BILL DE BLASIO HATES FREEDOM: Well, yes. But specifically, “Democrat doesn’t want New Yorkers to smoke in their own homes.” Or as the Daily Caller notes, “Former Pot Smoking Mayor Wants City Residents To Kick Their Tobacco Habit.”

Back in 2008 in response to Los Angeles’ anti-smoking proposals, Richard Miniter wrote, “In the 1950s, the most puritanical place in America was somewhere in Kansas. Today it is Los Angeles.” But as de Blasio’s latest initiatives illustrate, such leftwing Puritanism can be found throughout Blue America.

PJ MEDIA LAUNCHES NEW PARENTING SECTION: Stop by early and often!

“I AM NOW A BLOGGER FOR HIRE,” Aleister of the popular American Glob blog notes. Someone sign him up, fast!

GLENN REYNOLDS IN USA TODAY: Are happier lawyers, cheaper legal fees on the horizon?

FOX BUTTERFIELD, IS THAT YOU?

Trillions Spent, but Crises Like Greece’s Persist http://t.co/YPi6x3mG2z

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) June 30, 2015

Hangovers persist, despite chugging ouzo https://t.co/56DW5IqEh0

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 30, 2015

(Headline background here for those who don’t remember the cognitively dissonent textual stylings of Mr. Butterfield.)

MIKE FLYNN UPDATE: The Darin LaHood Campaign Asking the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to Lie About Mike Flynn Is Everything You Need to Know About the GOP Establishment.

David Steinberg’s article at PJM seems particularly timely right now:

https://twitter.com/Milenatehoff/status/615704104011075585

https://twitter.com/Milenatehoff/status/615699842174709760

https://twitter.com/Milenatehoff/status/615701238215217154

.@dloesch is having an exchange with a guy from the US Chamber of Commerce much as Jaws had an exchange with Quint's intestines

— Ursus, Director of Weather and Banana Programming (@AceofSpadesHQ) June 30, 2015

If Mike Flynn was hired by Andrew Breibart and is supported by Mark Levin, Ace and Michelle Malkin, I think he's worth a look, at least.

— LincolnHillsFrau (@bayareahausfrau) June 24, 2015

The case for Mike Flynn, 18th District, Illinois http://t.co/299fRDFYfF

— Mark R. Levin (@marklevinshow) June 24, 2015

CAN TWITTER BE SAVED? “Why Twitter is terrible”  is explored by former PJTV host James Poulos in The Week:

It would be one thing if we could redeem all society by leaving Twitter. But Twitter is just the beginning. We could “burn down the internet,” as the kids say, and still fail to calm our blind rage toward our all-too-human imperfection and intransigence. At this rate, maybe we will.

Two hundred years ago, another liberal philosopher explained how merciless worldviews can destroy all communication. “The nation could survive for a while,” warned Benjamin Constant, “on its acquired intelligence, on habits of thinking and doing picked up earlier; but nothing in the world of thought would renew itself. Writers strangled in this way start off with panegyrics; but they become bit by bit incapable even of praise and literature finishes up losing itself in anagrams and acrostics.” Sound familiar?

It may be too late to salvage Twitter. But if we’re going to save the internet, we’ve got to save some mercy for one another.

As Charles Krauthammer famously said in 2002, “To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.” If you’re a leftist who has convinced yourself that you’re in the holy, planet-saving socialist justice warrior business of destroying evil one wrong-thinking person at a time, why take the time and effort to show mercy?

“THE SECRET JEWISH HISTORY OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD.”

JUSTICE BREYER “SAYS THAT THE DEATH PENALTY IS CRUEL because it is unreliable; but it is convictions, not punishments, that are unreliable,” writes Justice Scalia in today’s Glossip v. Gross.

The reality is that any innocent defendant is infinitely better off appealing a death sentence than a sentence of life imprisonment….

