LONDON TIMES: Top Democrat in holiday home intrigue: Senator Christopher Dodd bought a share of the house in Galway 15 years ago. “A holiday home in Connemara is at the centre of a growing row in America involving a prominent Democrat politician, a convicted insider trader and the former president Bill Clinton. The purchase of the home by Senator Christopher Dodd is being examined by the US Senate ethics committee after allegations that Edward Downe Jr, a businessman convicted of insider trading, acted as a ‘middle man’ in the deal.”

THOUGHTS ON THE SUPREME COURT AND THE HAYES DECISION: “If domestic violence offenses are serious enough to take away one’s Constitutional Right to Keep and Bear Arms, then these offenses are serious enough to be felonies.”

JOHN HINDERAKER: Barack and Beijing. “Of course, what the Chinese are worried about is not that the United States government will default on its bonds. That obviously won’t happen. The Chinese concern, now being expressed openly for the first time, is that the U.S. will adopt the standard debtor’s remedy of inflating its currency and paying back its debts in shrunken dollars. Why are the Chinese worried about this? Because Barack Obama’s budget proposes to borrow trillions of dollars, injecting them into the U.S. economy without any offsetting wealth being created. . . . With their shot over the bow, I think the Chinese are telling Obama that they don’t like his budget.”

LONGEVITY UPDATE: Old age begins at 27: Scientists reveal new research into ageing. Well, this should broaden the support for the proposal I made in Forbes last week . . .

ANGRY OVER TAXES IN GEORGIA: “News that one in 10 Georgia lawmakers is a repeat violator of tax laws has fueled a call for a rewrite of the state’s tax code. And it’s not just conservatives who feel that way. When a series of President Barack Obama’s appointees to senior posts revealed they hadn’t paid their taxes, the anger grew. When the Georgia Department of Revenue distributed a list of outstanding taxes owed by 19 unnamed legislators, frustration boiled further.” Taxes are for the little people. We’re governed by an gaggle of Leona Helmsleys.

WHY PJTV IS THE COMING THING: Online TV blurs line between channel surfers, Web surfers.

A REPORT FROM THE Little Rock, Arkansas Tea Party Protest. 200 people showed up; pics at the link. Plus, Clayton Cramer reports from Boise. “I guess that we should consider the 100-150 people that turned out for the Boise Tea Party today to be pretty decent.” Indeed.

CHANGE: President Obama signed a law that bans federal funding of any research that leads to the destruction of human embryos just two days after lifting Bush-era restraints on it. I wonder what else was in that bill that nobody read . . . ?

IS AYN RAND relevant?

Well, Atlas Shrugged is currently #27 on Amazon, which isn’t bad for a dead lady.

Related thoughts here.

ANOTHER BRIGHT SPOT: Economic downturn hasn’t hurt condom sales. Hmm. Guns and ammo are selling like hotcakes, too. How about booze?

LAPSES IN JOURNALISTIC ETHICS? What we need is full disclosure.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING: “The cigarette tax is a great example of Big Government hypocrisy on Big Tobacco. They claim to want to penalize smokers for the health-care costs they create through their nicotine addiction, but the funds will go primarily to health-care costs to non-smokers: children. In reality, they needed a big new revenue stream to pay for another giveaway, and decided to get it from smokers. . . . Most nanny-staters claim that they’re acting in benefit of smokers by increasing taxes, as that will provide further incentive for them to quit using the product. However, if people actually did stop smoking, it would bankrupt government, which needs a large smoking tax base to provide billions in cash on state and federal levels. If we propose the reverse — if we outlawed tobacco rather than taxed it — would Congress eliminate S-CHIP? Of course not. They’d just look for something else to tax.”

YEAH, THAT’LL WORK: South African men are ‘raping women to cure them of being lesbians’.

TOMORROW, A CINCINNATI TEA PARTY ON FOUNTAIN SQUARE, AT 3 P.M. Details at the link. If you go, please send me pics!

TELEGRAPH: Britain is Fighting a War — And We Are Too Soft On Our Enemies.

WHAT THE HOUSING BUBBLE COLLAPSE has done to Baby Boomer wealth. And boomers will probably vote for a big intergenerational wealth transfer to make up the difference . . . . (Via TigerHawk, where one commenter observes: “Interesting how taxes go up when the Boomers needed them…as they went down when the Boomers were in prime earning years…”).

ALEC BALDWIN: Supply-Side Economist?

PEW: Stop the Presses? Many Americans Wouldn’t Care a Lot if Local Papers Folded. That’s a sign that they haven’t been paying enough attention to the customers.

RON PAUL BUMPERSTICKER? You might be a terrorist!

CLAY SHIRKY ON newspapers and thinking the unthinkable: “That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.”

Plus this: “Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.” Related thoughts from Ed Driscoll.

CHANGE: Barack Obama Apparel steeply marked down.

UH OH: Obama: Have ‘Absolute Confidence’ in T-Bills. Did previous administrations find it necessary to issue such attention-getting assurances?

UPDATE: Reader Bill Keane writes:

It is unsettlingly reminiscent of the comment made by Secretary of Treasury John Carlisle during Grover Cleveland’s second term. Attempting to reassure the public about the federal financial stability, Carlisle said “Treasury would meet demands for payment in gold so long as it has gold lawfully available for that purpose.” That reassurance (as you may well guess) did nothing to calm the public or the markets.

Oh, goody.

GREENS OBJECT to “science-based” wolf decision.

TURN THE PAGE: “We have exhausted the use of Rush as an attention-getter,” says WH official.

Plus, “Irony is dead.”

WELL, A DEFENSE BOOST WOULD BE A KIND OF “STIMULUS,” I GUESS: “The protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are forcing the Obama administration to rethink what for more than two decades has been a central premise of American strategy: that the nation need only prepare to fight two major wars at a time.”