AT AMAZON, markdowns in Tools & Home Improvement.

OUT: The latest issue of Modern Ink. The cover model is the daughter of an InstaPundit reader.

DAVID SWINDLE: Today’s Two New John Carter Clips Look Very Cool.

PETER INGEMI: My Two Cents On “Thigh-Gate.”

I predict a vast increase in CPAC attendance next year.

SANTORUM’S CHARITABLE CONTRIBUTIONS LOW? They’re huge compared to Joe Biden’s. Yeah, but Biden makes up for it by being generous with taxpayers’ money.

REVIEW: the Lumenyte emergency light.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: This Is The Debt Chart Obama and Geithner Should Be Ashamed Of. It’s why they and the press would rather be talking about contraception.

DIY: BIOTECH IN YOUR BEDROOM. “DIY biology is part of a wider trend in design that’s sometimes called maker culture: people are using 3-D printing services or cheap, custom electronic circuits to develop prototypes of gadgets, products, or vehicles. Now that amateurs can put rockets into space, what’s to stop them from genetically modifying life forms in the kitchen?”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Police Chase Ruins Naked Bondage Role Play.

LIST: Car-cleaning tools and supplies.

LIFE IN MANHATTAN: Upper East Siders don’t want the proles lingering around the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

THE NON-PROCREATIVE FUNCTIONS OF SEX: “If you’re interested in the stability of families, then you should also be a fan of non-procreative sex (which, let’s face it, is going to be a majority of sex any couple engages in, even if they’re choosing to forgo birth control). Women who have more sex are happier in their relationships. Sexual satisfaction outstrips even good communication in ratings of a couple’s happiness. Whether you have an active sex life is a strong predictor of your mental health and a lesser, but still significant, predictor of physical health. None of that has anything to do with babies. And it doesn’t really have anything to do with mere pleasure, which is what Santorum said sex is reduced to once the potential for kids has been stricken from the equation. Sexual satisfaction increases relationship satisfaction and couples who are more satisfied in their relationships are less likely to divorce.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with mere pleasure, as far as I’m concerned. Related thoughts here.

But note how the narrative in the press has shifted. The Obama Administration says that churches who oppose contraception still have to pay for it. And then, when people object, suddenly the talk shifts from who pays for contraception to whether someone wants to ban it.

It’s as if we passed a law requiring mosques to sell bacon and then, when people objected, responded by saying “What’s wrong with bacon? You’re trying to ban bacon!!!!”

I’m not much of a Santorum fan — to me, he seems like Mike Huckabee without the charm or political talent — but it’s hard not to notice the narrative jiu-jitsu here. Expect more effort to gin up social-issue hysteria in order to distract people from the real story, which is this:

Obama spent us into bankruptcy, most of the money went to cronies, and the job situation got worse. That’s the real story, not a question of who pays for birth control, which doesn’t cost that much anyway.

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer points out that Santorum has made the distinction clear:

“I was asked if I believed in it, and I said, ‘No, I’m a Catholic, and I don’t.’ I don’t want the government to fund it through Planned Parenthood, but that’s different than wanting to ban it; the idea I’m coming after your birth control is absurd. I was making a statement about my moral beliefs, but I won’t impose them on anyone else in this case. I don’t think the government should be involved in that. People are free to make their own decisions.’’

More thoughts from Clayton here. And if you’re interested, here’s my defense of the Griswold case against Robert Bork’s criticisms.

21ST CENTURY HIGHER EDUCATION: Campus Outbreaks of Norovirus and Lice. This isn’t how I expected things to be in the 21st Century.

POP THE GLOCK: David Brock, Media Matters and gun control hypocrisy. “No explanation has been offered by the group explaining why Brock has an assistant carry a gun to protect him if he really believes all the postings put out by his organization. . . . Ironically, for a media organization, neither Media Matters nor David Brock returned multiple calls from me about the Daily Caller story.”

If you’re out of line, it’s your bang-pop.

