“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Egyptians Enraged by U.S. Outreach to Muslim Brotherhood. Also: “They detest John McCain’s behavior, though you wouldn’t know that via U.S. media.”

FASTER, PLEASE: U.S. reports malaria vaccine breakthrough. “More than three dozen volunteers received multiple, intravenous doses of a vaccine produced with a weakened form of the disease, scientists from the National Institutes of Health, the Navy, Army and other organizations reported Thursday. Though the results were promising, more extensive field testing will be required, the researchers wrote. Nevertheless, the it marks the first time any vaccine trial has shown 100% success in protecting subjects from the mosquito-borne tropical disease, which kills about 1 million people a year and sickens more than 200 million.”

FIRST LAVABIT, now Silent Mail shuts down. Remember the innocent days of the Bush Administration, when people got exercised about the government knowing what books you checked out of the library?

THANKS, Twitchy Team! It’s nice to be appreciated!

FOR ALL THE HYPE, it’s “Brown Jobs,” not “Green Jobs” that are growing:

President Obama’s campaign promises of millions of green jobs haven’t materialized. A draft report by the Government Accountability Office found that the Labor Department’s $500 billion program to train people for green jobs produced just 55 percent of its targeted job placements—and most of those jobs were not in the solar or biofuels industries. But while green employment withers, brown jobs are booming: according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the oil and gas industry has added more than 162,000 jobs since 2007, a 40 percent increase. That growth rate is much higher than that of the total private sector, which has grown just 1 percent over the same time period.

The benefits of these new oil and gas jobs—which include positions drilling the wells, extracting the oil and gas, and supporting drilling operations—extend well beyond the men and women working American shale fields, the Energy Information Administration reports. . . . The shale boom isn’t just providing American industry with cheap energy; it’s giving hundreds of thousands of Americans high-paying jobs and a path to recovery from the recent recession.

Good.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Disturbing Questions Obama Won’t Be Asked At Today’s News Conference. You can’t ask disturbing questions at a News Conference! That’s for late-night comedians to do. You know, professionals.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Gov. Cuomo got $100,000 from developer, then signed law giving it big tax breaks.

THE END OF FREE CHECKING? Thank Dick Durbin.

AT AMAZON, up to 60% off on select school supplies.

Also, today only: Knight Rider: The Complete Series, $52.49 (56% off).

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 92.

SHOCKING: FBI Ties Chicago Representatives to Zimbabwe Lobbying.

Two Democratic lawmakers from Illinois worked to help lift economic sanctions against Zimbabwe after being targeted by an illegal $3.4 million lobbying scheme, according to FBI testimony unsealed in federal court.

Reps. Danny K. Davis and Bobby L. Rush, both of the Chicago area, were identified by Chicago media as “U.S. Representative A” and “U.S. Representative B” in the case, given that they were the only Illinois Democrats to have sponsored a failed 2010 resolution to lift sanctions against Zimbabwe cited in court documents.

Two other Chicagoians, Prince Asiel Ben Israel and C. Gregory Turner, are charged with accepting millions in illegal payments from Zimbabwe officials to lobby U.S. lawmakers to remove sanctions against the African nation. Such sanctions have been in place for almost a decade due to long-time President Robert Mugabe’s record of abuses of power.

Lovely.

JAMES TARANTO: Shot to the Heart: A how-to book about inciting a moral panic.

Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner has uncovered a fascinating document: an 80-page “talking points” monograph titled “Preventing Gun Violence Through Effective Messaging,” written by a trio of Democratic political operatives.

The document, as Bedard writes, instructs politicians and advocates “to hype high-profile gun incidents like the Florida slaying of Trayvon Martin to win support for new gun control laws.” Essentially it’s a how-to book on inciting a moral panic.

“The most powerful time to communicate is when concern and emotions are running at their peak,” it advises. Antigun advocates are urged to seize opportunistically on horrific crimes: “The debate over gun violence in America is periodically punctuated by high-profile gun violence incidents including Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, the Trayvon Martin killing, Aurora, and Oak Creek. When an incident such as these attracts sustained media attention, it creates a unique climate for our communications efforts.”

