UH OH: WHO predicts ‘explosion’ of swine flu cases.

MARK TAPSCOTT REVIEWS the new Ford F-150.

JOHN SCALZI’S Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars Design. “I’ll come right out and say it: Star Wars has a badly-designed universe; so poorly-designed, in fact, that one can say that a significant goal of all those Star Wars novels is to rationalize and mitigate the bad design choices of the movies. Need examples? Here’s ten.” My favorite: “Note to the Emperor: Someone on your Death Star design staff is in the pay of Rebel forces. Oh, right, you can’t get the memo because someone threw you down a huge exposed shaft in your Death Star throne room.“

CRAZY MOMS go after the Ice Cream Man.

IN THE MAIL: From Daniel Griswold, Mad About Trade: Why Main Street America should Embrace Globalization.

INDEED: Sheehan: Pro-Obama media want the anti-war movement to go away. Of course they do. They only boosted it in the hopes of hurting Bush. Now that there’s a Democrat in the White House, the useful idiots are no longer useful.

Plus, When Charlie Gibson was enthralled with Cindy Sheehan.

JOHN FUND: Eric Holder’s Black Panther Stonewall: Why did the Justice Department dismiss such a clear case of voter intimidation?

President Obama’s Justice Department continues to stonewall inquiries about why it dropped a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party.

The episode—which Bartle Bull, a former civil rights lawyer and publisher of the left-wing Village Voice, calls “the most blatant form of voter intimidation I’ve ever seen”—began on Election Day 2008. Mr. Bull and others witnessed two Black Panthers in paramilitary garb at a polling place near downtown Philadelphia. (Some of this behavior is on YouTube.)

One of them, they say, brandished a nightstick at the entrance and pointed it at voters and both made racial threats. Mr. Bull says he heard one yell “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!” . . .

President Obama needs to clear the air. As a former law professor who specialized in voting rights, he is aware of how important even-handed application of the law is to election integrity. In 2007, then-Sen. Obama introduced a bill to protect Americans from tactics that intimidate voters. It also increased the criminal penalty for voter intimidation to five years in prison from one year.

“There is no place for politics in this debate,” he testified before Mr. Conyers’s committee in March, 2007. “Both parties at different periods in our history have been guilty in different regions of preventing people from voting for a tactical advantage. We should be beyond that.”

One way to get there is for Mr. Obama to insist his Justice Department reinstate the Black Panther case or provide a full explanation for why it was dropped.

It does seem kind of fishy.

QUESTIONS ABOUT “creativity.”

LESSONS ON LONGEVITY from where people live the longest. “Think how much money this could save us on healthcare.”

“I’M SORRY.”

PEGGY NOONAN: Pull the plug on ObamaCare. With a Bay Of Pigs comparison.

A STEP FORWARD FOR Microbial Machines. “In a deft act of genomic manipulation, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute, in Rockville, MD, transplanted a bacterial genome into yeast, altered it, and then transplanted it back into a hollowed bacterial shell, producing a viable new microbe. The technique may provide a way to more easily genetically engineer organisms not commonly studied in the lab and could aid in the expanding effort to create microbes that can produce fuels or clean up toxic chemicals.” Among other things.

WASHINGTON POST: Faith in Obama Drops As Reform Fears Rise: Health-Care Effort Is Major Factor, Poll Finds.

THE HILL: A healthcare/gun-control connection? “And then you end up having a gazillion people lose their gun rights because of some medical record that someone doesn’t like, where they say, ‘Oh, that might be a danger to their self or others.’ No trial, no due process, just gone.”

DECRIMINALIZING DRUG POSSESSION in Mexico.

DAVID HARSANYI: What would Jesus Obama do? “For with thee is the fountain of life: and in thy light we shall see the public option.”

UPDATE: A reader emails: “Most commenters are focusing on Obama’s words about being his brothers’s keeper and his sister’s keeper, but the most egregious statement he made was that , ‘we are partners with God…’. Really? As a long time student of the Bible, I can’t recall God ever saying he needed a partner or wanted one.”

Yes, like his promise to create a Heaven here on Earth, this is kind of blasphemous, if you take it seriously. Or maybe he’s just a big Belinda Carlisle fan.

ANOTHER UPDATE: “As Jesus often said, ‘Let’s get the government to do something about it!'”

UNDERSEA METHANE DEPOSITS: A new energy frontier?

Yeah, but like I said, this is how Mother of Storms started, and — except for the porn star with a heart of gold — it wasn’t a very happy story.

STEVE CROWDER: White House FAIL! The People Win…Now it’s Time to Keep Fighting. “What we’re doing is working. . . . Which is why we can’t stand down.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Curiouser and curiouser: a footnote to Yale’s Islamophobia-phobia. I suspect that they were mostly afraid of scaring away Saudi money.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Was there a second gunman in Phoenix? “There is no reasonable doubt that MSNBC cropped the guy’s race out of the video with some extremely weird editing. I don’t know whether the anchor knew about it or not–I presume she didn’t–or why they chose to edit it that way. But the evidence is pretty overwhelming that they did, and that at the very least, the anchor made some stupid and unwarranted assumptions. The guy carrying the gun, by the way, was not a rage-filled lunatic looking to take out the president. It was a publicity stunt staged by a local (libertarian) talk radio host.”

UPDATE: MSNBC deliberately fomenting racism?

Plus, how to complain.

OUCH: ABC’s Charles Gibson to Cindy Sheehan: Thanks for your sacrifice. Now get lost. Hey, when the useful idiots aren’t useful anymore, they’re just, well, you know . . . .

JAMES TARANTO: Q: What’s the difference between the Associated Press and the Obama campaign? A: The AP admits the public is against it. “There’s one more difference between Obama and the AP: He is a politician trying to get a piece of legislation passed. One expects him to shade the truth, to downplay inconvenient facts. Politicians have even been forgiven for outright lies. By contrast, of what use is a news service that is not rigorously impartial and factual?” Oh, the Administration has found ’em fairly useful.

LAME NON-EXCUSE OF THE WEEK: MSNBC on race-baiting gun segment: Um, we were speaking “generally”.

I SUFFER FROM THE SAME PROBLEM: Ben Bernanke: His Tragedy is that Not Everyone Sees His Greatness. It’s tough, but like Ben, I soldier on.

HAS THE MORTGAGE-MODIFICATION PLAN failed?

UPDATE: A reader emails: “When the present administration put the private sector, rather than trained, non-profit oriented bankruptcy judges, in charge of mortgage modification, what did they expect?”