JAMES JOYNER ON Hybrid Cars, Rare Earth Elements, and Supply.

One of the regular themes of the old OTB Radio program* was that a major obstacle to hybrid vehicles dominating the market was that we couldn’t make enough batteries. President Obama apparently wasn’t a listener (it’s understandable; he’s a busy man). Among the pie-in-the-sky programs rattled off during January’s State of the Union was a goal of a million of these cars on the road by 2015.

While the target is, coincidentally I’m sure, happily after Obama’s political fate is sealed, the goal is highly unlikely absent either radical changes in technology overnight or an increase in the supply of the necessary rare earth elements. . . . The problem is threefold: The demand is high, the supply is limited, and the major supplier is China–with Russia and Brazil controlling most of the rest. Oh, and China is moving to keep more of its supply at home.

Also, the United States government is unusually slow in issuing permits to extract these minerals, not only by comparison to China, Russia and Brazil, but even by comparison to Canada and Australia.

I THINK WE’LL SEE MORE OF THIS: Obama Travels To Philly, Tea Party Breaks Out. “Demonstrators lined the sidewalk in front of the hotel holding signs with such slogans as ‘One and done,’ ‘Stop spending’ and ‘Balance the budget.’ Once inside, Obama was interrupted by at least two activists holding up paper signs objecting to the number of people who have died of AIDS.”

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Nothing Funny About Government Limits On Political Speech. A lesson for Stephen Colbert.

ALASKA PUSHES new domestic drilling plan.

AN IMPORTANT QUESTION: How Much Would It Cost To Buy Congress Back From Special Interests? Less than the trillions they’ve squandered. But would it stay bought?

MORE FACT-CHECKING: Yes, Obama Still Owns The Tax Break For Corporate Jets. “The jet tax provision is not a serious issue ($3 billion over ten years?), and Obama’s repeated mention of it demonstrates he is not serious about deficit reduction. It just adds icing to the cake that it exists in law today only because of his signature.”

Meanwhile, reader Steven DallaVicenza writes: “At some point, some troll needs to put out a petition calling for The United States to set its top marginal federal income tax rate at the Canadian level and see how many left of center people sign it. The current rates are 35% and 29% respectively.”

AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.

INSTAVISION: I talk with Georgetown Law Professor and blogger Randy Barnett about the Supreme Court, attacks on Clarence Thomas, and the future of constitutional reform.

JAMES TARANTO: “They told Glenn Reynolds that if he voted for John McCain, Jimmy Carter would come to seem like the best-case scenario, and they were right.”

THE HILL: Battle Lines Are Being Drawn.

BYRON YORK: New Budget Law, Hated By Unions, Is A Godsend For Some Wisconsin Schools.

“This is a disaster,” said Mark Miller, the Wisconsin Senate Democratic leader, last February after Republican Gov. Scott Walker proposed a budget bill that would curtail the collective bargaining powers of some public employees. Miller predicted catastrophe if the bill were to become law — a charge repeated thousands of times by his fellow Democrats, union officials, and protesters in the streets.

Now the bill is law, and we have some very early evidence of how it is working. And for one beleaguered Wisconsin school district, it’s a godsend, not a disaster.

The Kaukauna School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect, at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it’s all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous.

Disastrous for unions, maybe. A godsend for taxpayers and schoolchildren, probably. It’s not like those are mutually inconsistent outcomes. More:

“The monetary part of it is not the entire issue,” says Arnoldussen, a political independent who won a spot on the board in a nonpartisan election. Indeed, some of the most important improvements in Kaukauna’s outlook are because of the new limits on collective bargaining.

In the past, Kaukauna’s agreement with the teachers union required the school district to purchase health insurance coverage from something called WEA Trust — a company created by the Wisconsin teachers union. “It was in the collective bargaining agreement that we could only negotiate with them,” says Arnoldussen. “Well, you know what happens when you can only negotiate with one vendor.” This year, WEA Trust told Kaukauna that it would face a significant increase in premiums.

Now, the collective bargaining agreement is gone, and the school district is free to shop around for coverage. And all of a sudden, WEA Trust has changed its position. “With these changes, the schools could go out for bids, and lo and behold, WEA Trust said, ‘We can match the lowest bid,'” says Republican state Rep. Jim Steineke, who represents the area and supports the Walker changes. At least for the moment, Kaukauna is staying with WEA Trust, but saving substantial amounts of money.

Then there are work rules.

Read the whole thing.

