HMM: Obama Arizona lawsuit invites fortified state militia.

TIM CAVANAUGH: “Bernanke is now entering the second of two hot dog-eating competitions, but in this round buns and condiments are included. Much as I’d like to say this is going to be the hot dog-eating competition where somebody actually explodes, I think Bernanke will pull it off. The world hasn’t lost its taste for American debt, and America hasn’t lost its taste for running it up. Yes, yes, it can’t go on forever, but for the Fed’s purposes it only needs to go on until they can claim the Great Repression is over and have somebody believe them.”

MARKDOWNS ON men’s shoes.

YA THINK? NAACP has lost its luster in Tea Party fight.

SCOTT JOHNSON ON THE NEW BLACK PANTHER CASE: “I think this should be a big story, and I know it would be viewed as a scandal of epic proportions to which we would be treated on a daily basis if a similar story arose in a Republican administration. It is the sickening double standard of the mainstream media that adds the frisson of disgust to what is otherwise an interesting story in itself.”

Plus, Jan Crawford looks at things, and the Washington Post’s ombudsman wonders why his paper has ignored the story.

UPDATE: Reader Luke Pingel writes:

Glenn, I’ve written to you before, and you’ve even quoted me on the blog a few times. But, it’s always been snark. Not this time

Frisson, my ass! What is Scott Johnson smoking? Frisson?!!?? No fancy French-sounding, high-falutin’ BULLSHIT words can describe my ABSOLUTE SEETHING RAGE at this ENORMITY! This is an absolutely impeachable and an affront to the dignity and liberty of every American! This is a state-sanctioned denial of the civil rights of every voter! Tar and Feathers is just the start!

It takes me from being an intensely interested voter and turns me into a volunteer for my local anti-Democrat-machine politician. I’ve never been involved in any form of political activism. Ever. I’ve always had better things to do with my time. But this? This sealed the deal. I’ve pledged to volunteer a minimum of 100 hours between now and November with whatever local Tea Party organization.

THIS WILL NOT STAND.

A lot of people seem upset by this. I think the DoJ is oblivious to the response among a large number of Americans. But then, they seem to be oblivious to a lot.

CORRECTING THE NEW YORK TIMES: Congressman John Lewis was NOT ‘Showered With Hateful Epithets Outside the Capitol’ Last March. And Andrew Breitbart has the video, and the unclaimed $100K reward, to prove it.

JOHN HINDERAKER: “It’s funny how the political class is always wringing its hands about the potential for violence at Tea Party rallies, while 100% of the actual violence and intimidation that take place at political events is committed by union goons.”

TEXAS INSTRUMENTS VS. . . . calculator hobbyists? Good grief.

COMMENT OF THE WEEK: “If Demi Moore was married to the Old Spice Guy, he wouldn’t stand for this crap.”

JOHN STOSSEL: Kagan’s Exception To The First Amendment.

TYPICAL: Donald Berwick’s Motto? Rationing for Thee, but not for Me.

HOW TO start kite surfing.

WHAT’S GOING ON with sovereign debt.

I BLAME THE VIOLENT, EXTREMIST RHETORIC OF THIS ADMINISTRATION and its hate-speech purveying supporters in the press: Caught on Camera: Union Goon Hits, Shoves and Harasses GOP Supporter at Rally.

HMM: “The online dating industry is even bigger than the porn industry, and more than 30 percent of first dates end up in coitus yet its customers are much less satisfied than the customers of the porn industry.”

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste emails: “The difference is that the Porn industry delivers what it promises.”

A DANGEROUS DISAFFECTION. “There have been several occasions when the American people have voted for smaller government; most notably in 1972, 1980 and 1994. But it really doesn’t matter. You can vote for limited government, but you can’t get it; the political class won’t let you. This is not to assert the silly proposition that there is no major difference between Democrats and Republicans. The fiscal disaster that we have witnessed since the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007 proves the contrary. But still: experience shows that voting for Republicans hasn’t been enough to offset the power of the political class. . . . It remains to be seen whether the American people can finally break the grip of a political class that remains determined to run their lives and misappropriate trillions of dollars of their wealth. It will be, I think, a close-run thing. In the meantime, there is no mystery as to why most Americans do not regard the federal government as legitimate in Jeffersonian terms.”

