HALF-PRICE Swiss Army knives and more. I didn’t realize that Ken Onion did “tactical” knives — I only knew him via kitchenware.

SUZANNA LOGAN: God, Guns, Guts, and CNN’s Idiot Reporters. I’d like to know the name of these “some people” she keeps invoking. I think it would be Carol Costello. . . . .

POLITICO: Barack Obama Feels The Heat, Changes The Play.

VIRGINIA POSTREL on Architectural Glamour.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: The U.S. Steers Left on Honduras: Why would Hugo Chavez expect Obama to help him? “When Hugo Chávez makes a personal appeal to Washington for help, as he did 11 days ago, it raises serious questions about the signals that President Barack Obama is sending to the hemisphere’s most dangerous dictator.”

TUCSON TEA PARTY UPDATE: Robert Mayer writes:

Thanks for linking to the Gila Courier article about the protest yesterday! There is always some great video at the Jon Justice show website:

The two I recommend, the first from the beginning and the second from the end, are here:

Link 1

Link 2.

Thanks again for covering this!

Meanwhile, reader Deborah Durkee writes: “I just saw a link at www.realclearpolitics.com about Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of AZ (someone featured in the post on your site about the Tucson, AZ picketing of her office over health care). I thought you might be interested in this: ‘The most cash-rich Frontline Democrat is Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, who has $1.2 million in her campaign account.’”

Yeah, you can do a lot with amateurs — picket, demonstrate, show up wherever the Rep. does in the district, etc. But, ultimately, you have to get into actual politics: Raise money, run primary challengers, etc. That’s the next stage for a lot of Tea Party organizations.

UPDATE: A followup from Robert Mayer:

Thanks for posting up those videos! There is one candidate who has really stepped up to challenge Gabrielle Giffords. His name is Jesse Kelly (www.votejessekelly.com), and he has both raised the most money, gained the most early support, and attended pretty much every event we’ve put on. He’s a big tea party supporter and this is definitely a factor in his early support among many tea partiers.

We’ll see what holds in the future, but I believe that any primary challenger who lives where an effective Tea Party organization exists would do well to latch himself on to the ideals of the movement. He or she will gain early donors, hardcore volunteers, and a access to thousands of voters.

Good advice.

RACISM at the Washington Post?

ASTRONAUTS DEAL WITH flooded toilet on Space Station.

DID SOMETHING hit Jupiter?

DEBRA SAUNDERS: The Audacity of Self-Defense.

NEW YORK TIMES: Governors Join G.O.P. in Concerns on Health Bill. “Despite President Barack Obama’s assurance that a revamping of the United States health-care system would not swell the federal deficit, his goal of quick congressional passage seemed to grow a bit more tenuous on Sunday as Republicans dug in their heels while governors in both parties raised concerns that they will be handed costly new Medicaid obligations without the money to pay for them.”

Related: Democrats Grow Wary as Health Bill Advances.

HMM: 2010: A new space odyssey beckons: The world is on the verge of new manned exploration of the solar system – and, this time, environmentalists are backing it.

James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia theory, said: “I strongly support space travel. The whole notion of Gaia came out of space travel. It seems to me any environmentalist who opposes space travel has no imagination whatever. That gorgeous, inspirational image of the globe that we are now so familiar with came out of space travel. That image has perhaps been of the greatest value to the environmental movement. It gave me a great impetus.

“There are the unmanned spacecraft, which are relatively inexpensive, that I certainly think should continue. The more we know about Mars, for example, the better we can understand our own planet. The second sort, the more personally adventurous sort of travel, offers great inspiration to humans. And, were it not for space travel we’d have no mobile phones, no internet, no weather forecasts of the sort we have now and so on. There’s a lot of puritanical silliness about it.”

Less puritanical silliness, please.

WHAT THE YOUNG YOU can do for the old you.

GOOD NEWS? Food prices falling in U.S. stores.

IT’S EDUCATIONAL: They carry guns.

FIGHT THE POWER: Sarah Palin’s hairdresser battles the New York Times on Twitter.

