WANT TO LOOK YOUNGER? Have More Sex!

SPACE: Kickstarter Campaign Wants to Send Tiny Satellites out of Earth Orbit.

TURKEY DESCENDING: UPDATES FROM THE STREET. “The police use roaming thugs as muscle; judges openly flout orders of higher courts.”

MICHAEL BARONE ON OUR LOUSY SYSTEM FOR PICKING PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES.

SHIKHA DALMIA: Without big changes, Detroit won’t have a second act.

POST-APOCALYPTIC WATCHES that detect radiation.

JOHN FUND: Name That Bureaucrat: IRS Scandal Shows That Decisionmakers Must Be Held Accountable. “It’s taken nearly three months to begin to peel back the onion and discover the chain of command in the IRS scandal. One of the bureaucracy’s biggest weapons against scrutiny and accountability is its ability to hide who actually makes decisions and who should be held responsible for them. Back in May, former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman didn’t even pretend to know how the scandal had happened.”

On the other hand, some people seem fine with bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility: “There are nearly 100,000 people working for the IRS. The IRS has an Inspector General who keeps busy and issues reports. When the Inspector General issues a report there is always something that somebody, somewhere has done wrong.”

Related: Tax Court: IRS Must Sign Interrogatories Under Oath, Just Like Taxpayers.

A.P. FACT CHECK: “Another year, another round of exaggeration from President Barack Obama and his administration about health insurance rebates.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Obama To Detroit: Drop Dead.

This is where blue governance has brought Detroit in the end: not even a liberal Democratic administration will step in to save the pensions of thousands of public workers and African Americans, condemning countless innocents to having their pensions and health benefits gutted in bankruptcy court.

Blue model defenders will point to the cruel exodus of General Motors, the unjust outsourcing of American manufacturing, and the general unfairness of life in the big city as the culprits in the slaying of Detroit. But these champions of the marginalized should keep a few facts in mind.

Detroit has been spending on average $100 million more than it has taken in for each of the past five years. The city’s $11 billion in unsecured debt includes $6 billion in health and other retirement benefits and $3 billion in retiree pensions for its 20,000 city pensioners, who are slated to receive less than 10 percent of what they were promised. Between 2007 and 2011, an astounding 36 percent of residents lived below the poverty line. Last year, the FBI cited Detroit as having the highest violent crime rate for any major American city. In the first 12 years of the new century, Detroit lost more than 26 percent of its population.

And now Detroit’s desperate request for a bailout has been turned down by the Obama White House.

Progressive politicians, wonks, and activists can only blame big corporations and other liberal bogeymen for so long. The truth is that corrupt machine politics in a one-party system devoted to the blue social model wrecked an entire city and thousands of lives beyond repair. The sooner blues come to terms with this reality, the greater chance other cities will have of avoiding Detroit’s fate.

Yep. Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.

REMEMBER HOW I’VE SAID THAT A CARTER-RERUN WOULD BE THE BEST-CASE SCENARIO FOR OBAMA’S PRESIDENCY? WELL, NOW THERE’S THIS: Jimmy Carter: US “has no functioning democracy.”

MCCLATCHY: Obama boasts of health care savings, but costs likely to rise for many.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 71.

STEVEN CROWDER: PURE DETROIT.

PEGGY NOONAN: A Bombshell In The IRS Scandal.

The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been established—but to the office of the chief counsel.

That is a bombshell—such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in the middle of a committee room, some seemed unaware of the implications of what their investigators had uncovered, one pretended that the investigation should end if IRS workers couldn’t say the president had personally called and told them to harass his foes, and one seemed to be holding a filibuster on Pakistan.

Still, what landed was a bombshell. And Democrats know it. Which is why they are so desperate to make the investigation go away. They know, as Republicans do, that the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency.

Hence their attack-the-messenger strategy.

A PROPOSAL FROM IOWAHAWK: Turn Detroit into a national park, to show our kids the wonders of “Government Help.”

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE, ATTACK-THE-WHISTLEBLOWER EDITION: Watchdog decries ‘unprecedented’ treatment by Dems at IRS hearing.

The government watchdog who issued the report that found the IRS was targeting conservative groups was turned into a punching bag by Democrats in the second half of a tense hearing Thursday, leading Inspector General J. Russell George to chide lawmakers for their attacks on his office.

“This is unprecedented,” he said of his treatment before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee at the end of the hearing. The first half of the hearing was devoted to testimony from IRS officials who claimed higher-ups in Washington, D.C., were involved in applying additional scrutiny to Tea Party and other groups.

But the second half featured George and his associates, and ended up becoming a forum for Democratic lawmakers to accuse him of effectively ignoring potential signs that liberal groups may have been targeted as well. They pointed in part to IRS documents that suggest “progressive” groups may have been singled out.

George, though, said he didn’t see one of those packets until last week. He said he was “disturbed” it took so long for the IRS to produce the documents.

Hey, it took a while to make them look convincing. . . . And it’s obviously racist of the Democrats to go after a black man this way.

More:

Earlier Thursday, a veteran IRS worker testified that officials from a Washington office led by a political appointee intervened in the screening of Tea Party applications, saying publicly for the first time the IRS chief counsel’s office was involved in the controversial program.

Carter Hull, a recently retired tax law specialist, had earlier come under scrutiny after an employee in the Cincinnati IRS office told congressional investigators that he had been micro-managing her review of Tea Party groups’ applications for tax-exempt status. But Hull revealed that he, too, was taking orders from up the chain of command.

Hull specifically said he was told to forward documents to an adviser for embattled IRS official Lois Lerner — who first revealed the targeting of Tea Party groups and has since refused to answer lawmakers’ questions. But Hull said he was then told to send documents to the Office of Chief Counsel for their review — which is led by political appointee William Wilkins.

Reminder: Back in 2009, Obama “joked” about auditing his enemies.

WHY THE RIGHT IS DIVIDED: The “Snob Factor” Among Conservatives. T. Coddington van Voorhees VII says, “oh, pish posh.”

NOT EVEN ALL DRUNK WHITE PEOPLE: Chris Matthews: ‘I’m speaking now for all white people.’

INDEED: Charles Barkley ‘Agrees’ With Zimmerman Verdict, Hits Media For Giving ‘Racists’ A ‘Platform To Vent Ignorance.’

Related: The Zimmerman Case: A Touch Of Sanity.

HE’S AN ERRAND BOY, SENT BY GROCERY CLERKS: Paul Krugman’s Nasty and Inane Attack on ‘Libertarian Populism.’

WELL, SOMETHING BLOWS: Obama vows to ‘blow through’ GOP criticism of ObamaCare.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: IRS Scandal ‘Left Cincinnati And Is Now In DC.’

LEX LUTHOR LOOKS AT WATCH, SHAKES HIS HEAD: Alison Grimes Is Key to Kentucky Democrats’ Posterity.

MICKEY KAUS: Can GOPs fool voters using this one weird trick?