NEWSWEEK: Where Have All The Babies Gone? More and more Americans are childless by choice. But what makes sense for the individual may spell disaster for the country as a whole. It’s all about incentives. The rewards for having kids have dropped, while the costs have risen. If you don’t like the current situation, change it.

IF THE GOP WANTS TO IMPROVE ITS REPUTATION WITH YOUNG VOTERS, it might take a hint from the College Republicans who are standing up for the right to unlock your cellphone.

It might also move to abolish the federal 21-year-old drinking age. If some high-profile libertarian Republican in the Senate — say, Rand Paul or Ted Cruz — were to make a big public push for these things, it would be good for him, and for the party’s image.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Left’s Howls Against Rick Perry’s Texas Prove Its Low-Tax Model Is A Success.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Feds Turn Up The Heat On Expensive Colleges. “Delivering on one of President Obama’s State of the Union promises, the Department of Education recently unveiled the “College Scorecard,” which conveys information on average student debt, graduation rates and loan defaults at nearly 3,500 schools. Yes, much of the data is a few years old, and it doesn’t yet include graduates’ average starting salaries, but schools are already feeling the heat. NYU, which has the highest median debt among students at large universities, was defensive when its data was published. . . . Some of these complaints may have merit—the system is still very new, and raw data doesn’t tell the whole story. But it’s important to hold schools accountable for their costs. For years, schools have been able to raise tuition while expecting students to take on more and more loans, and hard facts about the value of various degrees were difficult to come by.”

TIME TO WORRY ABOUT human-robot relationships?

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Unemployment Stories, Vol. 27: ‘We Eat a Lot of Soup and Crackers.’

AT AMAZON, save up to 40% on elliptical trainers from Schwinn and Nautilus.

Also, today only: On Blu-Ray, Ben-Hur (50th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition), $26.49 (59% off).

NEWT GINGRICH Not So Happy With Karl Rove.

ERIC HOLDER’S LEGACY: Politicizing Justice. “Attorney General Eric Holder’s agenda begins and ends with delivering favors to Obama’s constituencies.”

EMILY MILLER ON OBAMA AND GUN CONTROL:

Chicago is a dangerous town, but gun control hasn’t made it better. The city forbids the law-abiding from having guns, leaving the bad guys to rule the streets. The result is one of the highest murder rates in the country. President Obama’s plan isn’t to reverse from a failed course, but to apply federal gun registration and confiscation of certain weapons nationwide.

Addressing students at Hyde Park Academy last week, Mr. Obama recalled the recent murder of Hadiya Pendleton, a teenager. “It’s not unique to Chicago,” he said. “It’s not unique to this country. Too many of our children are being taken away from us.”

The rising homicide rate actually is unique to the president’s hometown. The 506 murders last year reflected a 16 percent increase over the previous year. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, this happened while the rest of the country saw a 2 percent decrease in homicides; the national rate is at its lowest point since 1963.

Doubling down on failure while pointing fingers at others has become a hallmark.

21ST CENTURY POLITICS: Silicon Valley Libertarians Cling to Their Guns: “Gun Control is Technology Control.”

A gun, like a computer, is a tool that empowers the individual.

SMART DIPLOMACY’S FRUITS: Five Months After Benghazi Murders: Killers Frolic Untouched There.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Gas Prices Soar 51 Cents in Just Two Months.

BEN BOYCHUK: A Mighty Wind: As Texas appeals to California’s businesses, Golden State boosters can only make flatulence jokes.

JAMES TARANTO: The Devil Made Them Do It: Senate Democrats try to dodge responsibility for ObamaCare. “If we’re going to hold people accountable, how about starting with Bill Nelson, who was among the 89 senators voting ‘yes’ on the tax deal? Maybe that’s not entirely fair, since Nelson might have been unaware of that provision, and the expiration, less than two hours earlier, of the Bush tax cuts put genuine pressure on lawmakers to act quickly. Still, it’s odd for a member of Congress to be faulting the administration for a position it took in negotiating with Congress, rather than faulting himself and his colleagues for enacting a law whose provisions he doesn’t like.”

ALSO THAT GUY BEHIND THE TREE: Shea-Porter: Withhold pay from rich members of Congress, not me.

FLASHBACK: Gregg Easterbrook on defending against asteroid impacts.

Abbott believes that a space object about 300 meters in diameter hit the Gulf of Carpentaria, north of Australia, in 536 A.D. An object that size, striking at up to 50,000 miles per hour, could release as much energy as 1,000 nuclear bombs. Debris, dust, and gases thrown into the atmosphere by the impact would have blocked sunlight, temporarily cooling the planet—and indeed, contemporaneous accounts describe dim skies, cold summers, and poor harvests in 536 and 537. “A most dread portent took place,” the Byzantine historian Procopius wrote of 536; the sun “gave forth its light without brightness.” Frost reportedly covered China in the summertime. Still, the harm was mitigated by the ocean impact. When a space object strikes land, it kicks up more dust and debris, increasing the global-cooling effect; at the same time, the combination of shock waves and extreme heating at the point of impact generates nitric and nitrous acids, producing rain as corrosive as battery acid. If the Gulf of Carpentaria object were to strike Miami today, most of the city would be leveled, and the atmospheric effects could trigger crop failures around the world.

What’s more, the Gulf of Carpentaria object was a skipping stone compared with an object that Abbott thinks whammed into the Indian Ocean near Madagascar some 4,800 years ago, or about 2,800 B.C. Researchers generally assume that a space object a kilometer or more across would cause significant global harm: widespread destruction, severe acid rain, and dust storms that would darken the world’s skies for decades. The object that hit the Indian Ocean was three to five kilometers across, Abbott believes, and caused a tsunami in the Pacific 600 feet high—many times higher than the 2004 tsunami that struck Southeast Asia. Ancient texts such as Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh support her conjecture, describing an unspeakable planetary flood in roughly the same time period. If the Indian Ocean object were to hit the sea now, many of the world’s coastal cities could be flattened. If it were to hit land, much of a continent would be leveled; years of winter and mass starvation would ensue.

Read the whole thing.

TED CRUZ: Washington has a tradition of trying to silence people.

WELCOME TO THE CRAZY YEARS: In a Remarkable Display of Government Stupidity on Steroids, Cops Arrest a 10-Year Old for a Toy Gun.

CHAOS UMPIRE: The President Is Raging Against a Budget Crisis He Created. “Obama invented the ‘sequester’ in the summer of 2011 to avoid facing up to America’s spending problem.”

IS SOCIAL MEDIA BREEDING MONSTERS? Stacy McCain says “Oh, Hell, Yes!”

VOTER FRAUD UPDATE: Ohio Officials: Poll Worker May Have Voted Six Times. It wasn’t for Romney.

STEPHEN L. CARTER: The Need for Dignity, on Land and at Sea.

HEH.

WELL, IF IT’S GOOD FOR LAWYERS, IT’S GOOD FOR AMERICA, RIGHT? Obama’s immigration law offers cornucopia to immigration lawyers.