THE HILL: Weiner Gone, Dems Try To Move On. But something’s missing.

SHOCKER: Companies Leaving California In Record Numbers.

AVERAGE SAN FRANCISCO PENSION PAYS OUT MORE than average private sector worker earns. “When you start looking at the total cost of these pensions, it’s through the roof.”

SALENA ZITO: A Failure To Communicate. “Projecting such commonality is not something that President Barack Obama does well. . . . Most golfers, according to Western Pennsylvania Golf Association spokesman Jeff Rivard, play 20 or so rounds a year. The president has played more than 70 rounds in two years — amid a recession, three wars, a Mideast meltdown, and an economy not flourishing under his stimulus and bailout programs. . . . Simple things, such as Obama not receiving economic briefings for more than a month, make voters scratch their heads — especially when the jobs data are anything but optimistic.”

SOME DESKTOP HUMOR.

But what does my desk say about me, then? Well, if you saw it today, I guess you’d conclude I’ve gotten a lot smarter since that picture was taken . . . .

STILL TRYING TO PUSH AMAZON FRESH, ACCORDING to this report in Slashdot. But Fresh has been around for a couple of years — unlike the now-defunct Amazon Tote — and my biggest complaint is that it’s not available in my zip code.

ROGER KIMBALL: Rick Perry vs. Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Here’s a statistic worth pondering: 45 percent of net U.S. job creation in the last two years comes from Texas.

Yes, Texas: the state that is the poster child for right-wingery, the state with no state income tax whose population is growing at about 1000 per day (see a connection?) while bankrupt behemoths like California are bleeding jobs and people.

There are a handful of other places in the U.S. where job creation is rife. One of them is Washington, D.C. where an exploding government bureaucracy has also led to the creation of many jobs.

Many public-sector, i.e., tax-payer-funded jobs, that is. The jobs in Texas are overwhelmingly private-sector, i.e., wealth-creating jobs.

I mention this by way of introduction to my main point, which is to highlight something Texas Governor Rick Perry said in a recent speech in New Orleans.

Read the whole thing. But don’t worry — the EPA is trying to fix that whole Texas job-creation problem.

KINDLE VS. BOOKS: A COMPLAINT. Funny, in the abstract I agree about the virtue of dead-tree books, but I find I do most of my reading on Kindle — actually, on the Kindle App for iPhone or iPad — and that I’m mildly irritated when a book is only available in old-fashioned form.

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Multitools.

CLAIRE BERLINSKI: Extremely Disturbing, Barely-Noticed Story Of The Week: “So: Threaten Chinese technicians and they’ll displace 10,000 of you in less than a week, and the only place it will be reported is in the New Light of Myanmar, which you can be dead sure is only hinting at the horror of this.”

I MEANT TO SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE NEW YORK TIMES’ LAME HIT PIECE ON CLARENCE THOMAS, but fellow lawprof Ann Althouse got there first. Bottom line:

The constitutional check on a Supreme Court Justice is impeachment. Picture Congress going after Thomas for playing some background role in preserving a valuable black history site.

In short: Put up or shut up, schmucks. But of course, the New York Times piece isn’t really about ethics. It’s battlespace preparation for the Supreme Court’s healthcare vote. The problem for the Times is that Thomas doesn’t care what the New York Times thinks. Which means this is more about preparing a narrative of failure for ObamaCare — It was struck down by evil corrupt conservative judges. I think they’re going to be kept quite busy constructing failure narratives over the next couple of years.

For more on the political abuse of ethics charges, well, you could write a book on the subject. And if you did, it would be evergreen. . . .

And this comment seems to sum things up: “I read the NYT piece this morning early, while still groggy, and went back for a second, slow pass to see what I was missing. Which was nothing. The Times can be slow to act on egregious matters (maybe John Edwards is a good example) that are right beneath their noses, but they will strive mightily to produce a hint of a whiff of an infraction, especially if it regards someone they simply despise.”

UPDATE: Reader Max Jones writes:

Like your previous correspondent, I read the piece on Clarence Thomas twice but on the second pass I realized the most interesting part: Harlan Crow has a serious library with lots of books! Statues of Lenin and Stalin in the backyard! Board member of the American Enterprise Institute! Maybe they are friends because they are interested in the same things?

Actually, that was the second most interesting part. The first was that Jill Abramson, author of “Strange Justice,” hasn’t even waited to become editor of the NYT to attack Thomas and attempt to lay the groundwork for recusal in some future case.

