CHARLIE CRIST SUED for return of donations.

MOCKING Al Gore’s reported taste in make-out music.

DAN RIEHL SAYS THE GOP IS BLOWING IT: “The DNC gets new media in ways the GOP still refuses to embrace. It’s intent on controlling the narrative, while the DNC is more interested in fueling constituent and blog-based activism from the Left. Democrat-aligned parties have also funded the mechanisms to accomplish it. You can go to even deeply Red districts and find an activist infrastructure on the Left, often blog-based. Meanwhile, GOP campaigns pay consultants to send out annoying spam emails to every blogger under the sun.” That does sound right to me.

UPDATE: Reader Matthew Bowdish writes:

I completely agree. I am a physician incensed about ObamaCare and I have given more money to Republican candidates this year than ever before. I have also repeatedly offered to personally help two Congressional campaigns here in Colorado, without even a peep back from either campaign. One of my colleagues in Michigan told me that she had the same experience. Yes, they are perfectly happy to send us fundraising emails every two days…But why not take advantage of people who are very educated on the health bill and motivated to assist them in fighting those who voted for ObamaCare?

They’re afraid of losing control.

RADLEY BALKO: Confirmation Theater: Elena Kagan is set to participate in a confirmation process she once dismissed as a charade.

CRITICIZE A KLANSMAN, get attacked from the “left.” Well, a lot of “blue Texans” were Klansmen, back in the day, so it makes sense. . . .

ANN ALTHOUSE IS blogging the Kagan hearings.

UPDATE: From the comments:

Interestingly enough in the last several years there have been four big SCOTUS cases which IMHO, really define our freedoms and personal liberty Kelo property rights; Citizens United free speech; Heller 2nd amendment and now McDonald.

I hear a lot from liberals about how the right wants to curtail freedoms, we’re fascists yet when I look at where the liberal Justices ruled or dissented in those aforementioned cases I think it’s pretty clear who are the real curtailers of freedom and liberty.

After all when the State can take your property, restrict your political speech and disarm the populace, you really don’t have much left in the way of freedom.

I’d like to know what Kagan’s opinions are on those cases.

Me too, though I think I can guess.

SHOCKER: Who Pays The Taxes.

MARKDOWNS ON ice cream machines.

STEPHEN GREEN’S HAIR OF THE DOG: A Nightmare On Libertarian Street.

POLITICS: Obama Postpones Tax Talk Until After Election.

MEGAN MCARDLE is back from her honeymoon and blogging up a storm.

THE SECOND PHASE OF the great American disillusionment.

CRAZED SEX POODLE DUCKS MEDIA IN SAN DIEGO: And the real story: “If Al Gore were a Republican he’d have an army of media tailing his every move. But since he’s a hero to the left he gets to avoid even having to respond to allegations he’s an out of control crazed sex poodle.” I guess the word’s gone out on Journolist to give him a pass. Plus, you don’t want to lose the big game.

TUNKU VARADARAJAN PREDICTS: Kagan Will Sail Through.

HOPE: “Americans socked away more savings in May than at any time since September, as they continued to be cautious spenders, according to government data released Monday. According to the Commerce Department, the personal savings rate in May — the part of every paycheck that goes unspent — rose to 4 percent, the highest amount in nearly a year, as worried consumers saw stocks tumble in the United States and debt problems spread across Europe.”

Plus this: “Personal income in May rose by only 0.4 percent, which was less than expected. More worrisome is the fact that almost all the wage growth is coming either from the government — via temporary census jobs, which will end when the decennial count concludes in the fall — or from businesses that have received government stimulus funds. In short, very little growth is coming from the private sector.”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MCCAIN-PALIN, we’d have women who were okay with book bans in high office. And they were right.

REPORT: Scott Brown “has listened to his constituents” and will definitely vote “no” on financial reform.

JIM TREACHER on what Al Gore is raising.

CALLING VOTERS NAZIS IS USUALLY A BAD ELECTION MOVE: Claire McCaskill Forced to Apologize for Aide’s “Brownshirt” Comments. Note the ubiquitous video camera angle. But I’m pretty sure that picture of McCaskill has been photoshopped. . . .

