CALIFORNIA PENSION CRISIS UPDATE: Largest public pension fund earns dismal 1 percent. “The nation’s largest public pension fund collected a dismal 1 percent annual return on its investments, a figure far short of projections that will likely bring pressure on California’s state and local governments to contribute more money, officials said Monday. The return reported by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System was well below its projected return of 7.5 percent for the fiscal year that ended June 30 and is prompting administrators to consider changes to investment strategies.”

Key bit: “You just can’t rely on these optimistic assumptions that somehow the investment returns are going to be so great that you don’t have to worry about paying for this stuff.” Things that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be.

CHANGE: Welcome To The Post-Employee Economy.

Related: Kent Brockman on unemployment.

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Portable Generators.

MICHAEL WALSH: The Professor, The Ballerina, And The Public Enemy.

SO MUCH FOR “LUX ET VERITAS:” Protests Won’t Be Allowed On Yale’s Singapore Campus.

WELCOME TO DISABILITY NATION: “In the Age of Obama, Americans may be better off faking disability than trying to find a non-existent job. Obamanomics reached the bottom of the barrel last month, when more Americans went on disability than found jobs. That is, apparently, the end point of the welfare state.”

UPDATE: Reader Charles Gallo writes:

Back in 2009, I was working for a major media company, and got very very sick, and spent 3 months in the hospital then home. At the end of that time, I wanted to go back to work, and my MD said, “I am willing to sign you out on permanent disability”. I had long term insurance that would have paid me 80% for the rest of my life, but I wanted to go back. In Jan 2010, I was laid off, and the best paying job I’ve had since then pays about 72% of what I was earning, with no benefits. Would have been a lot better off if I had said “yeah, I’ll retire.”

Sounds like it.

PETER INGEMI: Obama’s “Prevent” Defense. “They aren’t spending their money in the middle of summer in the hopes of defining Romney to an audience that isn’t paying attention, they are spending the money NOW to keep their poll numbers from collapsing prior to the fall campaign season. This isn’t about getting ahead, it’s about treading water long enough for something ANYTHING to come along and save them.” Perhaps the horse will learn to sing.

LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: The Shifting Bi-Modal Distribution of Entry-Level Lawyer Salaries.

DISTRACTION: Jennifer Rubin: The media obsess on Bain while we head to a recession. “The political media’s failure to grasp the import of the economic news is as embarrassing as Obama’s economic policy failure.” I think a lot of them do grasp it. They just hope the public won’t.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Look who’s holding the economy hostage now. “Democrats say they’ll let all the Bush-era tax cuts expire if they can’t raise taxes on the rich. Apparently, economic catastrophe is a reasonable price to pay for class warfare politics.”

LAWS, LIKE TAXES, ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Deval Patrick: Herald ‘not entitled’ to parking records.

Gov. Deval Patrick — adamant that taxpayers have no business knowing what hours top state officials keep — again refused to release electronic State House parking lot records, daring the Herald to conduct its own surveillance.

“First of all, you’re not entitled to them,” Patrick said about the parking records yesterday when asked why he was denying the Herald’s public records request.

Asked to explain, a petulant Patrick said: “Because you’re not.”

That’s the caliber of legal analysis we’ve come to expect from our lawyer-in-chief. Apparently, it’s spreading. This seems to be the actual reason: “The logs could show not only when state officials are at the State House, but whether lawmakers are honestly reporting their per diem travel reimbursements for trips into Boston — which range from $10 to $100 a day. The log lockdown triggered a firestorm from Herald readers yesterday.”

CHANGE: “The middle class, having long been a net contributor to the funding of government, is now a net recipient of government largess.” This is by design.

WHY GAS PRICES are heading back up.

UPDATE: Reader Jason Ireland writes: “So it is a lack of refinery capacity that is causing gas prices to rise? What ever could be the root cause behind the lack of refinery capacity?” What, indeed?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Education Dept. Proposes New Rules on Student Loans. “The U.S. Education Department today proposed new rules governing federal student loans, which would, among other things, ease the process by which disabled borrowers could have their loans discharged, establish a new income-contingent repayment plan for direct student loans, and expand the government’s income-based repayment program.” They need to make schools more responsible for students’ failure to repay.