INTERVIEW: Talking to Edward James Olmos about Battlestar Galactica.

MASSACHUSETTS HEALTH PLAN PUSHES FOR CAPITATION. Megan McArdle comments: “Capitation looks attractive, because it discourages doctors and hospitals from doing too much. But, as with all good things in life, it has a few downsides.”

SCOTT JOHNSON: Chappaquiddick at 40.

OPENING UP paved-over streams.

PROMOTING HEALING by stimulating stem cells? Hope it works.

IN THE MAIL: Robert Heinlein’s Farmer In The Sky. Glad to see the folks are keeping the Heinlein juniors in print, even if The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is the book that’s getting the buzz these days.

STACY MCCAIN, citizen journalist. “People who don’t want to deal with reporters can dodge an e-mail or a phone call, but they get their salaries from the American taxpayer. They claim to be ‘public servants,’ so they don’t have much choice in the matter when a citizen-journalist walks in the front door and says, ‘Serve me.’”

UPDATE: “Tell it to Charlie Rangel.”

JAMES LILEKS: Joe Biden’s Terrible Truths. “Biden’s ‘gaffes’ are anything but — they’re simply what the administration is really thinking. Truer words have never been babbled.”

THE HILL: Centrist Dems talking healthcare coalition with GOP.

TRAFFIC CAMERA TICKETS IN OAK RIDGE. Expect these ticket numbers to go up everywhere as cities scramble for revenue. Traffic-enforcement is basically just a kind of taxation without representation. (Via Michael Silence, who comments: “I guess having one of the highest property tax rates in the state isn’t enough.”)

AND THAT’S THE WAY IT WASN’T: Ed Driscoll on Walter Cronkite nostalgia. The nostalgia isn’t for lost integrity. It’s for lost power.

UPDATE: Roger Kimball calls Cronkite the world’s most overrated reader of the news. “Like Michael Jackson, he was so successful because he perfectly incarnated certain popular clichés. His success was not a matter of substance. . . . He didn’t research or write the news. He read it. He emitted the same platitudes every other news reader mouthed. He did so, however, with a sort of cardigan authenticity that used car salesmen would climb naked over broken bottles to emulate. . . . Michael Jackson was famous for inventing a dance step called the moonwalk in which the dancer seems to float backwards while walking in place. Walter Cronkite did something similar. He seemed to float above the yapping clamor of common opinion. At bottom, though, he merely reflected it.”

WHO’S GETTING hit hardest by layoffs.

WELL, BUT WHO DOESN’T, REALLY? Navy Wants High-Powered Laser for Fending Off Small Boats.

WILLIAM FORSTCHEN, author of One Second After, on preparing for an EMP attack.

MATT WELCH AND NICK GILLESPIE, IN THE WASHINGTON POST: Obama’s Domestic Agenda Teeters. “From a lousy cap-and-trade bill awaiting death in the Senate to a health-care reform agenda already weak in the knees to the failure of the stimulus to deliver promised jobs and economic activity, what once looked like a hope-tastic juggernaut is showing all the horsepower of a Chevy Cobalt. . . . So far, he seems to be skipping the chapter on Bill Clinton and his generally free-market economic policies and instead flipping back to the themes and comportment of Jimmy Carter. Like the 39th president, Obama has inherited an awful economy, dizzying budget deficits and a geopolitical situation as promising as Kim Jong Il’s health. Like Carter, Obama is smart, moralistic and enamored of alternative energy schemes that were nonstarters back when America’s best-known peanut farmer was installing solar panels at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Like Carter, Obama faces as much effective opposition from his own party’s left wing as he does from an ardent but diminished GOP. And perhaps most important, as with Carter, his specific policies are genuinely unpopular.”

KINDLE UPDATE: Ouch:

I was set to splurge on the DX for my mom’s birthday; now I’m leaning towards Broadway tickets. If there’s a more sensational example in recent years of a company with an up-and-coming product shooting itself in the foot, I’d like to know what it is.