Justice Breyer next says that the death penalty is cruel because it is arbitrary. To prove this point, he points to a study of 205 cases that “measured the ‘egregiousness’ of the murderer’s conduct” with “a system of metrics,” and then “compared the egregiousness of the conduct of the 9 defendants sentenced to death with the egregiousness of the conduct of defendants in the remaining 196 cases [who were not sentenced to death],” post, at 10–11. If only Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hume knew that moral philosophy could be so neatly distilled into a pocket-sized, vade mecum “system of metrics.”…

It is because these questions are contextual and admit of no easy answers that we rely on juries to make judgments about the people and crimes before them. The fact that these judgments may vary across cases is an inevitable consequence of the jury trial, that cornerstone of Anglo-American judicial procedure….”

TWO GRAY LADIES IN ONE: The NYT Doesn’t Publish Religiously Offensive Images, Except When They Offend Christians.

RELATED: Honesty! NY Times Reporter Admits ‘I Live in a Bubble.’

Paul Kael, call your office. And this seems like an appropriate post to add this as well:

.@mikiebarb Think you got your parties mixed up here Mike pic.twitter.com/xRGYl6N7KD

— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) June 29, 2015

DELAWARE SEEMS SO IMPORTANT, DOMICILE TO SO MANY CORPORATIONS. But it no longer has an any commercial air service — the only U.S. state in that predicament. But the state is so small. Enter through Philadelphia. Or just think of it as a imaginary place. Over the years, when I’ve told people I was born in Delaware — true fact! — they’ll say things like  I thought only corporations were born in Delaware.

SPORTS NEWS FROM WISCONSIN. Football: Aaron Rodgers trains alongside Olivia Munn. Basketball: Bo Ryan is retiring after next year. And: Sam Dekker mows his lawn!

DON’T CARRY CASH, THE FEDS MIGHT STEAL IT: A New York City nail salon owner tried to take his life savings of $44,000 to help his siblings in California. The DEA took it from him at JFK airport, without so much as issuing a citation. Now he’s suing to get it back–but he has very little chance of succeeding. Read the whole sad story, including a copy of the lawsuit, here. From the article:

Nevertheless, the DEA took all of Do’s money under the assumption that he’s involved in the drug business, despite being more than willing to let him go without even a citation. Do had planned to take his money to California to help his financially-struggling siblings out, but ran into the DEA first.

Then there’s this:

The Plaintiff did not know that it was a violation of Federal regulations to carry cash in excess of $5,000 at the time of the seizure.There’s a good reason for not knowing this. There is no federal regulation prohibiting citizens from walking around (or boarding planes) with any amount of cash. Asset forfeiture laws make this practice unwise, but nothing in federal law says Do was forbidden from boarding a plane with his $44,000.

As Institute for Justice attorney Darpana Sheth said about IJ’s latest civil forfeiture case, “Carrying cash is not a crime. No one should lose their life savings when no drugs or evidence of any crime are found on them or their belongings.”

HILLARY CLINTON, GET THIS, EDITED THE EMAILS SHE TURNED OVER TO STATE TO DELETE EMBARRASSING REFERENCES TO OIL, TERRORISM: “Another story the media won’t discuss,” Ace of Spades writes.

Related:

https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/615603802733965317

Hillary so proud of Libya she wanted it publicly tied to her strategy, forever. Wish granted! http://t.co/xi0UI8aWWI pic.twitter.com/XDsAOTMdsF

— Razor (@hale_razor) June 29, 2015

IT’S NOT JUST GREECE: Puerto Rico is expected to default on more than $70 billion in debt, four times what Detroit owed when it went bankrupt. A report by economists Anne Krueger, Ranjit Teja, and Andrew Wolfe, nicely summarized in this WaPo explainer, points to the sort of fiscal mismanagement you’d expect in such a bankruptcy but also to federal policies that make things especially difficult for the island: the Jones Act, which requires all goods come on U.S. merchant marine vessels, thereby doubling shipping costs compared to nearby islands, and a minimum wage way too high for local conditions. (The WaPo’s Max Ehrenfreund finds the latter “surprising,” which is the opposite of what it is.) The population has been leaving in droves, presumably to more economically promising places.

