GOOD QUESTION: “Why is Ed Liddy taking all this grief? The government brought him in to clean up this mess. As nearly as I can tell, he took the job for a dollar a year — adjusted for inflation, that’s less than FDR’s dollar-a-year men got! — and there is no disclosure in AIG’s SEC filings to suggest that he is getting anything more than that (although to be sure we have to wait for the proxy statement). Why has Liddy become every federal politician’s punching bag? One is forced to wonder why he does not just tell the Obama administration that they can find some other chump to wind down AIG.”

UPDATE: Reader Thomas Prewitt writes:

After watching the Liddy debacle on C-SPAN, it has become painfully clear to me that our federal government is a joke. Those jerks were personally attacking a man working very hard to pull our collective butts out of the fire, all at great risk to his reputation, and for only $1 per year. I was angered and saddened.

Congress has zero accountability. The only solutions that I can come up with to address this are term limits and flat taxes. If the American people don’t put the reigns on these people by limiting the power of longevity and limiting their ability to tax us to death, we are doomed.

I vote the the Tea Party movement adopt term limits and flat taxes as major components of governmental reform.

The current crowd isn’t inspiring confidence.

A VOTE OF CONFIDENCE IN THE ADMINISTRATION’S PLANS: China Inoculates Itself Against Dollar Collapse. “There is mounting evidence that China’s central bank is undertaking the process of divesting itself of longer-dated US Treasuries in favor of shorter-dated ones.”

IRANIAN BLOGGER dies in Iranian prison.

AN OUTBREAK OF AUTISM? Or a statistical fluke?

MARK TAPSCOTT on Tea Parties, Flash Crowds, and Obama.

Compare those with this.

DAVID HARSANYI: Fates worse than bonuses.

CHRIS DODD spills the beans.

UPDATE: Dodd Facing Fresh Political Firestorm. “Dodd just admitted on CNN that he inserted a loophole in the stimulus legislation that allowed million-dollar bonuses to insurance giant AIG to go forward – after previously denying any involvement in writing the controversial provision.”

The country’s in the very best of hands. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Stephen Spruiell; “Look, it’s hard to have any sympathy for Dodd — the sweetheart mortgage deals, the Irish cottage, the self-righteous grandstanding, etc. And as for the policy at hand, I agree more with Geithner and Summers than Dodd. But as for the politics, this AIG thing is blowing up in Obama’s face, and it looks an awful lot like his administration is trying to make Dodd the fall guy. I’m not so sure Republicans (or conservatives) should help.”

Plus this: “Ed Liddy sized up this situation when he got to AIG and came to the conclusion that the best course for taxpayers and for the financial system was to pay the bonuses. This gets back to something I wrote earlier: If Obama disagrees with Liddy’s decision, he should either A) fire Liddy, or B) fire the guy who hired Liddy (Tim Geithner). What he should not do is go along with this Kabuki outrage, in which official Washington pretends it had no idea that big financial institutions — especially failing ones — might need to keep paying their top employees competitive salaries.”

BOLDLY STANDING AGAINST SORCERY in Saudi Arabia.

THOUGHTS ON THE WHITE HOUSE’S council on women and girls, from the Insta-wife.

A CHANCE TO win a Cuisinart stand mixer.

CRIMINAL COMPLAINT against Madoff accountant.

COMMUNISM SOLVES THE PIZZA PROBLEM IN TEN YEARS. Capitalism would have done it in ten days.

CBS NEWS: Questions About Murtha Contract Awards.

UNGUIDED MISSILE? Christopher Fountain isn’t happy about the Fed’s buying up long-term bonds.

UPDATE: Fed primes pump as bailout skepticism rises.

VIDEO: Taxpayers Gather To Protest Spending, Taxes, Growing Debt: An interesting montage of news coverage.

DOES THIS MEAN YOU CAN BLOG WITH IT? iPhone 3.0 will support cut-and-paste.

FUN WITH the Wagon Queen Family Truckster. They don’t build ’em like that anymore.

BONUSES FOR Fannie Mae execs? “Fannie Mae is planning to pay retention bonuses of as much as $611,000 each to several top executives of the government-controlled mortgage finance titan. Sibling company Freddie Mac is planning similar awards.”

UPDATE: A.P.: White House, Dems backpedaling on AIG.

ANOTHER UPDATE: ABC NEWS: Will Obama, McCain, Dodd Return Contributions From AIG Employees?

MORE: “So why did you vote for the AIG payoffs, Rep. Kanjorski?”

STILL MORE, from Ed Morrissey: “I’m a little confused over Kanjorski’s thinly-veiled threat towards Edward Liddy. First, Liddy got brought into AIG by the government after the first bailout; he didn’t run AIG when it ran itself into the ground, and he’s just beginning to figure out what to fix, as Liddy himself explains in a WaPo column today. Also, as Dave at AOL Political Machine points out, we own 80% of AIG. If we don’t like the way the board runs the company, why don’t we replace them?” But then who would we blame?

COMING SOON: A 9-inch Dell Adamo? My own netbook experience is that 7″ is usable, but kinda small, 9″ is better, and 10″ is the sweet spot — at least if you have hands as big as mine.

A FEDERAL HEALTH-CARE DATA PRIVACY BREACH screws up nuclear workers’ health screenings. “The incident involved a lost disc containing the personal information for thousands of current and former employees at DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory.”

TELEPROMPTERS can be tricky.

UPDATE: Toby Harnden says this story is bogus.

TOM MAGUIRE: Who broke AIG? “Why the misdirected coverage? My guess is that we are seeing an unholy alliance of insurance regulators who would rather point the finger at unregulated credit derivatives, people who always favor more regulation as the answer to everything, and public officials who don’t want people to wonder whether other staid, boring insurance companies that don’t do credit derivatives might still have huge problems in their core portfolios. Since securities lending lacks the glamour of M&A or international ‘Master of the Universe’ trading, the media is easily distracted.”

AUSTIN BAY: Tea Parties, Flash Mobs, and Tocqueville.

A COMING WAVE OF small-business tax audits? Stimulus!

IN THE MAIL: Andre Norton’s From The Sea To The Stars. (Actually, two novels in one reissue). They’re reissuing a lot of classic SF lately, which is a good thing; I’m happy to see this stuff stay in print.