CHRIS CHRISTIE: I’M STILL WAITING.

IN THE MAIL: God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right.

EVERYTHING IS THE FAULT OF LIBERTARIANS, APPARENTLY. Tremble before our mighty power.

COLUMBIA LAW PROFESSOR PHIL HAMBURGER: Are ObamaCare Waivers Unconstitutional? “The president cannot simply decide who does and does not have to follow the law.” But mama, that’s where the fun is.

ANN ALTHOUSE BUSTS LARRY TRIBE’S RHETORIC:

Oh, come on. Tribe’s rhetorical move has become comical at this point. It reminds me of an old-fashioned mother exerting moral pressure on a child by telling him how sure she is that he is such a good little boy that he could never do whatever it is she doesn’t want him to do. Put more directly, it’s an assertion of authority: I’m telling you what’s right and if you don’t do it, you’ll be wrong. Could the Justices possibly yield to pressure like that? It’s crude to think that they would, isn’t it? It’s an insult both their intellect and their integrity.

And yet, Larry Tribe does think it, right? That’s what’s behind his rhetoric. I believe. Crudely.

Ouch.

Plus this: “Doesn’t Larry Tribe sound like your old man carping about welfare queens?”

UPDATE: Another conlaw professor emails:

Based on Akhil’s overwrought op-ed in the LA Times (Roger Vinson as Roger Taney) and Tribe’s op-ed that Althouse links to, it seems to me that the arguments against constitutionality are making supporters sufficiently nervous that they’re doing some battlefield preparation for the following narrative: a highly-partisan, closely-divided Supreme Court, taking its marching orders from the GOP and the tea party, invalidated the individual mandate in a shocking example of conservative judicial activism. It’ll be Bush v. Gore II: Electric Boogaloo.

BTW, will Kagan have to recuse? That sets up the interesting possibility of a 4-4 split; or, a 5-3 decision, which wouldn’t be so closely divided!

Interesting thought.

UPDATE: Heh: “What Tribe forgets is that the constitution is a living document. The constitution’s meaning is not fixed by the New Deal. The constitution evolves to meet the needs of the people in the here and now. Tribe’s interpretation of the commerce clause, which may have been appropriate for the age of steel and iron, is not necessarily right for the age of genes and bytes. We are fortunate, the constitution lives.”

SWINE FLU SPREADS MOSTLY THROUGH FRIEND NETWORKS. “A new study of a 2009 epidemic at a school in Pennsylvania has found that children most likely did not catch it by sitting near an infected classmate, and that adults who got sick were probably not infected by their own children. Closing the school after the epidemic was under way did little to slow the rate of transmission, the study found, and the most common way the disease spread was a through child’s network of friends.”

THE HILL: Remaining Blue Dogs may support GOP budget plan.

MORE ON THE COMMON CAUSE LYNCH-CLARENCE-THOMAS COMMENTS: “So much for civility.”

AT AMAZON, a sale on Toys And Games.

CANADA: Multiculturalism “Will Fail.”

A prominent voice in Canada’s Muslim community said British Prime Minister David Cameron was “spot on” when he insisted British multiculturalism has failed.

And just like Britain, Canada’s will fail, said Muslim Canadian Congress founder Tarek Fatah.

He said Monday that, like Britain, Canada has been too tolerant in allowing Muslim immigrants to settle into closed communities, some of which preach Islamic values and a hatred toward the West.

Actually, I’d say that it has already failed. Read the whole thing.

IRANIUM: You can watch it now for free online.

CLAIRE BERLINSKI: Turkey And The Fear Society.

Erdoğan has begun pressing charges against bloggers whose writings meet with his displeasure. A 22-year-old college student, Barış Ünver, could face two years in prison for intimating that Erdoğan was “the soul mate” of PKK terrorist Ocalan.

Powerful autocrats going after their critics? Good thing that could never happen here.

AP SAYS TAXES AS A FRACTION OF THE ECONOMY are the lowest in 60 years, but TaxProf notes that AP is playing fast-and-loose: “The article, however, omits the CBO’s projection that, as the economy recovers, taxes (as a percentage of the economy) will surge to post-World War II highs (principally due to record individual income tax collections).”

