NOW UP: Part 2 of my Steven Pressfield interview.

POLITICO: The DNC’s New Surrogate: Jon Huntsman. That’s pretty much how most Republicans think of him, I suspect — if they think of him at all, which I rather doubt.

Hey, maybe if Obama dumps Biden he can name Huntsman as the new Veep. I think he’d be a worthy successor to Joe Biden.

SHORT AND DIRECT: Koch to Buffet: Who are you to think Government is a better judge of spending money then the earners of that money?

FROM STEPHEN GREEN, it’s The Week In Blogs.

“MASSIVE” WHITE HOUSE PIPELINE PROTEST draws dozens.

Continuing Jane Hamsher’s record of abject failure in this department.

IS ED SCHULTZ RACIST? “I mean, what about ‘big black cloud’ says Barack Obama to you?”

Yeah, but Janeane Garofalo is a bigger racist. “She’s basically the Bob Hope of brainless left-wing race-baiters. . . . Even as a conspiracy theorist, she’s terrible. But good enough for ‘Countdown,’ I guess.”

UPDATE: Reader Brian Gates objects:

Calling Bob Hope just an “old performer” who ran through a routine, presumably on the basis of tv appearances he made in his 90s, is like judging Michael Jordan’s basketball talent from tapes of his fantasy basketball camp. You know the difference between Bob Hope and Janeane Garafalo? Bob Hope was an American icon, the only person ever named an honorary veteran of the US Armed Forces for decades of USO tours that have won praise from everyone from John Steinbeck to Bill Clinton, a man who could sing with Bing Crosby, dance with Jimmy Cagney, and act opposite virtually every leading lady of Hollywood’s Golden Age including Katharine Hepburn, Jane Russell, Lucille Ball, and Hedy Lamar, and who had the confidence and talent to ad lib an entire episode of the most-watched tv show in America, a man whose show business career spanned seven decades – and Janeane Garafalo’s a racist.

PS A few weeks ago I happened upon a 1941 Bob Hope movie called “Louisiana Purchase”. It’s a thoroughly Republican picture, with several anti-Roosevelt lines. The best joke comes when the female lead has just completed the typical Hollywood transformation from dowdy to knockout. Several guys are in her hotel room drooling over her, and an African-American hotel employee walks past the open door. He does a double-take and walks away shaking his head, saying, “If she were black, she’d be beautiful”. That’s what guys like Bob Hope were doing for racial humor back when members of Janeane Garafalo’s party were enforcing segregation and anti-miscegenation laws across the country.

Good point. And she’s certainly carrying on that racist, Jim Crow tradition today — as is Ed Schultz.

REPORT: Libya Rebels in Tripoli as Qaddafi’s Defenses Collapse. “Libyan rebels raced into Tripoli Sunday and met little resistance as Muammar Qaddafi’s defenders melted away and his 42-year rule rapidly crumbled. The euphoric fighters celebrated with residents of the capital in Green Square, the symbolic heart of the regime.”

UPDATE: On Martha’s Vineyard, Obama monitors Libya news. Hey, that’s what I’m doing here in Knoxville, too!

MORE: Libya war news draws Obama statement from vacation. Plus, bonus golf photo.

CHINA’S UNDERGROUND NUCLEAR GREAT WALL: “In March 2008, China’s state-run CCTV network broke the news about a 5,000-kilometre-long network of hardened tunnels built to house the Chinese Second Artillery Corps’s increasingly modern force of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. Tunnelling evidently commenced in 1995. Located in, or rather under, mountainous districts of Hebei Province, in northern China, the facility is reportedly hundreds of meters deep. That makes it an exceptionally hard target against conventional or nuclear counterstrikes. . . . What should have been a blockbuster story occasioned barely a peep in the Western press, and elicited little response even in Asia. For lack of a catchier metaphor, call it the dragon that never roared.”

AT AMAZON, markdowns on action sports clothing.