WHY ARE HIGHER ED COSTS SO HIGH? Retired, then rehired: How college workers use loophole to boost pay. “Greg Royer ranks among the state’s top-paid employees, with a salary of $304,000. But that’s just part of his income. For nearly seven years, he’s also collected an annual pension of $105,000. Royer, the vice president for business and finance at Washington State University, tops a long list of college administrative staff members who’ve been able to boost their incomes by up to 60 percent by exploiting a loophole in state retirement laws.”

Note that he’s an administrator . . . .

CONVENIENT AMNESIA: Shocker! Obama Political Director ‘Forgot’ He Was on SEIU Payroll Last Year.

I’LL BET MARK STEYN HAS ALREADY SEEN THIS: U.S. Childlessness Up Amid Demographic Shift.

TOM SMITH: “This is really bad. I know it’s a cliche by now, but if anything remotely like this had happened in the Bush administration, every legal worthy you can think of would be on about it, and rightly, until no one could stand it anymore.”

I guess the lesson is, if you want scrutiny of Executive Branch actions, vote Republican. . . .

RICK SANTELLI GOES NUCLEAR: “Stop spending, stop spending, stop spending!”

CHICAGO COP likes the McDonald decision, mocks Daley Administration. “Give it up Shanks – we can’t protect everyone all the time and you are actively seeking to create more casualties as the city spirals into Detroit II. Give law abiding citizens a fair chance to defend themselves, their loved ones and their property.”

RANDY BARNETT: “Today, the Privileges or Immunities Clause has risen from the grave. Only a plurality was willing to use the Due Process Clause to apply an individual right to the states. The crucial fifth vote was provided by Justice Thomas’ extensive fifty-six-page originalist opinion that rested solely on the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Neither Justice Alito for the plurality, nor Justices Stevens or Breyer in dissent, even attempted to impeach Justice Thomas’ analysis, which now stands uncontradicted in the Supreme Court Reports. Decades of academic research that has lead to a remarkable consensus among constitutional scholars that The Slaughter-House Cases was wrongly decided have now been vindicated. Only a remarkably tepid and barely defended assertion of stare decisis by Justice Alito now stands in the way of a complete restoration of the ‘lost’ Privileges or Immunities Clause at the heart of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

THEN THE TERRORISTS WILL HAVE WON: Apocalypse now: Vuvuzelas coming to America?

NOT QUITE CRICKET: OUCH.

BREAKING: Ten Russian Spies Arrested by FBI.

HAYEK’S TIMELY COMEBACK.

I TALK ABOUT THE MCDONALD CASE in the New York Times “Room For Debate” Blog. (Bumped).

THE END TIMES ARE HERE: Country Hip Hop Dancing.

26 WAYS to prevent summer reading.

MORE THOUGHTS ON MCDONALD OVER AT THE FACULTY LOUNGE. And yes, there’s support for one of my theories. . . .

NOTE TO DAVID FRUM: Google doesn’t own BlogAds. But I’m sure Henry Copeland would entertain a sufficiently generous offer.

WELL, DUH: Booze And Sex Rule At InstaPundit.

MAKING THEM TWICE AS EASY TO FIND WHEN LOST! Schrödinger’s kit: Tools that are in two places at once.

HE BLINDED deafened me with science.

LANDING ON AN ASTEROID: Not quite like in the movies.

BYRON YORK: Sex complaint against Gore is detailed, credible; Could this be Gore’s real ‘Inconvenient Truth’? Anybody else notice that this came out right after Gore started criticizing the White House over the oil spill?

Plus, condoms in the hotel “treat box?” Was that an “intimacy kit?” What kind of hotel was this? . . . .

THIS WEEK IN THE FUTURE.

MARKDOWNS ON patio, lawn, and garden stuff.

WHAT’S WORSE than a politician who cheats?

IN MASSACHUSETTS: Scott Brown Outpolls Kerry, Obama. “US Senator Scott Brown, who only months ago was a little-known figure even within the tiny band of Republicans in the state Senate, not only catapulted to national stature with his upset US Senate victory, but is today the most popular officeholder in Massachusetts, according to a Boston Globe poll. After less than five months in Washington, Brown outpolls such Democratic stalwarts as President Obama and US Senator John F. Kerry in popularity, the poll indicates. He gets high marks not only from Republicans, but even a plurality of Democrats views him favorably.”

