DAILY CALLER: Reid’s Phony Budget Numbers Go Unchallenged On Face The Nation.

HOUSE OF CARDS? Foreclosure crisis: Fed-up judges crack down disorder in the courts. “A Palm Beach Post review of cases in state and appellate courts found judges are routinely dismissing cases for questionable paperwork. Although in most cases the bank is allowed to refile the case with the appropriate documents, in a growing number of cases judges are awarding homeowners their homes free and clear after finding fraud upon the court. . . . Ongoing scrutiny by the FBI, the Florida attorney general, the Florida Bar, the media and defense attorneys has uncovered countless examples of forged signatures, post-dated documents, robo-signing and lost paperwork.”

ON SALE: A Cuisinart ice-cream maker. Is this better than an Ice Cream Ball?

UPDATE: On the Cuisinart machine, reader Marica Bernstein writes:

We have this and it’s freaking awesome. We are people who like low-tech food making/processing stuff, but are willing to set aside this preference.

I had a spectacular crop of melons last summer– mostly rare & heirloom, some of which had gone out of production just because they didn’t ship well. What to do with all these flavorful melons? Melon sherbet.

At the same time, we suffered a number of ice cream maker disasters. Recall that we live out in the county. The best way to fix this sort of problem– the need to make sherbet and the lack of a functional ice cream maker– is the internet, although we are trying to prepare for the lack thereof.

As I said, this thing is awesome. Turns out, you can freeze melon. So we had homegrown melon sherbet a few times this past winter. It was good.

John made a nice batch of coffee toffee ice cream in it last weekend. It’s not really ice cream. It’s iced custard. There are a lot of yolks involved. But the machine handles it well. For custard you have to pre-do some stuff which takes a couple of hours, but once it’s in the machine, you’re having a taste in 20-30 minutes.

Highly recommend this little appliance.

Thanks!

GEORGE WILL: In St. Louis, A Protest Sign Meets Government Arrogance.

GUN RIGHTS: Brannon Denning and I have a piece on what the McDonald v. Chicago case means. Download early and often! (Bumped).

TOM FRIEDMAN WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: Chinese artist Ai Weiwei arrested in latest government crackdown. “Ai Weiwei, one of China’s most prominent artists and an outspoken critic of the communist regime, was taken from Beijing’s airport by security agents Sunday as he was about to board a flight to Hong Kong. Police later raided his studio.” Still envious of the Chinese leadership, Tom? Sadly, I think the answer is yes.

WELCOME BACK, CARTER: Scary-Ass Charts Of The Day. As I keep saying, a Carter re-run is looking more and more like a best-case scenario.

MANCESSION UPDATE: looking at the BLS numbers: “The unemployment rate among men 20 years and older dropped only because the male labor force dropped by 31,000. Those employed barely rose by 4,000. Contrast with stats for women 20 years and older below. The labor pool for women rose by 96,000. The number of employed women rose by 247,000 vs. 4,000 for men. Thus, improvement in Friday’s jobs numbers came entirely from women, at least according to the household survey.”

CHART: Silver Coin Sales Skyrocketing. It’s like people have lost faith in the dollar.

ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION: “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says congressional lawmakers all are discussing taking some action in response to the Koran burnings of a Tennessee pastor that led to killings at the U.N. facility in Afghanistan and sparked protests across the Middle East, Politico reports. . . . Sen. Lindsey Graham said Congress might need to explore the need to limit some forms of freedom of speech, in light of Tennessee pastor Terry Jones’ Quran burning, and how such actions result in enabling U.S. enemies.”

They told me if I voted Republican we’d see an establishment of religion, complete with penalties for heretics and blasphemers. And they were right!

UPDATE: Ann Althouse: “Zero attention is paid to freedom of speech or religious freedom. Neither Schieffer nor Reid gives a damn (or dares to say he gives a damn). Pathetic.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steven Corcoran notes a double standard: “If only Terry Jones had submerged a Koran in a jar of urine, the entire world (or at least the Left) would have proclaimed this a great work of art. As for those who protested: bigots all.”

