Ciao Publishers, Ciao Agents, Ciao Slavery.

GET REAL: Vladimir Putin is not a victim.

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION EDITORS PANDER TO ACADEMIC LYNCH MOB, FIRE JOURNALIST: Stacy McCain interviews Naomi Schaefer Riley at the American Spectator.

More from KC Johnson of Minding the Campus: “Writer Purged for Causing Distress.”

And from John Podhoretz last night on Twitter, linking to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “This is contemptible. Congratulations, Liz McMillen, for displaying the temperament of a toady.”

At Podhoretz’s Commentary, Jonathan S. Tobin on “Silencing Dissent About Black Studies.”

A REASON TO GO TOPLESS:  For men (ahem). The US global AIDS coordinator is recommending circumcision to reduce AIDS rates among African soldiers. “In 2006, trials in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa found foreskin removal more than halved men’s risk of HIV infection. Longer-term analysis has found the benefit to be even greater than thought, with a risk reduction of around 60 percent.”

MAURICE SENDAK, RIP: Let the wild rumpus in heaven start.

ANOTHER READER BOOK: Reader J. Gunnar Grey pitches his World War II thriller, Deal With The Devil.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD on Israel’s new government.

The new centrist coalition relegates extreme parties to its fringe, increases Netanyahu’s maneuverability on everything from Iran to the economy to the peace process, and allows him to embark on much-needed electoral reform to reduce the influence on small extremist parties. But just as crucially, the new government will also put greater internal pressure on Netanyahu to deal with the Palestinians (Kadima and Mofaz are on record in support of a more conciliatory approach).

It is a mixed picture for Obama. On the one hand, this government may be a little easier to work with on Palestinian issues; on the other, it may be politically easier for the Israelis to launch an attack against Iran.

UPDATE: Roger L. Simon admires Mead, but dissents from his conclusion: “It depends on the Palestinians, or a significant component of them, actually wanting a two-state solution. Sadly, there is little evidence of that. Less and less, in fact.”

SENATE REPUBLICANS BLOCK STUDENT LOAN BILL, AND IT’S A GOOD THING:  The Democrats are screaming that the sky will now fall, since student loan interest rates will rise from current 3.4 % to about 7 percent. Price tag was a whopping $6 billion, funded  by hiking  Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes on some folks labeled as “rich.”  But why should students be insulated from paying a market rate on their loans? Is there some reason why these particular loans should have artificially lowered rates?  Oh yeah, I forgot: It’s an election year, and the Dems need to energize the student part of their patchwork base. God forbid students should begin to feel the real effects of the Obama economy before November.  And for the record:  I’m still paying my loans back from law school, they’ve all been refinanced/consolidated, and this won’t affect me or anyone else who has had the brains to consolidate.

CLASS OF 2012:  GET OVER YOURSELF:  Bret Stephens’s WSJ op-ed offers some solid advice for this year’s college graduates:  “But if you can just manage to tone down your egos, shape up your minds, and think unfashionable thoughts, you just might be able to do something worthy with your lives. And even get a job.”

U.S. BOMB EXPERTS are trying to figure out if Al Qaeda’s upgraded and recently seized underwear bomb would have slipped through security if it had gotten that far. There’s no metal in it, so the body scanners would need to catch it. And maybe they wouldn’t.

TSA needs to spend more time looking for terrorists and less time looking for objects. A terrorist without a bomb or even tweezers is much more dangerous than an 80 year-old nun with a snow globe.

The TSA rude?  Clueless?  No way!  A Colorado teen is upset with screeners at Salt Lake City International Airport. The type one diabetic says TSA agents were abrupt, rude and were responsible for breaking her $10,000 insulin pump. A pump she has to have to survive.   I disagree though.  They don’t need to be trained.  We just need to stop the security kabuki.

CHRISTIAN ADAMS: 90 YEAR OLD D-DAY PARATROOPER AND WIFE MURDERED IN OKLAHOMA.

SOUTH SUDAN’S disastrous first year.

Don’t be ridiculous, Steve!  Mitt doesn’t SPARKLE.

Is it bad that I’m starting to lament we didn’t get President Biden in 08?  Not only do I agree with him on the gay marriage issue, but well…  The gaffe-prone vice president had been relatively on message for months. But on Sunday, he referred to the likely Republican presidential nominee as “President Romney” and to his own boss as “President Clinton.” And he inadvertently set off a frenzy on same-sex marriage, not because his position was surprising but because it made Obama’s look all the more absurd.   I think he’s misunderstood.  He’s ALWAYS been a performance artist.

