JIMMY CARTER WORKS ON HIS LEGACY OF “NO LONGER WORST PRESIDENT”: Jimmy Carter: Obama’s Foreign Policy Accomplishments ‘Minimal’.

NOT A DREAM. AN ILLUSION BORN OF THE MIASMAS OF WWI: Europe’s dream is dying in Greece. Perhaps a warning too.  These super-states controlling everything in the lands under their sway are never a good idea.

WHY IS TSA SPOKESWOMAN LISA FARBSTEIN TWEETING PHOTOS OF PASSENGERS’ LUGGAGE CONTENTS?

Farbstein faced a well-deserved backlash on Twitter; this round-up at Twitchy is just a hint of the response.

WORKER’S PARADISE. Cuba has ice cream. They have a chronic shortage of ice cream, but they do have some ice cream.

A couple of non-gullible journalists went down there with a video camera and recorded the state-run ice cream parlor. The line on a Sunday was two hours long. Only one flavor—strawberry—was available. It costs a little more than two dollars for a scoop. That’s more than ten percent of Cuba’s state-imposed Maximum Wage of twenty dollars a month. Such is life when the dictator insists on “socialism or death.”

OBAMA’S ‘BEST WEEK EVER’ AND THE COMING BACKLASH, from Noah Rothman at Commentary:

If history is any guide, change is coming. Dispirited conservatives will balk at the notion that Republicans can serve as change agents, but the out-party is the most frequent beneficiary of this voter sentiment. For progressives, the irrefutable moral justification of their cause renders any setback to its agenda a deviation from the norm, but this is self-flattery. American political history and the inherent dynamics of republican politics suggests that voters will soon correct for the excesses of the progressive left that it once empowered. When it happens, it will probably come as a shock to all those progressives who are forever citing the long march of history to justify their peculiar policy preferences.

It’s entirely possible that the GOP could win the White House in 2016, but as far as the long march of history, while elements of the New Deal and the Great Society have been updated over the years (such as welfare reform), how much of Big Government has actually ever been rolled back?  Yesterday’s Fox Butterfield-esque original New York Times headline on the Greek fiscal debacle, “Trillions Spent, but Crises Like Greece’s Persist,” could apply equally well to own bloated socialist leviathan.

CLAUDIA ROSETT ON NUCLEAR GROUNDHOG DAY: Today, You’ll Hear That State Dept. Needs ‘More Time’ To Finish Iran Nuke Deal They Can’t Possibly Enforce.

What could go wrong?

AND AFTER SHIRTSTORM, WHO’D BE SURPRISED: Vagina Vigilantes never sleep.

TWITCHY: THIS SCHOOLING OF GUN-GRABBING IDJIT STEPHEN KING BY DANA LOESCH, OTHERS WILL CRACK YOU UP: “What’s a ‘30-shot clip?’” “Also, clips and mags are two different things, natch. Unrelated: You made me hate clowns.”

Just a reminder: You can catch Dana Loesch speaking at Bullets & Bourbon in December in the Dallas area.

THEY REALLY, REALLY SHOULD HAVE LISTENED TO THATCHER: The Greek Crisis: Too Little Democracy, Too Much Bureaucracy.

THOMAS SOWELL: Supreme Court disasters.

Many people are looking at the recent Supreme Court decisions about ObamaCare and same-sex marriage in terms of whether they think these are good or bad policies. That is certainly a legitimate concern, for both those who favor those policies and those who oppose them.

But there is a deeper and more long-lasting impact of these decisions that raise the question whether we are still living in America, where “we the people” are supposed to decide what kind of society we want, not have our betters impose their notions on us. . . .

When any branch of government can exercise powers not authorized by either statutes or the Constitution, “we the people” are no longer free citizens but subjects, and our “public servants” are really our public masters. And America is no longer America. The freedom for which whole generations of Americans have fought and died is gradually but increasingly being taken away from us with smooth and slippery words.

