WHEN AUTOGRAPHS ARE OUT OF DATE: Today’s fans would rather have stars pose with them for a personal snapshot they can share on social media than sign memorabilia.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: America’s Favorite Golfer Gets Fleeced: What Phil Mickelson’s tax saga teaches us about the uses and abuses of state fiscal policy.

WHEN YOU CAN’T TRUST THE NUMBERS: China’s economic data draw sharp scrutiny from experts analyzing global trends.

CHARLIE MARTIN, late-blooming athlete.

WAR ON PHOTOGRAPHY UPDATE: Mario Cerame, The Right To Record Police in Connecticut.

BROWN VS. GREEN: The Clash of the Titans in California.

Massive shale oil reserves could give California one of the biggest oil booms on Earth, but the uber-powerful California green lobby is gearing up for the fight of its life.

The stakes of the battle could be huge, reports the New York Times. Hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs for Californians, versus environmental concerns about fracking, pipelines, and greenhouse gasses.

The Monterey Shale formation, stretching 1,750 square miles from southern to central California, constitutes two-thirds of the country’s total estimated shale oil reserves. That’s an estimated 15.4 billion barrels, or four times as much as the Bakken Shale reserves in North Dakota, whose exploitation can now be seen from space.

But the green lobby will prove a formidable opponent to the oil and gas companies jostling for a piece of this giant pie. It is already hard at work trying to keep California’s newly recoverable energy reserves in the ground: Two powerhouse lobbies are suing the Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Conservation to prevent further exploration of the Monterey Shale and impose stricter regulations on fracking.

The intrigues in this drama are many. Does California’s Democratic Party come down on the side of low income Californians, who desperately need the jobs and state services new oil extraction will fund? Or does it come down on the side of a green lobby that is heavily backed by some of the wealthiest people in the state? To what extent does the wealthy coastal elite control the future of the inland poor in California?

To a near-total extent. And they feel no compunction at all.

UPDATE: Environmental benefits from California oil. “Restoring oil self-sufficiency would reduce the risk of spills from the tankers bringing in imports, while refilling existing infrastructure. And if the Monterey yields oil similar in quality to the light, sweet crude now being produced from the Bakken and Eagle Ford shales, it could actually cut both greenhouse gas emissions and local pollution by reducing the refining intensity required to turn the state’s current diet of heavier crudes into ultra-low sulfur gasoline and diesel fuel.” Don’t expect the Greens to care. Their opposition is more religious than rational.

REPORT: Congressional Democrats Are Angry at Obama … Again. “People have been telling Obama he needs to play more of an inside game for more than four years. And while his choice of Rahm Emanuel as his first chief of staff was seen as a way of reaching out to Congress, he’s gone now and the complaints are still around — Obama isn’t buying the need to make representatives and senators feel special.”

AT AMAZON, Top Deals on HDTVs and Video.

Also, today only: Sunforce 60 LED Solar Motion Security Light, $28.97 (42% off).

A REVOLUTION IN THE WORKS? My USA Today column is up. “If there’s an upside to the increasing unhappiness that most Americans feel toward the political class, it’s that maybe it means people are paying closer attention.”

ONE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE’S TOP LEGISLATIVE PRIORITIES, unfortunately, is seeing that people with handgun carry permits can’t carry on campus.

I’d just like to refer people to this excellent letter from my colleague Jack Parker in the College of Engineering, on why they’re wrong.

PEOPLE KEEP EMAILING TO ASK WHERE THE BLOGROLL WENT. It’s still there! Now it’s in pulldown menus to save valuable space, right above the search box and the “Buy My Book!” link for Army of Davids.

AARON SWARTZ UPDATE: Carmen Ortiz On the Hot Seat: U.S. attorney facing Congressional scrutiny. “The Justice Department is scrambling to answer pointed inquiries from a congressional committee about U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz’s prosecution of Internet whiz Aaron Swartz, raising the specter of a brutal Beltway hearing that could call her judgment into question as she pursues high-profile cases, including her Probation 
Department probe.”

There’s also her lame asset-seizure effort in the Tewksbury motel case.

BYRON YORK: Legalization-first could scuttle immigration plan.

To hear Sen. Charles Schumer tell it, lawmakers crafting an immigration reform bill will focus on two big tasks. “First, defining metrics that demonstrate that the border is secure,” the New York Democrat explained at a Jan. 31 news conference. “Second, defining exactly what the path to citizenship looks like and how it proceeds.”

For Schumer and some Senate colleagues, that is the short version of immigration reform: First, border security, and second, a path to citizenship.

But immigration reform as envisioned by the so-called Gang of Eight is actually a three-step process. Schumer left out the first part: immediate legalization of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country. In the statement of principles released by the gang on Jan. 28, legalization begins the process, followed by securing the border, and then, after an as-yet-undefined standard of border enforcement is met, a path to citizenship.

It’s the first step, immediate legalization, that worries skeptics. Those worries intensified after Schumer and others gave varying accounts of how they expect it all to work.

I’m sure it will work out as well as the health “reform” bill did.

THE PERILS OF small business in California.

