A REPORT FROM TODAY’S San Antonio Tea Party Meetup.

NORTH CAROLINA: Democrat resigns amid sexual harassment stories.

Well, this stuff starts at the top.

UPDATE: A reader points out that Jon Favreau, pictured above, still works for the White House at a salary of $172,200 a year.

EUROPE: The Pain in Spain is too Big to be Contained. Gotta love the headline, anyway.

And luckily, Tim Geithner says there’s “no risk” that America will wind up like Greece.

TOM MAGUIRE: The Federal Investigation Of Zimmerman – Sand In The Gears From Florida?

AT AMAZON, markdowns in Patio, Lawn & Garden. Including pool supplies.

Also, 50% or more off in Kitchen & Dining.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Democrat Patrick Kennedy: Obama is Running a ‘Quid Pro Quo’ White House. “The entire New York Times story is interesting. Its essential takeaway is that Obama is running a pay-for-play White House despite his promises to keep lobbyists out and clean things up. ‘Drain the swamp’ is how Nancy Pelosi phrased it. But all the Democrats have really done is make sure the swamp is under their management.”

That’s all they ever really wanted.

CAPTAIN’S JOURNAL: Obama And Romney On Gun Control. “Romney has some explaining to do on the campaign trail. But understanding why Romney is speaking before the NRA and Obama is not requires only that one understand the people with whom Obama has surrounded himself. The President cannot pass laws, but the President can do two things that are unique to the office. He can appoint judges, and he can fill positions in the executive branch of government.”

HEH: Download your “Buffett Rule” 1040 forms here.

IMPORTANT DATING ADVICE FROM . . . Stacy McCain?

PROF. MARK PERRY: Gas prices are complex, but not mysterious. Also, high.

JOHN HINDERAKER: “It isn’t surprising that a Muslim extremist has offered $10 million bounty on the heads of George Bush and Barack Obama, but it is a little shocking that the extremist in question is a member of the House of Lords.”

HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: Obama 2012 Top Contributors : Higher Education Has 5 of the Top 20 Spots.

#TSAFAIL: TSA inspector accused of stealing iPads at DFW Airport.

#SILENCEISTOXIC: Why isn’t anyone talking about the failure of Obama’s ‘Green Economy?’ “This piece by Andy Sullivan at Reuters is remarkable for how it highlights the monumental gap between President Obama’s promises about how going green will create hundreds of thousands of jobs and begin to transform the economy, and the actual results in the last 3 years. . . . Obama’s promises on green energy in 2008 made him sound modern, forward looking, even cool. But the truth was there for anyone who cared to see it; most of his program – including the $90 billion for green energy in the stim bill – was unrealistic and deceptive. It’s not clear that all that money added a significant amount of renewable electrical generation to the national grid that wouldn’t have been built in the first place, and plenty of evidence that much of it was misdirected (Solyndra and many other loan recipients as well as money for job training gone to waste). For all his promises, Obama’s green plans have utterly failed. The question is: Why isn’t anyone talking about this?”

ERGONOMICS: A COMPUTER MONITOR THAT WORRIES ABOUT YOUR POSTURE. Building ergonomic smarts into gadgets is a good idea, though my own experiene is that it’s more valuable to change positions frequently than it is to try to find the one perfect position.

I should note that Helen wrote her entire book — now basically finished — on this ball chair without lower back pain, though her neck still bothered her some because of her tendency to hunch her shoulders while typing. Still, she considers the chair a big success.

NON-HATE-CRIME UPDATE: Man arrested in Baltimore St. Patrick’s Day beating.

THE NATION SAYS THAT THE REAL HILARY ROSEN SCANDAL is that she’s just another of the many corporate whores who have surrounded Obama:

Per a senior Dem: “Serious Dem operatives are aghast at Hilary Rosen’s misguided attack on Ann Romney’s work history. She and others at PR firm SKD Knickerbocker have represented many clients that have raised hackles with senior White House staff. It’s an open secret in the Dem consultant community that SKD has been signing up clients based on ‘perceived White House access’ tied to prior relationships and employment.”

As we’ve reported, SKDKnickerbocker is led by a team of former Democratic operatives and key White House figures. But instead of promoting a progressive agenda, or even an Obama agenda, these consultants score huge contracts by helping corporate interests lobby for policies that are not in line with the public interest. Many SKDKnickerbocker employees, including Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director, are also frequent White House visitors.