CLARICE FELDMAN: “I think sentient Democrats are watching their party’s chances in 2012 slip away, and had they not made such a big deal of claiming all opposition to Obama was racist in motivation and effect (see, e.g., this) , they would now be urging him to quit and seeking a new contender for his office. Like Coleridge’s ancient Mariner, however, they can only stand on deck with that albatross around their neck watching both the White House and the Senate slip from their grasp just as did so many state governorships and the House of Representatives.”

Obama an albatross? I thought he was a creepy robot.

PERSONALLY, I PREFER THE FEELING OF HAVING A GUN AND NOT NEEDING ONE: Question of the Day: Have You Ever Felt You Needed A Gun and Didn’t Have One?

AT AMAZON, markdowns on editors’ picks for Best Books Of The Month.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ FOR YA? Houses In Baltimore Selling For Less Than $10,000.

I REMEMBER THIS FROM AN EPISODE OF BIG BANG THEORY: Telepresence Robots Seek Office Work.

EVERYONE’S A DJ: Group Listening Rooms Turn Up Volume on Web Music. “Turntable.fm turns your browser into a virtual dance club where users swap turns at the DJ tables and rate songs ‘awesome’ or ‘lame’ (Rolling.fm is almost identical).”

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Man Wins Handgun Lawsuit Against Chicago. “Jesus Duenas says he knows the law and he says he knows his rights. He has a Firearm Owners Identification Card. Now the full-time paralegal wants his gun back so he can protect his wife and 14-year-old son.”

DARPA LOOKING AT interstellar travel.

MARK STEYN: The Imperial Presidency: European royals make do with a less lavish lifestyle than the supposed citizen-executive of a so-called republic.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Be Realistic About Planning For College Costs.

After many families carefully mapped out a plan to pay for college costs, the economy’s downward spiral forced them to rip it up.

State-budget cuts forced many colleges and universities to make huge tuition hikes. Job losses siphoned money for college savings accounts.

When home values nose-dived during the housing bust, students and parents lost the ability to tap home-equity lines for extra cash. The Dow’s wild swings have chewed up balances in 529 college-saving accounts, which often include stocks.

“Parents are desperate,” said April Osborn, executive director of the Arizona Commission for Postsecondary Education, which administers several federal and state grants that go to Arizona college students.

Don’t be desperate. Look for cheaper alternatives, which abound. If they miss out on the “college experience” because they start out at a community college and then finish as commuter students at a public university, well, that’s too bad but it’s not tragic, and it’s certainly not worth bankrupting yourself to avoid.

BEWARE THE .357 Magnum doughnuts of doom!

BIG BEAR TERRORIZING TOWNSEND WOMAN: “For about two months now a bear — one she estimates to be about 7 feet tall and at least 400 pounds — has been coming around her house, sometimes as many as three times a day. . . . Shibley is a little scared herself, so much so that she just about doesn’t go outside. She is even worried about cooking. She woke up one morning to bloody claw marks on a screen.”

I’m thinking it’s bearskin-rug time.

IN TEXAS, THE FASTEST GROWING GROUP APPLYING FOR GUN CARRY PERMITS? African-American Women.

AN ECONOMIC BRIGHT SPOT: Despite Economy, Ohio, U.S. Gun Sales Defy Gravity.

ENDANGERED SPECIES: Where Have All The Millionaires Gone?

A. BARTON HINKLE: Airport Security vs The Constitution: Government critics deserve their day in court.

SOME PRE-HURRICANE PREPAREDNESS SUGGESTIONS.

Plus, a hurricane preparedness list. And here’s a roundup of hurricane tips from a while back.

IN THE MAIL: The 9/11 Commission Report: The Attack from Planning to Aftermath.

GUNWALKER AND THE FOUNDATION OF LIBERTY.

It all comes down to this: Is there an inalienable right to self-defense? If there is, each man has indisputable, inestimable value, value that he may rightly preserve even if the life of another man is forfeit. A man may kill another in lawful self-defense even if the policy preferences of the state would prefer his death. If a right to self-defense actually exists, it is in a very real sense the highest law of the land and all lesser laws must pay it deference. It fundamentally defines the social contract, the nature of the relationship between man and the state.

