WHEN CHILD ABUSE HYSTERIA CAUSES THE SEXUALIZATION OF INNOCENT IMAGES: North Carolina mom battles Facebook over child photo meant to mimic ‘Coppertone’ pose.

PARENTING: 5 Reasons Modern-Day Parenting Is in Crisis, According to a British Nanny.

SHOCKING: Health-care worker hand hygiene rates increase three-fold when auditors visible.

FIRSTHAND REPORT: A Kassam Rocket Strikes a Home in Sderot: A mother whose home was just struck tells PJ Media her experience.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Build Leonardo Da Vinci’s Catapult.

The book sounds cool: Defending Your Castle: Build Catapults, Crossbows, Moats, Bulletproof Shields, and More Defensive Devices to Fend Off the Invading Hordes.

AIRBRUSH ALERT: AP Stealth-Edits Iraq WMD Story.

SUSAN GOLDBERG: The Real Reason Why Liberals Are Scared Of Women With Guns. “The real issue has never been religious fundamentalism or baby lions. Whether it is God, guns, or birth control, the real issue has been, and always will be, a woman with a mind of her own.”

OUCH: The latest hard-hitting Truesbury strip.

EIGHTIES TRIVIA, MERCHANDISE, MUSIC AND MORE: At LikeTotally80s.com.

And the same for the Nineties at 90s411.com.

NOW ON YOUTUBE: The Insta-Wife’s first round of interviews from the Detroit Men’s Rights Conference. You’ll see that it was a bigger and more diverse crowd than some of the mainstream media coverage suggested.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Have We Gone From a Post-War to a Pre-War World?

In 1914, Germany was the rising power, the U.K. the weary hegemon and the Balkans was the powder keg. In 2014, China is rising, the United States is staggering under the burden of world leadership and the Middle East is the powder keg.

Only a few years ago, most western observers believed that the age of geopolitical rivalry and great power war was over. Today, with Russian forces in Ukraine, religious wars exploding across the Middle East, and territorial disputes leading to one crisis after another in the East and South China seas, the outlook is darker. Serious people now ask whether we have moved from a post-war into a pre-war world. Could some incident somewhere in the world spark another global war? . . .

Despite worries about the rise of China, the place of the United States at the pinnacle of world power is more secure today than Britain’s was 100 years ago. The U.S. economy is a larger share of GDP, the U.S. military advantage is qualitatively greater than anything Britain ever enjoyed, and none of its political problems are as polarizing as the Irish question or the rise of a socialist working class party were for the U.K. in 1914.

Even so, it is possible that other powers may not be sure how committed the United States is to defending its allies or its interests around the world, and that can make bold or even rash moves look attractive.

It’s possible, for example, that some people in the Chinese leadership look at President Obama’s mixed messages about his “red lines” in Syria and wonder how seriously to take American red lines in the Pacific. Would the U.S. really go to war over a handful of uninhabited rocks scattered through the East and South China seas? Would we take stronger steps against an invasion of Taiwan than we have against Russia’s conquest of the Crimea? Russia and Iran may be asking themselves similar questions and looking for places where they can push against what they see as weak spots in the U.S. alliance system. At the same time, countries that depend on U.S. guarantees (like Israel and Japan) may become more aggressive to deter potential adversaries.

I’m sure “smart diplomacy” will take care of everything.

WAR ON WOMEN: Hillary Clinton Refuses To Apologize For Laughing About 12-Year-Old Rape Victim She Maligned In Court. The thing is, all the “war on women” talk is aimed at energizing wealthy white women. The rape victim didn’t fit the demographic, so she’s disposable.

OUT: “Death Panels” Are A Lie Invented By Sarah Palin. IN: Death Panels Are Good For You!

In his Politico piece calling for a revival of Obamacare’s original end-of-life-counseling provisions, Harold Pollack blames “Palin, Bachmann and McCaughey” for having “dragged comparative effectiveness research (CER) into the broader partisan knife-fight over health reform.” But of course the main person who dragged comparative effectiveness into the knife-fight was Barack Obama, expounding on red pills vs. blue pills to David Leonhardt in the NYT months before Palin’s “death panel” gibe (and doing it again in subsequent speeches and statements). … Obama also put cost saving through “comparative effectiveness’ squarely in the context of end-of-life decisions when he questioned whether his terminally ill grandmother should have been given a hip operation. (While Pollack says end-of-life treatment is not one of the top targets for savings, Obama says it’s a “huge driver of costs.”) And Obama made it clear he favored a centralized effort to at least nudge doctors into dropping some treatments — and not such a democratic effort either . . .