HMM: Obama Stalls In Michigan, Despite Auto Bailout.

JOHN ROSENBERG: Teresa Sullivan, Then and Now: The University of Virginia president used to be an articulate critic of affirmative action.

HOW BAD ARE AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS? So bad that some parents are sending their kids to Africa for schooling. “They don’t like the expensive child care, the lax public school system, the sense of entitlement that comes with living in a country so privileged. . . . What is easier to gauge, at least according to Edem Andy, a high school physics teacher in Prince George’s County who has taught in the United States and Nigeria, is the academic advantage that children who are sent back to Nigeria gain when they return to the United States. During his 16-year stint as a teacher in the county, he has noticed that those children come back ‘better organized [and] basically more prepared. A child that has been to school in Nigeria knows how to study and take notes, which is lacking with American kids.'” And yet we spend more on public education than anybody else. What are we getting?

WELL, IT’S BEEN RAINING HERE FOR OVER A WEEK: Drought in U.S. reaching levels not seen in 50 years, pushing up crop prices. But there is a drought. However, its extent may be exaggerated.

UPDATE: Which isn’t to say it isn’t plenty dry in plenty of places. Reader Robert Ives writes: “Here in the middle of Indiana it is the driest I can remember in my 55 years.”

And reader Avner Bezborodko writes:

I am a libertarian, and I don’t like hyperbole, but it isn’t true that the drought is not bad and getting worse.

Look at the below link. It is more current than that in your post, and shows that things have gotten worse through July.

It’s bad. Let’s just not jump into Joad territory prematurely.

JAMES TARANTO: Political Correctness and Racial Tension: Less of the former might help relieve the latter. “Seventy-four years later, Matt Taibbi has discovered an invidious racial subtext in this economic truism. Of course, finding implausible racial subtexts has been a favorite pastime of the left since Barack Obama rose to prominence. In the past four years we have learned that all manner of innocuous words, from ‘skinny’ to ‘professor’–even ‘European’!–are also racial slurs. . . . This column has argued that the Obama presidency poses a deep political and psychological challenge to the Democratic left, which relies on the perception that racism remains prevalent in America, and that the GOP is racist, both to motivate black voters and to maintain its own self-identity as morally superior. That explains the desperate need to stereotype Obama critics, and conservatives more generally, as racist. Of all of the examples of this phenomenon, Taibbi’s may well be the most recent.”

When everything is a racial slur, nothing is a racial slur.

LAWS, LIKE TAXES, ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE (CONT’D): Inspector General: IRS Did Not Follow Law in 22% of Seizures of Taxpayers’ Property. A private organization that violated the law this way would be shut down, and its people in jail.

ANDY KESSLER: The Incredible Bain Jobs Machine. “In a competitive economy, $5,000 computers become $500 tablets. Consumers get to spend the difference elsewhere in the economy.”

MESSING WITH THIS GUY was almost as dumb as trying to out-crazy Stacy McCain. Almost.

ROLL CALL: John Boehner: Democrats Willing to ‘Tank Our Economy.’

Speaker John Boehner charged Democrats today with being willing to “tank our economy” to secure a “small business tax hike” in response to vows by top Democrats that they will use scheduled defense spending cuts as leverage on taxes.

“Has it come to this, that Democrats are willing to hurt jobs and tank our economy for the sake of a small business tax hike that would also have disastrous consequences?” Boehner said in a written statement.

Senate Democrats said they see no political downside to leaving the issue of $1.2 trillion in automatic spending to both defense and domestic accounts until after the November elections, as they try to use the cuts as leverage with Republicans to negotiate on tax increases on the wealthy

“We structured the sequester in a way that would be more comfortable for us than for Republicans,” a senior Senate Democratic aide said.

Of course you did.

AUSTIN BAY: Strategy Lessons From The War of 1812.

I DON’T MEAN TO SOUND UNSYMPATHETIC, but what kind of chump defects to North Korea? As Rocky Rococo would say, “First class.”