JUSTIN BINIK-THOMAS: Why Is The IRS Asking Tea Party Groups If They Know Me? (Bumped).

UPDATE: Reader David Block writes: “Shades of Richard Nixon’s IRS. People were right to call Barack ‘Milhous’ after all!!! Mark Levin is a prophet.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: California Sounds Retreat In War On Arithmetic.

The trouble with math, of course, is that it is so implacable. You can tell it anything you want; the numbers don’t change. If you don’t put enough money away, and it doesn’t grow as fast as you tell yourself it will grow, you won’t have enough money when the time comes to write the checks.

That is where California is today.

Despite the best efforts of public unions and government planners to deny the hard truth, in some combination, payouts will need to drop and other contributions will need to rise to keep the funds from running out of dough.

Calpers, the most important California retirement fund and one of the largest pension funds in the country, is responding to the crisis with a partial recognition of reality. For the first time in nearly a decade, it is lowering its estimates for return on investments to 7.5 percent.

So they’ve gone from wildly unrealistic to merely extremely unrealistic. Well, I suppose it’s progress.

REMEMBERING OBAMA’S WAR AGAINST WOMEN: 2008: Hey, Obama boys: Back off already! Young women are growing increasingly frustrated with the fanatical support of Barack and gleeful bashing of Hillary.

“I’ve been really bothered by what I perceive as sexism [among some male Obama supporters] and have spent hours defending [Clinton] … A lot of guys just can’t stand Hillary, and it’s the intensity of their irritation with her that disturbs me more than their devotion to Obama.”

This riveting Democratic primary campaign has provided us with its own stock characters: There are the young “Daily Show”-watching Obama-maniacs getting over their irony addiction by falling earnestly in love with the senator from Illinois. There are the pissed-off second-wave feminists, uptight and out of touch, howling as their dream of seeing a woman in the Oval Office fades. And then there are the young women caught between them. . . . I am a loud feminist and a longtime Clinton skeptic who was suddenly feeling that I needed to rationalize, apologize for, or even just stay quiet about my increasing unease with the way Clinton was being discussed. Meanwhile, I was getting e-mails from men I didn’t know well who approached me as a go-to feminist to whom they could express their hatred of Hillary and their anger at her staying in the race — an anger that seemed to build with every one of her victories. One of my closest girlfriends, an Obama voter, told me of a drink she’d had with a politically progressive man who made a series of legitimate complaints about Clinton’s policies before adding that when he hears the senator’s voice, he’s overcome by an urge to punch her in the face. . . .

I received e-mails and phone calls from women voicing various strains of frustration: They told me about the sexism they felt coming from their brothers and husbands and friends and boyfriends; some described the suspicion that their politically progressive partners were actually uncomfortable with powerful women. Others had to find ways to call me out of earshot of their Obama-loving boyfriends.

Talk of violence, fear of being overheard by their partners — classic symptoms of domestic abuse. But then, that’s the culture at the top.

OBAMA PICKS FIGHT WITH TEA PARTY. Good luck with that.

SHEILA BAIR: Goldman Should Be Barred From Returning More Capital. “Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) should be prohibited from boosting its dividend or repurchasing stock because Federal Reserve stress tests showed the investment bank is too leveraged, according to former regulator Sheila Bair.”

WAPO FACT-CHECK: Obama’s whopper about Rutherford B. Hayes and the telephone. “It’s bad enough for one president to knock another one for not being on Mt. Rushmore, but it’s particularly egregious to do so based on incorrect information.”

Now if they’d display similar skepticism toward his claims on healthcare, the economy, Afghanistan, etc. . . . Or energy.

UPDATE: Some Rutherford B. Hayes QuickMeme fun.

Heh.

MOVING TARGET: The Obama administration has shifted its legal arguments as it prepares to defend the president’s healthcare law before the Supreme Court. “The shift moves the focus of Justice’s argument from the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to the Necessary and Proper Clause, which says Congress can make laws that are necessary for carrying out its other powers. The briefs give a long history of failed efforts to expand healthcare coverage and say the new law’s purpose was to reform the overall system.”

The technical term here is “mere post-hoc rationalization.”

Related: CBO report says healthcare law could cause as many as 20M to lose coverage. “Republicans immediately pounced after the new numbers came out because they appear to violate Obama’s pledge that people who like their health plans will be able to keep them. Last year, CBO’s best estimate was that only 1 million people would lose employer-sponsored coverage.” All of Obama’s promises have an expiration date.

CHEATING: University of St. Thomas Reported Inflated Placement Data to U.S. News.

AT AMAZON, warehouse deals on pet products.

Also, today only: Up to 59% off on Stanley Kubrick collections. From Lolita to 2001 to Full Metal Jacket and more.

MICKEY KAUS: “Arguments in favor of Obamacare’s appointed, cost-cutting ‘Independent Payment Advisory Board’–like this effort from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities–would be a lot more persuasive if they gave at least one (1) concrete example of ineffective health spending the IPAB will eliminate to achieve its cost target. We’re assured the ‘board may not make recommendations to ration health care, cut benefits, increase premiums and cost sharing, or restrict eligibility’ for Medicare. Good to hear! (And we know they would never try to finesse the definition of ‘ration.’) So what would they recommend?”

