JIM TREACHER: Obama ’08: Yes We Can! Obama ’12: No You Didn’t. Heh.

TOM SMITH ON “YOU DIDN’T BUILD THAT!” What Is Seen And What Is Not Seen.

But here’s the question to ask — how many more successful businesses, inventions, products, services, toys, tools, insights, and just plain fun would there be, if government did not in the first place make it so ridiculously difficult to start a business and keep it going? I don’t see our young president taking credit on behalf of the state for all the failures it helped cause, all the ideas that never got off the ground because the regulatory hurdles were so high, or all the established companies that never had to face competition because they had managed to get their rents written into law. This is part of the seen and not seen insight of Bastiat. What you see is a successful business when it manages to survive, and then people run up, the same people who taxed and regulated it nearly to death, and say I helped! I helped! What you don’t see are all the businesses that perished or never got started because of the heavy hand of the state. And it’s a very heavy hand.

Indeed.

ROGER SIMON: Time To Curtail Violence In Film.

TALK OF MAKING PRIVATE STUDENT LOANS dischargeable in bankruptcy. I’d favor that, with a 5- or 10-year waiting period and a requirement that colleges be on the hook for part of the loss.

Woudn’t be surprised to hear Obama push something like this between now and the election. Republicans might want to get out in front of him on this. Too many people are too deep in student loan debt, but too many schools have taken borrowed money to pay for insubstantial degrees.

BUT REMEMBER, THE BIG MEDIA FOLKS ARE “RESPONSIBLE,” NOT LIKE THOSE GRUBBY BLOGGERS: Brian Ross, media malpractice consequences: Falsely accused Tea Party member receiving threats.

Related thoughts from Ben Garrett: “ABC News was quick to link the accused shooter — James Holmes, 24, a med school dropout — to the Tea Party. Reporter Brian Ross rushed to the camera with his information after seeing a Jim Holmes of Aurora registered on Colorado’s tea party website, saying, ‘Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes, but it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.’ Translation: We have no clue whether this guy is our guy but, hell, he’s got the same name and he’s from the same town, so let’s just say that he is. Linking mass murderers to the tea party is becoming old hat for the mainstream media, which also attempted to link Tucson shooter Jared Loughner to the tea party . . . except it turned out that Loughner wasn’t linked in any way to the tea party and was, in fact, liberal in his political ideologies. Not surprisingly, the media turned out to be wrong again; ABC News has since said that Ross’s report was incorrect . . . which, of course, underscores the inherent dangers of doing exactly what ABC News did.”

POLITIFACT SCORES IT “TRUE:” Over the last six months, President Barack Obama has golfed 10 times and held 106 fundraisers, but his jobs council has never met.

NEPTUNE’S ORPHANS: A Sarah Hoyt novella, set in the world of Darkship Thieves. $2.99 on Kindle.

EIGHT SCIENCE FICTION GADGETS that are becoming reality.

SOMEWHERE, BUSH AND CHENEY ARE SMILING: Investors Abandon Western Europe, Head to… Iraq? “The euro mess has driven several large fund managers away from places like Spain, Italy and France and into the debt markets of the likes of Serbia, Hungary and even Iraq. To some investors, the vulnerability of these small and politically tenuous states is nothing compared to the quicksands of the Eurozone.”

Ah, that old Chirac photo never fails to amuse.

MARY KATHARINE HAM: Details about Colorado shooter emerge as ABC apologizes for false Tea Party reporting.

SIZE OF KEY BRAIN REGION predicts degree of altruism.

RICK MORAN: Why is Brian Ross Still Working for ABC News? “ABC News reporter Brian Ross committed what used to be a fatal mistake to a journalist’s career: He blurted out a wild, unsubstantiated, speculative observation that hadn’t been vetted by anyone and was explosively political at the same time. . . . And what made Ross make a beeline straight for the Tea Party website in the first place?” Reckless disregard?

BIG BROTHER IS TRACKING YOU: Bay Area Drivers Could Be Tracked By GPS, Taxed Per Mile Driven.

I had some related thoughts here.

SCIENCE: Astronomers discover exoplanet neighbor smaller than Earth. “The University of Central Florida has detected what could be its first planet, only two-thirds the size of Earth and located right around the corner, cosmically speaking, at a mere 33 light- years away.”

JACK GOLDSMITH ON George W. Bush’s Barack Obama’s Endless War on Terror.

FIRST, ABC NEWS CONNECTS THE COLORADO SHOOTING WITH THE TEA PARTY, now Brian Ross says oops, sorry about that.

Reaction: “Brian Ross must be fired by the end of the day.”

What’s pathetic is that every time, they so clearly want to blame tragedies like this on the Tea Party. I don’t generally like these calls for firings, and Ross was no doubt just reading what a producer sent him, but . . . They know how to be exquisitely sensitive and non-prejudgey when it might be a Muslim or some other protected minority, so maybe the only way to encourage them to show better judgment the rest of the time is to cost some people their jobs. Who was the producer? Meanwhile, I look forward to the libel suit. . . .

UPDATE: ABC News goes into “Damage Control Mode.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Treacher on Twitter: “It’s not even about @BrianRoss. It’s about a subculture with a view of the world in which @BrianRoss’s assumption there is only natural.”

MORE: Here’s an interview with the man ABC News libeled.

MORE STILL: A roundup of “progressive” scapegoating, some of it racist.

STILL MORE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes: “Yes, but ‘subculture’ suggests a smaller group than it actually is. The condescension implicit in these repeated attempts by the likes of Ross is widely shared. And though observed frequently, these acts highlight one of the great cultural divides yet to be fully examined. Academics like Haidt have only scratched the surface by shining a light on the divide.”

BILL WHITTLE: Afterburner: It’s A Miracle!

VIRGINIA POSTREL: How The Elites Built America’s Wall. “The key to convergence was never just mobile capital. It was also mobile labor. But the promise of a better life that once drew people of all backgrounds to rich places such as New York and California now applies only to an educated elite — because rich places have made housing prohibitively expensive.”

Read the whole thing.

SCIENCE: New Study: Online Classes Just as Good. “These results are heartening. The more such studies proliferate, the more likely universities are to experiment with new programs. This also serves as a reminder that even though the American university system sometimes seems full of obstructionists and slow to move, it’s actually moving much faster than most of its rivals overseas. What’s more, these changes tend to accelerate once they get under way. If this happens with online learning, the United States will end up with a reformed and much more efficient higher-ed system while overseas university systems are still arguing over whether it’s a good idea to try. This is looking like a textbook case of how the United States reinvents itself faster than its competitors in response to technological and social changes.”

We’ll see.

REASON TV: From Moral Panic To Enthusiasm: How Washington Learned To Love Video Games.

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: Obama’s Enemies List—Part II: First an Obama campaign website called out Romney donor Frank Vandersloot. Next the IRS moved to audit him—and so did the Labor Department.

Gee, who could have seen this coming?

MICKEY KAUS: “Strategists, columnists and reporters are constantly declaring that Democrats (and Republicans) must promote illegal immigrant legalization in order to win the growing Latino vote that is supposedly crucial in swing states. Would Virginia be one of those states?”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Elite College ($50,000 a Year) or Good State School ($20,000)?

AT AMAZON, up to 30% off on Outdoor Toys.

Also, today only: Own 18 Digital Movies for $3.99 Each.

UPDATE: Yeah, this was a scheduled post and Amazon has now changed the Gold Box deal, removing the Dark Knight reference.