INDEED: “Not that being an environmentalist makes a guy a saint, but Gore seemed almost desperate to have us see him as more moral than the average Al. . . . The greenest of the green people I talked to felt betrayed. Gore was their leader and the movement is now, um, stained. The woman even said, according to the transcript of her interview with Portland, Ore., police made public on the Internet, that her ‘Birkenstock Tribe’ friends told her to ‘suck it up’ and not tell anyone or the ‘world’s going to be destroyed from global warming.’”

“Suzy, if you tell what Joe did to you after the dance, we’ll lose the big game!“

AT 3 PM: The Ed Morrissey Show.

VIDEO: Tea Party activists Greet Joe Biden in Indiana this afternoon.

MORE ECONOMIC NEWS: Consumer spending on goods drops in May. “The first event of Recovery Summer was the revaluation of Q1 GDP from a previously-announced annualized rate of 3.2% to 2.7%. New home sales dropped 33% last month, and existing home sales dropped 2.2% in May. The Commerce Department followed that with the news that consumer spending on goods dropped in May, while spending on services rose … mainly on energy costs. . . . Instead of improving, we’re sliding backwards. That’s not a Recovery Summer, it’s Relapse Season.”

UH OH: GM of Europe concerned Asian suppliers will take electric vehicle market by storm.

A RETURN TO “regulation by deal?”

CAMILLE PAGLIA: No Sex Please, We’re Middle Class. “In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure. Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women.” Maybe this accounts for the “marriage strike.”

And it’s funny how all the lefty yammering was supposed to free us from “middle-class morality” — but, when they were done with it, somehow the chains were tighter than ever. I suspect the slow recognition of this fact is one reason for the popularity of Mad Men . . . .

MICHAEL TOTTEN INTERVIEWS MICHAEL YOUNG about his new book, The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle.

FROM JEFFREY GOLDBERG, An invitation for Glenn Greenwald. “As it happens, I was e-mailing yesterday with the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, Barham Salih, and I mentioned Greenwald’s critique. I explained that Greenwald believes the invasion was a criminal act, to which Salih responded by asking if Greenwald had ever visited Iraqi Kurdistan. I said I didn’t know, not having too much contact with him, on account of him hating me. So Salih asked me to extend an invitation to Greenwald to visit Iraqi Kurdistan. . . . Obviously, I think this is a good idea, because I view the subject of Iraq as a complicated one, and I think that Greenwald has an overly simplistic, black-and-white view of the situation.”

THE GRACE SLICK / GLENN BECK connection. In the future, we will all be Glenn Beck for 15 minutes. Or maybe that’s the past. . . .

“THE SEXIST NOTION THAT it’s better for women to marry up.”

OKAY, having quickly skimmed the McDonald opinion, a few thoughts.

First, it’s 5-4. Though a pro-gun-rights opinion may pacify the gun-rights crowd to a degree, the closeness of these decisions is likely to keep them active in upcoming elections.

Second, it shows how little influence legal academics have. Virtually all of us have been saying that Slaughter House is lousy and that privileges or immunities should be far more significant, but only Justice Thomas was willing to go that far.

Third, it really is interesting how much emphasis the majority, and Justice Thomas’s concurrence, put on the racist roots of gun control. See this article and this one by Bob Cottrol and Ray Diamond for more background. And isn’t it interesting that this is happening on the same day the Senate’s last Klansman went to his reward?

Fourth, the Chicago law, being virtually identical to the DC law, is very likely to go down. The big question is, what comes next?

Fifth, and personally, I’d like to note that a lot of “respectable” commentators were, just a few years ago, calling the individual-rights theory of the Second Amendment absurd, ridiculous, and something that only (probably paid) shills for the NRA would espouse. (I’m talking to you, Garry Wills and Robert Spitzer, among others). Yet it is impossible to read this opinion, and the Heller opinion, and conclude that the individual right is really just a “fraud” concocted by the NRA. So were those who were saying so until quite recently being dishonest, or merely inexcusably ignorant?

