Bottle Rocket: It’s the 4^th of July, a day when Americans blow things up for fun in memory of blowing things up for independence.

Permawar: An enormous explosion around midnight Saturday in Baghdad killed at least 149 people in the Islamic State’s third major attack in as many days. The death toll may rise. It happened in the busy Karrada district, an area of shops, hotels, and restaurants.

The Islamic State claimed it had attacked Shiites, but Karrada is a mixed neighborhood. ISIS in recent days has also claimed responsibility for the attack on a Bangladesh restaurant, and the Istanbul airport.

>Residents of Dhaka, Bangladesh, have been shocked to learn that the savage attackers who killed 20 people in an upscale restaurant were all the product of privileged families. Several of them attended elite private schools and universities. They targeted foreigners, shooting and hacking them to death.

Nation: Rumors and ripples of fear spread through New York’s Central Park yesterday after a man from Virginia lost his left foot stepping on an explosive. Reporters gathered nearby to cover the funeral of Holocaust author Elie Wiesel focused more attention on the incident than it may have required. For a short while it was reported that the police were clearing all of Central Park, but it wasn’t true.

Connor Golden, 18, of Fairfax, Va. jumped off a rock and stepped on what may have been a pressure-sensitive explosive. Investigators declined to describe the explosive as a “device,” saying only that it’s not uncommon to come across homemade explosives around the 4^th of July.

Politics: Hillary Clinton told the NY Times she would do four things in her first 100 days as president.

1. Appoint women to half her cabinet posts
2. Revive immigration reform with a path to citizenship
3. Push a $275 billion infrastructure/jobs plan
4. Seek common ground with the G.O.P. over drinks

And she said that if Republicans block her on immigration, guns, and corporate tax-dodging maneuvers, she’ll use executive action.

Donald Trump, for his part, tweeted, “Crooked Hillary will NEVER be able to handle the complexities and danger of ISIS – it will just go on forever. We need change!”

BookBeat: Peter Baker writes in the NY Times that the first major review of George W. Bush’s presidency completely pans the show. Jean Edward Smith’s “Bush” is a searing account of Bush’s entry into two wars, and his faith-based presidency. Smith, a noted biographer of Dwight Eisenhower and Ulysses Grant, writes, “Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush.”

And he says, “Whether George W. Bush was the worst president in American history will be long debated, but his decision to invade Iraq is easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.”

Party, Dude: Research from the University of Houston that surveyed 1,200 college students has found that the practice of “drunkorexia” is more common than previously thought. Drunkorexia is the practice of cutting calories so you can get a better buzz and drink more putting on fat. It includes induced vomiting, using laxatives, or just not eating before drinking. The survey found that eight in ten students had engaged in one of the behaviors associated with drunkorexia.

Somewhere among the survey subjects are probably several future US Representatives, a Senator and maybe even a president.

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