TAXPAYER-FUNDED ELECTIONEERING: The Hill: HHS signs $20M PR contract to promote healthcare law.

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ANNALS OF THE ONE PERCENT: Obama Bundler Corzine Snagged $8.4 Million in Year Before MF Global Collapse.

Likely response: “But … but … Bain!”

LOOKING FOR WAR ON TERROR NEWS? Check out Fred Pruitt’s Rantburg. And hit the tipjar if you like what you see.

ILYA SOMIN DEMOLISHES Nonlegal Arguments for Upholding the Individual Mandate.

#OBAMAFAIL: GAO: Tax credit in healthcare law underperforms.

IN TELECOM, a growing worry that we’ll become more like Europe. That’s the worry in a lot of areas these days.

VERONIQUE DE RUGY: More Spending Won’t Save Europe.

JAMES TARANTO TAKES ON CENTRIST CENSORSHIP:

Inasmuch as Schoen is arguing that Obama’s actions as president are more pertinent than those before he took office in reaching a judgment about his re-election, we tend to agree. It sounds as though the proposed Ricketts ad would have been a waste of money (especially now that the New York Times has demonstrated its willingness to propagate the message free of charge).

But Schoen’s appetite for government censorship of political speech based on his disapproval of its content, and his insouciance about even articulating a coherent standard to explain his disapproval, shows why it is so important to guard our First Amendment rights vigilantly. Schoen is in no sense a political extremist, yet he is eager to stifle dissent.

Not so many free-speech Democrats around, these days.

LIST: Best books on home repair.

SUCCESS: SpaceX Launches Private Capsule on Historic Trip to Space Station.

CHANGE: The Coming Decline of the Academic Left.

WASHINGTON POST: Romney Revels In Opponent’s Bain Blunders.

UPDATE: More criticism from Democrats:

President Barack Obama took over the country in 2008, but he never took full control of the Democratic Party — a state of affairs that became painfully clear this week as the White House struggled to distinguish friends from enemies.

A series of Democrats, most prominent among them Newark Mayor Cory Booker, raised doubts about Democratic attacks on Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s former venture capital firm. And while Booker was forced into a long, slow, painful walkback of his worries, other figures — like former Rep. Harold Ford — remained unapologetic markers of the party’s independence from its president. . . .

Former Pensylvania Governor Ed Rendell said it would be unfair to compare Obama’s aides to Clinton’s operation.

“You’re comparing them to the gold standard,” Rendell told BuzzFeed. “They’ve done a good job.”

He added, however, that he hasn’t heard of officials getting Clinton-style calls from Obama at 11:30 at night to ask about local issues. That, said a former Clinton aide, is simply a product of how Obama rose to power.

“He’s not as engaged in building Democratic institutions in different states,” the consultant said. “If you think about how he came to beat Hillary and become president, he did not go through typical Democratic institutions — he ceded that to Hillary. Eventually some started to come his way. I don’t know if there’s as much of a reliance on building these operations state by state.”

And Rendell joined the chorus of criticism of Obama’s attacks on finance, whose leaders have written checks to many members of both parties.

Read the whole thing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Are We Subsidizing Student Debt Too Generously? “Why am I subsidizing student loans for Harvard kids? . . . I have no idea why. It never made sense to me even when I was at Harvard. Harvard has a huge endowment, and just hoards it. It’s not mostly for the students. As the Dean of Harvard Law School publicly said then, students are merely ‘incidental.'”

GREETINGS FROM THE GEEK CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.

#OBAMAFAIL: “It’s a big problem for the party because the Democrats’ fundraising base is shrinking.”

DRUG WAR UPDATE: Penn Jillette, on Obama Locking Up People for Doing the Same Drugs He Did: “It’s not a goddamn joke!”

OBAMACARE: The Catholic Church Goes To Court.

OBAMACARE: Hey men, you don’t need that PSA test, you know!

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Median Compensation for Public College Heads Grew 3% in 2010-11. “The median total compensation of the 199 public college presidents surveyed was $421,395, up 2.9 percent from 2009-10, the survey found, while the median base pay, $383,800, increased 1.3 percent. As in the past, E. Gordon Gee of Ohio State University was the highest-paid president, earning $1,992,221 in total compensation — 12.3 times the compensation for the average full professor at Ohio State. His base pay was $814,156, with the rest coming as a bonus and deferred compensation.”

A HUMILIATION for the New York Times op-ed page.

JIM TREACHER: Remember How Excited The Lefties Were About Elizabeth Warren? “Not that long ago, either. . . . Now Massachusetts Dems are in the unenviable position of denying they’re going to ditch their candidate.”

IMMIGRATION: Democrats’ Latino problem: Obama admin deports more immigrants than Bush.

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BLOG COMMENT OF THE DAY: “The non-socialist rich are the only species that Democrats want to see hunted to extinction.”