PHILIP K. HOWARD IN THE ATLANTIC: Stonewalling Legal Reform.

DAVID HARSANYI: America needs a warning system to identify the threats coming out of Washington. We’re clearly approaching “Code Red.”

REPORT: Richardson Probe was “Killed in Washington.” “New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former high-ranking members of his administration won’t be criminally charged in a yearlong federal investigation into pay-to-play allegations involving one of the Democratic governor’s large political donors, someone familiar with the case said. The decision not to pursue indictments was made by top Justice Department officials, according to a person familiar with the investigation, who asked not to be identified because federal officials had not disclosed results of the probe. . . . A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Albuquerque said he had no information about the Justice Department’s decision and couldn’t comment.”

A GOOD CAUSE: Take A Vet To Lunch. I try to do this sort of thing on a catch-as-catch-can basis, but this is more systematic.

MICHELLE MALKIN’S Culture Of Corruption is number one on the New York Times bestseller list for a fourth week.

WRONG-DOOR RAIDS AND INJUSTICE IN THE JUSTICE SYSTEM: I talk with Radley Balko about the Cory Maye case, SWAT raids gone wrong, and more. Now if they’ll just let me out of this cage . . . .

NICK SCHULZ: A Tale of Two $100,000 Jobs — A Tale of Two Americas.

PERSPECTIVE: Rachel Lucas blogs Auschwitz.

MICKEY KAUS: “I said ‘Blame Orszag’ would be CW by Sept.14. My mistake. I should have said by next Tuesday.”

THE BORROW-AND-SPEND ECONOMY: What’s the exit strategy from the monetary and fiscal easing? “Consider how much has been committed and how much has been spent. In the U.S. alone, when you add up the government’s liquidity support measures, its re-capitalizations of banks, its guarantees of bad assets, its extension of deposit insurance and guarantees of unsecured bank debt, at least $12 trillion has been committed, and a quarter of that has already been spent. Along with the rise in spending there has also been a very large fiscal stimulus, pushing the federal budget deficit to 13% of gross domestic product this year. . . . Governments cannot run deficits of 10% or more of GDP, and they cannot go on doubling the monetary base, without eventually stoking inflation expectations, pushing up long-term interest rates and eventually eroding their very viability as sovereign borrowers. Not even the U.S. can do that.”

UPDATE: A reader emails that President Obama is in danger of being remembered as “President Owe-bama.”

JIM LINDGREN: NEA conference call directs artists to push the Administration’s agenda on health care and the environment. “This is precisely the sort of thing that I feared when last year I blogged about private associations being brought under state control.”

UPDATE: More on this from Nick Gillespie: “It’s really pretty disturbing (maybe not surprising, but still disturbing).”

DON SURBER: “I wonder how many McClatchy readers knew that someone in the White House is connected to this boycott?”

CATO: Federal Pay Continues Rapid Ascent.

Related: House quietly gives ‘bonuses’ to top aides. Hey, it’s only bad when businesses do it.

SETTING THE BAR LOW: Voters Say They Know Health Care Bill Better Than Congress.

THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT for the Art of Persuasion.

KATIE ROIPHE on the joy of infants. For some reason, this piece is controversial.

FROM DANIEL DREZNER: An obligatory fisking of Maureen Dowd. “In my experience, anonymous or not, the quality of one’s insights and shrewdness of one’s observations are the things that tend to push a blogger up through the ranks. If only that were still true of New York Times columnists.”

SOME RIGHT-WING LOON: “The problems of our economy have occurred not as an outgrowth of laissez-faire, unbridled competition. They have occurred under the guidance of federal agencies, and under the umbrella of federal regulations.”

CLUBBING THE CIA into submission.

THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO just came out on DVD, and to mark the occasion here’s an interview with Whit Stillman. And revelations regarding the unsavory relationship between Gossip Girls and Metropolitan.

A SOLEMN TRIBUTE to the dead.

THE BOY WHO heard too much.

NICK GILLESPIE: Ted Kennedy and the Death (Hopefully) of an Era. “There is, buried deep within Kennedy’s legislative legacy, a different set of policies worth exhuming and examining, precisely because they were truly a break with the normal way of doing business in Washington. During the 1970s, Kennedy was instrumental in deregulating the interstate trucking industry and airline ticket prices, two innovations that have vastly improved the quality of life in America even as—or more precisely, because—they pushed power out of D.C. and into the pocketbooks of everyday Americans. We are incalculably richer and better off because something like actual prices replaced regulatory fiat in trucking and flying. Because they do not fit the Ted Kennedy narrative preferred by his admirers and detractors alike, these accomplishments rarely get mentioned in stories about the late senator. But they are exactly the sort of legislation that we should be celebrating in his honor, and using as a model in today’s debates about health care, education, and virtually every aspect of government action.”

FORGET THE DEATH PANELS. Now we’re supposed to be worrying about Dick Panels? “Barack Obama has warned us of Tonsil Vultures and Foot Rustlers. So far, he hasn’t issued a warning on Foreskin Fiends.”

CHEERY NEWS: Real US unemployment rate at 16 pct: Fed official. “The real US unemployment rate is 16 percent if persons who have dropped out of the labor pool and those working less than they would like are counted, a Federal Reserve official said Wednesday.”