“So the Cult of Personality is well and truly dead. Never again will we hear hoseannas about our Great Leader’s supple mind, erotically throbbing pectoral muscles, or literary genius, except perhaps from our Great Leader himself or his whispering sycophant Valerie Jarrett. This is good for America, as well: It is a stupid and frightening and shameful thing for a people to fall so hard for a ridiculous, false-on-its-face fairy tale about a Crusading Hero Who Will Deliver Us All. This is how nations die.Perhaps America has learned some hard-won wisdom from its folly. Perhaps there will not be a Next Charismatic Cult of Personality Hero on a White Horse, at least for a generation.” – Ace of Spades

“America: Imagine The World Without Her begins by letting leftists tell why they hate this country, as they so obviously do. D’Souza doesn’t argue with them or try to make them look stupid. He lets them say exactly what they have to say: we stole the country from the Washington Redskins, we enslaved blacks, we murdered all those nice Vietnamese people, capitalism is greed, we suck.” – Andrew Klavan/PJ Media

“This is not just garbage. It’s an entire landfill on stilts. Imagine that a woman starts work at Hobby Lobby tomorrow morning — July 1. She joins Hobby Lobby’s health care plan. It includes access, copay-free, to the following categories of FDA-approved birth-control:” – Deroy Murdock/National Review

“Obama has had a very bad year at the Supreme Court. As catalogued by Reason, the President has suffered a series of stunning and mostly unanimous rebukes at the hands of SCOTUS (including the two Justices he appointed) in connection with executive branch overreach. Predictably, Obama has responded to this rebuke by going on the stump and swearing to do even more than he has in the past without the approval of Congress.” – RedState

“The National Organization for Marriage said the $50,000 settlement the IRS paid the group for releasing its private tax information was a start, but it still wants the Justice Department to grant immunity to the key gay rights activist involved in the release.” – Washington Times

“Looks like the portents from ADP and Gallup were accurate. The BLS reports solid job growth in June of 288K, with the jobless rate decreasing to 6.1%. The number of jobs added in April and May were revised upward by 29,000 as well.  However, the workforce participation rate remains at a 36-year low, while the number of involuntary part-time workers rose by 275,000:” – Hot Air

“In his first term, Barack Obama all but declared victory in America’s Middle East struggles. As he precipitously pulled out all U.S. peacekeepers from Iraq, the president had his own ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment when declaring the country ‘stable,’ ‘self-reliant,’ and an ‘extraordinary achievement.'” – Victor Davis Hanson/National Review

“A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could mean bad news for environmental doomsayers. Forget all those warnings about the million tons of plastic debris floating in the ocean. Ignore the photos that you think show the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Andres Cozar of the University of Cadiz in Spain is the man who once extrapolated the 1 million-ton estimate. Since then, however, he has led research that collected samples at 141 ocean sites. Cozar’s new estimate: Between 7,000 and 35,000 tons of plastic are floating in the ocean.” – Debra Saunders/Townhall

“House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) sent a scathing letter to Acting Social Security Administrator (SSA) Carolyn Colvin late Tuesday, questioning her commitment to stopping widespread abuse within federal disability programs.” – Washington Free Beacon

“The Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 17000 for the first time in intraday trading after a rosy report on U.S. job creation helped reassure investors that economic growth can support stock benchmarks at all-time highs.” – WSJ