MARKDOWNS ON Swiss Army Knives And Tools.

GOOD GRIEF: So Dennis Blair is out as director of national intelligence, which is fine, but now President Obama says he has “more confidence” in John Brennan? This is the man who wants to go looking for moderates in Hezbollah, who do not exist, and promote them within the organization, which he could not do even if they were real. We can’t monkey with Hezbollah’s org chart any more than we can Al Qaeda’s or the Iranian government’s.

I’d have a little more faith in the Obama Administration’s foreign policy officials if they demonstrated more consistent knowledge of Middle East 101.

WALTER DURANTY COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: “The Pulitzer Board’s Mysterious Aversion To Rupert Murdoch And the Wall Street Journal.”

WONDERFUL. WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Hugo Chavez vows to continue financial crackdown in Venezuela.

TIMELESS ADVICE, DISPENSED BY MEN WITH VERY WIDE TIES: A time capsule 1970 edition of the David Susskind Show, with Mel Brooks, David Steinberg, and George Segal on “How to be a Jewish Son:”

POLITICS’ SAD LEXICON: Bill Kristol On “Marx, Keynes, Pelosi;” it’s sort of like Tinkers to Evers to Chance, except all the plays only bounce around the left side of the infield.

DON’T TRUST A CONGRESSMAN OVER THE AGE OF 50. Of course, the first four words of that sentence work also pretty well all by themselves.

US CIVILIAN TARGET NO. 1: “AQ Imam Anwar al-Awlaki calls for the killing of U.S. civilians. He is ID’d in the AP headline as a Yemeni cleric, but in fact he is a US citizen. So I say, good, if anyone’s going to kill U.S. civilians, let’s start with him. Because petard hoistmanship is fun!”

HELL ON THE MEDITERRANEAN: “An iron curtain of a strict theocracy is slowly descending on Gaza, but many human rights proponents still prefer to depict it as the embattled bastion of freedom fighters.”

NEWS FROM THE DIGITAL DISTAFF DEPARTMENT: “The 15 Hottest Conservative Women In The New Media.”

LIFE IMITATES ART? At Barcepundit, Jose Guardia writes:

MY LAW STUDIES are a bit rusty, but I’d say he’s got a strong case:

Author/filmmaker, J. Neil Schulman, today announced his intention to file a lawsuit for copyright infringement of his 1979 novel, Alongside Night, which tells the story of the collapse of the American economy due to massive government overspending and the issuing of unbacked money and credit to pay the interest on the national debt.

He plans to sue for plagiarism both the executive and legislative branches of the US government, the courts, plus the Federal Reserve Bank, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and General Motors. Oh, and Greece.

“Just look at TV news or read a newspaper,” Schulman said. “Plot point after plot point is identical. In my 1979 novel I have General Motors go bankrupt — General Motors then files for bankruptcy. I have Europe issue a common currency in my novel called the ‘eurofranc’ — the European Union then goes and issues the ‘euro.’ In my novel I have a European Chancellor, based in France, accuse the U.S. President of having the monetary policies of a banana republic — then the President of the European Union — also based in France — slams U.S. plans to spend its way out of recession as ‘a road to hell’ and says President Barack Obama’s massive stimulus package and banking bailout ‘will undermine the liquidity of the global financial market.’ The copycat nature of all these plot points and dialogue” — says Schulman — “could not be more obvious!”

You can download the novel here if you’re fast (he’s giving away 100,000 copies, and so far 87,000 have been taken).

Meanwhile, this New York Times headline could easily be paraphrased as “Europe Bankrupt; Liberals, Progressives Hardest Hit.”

DARIUSZ TOLCZYK AT THE NEW CRITERION on Russia’s persistent unwillingness to fully face up to the mass murder of tens of thousands of Polish military officers and intellectuals in the Katyn forest by Stalin’s NKVD in 1940.

THE ALLURE OF A LIFE TRANSFORMED: “Few sentiments are at once as honest and as absurd as the one that moves us to declare: ‘Life would be perfect if I lived in that house.’”

