RACISM IN THE AGE OF OBAMA: “Seven black teens have been arrested on suspicion that they committed a hate crime when they attacked a 15-year-old Hispanic boy while he was walking home from school in Southern California, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office. . . . During the beating, the teens made racially derogatory statements that were captured on the video, Ford said.”

Following the lead of the folks at MSNBC, I suppose I should blame the climate of hate whipped up by the President and his supporters’ racially-charged rhetoric.

THE HUFFINGTON POST’S UNPAID BLOGGERS LOSE THEIR LAWSUIT and get no sympathy from Ann Althouse: “You want to get paid for your writing? Bargain for it. And quit whining. No one wants to read things written by whiners, so you’re only digging yourselves a deeper hole.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Middle-aged borrowers piling on student debt. “Everybody believes they will get out school, get a job and pay it back. Few really take the time to do the math and decide how much they could afford to borrow.”

CANADA eliminates the penny.

PHIL BOWERMASTER: Teleportation In The News. “The guy who lands on the other side isn’t me — he just thinks he is. I’m dead.”

AT AMAZON, digital deals.

FROM THE FOLKS AT REASON, It’s the Nanny Of The Month.

HMM: California State Colleges and Universities May Screen for Sexual Orientation in Admissions Applications.

I wonder if it’ll work like in this Fedde LeGrande video? Transfer to Sector 8!

QUESTIONS ABOUT Scotusblog’s objectivity? From the comments: “As for the RNC ad, Goldstein’s comments reflect more the tendency of any small, in-bred group to protect its own. Verrilli is a certified, card-carrying member of the SCT bar — he personifies it in his background, current position and likely future career. Goldstein certainly sees himself as part of the same elite crowd. So it’s not political; it’s just a ‘let’s defend Don’ moment. Unfortunately it is likely to backfire badly with anyone not living in the same bubble.”

UPDATE: Related: Legal Elites And Strategic Behavior.

THIS WEEK IN THE FUTURE.

ON BRIAN WILSON’S RADIO SHOW, the Insta-Wife talks about negative media images of men.

ER, FASTER PLEASE? Vaccine to stop heart attacks could be here in 5 years. “Scientists have discovered that the drug stimulates the body’s immune system to produce antibodies which prevent heart disease by stopping fat building up in the arteries.” Well, stay tuned.

STEPHEN GORDON: The Medical Lab ON Your Body.

KEITH OLBERMANN’S DEPARTURE: The Day The Muzak Died. Heh.

BRITAIN’S FUEL PANIC: “Self-Inflicted Insanity.” “The ambulance had enough diesel to get to the destination but they were struggling to find fuel to allow the team to return to Yorkshire to do further work.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE? What higher education bubble?

JONATHAN ADLER: Why Did Legal Elites Underestimate the Case Against the Mandate?

Related thoughts from Peter Suderman.

JAMES TARANTO: Leonid Brezhnev lives. “The presumption that history inevitably moves in one ideological direction is reminiscent of Marx, just as the determination to defend decades-old revolutionary gains echoes the Brezhnev Doctrine.” Hey, if we have a living constitution, that means it can change to meet changed circumstances. Such as our going broke under the old living constitution.

AT AMAZON, Today only: 60% or more off on Barska flashlights.

SCIENCE: EPA Backpedals on Fracking Contamination: Texas Water-Pollution Suit Dropped; Third Recent Setback on Drilling for Agency. “The Environmental Protection Agency has dropped its claim that an energy company contaminated drinking water in Texas, the third time in recent months that the agency has backtracked on high-profile local allegations linking natural-gas drilling and water pollution.”

THE TRAYVON MARTIN CASE: “A very unattractive descent into tribalism.” Hope and change!

WAPO QUESTIONS: Did the White House Pressure Washington Post to Change Fact Checker?

On March 27, Josh Hicks of the Washington Post’s Fact Checker gave White House regulation czar Cass Sunstein one “Pinocchio” for his defense of the Obama administration’s regulatory record. However, the same article, a day earlier, was far more critical of the administration, giving Sunstein a total of three Pinocchios.

Below (as text, and in Word document at the end of the article) is a comparison of the first (3 Pinocchio) and the second (1 Pinocchio) versions of the Fact Checker article, with extensive changes indicated.

But wait, there’s more: Washington Post and the Rush Limbaugh Memory Hole. Now they don’t mention that Limbaugh lost “fewer than five” advertisers.

The Post — and other media folks — need to realize that this sort of change doesn’t go unnoticed. But I wonder if this means that the White House’s pressure on Kaplan, the cash-cow that keeps the Post afloat, is bearing fruit. More on that here. (Bumped).

#OBAMAFAIL: Obama Campus Fervor Losing to Apathy as Students Sour on 2012. They should be sour, as they’ve done worse under Obama than almost any other group. “Obama came in with so many big ideas and big promises and this mantra of hope and change and something new. . . . I was more excited in 2008, but I was also very much naive about how politics work.”

TIMOTHY DALRYMPLE: Want To End Rabid Partisanship? Reform American Academia. “When you look at the three values that conservatives (according to Haidt) honor but liberals do not — loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity — these are precisely the values that are flouted in the precincts of American academe. The result is a more impoverished moral imagination amongst students, a stubborn inability to understand the beliefs and the motives of conservatives, and thus the imputation of nefarious motives to those irrational conservatives who do not see things in the ways the illuminati do. If you don’t believe that this has contributed to the partisanship we’ve observed in recent years — particularly the exceedingly nasty way in which liberals in general have responded to the Tea Party movement, to social conservatives and generally to anyone who refers too much to moral sanctity and loyalty to American traditions and institutions, then I think you’re wearing exactly the kind of blinders Haidt talks about.”