MORE CLINTON FOUNDATION HIDE & SEEK:  This time it’s none other than George Stephanopoulos hiding, but he’s been caught, failing to disclose a $75,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation.

The failure to disclose the donations raises serious conflict of interest concerns, especially in light of a recent interview Stephanopoulos conducted with the author of a book that questions how the Clinton Foundation operates.

But hey, I’m sure Stephanopoulos isn’t biased or anything.

The RNC should ban Stephanopoulos from taking any part in the 2016 presidential debates.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: MIT’s Undersea Robots Can Plan Their Own Missions.

TORIES, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: UK Plans To Do Away With Free Speech… In The Name Of Free Speech. Going after “extremists.”

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Conference video: Multi-Million Atom Simulations for Single Atom Transistor Structures.

AT LEAST THEY’RE TRYING:  House Budget Committee Chair Tom Price (R-GA) unveils a Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare.  It seems like a relatively simple, efficient alternative based on sliding-scale (by income and age) tax credits for the purchase of health insurance, combined with a health savings account to handle out-of-pocket expenses.

THE RISE OF ROBOT ROOM SERVICE. No one is safe from the machines.

PLANET OBAMA:  Where self-awareness goes to die.  Heather Wilhelm’s terrific piece today on RCP.  Wilhelm highlights a statement of Michelle Obama on Sunday to Tuskegee University graduates:

“There will be times,” the first lady continued, “when you feel folks look right past you, or they see just a fraction of who you really are. … My husband and I [have] both felt the sting of those daily slights throughout our entire lives — the folks who crossed the street in fear of their safety; the clerks who kept a close eye on us in all those department stores; the people at formal events who assumed we were the ‘help’ — and all those who questioned our intelligence, our honesty, even our love of this country.”

. . . . [T]hat last phrase is rather breathtaking. In one fell swoop, it groups “those who questioned our intelligence, our honesty, even our love of country” together with a giant bushel of supposed racism. It also reveals a lot about the mind of Michelle Obama, who apparently assumes that the only reason you could possibly criticize her or the president is simple: You’re probably a racist.

But it’s not just Michelle who should check her #privilege.  The President has his own checking to do:

Alas, among the Obamas, self-awareness is not a strong suit, and this particular deficit isn’t limited to the first lady. This week, at Georgetown University, the president bemoaned the scourge of private schools, driven by “an anti-government ideology that disinvests from those common goods and those things that draw us together.”

One wonders: Did he feel that way as a teenager while in the bosom of the exclusive Punahou prep school in Honolulu?  The Obama children, of course, attend Sidwell Friends, a private institution that costs $37,750 a year. Before moving to Washington, D.C., Sasha and Malia studied at the University of Chicago’s elite Laboratory School, where middle school tuition runs at $29,328.

Of course the truth is that neither the President nor First Lady need to check their “privilege.”  They have succeeded–wildly so– and they have done so because America is a place where that can happen.  Maybe the Obamas suffer from “black guilt” or something.

GALLERY: Drones Capture Global Ghost Towns. “Who knew that parts of Detroit look like abandoned towns left to rot after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in Pripyat, Ukraine?That’s what haunting footage captured by drones, and compiled by Mic, shows as they navigate cities that have fallen prey to both natural and manmade disasters in Pripyat, the Motor City and Tomioka, Japan — the site of the 2011 nuclear disaster at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant.”

So, basically, 50 years of one-party Democratic rule is the equivalent of a nuclear meltdown. Sounds about right.

FRONTIERS IN HYPOCRISY: Joe Scarborough to Josh Earnest: How Can Obama Complain About Private Schools When He Went To One, His Children Attend One?

PUNISHING “DEVIANT” PARENTS:  George Will’s latest column offers numerous astute observations about the litany of ridiculous attitudes toward “kids” today:

Today’s saturating media tug children beyond childhood prematurely, but not to maturity. Children are cosseted by intensive parenting that encourages passivity and dependency, and stunts their abilities to improvise, adapt and weigh risks. . . .

