76 TRUMBOS.

I’d like to see them make Total Eclipse. That’s not likely, though.

JAMES JOYNER: “That the GOP was ever the country club party is an absurd myth. One simply doesn’t win elective office appealing only to the top half of one percent. But a populism that allows the many to vote themselves the wealth of the few was one of the principal fears of founders like John Adams. Certainly, we don’t need both our major parties championing that notion.”

SO, TECHNICALLY, IT’S NOT REALLY A COMPLETE GYP: “Sexually deceptive orchids, as biologists have long known, look and can even smell so much like a female insect that males will try to mate with the flower in a sometimes vigorous process that can result in pollination. But scientists now report that the tongue orchids of Australia are such thoroughly convincing mimics of female wasps that males not only try to mate with them, but they actually do mate with them — to the point of ejaculation.”

REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.

D.C.’S HELLER COMPLIANCE seems to focus on imposing bureaucratic barriers in place of legal ones. My favorites: “If you want to keep a handgun in your home, the MPD will have to perform ballistic testing on it before it can be legally registered. . . . Firearms in the home must be stored unloaded and disassembled, and secured with either a trigger lock, gun safe, or similar device. The new law will allow an exception for a firearm while it is being used against an intruder in the home.” So you can assemble it and load it after the burglar breaks in, without breaking the law. How helpful! This seems flatly inconsistent with the Court’s opinion in Heller.

This is bad faith, pure and simple, on the part of the D.C. government. It’s just more reason why Congress needs to take a hand in protecting D.C. residents’ rights. I hope the proposed legislation on that front moves ahead.

UPDATE: Proposed D.C. Gun Law Violates D.C. [Disability] Law.

Plus this: “Hey, here’s an idea: let’s require the cops to keep their guns disassembled and locked away at all times too, with an exemption allowed only while it’s being fired wildly at some perp during the commission of a crime. After all, if it’s really safety we’re concerned about here, what’s good for the citizenry at large ought to be good for them, too.”

FANNIE MAE, ENRON, and the public trust. “We all have a stake in bailing them out, because . . . well, hell if I know.”

A PROBLEM NOBODY WILL ADDRESS: The exploding number of federal crimes. Weirdly, this is true even though there’s a lot of left-right agreement that the situation is ridiculous.

EPA LOOKING TO regulate lawnmowers and speed limits.

AN OBAMA STRADDLE ON IRAQ? Straddle now, pivot later! I tried to check the Google Cache of his site, but, interestingly, his site doesn’t cache in Google. How convenient. Anyway, here’s an earlier page, in which he stakes everything on the Iraq Study Group plan, which would have been a disaster, instead of the surge, which has succeeded.

It’s all about judgment!

UPDATE: More:

Obama spokesmen now say everyone knew that President Bush’s troop surge would create more security. This is blatantly false. Obama said in early 2007 that nothing in the surge plan would “make a significant dent in the sectarian violence,” and the new strategy would “not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly.” He referred to the surge derisively as “baby-sit(ting) a civil war.”

Now that the civil war has all but ended, he wants to claim retroactive clairvoyance. In a New York Times op-ed laying out his position, Obama credits the heroism of our troops and new tactics with bringing down the violence. Our troops have always been heroic; what made the difference was the surge strategy that Obama lacked the military judgment — or political courage — to support.

It was the audacity of hopelessness, and it was a miserable failure. He’s counting on the press to make sure nobody notices.

BECAUSE ANY SUCCESSFUL AMERICAN SYSTEM MUST BE RUINED BY ACTIVISTS:

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science. . . .

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven’t had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview “a complete waste of time.”) But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.

I want to see a federal investigation on the shortage of men in K-12 education, and in college education programs. . . .

FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC: Too big not to fail? “Because they are government sponsored, the government let them get away with practices that would never fly in the private market. Contrary to the belief of many on the left, this is par for the course; just take a look at what’s happening to state and local government pensions now that the federal government has forced them to account for their liabilities like normal pension funds do.”

UPDATE: So if this is how big government programs inevitably end up, what about health care? Will it have its own “friends of Angelo?”

ROBERT LEVY: District of Columbia v. Heller: What’s Next?

I MENTIONED JOHN SCALZI’S ZOE’S TALE EARLIER — now here’s a strong review of the book in the L.A. Times.

BOB OWENS LOOKS AT CALLS FOR A WAR CRIMES INVESTIGATION — involving an Obama supporter.

HEH: Defunct Blog Increasingly Influential.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey comments: “Dude, my archives are just that powerful.”

MICKEY KAUS: “Does Krugman not know that Fannie Mae was a huge buyer of subprime mortgages, including mortgages from Angelo Mozilo’s Countrywide? David Smith’s eerily prescient AHI blog noted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reportedly bought $35 billion in subprimes in the first quarter of 2007 alone. . . . Could Mozilo have done his subprime thing without Johnson and Fannie Mae as a backup to purchase his junky mortgages?”

Plus, Jim Lindgren on Jamie Gorelick and Fannie Mae.

MORE THOUGHTS on that Mountain City, Tennessee photo-bullying case, from Brendan Loy.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg wonders why we’re expected to know the law, but the people who enforce it aren’t.

FIVE FAVORITE FICTIONAL FOODS: I always wanted a Crabby Patty. I think the conch burger from the Crow’s Nest in Grand Cayman was a good approximation, but with jerk mayo to make it even better. Alas, the Crow’s Nest was washed away by Ivan so thoroughly that it’s hard to even figure out where, exactly, it used to be.

ANN ALTHOUSE: The Wit and Humor of Barack Obama. “So we could write a book called ‘The Wit and Humor of Barack Obama.’ But how thick would it be? You know, there was a book called ‘The Wit and Humor of Richard Nixon.'”

JOHN KASS IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE: “The true believers who evangelized that Obama would transcend politics as we knew it are suffering a Barackian hangover.”

DITCHING SPEED CAMERAS in Britain: “In a direct attack on Government policy, Mr Greenhalgh said local authorities like Swindon did not see a penny of the revenue generated by speed cameras. Instead the money raised in fines went straight back to central government, he argued.” So I’m not sure this is really about principle. But still.

BRIAN WANG on interesting developments regarding the Casimir Force.

A “MEDIA BLACKOUT” on Chicago’s pro-Second Amendment rally. “Meanwhile, if 12 anti-gunners listen to one crazy ass preacher it’s front page!”

STILL BENT ON losing a war?

HEH: “Can we call them ‘Schumervilles’?”