RAND SIMBERG: Obama’s Space Program: More Conservative than Bush’s. “America has never had a space policy more visionary or more friendly to private enterprise.”

VIDEO: Noted “minstrel show” performer responds to NYT smear merchant.

UPDATE: From the comments: “It sounds as if Blow is the one trying to convince white liberals that he is one of the ‘good ones,’ by denigrating other African Americans who don’t follow the ‘party line.’ So if there is a minstrel show in this situation, I believe Blow is the star performer.” That’s gonna leave a mark.

IN THE MAIL: Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the New American Politics.

JERRY POURNELLE: “There is never going to be a national school system much better than what we have now. It may get worse, but it won’t get much better.”

THE VALUE-ADDED TAX: A mom-blogger’s perspective.

RADLEY BALKO: “I don’t promote government failure, I expect it.”

BETTER BUY IT, THEN, BEFORE THEY’RE OUTLAWED BY THE FDA: “I Really, Really Want A Deep-Fat Fryer!”

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, HACKER: I’ve got a review in the Wall Street Journal on Richard Clarke’s new book, Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It.

FEAR THE HYPNOTIC POWER OF . . . Rush Limbaugh?

POLITICO: Dems Haunted By Corporate Ties: “President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are promising a climactic clash with Wall Street, but there’s a complication in their battle plan: The Democratic Party is closer to corporate America — and to Wall Street in particular — than many Democrats would care to admit.”

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Michael Barone. “Republicans have been accurately attacking the Dodd bill for authorizing bailouts of big Wall Street firms and giving them unfair advantages over small competitors. They might want to add that it authorizes Gangster Government — the channeling of vast sums from the politically unprotected to the politically connected.”

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Losing Faith In Government. “Actually, it’s not hard to understand why public faith in government is at rock bottom: People lose trust when the officials either ignore the public will, or, worse, do the opposite of what they promised voters they would do. President Obama, for example, promised a ‘net spending cut’ during the 2008 presidential campaign. He has instead delivered the biggest explosion in federal spending in American history, with a result that the annual federal deficit and the national debt are now at levels nobody envisioned even a few years ago.”

UPDATE: David Harsanyi: Lack of trust isn’t a bug, it’s a feature! Plus, a nice Star Wars reference.

OH, GOODY: Threat of new, larger Icelandic eruption looms.

CHARLES DJOU, the Republican Congressional candidate who — surprisingly — is running slightly ahead in Hawaii, is posting a “Moneywave.” I guess that’s like a “Moneybomb” except that you can surf it, or something . . . .

ILYA SOMIN: Timothy McVeigh Was No Libertarian: The Fallacy of Conflating Two Very Different Types of “Anti-Government” Movements. It’s not so much a fallacy as a malicious lie, but yeah.

From such statements, you might think that Timothy McVeigh and friends were libertarian foes of big government who hoped that their terrorist attacks would somehow lead to tighter constraints on government power.

Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. In reality, McVeigh was a neo-Nazi and his attack was inspired by the Turner Diaries, a 1978 tract that advocated the use of terrorism to overthrow the US and establish a government explicitly based on Nazi Germany. If you suffer through the experience of actually reading The Turner Diaries, as I did, you will find that author William Pierce did not support anything remotely resembling limited government; indeed, he explicitly repudiated limited government conservatism in the book. . . .

By contrast, the Tea Party movement that many seek to conflate with McVeigh is primarily motivated by wholly different concerns. As a recent New York Times survey concluded, “When talking about the Tea Party movement, the largest number of respondents [who were supporters of the movement] said that the movement’s goal should be reducing the size of government.”

Those dangerous libertarians — they want to take over the government, and then leave you alone! Read the whole thing.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Five Lies We Live With.

STICKING HIS, ER, HEAD IN THE LION’S MOUTH: Obama to visit Quincy, Illinois.

CHRIS CHRISTIE WINS ONE: Earthquake in New Jersey: Majority of School Budgets Defeated.

