ADVICE: Zip It About The OBL Raid Already.

I noticed that SNL was mocking Obama pretty harshly last night for not being able to shut up about killing bin Laden.

NEWT GINGRICH isn’t helping.

JEFF JACOBY: Obama’s Inexcusable Indecision On Syria.

A NIGHTMARE SCENARIO FOR HIGHER EDUCATION? “Permission fees are the real purpose here, of course. The goal is to drive more and more money to the Copyright Clearance Center, which is the only source of permission mentioned by name in the draft injunction. The way the injunction would accomplish this would be by entirely eliminating fair use for Georgia State.” It’s time for a massive revision — read: shrinkage — in copyright protection. The only justification for copyright is, as the Constitution says, to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Protection that goes beyond that should be regarded as unconstitutional. More on that here.

SUMMER READING in mysteries and thrillers.

STACY MCCAIN DEFENDS PRESIDENT OBAMA: “Frankly, I think our current president still has a good way to go before he can merit the claim of being worse than Jimmy Carter, and too many Americans have forgotten exactly how wretched Jimmy was.”

Well, Barack hasn’t killed any cats lately.

IMF HEAD PICKED OUT in police lineup.

THE ECONOMIST ON THAT IMF SEX SCANDAL: It Makes You Want To Join The Tea Party:

Leave aside the details of the allegations against Dominique Strauss Kahn, the head of the IMF (his lawyer indicates he will plead not guilty). Just note that the New York Times states that he was staying in a $3,000 a night suite and was taking a first class flight to Paris. This is the IMF, the body that imposes austerity on indebted countries and is funded by global taxpayers. And this was the likely leading socialist candidate for the French presidency.

Indeed.

CHILDREN DON’T LIE, except when they do. “The girl, angry at Lanigan about something else entirely, had made the whole thing up. But her accusations launched a soul-sapping rollercoaster ride that still hasn’t ended. . . . Lanigan remains in limbo, nearly a year after a jury’s acquittal. The Fairfax School District transferred him from Centre Ridge in a move that ultimately forced his wife to quit her job. School officials are now transferring him again. And the district has refused to pay his $125,000 in legal fees, even though Virginia law allows reimbursement for employees who are cleared of wrongdoing on the job.”

PORN: The Muslim world’s dirty little secret. “Last year, Google ran an analysis of its search queries and concluded Pakistan is the leading nation in sex-related, porn content searches . . . Iran came in third on the overall list, and Egypt was fifth.” Sexual repression, paired with the inevitable hypocrisy, is at the root of most of their troubles, I suspect.

UPDATE: Col. John Tammes emails: “When I was visiting a local Afghan bigshot in 2004, I noticed he had a satellite dish on his roof – when I asked, he said he got over 500 channels and that some of them were – here he hesitated, then laughed. Later on, my interpreter said that half of them were porn related channels and that the Taliban would never retake Afghanistan because too many men would not want to give up their newfound viewing choices…” Heh. Well, possibly.

ALLISON KAPLAN SOMMER reports on those Israeli border incidents. “Israeli politicians and pundits quickly theorized that the infiltration was a Bashar Assad production. Israel was clearly being used in a public relations exercise, they said, deliberately orchestrated by the Assad regime in an effort to take the spotlight off of their brutal suppression of protest movements in Syria and draw attention instead to the border with Israel. . . . If Syria was indeed an active player, it was successful: international headlines emphasized the events on the Israeli border and downplayed a continuing crackdown in a Syrian city on the Lebanese border on the very same day that claimed more Syrian lives than the IDF incident.” It’s easy to distract the media when they want to be distracted.

THE ANSWER, OF COURSE, IS NO: “Have you ever had a thought on the topic of race that isn’t set generations into the past? Have you ever thought about the future?” Because the “progressives” don’t do much actual, you know, progressing.

SALENA ZITO: As Go Jobs, So Goes Ohio:

Joyce McNears peers over her reading glasses and asks a question, expecting no answer: “Why is the president still not talking about jobs?”