Yeah, this will kill them on the “cool factor,” replacing it with the “creep factor.” Not good, not good at all.

IRANIAN REVOLUTION, DAY 36: A roundup at The Berman Post.

HMM: Anti-Obamacare Protesters Take the Streets, Democrats Panic.

AND YET EVERYTHING THEY WERE SAYING IN PUBLIC WAS REASSURING: Administration feared breakdown in law and order because of financial crisis.

IMAGINING THE Mary Jo Kopechne commemorative Google logo.

You’ll never beat this, though.

HMM: Politico: Obama no longer stressing August deadline for passing health reform bill. I suspect that means he doesn’t think he’s got the votes.

OKAY, I STEPPED OUTSIDE A LITTLE WHILE AGO, and it was actually a bit chilly. In Knoxville, in mid-July. My dad says it hasn’t broken 90 all summer, which may be right. I’m saving real money on A/C bills this year. Could be worse — could be Michigan.

Meanwhile, Nate Silver says it’s all in your mind. Two thoughts: (1) I hope so — better that than living in a John Ringo novel. (2) Just remember Nate’s stuff when the press is yammering on about a hot day, or a hurricane, being “caused by global warming.”

UPDATE: Reader Bobby Clarke writes: “Here in Austin, we’re having one of the worst summers ever. We’re on the tail end of a 2 year drought, and we’ve had record highs for most of July (well over 100). I don’t want to think about the utility bills. Those 70 degree days sound pretty good to us right now. So it’s cold in most of the country, and hot in the other parts. Its almost like weather is some amazingly complex and hard to understand system!” Nah — hot or cold, it’s always because of global warming. I think that’s in the AP stylebook or something.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Steve Schroeder of Mantorville, Minnesota writes:

In regards to the post about Minnesota Temps Nate Silver is just picking out high temps for a weird period of time – 6/21/09 to 7/17/09. What really matters in Southern Minnesota is Growing Degree Days – how is the Corn growing? Here is a link showing that we are behind by 131 growing degree days for the entire 2009 growing season. I have lived in Southern Minnesota for over 45 years and can say that the field corn is behind in its’ development and we are also behind by about a week or two eating the great sweet corn that grows here in Minnesota. In the real world these are the statistics that matter because it is a major economic driver for our local economy.

My tomatoes aren’t doing well, either. I don’t know that that says much about the global temperature, but you can bet if it were unseasonably hot we’d be hearing that it’s a vindication of Al Gore.

MAKE CONGRESS PAY THE SURTAX: “Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala., said he will propose that a 1% surtax be applied to the salaries of members of Congress, regardless of how much they earn. Davis said that would help lawmakers share in the tax that the House bill — which this week cleared two of three House Committees — would impose on families and businesses earning more than $350,000 annually.” It’s their fair share.

Hey, how about a constitutional amendment requiring that members of Congress always pay the highest marginal rate. . . .

MARK STEYN notes that demographic worries are getting Strange New Respect.

HONDURAS: Certified results for an election that never took place?

A BIG gourmet food sale.

RAND SIMBERG AND CLARK LINDSEY are blogging from the Newspace 2009 commercial space conference. (Bumped).

POLITICO: White House’s $50B foreclosure plan a bust so far. “The Obama administration’s $50 billion program to curb foreclosures isn’t working, and the White House knows it. Administration officials blame the mortgage servicers charged with carrying out the mortgage modifications and refinancing under the federal program. Many of their Democratic allies on Capitol Hill back them up, but others are criticizing the White House for fumbling the execution. Whatever the reason, the program hasn’t stopped the rising tide of foreclosures: Experts predict that at least another 2 million homes will be lost this year, and the administration’s plan has so far reached only about 160,000 of the 3 million to 4 million homes it was supposed to protect over the next three years.”

STACY MCCAIN has no regrets.

IN THE MAIL: Michelle Malkin’s new book, Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies. Buy it in hardcopy, so it’ll still be around when Eric Holder has all the Kindle versions deleted as “hate speech!” (Bumped).

