THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: AP Report: Government Says Report On Power Grid’s Detailed Vulnerabilities Mishandled, Should Have Been Kept Secret. “Federal energy regulators improperly allowed widespread access to a sensitive document that outlined specific locations where the nation’s electric grid is vulnerable to physical threats, a government investigator said Wednesday. The document created by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should have been kept secret as a national security matter, Energy Department Inspector General Gregory Friedman said. Instead the information was provided in whole or in part to federal and industry officials in uncontrolled settings.”

READER BOOK PLUG: From Gonzalo Lira, Hyperinflation In America.

SCIENCE: Slow metabolism hindering weight loss? Genetic ‘switch’ may be answer.

LIFE IN OBAMA’S POST-RACIAL AMERICA: Video: Illinois Democrat dismisses GOP colleague as “half” a black person.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 10 Major Moving Mistakes to Avoid.

MICHAEL WALSH: A Criminal Organization Masquerading As… Oh, You Know the Rest.

GEORGE WILL: Amend the Constitution To Control Federal Spending. It’s a call for an Article V convention to propose amendments. Some states are already behind it.

By the way, the Tennessee Law Review published a symposium on Article V conventions, including a staff-written section on procedure, a couple of years ago. Contributors included such luminaries as Randy Barnett, Richard Epstein, Sanford Levinson and many others. Here’s my contribution, which focuses specifically on spending. And here’s video of me talking about it at the Harvard Law School conference on constitutional conventions.

KICKSTARTER: Send Michael Totten To Vietnam. It’s a worthy endeavor.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 336. It’s another big one.

OUR POLITICIZED, WEAPONIZED BUREAUCRACY: Key Lawyer in DOJ Office Charging Dinesh D’Souza is Obama Campaign Donor. “David Kennedy is the designated District Election Officer in the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York. According to Federal Election Commission records, Kennedy is also a campaign contributor to Barack Obama as well as to John Kerry. Kennedy has also contributed to state campaigns, including New York Democrat Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz. . . . Not only is DEO Kennedy a Obama campaign contributor, he also has a reputation as a proud and vocal liberal, not afraid to boast about his ideological worldview.”

HYPOCRISY: Georgia Dem Hank Johnson laments gender pay gap but pays female staff less than men. The more you look, the more Dems like this you find. This should be a gold mine for attack ads that will encourage women Dem voters to stay home.

UPDATE: Say, I wonder if there will be third party ads attacking the Democrats who took Koch money for taking Koch money? That kind of jiu-jitsu might actually work.

WOMEN PAYING THE SAME FOR LIFE INSURANCE: RANKEST SEXISM! On the other hand: Should Men Pay More For Buffets?

Then again, food-related discriminatory pricing is uniquely awkward. If this became widespread, it could reinforce the stereotype that women are supposed to be birdlike and abstemious while men can indulge without restraint. . . .

If an entire restaurant just assumes that women eat less than men, then it might be seen as wrong or unusual if they eat more. And we don’t need the judgy weight of menu pricing when we’re just trying to enjoy our fourth buttery Corral roll, or our zillionth Pao de Queijo cheese poof. I, for one, would gladly pay an additional $2.25 for the moral freedom to eat with the abandon of a post-breakup Henry the VIII.

Well, if a pricing scheme might make women feel bad about themselves, it must be illegal.

WHEN YOU’VE LOST RUTH MARCUS: “Democrats’ revolting equal-pay demagoguery.”

GLAD I DIDN’T INVEST IN THOSE PUERTO RICAN BONDS SOMEONE WAS TRYING TO SELL ME ON: There’s No Bailout For Puerto Rico. “A municipality could declare bankruptcy under the federal code. But Puerto Rico is a territory of the U.S. — sovereign, but not quite. To make matters worse, Felix Salmon notes, a lot of its debt is theoretically secured by specific revenue streams — so much of it that it is going to have to include revenue bonds, as well as theoretically less secure general obligation bonds. This is going to make the restructuring extremely complicated — and, worse, from the perspective of bondholders, extremely unpredictable. As difficult as it is, it’s hard to see that Puerto Rico has any choice. Its economy has been troubled for a while, and its debt burden is essentially unpayable.”

AT AMAZON, it’s the Cinco de Mayo Sale. Tequila not included.

Also, deals on Top Easter Gifts.

INSTAVISION: I talk with Matt Kibbe about his new book, Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto.

