CHRIS DODD UPDATE: Schiff Discusses Potential Dodd Challenge on Daily Show.

The opportunity to send Dodd home, Schiff said, is “the most attractive part of running.”

“He’s been living in the Senate his whole life. He thinks he’s in the House of Lords.”

“He’s got a very nice house. I happen to know he got a very good deal on his mortgage, as well,” Stewart Joked, in a nod to the controversy surrounding the VIP treatment Dodd received on his mortgage with Countrywide, which has since collapsed in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Seizing the opportunity to test out attack lines, Schiff noted that the man who helped Dodd with his mortgage, Countrywide co-founder Angelo Mozilo, was charged with fraud and insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission last week.

If Schiff does decide to run, he would first have to get through a crowded Republican primary.

Unless, you know, he decides to run as a Democrat.

SENATORS FLY HIGH on taxpayer dime.

INSTA-VISION: Is Freedom Blossoming in the Middle East? An interview with Joshua Muravchik, author of The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East. (Bumped).

THE RETURN OF STAGFLATION?

OBAMA’S DEBT: His biggest weakness?

DR. WES: A defibrillator in action.

RISING INTEREST RATES Cloud Recovery Prospects.

OBAMACARE: A.M.A. WEIGHS IN: Doctors’ Group Opposes Public Insurance Plan.

LA SHAWN BARBER: A TALE OF TWO MURDERS. “Two heinous crimes. Two different reactions from the government and media to the murders of George Tiller and William Long.” It’s all about the narrative.

CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS: Baseless Bias and the New Second Sex. “Claims of bias against women in academic science have been greatly exaggerated. Meanwhile, men are becoming the second sex in American higher education.”

UH OH: Pension “perfect storm” could derail retirement plans, global study finds.

DON SURBER: Why the Left Ridicules Women. With a lengthy track-record examination.

UPDATE: Talk of a Letterman advertisers’ boycott.

JOHN BOLTON: What if Israel Strikes Iran? “The mullahs would retaliate. But things would be much worse if they had the bomb.”

MEGAN MCARDLE ON THE DEFICIT BLAME GAME:

How is a $118 billion structural deficit, $35 billion in Medicare Part D, and a theoretical end to the Iraq presence forcing Barack Obama to spend nearly $1 trillion in 2018? How is it forcing him to spend roughly $650 trillion more than he takes in in 2012?

This is not Bush’s fault. And you know what? Even if it were Bush’s fault, who cares? It’s like those people in their thirties who spend the whole decade in therapy and get into long weepy conversations over bottles of wine about how they can never have a healthy relationship because their father was so cold and distant, and their mother was a perfectionist harpy.

I mean, hey, it sounds like your parents were terrible. But this is not actually very useful information. Dad could get down on his hands and knees and admit that he was the most horrible father in the entire world, and beg for your forgiveness, and guess what? You’re still lonely and balding and drinking way too much mid-priced Chardonnay.

And that’s no way to live. Plus this:

The problem with the budget deficit is that, unlike the deficits George Bush ran, the deficits projected under Obama (and beyond) are actually large enough to potentially precipitate a fiscal crisis. If our interest rates suddenly spiked up, perhaps because lenders were worried about the size of our budget deficits, we’d find ourselves in the kind of nasty fiscal jam that regularly plagues third-world countries. The difference is, no one has enough money to bail us out.

Obama is the one who will have to prevent this. Yet instead of plans, we’re getting fairy numbers from the OMB. That’s worrying, and it’s sure not George W. Bush’s fault. His OMB liked to inflate the deficit projections, so that they could take credit for a mostly imaginary reduction.

I don’t think Obama realizes — or, more frighteningly, perhaps he doesn’t care — what this spending is going to do to the economy. After all, the free market is just a rival power center. As Tim Noah says: ‘On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Growing Organs In The Lab.

OBAMA HAS lost Roseanne Barr? First Ted Rall, now this . . . .

HOLOCAUST MUSEUM SHOOTER: A Bush-hater who thought 9/11 was an inside job? That doesn’t fit the narrative.

UPDATE: He was a journalism major?

CBS ALTERED THE LETTERMAN TRANSCRIPT? “They obviously knew it was problematic. Why haven’t they apologized as a network, at least to the Palins, for airing it? Given that it was CBS, the only question that remains is, did they use a word processor, PC or an imitation of an old typewriter from Bush’s National Guard days to do it before they sent it out?”

SOLVING OUR ENERGY PROBLEMS with lots of nuclear power.

KEITH HENNESSEY: Ten more things about the official Kennedy-Dodd health care bill.

TRANSPARENCY: Congress Hedges on Disclosure:

As the government spends billions bailing out cash-strapped businesses and homeowners, Americans might wonder whether their lawmakers are refinancing their own mortgages or benefiting from relief they backed.

Good luck finding out.

Congress has made a big deal about getting tough on itself with stronger ethics rules, but when it comes to details of lawmakers’ personal finances — and any potential conflicts of interest they may pose — the law lets in as much shadow as sunlight. The government financial disclosure reports that Congress is expected to release Friday will be no exception. Lawmakers can still keep important information private. . . .

Lawmakers do not have to reveal homes they own unless they are rental properties. They also do not have to say whether they have mortgages or home equity lines of credit on their non-rental residences, who holds the debt, how much it is or what the terms are. Often, it’s only when scandal occurs that the public learns of financial arrangements that pose potential conflicts of interest.

That was the case when the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Kent Conrad, D-N.D., received preferential treatment on mortgages. Dodd was an architect of last year’s multibillion-dollar housing rescue plan. The scandal involved a Countrywide Financial Corp., “VIP” program for “friends of Angelo,” Countrywide’s then-chief executive Angelo Mozilo. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit this month accusing Mozilo of civil fraud and illegal insider trading.

Dodd’s mortgages don’t appear in his public financial disclosure reports; Conrad disclosed a Countrywide mortgage on a rental property but not one for a vacation home. Both have denied wrongdoing.

Of course they have.

TRAIL IN SMOKY MOUNTAINS CLOSED due to bear activity.

AN ANTI-CHRISTIAN WHITE SUPREMACIST?

That kind of blows the narrative. Plus, The Mudville Gazette notes some media-stretching in an effort to bail out Janet Napolitano’s deranged-vet claims.

But did he like anybody? Holocaust Museum Killer “Despised JEWS-NEOCONS-BILL O’REILLY.” Funny, O’Reilly doesn’t look neoish.

UPDATE: On Hardball, Blaming Rush Limbaugh. But of course!

TREASURY AUCTION GETS “tepid response.” Interest rates hit new high.

Is it a “Bogart Moment?”

One thing is certain: Big buyers are losing interest in U.S. government debt. There is a clear upside to this, because of the distance between promised largesse and the issuing of debt to pay for it. As Katherine Mangu-Ward noted earlier, the never-popular American Reinvestment and Recovery Act is less popular than ever. Very little of the ARRA’s funding has actually been committed. In April the GAO estimated that only $49 billion of $787 billion in stimulus funding was committed to be paid by September 30. A Pro Publica article today tracks the relative chump change that has been paid for transportation, supposedly a cornerstone of the stimulus package.

This means theoretically it’s still possible to walk back the stimulus payout, if you can make a political case for it. One way is to use the kind of magic talk politicians love: For every dollar we don’t borrow at 4 percent now, we save almost $1.50 over ten years!

Works for me.

JOHN RINGO, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Canada frosts the most widespread in recent memory. Plus, WHO gets ready declare a swine flu pandemic.