The booklet explicitly urges foes of the Second Amendment to abjure rationality in favor of the argumentum ad passiones, or appeal to emotion.

Didn’t work for them, though.

WELL, YES: IRS caressed liberals, harassed conservatives.

According to Team Obama’s “phony scandal” narrative, when the Internal Revenue Service processed 501(c)(3) tax-exemption applications, it equally tormented liberals and conservatives. No big deal, the argument goes. The IRS suffers from even-handed inefficiency rather than an un-American habit of slamming critics of the president of the United States.

Unfortunately for the Obamites, actual facts annihilate their institutional-incompetence defense.

Heads must roll.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: A lengthy cri de coeur from a reader:

I’ve thought about this and thought about this. And I don’t care to have my name attached to these thoughts, as I’m currently a teacher, but I need to express them. As I peek into your corner of the internet, I see all sorts of posts about the k-12 implosion, and I thought you might be willing to listen.

We, as a society, mandate that all children must be in school until 16, and we must provide educational opportunity to the willing until 18. If there’s an IEP in place, that age can go as far as 21.

A school in which I used to teach was failing. Is failing. Has always failed. Our staff was more than 50% non-traditional teachers. We had a strong core of Teach For America and Teaching Fellows – neither of which pull in your regular “he who can’t? Teaches” anecdotes. Most of us were “wanting to help where we can” folks.

We couldn’t make a dent in that school.

The only reason that the 60% of the kids who bothered to show up daily even came to school was for the 2 free meals and the climate control. We needed a force of 15 security people to keep the kids IN CLASS. They had no desire to learn. They did not CARE if they failed. I never, ever had kids who started at my school as 9th graders and had enough credits to be juniors by their third year. Most didn’t even have enough credits to be sophomores. And this was when summer school was free!

Most of my 33 student classes had a regular showing of about 20-25, and it was never the same kids.

Those that did come were usually passed up to their current grade based on age – after all, who wants a 16-year-old boy in classes with an 11-year-old girl? No one. And we can’t just stop them all in 9th grade! Why, it would be full! So, I had kids who read at 2nd grade level to 11th grade level, with math scores in the same range. All in the same classroom. About 60% of the time.

Now, there were the other issues. I didn’t see them in my room, but we did have some mongo fights in the school. We had fires (never had to have drills because we had fires). Anything we didn’t have nailed down got stolen. But that’s all secondary. Mostly, I liked my kids a lot. I got along with them very well. I even taught some pretty good science when I had seniors – kids who had cared enough to slog through 4 years of prison-without-bars, as they called it.

The primary issue is that these children (and their parents) have no vested interest in education. If they merely showed up to school, I was required to pass them. The D’s in my class were really F’s, but I gave them D’s because they showed up enough that I knew failing them would do them no good and would only get me in a world of trouble.

They look at school as something that is done to them. Something that they are subjected to. Sure, all kids kind of view school like that. But when the family is not saying that it’s their job, when they simply don’t see that school gets them anything? There will be no successful school with these children.

By the way, most of the children we had swapping in and out of our EMO-run (like HMO only E for Education!) public school went to a local charter. That charter has since failed.

What really scares and saddens me is that this is where the argument on education reform is centered: on these kids who WILL NOT SUCCEED. I’m sorry. They won’t. The public school system I teach in has plenty of escape routes for kids with parents who care: from charters to special admit public schools. And most of those special admits? They succeed. Because the kids who don’t care are forced to leave.

(Don’t look at me like that. Most of those special admit contracts aren’t even academics-based. They’re attendance and behavior (no fighting) based. I teach at a school like that now. And it works.)

