VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Truths We Dare Not Speak.

FROM THE CREEPY TOYS DEPARTMENT: The Playmobil Security Checkpoint. The customer reviews are the best part. My favorite: “I am holding out for the release of the Guantanemo Playset. Hopefully this will come with an extrordinary rendition option.”

TOPPED OUT! Have Americans Stopped Getting Fatter? “We may have hit the biological limit on how fat we can get: virtually everyone who is going to be obese, already is. Obviously, this is not terrific news, especially in a country as opposed to body fat as ours. But it suggests that, as usual, panicking over mindless trend extrapolations might be a little premature.” A number of commenters, however, suggest that it’s economics that’s producing skinnier (well, no fatter) Americans.

Meanwhile, when I read William Forstchen’s One Second After, with its graphic descriptions of starving Americans, it did cause me to look differently at the fat folks at the mall for a while . . . .

HEATHER MACDONALD: Chicago’s Real Crime Story: Why decades of community organizing haven’t stemmed the city’s youth violence.

IN CALIFORNIA: Tire Inflation Nazis. You’d think their budget problems would encourage them to prioritize. But then, if they could do that, they might not have such budget problems to begin with.

MISTAKES a high-school newspaper wouldn’t make.

LONDON TIMES: ‘Safe’ Kennedy seat now up for grabs. “Even a narrow loss for the Republicans, in what should be one of the safest Senate seats in the country, would be seen as disastrous for the Democrats, who are haemorrhaging the support of the independent-minded centrists who swept Mr Obama to power.”

Yes. Whether Scott Brown manages an upset or not, the closeness of this supposed-to-be-safe race demonstrates the Democrats’ problems.

MOE LANE: Harold Ford politely declares war on Democratic Establishment.

THE CASE OF THE HAUNTED SCROTUM. From the comments: “Worst Hardy Boys mystery ever.” Heh.

RADLEY BALKO ON MARTHA COAKLEY’S TROUBLING CAREER AS A PROSECUTOR:

Last year, Coakley chose to personally argue her state’s case before the Supreme Court in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts. Despite the recent headlines detailing forensic mishaps, fraudulent testimony and crime lab incompetence, Coakley argued that requiring crime lab technicians to be present at trial for questioning by defense attorneys would place too large a burden on prosecutors. The Supreme Court found otherwise, in a decision that had Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia coming down on Coakley’s left.

The Melendez-Diaz case wasn’t an anomaly. Coakley has made her reputation as a law-and-order prosecutor. More troubling, she’s shown a tendency to aggressively push the limits of the law in high-profile cases and an unwillingness to cop to mistakes — be they her own or those of other prosecutors . . . Wall Street Journal reporter Dorothy Rabinowitz, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of bogus sex abuse cases, recently told The Boston Globe of the Amirault case, “Martha Coakley was a very, very good soldier who showed she would do anything to preserve this horrendous assault on justice.” According to journalist Mark Pendergrast, Coakley herself prosecuted another questionable child abuse case in 1993, using the same recovered-memory testimony and now-discredited methods of questioning children to convict Ray and Shirley Souza of molesting their grandchildren.

It’s probably not surprising, then, that as DA in Middlesex County, Coakley opposed efforts to create an innocence commission in Massachusetts, calling the idea “backward-looking instead of forward-looking.” Of course, that’s sort of the point — to find people who have been wrongfully convicted. So far, there have been at least 23 exonerations in Massachusetts, including several in Coakley’s home county.

Read the whole thing.

JOHN YOO VS. JON STEWART: “The popular left is just beginning to cognize the perils of having a jokester as one of its prime disseminators of political information.”

UPDATE: So much for Alinsky’s Rule 5.

“YOU’RE SCREWED.”

NEWT GINGRICH: You know who’s a GOP frontrunner for 2012? Me!

TRAGEDY IN HAITI: The American Response.

SCOTT JOHNSON: “Whittle and PJTV go where 60 Minutes fears to tread.”

ANN ALTHOUSE: Why does Markos Moulitsas think oral sex is some kind of vice? “Shouldn’t a liberal be more accepting of various sexual practices?” I, on the other hand, am on the record as being proudly pro-sodomy. (Which makes me pretty unusual, judging from Google. Who knew?) [LATER: From the comments: “See, the vice? Not so bad. But a vise? Yes, painful painful.”]

Plus, What the hell’s wrong with Pat Robertson?

UPDATE: Robertson video. Plus this: “He may be a crank, but he’s consistent in his crankery. Anywhere there’s human misery — after 9/11, after Katrina, even after Ariel Sharon’s stroke — Reverend Pat will be there to explain to the victims why they deserved it. . . . According to the Harry Reid standard, shouldn’t Robertson’s charitable works absolve him from any and all offensive utterances?”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ilya Somin:

It seems that Robertson has learned nothing from the outcry generated by his 2001 comments endorsing Jerry Falwell’s claim that the 9/11 attacks were a punishment that God inflicted on America because of “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, [and] People For the American Way.” . . . As a fellow Yale Law School graduate, I’d have to say that the Reverend Robertson isn’t one of our alma mater’s more impressive products.

Indeed.

ARLEN SPECTER will now support Dawn Johnsen.

MARKDOWNS ON exercise and fitness gear.

INSTAVISION: Is Obama Flexing His Jeffersonian Muscle? I talk with Walter Russell Mead about Jimm Carter, Barack Obama, Jacksonian foreign policy, and the future.

THE BUSH YEARS: A golden era for gay Americans?

JIM TREACHER: You haven’t lived until you’ve done Jell-O shots with Paul Begala. Actually, I think you haven’t lived until you’ve done Jell-O shots with Jim Treacher. . . .

JOHN HINDERAKER: Hey, Vladimir, Man Up!

FROM J. STORRS HALL, a roundup of nanotechnology commentary.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE: What happens when the dots are connected.

THE TRUTH ABOUT “DIGITAL SWEAT SHOPS:” “The fear is that online labor markets, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, allow unscrupulous employers to exploit disadvantaged workers. The truth appears somewhat different.”