READER BOOK PLUG: From Stan Smith, The Search For Bryant Hunter.

DDT IS OUTLAWED, SO YOU CAN’T USE THAT. 8 Ways To Beat Bugs This Summer.

HOPEY-CHANGEY: 7 mass surveillance tools your local police might be using.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Shouted Down At Portland State.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: How Student Debt Keeps Young People From Buying Houses. “Bad education debt has created a class of adults who will probably have trouble getting credit for quite some time. And until that changes, they’ll be renters.”

Wow, who could have seen this coming?

WELL, THAT SEEMS KIND OF SHADY: Tennessee Judiciary Unilaterally Exempts Self From Open Records Law.

ISRAEL: A Jewish State In An Arab World.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 370.

WAIT, I THOUGHT THE TEA PARTY WAS DEAD? Eric Cantor’s tea party opponent in Va. primary may be picking up momentum.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Why Inequality’s A Loser For Democrats:

New York’s new mayor swept into office on a campaign against inequality. President Barack Obama has made any number of speeches about the rich who don’t pay their fair share. And yet, nationwide, this has not translated into big gains for the Democrats who are pushing it. Why is a phenomenon that keeps being heralded as the defining issue of our time such weak tea at the ballot box?

As a new article from Bloomberg News explains, Democrats aren’t benefiting from hammering on inequality because almost all the areas with the worst inequality are already controlled by Democrats.

That’s not an accident. Democratic policies promote inequality. And that’s not an accident either.

You can make a case that the difference between the Republican and Democratic politics of wealth lie in the difference between who tends to make up “the wealthy” in their districts. The rich of America’s affluent urban areas tend to be the beneficiaries, one way or another, of a global tournament economy in which markets are often close to “winner take all,” and vast sums can flow to people who are just a little bit better than their competitors. The wealthy in Republican districts, on the other hand, are more likely to be competing in local or national markets, not glamour industries, where sales are ground out one at a time. Because the sums involved are smaller, the wealth gap is also smaller — and business owners are less likely to be sympathetic to the idea that their success has a huge luck component.

Democratic policies are the warfare of the very-rich, allied with the poor, against the middle class and the petty-rich.

TRADEMARK LAW SEEMS INCREASINGLY POLITICIZED. Eugene Volokh comments: “My tentative view is that the general exclusion of marks that disparage persons, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols should be seen as unconstitutional.”

POSTCARDS FROM VENEZUELA: “The guardsmen beat them with their fists and the butts of their rifles, taking away their personal belongings before setting fire to the car.” If I lived in Venezuela, I’d find out where the guardsmen lived, and shoot them when they walked out the door in the morning. That is, of course, the proper response to dictators and their minions of every stripe, even Hollywood-backed socialists.

AT AMAZON, the Great Outdoor Savings Event.

Also, new releases in Music.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Jobless In Two Days. “Like so many institutions, Quinnipiac University has struggled at times to maintain its financial footing since the recession. And like their counterparts elsewhere, Quinnipiac professors have borne the brunt of that struggle, seeing a salary freeze and stalled hiring along the way. But faculty members say that no one saw last week’s rapid-fire round of full-time faculty cuts coming, and they’re still ‘reeling’ from the news.”

Things have gotten so bad, colleges are even closing their gender studies centers.

They’d be less surprised if they’d done more reading.

TO BE FAIR, IT’S IMPLICITLY UNDERSTOOD THAT THEY’LL VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS: ObamaCare Contractor in St. Louis Pays Employees To Do Nothing.

WELL, YES: Mitch McConnell: Harry Reid’s ’embarrassing’ behavior is leading Senate to ruin.

Related: Me: “And Dylan, [Reid] just made that up, right? [Romney not paying taxes] He flat out, flat out lied, right?” @DylanByers : Yeah,…

JAMES TARANTO: Bore More Years! Let’s Hear It For Voter Apathy.

Perhaps more interestingly, in every past year voters of at least one party had an enthusiasm “surplus”–that is, a higher proportion said they were more enthusiastic than less. The current poll finds deficits for both Republicans (42% more and 50% less enthusiastic) and Democrats (32% more, 55% less). The GOP ends up with a net 15-point advantage over the Democrats.