A PARTISAN POLITICAL OPERATION, WHOSE POWER TO TAX IS THE POWER TO DESTROY: The Hill: Watchdog finds IRS employees promoted Obama in 2012. “Internal Revenue Service employees encouraged taxpayers to vote for President Obama during his 2012 reelection campaign and disparaged Republicans, a federal ethics watchdog said Wednesday.”

LORETTA SANCHEZ’S EFFORTS TO POLITICIZE THE BOSTON MARATHON BOMBING INVESTIGATION NOT PLAYING WELL IN BOSTON:

Even by the low standards of Congress, Loretta Sanchez’s performance ranks as a disgrace. The Democrat from California managed — in just a few minutes — to turn the congressional investigation of the marathon terror bombings into a political hatchet job, while demonstrating her complete ignorance of basic facts of the case.

Sanchez somehow butchered the names of the alleged terror bombers not once, but three times, calling the Tsarnaev brothers “Tsarnavar,” then “Tsarnev,” and finally “Tsarnov.”

“There are still unanswered questions about the Tsarnavar brothers,” the tongue-tied congresswoman said. Yes, like, how to pronounce the names of the terrorists. Sorry, alleged terrorists.

Even worse, Sanchez didn’t seem to know that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is the one facing trial, and that his older brother Tamerlan — or “Tamarind” as Sanchez called him — is the one killed during their attempted escape.

Sanchez also flubbed the names of the Watertown police chief who was testifying, and generally sounded like an idiot.

Well, she is a member of Congress. . . .

JAMES TARANTO: ObamaCare’s Missing 3.2 Million: A mixed verdict from the Rand Corp.

The Rand study suggests that ObamaCare’s greatest incentive effect–a function of both the mandate tax and the unattractiveness of individual plans–is to nudge employees to opt in to workplace plans. As for the incentives on employers, they go in both directions. But the law’s main disincentive for ESI–the so-called Cadillac tax on expensive plans–doesn’t take effect until 2018.

As for the individual marketplace, its viability is questionable even if the administration’s overall enrollment figures turn out not to be wildly inflated. Because of price controls–a k a the ban on considering “pre-existing conditions” and limits on accounting for age in setting premiums–the exchanges depend on enrolling a substantial proportion of young, healthy people paying inflated premiums.

Preliminary data showed early enrollments skewing much older than the administration had hoped. And while no data are collected on enrollees’ health status, a new study shows, as the New York Times reports, that “people who signed up early for insurance through the new marketplaces were more likely to be prescribed drugs to treat pain, depression and H.I.V.”

Not a good demographic to insure.

OUCH: Two New Studies Raise Red Flags On ObamaCare. “Before we get to these studies, though, we should recognize why we need outside organizations to validate White House claims in the first place. The Department of Health and Human Services still has no way to quantify important data about those consumers signing up for health insurance through state and federal exchanges. More than six months after the initial rollout of Obamacare — and four years after the ACA’s passage — the systems designed by HHS still cannot determine basic and critical information about enrollments such as whether a premium payment has been made. Without a premium payment, a sign-up in the web portal does not mean coverage has been extended.”

AND WITH GOOD REASON: Post corrects Koch oil sands story, but critics remain unsatisfied.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Yes, the Obama SEC was colluding with banks on CDO prosecutions. “Now that this information is public, the SEC should apologize to all of us for its behavior, and promise not to collude with Wall Street again.” Er, at the very least.

IN CASE YOU MISSED THIS LAST NIGHT: Darrell Issa says emails suggest Elijah Cummings prompted IRS targeting of True the Vote. This is potentially huge. “The IRS and the Oversight Minority made numerous requests for virtually identical information from True the Vote, raising concerns that the IRS improperly shared protected taxpayer information with Rep. Cummings’ staff.”

SHOCKER: More Puzzling Obamacare Numbers.

In fact, we know that at least one midpoint is quite far from the truth, because there is no way to reconcile the 3.9 million people it says bought exchange policies with the Barack Obama administration’s official data showing that 7.3 million had selected exchange plans by the end of March. Even if we factor in the three days the survey missed — which saw a titanic surge in enrollments — and even if we assume that only 80 percent of the people who selected a plan have actually paid for it, 3.9 million is too small. Well before data collection ended, the administration had already announced that plan signups had hit 6 million. Even with attrition of 20 percent, that should still have yielded 4.8 million marketplace policies in the RAND study. And indeed, 4.8 million is within its margin of error, though at the very high end.

My working hypothesis is that the White House is lying. Because, you know, of experience.