IT LOOKS LIKE A WEEBLE CAR:  This video shows Google’s self-driving car prototype.  Not much sex appeal.  And as with previous prototypes, it has no steering wheel or pedals.  I don’t understand why they aren’t designing it as a “hybrid,” in the sense that one could “take over” navigation of the car if one wanted to.  But then again, I love to drive.

YET ANOTHER REASON TO OPPOSE HILLARY:  Like her cohort Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton told a group of supporters on Thursday that she will have a “litmus test” for her Supreme Court nominees:  They must agree to overturn Citizens United.

How typical of the Scandal Queen:  Citizens United involved a documentary film critical of Hillary called Hillary: The Movie. In upholding the free speech rights of Citizens United to air the film, the Supreme Court defended the First Amendment rights of groups of people (rather than just individuals), including corporations, unions and associations.  But of course the Court also allowed (gasp!) a criticism of Hillary to be aired.

So now the Queen is vowing payback for such criticism, and ensure it cannot happen again. Because, you know, a civilized country cannot allow citizens to question its political leaders.  Nice.

EPA’S BACK DOOR:  Only the green movement has the key.  Kimberley Strassel’s latest column documents the uber-cozy relationship between Obama’s EPA and environmentalists in the case over Pebble Mine in Alaska:

As Pebble summed it up in a letter to the agency’s inspector general this week: “EPA gave anti-mine activists an opportunity to review, comment, and shape the strategy EPA would pursue to block development of the mine. Then, having decided that it would proceed to block the mine using a [pre-emptive veto], EPA sought to cloak its actions by recruiting the very same anti mine activists to ‘petition’ EPA to initiate those [veto] proceedings. . . .

Pebble was bulldozed in a secret, ideologically driven collusion between greens and government. That is a scandal worthy of resignations.

Tar. Feathers. Sicilian Bull.   

THE UBIQUITOUS PROGRESSIVE SOLUTION:  Melissa Harris, a columnist at the Chicago Tribune, has, in her infinite wisdom, the perfect solution to Illinois’ infamous pension problem:

There is a simple solution to Illinois’ pension mess that too few people are talking about: Tax retirement income.

Make it taxable just like any other income.

Why?

It is the largest tax loophole in the state, costing an estimated $2 billion per year.

Eureka–that’s it!   Of course, Illinois’ profligate pension system has racked up $104.6 billion in unfunded liabilities for the State’s taxpayers.  But hey, I’m sure there are other things to tax besides senior citizens’ retirement income.

DON’T GET SICK IN JULY:  This is supposedly an “insider tip” proffered by nurses in this Politico article.  The reason seems logical:  July is the beginning month for medical school, and there’s a new batch of inexperienced interns and residents running around with new responsibilities.

The article also contains a shameless, progressive rant against “VIP” rooms and amenities in hospitals.  The writer opines, “VIP care becomes problematic when those patients unnecessarily take up resources that more critical patients need.”  But of course the article provides no actual evidence that this ever actually happens.  But, you know, like everybody should be, like, totally equal!  Karl Marx would be so proud.

HOUSE VOTES TO STRIP GALLEGO LANGUAGE FROM NDAA REAUTHORIZATION:   In a 221-202 vote Thursday night, the House passed Rep. Mo Brooks’ (R-AL) amendment to strip the Gallego language. As you may recall from previous posts, the Gallego amendment (named for its sponsor, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ)) would have encouraged the Secretary of Defense to hire illegal aliens who’ve been granted amnesty by President Obama’s unilateral executive actions on immigration.

The bad news is that 20 Republicans voted with the Democrats to oppose Brooks’ amendment.  A list of the 20 can be found here.  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi predictably called the Brooks’ amendment “xenophobic” and “un-American.”

RELATED:  Los Angeles Times reports on the House vote with the following headline: “Republicans Block Young Immigrant ‘Dreamers’ from Military.”  Not once does the Times acknowledge that these “immigrants” are in this country illegally.  

BECAUSE ACADEMIC FREEDOM IS A ONE-WAY STREET:  The University of Western Australia has defunded a major research center because its director is a climate skeptic, and a very light version of skeptic, to boot.  Because, you know, we can’t have an academic question the scientific “consensus” on anything.  

