"Demographer Joel Kotkin found that 13 of the 15 best cities in the country for African Americans to live in are now in the South. Over the last decade, millions of African Americans have been reversing the Great Migration of a century ago to live in Dixie. A big part of that story is economic, of course -- the 'blue state' model has failed generations of minorities -- but it's also cultural. Word has gotten out that while the flags may be around in some places, the Old Confederacy is gone.

"Whenever conservatives complain that blacks vote monolithically Democratic, liberals are quick to argue that this is a rational decision given the realities of the black community. Surely, the same thing holds when they vote with their feet?

"No, the South isn't perfect; name a region that is. But it does have good manners, which is why it routinely acts with more dignity -- and in Charleston, with more grace -- than its critics to the north."

"The Raisin Administrative Committee is the federal government's version of OPEC, but for raisins. Created by a 1937 law, it had (until Monday) the power to seize and destroy raisins without necessarily compensating farmers. The aim was to keep raisin prices high through artificial scarcity. Under the program, the government could do what it wanted with the raisins. Farmers had only a moderate chance of recouping the money from the raisins they lost, depending on whether the bureaucrats found a way to sell them profitably.

"The Supreme Court, in a resounding eight-to-one decision, ruled against the raisin panel and the Obama administration's defense of it. They did not do so because it is an abomination to a free society to have government dictate market outcomes in this way, but rather because the physical seizure of the raisins and the forced transferal of title to the government constitutes an obvious taking of private property. ...

"This ruling could make it significantly harder for government to run raisin cartels and similar agricultural programs in the future. We hope it makes it impossible."

"Hillary Clinton knows she has more baggage than Newark Airport. She doesn't care, because she is counting on two strong forces to carry her to victory: Demographics and the leftward turn in American culture.

"She and the other Democrats suffer from cultural hubris, though. Their social justice wings always threaten to take them a little too close to the sun....

"The media often remind us that Democrats and Republicans used to forge bipartisan policy solutions, scolding Republicans for supposedly moving right.

"But if the center is becoming a lonely place in American politics, Democrats are walking away from it much more rapidly than Republicans are."

"Mrs. Clinton is almost certainly about to glide to her party's nomination. There will be a few bumps. She will occasionally be pressed and challenged on various questions. There will be back and forth. But her Democratic opponents will not attack her character, her history, her financial decisions, her scandals. They will not go at her personally. She will emerge dinged but not damaged. No one will ravage the queen. ...

"The Democrats have an enforcement mechanism to keep all their candidates in line. Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley know without being told that the party will kill them if they tear apart the assumed nominee. Their careers will be over if they go at her personally."

"If the present trajectories continue, a reconfigured Middle East will be bookended by radical Islamic empires -- the Islamic State caliphate and a new Persian empire. China will control most of the Pacific and adjudicate trade, commerce, and politics west of Hawaii and to the south and east of India. The client states of a new Russian empire will border central Europe and be under constant pressure to leave the EU, NATO, or both.

"How does all this end? One of two ways.

"America and its allies can reawaken, gradually restore deterrence, and reestablish the old postwar order without a global war.

"Or the United States will not be bothered -- at least until this new generation of dictators bothers us at home."

"What if a team of Chinese agents had broken into the Pentagon or -- less box office but just as bad -- the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and carted out classified documents? ...

"Meanwhile, in real life, it was revealed last week that the Chinese stole millions of personnel files and mountains of background-check information from the U.S. government. ...

"Many are calling it a 'cyber Pearl Harbor.'

"And yet, this news took a back seat to Hillary Rodham Clinton's second announcement that she's running for president, iPhone footage of a hotheaded cop breaking up a Texas pool party, and the admittedly hilarious revelation that an obscure NAACP official in eastern Washington state isn't really black.

"Why?"

"June 15, 2015 -- House Republicans probing the 2012 Benghazi attacks are turning their attention to a figure from Hillary Clinton's past as the Democratic frontrunner tries to sell voters on her ideas about the future.

"On Tuesday, the GOP-led Select Committee on Benghazi will hold a closed-door, hours-long deposition of Sidney Blumenthal that will focus on the longtime Clinton family ally's email exchanges with Clinton about Libya while she was secretary of State.

"'Establishing the facts surrounding the large number of emails regarding Libya sent by Mr. Blumenthal to former Secretary Clinton is why he has been called to appear before the committee,' a committee aide said.

"On the eve of the deposition, the Benghazi panel's GOP Chairman Trey Gowdy said that Blumenthal had provided the committee with about 120 new pages of his emails with Clinton. The messages were not included in the Clinton-Blumenthal emails that the State Department had already provided to the committee months ago, he said."

"The Internal Revenue Service found 6,400 more Lois Lerner emails -- but they're not handing them over in court.

"The IRS' latest excuses are nothing short of infuriating.

"Department of Justice lawyers Geoffrey J. Klimas and Stephanie Sasarak, acting as counsel for the IRS, submitted a U.S. District Court filing June 12 in the case Judicial Watch v. Internal Revenue Service. The court filing, provided to The Daily Caller, claims the IRS received new Lerner emails from the Treasury Department's inspector general (TIGTA) but can't fork over the emails to Judicial Watch, a nonprofit group suing to get the emails. Why? Because the IRS is busy making sure that none of the emails are duplicates - you know, so as not to waste anyone's time.

"However, the inspector general already made sure that none of the emails were duplicates, so the IRS' latest excuse falls flat."

"Declaring that Republican-controlled states have 'systematically and deliberately' tried to 'disempower and disenfranchise' voters, Hillary Clinton has called for a sweeping expansion of federal involvement in elections. In a speech last week in Houston, laying out what promises to be a major campaign theme, Mrs. Clinton called for automatic voter registration at age 18, a 20-day early-voting period and a maximum 30-minute wait period to vote.

"She has also endorsed the idea of a federal law permitting convicted felons to vote and allowing individuals, such as students, who reside in one state to vote in another. All of these federal mandates would augment and make more onerous an unconstitutional election-regulating federal statute known as the 'Motor Voter' law enacted during her husband's White House tenure.

"A federal takeover of election laws -- and rolling back state voter-ID laws intended to discourage election fraud -- is a high priority for progressives. The billionaire financier George Soros reportedly has pledged $5 million to bankroll legal challenges to laws like those that Mrs. Clinton decries. Part of the effort is intended simply to galvanize the Democratic base by stoking a sense of grievance, but the strategy should be taken seriously -- and rebutted as unconstitutional."

"The National Commission on Presidential Debates recently invited Americans to suggest topics for the 2016 presidential debates. The commission is sure to receive thousands of proposals, but it should devote an entire debate to government reform. Why? Trust in the federal government has slumped to near-record lows, moving far beyond healthy skepticism toward a crisis of confidence. Whoever wins this 'FixTrust' debate could have an inside track to the presidency.

"According to a 2010 Pew Research Center poll, 74% of Americans rated the federal bureaucracy as only fair or poor in running its programs. In another Pew poll in January 2014, 75% said they trusted the federal government to do what is right 'only some of the time' or 'never.' And in a September 2014 Gallup poll, Americans estimated that Washington wastes 51 cents of every dollar it spends.

"The stakes of comprehensive reform are high. A new president serious about reform could take immediate action by executive order to collect the $700 billion already on the books in unpaid taxes, delinquent debts, and improper payments to individuals and government contractors. These numbers are estimates of the federal government’s own agencies.

"That'€™s just for starters. Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, says that there is $1.4 trillion that could be saved from the federal budget."