GEORGE WILL ON Education’s Status Quo.

ANOTHER PASSOVER MASSACRE.

CHARGES OF “POLITICAL CORRUPTION AND BACKROOM DEALS” in the Bank of America robo-signing settlement.

AT AMAZON, a clearance on outdoor and athletic clothing.

WHO IS WATCHING THE COPS? “The ticket-fixing scandal in New York City is a reminder that police officers cannot be trusted to patrol their own, and citizens must pick up the slack.”

Of course, here’s a guy who was beaten and subjected to false arrest for filming Las Vegas police.

WATCHING THADDEUS MCCOTTER on a DVR’ed episode of Redeye. He’s surprisingly funny.

WAPO: WikiLeaks discloses new details on whereabouts of al-Qaeda leaders on 9/11. “On Sept. 11, 2001, the core of al-Qaeda was concentrated in a single city: Karachi, Pakistan.”

BARACK OBAMA: The Unhappy President?

FARID GHADRY: Where is your Syrian Humanitarian Flotilla Erdogan?

PHOTO ESSAY: Robots At Work And Play.

UPDATE: Yes, the one with Obama does look like Photoshop-fodder, doesn’t it?

NEW YORK SUN: Sarah Palin For The Fed?

The big question as Chairman Bernanke gets set for his first quarterly press conference is how Sarah Palin was able to figure out sooner than everyone else that the Federal Reserve’s campaign of quantitative easing wouldn’t work. Disappointment in the Fed’s policies is being reported this morning at the top of page one of the New York Times. It reports that “most Americans are not feeling the difference” from the Fed’s “experimental effort to spur a recovery by purchasing vast quantities of federal debt.” It reports that “a broad range of economists say that the disappointing results show the limits of the central bank’s ability to lift the nation from its economic malaise.”

It’s a terrific story, and well-timed, given that on Wednesday Mr. Bernanke will break tradition and meet with the press. It is part of the Fed’s effort to get ahead of what is emerging as a public relations catastrophe, as gasoline is nearing six dollars a gallon at some pumps, the cost of groceries is skyrocketing, and the value of the dollars that Mr. Bernanke’s institution issues as Federal Reserve notes has collapsed to less than a 1,500th of an ounce of gold. Unemployment is still high. Shakespeare couldn’t come up with a better plot. But how in the world did Mrs. Palin, who is supposed to be so thick, manage to figure all this out so far ahead of the New York Times and all the economists it talked to?

She did this back in November in a speech at Phoenix, which the Wall Street Journal, in a laudatory editorial at the time, characterized as zeroing in on the connection between a weak dollar and rising prices for oil and food. “We don’t want temporary, artificial economic growth brought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings,” the Journal quoted Mrs. Palin as saying. “We want a stable dollar combined with real economic reform. It’s the only way we can get our economy back on the right track.” Now here is the New York Times quoting a raft of economists who have reached the conclusion that Mrs. Palin’s warning was right down the line.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Don Surber:

The Fed bet $900 billion it didn’t have — and it lost. . . . There should be severe penalties and frankly, not only should we fire Ben Bernanke, but we should strip him of his pension and sue him for economic malpractice. There should also be a federal grand jury investigating this monumental failure.

I think we’ll hear more sentiments along this line as the news of the Fed’s failure sinks in.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Mike Cardwell writes:

Inflation is poorly understood, but let me submit a basic propositions. The much more obvious reasons for inflation are rising input prices due to increasing restrictions on supply of these key ingredients. There’s much to blame Obama and the Democrats for. They’ve made working more expensive (min wage, health care, etc) and crummy foreign policy is making oil more expensive. Labor and oil are basic ingredients to most every good created by our economy, and so we get price inflation.

Whatever the policy failings of the Fed are (and I could go on at length on them), this isn’t one of them. The simple truth is both easier to understand and more damning. But we have to understand it in order to fix it.

