TROUBLE FOR RUSS FEINGOLD? “A new Wisconsin Policy Research Institute poll shows Tommy Thompson (R) leading Sen. Russ Feingold (D) in a possible U.S. Senate match up, 51% to 39%.” State polls are iffy, but this is a big margin. (Via NewsAlert.)

COFFEE PARTY boycotting Fox News? “They did not accept the interview invitation because it would be ‘focused on fostering ongoing political divisions…’”

RETRO-FUN: Remembering Operation.

IN KNOXVILLE, black pastors complain about abortions. You don’t see this kind of thing much.

IS IT WES CRAVEN, OR MONTY PYTHON? The Hill: Do Dems have to finish healthcare by Easter?

THOSE BIGOTED NORWEGIANS: Noted Homophobe Named Norway’s “Role Model of the Year.”

ARE SOME RACES MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS? “How will the Obama administration respond to a formal complaint in the wake of serious black-on-Asian violence at South Philadelphia High School? . . . According to Asian advocates, the whole Philadelphia district has been plagued by harassment and violence towards Asian students for many years. At SPHS, the assaults have occurred in the cafeteria line, in bathrooms, in stairwells, on school buses, and elsewhere. The incidents ran the gamut from verbal abuse, physical intimidation, blocking doorways, cutting in line ahead of Asian students in the cafeteria, use of anti-Asian racial epithets, and more serious physical abuse including shoving, kicking, and punching—sometimes at the hands of more than one assailant. Advocates have accused school officials, including school Superintendent Arlene Ackerman and Principal LaGreta Brown (both black) of indifference to the plight of Asian students in their charge.”

I’m sure Eric Holder will be right on this.

DAN MITCHELL: Keynesian Economics and the Wizard Of Oz.

LONDON TIMES: Does Barack Obama give a damn about us?

Rubes! “The paradox is Europeans think Obama is one of them, that he ran [for office] on repairing American relations with them — damaged by Bush and the war in Iraq — and now feel he doesn’t care about them.” He cares. Hating is a form of caring.

NOAH POLLAK ON the Obama-Israel crisis.

MAKING POVERTY PERMANENT.

SPRING FORWARD: Daylight Savings Time starts today.

ANOTHER “RUBE” SELF-IDENTIFIES: “We are shocked and stunned at the Administration’s tone and public dressing down of Israel,” Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman said in a statement.

UPDATE: Reader Anne Butzen writes:

Had to chuckle when I saw that quote from Mr. Foxman. I receive fundraising letters from the ADL now and then, and always marvel at his harangues – to read him, you’d think that Evangelical Christians were the greatest threat to world Jewry today. So this must have come as a terrible shock to him. If it actually causes him to wake up to the real world, though, then it may be a blessing in disguise.

I’d be surprised, but we’ll see.

“MY INVESTIGATION REVEALS THAT WE’RE KINDA UNPOPULAR:” The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration is investigating more than 70 threatening jokes or inappropriate statements made to IRS agents about the Feb. 18 attack on an IRS building in Austin, Texas.

My feeling is that if the President can “joke” about illegal audits, then IRS folks should have to put up with “inappropriate” humor too.

IN SEARCH OF the perfect doughnut.

BOX OFFICE FLOP? Matt Damon’s ‘Green Zone’ Could Open to Less Than $15 Million. “The moral of the story? If you’re going to trash America and the troops, use Smurfs.”

UPDATE: A real Green Zone film would look more like this report from Toby Harnden. How likely is that to be made . . . .

PHYLLIS CHESLER: Norway, Italy, Iran: The Islamist Takeover, The Push Back.

STEPHEN GREEN: The Week In Blogs.

DAN RIEHL: If You Prick Them, They Will Bleed. “Show up and be heard, or be herded. There are no other choices. This is the time.”

ILLINOIS: Thousands Of Gun Owners Hit State Capital’s Streets.

ANOTHER REPORT from the St. Paul “Kill The Bill” rally.

REGULATORS ARE FROM MARS, investors are from Venus?

GIVE CREDIT TO THE JAWA REPORT. I wrote about Army-of-Davids-style antiterrorism in, er, An Army of Davids. And it’s working.

BOINGBOING: Leaked UK record industry memo sets out plans for breaking UK copyright. “He cites an expert on legislation as saying that the bill will likely die if MPs insist on their right and responsibility to examine this legislation in detail before voting on it.”

No sweat. Just do things the Pelosi Way and “deem” it passed without even voting! It’s the new approach to 21st Century Democracy!

KILL THE BILL: Thousands rally against ObamaCare in St. Paul. Some brought pitchforks.

INSTAVISION: I talk with pollster Scott Rasmussen about the Political Class, the consent of the governed, and his new book, In Search of Self Governance. (Bumped.) By the way, we talk about Rasmussen’s book a lot, and I highly recommend it. It’s short, clear, and very, very insightful.

