TRUTH, SPOKEN: Chu to Congress: We’re not interested in lowering gas prices.

Related: Chu Lets The Cat Out Of The Bag. “For the president, expensive energy that depresses all Americans’ standards of living isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.”

IOWA DEMOCRATS FLEE CAPITOL rather than join the mainstream on civil rights.

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: Why is the press so reticent on the international NGO sex-abuse scandals? “Well, one reason is that in many less-developed countries the aid-group staff and the First World journalists are often dating. But you would think that the question of which internationally known ‘humanitarian’ groups has been covering up extortionate sex and child abuse would be at least as important as, say, which energy executives met with Dick Cheney.”

AT AMAZON, coupons galore.

BRITS WORRYING ABOUT EMP Problems.

BILL GATES: Obama Told Me He Supports A National Energy Consumption Tax.

MICHAEL BARONE: “Romney has shown in Michigan as elsewhere a capacity to win votes in affluent areas—which is exactly where (at least in the North) Republicans have been weak in presidential general elections over the last 20 years.” Plus this: “Affluent suburban voters are not happy with the Obama economic polices and are facing a choice between a Democrat who wants to tax their marginal income at 44% and a Republican (whether it is Romney or Santorum) who wants to tax it at 28%. They are far less concerned than they used to be about the cultural issues which moved them to the left in the 1990s and kept them there up through and including 2008. . . . Affluent suburbanites are not a target group anyone has focused on much. But there are plenty of them and they tend to be in states with lots of electoral votes currently considered unavailable to Republicans. Mitt Romney’s showing in Michigan, on top of his proven appeal to this demographic—and particularly to affluent women—suggests they could make a difference in November 2012.”

BLOG COMMENT OF THE DAY: “Two decades in higher education has taught me this: what most academics say is that they wish to challenge the prejudices of their students. When they really mean to say is that they intend to replace the prejudices of the students with the prejudices of academics.”

BEST NEW YORK TIMES CORRECTION YET? “A previous version of this article misstated how many of the president’s proposals to reduce the country’s reliance on imported oil were new in his speech on Wednesday. None of them were, not one of them.”

ED DRISCOLL: How Davy Jones Changed The World.

GOVERNMENT REPORT: Government Airport Scanners Are Perfectly Safe.

HMM: Did Lawsuit Figure In Snowe’s Departure?

Last August, while Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, was in the midst of an intensive round of fundraising for her 2012 reelection bid, a four-year-old civil lawsuit alleging fraud by an education company in which she and her husband are heavily invested became public.

Nationally, most of the coverage of Snowe’s decision to drop her reelection bid has focused on the centrist Republican’s frustration with the polarized politics on Capitol Hill. But in Maine, a few newspapers have speculated that her husband’s legal entanglements had a role in Snowe’s sudden and surprising decision, which left her with more than $3 million in her campaign coffers and her party without a Senate candidate less than three weeks before the filing deadline for Maine’s June 12 primary.

This warrants further attention.

UPDATE: Reader Douglas Bass reads it this way: “It says here that Olympia Snowe is collateral damage in Obama’s war on for-profit education.”

CHANGE: Video: We should embrace the Keystone pipeline, says … Bill Clinton. “The route is a secondary concern to hardcore greens. In fact, TransCanada already proposed changing it to avoid the Nebraska Sandhills back when the Keystone issue first blew up. So why is Clinton suddenly pushing this phony argument? Because, silly, he’s read the polls. Heavy majorities support building Keystone, and they’re only going to get heavier as gas prices rise. And it’s not just Republicans: Support among independents is net +39 and even among Democrats it’s net +5. Clinton knows that unless gas prices ease, this issue will become increasingly potent for the GOP, so here he is shoving Obama towards a reversal.”

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: James O’Keefe Sues Keith Olbermann and Pals.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “I guaran-damn-tee you more people just saw this on Instapundit than watch CurrentTV in toto. What could be the damages for slander on CurrentTV? $45.67 plus attorneys fees in the amount $50K.” Heh. If a tree libels in a forest, and no one hears it, has it defamed?

ANOTHER UPDATE: On a related note, reader Jeff Bonwick writes: “In light of the present state of political discourse, I offer you Godwin’s Moore’s Law: the speed with which all dialogue degenerates into Nazi comparisons will double every 18 months.”

