CHANGE: Wheat Price Spike Spells Trouble For Reliant Middle East States.

Related: Cost Of Eating Spikes For The Arab World.

Also: Mideast staggered by cost of wheat.

UPDATE: Reader Tom Grant notes that Spengler has been writing about this. “At this rate Egypt will be broke by September. . . . It will look like the Latin American banana republics, but without the bananas. That is not meant in jest: few people actually starved to death in the Latin inflations. Egypt, which imports half its wheat and a great deal of the rest of its food, will actually starve.”

STEVEN HAYWARD: “I’m reminded again of Glenn Reynolds’s refrain that a rerun of the Carter administration may be the best-case scenario for the Obama presidency. Cy Vance, Carter’s disaffected secretary of state, wrote in his memoirs that Carter had planned to sell out Israel if he was reelected in 1980. Obama looks poised to pick up where Jimmy left off.”

TRUMKA ISSUES THREAT TO DEMOCRATS: Help Us Or Pay.

HOW LIGHTNING shoots for the stars: “On rare occasions, jets of lightning escape from the tops of thunderclouds and shoot up into the atmosphere where they pose a threat to weather balloons and other scientific instruments. New research explains how it happens.” I understand that SR-71 pilots saw some cool stuff but weren’t believed because no one understood the mechanism.

ARE THESE THE END TIMES? Well, the Weird Times anyway. Or the Crazy Years.

SHOCKER: Wisconsin Supreme Court recount finished — and Prosser wins again!

UPDATE: More from Ann Althouse. So let’s just remember — in the birthplace of progressive unionism, the unions went all-in on a judicial election and lost.

But maybe there’s another agenda: “So Kloppenburg failed to win a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in an election that focused on the budget-repair bill, but she could try, by initiating a futile lawsuit about the election, to affect the way the Wisconsin Supreme Court decides the budget case and to affect it in a way that is contrary to what the voters voted for. And, if she does that, expect to hear her say lofty-sounding things about protecting the interests of the voters.”

MAYBE THE END TIMES REALLY ARE UPON US: From “Vajazzling” to “Pejazzling.”

BIBI GIVES OBAMA a history lesson.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, we’d have a President who made excuses for going to war that were so lame that John Yoo would be objecting. And they were right!

UPDATE: Chickens roosting.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Explaining the silence on Libya.

LOOKING BACK AT CONTEMPORARY COVERAGE OF THE SIX-DAY WAR.

ANDREW ROTHERHAM: Forget the higher education bubble talk, college is very much worth it. Well, I’ll say this — if America becomes more like France, it’ll certainly be worth it to go to the schools that let you join the nomenklatura.

But he kind of assumes away the problem when he says: “Assuming you don’t pile up mountains of debt that constrain your career options (and that outcome is avoidable) or go to a school where just fogging a mirror is good enough to get a diploma, there are not a lot of downsides to going to college.” Well, yes. If you get an actually useful education without running up a lot of debt, you’ll be fine. But when even Ivy League grads are having trouble, it’s not as simple as he makes it sound.

CHANGE: Feds Moving EV Tax Credits To “Cash For Clunkers” Model.

SPRING DEALS on camera and photo gear.

INSTAVISION: I talk to Michael Barone about the 2012 elections from Donald Trump to Herman Cain, about the Tea Party’s impact, and about what voters want. (Bumped).

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: IRS snafu leaves taxpayers, refunds in limbo for months.

IF YOU’RE IN THE SALT LAKE CITY AREA AND LIKE CARS, you might want to check out Kirkham Motorsports’ track day tomorrow. Kirkham emails: “I would be happy to give as many instapundit readers as possible rides tomorrow at the track. Just have them show up and tell me they are instapundit fans :) They have to be 18 or older for rides.” That’s a hell of an offer, considering the cars he builds.

UPDATE: Kirkham follows up:

People have been asking how they can find me…

Just look for the guy in the blue race suit with “DON’T TREAD ON ME” stickers on his helmet. My car has a red, white, and blue stripe (and DON’T TREAD ON ME stickers).

So there.

NOT-SO-SMART DIPLOMACY: “The larger problem is Obama’s failure to distinguish properly between friends and enemies.” On the other hand, he has no such problem in the domestic political context.

Related: Netanyahu Urges U.S. Return to 1845 Borders.

UPDATE: Basil Copeland writes on the 1845 borders: “Hey, don’t be giving Obama any ideas. He’s got a voting constituency in the Southwest who’d like to see a return to those borders.”

MORE: A reader emails: “Why would Obama cede all those voters in the Southwest to Mexico? They’re only useful to him in this country.”

MORE STILL: An I-told-you-so.

BARRY RUBIN ON OBAMA’S MIDDLE EAST SPEECH: The Opposite Of Strategy Is Catastrophe. Oh, I think he’s got a strategy.

SAYUNCLE: Rapture, Schmapture — “I was hoping for zombies.”

NO MAN IS AN ISLAND, but his house might be. “We’ve all undertaken home improvements but these residents in flood-stricken Mississippi have had to embark on major construction projects just to protect their houses and livelihoods. These homes in Vicksburg are all situated along the Yazoo River, a tributary of the overflowing Mississippi River, and their owners have surrounded themselves with tons of earth and sand.”

THE CREEPIEST INTERNET DATING MESSAGES.

GIVING SOLDIERS a drone’s-eye view of the battlefield.

A PEEK INSIDE SATURN’S enormous and unexpected swirling storm. “A storm nearly as wide as the Earth showed up on Saturn in December, and it still rages in the planet’s normally storm-free atmosphere. So, what caused it, and what does it mean?”

AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale. Lots of markdowns on coffee, which as we now know is good for your prostate.

COMEBACK STORY: Susannah Breslin: How I Went From Downsized to Self-Employed in Four Months. “Oftentimes, I read other posts at ForbesWoman that stress the importance of sisterhood, that your innate female characteristics of nurturing and support will get you through the hard times, that acting like a man in the professional realm will be your great undoing. I disagree. In fact, based on other articles I read, I began to gather that I was having trouble finding jobs initially because I was acting like a girl. . . . If I’d waited around for someone to save me, I’d still be waiting.”