AT THE RISKING OF WORKING VODKAPUNDIT’S SIDE OF THE STREET, Your Weekly ‘Alcohol is Good for You!’ Post.

PARENTING: “How children learn about wine and alcohol consumption sets the stage for drinking habits across the lifespan.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 15 Dishes, Drinks, and Desserts for Cinco de Mayo.

AT AMAZON, fresh deals in Movies & TV.

Also, deals in Exercise & Fitness.

Plus, savings in Kitchen & Dining.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: How to make the U.S. collapse-proof. It’s an idea so crazy it just might work!

WHO YOU GONNA CALL? Milo Yiannopoulos: Here’s Why The Left Is So Desperate To Defend The New Feminist Ghostbusters. “With nearly 750,000 dislikes, it is the most hated trailer in the site’s history. You’d think it would be time for the movie’s defenders to face reality, and accept the ill-fated reboot for what it is: a feminist cash-in for angsty, blue-haired, Tumblr-obsessed, pronoun-bothering cat ladies. But some are still trying to maintain the illusion that the movie is the best thing since Shawshank (even though no one has seen it yet) and that any dislike can only possibly stem from misogyny, rather than the film’s screechingly terrible trailer and promotional stills.”

GOOD: The Age of Cheap Oil and Natural Gas Is Just Beginning: Fracking and horizontal drilling have sent supplies through the roof and prices through the floor, and things are likely to stay that way.

KNOW YOUR PLACE, PEASANTS! The Left’s Push to Get Rid of Government Spending Transparency.

NOBODY TELL HILLARY: “Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Brazil Has To Pause Adoption Of Broadband Usage Caps After Consumers Revolt.

HISTORY: Who Raised the Flag at Iwo Jima? A 70-Year-Old Controversy, Reignited.

IOWAHAWK: Bajito Y Suavecito — Cinco de Mayo Ranfla Especial.

“If you’re going out to celebrate the 5th, remember to hoist a cerveza in honor of these true pioneers. Praise the Lowered!”

Speaking of which, a budding Manhattan restaurateur seeks your patronage today in his own inimitable style:

ELECTRIC FEEL: 2017 BMW i3: Now with More Electric Range.

AT AMAZON, deals galore in Training & Fitness.

And shop the Amazon Emergency Prep Store. Plus, Emergency & Long-Term Storage Food Deals. When bad things happen, it’s good to have food.

Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season. Or if a generator isn’t practical, consider an inverter.

What with all the Zika news, I’m guessing that the mosquito control stuff will be a big item this year.

LONDONISTAN: Americans will react with shock when they find out the new Mayor of London is a Muslim who called moderate Muslims ‘Uncle Toms’.

LYING TO SELL A DEBACLE: Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru Boasts of How the Administration Lied to Sell the Iran Deal. “Samuels’s profile is an amazing piece of writing about the Holden Caulfield of American foreign policy. He’s a sentimental adolescent with literary talent (Rhodes published one short story before his mother’s connections won him a job in the world of foreign policy), and high self regard, who thinks that everyone else is a phony. Those readers who found Jeffrey Goldberg’s picture of Obama in his March Atlantic profile refreshing for the president’s willingness to insult American allies publicly will be similarly cheered here by Rhodes’s boast of deceiving American citizens, lawmakers, and allies over the Iran deal. Conversely, those who believe Obama risked American interests to take a cheap shot at allies from the pedestal of the Oval Office will be appalled to see Rhodes dancing in the end zone to celebrate the well-packaged misdirections and even lies—what Rhodes and others call a ‘narrative’—that won Obama his signature foreign policy initiative.”

RIGHT ANGLE: Welcome to TSA Hell.

The lines have gotten worse, and will continue to get worse — but security has yet to improve.

F.I.R.E. LAUNCHES ‘So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast.’

“QUIRK.” Legal quirk enabling surveillance state expansion absent Congressional vote.

Consider that the US surveillance state was greatly expanded, and yet not a single member of Congress voted for the Justice Department’s proposal last week.

That’s because of a quirk in US law that allows so-called “procedural rules” of court to be written by unelected advisory committees under the umbrella of the Administrative Office of the US Courts. From there, they are generally rubber stamped by the Supreme Court. The only way these rules don’t become law is if Congress takes action to thwart them.

So what happened here? The Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure was amended to allow judges to sign warrants to allow the authorities to hack into computers outside a judge’s jurisdiction as part of a criminal investigation. What’s more, Rule 41 would allow judges to use one warrant to search multiple computers anywhere instead of having to get warrants for each computer. Without Rule 41, judges could authorize electronic searches only within their own judicial district. Although this is an amendment to courthouse procedure rules, it has a huge impact in practice and on the Fourth Amendment. The Justice Department even said so as early as last week.

Expanded government power without anyone taking responsibility. It’s the American way, in the 21st Century.

LIES ARE NOT A BIG PROBLEM FOR THEM: EMILY’s List spox claims Sen. Mark Kirk said something he didn’t.

