Some American history museums belabor visitors with this message: You shall know the truth and it shall make you feel ashamed of, but oh-so-superior to, your wretched ancestors. The new Museum of the American Revolution is better than that. Located near Independence Hall, it celebrates the luminous ideas affirmed there 241 Julys ago, but it does not flinch from this fact: The war that began at Lexington and Concord 14 months before the Declaration of Independence was America's first civil war. And it had all the messiness and nastiness that always accompany protracted fratricide.

"Contrary" does not quite capture Steve King's astringency. The Iowa native and conservative congressman was born, appropriately, in Storm Lake, and carries turbulence with him. He also carries experience of actual life before politics, when he founded a construction company, which is one reason he has long advocated an excellent idea -- repeal of the Davis-Bacon law.

Sparkling in the sunlight that inspired 19th-century romantic painters of the Hudson River School, Sing Sing prison's razor wire, through which inmates can see the flowing river, is almost pretty. Almost. Rain or shine, however, a fog of regret permeates any maximum-security prison. But 37 men -- almost all minorities; mostly African Americans -- recently received celebratory attention. It was their commencement -- attended by Harry Belafonte, 90, and the singer Usher -- as freshly minted college graduates. Their lives after prison will not soon, if ever, commence, but when they do these men will have unusual momentum for success.

Sensing that his Scottish enemies had blundered at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, Oliver Cromwell said, "The Lord hath delivered them into our hands." Philip K. Howard, were he the exulting type, could rejoice that some of his adversaries have taken a stand on indefensible terrain. Because the inaccurately named Center for American Progress has chosen to defend the impediments that government places in its own path regarding public works, it has done Howard the favor of rekindling interest in something he wrote in 2015.

As changing technologies and preferences make government-funded broadcasting increasingly preposterous, such broadcasting actually becomes useful by illustrating two dismal facts. One is the immortality of entitlements that especially benefit those among society's articulate upper reaches who feel entitled. The other fact is how impervious government programs are to evidence incompatible with their premises.

When in the Senate chamber, Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, sits by choice at the desk used by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. New York's scholar-senator would have recognized that Sasse has published a book of political philosophy in the form of a guide to parenting.

"But what good came of it at last?"

Quoth little Peterkin.

"Why that I cannot tell," said he,

"But 'twas a famous victory."

-- Robert Southey

"The Battle of Blenheim" (1798)

Having bestowed the presidency on a candidate who described their country as a "hellhole" besieged by multitudes trying to get into it, Americans need an antidote for social hypochondria. Fortunately, one has arrived from Don Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University's Mercatus Center and proprietor of the indispensable blog Cafe Hayek.

Three months ago, State Trooper Jonathan Otto, 33, of the Arizona Department of Public Safety pulled over a car that had caught his attention by traveling 104 miles per hour long after midnight, just south of Kingman. He smelled marijuana in the car. It was driven by a man with an adult female wearing only lingerie. Their passenger was a female juvenile whose fake document showed her to be 18. She was, Otto says, "not wearing a whole lot of clothing."

When not furrowing their collective brows about creches and displays of the Ten Commandments here and there, courts often are pondering tangential contacts between the government and religious schools. Courts have held that public money can constitutionally fund the transportation of parochial school pupils to classes -- but not on field trips. It can fund nurses at parochial schools -- but not guidance counselors. It can fund books -- but not maps. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wondered: What about atlases, which are books of maps? On  Wednesday, the Supreme Court will consider the constitutional significance of this incontrovertible truth: "A scraped knee is a scraped knee whether it happens at a Montessori day care or a Lutheran day care."