I don’t think it’s the urine that’s different here. And reader Cindy McNew writes:

U.S. flag burning: OK
Koran burning: Restricted.

I really despise the choice of language in saying it “enables” America’s enemies. … which, by the way, does he even realize he just called angry Muslims America’s enemies?

But it doesn’t enable them–it just gives them an excuse (what should be a laughably transparent one, instead of being taken seriously as a grievance) for what they want to do anyway.

Yes. This is a moment of clarity, on several grounds. And Lindsey Graham is unfit to hold office, too. Why don’t you and Harry resign, Lindsey? It’s the least you can do.

And reader Rob Crawford emails: “I wonder if it’s occurred to any of them that holding such hearings will cause a rash of Koran burnings. All the effort — by Democrats! — to protect the right to burn the US flag seems to have slipped from their minds. Almost as if it weren’t an issue of principle…”

MORE: Reader J.M. Hanes writes: “You know, if Harry Reid weren’t defending the Koran and attacking hookers, I’d have completely forgotten he’s the Majority Leader. You’d almost think that Mitch McConnell was already running the show, wouldn’t you?”

STILL MORE: Did they beclown themselves over nothing? Karzai’s brother: Beheadings had nothing to do with Koran burning. We’re led by cowards and fools. But at least by opening their mouths, they removed all doubt.

And reader Houston Foppiano emails: “Please correct the shoddy reporting in that Newsmax article. Terry Jones is not from Tennessee, he’s from Gainesville, Florida. For all the ‘hillybilly’ crap we’ve gotten from them over the years, make those damn Gators own this crackpot.” Heh.

MORE STILL: A reader emails:

You link to an erroneus Don Surber post about the beheadings in Afghanistan, titled “Karzai’s brother: Beheadings had nothing to do with Koran burning” (update to your 6:42 pm Sunday post).

Surber conflates the Mazar-i-Sharif beheadings with the riots in Kandahar. If you look carefully at the CNN story to which Surber links, Karzai’s brother was talking about a separate set of riots in Kandahar, where there were no beheadings (so far as I am aware).

Thus Surber’s point about the Koran-burning being merely a scapegoat for Petraeus et al. is somewhat undermined.

It’s hard to keep track of all the barbaric behavior emanating from that part of the world.

OF COURSE: Music Industry Will Force Licenses on Amazon Cloud Player — or Else.

INFLATION UPDATE: Many Restaurants Expecting To Raise Prices.

Grocery prices rose by more than 1 1/2 times the overall rate of inflation in 2010, according to government statistics, and economists predict that it will be even worse this year. For months consumers have grappled with higher prices at the supermarket, while restaurateurs pulled out every kitchen trick they could to absorb food inflation costs.

Well, the party is over. Experts say restaurant-goers can expect to see as much as an 8 percent increase in their checks.

And that may not be enough to keep the big chains alive, let alone the small independent eating places. Already suffering from flagging sales and low profit margins, record-high food prices – brought on by low supplies of corn, soybeans and wheat – could be the coup de gras for many restaurateurs.

Well, the supply of dollars has exploded, so the dollar’s worth less, so it takes more dollars to buy food. And there’s also the ethanol factor: “Because corn is also used for ethanol, demand has grown so great that feed costs for farmers and ranchers are being passed on in both the wholesale and retail markets.”

PROF. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Time for WaPo to disclose sources on bogus Lynch story. “It matters because, as months passed and American public opinion turned against the war in Iraq, the singular role of the Post in the mythical hero-warrior narrative about Lynch faded in favor of a false narrative that the Pentagon had made it all up. . . . The Post itself has been complicit in suggesting that machinations by the Pentagon were behind the bogus story. But it’s clear that the Post alone placed the ‘fighting to the death’ story into the public domain. And as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, the Pentagon wasn’t the source for the hero-warrior tale.”

AT AMAZON, markdowns in Sports and Outdoors.

MY SUNDAY WASHINGTON EXAMINER COLUMN: From “Just In Time” To “Just In Case” — Disaster Preparedness And Resilience. (Bumped).

