JAMES TARANTO: Walmart and Welfare: Low-wage employers aren’t to blame for food stamps.

David Tovar, Walmart’s vice president for corporate communications, certainly earned his paycheck last week by preparing a devastating Harpers magazine-style annotation of a column by the New York Times’s Timothy Egan. Egan denounced Walmart for poor corporate citizenship, a metaphor that he seems to take literally: “As long as the Supreme Court says that corporations are citizens, they may as well act like them.”

(As an aside, that’s an embarrassing error Tovar doesn’t correct. The court has never said corporations are citizens. Presumably Egan has in mind the court’s findings that the government may not infringe on free speech merely because it comes from an incorporated organization. But the right to free speech–unlike, say, the right to vote or run for office–belongs not only to citizens.) . . .

This columnist has no particular interest in Walmart, apart from shopping there on occasion, but we’d like to take a deeper conceptual look at Egan’s argument, which is far from original to him (we rebutted a version of it last month).

The complaint about food stamps (and other welfare programs) seems to be an effort at a cross-ideological appeal. Normally the left not only doesn’t object to food stamps but claims that objections should be out of bounds: In 2011, as the Daily Caller noted, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews accused Newt Gingrich of “talking in this dog whistle like the white racists” because Gingrich had called Barack Obama “the food stamp president” owing to the explosion in the number of beneficiaries during his presidency. But all taboos are off when liberals can vilify a big corporation, especially one they see as déclassé.

The notion is that food stamps amount to a sort of corporate welfare for Walmart and other employers of low-wage workers. But that makes no sense.

Walmart, after all, does not set eligibility standards for food stamps, a program created by Congress and administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The benefits go to individuals with low incomes, whether they work or not. (True, Walmart is an indirect beneficiary of the food-stamp program in its capacity as a retailer of food. But its critics never give it credit for helping beneficiaries stretch their food-stamp dollars by selling food at low prices.)

Contrary to Egan’s needlessly repeated claim, Walmart does not force anyone to collect food stamps. Those who are eligible need not enroll in the program, and Walmart employees who are eligible would not lose their eligibility by quitting.

But it’s a Democratic talking point.

TOM BLUMER: Cloward-Piven Everywhere, And Barely Time To Think.

PHILIP KLEIN: The story isn’t that Hillary Clinton is rich, it’s that she’s an overrated politician.

Because the Clintons are often viewed in tandem, a lot of people have mistakenly transposed Bill’s political acumen onto Hillary. But in reality, her political career has involved winning a Senate seat in New York over a weak Republican opponent in a year that Al Gore carried the state by 25 points — and squandering a massive lead against candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic nomination battle. . . .

There’s no doubt that if Hillary doesn’t find a better way to answer it, questions surrounding her wealth could become an issue. Liberals have been arguing that it won’t be, because unlike Mitt Romney (whose wealth was damaging) she’d be supporting policies to provide more benefits to lower income Americans. But that isn’t necessarily going to save her from attacks on her hypocrisy. Just consider how much the story of John Edwards’ $400 haircuts damaged his whole “son of a mill worker” poverty-fighting persona.

Related: Millionaire Chelsea Clinton can’t bring herself to care about money. Well, not caring about money is one of the main perquisites of wealth. I remember one of my friends at Skadden saying “I don’t like this job because of the money. I like this job because I never have to think about money.”

YA THINK? Mark Halperin: If We Had A Republican President, The IRS Scandal Would Be A National Obsession.

CHANGE: America’s New Industrial Boomtowns.

THE PRESS PROTECTS ITS MONOPOLY, WITH HELP FROM THE STATE: Standing Committee of Correspondents: SCOTUSblog Not Deserving of Accreditation.

The journalists in charge of Capitol Hill press credentials for daily publications are standing firm on their decision to deny SCOTUSblog’s application, stating that the publisher fails the “fundamental test of editorial independence,” primarily because he and his law firm argue cases before the high court.

During a brief Monday morning meeting, Standing Committee of Correspondents for the Daily Press Chairwoman Siobhan Hughes, a Capitol Hill reporter for the Wall Street Journal, asked the four fellow journalists on the committee if there was a motion to reconsider the heavily scrutinized April decision.

Sorry, but I don’t see very much independence from the rest of the journolist herd.

LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY: Woman shown mercy after sex attack lies led to arrest.

A woman who lied about being sexually assaulted – leading to an innocent man’s arrest – has been shown mercy by the courts.

Tracy Kent was spared prison after a judge learned how she was a “damaged and vulnerable woman” with a catalogue of woes behind her.

Kent, 36, admitted she falsely told police she’d been sexually assaulted to get sympathy from her husband after a row.

She ripped her own clothes to make her story more believable, Teesside Crown Court heard today.

Her lies led to an innocent man being arrested, detained by police for three hours and bailed for six days. . . . The bogus report wasted 64 hours of police time at a cost of almost £4,000.

The arrested man spoke in a statement of his shock and the effect of the false allegation against him.

When you reward conduct, you get more of it. When you punish conduct, you get less of it. The victim here should sue her.

