THEY WOULD HAVE HEARD IT ANYWAY, EVENTUALLY: What if the Supreme Court Had Turned Down Bush v. Gore? “The original sin, in my view, was Gore’s attempt to recount just the votes in a few heavily Democratic counties. I’m not saying that Bush would have done any different, had the positions been reversed. But once that had happened–and Democrats on local election boards and the Florida Supreme Court had decided to go along–there was no longer even a pretense that this was about anything other than naked post-facto power grabs, using whatever political levers your party controlled. ‘Count all the votes,’ which most progressives now remember as the rallying cry, actually came very late in the process, and only after the Supreme Court of the United States told the Florida Supreme Court that no, it couldn’t just let Al Gore add in some new votes from Democratic Counties his team had personally selected. . . . Had the Court let Bush v. Gore go, it would have ended up back there in a few weeks anyway–but this time, as a full-blown constitutional crisis.”

It’s worth noting that Bush won all the subsequent recounts, even the ones done by the media.

MATT WELCH: L.A. City Councilmen Would Divest Pension Money From a Potentially Koch-Owned Tribune Co. “It is instructive to watch the superstructure of liberalism wheeze into gear at the mere rumor of a right-wing-bogeyman purchase of a distressed, unloved newspaper company.” Tells you a lot about the current state of newspapers, too.

UPDATE: I wonder if this sort of politicized pension decisionmaking opens them up to a charge of breaching their fiduciary duty to beneficiaries?

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: In Green Europe, It Takes an Economic Disaster to Reduce Emissions.

This underscores the disconnect between green policies and green results. The US hasn’t checked off many items on the green wish list for domestic legislation; Europe has. But it turns out that the introduction of the euro and the subsequent economic disaster had more to do with European emissions drops than Kyoto or the shambolic carbon-trading program.

The usual suspects are headed to Bonn next week for another forlorn attempt to carve out a meaningful global climate treaty. Meanwhile in the real world, the challenge is to find a way for developing countries to continue rapid growth without driving greenhouse gasses and other pollutants to potentially dangerous levels.

But the diverging trends in greenhouse gas emissions won’t help the bureaucrats and cookie pushers in Bonn. The problem is simple. No meaningful climate treaty can get through the US Senate that doesn’t put strict limits on China and the developing world, and China will never voluntarily consent to international restrictions on the speed of its growth (nor will a large group of other developing countries). And Europe no longer has either the money to pay for grand global climate treaties or a way to pressure countries like China.

Under these conditions, some sort of grand bargain is unlikely. In the meantime, fracking continues to make the US greener every day.

Sounds good.

I THINK IT’S THAT “JOHNNY” KID WHO’S BEEN DRAGGING DOWN THE NUMBERS: You’ll Be Shocked by How Many of the World’s Top Students Are American. I mean, Johnny can’t read, can’t spell, can’t write, can’t add . . . .

AT AMAZON, it’s the Cycle Shop.

Also, today only: Save up to 50% on Select Digital Picture Frames.

WITHOUT BOGUS TALES OF RACISM, WHERE WOULD THE DEMS BE? The “Southern Strategy” Debunked Again. “The point is that the GOP finally became the region’s dominant party in the least racist phase of the South’s entire history, and it got that way by attracting most of its votes from the region’s growing and confident communities—not its declining and fearful ones. The myth’s shrillest proponents are as reluctant to admit this as they are to concede that most Republicans genuinely believe that a color-blind society lies down the road of individual choice and dynamic change, not down the road of state regulation and unequal treatment before the law. The truly tenacious prejudices here are the mythmakers’.”

DEMOCRATS: Supporting the NRA is evil — except when we need red-state votes.

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Obama defends relevancy, blames Congress for political gridlock. “Obama’s press conference marked the 100th day of his second term, an early measure of his job performance. Over the past three months, Obama has seen his push for new gun restrictions die on Capitol Hill and still faces an uphill battle to implement other centerpieces of his agenda, such as immigration reform. Foreign events, including evidence that Syria used chemical weapons against anti-government rebels, have also cast a shadow over the president’s domestic agenda. . . . Obama also faced questions about Guantanamo Bay, the American prison in Cuba where suspected terrorists, or enemy combatants — held for years by the U.S. — are now engaged in a hunger strike. He had pledged in his first campaign to shut it down.”

My favorite bit: “However, the president took no blame for Guantanamo remaining open, saying Congress repeatedly blocked his efforts to shutter the prison.” He’s not much for taking blame.

MAUREEN DOWD: Say, Obama’s not actually that good at being President, is he? “Actually, it is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It’s called leadership. He still thinks he’ll do his thing from the balcony and everyone else will follow along below. That’s not how it works.”

WHERE’S AL GORE? Happy May Day! It’s Snowing In Stapleton/Denver.

MARGARET CARLSON: SARAH PALIN IS RIGHT. “The White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner is a deeply narcissistic event.”