But if there is no such inalienable right, the entire nature of the social contract is changed. Each man’s worth is measured solely by his utility to the state, and as such the value of his life rides a roller coaster not unlike the stock market: dependent not only upon the preferences of the party in power but upon the whims of its political leaders and the permanent bureaucratic class. The proof of this analysis surrounds us.

I made a similar observation in my Second Amendment Penumbras piece.

DEMONSTRATING TO HAVE AMERICANS FREEZE IN THE DARK: Sixty-five arrested outside White House in oil pipeline protest. “Police arrested 65 environmentalists outside the White House Saturday as they staged a demonstration urging President Obama to block a proposed pipeline that would bring oil from Canada’s oil sands projects to Gulf Coast refineries.”

The Saudis don’t like this pipeline either. They’d rather we buy their “conflict oil” than Canadian “ethical oil.” Funny to see hopey-changey leftists taking the same side.

UPDATE: Reader Matt Edens notes the irony in this quote from the article: ““If Barack Obama mans up, says no to this thing, it will send a surge of electricity through all of the people that voted for him three years ago. It will be the reminder of why we were so enamored of this guy in 2008.” Apparently, that’s the only kind of electricity these people favor — the kind that comes from the government saying no to development. . . .

YOU KNOW WHO LOVED HIGH-SPEED RAIL? Hitler!

KEN ANDERSON: Out Of State Admissions To State Universities.

GREEN FAIL: “Nobody Ever Uses Them:” Costco Removes Free EV Chargers From Parking Lots.

TODAY ONLY: Sharp 40″ LCD HDTV for $649.

BRINGING CHANGE WHEREVER HE GOES: Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard No-Fly Zone Creates Airport Recession.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Stock Market Begins To Feed Economic Fear: Fourth weekly decline in stock prices raises concern that people and businesses will pull back.

Related: Why Obama’s Stimulus Program Failed.

TROPICAL STORM IRENE heading for Florida?

HMM: Intrade Now Pricing Greater Than 50% Chance Obama Will Not Be Re-Elected. Plus, speculation that he’ll start a war to boost his popularity. My guess is that, as with the stimulus spending and quantitative easing, we’re past the point of diminishing returns there. Even I have to stop and think to remember all the countries where we’re currently at war, or at least at “kinetic military action.”

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? Generation Vexed: Young Americans rein in their dreams: Amid so much economic uncertainty, many are rethinking career plans, putting off marriage and avoiding the stock market like the plague. “Fewer than half of Americans believe that the current generation will have a better life than the last, according to a Gallup poll this spring. It was the most pessimistic showing for that barometer in nearly three decades.”

MORE ON GUNS AND BRITISH HISTORY, from Joyce Malcolm.

STRIKE FAIL: Verizon Strikers Return To Work, Without A Deal.

IT WAS PAUL CAMPOS: Anonymous LawProf Scamblogger Outs Himself. “”ScamProf is the failed academic who has done almost no scholarly work in the last decade, teaches the same courses and seminars year in and year out, and spends his time trying to attract public attention, sometimes under his own name, this time anonymously. These are important facts about ScamProf, since he is indeed scamming his students and his state, and his initial posts were tantamount to a confession that he’s not doing his job. His colleagues, in any case, now know who he is, and are quite understandably angry, since the reckless generalizations are naturally read as commentary on them..”

Related thoughts from Ann Althouse. “I thought it was a student, because it had some bad writing and simplistic thinking.”

ARGENTINA CENSORS over a million blogs.

JOHN KASS: Obama Dangerously Close To A “Killer Rabbit Moment.” “There are eerie similarities. Like Obama, Carter was at that point where he was constantly viewed as weak and ineffectual. His fellow Democrats had lost patience with him. Liberal writers who once fawned on him had turned against him. And like Obama, Carter foolishly left the White House for a ‘vacation.’”