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Obama Losing Support Among Nervous Dems.

PENN JILLETTE TALKS ABOUT HEALTH CARE:

THE MOST OVERLOOKED bar essential.

HEALTH RATIONS AND YOU: An informative video for citizens.

(Via American Digest).

TOM HARKIN: “We own the automobile companies.” So why not use ‘em to subsidize Iowa farmers?

Well, maybe that’s unfair. From other people I might be more supportive of a flex-fuel requirement, but I know what Harkin’s after here. . . .

THE BIDEN EFFECT: It’s like the “Gore Effect,” only for unemployment:

Eight days after Joe Biden traveled to Ohio to defend the stimulus, arguing, “Roads plus teachers plus cops plus jobs equals a community — and that equals paychecks and prosperity,” the unemployment rate in the state increases from 10.8 percent to 11.1 percent. That is the highest in 26 years.

UPDATE: Man, Joe Biden is a one-man employment wrecking crew, because the rate shoots up everywhere he visits: “A day after the Vice President touted the success of the stimulus in Richmond, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that Virginia lost 22,800 jobs last month and the unemployment rate rose to 7.2 percent.”

Ouch.

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: HARTFORD COURANT: NRSC Asks Sen. Dodd To Return Contributions To Lobbyists. “Since Sen. Christopher J. Dodd has been criticizing lobbyists lately, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is now asking Dodd to return campaign contributions that have been given to him by lobbyists.”

STIMULUS! Buy a truck, get a free AK-47!

UPDATE: Andrew Lloyd emails: “For what it’s worth (maybe not much), but that car dealership is in Butler, Missouri, Robert Heinlein’s hometown. I trust he would approve.” Heh.

SHIKHA DALMIA: Global Warming: White Man’s Problem: Why poor countries won’t commit to binding emissions cuts. “In fact, there is a perfectly good reason developing countries are unwilling to act on climate change: What they are being asked to do is more awful than climate change’s implications–even if one accepts all the alarmist predictions.”

RAVE RIGHTS, NANOTECHNOLOGY, AND MORE: I’m interviewed here.

THIS ONE’S NOT OVER: AmeriCorps Inspector General Sues Government Over “Unlawful” Firing.

STEPHEN GREEN: The Week In Blogs.

SO I LIKE MY AMAZON KINDLE, but this business of remotely deleting books you’ve already “bought” is more than a little creepy, and a warning against the dangers of moving to electronic publishing in general.

The Insta-Wife and I were arguing about this this morning. Her position is that if Amazon sold you a book it didn’t have electronic rights to, then it was actually respecting property rights — of the copyright holder — by undoing the sale and refunding your money. I see that point, but on the other hand . . . it’s just creepy. As Jack Balkin says:

With ordinary hardcover and paperback books, once you purchase a copy, you keep it, and you can pretty much do whatever you want with it, including marking it up, cutting it into parts or selling it to someone else. This is because of the combination of the first sale doctrine in copyright law and the fact that the book is a physical copy. Because it is a physical copy, nobody would think that the publisher of the book would have the rights to enter your house and remove the book. But when you purchase an e-book, what you really purchase is merely a license to store the an electronic copy on the Kindle’s hard drive according to end user license agreement that Amazon provides (and that you agree to when you purchase and first use the device). As a result you may not have the rights to do things with the e-book that you think you can. . . . For centuries, we have understood, or rather believed, that owning books came with certain rights, including the right to keep what we purchase and to use it, mark it up, and sell it in any way we like. We were free to purchase books and keep them in our homes, without telling anybody what we were reading, or indeed, what page we had last looked at. Amazon’s Kindle system upends all of these expectations. Amazon knows what books you have on your Kindle, and, in theory, it can even know the book you are currently reading, and even the last page you’ve read on each of the books you own. It can delete books, add books, or modify books, all without your permission. It can change features of the Kindle at will. In upending our assumptions about our freedoms to read books in private and use them as we see fit, Amazon threatens many of the basic freedoms to read we have come to expect in a physical world. If we want to preserve these freedoms, we will have to reform copyright law and privacy law to control the new intermediaries who can control us at a distance.

