JAMES TARANTO: How come Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart keep scooping the New York Times? Because they’re actually trying to find out the truth?

VARIOUS READERS hope that the Boob Czar will become a fixture at Tea Party protests, the way the Debt Star already has. We’ll see!

ARE THE VOICES IN MAUREEN DOWD’S HEAD RACIST?

WELCOME TO POST-RACIAL AMERICA: Ex-Mayor of Memphis Starts Bid for Congress, Invoking Race in Campaign. “A Congressional race in Tennessee has become freighted with racial overtones almost a year before the election, with a prominent black politician saying the white incumbent cannot properly represent black voters.” But we’ve got a black President representing white voters now. Right?

BARACK OBAMA is no Fonzie.

HOW TO SHORT-CIRCUIT the U.S. power grid. “An attack on the nodes with the lowest loads can be a more effective way to destroy the electrical power grid of the western US due to cascading failures.”

BUZZ ALDRIN TO NASA: U.S. Space Policy is on the wrong track.

A BUNCH OF interesting food links. And slow-cooker season is coming! Bring on the Lamb and Guinness stew!

REASON TV: What we saw at the September 12 March On Washington.

THE DARWIN MOVIE’S NOT SELLING, but John Scalzi doubts those evil Creationmongers are the reason:

A producer of Creation, the film about Charles Darwin and his wife Emma, starring Paul Bettany and his real-life wife Jennifer Connelly, is griping that the film has no distributor in the US, apparently because so many Americans are evolution-hating mouth-breathers that no one wants the touch the thing; it’s just too darn controversial.

Well, it may be that. Alternately, and leaving aside any discussion of the actual quality of the film, it may be that a quiet story about the difficult relationship between an increasingly agnostic 19th Century British scientist and his increasingly devout wife, thrown into sharp relief by the death of their beloved 10-year-old daughter, performed by mid-list stars, is not exactly the sort of film that’s going to draw in a huge winter holiday crowd, regardless of whether that scientist happens to be Darwin or not, and that these facts are rather more pertinent, from a potential distributor’s point of view. . . . Maybe if Charles Darwin were played by Will Smith, was a gun-toting robot sent back from the future to learn how to love, and to kill the crap out of the alien baby eaters cleverly disguised as Galapagos tortoises, and then some way were contrived for Jennifer Connelly to expose her breasts to RoboDarwin two-thirds of the way through the film, and there were explosions and lasers and stunt men flying 150 feet into the air, then we might be talking wide-release from a modern major studio. Otherwise, you know, not so much. The “oh, it’s too controversial for Americans” comment is, I suspect, a bit of face-saving rationalization from a producer

Exploding robots and Jennifer Connelly’s breasts? I’m in. So are a lot of Scalzi’s readers. Scalzi’s response: “Give me $150 million and we’ll talk.”

8 MILLION DOLLARS FOR Polywell Fusion research. Well, that’s not a lot of dough, but Polywell is pretty cheap research.

JAMES JOYNER rebuts some lefty media criticism.

TO MAKE A BETTER WORLD, legalize drugs.

LET YOUR CHILD walk to school. “There are many reasons why the strong trend against small freedoms for children is a bad thing, but the best is this: The choice is not actually between more safety for your child and, well, less safety, but between safety today and safety tomorrow.”

CHARLIE MARTIN: How Big Was The Crowd?

FEDS LOOKING AT A Vehicle Tracking Tax? Sure. Why would anyone mind Uncle Sam knowing all about where and when they drive?

AN ORBITAL VACATION for only $35 million.

HOW DARE YOU OFFER RIDES FOR FREE! It might hurt cabbies’ business!

WHAT IT’S LIKE to be a “molecular chef.”

DANIEL DREZNER: I’m setting the protectionist threat level to safety orange. “For the first eight months of the Obama administration, I’ve been resisting the urge to shout ‘protectionism’ at the drop of the hat. This time, however, there are X reasons why I’m feeling much more nervous.”

IN THE MAIL: From Pat Choate, Saving Capitalism: Keeping America Strong.

SHIPS WITHOUT SHIPPING: The Ghost Fleet. (Via Rand Simberg.)

WITH AIR FORCE PARARESCUE: Michael Yon posts another report from Afghanistan. He emails: “Am in Kandahar City without soldiers. Did see an American patrol pass by in MRAPs last night. Otherwise haven’t seen any soldiers in days. Strange place, Afghanistan. Many attacks here in Kandahar, too.”

STEVE CHAPMAN: The Republican Health Care Failure. “Republicans left health care reform to wait until the Democrats regained power, and now the Democrats have.” Do you think the Dems would have left the issue alone if the GOP had done something modest under Bush? I don’t.

THINGS THAT DON’T SUCK: I’ve always admired those Bose noise-cancelling headphones, but they seemed kind of big and expensive. But last week I ordered these Sony noise-cancelling earphones for $59.99 and tried ’em out on the plane. They worked very well, and didn’t take up much more room in my briefcase than a pair of regular earbuds. Technology marches on.

UPDATE: Reader Sam Wilson writes: “Glenn, Iʻve been using these units (and their predecessors) for 6 or 7 years. Their specs are just as good as the Boseʻs but so much easier to manage. They used to cost about $125 in the US, so I buy them at the duty free store in Narita, Japan. They are only 80 bucks there. But this is the cheapest Iʻve seen, ever. A good deal!”