THREE QUESTIONS TO ASK before you order an Apple iPad. Lack of a Kindle app would probably be a deal-killer for me. I actually prefer reading Kindle books on my iPod Touch to reading on the Kindle. And I’d be irritated enough at Apple if it locked out competitors that I probably wouldn’t buy even if the Apple iBook store was just as good.

DONALD SENSING: Government’s New Motto: It’s Good To Be King.

TOM BLUMER ON JOBS: Last week’s report was worse than it appeared; the latest health care wrinkle would damage things further.

GREECE: The Coming Greek Debt Bubble.

DAVE KOPEL: Is the “Slaughter Solution” Constitutional?

HEH: Looking at Marion Barry through Painkiller-Vision™.

GOOD GRIEF: Pelosi: Health-Care Reform Will Finally Allow Artists to Focus on Being Unemployed, Comfortably. Translation: They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.

SO MUCH FOR NUKING ASTEROIDS: “Don Korycansky of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Catherine Plesko of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico simulated blowing up asteroids 1 kilometre across. When the speed of dispersal was relatively low, it took only hours for the fragments to coalesce into a new rock.”

AT AMAZON, markdowns at the Automotive Outlet.

PJTV: Don’t Mess With Zo, Part 1: Taxation, Misrepresentation & Awaking the Sleeping Giant.

2300 SHOW UP FOR ST. LOUIS TEA PARTY, only 30 show up for St. Louis “Coffee Party.” And that 30 includes the “tea party infiltrators.”

IT’S ABOUT TIME: Boosting economic competitiveness in the states.

FAILING UPWARD: Sulzberger’s Pay Doubles.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s overall compensation as chairman of the New York Times Company “more than doubled to $6 million in 2009,” reports Dow Jones Newswires. That during a year during which many Times reporters and editors, who make about $100,000 a year, were subjected to a 5% pay cut, and reporters at the Globe, who make less than those at the Times, took a 5.9% pay cut. Something to remember the next time you read one of those New York Times editorials piously denouncing income inequality.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Maybe he just had a good diversity year. Oops — nope!

MEGAN MCARDLE: How Real Are The Defects In Toyota’s Cars? “Several things are striking. First, the age distribution [of drivers] really is extremely skewed. The overwhelming majority are over 55. . . . At any rate, when you look at these incidents all together, it’s pretty clear why Toyota didn’t investigate this ‘overwhelming evidence’ of a problem: they look a lot like typical cases of driver error. I don’t know that all of them are. But I do know that however advanced Toyota’s electronics are, they’re not yet clever enough to be able to pick on senior citizens.”

Note this Michael Fumento piece, too.

SCOTT BROWN: A year has been wasted while Democrats clung bitterly to ObamaCare.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ BLOGS on Muslim conversions to Christianity in the Third World. “One factor driving Islamic militancy in many nations is the sense that Christianity is growing. Outside of the West, evangelism and conversion are two of the most sensitive issues in the modern world.”

DAVID BROOKS flunks political history.

SHOCKER: Primary red light camera industry advocate in Florida fails to register as a lobbyist with the state.

IN THE MAIL: Disaster Law And Policy.

ADVICE TO POLITICAL SCIENTISTS, from Walter Russell Mead: “Rule to live by, folks: when your theory of how the world works starts sounding like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it’s time to recheck those assumptions.”

HEH: WH Sources: Help Us Rahm, You’re Our Only Hope.

WINNERS: The National Book Critics Circle Awards.

JOHN FUND: Speaker Pelosi’s Treasure Hunt for Votes Isn’t Going Well.

LET’S HOPE NOT: “Today, in 2008, the price of 1 oz. of gold hit $1,000 for the first time. In future years, this may seem like the floor price.”

Plus, Uh oh. I’m not much of a fan of gold as an investment, though I bought a little bit a couple of years ago, and it’s done better than my stocks. But there’s no escaping regime uncertainty, even with gold.

DAILY MAIL: Congress should listen to states on the EPA. “THE governors of 18 states and two territories – including Democrats Joe Manchin and Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear – have called on Congress to rein in the Environmental Protection Agency. The governors, in a letter to congressional leaders, cited the failure of the administration to weigh the economic fallout of EPA’s intention to regulate greenhouse gases.”

ALL THAT PRESIDENTIAL JAWBONING DIDN’T HELP: Las Vegas jobless rate hits all-time high of 13.1 percent.

UPDATE: More recent story here. “Men, minorities hit particularly hard.”

CLIMATEGATE: Senator Barrasso: Why Won’t Congressional Democrats Permit Science Oversight Hearings?

MICHAEL FUMENTO: Toyota Hybrid Horror Hoax.

VERONIQUE DE RUGY: Is Foreign Ownership Of Our Debt A Threat To The United States? Plus this useful graphic.

