ROGER SIMON: The Good News and the Bad News on the Fourth of July.

BE A PATRIOT! GET A JOB!

SO THESE SUUNTO Heart Rate Monitors are on sale. I used to use a Polar until I lost the sensor and it was pretty good. I’ve got a Suunto dive computer and I like it. But the reader reviews on these are kinda lukewarm. Any recommendations from folks who’ve used ’em, or used others?

UPDATE: Reader Mike Dini emails:

I’m a slow runner and I’ve had several heart rate monitors. I’ve had one top-of-the-line model from each of the major vendors — Polar, Garmin, Suunto. To coin a technical phase related to engineering EDA software: ‘use what sucks the least’.

Given my experience with the T6, Suunto is dead last in this market. The device was nearly unusable. The SW sucked and regularly crashed. The heart rate monitoring function would occasionally go wild. This wildness was impossible to edit out of the database (My heart will not go 220 BPM). It would take a weird form of chanting to get the watch to recognize the foot pod and chest strap. The display is ODD and hard to read. The UI is not intuitive — merely starting and stopping the watch takes effort. If you take a vacation for 7 days, you will need to reread the manual. I had trouble giving the thing away. You claim: ‘I like the diving stuff’. The T6 made me extremely suspicious (read: terrified) of the diving products.

Polar (S625X) is pretty good, but it is only recently that they added GPS capability in the newer RS800G3. Note that the reviews of the RS800G3 are poor on Amazon. UI to the watch is fairly good (S625X). It is obvious, for example, how to start/stop the watch and save a lap time. All the functions needed are here, but it can take a rocket scientist to get some desperately needed things to work. The most important is to alarm when the aerobic threshold is exceeded (in my 167 BPM). This task taxed all of my 25 years of computer engineering skill to figure it out. The manual is terrible. Technical support is non-existent and hostile. I always had trouble with the IR link. This appears to be a sick company.

At present I’m using a Garmin 305. It is a little large and bulky, but has GPS capability. GPS is *VERY* slow to lock and I question its accuracy. The UI is wretched. It seems as if the engineers designed this product as a wrist-based GPS unit that happens to have a heart rate monitor. This should be reversed: a HR monitor that has GPS capability. The buttons are in the wrong place — during a training run, I regularly shut off the watch during the most critical time of a run by hitting the ‘off’ button rather than the ‘lap’ button. The display is hard to read, and doesn’t have nearly as much information as it first appears. The alarm is too faint. The SW is OK, but nothing spectacular. The connections on the back corrode. The watch behaves incorrectly at some of the boundary conditions. The battery life is too short (10 hours or so).

At the moment, I’m using the 305 — it sucks the least. But, it wouldn’t kill me to downgrade to the S625X. I will never use a Suunto HRM product again. OK to use my name and verify. Fix spelling and grammar please.

Ugh. None of this sounds especially appealing . . . .

A SECOND TERM FOR JIMMY CARTER? Courtesy of a Republican? “Sen. John Warner, R-Virginia, asked Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman to look into what speed limit would provide optimum gasoline efficiency given current technology. He said he wants to know if the administration might support efforts in Congress to require a lower speed limit.”

The 55-mile-per-hour speed limit is a bit of idiocy I hoped we’d left behind. I’m not suprised to see Mr. Private Jets supporting it, though. Meanwhile, here are some better ideas for energy savings.

TAYLOR MARSH: Why Barack Needs Hillary.

THE CLIMATE-CHANGE Juggernaut.

THE TOP 100 law and lawyer blogs.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE Fourth of July Movie?

FROM JENNIFER RUBIN, a Hollywood Pledge.

BRIAN BEUTLER, SHOT IN A MUGGING IN D.C., is going to be fine. They took out his spleen. Don’t worry, Brian — I haven’t had a spleen since an unfortunate incident in my youth, and it’s caused me no problems whatsoever.

WHO NEEDS WATERBOARDING, when there’s Nutraloaf? It’s gotta be better than some dorm food I’ve eaten.

NEXT STOP, serfdom!

SOME JULY FOURTH THOUGHTS from James Lileks.

MEGAN MCARDLE:

There’s also this dodgy belief, fervently embraced by many liberals advocating regulations–“Look, even a big business head who would be regulated believes it’s a good idea! It must be!” Au contraire, mon frere. The heads of big businesses often love big new regulatory bodies, because they have the resources to best negotiate a complex regime. The end result of this kind of radical regulation is usually that the big companies capture the regulator and use it to shut out competition.

Really big companies are more like bureaucracies than capitalist enterprises. See, e.g., Dilbert.

THE LONDON TIMES: Barack Obama’s policy switches are giving the Left whiplash. “Change, it turns out, wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. Having campaigned for the past year as the agent of transformation, the man who would lead an historic shift in America’s political direction, Barack Obama is discovering that there is quite a lot he likes about the way things are. . . . If next week he named Dick Cheney as his running-mate and revealed that he spends his spare time drilling for oil in wildlife habitats, the only surprise would be that it took him so long.”

This is not the Barack Obama that I knew. Well, that might nail down the InstaPundit endorsement . . . .

A LOOK AT race, politics, and the American labor movement.

IN THE MAIL: Christopher Jones’ The Intelligent Portfolio: Practical Wisdom on Personal Investing from Financial Engines.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF SPACE is up!

SO I WAS AT THE GYM THE OTHER DAY, WEARING MY BLACKFIVE Don’t Be A DouChe’ T-Shirt and one of the trainers came up and said it was the coolest t-shirt she’d ever seen. I’ve gotten a lot of favorable remarks on it, maybe even more than the Enjoy Capitalism! shirt from Bureaucrash. But sometimes real life is even better than parody: Colombian army duped FARC by wearing … Che t-shirts.

INTERESTED IN A SPACE CAREER? Blue Origin is hiring.

SOME INDEPENDENCE DAY THOUGHTS from Don Surber.

A MAN OF SEASONAL PRINCIPLES? I believe you mean “pragmatic and flexible,” Charles. We need that in a leader. Otherwise, he might lead us somewhere we don’t already want to go!

IN BAGHDAD, CELEBRATING INDEPENDENCE DAY WITH the largest re-enlistment ceremony in history:

While most Americans probably slept, 1,215 Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines raised their right hands and committed to a combined 5,500 years of additional service during the largest reenlistment ceremony in the history of the American military. Beneath a large American flag which dwarfed even the enormous chandelier that Saddam Hussein had built for the Al Faw Palace, members of all services, representing all 50 states took the oath administered by Gen. David Petraeus, Commander of Multi-National Forces Iraq.

Read the whole thing.