BOB ZUBRIN: Remembering Ploesti.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Never Try Jousting or Grilling While Drunk.

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Rawle Nyanzi, Alien Frontier. $1.99 on Kindle.

ZOOM: First Ride: 2014 Mission RS. “It’s common for a gas-powered superbike to exceed the Mission’s 160-hp figure, but 120 lb-ft of torque is 20 or so more than even the most powerful Ducatis. And all of it is available all the time, with no need to chase revs or gears. Thrust is simply a function of how far you twist the throttle. And you’d better hang on—this bike is powerful enough to wheelie on full throttle or, if you’re more restrained, run 0–60 mph in around three seconds. It’ll keep running all they way to a top speed of 150 mph. (It’s limited to that in the interest of range conservation.) . . . While you don’t feel it on the road, 540 lbs is a lot to push around a driveway, garage or parking lot. Recharge time on a standard 110v outlet is so bad that Mission doesn’t disclose it. When plugged into a 220v line with the available twin-charger system, the 17 kWh battery recharges fully in under two hours. Operating range is around 140 miles highway (Mission calls it “real world”) or 230 miles in the city.”

BRUCE SCHNEIER: The Public/Private Surveillance Partnership: “The primary business model of the Internet is built on mass surveillance, and our government’s intelligence-gathering agencies have become addicted to that data. Understanding how we got here is critical to understanding how we undo the damage.”

KEEP THIS IN MIND WHEN THEY OPINE ON THE ECONOMY: New York Times Sells Boston Globe For $70 Million; Bought It For $1.1 Billion. And maybe it’s just me, but this bit — “in recent years, the Times Company has been divesting itself of its noncore assets to focus on developing its primary brand, The New York Times” — sounds a bit like “their appeal is becoming more selective.”

The Globe went for less than a Red Sox outfielder.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 86.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: SEC Probing Terry McAuliffe’s Electric-Car Company.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD ON CLIMATE SCIENCE:

Global greens develop stupid, horrible, expensive, counterproductive climate policy agendas, and then try to use the imprimatur of “science” as a way to panic the world into adopting them. All too often, in other words, they fall prey to the temptation to make what the science says “clearer than truth” in Acheson’s phrase, in order to silence debate on their cockamamie policy fixes. A favorite tactic is to brand any dissent from the agenda as “anti-science.” It is not only a dishonest tactic; it’s a counterproductive one, generating new waves of skepticism with every exaggeration of fact.

We need a deep rethinking on the policy front. The problems of climate science need to be disaggregated. How do we help China and India move from coal to less carbon-intensive forms of energy use. How do we accelerate the US shift from coal to cleaner natural gas? How can we accelerate the shift from an industrial economy to an information economy in ways that allow the economy to grow and living standards to rise without making the environment worse off.

Environmental policy thinkers almost always begin with statist, top-down fixes, and quickly embrace crony capitalist ideas that involve subsidies for certain types of energy production, such as the ethanol abomination. Powerful economic lobbies then run with these ideas, perverting them until their environmental benefits take a back seat to their usefulness as tools of wealth capture.

This leaves environmentalists increasingly frustrated, increasingly panicked, and with increasingly little to show for it.

I dunno, quite a few of them have gotten increasingly rich along the way.

THE YOUTH DEMOGRAPHIC: “Highly overrated.” NBC wants to replace Leno with someone younger and “edgier.” Only problem is, nobody watches those guys. They do watch Leno. Is there a broader lesson here?

Also, in this economy, the old people are the only ones who still have money.

AT AMAZON, Kindle Deals For $3.99 Or Less.

Also, today only: Yamaha ATS-1010 Refurbished Front Surround System, $119.95 (60% off).

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Did White House Have Something To Do With Chattanooga Editor’s Firing? “We have no special information, but it’s significant that President Obama was in town that week, visiting an Amazon operation to tout his jobs plan. Johnson’s hard-hitting editorial drew unwelcome attention to that failed employment blueprint. And this is a White House that has called up newspapers and asked them to remove lines in stories.”

