YOUR JUSTICE DEPARTMENT AT WORK: Government Goes ‘Judge Shopping’ For Email Warrant Rubber Stamp, Gets Request Shot Down By Second Judge In A Row.

A THANK-YOU TO MARK RIPPETOE. So when I was off diving a couple of weeks ago, I took a nasty fall: I had all my dive gear on my back in the mesh bag when one of my Crocs (I had neglected to put down the heel strap) suddenly squirted off my wet foot like a pumpkin seed. I went down, but under control, and I could tell that if I hadn’t been doing all those squats and deadlifts I probably would have wrenched my back enough to put me out of action for a while; instead, I was just mildly sore. He’s right, you know, when he says it’s better to be stronger.

FACEBOOK IS INCREASINGLY IRRITATING: Facebook adds naggy “ask” button to profile pages. Perhaps coincidentally, I spend a lot less time on Facebook than I used to.

DISTANCING: Hillary Clinton slams Obama economy: ‘Dream feels further and further out of reach.’ “Obama is an unpopular president. Any Democratic candidate for president, especially one who served under Obama, will have to strike a tone that both calls for change and pays tribute to his achievements. Friday’s speech shows that Clinton is more inclined to call for change.”

CURE AN AFFLICTION, DESTROY THE SOLIDARITY OF THE AFFLICTED: How Technology Could Threaten Deaf Identity.

ALL ABOUT THE HIGHWAY FUNDING CRISIS. Not mentioned: Diversion of Highway Trust Fund money to sidewalks, mass transit, and other non-highway projects.

AT NPR, NOSTALGIA FOR SEGREGATION.

Meanwhile, the Brown anniversary is a good time to plug the excellent Separate But Equal. It’s a really well done film, with only one criticism: When it came out, Charlie Black told me “They got Sydney Poitier to play Thurgood, and then they found some SOB who looked just like me to play me.” That was kind of unfair.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 373.

MEGAN MCARDLE: To Roth Or Not To Roth:

What will the tax rate on your income be when you retire — higher or lower than your current tax rate?

Hard to say, isn’t it? We’re running some substantial deficits, and we’ve made some big promises to retirees. Those obligations will have to be paid for somehow, and by “somehow,” I mean “With higher taxes on someone.” What are the chances that you’ll be that someone? Pretty high, if you save a lot for retirement.

That makes a Roth sound like a pretty good bet. But unfortunately, the same logic that suggests higher income taxes in the future also suggests that a hungry-eyed Congress might settle on all those fat tax-free retirement accounts as a way to balance the books. What Congress giveth, Congress can taketh away. Can you really count on that income being tax-free when it’s finally time to collect it?

I don’t trust ’em.

WELL, YES: The Winner in Ukraine is China.

FRONTIERS IN FEMINISM: Paid Menstrual Leave.

AT AMAZON: HDTVs under $200.

Also, Up to 60% off Men’s Athletic and Outdoor Shoes.

ANOTHER CLIMATE SCANDAL? “The lead story in The Times of London today declares ‘Scientists in Cover Up of “Damaging” Climate View.’ The Times thinks the story, concerning peer reviewers suppressing a scientific paper purely for political reasons, may amount to the next ‘Climategate,’ on par with the scandal of the leaked emails back in 2009.”

If you want to be trusted as nonpolitical experts, don’t act like lying partisans.

WAS BRENDAN EICH DEFENESTRATED so that they could add Digital Rights Management to Firefox? “Eich stood firmly in the way of Mozilla incorporating DRM into Firefox. Now that he’s gone, and his technological authority with him, Mozilla immediately caved to Hollywood interests.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Stephen L. Carter: Dear Class of 2014: Thanks For Not Disinviting Me.

JAMES TARANTO: Give Peace a Chance: Echoes of the 2000s Democrats in the “Republican civil war.”

The “Republican civil war” has been a favorite media story line of the Obama years, but lately it’s become hard to sustain. Now John Dickerson, who covers politics for both CBS News and Slate.com, is asking: “Why Is the GOP’s Civil War So Civil?”

“At least on the Senate battlefield,” Dickerson writes, “the much-anticipated and contentious intraparty fights are not happening.” That’s in contrast with 2010, when Tea Party candidates in Colorado, Delaware and Nevada lost what were thought to be winnable races. The same is often said to have happened in 2012, but the case is considerably weaker. Several “electable” Republicans also lost that year, and the notorious Todd Akin was not a Tea Party guy.

