MICHAEL BARONE: “Suffice it to say that the crowd at Beck’s event was much, much larger. Plus he didn’t have to pay people to attend.”

SAY, I JUST NOTICED: An Army of Davids is now on Kindle. Seems kinda . . . fitting.

UPDATE: Reader Kristin Theerman writes: “Thanks for posting the update that Army of Davids is available on the Kindle. I just bought my copy… (I would have bought sooner but I’ve only bought digital book content since buying my Kindle). I rarely write or post any comments on your PJTV content, but I’m a big fan. Instapundit.com is my favorite online destination for staying caught up on things that matter to me. Can’t wait to read your book, and thanks to my Kindle, I don’t have to…” Instant gratification! Thanks, Kristin. (Bumped).

THE SCRIBES and the idea of freedom.

WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE, the eponymous Crooks And Liars, or your lying eyes?

IF YOU’RE TAKING STATINS, you may want to take Coenzyme Q10. I’ve been taking low-dose statins for nearly ten years, and I’ve noticed that adding a CoQ10 supplement really made a difference in terms of energy and vitality. I’ve mentioned that to a few other people and heard the same thing. For a while I was taking a resveratrol supplement that also contained Coenzyme Q10, then I switched to one that didn’t and noticed that I didn’t feel as good. As an experiment, I stopped the resveratrol and started just a Coenzyme Q10 supplement and it became clear that it, not the resveratrol, was the reason I had felt so good on the earlier supplement.

UPDATE: Reader Mary Forman writes:

As a physician, I’ve recommended plenty of Coenzyme Q10 for statin takers without having to provide references. However, isn’t it pretty unusual for Instapundit to make a recommendation of this nature without some linky goodness?

Well, that’s because I’m writing from personal experience. If you google statins and Coenzyme Q10, you’ll find that statins deplete blood levels of Coenzyme Q10, though there’s some question about whether they deplete it in tissues and organs. It’s all pretty inconclusive. But this is about my experience. Use it as you choose.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Manny Klausner writes:

After reading your post about your taking low-dose statins, I thought you’d be interested in knowing about my experience.

I had been taking Simvastatin 20 mg for nearly 3 years and I was having some adverse side effects that seemed to be related to the statins or my blood pressure medication.

I told my internist in August that I was now regularly practicing Tai Chi, and had improved my diet — and I’d lost 10 pounds — and I’d like to discontinue the statins and my blood pressure medication. I stopped taking the statins and was examined by my internist nearly 3 weeks later.

My cholesterol levels (after 18 days without the statins): 177 total; 115 LDL & 50 HDL. My blood pressure was 110/70.

My doctor said that I don’t need to take the statins any more and reduced the dosage of my blood pressure medication.

He said, “Keep doing what you’re doing; it’s obviously working.” I expect that he’ll take me off of my blood pressure medication on my next exam.

My blood pressure is awesomely low. Cardio in combination with the statins gives me good blood numbers, but neither seems to make as big a difference on its own. But that’s my experience. There seems to be a lot of individual variation here. The Insta-Wife’s cholesterol is borderline high, but is actually lower now than it was when she was a vegetarian who ran marathons. I credit the addition of bacon to her diet — is there anything it can’t do? . . . .

JAY COST: Our Hyper-Partisan President. “What’s peculiar about Obama (beyond the total lack of good cheer) is that he campaigned against the very type of partisan warfare he now engages in.” You’re either with him, or against him.

Related: “We are so in his head.” Living rent-free!

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: CU tuition plan: 9.5% hike next year, up to 9% for four more years. At a time when inflation is reported as negligible, can the market continue to absorb increases like this? Or will people seek lower-cost alternatives?

UPDATE: Reader Amy Ready writes:

Our local 9 news reported that the current freshman class at CU-Boulder had decreased 6.5% and is the smallest since 2005. The best part was that CU’s financial chief, Ric Porreca, told the Board of Regents it was due to glitches in the online student management system which frustrated students so they enrolled elsewhere. Certainly couldn’t have been the rapidly increasing tuition and/or tenured Professors like Ward Churchill…

Certainly not. The fact that they’re closing dorms because of a shortage of freshmen has nothing to do with it.

Meanwhile, reader Danielle Emery notes that the Colorado School of Mines isn’t raising tuition: “Are they blessed with a fantastic endowment? Or could it be that they know how to run a business, deliver value, or simply that they can do math and therefore balance a budget?” I’m going with the math. But that’s actually a really good school, teaching really useful stuff.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A couple of readers point out that Mines may be raising tuition, just less than the 9% that triggers legislative oversight.

