ANN ALTHOUSE: I said it first: Chris Christie may run for President in 2016 as a Democrat. Well, who else have they got? Hillary? Slow Joe?

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: What were IRS biggies really doing at the White House?

THIS WILL ONLY ENCOURAGE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS: Connecticut Law To Restrict Newtown Evidence. “Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed legislation into law Wednesday that prevents the public release of crime scene photos and video evidence from the Connecticut school shootings that took the lives of 20 first graders and six school employees.”

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): James Pethokoukis: 9 reasons why the 4-year old US economic recovery is closer to awful than awesome. Here are the first 5:

1. Annual US GDP growth, adjusted for inflation, has averaged an anemic 2.1% for the 15 full quarters of recovery, versus 5.1% during the same span after the severe 1981–82 recession.

2. As a result, the economy has yet to return to anywhere near its pre–Great Recession growth trend. If it had, the economy would be $1 trillion bigger today.

3. This recovery has seen the weakest increase in real disposable income of any of the seven most recent recoveries, according to ITG Market Research.

4. The average US household has recovered a mere 45% of the wealth lost during the Great Recession, according to the St. Louis Fed.

5. The economy has 2 million fewer private-sector jobs than it did at the January 2008 peak.

Other than that — er, and the other 4 — everything’s fine. Recovery summer 5!

MORE THOUGHTS ON WHY THE MEDIA GETS THINGS WRONG: “Unfortunately, Friedersdorf is so convinced the media’s groupthink accurately represents facts that he can’t see how utterly apt Unz’s title is. . . . Compare and contrast the coverage of the Valerie Plame scandal (body count, zero, for those keeping score), with the coverage of Benghazi. Alternatively, consider l’affaire Plame (body count zero), with the protracted somnolence – it never rose to the level of reporting – produced by the DOJ’s Fast ‘n’ Furious embarrassment. At last count, over two hundred people lost their lives as a result of Fast ‘n’ Furious, one of them being United States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Ho-hum. Got something snarky about the Tea Party?”

UPDATE: Big Media Failed To Break Even One of Obama Scandals.

ANOTHER UPDATE: “Obama media minions now know what it felt like when Jim Jones brought out the Kool-Aid: Disillusioned but still obedient.”

AT AMAZON, deals and markdowns on bestsellers in shoes for men and women. Looks to be mostly crocs and sandals at the top of the list. Well, summer is here!

Also, today only: Chamberlain Whisper Drive Garage Door Opener with Battery Backup, $189.99 (31% off). The battery backup is a nice feature.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 28.

GIRLS CHARGED WITH “SEXUAL HARASSMENT” FOR MAKING A VIDEO. “Sexual harassment” is now just a code for “offends the prudes.” Welcome to the neo-Victorian era — bringing back the censoriousness, but not the virtues . . . .

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Diet Coke Is Not Meth.

JAMES TARANTO: The Parochialism of ‘Diversity’: Explaining the naiveté and hypocrisy of multiculturalism.

Multiculturalists are no less prone than other human beings to be hostile to out-groups. It’s just that they are willing to accept almost anyone foreign, or otherwise identifiably different, into their in-group. The only out-groups they readily recognize are familiar, domestic ones, like the “other communities” that, according to Rae Binstock, “don’t have to deal with the idea that lots of communities of different people have to coexist.” It all goes back to oikophobia.

So much does. Plus: “Moral responsibility is the essence of humanity. It is what sets Homo sapiens apart from other animals. Assigning moral responsibility to whites while denying it to nonwhites is therefore a way of dehumanizing the latter. Multiculturalism turns out to be a disguised form of white supremacy.”

CHART OF THE DAY: Student Loan Debt is Skyrocketing. “I understand why this has happened, and I understand why it’s hard to get a handle on, but we’re going to regret it if we don’t do something about this. We’re training a whole generation to be wary of going to college, and for those who do, we’re forcing them to start out their lives living under a mountain of debt. . . . It’s also yet another fault line between young and old that’s not likely to turn out well. My generation got a cheap college education when we were young, and we’re getting good retirement benefits now that we’re old. Pretty nice. But now we’re turning around and telling today’s 20-somethings that they should pay through the nose for college, keep paying taxes for our retirements, and oh by the way, when it comes time for you to retire your benefits are going to have to be cut. So sorry. And all this despite the fact that the country is richer than it was 50 years ago.”

