ROGER SIMON: Higher and Higher Crimes: Andrew McCarthy’s New Book Advocating Obama’s Impeachment.

The book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment. McCarthy is an excellent prosecutor, but there’s no chance we’ll impeach the first black President. Which is why we probably should have exercised more care in who we chose for that position.

THIS IS LOOKING MORE AND MORE LIKE A DEBACLE: We Lost Soldiers in the Hunt for Bergdahl, a Guy Who Walked Off in the Dead of Night. “For five years, soldiers have been forced to stay silent about the disappearance and search for Bergdahl. Now we can talk about what really happened.”

Related: “Unique and exigent circumstances.” Like the need to spin a news cycle away from the VA debacle.

UPDATE: The Hill: Bergdahl’s Comrades: He’s A Deserter.

SMART DIPLOMACY: “Offshore Balancing” A Recipe For More Conflict.

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 389.

MEDICARE OFFICIALS: Yeah, Our System Is Rife With Fraud, But Investigating It Would Be Too Much Trouble.

Medicare lost 6.7 billion dollars to fraud and error in 2010, according to a new inspector’s general report. Something close to that number is likely lost every year, and NPR explains how this happens: of the claims examined overall, more than half “were billed at the wrong rate or lacked documentation to justify the service.” Moreover, the investigation found that while some doctors bill for procedures cheaper than the ones they actually provided, many more billed for procedures that were more expensive than what they provided.

In light of the report’s findings, the inspector general’s office suggested that CMS should investigate those doctors who charge for more expensive procedures than they actually deliver. And how did the CMS respond to this shocking report? . . .

To put it simply: Medicare knows some doctors are ripping off taxpayers but lacks the ability or will to find out how bad the problem is, much less put a stop to it. If this is the glorious health care system we are building, God help us all.

First the VA, now this. I’m beginning to doubt whether government is all that good at this health care stuff.

DOWN TO THE WIRE: The Cochran/McDaniel race in Mississippi.

LIBERTARIANISM 3.0: The Wave Of The Present?

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS ON BERGDAHL: They Don’t Care About the Law, Get Over It. “The law is a suggestion to this crowd, and usually a nuisance. Law is something to be twisted and reinterpreted. When it stands in the way of progressive policies, it is something to be ignored. The singular theme of the Obama age is lawlessness.”

Related: “We have determined never to air the facts of this case.”

OH, NO. NOT AGAIN! The Tea Party Is Dead.

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JACLYN CASHMAN: Hillary’s Double-Reverse Bloody-Shirt Game.

UPDATE: Bob Woodward on Benghazi: ‘Serious, Unanswered Questions About This.’

VIRGINIA POSTREL: The War Between Authors And Writers. “I am, in other words, a bona fide author, even by the exclusionary standards of the Authors Guild. But the guild has for years actively undermined my interests while claiming in federal court to speak in my name. It channels commercial authors’ understandable anxieties about piracy threats and increasing competition into unjustified attacks on institutions and practices, such as fair use and computer indexing, that help us create new works and promote existing ones. It feeds authors’ fears while working to make it harder to write and sell books.”

ED DRISCOLL INTERVIEWS AMITY SHLAES, about her new book, The Forgotten Man Graphic Edition: A New History of the Great Depression.

CHINA: Tiananmen’s Silent Ghosts. “The 25th anniversary of China’s inspirational Tiananmen Square uprising — and subsequent massacre — will pass quietly in Beijing this week. Activists are jailed or under scrutiny, news is aggressively censored, and Chinese history books and textbooks have long been scrubbed of any reference to the student-led demonstrations that riveted TV viewers in the West.”

I AGREE, SHUT THE WHOLE THING DOWN: NFL: Last sports bastion of white, male conservatives.

Also shut down the NBA, which is basically a modern version of slavery.

FROM BILL QUICK, a life, remembered.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: How UCLA Lies about Affirmative Action. “A century from now, historians will marvel at how crazy things are in academia today– how such smart people could so massively disregard the truth. They will look upon our era the way we look upon Salem witch-trials accusers and slave owners.”

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Wisconsin Club for Growth sues state board over involvement in probe targeting conservative groups. Don’t skimp on the discovery.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD ON SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY: “If Burma was a success of the Clinton approach, Egypt and Libya were sobering failures. Except in Tunisia, U.S. efforts to promote democracy after the Arab Spring were largely unsuccessful, with Egypt a particularly dramatic case. But the greatest problem for Clinton’s legacy is likely to be the miserable aftermath of the U.S.-backed overthrow of Gaddafi. Here, advocates of the Libya mission failed to take seriously one of the most important lessons of Iraq: When you overthrow a dictator in the Arab world, expect chaos and violence to follow. The mess in Libya — besides leading to the Benghazi attack that has entangled Clinton in congressional investigations and conspiracy theories — strengthened the voices in the administration opposing the more activist Syria policy Clinton promoted. It also deepened public resistance to more use of American military power abroad. This is not the legacy Clinton hoped to leave behind.”

BYRON YORK: The Senate’s failed, irrelevant plan to throw $20 billion at Veterans Affairs problems. Shut the VA down, and give veterans private health insurance.

NOWADAYS, OF COURSE, LAW ENFORCEMENT IS SO POLITICIZED THAT PEOPLE ASSUME INVESTIGATIONS ARE POLITICAL: Insider Trading Investigation, or Political Revenge?

ROSS DOUTHAT: Prisoners of Sex.

The Santa Barbara case hints at one such source — the tension between our culture’s official attitude toward sex on the one hand and our actual patterns of sexual and romantic life on the other.

The culture’s attitude is Hefnerism, basically, if less baldly chauvinistic than the original Playboy philosophy. Sexual fulfillment is treated as the source and summit of a life well lived, the thing without which nobody (from a carefree college student to a Cialis-taking senior) can be truly happy, enviable or free.

Meanwhile, social alternatives to sexual partnerships are disfavored or in decline: Virginity is for weirdos and losers, celibate life is either a form of unhealthy repression or a smoke screen for deviancy, the kind of intense friendships celebrated by past civilizations are associated with closeted homosexuality, and the steady shrinking of extended families has reduced many people’s access to the familial forms of platonic intimacy.

Yet as sex looms ever larger as an aspirational good, we also live in a society where more people are single and likely to remain so than in any previous era. And since single people have, on average, a lot less sex than the partnered and wedded, a growing number of Americans are statistically guaranteed to feel that they’re not living up to the culture’s standard of fulfillment, happiness and worth.

This tension between sexual expectations and social reality is a potential problem for both sexes, but for a variety of reasons — social, cultural and biological — it’s more likely to produce toxic reactions in the male of the species.

Related: Our Starved For Touch Culture.

WELL, YES: Only an independent special prosecutor can get all the truth in the IRS scandal. But Eric Holder will never appoint one, because his primary role is to protect the Democratic apparat. And his secondary role is to harass the Republicans.

IT’S ALMOST AS IF THAT WAS THE PLAN: The Hill: Bowe Bergdahl’s release bumps VA scandal from political spotlight.