TODAY’S ECONOMY: Why North Dakota May Be the Best State in the Country to Live In. Drill, baby, drill.

TECHNOLOGY: Authorities in Awe of Drug Runners’ Jungle-Built, Kevlar-Coated Supersubs.

And there was something else hastily abandoned in a narrow estuary: a 74-foot camouflaged submarine—nearly twice as long as a city bus—with twin propellers and a 5-foot conning tower, beached on its side at low tide. “It was incredible to find a submarine like that,” says rear admiral Carlos Albuja, who oversees Ecuadorean naval operations along the northwest coast. “I’m not sure who built it, but they knew what they were doing.”

So what are people building that we haven’t found? “The prospect of Colombian drug traffickers running their own private navy poses problems that won’t be solved with a few arrests.”

SIEGFRIED, THE TIGER, AND THE MURDERS IN AFGHANISTAN:

To those in the media who are suggesting, apparently in all seriousness, that Terry Jones caused the deaths of seven UN employees in Afghanistan by burning a copy of the Koran, I’ll just note that the only way that argument works is by means of a suppressed premise. The premise is that the killers had no moral agency–in other words, that they were, literally, animals.

Me, I’ll stick with “savages” and “barbarians.”

If there’s no moral agency, then I guess the folks who argued for a return to colonialism after 9/11 were right. If Muslims aren’t capable of self-control or moral responsibility, then they must be ruled with a firm hand by those who are. Is that “liberal?” No, but interestingly the consequences of taking the ideas of liberals seriously seldom are. Alternatively, some people are just using this as an excuse to blame people they like less than savages and barbarians.

WAS THERE A NATURAL NUCLEAR BLAST ON MARS?

According to Brandenburg, the natural explosion, the equivalent of 1 million one-megaton hydrogen bombs, occurred in the northern Mare Acidalium region of Mars where there is a heavy concentration of radioactivity.

This explosion filled the Martian atmosphere with radio-isotopes as well, which are seen in recent gamma ray spectrometry data taken by NASA, he said.

The radioactivity also explains why the planet looks red.

Brandenburg said gamma ray spectrometry taken over the past few years shows spiking radiation from Xenon 129 — an increase also seen on Earth after a nuclear reaction or a nuclear meltdown, including the one at Chernobyl in 1986 and the disaster in Japan earlier this month.

Natural criticality I can see — that’s happened on Earth in the distant past — but an explosion? Color me skeptical. And I don’t understand the radioactivity/redness connection, either.

HMM: Rasmussen poll shows no bump for Obama on national security.

IN THE MAIL: Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status.

SUSANNAH FLEETWOOD: Why Veena Malik’s smackdown of a mullah was a seminal moment for feminism.

HAWKWOMAN: Samantha Power To Be Next Secretary Of State?

A DEFENSE OF “ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM:”

Part of the problem is that the American distrust of intellectualism is itself not the irrational thing that those sympathetic to intellectuals would like to think. Intellectuals killed by the millions in the 20th century, and it actually takes the sophisticated training of “education” to work yourself up into a state where you refuse to count that in the books. Intellectuals routinely declared things that aren’t true; catastrophically wrong predictions about the economy, catastrophically wrong pronouncements about foreign policy, and just generally numerous times where they’ve been wrong. Again, it takes a lot of training to ignore this fact. “Scientists” collectively were witnessed by the public flipflopping at a relatively high frequency on numerous topics; how many times did eggs go back and forth between being deadly and beneficial? Sure the media gets some blame here but the scientists played into it, each time confidently pronouncing that this time they had it for sure and it is imperative that everyone live the way they are saying (until tomorrow). Scientists have failed to resist politicization across the board, and the standards of what constitutes science continues to shift from a living, vibrant, thoughtful understanding of the purposes and ways of science to a scelerotic hide-bound form-over-substance version of science where papers are too often written to either explicitly attract grants or to confirm someone’s political beliefs… and regardless of whether this is 2% or 80% of the papers written today it’s nearly 100% of the papers that people hear about.