Along with her son and grandson, the 66-year-old McNears matriarch is counting stock and rearranging shelves in the family hardware store that has seen good times and bad times in this Ohio River town.

Lately, times have been bad.

Joyce has lived in Belmont County and voted for Democrats all her life. Yet President Barack Obama and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, both Democrats, won’t get her vote next year.

Belmont went for Obama in 2008 but voted against his policies in 2010, when the Democrat-rich county went for Republican Rob Portman for U.S. Senate.

That’s a problem for Democrats going into 2012 because Ohio has supported the winner in 27 of the last 29 presidential elections. It is perhaps the nation’s most critical swing state.

Read the whole thing.

WHO WILL FOLLOW Herb Kohl?

TODAY ONLY: Up to 60% off on Swiss Army knives and multitools.

FRANKENHEARING: Senate GOP Embarrasses Dems Over Boeing.

Harkin was clearly annoyed at the turn that the hearing took. He muttered about his coal mining father and the unfair attacks on unions and the NLRB. But the political danger of the NLRB action was demonstrated by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who given his background in suing corporations, is not generally seen as “pro-business.”

Blumenthal went out of his way to be nice to Luttig and Boeing, the biggest American export company with $29 billion in overseas sales in 2009. That might also be due to the fact that Boeing suppliers spend more than a billion dollars in Connecticut.

Al Franken made a late appearance and demonstrated, once again, why Saturday Night Live suits him better than the United States Senate. Franken got angry and said it is untrue that anyone is ever forced to join a union. He obviously never worked in the produce section at Shop ‘n Save in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In a closed-shop state like Pennsylvania, the laws require employees to be members of a union if the employer is unionized. Enzi quipped, in response to Franken’s error, that you wouldn’t have to join a union unless “you wanted a job.”

Ouch.

JENNIFER RUBIN: If Paul Ryan Can Run For The Senate, Why Not The Presidency?

Related: Minnesota, Wisconsin, whatever.

A MODEST PROPOSAL TO expand railroad usage.

A QUESTION THAT HAS SUDDENLY BECOME MUCH MORE RELEVANT: What kind of diplomatic immunity does the IMF’s Managing Director have?

UNREST ALONG ISRAEL’S NORTHERN BORDERS: I assume it’s meant to serve as a distraction to take the pressure off of Assad, but I wonder if Syrians will fall for it as easily as the news media have.

MARKET-BASED MEDICINE: MEDIBID. “More than a medical directory, MediBid is a resource where medical consumers can find a doctor, then actively seek bids for the care they need.”

FOR RETIREES, a real-estate nightmare. “With home prices falling for nearly five years, many Americans now must consider what to do with their homes should prices continue to collapse and the equity in their homes — if they are still lucky enough to have any equity — disappears completely.”

IN THE MAIL: Habeas for the Twenty-First Century: Uses, Abuses, and the Future of the Great Writ.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: White House Down In Middle East. “The news that George Mitchell is resigning as US special envoy closes a chapter in the greatest international failure of the Obama administration to date. The President’s foreign policy team has some real successes under its belt — the reset with Russia, a marked reduction in global levels of anti-Americanism, steady progress in Iraq, and of course the spectacular Abbottabad raid to name a few — but there is no way to disguise the harsh truth: the White House flopped big time on the Israel-Palestine process.”

MICHAEL BARONE: Obama’s Hypocritical Rhetoric On Immigration Reform.

READER ANDREW SCHAFFER WONDERS WHY FOX NEWS IS IGNORING HERMAN CAIN: “This morning, Fox News put up a list, with pictures, of potential GOP contenders for President, including people like Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann who have not yet announced. There was no picture or mention of Herman Cain, who, by most accounts, won the GOP debatein South Carolina that was ironically broadcast by Fox News. Herman Cain is announcing he is entering the race this next week, May 21st. How could they leave him off of their list? He would be a great candidate and would totally refute the liberal and MSM label of racist charges against conservatives.” I don’t watch Fox enough to judge — I just watch Redeye on DVR and whatever I see at the gym, mostly — but have they really been ignoring him in general?

