WHY THE LADIES Love Jon Hamm of Mad Men.

This is old news.

SILENCE THE CRITICS: The “most formidable player” in California land regulation demands a documentarian’s raw footage.

Richard Oshen has spent the past four years making a documentary about the California Coastal Commission (CCC), a state agency too obscure to have gathered any previous documentarian’s attention. . . . The CCC is trying to legally seize copies of much of the raw footage Oshen has shot, as well as a version of the finished product, titled Sins of Commission, prior to its official release.

Roaches hate daylight. They’re acting like roaches.

BUILDING BLOCK OF LIFE FOUND ON COMET. Fred Hoyle, call your office!

SETTING POLITICAL SIGHTS on Bloomberg’s anti-gun mayors.

OUCH: Postal supervisors: Obama swipe “a kick to the chest.”

Plus, Crowley gets ovation from officers in California.

HOW’S HELLER PLAYING IN THE LOWER COURTS? Brannon Denning and I have an article in the Hastings Law Journal that examines that question. (For a lovely typeset copy, just follow the link and click the “download” tab at the top-center). One point: Heller countered the gun-control lobby’s effort to “denormalize” gun ownership, and that may be its most significant impact in some ways. (Bumped).

POLL: Voters Skeptical About Health Care Reform Claims Made By Pelosi and Hoyer. “Just 27% of all voters agree with the senior House Democrats that if the health care reform being considered by Congress is passed, it will mean more patient choice. Forty-nine percent (49%) disagree and do not believe more patient choice is likely, and 24% are not sure.”

OBAMA-JOKER ARTIST UNMASKED: A fellow Chicagoan.

Bored during his winter school break, Firas Alkhateed, a senior history major at the University of Illinois, crafted the picture of Obama with the recognizable clown makeup using Adobe’s Photoshop computer software.

Alkhateed had been tinkering with the program to improve the looks of photos he had taken on his clunky Kodak camera. The Joker project was his grandest undertaking yet. Using a tutorial he’d found online about how to “Jokerize” portraits, he downloaded the October 23 Time Magazine cover of Obama and began digitally painting over it.

Four or five hours later, he happily had his product. . . . Alkhateed says he wasn’t actively trying to cover his tracks, but he did want to lay low. He initially had concerns about …

… connecting his name with anything critical of the president — especially living in Chicago, where people are “very, very liberal,” he said.

“After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ,” Alkhateed said. “From my perspective, there wasn’t much substance to him.”

Then it went viral. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Reader Ron Wilson writes: “A Palestinian-American is the culprit? Boy, the narratives are getting really screwed up for Obama. At least he is delivering on the ‘change’ part, wonder how he is liking it?”

NPR skips the Ken Gladney story when talking about “racism” and Town Halls. Because it’s not racism if union guys beat up black people, but it is racism when voters criticize Obama’s policies.

HUGO CHAVEZ: Obama Lost in Space. Hmm. Rahm Emanuel does look a bit like Dr. Smith. . . .

VODKAPUNDIT’S HAIR OF THE DOG: Health Care Overhaul and Grassroots Anger.

A FATHER sends his son off to college.

RADLEY BALKO: Innocent Man Freed, But Shabby Prosecutor Still Works as Judge. “Bernard Baran served 22 years on dubious child molestation charges, yet the prosecutor who convicted him isn’t even inconvenienced.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: What’s Happening At The FDIC? “Clearly, these banks have been trading while insolvent for quite some time, hoping against hope that everything would somehow turn around. Meanwhile, they poured more of their investor and depositor’s assets into pursuing a Hail Mary pass. That’s the sort of behavior that I expect from desperate bank presidents, but the very reason that we have bank regulators is to crack down on that sort of thing.” And yet, they didn’t.

UPDATE: Perhaps the FDIC can’t afford to do much more.

Plus, Failed Banks Weighing on FDIC. Also, Bank Fails, And So Did Announcement. “Two weeks before the Office of Thrift Supervision swooped in and closed Dwelling House Savings & Loan Association, agency officials emailed a press release announcing the failure of an Ohio bank. There was a clear problem with the release, though: Two sentences about also closing Dwelling House appeared in the same document, blaring in bright-red type with cross-out lines through the still-visible words.”

OH NO: Crazies with guns everywhere!

I love this bit: “And that’s not all. A man brought a gun to a town hall with Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) last week, without incident.” Stop the presses! A man brought a gun without incident!

This, on the other hand, is mostly incoherent: “At Obama’s town hall last week in Portsmouth, N.H., a man was arrested for having a gun hidden in his car after the Secret Service found him at Portsmouth High School hours before Obama arrived carrying a pocketknife. He didn’t have a license for a concealed weapon.”

Does Obama need a license for a concealed weapon to carry a pocketknife? . . . . And if so, why didn’t they arrest him, too?

Okay, that’s just snark. But really, if you’re going to sell the image of crazy armed mobs everywhere!!!! you’re going to need better anecdotes than this. And, you know, a mastery of 8th grade grammar.

But one of my regular correspondents thinks these incidents are all a ruse by the authorities: “Here’s the set up for that Boston Massacre type of event I keep goin’ on about…”

I’m not seeing it, but then I’m well-known to be Polyannaish in outlook. However, assuming that these aren’t agents provocateurs but rather militant gun-rights activists trying to counter “denormalization,” well, I think this is a bad idea and I’d urge them to reconsider. Barbecue joints are one thing, Presidential appearances another.

Matt Welch has related thoughts. Plus, if people had showed up with guns at Bush events, do you think the press would have spun it as evidence of Bush’s unpopularity?