SPURRED BY MY ROBERT HEINLEIN CURMUDGEONS QUOTE, Dodd Harris reminds me of this post from last year: Dismiss The Tea Party At Your Peril.

CHARLES BLOW: How Did Barack Obama Turn Into A Creepy Robot?

HISTORY:

During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Christians were not supposed to charge interest. Therefore, the most common moneylenders-to-kings were Jews. They could loan money at a profit, and were thus more likely to lend it.

But whenever the King’s debts got too large to repay, he began to demonise the Jews. And eventually came a pogrom. And hey-ho, the debt went away along with the Jews.

I’m seeing the demonisation of banks. I wonder how long before government throws a pogrom?

Well, they’ve already bused mobs to bankers’ houses, though that was kind of a bust overall.

CHARLIE MARTIN: “I’m not gonna let Glenn get all the good Heinlein quotations.”

OBAMA’S ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY: Getting Ready For A Wave Of Power-Plant Shutdowns.

DELIBERATELY MISJUDGING Rick Perry. “Since his entry into the presidential race, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has faced continued derision for his ‘secession comment.’ After his recent announcement, we were curious about the national media’s characterization of the comment and were surprised to learn it is far less salacious than proclaimed.” Now there’s a shock.

AT AMAZON, IT’S the electronics outlet sale.

SO IN MY EARLIER POST ON THE BALANCE-BALL CHAIR, I WAS SKEPTICAL: But one of my longtime readers emails: “I started using a balance ball as an office chair two years ago, and it literally changed by life. I no longer stoop like an old man when I leave my desk, but stand tall and strong. I have more energy in the evening, and my lower back ‘lock-ups’ are a thing of the past.”

UPDATE: Another reader emails: “I’ve sat on an exercise ball for five years now – at work and home. Used to have back problems – enough to lay me up in bed a couple of times a year, several days at a time. It hasn’t happened a single time since I started sitting on the ball.”

Okay, so I cracked and ordered one.

JERRY POURNELLE looks back at the end of the Evil Empire.

VIDEO: Rick Perry Returns To Texas.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? Scars Left by ‘Great Recession’ Will Be Hard to Erase.

HAPPY HOUR with Bill Whittle.

WELL, I DON’T THINK THAT PICTURE WILL SELL MY ROLE: 6 Bloggers Who Should Be Republican Debate Moderators. I’m also available to moderate the Democratic debate, which at present looks like it should be between Candidate Obama and President Obama.

ISN’T THAT KIND OF OBVIOUS? Why “Friends With Benefits” Relationships Are On The Rise.

HOW TO CHOOSE a healthier beer.

MARK WHITTINGTON: Alien First Contact Paper Tainted By Media Misreporting. “The aliens commit genocide because we burn too much carbon comes right out of the odious remake of ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still.’ It is, however, unfortunate that this scenario, which is only one among many, is being played up. It plays into the meme, which has a certain grain of truth, that global warming hysterics are crazy. Now they are threatening us with alien invasion if we don’t change out evil, carbon burning ways.”

Meanwhile, Megan McArdle comments on the narrow-mindedness of those ETs. “It’s really remarkable, in fact, how often the aliens in science fiction just happen to be preoccupied with the exact same political issues that obsessed intellectuals of the era when the fiction was written. And yet it’s still somehow breathtaking. They don’t even notice that they’re not noticing all their embedded assumptions. For example, the scientists do not even consider the possibility that the recent decline in church attendance among the citizens of the world’s most powerful nations could be a signal to advanced, god-fearing aliens that we are a decadent and irreligious species who should be wiped out. . . . Of all the possibilities, the one that seems least likely to me is that advanced aliens capable of traveling between the stars will turn out to view global warming in very much the way that a handful of Western scientists do.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Why Hasn’t The Economic Recovery That Obama Promised Happened?

