PROGRESS in Carla Howell’s effort to repeal Massachusetts’ income tax.

ROGER SIMON: “Buying a Prius in Los Angeles these days is more difficult than scoring a bag of the purest Nepalese hash.” Naturally, however, Roger was up to the task.

HERE’S THE TRAILER for Stargate Continuum.

GO FIGURE: The New York Times has made a startling discovery: things are much improved in Iraq.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire wonders why the NYT ran this story on a Saturday.

JOHN KASS:

That Washington, D.C., gun ban that the Supreme Court should toss out any day now because it is unconstitutional is often compared to the handgun ban in Chicago.

But what’s not often reported by the decidedly pro-gun-control media is that since Chicago’s anti-handgun law went into effect in 1982, only two classes of people have had ready access to firearms:

The criminals. And the politicians. . . .

It is all about power in the end.

Read the whole thing.

SHOCKER: People are responding to higher gas prices by driving less.

THE ANKLE: last frontier in replaceable body parts.

BOB OWENS: “Why didn’t the press ask Physicians for Human Rights about how weak most of their evidence of torture by Americans turned out to be?”

MICHELE CATALANO: Fast Times at Gloucester High. “At an age when most teens are making plans for college and careers, 17 teenagers from Gloucester had a very different plan for their lives; they wanted to become mothers. Not after college, not even after high school, but now, while they were still teenagers. Soon, the girls were appearing in the school nurse’s office for pregnancy tests. Instead of scared young girls frightened at the prospect of a positive test, the nurse was faced with teens who were high fiving each other at the news they were expecting.”

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Rachel Lucas.

BEWARE: The Trojan Social Open-Source Drop-Down. Israel doesn’t exist, but “Palestine” does.

BRIAN WANG HAS THOUGHTS on achieving a technological singularity without breakthroughs in nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, and suggests that we’re already well on the way.

PHIL BOWERMASTER ON FEAR OF THE FUTURE: “The memeplexes which have grown out of our fear of the future — pessimism, cynicism, fatalism, misanthropy — seem to be gaining in influence. I wrote recently about longstanding debate between Paul Ehrlich, who is lauded for his consistently wrong predictions of catastrophe, and Julian Simon, who was essentially ignored in the face of his fact-based assessments of human progress and correct predictions of more of the same. Whether we’re talking about Paul Ehrlich or Bill Joy or Al Gore, a doomsayer is a person with a serious point of view, someone who is to be respected. And whether we’re talking about Julian Simon, Robin Hanson, or Ray Kurzweil, a doomslayer is a crackpot who needs to be taken down a peg.”

Plus this: “If our fixation with disaster and intolerance of risk continue to grow at the same pace as our overall improvement of the world, the happiest era in the history of humanity might turn out to be the most miserable. (Arguably, we are experiencing something like that even today.)”

I’ll just add that we’re likely to be told to fear the wrong things — those with an easy media hook or those that benefit clever interest groups — rather than things that are in fact dangers that need to be addressed.

UPDATE: Related thoughts here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Rand Simberg: “Hey, how about if we save the earth by migrating into space?”

“GET OVER IT:” Sparks Fly at Black Caucus Meeting.

WHAT TO DRINK: How to mix a Corpse Reviver.

Of course, we know what that leads to.

THE CASE FOR DROPPING MILES-PER-GALLON in favor of gallons per mile.

THE AD THAT SCARED OBAMA into dropping public funding?

MICHAEL BARONE: The Facts in Iraq Are Changing. Read the whole thing, but especially this bit:

If George W. Bush was wrong about the surge from summer 2003 to January 2007, Barack Obama has been wrong about it from January 2007 to today. John McCain seems to have been right on it all along. When asked why he changed his position on an issue, John Maynard Keynes said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” What say you, Sen. Obama?

Indeed.

SEVEN QUESTIONS, SEVEN ANSWERS, from the Space Business Forum.

JOHN MCCAIN, underdog.

BITES FROM THE APPLE: A roundup of Apple computer and iPhone news.

HEH: “Some people might be inclined to make fun of a grown candidate who’s against an imperial presidency but needs a really Great Seal before he even gets the official nomination.”

JEEZ.

IF YOU DON’T VOTE FOR OBAMA, YOU’RE A RACIST. “OBAMA DROPS PRE-EMPTIVE RACE BOMB.”

But how well is it working? Not everyone’s buying it:

Make no mistake: the man who admits he looks like Urkel is sounding about as post-racial as the Rev. Al Sharpton. Or about as post-racial as someone who spent the last 20 years under the spiritual tutelage of the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Fr. Michael Pfleger. Someone with that background ought to have some humility when it comes to dealing the race card, but he has chosen it as his opening gambit.

Humility isn’t his strong suit.

UPDATE: Juliette Ochieng comments:

This is just pathetic . . . . Most people couldn’t care less about your name and your color, Senator Obama. They fear being led by you because you have no substantive legislative record, you’re a chronic liar and, after explicitly stating that you choose your friends carefully, you have repeatedly and systematically made friends with people who hate this country.

You would “bridge the divide,” Senator, by burning that bridge.

Ouch.

THIS IS BAD FOR THE COUNTRY: Poll: Military approval beats Congress’s 71-12. “Gallup’s annual update on confidence in institutions finds just 12% of Americans expressing confidence in Congress, the lowest of the 16 institutions tested this year, and the worst rating Gallup has measured for any institution in the 35-year history of this question.” (Via JWF, who notes that the Pelosi era hasn’t done much for Congress’s approval ratings.)

THOUGHTS ON TIM RUSSERT’S HEART ATTACK, and sexism against men.