POLL: LARGE MAJORITY SUPPORT A BALANCED BUDGET AMENDMENT. “A full 65 percent of the public supports an amendment to the Constitution to require Congress to pass a balanced budget every year, The Daily Caller reports today. Just 27 percent oppose such an amendment, with 8 percent undecided.”

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Oprah, American Girls and Binge Dreamers.

TIME-LAPSE VIDEO: The Very Large Telescope at work.

STUDY: Car Buyers Will Pay More For Better Fuel Economy, Won’t Sacrifice Safety.

LAUGH ALL YOU WANT AT THE STEAMPUNK SARAH PALIN COMIC BOOK, but the robotic-armed “President Robama” that it predicted is now reality. Be very afraid.

SHERIFF DUPNIK’S GUYS ON VIDEO: The Jose Guerena Raid: A Demonstration of Tactical Incompetence. “These clowns shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near weapons.”

UPDATE: Reader Tim Moreau writes:

You know what? I would think that anyone busting down the door of a man’s home with a platoon of light infantry would be prepared for anything. But it seems these black-nylon kill squads are only prepared for one thing: absolute and immediate submission. What, your surprised by our raid? Confused? Startled? Sorry, you’ll have to be killed to protect us.

That’s just a peachy picture of a patriotic free nation, now aint it?

They’re just playing soldier. But I think that when you break down the door to someone’s home in response to anything other than a clear and immediate threat to life and limb, you act at your peril. I’d remove all official immunity in such cases. I think that would be a mild response to the many abuses we’ve seen. “Official immunity” is, at any rate, a judicial creation with no basis in the Constitution, one that should be scrapped in favor of a scheme debated and approved by elected representatives.

IN THE MAIL: From Donald L. Luskin and Andrew Greta, I Am John Galt: Today’s Heroic Innovators Building the World and the Villainous Parasites Destroying It.

PROF. STEPHEN L. CARTER: Economic Stagnation Explained At 30,000 Feet.

The man in the aisle seat is trying to tell me why he refuses to hire anybody. His business is successful, he says, as the 737 cruises smoothly eastward. Demand for his product is up. But he still won’t hire.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know how much it will cost,” he explains. “How can I hire new workers today, when I don’t know how much they will cost me tomorrow?”

He’s referring not to wages, but to regulation: He has no way of telling what new rules will go into effect when. His business, although it covers several states, operates on low margins. He can’t afford to take the chance of losing what little profit there is to the next round of regulatory changes. And so he’s hiring nobody until he has some certainty about cost.

Carter’s one of my old law professors, as well as a bigshot novelist. He explains well. Read the whole thing.

NOT ‘TIL TIM GEITHNER GIVES UP HIS TURBOTAX: IRS To Small Businesses: We Want Your QuickBooks.

Many accountants are worried this could lead to fishing expeditions” to find problems beyond the scope of the requested information, said Danny Snow, a certified public accountant in Memphis who is active in the American Institute of CPAs, or AICPA. “It’s not like what the IRS asks of large companies.”

It’s not like the President has joked about auditing his enemies or anything.

STATE BUDGETS: “Many states have announced higher-than-expected tax revenues lately, the first upbeat news to come out of beleaguered state budget offices since 2007. But the windfall is largely the result of smoke and mirrors. Revenue estimates for this year were set at ultra low levels, leaving plenty of room for good news. The reality is that state budget problems are the worst they’ve been since the start of the recession. State tax revenues are more than 10 percent below their 2008 levels, and 44 states and Washington DC have been scrambling to close a collective $112 billion budget shortfall for fiscal year 2012, which for most states begins July 1.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: Once Again, We Cannot Pay For Social Security By Ending the Bush Tax Cuts on High Earners. “That’s why I think it’s a terrible idea to juxtapose the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and Social Security in a graph that implies that the costs are roughly the same size. Not just because they’re not really equivalent–but because we don’t have that money to spend. We’re already assuming that we let those tax cuts go in 2012, and the budget picture is still a disaster.”

VERONIQUE DE RUGY: The Party Of Doing Nothing. And yet they ran on a platform of . . . Change!

AARON WORTHING: Hey, maybe you shouldn’t trust Google with your wallet.

LECH WALESA SNUBS OBAMA: “Lech Walesa, Poland’s Solidarity-era legend, ex-president and 1983 Nobel Peace Prize winner said Friday he would not accept an invitation to meet with fellow Nobel winner US President Barack Obama.”

AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.

JOHN MERLINE: War on For-Profit Colleges Doesn’t Make Sense. Sure it does. It’s protecting a constituency from market competition. That’s what politicians do.

And note this: “Critics point out that loan defaults are more common for students at for-profit colleges than those attending traditional schools. But others say this is largely because for-profits serve more low-income and ‘at risk’ students. Research by financial aid guru Mark Kantrowitz found little difference in defaults among low-income Pell Grant recipients, regardless of where they went to school.”

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: What Obama Did To Israel.

BYRON YORK: Palin Creates Buzz But Rivals Bet She Won’t Run.

WELL, THIS IS CHEERY: SocGen: “The China Domino Has Fallen!”, Big-Time Inflation Coming All Around The World. Inflation, deflation — we seem to have arrived at the worst of both. The things I own are deflating, the things I buy are inflating.

JENNIFER RUBIN talks to John Boehner. “He is blunt about the president’s conduct toward Israel. ‘It is part of what they’ve done for the last two and a half years — throw allies under the bus in an effort to reach out to people who hate us.’”

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Why the white working class is the most alienated and pessimistic group in American society.

MICKEY KAUS ON JOHN EDWARDS: “If the liberal political establishment had a subconscious, you could say the Edwards indictment was a belated overreaction produced by guilt over having willfully ignored his affair during the campaign, when it mattered. It’s also self-servingly exculpatory–see, we didn’t cover for him!” Well, not once he lost his usefulness. Keep rockin!

L.A. TIMES: DNC chairwoman supports U.S. auto industry so much she owns a Japanese car.

Oh, how embarrassing.

Like roll-up-the-tinted-windows-and-slouch-down-in-your-seat embarrassing.

The new chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee was criticizing Republicans who opposed President Obama’s bailout of the American automakers union, oh, no, make that American automakers.

“If it were up to the candidates for president on the Republican side,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, “we would be driving foreign cars. They would have let the auto industry in America go down the tubes.”

So Michael O’Brien of The Hill newspaper went and checked what kind of automobile loyal-American-car-supporter Debbie Wasserman Schultz owns.

Yup, you guessed it — Japanese.

Drive as she says, not as she does.

Ouch.

UPDATE: Even worse, it’s a Japanese car that, though it’s built in America, is built in a right-to-work state!

WELL, MAYBE THEY SHOULD NOMINATE BETTER CANDIDATES? In 2012 campaigns, spoilers from the Tea Party worry GOP.

CHANGE: ROTC Returns To Yale.