GUESTBLOGGING: Why American Food Used to Be So Bad and Other Lessons From Tyler Cowen.

AT POINTS AND FIGURES, SOME NOTES ON STAY-AT-HOME MOMS: “Couples that make the choice to have a spouse stay home don’t enter into it lightly.”

WORKING-CLASS IVY LEAGUER: Obama: We didn’t have “the luxury” for Michelle to not work. Luckily, she had a $300,000+ job in “community outreach.” A job so vital it was abolished after she left to be First Lady. That’s just like Hilary Rosen’s diner waitress in Nevada.

TEST-DRIVING THE 2013 Lincoln MKS.

JENNIFER RUBIN: Ann Romney discusses Hilary Rosen controversy. “Does she think women at home don’t work?”

UPDATE: Reader John Miller writes:

I don’t get it.

Why doesn’t every GOP statement on Rosen lead with ‘SOPA lobbyist and shadow-author Hilary Rosen’?

It’s the one issue that had Obama’s base up in arms last year, and in opposition to his party’s stance. It’s the one issue that wedges Obama’s base from the party’s Hollywood moneybags. And this rotting albatross hangs forevermore on her neck.

I have to think that her visibility is a huge Obama own-goal but someone has to get the refs to notice.

Indeed. And forget the refs — it’s hard to get the GOP team to notice . . . .

COMMERCE DEPARTMENT BUREAU hacked into “bureaucratic dark ages.”

ELON MUSK ON making life “multi-planetary.”

ANOTHER READER KINDLE BOOK: Hard Stop, by Declan Davies.

PETER WOOD: How To Comment.

THE ANCHORESS: Hilary Rosen, Ann Romney and the Credentialists. “There is irony in Rosen sneering that Ann Romney knows nothing about working women, while she, Rosen, supports an administration that pays its female employees less than men. But I digress. Rosen seems to truly not get why people, especially women (both working and at-home) took offense at this. . . . Because — unlike Rosen, or her favored women – I’ve actually lived the life of both struggling at-home mother and struggling working mom, I am inclined to take offense at the notion that a woman who finds her first vocation in child-rearing has surrendered her intellect, and therefore has nothing to say to the room. And make no mistake, that is precisely the sentiment that rests at the heart of Rosen’s remarks — an ugly disdain wholly at odds with the standard feminist rhetoric about the dignity of women and their choices.”

UPDATE: The Obama Campaign’s Framing Fail.

Hilary Rosen is on her way to making the Obama Administration as popular as she made the RIAA.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Bill Strieber emails: “Now Obama is saying that he and Michelle did not have the ‘luxury’ of her not working. Yeah… That tax burden can be a real hurdle to domestic tranquility.”

Michell wasn’t sounding like some waitress at a diner in Nevada back in 2008, when she was talking about how expensive dance lessons and private schools were . . . .

TOD LINDBERG ON MODERN HERO WORSHIP: Our egalitarian society distrusts claims of greatness and heroism.

GIMMICK: If Warren Buffett has lost Dana Milbank . . . “Three years into his presidency, Obama has not introduced a plan for comprehensive tax reform — arguably the most important vehicle for fixing the nation’s finances and boosting long-term economic growth. His opponents haven’t done much better, but that doesn’t excuse the president’s failures: appointing the Simpson-Bowles commission and then disregarding its findings, offering a plan for business tax reform only, and issuing a series of platitudes. The Buffett Rule, rather than overhauling the tax code, would simply add another layer.”

Well, I haven’t floated a comprehensive plan, exactly, but I have proposed a series of revenue enhancement measures that the President has inexplicably ignored.

INSTAVISION: Catherine Crier Is Afraid That We Are Losing Our Democracy. She has a book out: Patriot Acts: What Americans Must Do to Save the Republic.

I have to say, I don’t agree with her at all about Citizens United, and I think that if you’re worried about corporate entanglement in politics you need to look at how thoroughly the corporate media have been in the tank for Democrats over the past several election cycles, from RatherGate to the latest PolitiFact scandal.

DAVID BERNSTEIN corrects Jonathan Cohn on the New Deal cases.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Will Student Loan Debt Drive Higher Education Reform? “Nobody knows what the future of higher education will look like, but it is clear that the current model is horrendously inefficient. The pressure for reform will only increase as technological innovation combines with financial necessity to encourage greater experimentation. While the rest of the world is trying to copy the old American academic model, the United States is moving on to create a new and better approach.”

