ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE four years ago? No, but at this rate we’re better off than we will be four years from now. So we’ve got that, anyway.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

There was an old Soviet joke that went:

“How are you doing?”

“About average–worse off than I was last year, but better off than I’ll be a year from now. So about average.”

Yes, that’s what I was invoking. My store of those jokes may be becoming relevant again. . . .

IN THE MAIL: The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America.

YOU DON’T SAY: Obama Embraces Policies He Opposed As A Candidate.

Ah, remember when Obama supporters called McCain McSame, because a vote for him was a vote to continue Bush’s policies of bombing Muslim countries and keeping people locked up in Guantanamo? Rubes.

UPDATE: Well, here’s some change: Ex-Congressman in Libya to ‘Help’ Once Proposed Arming Gadhafi.

During the last decade, former Congressman Curt Weldon traveled repeatedly to Libya, becoming so close with the Gadhafi regime that the firm Weldon worked for even floated the idea of selling arms to Tripoli.

So now that Gadhafi is under assault from NATO airstrikes and rebel ground troops, it should come as no surprise that Weldon is back in Libya, “to try to help negotiate a political settlement with Gadhafi and family,” according to CNN.

And while Weldon’s there, the controversial former vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee is looking to do a little image re-polishing for himself. It wasn’t long ago — April, 2008, to be exact — that Weldon was boasting in a report that he had become the “1st non-Libyan Board Member of the Ghadaffi Foundation [sic].” During a trip to Tripoli the month before, the self-proclaimed “friend of Libya” carried “a personal letter from Libyan Chamber [of Commerce] President to US Chamber President.” Weldon also visited with with the country’s “Nuclear Ministry Leadership and agreed to reinforce US nuclear cooperation/collaboration.”

Finally, Weldon agreed “to quickly return to Libya for meetings with [Moammar Gadhafi’s] son Morti regarding defense and security cooperation.”

Just another dictator-suck-up. There are a lot of them. Funny that the New York Times is giving him a pass. Well, not that funny.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails: “Since John McCain was referred to as John McSame should we now refer to President Obama as Barack HuSame Obama? Just askin’.” I’m sure that would be racist.

PROF. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Busting The New York Times Bay-Of-Pigs Suppression Myth, 50 Years On.

Had Keller taken time to consult a database of issues of his newspaper, he would have found that the Times reported in detail about preparations to infiltrate the CIA-trained exiles into Cuba, in hopes of sparking an uprising that would overthrow Castro.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, “the notion that Kennedy asked or persuaded the Times to suppress, hold back, or dilute any of its reports about the pending Bay of Pigs invasion is utter fancy. There is no evidence that Kennedy or his administration knew in advance” about Szulc’s dispatch, which was filed from Miami on April 6, 1961.

The article was published the following day – above the fold on the Times’ front page.

Nor, I write, is there any evidence “that Kennedy or anyone in his administration lobbied or persuaded the Times to hold back or spike that story, as so many accounts have said.”

But the chosen narrative is so much more appealing.

BEYOND CYBER DOOM: “Cyber security is a serious concern, but if policy makers want to actually address these threats, they should pursue strategies that focus on increasing technological and infrastructural resilience while promoting decentralization, self-organization, economic strength, and strong social systems.”

DAN RIEHL: What Does The Wisconsin Election Say About The Judiciary?

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Ann Althouse. I believe the consequences of a Kloppenburg victory would constitute what we used to call a heightening of the contradictions.

SPIES: “Using sex in intelligence work is nothing new, but the Chinese are probably the most enthusiastic, and successful, users of this technique these days.”

WELL, THERE’S ALWAYS IRAN: Where should the United States store its nuclear waste?

UPDATE: Athena Runner emails: “You just gave Glenn Greenwald an aneurysm.” It’s probably petty of me to bait him this way, but what the hell. Though I think I actually stole that one from Howard Stern.

TWO AMERICAS: Public vs. Private Employees.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Life Beyond Blue: Faith And The Inner City. “The failure of the blue social model to solve the problems of the underclass in America’s inner cities was one of the great tragedies of the last thirty years. Hundreds of billions of dollars were spent; tens of millions of lives remained blighted, and a culture of violence, degradation and despair has taken hold among some of our society’s most vulnerable and needy people. Generations of children are growing up in gangs; our scarce financial resources are being consumed by a grotesquely overbuilt prison system; whole segments of our population are unable to cope with even the simplest demands of modern life.”

AT AMAZON, new releases on Blu-Ray.