YEP, GOVERNMENT CENTRALIZATION LEADS TO DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT: John Fund on how the latest Greek banking crisis exemplifies the EU’s persistent democratic deficit:

But for all the perfidy of the Greek government, it is, at least in its moment of crisis, returning to the roots of the democratic ideal: that it is the people, not experts or elites or aristocrats, who should have the ultimate say on those matters that must ultimately be settled politically. Here’s hoping the Greeks wake up their fellow Europeans to the fact that if they want to ensure a prosperous and free Europe for their children, politics is too important to be left to non-transparent Eurocrats.

Yep–the EU is a progressive’s dream: lots of elitist bureaucracy by “experts,” with little opportunity for republican or democratic participation by the unwashed masses. It’s a phenomenon that sounds increasingly familiar to American ears in the Obama era.

“HELLO, DETROIT? I THINK WE’VE FOUND YOUR NEXT MAYOR!”

“How can something like this happen without prior warning?” asked Angeliki Psarianou, a 67-year-old retired public servant, who stood in the drizzle after arriving too late at one empty ATM in the Greek capital.

Yes, it’s always unfortunate when bad economic news keeps happening so (wait for it…wait for it…) “unexpectedly.”

UPDATE: Closer to home, “Who’s ready for a bailout of … Puerto Rico?”

AT LONG LAST, AN EXPLANATION OF SETH ROGEN’S SEX APPEAL: Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight? A lot of people, it turns out. As I discuss in my NYT column on changing perceptions of “mate value,” psychologists and anthropologists can finally explain how someone who looks like Seth Rogen can wind up with someone who looks like Katherine Heigl, and why Mr. Darcy eventually falls in love with Elizabeth Bennet. The process may not come as a surprise to readers of Jane Austen novels or to viewers of Adam Sandler’s schlub-gets-babe movies, but at least we now have the data to back up our fantasies.

JEFF ROSEN PRAISES JOHN ROBERTS’ “DEFERENCE TO THE INTENT OF CONGRESS AS “THE UMPIRE IN CHIEF,”: saying he

embraced a bipartisan vision of judicial restraint based on the idea that the Supreme Court should generally defer to the choices of Congress and state legislatures. His insistence that the court should hesitate to second-guess the political branches regardless of whether liberals or conservatives win is based on his conception of the limited institutional role of the court in relation to the president, Congress and the states.

I have little doubt that this is how the Chief Justice thinks of what he did. And why he relied so heavily on deference in his dissent in Obergefell.

ARE HAPPIER LAWYERS, CHEAPER LEGAL FEES ON THE HORIZON? Glenn Reynolds, our beneficent Insta-host, reviews the new book, Glass Half Full: The Decline And Rebirth of the Legal Profession by Ben Barton, Glenn’s fellow University of Tennessee law professor, who has also been guest-posting here this week, in his latest USA Today column:

[W]hile technology is hurting firms’ income, it’s also cutting their expenses, and making life easier (in some ways) for solo practitioners. I have a former student who practices family law and doesn’t even keep an office. Her clients like it that she makes house calls, and she saves big on overhead. Email, voicemail and the like are better than a secretary, and online legal research is better than maintaining a law library.

Clients, meanwhile, will get cheaper legal services. There’s a limit to how much lawyers can cut their rates — those student loan debts have to be paid, and if you can’t make enough to pay them practicing law, you’re better off doing something else — but many tech startups are looking at ways to provide legal services more cheaply and efficiently than the old model ever did. Barton is optimistic about that, and I hope he’s right.

At any rate, law, as the ultimate white-collar job, is now undergoing what so many other fields have suffered before: Technological unemployment and a shrinking economic pie. Lawyers, who probably didn’t shed a lot of tears when this happened to linotype operators, will just have to deal with it as well. I hope that Ben Barton’s mostly-cheerful predictions turn out to be right.

Read the whole thing, to coin an Instaphrase.

THANKS SO MUCH TO GLENN, my co-guestbloggers, and to all of you for a great week.  I learned A LOT from the posts, your comments, and the experience.

