YOU DON’T SAY: Rangel’s Neighbors See a Rent Double Standard. “Mr. Rangel said last week that he never considered that he was getting a special deal from the Olnick Organization, even as he acknowledged that he had for years been allowed to lease four rent-stabilized units at Lenox Terrace at about half the market rate. That kind of generosity from Olnick, however, is unheard of for those lacking political power, other tenants say.”

DEEP INSIDE THE MEDIA-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, on this week’s PJM Political. Plus, James Lileks on Mad Men. Hosted by Stephen Green!

LA SHAWN BARBER on Republicans and race.

HEH.

POLYGAMY CASE BREAKS DOWN: “The Texas raid on the fundamentalist Mormon church was based on a bogus cry for help. Now an arrest warrant is issued for the woman who may have made the call.”

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: Asking Harry Reid to lead by example on energy.

HILL DEMOCRATS MIFFED AT OBAMA:

After a brief bout of Obamamania, some Capitol Hill Democrats have begun to complain privately that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is insular, uncooperative and inattentive to their hopes for a broad Democratic victory in November.

“They think they know what’s right and everyone else is wrong on everything,” groused one senior Senate Democratic aide. “They are kind of insufferable at this point.”

It’s that oozing sense of entitlement, again.

I PREDICT LIMITED SUCCESS: How black Baltimore drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories to confound the Feds. At least, white supremacists never got very far with those.

PRESIDENTIAL SUCCESSION: This Bruce Ackerman piece seems pretty thinly sourced. The subject needs more attention, but this has the ring of conspiracy theory about it: Some people say there might be a secret executive order that might be contrary to statute. Also, some people say that Chinese policemen are massing on the Mexican border for an invasion. You can look it up!

Could Bruce be right? Possibly, if all the public statements on the subject are lies. Could they be? Again, possibly, but some, you know, hard evidence would be useful. It seems unlikely to me — competing claims of succession at a time when both the Vice President and President are dead would be devastating, and I doubt anyone would set things up that way. Then again, this is all government work we’re talking about . . . .

UPDATE: James Joyner: “Bruce Ackerman has read a novel and heard unsubstantiated rumors and from these concocted a Constitutional crisis which he’s convinced the folks at Slate to publish.”

MORE: Bob Krumm emails:

Instead of imagining constitutional crises in the executive branch, Flight 93’s reported target of the Capitol Building should remind us that there’s a potential real constitutional crisis. The House of Representatives, which cannot operate without a quorum, and unlike the Senate has no provision for quick replacement appointments, could cripple the operations of our government in the event of the loss of half of its membership. Another 9-11, or worse, a 9-11 followed by a military attack on US interests, would leave America in a quandary if the House was unable to operate. Since it is in the House that spending bills have to originate, the US would be Constitutionally unable to authorize additional funds required to respond to the attack. Under current rules we would literally have to wait until after more than 200 individual elections were completed.

Indeed.

AN IPHONE 3G REVIEW, with video.

THEY TOLD ME THAT IF GEORGE W. BUSH WERE RE-ELECTED, people who dared to criticize the Dear Leader on the Internet would be silenced. And they were right!

CAR LUST? SOUNDS ABSOLUTELY IRRESISTIBLE: “But the build quality was not even third-world. Brakes and rotors replaced every 5-10k miles, half-shafts every 15-20. Positive ground electrical system. Pirelli Cinturato tires, with tubes, that disintegrated at speed or in cold weather. The aluminum head corroded through about two years in; the company declined to compensate me for it.”

HOW FLIRTATION affects steady relationships.

ARE MUSLIM DEFENDANTS GETTING SPECIAL TREATMENT IN COURT? “CAIR’s intervention in the Abbasi case is a manifestation of a larger campaign against law enforcement to use political alliances and legal threats to intimidate police in cases involving Muslim defendants and to establish separate and preferable treatment for Muslims in the American legal system.” Hmm. We’ve certainly seen this happen in Britain.

MORE FUN WITH CRAIGSLIST PERSONALS, from Gerard van der Leun.

UM, NOT FOR ME: Would Huckabee bridge the enthusiasm gap?

CZECH THIS OUT: Elderly, out of touch aspirant for national office calls Czech Republic “Czechoslovakia”.

Sam Nunn.

AN ECONOMIC WARNING WORTH PAYING ATTENTION TO: “The Federal Reserve has spent 25 years winning back the inflation fighting credibility that it lost during the 1960s and 1970s. Inflation has been fought so successfully that inflationary expectations are no longer even a glimmer in peoples’ financial calculations. But a few more months of this, and that will start to change. The Federal Reserve will have to clamp down, hard, to prevent high inflationary expectations from being written into contracts and labor agreements. Better a moderate recession now than a really severe one when the Fed has to wring the inflation out of the economy.”

MICHAEL TOTTEN: Is the war over? In Iraq, maybe.

A BIG ROUNDUP OF VIDEOGAME NEWS.

EUGENE VOLOKH ON HELLER and a Constitutional right of self-defense.

MONEY WASTED: For some reason, I’m seeing more and more expensive Italian cars in West Knoxville. Today, coming out from lunch, the Insta-Daughter and I saw a Maserati Quattroporte parked next to my Mazda. I thought it looked very nice, especially the interior, but the Insta-Daughter pronounced it “ugly” and added “I thought it was a Buick until you pointed it out.” Ouch. If I had dropped that much cash on a car, I wouldn’t want it confused with a Buick.

TOM FRIEDMAN: “Maybe Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans and Africans don’t like a world of too much American power — “Mr. Big” got a little too big for them. But how would they like a world of too little American power?”

That’s pretty much the question in John Birmingham’s forthcoming next novel, in which the United States literally disappears. (As I noted the other day, I read it in page proofs; it rocks). And the answer is “not as much as they might have thought.”

CORRECTING BOGUS HISTORICAL CLAIMS about Milton Friedman.

DOES TECHNOLOGY MAKE BAD PEOPLE TOO POWERFUL? Or does it just require that good people be smarter?