I would like to see electronic copies treated more like physical books — you buy it, you own it — rather than like “licenses to read” that can be revoked based on fine print in things nobody ever reads. The current situation is creepy, and subject to abuse. I like my Kindle, especially for travel, but if I’d known this was coming I don’t think I’d have bought it, and at this point I’m reluctant to recommend a Kindle to others. Meanwhile, given Congress’s domination by Big Copyright interests, I don’t expect any legislative reforms in the near future.

UPDATE: Here’s more from Ars Technica:

Ars Technica has learned that this was more serious than a publisher flippantly changing course. Accusations that Amazon had caved to the powerful meanderings of a “major publisher” were far off the mark, although the cause is still unsettling. As it turns out, the books in question were being sold by Amazon despite being unauthorized copies. The works weren’t legit. It was all copywrong. In other words, Amazon was selling bad books. Hot letters. Pilfered paragraphs. . . . So why would Amazon remove the books? It appears as though Amazon’s purchasing system does this automatically. The company told Ars that they are “changing [Amazon's] systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”

Bravo to that, but it would have been better for Amazon to tell customers of this planned change directly, in the first place. And why was the system designed to reach out and remove books, anyway?

No word on what Amazon will do to make sure that the books offered by third parties are properly licensed. We wouldn’t be surprised to see the company rake over its third party offerings just to be safe.

If they’re smart, they’ll send a new (legit) copy of the books to the owners ASAP. But the control issues are still troubling.

CHANGE! “Suffering Under Capitalism” to Be Replaced By New, Better Type of Suffering. I think I’ll stick with the old kind, where at least you get porn and cappucino.

DOG YOGA?

IRAN: Protesters outside the Interior Ministry.

PHOTOS AND A REPORT ON the Tucson Tea Party’s healthcare protest at Rep. Giffords’ office.

A YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER? It hasn’t been that here, but it’s been the coolest summer I can remember. On sunny days that’s nice. On the (frequent) rainy ones, it’s a bit too cool.

WAS SOTOMAYOR BOXED IN? And if so, who was the boxer?

SURVIVAL SCHOOL: Why more Americans are learning to pick locks, bust out of handcuffs, and avoid surveillance.

HEALTHCARE UPDATE, from the Los Angeles Times: “The president knows his keystone program is in deep trouble and losing momentum. That’s why his organization is sending out all those e-mails and organizing local discussion groups to mobilize grassroots support and why he drags the subject into everything he talks about. . . . Obama’s current problem is actually crumbling support among Democrats, dozens of whom are beginning to waver over the scale of such spending, whether some of it eventually gets covered by savings or not. They know that conveniently-predicted future government savings have a way in Washington of not actually ever materializing. But by then it’s too late.”

IT’S AN IMPROVEMENT OVER JUST DISAPPEARING, ANYWAY: Silence after China blogger amoiist tweets arrest SOS. “He said bloggers had been held more frequently in the last two years. ‘I think it is because the internet’s power is getting bigger and bigger and the internet uncovers many issues so the authorities get more pressure.’” Pressure is good.

A BIG REPORT on today’s Obamacare protests around the country.

Plus, in Asheville, North Carolina, 250 people showed up at Rep. Heath Shuler’s office to make their views known. Shuler’s people don’t seem to have been very gracious.

IRANIAN REVOLUTION, DAY 35: A roundup at The Berman Post.

JOHN PODHORETZ remembers Walter Cronkite.

“THOUGHT CRIME” LEGISLATION comes to America.

FUN WITH BUBBLES.

GIRL IN SHORTS doesn’t seem to merit the Blogger Content Warning.

KATIE GRANJU: Guns, Sons, and the Good Old Days of Parenting.

