BEEN DOWN SO LONG: For GOP, Nowhere To Go But Up.

JUST A NOTE TO THE FOLKS WHO SHOP VIA THE AMAZON LINKS ON INSTAPUNDIT: Your support is much appreciated. Thanks!

ARE THE ACADEMIC ELITE YOUR MORAL SUPERIORS? Absolutely. Ask practically any professor. And who would know better?

DENIAL: Rep. Weiner: I did not send Twitter crotch pic. Do you believe him?

Related: Rep. Weiner Still Claims Twitter Account Hacked; Big Questions Remain.

I DON’T THINK HE’S REALLY A “PICKUP ARTIST:” Chester Brown and prostitution.

THERE’S GOOD CHOLESTEROL, BAD CHOLESTEROL, and now “ultra-bad” cholesterol? I think they should have called it SuperBad cholesterol, because that would be funny.

LEE STRANAHAN: #Weinergate:The “Would Your Spouse Buy It?” Test. “Although I don’t think what Anthony Weiner is even accused of doing rises to the level of ‘love child while your wife has cancer’, the #Weinergate story reminds me a lot of the post-Beverly Hills Hotel phase of the John Edwards story.”

ERIC CANTOR: ‘We Can Accomplish Well Over a Trillion Dollars in Cuts.’

ED DRISCOLL: There’s a reason it’s called The Forgotten Man. “What would happen, if, heaven forfend, Obama actually went into business himself? Since his far left administration is basically an extension of George McGovern’s Pyrrhic 1972 campaign, perhaps this anecdote fits as well. It’s from 1994, after McGovern retired from politics and attempted to open, Bob Newhart style, a New England inn.” Read the whole thing.

NOT CLEAR ON THE ROLE OF INCENTIVES: Italian Seismologists Charged With Manslaughter for Not Predicting 2009 Quake. “Italian government officials have accused the country’s top seismologist of manslaughter, after failing to predict a natural disaster that struck Italy in 2009, a massive devastating earthquake that killed 308 people. A shocked spokesman for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) likened the accusations to a witch hunt.”

The Italian justice system is looking like a bigger joke than usual, lately.

JIM TREACHER: I demand an official investigation of the hacker who broke into Rep. Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account. “I don’t agree much with Rep. Weiner politically, but he’s a congressman and this is a serious crime he’s alleging. Not to mention that identity theft can happen to any of us at any time. Therefore, Rep. Weiner must call for an official investigation. He owes it to himself, to all other victims of cybercrime, and to his fellow members of Congress who might also be at risk. . . . And if Rep. Weiner doesn’t want an investigation, somebody should ask him why not.”

UPDATE: More here.

Related: WeinerGate: MSM Ignores Trifecta of Sex, Politics, and a Rising Political Star.

THOSE REVELATIONS ABOUT CONGRESSIONAL INSIDER TRADING lead Jeff Carter to observe: “I now understand why campaigns have become so expensive. The net present value of beating the market by 6% annually, along with the net present value of a guaranteed government pension, cushy health benefits, and the opportunity to leverage your elected position into a lucrative full time lobbying job after ‘serving’ your country makes the spending seem minimal.” Even better, the campaign cash comes out of other people’s pockets. Win-win!

AT AMAZON, it’s the Camera & Photo Outlet Sale.

I PREDICT MORE SUITS LIKE THIS: Unemployed Grad Files $50m Class Action v. Law School for Misrepresenting Placement Data. “Plaintiff would not have attended TJSL and incurred more than $150,000 in school loans if she knew the truth about her job prospects upon graduation.”

LARRY RIBSTEIN: Immigration, Preemption, And Regulatory Coordination.

REVENGE OF THE GEEKS: What made them outsiders in high school makes them stars in the world.

If high school is an environment that systematically punishes traits that lead to success in the real world, then why not abolish high school? As institutions, they don’t do a very good job of teaching math and history. If they also punish traits linked to innovation then what exactly are high schools good for?

UPDATE: Reader Drew Kelley writes: “They provide union-protected jobs for the graduates of Ed-Schools, insulating those grads from the cruelties of the market.”

READ BETWEEN THE LINES: “Less than three years into the job, first lady Michelle Obama is on her third chief of staff and third social secretary.” So where are the tell-all books?

JEFF ROSEN: The Wrongful Conviction As A Way Of Life. A review of Brandon Garrett’s Convicting The Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong. “Since the late 1980s, DNA testing has exonerated more than 250 wrongly convicted people, who spent an average of 13 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. (There is every reason to think that more people have been wrongly convicted since then, but only these 250 have been definitively exonerated by postconviction DNA tests.) Seventeen of the 250 were sentenced to die, and 80 to spend the rest of their lives in prison. . . . Garrett’s statistical analysis is invaluable, but the most dramatic parts of his book are those that provide narrative details of trials that failed to prevent the innocent from being wrongly convicted. It turns out to be surprisingly hard to prove your innocence: most people don’t remember where they were on a particular day months ago, and can present only weak alibis.”

THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF America’s crime decline.

WEINERGATE UPDATE: Hey MSM any old Twit(erer) understands what Rep Weiner’s numbers mean. “There are millions of people who use twitter who have absolutely no interest in politics, who when they see the numbers concerning followers also will understand exactly what it means.” Read the whole thing.

IN THE MAIL: From Robert A. Heinlein, The Green Hills Of Earth.

SCAREWARE FOR MACINTOSHES:

The fact that Mac users have fallen victim to “scareware” scams — the kind that have long plagued Windows users — shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, fake antivirus software schemes like MacDefender don’t have to rely on exploitable vulnerabilities, but instead typically depend on tricking users into visiting malicious sites and duping them into installing the software.

And Mac users, for all their pretensions otherwise, are as fallible as the next person.

There were some rogue ads on this site doing this, but they’re supposed to have been removed now. I’ve seen this via Java in rogue ads elsewhere in the past, too, once on my local TV station’s page. Don’t click on them!

Related: How to avoid or remove Mac Defender malware.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “Glenn, I have been doing mac tech support since the mid 90s. Why is this effective now? Because in the past few years the percentage of Mac users who formerly used Windows in the past 5 years is greater than Mac users who used Macs since before then. IMO, the windows users have brought their own habits and expectations that scareware villains can easily trick. Every victim of this I have helped has been a Windows user from the past 5 years or less.”

You’d think Windows users would be more careful about viruses.

MICHAEL BARONE: Pro-Obama media always shocked by bad economic news. “I’m confident that any comparison of economic coverage in the Bush years and the coverage now would show far fewer variants of the word ‘unexpectedly’ in stories suggesting economic doldrums. It’s obviously going to be hard to achieve the unacknowledged goal of many mainstream journalists — the president’s re-election — if the economic slump continues. So they characterize economic setbacks as unexpected, with the implication that there’s still every reason to believe that, in Herbert Hoover’s phrase, prosperity is just around the corner. . . . We tend to hire presidents who we think can foresee the future effect of their policies. No one does so perfectly. But if the best sympathetic observers can say about the results is that they are ‘unexpected,’ voters may decide someone else can do better.”

“EVERYBODY’S A VIRGIN, but somehow we got pregnant.”

WELL, GOOD: Precision-tinted lenses offer real migraine relief.