This decision makes next year’s choice of the next President of the United States more crucial than ever, because with that office goes the power to nominate justices of the Supreme Court. Democrats have consistently nominated people who shared their social vision and imposed their policy preferences, too often in disregard of the Constitution.

Republicans have complained about it but, when the power of judicial appointment was in the hands of Republican presidents, they have too often appointed justices who participated in the dismantling of the Constitution — and usually for the kinds of social policies preferred by Democrats. . . .

Can the Republicans — or the country — afford to put another mushy moderate in the White House, who can appoint more mushy moderates to the Supreme Court?

THEY SHOULD HAVE LISTENED TO THATCHER: The Decadence of the liberal mind in one sentence.

PROFESSOR: WHITE PEOPLE ARE CONDITIONED TO COMMIT MASS MURDER LIKE IN CHARLESTON: “Zandria Robinson still has a job at the taxpayer-funded University of Memphis.”

UPDATE: Well, not anymore, apparently; Katherine Timpf amends her article to note, “A University of Memphis spokesperson told National Review that Robinson was no longer working at the school, but refused to give further details – promising to release a statement on the issue soon. In the meantime, the school has posted the following on its Twitter account:”

Zandria Robinson is no longer employed by the University of Memphis.

— University of Memphis (@uofmemphis) June 30, 2015

HOWARD KURTZ: GOLLY, THE MEDIA HAVE TURNED INTO AN INTOLERANT MOB LATELY: Alternate headline of this post by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air: Kurtz finally discovers that media bias is real — nearly 20 years, as Ed writes, after then-CBS insider Bernard Goldberg first openly discussed its existence in a Wall Street Journal column.

THE FUTURE OF THE PAST: Cooking With Glass: How Pyrex Transformed Every Kitchen Into a Home-Ec Lab.

WINNER TAKE WHAT? “Ever wonder why no interesting center-left Democrats aren’t challenging an increasingly vulnerable Hillary Clinton? There aren’t any. Nobody. No one,” Noemie Emery writes in the Washington Examiner:

For several cycles, the GOP starting gates will be filled with fresh horses, while the Democrats have, at least for the moment, a collection of aging and battle-worn nags.

Ever wonder why no interesting center-left Democrats aren’t challenging an increasingly vulnerable Hillary Clinton? There aren’t any. Nobody. No one.

As Britain and France were bled white by their World War I battles, the Democrats were drained by a series of midterm debacles in which those in swing states were punished by voters, and all but the bluest of blue were cut down. On the altar of healthcare, Democrats sacrificed the fruit of two cycles of party-expansion, the picking of people who could win in red states and red districts, to bolster the party’s breadth and appeal.

Now, these Democrats were told by liberal bloggers that it was their duty to lay down their political lives for this unpopular measure that most of their voters despised. As a result, Clinton’s most viable challengers are a 75-year-old socialist from deep-blue Vermont, and the colorless former governor of very blue Maryland, who was so weak he could not help to elect his lieutenant governor, who lost to only the second Republican governor in a very long time. The Democrats’ bench is not merely weak, it is non-existent. And that is Obamacare’s work.

As Moe Lane adds in his post linking to Emery’s column, “I suspect that we have at least one last hurrah lurking down there in the crevices of the Grand Old Party, and that the folks over on the Other Side are telling themselves the exact same damned stories to boost their morale that I was telling myself in 2007. And we all know how that ended, huh?”

Still though, to borrow from one of the Insta-Professor’s recurring leitmotifs, this is not the time for the younger members of the right to embrace an overly arrogant or smugly self-assured pose.

UH OH, GOP LEADERSHIP: Mark Levin, Whose Endorsement Is Credited with Winning Dave Brat Race, Goes All In for Mike Flynn.

TOMORROW IS THE ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF FIRE’S STAND UP FOR SPEECH LITIGATION PROJECT: SUFS is an unprecedented national effort to eliminate unconstitutional speech codes from our nation’s public colleges and universities. Check out SUFS’s successful and pending cases here.

