HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: Don’t Let the Bedbugs (or Lice) Bite.

REPLACE MILITARY RETIREMENT WITH 401K PLANS?

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Ethics committee recusals latest saga in bungled Waters investigation.

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: “These polls are self-selected, of course, but I’ve noticed that online polls usually go this way. At the very least, this means that pro-gun folks are a lot better organized online than antigun folks (something that has been noted many places in the past), and that alone is an interesting datum. The other interesting datum is the way these online polls tend to disappear without a trace when they turn out differently than their sponsors hope.”

PROF. JACOBSON: Pro-Walker signature verification effort needs your help this weekend.

THREATS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE are okay when they’re from women, right? A reader emails: “Something like this by itself doesn’t bother me, but the double standard does. I can imagine the uproar if a male candidate, especially a GOP, made a crack like this about kicking a woman.”

If you don’t like Martha McSally’s threats against Rick Santorum’s genitals, she’s got a primary opponent.

CITIZENS SHOOT DOWN PRIVATE SURVEILLANCE DRONE.

HOW TO MANAGE independent contractors.

PHOTO REPORT: Tea Party and OWS Protest Side-By-Side Against Obama in San Francisco. “The unthinkable finally happened last night in San Francisco: the Tea Party shared a protest with the Occupiers, both groups angry with the same person.”

Meanwhile, look what’s planned for next month.

UPDATE: More from San Francisco.

BILL QUICK: Prediction: Mitt Romney Will Not Be the GOP Nominee This Year, And Barack Obama Will Not Be Re-Elected.

THANKS TO EVERYONE who’s been shopping via the Amazon links on this page or the searchbox in the right sidebar. By doing so you help support this blog at no cost to yourself. It’s much appreciated!

THREE YEARS AGO TODAY: Protesting The Stimulus Bill in Denver, as the Tea Party movement is born.

THE COSTS OF LOUSY POLICY — SOME PERSPECTIVE: Senate Passes Payroll Tax Extension, Gas Price Increase Has Already Offset Benefits.

CHANGE: Obama Pushes for Cheaper Pennies and Nickels. “Time Magazine reports that hidden deep inside in the White House’s $3.8 trillion, 2,000-page budget that was sent to Congress this week is a proposal to make pennies and nickels cheaper to produce. Why? Because it currently costs the federal government 2.4 cents to make a penny and 11.2 cents for every nickel. If passed, the budget would allow the Treasury Department to ‘change the composition of coins to more cost-effective materials’ resulting in changes that could save more than $100 million a year.”

Various prepper types have been hoarding nickels for a while in anticipation of this change.

YOU CAN SELL YOUR OLD ELECTRONICS to Amazon.com. They even pay for shipping.

WHAT’S IT LIKE to work at Media Matters?

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS (CONT’D): “It’s understandable that you’d like a little more formal scheduling to your casual sex, but remember that the guy reads X-rays and MRIs, not minds.”

BRYAN PRESTON: Was the Killing of ICE Agent Jaime Zapata Linked to Fast and Furious?

MEGAN MCARDLE: Heartland Memo Looking Faker By The Minute.

SHOCKER: Government regulation leads to drug shortage, again. “To prevent hoarding of materials and their potential for theft and illicit use, the Drug Enforcement Agency sets quotas for the chemical precursors to drugs like Adderall. The DEA projects the need for amphetamine salts, then produces and distributes the materials to pharmaceutical companies so that they can produce their drugs. But with the number of prescriptions for Adderall jumping 13 percent in the past year, pharmaceutical companies claim that the quotas are no longer sufficient for supplying Americans with their Adderall. The DEA contends that their quotas do, in fact, meet demands, and that any shortages arise from pharmaceutical companies selectively producing only certain, typically name-brand and more expensive versions of ADHD medications.”

BLU-RAY DEAL OF THE WEEK: Looney Tunes Platinum Collection: Volume One for $34.99.

Also, The Simpsons, Seasons 1-14 at up to 72% off.

AFTERBURNER WITH BILL WHITTLE: Han Shot First!

KEN ANDERSON TAKES MY WSJ COLUMN AS A JUMPING OFF PLACE, and makes a much more important point:

Strange as one might find it, I would put risk aversion as the primary behavior distinguishing today’s elites – in the college placement process, the university, the migration of top tier students to Wall Street jobs where they make good money but risk OPM, the assortative mating market that is quite possibly (as I remarked tongue in cheek at Valentine’s ) the raison d’être of the physical elite university, the intense reward of strategic behavior that is aimed less at maximizing gains than minimizing possible losses … today’s elites are well schooled in strategic behavior, but that strategic behavior is mostly about avoiding any error, and to the extent that our elites take risks, it is only with other people’s futures. . . .

All of this is very difficult for our elites to take up reflectively, for obvious reasons – conflicts of class interest, as well as in difficulty in confronting one’s own risk aversion as a social pathology, given how much success it has brought you. But, even more importantly, the master intellectual method that currently predominates in elite training and formation, economics, is remarkably ill-equipped even to see the issue, because its assumptions make it very difficult to see the “social” as an irreducible analytic category, rather than simply congeries of individuals. Until there is a recovery of social theory – and the conflict tradition in social theory in particular – and a greater willingness to see the discipline of economics within a centuries’ long trajectory of intellectual history, we will not have the tools by which to analyze the New Class in America.

Read the whole thing.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “He Stopped ‘Sexting’ Me!”

SAN FRANCISCO: Obama Holds Nob Hill Fundraiser… Massive Tea Party Breaks Out. Pics at the link.

Much more here.