AT AMAZON, a sale on Halloween costumes. I was going to go as the deficit, but I decided that would scare the children too much. And with reason.

I LINKED MY WASHINGTON EXAMINER COLUMN EARLIER, but it’s worth breaking this bit out:

But those establishment GOP figures who think that they’ll cruise to victory and a return to the pocket-stuffing business-as-usual that marked the prior GOP majority need to think again. This election cycle is, in a very real sense, a last chance for the Republicans. If they blow it, we’re likely to see third-party challenges in 2012, not only at the Presidential level but in numerous Congressional races as well.

For the national GOP, it’s do-or-die time. So guys, you’d better perform — unless you want me to be writing another “I told you so” column in 2013. And trust me, you don’t.

I don’t really think that the people who most need to read this follow InstaPundit, but just in case . . . .

UPDATE: Reader Richard Knudsen writes: “So it’s safe to assume you’re not on McConnell or Boehner’s speed dial?” If I were, they’d be doing better. That goes for Obama, too . . . .

SALENA ZITO:

More than distance and altitude separate “Main Street” Americans from those who govern them. The disconnect is so deep, so wide, that filling it is hard to imagine. . . . In less than a year, this columnist has traveled 6,609 miles, interviewed 432 people registered as or identifying with Democrats in 17 states, and written about scores of races for U.S. Senate and House seats and governors’ mansions.

In the process, I lost my car’s transmission, wore out four new tires (and promptly flattened two replacements), cracked a windshield, broke a passenger window, had emergency surgery, was chased by a funnel cloud on the Great Plains, staggered through two blizzards, was pelted by hail, wilted in record heat and even saw a lot of locusts (although a farmer assured me it wasn’t a swarm).

All along “blue highways,” Americans spoke about their disappointment in the change they so proudly supported in 2008 — some whispering for fear of being labeled racist, some shouting at tea party rallies.

In coffee shops, on streetcorners and farms, at factories, the narrative was always the same: How could such great promise have let the country down so much, so quickly?

Beltway pundits talk of how angry America is. They seem incredulous that Americans somehow find this historic president’s administration anything but exceptional.

What’s exceptional is the blame coming from Washington, which only deepens the divide between the elite and Main Street.

Indeed. All I can say is, I told you so. . . .

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Worth recalling: FDR was no fan of public employee unions.

ONE NATION RALLY leaves National Mall trashed. Of course it did. This was not a march of the industrious.

UPDATE: “Bite us, Frédéric Bastiat!”

QWERTY RULES: Obama vs. the “legacy systems.”

IT DOESN’T SEEM TO BE WORKING THIS TIME EITHER: Gloria Allred Has Played The “Nanny Card” Before. But as a loyal apparatchik, she’ll give it the old college try.

More on Allred’s willingness to sacrifice her credibility for The Combine, from Professor Jacobson. “Gloria Allred played the race card this week for political gain. In so doing, Allred exposed her client to criminal prosecution and deportation.” Does Allred really have clients? Or just tools?

LOST ROVER FOUND ON MOON, with retroreflector still intact. “The rediscovery of the reflector could have an important impact in several areas of science that depend on accurately measuring the position and orbit of the Moon. Laser rangefinding currently provides the most precise tests of many aspects of gravity, including the strong equivalence principle, the constancy of Newton’s constant, geodetic precession, gravitomagnetism and the inverse square law.”

THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TO OBESITY: “Reward pathways in the brains of overweight people become less responsive as they gain weight. This causes them to eat more to get the same pleasure from their food, which in turn reduces the reward response still further.” Sorta like politicians and spending.

STUXNET MAKES JUMP from computers to humans.

THE LATEST CARNIVAL OF NUCLEAR ENERGY IS UP!

THE JOYS OF the original Honda Civic.

REASON TV: Reason.tv: What We Saw At And Who We Talked With at the One Nation Rally in DC: Rangel, Jackson, Sharpton, the AFT, AFL-CIO, & More…

Plus, an animated .gif comparing One Nation attendance with Glenn Beck’s rally. Not even close.

SHOULD THE I.R.S. GIVE TAXPAYERS AN ITEMIZED RECEIPT? The notion that people would be more supportive of big government if they knew where their money was going betrays an almost touching naivete.

ANDREW BOSTOM: Mainstream Pakistani Jihadism and the Times Square Bomb Plot.

