MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Democrats In Disarray. “Hoping to spend the week sliming Paul Ryan and screeching about the mythical Republican ‘war on women,’ the Democrats instead have been set back as the news cycle spun out of their control. Foreign policy, health care, and energy have forced them into a defensive crouch. No wonder I’m in such a good mood.”

PUBLIC EDUCATION: We’ve Added Feathers and it Still Won’t Fly?!?

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: “MICHAEL JUDGE blows the whistle on the various neo-temperance outfits currently crusading against drinking. My advice to the public-health community: start focusing on things like anthrax and smallpox, instead of announcing bogus studies with the shocking discovery that college students like to drink.”

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KEITH OLBERMANN: The Incredible Shrinking Man.

Funny, but wasn’t it supposed to be Limbaugh going off the air?

UPDATE: Reader Michael Harlow writes: “You’ll hear a lot more in the press about Rush Limbaugh losing sponsors than you will about Keith Olbermann losing his job.” True.

EURO UNRAVEL: The central bank of Germany will no longer accept bank bonds backed by Ireland, Greece and Portugal as collateral.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Senate Bill Would Expand Clery Act To Include Dating Violence, Stalking. “Colleges would be required to track and report claims of dating violence, domestic violence and stalking on campus if a bill before the Senate is passed. While some hail it as an important step toward stopping those crimes, others call it a well-intentioned but perhaps misdirected effort that would prove burdensome to colleges.”

If passed, I predict it will be implemented in a sexist fashion, with stalking and violence by female students against male students largely ignored or excused. This will no doubt serve to exacerbate the already burgeoning gender imbalance in higher education, which these “reformers” seem uninterested in addressing. But perhaps male students will report females who text them 20 times in an hour for “stalking.”

Plus, from the comments: “Statistically, traditionally aged college students are safer than similarly aged people anywhere else in the country…in small towns…in urban settings…anywhere…why don’t they push for legislation to track this out in the world? Why not…because they can force colleges and universities to do anything they want with the whip of taking away financial aid. Every regulation that is passed causes cost of attendance to rise.” Yes, the social-experimentalists have universities under their thumb, the way they’d like to have everyone else under their thumb. Ironically, this is helping to undermine the solvency — and legitimacy — of their main source of support.

UPDATE: Reader Gregg Hanke writes: “If the Republicans want to poison-pill this bill, they only need to add a clause expanding the act to cover Senate interns.” Heh.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Kinde Durkee, once a trusted treasurer to dozens of California Democrats, pleaded guilty in the biggest campaign embezzlement case ever to hit U.S. politics.

LAYERS OF editors and fact-checkers.

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Plus, a sale on Dockers shorts for men.

BLOG REPORTS ABOUT NIKKI HALEY SEEM TO BE LESS RELIABLE THAN THE USUAL: IRS not investigating Nikki Haley for tax fraud.

GOING COMING GREEN: A solar-powered sex toy.

ADVICE: American Men Should Be Upfront About Asking For Sex, Like French Men.

But you follow that advice, you’re a harasser.

UPDATE: Reader Ray Dawson writes that the trick is to ask in a French accent, so as to bypass the oikophobia. Good point!

AL GORE’S CURRENT TV TERMINATES RELATIONSHIP WITH KEITH OLBERMANN: round up of links from Ed Driscoll; schadenfreude from Ace, and an employment opportunity from the Daily Caller.

UPDATE: “Olbermann now has the distinction of being fired from almost every major cable news channel on television – CNN, MSNBC and now Current. He never appeared on Fox News, but he did work for Fox Broadcasting, and was fired from there.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: “Keith Olbermann has been fired from Current TV, because he no longer reflects the company’s values, it was announced today. He will be replaced by a man who cheated on his wife with a prostitute.”

Plus this: “His viewer must be devastated.”

And, “One suspects that this might have something to do with the lawsuit involving James O’Keefe, but truthfully that is rank speculation.”

A CAUTIONARY NOTE FROM DEWEY & LEBOEUF: “In simple terms, it appears that Dewey (a) overpaid for M&A both big (firm mergers) and small (lateral partners), and (b) acted like it was making more money than it was, while not fully recognizing liabilities. One key to the Dewey story is the degree to which the wounds are self-inflicted, so the tendency of most folks will be to say ‘Well, there are no lessons there for us to learn, we would never make those mistakes.’ . . . The irony is that law, which should be managing to longer-term time horizons, seems to be more short-term oriented than most other businesses. When the Great Recession struck in 2008, most companies were able to do a “great reset,” re-setting stakeholder expectations by cleaning up balance sheets, lowering short-term profit expectations and making the case for strategic investments. But the folks running law firms don’t seem to feel they have the latitude to fess up that firms need to revamp to focus on client value, not near-term profits. That’s partly because in a cash-basis business they do have less latitude to clean things up, but also reflects deeper issues for which Dewey is an avatar, not an outlier.”

Related: The $60 an hour lawyer?

TOO CLEAN: RISE IN ALLERGIES LINKED TO WAR AGAINST BACTERIA.

“Allergic diseases have reached pandemic levels,” begins David Artis’s new paper in Nature Medicine. Artis goes on to say that, while everyone knows allergies are caused by a combination of factors involving both nature and nurture, that knowledge doesn’t help us identify what is culpable—it is not at all clear exactly what is involved, or how the relevant players promote allergic responses.

There is some evidence that one of the causes lies within our guts. Epidemiological studies have linked changes in the species present in commensal bacteria—the trillions of microorganisms that reside in our colon—to the development of allergic diseases. (Typically, somewhere between 1,000 and 15,000 different bacterial species inhabit our guts.) And immunologists know that signaling molecules produced by some immune cells mediate allergic inflammation. . . .

It has been well known for some time that IgE mediates allergies. But no one knew that bacteria living in the gut may use it to check the growth of immune precursor cells in the bone marrow. The finding might have wide ranging implications and help us make sense of other chronic inflammatory disease states that have also been associated with changes in this bacterial populations. Commensal bacteria might impact these other inflammatory conditions—including cancer, infection, and autoimmune disorders—through this mechanism, as well.

Experts have puzzled over the enormous explosion of asthma and allergies in recent years, and been unable to pinpoint the cause. This paper suggests that perhaps the overuse of antibacterial products could be to blame.

It’s a complex world.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why You Should Sell Out To the Man.

FASTER, PLEASE: Life-extending drug without the negative side effects.

It was a bittersweet discovery: a drug that extends life but at the cost of causing diabetes. Now the drug’s dual nature has been teased apart, raising the prospect of a new life-prolonging drug without the harmful side effects.

Rapamycin is regularly given to prevent transplant rejection and treat cancer. Previous studies have also shown that it extends the life of animals, but simultaneously causes glucose intolerance – a side effect reported in humans, too.

Nice to get the upside without the drawback.

FOR MARKETING PURPOSES, I THINK THEY’LL NEED A MORE ATTRACTIVE PHOTO: ‘Cyberplasm,’ a Micro-Robot Modeled After the Sea Lamprey, Could Swim Around Inside You.

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VIDEO: Health Care Mandates vs Pizza Toppings.

LIZ PEEK: Obama’s Folly: Choosing Switchgrass Over Oil.

FASTER, PLEASE: Lab-Created Cells Could Target Tumors and Deliver Drugs.

SEEN IN THE MARKET SQUARE PARKING GARAGE ON TUESDAY, a bumper sticker for a political ticket I could really get behind!

BOB OWENS: The Appleseed Project: History, Character, and Rifles.