MORE TROUBLES FOR electric-car battery makers. “If oil can get up to $200 per barrel and stay there then the prospects of EV makers will brighten somewhat. But it is questionable whether the global economy can support sustained high oil prices. As long oil prices dampen demand below the level at which EVs become competitive it is hard for EVs to become an effective substitute for oil-powered cars.”

DOUBLING DOWN: Obama’s proposed budget calls for upping plug-in vehicle tax credit to $10,000. “Getting to a million plug-ins in four years will be tough. Last year, the top two plug-ins, the Chevrolet Volt and the Nissan Leaf, sold just 17,345 units, combined.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: Leaked Docs From Heartland Institute Cause a Stir—but Is One a Fake?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Personal assistants with impressive credentials are more available due to the tough job market for college graduates. For $35 an hour you can get a cum laude graduate of Harvard with a degree in Folklore & Mythology to do your calendar management and travel planning.

TOM MAGUIRE: Trouble In Paradise: “Back in the Business section Katie Thomas of the Ministry of Truth discovers and covers a problem with Obama’s previously brilliant contraception compromise.”

PAUL RAHE: More Than A Touch Of Malice.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Arab Spring Bears Fruit: Chemical Weapons, Civil War. Thanks, smart diplomacy!

INSTAVISION: The Chimichanga Outrage: Why Obama Campaign Comments Are So Insulting to Hispanic Voters. With Spanish-language talk radio host Alfonso Aguilar, who thinks that Dems are taking Latino votes for granted. (Bumped)

IN WHAT I SUSPECT IS A PREVIEW OF THE GOP’S ELECTION STRATEGY, the House Republican Study Committee sends this “where are the jobs” graphic:

From the accompanying release:

Democrats said their costly plan ($1.2 trillion, including interest) would “save or create” up to 4 million jobs and bring the unemployment rate down to about 6% today. The unemployment rate has not fallen below 8% at any point in the last 36 months. Furthermore, the official unemployment rate does not actually count unemployed people who have given up looking for work.

The above chart shows the “labor force participation rate.” This statistic represents the share of working-age Americans who are either employed or unemployed but looking for work. It is not a pretty picture. Only 63.7% of working-age Americans are currently in the workforce – the lowest in almost 29 years!

To put it another way, 36.3% of working-age Americans do not have a job and are not even looking.

After 3 years of failure, it’s time to try something that will work. Let’s ramp up energy production. Let’s cut away government red tape that slows down job creation. And let’s design new tax code that is simpler, flatter, and fairer. Let’s pass the Jobs Through Growth Act, and create jobs by growing the economy – not the government.

I think it’s smart of them to focus on total-employment numbers, rather than the headline “unemployment” rate. But I’m predicting little interest in these numbers from the mainstream press, who seem uninterested in anything that doesn’t fit the Obama-recovery narrative.

Related: What Did Obama Know And When Did He Know It?

President Obama told an Atlanta TV station this week that the reason he’s unable to live up to his campaign promise to cut the deficit in half is “because this recession turned out to be a lot deeper than any of us realized.”

“Everybody who is out there back in 2009,” he went on, “everybody underestimated it,” adding that “the die had been cast, but a lot of us didn’t understand at that point how bad it was going to get.”

It’s a convenient excuse, and one that, if true, would help him escape blame for a deficit that will exceed $1 trillion for the fourth year in a row this year, and will still be a sky-high $901 billion next year.

But Obama’s own budget documents show that this excuse doesn’t hold up very well.

Read the whole thing. Conclusion: “Everyone was surprised by the weakness of Obama’s economic recovery.” That’s because what Obama did made things worse.

UPDATE: Obama’s old story: “I didn’t overpromise. And I didn’t underestimate how tough this was gonna be.” Swiftly changed. Maybe he underestimated how much he’d overpromised.

ETHICAL PROBLEMS IN THE BIOETHICS BIZ. Since I regard the whole enterprise of bioethics as tainted by conflicts of interest — it’s always in bioethicists’ professional interest to suggest that a new technology raises troubling moral issues that require deep (funded) thought and extensive (lucrative) conferences — I’m largely unmoved. Related item here.