ROMNEY LEADS OBAMA in first Gallup national daily tracking poll.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Taking the Fifth Over Four-Buck Shrimp. “The GSA’s inspector general tells Congress his probe is extending to bribery and kickbacks after the director of the lavish Vegas party refuses to testify.”

AUGMENTED REALITY GOES from science fiction to future fact.

THIS MUST BE MORE OF THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” STUFF WE WERE PROMISED: Barack Obama makes Falklands gaffe by calling Malvinas the Maldives. “President Obama erred during a speech at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, when attempting to call the disputed archipelago by its Spanish name. Instead of saying Malvinas, however, Mr Obama referred to the islands as the Maldives, a group of 26 atolls off that lie off the South coast of India.”

It would have been an error to call them the Malvinas anyway, since the Argentines might have interpreted that as support, but this is just sad.

UPDATE: Reader DRJ emails:

It is sad. I think this also tells us Obama supports the Argentines, or at least doesn’t support the British. Otherwise he would have called it the Falkland Islands — as the British call it — or the Falklands Islands (Malvinas) — as the UN calls it: http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/gacol3225.doc.htm.

It also tells us Obama doesn’t do his homework well enough to even get place names correct. The sad part to me is this happened on a trip when he knew or should have known this would come up, and he probably planned on talking about it.

Sigh.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes:

If we had a press corps that wasn’t a collection of puerile sycophants this would be called a story. It would lead at the very least to an immediate follow up with the President, his spokesman, or the Secretary of State or her spokesman: Does the US government now recognize the Argentine claim to the Falklands (Malvinas) as superior to the UK’s claim?

Or, has it reached the point that they now apply the Biden Standard to Obama?

Heh.

PUTTING THE INTERNET in your couch cushions.

ZOMBIE: TEA PARTY RALLIES FOR ROMNEY IN SAN FRANCISCO:

If you thought that big political rally in San Francisco on Saturday must have have been a “Romney for President” event, then you are forgiven — because it sure looked that way.

But it actually was Tea Partiers from around the Bay Area who gathered on the Embarcadero for the biggest Tea Party of the 2012 election season so far. (That’s right — they’re ba-a-a-a-a-ack, demanding fiscal responsibility and smaller government, and not letting the mainstream media’s lies silence the debate.)

And although early in the campaign Mitt Romney was not at first the Tea Party favorite, they’re now rallying to his side, if Saturday’s event was any indication.

Don’t miss Zombie’s extensive photo coverage.

THE DOWNSIDE OF COHABITING BEFORE MARRIAGE?

In a nationwide survey conducted in 2001 by the National Marriage Project, then at Rutgers and now at the University of Virginia, nearly half of 20-somethings agreed with the statement, “You would only marry someone if he or she agreed to live together with you first, so that you could find out whether you really get along.” About two-thirds said they believed that moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce.

But that belief is contradicted by experience. Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages — and more likely to divorce — than couples who do not. These negative outcomes are called the cohabitation effect.

But note that things are changing. Helen and I cohabited before marriage, and both of us had done so with others previously. Personally, I think it was helpful but then that’s me, refusing to accept settled science — I guess they’ll call me a “cohabitation effect denier” now. . . .

THE FANTASY LIVES of working women.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Negotiate Severance.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Defensive Gun Uses Save the U.S. One Trillion Dollars Per Year. And you can’t argue with science. If you do, you’re a denier or something.

CANCER MEDICINE: Stuck In The Past.

AT AMAZON, 50% and more off on select cookware.

SARAH HOYT: Science Fiction was never about predicting the future. The clue to this is that writers were not in carnival fairs, and didn’t say “cross my palm with silver.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Job Creation In A Post-Blue World.

There are several problems with an approach that envisions steady long term growth in the numbers of people dependent on government services and transfer programs to keep them afloat, but the crucial problem for the redistribute-to-perserve approach may be practical, not theoretical or moral.

Increasingly, it looks to me as if large chunks of the upper middle class are about to get whacked. Many of the learned professions are going to see their incomes cut and the private sector is going to seek much greater productivity improvements by replacing expensive US-based executives with cheaper foreign ones — and even cheaper computer technology. Lawyers, accountants, business managers and executives, university professors and administrators, architects, designers, upper level civil servants, NGO managers: this means you.

What’s happening is that computers and software are reaching the point where they can effectively displace more and more routine skilled labor — just as for the last forty years we’ve seen automation reducing the need for routine human labor in factories. At the same time the cost structure of the learned professions is so high that current patterns are increasingly unsustainable.

Yep.

BAD OPTICS: So how’s the Secret Service scandal affecting Obama’s messaging? Well, if you search “Cartagena Hookers” on Google Images, you get this:

IS YOUR UNEMPLOYMENT CHART upside-down?

BEHAVIORAL INFLUENCES: Oxytocin, Vasopressin Genetic Variants Influence Niceness.

KATIE PAVLICH ON FAST AND FURIOUS: Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal.

AN UPDATE ON THE MV-22 Osprey. “A fatal crash of an Osprey in Morocco this week means more bad press for military aviation. But look at the record: Despite its controversial reputation, the Osprey is actually the safest Marine Corps rotorcraft in combat.”

INSIDE THE SOVIETS’ SECRET NUCLEAR SUBMARINE LAIR: “The local guide explained how the facility was split into two clear sections on either side of the huge submarine channel that ran through the center, one side used for the operational running of the base and the other for arming the nuclear warheads. Then she dropped a bombshell of her own. She had worked on the operational side of the base for five years with level-two security clearance — just one step below the highest possible — yet in all her time at the facility she had never known the nuclear side existed. She was only made aware of it when she began guiding tours here years later.”

Jim Bennett, who sent the link, comments: “I remember when anybody who speculated about the existence of these kinds of facilities was dismissed as a ‘Cold War paranoid’.”

FEMINIST ORIGINS of “stand your ground” doctrine. “I’m impressed how many of the cases that I have found so far involve women defending themselves from abusive intimate partners (and sometimes the reverse, as in State v. Glowacki (Minn. 2001))–and being charged because they didn’t leave their own homes rather than use deadly force.”

WISCONSIN UPDATE: Madison Tea Party battleground more divided, entrenched than ever.

Plus, some cool pics.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Bringing Home A Porn Star.

LOOKING CLOSER AT PLUGIN/HYBRID MARKET HYPE: “If you look at the per model data, you see that Hybrids that do not come from Toyota move like molasses. Every second hybrid sold in America is a Prius, and the Prius delivers most of the growth of the hybrid segment. From March 2011 to March 12, sales of the Prius singlehandedly increased more in total units than those of all other 33 hybirds taken together. . . . Another interesting point: Clean diesels outsold plug-ins by nearly a factor three. 11,642 clean diesels were sold in March, most of them Volkswagens. Unhyped, Volkswagen sold more than twice as many diesel Jettas than Chevrolet sold Volts in March.”

ARE YOU PREPARED for a solar-storm disaster?