AT AMAZON, Father’s Day deals on Tools & Equipment.

Plus, take an extra 15% off on SOG Tools & Knives.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Cruz Grills FBI Director Over IRS Targeting Scandal: Director Ducks.

COURTS LOOKING LESS IMPRESSED WITH EPA OVERREACH:

FERC governs the electricity grid, and in 2011 Mr. Wellinghoff ordered transmission operators to pay retail energy users to reduce their power consumption at peak periods. This smart-grid program is known as “demand response” and can help run the system more efficiently and reliably. But FERC rigged this well-meaning incentive to harm traditional baseload power, especially coal but also natural gas and nuclear.

The problem is that Congress limited FERC’s mandate to the wholesale interstate power markets—that is, power supply. Authority over retail power demand is reserved to the “exclusive jurisdiction” of the states.

FERC regulated anyway, claiming that the demand-response program would “directly affect” the regional level and therefore the two distinct state and interstate spheres were essentially the same. Judge Janice Rogers Brown shreds that logic as a “metaphysical distinction.” She goes on to note that FERC’s rationale “has no limiting principle” because changes in one market inevitably beget changes in another. FERC could use the same rationale to claim jurisdiction over “any number of areas, including the steel, fuel and labor markets.”

The D.C. Circuit ruled FERC lacked statutory authority but then took a further step and declared the demand-response rule “arbitrary and capricious” on the merits, which is unusual. The courts generally defer to the judgment of regulators, and the Administrative Procedures Act blesses all but the most egregious overreach.

The bureaucrats should be held personally responsible for overreach. But this is a start.

MICKEY KAUS: Profile In Spinelessness. “In other words, after criticism from his underfunded challenger, Cantor ditches the ENLIST act. Then after a disapproving sentence from activist Frank Sharry, he tacks back and unditches it.”

IT’S NOT YOUR FATHER’S VIETNAM: “Most remarkable of all, my friend said that the Vietnamese people love Americans.”

WELL, I DON’T THINK MCCLOSKEY HAS FAKED UP HER NUMBERS, SO THERE’S THAT: Has Thomas Piketty met his match? Well, I think I might have met his match. She’s called Deirdre McCloskey.

I recommend her Bourgeois Dignity.

TODD ZYWICKI on “Operation Choke Point.”

The Justice Department’s “Operation Choke Point” initiative has been shrouded in secrecy, but now it is starting to come to light. I first heard about the program in January through this article and since then it has been difficult to discover details about it. It is so named because through strangling the providers of financial services to the targeted industries, the government can “choke off” the oxygen (money) needed for these industries to survive. Without an ability to process payments, the businesses – especially online vendors — cannot survive.

The general outline is the DOJ and bank regulators are putting the screws to banks and other third-party payment processors to refuse banking services to companies and industries that are deemed to pose a “reputation risk” to the bank. Most controversially, the list of dubious industries is populated by enterprises that are entirely, or at least generally, legal. Tom Blumer’s extremely informative post summarizing what is known to date about Operation Choke Point reproduces the list, which includes things such as ammunition sales, escort services, get-quick-rich schemes, on-line gambling, “racist materials” and payday loans. Quite obviously, some of these things are not like the other; moreover, just because there are some bad apples within a legal industry doesn’t justify effectively destroying a legal industry through secret executive fiat.

Especially ironic, of course, is that while the DOJ and bank regulators are choking off financial services to legal industries, they are also encouraging banks to provide banking services to illegal marijuana sales. . . . The larger legal and regulatory issue here is the expansive use of the vague and subjective standard of “reputation risk” to target these industries. In a letter to Janet Yellen, the chair of the Federal Reserve, last week, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling expressed concern over the growing use of “reputation risk” as a vehicle for attacking legal businesses. Is there any discernible principle as to why, for example, a payday lender or firearms dealer poses a “reputation risk” and an abortion provider does not?

I don’t understand why this isn’t simply a conspiracy to deprive people of their civil rights, and actionable as such.

FEMINISM: A Darwinian Dead-End?

Much of the lefty movement in the 1960s was led by “red diaper babies.” Would the 1960s have happened, if abortion had been readily available in the 1940s? See also James Taranto.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: The Hook-Up Truck.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Make An American Flag Out Of Bacon.

AMBASSADOR CHRIS STEVENS WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: Dem Rep.: We’re on Benghazi Committee to ‘Scream Bloody Murder’ over GOP Abuse. Okay, I stole that line from James Taranto, but it was worth stealing.

AT AMAZON, the Great Outdoor Savings Event.

Also, new releases in Music.

WOMEN SEEM WICKED, when you’re unwanted.

Related: Do you live inside a movie? “Needs used to be food, shelter and clothing. Today people have entitlements. . . . But the worst thing about the ‘supreme gentleman’s’ video rant is that it’s so funny. The rant sounded exactly like what it is: a bad movie, like Plan 9 from Outer Space. The horror notwithstanding, the rant was ridiculous. Yet there was nothing ridiculous about what ensued. Someone’s son had gone out and killed other children for essentially nothing. The greater tragedy is that maybe we as a civilization have forgotten our own humanity. The killer had turned himself into a cartoon; taken his flesh and blood and bone, plus something we once considered imbued with an immortal soul and converted it into a throwaway cardboard cutout character. Glamor has made real life too bland for us. But the price is high; in rejecting life we lose shame and we lose love; and all we have in the end is celebrity.”

I’VE WONDERED ABOUT THIS MYSELF: Does Donald Sterling Have Dementia?

TO ITS PROPONENTS, THIS IS NOT A BUG, BUT A FEATURE: New Jersey Law Would Ban Many Common Hunting Rifles.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Photos From Chicago’s Shuttered Public Schools.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

ED DRISCOLL ON OUR SCHIZOPHRENIC SOCIALISTS: Soft Pink Eloi on the Outside, Ravenous Morlocks in their Hearts.

GALLERY: Meet the Ragtag Vigilantes at War With Mexico’s Cartels.

AT AMAZON, Father’s Day Electronics Deals.

Plus, up to 50% off on Father’s Day Tool Deals.

EUGENE VOLOKH: Smart guns, electromagnetic pulse, and planning for unknown-probability dangers.

SPYING: Another Former NSA Lawyer Says He Wouldn’t Have Listened To Concerns About The Agency’s Surveillance Programs.

MORE ON THE Amazon vs. Hachette story. “Go ahead. More for those of us who understand business, and finances. I make between 70% and 35% for every ebook sold through Amazon. I make less than that through other venues (such as B&N) but still, I make immensely more off of every sale than any traditionally published author will ever see from Hachette, or any other publisher. I have print versions of my books I don’t make that high a percentage from, but you can order my books in any bookstore, and there are a few which carry a copy or two at any given time.”

SPYING: How the U.S. Could Escalate Its Name-and-Shame Campaign Against China’s Espionage.

WHAT MICROSOFT GETS WRONG about the tablet/laptop redundancy. My own take is that tablets are media-consumption devices, but laptops are media-creation devices.

ADVENTURES IN ILL-ADVISED OFFICE AVIATION. The Hercules Unbreakable RC copter looks cool.