BOB OWENS: Cloward-Piven: The Ultimate Goal of Gunwalker? It’s hard to think of a more logical reason for Gunwalker to exist.

IS THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT FOR WOMEN? Or is that just the grumbling of affirmative-action babies?

So… is there something sexist about the Obama administration? Seems like Suskind came up with a great angle for his book, but I’m skeptical. I think Obama may have been overenthusiastic about giving a lot of positions to women, and perhaps those women really weren’t as good as the men he surrounded himself with and really does need to rely on. In that case, he deserves credit for good judgment. But it is funny that he’s not more concerned about the optics. Perhaps he assumes that he is especially appealing to women constituents and he doesn’t need to do much to maintain that favor. It’s the men he’s in danger of losing. Time for another round of all-male, manly golf.

And maybe a beer summit with a Medal Of Honor winner. Oh, wait. . . .

AT AMAZON, it’s the DVD Outlet Sale.

WSJ: Obama’s Twitter Disaster: In the run-up to 2012, a high-profile effort by the re-election campaign to counter critics has become an online bulletin board for jokes.

TEENAGE BRAINS: Moody. Impulsive. Maddening. Why do teenagers act the way they do? Viewed through the eyes of evolution, their most exasperating traits may be the key to success as adults.

HAPPY CONSTITUTION DAY. Don’t take the Constitution for granted.

SOME SCIENCE FICTION MOVEMENTS AND MANIFESTOS.

NOT FITTING THE NARRATIVE: Byron York: Among Hispanics, strong support for voter ID.

LIGHTSQUARED: Lawmakers Question White House Role In Wireless Project.

SOCIAL SCIENCE CONUNDRUMS: Violent Crimes Drop 12%, Reason Unknown; In Other News, Record Number of Americans Carrying Concealed Weapons. Unexpectedly!

UPDATE: A North Carolina report.

REX MURPHY: The Media’s Love Affair with a Disastrous President. Now approaching an end, I think.

But he’s right about this: “As the bad economic news continues to emanate from the United States — with a double-dip recession now all but certain — a reckoning is overdue. American journalism will have to look back at the period starting with Barrack Obama’s rise, his assumption of the presidency and his conduct in it to the present, and ask itself how it came to cast aside so many of its vital functions. In the main, the establishment American media abandoned its critical faculties during the Obama campaign — and it hasn’t reclaimed them since. . . . As a result, the press gave the great American republic an untried, unknown and, it is becoming more and more frighteningly clear, incompetent figure as President. . . . To the degree the press neglected its function as watchdog and turned cupbearer to a styrofoam demigod, it is a partner in the flaws and failures of what is turning out to be one of the most miserable performances in the modern history of the American presidency.”

As with John Edwards, though, they’ll pretend they had nothing to do with it.

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste emails:

Rex Murphy’s column you linked to is interesting. But what’s particularly interesting is the word that isn’t there: “black”.

What no one wants to say is this: the reason the press gave Obama a free ride was because he is black. He’s the ultimate example of affirmative action.

Well, who can blame them, when every criticism of Obama is characterized as racism? And reader Sean Sorrentino writes:

You wrote “As with John Edwards, though, they’ll pretend they had nothing to do with it.” I think it will be more subtle than that. I think what will happen is that they will wring their hands and promise NEVER to do that again. They will take up their duties as political watchdogs with a vengeance. The next President will get the full treatment. The fact that the next President will be a Republican will not have anything to do with this. No Sir. Honest.

Heh. That’s probably right . . .

MORE: Den Beste posts an extended version.

STILL MORE: Bill Quick:

It’s all bullshit, you know. This new meme, that the press “neglected its functions as watchdog.” It didn’t. It performed to perfection what it truly believes its function is: to help shape history, politics, and culture in ways it finds congenial. Early on, the press made a collective decision that helping to effect the election of Barack Obama would admirably fulfill that function, and so it did everything it its power to help him defeat, first, Hillary Clinton, and next, John McCain. There was no failure here. There was instead complete success at fulfilling their intentions.

Unfortunately for them, the man they elected was nowhere near as effective in advancing their mutual goals as they were at getting him elected in the first place. And so, rather than admit their willing efforts to elect him, and take responsibility for the resulting disaster, they would rather pretend that their sin was a “failure” to “act as a watchdog.”

