I’LL BE ON PJTV just after 6, talking about Joe Biden’s constitutional goofs and other stories of the day.

THE WASHINGTON POST’S RUTH MARCUS picks up on Biden’s constitutional errors, and his gay marriage position.

HERE’S MORE on the Molecular Genetics of Aging Conference.

MICHAEL SILENCE ON THE BAILOUT BILL: “Pathetic.”

UPDATE: Going on the attack. What just happened?

CALCULATING THE ROLE OF CASIMIR FORCES in Nanotechnology.

OKAY, this is just wrong.

THE CARNIVAL OF SPACE IS UP!

MICHAEL MALONE: When policies collide:

From where I sit, the United States government has embarked on two pieces of social engineering in the last few years. One was to make oil expensive as expensive as possible to drive people to greater use of alternative energy sources – because anything less would be irresponsible and destructive to the environment. The other was to enshrine home ownership (i.e., easy-to-obtain mortgages) as a new American right – because anything less would be unequal and racist.

None of us voted on these decisions – indeed, neither was even spoken about directly, much less debated. But nevertheless, both became national policy . . .and both have sparked national, now international, crises. Then, once they became crises, both were blamed on ‘greedy capitalism’, instead of what they really were: legislative interference into market forces. . . . To my mind, what makes this economic crisis different from ones in even the recent past is that it has exposed the fact that there are, apparently, no real leaders left in Washington – that the intellectual capital in the National Capitol has fallen to a new low – if that’s possible. Most of all, it shows that we can no longer look to D.C. for leadership into the rest of the 21st century.

Read the whole thing.

UNVEILED: The Volkswagen Passat BlueMotion, a 57.4 mpg mid-size wagon. Cool.

EXTREME MORTMAN: Finger-pointing and photo-cropping at The Washington Post.

ENVIRONMENTALIST OPPOSITION to solar power. Might as well just build nukes, then . . . .

THOSE BOSNIAKS ARE OPENING A BIODIESEL FACTORY near Banja Luka.

I THOUGHT LINKING BEHAVIOR TO HORMONES WAS SEXIST: “A rumor’s going around that risk-taking linked to high testosterone levels caused the crash.” The research doesn’t actually support this, but so what?

BIDEN VS. BIDEN ON CLEAN COAL:

Plus, looking for Katie’s restaurant.

MICHAEL SILENCE on Gwen Ifill and her defenders. “This is about public trust and a clear conflict of interest. Ifill stands to financially benefit from how Obama does, and an opinion from the Ivory Tower does not change that fact.”

GOOD: Confirmed: Lexus to build Prius-based hybrid.

IN THE MAIL: Poul Anderson’s The Van Rijn Method, a collection of some of his classic Polesotechnic League stories. Libertarian science fiction at its best, and I’m glad this stuff is being reissued.

LYNNE KIESLING: An alternative approach to the bailout: enable fast recapitalization. Related thoughts from Alex Tabarrok. “The consensus among economists is now clear, the best strategy for dealing with the financial crisis is to recapitalize the banks that need recapitalization. Paul Krugman, John Cochrane, Luigi Zingales, Douglas Diamond, Raghuram Rajan and many others all advocate some form of recapitalization as do Tyler Cowen and myself.”

UPDATE: More on economists and the bailout.

INSTA-POLL, inspired by Harry Reid’s insurance remarks.

PRICING SIGNALS WORK (CONT’D): GM moves nearly 2,000 hybrids in September.

MATTHEW HOY on selective blindness among journalistic watchdogs.

MICHAEL TOTTEN:

In Thursday night’s vice presidential debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin, Biden said the strangest and most ill-informed thing I have ever heard about Lebanon in my life. . . . Nobody – nobody – has ever kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon. Not the United States. Nor France. Not Israel. And not the Lebanese. Nobody.

Joe Biden has literally no idea what he’s talking about.

It’s too bad debate moderator Gwen Ifill didn’t catch him and ask a follow up question: When did the United States and France kick Hezbollah out of Lebanon? . . .

Like many who watched the debate, I was bracing myself for Palin to say something off-putting about foreign policy. She’s the one who needed the crash course, allegedly; Biden is supposedly Mr. Foreign Policy. He’s supposed to be the experienced elder statesman Senator Barack Obama chose to help him govern and fill in some of his knowledge and experience gaps. He’s supposed to know far more about foreign policy than she does.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Nothing to see here, move along.

AN INTEGRITY GAP.

IT’S ALL COMING DOWN to a few key states.

MORE LARA LOGAN SCANDALS?