FORWARD, INTO THE PAST: Thomas Edison’s 1912 electric car restored; hits the streets once again.

ARCHIVE GALLERY: Wildly Experimental Medical Procedures.

THE INEVITABLE 10:10 Remix.

IN THE MAIL: Stretching Anatomy. The Insta-Wife has been doing some of these stretches and says that they help.

MY SUNDAY WASHINGTON EXAMINER COLUMN IS UP: Tea Party dominance was inevitable — and I told you so.

MORE MOMENTUM FOR the “Repeal Amendment.”

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

SWEDEN: The Newest Red State?

IF YOU MISSED IT BEFORE, you might want to check out Bill Quick’s disaster-prep discussion forum.

Related: Post-Apocalyptic Survival Gear.

HMM: Newspaper: Feds investigating W.Va. Democratic chairman.

FETISHIZING THE SUPREME COURT: It’s a natural tendency for people who worship centralized authority.

OBSCURANTISM:

Kate Zernike of the New York Times describes how tea-party activists explore “dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas” and study “once-obscure texts” by “long-dead authors.” She is of course referring to Friedrich Hayek, whose book The Road to Serfdom was excerpted in Reader’s Digest and never has been out of print, whose Nobel Prize for economics in 1972 celebrated the importance and mainstream acceptance of his thinking, and whose death in 1992 isn’t exactly ancient history.

If they didn’t learn it in college, it’s “obscure.” Which, alas, merely highlights the inadequacy of their educations. (I, on the other hand, took a semester-long seminar on Hayek in college.) At any rate, the “obscure” Road to Serfdom is currently #56 on Amazon.

Related: Stuart Schneiderman: Who’s Smarter Now?

UPDATE: Reader Michael Costello writes: “How long has Karl Marx been dead? And Friedrich Hayek outlived Saul Alinsky by 20 years.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: OUCH:

If I had said a day ago that your typical New York Times reporter doesn’t have the vaguest sense of what the rule of law means, I would have heard from all sorts of earnest liberal readers — and probably some conservative ones too – about how I was setting up a straw man. But now we know it’s true. It’s not just that she doesn’t know what it is, it’s that even after (presumably) looking it up, she still couldn’t describe it and none of her editors raised an eyebrow when she buttered it.

The claims of superior intellect on the part of the legacy media seem unfounded.

MORE: Reader Jim Bass writes:

Since Kate is so clueless about Hayek, she can take a remedial course by watching “Commanding Heights.” The full series is here for her enlightenment on PBS’s website safely away from dusty bookshelves.

Learning through TV may work best here, though no doubt it would be more persuasive if it came from Jon Stewart . . . .

PROFILES IN COURAGE: Rendell: Dems were ‘too scared’ to hold tax cut vote before campaign recess.

BITES FROM THE APPLE: First impressions of the new Apple TV.

NOT FOLLOWING THE TALKING POINTS: New York’s Democratic Governor Paterson Praises Tea Party, Says It Rejects Extremism.

CROWD ESTIMATE: ‘One Nation’ Rally: Liberal Media Concludes Size Doesn’t Matter. A.P. says it was significantly smaller than the Beck rally, and the pictures certainly seem to agree. Other outlets, however, are less . . . rigorous.

UPDATE: Here’s a crowd estimate of 50,000.

KENNETH ANDERSON: Drone Warfare as Force Protection, and Drones as Strategic Air Power. “The long-term question of drones is whether they are going to remain a remarkably useful weapon in support of a large variety of missions in different ways, or whether instead the US decides to try and leverage them into something much more strategically radical — the new strategic air power. In other words, the latest iteration of a very old dream, the ability to win wars from the air. But this time with a twist.”

HOW TO tax the millionaires and billionaires away. And once they’re gone, the rest of us will be rich!

WELL, YES: Earth to Beltway: It’s the uncertainty, stupid. “The real problem, however, is that people don’t know what the rules will be in the future. So, they don’t know whether to have confidence or not.” But the uncertainty is what makes it fun to the waterbugs flitting around our government.

SEXUAL DOUBLE STANDARD: “There’s no doubt that she made a huge, gigantic mistake by actually even going near a computer with this stuff, but we can’t help but think what would’ve happened if it was a guy who wrote this about the college girls he slept with. Lawsuits? Oh, you betcha. That boy would be paying for it for the rest of his life.”