IRS ADMITS ERROR IN CIVIL FORFEITURE CASE:  The IRS and Department of Justice are being forced to return $107,000 seized from a convenience store business in North Carolina.  The money was seized by the government pursuant to the atrocious practice known as “civil forfeiture”— which is just a legal term for government larceny–after mandatory bank deposit reporting alerted the government to the fact that the store’s bank account had received several deposits of just under $10,000 in a 24-hour period.

The business owner, Lyndon McClellan, had been struggling since the forfeiture to keep his business afloat.  Thankfully, the Institute for Justice agreed to represent McClellan pro bono.  They do good work.

ANSWER: YES: Question (posed by Ed Whelan at NRO): Is China’s approach to religious freedom a model for U.S. progressives?  Whelan notes:

The Washington Post reported last week that “Chinese authorities have ordered Muslim shopkeepers and restaurant owners in its troubled Xinjiang region to sell alcohol and cigarettes, and promote them in ‘eye-catching displays,’ in an attempt to undermine Islam’s hold on local residents.” According to the order, anyone who fails to comply with it “will see their shops sealed off, their businesses suspended, and legal action pursued against them.” Hmmm, sound familiar?

Why yes, yes it does.  We shouldn’t let something as insignificant as “religious freedom” get in the way of anti-discrimination objectives, even when those “discriminated” against aren’t members of any protected class.

NEWS YOU CAN USE:  How birds got their beaks.

ANTI-DEATH PENALTY DESPERATION:  The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in a death penalty case out of Oklahoma, Glossip v. Gross, which I’ve written about before.  The case centers on an argument by death penalty opponents that Oklahoma’s 3-drug cocktail for executions is “cruel and unusual” punishment because it uses an anesthetic called midazolam.

In a bizarre post-argument twist, now the anti-death penalty lawyers in Glossip are hitting the media with a highly misleading accusation that Oklahoma “misrepresented” facts to the Supreme Court.  The “story” was initially leaked to BuzzFeed, whose virulently anti-death penalty reporter, Chris McDaniel reported,

In the state’s brief to the justices, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s office highlights a letter that the lawyers describe as having been sent to state officials. That letter is real — but it was sent to an entirely different state. . . .

In Oklahoma’s brief, they state that the source of pentobarbital stopped supplying the drug to the state because the source faced “intense pressure” to stop.

As proof of their claim, Oklahoma’s lawyers presented a heavily redacted letter they claim was sent to “ODOC” — the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.

 Then the BuzzFeed reporter unveils his supposed “gotcha!”:

 The Woodlands letter was actually sent to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice . . . .

Duh.  This is the supposed “misrepresentation” by Oklahoma’s lawyers?  That a letter that was sent to Texas—saying that pentobarbital was unavailable—was miscited as a letter sent to Oklahoma?   This is the height of frivolity.  Oklahoma never “claim[ed]”– as BuzzFeed‘s reporter asserts–that the letter was sent to Oklahoma.

BuzzFeed‘s McDaniel makes much of the fact that this Texas letter was redacted in Oklahoma’s filing. But this isn’t some nefarious attempt to hide the fact that the letter was sent to Texas—it is a common courtesy Oklahoma provided to Texas, as many States—including Oklahoma and Texas—keep confidential the identity of the source of their lethal injection drugs, due to intense political pressure imposed by death penalty opponents when such information is made public.  BuzzFeed’s own prior reporting has acknowledged this reality.

Oklahoma’s Supreme Court brief did indeed miscite the Texas Letter as “Ltr. Pharmacy to ODOC (Doc. 64-6)”—with “ODOC” meaning Oklahoma Department of Corrections.  But the document cited—Doc. 64-6—was clearly the Texas letter, and Oklahoma never represented it as anything other.

Indeed, Oklahoma introduced the Texas letter in the federal trial court to support Oklahoma’s request for a protective order, seeking to keep the identity of Oklahoma’s lethal injection supplier confidential.  To support its request for a protective order, Oklahoma asserted that in both Oklahoma and other states, when compounding pharmacies supplying lethal injection drugs had been identified, those pharmacies came under intense pressure, and were forced to quit supplying. To support this assertion, Oklahoma included not only the Texas letter to support this contention, but also documents relating to Missouri’s lethal injection supplier, as well an email that an Oklahoma pharmacy received, in which the sender threatened to drive a truck filled with fertilizer in front of the pharmacy and blow it up.

