The National Review headline says “Plagiarism in Elizabeth Warren’s 2006 book.” The body refers to Warren publishing the book “in 2006″ and Black’s book coming out in 2005. That’s true! Except that in 2006 the paperback of Warren’s book was published. The hardcover came out in March of 2005. Black’s book seems to have come out, if Amazon is correct, October 14 2005. (Or, according to Barnes and Noble, July 2005?) Months after Warren’s book. Unless there was an earlier published hardcover version that I can’t find on Amazon, it seems like Black most likely plagiarized Warren.

UPDATE: Damn, that didn’t take long. Rich Lowry has acknowledged the mistake and says the post will be updated. It was so fun, while it lasted, this fake story.
UPDATE 2: And here’s the correction. They say they took down the initial story.

But what does producing this old booklet (that Obama did not write) with a factual error have to do with “vetting,” exactly? Well, Pollak explains that it fits a “pattern in which Obama — or the people representing and supporting him — manipulate his public persona,” by which he means “this is pointless bullshit that we’re publishing to stir up the birthers and look it worked plus we got a big Drudge link.”

Regardless of the reason for Obama’s odd biography, the Acton & Dystel booklet raises new questions as part of ongoing efforts to understand Barack Obama–who, despite four years in office remains a mystery to many Americans, thanks to the mainstream media.

IMPORTANT NEW QUESTIONS ARE BEING RAISED. This editing error that Obama had nothing, personally, to do with is part of a pattern of Obama deceiving people by allowing them to believe insane things about him.

Now, coincidentally, the Arizona secretary of state is playing the “I’m not a birther but on the other hand let’s indulge the birthers” game. The president might not be eligible to be on the Arizona ballot, because of a petition, according to Ken Bennett, an American state’s No. 2 elected official. Vetting is so fun!

So, on the one hand, we have Barack Obama’s birth certificate(s), two newspaper announcements, a couple of witnesses, and nearly every single other newspaper and media account up to the point at which the birther conspiracy was invented circa late 2007. On the other hand, we have an author’s bio he didn’t write from 1991, and a petition. Obviously there is much more “vetting” to do, before we finally find the one piece of secret buried evidence that proves that it was a horrible accident that a majority of voters picked the socialist Muslim in 2008. Wake up, sheeple, etc.

[Correction: I mistakenly attributed the Big Government story to Ben Shapiro, but it was written by Joel B. Pollak. I apologize to Ben.]

Trying to convince dad @JonHuntsman to run for mayor of NYC. Thoughts? #whynot?

— Abby Huntsman (@HuntsmanAbby) May 17, 2012

Why not? I mean sure he has never lived in New York and has no connection to the city, but why not?

Of course, now that this idea is floating around, very rich and well-connected morons just might set about trying very hard to make it a reality. Jon Huntsman is a creature of the sort of oblivious center-right rich folk who bankrolled the hilarious failed New York campaigns of Harold Ford Jr. and Reshma Saujani. They would like very much to see another one of their class be the mayor of their city, after Bloomberg ends his term (if he ends his term). The Republicans have essentially no candidate. (I still wouldn’t put it past Police Commissioner and professional harasser-of-minorities Ray Kelly to mount a run, but at the moment he’s sounding disinclined to.) And Jon Huntsman is the sort of nationally prominent “independent” candidate all three major New York newspapers would love (the Daily News would love him the most, obviously, but the Post would love him because he is secretly not actually that moderate).

Jon Huntsman — whose tax plan called for the complete elimination of taxes on capital gains and dividends, as well as the elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Reagan-era tax benefit for poor people that used to be the sole form of welfare that conservatives supported, and who also wholeheartedly supported the Paul Ryan plan to fix the deficit by eliminating Medicare and not making rich people pay taxes — was of course beloved by the press and labeled a reasonable moderate when he ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He was mistaken for a political moderate primarily because he does not believe that God created cavemen and dinosaurs at the same time, roughly 4,000 years ago. Huntsman, who supports the complete repeal of Dodd-Frank and is strictly antiabortion and anti-gay marriage and anti-healthcare reform and pro-gun, is now essentially a symbol of the dignity and sagacity of the “radical center,” even though he is a conservative Republican.

So obviously New Yorkers would be thrilled to vote for this guy. I endorse this.

Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, Paul declined to endorse Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor who endorsed Paul in 2008. Johnson was, formerly, the Republican presidential candidate all those young “liberal” college stoner Ron Paul supporters should have gone with if they’d wanted to support a candidate who believed strongly in liberty but who wasn’t a racist Alex Jonesian conspiracy-mongering goldbug loon. But Johnson had “extensive executive experience” instead of a blimp and a sweet logo, so he did not win over many Paul fanatics.

Ron Paul’s strategy seems to be a gradual takeover of the Republican Party itself, instead of attempting to build a Libertarian alternative to the GOP. I think he’ll find that he can get the party to happily sign on, at least rhetorically, to his fiscal message, as they continue to ignore his popular and populist isolationism and his eminently agreeable but politically untenable positions on criminal justice and civil liberties, forever. The party, in other words, will continue to co-opt whatever they find electorally useful about the Paul phenomenon, as the Tea Party movement stole his iconography and messaging wholesale while attaching it to the same religious-right/nativist sentiment that has driven the party’s activist base for decades.