Maybe Breitbart can get to work on Strange Editor.

Indeed.

CLIMATE CONFERENCE FACES BRUSH WITH REALITY: “In case you missed it – and judging by the complete lack of coverage on the cable news networks you may very well have – there was yet another climate conference held this week in Bonn, Germany. But rather than the usual singing in the round of Bob Dylan tunes and boisterous plans to alter the world, there was a decidedly depressed tone to the discussions. It’s not that they’ve suddenly begun to question their previously held beliefs concerning anthropogenic global warming, (AGW) but rather a grim realization that most of the nations involved are a bit too busy making sure their economies don’t collapse to dump a significant portion of their GDP into carbon emission control. . . . The other problem causing the talks to essentially fall apart until their next meeting in December was the lack of buy-in by both China and some developing countries. Even if China participates, they are insisting on a ‘trust me’ approach where no outside verification of compliance would be allowed.” Yeah, that’ll work.

Related: Climate change panel in hot water again over ‘biased’ energy report.

The world’s foremost authority on climate change used a Greenpeace campaigner to help write one of its key reports, which critics say made misleading claims about renewable energy, The Independent has learnt.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up by the UN in 1988 to advise governments on the science behind global warming, issued a report last month suggesting renewable sources could provide 77 per cent of the world’s energy supply by 2050. But in supporting documents released this week, it emerged that the claim was based on a real-terms decline in worldwide energy consumption over the next 40 years – and that the lead author of the section concerned was an employee of Greenpeace. Not only that, but the modelling scenario used was the most optimistic of the 164 investigated by the IPCC.

Critics said the decision to highlight the 77 per cent figure showed a bias within the IPCC against promoting potentially carbon-neutral energies such as nuclear fuel. One climate change sceptic said it showed the body was not truly independent and relied too heavily on green groups for its evidence.

Also: Changing Tides: Research Center Under Fire for ‘Adjusted’ Sea-Level Data.

And: Rex Murphy: Climate Scientists Make A Mockery Of The Peer-Review Process. “Much of what the world bizarrely allows to be called climate ‘science’ is a closet-game, an in-group referring to and reinforcing its own members. The insiders keep out those seen as interlopers and critics, vilify dissenters and labour to maintain a proprietary hold on the entire vast subject. It has been described very precisely as a ‘climate-assessment oligarchy.’ Less examined, or certainly less known to the general public, is how this in-group loops around itself. How the outside advocates buttress the inside scientists, and even — this is particularly noxious — how the outside advocates, the non-scientists, themselves become inside authorities. . . . A report on renewables, by the Renewable Energy Council of Europe, and Greenpeace, peer-reviewed by the man who wrote it. . . . Kind people may put this down to pure sloppiness on the part of the IPCC. Coming after its disastrous handling of the Himalayan glacier melt, however, it looks to me more like deliberate mischief. The IPCC cannot be that stupid by chance.”

You know, I’m entirely ready to believe that CO₂ emissions are having an effect on the climate. But the scientists involved aren’t acting as if they’re confident in letting the data speak for themselves, which is a big deal since they’re asking us to make enormous economic sacrifices based on what they’ve predicted. If, say, pharmaceutical companies were caught doing the same kinds of things, the politicians and the news media would be after their scalps.

Meanwhile, for the political leaders, well, I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis. Until they start foregoing private jets and beachside mansions, it’s going to be hard for me to take their calls for sacrifice on my part seriously.

ALL THAT FINDING-INNER-PEACE STUFF WAS JUST FOR THE RUBES ANYWAY: Deepak Chopra Mocks Sarah Palin In Angry Rant. Alternative argument: The two-minute hate is actually cleansing.

RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT? So what happened to that whole Obama doctrine about protecting civilians from atrocities by tyrants? Syrian forces try to stem exodus of refugees to Turkey. “Syrian human rights campaigner Ammara Qurabi also accused pro-government forces of attacking people who were helping the refugees as they tried to escape from a widening military assault to crush protests against Assad’s autocratic rule. . . . Witnesses said pro-Assad forces were firing randomly, ransacking houses and burning crops in Jisr al-Shughour, an area known for its apple groves, olive trees and wheat.”

I THINK I FORGOT TO MENTION that Professor Jacobson is now at LegalInsurrection.com. Bye, bye Blogspot!