Oklahoma never suggested to the district court that the Texas letter was a letter to Oklahoma. In fact, Oklahoma unambiguously stated that it was a letter from “an out-of-state pharmacy.” And in their response to Oklahoma’s motion, the anti-death penalty lawyers pointed out that the letter was from Texas.  So there was absolutely no confusion at the district court as to the source of the letter or why Oklahoma was using it.

That Oklahoma has been forced to stop using pentobarbital—and thus turned to midazolam—was supported by unrebutted testimony of the director and general counsel of ODOC, who explained how Oklahoma’s pharmacy had been forced to quit supplying pentobarbital because of threats.

It’s painfully obvious (pun intended) that Oklahoma’s only “sin” was a simple citation error–no fair reader of the record below could conclude otherwise.  The district court knew the letter was about Texas, and it was used to bolster a claim—that Oklahoma was forced to stop using pentobarbital—that no one has refuted, or reasonably could.  Indeed, in a ThinkProgress article posted yesterday (critical of Oklahoma’s death penalty, of course), the reporter acknowledged,

As is common practice in many states, Oklahoma typically relied on compounding pharmacies that sold non-FDA approved drugs for lethal injections. But prior to Lockett’s execution date, the compounding pharmacies, including Oklahoma’s supplier, were pressured to cease sales of execution drugs. As a result, the ODOC was unable to get its hands on the desired sedative [pentobarbital]. . . .

Since no one disputes that Oklahoma could no longer obtain pentobarbital, why are the anti-death penalty zealots now trying to pawn off a simple mis-cite as some nefarious attempt to “mislead” the court?  Because it’s just another example of guerilla legal warfare, in which anti-death penalty advocates cannot win on the facts or the law, so they resort to misleading antics like this.

If anyone is trying to “mislead,” its the anti-death penalty lawyers, and their progressive/liberal media minions.

IT’S ADORABLE, AND WARM-BLOODED:  No, it’s not a kitten, puppy, or even a cute guy.  It’s a the first warm-blooded fish ever discovered, called an opah.

HAPPENS ALL THE TIME IN PROGRESSIVE-LAND:  When ideology trumps facts.  The Amtrak crash is the latest example.  As Rahm Emanuel once said, never waste a crisis.

NDAA AMNESTY PROVISION UP FOR HOUSE VOTE TODAY:  Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) rightly says the House bill “betrays Americans” by containing  a provision promoted by Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) that encourages the Secretary of Defense to hire illegal aliens who’ve been granted amnesty by President Obama.  Rep. Brooks asserts:

As America’s military downsizes, there are a limited number of enlistment opportunities for American citizens,” Brooks wrote. “Each time an illegal alien takes an enlistment opportunity, an American or lawful immigrant loses an enlistment opportunity. The ratio is one-to-one. Period. That is the math.

He’s right.  If you agree with Rep. Brooks, today would be the day to call your Member of Congress and tell him/her that.

MORE CLINTON FOUNDATION HIDE & SEEK:  This time it’s none other than George Stephanopoulos hiding, but he’s been caught, failing to disclose a $75,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation.

The failure to disclose the donations raises serious conflict of interest concerns, especially in light of a recent interview Stephanopoulos conducted with the author of a book that questions how the Clinton Foundation operates.

But hey, I’m sure Stephanopoulos isn’t biased or anything.

The RNC should ban Stephanopoulos from taking any part in the 2016 presidential debates.

AT LEAST THEY’RE TRYING:  House Budget Committee Chair Tom Price (R-GA) unveils a Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare.  It seems like a relatively simple, efficient alternative based on sliding-scale (by income and age) tax credits for the purchase of health insurance, combined with a health savings account to handle out-of-pocket expenses.

PLANET OBAMA:  Where self-awareness goes to die.  Heather Wilhelm’s terrific piece today on RCP.  Wilhelm highlights a statement of Michelle Obama on Sunday to Tuskegee University graduates:

“There will be times,” the first lady continued, “when you feel folks look right past you, or they see just a fraction of who you really are. … My husband and I [have] both felt the sting of those daily slights throughout our entire lives — the folks who crossed the street in fear of their safety; the clerks who kept a close eye on us in all those department stores; the people at formal events who assumed we were the ‘help’ — and all those who questioned our intelligence, our honesty, even our love of this country.”

. . . . [T]hat last phrase is rather breathtaking. In one fell swoop, it groups “those who questioned our intelligence, our honesty, even our love of country” together with a giant bushel of supposed racism. It also reveals a lot about the mind of Michelle Obama, who apparently assumes that the only reason you could possibly criticize her or the president is simple: You’re probably a racist.

