SCRUTINY: IRS Probes NonProfit Pay Practices. “Nonprofit pay packages pale in comparison to some of those doled out to Wall Street executives. But a series of charity scandals in the past few years has focused attention on executive pay. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, has questioned some nonprofit executive pay practices. Others have said charities’ tax-exempt status – essentially a large taxpayer subsidy – could give rise to more scrutiny in the current political climate.”

As I’ve noted before on more than one occasion, the nonprofit sector enjoys far less scrutiny and transparency than the for-profit sector, yet it’s grown immensely. That suggests that there’s probably plenty of chicanery out there to be uncovered.

FROM TOM RICKS, the best books on military history.

HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Obama Administration Defends Wiretaps. Hope and change, yada yada.

EXPECTING THE ATLANTA TEA PARTY PROTEST to be really big.

HMM: Blogger claims police search of home was a threat.

Plus, Is your blog an ‘unaccredited grassroots Web site’? You don’t have to be an idiot to say things like that, but . . . oh, hell, yes you do. What was Phoenix Assistant Chief Andy Anderson thinking? Probably something about lunch . . . .

FROM BILL WHITTLE, a message to The Rich.

ABC NEWS: F-16s Tracking Stolen Cessna. “Over the skies of the Midwest, two F-16 fighter jets are escorting a private Cessna 172 aircraft stolen from a flight school in Ontario, Canada, whose pilot has been unresponsive to multiple requests that he establish communications with ground controllers.”

UPDATE: Stolen Canadian Plane Lands In Missouri. “A single-engine plane stolen from a Thunder Bay, Ont., aviation school has landed near a Missouri highway and the pilot is on the run.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Pilot nabbed.

MORE: Some question about whether his name is Adam Leon or Yavuz Berke.

IT’S NOT JUST ATLAS SHRUGGED: Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom is currently 601 on Amazon, which is pretty good for a book that’s been out for over half a century. Reader Greg Ransom sends this link.

READER AARON LAY WRITES:

I was reading Instapundit and noticed that you hadn’t mentioned the Charlotte Tea Party Protest. There was very little advertisement and several hundred people still showed up. This is particularly noteworthy because Charlotte is the second biggest financial center in the US and this town is the recipient of a lot of TARP funds – $40 Billion to Bank of America alone.

Another Charlotte protest is scheduled for April 15th and will likely bring out a much larger crowd.

There are so many of these protests going on that I can’t keep track of ’em all. If you attend one, please send pics. If you see news accounts, please send links.

Meanwhile, here’s another news report from this weekend’s Santa Barbara tea party. And here’s a report from Montana’s Flathead Tea Party:

The grassroots organizer for the first “tea party” tax protest in Montana says that the event’s success indicates the concern in Montana about taxes and spending in Washington, DC.

Between 500 and 1,000 people rallied on Saturday at Depot Park in Kalispell as part of the Flathead Tea Party. The Boston Tea Party is the inspiration for the modern day demonstration and event organizers tell us the rally was a non-partisan and peaceful. . . . A spokesman for Montana Senator Jon Tester said that “Jon is very concerned about government spending. He was the only Senate Democrat to vote against both bailouts, and just this week voted to cut the federal deficit in half”.

We need more Democrats like that. Maybe these protests will help to encourage them.

UPDATE: A warning: Get ready for the anti-Tea Party sabotage and smear campaign. Surely no one would resort to that sort of dirty pool.

And here’s a report from the Naples, Florida tea party protest this weekend:

About 400 people from all over Collier County gathered Sunday evening to put government officials on notice: they are frustrated with government bailouts, excessive national debt and perceived efforts to socialize services and businesses under the federal government.

“It all boils down to individual liberty,” said Marjorie Zimmerman, 73, an organizer of Sunday’s event.

The brainchild of Zimmerman and her neighbor, Doris Feinberg, Sunday’s “New American Tea Party” was a meeting of many and very different minds. Some people gathered to express outrage over the election of President Barack Obama, others were outraged over the use of government funds to prop up defaulted mortgages and still others were outraged by the government’s seemingly tacit approval of millions of dollars in bonuses given to AIG employees after the company accepted government money.