UPDATE: On the other hand, I should note what Bob Cottrol said to me at the NRA convention after Heller: “We owe this to the open-mindedness of liberal law professors.” That includes people like Larry Tribe, and Sandy Levinson, whose 1992 Yale Law Journal essay, The Embarrassing Second Amendment, really kicked things off by signaling to the legal academy that it was okay to write about this. Also William Van Alstyne, for his essay The Second Amendment And The Personal Right to Arms.

IN THE MAIL: From Stephen B. Waters, Individuals, Journalism, and Society.

JIM TREACHER: Being a smartass is better than the alternative, Mr. Vice President.

NICK GILLESPIE: Let’s Not Forget Sen. Byrd’s Negative Legacy. “As the encomia mount like rotting, fly-buzzed piles of the pork-barrel spending he so systematically shoveled back to his West Virginia home, let’s not forget the late Sen. Robert Byrd’s most undeniable legacy: Undermining belief in politicians as little more than self-serving glad-handers on the hunt for more and more taxpayer money for their constituents.”

CHICAGO GUN CASE RULING: Second Amendment Binds State and Local Governments, via the Fourteenth Amendment. Still trying to download the opinion; will have thoughts later.

UPDATE: Got it now. Reading. Very interesting to see both the majority and Justice Thomas reference the racist roots of gun control so strongly. Also, while Alan Gura didn’t win on the privileges and immunities argument, he did better than he might have. And by arguing that way, he made due-process incorporation of the Second Amendment, which looked radical not too long ago, look moderate by comparison!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Stephen Clark writes: “The Overton window in action!”

MICHAEL BARONE: Americans Relate To Founders, Not Progressives. “The polls and the post-2008 election results show that the purported beneficiaries of the Obama Democrats’ programs are unenthusiastic about voting and people with modest incomes are trending heavily Republican. The only enthusiasm for the Obama Democrats’ policies comes from David Brooks’s ‘educated class’: people who are or identify with the centralized experts tasked by the Obama Democrats with making decisions for the rest of us. Unfortunately for the Obama Democrats, they, unlike property owners, are not a majority in today’s America.”

BYRON YORK: “One question that hasn’t received enough attention in the whole David Weigel/Washington Post brouhaha is whether the Post needs a reporter to cover the conservative beat in the first place. There’s been a lot of discussion of what kind of reporter would be best on the beat — a conservative, a liberal, or someone studiously uncommitted? — but there has been less talk about why such a reporter is needed at all, or whether there should even be a conservative beat. In the past several years, newspapers have assigned reporters to specifically cover conservatives, but they haven’t done the same thing for liberals.”

HEH: Let’s Buy Ann Althouse The Journolist Archives.

WELCOME TO East Germany On The Potomac?

SCOTUSBLOG will be live-blogging Supreme Court opinion releases today.

UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!

ONE DAY ONLY: $79.99 Magellan GPS. The built-in AAA Tourbook info is a nice touch.

OKAY, THIS IS WORTH REPOSTING. THE GULF OIL SPILL: AN “AVERTIBLE CATASTROPHE.”

Some are attuned to the possibility of looming catastrophe and know how to head it off. Others are unprepared for risk and even unable to get their priorities straight when risk turns to reality.

The Dutch fall into the first group. Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. “Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour,” Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.

To protect against the possibility that its equipment wouldn’t capture all the oil gushing from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch also offered to prepare for the U.S. a contingency plan to protect Louisiana’s marshlands with sand barriers. One Dutch research institute specializing in deltas, coastal areas and rivers, in fact, developed a strategy to begin building 60-mile-long sand dikes within three weeks. . . .

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million — if water isn’t at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico. . . .

The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer — but only partly. Because the U.S. didn’t want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.

A catastrophe that could have been averted is now playing out.

Read the whole thing

THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED OVER THE WEEKEND:

Big Government And Bad Journalism.

“Why does Al Gore hate oil spills? It gets all over the sheets.

John Hinderaker on modern class conflict.

A darkness at noon. Or something like that.

Patty Murray in trouble.