BLACKOUT: Police chase reporters away from covering protest outside White House. “Exit question: On a scale of one to 10, where would this rate on the Crushing-of-Dissent-o-meter if it had happened under Bush? (Exit answer: Eight!)”

Related: Park Police, Secret Service give contradictory accounts of why Lafayette Park was ”closed” during White House protest by present and former servicemembers.

Also: Silence of the Lame: Gay, Inc. Mute on Obama, WH Zaps. “Here we have two glorious activist zaps, on both coasts, pushing the envelope to have our supposed fierce advocate and friend in the White House make good on his various promises to our community, made when he was campaigning for the Oval Office, and neitherGLAAD, HRC nor NGLTF can be bothered to issue statements on the action. Yet not a single word, as of 3:30 pm SF time as I write this, from GLAAD, HRC, or NGLTF on their respective web sites about zaps.”

UPDATE: More press mockery here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: “At what point will the media actually decide…that this administration is exactly what they accused the Bush Administration of being?”

MEGAN MCARDLE: Goldman In The Eye Of The Beholder: “So the vote on the SEC to bring charges against Goldman broke down by party lines. Liberals, understandably, view this as evidence of malfeasance. But of course, there’s an alternative interpretation also consistent with these facts: that Democrats brought a weak charge that won’t stand up in court because they thought it would help them push through their bank reform.”

UPDATE: Harvey Pitt: The SEC’s Dangerous Gamble. “The agency, already badly scarred by the financial crisis, runs the risk of blowing its credibility with the Goldman case.”

COMEDY GOLD: Salon editor can’t name any extreme voices on the left. “The funny part is that Scarborough and Brzezinski do have someone in mind and it’s painfully clear to everyone on set — except Walsh — who that person is. If you follow the MSNBC soap opera, it’s also painfully clear why Joe and Mika can’t name him, but between the hand gestures, facial expressions, and Scarborough cracking up with laughter at their dilemma, I dare say you’ll be able to figure it out.”

RON BAILEY: Earth Day Turns 40. “Obviously, Nelson’s dour pollution predictions did not materialize. We don’t wear gas masks or live in domed cities. Since 1980, ambient concentrations of the six major regulated air pollutants have dropped by 54 percent, while U.S. population grew 34 percent, energy use increased 32 percent, automobile miles nearly doubled, and GDP rose by 126 percent. Specifically, ambient carbon monoxide is down 79 percent; ozone down 25 percent; nitrogen dioxide down 46 percent; sulfur dioxide down 56 percent, particulates down 68 percent. . . . The environmental degradation that rightly concerned Nelson and other early environmentalists occurred in open access commons—areas where no one owned the resource and so had no incentive to protect and conserve it. Instead, the incentive of people operating in an open access commons is to grab as much as possible as quickly as possible because otherwise someone else will take it before they can. Thus airsheds, rivers, government forests, oceans, and even highways were polluted and degraded. Relying on this insight, I hope that future environmentalists will find that enclosing the commons, rather than using the blunt instrument of political regulation, will more effectively protect and restore the natural world.”

UTAH TEA PARTY: We’ve Taken Over The State GOP.

PROF. WILLIAM JACOBSON on what’s happening with Goldman, Sachs.

A CONTRARIAN TAKE FROM JOHN DICKERSON: Risk: The story of America’s greatest idea. “In this series, I seek to reclaim risk. I want to remind myself—and you—of the buoyant, thrilling side of risk, and I will do it by telling the stories of people who embrace risk and who live with the fear, exhilaration, and ambiguity it creates without shirking. People engaged in every kind of human endeavor say that taking risks is the key to fulfillment and success. It is at the heart of our biggest thrills and proudest achievements. Ask someone when she felt most alive and she’ll tell you a story about a risk she took. President Barack Obama talked about this in his inaugural address. ‘Greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted—for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things.'”

AS IF.