CNN: Will The Last Viewer Please Turn Out The Lights?

They should be reading InstaPundit.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): U.S. recovery weakest of any in the world since 1970.

HOPEY-CHANGEY: Amazing Live Prison People.

IF YOU MISSED IT, I posted my review of the FitDesk yesterday. Also a reader review of the InMotion mini-elliptical.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Recession Is So Bad Even Harvard Has to Innovate.

The economy is so bad that even Harvard is having to cut costs these days. The Wall Street Journal reports that, after the recession lowered the university’s endowment by nearly $5 billion, it has been putting a number of projects on hold to save cash.

At first, the cuts were skin-deep ones, limited to postponing construction projects and laying off non-faculty staff. Now the cuts are nearing the bone, including aid programs and even Harvard’s impressive library system. . . .

This is a constructive step. If Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and other prestigious universities take the lead in reforming wasteful academic practices of all kinds, it will make it easier for the rest of the nation’s universities, where budget pressures are often even greater, to follow suit, helping put U.S. higher education on a more sustainable footing across the board.

Adaptability is America’s key strength and in this tumultuous century our ability to innovate in the face of change is a bigger advantage than ever. It’s good to see that Harvard hasn’t forgotten what this is about.

Maybe they’ve been reading up.

POWERLESS: Huge Blackout Fuels Doubts About India’s Economic Ambitions. “It also destroyed any lingering hope that the nation’s entrepreneurial spirit and vibrant private sector could somehow deliver a significantly brighter future without a dramatic improvement in the way the country is governed. . . . Along with a lack of investment in infrastructure, the crisis also had roots in many of India’s familiar failings: the populist tone of much of its politics, rampant corruption and poor management in its government and public sector, weak law enforcement, and a maze of regulations that restrict many industries.”

Bad government is expensive. But bad governors don’t care, because they’re getting theirs.

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Bloomy’s Bottle Boner: What’s Mike Bloomberg’s Problem With Bottle-Feeding Moms?

AT AMAZON, Deals on Cellphones and Accessories.

FANTASY VS. REALITY: Obama Touts GM as Success While Market Share, Stock Price Decline. It was a success. It bought a lot of votes for November.

REMEMBER WHEN HE PROMISED TO RAISE A BILLION DOLLARS? Obama Supporters Barraged With Pleas for Cash. “Each plea for money from President Obama and his allies has become more urgent and desperate than the last.” Another promise that hit its expiration date, I guess.

Related: Obama now issuing instructional videos on how to send him money. “Key quote from a guy who broke his promise four years ago to accept public financing so that he could assemble the most lucrative campaign in American history: ‘We don’t get some of the massive checks that the other side does.’ That tearing sound you hear is the sound of your heart breaking.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Gore Vidal, 1925-2012.

HOLMAN JENKINS: Is Obama Beating Himself?

Mr. Obama himself chose to lash his re-election bid to his tax hike for the rich. His tax hike isn’t valuable to him because of the revenue it would raise (which isn’t much). It isn’t valuable to him because it somehow fits into his green-eyeshade management of the budget (neither he nor his party in Congress have shown much interest in managing the fisc).

His tax hike is only valuable to him because it nominates a villain for the campaign season—the greedy, undeserving, unpatriotic rich. It’s valuable because it affords a rhetorical escape route when the subject of unsustainable spending comes up. He can talk about making the rich pay their “fair share,” not about the chasm that would persist between spending and revenues, with or without his score-settling tax hike.

Hostility to the rich is a free-floating theme, one the Krugmanites tie themselves in knots trying to reconcile with their own policy agenda. After all, the Keynesian prescription for today’s ills certainly isn’t higher taxes. Just the opposite: It’s bigger deficits in pursuit of stimulus.

Team Obama can also have no illusion about the purpose of its campaign strategy. It doesn’t kid itself that its attacks on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital will cause voters to flock to Obama. If anything, Mr. Obama knows his tactics cost him donor and voter enthusiasm on his own side.

The goal is to drive up Romney negatives. The payoff the campaign hopes for is that voters who would never vote for Mr. Obama will prefer to stay home rather than vote for that rich so-and-so Romney. The White House strategy is a “shrink-the-electorate” strategy. Team Obama will play the Mormon card at some point too. Count on it.

Oh, I do.

THE HILL: Republicans: Obama administration hiding big job losses from sequester.

Republicans accused the Obama administration Tuesday of intimidating defense contractors and seeking to hide job losses from pending cuts to the Pentagon’s budget in order to help the president’s reelection campaign.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other Republicans pointed to guidance issued Monday by the Department of Labor that said it would be “inappropriate” for defense firms to issue layoff notices to employees before the election due to the pending cuts.

“The president doesn’t want people reading about pink slips in the weeks before his election, so the White House is telling people to keep the effects of these cuts secret — ‘Don’t tell anybody,’ he says, ‘keep it a secret’ — until, of course, after the election,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Tuesday.

I say, repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts!