ROGER KIMBALL ON THE S&P LAWSUIT: How do you spell “Retaliation”? “We are living with the most fiscally incontinent administration in U.S., perhaps in world, history. Both S&P and Moody’s took note of this incontinence and broadcast the news by downgrading U.S. debt in 2011. The result? A $1 billion law suit against S&P. Merely post hoc? Or do you discern a teensy bit of propter hoc there as well? I do.”

Hmm. I thought it was an ethical violation to threaten criminal action to bring about a civil settlement. “During settlement negotiations, the Justice Department held out the threat of a criminal case against S.&P., the people said.”

UPDATE: Now this is interesting. The part about criminal threats is now missing from the NY Times story, though the phrase still shows up in a search. I wonder why it was removed?

THE MENENDEZ DILEMMA: “Who is more trustworthy, a Dominican prostitute or a New Jersey Democrat?”

The real scandal, as I keep noting, isn’t the prostitution, but the influence-peddling.

ROLL CALL: Obama Looms Large Over Democrats’ 2014 Fight to Retain the Senate. “Democrats face better prospects of holding onto their Senate majority next November than they did two years ago (after all, they begin with 55 seats instead of 53), but a net loss looks inevitable and a big loss is quite possible. Cecil, who is back for a return engagement this cycle, has his work cut out for him. The biggest factor in how the cycle turns out probably isn’t candidate recruiting, fundraising or the number of open seats, though each will affect the fight for the Senate next year. It is almost certainly going to be President Barack Obama’s popularity and the electorate’s sense of how he is doing.”

WHEN WORK-AT-HOME JOBS COLLIDE:

I lived in dread of mixing up my phone-sex job with my tech support job. While a sexy laugh and a description of my breasts might have gotten me good results from retirees who needed their televisions fixed, I couldn’t imagine it going over well with my managers. What I didn’t realize was that that wasn’t the way the mix-up was actually going to go.

The session itself wasn’t anything to write home about. I told him all about how good he made me feel and how much I wanted him, and he was done in pretty short order. He was one of the ones who stuck around for pillow talk. More time means more money for me, so I asked him how his night was going.

“Well, after that, I’d be great all around if my fuckin’ Internet worked!”

“Oh,” I said without thinking about it. “Are you going through a router or are you plugged straight into the wall?”

As it turned out, he was using a router. One hard reboot later, he was back online, and I realized that my life was getting seriously weird.

21st Century employment.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: DOJ white paper on killer drones and US citizens abroad. “The Department of Justice has developed a white paper outlining the specific circumstances under which the United States can conduct a lethal drone strike against an American citizen, a copy of which was obtained Monday by NBC News. The paper provides the first detailed look at the criteria the Obama Administration uses to judge if it can legally kill American citizens traveling abroad without the benefit of due process.”

How’s that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?

HOWARD KURTZ: Obama, Gore, stop whining about right-wing media.

Now it’s true that Fox or Limbaugh can boost or batter any lawmaker, and that they can help drive a controversy into the broader mainstream media. But we’re talking here about the president of the United States. He has an army, a navy and a bunch of nuclear weapons, not to mention an ability to command the airwaves at a moment’s notice. And he’s complaining about a cable channel and a radio talk-show host? . . .

What liberals sometimes forget is that the conservative media took root because many Americans felt the fourth estate was too left-wing. ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, The New York Times and The Washington Post all strive for fairness, in my view, but there is little question that they have a social and cultural outlook that leans to the left. Collectively, they have far more weight than Fox, talk radio and The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Right-wing pundits make a convenient foil, but at times Obama seems to magnify their importance. After all, he’s got the biggest bully pulpit of all.

Well, he needs his Emmanuel Goldsteins.

AND YET, SOMEHOW, HIS PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN NEVER GOT TRACTION: Ron Paul tries to explain controversial comments about slain sniper.

COLLEGE: Whistles Are In, Self-Defense Is Out.

BARACK OBAMA COMES TO MINNEAPOLIS:

President Obama passed through Minneapolis today to push his gun control agenda. He met with local law enforcement officers, and delivered a photo-op speech in front of a backdrop of uniformed law enforcement personnel. The speech, while brief, was marked by Obama’s trademark incoherence. Everything is “reasonable,” and “common sense,” and favored by pretty much everyone. And yet, if you actually listen to what he says, it makes no sense at all.

You can watch the speech here. After introducing various dignitaries, Obama set the stage by declaring that the U.S. is experiencing an “epidemic of gun violence.” But that simply isn’t true. “Gun violence,” like violent crime in general, is declining. The homicide rate in the U.S. has been cut in half since the Clinton administration.

Never let a crisis go to waste. Even if you have to make it up.

ENDGAME: Argentina Freezes Supermarket Prices To Halt Soaring Inflation; Chaos To Follow. “Up until now, Argentina’s descent into a hyperinflationary basket case, with a crashing currency and loss of outside funding was relatively moderate and controlled. All this is about to change. Today, in a futile attempt to halt inflation, the government of Cristina Kirchner announced a two-month price freeze on supermarket products.”

This never works, but ignorant or dishonest politicians always try it. Luckily, nothing like this could happen here.