that translates to $63,525 per Chicago household. Unfunded pension liabilities make up nearly a quarter of that. Not all the debt is Chicago’s, a city with the nation’s highest sales tax, but enough of it is.

Chicago lost 200,000 people from 2000 to 2009. The only one of the nation’s 15 largest cities to lose people. Of all cities, it fell between Detroit, reigning champion of progressive urban decay, and hurricane ravaged New Orleans, in the number of people fleeing to greener pastures.

As Aaron M. Renn writes in City Journal, during the first decade of this century Chicago lost 7.1% of its jobs. Chicago’s famous Loop, the second-largest business district in the nation, lost 18.6% of its private-sector jobs.

Wherever “progressive” policies are tried, the result is the same.

DEFICITS. APPARENTLY, OBAMA’S DOING TO THE DEMOCRATS WHAT HE’S DONE TO THE COUNTRY: “Democrats are considering canceling their political convention’s kick-off event at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, as party planners grapple with a roughly $27 million fundraising deficit, according to two people familiar with matter.”

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT UPDATE: Holder DOJ Uses Newspaper for Statistical Data Against Rick Scott.

MICHAEL WALSH: First Principles.

#GREENFAIL: Green company creates three jobs in three years, gets another $80 million from DOE. “Department of Energy officials gave a New Hampshire-based biofuel company access to $80 million for a Michigan project that has already fallen short of job creation expectations, despite receiving another $40 million in state and DOE subsidies.”

THE POLITICO STORY JUST GETS UGLIER: Suspended reporter tweeted: Racism ‘secret sauce in the Politico sh*tburger.’ Ah, modern journalism.

OBVIOUSLY, IT’S BECAUSE OF RACISM: Jimmy Carter Accuses U.S. of ‘Widespread Abuse of Human Rights.’ “Jimmy Carter, America’s 39 th president, denounced the Obama administration for ‘clearly violating’ 10 of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, writing in a New York Times op-ed on Monday that the ‘United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.'”

ED DRISCOLL GOES FULL ZAPRUDER: Video of NBC ‘Tape Error’ from their Jerry Sandusky Interview.

CHANGE: “The most troubling part for the president is that he’s become so unpopular that donors don’t want their names to be associated with his events.”

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): For the past three months, year-over-year real personal income growth has stayed lower than it was at the start of each of the last ten recessions.

FIRST LINDSAY LOHAN, NOW HIM: Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. takes medical leave of absence for exhaustion.

K
Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) is taking a medical leave of absence and undergoing treatment for exhaustion, his office said in a statement released Monday.

“He asks that you respect his family’s privacy,” the statement read. “His offices remain open to serve residents of the Second District.”

Jackson’s medical leave began on June 10, and it is unclear when the nine-term congressman hopes to return to Capitol Hill. Jackson was not in Washington for votes last week. Jackson is currently under a House Ethics Committee investigation for his role in former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s attempts to trade appointment to President Obama’s Senate seat for campaign donations. The son of the famed civil rights leader has denied any wrongdoing in the case.

Sorry to hear that’s left him so tired.

DOUG MATACONIS: Debunking The Myth Of The “Radical” Roberts Court. Key bit: “The problem with these characterizations of the court is that if by ‘judicial activism’ one means a willingness to overturn precedents and invalidate federal laws, the Roberts Court is the least activist court of the post-war period.”

THE HILL: White House Threatens Polygraphs To Root Out Leakers. “Officials at the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies will be given expanded polygraph tests under a new Obama administration directive aimed at stamping out national-security leaks. . . . The most significant measure is the addition of a new question to the polygraph tests that are used by intelligence agencies. Officials will be asked during the lie-detector tests whether they have disclosed classified information to members of the media, according to Shawn Turner, a spokesman for Clapper.”

UPDATE: Reader Kim Sommer writes: “So White House staff won’t get the polygraph tests? Seems they’re giving up an easy target. Ohhhh wait…”

CALBUZZ: Dems’ Idiocy on Pensions Recalls ’70s Tax Fiasco. “Not since the disco era, when a young Jerry Brown and a tone-deaf Legislature dithered away their chance to head off Prop. 13, has Sacramento seen such a spectacle of fatuous folly as legislative Democrats now display over pension reform.”

ANNALS OF THE TOLERANT LEFT: Maurice Sendak fantasized about killing Bush, Cheney, and their wives in a suicide bombing.