THE SHEIK WITH 15 KIDS IS NOT A DESIRABLE NEIGHBOR… when the previous occupants were the doll collection of a recluse who reclused herself elsewhere.

THE CHARTS THAT SHOULD HAVE DESTROYED #OCCUPY WALL STREET.

RELATED: Thomas Sowell on Occupy’s potentially corrosive long-term effects: “The Crumbling Of Our Moral Infrastructure Can Be Deadly.”

MORE: Tim Blair rounds up “Faces of Innocence.”

ELIZABETH WARREN SKIPS HARVARD POWWOW. Didn’t she want to make friends?

HOW MAD MEN LANDED THE BEATLES: ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE (AND $250,000): I loved the use of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” one of the Beatles’ most innovative recordings under the montage at the conclusion of Sunday’s episode of Mad Men. The New York Times notes, “As with most transactions that involve the Beatles, that usage did not come cheap:”

According to two people briefed on the deal, who were not authorized to speak about it, Lionsgate, the studio that produces “Mad Men,” paid about $250,000 for the recording and publishing rights to the song. That is an appropriately high price, several music and advertising executives say, since many major pop songs can be licensed for less than $100,000.

Mr. Weiner declined to discuss the licensing costs, but said: “Whatever people think, this is not about money. It never is. They are concerned about their legacy and their artistic impact.”

Covers of Beatles songs turn up in various media, but the band’s own recordings are rarely heard on television or in films. The surviving Beatles and their heirs are known to be very picky licensors, turning down almost every request.

Aside from songs that have been played in the occasional commercial or the Beatles cartoon series that was shown on ABC in the 1960s, the use of “Tomorrow Never Knows” on “Mad Men” is likely one of the only times that a Beatles track has been used in a TV show, music and advertising executives say.

Other than a verse and the chorus of “All You Need is Love” being played near the beginning of the climactic episode of Patrick McGoohan’s groundbreaking 1967 TV series, The Prisoner, which apparently the otherwise pop culture-obsessed Times seems to have forgotten.

WHY EVEN THE NRA IS BLITZING SEN. RICHARD LUGAR:

What is interesting is that some large single-issue groups have decided to oppose Lugar. Club for Growth, a politically conservative group focused on taxation and economic issues, has been airing ads in Indiana saying, “Lugar voted for each and every Obama Supreme Court Justice…. Indiana conservatives deserve better than Obama’s favorite Republican.”

Those votes also angered the NRA into rallying its 100,000 Indiana members to vote against Lugar.

A few decades ago Lugar had an “A” rating from the NRA. He now has an “F.” The fact that the NRA is not bashful about attacking an “establishment” Republican in a primary breaks a lot of popular misconceptions about the NRA and says something profound about the current state of American politics.

NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris Cox told me, “We haven’t engaged in many primary elections but I have to tell you, this decision was easy. Richard Mourdock is a strong supporter of the Second Amendment and Lugar is not. Lugar got his ‘F’ rating from the NRA the old fashioned way, he earned it.”

To put this in perspective Cox said, “Senator Harry Reid actually has a better record of protecting the Second Amendment than Senator Lugar.”

Ouch.

SHOULD ROMNEY HAVE CHIDED THE WOMAN WHO SAID “TREASON”? I say absolutely not. This pushback from Obama supporters is an effort to neuter Romney. (Wouldn’t it be nice if he’d behave more like McCain?) And the word “treason” has a venerable place in the American free-speech tradition. John Marshall used it to express how wrong it is not to follow the Constitution.

LICENSING GONE WILD:  Should you need the government’s permission to work?  A new report released today by the Institute for Justice reveals a mind-boggling amount of over-regulation for an array of moderate-income occupations.  In today’s economy, these unnecessary burdens on workers and small businesses need to be rethought.  Watch the video here. 

