FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF POORLY CHOSEN METAPHORS: The Volt Is A Moonshot? I Get It, It’s THAT Moonshot.

A few days ago, the director of GM’s moon program, Bob Lutz, was at it again with his favorite moon analogy. Except that this time, Lutz asks readers to remember the “45th anniversary of the Apollo 1 disaster that killed three of our hero astronauts.”

I am old enough to remember that Chaffee, White and Grissom were killed by an electrical fire. Maybe that moon analogy wasn’t so good.

Or maybe it was.

Ouch.

THE NEW YORK SUN: Ex Parte Obama.

It’s been a long time since we’ve heard a presidential demarche as outrageous as President Obama’s warning to the Supreme Court not to overturn Obamacare. The president made the remarks at a press conference with the leaders of Mexico and Canada. It was an attack on the court’s standing and even its integrity in a backhanded way that is typically Obamanian. For starters the president expressed confidence that the Court would “not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” . . .

It is outrageous enough that the president’s protest was inaccurate. What in the world is he talking about when he asserts the law was passed by “a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress”? The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act barely squeaked through the Congress. In the Senate it escaped a filibuster by but a hair. The vote was so tight in the house — 219 to 212 — that the leadership went through byzantine maneuvers to get the measure to the president’s desk. No Republicans voted for it when it came up in the House, and the drive to repeal the measure began the day after Mr. Obama signed the measure.

It is the aspersions the President cast on the Supreme Court, though, that take the cake. We speak of the libel about the court being an “unelected group of people” who might “somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.” This libel was dealt with more than two centuries ago in the newspaper column known as 78 Federalist and written by Alexander Hamilton.

Obama must be expecting to lose. Because if he wins, this kind of threat will simply allow people on the right to argue that the Supreme Court’s decision was the result of intimidation, and deserves no deference by a new Supreme Court. And how will Obama’s feminist supporters feel, given that those all-important abortion and birth-control decisions also came from an “unelected” Supreme Court?

And if I were a Republican member of Congress I’d immediately introduce a proposed Constitutional amendment to elect all future Supreme Court justices in a national vote, with no input from the President. Just for fun . . . .

SYMPATHY: Candle Light Vigil For All Rape, Assault & Murder Victims of #Occupy Movement.

TOM MAGUIRE: Trayvon Martin – Is Everything You Think You Know Just Media BS?

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: Megan McArdle asks: “How come when regular countries let people summarily execute suspected dissidents, that’s a human rights crime, but when the Palestinians do it, neither the UN nor any of the Human Rights groups can find a damn thing to say?”

UPDATE: And, ten years later: Palestinian Authority arrests another reporter over Facebook post.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Swim Shop.

JUST GOT BACK FROM A DELIGHTFUL DINNER WITH WALTER RUSSELL MEAD at the home of History Department colleague Vejas Liulevicius. Mead and I will be doing a panel on blogging at the Baker Center tomorrow.

MATT WELCH ON THE CHE GUEVARA CULT: Is There “something admirable” About Murdering People for the “greater good”? Yes, so long as you’re on the left.

Plus, from the comments: “You can’t spell douche without Che.”

AT AMAZON, warehouse deals on musical instruments.

SHOULD JESSE JACKSON AND AL SHARPTON HAVE A DUTY TO RETREAT? More Dead-End Demagoguery From The Democrats.

SELF-SCULPTING SAND? “Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool. A few seconds later, you reach into the box and pull out a full-size footstool: The sand has assembled itself into a large-scale replica of the model. That may sound like a scene from a Harry Potter novel, but it’s the vision animating a research project at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory (DRL) at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.”

THE FADING OF A FAD: The Sustainable Endowments Institute has announced that it is suspending its production of the College Sustainability Report Card.

What’s most unsustainable about colleges is their tuition levels. As far as I know, not a single Campus Sustainability Center ever addressed that issue.

DISTRICT COURT UPHOLDS Illinois’ total ban on carrying guns outside of homes, but Eugene Volokh suggests an incompatibility with Ezell.

SPACE HOMESTEADING: Proposed Law Would Encourage Off-Planet Development and Settlement.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): ‘Massive Wealth Destruction’ Is About to Hit Investors: Faber. Well, let’s hope he’s wrong, but you know, he does have a college named after him. . . .

