IS DISTANCE THE KEY to a happy marriage?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 30 Minutes to a Sleek Physique: The No-Equipment Workout You Can Do Anywhere.

Sounds sort of like the Convict Conditioning approach.

IN SEARCH OF THE ELUSIVE Yogasm.

MORE MOCKERY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN over its lame Firefly censorship episode. “Wow. So much for all that blather about academic freedom, huh?” They can’t be mocked enough.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Students Skipping Law School Amid Stagnant Economy.

STEPHEN L. CARTER: Shockingly, The Energy Department Doesn’t Make Much Of A Venture Capitalist. “The analogy fails because the venture capitalist is disciplined in his lending by two forces that government does not face. First, if the venture capitalist makes too many bad bets, he will lose his investors. Government loan guarantee programs, on the other hand, can be refunded by Congress as often as politically convenient, and have been known to grow larger after making bad bets. Second, venture capitalists face potential liability for breach of fiduciary duty if they fail in the duty of care and loyalty imposed by law on those private individuals who handle other people’s money. Government officials and departments, with minor exceptions, are shielded from lawsuits by the doctrine of sovereign immunity. There is no way to subject a federal loan guarantee program to the discipline of the markets, and that might be reason enough for the government to stay out of the business of picking winners and losers. But if the program is here to stay, perhaps we should seek to discipline its administration through the alternative route: a partial waiver of sovereign immunity. . . . Liability is one risk of running a company that picks winners and losers in the marketplace. If the alternative energy loan guarantee program would be unable to function in the face of potential liability, one might reasonably ask whether it should exist at all.”

ANOTHER GREEN FAIL? World’s largest renewable diesel refiner says cost of fuel is way more than anticipated.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Illinois Reported Inflated LSAT, GPA Medians for Past Four Years. Thus boosting its U.S. News ranking and injuring the students who decided to attend based on that ranking, and the other schools who ranked lower as a result of its dishonesty. Plus, of course, injuring U.S. News. So where are the lawsuits?

HOLLYWOOD: EXPLOITER OF LABOR! Unpaid Interns Sue Motion Picture Studio for Wage/Hour Violations.

REASON TV: The Tragedy Of Urban Renewal. Shockingly, this program advertised as improving the urban environment actually involved a lot of corruption and political score-settling.

RAND SIMBERG: So what Disney tunes were the Solyndra robots playing?

RADLEY BALKO: WHY AMERICANS STILL SUPPORT THE DEATH PENALTY.

I think it’s because tedious liberals self-righteously oppose it, while showing an appalling insensitivity to the lives (and deaths) of ordinary non-criminal Americans. Though I should note that European citizens also support the death penalty in large numbers — they’re just ignored by their leaders. The best argument against the death penalty, of course, is what Charles Black called “the inevitability of caprice and mistake.” But that argument, taken seriously, is an indictment of the entire criminal-justice system, not just the death penalty. It may be a valid indictment, but few are willing to go that far.

The worst argument against the death penalty, of course, is that it’s somehow awful for the state to kill people. Nation-states are all about killing people. They exist solely because they’re better at that, on a large scale, than any other form of human organization. Everything else is superstructure, and if they lose that edge it will fade away.

HOPEY-CHANGEY: Walter Russell Mead: “In God We Trust” Is Out; “What, Me Worry?” Is In.

AMY SULLIVAN AND ANN ALTHOUSE: Obama’s Female Trouble.

CHUCK SIMMINS: Are Khaddafy’s Missiles Actually Missing?

TODAY ONLY: A Hitachi gas-powered leaf blower for $99.99.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: More solar companies led by Democratic donors received federal loan guarantees. “A Daily Caller investigation has found that in addition to the failed company Solyndra, at least four other solar panel manufacturing companies receiving in excess of $500 million in loan guarantees from the Obama administration employ executives or board members who have donated large sums of money to Democratic campaigns. And as questions swirl around possible connections between political donations and these preferential financing arrangements, the Obama White House suddenly began deflecting The Daily Caller’s questions on Wednesday to the Democratic National Committee.”

Related: $737 million in green-tech loan to company connected to Pelosi family?

WHITE HOUSE POLICY FAIL: Poster Children for New Health Care Model Won’t Participate in Model Program.