The test of understanding is predictive power. And reader Eric Schubert emails:

As much as it pains me, I have to strongly disagree with you and Sarah. I’m a financial historian by background whose doctoral study focused on financial crises. I strongly agree with the Fed Chairman’s choices in quantitative easing. He is more than aware of some of the inflation risk associated with his actions, but I agree with his assessment that the absolute devastation that accompanies real deflation more than offsets the well-know downsides of QE. The Chairman made his bones studying the Great Depression, and he is determined to avoid that death spiral. He should be applauded, not condemned.

If you need to blame someone, blame the President and former Speaker Pelosi who utterly wasted $800 billion on a rushed, ill-conceived, politically-driven stimulus package. Spending on public goods can be very beneficial when they complement the private sector, rather than focusing on consumption spending or social engineering.

The Fed Chairman was the only adult in the room in economic policy from the Fall of 2008 through the Fall of 2010. He can’t control the stalemate in Congress, nor can he be held responsible for the unwillingness of large portions of the public to face up to our poor long-term finances.

Well, that’s certainly true.

LOTS OF PEOPLE HAVE SENT ME this piece on David Eagleman and neuroscience. It’s very interesting, and I particularly like the bit on drummers’ sense of time. It’s real, but I think it can be cultivated: When I was producing blues and rock, drummer Doug Weinstein would spot stuff rushing or lagging the beat that I couldn’t hear unless he pointed it out. But once I started producing techno, my sense of beat-timing became vastly more refined, and even slight departures stood out to me. Synesthesia helps, too — I can (or could, back when I was doing that sort of thing regularly) hear tiny differences in delay time quite clearly, but “hear” isn’t quite the right word, because really they looked different.

The thing about drummers hearing beats everywhere, and that being as much a curse as a blessing, is true, too. . . .

PROF. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That’s Rich: Bob Woodward Bemoans Celebrity Journalism.

JON HENKE EMAILS: “I was thinking about the ongoing revolutions in the Middle East and surrounding areas and I recalled something you wrote in 2002 that really captured what is happening in that region today. Concerning ‘preference cascades’, you wrote…”

This illustrates, in a mild way, the reason why totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly. (Click here for a more complex analysis of this and related issues). Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it – but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers – or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.

One interesting question is whether a lot of the hardline Arab states are like this. Places like Iraq, Syria, or Saudi Arabia spend a lot of time telling their citizens that everyone feels a particular way, and punishing those who dare to differ, which has the effect of encouraging people to falsify their preferences. But who knows? Given the right trigger, those brittle authoritarian regimes might collapse overnight, with most of the population swearing – with all apparent sincerity – that it had never supported them, or their anti-Western policies, at all.

Perhaps we should think about how to make it so.

He continues: “It is becoming so. Preferences are cascading against the current regimes. Let us hope their preferences continue to cascade towards democratization and freedom, rather than simply into the arms of new dictators.” Indeed. I had pretty much forgotten that column, but it does fit today’s events pretty well.

Er, read the whole thing, as they say. . . . And if you want to know more about this phenomenon, I highly recommend Timur Kuran’s Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, which inspired that column.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? How Obama Failed to Close Guantanamo Bay. “The White House asserts it was fully engaged in the effort to close Guantanamo.”

AT AMAZON, Up to 50% off cordless power tools.

WEAPONIZING GPS TRACKING DEVICES: “Those low-cost embedded tracking devices in your smartphone or those personal GPS devices that track the whereabouts of your children, car, pet, or shipment can easily be intercepted by hackers, who can then pinpoint their whereabouts, impersonate them, and spoof their physical location, a researcher has discovered.”

XCOR CEO JEFF GREASON: Making Space Pay and Having Fun Doing It.

“‘Daddy, is it really true that people used to fly to the Moon when you were a boy?’ It shook me, because that’s how a Dark Age begins.”

REDISCOVERING the Mighty Thor.

ASK DR. HELEN: Pathological Altruism: Does Evil Wear a Politically Correct Mask? Talking with Barbara Oakley about Cold-Blooded Kindness and political correctness.

SUSANNAH BRESLIN: How Your Journalism Sausage Gets Made, Part One.