LIBERATE THE ANIMALS: In response to PETA’s animal-killing, Bill Quick has a plan.

THIS SEEMS LIKE POOR SALESMANSHIP: “GOP Congressman: ‘We Need to Put Forward Someone of Equal Integrity’ to Obama.”

NO LOVE FOR RICK SANTORUM from Joy McCann.

A WEBLOG FOR UNUSUAL WEDDINGS: Offbeat Bride.

UPDATE: Reader Kim Schratwieser recommends The BrokeAss Bride.

TEA PARTY DISCOVERY: Massachusetts already has a Voter ID Law. It’s just that nobody knew.

THIS DOESN’T SOUND SO GOOD: 1 in 8 Chance of Catastrophic Solar Megastorm by 2020.

At the time of the Carrington Event, telegraph stations caught on fire, their networks experienced major outages and magnetic observatories recorded disturbances in the Earth’s field that were literally off the scale.

In today’s electrically dependent modern world, a similar scale solar storm could have catastrophic consequences. Auroras damage electrical power grids and may contribute to the erosion of oil and gas pipelines. They can disrupt GPS satellites and disturb or even completely black out radio communication on Earth.

During a geomagnetic storm in 1989, for instance, Canada’s Hydro-Quebec power grid collapsed within 90 seconds, leaving millions without power for up to nine hours.

The potential collateral damage in the U.S. of a Carrington-type solar storm might be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in the first year alone, with full recovery taking an estimated four to 10 years, according to a 2008 report from the National Research Council.

Too bad we didn’t put that stimulus money toward hardening infrastructure against this and other disasters or something. But that would have meant too many jobs for burly men, which was politically unacceptable to feminists in the Obama Administration.

SO I KEEP HEARING THAT RICK SANTORUM IS LEADING IN TENNESSEE, but I’ve seen exactly one Santorum yard sign and one Santorum bumper sticker in Knoxville. Yeah, I know, that’s not scientific or anything, but still . . . .

KINDLE DAILY DEAL: I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can for 99 cents.

STUDY: The Well-Off Are More Likely To Use Coupons Than The Poor. “Households with incomes of $100,000 or more are twice as likely to coupon as those who earn less than $35,000. College-degree holders are also twice as likely to use coupons as those who did not graduate from high school.”

Remember that old commercial: “How do you think a man like me got to be a man like me?”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Please don’t use my name…

My wife is an avid couponer, and we fit into the 100,000+ and college graduate categories. I mentioned the story about couponing, and her response was “I have to coupon, we don’t qualify for food stamps!”

Heh.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Kyle Eubank writes:

It certainly seems that the majority of the time I’m in line at the grocery store behind someone who is paying with an EBT card, that while my cart is filled with generic and store brand items, they will have a cart full of name brand items. If I buy something that is name brand, it’s usually because I have a coupon for it.

And reader Dan Tracy writes:

We are in the $100K+ per year income category, and my wife is a big-time coupon/bargin shopper.

We feed a family of five on $160 to $180 per week for groceries, and not eating junk either…my wife buys a lot of fruits (for snacks) and vegetables, plus organics too (lots of shopping at Trader Joe’s).

$180/week for a family of five works out to $5.14 per day per person. Well below the $7/day limit some Dems denounce as not enough for recipients of gov’t aid.

“How do you think a man like me got to be a man like me?” Indeed.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Woman Pretends She’s Marrying Edward Cullen.

THOUGHTS ON RESPONSIBILITY: “It’s OK to be charitable with your own money. It’s not so virtuous to be generous with other people’s money. A publicly traded business should maximize profits and let shareholders be charitable with those returns if they so choose. . . . there is no such thing as ‘enough’ profit. The world is highly uncertain and sacrificing profits in the name of ‘soft values’ may end up destroying the company and putting everyone out of work.”

UPDATE: Reader Tom Caso writes:

This applies to government as well.

Why is OK for the President to announce a policy of higher taxation on the rich to finance higher handouts based on his view of what Jesus wants, but it is not OK for the Catholic Church to object to financing abortions based on their view of what Jesus wants?

Good question.