MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The battle to define Hillary Clinton is on—and she’s losing.

SO, HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Saudi Arabia Says King Won’t Attend Meetings in U.S. “Saudi Arabia announced on Sunday that its new monarch, King Salman, would not be attending meetings at the White House with President Obama or a summit gathering at Camp David this week, in an apparent signal of its continued displeasure with the administration over United States relations with Iran, its rising regional adversary.”

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Enumerated Powers: Republicans are supposed to be the party of limited government, even in the case of abortion.

PAUL RAHE ON MOTHER’S DAY PUNDITRY: “You can be a Jew. You can be a Catholic. But if you come to America and join the establishment, you will end up as a Puritan — appalled at the thought that somewhere somebody is having a good time.”

OKAY. START WITH TOM STEYER. AND LOOK INTO THE TIDES FOUNDATION. Peter Beinart: Reporters should apply the same level of scrutiny to campaign financiers as they do to political candidates.

I LIKE HER. SHE FIGHTS. ‘Chuck Todd just got jacked up’: Carly Fiorina is throwing ‘domaingate’ right back at the media.

UPDATE: Reuters: U.S. presidential candidate Fiorina spins web around interviewer.

POWER LINE PODCAST: The Stories Inside “Clinton Cash.”

FEMALE PRIVILEGE: “Women are disproportionately not imprisoned in America, making up 9% of those imprisoned.”

REPORT: OBAMA LIED ABOUT BIN LADEN RAID:  So says Seymour Hersh, writing in the London Review of Books.  Well, he lies about everything else, so what’s one more?

THE OPPRESSION NARRATIVE:  It’s coming to a high school near you, if it hasn’t already.  The new AP US History (APUSH) exam is the product of the same progressive ideologues as Common Core.  According to Stanley Kurtz, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the new exam rewrites U.S. history, deemphasizing American exceptionalism and constitutionalism, and exchanging it for a story of oppression, balkanization based on race, class and gender, and emphasizing “global” citizenship.  Take a look at the “learning objective” themes of the APUSH now:

Theme: Identity  This theme focuses on the formation of both American national identity and group identities in U.S. history. Students should be able to explain how various identities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in different contexts of U.S. history, with special attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial, and ethnic identities. Students should be able to explain how these sub-identities have interacted with each other and with larger conceptions of American national identity.

Theme:  Work, Exchange & Technology  This theme focuses on the development of American economies based on agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing. Students should examine ways that different economic and labor systems, technological innovations, and government policies have shaped American society. Students should explore the lives of working people and the relationships among social classes, racial and ethnic groups, and men and women, including the availability of land and labor, national and international economic developments, and the role of government support and regulation.

 Theme: Politics & Power  Students should examine ongoing debates over the role of the state in society and its potential as an active agent for change. This includes mechanisms for creating, implementing, or limiting participation in the political process and the resulting social effects, as well as the changing relationships among the branches of the federal government and among national, state, and local governments. Students should trace efforts to define or gain access to individual rights and citizenship and survey the evolutions of tensions between liberty and authority in different periods of U.S. history

Theme:  Ideas, Belief & Culture  This theme explores the roles that ideas, beliefs, social mores, and creative expression have played in shaping the United States. Students should examine the development of aesthetic, moral, religious, scientific, and philosophical principles and consider how these principles have affected individual and group actions. Students should analyze the interactions between beliefs and communities, economic values, and political movements, including attempts to change American society to align it with specific ideals. 

Um, is that English?  It seems like progressive edu-speak gobbleygook to me.  How about just teaching our children about the founding, the Constitution, and the major historical eras?  It isn’t a cultural anthropology or a race/gender relations class.  As Kurtz observes that the emphasis on oppression and “mini-nationalism” groups will breed hatred and bigotry, rather than unify a diverse country.  And the emphasis on being “global citizens” will undermine democracy:  “Global citizenry is the antithesis of democracy,” Kurtz says. “You can’t be free, if you are not sovereign.”

Yep.

THE CASE FOR CONSERVATIVE CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. Hey, if Hillary flouts the law, and Al Sharpton doesn’t pay his taxes, why should the rest of us pay attention?

It’s a review of Charles Murray’s new book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission.

IF THE NEXT OUTBREAK IS WORSE THAN THIS ONE BY THE SAME DEGREE THAT THIS ONE WAS WORSE THAN THE LAST, WE SHOULD ALL WORRY: Liberia Is Declared Free of Ebola, but Officials Sound Note of Caution.

The main upside of this outbreak is that it exposed just how unready public-health folks were for a serious outbreak of communicable disease. Will we take the lesson and whip them into shape? Or fall back into business as usual?

