DISCUSSION: What’s the best science fiction for people serving in the military?

BRANDON LARSON: My Case For Mars.

K.C. JOHNSON: Patrick Witt and Yale’s Disastrous Failure.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Worried India Shifts Defense Focus To China.

A LAW SCHOOL love story.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: Inspector General: IRS Fails to Ensure That Defendants Convicted of Tax Crimes Actually Pay Taxes Owed.

HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: Bedbug Coverup Alleged.

AT AMAZON, Top Deals in Patio & Garden.

LIST: Essential family survival kit for under $300. Not sure I agree with all of these choices, but you gotta love the Slim Jim 100-pack.

HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: Senate Republicans Question Obama’s Plan to Tie Federal Aid to Tuition. “Senate Democrats, not surprisingly, were generally supportive of the president’s proposals, praising his efforts to incentivize colleges and states to bring costs under control.”

FRANK J. FLEMING LAMENTS the Democrats’ rotten primary choices.

CHANGE: Small Business Hiring Flat In January.

UPDATE: But unemployment report falls.

JOHN HINDERAKER ON Eric Holder’s Performance. Emphasis on the “performance.” Plus this: “Executive privilege is like the filibuster: whether it is an outrageous practice or a pillar of our Constitution depends entirely on which party is making use of it. At Commentary, Seth Mandel notes that this is one more in a long series of instances where the Obama administration has acknowledged that Bush and Cheney were right all along. Still, as he points out, you wouldn’t want to hold your breath waiting for Jon Stewart to denounce the Obama administration’s assertions of executive privilege. . . . Eric Holder personifies the thin-skinned arrogance of the Obama administration. For someone who has spent his entire adult life in Washington, his expectations seem weirdly naive.”

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Number Of U.S. Expatriates Continues To Soar.

HOW CONVENIENT, THEN, THAT IT SOMEHOW BLEW UP: Iranian base that exploded was working on missile to reach the US.

TOM MAGUIRE ON REGULATING SUGAR LIKE ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO.

BOLD PREDICTIONS: Within fifty years Coca Cola and the NFL will be the fodder of campfire stories meant to scare excitable pre-teens. It can’t happen? Sixty years ago Frank and Dean were the Kings of Cool, smoking cigarettes live on national television; now they would get busted and the President of the United States is heckled in his own home for being a smoker.

If high school football were invented today, any school board listening to the injury rate and equipment expense would laugh out loud. It’s days are numbered.

And Coke? Sales will be regulated as cigarettes are today, and sales to minors won’t be legal. And someone somewhere will be charged with child abuse for giving a kid a Coke. Really.

Who dares to contradict this?

UPDATE: Sarah Hoyt does! “I dare contradict it. In the darkest days of the cold war, Heinlein predicted that we’d hang the commissars from their own guts from lampposts. He seems to have missed slightly. We just won the cold war. I predict in fifty years we’ll have won the cultural cold war and we’ll laugh at the idea of government restricting sugar or salt (and possibly alcohol and cigarettes, too). I’m safe predicting this, because command economies don’t do well and if we don’t win and soon, I doubt there will be enough organized civilization left to call me on it. Win-win.”

INVESTIGATING VOTER FRAUD:

Two elections supervisors are taking action after an NBC2 investigation uncovers flawed record keeping and human error allowing people who are not citizens of the United States to vote.

No one knows how widespread this problem is, because county election supervisors have no way to track non-citizens who live here.

So NBC2 did something election officials never thought to do, and found them on our own.

“I vote every year,” Hinako Dennett told NBC2.

The Cape Coral resident is not a US citizen, yet she’s registered to vote.

NBC2 found Dennett after reviewing her jury excusal form. She told the Clerk of Court she couldn’t serve as a juror because she wasn’t a U.S. citizen.

We found her name, and nearly a hundred others like her, in the database of Florida registered voters.

Read the whole thing.

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Holder Should Walk The Plank on “Fast and Furious.”

EUGENE VOLOKH: District Court Judge in Hutaree Case Rejects Government’s Conspiracy Theory Expert.

QUESTIONS: If The Economy Is Improving. . .

If the economy is getting better, then why did new home sales in the United States hit a brand new all-time record low during 2011?

If the economy is getting better, then why are there 6 million less jobs in America today than there were before the recession started?

If the economy is getting better, then why is the average duration of unemployment in this country close to an all-time record high?

If the economy is getting better, then why has the number of homeless female veterans more than doubled?

If the economy is getting better, then why has the number of Americans on food stamps increased by 3 million since this time last year and by more than 14 million since Barack Obama entered the White House?

If the economy is getting better, then why has the number of children living in poverty in America risen for four years in a row?

If the economy is getting better, then why is the percentage of Americans living in “extreme poverty” at an all-time high?

Lots more of these at the link. You know, if we had a Republican President, I’ll bet the press would be asking these questions every day.

THEY DON’T CALL IT THE STUPID PARTY FOR NOTHING: Tom Blumer: State GOP Establishments Attack Their Base. This is why Tea Party activists are well-advised to take over their own state committees.

BYRON YORK: Team Obama Shocked To Learn Romney Wants To Win.

Late Thursday night, as the political world was obsessing over fallout from Mitt Romney’s “not concerned about the very poor” remarks, the Obama campaign was scandalized by something else Romney said in the wake of victory in Florida. What distressed the president’s re-election team was Romney’s vow to defeat Barack Obama in November.

In a grammatically uneven fundraising email, Obama national finance director Rufus Gifford wrote, “Mitt Romney said just hours after winning the Florida GOP win [sic] primary this week that: ‘We must not forget what this election is really about: defeating Barack Obama.'”

“Mitt’s words weren’t an accident,” Gifford continued. “They’re what he really believes.”

Well, yes, they are. Republicans, Romney included, do in fact want to defeat Obama. In each stump appearance, Romney discusses his desire to restructure economic policy to help create jobs, to reduce federal spending, and to strengthen U.S. foreign policy. To accomplish those goals, Romney stresses, he must first defeat Obama.

Giffords is upset that the Romney campaign has created a “One-Term Fund” to raise money for the effort to defeat the president. The fund’s name comes from Obama’s statement three years ago about his administration’s effort to improve the economy: “If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition,” Obama said. Romney often mentions that on the stump.

How ungentlemanly of him to bring that up.

FASTER, PLEASE: Cystic Fibrosis Gene Correction Drug Approved by the FDA.

NATHAN HARDEN: “I wonder how many college freshmen fully appreciate how dramatic a difference their choice of a major will make in their economic futures? Maybe colleges should publish this information and distribute it to incoming students. I wonder, if that were the case, what would happen to the enrollment stats for all those gender- and race-studies departments around the country?”