[I]nstitutions have also decided that although undergraduates can cope with hormones and intoxicants, they must be protected from discomforting speech, which must be regulated by codes and confined to “free speech zones.” Uncongenial ideas must be foreshadowed by “trigger warnings,” lest students, who never were free-range children and now are as brittle as pretzels, crumble. Young people shaped by smothering parents come to college not really separated from their“helicopter parents.” Such students come convinced that the world is properly devoted to guaranteeing their serenity, and that their fragility entitles them to protection from distressing thoughts.

Yep. By hovering over children and scheduling their every waking moment with “organized” activities, we prevent them not only from making mistakes (and learning from them), but from tasting freedom, and hence, individuality and independence.  No wonder so many of them grow up to be delicate, oversensitive snowflakes.

IN THE MAIL: From Matthew Palmer, Secrets of State.

Plus, today only at Amazon: Up to 60% Off Select Computer Components & Accessories.

And, also today only: Camco Deluxe Grilling Table, $47.60 (66% off).

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 735.

HOUSE PASSES 20-WEEK ABORTION BILL:   The vote was 242-184, and along party lines (4 Democrats supported the bill; 4 Republicans opposed it). The bill would ban abortions after 20 weeks.

I am with my fellow constitutional law professors, Glenn (Mr. InstaP himself) and Jonathan Adler on this one:  I don’t see a principled constitutional basis for Congress to regulate abortions.  It is a matter of state power–for state-by-state legislative consideration–and not within Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.

For a Republican Congress to embrace such an expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause is more than a bit ironic (and unprincipled), especially given Republicans’ more parsimonious view of the Clause during the Obamacare litigation. Why jettison this basic understanding of constitutional structure/federalism merely to score a cheap political victory?

The goal of restricting abortions to 20 weeks’ gestation–which I support and is backed by increasing science on viability–can be accomplished within state legislatures.  There are some interesting and complicated legal questions about the constitutionality of a 20-week cutoff versus a 22-week cutoff due to the current science on viability, but there is little doubt that states have the constitutional wiggle room to ban abortions sometime around 22 weeks (the point of fetal viability).

But for Congress to impose a top-down, “one size fits all” cutoff for abortion flies in the face of conservative thought that Roe v. Wade itself was an inappropriate federalization of abortion that pretermitted democratic debate and state variation on such a contentious moral issue.

Note to Republicans in Congress:  The ends do not justify the means–rationale is out of the progressives’ playbook.

A FEMINISM VACCINE–FINALLY!:  Steven Hayward over at Power Line has a “public service announcement” for young women who are heading off to college this fall (and their parents).  He notes that there’s an organization called Network of Enlightened Women (NeW) that has chapters on 25 campuses thus far and is running a summer program (deadline fast approaching) at Sweet Briar College for conservative college women.  Its website states its mission as follows:

NeW educates young women on conservative values, cultivates a community in which to discuss and strengthen these values, and emboldens young women to speak out on campus and in their communities. NeW seeks to foster the education and leadership skills of conservative women. NeW is devoted to expanding the intellectual diversity on college campuses.

This sounds like a program worth looking into. There is no reason why we need to surrender our daughters to the progressive feminist propaganda so ubiquitous in academia.

SHALE HAS FAILED IN EUROPE:

Europe has watched the American shale revolution with envious eyes these last few years, and a number of countries—from the UK to Poland to Lithuania—have attempted to replicate U.S. success. But no one has been able to manage to put together the unique set of circumstances that have helped shale flourish here in the states, and the momentum behind fracking operations is stalling across Europe. . . .

Never is a long time, and it’s possible that as fracking technology advances operators will find ways to work with Europe’s trickier geology. But shale is already a high-cost resource, and with lower crude prices threatening American operations that already have a flourishing industry behind them, it’s hard to envisage Europe kick-starting its own boom in these market conditions. The U.S. “fracklog”, booming OPEC production, and sluggish global demand are all conspiring to keep prices down for the foreseeable future, and in so doing will likely keep European shale reserves in the ground.

Moscow is the only big winner here. Putin will be heartened to hear of Europe’s shale failures because it gives him more control over his Western customers and hamstrings their ability to find alternatives to Gazprom gas. For the time being, it looks like the only shale gas Europe will be consuming will be in the form of American LNG.

