DISCLAIMER OF THE WEEK:

From Daily Bruin, the Disclaimer of the Week: pic.twitter.com/nG5Lu1nbqJ

— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) July 22, 2015

Adjust journalistic style guides, Newspeak Dictionaries accordingly.

WHEN I DOVE WITH HER A FEW YEARS AGO, SHE WAS STILL RECOVERING FROM A SHARK BITE: Liz Parkinson Free Dives With Sharks: No Tank, No Cage, No Problem. It had driven the “shark proof” chain mail into her skin, leaving a sort of road-rash. But now she skips the mail entirely. Don’t think I’ll emulate her, but it’s a cool video.

THIS IS KNOWN AS ‘BAD LUCK:’

● Shot: Report: 3 million more children in poverty under Obama, 22% of all kids.

● Chaser: Obama: ‘On Almost Every Metric The Country Is Significantly Better Off.’

I think what he means is that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong,” but Robert Heinlein might beg to differ.

FASTER, PLEASE: New Antibody Fights Several Flu Strains At Once: And could make the annual flu shot a thing of the past.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Microwave Power Beaming May Launch Space Planes into Orbit.

TOP 10 THINGS EVERY NEW OR EXPECTING DAD MUST KNOW, from Duane Lester (“So far, I have seven children. You read that right. And yes, I said so far.”) at the new PJM Parenting section.

What else should dad know ahead of time? Leave your suggestions in the comment section below.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 804.

WE HAVE TO DESTROY THE MALL IN ORDER TO SAVE IT:  As their customers switch to online shopping, suburban malls are hurting. The empty storefronts are multiplying in areas that are now “over-malled,” especially at the older shopping centers that have come to seem sterile and boring. To save them, Michael Hendrix looks back to the pioneering architect, Victor Gruen, who built the Ur-mall in the 1950s. Gruen originally intended that mall, the Southdale Center outside Minneapolis, to be part of a mixed-use development of restaurants, homes, schools and parks. Instead, it became an isolated world of stores surrounded by blank walls and parking lots — nothing but a “shopping machine,” he lamented as it was copied across the country.

To survive, the old shopping centers need to reinvent themselves, and suburban officials need to change the zoning codes that have stifled innovation for so long by making it illegal to build homes near stores and offices. Hendrix writes:

Many of these shopping centers are ideal sites for transit-oriented, mixed-use developments that include housing, retail, office, services, and public space. Infusing malls with new life means following a few basic ideas. Outward-looking shop fronts will need to be carved into malls’ blank faces. Large parking lots will have to be replaced by regularized street patterns that connect with surrounding communities. Mixed-used developments around the mall should sit flush with roads and offer residents and shoppers walkable, public spaces. Non-retail activity, such as office space and housing, will need to be integrated directly into malls.

Innovative policymakers should also consider malls as self-contained zones for experimenting with new ideas. Devens, a 4,400-acre redevelopment of a former military base on the outskirts of Boston, implemented a 75-day, one-stop permitting regime that helped turn the once-derelict space into one of Massachusetts’s most thriving commercial centers. Other cities have turned ghost malls into low-cost co-working and “maker” hubs—a boon in particular for poorer entrepreneurs who can’t afford flashy commercial space. New ideas can be tried out in old malls, trusting that the best ones will trickle out to the rest of the city.

Read the whole thing at City Journal.

BLUE CIVIL WAR: Hillary Clinton’s ‘Black Lives Matter’ Triangulations.

Last month, Clinton herself said “all lives matter” in a speech at a black church, arousing the ire of some progressives—though not enough to make her apologize for using the phrase, as O’Malley did after his roasting at Netroots. Clinton’s statement Tuesday indicates that she likely won’t make the mistake of saying “all lives matter” again, at least during primary season.

It might be tempting to dismiss Hillary’s triangulation on “black lives matter” as petty primary posturing with little political significance. In fact, it points to a very real division within the American left, with important implications for the future of the Democratic Party—namely, the division between economic populists who rally around the politics of class and social progressives who rally around the politics of identity.

Sanders, Hillary’s chief rival, is clearly a social liberal, but the unifying theme of his platform—which includes single payer healthcare, a Wall Street crackdown, and a 90 percent top tax rate—is economic populism. Clinton has attempted to adopt a left-wing populist tone during the primary campaign, but as a private jet-setting multimillionaire whose top donors are Wall Street banks, she cannot credibly position herself to Sanders’ left on class or economic issues. Her Facebook statement rebuking Sanders and O’Malley on race—along with other policy moves like her celebration of the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision and her leftward pivot on immigration—can be seen as an effort to compensate for her populist deficiencies by emphasizing her identity politics bona fides.

Oh, goody.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: “… a cyber attack has the potential of existential consequence.”

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WIDESPREAD TOUCHSCREEN ORDERING TO COME TO NYC FAST FOOD RESTAURANTS BY NEXT YEAR? “The only reason that we don’t see more automation now is because it’s still cheaper to use human beings.  Make human beings more expensive, and, well…” And New York State, which is shooting for a $15 “fast-food wage,” is planning just that, as New York State’s run of “bad luck” continues.