Time is ignoring Cain too. Why?

MEANWHILE, IN KASHMIR: Just a reminder of what else could go wrong.

CHANGE: Shadow Stat Misery Index Highest on Record. “John Williams, over at Shadow Stats, compiles economic data for inflation and unemployment the way it used to be calculated pre-1990. Based on that data, the CPI inflation rate is over 10%, and the unemployment rate is over 15% (see charts). The Misery Index is the sum of the current inflation rate and the unemployment rate. If it were to be calculated using the older methods, the Index would now be over 25, a record high. It surpasses the old index high of 21.98, which occurred in June 1980, when Jimmy Carter was president.” Well, it’s a good thing we changed the way we calculate it, then! Whew, that was close!

UPDATE: Is Shadow Stats wrong?

ALSO, BUG OR FEATURE? Sex Addiction: Real or Imaginary Ailment?

AT AMAZON, it’s the videogame outlet sale.

A WHILE BACK I WROTE ABOUT EATING INVASIVE SPECIES, and while I was on Cayman last week I went along on a number of lionfish hunts at depths of between 30-100 feet with Nat Robb and Art Hintze of InDepth Watersports, and had some delicious lionfish sushi prepared carpaccio-style with lime juice, olive oil, and capers right on the boat. It was delicious.

UPDATE: Yes, that’s a Rearden Steel t-shirt I’m wearing.

STILL NO FLYING CARS, BUT A TRICORDER IS LOOKING MORE LIKELY: “The competition is modeled on earlier incentive programs such as the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private-sector spaceflight, or the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize for super-efficient road vehicles. The basic idea is to encourage the development of mobile devices that can diagnose patients at least as well as a panel of board-certified physicians.”

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT REST: Washington Post: Million Dollar Wasteland: A trail of stalled or abandoned HUD projects. “The federal government’s largest housing construction program for the poor has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on stalled or abandoned projects and routinely failed to crack down on derelict developers or the local housing agencies that funded them.” It’s like it’s just a bunch of corruption masquerading as an effort to help the poor.

BRITAIN’S MYSTERIOUS PARAKEET BOOM: “Individually, any of the rose-ringed parakeets could be the star of a DreamWorks film, electric green with bright pink beaks and the voluble personalities that have long made the tropical species a popular household pet. But for people who frequent the park or live nearby, the visceral experience is more like ‘The Birds’ — albeit with more color and a much noisier soundtrack than the Hitchcock film. Native to the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa, the rose-ringed parakeet is enjoying a population explosion in many London suburbs, turning a once-exotic bird into a notorious pest that awakens children, monopolizes garden bird feeders and might even threaten British crops.”

Maybe it was another secret Labour plan to lure migrants.

PEOPLE MARRY for political compatibility? “What would be interesting to know: For people who are not politically or religiously compatible what maintains the relationship? Are they different in that other traits draw them more strongly? Do political views as keys to compatibility only work for some people and not others?”

CRYSTAL MANGUM’S HISTORY SAYS OTHERWISE: Women Don’t Lie.

THERE’S NO GOOGLE ENTRY FOR “CAPTAIN SEXY BANJO.” Well, maybe this will fix that problem.

UPDATE: Ah, I’m not the only one who jumped on this, apparently.

THIS KIND OF THING KEEPS HAPPENING: U.S. imams arrested for alleged Pakistani Taliban links. “Two South Florida imams and a third family member were arrested Saturday on charges of providing support to the Pakistani Taliban, the Justice Department said.”

JOHN HINDERAKER: Democrats: Where Is Your Budget?

HUCKABEE WON’T RUN FOR PRESIDENT. Good.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE: Truth And Pension Ads: “Free speech entitles public employee unions to argue that reforming Illinois’ gravely underfunded pension system is unconstitutional, wrong, unfair — the unions can deploy any or all of a thousand negative adjectives. We do, though, wish their $1 million TV campaign didn’t mislead citizens — public employees included — about proposals legislators may consider in the last days of this session.”