UPDATE: Reader John Richardson writes:

Regarding the author of the F thesis, I wonder if her parents now think the $50,000 a year that they spent on her Duke education was worth it. If all she wanted out of college was to sleep with a bunch of jocks, wouldn’t it have been cheaper to have been a minor league baseball team groupie a’la Bull Durham (also set in Durham, NC)?

Or at least attend a state school. I hadn’t thought of the higher education bubble connection here!

JEFFREY ANDERSON: A Constitutional Amendment To Limit Spending. “To regain control over our government and its reach, we must limit its spending. And to limit its spending over the long-haul, we need a Limited Government Amendment. Would such an amendment really make that much of a difference? It would make a colossal difference.”

MARKDOWNS ON Men’s Shirts.

CHANGE CAN BE SLOW.

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION: In Partisan Hearing, Democrats Attack Proprietary Colleges for Profiting While Students Fail. Stupid for-profit colleges. It’s not like traditional nonprofit schools do anything like that.

GREENWALD VS. SULLIVAN: Who’s an apologist for torture and assassination? Ah, remember the fierce moral urgency of change?

VIDEO: The One Nation March in DC.

UPDATE: Religious Zealots March on DC, Nostalgic for Long Forgotten Past.

THOUGHTS ON “DIRTY JOBS” FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A TECHNICAL SCHOOL whose enrollment is “overflowing.”

WE’VE BEEN WARNED: “Unfortunately, there is no indication that the Administration is listening.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: The Sad State of Economic Modeling.

It’s fine to say “Our best guess is that TARP and the stimulus did some good. But it’s well to remember that our best guess really isn’t very good. And putting an exact number on it–”3.1 million jobs created or saved!” creates a dangerous false precision, giving people the illusion that we have good knowledge in a very foggy area.

Indeed, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that the simulation the Fed ran–and a million others run by regulators, bankers, and investors–probably made the bubble, and the resulting crash, much worse. People thought they knew something they didn’t, and it made them complacent.

Indeed.

BESTSELLING AUTHOR SETH GODIN gives up on traditional book-publishing. I’m not sure I’m ready to go that far — Army of Davids was pretty good to me — but I can see his point: “I like the people, but I can’t abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread … I really don’t think the process is worth the effort that it now takes to make it work. I can reach 10 or 50 times as many people electronically.”

A SUNNY LOOK AT our economic future. It’s times like this that I’m happy most forecasts are wrong.

BOB DYLAN EXPERT: Dylan’s Aloofness Toward Obama Is Because of Racism. Yeah, what else could it be?

YOU KNOW YOU’VE MADE IT WHEN John Scalzi shows up to defend you in the comments at Publisher’s Weekly.

ONE NATION AVOIDING WASHINGTON ALTOGETHER?

TEN GREAT NONTRADITIONAL MOVIE VAMPIRES. Though they left out my favorite non-traditional vampire line: Responding to a brandished cross with, “Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire!”

POLIWOOD: Boomers vs. Gen Y’ers: Who Boasts the More Talented Filmmakers?

POLLUTE AND DIE? “We’ve reached the point in this cycle of humanity to where if you aren’t part of Groupthink, you are to be eliminated.”

HEH: Proof You Can Go Camping In A Porsche Boxster Spyder.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Waste Grease Thefts On The Rise Again. “What is the waste worth? Around $1.90 a gallon, apparently, and those darn ‘grease rustlers’ are, in some cases, making off with 700 gallons at a time. Big producers can lose even more.”

ISN’T THIS PIECE ON SKIRT LENGTH UNCERTAINTY just an excuse to show a lot of leg? (Via Ann Althouse). Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

STEPHEN KRUISER: Remember How Marco Rubio Was Going to Ruin the GOP in Florida (And Everywhere Else)? For all the talk about how Tea Party folks were going to be spoilers, it’s been the establishment hacks — Specter, Murkowski, etc. — who’ve been spoilers. And spoiled.

PROPERTY TAXES: Highest In Blue States, Lowest In Red States.

IN THE MAIL: The Enigma of Capital: and the Crises of Capitalism.

STEM CELL UPDATE: Great news: “Researchers at the Children’s Hospital in Boston have figured out how to produce induced pluripotent human stem cells using skin cells. This is a considerable advance on earlier breakthroughs in which viruses were used to ferry the genes needed to transform adult cells into stem cells.” Ron Bailey adds: “If such IPS cells prove out, one can see the end of using stem cells derived from embryos. It is time for supporters of human embryonic stem cell research like me to acknowledge that opposition probably pushed these breakthroughs along. On the other hand, it is also time for opponents of human embryonic stem cell research to acknowledge that these breakthroughs would most likely have been impossible without earlier work on human embryonic stem cells.”