THE FOOTNOTE THAT JUDGES IGNORE: “The footnote in question — in a 2006 Supreme Court decision limiting the free speech rights of public employees — explicitly stated that the decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos did not apply to faculty members in public higher education.”

ELIE MYSTAL: The Student Loan Bubble: Only Stupid People Will Be Surprised When It Bursts.

ROBERT HEINLEIN: “Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”

EIGHT WEIRD WAYS people are using facial-recognition technology.

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in science fiction.

LONGEVITY UPDATE: The Million Year Life Span. Just remember: You can’t live a million years if you don’t make it through the next twenty or thirty.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: More than ever before, cash-crunched state schools are looking for out-of-state applicants to balance their budgets.

DAN MITCHELL: When an American Company Redomiciles to the Cayman Islands, What Lesson Should We Learn? “The companies that choose to expatriate usually fit a certain profile (this applies to individuals as well). They earn a substantial share of their income in other countries and they are put at a competitive disadvantage because of America’s ‘worldwide’ tax system.”

NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY: Will They Be Better At Sex Ed Than At Math Ed? “Last week, New York City announced that it would be bringing sex education back into public schools. I don’t have high hopes. That announcement came the day after the city released its standardized test scores. And here they are: 43.9 percent of New York City students met or exceeded the English proficiency standard. In math, 57.3 percent of city students were proficient.”

REX MURPHY: Global Warming Runs Out Of Gas. “In tight economic times people are naturally unwilling to engage in the comicbook fantasies of the wilder environmentalists. Perhaps Climategate gave a too-souring glimpse into the mixture of science and advocacy that has, to some extent, corrupted both. Perhaps, finally, the unctuousness, sanctimony and sputtering righteousness of the highprofile environmentalists signal to most observers that they aren’t really as certain of all this ‘science’ as they pretend to be. “

IN THE MAIL: From Brian Sack, The B.S. of A.: A Primer in Politics for the Incredibly Disenchanted.

CONSEQUENCES: Alumni Resignations at Widener Law School In Wake of Connell Case. I wonder how long Dean Linda Ammons — who precipitated this debacle — will remain.

FEEDING THE MASSES ON UNICORN RIBS: Walter Russell Mead on the “Green Jobs” Fiasco. “What worries me isn’t that the President’s team advised him to make a few speeches on this subject; if a candidate can’t throw chum to the base now and then what’s the point of having elections? What worries me is that they didn’t understand that making something this bogus a central plank of his actual governing plan on an issue as vital as jobs would have serious costs down the road.”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN WE’D SEE ENDLESS WAR. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! US troops may stay in Afghanistan until 2024.

DRUG SHORTAGE UPDATE: Scrambling For Cancer Drugs.

CIVIL RIGHTS PROGRESS: Mast General Store removes no-gun signs, rethinks policy.

WHAT’S THE HARDEST PART of looking for a job?

PEGGY NOONAN: The President’s Island Retreat: Is his visit to Martha’s Vineyard a sign that he’s giving up?

How could he not be depressed? He has made big mistakes since the beginning of his presidency and has been pounded since the beginning of his presidency. He’s got to be full of doubts at this point about what to do. His baseline political assumptions have proved incorrect, his calculations have turned out to be erroneous, his big decisions have turned to dust. He thought they’d love him for health care, that it was a down payment on greatness. But the left sees it as a sellout, the center as a vaguely threatening mess, the right as a rallying cry. He thought the stimulus would turn the economy around. It didn’t. He thought there would be a natural bounce-back a year ago, with “Recovery Summer.” There wasn’t. He thought a toe-to-toe, eyeball-to-eyeball struggle over the debt ceiling would enhance his reputation. The public would see through to the dark heart of Republican hackery and come to recognize the higher wisdom of his approach. That didn’t happen either.

Nothing worked! And nothing’s going to work. He’s the smartest guy in the room, but he’s got the reverse Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to—well, unsatisfying outcomes.

Indeed. Of course, it’s worth pointing out that Noonan was among those who expected great things from Obama.

