21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: I Have Dated Several Crack Dealers. “Crack dealers tend to approach me. I’m not chasing them down. It’s not like I ever said to myself, ‘I’m going to date crack dealers now!’ But when you meet one, you meet a lot of others. And then you just start dating.” I’m sure the pickup-artist crowd could find a lot to say about this piece.

HELEN WAS ON THE ANDREA TANTAROS SHOW TODAY, talking about her book, Men On Strike. You can listen to the podcast here.

REALLY? REALLY? RNC Operatives Join Holder’s Campaign Against Texas, Several Other States.

UPDATE: Hofeller says this is “unequivocally false.” Stay tuned.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Asking Questions About Lois Lerner’s Summer Vacation.

SINCE THEY CAN’T BE DRAFTED, THEY’RE NOT AS EXCITED ABOUT RISK-FREE WAYS TO KILL THE ENEMY? Why Do Women Disapprove of Drone Strikes So Much More Than Men Do? As a commenter says: “First thing that comes to mind is that since men are more likely to be soldiers, they’re more likely to think about it from the soldiers’ perspective, whereas women are more likely to just think about it from the civlians’. So women hear about drone strikes and think of civilian deaths, men hear about it and think about how soldiers aren’t being sent in because drones are instead.”

Alternative, evolutionary-psychology theory: Men who kill remotely via drone don’t demonstrate their genetic fitness in combat.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: US to Democrats: No, Really, We’re Okay with Some Abortion Restrictions.

A recent WSJ/NBC news poll has some data that might shock Democrats: Wendy Davis and her sneakers aside, a plurality of Americans support 20 week abortion bans of the kind passed in Texas. Forty-four percent of respondents said they would support the ban, with 37 percent opposed. And the numbers get more interesting the further down you dig. . . .

And, of course, when you expand the field of questioning from 20-week bans to late-term restrictions in general, the support gets even higher. As Gallup found, “One of the clearest messages from Gallup trends is that Americans oppose late-term abortion.”

In our post on the Texas abortion controversy we noted that “to many voters this will look like a law aimed at making abortion ‘safe, legal and rare.’” It seems we were right. While a lot of abortion policy is contentious and divisive, there is a clear plurality of Americans who both support keeping abortion legal under some circumstances and also support bills that impose some late-term restrictions and improve the safety of abortion centers.

This is why Republicans should encourage the Dems to make Wendy Davis their hero. The best thing you can do is to undermine your opponent by forcing them to defend a position that the country as a whole doesn’t like, but that their base demands. The Democrats thought they were doing that to the Republicans with gun control, but as it turned out, they were misinformed.

MOSTLY OF ITS VOTERS’ AND POLITICAL CLASS’S OWN MAKING: Megan McArdle: How Detroit Drowned In A Sea Of Troubles.

AT AMAZON, Markdowns On Bestsellers In Kitchen Utensils And Gadgets.

Also, up to 20% off handbags, wallets, and more.

And, very cool: Today Only: Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 Quadricopter with Extra Battery. But when can I get my own armed drone? All the cool kids are getting them . . . .

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 78. Stunning graphic.

DAVID FREDDOSO: Congressional Map Shows How Wednesday’s NSA Vote Cut Across Partisan Divides.

PEGGY NOONAN: Fortress IRS: Agency stonewalling could permanently harm Americans’ faith in government.

In all the day-to-day of the IRS scandals I don’t think it’s been fully noticed that the overall reputation of the agency has suffered a collapse, the kind from which it can take a generation to recover fully. In the long term this will prove damaging to the national morale—what happens to a great nation when its people come to lack even rudimentary confidence in the decisions made by the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government? It will also diminish the hope for faith in government, which whatever your politics is not a good thing. We need government, as we all know. Americans have a right to assume that while theirs may be deeply imperfect, it is not deeply corrupt. What harms trust in governmental institutions now will have reverberations in future administrations.

The scandals that have so damaged the agency took place in just the past few years, since the current administration began. And it is not Republicans on the Hill or conservatives in the press who have revealed the agency as badly managed, political in its actions, and really quite crazily run. That information, or at least the early outlines of it, came from the agency’s own inspector general.

But the point is that it was all so recent. It doesn’t take long to crater a reputation. . . . This White House is careless with the reputation of government. They are a campaigning organization, not a governing one.

I warned Obama — and, more significantly, the career folks at the IRS — about this way back in 2009. It appears that warning was insufficient.

AS WELL THEY MIGHT: Republicans Dispute Federal Power To Regulate Abortion.

As Dave Kopel and I wrote over a decade ago, Congress lacks power to regulate abortion under the Commerce Clause, a conclusion that is certainly strengthened by the Commerce Clause portion of the Sebelius opinion. Of course under Sebelius, I suppose you could tax late-term abortions. . . .

There’s a more recent take on this topic here. And note that the folks at ThinkProgress are apparently fine with regulating abortion under the Commerce Clause.

JOSE GUARDIA BUSTS THE NEW YORK TIMES for yellow journalism in its coverage of the Spanish high-speed train crash.

MARK CUNNINGHAM: Cheat sheet for the poverty tourists.

JAMES TARANTO: Losing the Plot: Why coverage of Obama is so boring.

The problem with the story that Obama and his press sycophants tell is that it is so boring and stupid. It reduces the president and his supporters to stick-figure caricatures of good and evil. (We almost said comic-book characters, but that would be unfair to comic books.) We could fill a column with examples every day, but here are a few that have come across our desk just in the past 24 hours:

National Journal’s Norm Ornstein published a column yesterday titled “The Unprecedented–and Contemptible–Attempts to Sabotage Obamacare.” Although allowing that opposition to ObamaCare is “not treasonous”–a good thing, as a substantial majority of Americans would be traitors if it were–it is “sharply beneath any reasonable standards of elected officials.” (What does “sharply beneath” even mean?)

The second paragraph of Ornstein’s column is comedy gold: “I am not the only one who has written about House and Senate Republicans’ monomaniacal focus on sabotaging the implementation of Obamacare–Greg Sargent, Steve Benen, Jon Chait, Jon Bernstein, Ezra Klein, and many others have written powerful pieces. But it is now spinning out of control.”

Ornstein acknowledges that what he has to say is utterly unoriginal, and to prove it he cites a long list of partisan hacks (all male, by the way; somebody alert Alicia Shepard!) who’ve said the same thing. Then he deploys a histrionic cliché in an attempt to justify the shopworn blather that follows.

It’s not just Obama who is boring. But read the whole thing.

KENTUCKY: After awkward initial rollout, Alison Lundergan Grimes repackages Senate campaign.

ROLL CALL: Republicans to Eric Holder: Don’t Mess With Texas on Voting Rights.

THE NEW REPUBLIC IS LOSING CREDIBILITY: How Not to Correct the Record – TNR Edition. Like MSNBC and The Nation, they’re mostly into The Narrative nowadays.