Hey, I told you so.

HOW TO SAVE CALIFORNIA.

FISHERIES: Iain Murray says the Obama Administration’s right, and the critics are wrong. “Tradeable catch share, or ITQs, the system that is being imposed in New England, seeks to remedy this government-caused problem by introducing genuine ownership stakes in the fisheries. Wherever it has been tried, it has worked to restore collapsed fisheries by making the fishermen responsible stewards of the fish rather than, as Tierney says, hunter-gatherers. . . . Of course, because fishing fleets have been bloated by years of government interference, there will be economic casualties in the course of a move to a more responsible property rights-based system, and the process by which that works out will be seen as anything but fair by the victims.”

CHANGE: Bank of America slows foreclosures as Fannie Mae steps in: Foreclosure crisis turmoil deepens in South Florida, across nation. Related item here.

MICKEY KAUS: Will GM’s Big IPO Actually Happen?

GM is currently planning an IPO designed to allow taxpayers to sell at least some of their 61 percent stake in the bailed-out giant. The IPO is one of the things that lets the Obama administration claim the bailout was an “unambiguous success,” in the words of former auto mini-czar Steven Rattner.

But isn’t it looking increasingly like the IPO is in trouble? I’m not a Wall Street expert, but I can read the papers. The IPO’s already been scaled back, apparently, to the point where taxpayers may not unload enough shares to put them under the 50 percent mark. The global economy is iffy. GM has just abruptly switched CEOs . Its balance sheet is “loaded with fluff,” according to Bloomberg. Its own IPO documents admit its “internal control over financial reporting are currently not effective.” UAW locals are restive. And its market share is now seemingly below the target level. (A percentage point of share is a big deal in the auto industry.)

I smell Kabuki! Here’s the increasingly plausible scenario: The IPO was conveniently scheduled for after the November elections because the White House knew there was a good chance it wouldn’t fly. Now they know that with more certainty. But until November 3, the prospect of the big fall sale allows Obama to portray the bailout as on track, minimizing voter disapproval of one of his most unpopular actions.

Wouldn’t surprise me.

UPDATE: Jim Bennett wonders about a government “pump and dump” operation:

I have been wondering about this for a while. The USG could easily make some moves that would spike GM stock up temporarily, so the administration could dump it on the good news. “It’s not illegal if the President does it”, as another President once said. The really interesting question s whether the UAW would be allowed to dump their stock, giving them a huge war chest they could spend in 2012. Know anything about whether the UAW is free to sell its stock in the IPO?

I don’t. Anybody out there know? But regardless, I believe that there will be fertile fields for various securities-law prosecutions stemming from events of the past couple of years, if any authorities care to pursue them. And perhaps some civil actions, even if they don’t.

CALIFORNIA: University Transparency Bill Vetoed. “Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday vetoed legislation that would have required foundations and other auxiliary groups tied to California’s two main university systems to open their lists of donors to the public . . . . Lawmakers approved the bill, saying it was needed to ensure accountability at California State and the University of California, but Schwarzenegger said the measure, as crafted, would not sufficiently protect the privacy of individual donors.” Of course, if you donate toward a political initiative, you have no privacy and you may have your house or business damaged. . . .

A ROUNDUP OF important news about meat.

THE NEW TEA PARTY CHALLENGE: Staying On Message. Yes, don’t get distracted. As this NPR story suggests, the powers-that-be would like nothing better than to see the Tea Party morph into a social-conservative movement instead of a small-government movement. They can handle the former, but not the latter.

OOPS: Investors Were Heard Making Chimp Sounds And Yelling “Short Ireland” On Disastrous Conference Call With Finance Minister.

ALL TOMORROW’S TEA PARTIES:

I see that former Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker was spotted at a Georgia Tea Party protest, telling a local reporter that she is “furious about the way we are being led towards socialism.” Prefix magazine calls this “depressing” news that will “bring you down” before the weekend, because it’s incumbent upon all musicians—especially those in seminal proto-punk bands like VU—to have roughly the same, boring lefty politics.

Heh.

ONLINE STARTUPS target rising textbook costs. Thanks to reader Adina Dabu for the link. This is progress, but of course — as outrageous as textbook costs are — they’re just a drop in the bucket.

ANDREW BREITBART: O’Keefe Owes His Supporters an Explanation. I think early success made him cocky. Don’t get cocky, kid.