FUN WITH an ice-cream maker.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT ON SIRIUS/XM SATELLITE RADIO, the latest PJM Political is now online.

LOTS OF FUTUREBLOGGING over at The Speculist.

RANDY BARNETT: So Much For the Commerce Clause Challenge to Individual Mandate Being “Frivolous.”

SMOOTH MOVE: GOP Dumps On Tea Party, Right Blogs. Tea Partiers need to work on taking over the party from the bottom up by filling precinct chairs and state committees, or they’ll wind up marginalized like the netroots even if the GOP wins. For the insiders, it’s all about their own power and perks. On the other hand, beware of divide-and-conquer journalism, too. . .

FDA WANTS TO regulate genetic testing.

TYLER COWEN: What Germany Knows About Debt.

RIDING ALONG with the Nissan Leaf.

THE OIL SPILL PROBLEM: “You can’t legislate competence.” Or elect it, apparently . . . .

IN THE MAIL: From Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor, Threshold.

PAMPERED POPULISTS: Victor Davis Hanson: “It’s surreal to see President Obama play the class-warfare card against the Republicans while on his way to vacation on the tony Maine coast, and even more interesting to note that now gone are the days when the media used to caricature Bush I (‘Poppy’) for boating in the summer off the preppie-sounding Kennebunkport. The truth is that the real big money and the lifestyles that go with it are now firmly liberal Democratic. . . . The more the polo-shirted Obama seems obsessed with golf, and the more he seems to prefer the landscape of the elite (who navigate the Ivy League, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Upper East Side, Cambridge, etc.), the more we wonder whom exactly he’s railing about.”

BILL QUICK: The Next Great Wave.

And there’s this from C.J. Burch: “In the days before World War I all of the Princes of Europe, all its nobles, all its educated and cultural elites saw a storm on the horizon. A storm that could lay all they had built low. Yet not one of them, not one, could muster the strength or the courage to do anything other than what they had always done before and what had brought them all to the brink of disaster.”

ACCOUNTABILITY: Joe Biden fined $219K for 2008 presidential campaign violations.

TOM SMITH: “The new DOJ website is kind of creepy.” Here’s the site. What do you think?

UPDATE: Reader Antoinette Aubert writes:

I clicked onto the DOJ site so I could make an informed vote on your poll. The first thing I see was an announcement that DOJ is investigating doctors. The next thing I see is that DOJ is investigating police officers. Doctors and police officers? Yep that’s the crime wave every American lives in fear of and wants the DOJ to protect them from. Think of all the candidates that have been elected to office because they promised the voters they would arrest doctors and police officers.

Not only is it creepy, its politically insane. If I were Holder at this point I would try to go for diminished capacity.

Heh.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Alan Henderson writes:

Maybe someone should hold a contest – best suggestion for the DOJ website’s background music. The theme to the original “Halloween” seems to catch the mood. The “Imperial March” is an easy choice. Blue Oyster Cult’s “Dominance and Submission” works, too – although I’d reserve that one for the White House Czars’ website, if they had one.

Heh.

NAACP GOES UNDER THE BUS: Biden: Tea Parties Aren’t Racist.

UPDATE: Thoughts on Biden from Moe Lane.

THE END OF the popularity contest.

WHEN I DROPPED BY THE VERIZON STORE TO LOOK AT ONE, THEY WERE SOLD OUT: Droid X Adds to the Challenge of Choosing a Smart-Phone.

SENIORS RULE: Dividends and capital gains by age group.

FACE-OFF: Three 1986 Porsches.

FROM BEN CUNNINGHAM, a roundup of Tea Party headlines.

BOB OWENS: “Think Progress” And The Eighth Circle Of Hell.

