IT WAS AN award-winning lefty blogger who was behind the fake-rape-threat hoax.

ED MORRISSEY: Unravel ObamaCare And You Get A Train Wreck.

APPARENTLY, THE WHOLE DEMOCRATIC-MEDIA COMPLEX: Who’s afraid of the Koch brothers?

The thought of the Koch brothers purchasing the Los Angeles Times so distressed staffers attending a recent in-house award ceremony that half of them raised their hands when asked if they would quit their jobs should the paper — which has come out of bankruptcy court and is very much for sale — fall into the two oil billionaires’ portfolio, the Huffington Post reported recently. . . .

Koch opponents fear they’ll turn the Los Angeles Times into a “conservative mouthpiece,” as one anonymous source put it to Media Matters’ Joe Strupp. Casting the Kochs as conservatives, which Garance Franke-Ruta (the Atlantic), Michael Wolff (USA Today) and David Horsey (Los Angeles Times) do in their recent pieces, makes them sound totally out of tune with cosmopolitan Los Angeles. Such a case can be made, of course, if you track the Kochs’ campaign donations and political philanthropy. They’ve given richly to Republican candidates and the party’s presidential nominee Mitt Romney, they’ve funded controversial climate science research and they’ve supported Tea Partiers.

But this portrait of the Kochs as proponents of smaller-than-small government and deregulation isn’t complete without a mention of their libertarian views — their long history of pairing fiscal conservatism with social liberalism. Politico acknowledged that wrinkle last year in a piece about David Koch in which he spoke in favor of gay marriage, defense cuts and military withdrawal from the Middle East. Hardly the views of a hard-core conservative. If these notions were smuggled into Los Angeles Times editorials or even (gasp!) news pages, would many of the city’s orthodox liberals reject them as propaganda?

It’s about crass politics, not even really ideology. Nothing outside the party.

SPENGLER: The Stock Market Rally That Leaves You Poorer.

HIGHER EDUCATION’S PROTECTIVE BUBBLE: “As UMass Dartmouth finds itself at the center of a terrorism investigation with four students jailed, school officials are refusing to release even basic information about the marathon-bombing-linked suspects — saying their privacy rights outweigh the public’s right to know.”

UPDATE: The Tsarnaevs’ Facilitators: Who inspired the alleged Boston marathon bombers to find meaning in the most violent forms of madness?

COLORADO GOES DEMOCRATIC, starts voting shenanigans. “Colorado’s Democratic-controlled state legislature is ramming through an election bill that critics say will open the door to voter fraud and intimidation. . . . The Colorado law would make mail-in ballots mandatory while eliminating local polling places and allowing people to vote on the same day they register. Critics of the bill say that these changes could lead to fraud and voter intimidation.” I think to some those aren’t bugs, but features.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Just How Ignorant Is Obama About ObamaCare? “At his press conference this week, President Obama tried to reassure Americans about ObamaCare. Instead, he displayed either an incredible lack of understanding about his own law, or something far worse.”

WAR ON WOMEN: Justice Dept. to appeal Plan B court ruling. “The Obama administration will appeal a court decision that required the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to make the controversial contraceptive known as Plan B available to women of all ages. The Justice Department (DOJ) filed its appeal with the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday — just 24 hours after the FDA relaxed its restrictions on Plan B.”

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Illinois County Public Housing Gun Ban Repealed, Following Second Amendment Foundation Lawsuit.

ACADEMIC FRAUD: How Social Scientists, and the Rest of Us, Got Seduced By a Good Story. “I do not excuse those who resort to cheating. But as the consumer of these publications, we should be worried, because this system essentially selects for bad data handling. The more you manipulate your data (and there are lots of ways to massage your data so that it shows what you’d like, even without knowing you’re doing it), the more likely you are to come up with a publishable result. Peer review acts as something of a check on this, of course. But your peers don’t know if, for example, you decided to report only the one time your experiment worked, instead of the seven times it didn’t. It would be much better if we rewarded replication: if journals were filled not only with papers describing novel effects, but also with papers by researchers who replicated someone else’s novel effects. But replicating an effect that someone else has found has nowhere near the prestige–or the publication value–of something entirely new. Which means, of course, that it’s relatively easy to make up numbers and be sure that no one else will try to check.”

WAR ON WOMEN: Possible Human Trafficking Investigated at Saudi Diplomatic Compound in Virginia. “Agents from U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement/Homeland Security Investigations and Fairfax County police were called to a home in the 6000 block of Orris Street in McLean overnight and, in the words of a source familiar with the investigation, ‘rescued’ two women. One woman reportedly tried to flee by squeezing through a gap in the front gate as it was closing. It’s not clear if the women, who sources say are from the Philippines, called investigators to the home themselves or if someone else did.”

MY GRANDFATHER, WHO WAS IN THE OIL BUSINESS, WAS SAYING THIS DECADES AGO: The U.S. Has Much, Much More Gas and Oil Than We Thought. “The United States has double the amount of oil and three times the amount of natural gas than previously thought, stored deep under the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana, according to new data the Obama administration released Tuesday. . . . The formations, called Bakken and Three Forks, span much of western North Dakota, the northern tip of South Dakota and the northeastern tip of Montana. The last time the United States Geological Survey assessed this area for its oil and gas reserves was in 2008. But that assessment did not include the Three Forks formation, which explains the substantial increase in the estimates. USGS estimates that these two formations together hold 7.4 billion barrels of undiscovered—but technically recoverable—oil and 6.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.”

