DISCARDED PUPPET: Has Chavez Quit on Zelaya? We can hope.

NOT AN UPGRADE — AN UPHEAVAL: Clay Shirky on journalism post-newspaper.

THIS WEEK’S Carnival Of The Capitalists is up!

OMEGA 3 FATTY ACIDS may prevent Alzheimer’s but don’t help once you’ve got it.

VIDEO: Formula 1 racers at 1500 FPS.

MARKET COMPETITION EXPLAINED: I love the television example — it’s still working.

HEH: Desperate New York Times Exploits Palin Controversy. Hey, you don’t want to let those pageviews drop, or you could get canned like Froomkin!

MAYBE I SHOULD GET a monitor rig like this.

“GREEN ENERGY” PROGRAM A FLOP: Austin’s clean energy program costing more, selling less. “Now the nationally renowned program is struggling to find buyers — the latest allotment is 99 percent unsold after seven months on the market — and Austin Energy is looking for ways to bring down the rising costs.” See, environmentalism is mostly about posturing — it’s not actually about sacrificing.

SEARCHING FOR KUCHI, FINDING LIZARDS: MICHAEL YON POSTS a dispatch from Afghanistan. Remember, he’s supported by reader donations, so if you like his work, consider hitting the tipjar.

AN ORGASM A DAY keeps the doctor away?

RANDY BARNETT: The Seinfeld Hearings: How Senators could, but probably won’t, make the Sotomayor confirmation a show about something.

IN THE MAIL: Zak Maymin’s Publicani. From the jacket copy, it looks like a cross between Atlas Shrugged and Harrison Bergeron.

JENNIFER RUBIN: When Do We Get That Job Surge? “The stimulus plan was bad policy, poorly conceived and oversold. It isn’t working, yet the president insists his policy was perfect. The result now is a surprising agreement between the Left and Right.”

MICHAEL BARONE: Chaos on Capitol Hill. All politics is loco?

DAN RIEHL: Warning Signs for the Republican Party: A Third Way? And not your soft-socialism “third way,” either. . . .

A SLOGAN FOR 2010? “Irresponsible Leadership For An Unsustainable Future.”

CALIFORNICATION and a girl’s guitar.

INDEED:

The sad truth is that the economy is still extremely ill. The recovery we were all waiting for has not started in any meaningful way.

True, by many metrics, the economy has stopped falling drastically, but we are still in a painful recession, large by postwar standards. The bank crises seem to have abated for now and Wall Street is paying itself fantastically well again, thank heavens, after being rescued with taxpayer money. But housing is still extremely weak, profits are miserable and, most important, far too many Americans are unemployed — roughly 9.5 percent, by the latest data.

Just as basic, far too many Americans are living in fear.

What is President Obama doing about it? Perhaps too much. And, possibly, his efforts are too diffuse. When I think about the economy I think about a plump man who has just been hit by a truck while crossing a street and is in severely critical condition with internal bleeding. Instead of just stabilizing his hemorrhaging, the doctor decides that while the patient is unconscious, he might as well also do a face lift, some coronary bypasses and a stomach-stapling to keep him from gaining weight while he is recovering (if he does recover). After all, a crisis is not to be wasted. . . . Maybe we should just concentrate on ending the recession and talk about the other plans later. Let’s consider just how much uncertainty is good for the economy.

Read the whole thing.

FROM LOS ANGELES TO TEHRAN, AND BACK: On this week’s PJM Political.

THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND, if you were out, you know, having a life:

My piece on the hidden cost of national healthcare. With some personal perspective.

Rex Murphy on Where we are.

Only twenty percent? Where do we sign up?

The Card-Check ad they don’t want you to see.

Virginia Postrel on fixing kidney donations. A must-read.

Some Tea Party photo fun with a member of Congress. Plus, outnumbering MoveOn / Acorn protesters again. (And again).

Is it a war against the producers?

Keith Hennessey critiques the Obama op-ed.

And a final goodbye to Billy Mays.

SOME QUESTIONS FOR JUDGE SOTOMAYOR, from Sen. John Cornyn.

ANDREW BREITBART: Racism’s Cure Found In Private Sector.

ANN ALTHOUSE AND SIX OTHER LEGAL EXPERTS pose questions for Sotomayor in the New York TImes.

UNSETTLING THOUGHTS on healthcare reform. Prompted by JournoList?