PHONY PETITION NUMBERS? “The DNC arrived at its 642,000 figure by making three photocopies of each petition.” If the Tea Party folks did this, they’d be loudly mocked by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

UPDATE: Reader Robert Long writes: “My wife has two names, a first one and a middle one. Next time I have sex with her can I claim to have had sex with 2? I knew it’d happen one day!” Sure, it’s the new math of hope and change.

TOM VANDERBILT: Lessons from ants regarding non-selfish routing.

IS BILL KELLER morally confused?

THE (SQUANDERED?) INHERITANCE: Mark Bowden on Pinch Sulzberger and the New York Times.

I respect people who avoid the spotlight, and a reluctance to be publicly vivisected is a sure sign of intelligence. But ducking interviews is an awkward policy for the leader of the world’s most celebrated newspaper, one that sends a small army of reporters—approximately 400 of them—into the field every day asking questions. Still, I could understand Arthur’s decision. After presiding or helping to preside over a decade of unprecedented prosperity, the publisher and chairman of the Times had recently begun to appear overmatched. Two of his star staffers were discovered to have violated basic rules of reporting practice; he had been bullied by the newsroom into firing his handpicked executive editor, Howell Raines; and he had spent much of the previous year in a confusing knot of difficulty surrounding one of his reporters and longtime friends, Judith Miller. For an earnest and well-meaning man, the hereditary publisher had begun to look dismayingly small.

He has been shrinking ever since. In 2001, The New York Times celebrated its 150th anniversary. In the years that have followed, Arthur Sulzberger has steered his inheritance into a ditch. As of this writing, Times Company stock is officially classified as junk.

It’s a sad story, overall.

BRIAN WANG ON PROTESTS AND POLITICS in the United States and China. With tea parties, and some cutting edge math.

TEA: The new coffee? “The culture that brought us pizza as a food group and $20,000 coffeemakers has now discovered tea.” Translation: You can be snobby about tea, too!

UNVEILING A PROTOTYPE HYDRAULIC HYBRID. Diagram of how it works at the link.

QUESTION: When will the buses go by the homes of big-bonus Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives?

IN THE MAIL: George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century.

REASON TV: Is your interior designer really putting your life at risk? “Alabama politicians once threatened unlicensed designers with jail time—moving a throw pillow could get you a year behind bars—and 22 states plus the District of Columbia regulate interior designers. Industry groups lobby for such laws because they say unlicensed designers put lives at risk.”

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: I thought Obama promised to get rid of earmarks! And yet:

Who says Members are opposed to earmarks? We hear that the earmark computer in the Appropriations Committee – the earmark database member request system, to be exact — broke down today. Again. This after it was revamped after last year’s overwhelming earmarking.

We also hear that Approps will announce they are extending the earmark request deadline as a result – it’s now 5p.m. Saturday.

I would say to hold on to your wallets — but they’ve already picked your pocket.

A TAX DAY TEA PARTY PROTEST at the Alamo.

UPDATE: 300 U.S. cities will host “Tax Day Tea Parties” and the count is growing.

Check out this map.

HOPE AND CHANGE: Jobless rate jumps to 8.5 percent, highest since late 1983.

UPDATE: “How has that worked so far?”

JURY SAYS WARD CHURCHILL WRONGLY FIRED, awards one dollar damages.

TED OLSON defends Harold Koh.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “Blair was denigrated as Bush’s poodle, although his eloquence and influence over Bush were clear to all. In contrast, Gordon Brown is embarrassingly obsequious to Obama, in a way Blair never was around Bush. And in further contrast, Obama shows an airy, polite disdain at being courted in such grubby fashion—while Bush was downright magnanimous in taking advice from Blair.”

UPDATE: Heh.

SOME OF US HAVE BEEN NOTING THIS FOR A WHILE: The Myth of 90 Percent: Only a Small Fraction of Guns in Mexico Come From U.S. “While 90 percent of the guns traced to the U.S. actually originated in the United States, the percent traced to the U.S. is only about 17 percent of the total number of guns reaching Mexico.” Gee, most guns traced to the United States come from the United States. Now there’s a meaningful statistic. I thought the Obama Administration was going to fearlessly follow science without distortion.

Well, okay, I never actually thought that, but a lot of people did claim that. But wait, there’s more:

So, if not from the U.S., where do they come from? There are a variety of sources:

— The Black Market. Mexico is a virtual arms bazaar, with fragmentation grenades from South Korea, AK-47s from China, and shoulder-fired rocket launchers from Spain, Israel and former Soviet bloc manufacturers.

— Russian crime organizations. Interpol says Russian Mafia groups such as Poldolskaya and Moscow-based Solntsevskaya are actively trafficking drugs and arms in Mexico.

– South America. During the late 1990s, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) established a clandestine arms smuggling and drug trafficking partnership with the Tijuana cartel, according to the Federal Research Division report from the Library of Congress.

— Asia. According to a 2006 Amnesty International Report, China has provided arms to countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Chinese assault weapons and Korean explosives have been recovered in Mexico.

— The Mexican Army. More than 150,000 soldiers deserted in the last six years, according to Mexican Congressman Robert Badillo. Many took their weapons with them, including the standard issue M-16 assault rifle made in Belgium.

— Guatemala. U.S. intelligence agencies say traffickers move immigrants, stolen cars, guns and drugs, including most of America’s cocaine, along the porous Mexican-Guatemalan border. On March 27, La Hora, a Guatemalan newspaper, reported that police seized 500 grenades and a load of AK-47s on the border. Police say the cache was transported by a Mexican drug cartel operating out of Ixcan, a border town.

So when you hear the Mexican Gun Canard, bear in mind that it’s a lie, told by people who want to manipulate American politics with a phony foreign connection.

CHRIS LEHMANN on the lesson of JournoList.

PJTV: NATO at 60.

MARK LEVIN’S LIBERTY AND TYRANNY is still the #1 book on Amazon.

CHRIS DODD UPDATE: Connecticut Voters Revolt Against Chris Dodd. “This is basically an almost unprecedented political revolt against a 30 year incumbent in a heavily Democratic state. Dodd’s popularity had been badly hurt in the last year, in particular by his ties to Countrywide. But the AIG bailout and bonuses seems to have amplified voter anger.”

BOB ZUBRIN: Growing Cap-and-Trade on the Tax Farm.

THE HILL: Members sought TARP cash for banks back home. “Several prominent lawmakers have pressed one of the nation’s top bank regulators to rescue financial institutions in their home states with money Congress allocated for government bailouts. In letters, e-mails and faxes to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), senior senators, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), wrote to agency Chairwoman Sheila Bair and others at the FDIC about applications by constituent banks for bailout funds under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). . . . Critics, including government watchdog offices, have charged that the TARP process and other decisions behind many of the government bailouts have been influenced by the political climate in Washington. Lawmakers who control the purse strings for the federal government can often sway an agency’s actions by personally lobbying for their constituents back home.”

RAHM EMANUEL: Victim of an extortion scheme?

I DON’T SEE THIS WORKING: “The head of the Alaska Republican Party today called on Sen. Mark Begich to step down from the U.S. Senate, saying that the state’s voters would have re-elected former Sen. Ted Stevens had they known the U.S Department of Justice would abandon its prosecution of him.” They may be right, but if they’d listened to my advice and replaced Ted Stevens before the trial, the question would be moot.