IT’S ABOUT TIME: Why This Is The End Of The Dumb Dad Era. “Look at what happened to Huggies when the diaper company tried to traffic in dumb-dad stereotypes for a 2012 commercial — dads and moms alike protested the ad’s conceit, which was that dads were so oblivious to their children that they’d leave diapers on well past the point that other brands would fail. Clorox tried something similar the following year, then meekly withdrew its ad, too.”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Partially naked principal arrested with student in car. “A Florida principal has been arrested after she was caught partially unclothed in a marijuana-filled car with a student. . . . Authorities say they responded to a report of people involved in sexual activity in a car and found Morton with a high school senior.”

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WELL, WELL: #HalperinQuestions is trending rather nicely. Even Peggy Noonan is joining in the fun.

The backstory is here.

UPDATE: Mark Halperin Interviews Ted Cruz, Expects Ricky Ricardo. “Frankly, by now I expect to consistently encounter discrimination and bigotry from Liberals. It’s in their mindset – identity politics is their lifeblood. . . . Cruz is much too polite, but I’m not. Here’s something in Spanish, Halperin.”

GARY TAUBES, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Why diets don’t actually work, according to a researcher who has studied them for decades. “Dieting is actually a lot like starving, physically. It’s living like you’re starving. A lot of people do it, but what they’re actually doing is living as if they’re starving. They’re putting their body into that exact same state that it would be in if they were literally starving to death.”

SO, WHAT UBER NEEDS IS AN ALGORITHM THAT WILL MATCH DRIVERS WITH COMPATIBLE PASSENGERS. Katie Pavlich would have benefited.

THIS IS A SLOW-MOTION AGRICULTURAL CATASTROPHE: Iowa: Bird Flu May Claim 4 Million More Chickens.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 6 Reasons Why ‘Starship Troopers’ Is the New ‘The Art of War.’ “Wall Street raiders and business tycoons still cite Sun Tzu’s classic military treatise to explain preparation and tactical prowess. But if you really want an insight into 21st century warfare, you need to read Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Here’s why.”

STAY QUIET AND YOU’LL BE OKAY:  Mark Steyn defends free speech by calling out the “I love free speech as much as anyone, but” crowd, which includes all progressives, and some prominent self-proclaimed conservatives like Bill O’Reilly.  Steyn observes:

Free speech is necessary to free society for all the stuff after the “but”, after the “however”. There’s no fine line between “free speech” and “hate speech”: Free speech is hate speech; it’s for the speech you hate – and for all your speech that the other guy hates. . . .

Alas, we have raised a generation of But boys. Ever since those ridiculous Washington Post and AP headlines, I’ve been thinking about the fellows who write and sub-edit and headline and approve such things – and never see the problem with it. Why would they? If you’re under a certain age, you accept instinctively that free speech is subordinate to other considerations: If you’ve been raised in the “safe space” of American universities, you take it as read that on gays and climate change and transgendered bathrooms and all kinds of other issues it’s perfectly normal to eliminate free speech and demand only the party line. So what’s the big deal about letting Muslims cut themselves in on a little of that action?

Why would you expect people who see nothing wrong with destroying a mom’n’pop bakery over its antipathy to gay wedding cakes to have any philosophical commitment to diversity of opinion? And once you no longer have any philosophical commitment to it it’s easy to see it the way Miliband and Cotler do – as a rusty cog in the societal machinery that can be shaved and sliced millimeter by millimeter.

Yep.  As George Orwell said, “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”  The progressive pursuit of “diversity” is playing with the fire of intolerance.  Free speech is its first victim.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 731.

RACISM IN TODAY’S POLITICIZED MEDIA: Ruben Navarrette: Halperin interview of Ted Cruz was painful.

Imagine the following pep talk that a young Ted Cruz might have gotten from his father, Rafael, about 35 years ago.

“My son, I was tortured in a jail cell in Cuba, but I managed to come to the United States and build a life so that you could live your dreams. I grew up speaking Spanish, but I made sure you spoke English so you could go far. If you study hard, you can attend great universities. You can clerk for the chief justice of the Supreme Court, become a great trial lawyer and argue nine cases before the high court, get elected to the U.S. Senate, and someday run for president.

“Then, after all the family’s efforts and sacrifices, one day, you can go on an interview program and be asked by a smug and clueless white journalist if you’re authentically Cuban.”

Watching Mark Halperin of Bloomberg Politics interview Cruz recently, I wasn’t just uncomfortable. I was actually nauseated.

As a journalist, I felt embarrassed for Halperin. As a Hispanic, I felt like I was watching a college fraternity have fun with racial stereotypes.

Well, minus the fun part. But you’ll note that it’s overwhelmingly Democrats who traffic in racial stereotypes; they just usually get a pass.

But maybe not this time. John Nolte: This seems like a really good time to tweet other members of the media to pressure them for comment on Mark Halperin’s overt racism.

UPDATE: Heh: #HalperinQuestions: Mockfest of Bloomberg Politics’ Ethnic Authenticity Cop unleashed.