“WALTER DURANTY IS ROLLING OVER IN HIS GRAVE:” The New York Times, which 80 years ago hid the results of Stalin’s terror famine is now getting into the food delivery business, Bloomberg reports:

This summer, the New York Times will begin selling ingredients for recipes from its NYT Cooking website as the newspaper publisher seeks new revenue sources to offset declines in print. The Times is partnering with meal-delivery startup Chef’d, which will send the ingredients to readers within 48 hours. The Times and Chef’d will split sales from the venture.

“Our audience spends a lot of time cooking at home,” said Alice Ting, vice president of brand development, licensing and syndication for the Times. “So for us it was a natural area to investigate.”

The Times’ foray into meal delivery is another example of how the publisher is looking for new ways to make money from its content, brand and journalists to hedge against the uncertain future of newspapers. Last year, circulation and advertising accounted for about 94 percent of total revenue.

In recent years, New York Times Co. has started businesses around live conferences, a wine club and an online store that sells hats, shirts and other trinkets with Times logos. The paper also runs a growing travel unit, “Times Journeys,” in which tourists pay thousands of dollars to see countries like Iran or Cuba, many of which are led by Times foreign correspondents.

In 2013, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos bought the free-falling Washington Post out of seat cushion money. But “In New York, Scrappy Local Newspaper Struggling For Survival,” to slightly modify a decade-old Iowahawk headline, is diversifying out of fear.

It’s a well-deserved fear, given the horrendous quality of their core product, which — I think! — is still virtue signaling leftwing opinion branded as news, right?

Speaking of which, after a couple of decades worth of articles decrying the “evils” of modern technology and hygiene, I hope whoever preps the Times’ meals washes his hands and has a working refrigerator.

Related: “What I Saw in Iran,” in which the Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles takes a “Times Journey” over to the land of Khomeini.

(Headline via Todd Kincannon.)

SOMETIMES YES, SOMETIMES NO: Do Police Body Cameras Really Work? Sometimes police body cameras accomplish their intended purpose, but other times they backfire. And nobody knows why.

DEAR GOP: I’VE DECIDED TO START SEEING OTHER PARTIES. “I have a hard time seeing profound ideological differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump…For over twenty years, all you have been able to offer me in presidential elections is something and someone to vote against,” Stephen Kruiser writes. “I’d like something to vote for again. So I’m leaving. Don’t write. Don’t call. Don’t stalk me on Instagram. We’re done, GOP. Several years too late, but it’s over. I’d like my key back now.”

THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE JUST DECLARED WAR ON NORTH CAROLINA, David French writes at NRO:

Is there a single person who believes that the Congress that passed Title VII believed that it was doing away with the distinction between male and female — making it completely dependent on individual preference — and thus granting men access to women and girls in bathrooms, lockers, and showers? LGBT activists used to be angry with the Obama administration for its failure to pass or even press hard for ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that would have added sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes in federal employment law. But passing bills is so tiresome and inefficient, especially when a mere memo can change the law, and the Obama administration can be confident that leftist judges will uphold most anything done with Obama’s ”pen and phone.”

The letter claims that North Carolina treats “transgender employees, whose gender identity does not match their ‘biological sex’ . . . differently from similarly-situated non-transgender employees.” This is a howler. I wonder . . . will the DOJ intervene to defend the state from liability the first time a woman or child is assaulted in a bathroom by a man who was granted a legal right to be there? Quack science meets quack law, and social justice warriors rejoice.

At Hot Air, Jazz Shaw writes “For their part, the state is thus far standing firm against the threats coming from Loretta Lynch’s office.” Shaw links to a Boston Herald article today that notes:

Giving no indication of yielding to pressure, North Carolina’s Republican leaders called a federal warning about the legality of the state’s new law limiting LGBT anti-discrimination rules a broad overreach by the government.

Gov. Pat McCrory and top state legislators were determining what steps to take after the U.S. Justice Department said in a letter Wednesday that the state law violated federal civil rights laws and threatened possible litigation.

“This is no longer just a North Carolina issue, because this conclusion by the Department of Justice impacts every state,” McCrory said.

As Shaw writes, “The stupidity surrounding this entire argument is staggering, but we unfortunately seem to be living in a time when the courts must be called in to decide every demand from the You Will Be Made To Care battalion of the SJW. It’s sad, but unless there is a resurgence of common sense around the electorate you can expect more and more of this nonsense to clog up the courts for years to come.”

While a two-front war is always a dangerous proposition, it’s got to be good for Mr. Obama to have President Ash Carter in charge of fighting ISIS. It frees up our reverse von Clausewitz, the man who views American politics as the continuation of warfare, to continue his all-out war against the American people, which as we’ve seen over the last seven and a half years, Mr. Obama views as the much more important of the two struggles. (Just ask him.)

IT’S NOT TOO LATE to shop the Amazon Mother’s Day Shop.