NOT SURE I BUY THIS DIAGNOSIS OF HILLARY’S PROBLEMS IN 2008: “They did not let Hillary be Hillary.”

KURT SCHLICHTER: Conservatism Is The New Punk Rock. Actually, that’s more libertarianism. But:

Look at ancient Hillary Clinton, that improbable Millennial heroine. She’s the Bachman Turner Overdrive of American politics, out there literally taking care of business – especially the businesses who take care of her by paying her hundreds of thousands a pop to come talk to them.

There’s no energy left in liberalism, no excitement, just more rules, more controls, everything the punks hated. You can’t say this, you can’t think that, everybody read the memo – today we’re scheduled to be angry at people don’t want to subsidize our birth control! Oh, and make sure you obtain a videotaped, notarized consent form before you kiss your cisgender hook-up.

Yeah. The Dems are looking like that crazy preacher in Footloose.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Out: “All But Dissertation.” In: “Certificate of Doctoral Completion.” “Dysfunctional graduate departments, toxic faculty, and the Navy Seal-like brutality of the Ph.D. process all contribute to the burnout experienced by the estimated 50-plus percent of Ph.D. students who fail to earn their doctorates.”

BILL QUICK WONDERS IF THIS IMMIGRATION CRISIS is backfiring on Obama.

DAVID GOLDMAN: Maybe This Time They’ll Kill Us Twice. You know what should come after Hamas? Nothing.

BETTER MAKE SOME DONATIONS TO ORGANIZING FOR AMERICA, STAT! Former Vanguard Tax Lawyer Files Whistleblower Suit Alleging Mutual Fund Giant Became Low-Cost Leader by Evading $1 Billion in Taxes.

LAYERS OF EDITORS AND FACT-CHECKERS: “That parody story about Michele Bachmann proposing to set up labor camps for illegal immigrant children, which took in our dear friends at Think Progress, has taken in the New York Times as well: Brazil bureau chief Simon Romero is tweeting the fake story as though it were real.”

UPDATE: Hey, though, this may actually do more than anything to shrink the flow of immigrants. Idea for anti-illegal-immigration groups: Buy ads in Central America, looking pretty official, denying that the U.S. Government puts illegals into forced-labor camps. Say that what the New York Times and ThinkProgress are reporting is false! Pay no attention to these absurd claims!

2014: GOP Counting on ‘Motivated Base,’ Courting ‘Low-Propensity Voters’ to Win This Fall. They’ll do better if the Republican apparat — I’m looking at you, NRSC — doesn’t piss off the base with racial attacks on Tea Party candidates. You know?

AT AMAZON, deals on new products from iRobot.

Plus, deals on American-made garden hoses from Water Right.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Supreme Beings Of Leisure: As technology advances, human work may become increasingly irrelevant.

HILLARY CLINTON: Hey, you know who was a great President? George W. Bush. “George W. Bush is very popular in Sub-Saharan Africa. Why? Because of the president emergency program for AIDS relief whether you agree or disagree with a lot of what else he did — and I disagree with a lot of it — I am proud to be an American when I go to Sub-Saharan Africa and people say, ‘I want to thank President Bush and the United States for helping us fight HIV/AIDS.'”

EUROPE’S AMAZING ANTI-ISRAEL WAYS.

I’ve lived in Europe the past dozen years—in Berlin, Prague, and London. When it comes to Israel, Europe’s ways seldom cease to amaze. . . .

Bias against Israel, and Jews, is hardly a rarity across the EU. This is not just about Gaza and it can pop up anywhere.

In late 1990s, the venerable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung slipped in a story about then British Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind. The prestigious German paper reported that “the Jew Rifkind” had ended a Bonn speech by quoting the founder of the Reformation, Martin Luther: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Huh? “Der Jude Rifkind”? The author of the story explained in defense that readers should know that the Foreign Secretary was quoting a Protestant, even though he was not one. Sigh.

A few years later France’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s slipped. In an unguarded moment at a London dinner party he referred to the Jewish state as “that shitty little country Israel.” The Qua d’Orsay envoy did not deny making the remark, but did say he found it outrageous that a private observation would find its way into the media. A French Embassy spokesman said at the time the ambassador had “no intention of apologizing.”

