NEWS: Forbes Ranks West Point As Nation’s Top College.

IT’S HARDER THAN STARTING A FIRE BY RUBBING STICKS TOGETHER: Teen Oversees Windows 7 Deployment for Eagle Scout Project.

LES JONES IS tracking California’s meltdown. IOUs for thee, but not for me?

READER RICHARD HALFERTY WRITES: “Why are all the questions at the Obama town hall meetings softballs? Where is the dissent shown at ALL the other town hall meetings? Maybe its just me, but I think many people are afraid to speak out at an Obama Town Hall meeting. Whether its Chicago style, Union goon reprisals, or a tax audit, people are just leery of what action this administration is capable of doing.”

I suspect it’s just the usual hand-picked questioners. But there’s this. And it’s true, the audit stuff is no laughing matter.

UPDATE: Related.

Plus, a question from Professor Bainbridge.

MORE: Claire McCaskill: “You don’t trust me?”

Plus, Jon Stewart: “You know a sales pitch is in trouble when it starts with Look, you gotta trust me, we’re not going to kill your grandparents!“ Love the graphic.

STILL MORE: Sen. Johnny Isakson pushes back on Obama: “This is what happens when the President and members of Congress don’t read the bills.”

FINALLY: Did I say “hand-picked questioners?” Little girl at Obama town hall has not-so-random political connections. More here.

POLITICO: Cruising On Private Jets. I’ve gotten emails from people in the private-jet biz asking why I hate them. I don’t. I just don’t want to be lectured on global warming — or conspicuous consumption — by folks who don’t fly commercial themselves. I’d be happy if everyone had a private jet. But I’m tired of carbon-footprint hypocrisy.

THE “WRONG SORT” OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZING. I like the tattoo.

MORE ON the Mancession. “For the first time in American history women are coming close to representing the majority of the national work force. It would of course be a bittersweet milestone, given that it comes primarily as a result of men’s layoffs.”

MICHAEL SILENCE: CNN decides to further alienate a large segment of America. But they’ll bring us incisive views from Kathie Griffin.

LESSONS FROM fighting swine flu.

ROGER KIMBALL: “You can’t make it up” or “Haven’t we been here before?”

DUELING VIDEOS: Barack Obama Was For Single Payer Health Care Before He Was Against It.

Plus, ABC News: President Obama’s “Senior” Moment? The floundering has hit a new level.

Also, “UPS and Fedex Are Doing Just Fine: It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.”

C-SPAN VIDEO: Arlen Specter’s town hall, in its entirety.

TOM VANDERBILT: Whatever Happened To The Playpen? How the kiddie enclosures fell out of favor. “Is the fear of playpens all hype? Just a hysterical outcropping of our anxious style of modern parenting?”

REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.

ROGER SIMON: The Plot Against The Doctors. History turned inside-out. Or something.

RASMUSSEN: 32% Favor Single-Payer Health Care, 57% Oppose.

And most are smart enough to realize that ObamaCare is designed to lead to that.

JOHN TIERNEY: The Earth Is Warming? Adjust The Thermostat.

President Obama and the rest of the Group of 8 leaders decreed last month that the planet’s average temperature shall not rise more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit above today’s level. But what if Mother Earth didn’t get the memo? How do we stay cool in the future? Two options:

Plan A. Keep talking about the weather. This has been the preferred approach for the past two decades in Western Europe, where leaders like to promise one another that they will keep the globe cool by drastically reducing carbon emissions. Then, when their countries’ emissions keep rising anyway, they convene to make new promises and swear that they really, really mean it this time.

Plan B. Do something about the weather. Originally called geoengineering, this approach used to be dismissed as science fiction fantasies: cooling the planet with sun-blocking particles or shades; tinkering with clouds to make them more reflective; removing vast quantities of carbon from the atmosphere.

Today this approach goes by the slightly less grandiose name of climate engineering, and it is looking more practical. Several recent reviews of these ideas conclude that cooling the planet would be technically feasible and economically affordable.

Also, make members of Congress fly commercial instead of in taxpayer-funded private jets. While the impact on global warming will be minor, it’s still worth doing. Just because. More on climate-engineering here.

UPDATE: A reader emails that it’s two degrees Celsius, not Fahrenheit.

WASHINGTON POST: U.S. Web-Tracking Plan Stirs Privacy Fears. “The Obama administration is proposing to scale back a long-standing ban on tracking how people use government Internet sites with ‘cookies’ and other technologies, raising alarms among privacy groups.”

MARKETWATCH: Kindle in danger of becoming e-books’ Betamax: Competitors adopting shared format to challenge Amazon’s leader.

I used my Kindle a fair amount last week. Some thoughts: (1) Battery life isn’t bad, but the battery runs down even when it’s turned “off.” (2) When you’re going to the beach or the pool, a $7.99 paperback is something you don’t worry about like you do a $300 gadget. (Yes, you can put it in a Ziploc bag. But it can still be stolen or stepped on.) (3) It’s nice to be able to order another book on the fly when you’ve finished the last one and don’t feel like reading something else you’ve got. (4) I can use it to check my blog and make sure I haven’t left open tags or something without needing a computer. Okay, this last isn’t of general utility. . . .

Related: A reader asks for a final review of Steve Carter’s Jericho’s Fall. I’d give it three-and-a-half stars out of five. It started out well, and held my interest to the end, but I found the conclusion unsatisfying. And there seemed to be a lot of muskets over the mantle that never got fired, to use Chekhov’s phrase. Not bad, but it seemed as if it was building to something better than it actually delivered.

WHAT THIS COUNTRY NEEDS: Singing Porn Stars. “A theater group is interviewing adult film stars in The Valley and collecting their stories to be turned into songs for a singing stage production of a not-yet-titled porn musical.”

A METAL COATING that repairs itself.

AUTOBLOG: How did GM arrive at 230 mpg for the 2011 Chevrolet Volt? I hope that turns out to be true.

MICHAEL BARONE: Democrats Flummoxed By Health Care Protests. In the diner where we had breakfast, CNN was showing Arlen Specter at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania. The best part was Specter’s body language — defensive, jaw set, clearly unhappy at having to listen to criticism from the Great Unwashed. Criticism that, as best I could tell from the CNN captions, was citing health bill page numbers and CBO estimates. Hey, it’s not fair to expect him to have actually read the bill — he’s just a Senator.

Here’s some Specter video where he cops an attitude. It’s not the bit I was watching, but it captures the flavor.

Hey, better send some more goons to the houses of people who speak out!

AN OFFER HE COULDN’T REFUSE: Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and the Fed. “Some observers say Lewis’s failure to disclose to his shareholders the extent of the problems at Merrill before the shareholder vote may have constituted securities fraud: a violation of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s rule 10b-5, which prohibits any act or omission resulting in fraud or deceit in connection with the purchase or sale of any security. . . . Although the government’s threat was unprecedented—and would have been almost inconceivable before the collapse of Bear Stearns in March 2008—Lewis argued against challenging Paulson and Bernanke. He also chose not to inform his shareholders or the public about his conversations with Paulson and Bernanke. . . . The most important questions arising from the Bank of America–Merrill Lynch merger do not involve Ken Lewis. They involve Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and the U.S. government. . . . How should businesses and investors think about bond purchases, mergers, compensation, and a range of other activities that are essential to a smoothly functioning economy, but now carry the uncertainty of potential government intervention? Creeping uncertainty of this sort would inevitably slow and distort the economy. It would also lead to charges of crony capitalism and favoritism—indeed, it already has.”

ECONOMIC GOOD NEWS: Consumer Confidence hits 2009 high.