FROM HOPE TO DESPAIR: Home Depot Co-Founder: A Second Obama Term Would Bring Despair to America (Video).

IT’S NOT NEWS. DOESN’T FIT THE NARRATIVE. 50 people killed in Easter Sunday bombings in Nigeria.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Strangers In A Strange Land.

Suddenly, the Supreme Court is a suspicious organization run by unelected politicos that uses capricious judicial fiat to overturn widely popular laws. The president denigrated it in a State of the Union address and now suggests that such “unelected” jurists (as opposed to electing them?) should act responsibly and thus “must” not find a popularly enacted law unconstitutional.

I am confused: I thought we were supposed to welcome such judicial audit. Was not that the charm of the Warren Court? Did not the Obama administration go to federal court to ask justices to set aside the Defense of Marriage Act that it was entrusted to enforce — seeking judicial help not to follow a law that it chose not to seek to overturn in Congress?

Read the whole thing.

ABA PRESIDENT SMACKS OBAMA FOR HIS COMMENTS ON JUDICIAL REVIEW.

OBAMA MOCKS ROMNEY’S DICTION: “I heard a smidgeon of homophobia. . . . The alliance of Romney and Ryan is so good that I suspect the Obama campaign will toy with mockery that has a homophobic edge. Let’s make their ‘marriage’ seem unseemly. Not so blatantly that they can’t deny it. Any homophobia can be disguised within a socially acceptable distaste for the rich.”

EDITGATE UPDATE: NBC’s Bad Edit Pre-dated Today Show And Still Appears on NBC News Sites.

So the blatant, racially charged distortion of George Zimmerman’s 911 call started on NBC 6 Miami on March 19, appearing in two articles by three different writers. It was repeated on March 20 in an article attributed to one of the three writers. The articles have been updated, but the quotes remain. The mis-quote aired on the Today Show on March 22 during a live segment with reporter Lilia Luciano, and again on March 27 with reporter Ron Allen.

For NBC and MSNBC to characterize the error as a single episode caused by a producer’s time constraints in getting a video clip ready for live morning television, which just unfortunately happened to be missed by layers of editorial control, is not very convincing.

Nope. So much for all those layers of editors and fact-checkers. Kinda looks. . . reckless.

TIM CAVANAUGH: “That Obama is out of his depth just shows again that he’s everything Bill Clinton wasn’t: inflexible, intellectually lazy, and tied to a vision of America the rest of the country stopped caring about decades ago.” Ouch.

CATHY YOUNG: IS THERE REALLY A GENDER WAR?

Some argue that current reproductive rights policies unfairly disadvantage males. A woman facing an unwanted pregnancy can terminate it; a man can be stuck with years of payments. If he complains, the typical response – “you play, you pay’’ – is uncannily reminiscent of pro-lifers’ attitude toward women. This dilemma has no easy answer; but there is a striking blindness toward ways in which men’s individual freedoms are often abridged in the perceived interests of children. Even men tricked into fatherhood, or forced to support children proven by DNA tests not to be theirs, have found no legal relief.

Are such policies anti-male? Is the Obama administration targeting men when it pushes colleges to lower the burden of proof for charges of sexual assault or harassment, making it much easier to expel (mostly male) students on a woman’s word? Apart from a handful of men’s rights activists, don’t expect controversy about a “war against men.’’ Gender injustice is generally equated with injustice against women – which, in 21st-century America, is not always true.

Nope.

YOU DON’T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO SEE WHICH WAY THE WIND IS BLOWING: In case you missed it, Al Sharpton stood up Trayvon Martin supporters yesterday.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: More Instances of Selective SAT Score Submission for Rankings. “Ramapo College has been excluding about 22 percent of its new students (generally the most disadvantaged students) when reporting average SAT scores to U.S. News & World Report. As a result, the SAT average reported by Ramapo was more than 50 points higher than it should have been. New Jersey City University has also been inflating its SAT scores.”

RAND SIMBERG ON That ‘Inadvertent’ Editing at NBC.

So was it really “inadvertent”? NBC asks us to take its word for it, but given its record, it is hard to do. They refuse to provide the name of the perpetrator or his or her history so that we can judge for ourselves.