PETER BERKOWITZ: Climategate Was an Academic Disaster Waiting to Happen.

What does this scandal say generally about the intellectual habits and norms at our universities?

This is a legitimate question, because our universities, which above all should be cultivating intellectual virtue, are in their day-to-day operations fostering the opposite. Fashionable ideas, the convenience of professors, and the bureaucratic structures of academic life combine to encourage students and faculty alike to defend arguments for which they lack vital information. They pretend to knowledge they don’t possess and invoke the authority of rank and status instead of reasoned debate.

Read the whole thing.

THE PRESIDENT IS NOT A BRAND.

From the comments: “President Edsel.”

MARCH 16TH: The People Surging Against ObamaCare. Marching on Washington Tuesday. I’m told PJTV will be covering it live.

FORCE OF NATURE? I think Sissy Willis kind of has a thing for Dan Riehl. At least a blog-crush, anyway . . . .

AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.

“WELL, THANKS FOR CLEARING THAT UP.”

OBAMA REINVENTION EFFORTS FACE A PROBLEM: “Something more fundamental is going on here: Obama seems not to respect his fellow citizens — the uninformed rubes who crashed the health-care town halls — nor care what they think. All his energy now is devoted to disregarding their strong aversion to his idea of health-care reform and forcing through a vote on something the public doesn’t want. It’s hard to bond with the American people, which is what Myers is suggesting, when your agenda conveys disdain for their concerns.”

OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Mickey Kaus’s campaign commences.

IMPORTANT dating advice for women.

THE COFFEE PARTY: Doing the research that CNN didn’t.

DAVID BROOKS applies for a job.

VACCINE UPDATE: Mercury-Autism Link Rejected.

TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN: Humans Outcompeting Killer Whales For Food.

FINALLY: A Tiger Woods Love Doll.

GERMANY TO GREECE: We’re In Charge, So Shut Up.

“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Holbrooke pulls a Biden in Afghanistan. “A recent comment by Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, that ‘almost every Pashtun family has someone involved with the [Taliban] movement,’ has caused an outcry in Afghanistan and strained the already tense relationship between Kabul and Washington.”

TIM CAVANAUGH: Five Lies About the American Economy.

JONAH GOLDBERG: “Brooks is turning out to be like Big Bird to Obama’s Snuffaluffagus! He’s the only one who can see the real Obama and nobody believes him.”

POLITZOID: Grandma Plugs ObamaCare: Help, I’ve Fallen And I Can’t Get Up!

THIS MIGHT BE USEFUL: Nanoelectromechanical Sensor Can Instantly Detect Pathogens And Toxins.

MARK LEVIN CALLS FOR Louise Slaughter’s expulsion from Congress.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND through the ages.

AN INTERVIEW WITH California Senate candidate Mickey Kaus. “I don’t have any particular beef with Barbara Boxer. My beef is with the official Democratic doctrine that anybody who reaches Boxer’s position has to spout and has to endorse. She’s sort of a state of the art Democratic senator and that’s a problem. The state of the art Democratic party has some positions that depart from common sense and also undermine, in practice, the ideals that the party stands for.”

TRYING TO REINVENT OBAMA.

SHIKHA DALMIA: THE OBAMACARE DEBACLE: “Even if Democrats extract the votes to put ObamaCare over the top, it will at best be a Pyrrhic victory for them. Regardless of the outcome, this monstrosity might cost the Democrats the Congress this November, ruin the party for a long time and prematurely render Barack Obama a lame duck president for the rest of his term. . . . In fact, the real reason why ObamaCare is so unpopular is that it is proposing a giant expansion of the entitlement state precisely when this state everywhere is coming apart: here and abroad; at the federal level and the state; in the public sector and the private. Suggesting a giant government takeover of a sixth of the economy can’t be a popular selling point in a country whose DNA has a programmed hostility to Big Government.”

DAVID HARSANYI: Colorado should repeal the Amazon Tax. But what’s going on here is Colorado legislator’s anger that there’s something they don’t control:

Actually, if anyone ever needed an obvious illustration of how government overreach can damage an economy, they need look no further than the Colorado legislature’s foolish attempt to wheedle a few extra bucks out of consumers via an Internet sales tax. . . . One only wishes that citizens could boycott irascible and intrusive state legislators — with their knee-jerk, ill-informed, anti-capitalist sentiment — who are willing to risk the jobs of thousands of citizens for a couple million bucks in the state’s coffers.

And follow the link for the sputtering anger of Colorado Senate Majority Leader John Morse. It’s not even about the money. It’s about the control.

HUGH HEFNER, Teenage Cartoonist.

DON’T WORRY — ONCE THE GOVERNMENT TAKES OVER, THAT WILL STOP: Death Rate Dropping For Cancer.

OF LYNDA BARRY, HEAD LICE, and Ira Glass.