DON’T IMMANENTIZE THE ESCHATON.

PRICES RANGE FROM $21.50 to $360: “Hear the Dalai Lama Speak About Why He’s Marxist and Not Capitalist; Tickets on Sale Now!”

TWEET OF THE DAY: “Mr. Gibbs, Obama is the top recipient of British Petrolium PAC & individual money over the past 20 years. Dispute these facts.”

LOOK WHO’S COMING TO THE TEA PARTY: Andrew Cuomo ditches his old man’s rhetoric and legacy, and attempts to impersonate Chris Christie in his bid to become Empire State emperor.

No word yet on when Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, Charles Blow, Roger Ebert, Janeane Garofalo and Joan Walsh will declare him a racist, though.

UPDATE: The Blog Prof has a reminder of Cuomo’s past that he’d like to keep buried in the Memory Hole: “Will the paper of record remember? Will New Yorkers?”

YES VIRGINIA, THERE IS A CULTURE WAR.

ONTARIO BANS DAN AYKROYD’S SKULL-SHAPED VODKA:

The clear-glass skull gazes out from the liquor shelves with a decidedly un-cadaverous smile. Save for the inch-long spout and knobby cork that protrude from its pate, Crystal Head Vodka’s distinctive bottle shape looks remarkably life-like, a curiosity you’d expect to see in a droll chiropractor’s office.

Or maybe that should be remarkably death-like, because that’s the Liquor Control Board of Ontario’s interpretation. And human remains do not convey the most tactful marketing message when your goal is to be a virtuous vendor of beverage alcohol.

Evidently, only the state is allowed to associate vice with death-related imagery.

Meanwhile, south of the 49th parallel, “What was it the hippies said? Never trust anybody over 30? Advice to DC women: Never trust anybody over 30 who expects the government to buy his condoms.”

(H/T: 5’F)

BEWARE OF BORDERS: Three American hikers arrested last summer for crossing into Iran from Iraq are now being called spies by the Iranian government. They aren’t, of course. Our intelligence agencies are too sophisticated to send people in country that way, but Tehran finds them useful and is now proposing a prisoner swap.

Years ago I walked right up to the Iranian border from the Iraqi side with a colleague, and we retreated the instant we sensed we were within grabbing distance of Iranian border guards. In hindsight, getting even that close may have been a little too daring.

JOB CREATION, OR THE LACK THEREOF: Lying with Statistics Again.

PARTISAN SENATE NOMINEE FLAILS ON MEET THE PRESS: Rand Paul? No, the other partisan Senate nominee, Hugh Hewitt writes:

Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee Joe Sestak turned in a horrible, halting and dissembling performance on this morning’s Meet The Press, even though host David Gregory let him get away with a simple acknowledgment of a job offer from the Obama Administration to get out of the primary he won against Arlen Specter and a stonewall on the details of who offered what to the Congressman.  There is a very good argument that the offer is itself a crime, and it is hard to imagine Gregory and the MSM refusing to force answers out of a GOP nominee for senate in 2008, 2006, 2004 or 2002 who had been offered such a deal by President Bush or Karl Rove.

Sestak’s hard left record and agenda will dominate much of the commentary around the November race against Pat Toomy, but the MSM’s lay down on this story is an amazing example of the double standard that dominates Beltway media when it comes to covering the Obama Administration.

Once the dust settled on the 2008 race, these sorts of double-standards ceased to be amazing, and become the accepted coin of the realm in MSM land, sad to say.

UPDATE: More at Hot Air.

IT’S A BIT LATE FOR THAT: “Obama Tries to Inoculate the U.S. Against Contagion from Euroland.”

Euroland inculcated at least half of America quite some time ago.

Today’s photo of the day is of the Aliak Glacier in Resurrection Bay, near Seward, Alaska.

I SURE HOPE HE’S WRONG: Christopher Booker says of the Euro crisis, “We have still scarcely begun to wake up to the gravity of the crisis now upon us, not just for the eurozone but also for us here in Britain and for the entire global economy.”