JOURNALISM IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Global press freedoms fall in wake of Snowden revelations: Report underscores that deterioration of media rights is reaching open societies.

THE 21ST CENTURY AMERICAN DREAM: From prep-school kid to millionaire porn star. “I’m part of the new era of porn. . . . We’re feminists, very sex-positive people. We’re not victims of rape, not drug addicts, we don’t have any daddy issues.”

Plus an escape from the degradation of . . . the mainstream magazine industry:

Then she landed an internship at the high-fashion magazine V. But that wasn’t for her, either.

“I’ve never been treated so badly,” says Akira, who has made films in which she has sex with seven men. “It was the most degrading thing I’ve ever done and I’ve done a lot.”

I can believe that.

READER BOOK PLUG: From G.K. Masterson, Stolen Lives.

SCIENCE: In Harsh Environments, Men Don’t Want A Pretty Face.

REPORT: Green Light For The BMW M2.

ROGER SIMON: Benghazi:  American “Liberalism” and the Mainstream Media on Trial.

WHY ARE PEOPLE SO GROSSED-OUT ABOUT stool transplants?

JOE PAPPALARDO: Why I Feel Bad for the United Launch Alliance (Sort Of).

FOR PUTIN, Eastern Europe Is Still Up For Grabs. Wars start because of insufficiently-guarded wealth.

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 358.

OUCH: DOJ’s “Operation Choke Point” Strips Porn Stars of Bank Accounts. “As a Tea Party activist, I am accustomed to the fact that our citizen-based groups are targeted. However, given how much time federal employees spend watching adult films during work hours, I would think that protecting the porn business would be a priority.” Heh.

HMM: Political Correctness As A Positional Good.

PC-brigadiers behave exactly like owners of a positional good who panic because wider availability of that good threatens their social status. The PC brigade has been highly successful in creating new social taboos, but their success is their very problem. Moral superiority is a prime example of a positional good, because we cannot all be morally superior to each other. Once you have successfully exorcised a word or an opinion, how do you differentiate yourself from others now? You need new things to be outraged about, new ways of asserting your imagined moral superiority.

You can do that by insisting that the no real progress has been made, that your issue is as real as ever, and just manifests itself in more subtle ways. Many people may imitate your rhetoric, but they do not really mean it, they are faking it, they are poseurs (here’s a nice example). You can also hugely inflate the definition of an existing offense (plenty of nice examples here.) Or you can move on to discover new things to label ‘offensive’, new victim groups, new patterns of dominance and oppression.

If I am right, then Political Correctness is really just a special form of conspicuous consumption, leading to a zero-sum status race. The fact that PC fans are still constantly outraged, despite the fact that PC has never been so pervasive, would then just be a special form of the Easterlin Paradox.

Sounds plausible. I’m thinking of drinking bottled water, which was something that cool, informed, health-conscious people did until everyone was drinking it, when it became a consumerist Menace To The Planet.

IT’S TELLING THAT THAT’S THEIR MAIN GOAL: The Counterattack: Has the Republican establishment finally found a way to vanquish the tea party? If the Tea Party is “vanquished,” there are two likely outcomes. One is that a lot of voters get demoralized and stay home. The other is a third party. Neither is a good thing for the GOP — if, that is, its goal is to win on a national scale. And while the Tea Party gets blame for loser candidates like Christine O’Donnell or Sharron Angle, the establishment has thrown up plenty of losers of its own. Meanwhile all the energy comes from Tea Party backed candidates like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Rand Paul. “Electability” is fine. But selecting for tractability isn’t.

ER, DOESN’T THIS PERCENTAGE COMPARE FAVORABLY TO MARRIAGES OVERALL? 30% of marriages with an ill spouse end in divorce: study.

SHARYL ATTKISSON: Internal Emails: State Dept. Immediately Attributed Benghazi Attacks to Terrorist Group. “A newly-released government email indicates that within hours of the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya; the State Department had already concluded with certainty that the Islamic militia terrorist group Ansar al Sharia was to blame. The private, internal communication directly contradicts the message that President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice and White House press secretary Jay Carney repeated publicly over the course of the next several weeks. They often maintained that an anti-Islamic YouTube video inspired a spontaneous demonstration that escalated into violence.”

More on that here.

ALL IS PROCEEDING AS I HAVE FORESEEN: Watch Obamacare Make Health-Care Costs Soar.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: The appalling Obama foreign policy team: The case of Tommy Vietor. Then, of course, there’s Ben Rhodes, whose chief qualification is that his brother is President of CBS News.

