SPACE UPDATE: XCOR Aerospace Closes $5 Million Round of Investment Capital.

BLUE-ON-BLUE: Landrieu blasts Salazar, White House over drilling moratorium. “I know, I know — the White House claims they don’t have any drilling moratorium in place. They claim that they want to increase domestic oil production. As Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) explains to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, their actions don’t match their rhetoric.”

FOILED AGAIN: Iranian Attempt to Assassinate Israeli Defense Minister Foiled in Singapore.

BOOKS, COOKED: The Other GM Bailout: The $18 billion tax gift Obama didn’t mention.

SHOCKER: States With Lower Taxes Creating More Jobs.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Beyond Blue 6: The Great Divorce.

Over the years I’ve gradually come to understand that the old model wasn’t just broken by evil corporate greedsters hellbent on pillaging the middle and working classes – not that such people don’t exist and don’t need to be watched. It was being broken from below as much as from above, and the left did as much to dismantle it as the right. The Ralph Nader consumer movement, for example, set about attacking the comfortable corporate oligarchies who sold shoddy goods at high prices to the public (can you hear me, Detroit?). Nader and his followers wanted consumers to have more choices, and they favored competition over monopoly. But it was exactly their ability to sell shoddy products at high prices that made so many American companies so profitable in the golden age of the blue model – and it was those profits that underwrote the wages and benefits that gave blue collar workers lifetime security and middle class incomes. Nader’s attack on corporate oligarchy was blue-on-blue violence.

Consumers wanted better goods and lower prices than the blue model could give them. Savers wanted higher interest rates than the highly regulated blue era banks could give them. Companies and consumers wanted more innovative telecom service at lower prices (and with less arrogance) than Ma Bell was ready to offer. The whole country was fed up with the inconvenient schedules and high prices that came with the oligopolistic air travel market. Individual investors were sick and tired of high trading fees and restricted information in the stock market. And given the choice between a shoddy and expensive American car, an expensive but well made European one, or a cheap and reliable Japanese car, fewer and fewer Americans picked something made in Detroit.

Americans wanted more than the blue model could give them, and increasingly they sensed that they could get it. That, more than corporate plots and Gordon Gekko style misdeeds on Wall Street, is why the blue model is going the way of the mastodon.

It was unsustainable. Read the whole thing.

A NEW WARNING ON STATINS: “It is the first time that the Food and Drug Administration has officially linked statin use with cognitive problems like forgetfulness and confusion, although some patients have reported such problems for years. Among the drugs affected are huge sellers like Lipitor, Zocor, Crestor and Vytorin.”

Try CoEnzyme Q10. In fact, you should probably try it even if you aren’t taking statins.

AT AMAZON, Movie & TV bestsellers in Blu-Ray.

Also, today only: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 for $89.99.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: To The Great Ideological Battleground. If you like his work, consider hitting his tipjar. I have.

DONALD TRUMP: OPEC Leaders Are Laughing At Us. “‘President Obama has not seen fit for [energy to be] a major agenda. Obamacare was a major agenda,’ said Trump, referring to the president’s health-care plan. ‘If he spent one-third of the effort on energy we wouldn’t even be bringing oil in.'”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Obama Admin Further Confuses Their Own Higher Ed Policy.

ANOTHER PR Crisis For Scientology.

ELIZABETH PRICE FOLEY’S TEA PARTY BOOK gets a not-very-friendly reception over at Inside Higher Ed. Yeah, shocking, I know.

TOM MAGUIRE: More on diets and insulin resistance.

THE HILL: Worried Dems Pressing Obama On Gas Prices.

RICK SANTORUM: Straining the Libertarian-Conservative Alliance?

MICKEY KAUS: David Brooks’ Sad Elite:

Those who buy the consensus elite position typically characterize dissenters as “extreme.” In the 60s, the bipartisan consensus elite position on welfare was basically ‘to hell with requiring work. Let’s just give everyone a guaranteed income.’ The extreme position was to oppose this as a “megadole,” as a nutty winger named Reagan put it. When the consensus position proved both wildly unpopular and unworkable, the Reagan position eventually became the new consensus, adopted by not only Republicans but Bill Clinton.

These days, on the budget, the consensus elite position is that you have to both cut government and raise taxes. The “extreme” position is to try cutting government first. Crazy, I know. On immigration, the consensus elite position is that we need to couple border enforcement with a simultaneous amnesty. The “extreme” position is to do the enforcement part first, while avoiding new magnets that might draw further illegal entries. Is that what Brooks means by “beyond the fringe”?

You get the point. Brooks doesn’t like the “heresy trial” that drove Rick Perry from the race merely for invoking the consensus position. But the only way for non-elites to convince elites that they are full of it is to beat them in elections when they invoke the consensus, no?

Elections are so plebeian. And worse, a plebe’s vote counts for just as much as a patrician’s.

RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATON in the Army.

LAWS, LIKE TAXES, ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE (CONT’D): County Official Caught Speeding Over 100 mph Gets Off With Warning. “Police indicated that she was driving a county issued Ford Edge going 105. Toles said in a statement on Tuesday that she was late for an appointment.”

SPECIAL TREATMENT? Treasury Bent NOL Rules to Provide $26 Billion to AIG. “The tax benefit is notable for more than simply its size. It is the result of a rule that the Treasury unilaterally bent for AIG and several other hobbled companies in 2008 that has largely been overlooked. This rule-twisting could deprive the government of tens of billions of dollars, assuming the firm remains profitable. The tax dodge, and let’s be honest, that’s what it is, also will most likely help goose the bonuses of AIG’s employees, some who helped create many of the problems that led to its role in the financial crisis.”

They told me if I voted for John McCain, stuff like this would happen. And they were right!

ANOTHER MILITARY BOOK RECOMMENDATION: John Lucas writes to recommend Platoon Leader by James McDonough. “Jim was my roommate at West Point and is the toughest soldier I ever met. Very good read about a young leader’s experience in Vietnam.”

UPDATE: Reader Dave Parmly writes:

Give me my choice of any combat weapon in the world and I will choose the M-14 every time. They need to use a different kind of Ranger in that park…one with an uppercase R.

For great combat reads I recommend Winston Churchill. 2 free downloadable books are “The River War” (about combat against a Jihadist army in Egypt) and also “The story of the Malakand Field Force” (combat in Afghanistan against a, you guessed it, Jihadi army there. Both of them have many observations that are salient for today. It’s also great writing from a brilliant guy.

I’ve got both of those on my Kindle, but haven’t gotten to ’em yet.

STUDY: EVEN LOW DOSES OF SLEEPING PILLS TRIPLE DEATH RISK. I wonder, though, if the real culprit is poor sleep.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “Roller Derby Has Made me Too Masculine for Men.” One of my UT Law colleagues did roller derby. She was tough, but not masculine.

Meanwhile, my advice is to compete against men. I had a research assistant who did SCA broadsword competition and was really formidable. She came up against a guy who gave her such a buffet that it turned her helmet around backward and knocked her cold. They were married a year later.

CLAIM: $400K from Rezko to Sen. Barack Obama. Is That Legal Patrick Fitzgerald?

CONN CARROLL: Santorum’s Blue Surge Fizzles.