FORGET BUYING A NEWSPAPER: How The Koch Brothers Could Save American Higher Education.

BORDER SECURITY: Student Arrested In Boston Bombings Case Entered US Without Visa.

MEET THE WOMEN OF THE NRA: “By the way, it seems to be a little-known fact, but the AR-15 is very popular with women, in part because it is easy to adapt to a smaller frame.”

DIVERSITY PROBLEM: Why Are Evangelicals Underrepresented Among the Legal Elite? I’m pretty sure that oikophobia plays a significant role.

IF YOU WONDER WHY PEOPLE ARE SUSPICIOUS THAT THE FEDS WANT TO CREATE AN ILLEGAL REGISTRY OF PEOPLE’S GUNS: Docs Show Napolitano Thanked Missouri Governor For Breaking State Law. “Missouri Governor Jay Nixon repeatedly denied knowing anything about Missouri illegally sharing its citizens private CCW information with the federal government, even after his own head of Missouri Highway Patrol contradicted him in a public hearing. Now we’ve learned that Nixon not only knew about the violation of Missouri law, but he was thanked in a letter by Janet Napolitano. Missouri law — signed into effect by Gov. Nixon himself — prohibits full compliance with the Real ID Act. This includes sharing Missouri’s conceal carry list, which officials under Nixon did, with his full knowledge, according to this letter.”

FREE SPEECH IN THE ACADEMY: Morehouse College disinvites black pastor from graduation for criticizing Obama.

WELL, YES: Study: Ordering Groceries Online Is Greener Than Driving To The Store. “The basic intuition here is that a truck or van packed with groceries delivering to eight different houses can, in theory, use a lot less fuel than eight different cars all driving from home to the store and back again.”

I wrote about this nearly a decade ago. “I order a lot of things from the Web specifically because it saves me the hassle of venturing out into traffic to visit stores, but when I avoid that hassle I avoid burning gas, too. True, the delivery truck burns gas — but it’s delivering to a lot of other homes at the same time it’s delivering to mine, so overall it winds up using considerably less per person than if everyone shops individually.” I should’ve applied for a grant.

ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: New Tone: Liberals in Media Call Senator Kelly Ayotte a ‘Target.’

PETER SUDERMAN: Democrats in Congress Are Increasingly Worried About Obamacare.

SCIENCE: More Bad News for Obamacare: Study Finds Medicaid Has No Effect on Measured Health Outcomes.

ANTI-GROWTH: Harsanyi: Barack Obama’s ‘Fairness’ Economy Has Backfired.

MATT YGLESIAS SAYS 401KS SUCK. Instead he calls for “a much more forceful, much more statist approach to forced savings, whether that’s quasi-savings in the form of higher taxes and more Social Security benefits or something like a Singapore-style system where ‘private’ savings are pooled into a state-run investment fund.”

The problem is, those approaches suck, too. Social Security is going broke. If you want to see a pooled state-run investment fund, look at CalPers. It’s going broke amid horribly politicized mismanagement. And state-run pension funds are subject to all sorts of politicized investment decisions that have nothing to do with the interests of the pensioners. At least with 401k plans, the politicians aren’t involved — though I sense a political move to change that, too . . . .

Ultimately, there’s no magic solution to retirement savings, though a higher economic growth rate would help a lot. But the solutions being peddled all seem to involve putting more power into the hands of the people who have created the problems we face now.

UPDATE: A cynical take from reader John Koisch:

Do you get the feeling this is all battlefield preparation for Obama to start implementing his limitations on retirement savings? We never heard of this as a problem until Obama took office.

The real problem here is that, just as in Healthcare, my sense is that Bambi is going to turn to his friends, the “experts” to manage these funds on behalf of the state. And we will inevitably come across the 401K version of the IPAB … the group who removes funds from your account because of your 18% return and gives them to the other guy’s account who only got 5%.

The common theme in all of these is the co-opting of the corporate world. What government can’t do well, it borgs from the free-market. And when captains of industry face declining rates of return, they turn to the government to protect their fiefdoms and provide “guaranteed” rates of return. And the little guy and small business is left out of all of this … rubes.

Yes, if you’re not connected you get the shaft.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails this link: “It takes two words to show Yglesias’ statist approach is massively unwise: Chrysler bondholders.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: 25 Universities With The Worst Professors: Reader Brian Francis writes: “What fascinates me is the fact that this list is dominated by schools in the New England area: 15 schools from the Northeast made the list. Even more fascinating to me is that the article points out 11 schools from the Midwest are on the list, but makes no mention of the 15 from the Northeast. I suppose this is conjecture, but could it be a matter of politics? Clearly most of the Northeast is blue, and while many of these Midwest states voted blue in the last election, I cannot help but wonder if the media is attempting to protect the Higher Education establishment, at least to a certain extent. On the flip side, here is a list of the institutions with the best professors.”

Interestingly, none of the schools with the worst professors are in the south, while several of the schools with the best are.