Most notably I learned that this is even harder than it looks from the outside!  One possible explanation for the Blogfather’s excellence: Glenn is, in fact, a blogging cyborg.  He doesn’t eat.  He doesn’t sleep.  All he does is post awesome links with interesting commentary.  When he returns and finds that I have mocked his robot brethren I may be in some trouble. . . .

HOW DO YOU TELL SOMEONE THEY’RE NOT A VICTIM? “While speaking at the Network of Enlightened Women’s conference in Washington, D.C., on Friday, I was asked a question about how to tell someone they’re not a victim when the evidence shows they aren’t one,” Ashe Schow writes at the Washington Examiner:

As activists expand the definition of sexual assault and push debunked statistics to claim that it is rampant on college campuses, more and more might come to see regretted or misinterpreted encounters as something more sinister. We need to figure out how to gently tell them that they are not actually victims. But that would require finding another explanation for their negative feelings.

So many accusers, especially those who say the encounter happened while they were freshmen, say they become depressed and withdrawn. They see those feelings as the result of a sexual assault. Maybe, just maybe, some of those feelings come from being away from home for the first time or feeling overwhelmed in college, and have nothing to do with the first hook up of a college career.

I know that I haven’t figured out a way to properly articulate this idea, but I’m hoping someone else figures out a way to do so.

How do we change the enormous therapy-obsessed bureaucracy of university campuses, which have created a student culture where the will to power derives from victimhood?

BEN WATTENBERG, RIP: The veteran author, LBJ speechwriter, host of Think Tank for PBS and American Enterprise Institute scholar was 81. As Jonah Goldberg (who cut his teeth as Wattenberg’s producer and research assistant in the 1990s writes, “Ben was hard to classify intellectually or ideologically:”

Though it was not always as difficult as it is today because the tribe he represented — variously described as Scoop Jackson Democrat, Democratic neoconservative, Reagan Democrat, New Democrat, democratic triumphalist etc — no longer much exists. Obviously, the key word there is “Democrat.” But while his devotion to the partisan label with a capital-D waned over the years (without ever vanishing), his devotion to democracy itself was undying and infectious.

At the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last notes that in the early 1970s, Wattenberg was one of the few to push back against the Malthusian doomsday rantings of Paul Ehrlich and others. “It takes an uncommon mind to challenge the assumptions of the age in search of the truth. But the fortitude it takes to stand amidst the mob insisting on the truth once you have found it is ever more rare. What a man.”

At Commentary, John Podhoretz adds that Wattenberg “was one of the Democrats in the late 1960s and early 1970s who committed himself to fighting those who wanted to divert his party into anti-American tributaries through the founding of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, a group that had little success but did prove prophetic in insisting that only a move to the center, a la Bill Clinton, would save the party from itself. His most notable later book, Values Matter Most, became a hot topic of discussion when Clinton called Wattenberg and discussed it and his own failings in 1995.”

Shortly before his 2008 career retrospective Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism was published, I interviewed Wattenberg for an early segment of PJM’s old Sirius-XM show to discuss Fighting Words. The audio from that interview is still online here.

POLITICAL THREATS TO SCIENCE:  I earlier linked to Matt Ridley’s essay on how the Left has politicized climate science, and that’s hardly the only discipline that’s been corrupted. Democrats like to style themselves as the pro-science party, and a lot of reporters accept that assumption, but I see it as a highly debatable proposition. In fact, I’ve discussed that question with Intelligence Squared U.S.,  the sponsor of the great series of Oxford-style debates on public policy. It’s considering a debate next spring on the question of which side, the Left or Right, poses a greater threat to science.

Liberals have an easy time mocking creationist conservatives, whose impact on the practice of science I consider to be nil. But I wonder who on the Left would be willing to defend its overall record, which includes the promotion of so many unscientific fears (of genetically modified foods, fracking, nuclear power, etc.) and the ostracism of researchers who pursue taboo topics (like the effects of single-parent families, or innate differences between the sexes). I know of conservatives and libertarians who could debate their side of the question (John Stossel, David Harsanyi and Ronald Bailey have recently criticized the Left’s unscientific beliefs). But I’m not sure who would make a good case for the Left. Any suggestions?