ROGER SIMON: Harry Reid’s Not A Racist; He’s A Hack.

MICKEY KAUS: Why Peter Orszag Is No Gary Hart. Despite having some traits in common.

Plus: “I went to my local Mexican diner and offered to give them a bundled payment to cure my hunger, but they insisted I pay for every dish I ordered under the archaic ‘fee for taco’ model.”

BUT OF COURSE: “Sen. Harry Reid, in an effort to increase the popularity of the imperiled health care reform bill, on Monday added a provision requiring insurance companies to pay 100 percent of the cost of treatments intended to lighten the skin of African-Americans.”

WISDOM FROM THE WIRE for Harold Ford, Jr.?

POLL: Obama’s Independent Woes Intensify. “The bad news for Obama and other Democratic politicians gets worse: The number of independents is growing.”

JAN CRAWFORD ON HARRY REID: Racism Doesn’t Always have a Southern Drawl.

Harry Reid was practicing modern-day racial politics — gaming out what he thought white people would and wouldn’t accept and what kind of prejudices and stereotypes many of them hold.

Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising to hear, since Reid has waded into the minefield of prejudice and stereotyping before. I can’t help but think of his outrageous statements about Clarence Thomas back in 2005, when some were urging President Bush to make Thomas the first African American chief justice. We all know Thomas’s compelling life story: growing in the harrowing days of Jim Crow in the segregated South, struggling to break free from poverty and racism, becoming the first black child to integrate all-white schools, graduating with honors from the seminary and Holy Cross before Yale Law School. Thomas succeeded on his unquestioned intellect and his determination and hard work.

Thomas is one of the Court’s most original and compelling thinkers, and his opinions are praised by scholars on the Left and the Right as important contributions. You may not agree with a single word Clarence Thomas says, and it may drive you crazy that he took Thurgood Marshall’s seat on the Supreme Court, but you can’t call him stupid or deny he’s an important intellectual force.

Unless you’re Harry Reid.

Read the whole thing.

KEVIN RENNIE ON CHRIS DODD: Dodd’s Agenda Backfired Right Before His Eyes.

THE I.R.S. IS AUDITING HARVARD.

Any word on Arizona State?

SOMEBODY’S BETTING ON THAT WHOLE MINI-ICE-AGE THING: “The Toasty, due this spring for $60 (www.ionaudio.com), is a fleece electric blanket with sleeves that also features a built-in thermostat and controls to keep you at the right temperature while watching TV or reading.”

JULES CRITTENDEN: Martha Coakley vs. The Ladies’ Gardening Club. “I’m glad the AG is seeing to the critical issues of untidy garden club finances, a major problem in the Commonwealth that went largely unnoticed as the local papers focused on frivolities such as online brothels and public records, in hopes the AG might apply the same kind of diligence there.”

UPDATE: D’Oh! Coakley Ad Attacking Brown Misspells Massachusetts.

THE BIGGEST DISASTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY — all due to George W. Bush’s commitment to diversity?

HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Atlantic Columnist Condemns Boring, Longwinded Journalism.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Devaluation, Chavez-Style. “One of the hallmarks of a regime in financial trouble is a complicated regime of ‘special’ exchange rates aimed at getting around the problems caused by financial mismanagement. The devaluation that Venezuela announced last week may have been a good idea, given the country’s recession, and the problems of declining oil revenues. But the way Chavez has gone about the thing is typically ham-fisted. By Sunday, he was threatening to deploy the military against . . . shopkeepers who raised prices in response to the devaluation, as if fiat were the main component of import prices.”

UPDATE: Uh oh: “The Treasury admits it’s losing more money from TARP than it’s gaining. The White House considers a bank tax to make up those losses.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Charlie Martin writes:

Oh bullshit. They’re already treating the TARP money as spent — when they *do* get some back they start planning how to spend it before it, my gawd, gets back to pay off deficit. What they *mean* is “here’s a way we can raise taxes and hope our High Dudgeon will make it palatable.”

Looters and moochers.

WARD CONNERLY: Harry Reid’s Race Problem: I’m still trying to figure out what was offensive about the Senate majority leader’s comment.

THE UGLIEST CAR EVER MADE? “Not just ugly, but dog ugly. Butt ugly. Warthog-beaten-with-an-ugly-stick ugly.”

Plus this: “Fantastically practical, right up until the moment that you discover you can’t get your kids into the car because they’ve all run away through fright.”

NEW YORK GOV. DAVID PATERSON SLAMS REID COMMENTS: Governor calls remarks about Obama “reprehensible,” but says Reid should not quit.

GREG LUKIANOFF: Think campus censorship disappeared in the 1990s? Guess again.

ANOTHER MASSACHUSETTS PAPER endorses Scott Brown.

KIM HOLMES on contemporary politics and Rousseauvian utopianism.

HOW JONATHAN GRUBER gamed the system.

JERRY POURNELLE: “We are getting the Change You Can Believe In, and we are getting it good and hard.”

ILYA SOMIN: Harry Reid and the Costs of Expanding the Definition of Racism. “Conservatives and to a lesser extent libertarians are often accused of being racist for things like opposing affirmative action, skepticism about broad antidiscrimination laws, claiming that some intergroup differences in income are not due to discrimination, arguing that some cultures are better than others, and so on. If the GOP wins this particular fight and Reid is forced to resign, there will be a new norm in public discourse under which no prominent person can openly say the same kinds of things as Reid without being labeled a racist.”

GAS PRICES zip to new highs.

JIM TREACHER: If you like the words ‘uh,’ ‘yeah,’ and ‘y’know,’ have I got an interview for you.

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE: “If Scott Brown wins, Harry Reid loses. What more do you need to know?”