ROGER SIMON: Iran Will Not Have an Atomic Bomb. Period. “This is the desperate move of a president in free fall, only it’s a move being made with millions of lives at stake. . . . So we have left it all to Israel and, incredible as it may seem, Saudi Arabia to put a stop to this madness. What will they do? I wouldn’t want to be them. It’s no fun at all. Perhaps a new prayer should be added to the Jewish liturgy. ‘Thank G-d I wasn’t born Benjamin Netanyahu.'”

POLITICO: Early Skepticism, Caution on Iran Deal.

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WELL, HE’S DONE LESS DAMAGE TO HIS CONSTITUENTS: Crack-Smoking Mayor Rob Ford More Popular Than Obama, Congress.

ON AMY ALKON’S BLOGTALKRADIO SHOW IN JUST A FEW MINUTES: Dr. Edward L. Deci on how to be self-motivated and best motivate others.

THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION you can ask yourself today.

FILIBUSTER ROPE-A-DOPE: “Did the crafty Mitch McConnell just succeed in getting Democrats to damage their long-term interest by nuking the filibuster?”

ANOTHER RUBE SELF-IDENTIFIES: My ObamaCare Cancellation: Seething At The President I Helped Elect.

We received the letter in the mail a couple months ago. The good people at Regence Bluecross Blueshield were pleased to inform us that due to Obamacare our current low-monthly premium, comically-high deductible medical policy would no longer exist come January 1, 2014. Pleased, because a new and better plan would be offered in its place. Old monthly premium: $578 for a family of four (non-smoking, helmet-wearing, and paternally snipped). New premium: $1,123. A 94% increase.

Once the sound of boiling blood dissipated, in my head I heard my Republican friends chuckling at the sight of a liberal Democrat hoisted ten stories high on his own petard. How’s the view up there, Obamacare Ollie?

Plus this:

At a certain point in the conversation, the accountant/lawyer had to get off the phone. “I have to stop answering your questions,” he told Peter. “I can’t ethically advise you, because honestly I don’t know the right thing to do. Nobody does. There are no answers. Right now it’s a complete clusterfuck.”

Yeah, pretty much.

MARIA KANG: I am banned from Facebook. Basically, by women who are threatened by her looks and message on weight.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN FOR TOMORROW: The Real And The Fake of ObamaCare: Politicians can’t talk their way out of a technological mess.

All appearances to the contrary, the managers involved in this debacle aren’t dumb. But they come from a background — law and politics — where arguments often take the place of reality, and plausibility can be as good as, or better than, truth.

What engineers know that lawyers and politicians often don’t is that in the world of things, as opposed to people, there’s no escaping the sharp teeth of reality. But in law, and especially politics, inconvenient facts are merely inconvenient, something to be rationalized away.

When our country has accomplished great things in the past, there has usually been a great engineer running the program: Hyman Rickover with the nuclear submarine program, or Wernher von Braun with the Apollo space program, for example. Rickover and von Braun were famously stern taskmasters, but they did not substitute wishes for reality.

Which may be why they were able to launch submarines, and rockets that astounded the world. While today, we can’t even launch a website.

Read the whole thing!

RAND SIMBERG: The Space Legacy Myths of JFK.

WAIT, I THOUGHT MONEY IN POLITICS WAS BAD: The Liberal Billionaires’ Secret Influence Club.

The timing of a story by the campaign finance reporters of the New York Times, and its placement in the paper’s national edition, is fraught with meaning. Articles in which the totemic names “Koch” or “Adelson” appear have a habit of being published in the prime time of an election cycle, and share the uncanny ability to float, bubble-like, to the front-page. Stories that deal with the liberal moneymen who finance the Democratic Party and its affiliates, by contrast, tend to appear after the fact or when nobody is looking, and, like ballast, fall to the back of the A section, obscured by ads for Tiffany’s, Burberry, and Zegna. I wonder why.

I don’t.

TAR AND FEATHERS IS A FORM OF PUSHBACK: Push Back Against Border Checkpoints Located 100s of Miles from Borders! “Let us now praise Terry Bressi of the University of Arizona, who is publicizing the existence of in-country border checkpoints that are hundreds of miles from the nation’s edges. Bressi films his encounters – more than 300! – and posts the vids at his YouTube channel. Watch the vid above but expect to get pissed at the enormous waste of time, resources, and American idealism. Did any of our parents or grandparents or great-grandparents or whoever really come to the United States for this?”

No, they came to get away from it. But then a lot of them voted for big government once they got here.

THE WISDOM OF CROWDS? Almost 60% Of Americans Think You Should Have Kids Before Age 25.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Elon University is Offering a Self-Pleasure Course to Teach Students How to Masturbate.

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COMING SOON, NEWS ABOUT HOW FISH ACTUALLY KINDA WANT BICYCLES? Why women still need husbands.

That women prefer part-time work is simply irrefutable. It was true back in 2007, and it’s even true among Ivy League graduates! Study after study, both here and abroad (the majority of women in the UK, Spain and other countries seek some combination of paid work and family work) shows women as a whole (the Sheryl Sandbergs notwithstanding) want multifaceted lives. They want balance.

And there’s only one way to get it: rely on a man’s more linear career goals. Unlike women, a man’s identity is inextricably linked to his paycheck. That’s how most men feel a sense of purpose. Indeed, research shows men see it as their duty to support their families even when their wives make as much money (or more) as they do!

Perhaps that’s because men can’t produce life the way women can—let’s face it: those are some serious shoes to fill—but they can produce the means to make a child’s life secure. As a nation, we dismiss this integral part of masculinity. But that doesn’t make it any less true.

So why not let husbands bring home the bulk of the bacon so women can have the balanced lives they seek?

Because women with husbands vote Republican. Single women dependent on the government vote Democrat. Thus, a plethora of policies and media tropes aimed at producing the latter.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO PROPERLY CELEBRATE our historic deal with Iran.

WHITE MEN LEAST RACIST in deciding who to date. Interestingly, of all the people I follow on Twitter, only the black women tweet about how they wouldn’t date outside of their race.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “Users are asked to distinguish between people they want to date and those they just want to hook up with.” Plus: “Founder Colin Hodge told me via email that many of the changes came ‘directly from our female users.'”

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PAUL RAHE ON CHINESE AGGRESSIVENESS IN ASIA: “There is trouble on the horizon, and before long it may turn into very big trouble.” Fortunately, we’ve got Smart Diplomacy on the job.