MICKEY KAUS: In August, Silence = Amnesty. “Both pro- and anti-legalization forces in the immigration fight will be trying to make their cases to House members–especially Republican members–during the August recess. But here’s the fundamental asymmetry in this debate–the pro-legalization forces don’t really need to show up. The anti-legalizers do. Pro-side Democrats can be distracted (by the need to defend Obamacare, for example) or they can just be lazy and unmotivated. As long as the antis are also unmotivated, legalization will win. Tie goes to the border-jumper. . . . I doubt even these GOP leaders themselves know what they’re going to do in the coming months, or maybe even what they want to end up with. But it’s clear they face pressure to pass a legalization bill–and that the pressure is internal, not external. If they let amnesty come to a vote, it won’t be because La Raza stages 360 events or Frank Sharry chains himself to the White House fence. It will be because big Republican donors, businessmen and consultants are whispering in their ears. The only force stopping them, on the other hand, is external: fear of a rebellion by the GOP caucus. And the main thing driving such a rebellion would be intense opposition from GOP voters back home.”

STUPID ISLAMOPHOBIC RED-STATERS! OH, WAIT: Muslim Woman Harassed Over Religious Headwear While Taking Massachusetts Bar Exam. Now if this had happened in Texas, say, the coverage would probably include regional slurs.

RODRIGO SERMENO: Will Rand Paul’s School-Choice Focus Win Minority Votes?

IF SO, THE GOP SHOULD RETURN THE FAVOR AT THE NEXT OPPORTUNITY — IN SPADES: Leahy Eyes ‘Nuclear Option’ Threat to Confirm Judges.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Where’s that 5% unemployment rate Obama promised by now?

WAIT, I THOUGHT AL QAEDA WAS ON THE RUN: US issues global travel alert amid threat of al Qaeda terror attack.

What, did somebody post another YouTube video or something?

JAMES TARANTO ON Drew Johnson’s defenestration at the Times Free Press.

Johnson has a defender in Betsy Phillips of Nashville Scene, an alternative weekly. A liberal and two-time Obama voter, Phillips calls the headline “rude and unwelcoming,” but she argues there’s nothing wrong with being rude to the president: “He is not our king.” She thinks the Johnson-TFP dispute emblematic of a clash among Tennessee Republicans between “the brash folks who tell it like they see it” and “the folks who think putting on a polite, reasonable face is important.”

But one could just as easily construe that as a justification for Johnson’s termination. If the TFP’s owners wish the Free Press’s editorial page to be a voice for “polite, reasonable” Republicans, they are within their rights, and it seems a sensible thing to do, to let go an editor who is a poor fit because he turns out to be too “brash.”

All that said, the TFP’s claim that Johnson was fired for violating editorial procedures is incredible. He tells the Daily Caller that the rule in question was imposed in reaction to the disputed editorial headline: “I was fired retroactively for violating a policy that was not in place when I violated the policy.”

The “policy” does sound like a pretense–an effort by management to duck responsibility for what was in fact a decision based on editorial content (a decision, we should note, that is likely to offend a substantial minority of the paper’s readers). And whether the policy was established before or after the fact, it is, quite simply, bizarre. What kind of newspaper gives a man the title “editorial page editor” while denying him the authority to write headlines for editorials?

My question for the editors of the Times Free Press — did anyone from the Obama Administration or the Democratic Party call about this headline before Johnson was fired?

HILLARY’S RESET HAS GONE ABOUT AS WELL AS THE REST OF OUR “SMART DIPLOMACY,” I GUESS: Why Russia Helped Snowden: 5 Grievances Against the U.S.

DIANNE FEINSTEIN: You’re Not A Journalist Unless You Get A Salary.

“SMART DIPLOMACY:” American diplomat kills man in car crash in Kenya, flees country, leaves grieving, pregnant widow penniless. “The driver’s name is Joshua Walde, an 11-year employee of the State Department. And I’d expect that’s all the information about him we’re likely to get.”

WILL SALETAN: Laws Are Not Enough: Stop telling us what the NSA can’t do to us legally. Show us real barriers to abuse. Public floggings might work.

FROM SARAH HOYT AND CHARLIE MARTIN, it’s Book Plug Friday.