MALPRACTICE AT LAW SCHOOLS:  Jennifer Rubin, legal eagle over at the Washington Post, nails it in this blog post, commenting on Peter Berkowitz’s observation in the WSJ that colleges and grad schools don’t teach the Federalist Papers.  Rubin observes:

But the idea that the Constitution has objective meaning that can be ascertained, in part by studying works like “The Federalist,” is still resisted by the vast majority of elite law school faculty.  . . . Students study precedent and view newer decisions as either departures from or natural consequences of earlier cases. But assess that a decision, and maybe a great number before that, are just plain wrong because they misunderstood an aspect of the Framers’ intent or the structure of the Constitution? Perish the thought.

As one of those law school faculty members, I can vouch for the utter correctness of Rubin’s observation. Living constitutionalism has no patience whatsoever for what a bunch of old, dead (white) guys thought about the meaning of the Constitution they wrote and ratified.  It’s so late 1700s (*yawn*).

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Are the overweight the next government target? and Would more marriages occur if women picked up the check more often?

GOODBYE TO MAURICE SENDAK. He was 83.

“I refuse to lie to children… I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”

PHIL HARTMAN’S SNL AUDITION TAPE.

YOU CAN’T FIGHT IN HERE, GENTLEMEN! THIS IS A UNITY RALLY!

STILL WAITING FOR THAT NEW CIVILITY TO ARRIVE, PART DEUX: Or, Two Papers In One!

Thomas Edsall, who blogs for the New York Times, opens a post today with a violent metaphor:

“Right now, before everyone gets to know him, is the time for Obama to push Romney face down in the dirt,” a key Democratic operative working outside the campaign told me last week. “You can’t let Romney go before the voters looking clean.”

What Obama lacks right now, however, is a bludgeon–a super PAC loaded with cash to hammer home negative advertising. Super PACs, as you may have heard, have emerged as the hit men of 2012.

Remember when the New York Times was complaining about violent uncivil rhetoric? Oh, but that was only on the right.

Meanwhile, here’s Bill Keller, until recently, the lead editor of the Times:

My gripe against Fox is not that it is conservative. The channel’s pulpit-pounding pundits, with the exception of the avuncular Mike Huckabee, are too shrill for my taste, but they are not masquerading as impartial newsmen. Nor am I indignant that Fox News is the cultural home of the Republican Party and a nonstop Obama roast. Partisan journalism, while not my thing, has a long tradition. [Which the Times occasionally comes clean about participating in, at least in its all-too-rare more honest moments — Ed] Though I do wonder if the folks at Fox appreciate that this genre is more European than American.

My complaint is that Fox pretends very hard to be something it is not, and in the process contributes to the corrosive cynicism that has polarized our public discourse.

Good thing the Times has bludgeoned off all of its own corrosive cynicism.

JOIN THE HELLO KITTY MILE HIGH CLUB!:  I kid you not.  EVA Air (Taiwan) now has Hello Kitty-clad jets.  “Heralding the start of a happy journey, Hello Kitty’s friends and family members join her on the aircraft in a cheerful representation of friendship and love,” says EVA.

STILL WAITING FOR THAT NEW CIVILITY TO ARRIVE — ANY DAY NOW: Jon Stewart Loses Delta Airlines As Sponsor Due To ‘Vagina Manger’ Sketch.

CALIFORNIA: “THE NINTH CIRCLE OF BUSINESS HELL,” as voted by Chief Executive magazine.

TRENT LOTT AND RICHARD LUGAR ARE “LOST”:  My jaw dropped open on this one.  Apparently former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott has sold out and abandoned his own principles.  He is now lobbying for Senate ratification of the LOST (Law of the Sea Treaty), which he vehemently opposed during his time in the Senate.  Pay close attention to this one, folks:  LOST is a progressive dream, representing an significant potential loss of U.S. sovereignty if ratified.  It is nothing more than a U.N. wealth (and power) redistribution program in sheep’s clothing.  Perhaps this is one reason why Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar is expected to lose in today’s Republican primary there:  He shockingly supports LOST.