WHAT TO DO? In response to this piece by Angelo Codevilla on America’s ruling class, readers wonder what to do. Well, a few things suggest themselves.

First: Mockery. They are very mockable, and they are very thin-skinned. That leads them to erupt in embarrassing ways. Use their sense of entitlement against them.

Second (and related): Transparency. One-party government makes you stupid, and although composed of both Democrats and Republicans the political class is basically its own party, and these people are pretty stupid. Point it out, repeatedly. Use FOIA, ubiquitous videocameras, and other tools to make the stupidity show.

Third: Money. Codevilla writes: “Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof.” The coming budget crisis — already here, really, but still largely denied by the rulers — is an opportunity to defund a lot of this patronage stuff. They’ll try, of course, to cut the muscle and preserve the fat, but that won’t work very well if they’re closely watched (see above). Cut them off in other ways, too. Don’t support the media, nonprofits, and politicians who support them with your money.

Also, make sure that money flows TO things you like: Businesses, alt-media, politicians who aren’t part of the problem, etc. Build up countervailing institutions that don’t depend on the government to survive.

Fourth: Organize and infiltrate. Take over party apparats from the ground up. Create your own organizations that can focus sustained attention — the “ruling class” relies on others having short attention spans while it stays focused on amassing and protecting power.

Finally: Don’t act like a subject. Rulers like subjects. Don’t be one. As a famous man once said: Get in their face. Punch back twice as hard. Words for the coming decade?

UPDATE: Reader Stephen Clark writes:

All the things you’ve listed are good. However, one of the most important is to get involved with politics. Local and state politics are the most accessible to citizen movements. Take advantage of that. This is one of the most important features of the Tea Party movement, in my opinion. Many of these organizations are focusing as much on local and state party apparatus as on the higher profile national offices and races. Local and state government is, or at least can be, the defense in depth needed to take on the class and its ambitions described in Codevilla’s piece. As he makes clear, this is not the work of a few election cycles.

A few other items I would add to your list: Get to know your representatives and their staffs well and make sure they know you. Don’t fall for the suggestion that the task of government has grown so very complicated that only professional legislators and staff are fit to govern. Apart from being self-serving on its face, it’s a damn good argument for cutting back and decentralizing the tasks of government at all levels. Frequent changes in legislative seats not only can bring fresh faces and new ideas, it builds a reservoir of talent and knowledge that can augment that defense in depth meant to keep representatives on a very short leash.

Indeed. And let’s be honest — the claim that only “professional legislators and staff” are smart enough falls apart once you meet a few of these people.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Andrew Wharton emails: “Be armed, both intellectually and especially with guns. The ruling class hates it, but more importantly, it mitigates their baser instincts.” Yes, they’ll do whatever they can get away with, so it’s important to be sure they can’t get away with too much.

MORE: Reader Joan Varga writes:

What to do? Have a back-up plan for your information web. Do we really think that the powers that be will allow us unfettered access to information for much longer? What’s our plan for staying in touch, for finding out, for gathering information, for disseminating information after the Internet becomes too big to fail and too sweet for Obama to resist?

Why we aren’t taking over television stations and Hollywood studios is beyond me. They did it in the 60′s because they knew where real power comes from. Focusing on politicians and politics is not going to win the day.

You answer audacity with something more audacious. And “serious” people will be trampled by the mewling mob of gored oxes and spoiled public sector unions.

Hmm.

MORE: Steve White of Rantburg writes:

A practical application of the point made by reader Joan Varga today was seen last year in Tehran. When the Mad Mullahs of Iran wanted to shut down the anti-government demonstrations, they did everything they could to interfere with cell phones, internet service, and Twitter. It largely worked, too, not that the western press pointed it out at the time.

A backup plan for communication for the day that the government becomes serious about stifling the free flow of information is a good idea, because if push comes to shove our ‘ruling class’ will indeed lock down communications. It might not be as abrupt as what happened in Tehran, either, it might be cloaked instead in a serious of interlocking decisions such as ‘network neutrality’, anti-porn, anti-hate speech, and so on. They have ways.

