CHINA’S NEAR-MONOPOLY ON RARE EARTHS may soon be broken. Good.

FINANCIAL PLANNING on $2 a day.

YING MA: America’s Dangerous Love Affair With Chinese State Capitalism.

WALTER OLSON: In Defense of “Stand Your Ground” Laws.

ANDREW MALCOLM: The Chicago Way: How a minor House speech ties into Obama’s reelection. “The answer is an example of how Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, William Daley and the other Chicago cronies in this White House and administration and Congress have brought their city’s style and brand of Democratic politics to infect the nation’s capital. The Chicago Way. Think Solyndra.”

CHRIS REED: Solyndra Times Seven: Why California’s high-speed rail project is an even greater waste of federal tax dollars.

GALLUP: Americans Favor Keystone Oil Pipeline. “Americans who say they are very closely following news about the Keystone XL pipeline overwhelmingly think the government should approve the building of it, 78% to 22%. About a quarter of those who are not following news of it closely don’t have an opinion on the issue. But among those who do, more think the government should approve (44%) than disapprove (29%) it.”

ED MORRISSEY: EPA Gets Epic Smackdown from Supreme Court.

BANKRUPTCY: Stockton Woes Send Message In Pension Reform.

RON BAILEY: How Does The Brain Secrete Morality? Pondering the neuroscience of moral platitudes, free will, and sacred values.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Obama Plans Won’t Cut Oil Prices For Decades, If Ever.

AT AMAZON, 100 Kindle Books For $3.99 or Less.

Plus, today only, markdowns on Indian food.

SHOCKER: John Edwards is First Name Uncovered in ‘Millionaire Madam’ Investigation.

More here. I wonder if this is another thing about John Edwards that the press knew about or suspected but didn’t report?

INSTAVISION: I talk with Robert Zubrin about his new book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism. Bob’s written a number of influential books, but I think this one is really going to make a splash. I like the way he calls out the greens on their “eliminationist rhetoric.” (Bumped).

OBAMATEURISM: “We have subsidized oil companies for a century. We want to encourage production of oil and gas, and make sure that wherever we’ve got American resources, we are tapping into them. But they don’t need an additional incentive when gas is $3.75 a gallon, when oil is $1.20 a barrel, $1.25 a barrel. They don’t need additional incentives. They are doing fine.”

Ed Morrissey responds: “First, oil is not $1.20 or $1.25 a barrel. Today it was trading at $107 per barrel, or around 86 times what the President quoted here. Besides, this is about as big a non-sequitur as one can possibly create on the cost of gasoline. To the extent that this is coherent at all, it sounds as if Obama is claiming that the difference between the price of a gallon of gasoline and the price of a barrel of oil equals profit. That’s about as ignorant a claim on energy costs as I’ve ever heard.” Good thing that dumb cowboy Bush isn’t President, or the media would be making a big deal about this.

UPDATE: Reader Ryan Murphy emails:

Perhaps he meant “Per gallon”? Although since a standard US barrel of oil is 42 gallons, he comes out pricing oil that was at almost exactly HALF of what it really would be and excludes the cost of refinement and transport, as well as the gas company’s overhead,.

At 42 gallons per barrell and 107 dollars per barrel you come out with about $2.55 per gallon of oil.

Yeah, I couldn’t figure out any way that the numbers work on this one.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jack Moody writes:

Note in the President’s comments on the evils of oil profits he doesn’t mention how a good part of that $3.75 a gallon is due to taxes. I guess profiting on a commodity is only bad if it’s done by the private sector.

Also I get the sense that Obama has absolutely no idea how oil is turned into gasoline. Does he really think that the oil is just divided up from barrels into gallons or that distillation, processing, shipping and storage all come with costs? Is he really that ignorant on how things work?

Given that he can’t even get within two, TWO!, orders of magnitude on how much a barrel of oil costs… maybe he is.

I think he got within two. But I agree that he doesn’t seem to know much about the industry or how it works. Or care.

MORE: A reader emails:

I think the blame for “$1.20 a barrel, $1.25 a barrel” should be placed on the White House transcription, not the President. The White House YouTube video of the event (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9dUNVlgrIw&t=12m05s , link goes to 12:05 in the video) shows that the President said “one twenty a
barrel, one twenty five a barrel,” not “a dollar twenty, a dollar twenty five a barrel.” If the President meant “$120, $125 a barrel,” then he’s off by $13 or $18, not by two orders of magnitude.

Now, this doesn’t mean we can’t blame the President for the fact that oil actually *is* $107 a barrel.

Or for the fact that he doesn’t mind.

MICHAEL TOTTEN FROM TUNISIA: Radical Islamists are making inroads in the Arab world’s most advanced, liberal, and tolerant country. And the secularists think the United States is helping them do it. I guess it’s time for some of that “smart diplomacy” we were promised, huh?

SHOCKER: The New York Times on ‘Stand Your Ground’: Prosecutors Do Not Like a Law That Makes It Harder to Prosecute People.

HERE’S WHY YOU GET BAD ADVICE.

OBAMA’S WAR: A Year Later, Libya Is Still A Mess.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Obama’s Keystone XL Visit A Potemkin Village Photo-Op.

HARVEY SILVERGLATE: The Amazing, Shrinking Academic Year.

ORIN KERR: The Right to Effective Counsel in a Plea Bargain: The Important New Decisions in Missouri v. Frye and Lafler v. Cooper.

I think the whole plea-bargain process needs to be policed better. The tendency is to make kitchen-sink indictments, with lots and lots of charges, to induce a plea bargain. Adding extra charges doesn’t cost the prosecution anything, while failing to take a deal exposes the defendant to ruinous risk. There needs to be some mechanism to counter that tendency, where the prosecution holds all the cards. Perhaps require the prosecution’s plea offer to be disclosed to the jury at trial?

UPDATE: Reader John Steakley — a criminal defense lawyer and former prosecutor — writes: “How about more attentive citizens on Grand Juries?” Perhaps they should be better instructed and educated, and encouraged to be more skeptical about charges filed.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Worried About $6 Gas Prices? Try $8.

WENDY KAMINER: What’s wrong with the Violence Against Women Act. “A bill that was designed to rectify gender discrimination tips the balance too far, putting accused men at an unfair disadvantage.”

Why is violence against women worse than violence against men?