#OCCUPYFAIL: Zombie’s latest photo essay is on the March of the Idiots at OccupyLA May Day. Fight capitalism — by buying plenty of Rubbermaid garbage cans to use as shields!

OKAY, NOW THIS IS EXCITING!:  Gumby and Pokey gummies!  Am I the only one who finds this incredibly exciting? What’s not to love?

NEW SILICON GRAFFITI VIDEO: WEIMAR? BECAUSE WE REICH YOU:

Our latest Silicon Graffiti video was inspired by one of the key themes in the late Allan Bloom’s 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom wrote that by the middle of the 20^th century, American universities had essentially become enclaves of German philosophy. As a result, “the new American life-style has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family,” according to Bloom. Last year in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman famously asked, ‘Can Greeks Become Germans?’

Why not? If we could, any nation can. This video looks at how and why that happened, and the results — or at least scratches the surface of those concepts, inasmuch as any six minute video can.

Click here to watch.

WILBUR THE PIG CAN STAY:  Awwwww….. This is sweet.  A Texas trial judge ruled yesterday that a Vienamese pot bellied pig named Wilbur is a “pet,” not “livestock,” and thus is allowed under homeowners’ association rules. There is justice!

JOURNALIST FIRED FOR CRITICIZING “BLACK STUDIES” DEPARTMENTS:  Here we go again with the political correctness that is crippling intelligent discourse in this country. Nick Gillespie over at Reason reports that a Chronicle of Higher Education blogger, Naomi Schaefer Riley, has been fired for offense of penning a post titled, “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.” Keying off a recent Chronicle story touting Ph.D. candidates in black studies, Schaefer Riley notes in part:

If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them….

I’m sure she must be wrong about this– why, there must be hundreds and hundreds of dissertations from such students that espouse a wide range of viewpoints, with conservative viewpoints as prevalent as in society at large. Yeah, right– if you believe that, I have a bridge for sale I’d like to show you.

SOONER OR LATER, your schtick will wear thin, in half-empty halls.

OBAMA LOSES WEST VIRGINIA DELEGATES TO PRISON INMATE — Unexpectedly! “An obscure federal prison inmate gave President Obama an unexpected run for his money in the West Virginia Democratic Primary Tuesday, highlighting the deep dislike for the president in the Appalachian heartland.”

UPDATE: “Did Joe Manchin (D-WV) vote for prison inmate Keith Judd in today’s primary? He refuses to say if he voted for Obama.”

Answering the vital questions — if Big Foot exists, can you hunt it in Tennessee?  The truth is out there, but can you shoot it?

WHAT MOURDOCK’S DEFEAT OF LUGAR MEANS FOR A PRESIDENT ROMNEY: The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein wastes no time reading the tea leaves for what Indiana Secretary of State Richard Mourdock’s resounding defeat of Sen. Richard Lugar could portend for the Mitt Romney presidency that may be in the offing: “With the Republican presidential nomination going to the ideologically malleable Mitt Romney, supporters of limited government have recognized that their best hope for advancing the conservative agenda rests on the ability to elect as many principled conservatives to Congress as possible. That is, lawmakers who will be willing to fight for smaller government even if it means standing up to a president of their own party. The more victories the Tea Party racks up, the greater the chance that Romney will be forced to govern as a limited government conservative if elected, even if his natural inclination is to migrate to the left.” Or put another way – Are you listening, Mitch?

IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY GOT YOUR HANDS ON SEN. JIM INHOFE’S “The Greatest Hoax,” here’s a graph from the chapter entitled “The build-up to alarmism” that ought to send you right over to Amazon: “Such tactics had certainly worked to their advantage before. Take, for example, a quote from The New York Times reporting fears of an approaching ice age: ‘Geologists think the world may be frozen up again.’ That sentence appeared more than 100 years ago in the February 24, 1895 edition of The New York Times. Then, a front-page article in the October 7, 1912, New York Times, just a few months after the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, declared that a prominent professor ‘warns us of an encroaching ice age.’ The very same day, The Los Angeles Times ran an article warning that the ‘human race will have to fight for its existence against cold.’ An August 10, 1923, Washington Post article declared ‘Ice age coming here.'”

Inhofe goes on the same vein in the succeeding graphs, explaining how things changed by the 1930s when the dire MSM prophecies reverted to predictions of eminent global warming, but you will just have to get the book to read the rest of the story.

MOURDOCK VICTORY=TEA PARTY VICTORY:  There’s little doubt that tea party support propelled Richard Mourdock  to a 20 percentage point victory (60-40) over 30-year incumbent Republican Senator Richard Lugar in the Indiana Republican primary today.   As reported by CBS News, “His message was amplified by the Tea Party-aligned FreedomWorks, which held ‘activist training’ sessions and made phone calls on Mourdock’s behalf, and the super PAC Club for Growth, which spent more than $1.4 million on the race. (Lugar’s campaign, which had spent $6.7 million on the race as of April, did significantly outspend Mourdock’s, which had spent $2 million as of April.)”  It also demonstrates that money does not always = victory.  Money may talk, but the people, as individuals, speak louder. And right now, politically speaking, the Tea Party seems to be a bullhorn, amplifying deep and abiding concerns of the American electorate.

CIA UNRAVELED BOMB PLOT FROM WITHIN: “The latest al-Qaeda bomb plot targeting U.S. aircraft was unraveled from inside the terrorist group by operatives — including a double agent — working on behalf of the CIA and its counterparts in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, said U.S. and Middle Eastern officials.”

AP: NORTH CAROLINA VOTERS APPROVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT defining marriage as union between a man and woman. From Breaking News on Twitter; more details here.

THE NIGHT THEY DROVE DICK LUGAR DOWN:

Even in defeat, Lugar — attacking Mourdock’s “partisan mindset” — sounds as if he believes that Senate seat belongs to him.

Tonight he was reminded that it doesn’t. The accolades rolling in from Kerry and President Obama (whose press shop released a statement on Lugar’s “retirement) are an example of why Republicans voted against him. The quote of the night belongs to Hoosier conservative activist Greg Fettig: “The message to the establishment is, ‘You’re our servants. We’re the masters. Do what you’re supposed to do, adhere to the Constitution or we’ll fire you.'”

RELATED: “The more victories the Tea Party racks up, the greater the chance that Romney will be forced to govern as a limited government conservative if elected, even if his natural inclination is to migrate to the left.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, F.A. HAYEK!

NO SPRINGTIME FOR CAIRO: 61 percent of Egyptians choose Saudi Arabia as a model for religion and politics while only 17 percent would like to emulate Turkey.

MOURDOCK WINS. “With more than 20 percent of precincts reporting, Mourdock was winning 61 percent of the vote.”

THE AUDACITY OF CHUTZPAH: Obama: I’m the Real Small-Government President, Not Reagan.

THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS: “Generic Iconoclasm vs. Some Sensible Things You Were Taught in School:” Eugene Volokh responds to the Forbes’ “Nine Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School” article we linked to earlier today.

(H/T, headline suggestion, Joy McCann.)

CELL PHONE TRACKING:  We all know our cell phones can be used to track our whereabouts. But did you know that cell phone companies routinely turn over such data to law enforcement without a warrant (charging a pretty penny to do so)?  Does this violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures? The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided this summer, in U.S. v. Jones, that attaching a GPS to a car constitutes a “search” for purposes of the Fourth Amendment.

SPEAKING OF THE SUBSTANCE OF STYLE: Donald Rumsfeld’s image cheerfully selling peanuts in England; Time magazine hardest hit.