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DANA MILBANK: Clinton And Obama Are On The Wrong Side Of History. Well…

THIS IS COOL: The Hermione Sails Into New York Harbor, Cannons Blazing. “On Wednesday a replica of the Hermione, the three-masted, 32-gun frigate that carried Lafayette to America in 1780 with news of his king’s military support for the Americans, docked at the South Street Seaport. More than two centuries later, the crowds were smaller but the scene was still clangorous. After passing Governors Island, the Hermione sent a round of cannon blasts echoing off the buildings of Lower Manhattan before gliding into port. A band played ‘Down by the Riverside’ as costumed crew members scrambled from the masts for another deafening — and apparently unplanned — salute.”

As a big fan of Napoleonic-era sea stories from Patrick O’Brian, C.S. Forester, et al., I wish I could take a tour.

AMAZING GRACE: ‘Lovely’: Condoleezza Rice, Jenny Oaks Baker perform Amazing Grace to benefit Wounded Warriors.

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Gibson Says Self-Tuning Guitars Are Here To Stay, Even As Purists Fret.

BIG BROTHER IS TAXING YOU: Oregon Launches Program To Tax Drivers By The Mile. “According to a national usage fee alliance, 28 states are in various stages of following down the same road. However, there are also privacy concerns. Two of the three OReGO systems track and store a car’s every move.”

As I wrote on this a while back, Don’t Track Me, Bro.

REVIEW: Your Stupid Questions Have No Answers: Martin van Creveld vs. the Chimera of Equality. Political and social equality doesn’t mean you’re actually, you know, the same.

A FREE FOURTH OF JULY SHORT STORY: The Bombs Bursting In Air.

IF IT WERE A PILL, EVERYONE WOULD TAKE IT: Older Athletes Have a Strikingly Young Fitness Age. “Older athletes can be much younger, physically, than they are in real life, according to a new study of participants in the coming Senior Olympics. The study found that the athletes’ fitness age is typically 20 years or more younger than their chronological age, providing a clear inspiration to the rest of us to get out and start moving more.”

What’s most striking is that most of them hadn’t exercised vigorously their entire lives, but rather started late in life.

FASTER, PLEASE: Flying on a private jet is getting much cheaper.

PRESS ROPED IN BY AIDES AT HILLARY EVENT: I’m not sure what the usage rights are to the photos in Daniel Halper’s post at the Weekly Standard, which is also currently atop Drudge, so I don’t want to embed any of them here, but if you haven’t seen them yet, by all means click over. I’ll wait.

OK, back? That the press went along with this with such docility tells you everything you need to know about which party they support — they are, as Glenn likes to say, Democratic operatives with bylines. If they were real journalists, or if this technique was employed a GOP presidential campaign, their first thought would be: I’m cutting the rope. Even if I don’t have a knife. I’ll start sawing away with car keys — or simply duck under it, just to see what happens next.

Because what happens next is a headline. One that will quickly become what former AP man Joseph Campbell calls a classic media myth that feeds upon itself: HILLARY’S GOONS HARASS JOURNALIST. JOURNALIST HAULED AWAY BY CLINTON SECURITY.  I BROKE HILLARY’S PRESS BLOCKADE! A real journalist would dine out on the headline for months.

And if this was an opportunity to employ the same headlines but with Bush, Trump, Perry, Cruz or Rubio, the press would be chomping at the bits to write such a story. As Cruz told Glenn Beck on Thursday, “Nothing would make [a journalist] happier than to take your life and filet [a GOP candidate or his operatives] on the front pages.”

But why go out of the way to cause bad press for one of your own?

And for the furious reaction from Twitter users from the photos of the “press lapdogs herded like sheep,” Twitchy has you covered.

ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS: Iraq Christians train to recapture homes from IS.

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JACK NEELY: Was The South Ever Confederate Anyway?

The Civil War is a big bagful of ironies and paradoxes, and not a recommended study for folks who like to keep things simple. It would be a particular challenge for anyone to survive the 1860s in Knoxville and either idealize one side or demonize the other. It took a later generation, one that didn’t remember the war, to glorify it.