WILL BAUDE: With Same-Sex Marriage Legal, Is Polygamy Next? “With same-sex marriage on the books, we can now ask whether polyamorous relationships should be next. There is a very good argument that they should.”

HOME-SCHOOLER CHAIRS TEXAS BOARD OF EDUCATION:

[Donna Bahorich (R)] stressed she doesn’t think home-schooling is the only way for parents and children in Texas.

“I am definitely a conservative, but I don’t think of myself of being in a particular box. It is about individual issues for me,” she said “I am convinced that a strong public education system built this country to where we are today, and we can’t let that go by the wayside.”

A sentiment that puts her one up on most of her critics.

WAIT, I KEEP HEARING THAT FALSE ACCUSATIONS OF RAPE NEVER HAPPEN: Man wrongly accused of rape finally released from prison.

Mark Weiner wanted to do a good deed by giving a young woman who was walking alone at night a ride home. Unfortunately for Weiner, that young woman was looking to get sympathy from a man she was dating. So as Weiner drove her home, the woman, Chelsea Steiniger, texted her boyfriend, Michael Mills, claiming she had been abducted for sexual purposes.

Steiniger alleged that within a span of 28 minutes, Weiner “tried to get in my pants,” wouldn’t let her out of the car at her mother’s house and then took control of her phone to send threatening texts to Steiniger’s boyfriend. In one of those messages allegedly sent by Weiner, he told Mills: “[S]hes [sic] in my house she said she was cold so IMMa [sic] warm her up.”

Weiner was a 52-year-old manager at the local Food Lion, perhaps not the type of person one would expect to text “IMMa” to someone.

Steiniger would later testify that Weiner drove past her mother’s house, incapacitated her with a chemical-soaked rag and took her to a rural property to rape her. She claimed she had escaped by jumping off a second-floor balcony, hiding in the woods and walking two miles to her mother’s house. At no time did she call the police.

Mills did call the police, who tried to contact Steiniger, But she had turned off her phone after checking her voicemail. Police then went to Steiniger’s home. She answered the door looking exactly like someone who had not just jumped out a window and trekked through the woods.

Despite this, Weiner was arrested. The prosecutor for the case, Denise Lunsford, didn’t turn over potentially exculpatory evidence to the defense. Lunsford had spoken to two cops who said cell phone records indicated that Steiniger’s phone pinged two towers near her mother’s house but none near the house she was allegedly taken to by Weiner. Lunsford declined to allow the policemen to testify and didn’t notify the defense of their evidence.

As Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick noted, no physical evidence tied Weiner to the rural house or Steiniger’s phone. Weiner was convicted based solely on Steiniger’s testimony and was sent to prison.

This is why “believe the women” is a lousy foundation for a legal system. And Denise Lunsford should lose her job for this travesty.

REVISIONISM: Remember ‘Memogate’? Makers of a Dan Rather Film Don’t.

They rushed the documents onto air, and then, when the story exploded in their face, they spent an unconscionably long time attacking the people who had pointed out the glaring issues with their source material. They clung to theories along the lines of Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian assiduously fiddling with the margin stops on his typewriter, such that they coincidentally lined up exactly with the defaults in as-yet-uninvented Microsoft Word. For two weeks, they dragged their network through a professional embarrassment of a scale that has rarely been reached again, because they didn’t do the most basic thing we’re paid for: properly vet their story before they started hurling serious, potentially election-altering accusations at a sitting president.

Okay, so that’s why Rather left CBS. But that is not, according to Rather, the story you will hear in the movie.

So it’s a sanitized airbrushing. Worthy of Dan Rather himself.

WISCONSIN JOHN DOE FOLLOWUP: Erwin Chemerinsky, Stephen Salzburg, and I have an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the Rindfleisch case, which is about Fourth Amendment limits to government email trawling.

WELL, WHEN YOU SPEND DECADES BUILDING UP A RECORD AS A DUMB, OVERBEARING HACK, YEAH: Reputation Can Be Tough to Reverse; Just Ask Sheila Jackson Lee.

The latest dust-up centered on Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee has several hallmarks of her form — behaving in ways the vast majority of members of Congress intuitively know to avoid.

She got up in somebody’s business in a very public place. She sought to dominate a situation where her very presence was untoward. And she asserted her titular authority in the pursuit of special treatment at a time when such a power play seemed wholly inappropriate.

But there’s one way in which the altercation last month between Houston’s Democratic congresswoman and the Capitol Police deviated significantly from her reputation: She was coming to the defense of an aide, not castigating one.

According to detailed contemporaneous notes taken by witnesses and provided to CQ Roll Call, Jackson Lee said this upon arriving at the scene of a traffic accident on the Hill: “What happened? This is ludicrous. I am tired of Capitol Police harassing me and my staff. Who do I talk to about this?”

