AT AMAZON, deals galore in the Fourth Of July Store.

Plus, shop the Football Fever sale. Note: By “football,” they mean “soccer.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Get your Master of Science In Narrative Medicine from Columbia University.

THE LESSON I TAKE FROM MARK TUSHNET IS THAT Tennessee Needs Its Own Nuclear Deterrent, at least so long as Barack Obama is President. Fortunately, there are quite a few nuclear warheads resident within the state, and they appear to be readily obtainable in a pinch, at least so long as we can find a few 84-year-old nuns.

From the comments: “Hell, he already invaded Georgia.”

TRANNY-HATER DAN SAVAGE: About That Hate Crime I Committed at University of Chicago. Doubleplusungood Savage. Don’t waste your time with logic or explanations — the point is abject, groveling submission to the collective.

I do like the term “tempest in a privilege pot.” But that’s what all of these affairs are, Dan. Not just the ones where you’re targeted personally. But I hope your example of heaping contempt on the spoiled complainers catches on. That’s precisely what they deserve. Every time.

CHANGE: Virginia Democrats Lose State Senate Majority.

WOW, THAT WENT FAST: Ghostbusters’ 30th Anniversary?

MY GUESS IS, HE THINKS IT WAS WORTH IT: This Man’s $26,000 Video Game ‘Man Cave’ Cost Him His Fiancée. Anyone who’d leave you over Super Pac Man is probably no prize.

WHEN MONEY TRUMPS DEMOCRACY: “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.”

UPDATE: I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that Common Core is the Windows 8 of curricula. . . .

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Blue State Policies Increase Income Inequality. “The income gap between rich and poor tends to be wider in blue states than in red states. Our state-by-state analysis finds that the more liberal states whose policies are supposed to promote fairness have a bigger gap between higher and lower incomes than do states that have more conservative, pro-growth policies. . . . According to 2012 Census Bureau data (the latest available figures), the District of Columbia, New York, Connecticut, Mississippi and Louisiana have the highest measure of income inequality of all the states; Wyoming, Alaska, Utah, Hawaii and New Hampshire have the lowest Gini coefficients. The three places that are most unequal—Washington, D.C., New York and Connecticut—are dominated by liberal policies and politicians. Four of the five states with the lowest Gini coefficients—Wyoming, Alaska, Utah and New Hampshire—are generally red states.”

You don’t want to be a science-denier, do you?

MORE EVIDENCE OF dissembling at the New York Times. Say it isn’t so!

WELL, IT WORKED FOR OBAMA: Hillary Wants To Be President Without Media Vetting.

WOMAN SUES after hospital posts her STD results on Facebook.

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TRANSPARENCY: Judge Says NSA Can Continue To Destroy Evidence.

SPACE: Senate’s NASA budget bill may hamper commercial spacecraft makers. Which is not an accident.

So to revisit, here’s our current space strategy: Step one: Rely on Russian rockets. Step two: Put in place sanctions that get Russian rockets cut off, forcing reliance on American commercial launchers. Step three: Put the squeeze on American commercial launchers.

SPYING: A Simple Plan to Impede the NSA Is Taking Hold: More e-mail providers are using encryption, meaning messages can’t be intercepted and read by the NSA or hackers. Well, to the extent that the encryption is secure, anyway. Which is largely unknowable.

AN ODE TO THE CIRCULAR SAW. “Think about this: The fact that a slippery, uncomfortable, loud, and heavy tool—it is about 18 pounds of motor and steel—was still a labor-saving device tells you how difficult it is to cut a house’s worth of lumber with a handsaw.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 395.

SOCIALISM: THE PROMISES AT THE BEGINNING ARE ALWAYS THE SAME. AND SO IS THE REALITY AT THE END: Venezuela Runs Out Of Drinking Water.

Venezuela has already run short of milk, sugar, and even toilet paper, and now supplies of drinking water have fallen dangerously low. Drought and poor infrastructure are the usual culprits, but the socialist paradise also owed tens of billions to international bondholders, and the Chávistas couldn’t afford to finance their debts and also import bottled water. So which did they choose? Venezuela, fearful that foreign creditors would seize its oil shipments, elected to pay $2.8 billion dollars in interest on foreign debt. . . .