And here’s Part Two.

Also, Part Three. Good advice in all of them for people who want to make it in media today.

SO MUCH FOR THOSE OFF-THE-RACK SUITS we heard about. I want the record to reflect my early suspicions.

TOM FRIEDMAN WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: China seizes Christians in Easter raid. “Dozens of Chinese Christians were arrested on Sunday when police prevented an evangelical Protestant church from holding its Easter Sunday service, as the state continued its attack on protests against one-party rule. . . . Yesterday’s arrests were a continuation of the authorities’ increase in repression of dissenters to stop any chance of a revolution such as those seen in North Africa and the Middle-East.”

TELEGRAPH: Lobbyists who cleared ‘Climategate’ academics funded by taxpayers and the BBC. Hmm.

HMM: Botox May Deaden Ability to Empathize, New Study Says. “According to a study published in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science, Botox may not only numb facial muscles, but also – and for the same reason – numb users’ perception of other people’s emotions.”

SO HOW’S IT SELLING? Nissan Leaf Named World Car Of The Year.

IN THE MAIL: From Will McIntosh, Soft Apocalypse.

AT PJM, still more video from Syria.

BLAME GAME: The Hill: Battered by gas prices, White House starts attacks on oil companies.

Related: AP: Costly gasoline clouds Obama re-election prospects. George Korda saw this coming.

INTERESTED IN DISASTER-PREP? Check out Bill Quick’s discussion forum.

And here’s a list of recommended survival gear.

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S NOT FIT TO PRINT, in China. “The press guidance provided by China’s censors is so voluminous and detailed that leaked copies of the guidance are now available on a regular basis. China Digital Times publishes a weekly list of what China’s censors tell their journalists not to report or hype. It’s a remarkable glimpse into the dark soul of Chinese bureaucracy, a guide to what really scares China’s rulers. But there’s irony there as well. I mean, why read Chinese papers when we can get all the juiciest bits from the censors themselves?”

WAL-MART IS testing online grocery delivery in California.

I’d rather have Amazon Fresh, but I’ll take what I can get. Which at the moment is none of the above . . . . And then there’s what happened to poor Amazon Tote.

TED LECTURE: Kirk Sorensen: Can Thorium End Our Energy Crisis?

ON SALE, TODAY ONLY: A JBL iPod/iPhone speaker dock.

HAPPY EASTER!

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Is War In Syria Next?

THE TELEGRAPH: Welfare handouts aren’t fair – and the public knows it. “A new survey shows that despite years of propaganda from the Left, Britons retain a deep-seated sense of fairness and individual responsibility, says Janet Daley. If you could work, but won’t, a large majority think you should have your benefits either reduced or stopped completely.”

DODD HARRIS: Nice move, Dearborn: You’ve made Terry Jones a Koran-burning martyr. “This case won’t have to go all the way to the Supreme Court. Michigan’s appellate court should vacate the convictions immediately. And then Pastor Jones will get to file his 1983 action and be entitled to damages from the state. All of which will do nothing but increase his media exposure and generate sympathy for his asshattery.”

THE HILL: Democrat rips Obama for not focusing more on jobs.

LITTLE MISS ATTILA: Caitlin Flanagan Trips Over A Shark. “In the past, Ms. Flanagan has peppered her subjective pieces with some real insights. This one was just flimsy, bigoted, and awful.” Yeah, that’s pretty much how I feel.

Plus, from the comments: “Stories like this drive me crazy. What is the moral supposed to be, that young women are too fragile to be allowed outdoors without a chaperon? That if you let them in your institution in the first place, you’ll have to remake it so that it’s a place of special security? Those were exactly the arguments that used to keep women out.”

THEY DON’T HAVE MUCH LEFT: Fareed Zakaria plays the “John Smith” card.

AT AMAZON, up to 65% off on select knives. You can never have too many knives, right?

MATT WELCH: “To follow up on Peter Suderman’s great post from yesterday about the predictive unreliability of interest rates (and the bubble mentality inflated by those who cling to low interest rates as proof that there’s no real borrowing problem), here’s a selection of commentators who reacted to this week’s Standard & Poor’s downgrade by flaming the messenger.”

