SALENA ZITO: Romney Seizing Pennsylvania Opportunity. “The Jacksonian-Jeffersonian voters who will swing this election in key battleground states are especially plentiful in the Keystone State and are most dissatisfied with the president’s performance. . . . An interesting juxtaposition in the data shows Americans want to be optimistic (the trend line on the economy is better and people tend to think the country’s best days are ahead) but they are staring reality in the face (jobs are hard to find, children won’t do as well in the future), so they feel pessimistic.”

JENNIFER RUBIN: Obama vs. The Rule of Law.

MORE ON ELIZABETH WARREN’S CLAIM OF “MINORITY” STATUS:

My contribution to this controversy is that there seems to be some disingenuousness going on. Warren says that she could not “recall” ever listing her Native American background when applying for college or a job.

The old AALS Directory of Faculty guides are online (through academic libraries) at Hein Online. The directories starting listing minority faculty in an appendix in 1986. There’s Elizabeth Warren, listed as a professor at Texas. I spot-checked three additional directories from when she was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, including 1995-96, the year Harvard offered her a position. Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren.

So, we know one thing with almost 100% certainty: Elizabeth Warren identified herself as a minority law professor. We know something else with 90%+ certainty: (at least some) folks at Harvard were almost certainly aware that she identified as a minority law professor, though they may not have known which ethnic group she claimed to be belong to, and it may not have played any role in her hiring.

But it gets even more interesting: once Warren joined the Harvard faculty, she dropped off the list of minority law faculty. Now that’s passing strange. When the AALS directory form came around before Warren arrived at Harvard, she was proud enough of her Native American ancestry to ask that she be listed among the minority law professors. (Or, in the unlikely even that she just allowed law school administrators to fill out the forms for her without reviewing them, they were aware that she claimed such ancestry, and she didn’t object when she was listed.) Once she arrived at Harvard, however, she no longer chose to be listed as a minority law professor.

Hmmm.

It’s almost as if, once she could no longer benefit from affirmative action, she didn’t want people to realize that she might have done so.

OVERSIGHT: Energy Committee Warns EPA Official He’ll be Hauled in to Testify. “Lawmakers warned the head of the EPA’s Dallas office that he will soon be invited before a congressional committee — and warned they’ll implement all means available to ensure his appearance — to answer for a 2010 video in which he talks about ‘crucifying’ oil and gas companies.”

RETROSPECTIVE: For 22 murder victims, LA Riots leave legacy of justice eluded. “The dead for whom justice remains elusive include a 15-year-old boy shot as he stood on a corner, a Good Samaritan who tried to douse flames set by a crowd of angry looters, a hard-working immigrant who insisted on making grocery deliveries even as his neighborhood burned, a suburban man shot when he came to check on his store and John Doe No. 80, whose identity may never be known.”

PROF. JACOBSON: Er, What Race Is An Illegal Alien, Exactly?

STREET VIEW SCANDAL UPDATE: “According to the FCC report, Google’s collection of Street View data was not the unauthorized act of a rogue engineer, as Google had portrayed it, but an authorized program known to supervisors and at least seven other engineers. The original proposal contradicts Google’s claim that there was no intent to gather payload data: ‘We are logging user traffic along with sufficient data to precisely triangulate their position at a given time, along with information about what they were doing.'”