Well, this isn’t Iran, and there’s no Revolutionary Guard here. But backup plans are always good. There’s always ham radio, and probably a lot more out there. I believe some geeks are working on this.

STILL MORE: Reader Donald Golgert writes:

This piece finally codified what I’ve been seeing/feeling/living for some time now. I’ve been uncomfortable with Republican politicians and hated the Democrats as a whole.

I’ve done two things.

I’m now the Republican PCO for my precinct. I’ll attempt to fix the problems from inside. At 46, I’m the youngest acknowledged (out?) Republican in my very blue district in Seattle.

I’ve launched a Cafe Press store. The 1st design is built on the phrase “Depose the Ruling Class”. More to follow. Snarkier to be sure. Mockery laden even.

Snark and mockery?

MORE STILL: Reader John Steakley writes:

The founding fathers had the idea of checks and balances before parties emerged. Parties undermine C&B because we can’t expect the White House to keep Congress in check (or vice-versa) when they are both of the same party.

We need a third party (or maybe a fourth, too) dedicated SOLELY to either Congress or the White House. Let’s call them the “White House Party” and the “Capitol Party.” Each one fields candidates only for that branch of government, immunizing themselves of influence peddling from another branch. They could openly campaign against the excesses and abuses of the other branch, free from fear of party retribution.

Can you imagine the power a President would have if he could truly serve as a check and balance on Congress regardless of which party controlled it without fear of losing votes in the upcoming election? Can you imagine the power Congress would have if controlled by a party with no eye on the White House?

Since the third branch – Judicial – is unelected, the Supreme Court candidates would, by definition, have to be approved by BOTH parties.

Hmm.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: Dodd-Frank And The Non-Delegation Doctrine.

JOE THE PLUMBER FIXED THE GULF OIL LEAK: Okay, it’s a different Joe the Plumber, but still, it’s kind of fitting.

Plumber. . . fitting . . . heh.

REGULATING the New York Times algorithm.

ED DRISCOLL: Leading By Example, Then And Now. Plus, “Lobster for everyone!”

ROGER SIMON: The Congress of the Vengeful Narcissists.

“SOMETHING IS GOING ON that we do not understand.”

FROM MARK LEVIN, the Landmark Legal Foundation’s brief in the Virginia healthcare suit.

FROM POST-RACIAL PRESIDENT to “most-racial” President.

OBAMA CASTS REPUBLICANS AS PARTY OF THE RICH. Yeah, stupid fatcat Republicans — and to maintain their majority, they’re just going to go on making more and more rich people until the country’s completely under their thumb. Meanwhile the Democrats are the party of the poor, man, and — uh, can we get rewrite on this?

I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ONE GODDAMN WORD ABOUT MY CARBON FOOTPRINT: “Arriving in a small jet before the Obamas was the first dog, Bo, a Portuguese water dog given as a present by the late U.S. Sen Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.”

UPDATE: Note the appended “clarification” to the story, which says that Bo didn’t get his own plane to himself, but was accompanied by other staffers. But reader Ed Stephens writes: “Do you think any reporter will have the nerve to ask Obama directly about flying the dog on a private jet?”

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails: “The first reporter that *does* ask about the dog’s private jet, will get immediate street cred (and Tea Party cred) that will send shock waves through the MSM.” But the lunch invitations will dry up.

MARKDOWNS ON patio and garden stuff.

PJTV: From Stephen Green, it’s The Week In Blogs.

I LOVE MY LUMIX LX-3, but it looks like Panasonic is upping the ante with a soon-to-appear Lumix LX5. “Coming in both black and white versions, the pro compact camera would build on the LX3 by getting a much more sensitive sensor that can now handle ISO 12,800 versus the earlier model’s ISO 3,200. The camera now has a much longer-ranged 24-90mm lens (versus 24-60mm) without sacrificing the bright f2.0 maximum aperture.” Sounds like it takes what I like about the LX3 and makes it moreso. Cool. I expect I’ll be ordering one soon. . . .

