WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: The App I Used to Break Into My Neighbor’s Home.

AT AMAZON, discounts on The Best Books of 2014 So Far.

Also, rent eTextbooks for 80% off.

UPDATE: Sorry, first link was wrong before. Fixed now.

BOUGHT AND PAID FOR: Australian Government Proposes New Copyright Law: Basically Hollywood’s Wishlist.

I say, repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts!

MH17: The Good News And The Bad News About Anti-Aircraft Missiles.

SARAH HOYT’S WITCHFINDER is on sale for $2.99 in the Kindle edition. Snap it up before the price rises.

ED KLEIN ON THE WAGES OF “SMART DIPLOMACY:” How Our World Fell Apart. These people are constantly telling us how smart they are, but from diplomatic disasters to “speak-o” incidents, the evidence suggests otherwise.

WELL, THEY WERE LARGELY WRITTEN BY HOSPITAL LOBBYISTS: When Federal Privacy Laws Protect Hospitals Instead Of Patients.

CHIVALRY, IT TURNS OUT, isn’t entirely dead.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 443.

MICKEY KAUS: Has Obama Trapped Himself?

FOREIGN POLICY: It’s time to treat Vladimir Putin like the crime boss he is: Go after his money.

Last week, Putin’s wholly owned guerrilla subsidiary in Ukraine blew 298 civilians out of the sky, looted the belongings of the victims, let their cadavers rot for days in the hot summer sun, then violently obstructed OSCE monitors from inspecting the carnage. Talk of a forensic “investigation” at this point is just that — talk. Furthermore, according to U.S. intelligence, the Kremlin was evidently so pleased with this performance that it has dispatched more materiel to the culprits in eastern Ukraine. This new hardware includes rocket launchers, light arms, and tanks — only adding to the sophisticated weapons already sent in to aid the rebel cause. There are “indications,” U.S. officials say, that advanced Russian anti-aircraft systems — such as vehicle-mounted Buk (or SA-11) missile launchers, which defense and aviation analysts agree were responsible for downing MH17 — had been moved into eastern Ukraine from Russia and then back to the Motherland following the immolation of the airliner. The West has lately discovered something about Putin that Marina Litvinenko did eight years ago: his penchant for covering up his worst crimes. . . .

Let’s give Putin a clear choice: Either he can continue subventing and enabling the bloodletting in eastern Ukraine, or we can expose the enormous global network of offshore bank accounts, dummy companies, and real estate holdings that belong to him and his criminal elite. A mafia state should be treated as such. And information should once again be weaponized as it was during the Cold War. Moscow has already gotten a head start, by leaking compromised telephone calls between members of our State Department and between Eurocrats and NATO-allied state officials.

Investigative journalism has already yielded reams of copy on where some of the Putinist wealth is hidden, and how it got there. Much of it is in EU jurisdictions, which are subject to sanctions and/or concerted American diplomatic overtures. The U.S. Treasury Department, the CIA, and the FBI all know more about Putin’s and his cronies’ billions than they say publicly.

True, but I imagine Putin also has friends in high places.

A LOOK AT Marsha Blackburn’s friendly relationship with the music industry.

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Also, coupons galore in Household Supplies.

NEWS FROM THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF AUSTIN: Federal judge upholds activist Antonio Buehler’s right to film officers. “In an order filed Thursday, Judge Mark Lane denied motions to dismiss the case, finding that private citizens have the right to record officers in public places as they perform their official duties and that such a right had clearly been established in Buehler’s case. . . . Lane also declined to dismiss claims that the police department had failed to establish a policy and provide training addressing how officers should proceed when being videotaped or photographed by citizens.”

Note that you also have a due process right to record the police.

THIS IS HOW DESPERATE THEY ARE FOR A BASE-FIRMING DISTRACTION: The Hill: White House Doubles Down On Impeachment.

The White House on Friday doubled down on its talk that Republicans could try and impeach President Obama, hours after a top White House aide said they were taking these calls more seriously.

“I think there are some Republicans, including some Republicans running for office, hoping to get into office to impeach the president,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, which he described as “political sideshows.”

Earnest was asked to identify who those Republicans are, and he only mentioned Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee, but added there’s “no doubt” there are other voices also calling for impeachment.

Earnest also acknowledged that impeachment calls are being tied to fundraising.

Do tell.

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: The ObamaCare/IRS Nexus: The supposedly independent agency harassed the administration’s political opponents and saved its health-care law.

One of the big questions out of the IRS targeting scandal is this: How can an agency that engaged in such political misconduct be trusted to implement ObamaCare? This week’s Halbig v. Burwell ruling reminded us of the answer. It can’t.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Halbig that the administration had illegally provided ObamaCare subsidies in 36 insurance exchanges run by the federal government. Yet it wasn’t the “administration” as a whole that issued the lawless subsidy gift. It was the administration acting through its new, favorite enforcer: the IRS.

