NICK SCHULZ: A Star Is Born (Tobacco Bill Edition).

ILYA SOMIN: “Eduardo Penalver, a prominent property scholar, has written an interesting, but I think ultimately unsuccessful defense of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s ruling in the Didden case.”

HEH: Attempted Iran media clampdown meets Internet age. “Iran clamped down Tuesday on independent media in an attempt to control images of election protests, but pictures and videos leaked out anyway — showing how difficult it is to shut off the flow of information in the Internet age.” You could write a book about this stuff. . . . But nation-states are still tough opponents. Somebody should be trying to get as many satphones into Iran as possible, in case they shut down Internet access entirely.

UH OH: Dollar Drops on Reserve Currency Doubts.

Plus this: China sells US bonds to ‘show concern’.

“FIGHTING HARD” for gay rights.

MEGAN MCARDLE: The politics of controlled crisis. “As far as I’m aware, the actual track record of heightened contradictions is pretty poor. The crisis tends to straggle on far longer than you thought possible, a large number of people suffer, and it turns out that you don’t get the exciting new system you were hoping for, but whatever terrible idea looked most expedient during the crisis. See Argentina, Nation of.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “One can sympathize with worry not to undermine the resistance by being tied to it, or being concerned about nuclear weapons, or trying to figure the odds of who will win, but all that said, it’s starting to get a little shameful for the professed humanitarian Obama to be seen so nakedly uninterested in the hundreds of thousands in the streets of Tehran both voicing values similar to our own, and ridiculing a government that for 30 years has serially killed Americans, promoted worldwide terror, and violated international agreements. We are now well below the Ford administration’s 1975 snubbing of Solzhenitsyn.”

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Roger Simon.

CLAY SHIRKY: “This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted ‘the whole world is watching.’ Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.”

IRAN’S REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS: A State Within A State.

NOAH SHACHTMAN: Web Attacks Expand in Iran’s Cyber Battle.

INDEED: “The hopelessly lopsided partisan commitments of the journalistic elite — try a show of hands in the WH press corps, who voted Republican? — have always been the secret weapons of the liberal blogosphere. . . . Most D.C. reporters, editors and producers hate Republicans, and that hatred matters.” Plus, advice to the RNC.

SLEEPLESS IN DREAMLAND: Obama losing sleep over Obama deficits. “It’s hard to work up a lot of sympathy for a guy who can’t sleep with his own decisions, and is still trying to figure out ways to drive the deficit even higher … no matter how often he says his universal health plan is going to cuts costs.”

MICHAEL BARONE: All Politics Is Turnout — And Enthusiasm is Key.

And, sorry Ahmadinejad, but photoshopped turnout doesn’t count . . .

IS IT 1979 all over again?

MICKEY KAUS: Orszagism is ‘The Laffer Curve of the Left’. Plus this: “If you are a liberal who thinks that not funding a $100,000 operation is effectively denying the operation to a large group of citizens–one reason, perhaps, that you favor universal health insurance in the first place–then supporting Obama and Orszag isn’t as easy.”

CONSTANT IRAN-BLOGGING, from Michael Totten. Plus, constant updates from Nico Pitney at The Huffington Post.

AN INFORMATION CRACKDOWN IN IRAN. Perhaps trying to make things safe for a Tiananmen-style solution? But, so far, “Despite the crackdown on the news media, an extraordinary amount of information about the protests in Tehran and other cities has reached the outside world.”

MORE Polywell Fusion news.

HARTFORD COURANT: GOP Could Get Dodd Mortgage Documents. “The Countrywide loan has been a continuing irritant for Dodd since Portfolio magazine alleged a year ago that he and his wife, Jackie Clegg Dodd, benefited from improper VIP treatment when Countrywide gave them $781,000 in loans on homes in Washington and East Haddam. Dodd denies he received favorable treatment.”

Related: Chris Dodd’s Irish Getaway Won’t Go Away.

POLITICO: Rural Dems Have Beef With Obama: “Angered by White House decisions on everything from greenhouse gases to car dealerships, congressional Democrats from rural districts are threatening to revolt against parts of President Barack Obama’s ambitious first-year agenda. ‘They don’t get rural America,’ said Rep. Dennis Cardoza, a Democrat who represents California’s agriculture-rich Central Valley. ‘They form their views of the world in large cities.’”

POLITICO: Dems table Pelosi-CIA inquiry.

Like Pelosi tabled the Murtha inquiry. And we’re not hearing much about Dodd, Moran, or Visclosky, either. And what about Charles Rangel? I’m beginning to think all that “draining the swamp” talk was just a bunch of campaign lies!

THE HILL: Dems reel on healthcare: “Congressional Democrats and the White House are scrambling to regain their footing after a series of setbacks has stalled political momentum to reform the nation’s healthcare system. . . . A cost estimate hanging a $1 trillion price tag on an incomplete bill, salvos from powerful interest groups and great uncertainty among key Democrats on what will actually be in the legislation that moves through Congress have emboldened Republican critics.”

SO DID WE GET THE HOUSING BUBBLE BECAUSE BERNANKE LISTENED TO THIS IN 2002 FROM PAUL KRUGMAN?

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

Well, we got the housing bubble, anyway.

JUDITH WOODSON: Wishing I’d served my ailing father more pie and beer, and less yogurt:

Hospice literature suggests that the dying often lose interest in food. My father did. He looked, mystified, at all I’d set out. “Now, who is going to eat this?” he marveled, and while everyone else ate, he and I just held hands.

Then, at the sound of a beer being opened, a mischievous light entered his face. “Hey,” he said. “I’ll have some of that!”

Carpe Diem.

THAT’S OKAY, IT’S NOT LIKE WE’VE GOT A BIG FEDERAL DEBT OR ANYTHING: AP sources: Senate health overhaul costs top $1.6T. “Senate sources say the latest cost estimates for health care legislation are around $1.6 trillion over 10 years. Two Senate staffers, one Democratic and one Republican, said Congressional Budget Office estimates put the cost of the Finance Committee version of the bill at around $1.6 trillion.”