Read the whole thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I’m shocked, shocked, to be informed that Tester is being, um, parsimonious with the truth. A U.S. Senator! At least reader Mike Latina writes: “I can’t believe you fell for his rhetoric on spending. He was one of the ones that voted FOR the Obama budget this week in the Senate. You know, the $3.6 Trillion. The halving the deficit claim is straight from Obama himself. We certainly DO NOT need more senators like Tester…”

Well, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue — but if he voted for that budget, his fiscal credibility is pretty well shot. Hope the Montanans will point that out on April 15th.

FINALLY: Another report of a Tea Party protest in Quincy. “People carried flags, homemade signs like “T.E.A. — Taxed Enough Already” — tea bags and pent-up frustration with government to Clat Adams Park on Saturday afternoon to join their voices together. . . . Quincyans Steve McQueen and Terri Cary organized the Tax Day Tea Party to protest wasteful spending of U.S. tax dollars. They hope a proclamation signed during the party will spread the word along with plans under way to take the rally to the state capitol.”

VIDEO: Geithner stress tests a “sham … a Potemkin Village.” Well, with all these czars around, there was bound to be a Potemkin village somewhere . . .

INDEED: “You know, for a political faction that is ‘irrelevant’ and ‘out in the wilderness’, the Right seems to really get on the Left’s nerves. It’s like the Left isn’t quite convinced that the current state of things will last very long. And who knows? They may be right.”

HOPE AND CHANGE! US Recovery Is Far Off, Banks Are ‘Basically Insolvent’: Soros.

OBAMA SAYS HE DOESN’T SPEAK “AUSTRIAN.”

Well, neither do I! Plus this: “George Bush’s critics rightly roasted him for his tortured syntax and waterboarded grammar, and used it to make the claim that the graduate of both Harvard and Yale was an idiot. Well, perhaps, but I don’t recall him ever claiming that Austrian was a language. It takes a highly-esteemed intellect, it seems, to miss the fact that Austrians mainly speak German.”

AL GORE: Stop scaring people with apocalyptic doomsaying!

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 40 per cent of Australian women wear a bra with a cup size DD or bigger.

UPDATE: Yeah, but before you move down there, do you speak “Australian?” (Thanks to reader Edward Reiss for the amusing Dumb and Dumber Austria/Australia clip).

SPACE TOURISM LAW: From Mark Sundahl, The Duty to Rescue Space Tourists and Return Private Spacecraft .

ANNOUNCING THE IACP cookbook award winners for 2009.

QUAINT? The Deficit Trials of 2017.

THINGS TO BUY before the economy improves. I don’t think you’ll have to rush right out, though.

SMART DIPLOMACY? U.S. gives $50,000 for Italian earthquake relief. Pretty puny considering the magnitude of the disaster. Perhaps more will be forthcoming if things turn out to be as bad as they appear.

UPDATE: A State Department reader emails: “Quick point of clarification–the 50K for Italian quake relief is the amount immediately available from US Chiefs of Mission to release on their own authority. More will inevitably follow.” Ah, I should have thought of that, and the story should have noted it.

MICKEY KAUS:

The Obama aide disclosure that shocked me wasn’t Lawrence Summers making $5 million at a hedge fund, but Tom Donilon “earning $3.9 million as a partner at the Washington law firm O’Melveny & Myers.” … Summers is a big-time economist, advising people with lots of money at stake on questions that involve, you know, equations. He had to “solve math puzzles” to get hired! I’d expect him to be expensive. But Donilon’s just a political Washington lawyer. He makes almost $4M? Wow. I didn’t know I’d fallen so far behind. Somebody really ought to do something about the growing income inequality in our society.

Hope and change!

WASHINGTON POST: Obama’s Machine Sputters in Effort to Push Budget. “When his post-campaign organization was unveiled in January, Barack Obama vowed that the 13 million-strong grass-roots network built during his presidential campaign would play a “crucial role” in enacting his agenda from the White House. . . . But in its first big test, the group dubbed Organizing for America (OFA) had little obvious impact on the debate over President Obama’s budget.” Within a couple of weeks, we’ll be able to see whether the “tea party” campaign will have more impact. It’s certainly drawing bigger crowds. . . .

A DELIGHTFUL DOMESTIC SCENE.

MAJOR ADVANCES IN Nerf weaponry.

BE CAREFUL WHO YOU give your Lamborghini keys to.