I simplify for rhetorical effect; my point is not that this is a literal description of the current state of the world but that it is far more true than it should be. Any accounting of “anti-intellectualism” that fails to take this into account and lays all the blame on “Americans” is too incomplete to formulate an action plan that will have any chance of success. It’s not a one-sided problem.

If you want to fix anti-intellectualism, you first need to fix intellectualism and return it to its roots of dispassionate exploration, commitment to truth over all else and bending processes to find truth rather than bending truth to fit (politicized) processes.

(Thanks to reader Jonathan Stafford for the link.) This is much like what Neal Stephenson said in In The Beginning Was The Command Line:

The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.

Indeed.

UPDATE: It seems I have the above Stephenson quote wrong. A reader emails:

You’ve several times quoted Stephenson as writing:

“The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.”

But every copy of “In the Beginning was the Command Line” I’ve been able to find does not contain this quote anywhere. I fact, the phrase “state power” does not appear anywhere in the text, not even once.

Following the link you provide (to Amazon.com), and using their ‘look inside the book feature’ turns up the following, and it’s the same in every version I’ve examined:

“But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media.”

I’m confident you’ll want to correct this error, as it seems somewhere along the line someone’s twisted Stephenson’s words somewhat, and accuracy in quotations and references are important.

My copy of Command Line is at the office, but looking inside the book on Amazon this seems to be right. Further research reveals that the opening bit about state power is an introductory phrase from a law review article that somehow got put inside the quote, which is probably my error, though since I originally posted this in 2002, I’m not positive where I got it from then. But I’ll go back and correct the earlier posts as well. I don’t think the sense of the quote is wrong, but nonetheless I apologize for the error, and thank the reader (whose name isn’t in his/her email address) for the correction. To err is human, but to be corrected by anonymous readers is blogging!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Santiago Valenzuela writes:

Thoughtful article, but I am always disturbed by conservative anti-intellectualism.

Particularly, what disturbs me, is that it equivocates intellectualism per se with a specific species of intellectualism (statism of various stripes.) Why have conservatives ceded the title of intellectual to their opponents, instead confidently putting their faith in their gut instincts, “common sense,” and other decidedly “non-intellectual” ways of deciding? While it may be superior to statism in this case, it doesn’t make it good.

So why not instead say “These intellectuals have failed. Our intellectuals have a better grasp of reality and how men must live in it”? Why a rejection of intellectualism per se? It troubles me, because I have a profound respect for rational thought and a systematic approach to the troubles humanity faces, and seeing people mock that because one crop of intellectuals chose their theoretical models over reality can’t bode well.

Well, anti-intellectualism can mean two things. One is opposition to intellectualism, but the other is opposition to self-described “intellectuals” — who, often as not, are more credentialed than educated, and frequently not particularly intellectual at all except in mannerisms and self-description. We should, I think, be more explicit about distinguishing between intellectuals, and activists who mimic the mannerisms of intellectuals.

MORE: Hanah Volokh emails:

I found your recent blog post on anti-intellectualism interesting, particularly the last comments from Santiago Valenzuela and your response to them. I also find conservative anti-intellectualism troubling, and I think it’s important to separate it into three separate points:

1. Left-wing intellectuals are wrong substantively.

2. Many people who claim to be intellectuals are actually not intellectuals at all, but activists.

3. Central planning is not the best way to run a government or economy, so intellectuals do not need to be running things.

Still, to understand why central planning is a bad idea, and what we should have instead, and to get at the answers to numerous substantive policy issues, intellectuals are crucially important.

You may also be interested in this recent Stanley Fish column that attempts to describe academic intellectualism to laymen. It is particularly helpful at identifying the difference between an intellectual and an activist (full disclosure: I was an attendee at the conference he describes).

Thanks!

A SHOCKING CONFESSION: The Cause of All Discrimination? Me. Well, at least we know who to blame.

TODAY ONLY: Thriller: The Complete Series on sale. Think Boris Karloff, not Michael Jackson.

REASON TV: Veronique de Rugy Discusses The Truth About Deficits And The Debt.

COLUMBIA VOTES to bring back ROTC.

Plus, what’s happening at Brown.

KEVIN DRUM channels Britney Spears.

