ACTUAL PUBLIC HEALTH PROBLEM DOWNPLAYED: Health Department trying to cover up bedbug problem at its headquarters.

The Health Department is trying to sweep a bedbug problem at its shimmering Long Island City headquarters under the rug, sources told The Post.

“We’re the Health Department, and they don’t let us know, they don’t keep us informed. I was told they don’t want mass hysteria — but people have a right to know,” a source told The Post.

At least five floors have so far been affected by the six-legged scourge, sources said, but agency higher ups are not being up front about the problem.

Sigh. How come we can’t get Bloomberg to pay more attention to bedbugs than to big gulps? Insufficient opportunity for nannying, I guess.

NEW POLL ECHOES OLDER POLLS: Most People Hate Obamacare.

And a reader emails: “I think that Obama (or whoever handles him) may turn around late next year and suddenly reactivate the employer mandate. Remember, he can only refuse to enforce it, he cannot undo it. So what’s to stop him from not enforcing it early, then right around the end of the year, say right after the elections, saying ‘okay now we will enforce it,’ and punish companies for not providing health insurance? He could even pick and choose which companies against which to enforce it! Would you warn companies of such a possibility?” Well, that’s the thing about executive discretion — you can’t count on it. But it’s not clear to me where Obama gets that discretion anyway. In fact, I’m not sure that the Uniformity Clause doesn’t block the granting of waivers anyway.

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GOOD QUESTION: How Did The NSA Let Itself Get Blindsided By Snowden?

CHARLIE MARTIN: 13 Weeks: A Boring Week Of Excitement. “Being bad can be fun. Why wasn’t it?”

KYLE SMITH: Shocked that Hollywood collaborated with the Nazis? It’s doing the exact same thing today with China. Is film an inherently totalitarian medium? Consider the cult of the auteur.

THIS ISN’T ALL THAT SHOCKING: Los Angeles Is The Model For Food-Truck Freedom, Washington, D.C. Is Protectionist Hell. It’s protectionist Hell for most things. That’s how they think there.

AL SHARPTON WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: “Twenty-five years after accusing an innocent man of rape, Tawana Brawley is finally paying for her lies.”

Plus: “Sharpton, now a national figure, has never apologized for his role in the hoax.” It made his career, and he’s rich and famous to this day because of it. And his sins are forgiven by all the best people, because he’s useful.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Rise Of Competency Testing.

Testing firms are offering new ways to measure what students learn in college. Their next generation of assessments is billed as an add-on – rather than a replacement – to the college degree. But the tests also give graduates something besides a transcript to send to a potential employer.

As a result, skills assessments are related to potential higher education “disruptions” like competency-based education or even digital badging. They offer portable ways for students to show what they know and what they can do. And in this case, they’re verified by testing giants.

More significantly, they mean that someone other than the degree-granting institution is certifying competence. Institutions have incentive to be lax regarding their students; external certifiers not so much. Then, at some point, people might start asking why you need the degree, when you’ve got the certification.

In other words, all is proceeding as I have foreseen.

LIBERTARIAN POPULISM: Actually, arguing that it’s unfair for government workers to make more than taxpayers is probably a good tactic.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, AFTER ALL: Giant Crab Robot To Explore Ocean Floor.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Youth Unemployment At 16.1%.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “Fast food workers struck earlier this week over their low wages, agitating for a hike to $15 an hour. This has led to a lot of nonsense being talked about minimum wages.”

GOOD QUESTION: Why Does FEMA Want To Know This? They’re getting ready for the Alien Invasion.

CONGRESSMAN KEITH ELLISON: “There’s plenty of money, it’s just the government doesn’t have it.”

HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? “You Turned Your Back on the Egyptians:” Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s top general, has stern words for the United States.

JOHN HINDERAKER: So, What Is the Benghazi Cover-Up All About?

COMIC RELIEF: “Brown bag” controversy reveals chink in the armor of language police. These people are illiterate idiots. They should be mocked mercilessly and never taken seriously. Likewise the even bigger idiots who listen to them.

UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes:

You are absolutely right when your write, “These people are illiterate idiots. They should be mocked mercilessly and never taken seriously. Likewise the even bigger idiots who listen to them.”

However, not only are they idiots, they reveal themselves, all of them, to be racialist to the core. They are literally not normal. Normal people, and by that I mean the great majority of people, do not read racial intent into colloquial expressions of longstanding that have never before had racial coloration. These people are not normal, and they should be dismissed as such. In truth, they are paranoid cranks.

Indeed.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Despite Administration Promises, Few Signs of Change in Drone Wars.

There were more drone strikes in Pakistan last month than any month since January. Three missile strikes were carried out in Yemen in the last week alone. And after Secretary of State John Kerry told Pakistanis on Thursday that the United States was winding down the drone wars there, officials back in Washington quickly contradicted him.

Smart diplomacy! Plus:

More than two months after President Obama signaled a sharp shift in America’s targeted-killing operations, there is little public evidence of change in a strategy that has come to define the administration’s approach to combating terrorism.

Boy, that statement hit its expiration date within minutes.

SAWED-OFF WHITE GUY’S NEWS SERVICE plays the race card.

HMM: Has LHCb spotted physics beyond the Standard Model?

GOOD: Islamists in Egypt face popular backlash.

It is no longer cool to have a beard.

Islamist president Mohamed Morsi is out. His opponents, a military-backed interim government of secularists, are in. And if you’ve got a beard — that most conspicuous symbol of Islamism in post-Arab Spring Egypt — you’re likely to get taunted on the metro, harassed in the souk and possibly even assaulted, according to conservative Muslims. . . .

“The treatment has changed for the worse,” said Osama Ibrahim, an imam at a Cairo mosque that caters to hard-line Islamists.

The nation’s turmoil has seeped into his daily life in the Cairo neighborhood of Ain Shams, he said. “On the metro, they call us names. People come up to us and say, ‘How are you, Sheik Morsi?’” he said.

He said his wife, who wears a face veil, saw men in their neighborhood yank the veil off another woman draped in black. At another point, local men stopped the couple’s car and barred them from entering a marketplace, Ibrahim said, because of the way they were dressed.

“You have to understand: The minibuses don’t even stop for me anymore,” he said.

Heh.

WOMAN FALLS OFF BALCONY, FEMINIST BLOG DECIDES IT’S ABOUT SEXISM, ANN ALTHOUSE NOT IMPRESSED: “Like any blog, a feminist blog must feed on the available news stories or die of starvation, but a feminist blog is committed to chewing things into a bolus of feminism. . . . Is that straight out of her notes from a Women’s Studies class? This platitude is the platform for many a feminist blog. Scan stories for minor details relating to gender, then highlight them, and make grandiose statements about the perpetuation of oppression. When the evidence is flimsy, lubricate the bolus with the notion of the subtlety of the oppression. It might be swallowable.”

If you have to have majored in gender studies to spot the sexism, it’s probably not really sexism.

EXPECT AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Arrest made in Kid Rock home invasion attempt, but not before singer issues warning. “I will not hesitate to shoot anyone who has myself or family in fear for our lives.”

#WARONMEN: Eyewitness: CA Officer Fatally Shot Unarmed Homeless Man After He Called Her ‘B**ch.’ Note that her name isn’t included in the story. Why not?