The truth is, their only failure was to drastically overestimate his ability to do what they elected him to do. That’s what they’re really ashamed of. They thought they were electing a full-on Marxist hero. Instead, they elevated an incompetent socialist with pretensions to Marxism. And now, steeped in the misery and humiliation of their own miscalculations, they want to pretend – and want us to believe – that their only sin was neglecting to vet him properly.

Indeed.

SOLYNDRA, CON’TD: “So now it turns out that the Obama White House was warned privately in no uncertain terms last January against a fresh infusion of taxpayer cash to financially beleaguered Solyndra.”

WHAT LUCKY PEOPLE DO DIFFERENTLY than unlucky people.

AT AMAZON, Kitchen Warehouse Deals.

AT SLATE, DEBATING TRANSHUMANISM. Put me down in the “for” camp. But, then, I’m already married to a Cyborg.

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: Solyndra: We Told You So. “The failure of the government-backed solar company points to the dangers of conflating job creation and energy innovation.” At the very least.

YOU MEAN IT WASN’T BEFORE? “The Vagina Is Becoming Big Business.”

POYNTER: Why “NewsHour” omission of Obama’s Lincoln mistake looked like a liberal media conspiracy.

ARE PREDICTIONS OF RAPID ELECTRIC-CAR BATTERY PRICE DECLINES unrealistic? “The Academies and Toyota Motor Corp. have publicly said they don’t think the Department of Energy goals are achievable and that cost reductions are likely to be far lower. It likely will be 20 years before costs fall 50%—not the three or so years the DOE projects for an even greater reduction—according to an Academies council studying battery costs. The council was made up of nearly a dozen researchers in the battery field.” Well it wouldn’t be the first time the Administration was over-optimistic about green technology.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, WOMEN WOULD BE SECOND CLASS CITIZENS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT!

A new book claims that the Obama White House is a boys’ club marred by rampant infighting that has hindered the administration’s economic policy and left top female advisers feeling excluded from key conversations. “Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President,” by journalist Ron Suskind due out next Tuesday, details the rivalries among Obama’s top economic advisers, Larry Summers, former chairman of the National Economic Council, and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. It describes constant second-guessing by Summers, now at Harvard, who was seen by others as “imperious and heavy-handed” in his decision-making.

In an excerpt obtained by The Post, a female senior aide to President Obama called the White House a hostile environment for women.

“This place would be in court for a hostile workplace,” former White House communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying. “Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.”

Well, the Dems could have nominated Hillary. But nooo. . . .

Related: Bloomberg poll sparks more useless pining for ‘President Hillary.’ Hmm. Useless? We’re sure seeing a lot of this kind of thing all of a sudden.

INTERNET LAW UPDATE: Senate Judiciary Committee Passes Amendment to Prohibit Prosecutions for Terms-of-Service Violations.

RAND SIMBERG: Some Commercial Crew questions for NASA.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The War On The Young: A Warning From Italy And France.

The war on the young is led ‘by cadres of elderly men, content to manage decline. and exacerbated by younger generations, who don’t seem to know what’s going on or understand the gravity of the financial situation that will hit them in the future. . . .

The war on the young is most intense in countries (and, in the US, industries and states) which have the blue social model deeply embedded in their social institutions. It is an interesting struggle: these days, the young face serious trouble finding employment and will be saddled with debts run up by their elders as they grow up.

The older generations benefited from a kind of escalator system in life. You step on the escalator after finishing your education and it almost automatically carries you upward in life, with higher pay and higher status until, at retirement, you step off and enjoy a good, level standard of living for the rest of your days.

One of the younger generations’ biggest problems is that many of those escalators don’t work anymore. In Italy and Japan, companies are reluctant to hire young people on what American universities call “tenure track”; unsure about their future needs and resources they don’t want high cost employees that can’t be fired. The older workers are too powerful to dislodge — just as in American universities the tenured professors are too powerful to give up tenure. So younger workers increasingly are hired if at all on temporary contracts, with lower benefits and fewer prospects for promotion.

Hope and change!

OH, GOODY: U.S. Taxpayers Could Be On Hook For Fed’s Europe Bailout.