POPULAR MECHANICS: Driving Hazards More Dangerous Than Unintended Acceleration.

THE FIRST AMENDMENT AND advertising for legal prostitution.

NO RECESSION in D.C.

HMM: Report: Toyota sales may bounce back big time in March.

WHY WE ARE NOT LIVING in Western Civilization.

IN THE MAIL: War Stories: The Causes and Consequences of Public Views of War.

DANA CARVEY AS OBAMA on Leno.

PETER SUDERMAN: The White House Kindly Requests You Do Not Refer to Its Health Care Budget Gimmicks as “Gimmicks”. “When early drafts of health care reform rang up at around $1.6 trillion, Washington underwent a massive freakout; it became clear that passing a bill that kind of price tag was almost certainly impossible. So Obama gave Congress a target of ‘around $900 billion’ for the bill, and one of the ways the lower figure was achieved was by starting the taxes revenue mechanisms immediately but holding off on implementing the benefits. That allowed for the Senate bill’s politically convenient $850 billion score while disguising the fact that true cost of a full ten years of the bill’s programs is actually more like $1.8 trillion (and that’s not counting the trillion-plus in additional costs imposed by an individual mandate).”

EVEN WHEN IT’S YOUR MONEY, IT’S THEIR MONEY: States May Hold Tax Refunds For Months.

Residents eager to get their state tax refunds may have a long wait this year: The recession has tied up cash and caused officials in half a dozen states to consider freezing refunds, in one case for as long as five months.

States from New York to Hawaii that have been hard-hit by the economic downturn say they have either delayed refunds or are considering doing so because of budget shortfalls.

Next year, of course, people will be more likely to avoid overpayment, and states will lose the “float” entirely. Short-term thinking indeed.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Is Tom Hanks Unhinged? “Indeed, the most disturbing phrase of all was Hanks’ suggestion that the Japanese wished to ‘kill,’ us, while we in turn wanted to ‘annihilate’ them. Had they developed the bomb or other such weapons of mass destruction (and they had all sorts of plans of creating WMDs), and won the war, I can guarantee Hanks that he would probably would not be here today, and that his Los Angeles would look nothing like a prosperous and modern Tokyo.”

Talk of racism is how the elites feel good about themselves. That’s all it means.

WIRED: How Andrew Breitbart Hacks The Media.

AGENTS OF INCOMPETENCE: Agents of Incompetence: Customs, ATF Dodging All Questions About Toy Guns (Part III).

ANDREW COULSON on National Education Standards.

WELL, THAT’S A RELIEF: “No, there is nothing cooler than Al Franken at Netroots Nation. It is absolutely the coolest thing known to mankind.” I mean, now there’s no point even trying.

RESTORING DIGNITY TO THE GOVERNMENT? More on “Naked Lobbying” by Rahm Emanuel.

POLITICO quotes pro-Obama evangelical in evangelicals-fear-Tea Party piece. Lame.

Meanwhile, reader Trey Monroe writes:

I am an Evangelical and there are LOTS of us at tea party events and we are more than happy to have non-religious folks who understand the proper place of government at our side. I have been to two Tennessee tea parties here in Nashville and the March on Washington DC. Frankly, I was surprised at how many other Christians I saw and met. So there were lots of Christians in the crowds, and lots of secular folks as well at all those events. I do not see the tea party movement as being concerned with social issues. It is about smaller, cheaper, less intrusive government and increased personal freedoms. It is about personal responsibility and removing the oligarchy to replace them with people who understand and will work toward a government that knows its limited place. While there are social issues these groups disagree on, I do not recall seeing a single sign about social issues at the events I have attended.

I see this story as part of an effort to sow division. I think Ben Smith was used here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Geoffrey Robinson emails:

My general sense, as an evangelical, is that the tea partiers and most evangelicals would get along because of common causes. We both know the government is going crazy.

And the Tea Partiers have done a fantastic job thus far of being really smart about taking half a loaf rather than none at all (i.e., Scott Brown). There are more evangelicals with libertarian (esp. economic) leanings than the media suspects.

I think they’re afraid of this movement, and since marginalizing it hasn’t worked, they’re trying to divide it.

MORE: Bryan Preston emails:

Hey Glenn, I just read your post about Ben Smith’s Tea Parties vs evangelicals article, thought I’d give you another data point about this. Here in Texas, the Tea Parties are huge thanks a whole lot of things, from our state’s unique take on things to Katrina Pierson to Gov Perry. At Tea Party gatherings all over the state, few state leaders are more popular to have as guest speaker or what have you than Cathie Adams, who is both a well known evangelical leader and chairman of the state GOP. It’s all about common causes and common goals. Smith’s article was slippery, at best, in its use of one liberal evangelical to make the case for some kind of division between evangelicals and the Tea Parties.

Indeed.