UH OH: Bad news: Centrist group collapses after party is captured by ideological extremists. The centrist group is the Democratic Leadership Council, left behind as the Democratic Party apparat moves left, and those in the middle — even if they’re black — are switching to the GOP.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: When States Go Bust: The Bankruptcy Debate Heats Up.

J.P. FREIRE: Paul Ryan To Lock In Cap On Discretionary Spending.

THE HILL: Ditching Unwritten Rules For Freshmen, Rand Paul Does It His Way. “He has pushed a proposal to cut $500 billion in federal spending over the course of a single year. That has applied pressure to GOP leaders, including Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, to take a similarly hard approach or risk looking timid to Tea Party activists.” These are not normal times.

TODAY ONLY: A sale on Sennheiser earbuds.

A MOVEMENT TO DRAFT AMITY SHLAES to run for Senate against Kirsten Gillibrand.

BECAUSE THE NAACP IS OKAY WITH LYNCHING AS LONG AS IT HAPPENS TO THE RIGHT BLACK GUYS, APPARENTLY: NAACP won’t directly address racism leveled against Clarence Thomas at progressive protest.

In response to The Daily Caller’s request for comment on a video showing progressive protesters calling for somebody to “string up” African American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, or “send him back into the fields” or “cut off all his toes and feed them to him one-by-one,” NAACP spokesman Hilary Shelton pointed to the organization’s recent resolution calling for a “civil political discourse.”

A bunch of pathetic house negroes living on the Democratic Party’s plantation. There’s no reason why anyone should take anything they say seriously any more. They’re certainly not a civil rights, or racial equality, group, as their recent behavior illustrates.

YOU THINK? Social Scientist Sees Bias Within:

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

Indeed.

JAMES TARANTO: What They Mean by ‘Civility’: The New York Times raises no objection to murderous, racist rhetoric at a Common Cause rally.

The New York Times editorial page, a division of the New York Times Co., on Saturday endorsed Common Cause’s personal attack on Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. . . . That campaign took an even more sinister turn at a Common Cause protest Jan. 30, as we noted Thursday. Participants in the rally were captured on video advocating the assassination of Scalia, Thomas, Thomas’s wife and Chief Justice John Roberts. Two of them explicitly called for Justice Thomas, the court’s only black member, to be lynched. One man also asserted that Fox News president Roger Ailes “should be strung up,” adding: “Kill the bastard.”

A statement from Common Cause made clear that what it called these “hateful, narrow-minded sentiments”–rather a delicate way of describing lurid calls for murder–were contrary to the corporate position of the self-styled “grassroots organization.” But the Times editorial expresses no disapproval of the Common Cause supporters’ racist and eliminationist statements. . . . This is the same New York Times that, as we noted Jan. 11, seized on the attempted murder of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona to announce that “it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible” for a “gale of anger” that the Times claimed had set “the nation on edge”–even though it had already been established that the vicious crime in Arizona had nothing to do with Republicans or their “supporters in the media.”

By the Times’s standards, surely it is legitimate to hold Common Cause, and particularly its most virulent supporters in the media, responsible for the depraved sentiments expressed at the Common Cause rally. That the editorial said nothing at all about the subject is further evidence that the paper’s pieties about “civility” are fraudulent–a cheap exercise in partisanship and a thuggish attempt to burnish its own reputation by tearing down those of its media competitors.

Thuggish but ineffectual.

That’s likely to be the epitaph for Pinch Sulzberger’s version of the New York Times.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on software.

HEH: “Are they Democrats or Republicans? Here’s a clue: neither the word Democrat or Republican appears in the linked article. So?”

STANDING UP TO BULLIES: Sold-out crowd views Iranium. “Weeks after complaints from the Iranian government cancelled a screening of Iranium at Library and Archives Canada, a sold-out audience filled the theatre Sunday evening to take in the film — a documentary that is sharply critical of Iran’s nuclear arms program.”

Best line: “Who cares what the Iranians think?”