“STEEP CUTS” IN THE OBAMA BUDGET? Even the left is starting to notice it’s a sham. “Obama’s game is transparent, isn’t it? He is playing a game of chicken. He puts forward a series of proposals that he knows are more or less insane; but he also believes that Republicans will come to his rescue.”

UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch is unimpressed: “He’s promised so much and hasn’t delivered any of it. Not on Iraq or Afghanistan or Guantanamo not with the stimulus, not with any thing. And as the Unions begin to notice he can’t deliver ( and delivering what they need is a fiscal impossibility) it’s going to get worse for him. Unfortunately he’s such a clown he may take the country down the tubes as well. The man has the depth of a sheet of paper.”

SO, A LOT OF PEOPLE LIKED ROBERT HOYT’S “BLOGFATHER” PIC. His mother, Sarah Hoyt, sent me a mug with this pic on it, so I inquired if there’s a CafePress store — since it looked like it came from one. And there is. It’s right here!

HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA — THE NEW EGYPT? Crowd gathers in downtown Harrisburg calling for Mayor Linda Thompson to quit.

OBAMA BUDGET RELEASE: MISERABLE FAILURE. “At no point in the president’s 10-year projection would the U.S. government spend less than it’s taking in.”

Related: “An appalling failure of leadership.” Plus this: “When we look back on this period a decade or two from now, I think we’ll identify this moment — the president’s decision about how to approach the budget battle of 2012 — as the last real opportunity we had for a gradual bipartisan course correction. That option now seems closed off, and it is up to Republicans to decide if the alternative is to march off the fiscal cliff in order to avoid political risks or to propose a gradual course correction to voters and make the case for why it is sensible, responsible, and essential.”

ED DRISCOLL: You’re so vain, you probably think that Egypt’s about you.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on flashlights.

MICHAEL WALSH: Intelligence Breakdown: Behind Team O’s Egypt Gaffes.

“MEDIA PSYCHIATRIST” CAN’T PRODUCE ACTUAL EVIDENCE to support claim that videogames cause rape. “Despite the seriousness of Lieberman’s allegations, when Wired.com asked her multiple times to clarify her comments, she failed to cite a single study, statistic or piece of evidence that proved her point. ”

I, on the other hand, have produced evidence that they do not.

OBAMA TO THE NEXT GENERATION: SCREW YOU, SUCKERS! “In this budget, in his refusal to do anything concrete to tackle the looming entitlement debt, in his failure to address the generational injustice, in his blithe indifference to the increasing danger of default, he has betrayed those of us who took him to be a serious president prepared to put the good of the country before his short term political interests. . . . On the critical issue of America’s fiscal crisis, he represents no hope and no change. Just the same old Washington politics he once promised to end.” Hard to argue with this take, but I’m surprised at the source. Though maybe I shouldn’t be, as Obama is losing all sorts of support among the previously supportive liberal punditariat lately.

Meanwhile, Lexington Green thinks Obama’s plan is cynical to the max: “Obama is betting that he can force the GOP to make their proposed cuts, which he can blame them for, which he can truthfully say he does not support. Then he can attack the Republicans for making the cuts. He will appeal to the people who are suffering from the cuts, and strip away GOP support. They will be angry and mobilized. Obama then plans to force the GOP into a funding crisis just as Clinton did. Obama plans to destroy the GOP reform wave of 2011 just as Clinton destroyed the GOP reform effort in 1995.”

It’s not 1995 anymore, though.

MEGAN MCARDLE ON ACADEMIA: What Bias Looks Like. “One of the things the legacy of racism has taught us is just how good dominant groups are at constructing narratives that justify their dominance. Somehow, the problem is never them. It’s always the out group. . . . More troubling is that these volitional arguments are almost always combined with denigration: the out group is stupid, greedy, mean, violent, overemotional, corrupt . . . whatever. As indeed these arguments are when they’re deployed against conservatives in my comment threads. In fact, it seems clear to me that many commenters have taken the underrepresentation of conservatives in academia as vindication of their beliefs–if conservatives can’t make it in academia, that proves that conservatives are not smart, and liberal ideas must be better. This is possible, of course. It’s also possible that academics are validating their own bias by systematically excluding those who disagree with them.”

LAST NIGHT, in response to stories on skyrocketing produce prices, I linked a gardening book that M. Simon recommends. I should also note that back when I did more gardening I really liked Square Foot Gardening, and it’s especially good for folks without much land. Helen’s already decided to bring back the Earth Box for this summer, which gave us more tomatoes than we could use a couple of years back. And they were really good. She let it go last year and I was sad.

WORST TATTOOS ever? I think the bacon tattoos are cool, though. I mean, they’re about bacon. This one, on the other hand. . . .