THE DECLINE AND SLIGHT RETURN OF ROTC AT ELITE SCHOOLS: An interview with the authors of Arms and the University: Military Presence and the Civic Education of Non-Military Students. It’s not about students, but about Baby Boomer nostalgia:

While many students or even their parents may not have participated in the struggle against military presence in universities, many administrators and faculty are still around who were there, so to speak. Many people we talked to expressed strong preferences about the military on campus. One former university administrator, upon hearing about the subject of the book, said, “This is a university, not a military training ground!” To understand why opposition persists, even though there is generational change in the student body, it helps us to think about universities from an organizational and institutional perspective. Once opposition to military presence became institutionalized in a university, it is hard to change since there is often very little and slow turnover in an organization. This organizational persistence helps us understand why opposition to a reasonable degree of military presence has proven hard to dislodge even when students seem more supportive of something like an ROTC detachment.

Further support for the notion that the politicization of faculty — and especially of administration — has damaged higher education’s ability to do its purported job.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Video: Obama Campaign Disables Credit Card Verification, Accepts Donation from ‘Nidal Hasan.’ “Obama’s campaign implemented the same lack of verification in 2008, but the mainstream media never called them on it. It appears as though that episode has prompted a repeat in 2012. . . . Not only can people in foreign countries donate to the Obama campaign in violation of federal campaign law, so apparently can identity thieves who have access to stolen credit card numbers. People who do not know that their credit cards have been compromised may not notice small amounts in the $3 dollar donation range that the Obama campaign has been targeting, when such donations show up on their statements.”

NAVY: We’re Four Years Away From Having Laser Guns On Ships. “The dream of sailors, nerds and sailor-nerds everywhere is on the verge of coming true, senior Navy technologists swear. Within four years, they claim they’ll have a working prototype of a laser cannon, ready to place aboard a ship. And they’re just months away from inviting defense contractors to bid on a contract to build it for them. . . . From a technological perspective, the Navy thinks maritime laser weapons finally represent a proven, mature technology. The key point came last April, when the Navy put a test laser firing a (relatively weak) 15-kilowatt beam aboard a decommissioned destroyer. Never before had a laser cannon at sea disabled an enemy vessel. But the Martime Laser Demonstrator cut through choppy California waters, an overcast sky and salty sea air to burn through the outboard engine of a moving motorboat a mile away. You can see video of the successful demonstration above.”

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: What If Obama Ran Apple?

TOM MAGUIRE: The Self-Refuting Expert Witness The Orlando Sentinel Is Touting. “Well, if the prosecutor loses his mind and waves Mr. Owen up as an expert witness in the trial of George Zimmerman, the defense will ask him to re-read this material from his own website, then ask the judge to dismiss him. Good luck to the prosecutor. . . . As to why Mr. Owen is sticking his neck out, well, he may be civic minded. But he rolled out his new voice recognition software on March 1, so he also may welcome the publicity. I figure the media mavens that are starting to play catch-up will catch up to this by May. Is it asking to much to expect them to review his website and ask a few basic questions, such as, why does your website say this Zimmerman match can’t be done? Oh, why ask why.”

FEDERAL APPEALS COURT upholds California affirmative-action ban. “The lawsuit, filed on behalf of more than 40 black and Hispanic students, argued that minority students in some areas are unable to compete effectively for slots to the University of California system because their high school programs are insufficiently rigorous.”

MAKING HIGHER EDUCATION less like buying a house and more like getting cable. Well, that’s an improvement, but can we make it more like a Roku box?

A CONTROVERSIAL PROPOSAL: Teachers should be able to pass a reading-instruction test.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Senior citizens continue to bear burden of student loans. “New research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that Americans 60 and older still owe about $36 billion in student loans, providing a rare window into the dynamics of student debt. More than 10 percent of those loans are delinquent. As a result, consumer advocates say, it is not uncommon for Social Security checks to be garnished or for debt collectors to harass borrowers in their 80s over student loans that are decades old. That even seniors remain saddled with student loans highlights what a growing chorus of lawmakers, economists and financial experts say has become a central conflict in the nation’s higher education system: The long-touted benefits of a college degree are being diluted by rising tuition rates and the longevity of debt.”

Do tell.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: The Obama Jobs Gap Is Up To 15 Million Missing Jobs. That’s why they’d rather talk about hoodies and birth control.