BRUCE SCHNEIER: A new bill moving through Congress would give the authorities unprecedented access to citizens’ information.

JOEL POLLAK: True Story: Even the Kinko’s Guy Knows About Pigford.

ROLL CALL: Larry Flynt Endorses Mark Sanford — Because it Wasn’t all Weird Enough.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Obama moving toward sending lethal arms to Syrian rebels, officials say.

TED CRUZ: Considering a Presidential run? Don’t be silly. How can a newly-elected Senator — and a minority! — aspire to the White House so soon?

ACCOMPLICES TO KABUKI: Mickey Kaus: Learned Cluelessness From Politico.

WELL, GOOD: Researchers Have Stumbled On A Massive Lithium Mine That Could Meet All US Demand. In Wyoming.

YESTERDAY’S PRESS CONFERENCE STILL NOT WOWING THEM: The Hill: President Obama bristles, says he still has juice for second term. “The remark was a far cry from the triumphant tone heard in 2009, when Obama proclaimed he was ‘proud of what we’ve achieved’ and ‘pleased with our progress’ after 100 days in the Oval Office.”

Related: Politico: President Obama: I’m still relevant.

And, even from NPR: Logic Behind Obama News Conference Hard To Fathom.

UPDATE: Reader B. Coleman writes:

In analyzing any number of political movements, regimes and governments over the past 500 years, Jacques Barzun notes that all of the successful ones had to have BOTH political genius and administrative genius to survive and be effective. Administrative genius sees and manages every detail and knows its importance of lack of importance in the greater scheme of things.

I think Obama may have appointed political operatives to administrative positions – thus all of the too many misses and obvious chaos in many areas. I also don’t think he sees his error and gets cranky about the failures. He sees only political reasons for his failures not administrative ones.

Well, he has no administrative training or experience.

NOT PAYING ATTENTION: Saudi Arabia ‘warned the United States IN WRITING about Boston Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2012.’ “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia sent a written warning about accused Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2012, long before pressure-cooker blasts killed three and injured hundreds, according to a senior Saudi government official with direct knowledge of the document. The Saudi warning, the official told MailOnline, was separate from the multiple red flags raised by Russian intelligence in 2011, and was based on human intelligence developed independently in Yemen.”

So we were warned about him by both the Russians and the Saudis and still did nothing? What exactly are all those hundreds of billions for Homeland Security going for?

Related: Sleeping through the “wake-up” calls.

UPDATE: WaPo: As FBI expands Boston investigation, Obama defends law enforcement efforts.

ANOTHER UPDATE: DHS denies any knowledge of Saudi warning.

LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Is the problem not enough jobs, or not enough jobs that pay well enough to cover loans?

JOEL KOTKIN: THE TRIUMPH OF SUBURBIA OVER ITS DETRACTORS:

The Hate Affair With Suburbia

Suburbs have never been popular with the chattering classes, whose members tend to cluster in a handful of denser, urban communities—and who tend to assume that place shapes behavior, so that if others are pushed to live in these communities they will also behave in a more enlightened fashion, like the chatterers. This is a fallacy with a long pedigree in planning circles, going back to the housing projects of the 1940s, which were built in no small part on the evidently absurd, and eventually discredited, assumption that if the poor had the same sort of housing stock as the rich, they would behave in the same ways.

Prof. Stephen Clark, who sends the link, comments: “The last part reminds me of Reynolds’ First Law.” Indeed.

More:

But the simple fact remains that the single-family home has remained the American dream, with sales outpacing those of condominiums and co-ops despite the downturn.

Florida has suggested that simply stating the numbers makes me a sprawl lover. While he and other urban nostalgists see the city only in its dense urban core, and the city’s role as intimately tied with the amenities that are supposed to attract the relatively wealthy members of the so-called “creative class,” I see the urban form as ever changing, and consider a city’s primary mission not aesthetic or simply economic but to serve the interests and aspirations of all of its residents.

Clearly the data supports a long-term preference for suburbs.

Shout him down! He’s a sprawl lover! Well, then, come after me, too. “The biggest complaint against sprawl, as Bruegmann repeatedly points out, seems at core to be that some people are getting above themselves.”

FUNNY, WHEN THIS STORY FIRST BROKE IT WAS ALL ABOUT “STAND YOUR GROUND:” George Zimmerman, accused of murdering Trayvon Martin, won’t seek pre-trial ‘Stand Your Ground’ hearing. Then it became all about firing up Obama’s racialist base. But you know, Zimmerman looks pretty Hispanic in this picture. . . .

WAR ON WOMEN: Jason Collins’ Ex-Fiancee: I Had NO IDEA He Was Gay. “It’s very emotional for me as a woman to have invested 8 years in my dream to have a husband, soul mate, and best friend in him. So this is all hard to understand.”

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: ‘Teen Mom’ Farrah Abraham says she’s ‘happy’ with sex tape sale, looks forward to ‘completing my Master’s degree.’