DEMOCRACY, WHISKEY, SEXY! “BAGHDAD, Iraq – Vice is making a comeback in this city once famous for 1,001 varieties of it. . . . Nightclubs have reopened, and in many of them, prostitutes troll for clients. Liquor stores, once shut down by fundamentalist militiamen, have proliferated; on one block of busy Saddoun Street, there are more than 10 of them. bu Nawas Park, previously deserted for fear of suicide bombers seeking vulnerable crowds, has now become a place for assignations between young people so inclined. It is not that there are hiding places in the park, where trees are pretty sparse; the couples just pretend they cannot be seen, and passers-by go along with the pretense.”

THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND:

Tea Partiers boo Republican Congressman who supported bailouts.

Worries about EMP problems, artificial or natural in origin.

Chris Dodd “fighting for consumers” while taking money from pawnshops and payday lenders.

More questions about Murtha earmarks. Plus, earmark problems for Reps. Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Pete Visclosky.

Changing positions on the patriotism of dissent.

MICHAEL BARONE: Back To The Future: Obama’s Foreign Policy. “Obama campaigned as the candidate of hope and change. But on pressing matters he has, responsibly, not produced as much change as many of his supporters expected.” I actually am tentatively in favor of opening relations with Cuba.

HEH: Flashback: Jan Schakowsky’s Close Ties to Rod Blagojevich. Full story here: Big donor, introduced his candidacy in 2001, ran his get-out-the-vote operation in 2002? And she calls the Tea Party protests “despicable?” Sounds like the attitude of a burglar toward the Neighborhood Watch. . . .

STEVE CHAPMAN: The Truth About The Tea Parties. “The scale of the federal response to the crises has come as a frightening surprise to many Americans, who suspect the cure will be worse, and less transitory, than the disease. . . . So why did people rally across the country when they should have been planning how to spend their tax refunds? Because their true dismay is about the mushrooming of federal outlays, which the demonstrators regard as a future tax increase in the making. Which, of course, it is.”

UPDATE: A.C. Kleinheider says it’s 1994 all over again. Which is a mixed bag . . . . Beware of the “professional conservatives.”

FROM MICKEY KAUS, an update on the Rattner scandal.

FAKE BUDGET CUTS? “In our age of trillion-dollar budgets and deficits, $100 million is a rounding error at a Department of Agriculture regional office.”

UPDATE: Reader Jeff Scott writes: “Since the President is selling this as a typical household cutting costs, 100 million dollars of a nominal 1 trillion dollar budget is equivalent of a family making $75,000 forgoing two cups of coffee IN A YEAR. Some budget choices.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails: “Cutting $100 milllion from the budget is easy, just lock John Murtha in a closet for a week.”

IN LIGHT OF MY EARLIER comments on William Forstchen’s One Second After, here’s a review from John Walker, who thinks Forstchen’s a bit too pessimistic about the consequences of an EMP attack. I certainly hope so. Especially because of this: “Little or no effort has been expended on hardening the civil infrastructure or commercial electronics against this threat.” If I ran things, infrastructure would be a lot harder, and there’d be a lot more foodstuffs, medicine, and spare parts in emergency storage. That would be a better use for “stimulus” money than most of the places it’s actually going . . . .

CHARLES GASPARINO: Blame Spitzer: His AIG probe led to the firm’s biggest mistake.

MORE ON Harold Koh.

THE BRUTAL BURDEN OF STUDENT LOANS: I think they’re the worst debt you can get — huge, at unattractive interest rates, and non-bankruptable. “Perhaps seduced by the idea of graduating from a well-respected university, many students tend to overlook the consequences of graduating with debts that are likely to far exceed their starting salaries. And as many borrowers have learned, student loans are among the most ironclad debts, on par with child support, alimony and overdue taxes. They stick with you no matter what.” I discourage students from borrowing, but as more people look at the results, we may see a lot of pressure on higher education, where overly-high tuitions have been propped up by easy credit taken out by people who don’t really know what they’re getting into, and who universities aren’t eager to educate on that subject. This quotation suggests that people are catching on:

“You often hear the quote that you can’t put a price on ignorance,” said Ezra Kazee, who has $29,000 in student debt and has been unable to find a job since graduating from Winona State University in Minnesota last May. “But with the way higher education is going, ignorance is looking more and more affordable every day.”

It’s also worth noting that when it comes to consumer exploitation, higher education has no room to strike moral poses vis-a-vis the for-profit sector.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAWYER RON COLEMAN on CNN’s copyright abuse. “It is a kind of censorship, I think we can say by now, to cynically use the copyright laws to shut down embarrassing publication of obviously non-infringing works. It’s particularly ugly when media outlets do it, though.”

WILL THE U.S. GOVERNMENT block solar power plans?

MAKE YOUR OWN YOGURT.

AMAZON WARS: Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny holds back Hugo Chavez’s favorite book. (Via Drudge).

DANA MILBANK: They won, so why is the Left still so angry? Maybe it’s become a habit?

UPDATE: Rand Simberg says it’s intrinsic.

OBVIOUSLY, THIS IS PROOF OF INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM: Men Bear The Brunt Of U.S. Jobs Lost. “The US recession has opened up the biggest gap between male and female unemployment rates since records began in 1948, as men bear the brunt of the economy’s contraction. Men have lost almost 80 per cent of the 5.1m jobs that have gone in the US since the recession started, pushing the male unemployment rate to 8.8 per cent. The female jobless rate has hit 7 per cent. . . . It also means that women could soon overtake men as the majority of the US labour force.”

ANA MARIE COX: Why We Should Get Rid of the White House Press Corps. “Here are some stories that reporters working the White House beat have produced in the past few months: Pocket squares are back! The president is popular in Europe. Vegetable garden! Joe Biden occasionally says things he probably regrets. Puppy!“

IT’S A WOMAN’S WORLD on the Tennessee Supreme Court.

NEW YORK TIMES: Obama’s Revenue Plans Hit Resistance in Congress. “The administration’s central revenue proposal — limiting the value of affluent Americans’ itemized deductions, including the one for charitable giving — fell flat in Congress, leaving the White House, at least for now, without $318 billion that it wants to set aside to help cover uninsured Americans. . . . The unwillingness to embrace some of the major White House tax and revenue proposals has frustrated administration officials. They note that lawmakers, many of them supporters of the president’s ambitious agenda, clamor to hold down the deficit while balking at the proposals to finance his program.”

UPDATE: Readers wonder if this is a sign of Tea Party impact on Congress. Possibly.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here: “aybe the fact that 435 congressmen and one third of the Senate must face the public in less than two years has the legislators’ enthusiasm for another round of spending (and the required tax hikes) running thin. So you can understand the White House’s peevish reaction to the ‘unhealthy’ tea parties. Yes, they may be contagious. And worse, the sentiment in favor of fiscal sobriety so clearly expressed by those in attendance may spell an early demise to the Obama agenda.”