ONE OF ANDREW SULLIVAN’S GUESTBLOGGERS is, ironically, enough, slagging people for being too pro-war in 2003. Yeah, not like Andrew was back then. At any rate, according to a comment in the linked post, I was off by 39 for the casualty toll of the invasion through “mission accomplished.” I’m willing to admit the error. That’s better than Ted Kennedy, who predicted we’d lose “battalions a day.”

And I didn’t take a post-invasion “mission accomplished” vacation, either.

Meanwhile, The Mudville Gazette is hosting a contest.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Notice how there was no “antiwar” movement during the ‘90’s, even though we were at war the entire time in Iraq, Haiti, Kosovo, a dab here and there in Afghanistan and Sudan. Then, after 9/11, it was the “Next Vietnam” with a passionate “antiwar” movement with the NYT’s full treasonous participation, just like the good old days. And now, even though the daily death count has matched the highest daily rate we ever saw in Iraq, there is no “antiwar” movement or daily casualty count in all the newspapers. It’s like the “antiwar” movement can be turned off and on like a switch, depending on which party is in the White House.

What’s the “exit strategy” for Afghanistan? Having been there, I must ask: what’s the strategy for Afghanistan, period?

Yes, it’s as if all that fierce moral urgency was more about the urgency of regaining political power than anything else. As for Afghanistan, I don’t see solving that problem without dealing with Pakistan, and I don’t see anything particularly encouraging on that front. But perhaps I’m missing something. More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steven Den Beste emails:

As I recall, when I answered that question I was thinking in terms of the number of casualties during the primary invasion. And based on
what some commenters on that blog say, I got it right. My prediction was “50-150″ and they say the real number was 139.

I never thought, or said, that the occupation would be bloodless. I expected it to go on for years and to involve a steady low rate of
casualties by our soldiers.

But I also thought, and said, that in the long run we’d win. I thought we’d be successful in training a new, effective Iraqi army which would
eventually take over security in Iraq, and I thought we’d be successful in setting up a representative democracy there. And I was right about those things.

How many of the people commenting on that blog predicted (and hoped) that we’d fail?

More than will admit it now. And yes, these Den Beste worries from 2003 were in some ways prescient (“After we win, and during the post-war occupation, I’m concerned about a campaign of terrorism developing (90%)”), though in others, happily, not as much.

Meanwhile, on the antiwar left, reader Douglas Mortimer emails, “Well, there’s still Ted Rall.” Good point.

MORE: Reader John Hendricks writes:

Oh, Glenn, that is too rich. I’ve been around the blogosphere long enough to personally remember where Andrew just wasn’t just in favor removing Saddam militarily but he and a few other obscure members of the blogosphere became known as the “Four Horsemen of the Ablogalypse.”

Question: how can a man go from being responsible enough to know that Saddam had made his removal by force necessary to becoming so frivolously irrational as to end up the world leading expert on Palin’s birth-canal? That is a mystery to me.

What I now know it that when the next war comes, Andrew Sullivan is one of the last people I want on championing it just so he can double-cross the people who take his advice when the going gets tough.

Heh. I’d forgotten that “Four Horsemen” thing. I used to have a printout on my office door. It’s not for nothing that Andrew was “War.”

PJTV: Nationwide Protests Target Obamacare.

UPDATE: “Their fear tells us a lot.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bureaucrash protests outside Sen. Jim Webb’s Office.

Plus, more evidence of fear.

TEHRAN STREETS ERUPT after Rafsanjani speech. “Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s harsh rebuke of Ahmadinejad supporters is followed by renewed violence, suggesting the discontent over recent election results is as strong as ever.”

HERE’S A REPORT ON THE San Diego Obamacare protest outside Barbara Boxer’s office.

UPDATE: C.J. Burch emails: “By the by Jim Marshall just appeared on the local news here to inform his constituents that he will not vote for Obama care and that it will not pass the Senate. What that portends, I do not know.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: A report from Ohio, from reader Pat Dooley: “About 30 protesters assembled outside Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown’s office and then met with his staff for an hour afterwards. My wife Diana Price took the attached picture. She was one of the organizers.” I’ll just note that — consistent with Jim Geraghty’s advice — 30 people who show up at the office and meet is probably worth more than 300 who march in a park somewhere.