UPDATE: Jim Treacher emails: “It’s also worth pointing out that Obama isn’t behaving any differently now than he did when Noonan thought he was wonderful. . . . The stuff they’re criticizing him for now is the same stuff we told them when they tried to sell us on him. And they’re acting like it never happened.”

CHANGE: Democrats Panicking Over Losing Weiner Seat.

AT AMAZON, markdowns in the Automotive Outlet.

MARCIA MORRISSEY: Triumph And Trust At Ground Zero.

WHEAT AND TRADE: A Sad Day For U.S. Wheat Growers:

At last, sadly, the day has come and gone when the United States government has ignored the rational pleas of its citizens and businesses and handed an unnecessary advantage to countries that compete with us in world trade.

On Monday, the Colombia-Canada Free Trade Agreement (FTA) entered into force. It is an agreement first signed on Nov. 21, 2008, nearly two years to the day after a U.S.-Colombia FTA was signed. Now most Canadian industries enjoy duty-free access to the growing Colombian market. In contrast, because our government has allowed our FTA to languish, Colombian importers must still pay tariffs on most U.S. goods. For wheat, that tariff overcomes the natural advantage U.S. exporters otherwise have in providing quality wheat on a timely basis to our valued Colombian customers.

Funny, I don’t remember any press coverage about this during Obama’s midwest tour.

UPDATE: Farmer-reader Bart Hall emails:

Even if the US eventually signs the agreement, wheat growers will not be able to capture that market from the Canadians, who are by far the best wheat growers in the world. The ordinary farmer in Saskatchewan or Manitoba cleans his grain to seed grade before it ever leaves the farm. Downstream from there it might be cleaned up even more, right down to zero weeds and zero foreign matter.

American export standards allow up to 3% foreign matter and 1% weed seeds. There’s no reason for an American farmer to clean his grain because he knows that once it gets to the river terminal the consolidator has tanks of sand and bins of weed seed available to ADD to the grain in order to get right up to the export limits. As a general rule, once foreign buyers have experienced Canadian quality, they don’t care about American price.

The utterly feckless Obama administration just handed our chief grain export competitor a market of almost 50 million, second largest in South America. Most Canadian wheat is exported from Vancouver, whence it is an easy run to Buenaventura, one of the best Colombian grain ports. This is a totally unforced error from the current administration, one of depressingly many.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes:

When you wrote, “Funny, I don’t remember any press coverage about this during Obama’s midwest tour,” a good part of the blame should be assigned to Republicans for not highlighting this. It’s a target rich environment out there and they should be relentless.

The GOP doesn’t work the press well. Part of that is learned helplessness, but part of it is ineptitude.

ANOTHER REASON FOR MEN TO avoid college.

IF YOU LOOK AT THE MASTHEAD ON THE LATEST POPULAR MECHANICS, you’ll see that I’ve been promoted from “Contributing Editor” to “Resident Contrarian,” part of an overall re-titling of outside writers. Jay Leno is now “Garage Proprietor,” but I think the coolest title is “Explosives and Pyrotechnics Editor.”

AT AMAZON, a sale on balance-ball chairs. These are supposed to be good for your back, but I’ve always been skeptical.

UPDATE: Reader Margaret Morrell writes: “I’ve used a balance ball as a desk-chair for a while. It takes some getting used to but it’s done wonders for my posture.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Get Out While You Can! “Tenure won’t save us from a higher education collapse. Start making alternative career contingency plans now because this collapse could be sudden and catastrophic.” Huh. I guess I could always try to make it as a fulltime blogger . . . .

More: “Many governors face enormous fiscal shortfalls, forcing them to choose which public employees to anger. Tenured professors, I suspect, have a lot less political clout in most states than do policeman, nurses, prison guards and public school teachers. If online education keeps improving, then I predict that some governor is going to propose firing most of the tenured faculty at his public colleges and replacing the high-priced teachers with online courses. Since Republicans consider academia to be a creature of the far left, many Republican governors would undoubtedly take joy in decimating the traditional higher education market.” I wonder where they got that idea?