So these fat politicos go around slamming the teachers at these under-performing schools. Fine. Whatever. I could always go back to computer programming. But what got me was the great gobs of money that were shoved into that failing school. My school now? I have to buy my own equipment. All of it. I’m currently saving my Amazon dollars to buy calculators for my room, because school calculators are only for math classrooms. There? We had 35 Hooke’s Law experiment setups, just as a case in point. Chemicals, balances, optics, electronics, you name it? We had it. If great gobs of money are making it into the classroom, you’d better bet that there’s skimming off the top. In fact, when the school was being taken from its EMO partner because it was STILL failing 7 years after the EMO took it over, the local politicians got slammed for back-room deals where they were trying to take over the school. Those who didn’t have their hands in that cookie jar were just lining up to get “those poor public school tortured kids” onto the rolls of their charter schools.

It was something I was very familiar with. The charter schools would sign in, say, 100 kids in September. The checks for those kids clear from the state sometime, I’d say, around December. Because by January? Those failing kids were sent back to my public school. We’d get 20 kids back from the charters, and we could not turn them away. The reasons were myriad: truancy, tardiness, uniform violations, sass. Nothing the public schools can expel for. But the charters can. Meanwhile? I wonder if they report to the state that they dropped Suzy Sunshine off their rolls, and she’s now back in the public school system? I wonder what happens to the rest of the money?

There HAS to be a reason that all of the politicians in this big city are lining up to have their own sponsored charter schools. And I’m betting altruism has little to do with it.

So, to recap: The big comprehensive schools are failing. And it is not surprising. But many of the other public schools are not. And letting politicians have yet another way to steal money from the people is bad.

This is key, I think: “They look at school as something that is done to them. Something that they are subjected to.”

HYPOCRITE-IN-CHIEF: 5 Limits On NSA Spying That Senator Obama Supported But President Obama Opposes.

THE HILL: Issa demands more documents over Benghazi talking points. “Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Thursday sent a letter to the State Department demanding more information about the talking points the Obama administration used in the wake of last year’s deadly terrorist attack on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya. Issa says emails he obtained through a subpoena indicate that State Department leadership signed off on talking points that said the attack was due to a spontaneous protest, even though they were aware of a potential terrorist threat in the region at the time of the attack.”

But they needed to scapegoat a YouTube guy, so. . . .

BUT I THOUGHT IT WAS AL QAEDA ON THE RUN: No End In Sight To U.S. Embassy Closures. “One day after the Yemeni authorities took credit for disrupting a terrorist plot against oil and gas lines there, the White House continued to rigorously defend the administration’s decision to keep a record numbers of embassies around the world shuttered with no end in sight to the closures. U.S. officials are remaining on high alert and will continue to keep 19 diplomatic facilities in the Middle East, Northern Africa and Central Asia shuttered as intelligence agencies evaluate the threat level.”

THIS WILL END WELL: Gutierrez: 40-50 House Republicans will back immigration reform. “Forty to 50 House Republicans will support immigration reform, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) predicted Thursday. Gutierrez said many of the Republicans supportive of immigration reform don’t want to be identified, but he insisted they would support comprehensive immigration reform.”

CHARLIE MARTIN ON climate change, Earth Day, and unrequited love.

ED DRISCOLL: They Build The Memory Hole Deep At CNN.

“PHONY SCANDALS?” NOT TO VOTERS.

A Fox News national poll released Thursday finds that 78 percent of voters think the questions over the administration’s handling of the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi should be taken seriously. Just 17 percent call it a phony scandal.

The attack, on the anniversary of September 11, killed four Americans — including the U.S. ambassador.

Meanwhile, 69 percent of voters say the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance of everyday Americans is serious, while 26 percent call that a fake scandal.

By a margin of 59-31 percent, voters are also more likely to view the seizure of reporters’ phone records by the Justice Department as serious rather than phony.

And while the White House sees a Congressional investigation of the IRS targeting of conservative groups as a “distraction,” 59 percent of voters take it seriously. Some 33 percent agree with the administration that it’s fake.

It’s always nice when the message-management fails.

UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT bans faculty-student sex.

PERFECTLY SUITED FOR THE CURRENT ECONOMY: New App Will Let You Swap Leftovers With Strangers.

FAMOUS METROPOLITAN DISASTERS.