WALL STREET JOURNAL: Dollar’s Decline Speeds Up, With Risks for U.S.

THIS COULD POSE A PROBLEM FOR THE RECOVERY: “This Easter weekend, Americans will spend a lot of money on items such as marshmallow peeps, plush bunnies and fake hay, begging a question: How much does the U.S. economy depend on purchases of goods and services people don’t absolutely need? As it turns out, quite a lot.”

UPDATE: Reader John Marcoux writes: “I’ve said it before, and it seems especially so to me now, there is nothing in Best Buy that I really need. I think most people are capable of accepting that. Hence the problem for the economy, and for stocks if the sidelined boomers don’t take the bait and finally lunge back into the market.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “‘It’s likely that all interested and qualified students are already enrolling in college,’ writes the Pope Center’s Jenna Ashley Robinson as she starts a series of graph-illustrated articles about components of what appears to be a college bubble. If she is right, then the nation’s push for more college graduates is eerily parallel to the expansion of subprime mortgages that underlay the housing bubble.”

Here’s the article. Bottom line: “As costs continue to rise and students see lower returns from their investments in higher education, the bubble is likely to burst.”

OBAMA’S S.F. VISIT: A Zombie Report. “Of all the billionaires and celebrities showing up, Craig Newmark was the only person the police acted like fans around.” In my experience, he’s a mensch.

Plus this: “Another passersby came over to investigate the hubbub, and I have no real reason to post her picture except to lure in as much male Web traffic as possible. In fact, I might as well not even write a caption for this picture, because I know you’re not reading it.” She’s better looking than Craig, I have to admit.

MORE ON THE UPS AND DOWNS OF drone warfare.

AT THE NORTHWESTERN LAW REVIEW, an online symposium on the Tea Party and popular constitutionalism.

STANDING UP TO CITY HALL: Boloco owner blasts city over food giveaway permit.

A Boston burrito chain owner was seeing cayenne red on Thursday after a charitable turn for a mayoral event was met with a threat from city inspectors.

And, to the apparent dismay of Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, Boloco CEO John Pepper vented his frustration the social media way — on Twitter.

In a series of tweets, Pepper relayed his run-in with City Hall after he agreed to donate 200 burritos to celebrate Menino’s signing of a contract for Boston’s first bike-sharing system.

First, demand free food. Then, demand that the donor pay to get a city permit. Then, “dismay” when he’s unhappy. Ungrateful serfs!

DON SURBER: “If Paul Krugman were a real economist, this is what he would tell you.” He used to be a real economist. But that was back when Reagan was President.

FASTER, PLEASE: Nanotechnology boosts anticancer drug cocktail many times over.

MARKDOWNS ON Mother’s Day gifts.

A SIMPLE WEIGHT-LOSS PLAN THAT WORKED: “Almost two years later, Mills has dropped 232 pounds from her body and has trimmed her waist down to 26 inches (a size 6).”

UPDATE: Reader Holly Behre writes:

Hi! I visit Instapundit almost daily and enjoy it so much. I’m writing about the CNN weight-loss article about Anita Mills, http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/119107/:

The article doesn’t discuss the 4th tip, “Do not tell anyone what you’re doing.” But I think there’s something worth exploring there. The conventional wisdom is to tell everyone as a sign of commitment, and get support from friends and family, etc. I’ve gone that route and failed. But from May 2009 to May 2010, I lost 70 pounds (210 to 140, as a 5’2″ woman, now age 50), no gimmicks, no paid programs or special foods, just counting calories and walking daily. I’ve kept it off for almost a year.

I didn’t tell a soul what I was doing, and I think that was important to my success. I continued to eat family meals, I just ate less and made different choices (more veggies, less fat, sugar and starch). It wasn’t a “diet” — it was, as they say, a lifestyle change. Hardly anyone mentioned my weight loss until I was down 40 pounds, and then I just replied, “Yes, I’m watching what I eat and exercising more. Thanks for noticing.”