“REPORTER MISREPORTED NOBEL SCIENTIST TIM HUNT’S WORDS TO SMEAR HIM AND GET A #SOCIALATTENTIONWHORING STORY GOING,” Ace of Spades writes:

Unbelievable. According to a third-party EU official, and Sir Tim Hunt himself, she took words out the context, and concealed the fact that Hunt’s remarks were jokes at his own expense.

The Guardian has now heavily re-edited this Social Attention Whore’s story to make it less defamatory — but the Guardian doesn’t alert you to that, contrary to its own claimed rules.

Hunt has now resigned from his important work in cancer research. And this Social Attention Whore got her scalp.

New revelations about the speech and the context of the joke have surfaced. An account of a European Commission Official who took detailed minutes of the event adds key information absent from the original report:

According to the new account, Sir Tim started with: “It’s strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists” which makes clear he mocking sexism, rather than indulging in it. St. Louis reported this as Hunt simply admitting: “he has a reputation as a male chauvinist.”Immediately after the now infamous joke, according to the new evidence, he proceeded to make several very pro gender equality remarks, including: “Now seriously… Science needs women and you should do science despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me,” which was similarly disregarded in St. Louis’s twitter report.

Hunt has already protested that he added, “now seriously” to indicate the joke was over.

The Daily Mail is now vetting this #SocialAttentionWarrior, Connie St. Louis, and finding lots of troubling facts.

Troubled by Sir Tim’s fate, a collection of eminent scientists, including eight other Nobel Prize winners (and several senior female academics) chose to speak out publicly in support of him. Many professed outrage that, in the echo-chamber of social media, a single careless remark, just 37 words long, could apparently derail the career of a pioneering scientist.

Hey, these days all it takes for a SJW to derail a leading scientist’s career is his wearing the wrong shirt. Read the whole thing, and then follow the link to the London Daily Mail article — a publication that St. Louis claimed to have written for, and yet according to the author of the above piece, the newspaper can find no evidence of her contributions in their archives or accounts payable department.

CRUZ REMINDS YAHOO VIDEO BLOGGER KATIE COURIC THAT HILLARY CREATED ANTI-OBAMA BIRTHER MOVEMENT: “The look on Couric’s smug face when he correctly reminded her that it was the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008 that birthed the anti-Obama Birther movement, is priceless.”

“WHAT CHUMPS!” wrote Chief Justice Roberts, dissenting in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission.

Just over a century ago, Arizona became the second State in the Union to ratify the Seventeenth Amendment. That Amendment transferred power to choose United States Senators from “the Legislature” of each State, Art. I, §3, to “the people thereof.” The Amendment resulted from an arduous, decades-long campaign in which reformers across the country worked hard to garner approval from Congress and three-quarters of the States.

What chumps! Didn’t they realize that all they had to do was interpret the constitutional term “the Legislature” to mean “the people”? The Court today performs just such a magic trick with the Elections Clause. Art. I, §4. That Clause vests congressional redistricting authority in “the Legislature” of each State. An Arizona ballot initiative transferred that authority from “the Legislature” to an “Independent Redistricting Commission.” The majority approves this deliberate constitutional evasion by doing what the proponents of the Seventeenth Amendment dared not: revising “the Legislature” to mean “the people.”

BUZZFEED’S JOURNALISTIC STRUGGLES ON SAME-SEX MARRIAGE, IN GIFS: Images so easy to follow, even a BuzzFeed editor can understand them!

RELATED: An accurate albeit painful to read transcript of Ben Smith of BuzzFeed’s rapid-fire dissembling during his interview with Hugh Hewitt yesterday. Interesting question from Hugh:

I gave Hugh a standing slow clap for this. pic.twitter.com/YKe8MjFL14

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) June 30, 2015

Elsewhere, John Nolte of Big Journalism listens to Hewitt’s interview with Smith and spots this juxtaposition: “BuzzFeed Pledges Allegience to Gay Flag — Editor Ben Smith Won’t Call Shariah Evil.”