THIS WEEK in the future.

MORT ZUCKERMAN: Zuckerman: Obamanomics “our economic Katrina.” Too bad you didn’t notice a couple of years ago, Mort. But better late than never, I guess.

Plus this: “As we have discussed, the media and the Democrats seem to forget about the primary role previous government interventions had in creating our current mess. The anti-capital rhetoric has been a calculation designed to distract people from the failure of previous social engineering.”

CATCHING UP: If you missed it last week, check out my interview with Mark Levin on the collapse of the welfare state, what to do between now and November, and more.

Knoxville, Tennessee.

ANDY KESSLER: The stock market will suffer dizzy spells until the fog of monetary policy uncertainty is lifted.

WHERE ARE THE GIRLS? “Darkly, I suspect that girls were killed–and that this doesn’t get talked about because it spoils the happy feminist image. But that seems unduly paranoid.”

STRANGELY SILENT in the Eurozone.

KATHY GRIFFIN speaks truth to power.

JOHN GALT WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: Wealthy Reduce Buying in a Blow to the Recovery. Unexpectedly! Gee, regulatory uncertainty, promises of higher taxation — who could have seen this coming?

Related thoughts from Roger Kimball.

WAPO OMBUDSMAN: We Should Be Covering The Black Panther Story. Ya think?

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE BLOGGERS. Yeah, I had something on this last night. It deserves more attention.

THIS LAP DANCE brought to you by California taxpayers.

QUESTIONS ABOUT the speed of labor market adjustment.

MARKDOWNS ON men’s swimwear.

PHOTO: The devastation from the D.C. earthquake.

I’ve experienced this sort of devastation myself.

SERIOUS human beings.

JONAH GOLDBERG: “I’m beginning to wonder if the political moment is much, much, more significant than most of us realize. The rules may have changed in ways no one would have predicted two years ago. And perhaps 10 years from now we’ll look back on this moment and it will all seem so obvious.”

UPDATE: Thoughts from the Crack Emcee.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Nuking Westphalia: Obama’s Deep Convictions Point to War With Iran.

PSA: How To Remove A Bumpersticker.

LUKEWARM SUPPORT for Elena Kagan: “If confirmed, Kagan would be the first successful nominee in recent years whose nomination was backed by less than a majority of Americans in the final poll before the Senate confirmation vote (or, in the case of Harriet Miers, before her nomination was withdrawn).”

I think that Republicans shouldn’t make a fight of it, as whoever is next would be worse. But some people disagree.

OMEGA IMBALANCE produces overweight offspring?

Omega-6 and omega-3, both polyunsaturated fatty acids, are each critical to good health.

But too much of the first and not enough of the second can lead to overweight offspring, the scientists showed in experiments with mice designed to mirror recent shifts in human diet.

Over the last four decades, the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in a typical Western diet has shifted from a healthy five-to-one to 15-to-one in much of Europe, and up to 40-to-one in the United States.

In the breast milk of American women, the average ratio has gone from six-to-one to 18-to-one.

Earlier studies have established a link between such imbalances and heart disease.

But “this is the first time that we have shown a trans-generational increase in obesity” linked to omega intake, said Gerard Ailhaud, a biochemist at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis and main architect of the study.

“Omega six is like a fat-producing bomb,” he told AFP by phone.

Uh oh.

FRANK TIPLER ON LEE BOLLINGER, GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES, AND PRESS FREEDOM: “His argument is so obviously false that he himself, in his own article, cannot avoid providing the facts needed to refute it.”

SPACE TOURISM UPDATE: Virgin Galactic spacecraft makes 1st crewed flight.

THE NEXT BUBBLE: Municipal Bonds?

IN THE MAIL: How to Disagree Without Being Disagreeable: Getting Your Point Across with the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense.

“MALAISE.” “Is Brzezinski so clueless about his own boss’s legacy and liberals’ sensitivity to it as to stumble into this choice of phrase, or is he obliquely drawing the comparison deliberately for whatever insane reason? Lucky for him and his party that he’s as relatively obscure now as he is; had a more prominent Dem said this, the RNC’s soundbite machine would be in hog heaven.”