Plus this: “If I were trying to repeal IPAB, I’d xerox the CBPP brief and send it to everyone in Congress. Much of it is devoted to the argument that IPAB won’t really cut much because it probably ‘will not be needed’ to achieve Obamacare’s cost-cutting goals. But if it isn’t needed . . .”

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Gas Prices Spike and American Motorists Rumble With Anger, Frustration.

IF HE WERE A REPUBLICAN, THIS WOULD BE PROOF THAT HE’S AN UNEDUCATED NINNY: RutherfordGate part of a pattern for Obama. “In recent months, he’s been citing all sorts of fabricated quotes attributed to his presidential predecessors, and then mocking their obvious inferiority to his visionary self. Here are just a few examples overlooked by the media.” I’m sure they’ll continue the overlooking.

ROGER KIMBALL: How the Liberal Mind Works, WaPo edition.

The moral: if you are a liberal think tank, advocacy is OK because you are advocating the right ideas. If you are a conservative think tank, advocacy is not OK because it is “divisive,” “partisan,” and lacks “objectivity.”

The good news is that the double standards are increasingly obvious.

ROBERT SAMUELSON: Are Regulations Killing The Economy?

LET THE MACHINE SPEAK: Hatch Brings The Troops To Utah Caucuses.

After 36 years, Hatch was facing perhaps his gravest political threat, but spent more than a year fighting back, mobilizing supporters to attend the caucuses and by early and anecdotal reports, appears to have fared well. . . .

Slightly more than half of the crowd supported Hatch — and rules required all delegates to eventually win by a majority through numerous rounds of elimination. Hatch supporters used their slight majority to methodically eliminate pro-Liljenquist candidates, as Liljenquist merely shook his head.

Liljenquist even lost the last available delegate on a 69-68 vote.

Nobody said it would be easy.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Three Out of Ten Young Adults Are Living With Their Parents.

Maybe I should have tagged this “Higher Education Bubble Update,” though: “After graduating from Brown University in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and completing a Fulbright scholarship in Brazil, Cassie Owens was left with a few dollars on her stipend and no job in sight. So, Ms. Owens returned home to her mother in Philadelphia.”

THIS SOUNDS LIKE STEALTH GUN-CONTROL TO ME: Citing risks to birds and to human health, roughly 100 environmental groups formally asked the federal Environmental Protection Agency this week to ban or at least impose limits on lead in the manufacturing of bullets and shotgun pellets for hunting or recreation.

Part of Obama’s “under the radar” approach, perhaps? If so, expect a swift and credulous response from Obama’s EPA.

UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes:

The proposed ban on lead in ammunition is a broader war on the hunting culture. There is plenty of non-toxic shotgun ammunition for water fowl already in existence whose use could be expanded – but it’s more expensive. Rifle and pistol ammunition is different of course but it’s hard to see how that, in the course of hunting, becomes a problem for the environment. If it is ranges they claim to be the issue, then the claim, and remedy most especially, are laughable.

There are studies involved no doubt and they should be examined carefully.

I’m not so sure the EPA will be anxious to take this up this year, unless the administration believes that given all the other fodder Republicans have for commercials this would simply be lost in the flurry of ads and issues aired.

Or they think he’s a one-termer.

JONATHAN WEIL: Fed’s Stress Tests Are Mostly For Show.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Bigot Chris Matthews’ War On Catholics And Mormons.

JEFFREY SINGER: The Coming Medical Ethics Crisis: How the government is putting the medical profession—and your health—at risk.

EMP PREPARATION: A Drill to Replace Crucial Transformers (Not the Hollywood Kind):

The electric grid, which keeps beer cold, houses warm, and city traffic from turning to chaos, depends on about 2,100 high-voltage transformers spread throughout the country. But engineers in the electric business and officials with the Department of Homeland Security have long been concerned that transformers are vulnerable to disruptions from extreme weather like hurricanes, as well as terrorist and computer attacks and even electrical disturbances from geomagnetic, or so-called solar, storms. One such storm, in 1989, blacked out the entire province of Quebec, and this week, a transformer fire of unknown origin blacked out parts of Boston.

And while replacing transformers is not technically difficult, it is a logistical and time-consuming nightmare that can take up to two years.

So this week the industry and the government have been carrying out an emergency drill unlike any that electrical engineers can remember, to explore how quickly the country could recover from a crippling blow to the power grid.

It’s nice to see that people are taking this seriously, even though Newt was mocked for raising it a while back. But the mockers hadn’t been paying attention. Happily, people more serious than the political press have been.

And note this discovery: “Ordinary transformers are often too big and heavy to travel by road, and they require special rail cars. But because the transformers typically last 50 years, only a few dozen are shipped each year, so even the appropriate rail cars are in short supply. Ratcheting up the degree of difficulty, many of the places where a replacement transformer might have to go are no longer served by rail.”

JOHN STOSSEL: Why Complex Societies Need Simple Laws.

EGYPTIAN LAWYERS AGAINST THE RULE OF LAW: 300 Muslim Lawyers Storm Egyptian Court, Prevent Lawyers for Christian From Entering.

SARAH PALIN: Breitbart Is Here.