Related: The Loyalty Of The Clerks.

“I ALREADY GOT YOUR MONEY, DUDE!” Charlie Sheen stage show a disaster.

UPDATE: Donna Brazile much funnier.

HMM: E.U. TO PUT BOOTS ON THE GROUND IN LIBYA? “If I’m reading that right, the EU’s mission is half Dunkirk, half Peace Corps. It also appears to be a sign that Gaddafi will get to hang around a while longer.”

JOHN PODHORETZ: Have A Rotten Eggroll, Mr. Goldstone.

CHANGE: Rasmussen: Obama approval rating continued downward trend in March.

TIM CAVANAUGH: “Job growth, despite our leadership’s best efforts, can only follow business growth, so the pickup in jobs will be different throughout the country – with Texas vs. California giving the starkest and most popular contrast between growth and stagnation. The question isn’t why we have ghost towns but why we don’t have more of them. . . . My sense of justice and order in the universe tells me Los Angeles should become America’s next ghost town, but I have a terrible feeling that won’t happen.”

MARC AMBINDER ON FACEBOOK: “My hunch is that this election will hinge on who best harnesses the gut fear that America is in decline — and turns it into real optimism.”

U.S. CANCER INCIDENCE continues to fall.

AT AMAZON, the spring automotive sale.

RICHARD GOLDSTONE confirms he was a useful idiot. “Some have suggested that it was absurd to expect Hamas, an organization that has a policy to destroy the state of Israel, to investigate what we said were serious war crimes. It was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if Israel conducted its own investigations. At minimum I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case.”

Prof. Jacobson comments: “The damage Richard Goldstone did was enormous. The Washington Post op-ed isn’t even a good first step at undoing the damage.”

ASSAD STATE OF AFFAIRS: Will Syria Be The Next To Fall? Well, since Obama hasn’t endorsed the opposition yet, there’s still hope. . . . .

AMONG KENYA’S EXPLODING JEWISH POPULATION:

Gathundia’s Jews are carving out their own Jewish identity, inspired by a reverence for an ancient tradition but inflected with local customs. Educating themselves and one another, many of them have become adept at Hebrew and live devoutly Jewish lives while continuing to work as subsistence farmers. They are also one of a number of small but growing Jewish communities in sub-Saharan Africa that look to Mbale, Uganda, home to the Abayudaya, as both a model and a site of pilgrimage, religious guidance, education, and even youth conventions.

One of my Nigerian relatives claims (with some pride) that the Ibo were originally Jews. I found the evidence rather thin, but given the spread of antisemitism worldwide, it’s interesting to see people not sharing that prejudice.

GUN RIGHTS: Brannon Denning and I have a piece on what the McDonald v. Chicago case means. Download early and often! (Bumped).

THE NEW CIVILITY: Conservative Think Tank Receives Bomb Threats After Michigan FOIAs. My prediction: There will be more mainstream media outrage over the FOIA requests than over the bomb threats.

THE HILL: A “Tea Party” Budget.

NARRATIVE FAIL (CONT’D): U.S. Embassy Cables: 90 Percent of Mexican Drug Cartels’ Most Lethal Weapons Come From Central America–Not USA.

Of course, we’re still trying to figure out just how many of the weapons that do reach Mexico via the United States get there with the connivance of the ATF.

MORE ON THAT UCLA WHISTLEBLOWER-FIRING SCANDAL:

On Thursday, I wrote about Dr. James Enstrom, an environmental sciences professor and researcher at UCLA who blew the whistle on a fraud at the California Air Resources Board. Enstrom started looking into what he thought was a less-than-rigorous study that attempted to link fine particulate emissions from diesel engines to 2,000 “premature deaths” in the state, and discovered that the lead author, “Dr.” Hien Tran, had received his diploma from Thornhill University instead of UC Davis, which Tran’s CV had claimed. The school colors of Thornhill University, as it turns out, are brown and brown — UPS brown, because the entire school fit into a mailbox in one of their stores. Tran, it turns out, bought his PhD from a diploma mill.