Although in May the government began to pay down some of its bills, it still has over $25 billion dollars of debt outstanding to foreign companies that provide its medicine, operate its telephones, and import its food. Remain calm, however. Fervently denying that the temple of Bolivarian Socialism has credit problems, the Economy Vice President stated, “Venezuela doesn’t have debt with anyone. What we have are pending foreign-exchange liquidations, which we are reviewing.”

American college grads, rejoice: you’re not crushed by student debt. You just have a few pesky education-exchange liquidations to clear up.

Meanwhile, “friend of the poor” Hugo Chavez left an estate worth two billion dollars.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Morbid Fascination With The Death Of The Humanities.

I’m reminded of what Robert Heinlein said — quoted in volume 2 of the excellent William Patterson biography I’m reading now — about hippies: “Hippydom is not itself a culture (as the hippies seem to think) as it has no economic foundation; it can exist only as a parasitic excrescence to the ‘square’ culture.” So too with the academic humanities, which have largely squandered the moral and intellectual capital they once possessed by adopting the roles of adversaries to, rather than preservers of, the larger culture. This, too, turns out not to be sustainable.

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THE BERGDAHL DEBACLE: Ed Driscoll: World’s Greatest Spin Doctor Commits Malpractice On Himself. “It’s amusing to see the sad little man behind the giant face of Oz.”

DIANE DIMOND: The President’s Very Real Military Problem.

The president of the United States is the commander in chief over all branches of the military. It is a historic time, given that no military member goes public to speak negatively about the ultimate commander.

But now, with the scandal in full bloom, after the administration’s smokescreen about what triggered the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and after the president’s tepidly received speech at West Point announcing diplomacy will replace military responses henceforth, the time for silence is over.

Now career military personnel are speaking out through gritted teeth, insisting they speak for active-duty personnel who cannot talk without being punished. They are speaking about injustice, ineptitude and impeachment.

The era of silence changed after President Barack Obama’s super-secret prisoner swap — five “high-risk” Taliban prisoners from Gitmo in exchange for one U.S. solider held for nearly five years in Afghanistan. The fact that the soldier, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, walked away from his unit leaving a note saying he was “disillusioned with the Army,” did not support his commander in chief’s mission in Afghanistan and was “leaving to start a new life” left military types stunned that the president would stage a Rose Garden ceremony with Bergdahl’s parents.

“I’m just surprised the president was dumb enough to stand next to them,” Maj. Mike Lyons told me. “It’s another example of (Obama’s) reading the tea leaves wrong.” . . . In addition, these men (I was not able to interview any military women) wonder why Bergdahl is free while just across the Mexican border, a U.S. Marine still sits in a Mexican jail after being arrested two months ago. Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi insists that while moving across country, he accidentally crossed the border. His offense? He carried three (legally owned) guns among his possessions.

Forget what the politicians on Capitol Hill are saying about the prisoner swap. Forget the pontifications from the myriad talking heads on TV and radio. Now you know what members of our U.S. military are thinking and saying. They have lost all respect for their commander in chief.

In the world Obama comes from, nobody but Fox pundits would notice or care.

ANDREW MALCOLM: A Clueless President That Wears His Incompetence With Pride.

President Obama was completely surprised by the IRS scandal. Dumbfounded, in fact, that government workers would help his 2012 re-election campaign.

And the NSA scandal. Who could possibly anticipate citizen outrage over government monitoring all their communications?
Obama was clueless about the ObamaCare debacle, even days after its botched rollout dominated national news. Months after staff warnings of fundamental tech troubles within his namesake legislation.

And Obama only learned of the recent VA corruption scandal, fraud and tardy treatment for vets from the media, which had chronicled his original outrage over unconscionable delays fully six years ago. Delays he vowed then to fix should he become king president.

But, according to Obama, he was not stunned or surprised at all, not even mildly shocked by the nationwide, bipartisan outrage over his illegal swapping of the Taliban’s Terrorism Board of Directors for an American who not only volunteered for the U.S. Army, but then volunteered to walk over to the enemy busy killing his comrades.

And to see that man and his eccentric parents hailed in a special Saturday Rose Garden photo-op celebrating his release with an heroic tone. True, this prisoner-bargain controversy buried the VA scandal for the moment. But it’s also hijacked coverage of the president’s weeklong attempted reset of security policy in Europe.

“I’m never surprised by controversies that are whipped up in Washington,” the president claimed in a Thursday news conference.

Read the whole thing.