To the extent these figures mean anything–a significant qualification, since what ultimately matters is if and how people vote, not whether they do it with gusto–they’re worse news for Democrats than for Republicans. That means they’re good news for Republicans, given the zero-sum nature of electoral politics. In four out of the past five midterm elections (1998 is the exception), the party with greater “net enthusiasm” gained seats.

A Wall Street Journal poll, also conducted at the end of April, gives further “reason for Democrats to sleep uneasily right now,” as the Journal’s Gerald Seib reports: “Public attitudes today are remarkably similar to those that prevailed just before [their 2010] election disaster.”

Well, what is there, really, for voters to be enthusiastic about?

DEREK KHANNA: GOP Should Fight Crony Capitalism By Being Party of Innovation. Yes.

THE FRUITS OF COMPLACENCY? John Conyers Does Not Qualify For Primary Ballot. “Democratic Rep. John Conyers Jr. failed to qualify for the Michigan 13th District primary ballot, a local county clerk ruled Tuesday. . . . Conyers’ re-election had been a foregone conclusion — as it has been for decades — until recent weeks, when the 25-term incumbent’s position on the ballot became imperiled. Two individuals collecting signatures for Conyers’ ballot-qualifying petition were found to not be registered voters and thereby the signatures were ruled invalid. As a result, Conyers did not meet the 1,000-signature threshold to appear on the Aug. 5 primary ballot.”

REMEMBER, ONLY TRAINED LAW ENFORCEMENT PROFESSIONALS CAN BE TRUSTED WITH GUNS: State Patrol: Man who brandished gun on I-694 was ATF agent.

Authorities partly closed a downtown Minneapolis freeway briefly Tuesday morning as they made a “high-risk” traffic stop to detain a motorist who allegedly brandished a gun at another driver.

Turns out the driver was an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a State Patrol report said.

They didn’t release his name, which sounds fishy.

DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: The IRS’s Media Firewall.

WELL, THEY’RE OBVIOUSLY RACISTS: The Hill: Senate Dems Pound Obama Judge Pick Michael Boggs.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday suggested President Obama’s nominee for a federal court in Georgia is in trouble.

The Democrats said they have deep concerns with Georgia Court of Appeals Judge Michael Boggs’s voting record as a former state legislator, particularly on abortion, gay rights and civil liberties.

They told me if I voted for Mitt Romney, a Democratic Senate would pound judicial nominees for troglodytic views. And they were right!

BRIDGET JOHNSON: Veteran Congressman: ‘We Need to Talk About Who Needs to End Up in Jail’ in VA Scandal.

ROGER SIMON: The Holocaust Revisited – An Open Thank You Note to Ed Schulz.

I just wanted to say thank you, sir, for my family and for myself!

You see you have solved the mystery of why my grandmother’s Uncle Lennie, “the bachelor,” was incinerated at Auschwitz. Unfortunately, his sexual preference did not appear on ancestor.com. But now we know.

It’s clear from your writing that Lennie’s Jewish identity would not have been enough, even though, as I’m sure you are aware as a prestigious political commentator at MSNBC, some recent investigators, including a French priest, have asserted that the stratospheric number of Jewish dead could actually be revised upwards.

And then, as you also must know, there are many groups besides Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, among them Poles, Slavs, Serbs, gypsies, Soviet POWs, some leftists (although the Nazis began as a left-wing party), the mentally and physically disabled and, of course, gays. Hitler was, in his way, an equal opportunity genocidal maniac.

It’s interesting, however, that you single out gays as the most persecuted (can there be a most dead?). Have you ever considered why you might have done that? I know introspection isn’t exactly your style, but Twitter is the new media platform for the id, fairly begging us to reveal our innermost thoughts instantaneously in 140 or fewer characters. I know. I have made the mistake of doing so myself and, yes, having to hit the delete button in embarrassment.

Nevertheless, to my knowledge, I never exhibited anything approaching your level of bigotry. So although I am extremely grateful for your solving my family’s Uncle Lennie problem, I would advise you to take some serious time off. Like the aforementioned Donald Sterling, the kind of statements you like to make are probably better made in private, preferably in a therapist’s office.

Well, to be fair, Ed’s therapist is pretty much the only one who watches his show aside from right-leaning bloggers looking for material.