TAX-FUNDED UNIVERSITY hosting a conference on “combating the right?”

PRESERVING NIKOLA TESLA’S legacy.

IT’S HAYEK’S 110TH BIRTHDAY. And his book sales have gotten a boost from Obama!

MICKEY KAUS: “Chrysler says it will show a profit in 2012. Hey, that’s just about when kausfiles is planning to go public!” 2012, huh? How convenient . . . . Plus this: “How will they lose two-thirds less money this year than last, when this year’s sales are so far down 46% from last year (and down even more for April)?” Well, maybe they’re losing money on every car, so as sales go down, they get steadily closer to profit . . . .

WELL, IT IS: Massachusetts Supreme Court Calls Illegal Gun Possession a “Victimless Crime.” “In a 4-to-1 ruling, the state’s highest court rejected the law enforcement strategy of Bristol District Attorney C. Samuel Sutter to cut down on gun violence by seeking pretrial detention for every person charged with illegal gun possession in his jurisdiction, which includes New Bedford.”

From the opinion: “That a person possesses a firearm without a valid license does not itself pose a substantial risk that physical force against another may result. Rather, it is the unlawful use of a firearm that involves a substantial risk that physical force against another may result.” I think this may be a penumbral result of Heller, though maybe not.

I’ll be on Michael Graham’s show in Boston talking about this at 9:25.

READER JOHN MARCOUX WONDERS how Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins feel about their support for John Edwards.

HIGH SCHOOL THRILLER GOES PATRIOTIC: A review of Andrew Klavan’s The Last Thing I Remember. “Andrew Klavan’s ‘The Last Thing I Remember’ is one of the more subversive books I’ve read in a long time. I ought to know – I used to be a subversive (or consider myself to be one). Moreover, it’s subversive in a truly important and new way.”

TRUST THE GOVERNMENT WITH YOUR INFORMATION: Hackers Break Into Virginia Health Professions Database, Demand Ransom.

CHRYSLER BAILOUT UPDATE: “The dissenting lenders led by Oppenheimer Funds and Stairway Capital argued in a New York bankruptcy court that the sale proposal was ‘orchestrated entirely by the U.S. Treasury and foisted upon the debtors.’ A lawyer for the group, Tom Lauria, said some identified publicly in the politically charged reorganization have received death threats ‘which they perceive as being bona fide.’ Those lenders have notified police and the FBI, he said. President Barack Obama called the dissenters ‘speculators’ in public criticism last week for refusing to join Chrysler’s biggest banks in a government-brokered deal to wipe out Chrysler’s $6.9 billion debt and move forward with the Fiat alliance.”

LESSONS FOR THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT? How David Beats Goliath. Is getting active in every Congressional district kind of like a full-court press? But don’t wait for elections: “Insurgents operate in real time.” Give ’em something new to react to all the time. But it’s not easy: “Effort can trump ability—legs, in Saxe’s formulation, can overpower arms—because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coördination.” And remember this, too: “When the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: Secondary Markets Are Real Markets.

Plus this: “I recognize that the law is always kind of messy, but as far as I know, this kind of blatant political intervention between debt claims is unprecedented, and worse, it’s a dress rehearsal for doing the same thing at GM. I don’t think this is good for the rule of law, I’m pretty sure it will be bad for capital markets, and I’m nearly positive it’s going to make it hard for any heavily unionized company to get substantial capital for the next decade. And why? It hasn’t exactly enhanced Chrysler’s already dicey chances of survival.”

If I were the Chinese, or other big buyers of Treasury bonds, I’d look at how the Obama Administration is treating corporate bondholders, and wonder why the Obama Administration would treat Treasury bondholders better than it has treated corporate bondholders. And then I’d get out of Treasuries, the way a lot of Chrysler bondholders wish they’d done already with Chrysler bonds. Certainly I wouldn’t want to rely on their belief in the sanctity of contracts, or even their pragmatic understanding of credit markets . . . .

MICKEY KAUS ON THE SICKNESS OF THE MEDIA: “John Edwards runs an entire presidential campaign based in large part on his character as shown by his loyalty to his brave, ill wife–when in reality he’s cheating on her, practically setting up a second family–and the press doesn’t care (or, rather, pretends in public that it doesn’t care, lest its readers get interested). But a year later some prosecutor comes up with a tedious, hard-to-define potential campaign violation, and it’s katy-bar-the door!”

NO ETHNIC STEREOTYPES HERE:

I found it impossible not to be touched by the warmth, the vigor, and the forceful vitality of the Mexican people — a love of life I’ve seen in Mexican American communities throughout this nation.

Coming next: Reflections on Scottish thrift, Irish dipsomania, and African terpsichorean skills.

JACOB SULLUM: Jim Moran’s Stiff Opposition to Sexual Innuendo Hard to Understand. “Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) has reintroduced legislation that would require the Federal Communications Commission to treat ads for Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs as indecent, meaning they could be legally aired only between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.” Why would he find such ads so disturbing?

STOCK YOUR FLU-BUNKER SHELVES NOW: A big sci-fi DVD sale.

I’M NOT “LEERY” — just laughing out loud at a promise to crack down on “tax cheats” from the guy who appointed Tim Geithner.

I’m not alone: “Geithner and Rangel thanked for helping crack down on tax cheats? What’s next, a ceremony on the importance of accurate information in public-health communication, thanking Joe Biden?”

“TEA PARTY” LEADER silenced by City Council.

MARY KATHARINE HAM: Our Genius President: ‘Happy Cuatro de Cinco!’ “I like to note these little incidents when they happen, not because I think it makes Obama an idiot because he occasionally stumbles over his words, but because his somewhat overblown reputation as the most cerebral, eloquent, utterly erudite president of all time could really use a pricking every now and then. Also, because if Bush had made such a blunder, it would have been the basis of a four-part MSNBC investigative series on the malapropism’s deleterious effects on the Republican Party’s attempts to woo Hispanic voters, Mexican-American relations, and our ‘place in the world.'”

WHAT HAPPENS if the Swine Flu goes away?

On the other hand, a reader says don’t get cocky:

Definitely just the squall before the flu hurricane this Fall. “In each of the four major pandemics since 1889, a spring wave of relatively mild illness was followed by a second wave, a few months later, of a much more virulent disease. This was true in 1889, 1957, 1968 and in the catastrophic flu outbreak of 1918, which sickened an estimated third of the world’s population and killed, conservatively, 50 million people.”

All the more reason for quick vaccine work, and more effort to top up antiviral supplies and learn from what went right, and wrong, this time. And, of course, a reason for general preparedness.

VOTER FRAUD convictions in Ohio.

MICKEY KAUS: “While some Obama supporters deride ‘Tea Party’ tax protests on the grounds that Obama hasn’t increased taxes on the bottom ’95 percent of working families’ yet, the diligent Matt Yglesias is already trying to figure out which ones to raise.”

UPDATE: Reader Dave Ivers writes: “I vote for a ‘smug’ tax. Could raise an enormous amount of money.”

SHADES OF A.I.G.? “A lawyer representing the dissenting lenders, told a packed courtroom on Monday that some of the lenders who were publicly identified have received death threats. Those dissenters also have objected to the sale and government bankruptcy financing.” Did anyone mail them a dead fish?

NO SURPRISE HERE: Obama official Kareem Dale confirms White House’s love for MSNBC.

NOW HERE’S A SHOCKER: Lobbyists help Dems draft climate change bill. I mean, who saw that coming?

THE NEXT BIG sub-prime crash?