TIM GEITHNER HAPPIEST! Mickey Kaus: Big Obamacare payoff for tax cheats? “The Obamacare cheating bonus–$5,328, in the above example–dwarfs either of those incentives, and almost doubles the payoff for understating your income. Save on income taxes and FICA and get near-free health insurance too!”

THE HILL: GOP touts campaign to blunt Obama’s executive powers.

House Republicans say they’re proud of their 2013 campaign to stymie President Obama’s regulatory agenda, even as Congress comes under fire for one of its least productive years.

The bitterly divided Congress will pass fewer laws in 2013 than any year in modern history. As a result of the gridlock, President Obama has turned to his administration’s regulatory authority in pursuit of key policy goals, including efforts to tackle gun violence and climate change.

While House Republicans have pinned the blame for Congress’ anemic legislative output on Senate Democrats, they make no bones about their efforts to blunt Obama’s rulemaking power.

“We’re left with no choice,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). “The president can’t just go it alone, that’s not who we are as a country.”

In interviews with The Hill, several House Republicans claimed momentum in the messaging battle over federal regulations, which they’ve portrayed as too overbearing and expensive under the Obama administration.

The conference has sought to put the president’s rulemaking agenda on trial in dozens of hearings convened in 2013 by Republican committee and subcommittee leaders.

That’s nice, but you also need the kind of blizzard of legal challenges, and accompanying PR, that Democrats would wage against a Republican doing the same thing.

INVASION OF PRIVACY: The government can “imagine some people may be upset” but also that some “will be comforted and relieved at getting the help they need to navigate a confusing process.” “The quotes are from Peter Lee, the executive director of California health exchange, about sending private insurance companies the contact information for individuals who started an application on the website but did not complete the process. They also did not agree to be contacted by insurance agents. This release of information was no accident, but a new program designed to get people signed up.”

When private companies do this sort of thing, it’s a crime. When the government does it, it’s supposed to be a comfort.

JOSEPH CURL: Obama Tells A Whopper On IRS Scandal.

Fact: The IRS targeted conservative and tea party groups requesting tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election. That’s a fact.

Congress held hearings — embarrassing hearings. Three top Internal Revenue Service officials resigned. No heads rolled, but for the Obama administration, and the lawless Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., that amounted to a major scandal. Even White House spokesman Jay “Circus” Carney called the IRS’s actions “inappropriate.” Fact.

But President Obama, in an interview last week with sycophant Chris Matthews, now says the entire scandal was made up by the media.

“When we do things right, they don’t get a lot of attention,” the president said, no doubt sending a thrill up the MSNBC host’s leg. “If we do something that is perceived at least initially as a screwup, it will be on the nightly news for a week.”

Like, say, deploying the nation’s tax watchdog to target political opponents? Just a “screw up.” . . . Although the president is busy trying to change the subject, this time to income inequality, the IRS story just won’t disappear. Last week, Rep. Darrell E. Issa, chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, had simply had enough. He called out the IRS’s chief counsel, William Wilkins, for saying “I don’t recall” a staggering 80 times during his congressional testimony last month.

“Your memory consistently failed when you were asked about information you shared with the Treasury Department,” the lawmaker wrote. “Your failure to recollect important aspects of the Committee’s investigation suggests either a deliberate attempt to obfuscate your involvement in this matter or gross incompetence on your part.”

Funny, the Obama administration, in Year 5, is totally fine with “gross incompetence.” Many warned that these guys weren’t ready for prime time. They said they were.

The only “screw up” was getting caught.

RUBES SELF-IDENTIFY: Byron York: Among ‘Obama Coalition,’ Obama approval plunges.

President Obama won re-election with the rock-solid support of what has become known as the “Obama Coalition” — young people, minorities, women, and low-income voters. Without a firm foundation — and high turnout — among those groups, Obama would not be in the White House today.

Now, little more than a year after the president’s re-election, his job approval rating has fallen among all segments of the American electorate. But it has fallen the most among those who did the most to elect him.

For example, according to a new Gallup compilation, Obama’s job approval rating among Hispanic Americans has plunged from 75 percent in December 2012 to 52 percent today — a drop of 23 percentage points, the sharpest decline among any voter group. Among Americans who make less than $24,000 a year, the president’s approval rating has fallen from 64 percent last December to 46 percent today. Among Americans 18 to 29 years of age, it has fallen from 61 percent to 46 percent. Among women, it has fallen from 57 percent to 43 percent.

The only key part of the Obama Coalition that did not experience a double-digit drop in support for the president is black Americans, although his support is down there, too — from 92 percent last December to 83 percent today.

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

POLITICO: Teachers Unions Face Moment Of Truth.