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Automotive. Also, power inverters.

I keep a little cigarette-lighter inverter in the car and don’t use it much, but on our last trip Helen’s cellphone died and all she had was the 110v charger in her purse. Popped the inverter in and she was charged up in a jiffy. I keep one of the bigger ones in the garage in case we need to charge electronics (laptops, etc.) in an extended power outage, but I’ve never had to do that because our power is pretty reliable. Nice to have, though. Interesting that a lot of them now come with USB outlets.

FAIL: Gun at anti-violence film shoot leads to arrests. “Oakland Schools spokesman Troy Flint says the teacher and counselor showed a severe lapse in judgment. He said they were trying to create a film to illustrate the harms of violence.”

A HACKER CIVIL WAR? Hit the deck: LulzSec and Anonymous start trading blows. “Hacker group LulzSec has begun publicly attacking hacker group Anonymous, an action that could lead to a civil war of sorts between the two hacker groups that have similar origins. LulzSec has begun publicly mocking 4chan.org, the image-sharing message board where Anonymous was reportedly born, on its main Twitter account, which it has used to generate publicity for its attacks.”

MAPPING THE DEAD from Mexico’s Drug War.

HAPPY JUNETEENTH.

WISCONSIN: What Will The Unions Do Now?

YESTERDAY, I LINKED A DISCUSSION OF THE NEW EPIDEMIC OF NON-ALCOHOLIC FATTY LIVER DISEASE, and a lot of readers think that there’s a Gary Taubes point to be made.

Reader Scott Loftfield sends this link to the benefits of a low-carbohydrate diet, and reader Jeffrey Bentley writes:

I read on Instapundit the finding about high incident rate of NASH in the US.

I was diagnosed with NASH in 1999 or so when my liver started failing.

They spent two years running just about any test or imaging scan they could think of, as my liver slowly developed fibrosis. I was one of those people that were told I’d need a liver transplant in 5-10 years. To buy myself some time my gastroenterologists recommended losing weight, but doing it healthily by going to a nutritionist to develop a custom diet. Many typical weight-loss diets put stress on the liver, so doing a “low impact” weight reduction diet was critical for me.

The nutritionist I went to was a semi-retired surgeon, fatigued from years of transplant surgery, that decided to start a clinic devoted to preventing disease.

She basically saved my life.

In doing her intake on me as a patient, she looked over the pile of data, quizzed me on the effects certain foods have on me, and realized that I may have difficulty processing fructose.

She put me on a diet restrictive of fructose. I had to give up the fruits and fruit juices that I loved, I had to give up food with high fructose corn syrup, and I had to give up table sugar, as that is processed by the body into fructose and glucose.

Within 6 months my liver enzymes were normal and within a year my ultrasounds showed a normal-sized liver. No more NASH.

I have pretty much stayed on this diet, lost 30 pounds on it, and have had no problems with my liver. I put a couple tablespoons of sugar in my coffee every morning, otherwise, I avoid it.

As to why fructose would have this effect, we have no idea. My liver was treating it as a harmful substance that needed to be eliminated, the process of which was taking a heavy toll on my liver, much as if I was drinking a lot of alcohol. There seems to be no readily identifiable reason why this was so, but when I backslid on my diet and started eating fructose again, I did start having lots of pain in my liver and developed jaundice. When I stopped eating fructose, the jaundice and pain went away.

This is just my personal experience, and may not be the same for the others afflicted with NASH. But it’s easily tested on an individual basis. Just watch what you eat, skipping sucrose and fructose in your meals, and see if it helps.

More here, and also here. Plus, more on a fructose connection. (Thanks to reader Laurie Weakley for the links). I have to say that the Taubes thesis is looking better in numerous ways.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, WHISTLEBLOWERS WOULD BE SUPPRESSED. And they were right! “Stephen J. Kim, an arms expert who immigrated from South Korea as a child, spent a decade briefing top government officials on the dangers posed by North Korea. Then last August he was charged with violating the Espionage Act — not by aiding some foreign adversary, but by revealing classified information to a Fox News reporter. Mr. Kim’s case is next in line in the Obama administration’s unprecedented crackdown on leaks.”

TIM CAVANAUGH; Why Not Let Wages And Prices Fall? Bernanke’s sophisticated surgical tools keep making the patient worse. Whether Bernanke’s surgery is a success or failure depends on who you think he’s trying to help.