AT RED STATE: OPERATION COUNTERWEIGHT COMES TO INDIANA.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN OLD MEDIA: Stacy McCain and Forbes have “Grim News in WaPoVille:”

Washington Post, it sucks to be you:

The Washington Post Co. reported its first-quarter earnings on Friday, and the news coming out of the newspaper division was mostly grim. The unit lost $22.6 million in the quarter, with revenue down 8% and revenue from print advertising specifically falling 17%.
Meanwhile, the Post just reported one of the biggest circulation drops of any major newspaper with the lucrative Sunday edition selling 5.2% fewer copies and the daily edition skidding almost 10%. Oh, and newsroom leaders are so distressed about the way the business decline is affecting them, they held a secret meeting with the paper’s president, Steve Hills — without inviting executive editor Marcus Brauchli.

Click over to Stacy’s blog for details of that “secret meeting,” and some thoughts on the future of journalism (more on the latter in a moment).

There’s equally grim news coming out of the other end of the Northeast Corridor, where New York Times journalists “fight for [their] pensions, paper be damned,” an editorial at the Washington Examiner notes, with an embedded video that’s a series of cris de coeur from veteran Timespeople, a video that Walter Russell Mead quipped watching could cause the rest of us to have “Uncontrollable gales of laughter stemming from excessive levels of schadenfreude [that] may cause spilling and staining.”

Here’s more from the Examiner:

“What am I gonna do? Am I gonna eat cat food? Am I gonna move in with my kids? Am I gonna commit suicide?”

These complaints come not from a laid-off auto worker or a victim of foreclosure, but from longtime New York Times reporter Donald McNeil. His alarming quote expresses his fears that the New York Times Co. will freeze its defined-benefit employee pension plan and make the transition to a defined-contribution system. The Newspaper Guild, the union, which represents McNeil and other Times journalists, released his complaints and others in an Internet video as a protest against the 401(k) plans used by nearly every new worker in America who has retirement benefits.

We’ll leave it to the Times, its employees and its shareholders to settle the dispute. As spectators, we find it mind-boggling that journalists from a leading national newspaper would vigorously resist a trend they have been chronicling for years. What’s good for the rest of us is evidently not good enough for toplofty Timesmen.

In the real world of the private sector, defined-benefit pension plans have been going the way of the dinosaurs for decades. The Social Security Administration reports that between 1980 and 2008, the share of private sector workers in defined-benefit pension plans fell from 38 percent to 20 percent. By some estimates it stands at just 15 percent today. In 1985, 89 of the companies in the Fortune 100 offered traditional defined benefit plans. In 2011, only 13 did so. In the same period, the number of Fortune 100 companies offering only defined-contribution plans increased from just 10 to 70.

When not haggling over retirement plans, Stacy McCain’s post concludes with a reminder to journalists to endeavor to “write for the reader:”

This seems so obvious to non-journalists that it feels stupid saying it so simply, but too many people in the news business completely lose sight of the fact that the reader is their customer, and is under no obligation to consume your product. You must try to write something that people actually want to read, and try to keep the readership in mind. Your boss is ultimately not the editor, but rather the guy who drops 50 cents in the newspaper box.

But that can be awfully hard to remember, let alone take to heart, if you’re like so many in the MSM who “loathes the public,” as the Wall Street Journal’s David Gelernter wrote, in a snapshot that perfectly sums up the insular nature of the MSM  vis-à-vis their customers in 1996, just before first Matt Drudge and then the Blogosphere broke open the formerly closed feedback loop that was old media:

Today’s elite loathes the public. Nothing personal, just a fundamental difference in world view, but the hatred is unmistakable. Occasionally it escapes in scorching geysers. Michael Lewis reports in the New Republic on the ’96 Dole presidential campaign: ‘The crowd flips the finger at the busloads of journalists and chant rude things at them as they enter each arena. The journalists, for their part, wear buttons that say ‘yeah, I’m the Media. Screw You.’ The crowd hates the reporters, the reporters hate the crowd– an even matchup, except that the reporters wield power and the crowed (in effect) wields none.

The balance of power has shifted considerably in the years since, but that underlying attitude — “Yeah, I’m the Media. Screw You” — hasn’t changed. At the base of Bill Keller’s rants about Fox News is his anger that millions of viewers enjoy the channel (especially in middle America, which another prominent Timesman publicly referred to last year as “the dance of the low-sloping foreheads”), and have written the Gray Lady off as hopelessly out of touch with their day-to-day lives. (See also, video referenced above.)

Similarly, a recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review, the house organ of what Hugh Hewitt once dubbed “The Media’s Ancien Régime,” spends its time instructing old media journalists on “the right way to cover Joe the Plumber,” a man the MSM itself empowered by spending more time in the fall of 2008 vetting than they did the winner of the presidential race.

