YA THINK? George Schultz: We Need Better Governance.

IS AL QAEDA ON THE RUN? OR ARE WE? 19 Embassies To Remain Closed.

VIDEO: Joe Pappalardo on NBC talking about the future of military technology.

THIS MUST BE MORE OF THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WE WERE PROMISED: Sissi Blasts Obama Administration as Egyptians Turn on US.

“You left the Egyptians. You turned your back on the Egyptians, and they won’t forget that,” Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi said angrily in a rare interview with a Western newspaper. “Now you want to continue turning your backs on Egyptians?”

Given the state of public opinion in Egypt, it makes lots of sense for Sissi to stress his differences with the US. Nobody wants to look like our friends there. But Sissi is probably not as unhappy with Washington’s scolding as he lets on and this Post article confuses a few things about the relationship between Washington and Cairo.

This sentence in particular seems a bit strained: “The Egyptian military has long received critical support from the United States, and in return has upheld Egypt’s decades-old peace treaty with Israel while serving as a key regional ally.” The idea that observing the treaty with Israel is something the US “buys” from the Egyptian military with aid is a typical US liberal media construct. It magnifies our importance and flatters our narcissism, distorts the nature of our relationships with Israel and its neighbors, and provides a simplistic picture of both Egypt and US policy. The Egyptian military supports the peace treaty with Israel because stability on its eastern frontier (and the return of Sinai, which came with the treaty) are in Egypt’s national interest.

The US values the treaty not just because it protects Israel, but because it (with the work of the Egyptian military) ensures the stability of a vital waterway, the Suez Canal, and the Egyptian military is an important part of regional security and stability for reasons that have nothing to do with Israel.

Yeah, but we’re not even that popular with the Belly Dancers.

AT AMAZON, Warehouse Deals On Grilling Gear.

Also, markdowns on car headrest video players.

And, today only: Up to 60% Off Back-to-School Basics in Electronics.

CHARLES GLASSER: Congress should pass the federal shield law for journalists, bloggers.

YA THINK? GOP Lawmaker: Obama ‘Divides Us on Race.’ He’ll be doing it more, too, because he needs to keep the black vote, and the guilty white liberal vote, together despite the manifest failure to deliver on his promises.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Oakland educrats try to kill a phenomenally successful charter school system.

THE REAL REASON WHY POLITICIANS LIKE LIGHT RAIL:

A transit agency that expands its bus fleet gets the support of the transit operators union. But an agency that builds a rail line gets the support of construction companies, construction unions, banks and bond dealers, railcar manufacturers, electric power companies (if the railcars are electric powered), downtown property owners, and other real estate interests. Rail may be a negative-sum game for the region as a whole, but those concentrated interests stand to gain a lot at a relatively small expense to everyone else.

It’s always about opportunities for graft.

ANGELO CODEVILLA ON THE EMBASSY CLOSINGS: Manipulating the U.S. Intelligence Community Shouldn’t Be This Easy. No, it shouldn’t be. But it’s amateur hour.

ONE HAND WASHES THE OTHER: Chris Christie defends the mainstream media.

#NARRATIVEFAIL: Virginia Gun Sales Rise, Firearm-Related Crimes Drop. “Firearms sales rose 16 percent in 2012 to a record 490,119 guns purchased in 444,844, according to federally licensed gun dealer sales estimates obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. During the same period, major crimes committed with firearms dropped 5 percent to 4,378.”

SHOCKER: Open Borders, Open Wallets: Clinton Cronies Profiting from Fast-Tracked Visas?

GOSH, IT SEEMS LIKE JUST LAST OCTOBER WHEN AL QAEDA WAS DEAD AND DETROIT WAS ALIVE: Al Qaeda ‘on steroids’ since Benghazi attack. Stupid YouTube video. Good thing that Nakoula guy is still in jail.

THE OBAMA ECONOMY: BRINGING FAMILIES TOGETHER! More Than 1 in 3 Young Adults Still Live With Their Parents.

YOU KNOW, THIS IS GOING TO COST FACEBOOK BUSINESS, I THINK: Facebook’s Zuckerberg now building a political network. ” After largely sitting on the political sidelines for a few years, the 29-year-old Facebook founder is using his clout as a top business executive and American success story to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform. This week, Zuckerberg will publicly dive headfirst into the immigration debate that’s captivated Washington by joining forces with pro-immigration advocates outside of the tech industry.”

UPDATE: David Kirkham emails: “Facebook getting into immigration reform? He didn’t learn anything from the great fall of Oprah?” Oh, yeah. Her. She was big back before she endorsed Obama.

MORE SPYING: Reuters: Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans. And it’s not about stopping terrorists:

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

“I have never heard of anything like this at all,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

“It is one thing to create special rules for national security,” Gertner said. “Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.”

It’s like the whole system has become corrupt or something.

I BELIEVE THROUGH WHAT ROBERT HEINLEIN CALLED “BAD LUCK.” How Did Rich Connecticut Morph Into One Of America’s Worst Performing Economies?

OR, YOU KNOW, CONGRESS COULD PASS A PRIVACY LAW: Supreme Court may need to decide how private a cellphone is.

More than 85 percent of Americans carry one, and the devices provide authorities with more than just a vast record of a person’s travels and phone calls. Modern smartphones have a memory capacity equal to that of a typical home computer in 2004, capable of storing millions of pages of documents.

“That information is, by and large, of a highly personal nature: photographs, videos, written and audio messages (text, email and voicemail), contacts, calendar appointments, web search and browsing history, purchases and financial and medical records,” Judge Norman H. Stahl of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit wrote recently. “It is the kind of information one would previously have stored in one’s home.”

Read the whole thing.

OOPS: Health Care Law Raises Pressure on Public Unions. “The so-called Cadillac tax was inserted into the Affordable Care Act at the advice of economists who argued that expensive health insurance with the employee bearing little cost made people insensitive to the cost of care. In public employment, though, where benefits are arrived at through bargaining with powerful unions, switching to cheaper plans will not be easy.”

JUST WORDS: The Hill: Six months later, State of the Union policy goals gathering dust.

DAMAGE CONTROL: Marco Rubio’s New Mission: Win Back The Republican Party’s Base.

SHOCKER: Fact-Checkers Give President Failing Grade On Keystone Claims.

WHAT IF YOU HAD A RALLY TO SUPPORT OBAMACARE AND NOBODY CAME? Well, almost nobody: “That means gatherings like today’s in Centreville — although the slow start here is probably not what OFA organizers had in mind. After a scheduling snafu over the start time, a few people showed up and left before it actually started. Just one volunteer stayed to help work the phone bank for the health law, and the event’s organizer bolted after 20 minutes.”