AN L.A. TIMES EDITORIAL ON the public-pension crisis:

Many state and local government employees have been promised pensions that the public couldn’t have afforded even had there been no crash. . . . The commission is right about the importance of reducing the liabilities posed by current employees. And though picking a fight with unions over unilateral reductions in pensions probably isn’t the solution, the report should persuade both sides to do more at the negotiating table to prevent pension costs from swamping state and local budgets. As the commission notes, public employees in California enjoy some of the most generous pension plans in the country. Those plans won’t do them much good, however, if their employer can’t afford to keep them on the payroll.

Read the whole thing.

WELL, THIS ISN’T THE “HOPE,” SO I GUESS IT’S THE “CHANGE:” Analysis: Oil prices could be game-changer for world economy. “Soaring oil prices are reaching levels that could threaten to brake improving but tentative global economic recovery, with an outside chance of a new recession or that most destructive of conditions, stagflation.”

MISERABLE FAILURE? Prof. Jacobson: 50-State Union Protest Falls Far Short Of Predicted Turnout.

UPDATE: Dems Left Red-Faced; Protesters Fail to Materialize at National MoveOn Rallies.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Troy Hinrichs emails: “It seems that unless government workers get a paid day off (from us) they’re not too interested in taking their unpaid days off to protest.”

MORE: DaTechGuy notes that it’s all about maintaining the fiction.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY of government-employee unions.

WISCONSIN FUGITIVE SENATOR UPDATE: Hundreds Turn Out for Recall Senator Wirch Rally in Wisconsin.

MARKDOWNS ON bestselling power tools.

ERIC LIPTON RESPONDS, and the verdict is in. “Eric Lipton and the New York Times owe Tim Phillips, Americans For Progress and Charles and David Koch an apology, and they owe their readers a correction.”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

The story of a NYT reporter bastardizing statements made by a conservative is an excellent example of why cell phone cameras, digital recorders and the like are necessary instruments for any conservative in the public light. There should be a record of everything so that the truth has a chance to embarrass the S.O.B.s. The Army of Davids can’t travel without today’s version of a slingshot with which to repel the Goliaths.

The reporter makes it a point that he doesn’t record his own interviews. How convenient! It’s as if he wants to create no record, no paper trail, no evidence of actual malice. That’s fine. But now that the ground rules are abundantly clear conservatives must do some heavy lifting of their own.

To all potential 2012 GOP candidates for President, listen well: Record every encounter with the press. Tape everything. And then try to push back, twice as hard, when the inevitable attacks begin.

Good advice. I had some related thoughts here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails:

In this post, http://instapundit.com/115783/, your reader says politicians should record every encounter with the press. In fact, conservative politicians should record every moment of their day, not just encounters with the press. There is too much opportunity for misleading clips or snippets to derail a potential campaign. And more important than recording everything is keeping it. The price of storage has decreased to the point that days and days of decent resolution footage can be stored for little money. I own multi-drive NAS that can store a few thousand hours of 720p video. The cost was less than $2500 with the drives. Campaigns by conservatives will need to be able to fight the active opposition they can expect from the news media, and there is no better way of doing so than with video.

BTW, I work in the news bureau of a major international/financial news service. The comments I have heard are astounding. The only saving grace is that since I work with financial journalists, there are several libertarians/conservatives in the mix. Sadly though, there are none in the regular news units.

Please do not use my name if you decide to publish this.

I understand.

THE CHANGING FACE OF FAME: Comparing modern stars with stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age: “There seem to be two correlated trends here: 1) more feminine features for both males and females, and 2) more youthful features for both males and females.”

RADIO NEW ZEALAND: Quake Death Toll Stands at 146; Expected To Rise.

SOMEBODY SHOULD HAVE SHOT MUGABE YEARS AGO: Zimbabwe Prof Arrested, Tortured for Watching Viral Vids. And plenty of Zimbabweans know where the people who arrested him live. They should do something about it. Rule-of-law concerns don’t apply in a murderous dictatorship, which Zimbabwe’s certainly is.

