That’s not snow, it’s spider webs.

Flooding in Australia caused them to move inland. More photos here.

NSFW. Maher was not bleeped on HBO — his vulgarities were proudly broadcast.

New York Times

On Wednesday, White House officials summoned dozens of leaders of nonprofit organizations that strongly back the health law to help them coordinate plans for a prayer vigil, press conferences and other events outside the court when justices hear arguments for three days beginning March 26.

Can you imagine the shrieking from the left had Bush done this?

Speaking of “the coming theocracy” prophesied by progressives during the Bush years, it never quite arrived did it?

After all, 40 years ago the conversation would have been about the morality of unmarried sex, not forcing churches to pay for unmarried students’ birth control pills.

Yet the progressive doomsayers predicted a theocracy.

Surely they deserve the same mockery aimed at Harold Camping’s prediction of the end of the world.

LA Times

Spanx inventor Sara Blakely is now a billionaire at 41 years old, making her the youngest woman on the latest Forbes magazine billionaires list to amass that much wealth on her own.

Blakely, the creator and owner of the line of women’s slimming, smoothing undergarments called Spanx, is the youngest self-made woman to make Forbes list – meaning she didn’t inherit or marry into the money.

She’s one of several billionaires who appear on the cover of the latest Forbes issue.

According to Forbes, Blakely was 29 when she invested $5,000, her entire life savings, in an attempt to come up with something flattering to wear under her white slacks. She ended up inventing a new line of shaping underwear.

…”I’ve always had that gratitude that I had the opportunity to pursue my potential,” she said. “So I think my story says that, when women are given the chance and the opportunity, that we can achieve a lot. We deliver. We can make the world a better place, one butt at a time.”

Better send an OWS squad right away.

Cain has always been entertaining. Here he moves into David Lynch territory.

The working class, he figures, would eat up his government giveaways. But as Daniel Henninger points out, the real hot button issue is personal freedom.

…What Mr. Santorum has discovered in this campaign is that for a large number of voters, a connection has surfaced between Barack Obama’s economic policies and the issue of personal freedom. The potency of the latter is what’s new, and a vulnerability for this presidency.

Freedom, or liberty, is a staple of conservative politics. Ron Paul speaks about “liberty” as libertarian philosophy, and that has drawn new support. In the Santorum version it comes out as “freedom,” and it wells up from something more akin to the “Don’t tread on me” motto and coiled rattlesnake sewn into the famous yellow Gadsden flag created before the American Revolution. The Gadsden flag was a staple at tea party rallies two years ago.

Rick Santorum has linked these concerns about the status of personal freedom directly to ObamaCare and beyond that to the broader policy legacy of Obama administration.

His 35-minute speech in Cuyahoga Falls touched an array of subjects that drew applause. But at the halfway point, when he tore into ObamaCare, his mostly working-class audience exploded into applause and cries of “Rick! Rick! Rick!”

Obama probably figures he just needs to explain it better.

Gawker

A source with close knowledge of Twitter’s financials leaked us revenue, profit, and other figures from the company’s recent past. They are not encouraging.

It’s notoriously hard to build a profitable tech startup, even in these bubble times. But Twitter, the business, has been provided a huge leg up by Twitter, the technology platform. It counts somewhere north of 100 million global active users. But more than the numbers, it’s the quality of users that should have the company raking in ad dollars.

Twitter is provided a huge quantity of free celebrity content that sites like the hugely profitable Facebook would kill for, from the presidents of the United States and Russia to top film and TV stars like Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, Oprah Winfrey, and Ashton Kutcher, all the way down to gossip magnets like Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian. It has also raised an insane amount of cash, with net inflows of around $760 million. The company, now six years old, has had plenty of time to experiment with extracting gold from its enviable mine of content.

But for years and years, Twitter has failed to do so.

Jonathon Karl

Attention U.S. taxpayers:  You now own a piece of a French car company that is drowning in red ink.

That’s right.  In a move little noticed outside of the business pages, General Motors last week bought more than $400 million in shares of PSA Peugeot Citroen – a 7 percent stake in the company.

Because U.S. taxpayers still own roughly one-quarter of GM, they now own a piece of Peugeot.

Peugeot can undoubtedly use the cash.  Last year, Peugeot’s auto making division lost $123 million.  And on March 1 – just a day after the deal with GM was announced – Moody’s downgraded Peugeot’s credit rating to junk status with a negative outlook, citing “severe deterioration” of its finances.

In other words, General Motors essentially just dumped more than $400 million of taxpayer assets on junk bonds.

GM has said the deal is designed to give GM access to Peugeot’s expertise in small car and hybrid vehicle technology and ultimately allow both GM and Peugeot to save money by pooling their resources. But auto industry analysts find the deal mystifying.

An analysis by auto industry consultants IHS said it is “somewhat baffling that GM is willing to get involved in an alliance that it frankly does not need for size or complexity, while still avoiding any public plan to rationalise its European production, cut costs, or deal with labour rates.”