It’s designed to be an impressive show of force: Thousands of unionized teachers plan to rally Monday in cities from New York to San Francisco to “reclaim the promise of public education.” Behind the scenes, however, teachers unions are facing tumultuous times. Long among the wealthiest and most powerful interest groups in American politics, the unions are grappling with financial, legal and public-relations challenges as they fight to retain their clout and build alliances with a public increasingly skeptical of big labor.

And with reason.

NOTHING SHADY ABOUT THIS: NPR: Report Details ATF’s Use Of Mentally Disabled In Gun Stings.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel just : Based on court records, police reports and dozens of interviews, the paper details how the ATF used “rogue” tactics — including providing underage youths with alcohol and allowing them to smoke pot — to run storefront gun and drug stings across the country.

In our estimation the most explosive allegation made in the report is that the agents with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives used mentally disabled people to run their stings.

The country’s in the very best of hands. Here’s the original report.

NOPE. Would A Free Society Be A Crime-Free Society? But there would be less crime, and a notable absence of malum prohibitum.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: 10-year old Johnny Jones suspended for shooting imaginary arrow.

WAR ON WOMEN: Gender wage gap in Obama’s White House: Female staffers earn less than 87 cents on the dollar compared to men. “So I guess some obvious questions for Obama would include: Did you know that women working in your White House are paid less than men? Specifically, are you aware that female White House staffers earn 87 cents on the dollar compared to your male staffers? And shouldn’t your targeted initiatives to close the gender wage gap start in your own White House?”

Yeah, I’m sure the White House Press Corps will ask these hard-hitting questions real soon now.

AT DAILY KOS, worries that Mark Levin might actually get his Article V convention.

I should mention, by the way, that last year the Tennessee Law Review devoted an entire issue to constitutional conventions, I wrote the foreword, Sandy Levinson wrote the afterword, and an all-star cast including Randy Barnett, Brannon Denning, Richard Epstein, Tim Lynch, Rob Natelson, and too many other luminaries to mention contributed the stuff in between. (Plus a staff-written section on the rules and mechanics of such a convention). Alas, the issue isn’t online, but you can read my Foreword, which contains many suggested amendments, here.

You can also see my keynote speech at the Harvard Law School conference on constitutional conventions.

BREEDING OVERREACHING TECHNOCRATS WITH NO REAL-WORLD EXPERIENCE? The Problem With Public Policy Schools.

The Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration already lists some 285 such institutions in the United States, and new ones are opening up — but the field as a whole seems to be having an identity crisis. The schools’ curricula and missions have become at once too broad and too academic, too focused on national and global issues at the expense of local and state-level ones. It’s not clear that the schools are preparing their graduates to fix all that needs fixing.

“Policy schools used to be much more about how to translate ideas into solutions to public problems,” says Anne-Marie Slaughter, former dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and now president of the New America Foundation. Scholars at policy schools “do extremely important work,” she asserts, but often, “that’s not work that policymakers read.”

Do tell.

MARGARET WENTE: Obamacare, where the liberal dream crashes and burns.

The Affordable Care Act was going to save the world. But now, the law’s supporters will be happy just to save the furniture. They used to talk about transformation. Today they’re simply hoping for survival.

The botched website was an unforced catastrophe. But that’s not the real problem with Obamacare. The real problem, as dozens of thoughtful commentators have concluded, is the law itself. Obamacare is a massive policy experiment that seeks to remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy – a body that’s so fantastically complex, with so many players and so many moving parts, that nobody can possibly understand how they all interact. Tweak one part, and other parts will behave in unpredictable ways. Pull on a thread and half the sweater may unravel. Even Max Baucus, the Democratic Senate finance chairman, has warned that implementing a law so complicated could be a “train wreck.”

The biggest threat to Obamacare is not Republicans. The biggest threat is Murphy’s Law, along with its corollary, the Law of Unintended Consequences. These are the most powerful laws in the world. They are even more powerful than the Affordable Care Act, and they are the nemesis of all master plans. Evidently, the President and his merry band of wonks had never heard of them.

Mr. Obama is in a tough spot. It’s not just that he looks incompetent – it’s that he looks deceitful.

Well, that’s because he’s both. Plus:

Obamacare is much more than a test of a presidency. It’s a test of whether big government can solve big problems. And so far, the answer is very bad for the entire liberal enterprise. As venerable left-leaning pundit Thomas Edsall wrote in The New York Times, “Cumulatively, recent developments surrounding the rollout of Obamacare strengthen the most damaging conservative portrayals of liberalism and of big government – that on one hand government is too much a part of our lives, too invasive, too big, too scary, too regulatory, too in your face, and on the other hand it is incompetent, bureaucratic and expropriatory.”

The old argument for Big Government’s competence was “we won World War II, we split the atom, we built dams and interstate highways and spaceships.” Now, well. . . .