But it’s not just Michelle who should check her #privilege.  The President has his own checking to do:

Alas, among the Obamas, self-awareness is not a strong suit, and this particular deficit isn’t limited to the first lady. This week, at Georgetown University, the president bemoaned the scourge of private schools, driven by “an anti-government ideology that disinvests from those common goods and those things that draw us together.”

One wonders: Did he feel that way as a teenager while in the bosom of the exclusive Punahou prep school in Honolulu?  The Obama children, of course, attend Sidwell Friends, a private institution that costs $37,750 a year. Before moving to Washington, D.C., Sasha and Malia studied at the University of Chicago’s elite Laboratory School, where middle school tuition runs at $29,328.

Of course the truth is that neither the President nor First Lady need to check their “privilege.”  They have succeeded–wildly so– and they have done so because America is a place where that can happen.  Maybe the Obamas suffer from “black guilt” or something.

PUNISHING “DEVIANT” PARENTS:  George Will’s latest column offers numerous astute observations about the litany of ridiculous attitudes toward “kids” today:

Today’s saturating media tug children beyond childhood prematurely, but not to maturity. Children are cosseted by intensive parenting that encourages passivity and dependency, and stunts their abilities to improvise, adapt and weigh risks. . . .

[I]nstitutions have also decided that although undergraduates can cope with hormones and intoxicants, they must be protected from discomforting speech, which must be regulated by codes and confined to “free speech zones.” Uncongenial ideas must be foreshadowed by “trigger warnings,” lest students, who never were free-range children and now are as brittle as pretzels, crumble. Young people shaped by smothering parents come to college not really separated from their“helicopter parents.” Such students come convinced that the world is properly devoted to guaranteeing their serenity, and that their fragility entitles them to protection from distressing thoughts.

Yep. By hovering over children and scheduling their every waking moment with “organized” activities, we prevent them not only from making mistakes (and learning from them), but from tasting freedom, and hence, individuality and independence.  No wonder so many of them grow up to be delicate, oversensitive snowflakes.

HOUSE PASSES 20-WEEK ABORTION BILL:   The vote was 242-184, and along party lines (4 Democrats supported the bill; 4 Republicans opposed it). The bill would ban abortions after 20 weeks.

I am with my fellow constitutional law professors, Glenn (Mr. InstaP himself) and Jonathan Adler on this one:  I don’t see a principled constitutional basis for Congress to regulate abortions.  It is a matter of state power–for state-by-state legislative consideration–and not within Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.

For a Republican Congress to embrace such an expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause is more than a bit ironic (and unprincipled), especially given Republicans’ more parsimonious view of the Clause during the Obamacare litigation. Why jettison this basic understanding of constitutional structure/federalism merely to score a cheap political victory?

The goal of restricting abortions to 20 weeks’ gestation–which I support and is backed by increasing science on viability–can be accomplished within state legislatures.  There are some interesting and complicated legal questions about the constitutionality of a 20-week cutoff versus a 22-week cutoff due to the current science on viability, but there is little doubt that states have the constitutional wiggle room to ban abortions sometime around 22 weeks (the point of fetal viability).

But for Congress to impose a top-down, “one size fits all” cutoff for abortion flies in the face of conservative thought that Roe v. Wade itself was an inappropriate federalization of abortion that pretermitted democratic debate and state variation on such a contentious moral issue.

Note to Republicans in Congress:  The ends do not justify the means–rationale is out of the progressives’ playbook.

A FEMINISM VACCINE–FINALLY!:  Steven Hayward over at Power Line has a “public service announcement” for young women who are heading off to college this fall (and their parents).  He notes that there’s an organization called Network of Enlightened Women (NeW) that has chapters on 25 campuses thus far and is running a summer program (deadline fast approaching) at Sweet Briar College for conservative college women.  Its website states its mission as follows:

NeW educates young women on conservative values, cultivates a community in which to discuss and strengthen these values, and emboldens young women to speak out on campus and in their communities. NeW seeks to foster the education and leadership skills of conservative women. NeW is devoted to expanding the intellectual diversity on college campuses.

This sounds like a program worth looking into. There is no reason why we need to surrender our daughters to the progressive feminist propaganda so ubiquitous in academia.

SPRINGTIME FOR DICTATORS: Dan Henninger’s latest column in the Wall Street Journal.  