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER RODDY BOYD HAS A NEW BOOK OUT: Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG’s Corporate Suicide. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m a fan of his work in general, and here’s a review in the Wall Street Journal.

BIPARTISAN! Senate defeats Rand Paul’s resolution reasserting Congress’s war powers, 90-10. “This wasn’t a resolution to authorize operations in Libya but something far craftier — a resolution reaffirming Obama’s own words from 2007 that ‘the President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.’ When Paul first introduced the idea last week, a flustered Harry Reid temporarily closed up shop to keep it from coming to the floor. Turns out he needn’t have worried.”

So the headline should really be Senate Rejects Obama View Of War Powers 90-10. Right? Of course, only after Obama himself rejected it. Feel the hope! Feel the change!

Predicted response: “I don’t care. Obama is awesome.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: First Thoughts On The Ryan Plan. “I think it’s no longer credible to complain that the GOP has not put forward any sort of meaningful solution for the budget. At this point, they’re the only ones who have put forward a detailed outline; the Democrats still seem to be hoping that if they kind of mill around long enough, eventually an angel will float over the horizon and deposit a plan that doesn’t annoy anyone (and/or allows them to pay for the entire thing by raising the marginal tax rate on the Koch brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife to 110%).”

Plus this: “The wildly disproportionate fury and outrage which greeted both Bowles-Simpson and the Ryan plan from the left indicate that progressives have so far failed to come to grips with the fact that they are going to have to compromise: that while some of the gap is going to be closed by tax increases, some of it is going to be closed by spending cuts. And not just defense cuts, or seemingly trivial changes to physician reimbursement rates that we hope will snowball over time, but actual cuts in services that people currently want and expect to get from government–but do not want or expect to pay for.”

LIBYAN REBELS TO NATO: Is This The Best You Can Do?

A FOLLOWUP on the HTI Hydropacks I mentioned earlier: So I put one in a pot of water and 12 hours later it had filled. Tasted like room-temperature Gatorade more or less. Was easy to use. I didn’t test it on contaminated water because I was too busy to add dirt. I can see why a pallet-load of these would be useful disaster-prep for a small city or organization. Some readers suggested that a Katadyn filter would be better, and of course they’re right. But these are easy to store and portable. They’d do well in a backpack or car bag, too.

REVEALED: London’s Secret Wildlife Wonderland. Some very cool photos.

LEE STRANAHAN: The Right’s Missing Organizational Machinery.

TEA PARTY UPDATE: Utah tea party leader has political warning for Herbert, Hatch.

MICKEY KAUS ON THE RYAN BUDGET PLAN: It’s a near-suicidal act that will lead Republicans off the cliff. “Here Republicans were winning the grinding debate over relatively small cuts in the federal discretionary budget. Democrats–the party that desperately needs to convince voters it can be trusted to get rid of $1.6 trillion annual deficits–seemed to be reflexively defending government bloat, measuring success by the amount of spending preserved the way antipoverty activists measure success by the number of people on the dole.”

UPDATE: Ira Stoll: Ryan Plan Isn’t Enough.

ORIN KERR: Applying the Mosaic Theory of the Fourth Amendment to Disclosure of Stored Records. “I’ve blogged a few times about United States v. Maynard, the controversial D.C. Circuit case holding that over time, GPS surveillance begins to be a search that requires a warrant. Maynard introduced a novel mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment: Although individual moments of surveillance were not searches, when you added up the surveillance over time, all the non-searches taken together amounted to a search. The obvious question is, just how much is enough to trigger a search? At what does point the Constitution require the police to get a warrant? This issue recently came up in a court order application before Magistrate Judge James Orenstein in Brooklyn seeking historical cell-site location for two cell phones used by a particular suspect.”

IN WISCONSIN, PROSSER IS AHEAD, but with a lead that’s inside the “margin of fraud.” Expect a box of Kloppenburg ballots to be “found” soon. . . .

UPDATE: Alternate view: The unions brought out all their big guns, and all they could manage was a dead heat in a judicial election?

MICHAEL BARONE: Ryan Steals March On Obama As Fiscal Crisis Looms.

FUKUSHIMA FALLOUT arrives in Oak Ridge. In minuscule quantities.

HOPE: The Hill: Senate repeals health law’s 1099 provision, sends bill to president. “After a months-long battle, the Senate voted Tuesday, 87 to 12, to repeal the 1099 tax-reporting requirement in Democrats’ healthcare reform bill. The measure now goes to the president, who is expected to sign it, making it the first part of his party’s signature reform bill to be scrapped.”