Was such a blatant and misleading editing a first offense? If so, firing seems a little harsh, but because we don’t know who it is, we don’t know.

Does the person have a history of doing stories that seem to advance a Democratic/”liberal” agenda, and a paucity of such stories otherwise? We don’t know.

Was no one else aware of the misleading edit? We’re told that the execs didn’t know, but little else, because of the lack of the transparency of the “investigation.”

Do we really even know that the person was fired? Absent an identification, no.

Don’t trust content from NBC.

THE HILL: The Obama administration is quietly diverting roughly $500 million to the IRS to help implement the president’s healthcare law. “The money is only part of the IRS’s total implementation spending, and it is being provided outside the normal appropriations process.”

MATT WELCH: When Losers Write History: Why legacy-newspaper media reporters get their own industry so wrong.

Imagine for a moment that the hurly-burly history of American retail was chronicled not by reporters and academics but by life-long employees of A&P, a largely forgotten supermarket chain that enjoyed a 75 percent market share as recently as the 1950s. How do you suppose an A&P Organization Man might portray the rise of discount super-retailer Wal-Mart, or organic foods-popularizer Whole Foods, let alone such newfangled Internet ventures as Peapod.com? Life looks a hell of a lot different from the perspective of a dinosaur slowing leaking power than it does to a fickle consumer happily gobbling up innovation wherever it shoots up.

That is largely where we find ourselves in the journalism conversation of 2012, with a dreary roll call of depressive statistics invariably from the behemoth’s point of view: newspaper job losses, ad-spending cutbacks, shuttered bureaus, plummeting stock prices, major-media bankruptcies. Never has there been more journalism produced or consumed, never has it been easier to find or create or curate news items, and yet this moment is being portrayed by self-interested insiders as a tale of decline and despair.

It is no insult to the hard work and good faith of either newspaper reporters or media-beat writers (and I’ve been both) to acknowledge that their conflict of interest in this story far exceeds that of, say, academic researchers who occasionally take corporate money, or politicians who pocket campaign donations from entities they help regulate, to name two perennial targets of newspaper editorial boards. We should not expect anything like impartial analysis from people whose very livelihoods—and those of their close friends—are directly threatened by their subject matter.

This goes a long way toward explaining a persistent media-criticism dissonance that has been puzzling observers since at least the mid-1990s.

Read the whole thing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: There Are as Many Student-Loan Debtors as College Graduates. “That’s right: as many debtors as degree holders! How can that be? First, huge numbers of those borrowing money never graduate from college. Second, many who borrow are not in baccalaureate degree programs. Three, people take forever to pay their loans back.”

FIRE ‘EM ALL AND PRIVATIZE: A TSA screener was arrested at JFK Airport for hurling a cup of hot coffee at an American Airlines pilot who told her and some colleagues to tone down a profanity- laced conversation in a terminal, sources said yesterday.

They’re a joke of an agency with way too many joke employees. Abolish the TSA and put security back in the airlines’ hands.

UPDATE: Reader John Steele writes:

The week does not go by without some report ranging from child pornography to theft and now assault. How can anyone reasonably argue that their procedures can screen out terrorists among passengers when they can’t even screen criminals in their midst. The entire thing is a gross violation of civil rights and a joke; unfortunately the joke is on us an it isn’t very funny.

Sadly, even if we did away with it Napolitano, Pistole and company would still be setting the standards and procedures so instead of being groped by some surly TSA agent we’ll be groped by some private security guard — still groped but probably politely.

But like any government activity the probability of this poorly acted theater going away is minimal. Once a government gets the opportunity to control people they don’t relinquish it lightly. And TSA has the ultimate control opportunity; first air and now rail and roads and I expect soon, sea.

Bankruptcy will solve that problem. Related: Another TSA Security Breach at Newark Airport:

Security officials at Newark Liberty International Airport are reviewing an incident in which a traveler breached a checkpoint and caused the evacuation of one of the airport’s terminals, the Port Authority said.

A 64-year-old British man walked past a distracted Transportation Security Administration agent at Terminal B Thursday.

The terminal was evacuated for an hour, and passengers had to be rescreened.

A joke.