GREEN JOBS Myths.

WHY BROADCASTERS FEAR accurate audience ratings.

GOVERNMENT comic books.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS: Billings, MT rushes to install red-light camera before new state law bans them.

IN THE MAIL: Sheila Heen sends a copy of her book (coauthored with Douglas Stone and Bruce Patton), Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss what Matters Most. She also encloses a photo of her yard, featuring an Obama/Biden and a McCain/Palin sign, labeled “His” and “Hers.” See, we all can get along.

IS OBAMA LOSING PAUL KRUGMAN?

$100 million here, $100 million there “pretty soon, even here in Washington, it adds up to real money,” says the president.

Except, you know, really it doesn’t. Let’s say the administration finds $100 million in efficiencies every working day for the rest of the Obama administration’s first term. That’s still around $80 billion, or around 2% of one year’s federal spending.

Yeah, this was a lame effort.

FROM STEPHEN GORDON: A Sincere Warning to Big-Government Republican Politicians.

CHRIS DODD UPDATE: Dodd taps Wall Street money for re-election. Hey, wait, I thought they were evil!

Plus, Chris Dodd’s personal bailout.

PMA UPDATE: Visclosky Seeks to Use Campaign Funds for Legal Defense.

Rep. Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.) is seeking permission from the Federal Election Commission to spend campaign money on legal fees that may arise from the FBI investigation of the PMA Group lobbying firm, though his request letter claims no independent knowledge of the investigation.

PMA Group imploded after news broke in February that federal agents had raided its offices last fall, reportedly as part of an investigation of potentially improper campaign contributions.

The firm’s employees and clients have provided millions of dollars worth of campaign donations to top Members of Congress, including several Appropriations Committee members. Many of these members — particularly Reps. John Murtha (D-Pa.), Jim Moran (D-Va.) and Visclosky — have provided millions of dollars worth of earmarks for PMA clients.

Sounds like he’s expecting to be in trouble.

TEA PARTY UPDATE: Sen. Ronnie Chance and Rep. Matt Ramsey: Tea Party Reflections.

What we found most striking about the tea party we attended, and those that we observed taking place elsewhere, is how it departed from the normal partisan atmosphere one comes to expect at political rallies. Those in attendance were for the most part not political activists, and most did not come to support one party or oppose another, though certainly there was an emphasis on limited government that once was, and must become again, the rallying cry of the Republican Party.

We say once because during the presidency of George W. Bush, Republicans in Washington abandoned their economic principles. Spending rose and the earmark culture flourished. As has often been said, Republicans went to Washington to drain the swamp, but instead joined the alligators.

Thus, the furious reaction by many on the left to the tea parties. . . . The fact that the tea parties represent a grassroots movement only perplexes the cynics further, because Obama’s election to the presidency has been marketed as the apotheosis of grassroots populism. It is as if the true believers of ever-expanding government have actually convinced themselves that only hedge fund managers on Wall Street could possibly oppose the government takeover of the private sector. Of course, they’ve also convinced themselves that a federal government unable to balance its budget — or even to finish its budget on time — year after year is somehow going to introduce sound accounting to the private sector.

Indeed.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Pelosi, other Dem leaders pressure members to oppose ethics measure.

House Democratic leaders, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), have ratcheted up the pressure on their rank-and-file members to oppose a resolution calling for an ethics committee investigation into the ties between key Democrats and a controversial defense-lobbying firm.

Democratic leaders have told their members they should let the ethics panel do its work and stop supporting a measure sponsored by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) that calls for an ethics probe into political donations from the now-defunct PMA Group lobbying firm and earmarks its clients received. . . . The pressure appears to be working. Reps. Ron Kind (D-Wis.) and Tim Walz (D-Minn.), two of more than two dozen Democrats who supported Flake’s measure in the latest vote, on April 1, are now wavering. . . . The week before the recess, Kind told The Hill that a cloud will be hanging over all House Democrats until their leaders address the PMA controversy. The quote was repeated in a New York Times editorial calling for an ethics committee investigation into the PMA controversy.

Pelosi is in a particularly difficult position. Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a Pelosi ally, has close ties to PMA and its clients, as do Reps. Pete Visclosky (D-Ind.) and Jim Moran (D-Va.).

Remember when Pelosi promised to “drain the swamp” if the Democrats took back the Congress back in 2006? Instead, she’s trying to shut down the pumps.

Related: “Do as I say, not as I do.”

UPDATE: Speaking of Pelosi, an interesting take on the Harman eavesdropping scandal:

Why would “the caller” expect Rep. Harman to believe that Nancy Pelosi, Harman’s fellow California Democrat, would trade the chairmanship for campaign contributions? What is it about Pelosi’s reputation among insiders that made “the caller’s” offer credible?

