CHANGE: iPhone Users Sue AT&T For Letting Thieves Re-Activate Their Stolen Devices.

GINGRICH TO THE NRA: It’s time to make the right to bear arms a universal human right at the UN.

Well, he’s only ten years behind yours truly, but it’s still a good idea.

HE’S BAAACK! Cheney on Obama: “He has been an unmitigated disaster to the country.”

Apparently the lefty death-tweets had no impact: “Former Vice President Dick Cheney walked onstage without any assistance and spoke for an hour and 15 minutes without seeming to tire in his first public engagement since he underwent a heart transplant three weeks ago.”

JOY MCCANN: The RMS Titanic at 100: What Does It Mean?

MORE ON PRIVATE PROPERTY IN OUTER SPACE. I disagree with the thesis that because Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty requires nations to supervise their nationals, it somehow bans private property. And I think that the later drafting of the failed Moon Treaty — which did explicitly ban private property — was an admission that the Outer Space Treaty didn’t. Furthermore, there’s precedent for the U.S. recognizing property rights in areas where it doesn’t, and can’t, claim sovereignty.

Here’s a piece that I did for Popular Mechanics a while back on this topic. And here’s an article on space property rights that Rob Merges and I wrote for the NYU Environmental Law Journal.

AN A.P. REPORT ON THE STATE OF THE TEA PARTY: Dead it’s not — the tea party lives on in grassroots activists determined to see change. “Dead the tea party is not. Changed? Perhaps. But still very much alive, in the back room of a Jim’s Restaurant in San Antonio and many other places across the land. . . . Perhaps nowhere is the persistent power of the tea party more at work today than at the local and state level, where many grassroots activists have decided to shift the focus of their efforts. More tea party-backed candidates are running for county and state Republican leadership positions, with the aim of having a bigger say in the party’s agenda and direction.”

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

WELL, MY EARS WERE BURNING LAST NIGHT, but I thought it was just the niacin.

SO, ASIDE FROM THAT BUSINESS WITH THE HOOKERS AND THE SECRET SERVICE, HOW’S THE SUMMIT GOING? Fausta Wertz has some news.

RASMUSSEN: Romney 48, Obama 43.

UPDATE: Reader Mark Shelden writes: “I wonder if Hilary Rosen finally got Romney’s evangelical numbers to move?”

GIVEN HOW THAT’S WORKED OUT, I’M NOT SURE THIS IS SOMETHING TO BRAG ABOUT: U.S. Leads In Clean Energy Investments.

IOWAHAWK: Apparently, I’m supposed to be more outraged by what Mitt Romney does with his money than by what Barack Obama does with mine.

LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL: Obama Owns The GSA Scandals.

The boys and girls at the re-elect Obama campaign headquarters are naturally sensitive about the expenditure. It was clearly inappropriate and absolutely the kind of thing they did not want to deal with in an election year. Team Obama quickly tried to spin the situation to blame the prior administration by saying that under President Bush GSA junkets increased percentage-wise more than under Obama’s watchful eye. Only problem with that spin is it wasn’t true, at least in the context Team Obama tried to make it fit.

Someone dug up the real numbers and it shows GSA junket spending went down under Bush, then up. Here are the numbers for the GSA junkets by year. Make of them what you will, but you’d be hard pressed to blame the 2010 par-tay in Las Vegas on Bush. Obama owns this, lock, stock and barrel. It was his appointee who made it happen. She planned it, mind-reader, clowns and all. And it should raise valid questions about whether Team Obama can be trusted with more dollars to spend.

More at the link.

ANN ALTHOUSE: What it looked like today at the Tax Day rally at the Wisconsin Capitol.

I like the “Breitbart Is Here” posters.

CHANGE: Space Shuttle Contractor Fires Hundreds of Employees.

Jay Beason was a senior aerospace technician at United Space Alliance until the company laid him off today. Beason began working with the space shuttles in 1988 and said he will miss his work family of 23 years.

“I spent countless hours and days and weekends with these guys. We loved what we did so much,” said Beason, who, in his most recent job at United Space Alliance, helped test and configure the space shuttles’ crew modules for astronauts.

“Turning in my badges was the hardest part. It felt like someone taking a piece of you away, a piece of your personality, a piece of your being,” he said. “I knew it was coming since February, but there’s no way to prepare for something like that. I got very emotional.”

Space shuttle workers like Beason numbered close to 9,000 just a few years ago. Big rounds of shuttle retirement-related layoffs, however, have whittled the workforce down every four to five months since April 2009.

The good news is that some of these people are going to space-related startups.

SOME BACK-AND-FORTH BETWEEN EINER ELHAUGE AND RANDY BARNETT on the Individual Mandate. And note this bit from Barnett in particular: “Offering the militia duty as a precedent for the individual insurance mandate is revealing. For it highlights the fundamental question posed by this case: does every citizen of the United States serve at the pleasure of the Congress of the United States in the same manner as a draftee serves in the military? Put another way, does the Congress have the same power over individual citizens as the Captain or Commanding Officer of a militia company? As Justice Kennedy observed during oral argument, this would be to fundamentally alter the relation of the citizen to the federal government.”

I make a related point in my just-published Second Amendment Penumbras piece in the Southern California Law Review.

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WHY NOT? A LOT OF THE PEOPLE PAYING CHILD SUPPORT HAVE TO PASS A DRUG TEST AT THEIR JOBS: Should Iowa child support recipients prove they don’t do drugs?

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Woman Seeking Man Who Knocked Her Up In The Bathroom At Megadeth/Motorhead Show On Craigslist.

AT AMAZON, Top Deals in HDTV and Video.

DEATH TO MICROSOFT WORD. I still prefer WordPerfect, but I’ve liked OpenOffice.

HERE YOU SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE SYSTEM: Sen. Orrin Hatch “doggone offended” by “radical libertarians,” threatens to punch them (us) in the mouth.

TEDx LECTURE: Michele Pistone on the future of higher education.

CHANGE: Judges Brown and Sentelle Urge the Supreme Court to End Rational Basis Review of Economic Regulations. “In a concurring opinion today in Hettinga v. United States, Judge Janice Rogers Brown (joined by Judge Sentelle) contends that the Supreme Court should overturn its rational basis caselaw in the economic area and return to a Lochner-era regime of judicial scrutiny for economic regulations.” Well, there is no constitutional basis for treating “economic rights” differently from, say, “privacy rights.” Rights are rights. Right?

PREGNANCY SUCCESS RATES FOR OLDER WOMEN are not improving.

#GREENFAIL: NADA: 7 million car buyers to be pushed out of the market by fuel economy rules.