But at least it’s got a match.

YOU KNOW YOU NEED THEM: Markdowns on surge protectors. If you’re at all prone to power outages, I recommend putting your router/modem on a big uninterruptible power supply. That way you’ll have Internet for hours or days (and you can recharge your laptop battery or your cellphone when it dies). It’s the poor person’s generator.

STRATFOR: Mexico’s Gun Supply and the 90 Percent Myth. “It has now become quite common to hear U.S. officials confidently assert that 90 percent of the weapons used by the Mexican drug cartels come from the United States. However, a close examination of the dynamics of the cartel wars in Mexico — and of how the oft-echoed 90 percent number was reached — clearly demonstrates that the number is more political rhetoric than empirical fact.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Goodbye To All That.

In times to come, the period between the failed campaign of John Kerry and the Democratic control of the Congress, coupled with the beginning of the successful surge, should be known as “The Insane Years.” This was the era in which Guantanamo was a gulag, renditions were the stuff of Hollywood movies, and Bush and Cheney were deemed veritable war criminals. Was it all a dream, those nightmare years of 2004-7?

I recall all that only because Oprah was just quoted as calling for more civility to be shown President Obama (“even if you’re not in support of his policies, there needs to be a certain level of respect”), echoing the president’s own post-Tucson insistence on a new amity between opponents. Bill Maher recently expressed outrage over the uncivil tone shown Barack Obama in Bill O’Reilly’s Super-Bowl Day interview. I think such concern for deference and conciliation is altogether fine and good; but, again, do we recall the crazy years of not so long ago?

This was the period in which Michael Moore called for U.S. defeat in Iraq and dubbed the Islamists who were killing our own soldiers “Minutemen.” . . . I do remember 2007, when the New York Times gave a discount to MoveOn.org for the ad hominem “General Betray Us” ad. Hillary that day suggested the general’s testimony required a suspicion of disbelief. Barack Obama assured us the surge had failed, and Joe Biden lectured Petraeus on trisecting Iraq — in the days before Iraq became, in Biden’s words, “our greatest achievement.”

Many of us remember that, even if others would prefer we forget.

CHANGE: Debt Now Equals Total U.S. Economy. “Amid the other staggering numbers in the budget Mr. Obama sent to Congress on Monday, the debt stands out — both because Congress will need to vote to raise the debt limit later this year, and because the numbers are so large.”

KAY HYMOWITZ: Why Men Still Do The Proposing.

COMPARISON: Top mobile phones. “For many, the iPhone 4 is the top of the heap for smartphone choice (I know I love mine). But it’s not necessarily for everybody, due to preference of operating system, additional functionality (such as video calls over 3G/4G), or even availability on one’s contracted carrier.”

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Obama’s Budget Reveals Obama’s Core. “The budget is a political document that bets voters really don’t care much about deficits.”

HUSBAND WANTS A VASECTOMY? Only with the wife’s permission! Where are our “reproductive rights” advocates on this?

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Found your post on how some doctors require men to provide their wife’s OK prior to a vasectomy to be truly appalling. I can safely report I had such a procedure (in Massachusetts) a few months ago and I had no such issues with my physician (not that it would have been a problem; my wife was actively encouraging me). But I’m pretty sure that I’d have been quite offended had my urologist demanding my wife’s John Hancock before putting his hands on my… oh, nevermind, I could make a very bad pun here.

On the subject of slogans, though, I think what we need is a catchy slogan to sear the idea of this injustice into the heads of the public. Something like “Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries”. I would suggest:

“Keep Your Manacles Off My Testicles”

or

“No Legislation On Our Ejaculation”

Sounds like we could have a fun with this one…

Heh. And another reader emails:

I can vouch for that assertion. Had mine “done” in early 1996 in Florida. I was much chagrined to find out that my wife had to sign off on my electing to have one. Wondered then if it was a state requirement of some kind but was otherwise occupied to question it.

I’ve heard of this before.

FROM MICHAEL HIGDON: Fatherhood by Conscription: Nonconsensual Insemination and the Duty of Child Support. I was thinking of writing an article on this subject someday, entitled “Ejaculation As An Ultrahazardous Activity.” But this is close. (Bumped).

IT’S THE 400TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE KING JAMES BIBLE: Which must have been divinely inspired, because it was done by a committee, and yet it’s well-written.

JPEG FOR THE MIND: How the brain compresses visual information.

“TOTAL CHAOS” IN IRAN: “Obama, if you screw this one up, history will never forgive you. Think about that. You will never be forgiven by history. You’re the president of the United States of America. Swallow your pride. Get rid of that clown Clapper, get rid of all the incompetents advising you, and get an experienced A-team in the White House, now.”

BETTER MEMORIES for bad events that could recur.