The reason I didn’t tell anyone? Because it made me, and only me, responsible for what I put in my mouth. I couldn’t blame my husband for cooking something tempting, or my kids for leaving too many leftovers. Also (and I can’t offer evidence of this) I do believe people that who love you are afraid to see you change. (For this I reference another link I got from Instapundit: http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/119130/ (read it, loved it, btw.)

She’s referencing Steven Pressfield’s new book. Free on Kindle — did I mention that?

THE LIFE OF AN IRANIAN REVOLUTIONARY: An interview with Shirin Ebadi.

ECONOMIC MYSTERIES EXPLAINED: What do guns, burglar alarms, and condoms have in common? Their sales all boomed in 2009, with condom sales jumping 22% over the same period in 2008. But why? Hope. And change.

MARY KATHARINE HAM: “Peeps Didn’t Start the Fire!” Two Years in Peeps: The Music Video.

CHINA’S TRAIN WRECK: “Is China’s high-speed rail a model for U.S. transportation? Based on his travels in China, Washington Post editorial writer Charles Lane thinks not. . . . Liu’s legacy, in short, is a system that could drain China’s economic resources for years. So much for the grand project that Thomas Friedman of the New York Times likened to a ‘moon shot’ and that President Obama held up as a model for the United States.”

If nothing else, I’m hoping that the Atlas Shrugged movie, with its romanticization of trains, will kill lefties’ enthusiasm for high-speed rail.

UPDATE: “Prediction: this won’t make Tom Friedman stop talking nonsense about how awesome China is.” Well, nothing else has.

AUGMENTED REALITY APP keeps libraries tidy.

NEW AT PAJAMAS MEDIA: Still more gruesome video from Syria.

GPS SATELLITES get a serious upgrade.

COULD AUGMENTED REALITY be hazardous to your health?

A NICE PIC from Lisa Scheer.

PEOPLE ARE STILL WRITING TO SAY HOW MUCH THEY LIKE Steven Pressfield’s Do The Work. The Kindle edition is free!

IN THE MAIL: After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street-and Washington.

ANN ALTHOUSE: Why did Caitlin Flanagan write such a poorly supported article on fraternities and rape? As I said yesterday, this column is an embarrassment.

FREE SPEECH UPDATE: ACLU Fighting Attempts to Suppress Anti-Islam Speech.

CARPE DIEM BLOG: As tax rates drop, top 1% pays more in taxes. “In 1979 the top marginal income tax rate was 70% and 18.3% of the total taxes paid were collected from the top 1% of taxpayers. By 2007 the top tax rate was 35% (half of the 1979 rate), and the tax share of the top 1% had more than doubled to 39.5% (from 18.3% in 1979).”

HERE’S YOUR HOPE AND CHANGE: Obama administration asks Supreme Court to uphold FCC’s indecency policy. I remember some of the post-9/11 liberal hawks turning on Bush because of broadcast-indecency regulation and Howard Stern. So: How’s that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?

HACKERS SHUT DOWN INTERNET ACCESS, IMPROVE PRODUCTIVITY: “Our internal systems are working well and users are in here beavering away on their experiments. The break from the internet is almost heaven — more time to concentrate on important things.”

AT AMAZON, markdowns on binoculars.

SYRIA OPENS FIRE ON MOURNERS: “The reports are confused but it’s clear that the security forces this morning opened fire this morning on funeral processions. Obama at least spoke quite clearly about it, no equivocating.”

UPDATE: WaPo editorial calls Obama’s inaction on Syria “Shameful.”

COURT: Ban on stunguns violates Second Amendment.

SYRIA: Why PJ Media is publishing these very graphic videos.

Videos are here.

WELL, THAT SEEMS FAIR: Divorced Dad Who Is Paying for Child’s College Has Right to See Report Card.

NOTE TO PRO-LIFE MEN: Feminists will still date you if you’re hot. And if you’re not hot, they won’t date you anyway.

Just don’t have the wrong opinion on global warming.