Enstrom blew the whistle on Tran, but Mary Nichols, chair of CARB and a UCLA law professor, hid the fraud from the board until after the regulations had been approved. Enstrom also pointed out that John Froines, another environmental sciences professor at UCLA, had served on the scientific advisory panel for far longer than the charter allowed, where members were supposed to serve for short periods of time to avoid dogmatic thinking. When the dust had settled, everyone kept their jobs — except for Enstrom, whom UCLA fired for a changing set of reasons.

Enstrom will meet with University of California chancellor Gene Block on Monday to start the appeal of his dismissal, but that may not be the last word. According to FIRE, which has come to Enstrom’s defense, twelve members of the state Assembly have warned Block that they will hold public hearings into the UC system’s handling of academic freedom if Enstrom’s termination is not rescinded.

As they should. A cynic might suggest, of course, that notions of academic freedom were developed in the first half of the 20th century largely in order to protect communists from being fired, and that since Enstrom isn’t a communist, academic freedom shouldn’t apply . . . .

LEO RASKIND HAS DIED. He was a visiting professor at Tennessee some years ago, and we were very happy to have him around.

SOFTWARE FOR browsing the web anonymously.

JIM GERAGHTY: Our Workforce Lost 2.33 Million People in One Year? “If you remove 2.33 million people from the labor force within one year, that will indeed help lower the unemployment rate. It is, however, not the same as helping the unemployed find jobs.”

SHOULD PROFESSORS be political?

LITTLE MISS ATTILA TO STACY MCCAIN: Mmmm, Stacy–That Was Great!

MARKDOWNS IN Kitchen And Dining.

RANDY BARNETT, profiled in the Boston Globe over his ObamaCare opposition.

CLIVE CROOK: About Those False False Choices.

WHAT’S WRONG with U.C. Irvine?

DARK DAYS AHEAD FOR TRANSPARENT GOVERNMENT:

I give you two headlines that pretty much say it all:

Obama Receives Transparency Award at Secret Meeting

OMB prepares for open gov sites to go dark in May

It is relatively easy to make promises about transparency and to engage in all manner of posturing about it, but when push comes to shove it’s just a lot easier doing certain things (most things) when someone isn’t looking over your shoulder.

Well, on the pro-transparency side, you can see right through them.

POPULAR MECHANICS: Eyewitness Reports From Japan’s Ongoing Disaster.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Virtues Of Machiavelli.

SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO: SpaceX Will Officially Launch The Falcon 9 Heavy Rocket On April 5.

AUTO SALES by the numbers.

IN THE MAIL: How Evil Works: Understanding and Overcoming the Destructive Forces That Are Transforming America.

DON SURBER: “Are we losing the kinetic military action in Libya? No matter what one’s feelings are toward President Obama as a man or a president, this is not good news.”

Meanwhile, reader Brent Glines emails that it’s the Obama Curse, in which everything Obama touches turns to crap:

One aspect of the Libya debacle seems to have slipped by everyone in the punditocracy, but it seems obvious to me. The Obama Curse.

For the last couple of years, every time Obama backs either a particular sports team in a playoff, super bowl, world series, what have you, or a candidate running for office, the team or candidate endorsed by Obama immediately tanks. Doug Powers noted this phenomenon over a year ago, http://dougpowers.com/2010/01/27/the-obama-curse-continues/ , and there have been numerous other examples since then, most recently Obama’s NCAA picks.

So now Obama has backed the rebel cause in Libya against Moammar Gadhafi, so OF COURSE, the rebels immediately start to tank, and are now in full retreat on all fronts.

The Obama Curse. Fear it! And pray he never endorses your team, cause, or candidacy.

I’m safe. Er, except for the space-policy thing, where I strongly support Obama’s policy — and which, come to think of it, has also turned to crap.

DEMANDING A CORRECTION from the New York Times.

HEY, RUBE! SO MUCH FOR THE FIERCE MORAL URGENCY OF CHANGE: “As a candidate, Obama defined his approach as the opposite of everything Bush. Whatever the issue, Obama would be the photographic negative. But as president, Obama’s foreign policy has been slowly evolving toward the views of his predecessor. Obama’s pride will not allow him to admit it. His rhetorical imprecision obscures it. But behind the fog is the Bush Doctrine.”