UPDATE: Reader Nathaniel Ferguson writes:

This is not just a poorly written statement, it also brings up a couple of questions.

1. Is it illegal to carry a pocket knife?

2. Is it illegal to carry a pocket knife in a location where the President is going to be in the near future?

3. Is being found with a pocket knife (oh the horror of it!) grounds for the police to search your car? Did the police have to get a warrant for that?

4. Does a person need to have a concealed carry permit to have a firearm in their car? It doesn’t seem that he was carrying the gun on his person.

5. What’s next, police will visit gunowners’ homes in towns the President will visit at some point in the future and take their guns away before he arrives?

I could be wrong, but I think the Secret Service offers adequate protection for the President in the event of a potential Swiss Army Knife wielding maniac.

If not, our tax dollars are going to waste. Meanwhile, I’ll note that the worst actual violence at any Town Hall event was the Ken Gladney beating. But when a black guy is beaten by white union supporters of Obama’s healthcare plan, it’s not news.

Plus, eliminationist rhetoric from the Green Party? Well, Ken Gladney certainly experienced that “smash critics” talk firsthand.

MORE: SayUncle: “Black man with a gun not breaking the law. Press panics.” Well, it does kind of blow their preferred racial narrative.

STILL MORE: Bob Owens deflates lefty shock:

The armed protesters at events in Arizona and New Hampshire were never “at” Obama’s meetings. They were never inside of the security perimeter that the Secret Service establishes for Presidential appearances. They weren’t ever close.

The protester in New Hampshire who had a gun in a tactical drop-leg rig was on private property well away from the Obama appearance (I’ve heard estimates of ½ to ¾ mile away) and was never in direct line of sight of either the venue or the motorcade. He never remotely a threat to the President, nor did he intend to be.

Likewise, those open carry advocates at yesterday’s event in Arizona arranged for a police liaison the day before the event, and were constantly afforded security by the Phoenix Police Department and had at least one known Secret Service agent shadowing them to assure they were following the law. These citizens were never anywhere near the President, nor did they attempt to go anywhere near the Secret Service’s security perimeter that cordoned off the event and the building in which it was held.

As for the citizens ejected by the Secret Service during President Bush’s meetings in the past, I can’t claim to know much about the specific instances they refer to, but they do make clear these were citizens inside the event location when they were ejected.

Read the whole thing.

FINALLY: The White House and Secret Service are fine with armed protesters. Go figure. Tempest, meet teapot! Er, and somebody tell the folks at Talking Points Memo that they’re diverging from the, er, talking points . . . .

J.D. JOHANNES EMAILS:

Chrome rims. 22’s, 24’s, spinners…for when you need to travel down the silk road in in full G style.

I’ve been out on the streets of Kabul again. This time as I was walking with my interpreter/fixer I spotted shiny chrome tire rims in a block full of shops selling car parts.

(See attached pic)

I wonder what the Taliban thinks of 24-inch spinning rims?

The election campaign is its closing days. Under Afghan law, if no candidate gets above 50%, there is a run off. It is looking like a runoff and I may be back here again working the elections again soon.

Some people are expecting civil unrest…but I’m not seeing it at this point. It would take an outright win by Karzai to cause that…and not even his machine can stuff that many ballot boxes. In the recent polls, he’s running only 35%…and this with an oversample of Pashtuns, his ethnic base in the poll.

So, it looks like extra innings.

This report says 45%, but we’ll see. I’m guessing that Afghan polling is less than perfectly reliable.

CASH FOR CLUNKERS: Stiffing the auto dealers? “Rep. Joe Sestak says only 2 percent of claims have been paid and that four of every five applications have been ‘rejected for minor oversight.'”

AN OPEN-THREAD DISCUSSION ON CASH FOR CLUNKERS. “My most honest, most visceral response to Cash for Clunkers is sadness–sadness that old cars are being destroyed before their natural end. Older cars are rolling history. Chevrolet isn’t making any more 1991 Chevrolet Caprices, for example. These cars are a non-renewable and, in my mind, precious resource.”

Somebody emailed me the other day with this thought: Cash For Clunkers is just “death panels” for cars. Ouch. First Grandma’s Caprice, then Grandma?

POLIWOOD: In Memoriam: John Hughes.

WHY NOT? Everything else in Washington seems to be up for sale.

WHY THE POLICE stopped Bob Dylan. Still waiting for the “bong summit,” though.

OBAMA’S AUTO PITFALLS: “Media fascination with the government’s new ‘cash for clunkers’ program is diverting public attention from President Obama’s extraordinary long-term intervention into the automotive sector of the U.S. economy. Since the impact of ‘cash for clunkers’ will be modest and temporary, the more consequential reforms are the massive subsidies to a limited number of vehicle manufacturers and suppliers organized by the United Auto Workers; the new subsidy programs that favor electric cars and plug-in hybrids over ordinary hybrids, clean diesel technology, and other fuel-saving innovations; and the revamped federal mileage standards that supersede—or at least delay—the practical impact of California’s complex program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cars, a program that was replicated by legislatures in at least a dozen other states.”

IN ORLANDO, HOLDING A “TOWN HALL” at a union headquarters. “The meeting will be at 7:45 p.m. Monday at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 606 Union Hall at 820 Virginia Drive.”

UPDATE: Angry Mobs for Thee, But Not For Me. “Last March he wasn’t worried about angry mobs when he tried to browbeat AIG CEO Ed Lilly into publicly disclosing the names of employees receiving bonuses in the Financial Products division, amid public furor.”

READER’S DIGEST: Death By Consultants?

MICHAEL SILENCE: Triage for my wallet.