COMPROMISE STRUCK on cellphone unlocking bill.

During a meeting on Thursday, the committee will consider the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act, the committee announced Monday.

The bill, which would allow users to take their mobile device from one wireless network to another, is backed by committee members including Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

“Consumers should be able to use their existing cell phones when they move their service to a new wireless provider,” Leahy said in a statement, pointing to work over the last few months to reach a compromise on this bill.

“Our laws should not prohibit consumers from carrying their cell phones to a new network, and we should promote and protect competition in the wireless marketplace,” he said.

Grassley called the bipartisan compromise announced Monday “an important step forward in ensuring that there is competition in the industry and in safeguarding options for consumers as they look at new cell phone contracts.”

At the very least, it shouldn’t be a felony.

HE REALLY SEEMS TO THINK HE’S GOT A SHOT IN 2016: Biden Hits Hillary: ‘Don’t Hold It Against Me’ I’m Not Rich.

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Plus, top Kids & Family titles in Entertainment.

RICH ENOUGH? Daniel Drezner: Hillary Clinton Suffers From Status-Income Disequilibrium. So does most of the press, which explains a lot. But how much status do you have to think you have to feel that a net worth exceeding $100 million isn’t enough?

PARTISAN TAXMEN: IRS Chief Koskinen Has Donated Big to Democrats Over the Years.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: How World War I destroyed the “glamour of battle” and made pacifism glamorous. Though much of the World War I narrative is myth.

SO I GUESS ALL THESE LEFTY ATTACKS ON THE IDEA OF JUDICIAL REVIEW mean that they don’t expect to control the Supreme Court anytime soon. But if they do, expect an immediate 180-degree shift.

NANNY ALERT: Massachusetts State Agencies Warn Motorists against Transporting Illegal Fireworks into the State. Fireworks bans, as reported so many years ago by Henry Reed, were the entering wedge of nannyism.

LATEST HEALTH DRINK: Coffee flavored with butter and coconut oil. Sorry, it’s just pastured cream for me.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN is on how the VA scandal illustrates that government can’t be trusted to favor the common good.

NICHOLAS WADE says the social sciences are Voodoo Science.

I’VE BEEN GETTING SPAM-SLAMMED BY TENNESSEE DEMOCRATS AFRAID THAT DEMOCRATIC JUSTICES ON THE SUPREME COURT WILL LOSE THE RETENTION VOTE. Now it looks like they may have violated state election laws with this campaign. More here.

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but Tennessee’s constitution says that the Supreme Court is to be elected, and the system under which that retention vote takes place — though upheld by, ahem, the Tennessee Supreme Court — isn’t really an “election” as such, and was put in place by Democrats in the 1970s who saw a Republican wave building in the state and wanted to hang on to the Supreme Court. The thing about a retention vote, though, is that it’s an easy win if nobody makes an issue of it, but if people organize against you there’s no opposing candidate to point to and attack.

JOHN FUND: Uber Alles: The taxi industry tries to regulate a technology-fueled competitor.

Uber and Lyft are straight out of the “creative destruction” model that economist Joseph Schumpeter said was the essence of free markets. Competition can serve as a powerful force to improve the operation of economies. Uber has built a better, tech-savvy mousetrap for transportation services. Uber drivers’ cars are often newer and cleaner than traditional cabs, and customers can easily request upgrades. Drivers are screened, and a passenger can see a picture of the driver and his or her customer-service rating before getting into the car. Low-ranked drivers can be and are removed from the system, an accountability system that’s missing from most cab companies.

Many drivers with an entrepreneurial bent also like Uber because they can decide what hours they will work and use the service to earn a supplementary income if they happen to be unemployed. Armando Rojas, an immigrant from Colombia who now lives in New York City, told me he likes the flexibility of Uber “and the fact you are more your own man.” Having said that, he complains the company has lately added fees, which, combined with new taxes, make it almost as difficult for him to make ends meet as it would be if he were driving a cab.

The latest battleground between Uber and its enemies is in Cambridge, Mass., the home of both MIT and Harvard, powerhouses of scientific research. But the low-tech cab industry is pulling all the strings it can to get local government to kill innovation and unplug Uber.

Local government is mostly about rent-extraction.

DESIGN: An Ultra-Simple Tourniquet That’s Saving Soldiers’ Lives.

INSERT “LUBE” JOKE HERE: US exchange student pulled from Tubingen university marble vagina. “A US exchange student had to be delivered from a giant stone vagina in Germany after a dare went awry. German emergency services were called to make a safe withdrawal of the student from the marble sculpture of a vulva in the grounds of Tubingen University Institute of Microbiology.”

JUST $3.99 ON KINDLE: Bill Quick’s new novel, Lightning Fall.

HE DOESN’T SEEM BIG ON LEARNING FROM THEM: WaPo: Will Obama Repeat His Iraq Mistakes In Afghanistan?

MY CONFIDENCE IN NEW JERSEY’S JUSTICE SYSTEM IS NOT UNLIMITED: NJ Attorney General’s Office Trying To Push State Supreme Court To Overturn Precedent Requiring A Warrant To Access Phone Billing Records.