Stay tuned.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Why Steven Rattner is above the law.

ADVICE TO THE ECONOMIST: “To write about a television show one should first watch the show.” As I’ve noted here before, The Economist has been slipping in recent years.

DID FEARS OF COMPENSATION CAPS cause Chrysler to tank? “On the other hand, this has the feel of a targeted administration leak.”

PJTV: Michael Patrick Leahy and I talk about tea parties and what comes next.

ILYA SHAPIRO: Yes, California, There Is an Individual Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

If you want to know how this came about, I highly recommend Brian Doherty’s book, Gun Control On Trial: Inside the Supreme Court Battle over the Second Amendment. As I said when I blurbed it, it does for the Heller case what Simple Justice did for Brown.

OH, GOODY: Computer Spies Breach Fighter-Jet Project.

CBS NEWS: Murtha’s Defense Earmarks Draw Questions.

The contractor was set to receive $1 million tax dollars. He said the military told him the money would come through a company called Commonwealth Research Institute, whose parent company, Concurrent Technologies, ranked among the largest earmark recipients. Both were set up with Murtha’s help in his own hometown. The defense contractor said Commonwealth officials told him to get the money, he should “consider opening an office” in Johnstown, Murtha’s hometown, and chided his company for not giving “enough campaign contributions to Murtha,” and not making “a showing at Murtha’s annual defense contractor fair.”

Read the whole thing.

POLITICO: BLAMING BARNEY:

AU students protest Barney speech

About 130 American University students have signed an online petition of sorts asking the school’s administration to withdraw an invitation to Barney Frank, who is slated to deliver a commencement address at AU’s School of Public Affairs in a few weeks.

The students blame the fiery House Financial Services chairman for the financial meltdown, singling out his longtime support of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae as contributing to the severity of the crisis and magnitude of bailouts. . . . Many of the signees are members of the campus Young Republicans chapter but a handful are Dems or independents — and one of the protesters is the vice-president of the campus Democrats, she said.

DeStefano has set up a Facebook “AU Students & Alumni Against Barney Frank @ SPA Commencement ’09” page that has 128 signees.

On it, she claims Frank “helped lead us and the world into a global economic meltdown,” and describes the Massachusetts Democrat as “excessively partisan and notoriously divisive during times when compromise and bipartisanship is needed the most.”

(Via NewsAlert).

JOHN ZIEGLER: The Truth About My Arrest at USC.

HOW TO GIVE THE E.P.A. your views on the new proposed CO₂-as-pollutant rules.

MICHAEL BARONE: The public is more knowledgeable than politicians and pundits think.

L.A. TIMES: Crimes suspected in 20 bailout cases — for starters. “In the first major disclosure of corruption in the $750-billion financial bailout program, federal investigators said Monday they have opened 20 criminal probes into possible securities fraud, tax violations, insider trading and other crimes. The cases represent only the first wave of investigations, and the total fraud could ultimately reach into the tens of billions of dollars, according to Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general overseeing the bailout program. The disclosures reinforce fears that the hastily designed and rapidly changing bailout program run by the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve is going to carry a heavy price of fraud against taxpayers — even as questions grow about its ability to stabilize the nation’s financial system.”

UPDATE: Reader Ralph Smith writes:

You might want to mention that the tea parties are about more than protesting higher taxes and big government. I suspect that a lot of folks feel the same disgust and frustration as I with the widespread corruption of public officials — Murtha, Rangel, Dodd, Moran, Mollohan, Feinstein, et al. And revulsion at such practices as pay-to-sue (Rendell and Hood), tax cheats (Geithner and Daschle), pay-to-play with state pension funds, Congressional earmarks and quid pro quo campaign “contributions”, the list is seemingly endless. And we feel powerless to do anything about it, other than take to the streets.

Indeed.

RON BAILEY: The NIH’s Morally and Scientifically Incoherent Stem Cell Guidelines.

SPECULATION: Is Rahm Emanuel behind the Jane Harman leaks? “Civil liberties advocates take note. This is only the first such leak. There will be more. Combined with the DHS attack on ‘rightwing extremists’ last week, it bodes ill for this administration’s respect for the rule of law, not to mention personal privacy.”

HEH: “Tapper to White House spokebot Robert Gibbs: ‘You were talking about an appropriations bill a few weeks ago about $8 billion being minuscule — $8 billion in earmarks. We were talking about that and you said that that $100 million is a lot but $8 billion is small?'”