Now the Service wants to conduct its own fund raising, which would compete for and detract from the only funding, apart from the state and other grants, upon which individual libraries rely.

Yesterday evening the wife and I attended a lecture by Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the progentures of the Affordable Care Act, at the Harvard Club in New York City. (No, the publisher is not a Harvard graduate. He married up!)

BUDAPEST BEACON: Tens of thousands of Hungarians participated in “Day of Public Outrage” demonstrations across Hungary Monday evening. In Budapest over ten thousand demonstrators packed parliament’s Kossuth square.

That’s the stance of two Pennsylvanian legislators who recently entered bills into the state House and Senate proposing a law similar to Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act, which permits terminally ill adult Oregonians to obtain from their doctor and self-administer a lethal dose of medication…

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane confirmed Monday that she was testifying before a grand jury overseen by a special prosecutor exploring whether her office disclosed secret investigative information, and said she is fighting to do her job without interference.

NEW YORK TIMES: The Hong Kong government moved to clear pro-democracy protesters from a small area in front of an office building on Tuesday morning in the first move against the demonstrators in weeks. The authorities met no resistance, with student protesters saying they would not oppose the court order.

The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment holds that no one may be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Yet asset forfeiture laws have allowed police to seize assets of people who are not even charged with crimes, much less convicted. Mere suspicion is not due process.

From the PSU-commissioned Freeh Report that some now see as a hatchet job on legendary coach Joe Paterno’s once-pristine legacy, the university’s hasty removal of the Paterno statue, which now appears to be MIA, to the willingness – some would say, eagerness – with which Penn State accepted the unprecedented slate of NCAA sanctions in consent decree, the board remains as much under a microscope as ever…

This story of an ambitious young striver and his difficult mentor could easily have been a sports movie, and structurally, it resembles one. There are montages of grueling practice scattered among scenes of tense competition, all of it building toward a hugely suspenseful (but also, to some extent, never in doubt) championship game moment of reckoning.

Bottom Line: During those three weeks, think privatizing state stores. Think changing the electoral vote system for presidential campaigns from winner-take-all to one vote for each senatorial district. Think additional voter suppression techniques, business tax cuts, etc.