And Robert Mayer emails from Tucson:

The Cap’n'Traitor / health care tea party protest in front of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ (D-AZ) office here in Tucson is shaping up to be a battle. The Pima County Dems (pimadems.org) have on their front page a notice calling the Tea Party an extremist organization. They’re organizing a counter-protest to us.

Additionally, in an email sent out to supporters, the conclusion reads: “Tucson, let’s show America what it looks like to come together for the common good of the party, because we know the Tea Party is WRONG and that takes precedence over any other agenda!”

Basically, our tea party organization has made so many waves here that the Democrats are now focusing on US instead of the Republican Party.

Hopefully there will be some media coverage. I’ll be sure to get you some pics by tomorrow! Should be quite a sight!

Sounds like it. The Tucson Tea Party folks, you may remember, got 1,000 people to show up at a City Council meeting to protest a local tax increase.

TODAY IN HISTORY: Willis Carrier invents the air conditioner. The entire South thanks him. On the other hand, Congress — one of his very first customers, natch — should have remained un-air-conditioned, for the betterment of the Republic.

HMM: Social networking site for researchers aims to make academic papers a thing of the past.

PANICKED AT THE ANTI-OBAMACARE PROTEST IN ST. LOUIS: McCaskill’s Office Locks Doors, Pulls Blinds, Calls Cops & Forces Obamacare Protesters Off Public Property.

Yeah, it’s not like these are constituents or anything. . . .

FARHAD MANJOO: The world’s greatest music service. Not currently available in the United States.

BEER, BOOKS, AND BLOGGING.

UWE REINHARDT on health care rationing.

SUSAN ROESGEN: An example for others? Well, she was very unprofessional, and she damaged the brand she was associated with. And she forgot that she wasn’t the only one with a video camera.

PROTESTING OBAMACARE IN RALEIGH: Reader Amanda Cross sends this picture.

UPDATE: Reader Dave Jennings sends one from Dallas. This was in front of Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s office. It’s obviously a grassroots movement, or the signs would be better . . .

And reader Corey Hall reports from Pennsylvania: “My group of anti-obamacare protesters outnumbered the opposition ~25-2 at Arlen Specter’s Lehigh Valley office today. There were other groups at Sen. Casey & Rep. Dent’s offices too, though I don’t have numbers for them.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Cynthea Sabolich sends this picture of protesters from outside Dennis Kucinich’s office in Cleveland today.

AT FORBES, a Moon-landing retrospective.

GIVING A NEW MEANING TO THE TERM “HOT THREE-WAY ACTION:” Test-firing the Taser X3.

WHAT NEIL ARMSTRONG SHOULD HAVE SAID: An Esquire flashback.

SOME APOLLO REFLECTIONS from Jerry Pournelle.

THIS IS COOL: Tweeting Under Fire: Disaster researcher Jeannette Sutton explores how ordinary people create their own media during crises.

WHY DOES THE GOVERNMENT LIKE BODY-MASS INDEX as a measure of obesity? I dunno, but I could have lived without that illustration. . . .

GOOD NEWS FROM MICHIGAN! 84.8% Of Jobs In Michigan “Created Or Saved”. “That’s the positive spin. The bad news is that over 15% of the Michigan labor force is out of work. Oh, and by the way, 16 states passed 10% unemployment in June.”

REASON TV: Mythbusting With Adam Savage.

IN THE MAIL: Howard Myers’ A Sense Of Infinity.

JOHN STOSSEL ON HEALTHCARE: If the policy elite really wanted to cut costs, they would deregulate medicine.

They don’t want to cut costs, they want to consolidate power.

LEGAL INSURRECTION: Yes On Sotomayor.

Plus, this from IowaHawk.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS ON HANK PAULSON: American Hero Or Wall Street Bagman?

GEITHNER AND SUMMERS: When They Were Young.