WAR ON WOMEN, MY ARSE:  Is it not abundantly clear that the Democrats are the ones who seem to view women as unidimensional, helpless beings who need to be taken care of by big government? If ever there was a “war on women,” my friends, it is the Democrats who are waging it.  Besides thinking all women are like the composite, dependent “Julia,” Democrats in Congress now insist anything short of support for the Senate version of  VAWA (the Violence Against Women Act) is a surefire sign of  misogyny.  The fact that VAWA is an unnecessary, massive federal spending program (in a time of historic deficits) that displaces and strong-arms States is the  real “woman” behind the curtain.

LAWFARE COMES TO GITMO:  Excellent editorial in the WSJ today about the lawfare tactics of the 9/11 defense lawyers and their terrorist clients. It’s all just another opportunity to disparage and undermine the U.S. and use the legal system to do it.  Think about it folks:  If a military tribunal can become such a spectacle, can you imagine what it would be like in a civilian courtroom, as  President Obama, Eric Holder & Co. had wanted?  Geez.

OH, PLEASE: The Syrian government says it’s counting ballots.

PART II OF MY INTERVIEW WITH JONAH GOLDBERG on the Tyranny of Cliches is now online; click here to listen, and for a transcript.

(If you missed Part I yesterday, it’s online here.)

SAVING BRAIN CELLS:  The BBC reports that UK researchers have just published a study showing an ability to shut off the buildup of proteins that lead to brain cell damage. Professor of Molecular Neurobiology at King’s College London, Roger Morris, said it was a “breakthrough in understanding what kills neurons.” He added: “There are good reasons for believing this response, identified with prion disease, applies also to Alzheimer’s and other neuro-degenerative diseases.”

BYRON YORK: IN NEW BIOGRAPHY, OBAMA ASKS: AM I AN AMERICAN? Read the whole thing.

OBAMA’S NOT-SO-HOT DATE WITH WALL STREET:

[N]egotiations over the implementation of the new Dodd-Frank financial regulations had made large Wall Street institutions, chiefly banks, wary of open war with the White House. “Most of them are scared stiff of the president,” a top Romney bundler on Wall Street told me recently. “Including the ones on our side.”

But by the beginning of the year, it had also become obvious to many on Wall Street that Obama’s campaign was going to take a populist turn. Some bankers believed that the administration’s strategy was to talk tough in public and play damage control in private, and they were sick of playing along.

One day in late October, Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, slipped into the Regency Hotel in New York and walked up to a second-floor meeting room reserved by his aides. More than 20 of Obama’s top donors and fund-raisers, many of them from the financial industry, sat in leather chairs around a granite conference table.
Messina told them he had a problem: New York City and its suburbs, Obama’s top source of money in 2008, were behind quota. He needed their help bringing the financial community back on board.

For the next hour, the donors relayed to Messina what their friends had been saying. They felt unfairly demonized for being wealthy. They felt scapegoated for the recession. It was a few weeks into the Occupy Wall Street movement, with mass protests against the 1 percent springing up all around the country, and they blamed the president and his party for the public’s nasty mood. The administration, some suggested, had created a hostile environment for job creators.

Messina politely pushed back. It’s not the president’s fault that Americans are still upset with Wall Street, he told them, and given the public’s mood, the administration’s rhetoric had been notably restrained.

One of the guests raised his hand; he knew how to solve the problem. The president had won plaudits for his speech on race during the last campaign, the guest noted. It was a soaring address that acknowledged white resentment and urged national unity. What if Obama gave a similarly healing speech about class and inequality? What if he urged an end to attacks on the rich?

As Orrin Judd writes, that’s from the New York Times, not the Onion. (Though admittedly sometimes it’s hard to tell the two apart.)

