CAR LUST: Remembering the Karmann-Ghia.

HER BALLAD OF TIMOTHY GEITHNER is moving up toward a million views on YouTube, but singing lawyer Anne McKinney has followed up with That’s Pelosi!

THE END OF 100 DAYS: A New Federalism Amendment?

WELL, ONE WOULD HOPE SO: Health Agencies Warily Monitor Swine Flu Strain. Related item here.

Also, New York school children likely infected with swine flu.

WHAT’S WRONG with wind power.

ADVICE TO TENNESSEE DEMOCRATS, FROM MICHAEL SILENCE: “Dissing bloggers is not something I would recommend.”

REAL BIBLICAL STUFF: “Charla Muller was reading Galatians 5.22-23 in her Bible study group when she decided what she was going to get her husband, Brad, for his 40th birthday. Perhaps disappointingly for him, it wasn’t an iTunes voucher. Instead, she was going to give him the gift of sex for 365 nights.” Hmm. Plus this: “Muller concludes with some advice for married couples: ‘However often you are doing it, double it. And six months from now, double it again. It’s proof that you’re here, alive and very together’.”

JOE HICKS: President Obama and Miss California vs. Gay Marriage.

GERMANS EAGERLY VIEW our plunge into national poverty.

WHAT HAPPENED TO STRETCH ARMSTRONG: With video.

MORE PICTURES OF Israeli women soldiers.

STUART TAYLOR ON THE “TRUTH COMMISSION” WE REALLY NEED. (Via TigerHawk.)

Plus, from Tom Maguire: “I back the CW on this – Washington and the Obama agenda will freeze if Obama does not Move On. So speaking as someone with no love for either Bush or Obama’s likely agenda, I say to the Truth Commission idea, bring it on. Nancy Pelosi being sworn in to lie about what she knew and when she forgot it – she has to be less dangerous to the country that way. . . . I’m counting on my President to do the right thing.”

UPDATE: Porter Goss points up the amnesia from Democrats:

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as “waterboarding” were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.

Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

— The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.

— We understood what the CIA was doing.

— We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.

— We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.

— On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.

I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed “memorandums for the record” suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately — to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president’s national security adviser — and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.

Our political class is a sorry lot, regardless of which party is in charge, but it hasn’t improved since the election. It just feels less constrained.

RADLEY BALKO: Putting MADD in Charge of America’s Highways. “With Hurley in charge, MADD’s goals will become NHTSA’s goals. That’s troubling because at heart, MADD is an activist organization. The groups once-admirable goal of raising public awareness about drunk driving has over the last several years morphed into a zealous, evangelical teatotaling campaign. When a coalition of college presidents recently asked for nothing more than a new debate over the federal drinking age last year, for example, MADD called on parents to boycott the presidents’ schools.”

HEH: “Two men attempted to carjack Ted Mazetier, 84, of Tacoma, Washington. So he beat the crap out of them. Very Gran Torino.”

I THINK THERE WILL BE LOTS OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR prosecutions relating to the bailouts, for various financial-fraud and securities issues.

ASTROTURFING in Boston.

WIRED: The Geomagnetic Apocalypse — And How to Stop It. “For scary speculation about the end of civilization in 2012, people usually turn to followers of cryptic Mayan prophecy, not scientists. But that’s exactly what a group of NASA-assembled researchers described in a chilling report issued earlier this year on the destructive potential of solar storms. . . . Such a catastrophe would cost the United States “$1 trillion to $2 trillion in the first year,” concluded the panel, and “full recovery could take four to 10 years.” That would, of course, be just a fraction of global damages. Needless to say, shorting out the electrical grid would cause major disruptions to developed nations and their economies. Worse yet, the next period of intense solar activity is expected in 2012, and coincides with the presence of an unusually large hole in Earth’s geomagnetic shield, meaning we’ll have less protection than usual from the solar flares.” Plus this: “Kappenman also points out that when the transformers blow, they can’t be fixed in the field. They often can’t be fixed at all. Right now there’s a one- to three-year lag time between placing an order and getting a new one.” Plus, what we should be doing with the stimulus money.

IN THE MAIL: Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto.

I really liked his A Soldier of the Great War.

ABC NEWS ON JOHN MURTHA’S VANITY AIRPORT:

JENNIFER RUBIN: Government Bullying of Private Industry More Serious than Imagined. “Three cheers for Andrew Cuomo! No, honestly. He’s taken a break from extorting AIG execs to give up their bonuses to expose a far more frightening extortion plot: the effort by former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to force Bank of America to go through with the Merrill Lynch deal — and conceal the mammoth losses from the shareholders.” I continue to wonder why this isn’t a massive securities law violation.

ALAN BOYLE: How Smart Can The Grid Get? But it needs to get not only smarter, but tougher and more disaster-resistant.

GIVING PROPERTY RIGHTS second-class constitutional status.

NOEMIE EMERY: Let The Hearings Begin! “Let’s tell the truth about all the liberals who went on record supporting real torture, not to mention the Democrats in Congress, when it was cool to want to seem tough on our enemies, who couldn’t be too warlike. Then war and tough measures stopped being cool, and ‘world opinion’ became more important. Nothing like statements under oath to revive ancient memories! And rewind the tapes.”

FOUNDING BLOGGERS V. CNN: Counternotice Submitted: Countdown to Re-Posting — or a Lawsuit.

MORE ON THE SWINE FLU outbreak. Good news: Tamiflu works, and a vaccine is being developed.

UPDATE: More here. How worried should you be? I dunno. Some readers caution against a repeat of the 1970s swine flu fiasco, but the situation appears to have already gone well beyond that.