Why did this discussion have to be part of the debate on extending coverage to the uninsured and security to the insured? A: It didn’t. But that was Obama’s choice, not Palin’s. “The critics have said, you’re doing too much, you can’t do all this at once, Congress can’t digest everything. I just reject that,” he told Leonhardt. In this case — given Obama’s failure to sell voters on his cost-cutting, tough-choice-making ACA — it’s hard to say the critics weren’t right.

I could go on (Pollack has convenient fantasies about how wonderful it is for people to die at home, and about hospice care, which in my experience with actual patients in excellent Southern California facilities means precisely that your docs have given up on you and are now farming you out to lower-cost care provided by drive-by contractors.

Indeed.

OOPS: Mark Zuckerberg’s Immigration Push Hits Brick Wall.

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

Also, rent eTextbooks for 80% off.

ADRIANA COHEN: Immigration Mess A Wholly Owned Democratic Debacle. “Democrats — here and elsewhere — have been pushing for years to let people without Social Security numbers have driver’s licenses and welfare benefits. They’ve pushed for in-state university tuition for people who don’t belong here. Obama himself acted to dramatically reduce deportations — specifically of children — and has broadly signaled he wants to legalize the estimated 12 million illegals. Who can blame the hundreds of thousands flooding across our borders for thinking they are welcome? The Democrats told them so. Never mind that 92 million Americans are unemployed or no longer looking for jobs.”

HEH: “Did somebody say ‘unaccompanied minors’?”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Cuban Conspiracy Aside, Menendez Troubles Remain.

The best publicity Menendez has enjoyed all year arrived Monday, when the Washington Post reported on evidence the Cuban government may have fabricated and planted the lurid story that has smudged the senator’s reputation since just before his 2012 re-election bid. Menendez crowed to CNN Tuesday that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the regime in Havana had concocted the smear he had hired several underage Dominican prostitutes — because, he said, it “would do anything it can to stop me.”

What all the righteous indignation and melodramatic skullduggery obscures, however, is that Menendez continues to face questions about behavior that’s far more legally and politically problematic than the already substantially discredited tales about his cavorting at sex parties in the Caribbean.

For nearly two years, the Justice Department has been investigating whether Menendez illegally used his congressional office to benefit the business interests of his most generous donors, particularly Florida ophthalmologist Salomon Melgen. The Senate Ethics Committee appears to have put its similar inquiry on hold in deference to the Feds.

If federal prosecutors end up alleging Menendez broke the law, that would be a much bigger deal for the already dismal ethical reputation of Congress — as well as for the Democratic Party and Latino community — than whether an antagonistic nation was able to make headway with an ambitious conspiracy to ruin an influential lawmaker.

A New Jersey Democrat, corrupt?

GOOD QUESTION: “Why should the Constitution be surrendered at the campus gates?”

THE GOP SHOULD NOW PUSH THIS BILL, JUST TO MESS WITH THEM: Gay rights groups withdraw support of ENDA after Hobby Lobby decision. “Several major gay rights groups withdrew support Tuesday for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that would bolster gay and transgender rights in the workplace, saying they fear that broad religious exemptions included in the current bill might compel private companies to begin citing objections similar to those that prevailed in a U.S. Supreme Court case last week.”

ANNALS OF CRONY CAPITALISM: McAuliffe picks GreenTech funder for lottery. “Gov. Terry McAuliffe has named a director of GreenTech Automotive’s funding arm to be deputy chief of the Virginia Lottery. The appointment of Randy Wright comes a year after a federal investigation began into Gulf Coast Funds Management and money raised for the electric-car company McAuliffe says he founded in 2009. Wright, of Norfolk, sits on Gulf Coast’s three-member board, though McAuliffe’s announcement did not mention that fact.”

BOOK WARS: Amazon Makes Offer To Hachette Authors: “Amazon.com has an offer for authors at the book publisher Hachette, which is embroiled in a fight with the Internet retailer over e-book prices: Amazon will restore the authors’ books to its Web site and give writers all of the revenue from digital sales of their books.”

THE HILL: Untamed Cruz refuses to play nice with GOP campaign arm.

The defiant Republican’s brutal criticism of Sen. Thad Cochran’s (R-Miss.) reelection campaign on Tuesday — and the involvement of a group he is technically a vice chairman of, the National Republican Senatorial Committee — is just the latest example of the Tea Party hero refusing to play nice.

That brazen approach has exacerbated already fragile relations with establishment Republicans, who believe the freshman senator is intentionally undercutting them for no reason other than furthering his own political career.

Meanwhile, his conservative base is rejoicing that he’s refusing to be cowed.

The NRSC’s base is the minority of Republicans in the Senate. And the NRSC has been ham-handed all year, going out of its way to alienate supporters with dumb race-baiting that Dems have picked up on. This isn’t smart.

REASON TV VISITS L.A.’s first marijuana Farmer’s Market.