I do want to point out something provable. Whether the Confederate flag is an irredeemably racist and oppressive symbol or not, the Confederacy is not “the South.” It is not “the South now,” certainly. It was not even “the South” in 1861. The conflation of the Confederacy with “the South” began, I suspect, as some tired editor’s attempt to make a headline fit.

People of European and African ancestry have been living in the South for 400 years. The Confederacy lasted for four years, about 1 percent of that time. And even during that 1 percent, a large proportion of the people who lived in the South—perhaps even a majority—were skeptical of the Confederacy. . . .

The Confederacy was not universally popular, even in the South. It would be difficult to prove that as much as half the people who lived in the South in 1861 were fond of the Confederacy. Sam Houston, who grew up in East Tennessee and spent his entire life in the South—except when he was in D.C., representing Southern states in Congress—despised the Confederacy and denounced it publicly. David Glasgow Farragut and Gen. William Sanders—whose last names survive in multiple institutions in Knox County—both grew up in the South and fought against the Confederacy. Sanders, who’d spent most of his life in Kentucky and Mississippi, was killed by Confederate bullets. Several of Knoxville’s fiercest Unionists, Parson W.G. Brownlow, William Rule, and Thomas Humes, were lifelong Southerners.

It might take years to do a thorough study on the subject, but judging by what we know of those who favored secessionism or the Union, here in East Tennessee at least, Confederate sympathies didn’t necessarily suggest Southern roots. Many of Knoxville’s notable Confederates were immigrants from Switzerland, Germany, or Ireland. John Mitchel, probably Knoxville’s most nationally famous secessionist—editor of The Southern Citizen, which advocated slavery—was an Irish revolutionary Unitarian who’d spent several years in prison in Tasmania and never laid eyes on the South until 1853. J.G.M. Ramsey, the secessionist most influential locally, was from a Pennsylvania family. Father Abram Ryan, Knoxville’s “Poet-Priest of the Confederacy,” grew up in Maryland and Missouri, son of Irish immigrants. Thousands of New Yorkers, many of whom had never seen the South, were Confederate sympathizers.

Meanwhile, many of Knoxville’s Unionists grew up in multi-generational Tennessee families. Did Southern heritage even play a role in affiliation with the Confederacy? Here in Knoxville, a demographic study might even prove the opposite. Maybe it was the people with the deepest roots here who were most skeptical of the noisy rebel bandwagon.

In any case, in 1861 more than 30 percent of Tennessee’s Southerners voted against secession, against joining the Confederacy. Well over 30,000 Tennesseans took up arms against the Confederacy.

Yes, but the important point is letting low-information white Democrats feel superior.

UPDATE: Oh, look: Here’s one of those now. Though to be fair, I considered using the “outside agitator” line myself.

JEFF CARTER: A House Divided.

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: “It’s a surreal moment when you discover that a) ISIS has a blocklist, and b) you’re on it.”

MARK JUDGE: In retrospect, Woody Allen’s Manhattan looks like a conservative countercultural film. “I’m from Philadelphia, we believe in God.”

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HOW DEMOCRATS THINK: Vetoing Liquor Privatization, Pennsylvania’s Governor Says Competition Would Raise Prices: Tom Wolf claims a state monopoly benefits consumers.

ANGELO CODEVILLA: Standing Up To The Ruling Class.

HENRY MILLER: When Bureaucrats Get Away With Murder.

AUSTIN BAY: Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy: Liberty Demands Responsibility.

SHOCKER: Mass Killings Inspire Copycats, Study Finds.

We’ve known about the copycat effect for a while. But the press blames everyone but itself when these happen.

BERNIE SANDERS IN THE 1960S: “I love the photo. I’m sure I would have had a crush on him back then. It was very typical for younger people of that time to regard ordinary middle-class people going to work as shuffling, horrifying zombies.”

RANDY BARNETT: What The Declaration Of Independence Really Claimed.

Also: Happy 4th of July! The Drafting of the Declaration of Independence.

Both are excerpts from his forthcoming book, Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Sovereignty of the People.