UPDATE: M. Simon emails:

I do agree with you but it causes problems “after”. Look at France’s post WW2 with governments changing every year or less because of the loss of rule of law caused by guerrilla warfare. It also explains why Franco was so good for Spain long term. It was still suffering from Wellington’s Peninsula Campaign 120 years later.

May I suggest reading B.H.L. Hart’s “Strategy” (a classic in the field and recommended reading for every member of the military from E-1 up) on the problems of irregular warfare. I re-read the book every year.

I read that back in high school. But yeah, it’s dangerous medicine, only applicable in extremis. But Zimbabwe is really sick, and has been for a long, long time. If it doesn’t justify guerrilla resistance, not much would.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on multitools. Leatherman, Gerber, and more.

UPDATE: Just hope you never have to use your Leatherman for an emergency amputation.

WHAT ABOUT BRINGING DEMOCRACY TO IRAN? Report: Iranian democracy leaders Mousavi & Karoubi taken to secret prison.

PJTV: Sheriff Joe Arpaio at the Tea Party Summit.

Also, Tim Pawlenty: The Government Is Too Damned Big, and the Obama Administration Is Incoherent.

EUGENE VOLOKH: Thugs Win Again. We would, of course, be better off in a society without thuggery. However, so long as thuggery is rewarded — and at the moment, it pretty clearly is — many people who would otherwise avoid thuggery will choose to engage in it, because the incentives point that way. I have been warning of this phenomenon for a while, but I predict that it will change only when we start to see thuggery emanating from groups whose thuggish behavior tends to threaten, rather than entrench, the position of those establishing the incentives. In that sense, this may be a mildly hopeful sign . . . .

TEA PARTY SCRUTINY: Each member of Congress to get a dedicated blogger.

LOS ANGELES MAYOR VILLARAIGOSA: Hey, maybe building a fence to keep people out isn’t such a bad idea.

ROBERT SHIBLEY: The Greek Tragedy of Campus Censorship.

RADLEY BALKO: Obama’s War On Whistleblowers. Even Glenn Greenwald is incensed. Well, they told me if I voted Republican we’d see rampant coverups involving cronyism and corruption — and they were right! Again.

UPDATE: Message to Greenwald: You reap what you sow.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Three Law Schools Freeze Tuition. Put this together with Sewanee’s tuition cut, and I wonder if we’re seeing an upper limit on pricing here.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Impact of Earmark Ban Already Being Felt:

When House Republicans were searching for cuts to offer Senate Democrats as part of a temporary spending plan to avert a government shutdown, they were able to reach into accounts set aside for earmarks and find nearly $2.8 billion that would have previously gone to water projects, transit programs and construction programs. No earmarks, no need for that money, and the threat of an imminent shutdown was eased.

Lawmakers said the absence of earmarks also allowed for a more freewheeling debate on the House floor during consideration of the Republican plan to slash $61 billion from this year’s budget since Democrats and Republicans were not caught up in protecting the special provisions they had worked so hard to tuck into the spending bill.

“This is a completely new experience, and a good one,” said Representative Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who had lost scores of attempts on the House floor to strip earmarks from spending bills.

While spending on earmarks is a tiny portion of the budget, critics like Mr. Flake and Mr. Boehner said they played an insidious role in pushing up federal spending through what is known in legislative terms as logrolling. . . .

Top members of the Appropriations Committee might, for instance, grant a lawmaker’s request for a few million dollars for an important project back home. That lawmaker would then be obligated to support the entire multibillion-dollar bill despite possible reservations. . . .

“You get millions for an earmark and end up voting for billions of dollars that you may oppose,” said Steve Ellis, a vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a government watchdog group.

Can I just say I told you so? Because, you know, I did.

DANA MILBANK WONDERS IF THE WHITE HOUSE HAS ANY IDEAS. The Carterization proceeds apace — though, as I’ve said before, at this point a Carter rerun is the best-case scenario.

RESEARCH: Moderate alcohol consumption can prevent heart disease. “An alcoholic drink a day can help keep heart disease at bay, according to a review of 30 years of research. The work, published in the British Medical Journal, showed a 14% to 25% reduction in heart disease in moderate drinkers compared with people who had never drunk alcohol.”

A NEW WEB AD targeting those fugitive Wisconsin legislators.

IN THE MAIL: From Walter Olson, Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America.