Suckers.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: An Anti-College Backlash?

Start paying attention, and it becomes readily apparent that more and more Americans today are skeptical about the benefits of college. . . . Yet despite the mounting skepticism about the value of a college degree, and in the face of the economic downturn, colleges continue to demand ever higher fees, saddling graduates with crushing debt along with their diplomas. In June of last year the Federal Reserve released new figures showing that the nation’s total student loan debt now sits at about $830 billion – for the first time surpassing the nation’s credit card debt. Student loan debt, it should be noted, is in many respects less forgiving than credit card debt: “These loans typically can’t be discharged in bankruptcy,” explains the Wall Street Journal. “They have different repayment terms, some of which have heavy consequences for borrowers who miss payments.” Some commentators have even suggested that the crimp the financial downturn is putting on students’ ability to get loans may in fact be doing those students a favor.

Read the whole thing.

JIM TREACHER: The President of the United States bombs a Muslim country, and some nobody in Florida burns a Koran. Guess which one’s to blame for rioting in Afghanistan?

UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes:

RE: Treacher’s comment on the Koran burning

It shouldn’t go unnoted that Obama’s military intervention, when juxtaposed with the Afghan riot, nukes the old canard that US military interventions in Arab countries run the risk of provoking the Arab street – not that this ever had much contact with reality, still it existed. With the governors on the Arab street now weakened or entirely off, you’d expect the grand explosion, long prophesied, to have taken place by now.

Good point.

THOMAS SOWELL ON LIBYA:

You don’t just walk up to the local bully and slap him across the face. If you are determined to confront him, then you try to knock the living daylights out of him. Otherwise, you are better off leaving him alone.

Anyone who grew up in my old neighborhood in Harlem could have told you that. But Barack Obama didn’t grow up in my old neighborhood. He had a much more genteel upbringing, including a fancy private school, in Hawaii.

Read the whole thing.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Outlet Sale.

MODERATES and other creatures.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Gold nanoparticles deliver DOX directly to cancer. “Another week, another miracle nanoparticle that promises to deliver anti-cancer drugs directly into tumors while leaving healthy cells alone. This time, it’s a team from the University of Syracuse with the promising little development. Their system hitches DNA onto gold nanoparticles, which then binds to the anti-cancer drug doxorubin, also known as DOX.”

ENERGY CONSERVATION, LIKE TAXES, IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Presidential limousine, security vehicles exempt from fed ‘green’ vehicle policy.

Don Surber: “Barack Obama: Talk loudly but carry a bunch of waivers.”

BARBARIANS: Afghan mob kills at least 12 UN workers in protest over Terry Jones’s Koran-burning.

HEY, RUBE! Andrew Sullivan: “King Barack I.”

Little Miss Attila is gloating.

And Stacy McCain is . . . well, see for yourself.

UPDATE: Brian Dunn enjoys the lamentations.

And, well, meep-meep.

JOHN FUND: As Wisconsin’s Battle Heads to Court, Unions Try to Oust a Judge: Next Tuesday’s judicial election could swing the state Supreme Court majority from right to left.

CRUELTY IN POLITICS: Rand Paul outsmarts, embarrasses slow-witted Democrat. “Makes me wonder if opinion on Libya inside Congress is already so sour that Democrats fear a vote to authorize the mission retroactively might not go Obama’s way.”

WISCONSIN UNIONS GET UGLY: Now they’re threatening businesses that stay neutral in the state’s budget battle.

MOE LANE: Wisconsin Democrat Joanne Kloppenburg ignored abuse victim’s pleas.

BROKEN LINKS: Japan And The Global Supply Chain. “There are some enlightening similarities between the shocks that manufacturers are now suffering and those that buffeted the banking system in the 2008 financial crisis. In both cases two of the biggest surprises were the unexpected connections the crisis uncovered, and the extent of the contagion. The problems began in a seemingly well-contained part of the system—subprime mortgages in the case of finance, in manufacturing’s case a natural disaster in an economic backwater—but quickly spread.”

