ANN ALTHOUSE:

“Mitt and Ann Romney’s marriage is strong because they believe they will live together in an eternal afterlife…” Writes Jodi Kantor in the NYT, citing “relatives and friends” as the source of information. It’s a whole long article about Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith.

Fascinating! But what I’d like to know is what Barack and Michelle Obama are picturing for the afterlife. NYT, can you clue me in? Because I feel like there are so many things we never found out about Obama the first time around in 2008. How about now?

Don’t be silly. Looking into Barack Obama’s church or religion is racist or something.

#OCCUPYSELFPARODY: “Eat The Rich And Smash The State.” Remember, these are the folks for whom Elizabeth Warren was claiming intellectual parentage.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Voters, Depositors Could Bring Europe Down.

An invisible bank run is a hard thing to watch; not only is it less telegenic than the old-fashioned kind, one relies on numbers from official government agencies for statistics. How much money left the banking system today? How many banks need emergency liquidity to meet the tide of withdrawals? In the old days, reporters could and did watch lines form outside the banks and watch the armored trucks arrive with cash. These days it is happening anonymously and you only know what they tell you.

They are very unlikely to tell you the truth. Officials lie like rats in times of financial panic; they do it out of a sense of duty. They will insist that a given country will never leave the euro until the moment that it does; they will say that a deposit freeze is unthinkable until they announce that they’ve done it; they will tell you a bank is rock solid until the moment they padlock its doors. This is all for your own good, of course. They don’t want you to panic — and they want to make sure that your money is trapped when they take it away or turn it from gold into straw.

Bank runs, even virtual ones, are the method by which public fear can blow up the eurozone.

Indeed.

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MORE PUBLIC-SCHOOL SEX SHENANIGANS. Remember, if this were a Catholic school or something, it would be indicative of systemic rot. But since it’s a public school it’s just a couple of bad apples, waddyagonnado?

CAMPBELL BROWN: President Obama, Stop Condescending To Women. To be fair, he’s condescending to pretty much everybody. That’s kind of his thing.

BYRON YORK: Rev. Wright urged to stay silent until after 2012.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose “God damn America” sermon set off a firestorm during the 2008 campaign, agreed not to publish an account of the episode until after President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, according to an interview Wright conducted with the author of a new book on Obama. Wright said he made the decision at the urging of a friend and mentor, the prominent University of Chicago emeritus professor Martin Marty.

In the interview, Wright told Ed Klein, author of The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House, that he keeps a cardboard box of documents and notes detailing his experiences beginning in March 2008, when the controversy over his sermons began. “It’s a painful box to look at,” Wright said.

So many things they don’t want us talking about, these days.

ON CALL: NAACP Offers Obama Political Cover On Gay Marriage. “Polls show that Blacks as a group are opposed to gay marriage. Obama needs the full, enthusiastic support of Black voters and potential voters. The NAACP’s resolution should be understood as an effort at damage control with this constituency. Anyone who finds this assessment too cynical should consider the timing of the announcement.”

EUROPE: Days Of Turmoil.

WISCONSIN: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel endorses Scott Walker in the recall election. “Even though the Journal Sentinel does not give particularly good press to our Governor, it does support him in the recall election, mainly, it seems, because recall elections are different.”

UPDATE: Walker Rising, Barrett Falling, Unions Crying.

EARTHQUAKE HITS ITALY: A Twitter roundup at Twitchy.

HEH.

EDUCATION: The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn. “The unteachable student has been told all her life that she is excellent: gifted, creative, insightful, thoughtful, able to succeed at whatever she tries, full of potential and innate ability. . . . It sounds good. The problem, as traditionalists have argued (but without much success), is that the utopian approach hasn’t worked as intended. Rather than forming cheerful, self-directed learners, the pedagogy of self-esteem has often created disaffected, passive pupils, bored precisely because they were never forced to learn.”

TO BOLDLY GO where no bond has gone before.

MARK STEYN: The Eternally Shifting Sands of Obama’s Biography.

So the lunatic theory that Barack Obama doesn’t meet the minimum eligibility requirements to be president of the United States was first advanced by Barack Obama’s official representative. Where did she get that wacky idea from? “This was nothing more than a fact-checking error by me,” says Obama’s literary agent, Miriam Goderich, a “fact” that went so un-“checked” that it stayed up on her agency’s website in the official biography of her by-then-famous client up until 2007:

“He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister.”

And then in April 2007, someone belatedly decided to “check” the 16-year-old “fact” and revised the biography, a few weeks into the now non-Kenyan’s campaign for the presidency. Fancy that!

When it comes to conspiracies, I’m an Occam’s Razor man. The more obvious explanation of the variable first line in the eternally shifting sands of Obama’s biography is that, rather than pretending to have been born in Hawaii, he’s spent much of his life pretending to have been born in Kenya.

After all, if your first book is an exploration of racial identity and has the working title “Journeys In Black And White,” being born in Hawaii doesn’t really help. It’s entirely irrelevant to the twin pillars of contemporary black grievance – American slavery and European imperialism. To 99.99 percent of people, Hawaii is a luxury vacation destination and nothing else.

Whereas Kenya puts you at the heart of what, in an otherwise notably orderly decolonization process by the British, was a bitter and violent struggle against the white man’s rule. Cool! The composite chicks dig it, and the literary agents. . . . In a post-modern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake – an elite schooling – Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure – the impoverished roots – merely add to Obama’s luster. Gatsby claimed to have gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a million bucks’ worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law, and still nobody knew him (“Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him”). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby.

The thing about Obama is, there’s no there there. It’s composite all the way down.

SPENGLER: Why Invent Mohammed?

REMEMBERING WHEN Bill Maher was interesting. Ah, those were the days, my friend.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Robert Reich to Graduates: “You’re F*cked!” “The job market you’re heading into is still bad. Fewer than half of the graduates from last year’s class have as yet found full-time jobs. Most are still looking. That’s been the pattern over the last three graduating classes.”

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COURAGE: Heroic, Courageous Gay President Steers Clear of Prop 8 in California. Hey, it passed because of black votes.

A FISH, A BARREL, A SMOKING GUN: Dana Loesch verbally smacks Tommy Christopher for conspiratorial, condescending article.

Seems like Christopher’s role has been to serve as a punching bag lately. And he fills it so well!

UPDATE: Heh: “Why is Chuck Norris afraid to look under the bed? Easy: #TeleportingDana.”

FACEBOOK: This Time Is Different?

INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM: Stacy McCain on Brett Kimberlin.