Related: Former Obama NSC spokesman on Benghazi: “Dude, this was like, two years ago.”

JAMES TARANTO: Vapor Madness: Nicotine nannyism and pot permissiveness.

We don’t mean to be a scold; this column has some sympathy with the arguments for marijuana decriminalization, and we certainly are not too high and mighty to make pot puns. (John Paul Stevens said last week he thinks marijuana should be legal. Ironic that he waited until after leaving the high court. Get it?)

Instead, we mean to call attention to the disconnect between nannyism about nicotine and permissiveness about pot. It’s especially striking given the push to regulate so-called e-cigarettes. Clines’s page last week cheered the Food and Drug Administration for imposing a series of new rules that it says “will lay the foundation to protect the public from devices whose risks and benefits are largely unknown.”

Among the new regulations, as summarized by the Times: “Manufacturers would for the first time have to tell the F.D.A. what ingredients and toxic chemicals are in their products, and the agency would decide, based on scientific evidence, whether the product could be marketed. . . . And companies could not claim that their e-cigarettes are less harmful than regular cigarettes without submitting scientific proof to the F.D.A.” And they disdain global-warming skeptics.

The Times wants more, though: a ban on “flavors and colorful packaging,” restrictions on TV marketing, and a limit on nicotine concentration.

The important thing about e-cigarettes is that they are not cigarettes. They contain nicotine but no tobacco. They don’t burn, and you can’t smoke them. They are battery-powered devices that produce a vapor, which quickly dissipates on exhalation and has none of the pungency of smoke. Using e-cigarettes and similar devices is known as “vaping” rather than smoking. . . .

It occurs to us that the “social acceptability” rationale also raises a First Amendment question. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that burning a flag is constitutionally protected “symbolic speech.” Here we have a ban on symbolic smoking, premised precisely on the undesirable symbolism–on its conveying the idea that smoking is socially acceptable.

Meanwhile, we can think of something else that looks like smoking: marijuana smoking, of which Americans, including elite opinion leaders like Francis X. Clines, are increasingly indulgent.

Yeah, it’s as if there’s more going on here than a concern for freedom, safety, or public health.

SPYING: Obama panel supports warrant requirement for e-mail, cloud content.

The proposal seems a bit vague to me. And there are critics:

Kevin Bankston, the Policy Director at New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, praised the White House report for recommending ECPA reform and urged legislative action. “Especially now that the White House has joined the chorus of voices calling for strong electronic privacy reform, it’s time for Congress to quit stalling and move forward on legislation to ensure that the police can’t secretly grab your private emails without probable cause,” he said in a press release.

But Bankston also questioned if the report’s timing may have been aimed at deflecting pressure from the ongoing debate about National Security Agency surveillance practices. Although he called the report a “helpful addition” to the larger consumer privacy debate, Bankston wondered if producing the report “was really the best way for the White House’s top tech policy minds to be spending the last three months” or “ultimately a distraction” from reforming the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance program.

I’m going with “distraction,” I think. Related: Apple, Facebook, others defy authorities, notify users of secret data demands. “Post-Snowden, there is a greater desire to compete on privacy.”

UPDATE: White House Data Report: 68 Pages But No Mention Of Spying. “It’s a generally balanced report that, curiously, doesn’t include any real reference to the large-scale domestic spying carried out by the National Security Agency — one of the biggest and most-impressive big data projects around.”

Meanwhile, you can compare the White House report with my proposals. I didn’t take 68 pages, and I did mention spying.

SCANDAL AT THE VA: Veterans Affairs puts 3 on leave; Congress threatens subpoena over destruction of ‘secret’ wait list.

Department of Veterans Affairs officials were threatened Thursday with a congressional subpoena if they fail to explain the destruction of a secret list of medical appointments at the Phoenix veterans’ hospital and preserve documents for an inspector general’s investigation.

Meanwhile, the agency placed three officials from the Phoenix facility on leave.

Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said he is prepared to call an emergency committee meeting to subpoena the information formally if he does not get answers by next week.

Whistleblowers say more than 40 patients died because of delays in treatment while in the Phoenix VA Health Care System.

That’s your caring government health care system, right there.

SPLC WANTS AMAZON TO EXCOMMUNICATE “HATERS.”

Given that the SPLC’s own “kill map” led to a shooting at the Family Research Council, I don’t think they have much room to talk. What’ll they do next, try to get books by pickup artists banned?

OUT FROM THE MERCATUS CENTER: The Economics of Medicaid: Assessing the Costs and Consequences. Free PDF at the link.

THE HILL: Boehner calls on Kerry to testify about email in Benghazi subpoena.