PATIENCE: Line forms in front of Sioux Falls Barnes & Noble 36 Hours Before Palin Visit. Good grief.

MARC SHEPARD: Understanding ClimateGate’s Hidden Decline.

GOOD NEWS: Virgin Galactic Poised to Unveil Suborbital Spaceliner. (Via Samizdata).

REMEMBERING THE CREATION OF HOTWIRED, and the first banner ad.

HOT AIR AND CARBON: Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges.

I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

MORE PROGRESS FOR THE Tennessee Newspaper Network.

IN THE MAIL: Who Turned Out the Lights?: Your Guided Tour to the Energy Crisis.

ARE YOU UNEMPLOYED?

TAXPROF: 1/3 of Tax Returns Filed Pay Zero Tax (and 1/2 of Those Get “Refunds”).

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Our Present Anxieties.

CANADIAN HYSTERIA: A SWAT Raid Over A LEGO Gun.

HAMMER, MEET ANVIL: “It’s 3/4 Marines* and 3rd Recon, working on both ends of Helmand’s Now Zad valley with a Taliban concentration, communication and supply lines in the middle.”

FOLLOWUP: So in yesterday’s discussion of hands-on toys, numerous readers thought my five-year-old nephew could probably handle the Snap Circuits Electronics Kit even though it says it’s for 8 and up. I asked my brother about it — and he reported that they gave him that very kit for his birthday last month and he’s using it with glee, and even improving some of the designs that come with it.

Okay. So now I’m thinking the Snap Circuits radio-controlled rover. Or maybe I should just send him off to help debug the Large Hadron Collider . . . .

UPDATE: Reader Jeff Weimer writes:

We bought the Snap-Circuits kit last Christmas for my then 6 year old son, who immediately began to build the most complicated diagram – the AM radio on the cover. He only got one thing wrong – a diode backwards. We later bought the rover and an expansion kit. It’s a great tool for teaching electronics hands on. And the helicopter fan will go up at least 20 feet if you wire the motor in series with both battery packs. And some of it is surprisingly easy to repair; if you know how to solder, you can fix the wire connectors lickety split.

That was when we thought maybe he was too smart for his age and we needed to look at skipping the second grade or gifted programs. He’s now beating his fellow third graders in school, mostly. He still complains that school is too easy.

Full disclosure – I’m an electronics and weapons system tech in the Navy, so I’m intimately familiar with the concepts and items in the kits. It lets me teach a little bit to my son what I do on an everyday basis.

Well, my nephew’s mom is getting her Ph.D in AI, and my brother’s become — under my evil influence — an electronics geek, so I guess this all makes sense. I’m sending him the rover this year.

CLIMATEGATE: Obama’s Science Adviser Confirms the Scandal — Unintentionally.

A REPORT, WITH PHOTOS AND VIDEO, from yesterday’s anti-KSM trial rally in New York.

UPDATE: The weather was better at this Orange County anti-Pelosi protest.

DAVID BELLAMY: Twenty-Eight Years on TV, Then Blackballed for Challenging AGW. “An illustrious career on the BBC and ITV was cut short when Professor Bellamy came out as a global warming heretic.”

MICHAEL SILENCE: Is this a news story or an editorial?

“This AP report should at least be labeled analysis. And not one mention of Climategate.”

DVDS AS LOW AS $5.49.

STEPHEN GREEN: THE WEEK IN BLOGS!

TINA BROWN: What Is Obama Talking About?

Plus, Lee Siegel: All Things To All People. “We can win the war, but be home in 18 months. We can have health-care reform, without increasing the deficit. . . . Obama’s language is the temperamental equivalent of Tiger Woods’ libido. Both the president’s rhetoric and the golfer’s id want everything.” We could use a lot more superego in Washington. . . .

BITES FROM THE APPLE: A roundup of news from the Apple Empire.

FOCUS GROUP: Congress Is Like Satan. Best bit: “One telling moment came after Hart asked each voter to write the name that comes to mind when they think of Congress. Bill, a 62-year-old retired automobile-industry executive and independent who backed Obama, wrote ‘Satan.’ When Hart asked why, Bill answered, ‘Because I wasn’t sure of the correct spelling of ‘Beelzebub.’ Now that’s intensity.”

A.W.R. HAWKINS: Al Gore: Fraud, Scaredy Cat. “Gore backs out of his planned hand-shaking appearance in Copenhagen. Perhaps because anyone allowed to get that close might be able to ask a question.” He knows it’s all unravelling.

THE COUNTRY, AND AUTO INDUSTRY, ARE IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: “The first morning of this year’s Los Angeles auto show, the CEO of General Motors, Fritz Henderson, was scheduled to give the keynote address. The night before, he got fired.”

A REPORT, WITH PHOTOS, from the KSM trial protest in Manhattan.