The face of modern journalism, revealed.

It’s good to be the King Rahm Emanuel.

The death of privacy. And who killed it.

Was Journolist a vehicle for employment discrimination?

The Science Gap.

Consumer Reports drives the Chevy Volt.

Sarah Palin Wants Cops To Leave Weed Smokers Alone.

Obama: “You’ve got a lot of golf courses here, don’t you?”

SIDE EFFECTS of the Afghanistan Rules of Engagement.

BLACK PANTHER UPDATE: J. Christian Adams: You Deserve To Know — Unequal Law Enforcement Reigns at Obama’s DOJ.

WHAT’S MORE IMPORTANT? The environment, or the environmentalists?

MESSAGE TO JOE BIDEN: “Bite me.” “When the powerful seek to work their will upon us and demand that we be nice about it, that’s the right response: Bite me. Even if he were the one being nice about it, we shouldn’t have to put up with it without complaint.”

UPDATE: VP Admits Stimulus Didn’t Work: Biden admits no possibility of restoring jobs lost during recession.

BIG JOURNALISM: Hubris and Humility: David Weigel Comes Clean on Washington Post, the D.C. Bubble, & the ‘Journolist’. “I was cocky, and I got worse. I treated the list like a dive bar, swaggering in and popping off about what was ‘really’ happening out there, and snarking at conservatives. Why did I want these people to like me so much? Why did I assume that I needed to crack wise and rant about people who, usually for no more than five minutes were getting on my nerves? Because I was stupid and arrogant, and needlessly mean.”

SENATOR ROBERT BYRD has died.

UPDATE: More thoughts from West Virginian Don Surber. Also from Ed Driscoll, who notes Byrd’s “horrific past” with the Ku Klux Klan.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Off To That Great Klavern In The Sky.

And keep a list of hagiographers in the press who don’t mention Byrd’s Klan connection. Then we can cross-index with the Journolist membership when it comes out . . . .

MORE: Surber emails: “Thanks for the link. Byrd’s past is, um, white washed. West Virginians knew of it in 1952 and still elected him. And in 1964 they re-elected him after the vote against civil rights.”

JAILED FOR A FALSE RAPE CHARGE:

A lying mother-of-one who claimed she had been raped because she wanted to get rid of her husband has been jailed for 18 months.

Bernadett Kore, 29, told police she had been brutally attacked by two thugs in an alleyway in October.

But it transpired that the woman made the whole story up – leaving the two men she accused devastated by their terrifying ordeal.

Jail seems fair.

RICK SANTELLI AND LOU DOBBS on Tea Party power.

MARK STEYN: “Having stood by watching as a mob trashed downtown businesses (and their own cruisers), the peculiarly insecure dweebs of the Toronto police are now threatening law-abiding passers-by (that would be Cop#3478) and beating up Guardian reporters.”

After acting cowardly around those who might hit back, they have to reestablish their dominance somehow.

Related: Why do we have police forces? “I’ve spent very little time in Toronto over the years. Last time I was there, it reminded me of an American city of the 1970s–dirty, with a menacing street population and a whiff of violence in the air. That was only an impression, but it may be that inept police work didn’t start with the G-20.”

IS THERE A “NEW MEDIA WAR?”

COMMENT OF THE DAY:

A reason for the “wealth or income gap”: Smart people keep on doing things that are smart and make them money while stupid people keep on doing things that are stupid and keep them from achieving.

People who get an education, stay off of drugs, apply themselves, and save and wisely invest their earnings do a lot better than people who drop out of school, become substance abusers, and buy fancy cars and houses that they can’t afford, only to lose them.

We don’t have an income gap. We have a stupid gap.

Ouch.

ARE CIVIL RIGHTS GROUPS skeptical of Kagan?

APPLIANCEBLOGGING: So the latest Consumer Reports likes the Cuisinart coffeemaker best. As the owner of one, that makes me feel slightly smug. As I’ve mentioned before, I like my All-Clad slow-cooker a lot, but it’s kind of pricey; I got it as a gift, but probably wouldn’t spend that much myself. Luckily, Consumer Reports likes this much much cheaper Hamilton Beach.