A CIVIL RIGHTS VICTORY: Court Overturns Oregon Universities’ Ban on Firearms. “The Oregon Court of Appeals on Wednesday overturned a 20-year-old state regulation barring the possession of firearms on public colleges’ campuses, ruling that Oregon’s Board of Higher Education was not authorized by the state legislature to enact such a rule.”

SHOCKER: Gun crime continues to decrease, despite increase in gun sales.

Despite increases in gun sales, gun crimes continued to decrease in the United States for the fourth straight year in 2010, according to the FBI.

The FBI recently released its Crime in The United States statistics for 2010. Overall, murders in the U.S. have decreased steadily since 2006, dropping from 15,087 to 12,996. Firearms murders — which made up 67 percent of all murders in the U.S. in 2010 — have followed this trend, decreasing by 14 percent.

At the same time that firearms murders were dropping, gun sales were surging. In 2009, FBI background checks for guns increased by 30 percent over the previous year, while firearms sales in large retail outlets increased by almost 40 percent. The number of applications for concealed carry permits jumped across the country as well.

Wow, you could write a book about this phenomenon, if you could just come up with a title or something.

HERMAN CAIN: Black Voters Have Been “Brainwashed.”

CITIZEN ANGER AT Tucson town hall over Fast and Furious gun-smuggling scandal.

Related: Obama evades ‘Fast and Furious’ questions from Latino media.

Plus: More “Fast & Furious” Revelations:

This just might be the smoking gun we’ve been waiting for to break the festering “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal wide open: the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives apparently ordered one of its own agents to purchase firearms with taxpayer money, and sell them directly to a Mexican drug cartel.

Let that sink in: After months of pretending that “Fast and Furious” was a botched surveillance operation of illegal gun-running spearheaded by the ATF and the US attorney’s office in Phoenix, it turns out that the government itself was selling guns to the bad guys. . . .

There are two possible explanations. The first is that the anti-gun Obama administration deliberately wanted American guns planted in Mexico in order to demonize American firearms dealers and gun owners. The operation was manufacturing “evidence” for the president’s false claim that we’re to blame for the appalling levels of Mexican drug-war violence.

If this is true, then Holder & Co. have got to go — and the trail needs to be followed no matter where it leads. For the federal government to seek to frame its own citizens is unconscionable.

A second notion is that the CIA was behind the whole thing, which accounts for all the desperate wagon-circling. Under this theory, the Agency feared the los Zetas drug cartel was becoming too powerful and might even mount a coup against the Mexican government. So some 2,000 weapons costing more than $1.25 million were deliberately channeled to the rival Sinaloa cartel, which operates along the American border, to keep the Zetas in check.

Of course, there’s a third explanation — that both scenarios are true, and that those in charge of Fast and Furious saw an opportunity to shoot two birds with one Romanian-made AK Draco pistol.

Time for a special prosecutor, who’s both fast and furious.

Yes, a special prosecutor is clearly warranted here.

NITA GHEI: Eurozone Debt Debacle: Government spending spree could bring down European Union.

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Obama-style Democracy: Bureaucrats know best.

 

Most Americans complain that government is unresponsive to their wishes. But not everyone feels that way. In the space of two days, two prominent Democrats have called for less responsive government that ignores public input.

One of them, former White House Budget Director Peter Orszag, penned a piece this week in the New Republic arguing, as the title says, “Why we need less democracy.” Orszag wrote that “the country’s political polarization was growing worse — harming Washington’s ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing.” His solution? “[W]e need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic.” . . .

Perhaps know-it-all bureaucrats can be forgiven for harboring such contempt for the voting public. But elected officials cannot. That’s why similar comments by Gov. Bev Perdue, D-N.C., are far more troubling. “I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover,” Perdue told a Rotary Club gathering in suburban Raleigh this week. “I really hope that someone can agree with me on that.”

Perdue’s office at first claimed her comments were made in jest. The subsequent release of the audio conclusively demonstrates otherwise.

The federal government’s legitimacy is based upon the consent of the governed. This nation’s Founding Fathers would have had it no other way. Given Perdue’s apparent disdain for the American constitutional system, she might be more comfortable in the private sector, where hierarchical management is the rule. And the voters in her state should remind her next November who’s the boss.

Actually, I think she should resign now. This was much worse than anything Trent Lott said.