MIKE MCNALLY on Libya and the Liberal Way Of War.

HEH: Taco Bell Demands an Apology After Beef Lawsuit Dropped. “Love may mean never having to say you’re sorry, as the old Love Story theme goes, but lawsuits are another thing. Taco Bell would like an apology from the folks who brought (and then withdrew) the lawsuit against them that claimed their meat mixture was less than 35 percent beef.”

An apology is getting off light: Bratz wins $88.4 million from Mattel… and Mattel started the legal battle.

FREE-SPEECH UPDATE: Koran-Burning New Jersey Transit Employee Gets Job Back + Back Pay + $25,000 Settlement.

Related: Terry Jones Jailed, Apparently for Refusing to Promise Not to Demonstrate in Front of a Mosque.

Another take: A Michigan Jury Finds That Muslims Can’t Be Expected To Control Themselves and Pastor Jones Gets His Birmingham Jail Moment.

THE NEW CIVILITY: Paul Krugman says “So, let’s try another shot to the head.”

HEH: “If nothing else, it is… cathartic.”

STACY MCCAIN DECRIES the new climate of hate.

JOHN HINDERAKER: “We are living in a bizarre moment in history. Our establishment–the press, the academy, all unions, most politicians, many in business who have skin in the Ponzi game–assure us that borrowing trillions of dollars to finance wasteful spending, while sticking our children with the tab plus interest, is perfectly sensible. On the other hand, believing that we should live within our means is? Crazy!”

THE “NEW CIVILITY” FACES another grim milestone.

VIDEOGAMES: Buy One, Get One Free.

CAITLIN FLANAGAN engages in stereotyping and collective guilt. Because if you have a few bad anecdotes about a group, it justifies acting against every member of the group. So long as . . . well, you can guess the rest.

UPDATE: From the comments: “I had a bad date in college one time. I think that sororities should be shut down.” Let me just say: Caitlin Flanagan should be ashamed to have put this out under her name. It’s a joke. She’ll never again have the credibility that she had before this sad piece of work was published. Not only is it sexist. It’s dumb.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mr. Bingley emails:

I was a student at UVa during those exact years (82-86). What happened to poor Ms. Securro was disgusting, horrific and inexcusable and I’m glad that there is justice being served, however belatedly and yet I’m fully aware that it can in no way right the wrong that was committed. I also should point out that I did not belong to a fraternity and never attempted to join one; hell, I think that in my 4 years at Virginia I maybe went to three fraternity parties (I hated how they spilled so much beer over the floors of those gorgeous houses they had and they were too noisy and loud for my taste). Also, as only about 1/3 of students belonged to fraternities, one could quite easily have a wonderful and social four years at UVa and basically never step into one.

But this article isn’t at all about Ms. Securro, is it? It’s about the demons that inhabit dear fragile Miss Flanagan’s mind. The key sentences (“They are built of the same Jeffersonian architecture as the rest of the campus. At once august and moldering, they seemed sinister, to stand for male power at its most malevolent and institutionally condoned.”) speak of that same sort of Andrea Dworkin mindset that was all too prevalent in that era: “Every! Telephone! Pole! Is! A! Penis! And! Wants! To! Rape! Me!”

Virginia is currently 56% women and 44% male. If someone is being “robbed” of a chance at an education I would politely suggest it isn’t the young ladies.

I write this as the father of a rising HS senior Daughter who just completed a week of visiting colleges, including Virginia, and I have no out-of-the-ordinary qualms about her attending there or any of the other fine institutions we visited last week (sadly, UT was not on her list).

Yes, the whole piece had a rather musty quality, in addition to its other flaws.

UPDATE: More criticism from Ann Althouse. “Why don’t women claim the power they have instead of running to Daddy (i.e., the government)?”

THE NEW CIVILITY: Wisconsin School Employee Makes Threatening Phone Call to Business for Selling Gas to GOPer.

MASSIVE TORNADO strikes North St. Louis.