Fracking technology is advancing very rapidly. But for the moment, the U.S. is way ahead of everybody. We should be exploiting that advantage.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Partisan Hack Stephanopoulos, ABC ‘Newsman,’ Gave $50K to Clinton ‘Foundation.’ We knew he was a Democratic operative with a byline. But this ought to make him radioactive.

CARLY FIORINA: “I started out as a secretary. I have been underestimated all my life. I’m used to the pattern. I’m used to being underestimated and having to demonstrate competence.”

Quite a contrast to Hillary, who started out a Yale Law grad, but who never has.

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IS SCOTT WALKER the Anti-Bush?

ASHE SCHOW: Obama, the most sexist President ever?

If verbal sleights (or microaggressions) are equal to violence against women — and if you’ve been paying attention to the current state of college campuses, they are — then President Obama is one of the worst offenders in modern history, if not ever.

Exhibit A: Yesterday, Senate Democrats blocked a trade bill supported by Obama and Republicans (yes, you read that correctly). Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., led the revolt by Democrats. On Saturday, Obama said the following of Warren:

“The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else. And you know, she’s got a voice that she wants to get out there. And I understand that.”

Did you see the sexism? Did you see it? Those three sentences are teeming with sexism so wrong, so disrespectful, I’m surprised the outrage brigade isn’t calling for his head. . . .

This is just Obama’s most recent brush with sexism. After all, this is a man who has been waging his own “war on women” for years. In 2013, he was considering replacing Debbie Wasserman Schultz as head of the Democratic National Committee, which is about as sexist a thing as anyone could do. Wasserman Schultz was prepared to call him out on it in such terms. Luckily for Obama, she was mollified by the patriarchy and allowed to keep her job.

And let’s not forget May 2008, when then-Sen. Obama called a female reporter “sweetie” during a visit to a Chrysler plant in Sterling Heights, Pa. A month earlier, he had called a female factory worker in Allentown, Pa., “sweetie” as well. And don’t forget his famous sexist response to Hillary Clinton: “You’re likable enough, Hillary.”

That’s a seven-year history of sexism for Obama.

They told me if I voted for Mitt Romney we’d have a president who was dismissive toward women. And they were right!

NO ONE WILL GO TO JAIL FOR THIS. PROBABLY, NO ONE WILL LOSE THEIR JOB. VA improperly spent $6 billion annually, senior official says.

SPRINGTIME FOR DICTATORS: Dan Henninger’s latest column in the Wall Street Journal.  

Raúl Castro is taking meetings with everyone from President Barack Obama in Panama last month to Pope Francis in Rome last weekend. Then he returned to Havana for a meeting with President François Hollande of France, who flew in to see him and Fidel. How good can it get? . . . .

Raúl’s brutal modus operandi for critics of Cuba’s system is described at length in reports by the U.S. State Department and Human Rights Watch. But the Castros’ celebrity status with international elites transcends anything they do, and so Cuba is a member of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. . . .

Last weekend German Chancellor Angela Merkel went to Russia to honor the Russian soldiers who died in World War II. But while in Moscow, Ms. Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, said directly to Vladimir Putin: “I would like also to recall that the end of World War II did not bring democracy and freedom for all of Europe.”

Would that one of these men of the world had the guts to say that to Fidel’s face in Havana.

But they don’t.  

EUGENE VOLOKH: The Fourth Amendment and open carry of guns (where such open carry is legal). “While open-carry laws may put police officers (and some motorcyclists) in awkward situations from time to time, the Ohio legislature has decided its citizens may be entrusted with firearms on public streets. Ohio Rev. Code §§ 9.68, 2923.125. The Toledo Police Department has no authority to disregard this decision — not to mention the protections of the Fourth Amendment — by detaining every ‘gunman’ who lawfully possesses a firearm. And it has long been clearly established that an officer needs evidence of criminality or dangerousness before he may detain and disarm a law-abiding citizen.”

Glad to see the Sixth Circuit standing up for freedom and civil rights.

WE SHOULD GO BACK TO THAT PRACTICE: Guns and Members, When Congress Protected Itself.

Before there were Capitol Police to protect Congress (and leave their guns stashed in bathrooms), lawmakers tended to their own security — and their own weaponry.

And through much of the first half of the 19th century, whenever political tensions began to run high, guns were likely to appear on the hips of members.

It would do them good.