CIVIL RIGHTS PROGRESS: Mast General Store removes no-gun signs, rethinks policy.

WHAT’S THE HARDEST PART of looking for a job?

PEGGY NOONAN: The President’s Island Retreat: Is his visit to Martha’s Vineyard a sign that he’s giving up?

How could he not be depressed? He has made big mistakes since the beginning of his presidency and has been pounded since the beginning of his presidency. He’s got to be full of doubts at this point about what to do. His baseline political assumptions have proved incorrect, his calculations have turned out to be erroneous, his big decisions have turned to dust. He thought they’d love him for health care, that it was a down payment on greatness. But the left sees it as a sellout, the center as a vaguely threatening mess, the right as a rallying cry. He thought the stimulus would turn the economy around. It didn’t. He thought there would be a natural bounce-back a year ago, with “Recovery Summer.” There wasn’t. He thought a toe-to-toe, eyeball-to-eyeball struggle over the debt ceiling would enhance his reputation. The public would see through to the dark heart of Republican hackery and come to recognize the higher wisdom of his approach. That didn’t happen either.

Nothing worked! And nothing’s going to work. He’s the smartest guy in the room, but he’s got the reverse Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to—well, unsatisfying outcomes.

Indeed. Of course, it’s worth pointing out that Noonan was among those who expected great things from Obama.

UPDATE: Jim Treacher emails: “It’s also worth pointing out that Obama isn’t behaving any differently now than he did when Noonan thought he was wonderful. . . . The stuff they’re criticizing him for now is the same stuff we told them when they tried to sell us on him. And they’re acting like it never happened.”

CHANGE: Democrats Panicking Over Losing Weiner Seat.

AT AMAZON, markdowns in the Automotive Outlet.

MARCIA MORRISSEY: Triumph And Trust At Ground Zero.

WHEAT AND TRADE: A Sad Day For U.S. Wheat Growers:

At last, sadly, the day has come and gone when the United States government has ignored the rational pleas of its citizens and businesses and handed an unnecessary advantage to countries that compete with us in world trade.

On Monday, the Colombia-Canada Free Trade Agreement (FTA) entered into force. It is an agreement first signed on Nov. 21, 2008, nearly two years to the day after a U.S.-Colombia FTA was signed. Now most Canadian industries enjoy duty-free access to the growing Colombian market. In contrast, because our government has allowed our FTA to languish, Colombian importers must still pay tariffs on most U.S. goods. For wheat, that tariff overcomes the natural advantage U.S. exporters otherwise have in providing quality wheat on a timely basis to our valued Colombian customers.

Funny, I don’t remember any press coverage about this during Obama’s midwest tour.

UPDATE: Farmer-reader Bart Hall emails:

Even if the US eventually signs the agreement, wheat growers will not be able to capture that market from the Canadians, who are by far the best wheat growers in the world. The ordinary farmer in Saskatchewan or Manitoba cleans his grain to seed grade before it ever leaves the farm. Downstream from there it might be cleaned up even more, right down to zero weeds and zero foreign matter.

American export standards allow up to 3% foreign matter and 1% weed seeds. There’s no reason for an American farmer to clean his grain because he knows that once it gets to the river terminal the consolidator has tanks of sand and bins of weed seed available to ADD to the grain in order to get right up to the export limits. As a general rule, once foreign buyers have experienced Canadian quality, they don’t care about American price.

The utterly feckless Obama administration just handed our chief grain export competitor a market of almost 50 million, second largest in South America. Most Canadian wheat is exported from Vancouver, whence it is an easy run to Buenaventura, one of the best Colombian grain ports. This is a totally unforced error from the current administration, one of depressingly many.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes:

When you wrote, “Funny, I don’t remember any press coverage about this during Obama’s midwest tour,” a good part of the blame should be assigned to Republicans for not highlighting this. It’s a target rich environment out there and they should be relentless.

The GOP doesn’t work the press well. Part of that is learned helplessness, but part of it is ineptitude.

ANOTHER REASON FOR MEN TO avoid college.

IF YOU LOOK AT THE MASTHEAD ON THE LATEST POPULAR MECHANICS, you’ll see that I’ve been promoted from “Contributing Editor” to “Resident Contrarian,” part of an overall re-titling of outside writers. Jay Leno is now “Garage Proprietor,” but I think the coolest title is “Explosives and Pyrotechnics Editor.”

AT AMAZON, a sale on balance-ball chairs. These are supposed to be good for your back, but I’ve always been skeptical.

