CASS SUNSTEIN UPDATE: Powerful Shaper of U.S. Rules Quits, With Critics in Wake. ” Cass R. Sunstein, who wielded enormous power as the White House overseer of federal regulation, came to Washington to test his theories of human behavior and economic efficiency in the laboratory of the federal government. Now he is departing with a record that left many business interests disappointed and environmental, health and consumer advocates even more unhappy.” He’s a nice guy, and a smart one, but going in I don’t think he fully appreciated the messiness of how government actually works. I’ll be interested to see how his experiences inform his subsequent scholarship.

VOTER FRAUD: ‘Boleteros’: Inside the shady world of ballot-brokers. “Deisy Cabrera’s arrest puts a spotlight on ‘boleteros,’ the often elderly campaign workers who hustle for absentee-ballot voters. . . . Cabrera was charged Wednesday with a state felony for allegedly forging an elderly woman’s signature on an absentee ballot, and with two counts of violating a Miami-Dade County ordinance banning the possession of more than two filled-out absentee ballots.”

DO TELL: Ex-Limbaugh sponsor says dropping show during Fluke controversy hurt company. “So how has dumping Limbaugh worked out for Carbonite? Not so well. Turns out alienating Rush’s fans may have been more damaging than alienating his critics.”

They chose . . poorly.

BYRON YORK: Obama: Negative Approval Ratings in 37 States, But King Of DC. “Obama’s approval rating is below 50 percent in 37 states, ranging from a 26 percent rating in Utah to a 49 percent rating in Michigan. Obama is at 50 percent or higher in just 13 states, from a 50 percent rating in Minnesota to a 63 percent rating in Hawaii. The president is most popular in Washington DC, where his job approval rating is an astonishing 83 percent. . . . States where Obama is just below the 50 percent mark are: Michigan 49 percent; Wisconsin 49 percent; Maine 47 percent; Oregon 47 percent; and Iowa, Florida, Virginia, and Pennsylvania — all key electoral states — where Obama is at 46 percent.”

Plus this: “Finally, a note on Washington DC. Some readers might attribute Obama’s rating there solely to his enduring popularity among black voters, but Washington is no longer a majority-black city. (The black population dipped below 50 percent last year.) Obama is popular with nearly everyone in the capital. Among those who work for the government and for government-related businesses — the permanent bureaucracy centered in Washington DC, northern Virginia and southern Maryland — approval of the president remains very high.”

ROGER SIMON: Clint Eastwood Comes Out of Closet, Endorses Romney.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): CNBC: Get Used to ‘New Norm’ of 6-7% US Jobless Rate. “The jobless rate in the United States will never go back to where it was before the global financial crisis and people will have to get used to a ‘new normal’ of 6-7 percent even if the economy starts revving up from where it is now, observers tell CNBC.”

L.A. TIMES: Chick-fil-A ‘Kiss in’ protest small compared to appreciation day. But it got more media coverage, I think.

Meanwhile, here’s a firsthand report from the Hollywood Chick-Fil-A. Compare this report from the same place on Wednesday.

ANOTHER OBAMA STATEMENT HITS ITS EXPIRATION DATE: “I Am Pledging To Cut The Deficit We Inherited By Half By The End Of My First Term In Office.” The Romney ads write themselves. Check out the video and graphics at the link.

MORE TESTS WE DON’T NEED ANY MORE: Professors: Komen overstating benefits of mammograms. “A national breast cancer charity is being accused of using misleading statistics to convince women to have mammograms, according to a paper published Thursday in the British Medical Journal.”

CLIMATE OF FEAR: In the era of Hope and Change, does it take courage to put a Romney sticker on your car?

EXPIRATION DATE: Reminder: Team Obama said in ’09 stimulus would have unemployment below 6% by 2012.

The report, entitled “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan,” was released on Jan. 9, 2009. It was put out by the office of the president-elect was written by economists Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein. Romer would become chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Obama. Bernstein was Vice President Biden’s chief economic advisor.

Page four of the report features a chart projecting the unemployment levels with and without the stimulus. With the stimulus, the Romer and Bernstein predicted that unemployment would never rise past 8 percent, and would peak just under that in the third quarter of 2009 before steadily declining to around 5.6 percent by today. Without the stimulus, they predicted that unemployment would peak around 9 percent in the third quarter of 2010 before declining to around 6 percent today.

The then-Democrat majority Congress passed the $819 billion stimulus bill later that month. The projection turned out to be one of the few things connected to it that was shovel-ready. The unemployment rate reached 10.1 percent in late 2009. It has declined since then but has remained above 8 percent for 41 months straight, a record.

Let’s have that graphic one more time:

Of course, there’s this caveat: “One note: the report assumed that the unemployment rate in the first quarter of 2009 would be 7.5 percent. It was in fact 8.2 percent. Economist Lawrence Lindsey later adjusted their forecast to reflect this and found that it projected unemployment to be about 6.3 percent by this time.”

Well, okay then. Obama defenders sometimes say that, well, Obama didn’t realize how bad the recession was going to be. But that hardly helps. It merely indicates the general problem with central economic planning — the planners never really know what’s going on. The fact is, he spent nearly a trillion dollars on a “stimulus” that was largely wasted (or stolen) and that didn’t deliver anything like the results he promised when selling it. Obama’s stimulus didn’t help, and Obama’s policies in general took a bad situation and made it worse.

BYRON YORK: Heeding critics, Mitt sharpens pitch for long run.

OIL? WHO NEEDS OIL? Five dozen lawmakers protest ‘untenable’ oil field regulations.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Pentagon releases report on sex scandal during Colombia trip.

HOPEY-CHANGEY: Economist Richard Duncan: Civilization May Not Survive ‘Death Spiral’.

HEH: RNC sends DNC ‘you didn’t bake this’ Obama birthday cake.

HACKING AT YALE: “Yale is notifying 71 people that their personal information was stolen from a university computer last month.”

BARACK OBAMA: Tax Hypocrite.

OUCH: Vermont man uses tractor to flatten 8 police cars.

It was probably an antislavery protest.