FOND REMEMBRANCE OF THE RECENT PAST: “Which looks better and better every day, when compared to 2011. Hey, remember when gas was $2.20 a gallon and the unemployment rate was 4.4%? What happened with that? …Oh, right, the Democrats won the 2006 Congressional elections.”

I think the GOP has found its 2012 message . . . .

“I HAVE TWO GUNS, ONE FOR EACH OF YOU.” Really, his best role ever.

SYRIA UPDATE: PJM Exclusive: Video from Syria’s ‘Great Friday Uprising’ (Content Warning).

THREE REASONS WHY WONKETTE SELF-DESTRUCTED. Besides the obvious, which is that it was an Ana Marie Cox vehicle, and she’s been gone from Wonkette for a long time.

DRAINED AT THE GAS PUMP. “With gas prices above $4 in some states, Americans are canceling spring break plans and rethinking summer vacation, and some tourist destinations are offering gas vouchers of as much as $50 to talk people out of giving up and staying home.”

MICKEY KAUS NOT IMPRESSED with the New York Times’ claim of 100,000 new digital subscribers:

The New York Times claims 100,000 people have paid for digital subscriptions that go behind the paper’s new Maginot-like paywall. Howard Kurtz say this is “not a bad start.” Really? You’d think the Times would get most of the people who are going to subscribe right away, and that adding to that initial haul would be relatively difficult. Remember TimesSelect? That was the Times’s early attempt to charge only for its marquee opinion writers. It was launched in September of 2005. By June of 2006 it had 175,000 exclusively-online subscribers. More than a year later, that figure had risen only a bit–to 221,000, and the Times soon pulled the plug.*

Why isn’t the paywall set to follow a similiar trajectory? Kurtz says, “If the figure triples this year, the company may have a viable business plan.” Is there any reason to think the figure will triple this year?

I wish them luck.

HAPPY EARTH DAY: “President Obama declared today’s 41st annual Earth Day proof of America’s ecological and conservation spirit—then completed a three-day campaign-style trip logging 10,666 miles on Air Force One, eating up some 53,300 gallons at a cost of about $180,000. And that doesn’t include the fuel consumption of his helicopter, limo, or the 29 other vehicles that travel with that car.”

Related: “Earth Day is now a joke.”

UPDATE: The headline of the day is from MSNBC, believe it or not: Earth Day Co-Founder Killed, Composted Girlfriend.

I don’t think that’s what they mean by an Eco-Friendly Love Life.

THE NEW CIVILITY (CONT’D): Ugly Ivy Politics Preceded Suicide Of Popular Princeton Teacher: Friends.

He wasn’t PC enough for Princeton.

A vicious campaign to end the unblemished 10-year career of a popular but often politically incorrect Princeton teacher left him so despondent that he took his own life, brokenhearted pals said yesterday. Spanish teacher Antonio Calvo, 45 — who stabbed himself to death in his Chelsea apartment on April 12 — believed at least two graduate students and another lecturer were behind a poisonous political maneuver that robbed him of a contract renewal, two friends told The Post.

More here.

UPDATE: Princeton’s Spanish professor ‘killed himself after he was forced from job for being politically incorrect.’ “Devastated colleagues and students are blaming a campaign by another lecturer and several students for his death, saying they launched a hate campaign against him to get him ousted from his job.”

So is someone guilty of a hate crime, then?

BRIDGE TO FUSION? Four Advanced Nuclear Fission Technologies.

NEW RELEASES on DVD and Blu-Ray.

THE ECONOMIST: EUROPE’S PROBLEMS IN A NUTSHELL: “When we talk about the debt crisis in Europe, we tend to focus on the specific details—a relative loss of peripheral European competitiveness, accumulation of debt, rising bond yields and contracting economies. But the bigger story is a simpler one: The euro zone’s political institutions did not keep up with its economic institutions.”

DEATH TOLL RISING IN SYRIA: “At least 90 people were reportedly killed and dozens were injured when Syrian security forces fired live bullets and teargas to disperse ‘Good Friday’ protests in several cities, witnesses reported. The death toll seemed to be rising late Friday.”