MOE LANE: Wisconsin Democrat Joanne Kloppenburg ignored abuse victim’s pleas.

BROKEN LINKS: Japan And The Global Supply Chain. “There are some enlightening similarities between the shocks that manufacturers are now suffering and those that buffeted the banking system in the 2008 financial crisis. In both cases two of the biggest surprises were the unexpected connections the crisis uncovered, and the extent of the contagion. The problems began in a seemingly well-contained part of the system—subprime mortgages in the case of finance, in manufacturing’s case a natural disaster in an economic backwater—but quickly spread.”

My Sunday Washington Examiner column will be on this topic.

LAW SCHOOL APPLICATIONS ARE DOWN AT YALE: “One of the biggest drops in applications we’ve heard about comes not from some unranked law school, but at Yale Law School.. . . The Yale Daily News reports that applications are down 16.5% this year at YLS.”

HOW TO DEFEND AGAINST HOME INVASION: “If you’re going to rely on a gun for part of your home defense plan, observe the first rule of a gunfight: have a gun.”

AT AMAZON, 50% off on coolers.

ARE YOU HAPPY?

AUGMENTED REALITY: A smartphone face-recognition app that will pull up Web info on anyone you meet. Not coming soon, I suspect, but almost certainly coming sooner than you think.

DESPERATE DEMS snooping into Scott Brown Family’s Medical Records. Just think how much easier that sort of thing will be for them once ObamaCare is fully implemented.

FIRST MERCURY PHOTOS FROM NASA’s Messenger spacecraft.

ADVICE ON PROPER SHOOTING STANCE and proper handgun grip.

AT AMAZON, a spring gardening sale. It’s that time of year — Helen’s getting ready to fire up the Earth Box.

MEDIA: Intel analyst to CNN host: “You’re just carrying water for Mr. Obama.”

GOP LAUNCHES MOCK OBAMA 2012 AD.

AT OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LAB, Y-12’s production hub vulnerable; major earthquake could disable uranium processes, create criticality threats. Oh, goody.

CHARLIE MARTIN PRAISES JAPANESE GUTS:

The example that we see the most in the United States is in Fukushima, and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) workers. Many of these people have lost their homes, their possessions, their family members and their pets to the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and the almost unimaginable tsunami that reached as high as 100 feet at some places on the coast.

These people are working 24 hours a day, in immensely difficult conditions, to prevent a possible disaster. And they are by no means alone in this: read the English-language Japanese press, or blogs by people in Japan, and you’ll read a thousand stories — people sharing their hardships, helping their neighbors, working together spontaneously as they begin to rebuild.

Read the whole thing.

WHERE YOUR MONEY WENT: Foreign Banks Tapped Fed’s Secret Lifeline Most at Crisis Peak. “The biggest borrowers from the 97-year-old discount window as the program reached its crisis-era peak were foreign banks, accounting for at least 70 percent of the $110.7 billion borrowed during the week in October 2008 when use of the program surged to a record. The disclosures may stoke a reexamination of the risks posed to U.S. taxpayers by the central bank’s role in global financial markets.” Wasn’t this happening at the same time European leaders were bashing “Cowboy capitalism” in the United States?

A JAPANESE NUCLEAR PLANT that not only survived the earthquake, but is now sheltering refugees. “It’s very clean inside. We have electricity and nice toilets.”

UPDATE: Various readers are reminded of Lucifer’s Hammer, though without the having-to-fight-off-cannibals part.

BUSINESS LEADERS, ECONOMISTS push for deficit cut.

HOW TO improve on bacon. I know, it sounds like sacrilege, but keep an open mind.

UPDATE: Moe Lane rises to the challenge and blogs the result.

THEN PERHAPS YOU HAVEN’T BEEN PAYING ATTENTION: “I find it remarkable that prestigious U.S. institutions of higher learning, such as NYU or Yale — which recently announced plans to open a campus in Singapore – find it so easy to partner with dictatorships, communist autocracies, and one-party authoritarian states.”

Of course, Bryn Mawr is taking the lead with an intergalactic partnership.

HMM: GM Books $1.6b Gain On Delphi Share Sale/Pension Shell Game.

CHANGE: House rejects Obama-backed labor amendment in FAA bill.

WHAT AMERICA NEEDS: A Chevy Volt convertible.

THE WASHINGTON POST’S RUTH MARCUS is tiring of Obama’s rhetoric. And even invoking Nixon.

KENNETH ANDERSON: “I am curious whether there is any evidence that high levels of student loan debt negatively impact a person’s marriage prospects.”