Or as Ace notes, “it is quite obvious that [Smith] has never even thought about the questions Hugh Hewitt poses before. Simple, obvious questions everyone even pretending to be a thinker must ask himself, like ‘Why is it I feel comfortable declaring there are no two sides on gay marriage, and yet I cannot bring myself to criticize Shariah law?'”

Which dovetails well with this observation from Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller, when as a (more or less) conservative, he debates leftists: “I’ve noticed an uptick in the following phenomenon: I go on a TV debate show, and the people I’m talking to fail to grasp my points. I don’t mean they disagree with me — I mean they don’t comprehend what I’m saying.“

Why, it’s as if the left and right are speaking an entirely different language — as Insta-guest blogger John Tierney noted here yesterday.

RELATED:  “It is essential to our understanding of how we’ve been bested in the propaganda battles and culture wars — not on the merits but rather through the very kernel assumptions about language we’ve allowed to become settled truths.”

JURY REJECTS UNSUCCESSFUL CONSERVATIVE FACULTY CANDIDATE’S DISCRIMINATION SUIT AGAINST UNIVERSITY OF IOWA LAW SCHOOL, from Paul Caron at his Tax Prof blog.

A COLLEGE BALKS AT HILLARY CLINTON’S FEE, BOOKS CHELSEA FOR $65,000 INSTEAD: “As with Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches at universities, Chelsea Clinton made no personal income from the appearance, her spokesman said, and directed her fee to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation,” the Washington Post reports. “Just shy of her 34th birthday, Clinton commanded a higher fee than other prominent women speakers who were considered, including feminist icon Gloria Steinem ($30,000) and journalists Cokie Roberts ($40,000), Tina Brown ($50,000) and Lesley Stahl ($50,000), the records show.”

RELATED: “Chelsea Clinton too expensive? You can hire me for a lot less!” Ashe Schow of the Washington Examiner makes her case — and she’s guaranteed to be an infinitely more interesting speaker — but how does her appearance offer allow universities the opportunity to fund the Clinton family’s personal slush fund?

THIS WEEK’S NEWEST FINAL COUNTDOWN: “Robert Redford Sees ‘Last Chance’ to Fix Climate:”

Robert Redford told the United Nations on Monday that negotiations on a global deal to tackle climate change could be the world’s “last chance” to save the planet.

“This December, the world must unite behind a common goal,” said the American actor and producer.

“Because look, this is it. This is our only planet, our only life source.

“This may be our last chance.”

It’s the final countdown! Or actually, the latest final countdown, which have been arriving on a regular basis from those warning of first global cooling and then global warming since the first “Earth Day” in 1970; just add it to all of these earlier “last chances” to save the earth.

Once he made his pronouncement, Redford may have retreated back to here:

As the InstaProfessor likes to say, I’ll believe global warming is a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start to act like it’s a crisis themselves. (Oh, and I don’t want to hear another goddamn word about Glenn’s carbon footprint either.)

Though it’s interesting that Redford is playing weatherman after supporting Bill Ayers’ old Weathermen via his disastrously timed The Company You Keep movie, which inadvertently debuted in April of 2013, the same month as another real life terrorist bombed the Boston Marathon. Appearing at the start of that month on Good Morning America with Hillary Clinton flack George Stephanopoulos, who asked Redford if he was still sympathetic to the Weathermen, “Even when you read about bombings,” (i.e. the bombing of the Pentagon among others) the actor-director chillingly responded, “All of it. I knew that it was extreme and I guess movements have to be extreme to some degree.”

And finally, speaking of extreme, what’s up with Redford’s hair in the photo of him at the UN, which is beginning to take on unsustainable Trumpian proportions?