ROGER SIMON: Burning Down the New York Times … Act 2: Walter Duranty Meets the Holocaust.

THIS IS CONVENIENT FOR SOME, OF COURSE: After Stevens Case, Justice Dept. Corruption Unit in Disarray.

EDITORIAL: Durbin’s Insider Trading: The latest example of Congressional hypocrisy. “The Fed chairman and Treasury secretary briefed Mr. Durbin and other congressional leaders on the financial crisis and efforts to help financially troubled banks. Mr. Durbin’s great sell-off started the day after this privileged briefing. . . . This senator’s hypocrisy is particularly ripe because Mr. Durbin has been at the forefront of denouncing the greed of Wall Street bankers. In 2002, he condemned the lack of criminal penalties for corporate executives accused of insider trading.”

DALE CARPENTER: THE LEAST HE COULD DO. “In a brief and perfunctory prepared statement, read carefully from a script, President Obama just signed an order directing federal departments to grant some benefits to employees’ same-sex partners. It includes things like sick leave for partners, the use of medical facilities, access to long-term care benefits, and instruction in foreign languages, if such benefits are otherwise available to spouses. . . . Interestingly, Obama’s rhetoric was at odds with his own Justice Department’s brief, filed late last week, defending the constitutionality of DOMA. Obama called DOMA “discriminatory,” though he never said on what grounds he thinks it’s discriminatory. His DOJ last week maintained that DOMA doesn’t discriminate based on sexual orientation or sex, the two most obvious ways in which one might think it discriminatory.”

DRAWING A CONNECTION between Barack Obama, Gerald Walpin, and Led Zeppelin.

WELL, DARN: You’re Not Going to be a Professional Blogger, Regardless of What the Wall Street Journal Tells You.

DOES MEMBERSHIP IN A SINGLE-SEX CLUB disqualify a Supreme Court nominee?

NEW YORK TIMES: In Poll, Obama Is Seen as Ineffective on the Economy. “A substantial majority of Americans say President Obama has not developed a strategy to deal with the budget deficit, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, which also found that support for his plans to overhaul health care, rescue the auto industry and close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, falls well below his job approval ratings. . . . A majority of people said his policies have had either no effect yet on improving the economy or had made it worse, underscoring how his political strength still rests on faith in his leadership rather than concrete results. As Mr. Obama finishes his fifth month in office and assumes greater ownership of the problems he inherited, Americans are alarmed by the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been doled out to boost the economy. A majority said the government should instead focus on reducing the federal deficit.”

A BUNCH OF new releases on DVD and Blu-Ray.

AND YET, STRANGELY, IT’S NOT GETTING AS MUCH PRESS COVERAGE AS LAST YEAR: Gas prices rise for 50th straight day.

CRITICISM FOR THE “FEMINISTS AGAINST WOMEN” at Feministing.

OOPS: Outcry on Federal Same-Sex Benefits. “The package of domestic partnership benefits that President Obama established for federal workers on Wednesday drew the loudest protests from some of those it was intended to help, gay men and lesbians who criticized the move as too timid.”

IOWAHAWK: Hail To The Victors!

A REPORT FROM TODAY’S Iranian Election Fraud Protest at Union Square. With lots of pics.

I KEEP SEEING THOSE DUMB BRINKS HOME SECURITY COMMERCIALS, in which the burglars are always scared off by some lame-ass siren. But every time I see them, I just think of this.

“LIGHT TOUCH:” “Now I’m wondering what would the heavy hand of Obama feel like?” Ask that fly . . . .

ANGRY GAY DEMOCRATS: Stacy McCain feels your pain.

JOHN ARAVOSIS: Barney Frank throws us under the bus. Lauds incest brief. Says language was appropriate.

UPDATE: From Law Dork, a defense of Barney Frank. Likewise (sort of) from Ron Coleman. Strange bedfellows . . . .

AGING RESEARCH: Failing Memory and the Failing Immune System: Reversible?

JOHN EDWARDS misses us more than we miss him. “In agreeing to his first extended interview since confirming the affair, Edwards refused to address Hunter, the baby’s paternity, his wife’s memoir, or the investigation. But he spoke expansively over the phone for 90 minutes about his tumultuous decade in politics, which began when, after the death of his teenaged son in a car accident, he left behind a career as a trial lawyer to run for the Senate in 1998.”

UPDATE: More on John Edwards here.

A RECIPE FOR “Supernatural Brownies.”

A PUBLIC-SCHOOL NIGHTMARE: Kids lose their summer break due to impenetrable bureaucratic mess. “A bureaucratic boondoggle in the western San Bernardino County, California school district will cost the students their summer breaks — the schools inadvertently introduced a school-time shortfall amounting to two school days’ worth of instruction time over the entire school year. Due to a quirk of regulation, they have to keep the schools in session for an extra thirty four days or lose $7 million in funding.”

HOME APPLIANCES: When to fix ’em, when to ditch ’em.

JAMES TARANTO: Events in Iran catch President Obama flat-footed. “Speaking very broadly, there are two possible outcomes in Iran now. The regime may succeed in crushing the opposition, enhancing its own power at the expense of whatever pretense of legitimacy it might have had a week ago. Or it may fail to do so and be weakened or overthrown. The free world has every interest in encouraging the latter outcome, and someone ought to bring the leader of the free world up to speed on the events of the past few days.”

SMALLER, FASTER, CHEAPER: ORNL hails breakthrough with ferroelectric materials. “A research team at ORNL’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences has made a discovery that could allow electronic devices of the future to be ‘smaller, faster, more powerful and consume less energy,”‘ according to info distributed to the news media this week,”