ASKING SERIOUS QUESTIONS about David Brooks’ inner thigh.

LIFE ON MARS.

PAPER TIGER? (CONT’D): “A health care rally drew only four people to U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker’s office Thursday. Sponsored by MoveOn, a national public policy advocacy organization, the rally was intended to support expanded health care for the poor.”

TOP FIVE new small appliances.

MARTIN PERETZ: Christian Believers Would Be Excluded From Government If The Left Liberals Had Their Way. So maybe Christian is the new gay?

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE: Nazi! It’s the new gay! So if I still hate Illinois Nazis, does that make me a bigot now?

POUNDING THE TABLE.

A ROUNDUP ON THE Uighur Crisis in Xinjiang.

THE HILL: Congressman: Michigan could hit 20% jobless thanks to Obama. Yeah, but the unemployed will mostly be men, so no worries.

PJTV: Communism and Consequences in Honduras. Chris Burgard and Sean Fairburn, reporting from Tegucigalpa.

REPRESENTATIVE EMANUEL CLEAVER thinks poor people can’t be trusted with guns. Perhaps we could have an income test for gun ownership. Then we could extend it to voting. Hope and change!

THE BEATLES: Remastered and Rock-Banded!

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: SEIU’s Chavista Legal Team Cribs from Obama, Threatens Broadcasters.

Here’s the ad they’re trying to keep off the air.

More at Talking Points Memo.

UPDATE: Remember the Barack Obama Truth Squad?

ANOTHER RUBE GETS A CLUE:

A Democrat of my acquaintance, who makes something, but not a huge something, over $200,000 a year while living in Manhattan, was recently grousing to me about the surtax. “My taxes on a marginal dollar are going to go up almost 1000 basis points!” said he.

This is true, I agreed. And just what, I wondered, had he thought was going to happen if he elected Obama? Not clear. Our subject had listened to Obama talk about taxing people who made more than $250,000, which seemed entirely reasonable; he hadn’t realized that being single, his tax hikes would start much lower than that–that he, too, was “the rich”. Mentally speaking, the rich don’t live in eight hundred moderately roach-infested square feet in an unfashionable neighborhood of New York.

Hope and change.

ANNALS OF MY PROFESSION: Lawyer asks judge to force rival to wear nicer shoes. “A lawyer in Florida filed a motion to force his rival to upgrade to newer shoes, on the grounds that his homely old hush puppies gave him an unfair advantage by projecting an air of unsophisticated honesty to the jury.”

JOE SCARBOROUGH’S NEW BOOK gets a rather unethusiastic review from Nick Gillespie. “He unwittingly tells us that conservatives can at best stand athwart history yelling ‘Slow down,’ but they can’t fundamentally change its direction.”

DOING SOMETHING ABOUT KIDNEY DONATIONS: An important piece from Virginia Postrel.

In the United States, more than 80,000 people are on the official waiting list, all hoping that someone will die in just the right circumstances and bequeath them the “gift of life.” Last year, only 16,517 got transplants: 10,550 with the cadaver organs allocated through the list, and 5,967 from living donors. More than 4,000 on the list, or about 11 a day, died. And the list gets longer every year. . . .

The list doesn’t have to exist. It is a result not of medical necessity or economic constraints but of public ignorance, conscious policy, and complacent institutions. Too many people are suffering unnecessarily.

Plus this: “To people who like to celebrate living donors as heroes, payment seems terribly crass. But the vicarious thrill of someone else’s altruism comes at a terrible cost.” Read the whole thing. As I say, it’s important. (Bumped, because it’s important).

MORAL RAILROADS.

HEH: Joe Biden update: No ‘private meetings,’ just meetings closed to the press.

PJTV: An interview with Cyrus Nowrasteh, director of The Stoning of Soraya M.

WELL, DANG: No women’s ski jumping at Olympics. “Justice Lauri Ann Fenlon wrote that the 2006 International Olympic Committee decision against adding a women’s division was discriminatory, but it did not breach Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ gender equality guarantees. . . . Fenlon found that VANOC is subject to the Charter when it carries out the planning, organizing, financing and staging of the 2010 Games, but it is not government-controlled.”

My PJTV report on this lawsuit is here. Complete with video of spandex-clad women athletes.

UPDATE: More here. I agree with the suspicion that one problem the IOC has with this sport is that it’s one in which the women can surpass the men.

IN THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, Katherine Mangu-Ward and I talk about the G.O.P. “brand” and 2012.

THE HITS JUST KEEP COMING. This reminds me of a Seinfeld episode.

UPDATE: Yes, good guess: the Fusilli Jerry episode. It was a million-to-one shot.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Forensics: A Frame-by-Frame Analysis of Obama’s Alleged Ass-Peek. Plus, from the comments: “Americans have spent more time looking at this girl’s ass than they have looking at Obama’s Health Care plan.”

IS YOUR CITY PREPARED FOR A HOMEMADE NUKE? “For many people, the safest option would be to seek shelter in buildings or underground. Just staying inside could slash the immediate death toll from radiation by up to a factor of 100, or even 1000, Mettler says. However, people must be told this in advance. ‘Without prior education, it would be a horrible issue,’ he says.” I was discussing fallout in Administrative Law class — talking about Gott v. Walters, the radiation-vets case — and realized that today’s law students have virtually no understanding of things that were common knowledge in my Cold War childhood. I suppose that’s a good sign overall, but . . . .

AL SHARPTON ON MICHAEL JACKSON: Then, and now.