Twitter cofounder and CEO Ev Williams is headed to the White House today.

The administration invited him to join a “young business leaders" summit to discuss the economic crises.

As Ev himself puts it — in a Twitter message, of course — "[this] must mean they're *really* out of ideas."

A reminder: With 6 million members and 700% plus growth, Twitter makes no money in the US. (It sells some ads in Japan).

The White House was relishing the chance to fight Rush Limbaugh, to elevate him to the role of Leader of the Opposition, to have the country riveted to the day-to-day back-and-forth between the administration and the national radio-show host. And it is working . . . but for who?

Ballot labels on two measures in the May 19 special election were altered Thursday after complaints that the Legislature's wording was misleading and biased in favor of their passage.

The labels are seen as critical because voters often rely on them as their sole source of information.

Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny reworded part of the label for Proposition 1A, which would impose a state spending restriction and extend tax increases lawmakers approved as part of the budget deal last month.

The original ballot label made no mention of the tax increase extensions and portrayed the spending cap as a "reform" that would limit "overspending." The wording drew a lawsuit from strange bedfellows – an anti-tax group that opposes the tax extension and Health Access, a health care advocacy group that opposes the spending cap.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appointee Rosario Marin resigned Thursday from her post as secretary of the State and Consumer Services Agency after accepting tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees in defiance of administration policy and possibly state law.

Marin faces an investigation by the Fair Political Practices Commission after declaring the speaking fees on income statements she must file as a public official.

In a bold move today, House Republicans attempted to force the Democrat majority to freeze federal government spending at current levels. Because Senate Democrat leadership failed to get enough votes to pass the porked-up $410 billion omnibus spending bill last night, funding for the federal government runs out today. A continuing resolution is required to keep the government funded through early next week while the Senate Democrat leadership looks for a patsy to give them the additional vote needed to reach cloture allowing the bill to come up for a vote for final passage.
The motion failed to pass the House (160-218) with every Republican voting for the measure that would have at least flatted the unrestrained spending spree through the end of the fiscal year.

Eight Democrats voted with the Republicans: Altmire, Childers, Donnelly, Ellsworth, Giffords, Minnick, Mitchell and Nye

26 Republicans and 28 Democrats did not have the courage to vote or were otherwise absent.

But when pro-life students ask a couple of hard-hitting questions of Selena Josel, a Planned Parenthood PR rep, they get banned from Pomona College.

Even though Page 129, Pomona College's handbook calls for a "written statement" to be sent to the respondent, no statement was delivered letting the boys know that there were charges outstanding against them. They were just flat out banned.

The top Republican in the House is seizing on the latest spike in unemployment to call for a freeze on government spending and to urge President Barack Obama to veto a $410 billion spending bill.

Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the jump in unemployment to 8.1 percent and the loss of 651,000 jobs in February is a sign of a worsening recession that demands better solutions from both parties.

Boehner criticized the spending bill as chocked full of wasteful, pork-barrel projects. The Senate postponed a vote on the bill until Monday amid the criticism.

Boehner said he hoped Obama would veto the bill. He urged the president to work with House Republicans to impose a spending freeze until the end of this fiscal year.

Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 — 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.

President Obama has been rudeness personified towards Britain this week. His handling of the visit of the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to Washington was appalling. First Brown wasn't granted a press conference with flags, then one was hastily arranged in the Oval office after the Brits had to beg. Obama looked like he would rather have been anywhere else than welcoming the British leader to his office and topped it all with his choice of present (*) for the PM. A box of 25 DVDS including ET, the Wizard of Oz and Star Wars? Oh, give me strength. We do have television and DVD stores on this side of the Atlantic. Even Gordon Brown will have seen those films too often already.

The illusion that Barack Obama will lead from the economic center has quickly come to an end. Instead of combining the best policies of past Democratic presidents — John Kennedy on taxes, Bill Clinton on welfare reform and a balanced budget, for instance — President Obama is returning to Jimmy Carter's higher taxes and Mr. Clinton's draconian defense drawdown.

Mr. Obama's $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society.