IN D.C., you can buy a gun, but that doesn’t mean you can have it.

AMERICA’S BEST THINK TANK: The Cato Institute Responds To President Obama’s State Of The Union Address.

A SIGNIFICANT OMISSION: “The Department of Education has acknowledged using flawed data in a study on the impact of race on student loan repayment rates, having omitted black students from its calculation.”

Really? Really.

HAVE THEM START THEIR INVESTIGATION IN THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama Announces New Financial Crimes Unit. “The unit will be staffed by ‘highly trained investigators’ and charged with tracking ‘large-scale fraud.'”

TAXPROF: Mitt Romney’s True Tax Rate: 44.75%. “This is ironically the embodiment of the ‘corporate personhood’ legal doctrine otherwise so decried by the left. The law taxes corporations as if they were separate beings from the shareholders who own them and then levies a separate tax on shareholder payouts and gains. This double taxation brings the effective tax rate on investment income to as much as 44.75%.”

BAHRAIN: A Potential Hot Spot.

MICKEY KAUS: “I just finished reading Obama’s State of the Union. Didn’t see it. Reactions: 1) Was it as boring to see as it was to read? Because it is really boring to read. About a third of the way through I put it down and switched to reading the ingredients on the granola bar I was eating, just to perk myself up. Made me long for Newt Gingrich, a feeling Obama surely did not want to produce.”

LIZ PEEK: How Private Equity Helped Save The U.S. Economy.

FRANK J. FLEMING LEAPS TO OBAMA’S DEFENSE: Don’t We Need A Food-Stamp President?

Some think Newt Gingrich scored by calling Barack Obama the “food-stamp president,” but isn’t it really a compliment?

Obama tried to get everyone jobs — he even had the surefire plan of spending hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus money — but it turns out, making lots of new jobs is really, really hard. Who knew?

But Obama was easily able to relax the requirements for receiving food stamps and increase the program’s benefits. So now if you can’t get a job, it doesn’t matter, because you still get to eat.

But how do people react to seeing millions more on food stamps? It’s not the logical, “Yay — look at all the new people I get to help with my tax dollars!” No, it’s irrational yelling about all the extra people dependent on government. To which I ask: What’s so wrong with being dependent on government? Of all the things to depend on, isn’t government the smartest choice? You could depend on yourself, but come on. You know yourself; you fail all the time. You could depend on your friends and family, but they’d eventually get sick of you. But government will always love you and always be there. Long after you’re dead and forgotten, there will be government.

Read the whole thing.

FASTER, PLEASE: Phase I clinical trials for dendritic cell vaccine designed to both eradicate cancer cells and prevent disease relapse.

PROF. JACOBSON: Are we seeing the beginning of the end of Rick Santorum’s campaign?

OBAMA’S STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESSES: The Tale Of The Tape.

I guess when I said this speech was a rerun, I was righter than I knew.

TERRELL OWENS: “I’m In Hell.”

RATHER A LOT, REALLY: How Many Jobs Did Romney Create At Bain? “The companies Bain Capital funded under Romney have created tens of thousands of jobs using any measure.” Of course, anything that isn’t measured in the negative millions would be an improvement over Obama’s record.

MICKEY KAUS: Wagner Act = Outsourcing? “In other words, the union threatens to screw up production of the most important products because that’s where they have leverage. Gee, why would U.S.-headquartered manufacturers not want to move production back home from overseas so they could go through this kind of experience? … And wouldn’t consumers rush to buy cars built by these dedicated union members?”

BOSTON HERALD: Prez Fans The Flames. “State of the Union addresses are inherently political. But there is something a bit unseemly about seeing the president exploit the raw insecurity many Americans feel about their finances, for election-year advantage. This White House rarely hesitates to go there and President Barack Obama did so again last night. . . . Much of the president’s message reflects the genuine concerns of the middle class as the economy sputters and millions of Americans seek only that ‘fair shot’ he described. But this country has long resisted the notion of punishing success. Team Obama, it seems, is making it a priority.”

He’s a divider, not a uniter.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Knox County prosecutors will not file charges against two off-duty Oak Ridge police officers accused of pulling a handgun on a motorist during an alleged road-rage incident last month.

“SMART DIPLOMACY?” Australia As A “U.S. Copyright Colony.”

The Canberra Wikileaks cables revealed the US Embassy sanctioned a conspiracy by Hollywood studios to target Australian communications company iiNet through the local court-system, with the aim of establishing a binding common-law precedent which would make ISPs responsible for the unauthorised file-sharing of their customers.

Both the location, Australia, and the target, iiNet, were carefully selected. A precedent set in Australia would be influential in countries with comparable legal systems such as Canada, India, New Zealand and Great Britain. Australian telecommunications giant Telstra was judged too large for the purposes of the attack. Owing to its smaller size and more limited resources, iiNet was gauged the perfect candidate.

The involvement of major American studios in the offensive was suppressed.

It’s nice to be able to use the U.S. government as your enforcer. Funny that it’s only so eager to help out when certain people are involved.

IN MARYLAND, a tax on blogs?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Obama Attacks High Tuition. Couple this with Biden’s comments about faculty being overpaid — which don’t seem so incidental now — and this seems to be a major turning point. Higher Ed is a major Democratic constituency and a huge source of donations, so I don’t expect them to actually do a whole lot (at least before the election) but that Obama feels he has to make this sort of statement indicates which way the wind is blowing.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: What the White House Really Knew About the Stimulus. “What the memo really exposes are Obama’s many bogus claims about his economic stewardship.”

MORE ON WARREN BUFFETT: At least somebody benefited from Obama’s “no” on Keystone XL.

RAND SIMBERG ON The Left’s Flexible Attitude Toward ‘Rights.’ If they don’t like it, it’s not really a right.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Beware: Alternative Certification Is Coming.

The announcement of agreements between Burck Smith’s StraighterLine and the Education Testing Service (ETS) and the Council on Aid to Education (CAE) to provide competency test materials to students online is potentially very important, along with several other recent developments. A little economics explains why this is so.

In the first week of beginning economics courses, professors usually make this fundamental point: If the price of something rises a lot, people look for substitutes. Resources (dollars) are scarce, and individuals want to make the best use of them. They “maximize their utility” by shifting away from high-priced good or service A to lower-priced good B.

With regards to colleges, consumers typically have believed that there are no good substitutes–the only way a person can certify to potential employers that she/he is pretty bright, well educated, good at communicating, disciplined, etc., is by presenting a bachelor’s degree diploma. College graduates typically have these positive attributes more than others, so degrees serve as an important signaling device to employers, lowering the costs of learning about the traits of the applicant. Because of the lack of good substitutes, colleges face little outside competition and can raise prices more, given their quasi-monopoly status.

As college costs rise, however, people are asking: Aren’t there cheaper ways of certifying competence and skills to employers? Employers like the current system, because the huge (often over $100,000) cost of demonstrating competency is borne by the student, not by them. Employers seemingly have little incentive to look for alternative certification. That is why reformers like me cannot get employer organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to take alternative certification seriously. But if companies can find good employees with high-school diplomas who have demonstrated necessary skills and competency via some cheaper (to society) means, they might be able to hire workers more cheaply than before–paying wages that are high by high-school-graduate standards, but low relative to college-graduate norms. Employers can capture the huge savings of reduced certification costs. And students avoid huge debt, get four years more time in the labor force, and do not face the risks of not getting through college. Since millions of college grads have jobs which really do not use skills developed in college anyhow, alternative certification is more attractive than ever.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.