We could always replace student debt with student equity.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Cornell Study Destroys Obama’s Inequality Argument.

TOM MAGUIRE: Semi-Props To Ms. Alvarez of the NY Times; Mockery For Their Editors.

SOME HISTORY: MATT BAI ON HILARY ROSEN: “Reviled by college kids, music fans, and more than a few recording artists for the RIAA’s role in forcing the shutdown of Napster, Rosen is seen as the embodiment of a venal corporate culture hurtling toward obsolescence.”

Her parting line: “Your cynicism makes me feel better.”

Not a great choice to speak for the Democrats. Or, in another way, a perfect choice to speak for the Democrats.

Meanwhile, reader Robert Bleck emails: “The most lasting damage in this kerfuffle will be to Hillary Rosen’s ability to get work. She is an executive at a communications company. Epic Fail.” Yeah, not so smart.

POLITI-SMACKED: Romney Campaign Demands Correction From PolitiFact On Women’s Job Loss Claim.

“I hope you will agree that this rating was inappropriate and that the piece does not reflect the journalistic standards to which your organization intends to hold itself. Please retract the piece and issue a correction as soon as possible,” Romney adviser Lanhee Chen wrote in a letter obtained by The Huffington Post.

Chen wrote to PolitiFact that their “analysis in this instance was so inadequate that the piece ended up being little more than Obama for Americaspin.”

PolitiFact is headed by Bill Adair, Washington Bureau Chief for the Tampa Bay Times, and the item in question was edited by by Martha M. Hamilton, a former reporter and editor at the Washington Post.

Chen’s letter is a detailed and lengthy take down of PolitiFact’s analysis. He said that PolitiFact has in the past given credit to President Reagan for jobs gained from the beginning of his presidency to the end, and so their judgment that it was inaccurate to measure job losses from Obama’s first month in office was inconsistent.

Chen also took issue with the context, cited by PolitiFact, that men had lost the majority of jobs cut in the economy in the year before Obama took office. Because of this, PolitiFact declared that the Romney claim was “misleading.”

But Chen wrote: “Why should it matter that men had already lost millions of jobs? Was it now women’s ‘turn’? Is this part of the President’s conception of ‘fairness’ that he talks about so frequently?”

And Chen went after the two “experts” cited by PolitiFact in their article, Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution and Betsey Stevenson of Princeton University.

“As you may or may not know, Gary Burtless has already donated twice to President Obama’s campaign this cycle,” Chen wrote. “Much more inexplicably, Bestey [sic] Stevenson, who you identify simply as ‘a business and public policy professor at Princeton University,’ was until recently the chief economist for Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis.”

That’s going to leave a mark. And don’t miss Ann Althouse’s PolitiFact takedown. PolitiFact has been a joke all along — more like a DNC spin operation than any sort of media watchdog. But this one — your number’s entirely accurate but we’re going to rate your comments as mostly false because they make Obama look bad — is just pathetic, even by PolitiFact’s low standards.

INVESTIGATION: House Demands IRS Documents on Alleged Harassment of Tea Party Groups.

FLIPFLOPS: Hilary Rosen on Working Moms. Meanwhile, has anyone asked Anderson Cooper where he stands on this?

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION UPDATE: K.C. Johnson: The “Mismatch Thesis,” Eye-Opening Research, and the Fisher Case.

CHINA TROUBLES: China’s internet users temporarily blocked from using foreign websites. “China’s internet users have been cut off from accessing all foreign websites for around an hour in an unexplained incident that sparked speculation the country’s censorship system was being tested or further tightened.” The Chinese leadership acts like it’s worried about something.

TIM CAVANAUGH: The myth of the highly skilled public-service elite. “If you don’t think it’s fair for government employees to make substantially more money than people who do the same jobs in the private sector, a burgeoning public relations campaign is here to say you’re wrong. During the last two years, with public-sector compensation becoming a bitter political issue, a host of new studies have appeared, arguing that government workers deserve the big bucks, thanks to their extra-special skills and book learnin’.” Cavanaugh does some debunking.