My Sunday Washington Examiner column will be on this topic.

LAW SCHOOL APPLICATIONS ARE DOWN AT YALE: “One of the biggest drops in applications we’ve heard about comes not from some unranked law school, but at Yale Law School.. . . The Yale Daily News reports that applications are down 16.5% this year at YLS.”

HOW TO DEFEND AGAINST HOME INVASION: “If you’re going to rely on a gun for part of your home defense plan, observe the first rule of a gunfight: have a gun.”

AT AMAZON, 50% off on coolers.

ARE YOU HAPPY?

AUGMENTED REALITY: A smartphone face-recognition app that will pull up Web info on anyone you meet. Not coming soon, I suspect, but almost certainly coming sooner than you think.

DESPERATE DEMS snooping into Scott Brown Family’s Medical Records. Just think how much easier that sort of thing will be for them once ObamaCare is fully implemented.

FIRST MERCURY PHOTOS FROM NASA’s Messenger spacecraft.

ADVICE ON PROPER SHOOTING STANCE and proper handgun grip.

AT AMAZON, a spring gardening sale. It’s that time of year — Helen’s getting ready to fire up the Earth Box.

MEDIA: Intel analyst to CNN host: “You’re just carrying water for Mr. Obama.”

GOP LAUNCHES MOCK OBAMA 2012 AD.

AT OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LAB, Y-12′s production hub vulnerable; major earthquake could disable uranium processes, create criticality threats. Oh, goody.

CHARLIE MARTIN PRAISES JAPANESE GUTS:

The example that we see the most in the United States is in Fukushima, and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) workers. Many of these people have lost their homes, their possessions, their family members and their pets to the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and the almost unimaginable tsunami that reached as high as 100 feet at some places on the coast.

These people are working 24 hours a day, in immensely difficult conditions, to prevent a possible disaster. And they are by no means alone in this: read the English-language Japanese press, or blogs by people in Japan, and you’ll read a thousand stories — people sharing their hardships, helping their neighbors, working together spontaneously as they begin to rebuild.

Read the whole thing.

WHERE YOUR MONEY WENT: Foreign Banks Tapped Fed’s Secret Lifeline Most at Crisis Peak. “The biggest borrowers from the 97-year-old discount window as the program reached its crisis-era peak were foreign banks, accounting for at least 70 percent of the $110.7 billion borrowed during the week in October 2008 when use of the program surged to a record. The disclosures may stoke a reexamination of the risks posed to U.S. taxpayers by the central bank’s role in global financial markets.” Wasn’t this happening at the same time European leaders were bashing “Cowboy capitalism” in the United States?

A JAPANESE NUCLEAR PLANT that not only survived the earthquake, but is now sheltering refugees. “It’s very clean inside. We have electricity and nice toilets.”

UPDATE: Various readers are reminded of Lucifer’s Hammer, though without the having-to-fight-off-cannibals part.

BUSINESS LEADERS, ECONOMISTS push for deficit cut.

HOW TO improve on bacon. I know, it sounds like sacrilege, but keep an open mind.

UPDATE: Moe Lane rises to the challenge and blogs the result.

THEN PERHAPS YOU HAVEN’T BEEN PAYING ATTENTION: “I find it remarkable that prestigious U.S. institutions of higher learning, such as NYU or Yale — which recently announced plans to open a campus in Singapore – find it so easy to partner with dictatorships, communist autocracies, and one-party authoritarian states.”

Of course, Bryn Mawr is taking the lead with an intergalactic partnership.

HMM: GM Books $1.6b Gain On Delphi Share Sale/Pension Shell Game.

CHANGE: House rejects Obama-backed labor amendment in FAA bill.

WHAT AMERICA NEEDS: A Chevy Volt convertible.

THE WASHINGTON POST’S RUTH MARCUS is tiring of Obama’s rhetoric. And even invoking Nixon.

KENNETH ANDERSON: “I am curious whether there is any evidence that high levels of student loan debt negatively impact a person’s marriage prospects.”