And it was entirely political. Democrats needed those subsidies. The party had assumed that dangling subsidies before the states would induce them to set up exchanges. When dozens instead refused, the White House was faced with the prospect that citizens in 36 states—two-thirds of the country—would be exposed to the full cost of ObamaCare’s overpriced insurance. The backlash would have been horrific, potentially forcing Democrats to reopen the law, or even costing President Obama re-election.

The White House viewed it as imperative, therefore, that IRS bureaucrats ignore the law’s text and come up with a politically helpful rule. The evidence shows that career officials at the IRS did indeed do as Treasury Department and Health and Human Services Department officials told them. This, despite the fact that the IRS is supposed to be insulated from political meddling.

We know this thanks to a largely overlooked joint investigation and February report by the House Oversight and Ways and Means committees into the history of the IRS subsidy rule. We know that in the late summer of 2010, after ObamaCare was signed into law, the IRS assembled a working group—made up of career IRS and Treasury employees—to develop regulations around ObamaCare subsidies. And we know that this working group initially decided to follow the text of the law. An early draft of its rule about subsidies explained that they were for “Exchanges established by the State.”

Yet in March 2011, Emily McMahon, the acting assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department (a political hire), saw a news article that noted a growing legal focus on the meaning of that text. She forwarded it to the working group, which in turn decided to elevate the issue—according to Congress’s report—to “senior IRS and Treasury officials.” The office of the IRS chief counsel—one of two positions appointed by the president—drafted a memo telling the group that it should read the text to mean that everyone, in every exchange, got subsidies. At some point between March 10 and March 15, 2011, the reference to “Exchanges established by the State” disappeared from the draft rule.

Emails viewed by congressional investigators nonetheless showed that Treasury and the IRS remained worried they were breaking the law. An email exchange between Treasury employees in the spring of 2011 expressed concern that they had no statutory authority to deem a federally run exchange the equivalent of a state-run exchange.

Yet rather than engage in a basic legal analysis—a core duty of an agency charged with tax laws—the IRS instead set about obtaining cover for its predetermined political goal.

Tyrannizing you with your money.

WILL HE SIGN? Bill allowing Americans to unlock smartphones passes, heads to Obama.

THERE’S A U.S. ENERGY BOOM, NO THANKS TO OBAMA: U.S. crude production has soared 70% since 2008 even as output on federal lands falls sharply.

SO READ THIS STORY AGAIN, AND THINK ABOUT ALL WE’VE LEARNED ABOUT NSA SPYING SINCE: Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win: Data-driven decisionmaking played a huge role in creating a second term for the 44th President and will be one of the more closely studied elements of the 2012 cycle.

I’LL BELIEVE IT’S A CRISIS WHEN THE PEOPLE WHO KEEP TELLING ME IT’S A CRISIS START ACTING LIKE IT’S A CRISIS: Globetrotting Harvard Prof Takes Break From Jet-Setting To Gripe About Climate Change Deniers.

ARMED DOCTOR THWARTS SHOOTER IN PHILY HOSPITAL, a gun-rights case is born. “The question of whether it’s a good idea to arm doctors and teachers and others who work in places historically targeted by mass shooters has been recurrent in the news since even before the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn. . . . For one thing, police are still trying to figure out why Silverman was armed in the first place since bringing a gun to work is against the rules at the hospital.”

Yeah, the rules didn’t stop the bad guy either.

USA TODAY: ObamaCare Court Defense Crumbles: Key Affordable Care Act architect tangled in his conveniently changing story..

In other words, Congress did mean to use the subsidies to overcome state resistance and pressure them to set up their own exchanges. That is precisely what the plaintiffs in Halbig asserted. Of course, Obamacare’s supporters didn’t anticipate that the backlash against the law would be so intense that 34 states would actually decline the subsidies, almost as an act of civil disobedience.

On Friday morning, an embarrassed Gruber insisted to The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn, “I honestly don’t remember why I said that… I was speaking off-the-cuff. It was just a mistake.”

But a second speech, this time in the form of audio, surfaced this morning in which he makes the same claims before the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco at around the same time. In it, Gruber actively acknowledges that should if states revolt en masse, they’d bring down the law. But, he said, that he had enough faith in democracy to believe that even the states that didn’t like Obamacare would eventually succumb to the “ultimate threat” that “if your governor doesn’t set up an exchange, you are losing hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits to be delivered to your citizens.”

Gruber would like everyone to ignore, not just the plain text of a law that he had a major hand in crafting, but also the plain meaning of his own words explaining why the law was written the way it was – not once, but at least twice.

Who is being “screwy” and “really criminal” here?

They took a crappy bill that they hadn’t read, they rammed it through on a party-line vote using a budget-reconciliation technicality, then they did an “I won” victory dance. Now it turns out the bill sucks and they’re blaming Republicans for not stopping them.

THIS SEEMS RIGHT: Israel must be permitted to crush Hamas.

I’M OKAY WITH THIS: Report: Hamas Morale Collapsing, Terrorists Flee IDF.