UPDATE: Reader Margaret Morrell writes: “I’ve used a balance ball as a desk-chair for a while. It takes some getting used to but it’s done wonders for my posture.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Get Out While You Can! “Tenure won’t save us from a higher education collapse. Start making alternative career contingency plans now because this collapse could be sudden and catastrophic.” Huh. I guess I could always try to make it as a fulltime blogger . . . .

More: “Many governors face enormous fiscal shortfalls, forcing them to choose which public employees to anger. Tenured professors, I suspect, have a lot less political clout in most states than do policeman, nurses, prison guards and public school teachers. If online education keeps improving, then I predict that some governor is going to propose firing most of the tenured faculty at his public colleges and replacing the high-priced teachers with online courses. Since Republicans consider academia to be a creature of the far left, many Republican governors would undoubtedly take joy in decimating the traditional higher education market.” I wonder where they got that idea?

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: Obama deportation policy could be ‘nightmare’ for law enforcement. “The Obama administration says its new deportation policy will focus only on the worst criminals, not college kids and maids. But that could make the jobs of law enforcement – from local cops to federal agents – much more complicated.”

UPDATE: A reader emails: “Note that they have just created another way to interpret the law as they see fit….” They seem to like to do that.

UNSUSTAINABLE: 1 in 5 Americans Receive Benefits From Social Security. And disability claims are on the rise. “Some 31% of benefits go to those under 62. . . . In my opinion, long-run concerns about the financial solvency of both OASI and DI are warranted, but between the two, DI seems to raise the most immediate alarm.”

PLAN B IS HARDER THAN IT SEEMS: Lawyers who leave law practice find alternative careers grueling.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER ON Obama’s Vacation Optics.

Choosing an exclusive enclave like the Vineyard after spending three days on the road railing against the rich and the wealthy and the millionaires and the billionaires and the corporate jet owners who vacation exactly in the same place — and then spending ten days in their company — speaks of a kind of dissonance or hypocrisy.

You know, the Vineyard doesn’t have any bridges to it. You either get there on a ferry in your Maserati, or on a jet or a helicopter. It’s not exactly where ordinary folks will take a vacation.

Ordinary vacations are for the little people.

KENNETH ANDERSON ON regulatory scrutiny of the ratings agencies. My prediction is that not much will come of this, because when they investigate they’ll find that many politicians — including some major Democratic operatives with connections to the Administration — were encouraging the ratings agencies to turn a blind eye to the problems during the housing bubble. Then the story will fade away.

SPEECH: Protests, Flash Mobs Spark Controversy Over Communications Crackdowns.

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF UNCONSTITUTIONAL ORDERS: “Respondent Is Prohibited from Posting Any Information/Comments … on Any Internet Site Regarding the Petitioner [the Mayor’s Sister] and … Her Immediate or Extended Family.”

This order is a blatant First Amendment violation, it seems to me. Even if the injunction restricted only speech that allegedly fell into a First Amendment exception (such as libel or threats or obscenity), such an injunction would almost never be constitutional unless it was issued following a final decision on the merits that the speech indeed falls into a First Amendment exception — and there was no final decision on the merits here: This is a preliminary injunction issued at an ex parte hearing at which defendant wasn’t even present.

Judges issuing this sort of order shouldn’t just be reversed, they should be disciplined.

THE RISK-ADJUSTED RETURNS AREN’T GOOD ENOUGH, APPARENTLY: Real Private Investment Flat vs. 1998. “This points to the real growth conundrum: Outside of a completely unexpected housing rebound, private investment can’t possibly grow fast enough to spur a healthy jobs recovery on its own. But the two horses that the U.S. economy has been riding for the last several years are exhausted and unlikely to be refreshed as Washington enters an age of budget austerity.”

STEVE CARTER: Baseball, Tim Pawlenty, And Celebrity Politics.

FREELANCING: How To Calculate Your Worth.

DAVE KOPEL: Could President Perry Carry A Gun? “Chris Moody attempts to analyze the issue for The Ticket. The analysis could have been improved by reading the laws of the District of Columbia.” Of course the President could authorize himself to carry a gun. Such powers are, in fact, widely dispersed among the federal government — I remember noticing years ago that the NASA Administrator could authorize people to carry a gun, and briefly considered trying to pull strings to get a NASA carry permit . . . .

Plus, from the comments: “If Harrison Ford’s POTUS character in Air Force One had been packing, I bet the movie would have unfolded differently.” I seem to remember reading that Churchill carried a .38 revolver during World War II, in light of not-entirely-unreasonable fears of a German assassination/kidnap attempt.

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Darrell Issa Sticks It To The Times.

HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WORKING OUT? Talking to the Taliban Has Backfired.

SATURDAY IS LEMONADE FREEDOM DAY!