Related: Illinois Democrats Unveil Budget Only Minutes Before Votes.

REMEMBERING Bonny Kate. “It is said that she was not someone that you wanted to mess with. She could shoot a gun as well as a man and could ride a horse as well as a man. For her to take care of all of those children out in the wilderness is just remarkable.”

AND HE WASN’T JUST ASKING FOR A CHAKRA-RELEASE: Socialist Head of IMF Accused of Sexual Attack in NYC. “The Port Authority officers were acting on information from the New York Police Department, whose detectives had been investigating a brutal attack of a woman employee at the hotel Sofitel New York, at 45 West 44th Street, in the heart of the city’s theater district. Mr. Strauss-Kahn had been considered a leading contender to run on the Socialist Party’s ticket against President Nicolas Sarkozy.”

BIGGEST TECHNOLOGY OF THE NEXT 30 YEARS? Medical nanorobots. Faster, please.

POPULAR MECHANICS: How It Works: The Spillways Trying To Control The Rising Mississippi.

NOBODY TELL ALTHOUSE: Markdowns on men’s Dockers shorts.

THE CONVERSION OF David Mamet. “Mamet was delivering a frontal assault on American higher education, the provider of the livelihood of nearly everyone in his audience. Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. . . . It was as nervy a speech as I’ve ever seen, and not quite rude—Mamet was too genial to be rude—but almost. The students in Memorial Hall seemed mostly unperturbed. The ripples of dissatisfaction issued from the older members of the crowd.”

READER DAVID DUFTY WRITES: “Once again, your guest bloggers did a sterling job of blogging in the ‘instapundit’ style. Not only did they do short, snappy posts just as you do, but they even emulated your spread of subject matter, updating us on insta-favorites such as robots, fusion research, the higher education bubble, and even wonkish constitutional issues. They became you. Perhaps ‘instapundit’ will outlast you, in spirit as well as name.”

Hmm. Not anytime soon, I hope! But as I mentioned before, InstaPundit was originally meant to be a group blog. Every once in a while I consider giving that a try again.

IN CANADA, a promising brain-cancer treatment. “Medical Researchers at the University of Alberta reported today evidence that the orphan generic drug Dichloroacetate (DCA) may hold promise as potential therapy for perhaps the deadliest of all human cancers: a form of brain cancer called glioblastoma.” Faster, please.

SOMEBODY GIVE MICKEY KAUS a job with the CIA.

ILYA SOMIN TO MICHAEL GERSON: Actually, Libertarians Aren’t Selfish. And people who would spend other people’s money on charity aren’t generous, I should add.

IS ELECTRICITY the bottleneck for Japan’s recovery? This is why surplus capacity is good.

CHANGE: CBO Puts Health Care Safety Net on Critical List.

PRIORITIES: Rural Louisiana Flooded To Save New Orleans.

DISASTER PREP: Village unscathed by tsunami – thanks to mayor’s ‘crazy idea.’ “Wthe mayor of the Japanese coastal village of Fudai ordered a 51ft-high wall built in the 1970s to protect his people from the potential ravages of a tsunami, he was called crazy, foolish and wasteful. But after Fudai survived the monster wave that followed the 11 March earthquake unscathed, he is now regarded as a saviour.”

AT AMAZON, a sale on patio and garden items.

UPDATE: Link was wrong before, fixed now. Sorry!

AT PAJAMAS, an exclusive report from the Ferrari Challenge.

BOB ZUBRIN IN THE WSJ: How We Can Fly To Mars In This Decade — And On The Cheap.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED REPUBLICAN, WE’D HAVE SMARMY TV PERSONALITIES LECTURING US ABOUT CHRISTIANITY. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Bill Maher: If You Celebrated Bin Laden’s Death, You’re Not Really A Christian.

UPDATE: I guess these are some of those “Christianists” Andrew Sullivan is always warning about: Four Dems vote ‘present’ on honoring Bin Laden mission.

MUCH ADO ABOUT gas prices.

