HOPE AND CHANGE: As large retailers shut doors, warehouse-like buildings sit unused. Well, change.

TIGERHAWK: Obama’s popularity declines, and the investigations begin. “Call me a cynic, but I am not in the least surprised that a couple of weeks after Barack Obama’s strong approval/disapproval ratings took a turn to the unfavorable and Obamacare is looking less like a lead pipe cinch it is suddenly time to investigate the Bush administration.”

MARKDOWNS ON electric razors.

THE BRIGHT SIDE TO OBAMA’S OPED: “But the most important thing is the rejection of the second stimulus. By Paul Krugman’s lights that means the president doesn’t understand basic logic, but it’s a relief nonetheless.” It shows that Obama understands the polls, anyway.

JEFF JACOBY: Lawmakers, read the bills before you vote.

Hoyer conceded that if lawmakers had to carefully study the bill ahead of time, they would never vote for it. “If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,’’ he said. The majority leader was declaring, in other words, that it is more important for Congress to pass the bill than to understand it.

“Transparency’’ is a popular buzzword in good-government circles, and politicians are forever promising to transact the people’s business in the sunshine. But as Hoyer’s mirth suggests, when it comes to lawmaking, transparency is a joke. Congress frequently votes on huge and complex bills that few if any members of the House or Senate have read through. They couldn’t read them even if they wanted to, since it is not unusual for legislation to be put to a vote just hours after the text is made available to lawmakers. Congress passed the gigantic, $787 billion “stimulus’’ bill in February – the largest spending bill in history – after having had only 13 hours to master its 1,100 pages. A 300-page amendment was added to Waxman-Markey, the mammoth cap-and-trade energy bill, at 3 a.m. on the day the bill was to be voted on by the House. And that wasn’t the worst of it.

If companies that are “too big to fail” are too big to exist, then bills that are “too long to read” are too long to pass. This sort of behavior — passing bills that no one has read — or, that in the case of the healthcare “bill” haven’t even actually been written — represents political corruption of the first order. If representation is the basis on which laws bind the citizen, then why should citizens regard themselves as bound by laws that their representatives haven’t read, or, sometimes, even written yet?

UPDATE: Reader Julie Pascal writes:

You wrote “If representation is the basis on which laws bind the citizen, then why should citizens regard themselves as bound by laws that their representatives haven’t read, or, sometimes, even written yet?”

Makes me think of The Princess Bride….

*Westley:* Did you say I do?
*Buttercup:* Uh…no. We sort of skipped that part.
*Westley:* Then you’re not married. You didn’t say it. You didn’t do it.

There is no reason I can see to be worried at all about following laws that weren’t read… if they weren’t *read* how could they have been voted on?

Hmm. Well, it’s no stranger than many constitutional arguments that have succeeded in court.

FLASHBACK: Panic At The Anti-Disco Rally. The ’70s anti-disco movement — then seen as rock’n’roll rebellion against commercialized phoniness — is now regarded by academics as racist. Just so you know . . . .

HMM: “Administration Economic Rhetoric Takes Sudden Rosy Turn.”

TOM MAGUIRE EXPLAINS What’s news and what’s not. Plus, racism veers left.

SO WHILE JACK LAIL, MICHAEL SILENCE, AND I WERE ON GEORGE KORDA’S SHOW TALKING ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA, Jack Lail was taking video and uploading it to YouTube.

WHAT LARRY SUMMERS AND ROBERT RUBIN did to Harvard. The same thing they’re now doing to America. A “Ferrari without the engine.”

IRAN UPDATE: Candidate Declares Iran May Face ‘Disintegration’ . “In an implicit rebuke to Iran’s ruling elite, a conservative presidential candidate warned Sunday that the political and social rifts opened by the disputed June 12 vote and subsequent crackdown could lead to the nation’s ‘disintegration’ if they were not resolved soon.”

EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: Potato famine disease striking home gardens in U.S. I blame Global Warming! Oh, wait: “This year’s cool, wet weather created perfect conditions for the disease.” Okay, I blame Climate Change!

WSJ: SMALL INVESTORS are hoarding gold. “Individuals’ bullion purchases almost doubled last year, amid apocalyptic panic over the financial system, to 862 metric tons. Lately, that panic-driven demand has given way to a more subdued, yet still potent, fear that stocks will suffer as the recession grinds on for a long time, so gold makes sense. At the same time, there’s a rising anxiety about inflation among people like Dr. Van Steyn, resulting from the Obama administration’s massive stimulus spending.” Hmm. Are they right, or are they paranoid? Or are they paranoid and right?

THE END of Obamania?

GIVING A WHOLE NEW MEANING to the term toe shoes. “Vibram FiveFingers are little more than flexible plastic soles with just enough cloth to hold them snugly on your feet. They have little individual pockets for each toe, making the FiveFingers into a sort of foot glove. The resulting footwear feel less like shoes and more like tougher, more invulnerable versions of your feet.” But there’s a downside: “Ugly as a bucket of vomit.”

10 WIND TURBINES that push the limits of design.

STIMULUS! Victor Davis Hanson on The War Against The Producers. “Ponder a simple fact: The Obama administration is dispersing income lavishly to those who do not pay taxes and it will have to be paid for by those who do. For all the talk of that awful percentile who make over $200,000, this administration has not distinguished the hyper-rich 1% that make untold money (e.g., the Buffets, Soroses, Turners, Gateses, Kerrys, Gores, etc), from the much more demonized, larger 5% of the population whose income does not come from investments and insider influence and deal-making, but rather from providing more tangible goods and services–the family doctor, the plumbing contractor, the small lumber company owner, the car dealer, the local family-held insurance company, the airline pilot, the car-leasing firm, the patent attorney, etc.”

A BUNCH OF interesting food links. Plus a recipe for homemade salsa.

PJTV: One Last Pitch: An Ode to Billy Mays.

A QUESTION FOR DAVID BROOKS. I think the simple answer is that the habit of deference to power has become ingrained. . . .

GOOD NEWS: Birth Defect Study Casts Doubt on Phthalate Fears.

ED MORRISSEY HAS more thoughts on Obamacare and the threat to medical innovation.

MORE TROUBLE AHEAD for housing?

CUT-PRONE FIGHTERS turn to surgery to stop the bleeding.

A PRIMARY-CARE PROVIDER’S DILEMMA: The decision to opt out of Medicare.

We opted out of Medicare because the service won’t pay for phone consultations, won’t pay for email consultations, barely pays for an office visit, and does not pay nearly enough to cover a house call.

All of these services are critical to our medical practice. Medicare would require us to hire too many staff, as well as require us to do too much paper work and administration. I cannot afford to invest in either and still manage to operate in the black. Medicare has too many regulations and rules; we can’t understand a lot of them, and frankly, Medicare doesn’t seem to understand them most of the time either.

And yet if you make a mistake, you face possible criminal prosecution.