BELLESILES UPDATE: Jim Lindgren: Professor Of Military History Weighs in on the Implausibility of Bellesiles’s Story.

ANN ALTHOUSE: The Nation promotes the anti-choice liberal meme. You don’t need stupid choices. Instead, let experts tell you what you want.

TODAY ONLY: Another cheap, portable hard drive on sale.

KRUISER CONTROL: Pundits Gone Wild: The Megyn Kelly Smackdown, and the Larry King Tongue-Loesching.

GENERATION Y’S EMPTY PIGGY BANK: “As fund managers try to woo younger workers, why are few paying attention? They’re overwhelmed by big debts and high unemployment. . . . Already saddled with student debts averaging almost $20,000, according to New York-based think tank Demos, Gen Y is in a tougher financial position than previous generations. The average salary for 25- to 34-year-olds, for instance, fell 19 percent over the last 30 years, after adjusting for inflation, to $35,100, Demos estimates. That’s if they can get jobs.” This is why I don’t see a housing recovery any time soon. The people who should be supplying the next wave of demand, can’t. (Via NewsAlert).

ILLINOIS’ PENSION MELTDOWN PROCEEDS. The logical conclusion of a certain set of policies.

TIM CAVANAUGH: “It’s going to take a lot more than a trillion new dollars to bring the kind of inflation Ben Bernanke wants. The chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank thought he had the problem licked just a few months ago, but now, for the third straight month, the “core” consumer price index (excluding food and energy) has fallen. That 1/10th of a penny you’re now saving on every dollar? Don’t spend it all in one place. The two big items not covered in CPI — energy and food — are both either flat or falling.”

UPDATE: From the comments: “So who fears deflation? Debtors fear it. And who is the biggest debtor? The federal government – to an extent never seen before in the history of this country.”

TIMOTHY LEE: Put The NSA On A Shorter Leash.

ANGELO CODEVILLA: America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution.

Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. . . . Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans’ conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so. . . . Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. . . . In this clash, the ruling class holds most of the cards: because it has established itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference. Breaking them, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involve far more than electoral politics.

Read the whole thing.

BIGGEST TURNOUT YET for California Tea Party group. Apparently, those fabricated charges of racism aren’t deterring people.

HEADLINES YOU THOUGHT YOU’D NEVER SEE: Florida ACLU Petitions for Return of Man’s Guns.

I HOPE HE GETS WHAT HE DESERVES: Louis Farrakhan demands reparations from Jews.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, the U.S. government would be shutting down private websites by the thousands for murky reasons. And they were right!

CELEBRATE your uniqueness. “Like a fingerprint, the virus communities in the human gut are unique to each individual, a new study on poop DNA suggests. Even identical twins have very different collections of viruses colonizing their lower intestines. This is in contrast to bacterial communities, which are similar in related individuals, the researchers say.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The 10 Kinds Of Cleavage.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why does every middle-aged woman think HER holiday seducer is the real deal?

STAGLIANO CASE UPDATE: All Charges Dismissed. They told me if I voted for John McCain we’d see flimsy obscenity prosecutions to make a political point. And they were right!

BEST AND WORST TRAVEL DISCOUNT PROGRAMS. Including this: “AARP’s ‘discounts’ are the most disingenuous of the programs I researched.” Why am I not surprised?

POLITICAL CHAOS: Governor Manchin Names Old Family Friend as Senator to Replace Robert Byrd.

STAR WARS on a subway.

HMM: University of Texas regents take KKK organizer’s name off dorm. Does that mean that all those buildings named after Robert Byrd in West Virginia will have to change?

UPDATE: Reader Mike Ferrante writes: “Seems like we’re getting like the old Stalinist Russia where we erase the people who have become unfashionable. WTF.”

HOPE AND SAME: The Wage and Hour Division: We Can Help Prolong the Recession.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER voter fraud news blackout?