Raúl Castro is taking meetings with everyone from President Barack Obama in Panama last month to Pope Francis in Rome last weekend. Then he returned to Havana for a meeting with President François Hollande of France, who flew in to see him and Fidel. How good can it get? . . . .

Raúl’s brutal modus operandi for critics of Cuba’s system is described at length in reports by the U.S. State Department and Human Rights Watch. But the Castros’ celebrity status with international elites transcends anything they do, and so Cuba is a member of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. . . .

Last weekend German Chancellor Angela Merkel went to Russia to honor the Russian soldiers who died in World War II. But while in Moscow, Ms. Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, said directly to Vladimir Putin: “I would like also to recall that the end of World War II did not bring democracy and freedom for all of Europe.”

Would that one of these men of the world had the guts to say that to Fidel’s face in Havana.

But they don’t.  

VATICAN TO RECOGNIZE PALESTINE:  The Vatican has brokered at “treaty” with the “State of Palestine.” The treaty reportedly deals with the activities of the Catholic Church in Palestine. Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is expected meet with Pope Francis over the weekend to finalize details.

The Vatican has referred to Palestine as a “state” since November 2012, when the UN voted to upgrade the Palestinian Authority’s status from “entity” to “non-member state.”  Just last week, Pope Francis said the Vatican would canonize two nuns who lived in Israel under Ottomon rule as “Palestinian saints.”

It hasn’t been very long since the Palestinian Authority/PLO was widely considered to be a terrorist organization.

Well, it’s all part of a global progressive movement. Pope Francis has been dogged by accusations that he is sympathetic to communism.  The Pope doesn’t help allay these concerns when he meets with Raul Castro, reinstates a Marxist “liberation theology,” vocally anti-Israel Nicaraguan priest who won the Lenin Peace Prize, invites a Peruvian liberation theology priest to speak, and hosts the World Meeting of Popular Movements, where he said attendees must unite “against the structural causes of poverty, inequality, the lack of work, land and shelter, the denial of social and labor rights,” and confront the “empire of money.”

At a minimum, it seems Pope Francis is becoming very cozy with liberation theology, which is essentially a progressive/Marxist vision of Catholicism.  A top Soviet bloc defector recently claimed that liberation theology was created by the KGB.

ANSWER: YES, IF YOU ARE A PROGRESSIVE:  Question:  Are you “oversensitive”?  According to the delicate snowflake who wrote the piece, one knows one suffers from this syndrome as follows:

I’ll bet that at least once in your life, you’ve been called “too dramatic” or “oversensitive.” I imagine that afterward you felt pretty ashamed, and maybe felt like you had no choice but to drop whatever issue you were upset about. That was a manipulative move on the part of the person who called you that. It was unfair. For the most part, I’ve viewed my sensitivity as a positive thing, because of the empathy and emotional awareness that comes with it. At worst, it’s been a heavy frustration or annoyance, because life would be so much easier and productive if my heart could recover from disappointments faster. The only time I saw it as negative is when others told me to see it that way. Growing up, I started to notice that a select few of the men in my family regularly found ways to misconstrue my sensitivity as a flaw, and conveniently enough, this tended to happen whenever I said something a bit too honest or uncomfortable about a situation they had a hand in.

Notice that it is the “unfair,” hard-hearted men who didn’t appreciate her “empathy and emotional awareness.”  And of course the male aggression of calling her “sensitivity” a “flaw,” was triggered whenever our little snowflake was “a bit too honest” or made the men “uncomfortable about a situation they had a hand in.”

I’m sure that’s it, dear– it’s them, not you!  When will these women grow up?  They are non compos mentis, and thus should be unable to date, much less marry or procreate.   These days, there are so many of these snowflakes that men would be well advised to administer this oversensitivity test prior to the first date.

LIKE RATS FLEEING A SINKING SHIP:  Liberal pundit Alan Colmes says FBI should investigate Hillary Clinton’s potential conflicts with the Clinton Foundation while serving as Secretary of State.  Ya think, Alan?

WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND:  After NOW President called President Obama “sexist” for saying Elizabeth Warren is a “politician like everybody else,”–which, by the way is redonkulous, since saying a female politician is “like everybody else” is utterly gender-neutral–Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) joined the fight, suggesting that it was calling Warren by her first name that was “disrespectful.”

Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) has now come to Obama’s rescue, calling the accusation “silliness.”

It’s kind of fun to watch the Democrats get all stuck to their own progressive Tar Baby.