We’ve compiled a partial list of SKDKnickerbocker’s clients. Since the firm refuses to register as an ordinary lobbying firm, we don’t know their full roster of clients.

My favorite: “SKDKnickerbocker was hired to push for billions in tax breaks for already profitable corporations.”

Then, of course, there’s her history as an attack dog for the music industry. Well, what do you expect? They don’t call him President Goldman Sachs for nothing.

This kind of climate comes down from the top. Related: Why Hilary Rosen visited at the White House. Including 5 meetings with President Goldman Sachs.

WEEKLY STANDARD: The New York Times Speaks Ill—and Falsely—of Andrew Breitbart. “I suspect this parenthesis was added by Times editors who couldn’t stand the notion that innocent people might read Carr’s piece and decide that Andrew’s achievements were, on the whole, admirable.”

Yeah, I saw that earlier and started to link, but decided not to reward them with the traffic.

A CAUTIONARY EXAMPLE for bloggers of all stripes.

REMEMBERING NERVA: “Through most of 1966, it was still reasonable to assume that NASA and the United States might enjoy an expansive post-Apollo future off the Earth. Manned missions beyond the moon were expected to evolve from programs already in place; namely, the Apollo lunar landing program, the joint NASA/Atomic Energy Commission NERVA nuclear-thermal rocket program, and the Apollo Applications Program of advanced lunar missions and Earth-orbiting space stations. . . . The hybrid NERVA/nuclear-ion approach would, the MSFC engineers explained, magnify the benefits and mitigate the drawbacks of both propulsion methods. Efficient ion propulsion would slash the amount of the propellant required to reach and return from Mars. This would in turn reduce the number of costly rockets required to place a hybrid Mars spacecraft into Earth orbit for assembly. Five uprated Saturn V rockets would be sufficient to launch a hybrid spacecraft into Earth orbit, or about half as many as required to launch a Mars spacecraft propelled by NERVA nuclear-thermal rocket engines alone.”

ADVICE: Bob Owens: So You Want To Own A Gun.

AT AMAZON, markdowns in Automotive & Motorcycle.

Also, steep markdowns on women’s shoes.

THE END OF RETAIL? Why The Future Of Shopping Doesn’t Need Workers.

This end of retail might have begun in 1997, the year the great jobs race was all tied up.

In that year, there were 14 million people working in retail, 14 million people working in the health & education super-sector, and 14 million people working in professional & business services. So, for a split second, there was virtual tie in the race within service jobs.

Fifteen years later, the tie-game has turned into a blow-out. Health care jobs grew by almost 50%. Professional/business services — a catch-all that includes such wide-ranging jobs as law, software engineering, and waste management — rode the roller-coaster of two recessions and wound up 4 million jobs biggers. And then there’s retail. In 15 years, retail added only 400,000 new workers, or 26,000 jobs a year. In the time that health/education jobs grew by 50%, retail grew by 0.2%. . . . Today, as Brad Stone and David Welch report in Bloomberg Businessweek, the future of retail looks like a wasteland. Even with stores like Circuit City out of business, it might be too late for even the survivors like Best Buy to have a sustained recovery.

Well, Best Buy can’t compete on service. Or, at least, it hasn’t tried. Meanwhile, some thoughts on an alternative approach.

UPDATE: Reader Sean-David Hubbard writes:

I’m finding more and more that I’m being let down by brick and mortar stores in terms of selection. I’m a big guy, 6’4, so finding clothes in my size is an exercise in frustration. A good portion of the clothes I wear now, I purchased off of Amazon. And just this morning, I was looking for a specific frozen food item (Chicken Tandoori with Spinach, in case anyone’s interested) in both Trader Joe’s and The Fresh Market and came up empty on both counts. It seems the the range of products available to the consumer are wider than ever, yet the brick and mortar stores only have so much self space. As a result more people are going to have to turn to Amazon, and similar online retailers to find what they’re looking for.

And reader Martin Murcek comments: “Well, it seems the Universe has a quota for disinterested – rude workers. As the need to interface with retail sales people fades, it seems the ‘can’t be bothered’ types smoothly transitioned to jobs in the healthcare sector. I anxiously await the day when everyone but my actual physician is a machine. At least I could forgive a drone for acting like – a drone.”

SOUNDS LIKE AN IMPROVEMENT TO ME: TV Station Accidentally Airs Porn Instead of Good Morning America.

A BAD TV MOMENT for David Axelrod. “Axelrod seems almost at a loss to respond once the talking points are challenged.”