So far in this year’s Senate primaries, there’s been more amity than acrimony between the establishment and the Tea Party. Dickerson focuses on two of them: in Nebraska and North Carolina. In the former–for an open seat considered safely Republican–Ben Sasse, the Tea Party favorite, won. In the latter, the establishment’s man, state House Speaker Thom Tillis, prevailed and will take on Sen. Kay Hagan, the Democratic incumbent. Professional handicappers call that contest a toss-up.

If Sasse–whose name rhymes with “grass,” as we learned the other day thanks to MSNBC–and Tillis are on opposite sides of the Republican divide, neither gives the other side much to object to. As Dickerson notes, Sasse is perfectly electable; he “has political skill, an Ivy League education, and credentials as a Bush administration veteran.” He’s not a witch. As for Tillis, he “was not so [ideologically] objectionable that he kept movement conservatives from falling in line quickly behind him.”

It’s the same story in other states with upcoming primaries.

Meanwhile, the “most botched House race of 2014” was by a Democrat in Florida.

DARK MONEY, Democrat Style.

STIFF COMPETITION: What Is The Worst Agency In Washington, D.C. Today?

POPEHAT ON SPYING:

I had an insight just now.

We know that the NSA collects all sorts of information on American citizens. We know that the FBI and the CIA have full access to this information. We know that the DEA also has full access to that data. And we know that when the DEA busts someone using information gleaned by the electronic panopticon of our internal spy organization, they take pains to hide the source of the information via the subterfuge of parallel construction.

The insight is this: our government is now dealing with the citizenry the same way that the British dealt with the Nazis: treating them as an external existential threat, spying on them, and taking pains to obfuscate the source of the information that they use to target their attacks.

Yeah, Godwin’s law, whatever, whatever. My point is NOT that the NSA is the same as the Nazi party (in fact, my argument has the NSA on the opposite side). My point is that the government now treats ordinary civilians as worthy of the same sort of tactics that they once used against the Nazis.

Charming.

TRANSPARENCY: IRS Stonewalling FOIA Request Surrounding Correspondence With Democratic Members of Congress.

On May 21, 2013 the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent the IRS a Freedom of Information Act request asking for “any and all documents or records, including but not limited to electronic documents, e-mails, paper documents, photographs (electronic or hard copy), or audio files,” related to correspondence from January 1, 2009 and May 21, 2013 between thirteen different Democrat members of Congress and top IRS officials. Those officials include former IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman, former Commissioner Steven Miller, senior IRS official Joseph Grant and former head of tax exempt groups Lois Lerner. Members of Congress named in the request include Sen. Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Reid (D-NV), DSCC Chair Sen. Bennet (D-CO), Sen. Landrieu (D-LA), Sen. Pryor (D-AR), Sen. Hagan (D-NC), Sen. Begich (D-AK), Sen. Shaheen (D-NH), Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO), Sen. Franken (D-MN), Sen. Warner (D-VA), Rep. Braley and Rep. Peters (D-MI).

Since that request was received by the IRS nearly one year ago, IRS Tax Law Specialists Robert Thomas and Denise Higley have asked for more time to fulfill the request six times.

January of 2017 looks do-able.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON JILL ABRAMSON AND CLARENCE THOMAS:

The angry black man. The classic stereotype of a black man. And now, replaced by a reputedly amiable black man, Jill Abramson is exposed to the world as the classic stereotype of a successful woman: the bossy bitch.

The arc of a generation is long, but it bends toward poetic justice.

Indeed.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: The Emerging Junta: The IRS’s illegal actions — and its efforts at cover-up — undermine the foundations of our government. “The IRS scandal is not a standalone issue but comes at a time when the Democratic party is seeking to radically expand the power of the federal government to regulate political speech; we can safely assume that the same people who were using the IRS’s political-speech regulations for political ends will have precisely the same motives and precisely the same opportunity to use other political-speech regulations for precisely the same political ends: to benefit their allies and persecute their enemies. So committed are the Democrats to keeping their critics under the thumb of federal police powers that they have introduced an amendment in the Senate that would effectively repeal the free-speech provisions of the First Amendment, those having proved inconvenient to Democrats.”

ROGER SIMON: Looking for Mr. or Ms. ‘Perfect Republican.’

BRING BACK DDT: Chikunguya Virus Spreads To Florida.