OUTSOURCING: Busy Month for Obama Campaign with Fundraisers in Switzerland, Sweden, Paris and Communist China.

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Also, markdowns on sandals for men and for women.

THE DEATH PENALTY for Penn State football?

WHY IT’S HARDER TO MAKE FRIENDS WHEN YOU’RE OLDER. Meh. Join a Tea Party group and you’ll get all three conditions met.

HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? Egyptians pelt Clinton motorcade with tomatoes.

Protesters threw tomatoes and shoes at U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s motorcade on Sunday during her first visit to Egypt since the election of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi.

A tomato struck an Egyptian official in the face, and shoes and a water bottle landed near the armoured cars carrying Clinton’s delegation in the port city of Alexandria.

A senior state department official said that neither Clinton nor her vehicle, which were around the corner from the incident, were struck by any of the projectiles.

Protesters chanted: “Monica, Monica”, a reference to Former President Bill Clinton’s extra-marital affair. Some chanted: “leave, Clinton”, Egyptian security officials said.

It was not clear who the protesters were or what political affiliations they had. Protesters outside Clinton’s hotel on Saturday night chanted anti-Islamist slogans, accusing the United States of backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power.

Not so great, it seems. But remember how hilarious it was when one guy threw a shoe at Bush? This must be a lot funnier, since it’s a bunch of guys throwing shoes and stuff.

CHANGE: Suburban Illinois Jews Embracing GOP. “And it’s the horrendous economy and the liberty, not Israel.” Funny, I was at a birthday party last year with a friend from the northern Chicago suburbs who had been a big Obama backer in 2008 and who had turned completely against him.

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WHY YOU SHOULD KNOW CPR: “…sudden cardiac arrest often picks the least likely victims.”

It’s an even better reason for the growing ubiquity of automated defibrillators, which work much more reliably than CPR.

JIM TREACHER: Obama To Americans: You Don’t Deserve What You’ve Earned! “Here’s The Smartest President Ever, speaking in Roanoke on Friday and writing Romney’s next ad for him. Sure sounds like he’s channelling Elizabeth Warren. . . . Barack Obama openly stokes bitter resentment against Americans who work hard, take risks, and create jobs. But at least he’s ‘likable’!”

He’s likable enough. Plus, from the comments:

“Obama to Americans: You don’t deserve what you’ve earned”

Americans to Obama: “Funny, we were thinking the exact same thing about you…”

Heh.

OUTSOURCING: Next American woman heads for space — on this Russian rocket.

ROGER KIMBALL: The Arab Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year.

The headline says it all: “Egyptian TV Airs Slow Beheading of Tunisian Muslim Who Converted to Christianity.”

Meanwhile, in other news, Hilary Clinton has been yucking it up with Egypt’s new President, Mohamed Morsi. The United States, quoth Clinton, “supports the full transition to civilian rule with all that entails.”

Isn’t that nice? Judging by his grin, Mr. Morsi seemed top like it.
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Query: What do you suppose “with all that entails,” um, entails?

Maybe we just don’t really care, now that the U.S. is headed for energy independence.

FROM SAILORS TO SITZPINKLERS? Navy’s New Gender-Neutral Carriers Won’t Have Urinals.

ED DRISCOLL INTERVIEWS ROGER KIMBALL on his new book, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia.

REPORTING FROM the Office Olympics. “And of course we had to do a little drinking.”

THE MANY THINGS THAT CAN CRASH A DATA CENTER: “Data centers go down all the time. It’s a fact of life. But while we’ve all seen the internet error messages, we don’t always hear what actually brought down the massive computing facilities responsible for serving up the web services we use everyday. Two weeks ago, Netflix went down on a Friday night. The problem? A massive storm on the east coast and some Amazon backup generators that didn’t power up in time to help. Here are few more root causes behind data center outages over the past few years. They include everything from lightning to squirrels to boredom.”

Yes, squirrels. “Squirrels may be the data center’s enemy number one. Level 3 Communications say that they accounted for an astounding 17 percent of all of their cable damage last year.”

A SMARTPHONE APP that can rescue you from a bad date. “The Bad Date Rescue app, which was launched by the dating website eHarmony.com this week, lets users arrange for a call to appear on their iPhone to graciously allow them to bow out if a date isn’t going well. . . . The free app includes several ways to set up a rescue. Users can pick a number from their address book for the call, for example from their mother or a friend. It the person’s picture is stored on the app it will appear on the screen when the call comes through. . . . The free app can be pre-set before the date to call at a specific time and there is a quick rescue that can be triggered on the spot to ring in a few seconds or minutes.”

BOOK PLUG: Reader Ron Ballew writes: “A long time reader here with a book I am plugging for my niece who is a High School English teacher. It’s title is The Unintended on kindle here. No zombies but there are vampires!” As long as they’re not sparkly.

WHY MATH TEACHERS feel poorly prepared. “There is perhaps a simple answer for the elementary and middle school teachers: They felt ill prepared because if we examine the coursework they studied during their teacher preparation, they were ill prepared. The new TEDS study results suggested this to be the case more generally, which clearly does not bode well for equality of learning experiences for students in these districts.”

REPORT FROM COMIC-CON: Why We Love Superheroes.

CHANGE: Obama to Clinton welfare reform: Drop dead. “The outrage is bipartisan.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: “Green” Energy Bias Killing California. “Destroying the economic hopes of low income people in order to stoke the self esteem of entitled Boomers is not Via Meadia’s idea of progressive politics, but that just goes to show how backwards we are by the exalted moral standards of the California elites. The destruction of California isn’t a victimless crime. Millions of low income California residents are trapped in decaying cities where, thanks in large part to narcissistic green unicorn chasers, the manufacturing base has withered away. And anything that blights California, blights us all. America and the world need California back on line; the Golden State has too much to offer for anyone to remain indifferent to its fate.”

IT’S NOT JUST HERE THAT THE DRUG WAR IS A JOKE: Dramatic drug raid at Stockholm school ‘failed.’

THIS DOESN’T SOUND GOOD: Chicken Vaccines Combine to Produce Deadly Virus. “Vaccines aren’t supposed to cause disease. But that appears to be what’s happening on Australian farms. Scientists have found that two virus strains used to vaccinate chickens there may have recombined to form a virus that is sickening and killing the animals. ‘This shows that recombination of such strains can happen and people need to think about it,’ says Glenn Browning, a veterinary microbiologist at the University of Melbourne, Parkville, in Australia and one of the co-authors on the paper.”

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