"Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus had a message last week for outspoken conservatives who support strict immigration enforcement policies: Shut up.

"Yes, the head of the RNC is more concerned about protecting the party's Hispanic vote-pandering campaign than protecting law-abiding citizens from the devastating consequences of illegal immigration.

"At the RNC's annual summer meeting in Boston, Priebus complained that openly advocating self-deportation policies during last year's election season was 'horrific' and that rule-of-law rhetoric 'hurts us.' Yes, really.

"So is it OK to discuss during off-year election cycles? Leap years? Weekends? Holidays? Can the GOP sensitivity police let us in on their approved immigration discussion calendar?"

"On the subject of Egypt: Is it the U.S. government's purpose merely to cop an attitude? Or does it also intend to have a policy? ... 

"It would be nice to live in a world in which we could conduct a foreign policy that aims at the realization of our dreams — peace in the Holy Land, a world without nuclear weapons, liberal democracy in the Arab world. A better foreign policy would be conducted to keep our nightmares at bay: stopping Iran's nuclear bid, preventing Syria's chemical weapons from falling into terrorist hands, and keeping the Brotherhood out of power in Egypt. But that would require an administration that knew the difference between an attitude and a policy."

"The Obama administration provided a New York Times reporter exclusive access to a range of high-level national security officials for a book that divulged highly classified information on a U.S. cyberwar on Iran’s nuclear program, internal State Department emails show. 

"The information in the 2012 book by chief Washington correspondent David E. Sanger has been the subject of a yearlong Justice Department criminal investigation: The FBI is hunting for those who leaked details to Mr. Sanger about a U.S.-Israeli covert cyberoperation to infect Iran’s nuclear facilities with a debilitating computer worm known as Stuxnet. ... 

"The scores of State Department emails from the fall of 2011 to the spring of 2012 do not reveal which officials told Mr. Sanger, but they do show an atmosphere of cooperation within the administration for a book generally favorable toward, but not uncritical of, President Obama."

"Newly declassified documents, obtained by George Washington University’s National Security Archive, appear to for the first time acknowledge the existence of Area 51. Hundreds of pages describe the genesis of the Nevada site that was home to the government’s spy plane program for decades. The documents do not, however, mention any aliens."

"It is either the case that African Americans, young people, old people, and poor people labor under some onerous yet curiously undetectable burden that keeps them from obtaining free, government-issued photo IDs, or it is the case that Hillary Clinton, the NAACP, et al. are full of bunk when they claim that voter-ID laws such as the one just adopted in North Carolina amount to 'disenfranchisement.'

"The evidence strongly suggests the presence of ambient bunk levels approaching toxicity.  In general, Americans are very handy when it comes to acquiring free things issued by the government, and none of the groups that Democrats list as targets for 'disenfranchisement' has shown itself disproportionately unskillful in doing so. ..."

"If a regular citizen makes $100,000 a year working for a private company and loses his insurance because of ObamaCare, he must pay out of his pocket for the insurance he will be forced to purchase from the exchanges.

"However, if you are a sainted congressional staffer earning $100,000 a year and enter the exchanges, guess who picks up the tab for your new insurance plan? That’s right, your employer, the federal government, the lowly taxpayer.

"In other words, under ObamaCare, the only people forced into the exchanges whose insurance will still be paid for by their employer will be members of Congress and their staff."

"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid admitted last week that ObamaCare was just a first move toward a fully government-run single-payer system. This should not be a surprise. Some of us knew it all along. ... 

"Single-payer systems purport to offer universal access, but that's not exactly right. These systems have to ration care because there's no endless stream of cash to fund them. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, sooner or later socialist systems run out of other people's money."

"The biggest underreported story out of Washington this year is that the federal budget is shrinking and much more than anyone in either party expected.  ... 

"The sequester is squeezing the very programs liberals care most about — including the National Endowment for the Arts, green-energy subsidies, the Environmental Protection Agency and National Public Radio. Outside Washington, the sequester is forcing a fiscal retrenchment for such liberal special-interest groups as Planned Parenthood and the National Council of La Raza, which have grown dependent on government largess. ... 

"Liberals had hoped that re-electing Mr. Obama, the most pro-spending president since LBJ, would unleash another four years of Great Society government expansion. Instead, spending caps and the sequester are squashing these progressive dreams. Welcome to the new fiscal reality in Washington. All Republicans need to do is enforce the budget laws Mr. Obama has already agreed to. Entitlement reforms will come when liberals realize that the unhappy alternative is to allow every program they cherish to keep shrinking."

"[M]ost Americans with school-age children continue to say they would feel safer if their child attended a school with an armed guard and think the decision to put armed guards in the schools should be made by local government officials.  

"A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 62% of Americans with children of elementary or secondary school age would feel safer if their child attended a school with an armed security guard. Just 24% say they would feel safer if their child went to a school where no adults were allowed to own a gun."

"Earlier this week, we learned that other federal agencies — the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the CIA, the FBI — all want access to the NSA’s database, and it has shared some of it with most of them. Also this week, former Drug Enforcement Administration agents acknowledged the agency regularly receives raw data from the NSA and uses that data to commence criminal investigations, and claimed this has been going on for at least a decade. 

"Down the slippery slope we go. ... 

"What will the NSA spies seek next? Our passwords? We already know the answer to that one. They asked for them last week."