But hey, what could go wrong with such a speech? Other than America’s class warrior-in-chief might use soothing, diplomatic language that suggests getting opponents’ faces and punching back twice as hard? Or these earlier examples of the president’s pro-business rhetoric:

Here’s Barack Obama on the campaign trail, in February of 2008:

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

There’s this quote from an attorney who deposed Chrysler’s president in May of 2009:

“It became clear to us that Chrysler does not see the wisdom of terminating 25 percent of its dealers… It really wasn’t Chrysler’s decision. They are under enormous pressure from the President’s automotive task force.”

“My administration,” the president told bank CEOs in April of 2009, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

Obama as quoted by the New York Times in March of 2009 on AIG bonuses:

“I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry. I’m angry,” Mr. Obama said, his voice reaching a peak seven days after learning of the bonuses given to employees of the American International Group. “What I want to do, though, is channel our anger in a constructive way.”

Obama during the BP oil spill:

“I was down there a month ago, before most of these talkin’ heads were even paying attention to the gulf. A month ago…I was meeting with fishermen down there, standin’ in the rain talking about what a potential crisis this could be. and I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminare, we talk to these folks because they potentially…have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”

Obama in April of 2010, in the middle of a speech on Wall Street “reform” blurted out, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

In June of 2008, Jim Geraghty spotted this telling passage in a book by David Mendell titled Obama: From Promise to Power:

“[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day,” said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. “The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions… that was scary to him.”

That’s the pro-business president you want giving a “healing speech about class and inequality,” and urging “an end to attacks on the rich.”

Today at the Washington Post, former GWB speechwriter Michael Gerson notes that “The brand of the Obama reelection campaign, so far, is ruthlessness:”

Obama’s agenda, strategy and rhetoric are now solidly blue — perhaps for sound political reasons. But Obama’s talent for inspiration was the single most interesting thing about him as a politician. Without that aspiration, what is left of his appeal? This is the reason his Ohio speech seemed so boring, particularly in comparison to his speeches four years ago. There was little that couldn’t be said by any liberal politician, at any time. Obama has lost more than a campaign talking point; he has lost one of the main reasons for his rise.

What principle or purpose unites Obama’s initial campaign with his current reelection effort? There is little obvious continuity — apart from one, unchanging commitment. The cause that has outlasted hope and change is Obama himself.

There have always been two parts of Obama’s political persona, both of which were essential to his rapid advancement. There is the Hyde Park Obama, lecturing on constitutional law, quoting Reinhold Niebuhr and transcending old political divisions. There is also the South Side Obama, who rose in Chicago politics by doing what it takes.

This is not unusual. All politicians believe that their tenacity and competitiveness are servants to their idealism. But as the Hyde Park Obama fades, the South Side Obama becomes less appealing.

All of the atmospheric elements of politics — unity, bipartisanship and common purpose — are significantly worse than four years ago. This is not all Obama’s fault. But he is choosing — in a campaign so nasty, so early — to make it worse. At some point, ruthlessness just leaves ruins.

To paraphrase Peter Arnett, Obama apparently believes it’s necessary to destroy the country in order to save it.

RELATED: Charles Krauthammer on the “Divider-in-Chief.”

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● “All we’re doing is going into the basket and saying, ‘Damn, what did they do in ’32, what did they do in ’34, what did they do in ’36,’ and we’re pulling them out, dusting them off, giving them a paint job, correcting the fenders a bit, and we’re using them,” then-Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) said in May of 2008, months before the financial collapse that fall.  “To get us through the horrendous problems we may have over the next several years, we’ve got to make these old programs work, and we’ve got to be as inventive as hell.”

● “Paul Krugman: ‘Now Is The Time For The Government To Spend More.'”

— Real Clear Politics, Friday, May 4th, 2012.

● “Obama administration advises new French president: For sake of world economy, don’t raise taxes and increase spending.”

— Doug Powers, at Michelle Malkin.com, today.

UPDATE: An Insta-reader emails:

Hey Ed, that line “PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS” just might be Obama’s best campaign slogan!

Don’t give them any more good ideas!

Heh.™