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: Obama deportation policy could be ‘nightmare’ for law enforcement. “The Obama administration says its new deportation policy will focus only on the worst criminals, not college kids and maids. But that could make the jobs of law enforcement – from local cops to federal agents – much more complicated.”

UPDATE: A reader emails: “Note that they have just created another way to interpret the law as they see fit….” They seem to like to do that.

UNSUSTAINABLE: 1 in 5 Americans Receive Benefits From Social Security. And disability claims are on the rise. “Some 31% of benefits go to those under 62. . . . In my opinion, long-run concerns about the financial solvency of both OASI and DI are warranted, but between the two, DI seems to raise the most immediate alarm.”

PLAN B IS HARDER THAN IT SEEMS: Lawyers who leave law practice find alternative careers grueling.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER ON Obama’s Vacation Optics.

Choosing an exclusive enclave like the Vineyard after spending three days on the road railing against the rich and the wealthy and the millionaires and the billionaires and the corporate jet owners who vacation exactly in the same place — and then spending ten days in their company — speaks of a kind of dissonance or hypocrisy.

You know, the Vineyard doesn’t have any bridges to it. You either get there on a ferry in your Maserati, or on a jet or a helicopter. It’s not exactly where ordinary folks will take a vacation.

Ordinary vacations are for the little people.

KENNETH ANDERSON ON regulatory scrutiny of the ratings agencies. My prediction is that not much will come of this, because when they investigate they’ll find that many politicians — including some major Democratic operatives with connections to the Administration — were encouraging the ratings agencies to turn a blind eye to the problems during the housing bubble. Then the story will fade away.

SPEECH: Protests, Flash Mobs Spark Controversy Over Communications Crackdowns.

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF UNCONSTITUTIONAL ORDERS: “Respondent Is Prohibited from Posting Any Information/Comments … on Any Internet Site Regarding the Petitioner [the Mayor’s Sister] and … Her Immediate or Extended Family.”

This order is a blatant First Amendment violation, it seems to me. Even if the injunction restricted only speech that allegedly fell into a First Amendment exception (such as libel or threats or obscenity), such an injunction would almost never be constitutional unless it was issued following a final decision on the merits that the speech indeed falls into a First Amendment exception — and there was no final decision on the merits here: This is a preliminary injunction issued at an ex parte hearing at which defendant wasn’t even present.

Judges issuing this sort of order shouldn’t just be reversed, they should be disciplined.

THE RISK-ADJUSTED RETURNS AREN’T GOOD ENOUGH, APPARENTLY: Real Private Investment Flat vs. 1998. “This points to the real growth conundrum: Outside of a completely unexpected housing rebound, private investment can’t possibly grow fast enough to spur a healthy jobs recovery on its own. But the two horses that the U.S. economy has been riding for the last several years are exhausted and unlikely to be refreshed as Washington enters an age of budget austerity.”

STEVE CARTER: Baseball, Tim Pawlenty, And Celebrity Politics.

FREELANCING: How To Calculate Your Worth.

DAVE KOPEL: Could President Perry Carry A Gun? “Chris Moody attempts to analyze the issue for The Ticket. The analysis could have been improved by reading the laws of the District of Columbia.” Of course the President could authorize himself to carry a gun. Such powers are, in fact, widely dispersed among the federal government — I remember noticing years ago that the NASA Administrator could authorize people to carry a gun, and briefly considered trying to pull strings to get a NASA carry permit . . . .

Plus, from the comments: “If Harrison Ford’s POTUS character in Air Force One had been packing, I bet the movie would have unfolded differently.” I seem to remember reading that Churchill carried a .38 revolver during World War II, in light of not-entirely-unreasonable fears of a German assassination/kidnap attempt.

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Darrell Issa Sticks It To The Times.

HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” WORKING OUT? Talking to the Taliban Has Backfired.

SATURDAY IS LEMONADE FREEDOM DAY!