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Sick Girl May Get A Lung Transplant But It’s Not A Happy Ending. “The case points up the tragic and, despite efforts to the contrary, inherently arbitrary nature of organ allocation. As long as there is an absolute shortage of organs, giving one person a transplant means denying it to someone else.”

WAR ON SCIENCE: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Anti-Vaxxer. “RFK Jr. has a long history of adhering to crackpot ideas about vaccines, mostly in the form of the now thoroughly disproven link to autism. He’s been hammering this issue for a decade now, and his claims appear to be no better and no more accurate now than they were when he first started making them.”

Contrary to reputation, the Kennedys aren’t particularly bright.

RACISM AT THE D.C. Labor Board.

THIS ISN’T HOW I ENVISIONED THE 21ST CENTURY: The Meth-Fueled, Weeklong Orgies Ravaging London’s Gay Sex-Party Scene. “David Stuart told me that around 75 percent of the 800 men being treated at Antidote’s services are HIV positive, with 60 percent failing to adhere to their HIV treatment when under the influence of drugs.”

AT AMAZON, Warehouse Deals in Toys.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Will Islam Make A Man Out Of You? Islam evolved in the Byzantine era, in part as a reaction to a stratified, bureaucratic and highly complex society that did not allow ordinary men a way of feeling significant.

WORKPLACE VIOLENCE UPDATE: Christian Science Monitor: With Nidal Hasan bombshell, time to call Fort Hood shooting a terror attack? “Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army major facing court-martial for a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009, plans to argue that he acted in defense of the Taliban in Afghanistan. So much for the official US line that the shootings were an act of workplace violence, critics say.”

ANN ALTHOUSE: Character assassination attempted on 5th Circuit Judge Edith Jones. “This is truly scurrilous. I’m embarrassed for these organizations — so-called civil rights groups — who filed this complaint. . . . She gave a speech. You don’t have the text, but you’d like to destroy her. Why not just argue and debate about the ideas? Instead, you tell us about how you — who don’t like her legal decisions — felt an upswelling of emotion over whatever it was she said. Shame on you!”

WHEN WOMEN DON’T WANT SEX, it’s all the fault of men. Well, yeah. I mean, what isn’t? And it’s not sexist to say that. But if a man were to suggest that booming sales of erectile-dysfunction drugs are driven by the upsurge in obesity among American women, well, he’d be savaged by all right-thinking people. Because sexism.

THEY TOLD ME THIS WOULD HAPPEN IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY: Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily. And they were right!

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, ARTISTS WOULD BE JAILED OVER POLITICAL SENSIBILITIES. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Teen Jailed for Rap Lyrics Posted After Boston Bombings.

A Massachusetts teen has been jailed for a month without bail on charges of making a bomb threat after writing rap lyrics that some found threatening following the Boston Marathon bombings.

Cameron D’Ambrosio, 18, was arrested May 1 after friends saw a message he posted to his Facebook page and reported him to his high school principal.

Within hours, police picked him up and later executed a search warrant at the home of his parents, seizing a laptop and Xbox but finding no evidence of explosives, weapons or anything else to indicate he planned to act on any threat, says his attorney. He’s been held without bail since his arrest while authorities convene a grand jury to determine if there is probable cause to indict him. Prosecutors successfully argued that D’Ambrosio was a danger to the public and needed to be held without bail.

The post D’Ambrosio wrote referred to the Boston Marathon bombings that occurred on April 15 and killed three bystanders and have been attributed to two local Chechen brothers.

D’Ambrosio is an aspiring rapper and has posted a number of YouTube videos of himself rapping under the name CammyDee (see video above).

In his post, D’Ambrosio allegedly wrote “fuck a boston bombinb [sic] wait till u see the shit I do, I’ma be famous for rapping, and beat every murder charge that comes across me!”

Police Chief Joseph Solomon said that jokes about bombing and killing people don’t fly in an age when such real events are a regular occurrence.

Apparently, Chief Solomon doesn’t understand the law, or the meaning of “jokes.”

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: NASA to launch equipment for 3D manufacturing in space.

NOW AVAILABLE FOR INSTANT DELIVERY ON KINDLE: The Insta-Wife’s Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters. Buy it now!

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Quantum dot conduction impacted by stoichiometry, not dangling bonds.