The police report outlines what happened as not at all complicated, with no apparent need for congressional intervention. At 1:50 p.m. on June 17, a gray Nissan SUV backed away from a vehicle barricade between the Cannon and Longworth buildings, at the intersection of New Jersey and Independence avenues, and the left side of the car struck Officer Terry Absher on his right side. No injuries were reported at the scene, and no citations were issued.

What made the situation fraught was that the driver was Glenn Rushing, whose 52 months on the job makes him by far the longest serving chief of staff in the congresswoman’s 11 terms in office, where the rapid pace of turnover became legend long ago. (The congresswoman had 11 different chiefs, for example, in the decade before she hired Rushing, who took the position after a series of congressional campaign committee posts and a brief run at lobbying.)

Unsatisfied with Absher’s “I’m alright” response to her inquiry about his condition, Jackson Lee declared, “You don’t look hurt. Where are you hurt?” and then violated one of the first rules of propriety in dealing with the police: She put her hands on the officer to assess his condition for herself.

He should sue for sexual assault. It was an unconsented touching. Though she does seem atypically concerned with Mr. Rushing’s wellbeing.

AFTER NEARLY 4 YEARS IN HANDS OF IRAN, OBAMA FINALLY SAYS U.S. HOSTAGE’S NAME:

Next month, the family of a Marine veteran will mark the grim milestone of his fourth year held by Iran — barring a miraculous change of heart by a regime that originally sentenced him to death for conspiracy to commit espionage.

Today brought another milestone in the tragic case of Amir Hekmati: President Obama finally, for the first time, said his name in public.

The family had been begging the White House just to say Amir’s name.

Mr. Obama’s two terms really are a case study in how a president can make Jimmy Carter look competent by comparison, aren’t they?

MILO YIANNOPOULOS: Feminist Champion Randi Harper, in Her Own Words: ‘Stop Making Everything a Gender Issue.’

#TEAMWOODCHIPPER: Rand Paul puts tax code in woodchipper.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) knows what he wants to do the tax code if he becomes president: put it through a wood chipper.

Paul’s campaign released a video Tuesday that shows the GOP presidential candidate bashing the complexities of the tax code and finding various ways to “kill it.”

As a guitar version of the “Star Spangled Banner” plays, Paul feeds printed pages of the tax code into a wood chipper, slashes the pages with a chainsaw and lights the paper on fire.

“Hey, I’m Rand Paul and I’m trying to kill the tax code, all 70,000 pages of it,” Paul says at the start of the video, wearing a t-shirt that reads “Detroit Republican.”

“If you want to know more about my plan to have a one-page tax code, a one-page tax return, a flat tax of 14.5 percent, go to RandPaul.com.”

His website currently directs to a splash page that asks supporters to sign up and vote on how they want to kill the code.

Enjoy.

TIM COOK HAS NOT PERFORMED AS WELL AS HOPED: Apple shares plummet after lower than expected iPhone sales. The watch is a product that appeals mostly to hipster doofuses, the iPhone is great, but improvements have been incremental and there’s stiff competition from Samsung, etc., and there’s nothing new or exciting. (A gold MacBook?) Cook has also been expressly political in a way Steve Jobs wasn’t.

WASHINGTON POST: POLLS SHOW A SETUP FOR A BACKLASH. Liberals have won a series of victories on social issues. Most Americans aren’t thrilled about it. “Liberals’ have won a string of victories on gay marriage and health care reform this year, but a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds a large majority of Americans are unhappy with where the nation is headed on social issues. Sixty three percent of people say they are uncomfortable with the country’s overall direction on social issues these days; four in 10 feel ‘strongly’ uncomfortable about the nation’s changes. . . . What appeared to be overwhelming wins for President Obama in June and July are not resonating with his base quite as soundly as may have been expected. As Republican and Democratic presidential candidates look to the key issues in the 2016 election, the role of the wealth gap is a far more unifying issue than changing social issues. Nearly 7 in 10 say the economic system favors the wealthy, something Democrats and Republicans agree upon.”

HOW A DEFECTOR FROM NORTH KOREA REALIZED ALMOST EVERYTHING SHE LEARNED ABOUT HER COUNTRY WAS A LIE:

The woman was raised in a relatively privileged manner, a middle-class existence because of her stepfather’s job with the North Korean military, but even so she attended her first public execution at the age of seven — a stark lesson in obedience.

Seeing a man hanged under a railway bridge — one of many such public executions that are mandatory for people to see, she says — was only one of the grotesque means of control the regime waged against its citizens.

As in many authoritarian countries, for example, Lee’s family displayed portraits of the ruling family in their home, first Great Leader Kim Il-sung, then his son and heir Dear Leader Kim Jong-il and, later, his son and heir Kim Jong-un. The government gave them a special cloth for cleaning the portraits and nothing else. The pictures had to be the most prominent in any room, hung the highest, perfectly aligned and on a wall containing no other adornment.

Once a month, Lee says, officials wearing white gloves would visit every house in her neighbourhood to inspect the portraits. If one was dusty or improperly hung, the family would be punished. It was with the portraits, one under each arm, that her stepfather emerged — blackened and coughing — after running back into their burning house, risking his life for their preservation.

Read the whole thing.