A few years later still, when I was head of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, a German foreign ministry official sitting in my office out at the Wannsee—the site, incidentally where the Nazis planned the “Final Solution”—asked me why I, as a non-Jew, would be pro-Israel. More awkwardly, a senior executive at the American Chamber of Commerce in Frankfurt told me in the run up to the Iraq war that it was the Jews who were behind the campaign. Sound nutty? The Berlin daily Tagespiegel ran a major story on Iraq around the same time with a large photo of George W. Bush in the Oval Office, meeting with a delegation of Orthodox Jews from Israel. Mind you, the photo and White House visit had absolutely nothing to do with Iraq but, well, you get the picture.

There are a few things going on here. First, there’s guilt-displacement: If Israel is bad, then the Holocaust seems a bit less so. Second, opposing Israel and Jews gives Europe diplomatic leverage in the Middle East, to the point that one European Parliament member has called it a “proxy war” on America:

European Union Parliament member Ilka Schroeder delivered an address entitled, “The European Union, Israel, and Palestinian Terrorism” at the Center for German Studies of Ben Gurion University on Monday.

“The Europeans,” explained MP Schroeder, “supported the Palestinian Authority with the aim of becoming its main sponsor, and through this, challenge the U.S. and present themselves as the future global power. Therefore, the Al-Aksa Intifada should be understood as a proxy war between Europe and the United States.”

“It is an open secret within the European Parliament that EU aid to the Palestinian Authority has not been spent correctly,” MP Schroeder said during a recent address in New York. “The European Parliament does not intend to verify whether European taxpayers’ money could have been used to finance anti-Semitic murderous attacks. Unfortunately, this fits well with European policy in this area.”

MP Schroeder, a twenty-five-year-old former member of the German Green Party, began her political career protesting the war in Kosovo and denouncing globalization. A year ago, MP Schroeder set her sights on an issue long avoided by members of the radical Left – the diverting of some of the 250 million in annual aid for the Arabs of Yesha (Judea, Samaria and Gaza) to corrupt officials and terrorist groups bent on Israel’s destruction.

This doesn’t happen by accident. Related item here. And, of course, here. Then, of course, there’s Europe’s shameful record of anti-semitism over centuries, backstopping everything else.

THE RISE OF “WOMEN AGAINST FEMINISM.”

Well, this feminist stuff really has gotten out of hand.

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Eleanor Holmes Norton says ‘you don’t have a right to know’ what’s going on in government.

NO FAIR, JOE BIDEN GOT A PASS: Walsh Plagiarism Scandal Won’t Be Easy to Leave Behind: U.S. Army War College opens investigation while GOP campaign arm jumps on the story.

“SMART DIPLOMACY” BEARS ITS FRUIT: Madeleine Albright: ‘The world is a mess.’

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: CHICKS DIG JERKS. Study Finds That Men Like Nice Women, But Not the Other Way Around. “The researchers found that men who perceived possible female partners as responsive found them to be ‘more feminine and more attractive.’ Past research suggests that physical cues of femininity stimulate sexual attraction because they suggest higher estrogen levels, better overall mate quality and solid reproductive health. On the other hand, women didn’t necessarily perceive a responsive man as less masculine, but they also did not find a responsive man more attractive. What’s more, when women perceived their male partner to be responsive, they were less attracted to the man. In other words, it appeared that in an initial encounter men liked nice ladies; women thought nice guys were kind of lame.”

SUMMER SAVINGS ON RST Outdoor Furniture.

Also, deals on Fresh Air Vacuums from Miele. Plus, deals on Hoover cordless vacuums.

SIMULATION: Volunteers Emerge from Mock Mars Base in Hawaii. “Six volunteers are enjoying their first weekend of freedom after spending four months inside a mock Mars base atop a Hawaiian volcano, all in the name of science. . . . Since late March, the HI-SEAS 2 crew lived in a two-story, 36-foot-wide (11 meters), solar-powered dome situated on the slopes of the shield volcano Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii. The team only left the habitat during simulated ‘Marswalks’ and wore mock spacesuits to explore the Marslike environment of Mauna Loa about 8,000 feet above sea level.”

See the simulated-Areonauts talk about their experience here.

UGH: Two Teen Girls Arrested After Posting Video of Themselves Torturing Tortoise. “Burn baby, burn baby. Now you’re scared of us, huh?”

JAMES JAY CARAFANO: Bill Gates’ Summer Reading List Is So Lame. These 6 Books Are Much Better.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Robots could take half of jobs in Germany. It’s probably the Jews’ fault, somehow.

MYTHS VS. FACTS About Bakken Crude And Oil By Rail. I’d still rather see a pipeline built.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 444.