ED DRISCOLL SAYS I TOLD YOU SO! And so did I!

SUNLIGHT FOUNDATION: Rahm Emanuel’s White House Visitor Trail.

I’M NOT SURE THIS SHOULD BE FILED UNDER “HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE,” BUT. . . . Investigators say dean made students do housework for scholarships. “Investigators say a former vice president and dean at a New York university forced students to cook, clean, wash clothes and chauffeur her family — and threatened that their scholarships would be revoked if they refused. An arrest affidavit unsealed by federal prosecutors this week alleges that Cecilia Chang required scholarship students at St. John’s University to take out the garbage, shovel snow and cook food at her home in Queens, New York.”

GLORIA ALLRED UPDATE: “Gloria, this is almost delusional.” Video at the link.

ARE ANGELS the new vampires?

SHOCKINGLY, NOT MICHAEL BELLESILES: Man Convicted Of Impersonating Scholar.

AND I REMEMBER BACK WHEN HE WAS NOT-MENTIONING BILL CLINTON: Al Gore fails to mention President Barack Obama during Democratic rally in Florida .

STANDING UP FOR “DIRTY JOBS.”

Rowe explained that “dirty” jobs, like those in manufacturing and farming, used to mean success, but now look like settling. He wants that to change.

“I don’t think the country is going to fall back in love with manufacturing and I don’t think these policies are going to change, until or unless we reignite a fundamental relationship with dirt, work, and the business of making things, as opposed to the business of buying them,” he said.

He said one of reasons this is occurring is because community colleges and vocational education have taken the backseat to four-year college degrees.

“It’s not happening because people hate community colleges, it’s not happening because people hate the trades, it’s happening because we’re promoting a very specific kind of education at the expense of the others,” he said.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Reader Stephen Clark writes:

To Mike Rowe’s comments: Bravo! Decreasing support for vocational education has been one of the great mistakes in secondary education of the last 40 years. My grandmother on my mother’s side was the oldest of five children: 4 sisters and 1 brother. Her father was a house painter and wallpaperer and taught all of his children the trade – in the first decades of the 20th century. He believed, no matter what they did eventually, that all his children should have a trade at which they could earn a living on their own. Not bad advice then … or now.

And another reader emails:

I am a Looong time reader but have never contacted you. This made me want to. I am a very smart woman from a book-smart but not blue-collar family and I am a plumber. I sought this job out about five years ago and I think that I love my job more than almost anyone I know. I need a combination of mechanical intelligence (Obvious), social intelligence (you have to communicate with customers), and independence ( I am an employee of a medium-sized company but am on my own in the field (though I can call if I run into trouble)). I know that there is not an infinite demand for everyone in the U.S. to repair their neighbors house problems but damn, the high efficiency natural gas boilers come with computer controls and a 100 page manual. No-one should be ashamed to be the one who can come and make someone’s life better (If my grammar or spelling is off, I never claimed to have verbal intelligence :) )

No problem.

And reader Hugh Donohue notes that Rowe has a TED talk on the subject.

THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG: Rick Sanchez fired from CNN.

PICTURES FROM THE Paris Motor Show.

THE WORLD’S BIGGEST TORNADO HUNT.

THE HORROR: “Is there anything more frightening than seas of grandmothers waving American flags and singing ‘patriotic’ songs? I don’t think so.”

MORE J STREET SCANDAL.

TRAGIC NEWS: Heidi Klum’s Victoria’s Secret Run Comes To An End.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.

HOW FLORIDA TRIES TO block grassroots political activity. The Institute For Justice is suing them.

Related: Study: How State Campaign Finance Laws Erect Barriers to Entry for Political Entrepreneurs.

LOOKING AT interstellar space missions.

DO TRANS-FATS boost baby obesity?

A WAY TO ATTACK NUCLEAR PLANTS: Industrial computer systems are typically far less secure than they should be, experts say.

HOW THEY SAY GOODBYE: White House Staff Gives Rahm Emanuel Dead Fish as Parting Gift.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: What A Radical Republican Looks Like.

COMMERCIAL SPACE UPDATE: US congress clears private space taxis for lift-off.

ECO-FASCISM JUMPS THE SHARK: “With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.” It always ends up as mass murder, real or fantasized, with these people. That’s what they do. Treat them with all the respect they deserve.

UPDATE: Eco-Anschluss.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Remember that cocktail party game, Who Goes Nazi?