TOM HARKIN: “We own the automobile companies.” So why not use ’em to subsidize Iowa farmers?

Well, maybe that’s unfair. From other people I might be more supportive of a flex-fuel requirement, but I know what Harkin’s after here. . . .

THE BIDEN EFFECT: It’s like the “Gore Effect,” only for unemployment:

Eight days after Joe Biden traveled to Ohio to defend the stimulus, arguing, “Roads plus teachers plus cops plus jobs equals a community — and that equals paychecks and prosperity,” the unemployment rate in the state increases from 10.8 percent to 11.1 percent. That is the highest in 26 years.

UPDATE: Man, Joe Biden is a one-man employment wrecking crew, because the rate shoots up everywhere he visits: “A day after the Vice President touted the success of the stimulus in Richmond, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that Virginia lost 22,800 jobs last month and the unemployment rate rose to 7.2 percent.”

Ouch.

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: HARTFORD COURANT: NRSC Asks Sen. Dodd To Return Contributions To Lobbyists. “Since Sen. Christopher J. Dodd has been criticizing lobbyists lately, the National Republican Senatorial Committee is now asking Dodd to return campaign contributions that have been given to him by lobbyists.”

STIMULUS! Buy a truck, get a free AK-47!

UPDATE: Andrew Lloyd emails: “For what it’s worth (maybe not much), but that car dealership is in Butler, Missouri, Robert Heinlein’s hometown. I trust he would approve.” Heh.

SHIKHA DALMIA: Global Warming: White Man’s Problem: Why poor countries won’t commit to binding emissions cuts. “In fact, there is a perfectly good reason developing countries are unwilling to act on climate change: What they are being asked to do is more awful than climate change’s implications–even if one accepts all the alarmist predictions.”

RAVE RIGHTS, NANOTECHNOLOGY, AND MORE: I’m interviewed here.

THIS ONE’S NOT OVER: AmeriCorps Inspector General Sues Government Over “Unlawful” Firing.

STEPHEN GREEN: The Week In Blogs.

SO I LIKE MY AMAZON KINDLE, but this business of remotely deleting books you’ve already “bought” is more than a little creepy, and a warning against the dangers of moving to electronic publishing in general.

The Insta-Wife and I were arguing about this this morning. Her position is that if Amazon sold you a book it didn’t have electronic rights to, then it was actually respecting property rights — of the copyright holder — by undoing the sale and refunding your money. I see that point, but on the other hand . . . it’s just creepy. As Jack Balkin says:

With ordinary hardcover and paperback books, once you purchase a copy, you keep it, and you can pretty much do whatever you want with it, including marking it up, cutting it into parts or selling it to someone else. This is because of the combination of the first sale doctrine in copyright law and the fact that the book is a physical copy. Because it is a physical copy, nobody would think that the publisher of the book would have the rights to enter your house and remove the book. But when you purchase an e-book, what you really purchase is merely a license to store the an electronic copy on the Kindle’s hard drive according to end user license agreement that Amazon provides (and that you agree to when you purchase and first use the device). As a result you may not have the rights to do things with the e-book that you think you can. . . . For centuries, we have understood, or rather believed, that owning books came with certain rights, including the right to keep what we purchase and to use it, mark it up, and sell it in any way we like. We were free to purchase books and keep them in our homes, without telling anybody what we were reading, or indeed, what page we had last looked at. Amazon’s Kindle system upends all of these expectations. Amazon knows what books you have on your Kindle, and, in theory, it can even know the book you are currently reading, and even the last page you’ve read on each of the books you own. It can delete books, add books, or modify books, all without your permission. It can change features of the Kindle at will. In upending our assumptions about our freedoms to read books in private and use them as we see fit, Amazon threatens many of the basic freedoms to read we have come to expect in a physical world. If we want to preserve these freedoms, we will have to reform copyright law and privacy law to control the new intermediaries who can control us at a distance.

I would like to see electronic copies treated more like physical books — you buy it, you own it — rather than like “licenses to read” that can be revoked based on fine print in things nobody ever reads. The current situation is creepy, and subject to abuse. I like my Kindle, especially for travel, but if I’d known this was coming I don’t think I’d have bought it, and at this point I’m reluctant to recommend a Kindle to others. Meanwhile, given Congress’s domination by Big Copyright interests, I don’t expect any legislative reforms in the near future.

UPDATE: Here’s more from Ars Technica:

Ars Technica has learned that this was more serious than a publisher flippantly changing course. Accusations that Amazon had caved to the powerful meanderings of a “major publisher” were far off the mark, although the cause is still unsettling. As it turns out, the books in question were being sold by Amazon despite being unauthorized copies. The works weren’t legit. It was all copywrong. In other words, Amazon was selling bad books. Hot letters. Pilfered paragraphs. . . . So why would Amazon remove the books? It appears as though Amazon’s purchasing system does this automatically. The company told Ars that they are “changing [Amazon’s] systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”

Bravo to that, but it would have been better for Amazon to tell customers of this planned change directly, in the first place. And why was the system designed to reach out and remove books, anyway?

No word on what Amazon will do to make sure that the books offered by third parties are properly licensed. We wouldn’t be surprised to see the company rake over its third party offerings just to be safe.

If they’re smart, they’ll send a new (legit) copy of the books to the owners ASAP. But the control issues are still troubling.

CHANGE! “Suffering Under Capitalism” to Be Replaced By New, Better Type of Suffering. I think I’ll stick with the old kind, where at least you get porn and cappucino.

DOG YOGA?

IRAN: Protesters outside the Interior Ministry.

PHOTOS AND A REPORT ON the Tucson Tea Party’s healthcare protest at Rep. Giffords’ office.

A YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER? It hasn’t been that here, but it’s been the coolest summer I can remember. On sunny days that’s nice. On the (frequent) rainy ones, it’s a bit too cool.

WAS SOTOMAYOR BOXED IN? And if so, who was the boxer?

SURVIVAL SCHOOL: Why more Americans are learning to pick locks, bust out of handcuffs, and avoid surveillance.

HEALTHCARE UPDATE, from the Los Angeles Times: “The president knows his keystone program is in deep trouble and losing momentum. That’s why his organization is sending out all those e-mails and organizing local discussion groups to mobilize grassroots support and why he drags the subject into everything he talks about. . . . Obama’s current problem is actually crumbling support among Democrats, dozens of whom are beginning to waver over the scale of such spending, whether some of it eventually gets covered by savings or not. They know that conveniently-predicted future government savings have a way in Washington of not actually ever materializing. But by then it’s too late.”

IT’S AN IMPROVEMENT OVER JUST DISAPPEARING, ANYWAY: Silence after China blogger amoiist tweets arrest SOS. “He said bloggers had been held more frequently in the last two years. ‘I think it is because the internet’s power is getting bigger and bigger and the internet uncovers many issues so the authorities get more pressure.'” Pressure is good.

A BIG REPORT on today’s Obamacare protests around the country.

Plus, in Asheville, North Carolina, 250 people showed up at Rep. Heath Shuler’s office to make their views known. Shuler’s people don’t seem to have been very gracious.

IRANIAN REVOLUTION, DAY 35: A roundup at The Berman Post.

JOHN PODHORETZ remembers Walter Cronkite.

“THOUGHT CRIME” LEGISLATION comes to America.

FUN WITH BUBBLES.