UPDATE: Reader Joe Inscore writes:

I’ve been reading with interest your posts on repealing the Hollywood tax cuts, and frankly, you’ve hit a nerve with me. Hollywood has turned into a big cash cow for the Democratic Party, and is now the largest, or second largest, financier of national Democratic elections. With zero or close to zero funds going to Republicans, and I can’t see how the Republicans can continue to overlook this, I’m all for repealing the tax breaks for Hollywood, but I’m also for ala carte programing. The big media conglomerates using cable and satellite to broadcast force the consumer to support networks like CNN, MSNBC, E, Comedy Central, VH-1, and a host of others that wouldn’t be viable if they had to stand on their own and rely on advertising and traditional sources of revenue. Along with cleaning up the election process, ala carte programing would go a long way toward breaking up the Democrat stranglehold on the broadcast media. And lead to lower prices for consumers regardless of what the CEOs of these companies proclaim.

I’m all for unbundling.

A MITT ROMNEY OPED: Culture Does Matter.

JOSH BLACKMAN: Is Self-Service Education Entirely A Bad Thing?

Well, at Yale Law, a lot of my learning was self-service, really, and the faculty encouraged that among Yale students as a sign that it was a top-end place. (Also, it got them off the hook). So why not other places?

SCOUTING: ED DRISCOLL INTERVIEWS MICHAEL S. MALONE about his new book, Four Percent: The Story of Uncommon Youth in a Century of American Life.

And Malone also has a column in the Wall Street Journal on the Eagle Scouts’ 100th birthday today.

UPDATE: Link to Malone’s WSJ column fixed.

I BELIEVE THE PROBLEMS GO HIGHER THAN THESE GUYS: Report Faults ATF Officials for Fast and Furious Debacle.

CHARLIE SPIERING: Ted Cruz’s stunning 13 point victory in Texas. “Last January, Ted Cruz only registered 3 percent of support from Republicans in a PPP Texas primary poll for the United States Senate race. But last night the Tea Party candidate beat his opponent Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, by 13 points. With 100 percent of the precincts reporting, Cruz won a stunning 56.8 percent of the vote with Dewhurst only getting 43.2 percent.”

Related: Tea Party Pulls Upset In Texas Primary Race.

But they keep telling us the Tea Party is dead.

UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes: “The polls did not predict this beforehand and this was a much smaller sample the polling companies were working with. People should keep this in mind when reading polls about all the races this year; in particular, the presidential race.”

Meanwhile, Will Collier emails:

Ted Cruz wasn’t the only Tea Party victory yesterday. The entire political establishment of Georgia (including the Republican governor and legislative leadership, plus the Democratic mayor of Atlanta and his machine), just got its collective ass royally kicked by the Tea Party. “TSPLOST,” a sales tax hike that would have funded a multi-billion dollar slush fund for transit boondoggles and taxpayer-funded development bootstrapping was supported by $10 million in relentless advertising. Tea Party groups spent all of $15,000 in paid opposition.

Result: 69-31, against. And that was in the Atlanta metro region.

Story here. The Tea Party is not dead.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Obama, The Subprime President. “All this undercuts a market of customers who have saved money, built wealth and acquired the means to repay. It flips the meaning of ‘success’ and creates an upside-down economy built not on value, but on dictated results that in the end are unsustainable.”

OBAMA’S BRITAIN GAFFE: Nile Gardiner: Churchill bust debacle: ‘amateurish’ Obama White House remains firmly in denial over snub to Britain.

Related: White House to Krauthammer: Hey, sorry for calling you a liar about that Churchill bust when you were totally right. “Next up: An apology for the stimulus?” It would be nice . . . .

FCC: Verizon Can’t Charge Extra For Tethering.

SOON THEY’LL BE BEHIND PJTV: CNN’s Audience Continues To Plummet.

Hey, if they just read InstaPundit . . . .

JEREMY LOTT: Self-Plagiarism and Self-Pleasure.

Or, to use a less vulgar metaphor, self-plagiarism is like self-stealing — a logical fallacy. You see, it takes two to plagiarize: one to come up with the words in the first place; the other to steal those words and pass them off, without attribution, as his own.

If you create words in one context and then put them to a different purpose there might, conceivably, be copyright infringement involved. Or the double-dipping might offend an editor and cost you future income.

Yet copyright infringement and double dipping are not plagiarism. Any pretense that they are the same amounts to defining plagiarism down, and you can quote me on that.

Yes, Peter Morgan and I have discussed this in The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society, a book that is, alas, always timely.

NORTH KOREAN LIFTER: I DIDN’T LIFT THAT: “I am very happy and give thanks to our Great Leader for giving me the strength to lift this weight. I believe Kim Jong Il gave me the record and all my achievements. It is all because of him.” He’d fit right in on the Obama campaign team.

OUCH: Calling BS on Reid’s Bain tax claims. “Harry Reid is either a liar or a lousy critical thinker.”

Like Nancy Pelosi, if you were to cast Harry Reid as the villain in an Ayn Rand movie, people would think you were being unrealistically heavy-handed.

No word on the truth or falsity of those Harry Reid pederasty rumors, though.