Finally, back in 2005, I once wrote that in the wake of RatherGate, Dan Rather had morphed into his bête noire, Richard Nixon.  (Whom the Gods Destroy, They First Render Nixonian.) Today, as he makes the rounds promoting his autobiography, Rather is reduced to sounding like a stock Scooby Do villain — I would have gotten away with it, if it hadn’t been for all you meddling bloggers!

UPDATE: Michael Malone emails in a rather prescient Silicon Valley Insider column he wrote in 2005: “Newspapers Nearing Death?”

I can’t precisely place the moment when I stopped reading newspapers, but it was sometime during the dot-com boom. My family went off to Africa for a couple months one summer, cancelled our newspaper subscriptions, and when we got home never really got around to re-subscribing. Eventually, perhaps three months later, we did start again — but by then the bloom was off.

First to go was the Times. That one was easy. I didn’t write for it anymore. The kids kept me too busy on the weekend to read it. My colleagues always pointed out the interesting articles. And, most of all, because I didn’t trust the Gray Lady’s reporting anymore.

Next was the Merc. I found that the only thing I even looked at in the paper was the headlines in the business section — and I could get those stories in other places. That, and the movie listings — and when I needed those I could just drop four bits into a local newspaper rack. A few weeks ago, when the paper reprinted a column of mine in its Sunday Perspective section, I had to depend upon my 85-year-old mother to cut out the article. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even have a hard copy.

Then came the Chron. Of all of them, that was the one I noticed most. I missed the arts section, especially the old Sunday pink section, and the columnists. But after a month or so, I didn’t even notice.

That last paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, had the opportunity to break real news in early 2008, and chose to bury it instead. Try and guess why.

Awesome science: Black Hole Eats Star.  Apparently a less common event than you’d think.  Black holes have been afflicted by a reputation analogous to that of sharks. Everyone seems to thinks black holes go hunting around the Universe for things to rip apart, just like sharks supposedly go killing everything in the ocean.  Apparently the reputation isn’t deserved.  OTOH I, for one, think Black Hole Sharks Of The Galaxy would make a great science fiction b-movie.

NINE DANGEROUS THINGS YOU WERE TAUGHT IN SCHOOL.

3-WAY RACE: Romney 44%, Obama 39%, Ron Paul 13%.

WISCONSIN RECALL IRONY.  UW-Milwaukee political scientist Mordecai Lee expects 95% of Republicans voters to cross over in today’s recall primary and vote for one of the Democrats — most likely Kathleen Falk, who stands to the left of her Democratic opponent Tom Barrett, because she polls much worse against Scott Walker. But Barrett has been so far ahead of Falk in recent polls, that if Falk wins, it should be interpreted as a victory for Scott Walker, even though Falk has campaigned as an embodiment of the values of the anti-Scott Walker protests.

TALK ABOUT BURYING THE LEDE: The Americans For Prosperity Blog on “Wasteful Spending Spin vs Fact:”

Recently Obama for America Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter posted a video to Attack Watch responding to the new Americans for Prosperity ad, “Wasteful Spending.”This video is a desperate campaign tactic trying to divert and deflect from the truth: President Obama wasted billions in taxpayer dollars on “green energy” boondoggles in foreign countries.

This attempted rebuttal is really just a series of half-truths and outright lies in which Ms. Cutter equivocates and obfuscates Obama’s record. This video was doomed to fail by relying heavily on Washington Post “fact checker” Glenn Kessler, who wrote a piece that criticizes the ad, calling it “over-the-top.” The problem is, the Post offers zero substantive refutation of the facts used in “Wasteful Spending,” and was fully exposed as a pro-Obama puff piece.

That’s all well and good, but isn’t the real story here that “Attack Watch” is still online and being updated? And is there anybody who can hear those two words and not pronounce them Attttttaaaaaaaaccccck Waaaaatch after the hilarious video last fall, one of the first in a repeated series of pushbacks by the right against the Obama’s administration’s lame (and surprisingly Orwellian) attempts to use social media?

“IF WALKER WINS… you’ll never see Obama defending unions” says an American labor historian at the University of California who wants Gov. Scott Walker to lose. Interesting contrast to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s saying that a victorious Walker would be “a debilitated governor.”

AND THE WINNERS OF THE RAY NAGIN MEMORIAL MOTOR POOL AWARD ARE…

● “Hundreds of 5-year-old municipal vehicles found in Miami that were never used.”

● “A news crew from Detroit’s WXYX-TV discovered that the financially insolvent city of Detroit has wasted $4 million making monthly payments and paying mileage overages on 110 city vehicles whose leases have expired years ago.”

(Here’s a flashback to 2005, for those who’ve forgotten the Nagin motor pool.)

RELATED: “Good News: First Responders Are Now Receiving Training to Deal With Exploding Chevy Volts.”