READER DAVID WHIDDEN DECLARES VICTORY: “When all the New York Times can complain about is the color of buildings in Baghdad, can we officially say that the war was a success? Oh the horrors of tackiness! If only we had left Saddam in power!”

Well, we’d have been spared this: “In downtown Baghdad, a police headquarters has been painted two shades of purple: lilac and grape. The central bank, a staid building in many countries, is coated in bright red candy cane stripes. . . . Baghdad has weathered invasion, occupation, sectarian warfare and suicide bombers. But the latest scourge, tastelessness, may prove the toughest to overcome.”

STIMULATION, Sidwell style. “The latest scandal unfolding at Sidwell Friends, the school the Obama children attend, confirms all your worst ideas about what elite private schools are like.”

ENERGY CAVE: In the middle of the night, President Obama approves more drilling: “In what can only be described as a victory for Republicans, President Obama has, in the wee hours on a Saturday morning, announced that he will direct federal agencies to approve more drilling for oil and gas off the Alaska and Gulf coasts. His motives are transparent, even to Reuters. . . . The question is, why announce a big policy reversal at the quietest moment in the news cycle? Well, because it is a reversal, which point both victorious Republicans and anti-oil liberals will be making as loudly as possible with delight and outrage, respectively.”

Related: Obama: Hey, Let’s Start Drilling In Alaska! “I guess demonizing the oil companies isn’t having the desired effect.”

A one day sale on Quicken Deluxe 2011.

WHY MEN hate The Notebook.

ILYA SOMIN: Admiral Yamamoto And The Justification Of Targeted Killing.

SLEAZY: Disney wants to trademark “Seal Team Six.”

LOVE VIA AN email typo.

THE PAPER THAT BRANNON DENNING AND I WROTE ON MCDONALD V. CHICAGO is still Number One on SSRN.

THE NLRB’S ironic lawsuit against Arizona.

IN THE MAIL: From Daniel Solove, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security.

THE ECONOMIST: Higher Education Bubble: Blowing Up Grad School. More here. “The ultimate benefit seems to be a substantial wage premium, and comparisons of that premium to average levels of tuition or incurred debt make college look like an incredibly good deal. The tricky thing is that there may well be an identification problem: it could simply be the case that students who go to college earn more, because the types of students that go to college are the types that have characteristics (intelligence, discipline) that translate into higher earnings. University degrees could simply be expensive signaling mechanisms at best, in this world, and massively wasteful cultural institutions at worst.”

Related: Down To Business: Higher Education Is Ripe For Technology Disruption. “If you think online degrees will remain just a niche, consider the time when Borders and E.F. Hutton were touting their superior in-person experiences.”

Or is it really a student loan bubble?

What can’t go on forever, won’t. The increases in tuition and indebtedness we’ve seen over the past couple of decades can’t go on forever, so they won’t.

GEORGIA REPUBLICANS TO NEWT GINGRICH: Sorry, but you’re no Herman Cain.

GREENLANDERS: Hey, you know, this whole global-warming thing might not be so bad.

BILL QUICK: Why Mitch Daniels Shouldn’t Be President.

BEDBUG UPDATE: Scientists Discover Bedbugs Carrying MRSA Germ In Study.

HMM: IRS Denies Political influence in Gift Tax Scrutiny of 501(c)(4) Groups.

Of course, when you’ve got a President who publicly jokes about auditing his enemies, many will find this denial unpersuasive.

MICKEY KAUS: Even the liberal Ezra Klein knows a Dem dead end when he sees one. “Klein is sympathetic to the White House’s plight, of course. But he notes that ‘promising to pass laws that actually can’t pass hasn’t worked out for them,’ which I suppose for Klein amounts to a searing attack on Obama’s strategy.”

KRUISER CONTROL: Will Bin Laden’s Porn Stash Get Terrorists Hot & Bothered? Plus Angry Birds vs. MSNBC’s Brain Trust.

FLOODS: Mississippi River flood threat sends residents near Morganza Floodway scrambling.

Related: Here Are The Refineries And Nuclear Power Plants Threatened If The Morganza Spillway Is [Opened|Shut].

HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I HEARD THIS? “I was very anti-Bush. I’m a Democrat, I’ve got the canceled checks to prove it, and suddenly I’m the enemy? Me? Me?”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Strange Case Of John Brennan. “I am mystified by the various metamorphoses and general weirdness in the recent statements from John Brennan, Obama’s anti-terrorism czar. Since 2009, two characteristics unfortunately distinguish his all-too-frequent public proclamations: post-facto attacks on the prior administration whose anti-terrorism protocols he was knee-deep in, and commentary on current events that is either silly or soon proves untrue.”

WALL STREET JOURNAL: What If The U.S. Treasury Defaults?

TRUST: Facebook, Foe of Anonymity, Is Forced to Explain a Secret.

RAND SIMBERG: “Bob Zubrin says that people who oppose converting corn to ethanol are Malthusians. Ummmmm…no.”

ROGER SIMON: Forget the Osama photo, release the Osama porn! “Think I’m kidding? No, I’m not. The kind of pornography a man looks at it gives us a certain insight into him. I can’t even begin to guess what excited bin Laden’s twisted brain. It could be something quite banal or something, shall we say, rather outré. I leave that to your imagination. But whatever it is, it would be interesting. . . . I guess this is all of a piece with the old bird dying his hair and keeping a stash of herbal Viagra. Three wives weren’t enough for him.”

Plus this: “The discovery of pornography taken during raids on Islamic militants is not uncommon, officials told Reuters.”

OUCH: Google’s Blogger outage makes the case against a cloud-only strategy. “The same week that Google made its strongest pitch ever for putting your entire business online, one of its flagship services has failed spectacularly. . . . Google has owned and operated Blogger since 2003. It’s not like they’re still trying to figure out how to integrate the service into their operation. If it can happen at Blogger, why can’t it happen with another Google service?” Well, you can at least hope not to get “nitecruzr” as your support rep, I guess . . . But support has never been a Google strong suit.

WELL, SAUL ALINKSY SAID THAT THE PERCEPTION OF POWER IS POWER. So I’ve got that, anyway . . . . Heh.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Demagoguery 101. “The El Paso speech is notable not for breaking any new ground on immigration but for perfectly illustrating Obama’s political style: the professorial, almost therapeutic, invitation to civil discourse, wrapped around the basest of rhetorical devices — charges of malice compounded with accusations of bad faith. . . . This impugning of motives is an Obama constant.”

CHANGE: Medicare, Social Security Funds Expiring Sooner, U.S. Says. “Medicare, the U.S. health insurance program for the elderly and disabled, and the Social Security trust for the disabled and retirees are running out of money sooner than the government had projected.”

DON’T BE EVIL: Google Is Said to Have Broken Internal Rules on Drug Ads.

WHY SOUTH KOREANS are in love with Judaism: “Koreans and Jews both have a long history of oppression and surviving adversity with nothing but their own ingenuity to thank. There are no natural resources to speak of in Korea, so, like the Jews, all we can develop is our minds.”

GOLD MANIA in the Yukon. “Behind this stampede is the rising price of gold, and behind this price is fear. . . . Gold is countercyclical to happiness.”

ATF STARTS WILDFIRE IN TEXAS: “You can quote me on it: That bunch has a real corner on stupid.”

MASSACRE IN PAKISTAN: A “Teachable Moment” For The West.

IS BRIAN LEITER PREJUDICED against gay blog commenters? Anonymous blog-readers want to know! Er, I’m sure they do.

One of the reasons I don’t have comments on my blog — besides laziness, which has always been the main reason — is that if you have comments, some dishonest hack will attribute them to you, instead of the commenters.

A BLEG FOR DAN COLLINS. Yeah, I donated.

COMING SOON: The “Viagra condom?”

At Amazon, Today’s Deals on DVD & Blu-ray.

BLUE STATE MODEL FAIL: New York Losing Young Residents. “New Yorkers are feeling the financial squeeze on the home front. Right now, many young people do not see their future in New York State.”