REPORT: Maid who accused DSK of sexual assault repeatedly lied: sources. “The maid who accused former IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn of a violent sex attack in his Midtown hotel room has repeatedly lied to prosecutors and is ‘personally associated’ with money launderers and drug dealers — revelations that have sunk the prosecution’s case, sources told The Post last night. . . . Strauss-Kahn has admitted to having sex with her, but insisted it was consensual. That makes her the only one who can tell a jury she tried to resist — and DA Cyrus Vance now realizes that if she’s exposed to cross examinination she’ll be destroyed on the stand when defense lawyers shine a light on the skeletons in her closet. . . . prosecutors believe some of her account of her activities in the hours surrounding the alleged attack wasn’t true, though they haven’t necessarily reached a new conclusion about the incident itself, a law enforcement official told the Associated Press.” Well, that doesn’t mean she wasn’t raped, but it may mean that she’s not a credible complainant. On the other hand, he sure acted guilty that day.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “If DSK is innocent, and what happened was either consented to or just ‘bad sex’ (as Ann Althouse would say), then I think it’s an instructive example of the power imbalance between men and women in the legal setting. Also, a powerful example of what a class-neutral legal system we have.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: A cynical hedge-fund reader emails: “Does *anyone* think it’s a coincidence that DSK got his walking papers barely 2 days after his successor (a French finance minister with a Chicago law firm pedigree) was picked?”

Here’s more on Christine Lagarde.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Fed’s Massive Stimulus Had Little Impact. I think it made a few people rich.

THE TRUTH THAT HURTS: “It seems that in the free-wheeling news conference format Barack Obama is prone to the kind of hyperbole that is far more common on the campaign trail and usually reserved for political rookies. Now thanks to some splendid fact checking by the Associated Press, we have evidence that the president is actually beginning to believe his own press releases — never a good thing.”

YOU KNOW HOW PEOPLE SAY WE’D BE IN BIG TROUBLE WITHOUT GOVERNMENT INSPECTIONS? Pool Inspectors Failed To See Body At Site: “The permit for the state-run swimming pool where a woman’s body went unnoticed for more than two days this week had expired six months ago. A city health inspector who examined it Tuesday determined the water was cloudy, but did not see her remains resting on the bottom. . . . It raised sharp questions about whether those responsible for safety at the pool, from staff to city inspectors to state officials, may have neglected their duties.”

More here: Inspectors cleared murky pool, overlooked body. “It’s a safety hazard. If that pool is so murky you couldn’t see the bottom, you couldn’t see that there was a corpse there, then there’s something really wrong with the clarity of that pool.” Ya think?

HE WAS WILLING TO TALK TO THE IRANIANS WITHOUT PRECONDITIONS, BUT THIS IS DIFFERENT: Obama rejects McConnell’s offer to meet with GOP on debt ceiling.

DAILY CALLER: Halperin’s MSNBC suspension latest example of White House press tampering. That’s okay. The press is only supposed to serve as a check on government when Republicans are in power.

DESPICABLE: Rep. Cummings’ Gunwalker Report Neglects To Mention … Gunwalker. “The report doesn’t mention the estimated 150 dead in Mexico, plus two U.S. agents. Just gun control. And long-debunked statistics.”

Plus this:

The 26-page report appears to exist for a political purpose: to gloss over the felonious actions of a multi-agency task force drawn from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ), Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security, and the Internal Revenue Service, with input from the State Department. Operation Fast and Furious (“Gunwalker”) was responsible for providing weapons used in the murders of two federal officers, along with 150 or more Mexican police officers, soldiers, and civilians.

This scandal is about the dead.

But the substantial body count that resulted from this operation is something that Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings and his colleagues avoid mentioning. The report simply does not include the two American federal law enforcement officers killed in ambushes with Gunwalker firearms, and does not mention the Mexican casualties of this Obama administration-created fiasco.

Instead, the minority report minimizes the magnitude of the crimes perpetrated under the guise of law enforcement, while building the case for gun control — an interesting development, as gun control may have been the ulterior motive for Gunwalker all along.

I continue to suspect that a secret program allowing thousands of guns to go from U.S. gun stores to Mexican crime sites was more than coincidentally related to a gun-control campaign from the same administration that was predicated on . . . statements about the flow of guns from U.S. gun stores to Mexican crime sites.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Right-to-work states have generally lower unemployment, higher job growth, lower taxes and better business climates.

SOME LEGACY: Debt Increased More Under Geithner Than Under Any Treasury Secretary in U.S. History.

OUCH: At Least One American Family Will Be Taking A Nice Vacation This Summer.

AT THE REDESIGNED POWER LINE SITE, which I should have mentioned earlier, More Jimmy Carter Theater.

YA THINK? Doug Mataconis: Barack Obama Continues To Vote “Present” On Same-Sex Marriage.

JOE GANDELMAN ON MARK HALPERIN’S SUSPENSION from MSNBC for calling Obama a “dick.” Prediction: “In the way our media and political cultures now operate, Morning Joe will see its ratings go up.”

DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN CASE on verge of collapse?