But Paul thinks the future lies with his son Rand, who shares many of his father’s enthusiasms and beliefs while also appearing to be more acceptable to the mainstream. Various Paul allies and a few other Republicans strongly suggest that Rand is gearing up for a 2016 run; which would mean, of course, that they expect Romney to lose, but that they need to not appear to be rooting for Romney to lose.

The problem is that what makes Rand Paul more acceptable to the mainstream of the Republican Party is what makes him more repellent than his father. Take, for example, Rand Paul’s funny joke this last weekend about Barack Obama and gay marriage.

The president recently weighed in on marriage. And, you know, he said his views were evolving on marriage. Call me cynical but I wasn’t sure that his views on marriage could get any gayer. Now it did kind of bother me, though, that he used the justification for it in a biblical reference. He said the biblical Golden Rule caused him to be for gay marriage …

And I’m like: What version of the Bible is he reading? It’s not the King James version. It’s not the New American Standard. It’s not the New Revised version. I don’t know what version he is getting it from.

Haha Barack Obama is so gay, he should read a Bible for once. Libertarianism!

Nick Gillespie, of the libertarian Reason Magazine, does not get this joke. The crowd, at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, did seem to get it, or at least they appreciated it. But Rand sounds very different when he speaks to Iowa conservatives than he does when interviewed by Gillespie and Matt Welch. (His address received a nice notice from Robert Costa of the National Review, who did not mention his funny joke.)

While Rand Paul may be, as Gillespie says, the most libertarian senator, he is also not an actual libertarian, as demonstrated by his support for anti-constitutional anti-immigrant legislation and his very vocal antiabortion position. He is also a dumb lout, and I tend to think that having the Senate’s most libertarian member be a dumb lout is not actually that good for the Libertarian movement. When he makes explicitly libertarian arguments, he makes them dumbly. When he goes all anti-gay talk-radio bigot culture warrior, which he does increasingly frequently, he does so dumbly. (If he wants to be a mainstream politician and presidential contender, it was certainly dumb to appear — more than once — on the radio program of Truther/Birther/New World Orderer/every-other-conspiracy promoter Alex Jones, but for some reason he almost entirely escaped mainstream press scrutiny for these appearances.) While I don’t feel much affection for Ron Paul, he seems both significantly smarter and leagues more principled than his son the senator.

If the “electable” face of libertarianism is a fratty anti-gay, anti-choice nitwit like Rand Paul, I will stick with socialism, thank you. And I wonder if the Paul family’s plan is to promote “liberty” or to promote the Paul family.

John Avlon, the “No Labels” co-founder and Daily Beast contributor, is very sad about the news. He reports that they nearly called it quits last week:

Late last week, leaders at the well-funded insurgent organization were planning to pull the plug entirely on this year’s effort. There was talk of focusing instead on building the organization at the local level going forward, following a model like Angus King’s independent Senate campaign in Maine. But this abandonment would be devastating to overall efforts that aim to inject increased independence and competition into the political process, effectively wasting the 2.5 million signatures the group collected to get on the ballot in 26 states to date.

Well, the signatures have already been wasted. (Much, much more wasted: Peter Ackerman’s money.) They were used to win ballot access for a vague idea. Vague ideas can’t be elected president.

Basically everyone not affiliated with No Labels finds the failure of Americans Elect amusing (so it has succeeded in uniting the Weekly Standard and Paul Krugman!), but I actually feel kind of bad for those Americans Elect goobers. It’s not their fault that Americans don’t actually want an independent moderate unity presidential ticket. (It is their fault that they spent $10 zillion pushing the idea.) But there is really no excuse for the bizarre belief that anyone wants Joe Lieberman to be president.

Yes, according to Kenneth Vogel, AE recently sought to interest the soon-to-be former senator from Connecticut in mounting a run on the AE ticket, because what Americans are crying out for is a moralizing hawkish lifelong politician with no fixed ideology beyond reflexive baby-splitting and bombing everywhere forever. (It also reached out to Lamar Alexander, because it is beyond parody.)

A lot of the more prominent AE supporters and many of the people involved in organizing the group are disillusioned Republicans — like former Giuliani speechwriter John Avlon and former Bush strategist Mark McKinnon — which helps explain why AE keeps going after people who only appeal to … disillusioned moderate Republicans.

AE dreamed that superstars like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg or former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would decide to jump into the race once AE did the hard work of securing ballot access. You may note that neither of those candidates represents a significant national constituency whose interests are currently being ignored by the two major parties. (Bloomberg is essentially an old-fashioned Eastern Establishment Republican, or, in other words, a modern moderate Democrat. He is maybe a hair to the right of Obama on economic issues. Condoleezza Rice has never revealed much about her domestic policy preferences, besides that she is pro-choice, but on foreign policy she is known for being one of the people who repeatedly told scary stories to America and Congress until we agreed to launch the Iraq war.) But the movement isn’t about policies at all: It’s about finding the party system distasteful and being narcissistic enough to imagine that some massive silent majority of Americans agrees with you about everything.

When Rice and Bloomberg declined their advances, various AE insiders moved on to begging David Walker to enter the race. (David Walker! Does anyone not currently riding the Acela to or from D.C. know who David Walker is?) AE will announce its future plans on Thursday. So, you know, there’s still time for Jon Huntsman to shake things up. Huntsman/Walker ’12!