UPDATE: Reader Dan O’Brien writes: “My old style slow cooker died and I bought the Hamilton Beach you cited. I like it a lot. Time, manual, or temp sensing. Plus the top buckles down for transport without spilling anything. Nice unit.”

INSIDE THE BLACK PANTHER CASE: Anger, Ignorance, and Lies.

ANN ALTHOUSE: “Remember the liberal meme that George Bush was ‘incurious’? But aren’t these liberal journalists incurious? They had this email list that was designed — apparently — to figure out how to structure the various news stories to serve the interests of their party. The Journolist was a self-herding device. They wanted to be good cogs in a machine that would generate power for the Democratic Party, didn’t they? For career and social rewards? That’s my hypothesis. As an intellectual, I would like to study how that worked. I’ll write a book about it if someone will send me the raw material I need — the complete archive of the Journolist. I need a Deep Throat.” I’ve got your man right here.

UPDATE: A journalist reader emails:

That Ann Althouse post you quoted is more right than she knows. A friend who was on the List and works at a major newspaper told me recently, and I quote verbatim: “Journolist was basically a jobs program for liberals in DC.” This person said that it was used to link up the older, more established set with the younger up-and-comers, all to better staff newspapers, magazines, and institutions with liberals. And it is worth adding that this was said by a very liberal person who was not speaking the least bit apologetically.

Seems like it might violate some institutions’ affirmative action policies, then. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oh, here’s a blog post on the employment-discrimination angle. If they’re colluding to make their product uniform, is it an antitrust violation, too?

MORE: Ted Frank isn’t convinced on the antidiscrimination argument. I’m not sure about the legality here — though I think Ted’s thinking like a defense lawyer, not a plaintiff’s lawyer — but I was referencing internal HR policies. My institution, for example, makes us log all hiring-related email contacts.

QUAGMIRE!

Well, I dunno. The real quagmire seems to be in the Gulf of Mexico. There’s no Petraeus to bring in there. . . .

WALTER SHAPIRO ON THE DEATH OF PRIVACY. Well, this is a product of journalism. It probably started when Earl Butz lost his job. In The Appearance of Impropriety, Peter Morgan and I noted that sociologists like Erving Goffman think that every functioning society needs a “backstage” where people can let their hair down and speak without observing social proprieties. But journalists have been destroying that backstage for decades, reporting casual remarks, emails, and betrayed confidences whenever it would advance their careers, or their agendas. Why should they be permitted to keep one, when no one else is?

And if these had been emails among conservative pundits and reporters (er, if you could find 400 of those), the leaker would be treated as a hero, not a person “whose motivations were mysterious and whose lack of integrity was obvious.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Genetically-Engineered Salmon Get Closer To The Table. “Normally, salmon do not make growth hormone in cold weather. But the pout’s on-switch keeps production of the hormone going year round. The result is salmon that can grow to market size in 16 to 18 months instead of three years, though the company says the modified salmon will not end up any bigger than a conventional fish.”

PREHISTORIC “HOBBITS” weren’t malformed humans, but an entirely distinct species.

UPDATE: Despite what the expert said, the package sent to Calzada wasn’t a bomb.

MARKDOWNS ON cellphones and accessories.

ITALY GETS ITS OWN TEA PARTY MOVEMENT.

VIDEO: 2011 CHEVY VOLT visits Consumer Reports.

THE INSTA-WIFE IS ON WNOX talking about men and marriage. Listen live here. Call-in info here.

ADVICE: How to Properly Load a Dishwasher.

UH OH: “Anyone planning to travel to Eurozone countries during the summer should consider what has previously been unthinkable – the fate of euro notes and coins if the single currency falls apart.”

FOR WOMEN, some 80s Advice on Picking Up Men.

HORSE HAVEN OF TENNESSEE has a blog!

SINNERS AND SCOLDS, feasting together in a cornucopia of collusion.

TONY WOODLIEF: The Case Against Happiness.

TAKING THE TEA PARTIES SERIOUSLY. Oh, good grief. Check out the photo if you want to see the face of modern journalism. In your nightmares . . . .

IN THE MAIL: From Ryk E. Spoor, Grand Central Arena.