RON BAILEY: When is increased “biodiversity” bad? When it’s caused by humans!

NOT JUST A SPECIAL INTEREST, a super special interest!

UPDATE: States not facing teacher layoffs get federal money from education jobs bill anyway.

REVIEWING THE REVIEWERS: A roundup of book reviews from all over.

PJTV: Tracking The Tea Party With Bill Whittle, Scott Ott, and Stephen Green.

TRANSPARENCY! Medicare chief’s ties questioned: Nonprofit’s donors not filed.

HMM: Pimco: US faces real risk of outright deflation. “Pimco, the world’s biggest bond fund manager, has warned the US faces a prolonged period of stagnant growth and a real risk of outright deflation, similar to what Japan experienced in 1990s. Echoing a warning by M&G’s bond team on Monday, Pimco portfolio manager Scott Mather says if a Japan-like deflationary scenario becomes the baseline for the US, it would have ‘profound implications for asset prices’.”

Deflation hurts debtors. The U.S. government is the world’s biggest debtor. Therefore, I’m pretty confident the U.S. government will do everything it can to avoid deflation. Of course, it may not be able to succeed . . . .

UPDATE: Reader Dan Zimmerman emails: “Oh, they’ll succeed. They have the most powerful weapon of mass inflation known to man. Control of the printing presses.” Well, that’s been my take.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Vox Day says that I’m wrong.

JIM TREACHER: Tweeting about sensitivity.

KYLE-ANNE SHIVER: Why Can’t You Selfish Ingrates Feel the First Couple’s Pain?

MORE ON BELL CITY, CALIFORNIA. “In the short run, there will be a push for greater transparency, pay caps and restrictions on pension benefits. These things may quell the immediate outrage over revelations that the city manager of working-class Bell and other top officials earned fat, six-figure incomes. But the truth is, the eye-popping salaries, platinum pensions and lavish perks accorded Rizzo and his colleagues are merely symptoms, not the disease. . . . Self-styled progressives at the turn of the 20th century gave Californians the initiative, referendum and recall as ways of circumventing a Legislature in thrall to powerful business interests. The reformers established local nonpartisan elections in an effort to check the outsize influence of political machines. They envisioned professionally administered cities overseen by men and women trained in the modern science of management. Men like Rizzo, who holds a master’s degree in public administration from Cal State East Bay. Little did the reformers realize a century ago that the civil servants would themselves become predatory interests, preying on the private sector and the taxpayer.”

Related: How much do your City officials make?

FOUAD AJAMI: The Obsolescence Of Barack Obama. “The magic of 2008 can’t be recreated, and good riddance to it. Slowly, the nation has recovered its poise. There is a widespread sense of unstated embarrassment that a political majority, if only for a moment, fell for the promise of an untested redeemer—a belief alien to the temperament of this so practical and sober a nation.”

Also, JournoList is over.

CALIFORNIA UPDATE: “John ‘Cobol’ Chiang, the state controller who is unable to fix his paycheck-cutting devices to reduce state employee payments, nevertheless reports that the state managed to spend a billion dollars more than projected during in the month of July.”

BYRON YORK: Cut deficit without cutting services? Start here.

Whenever a conservative suggests reducing the federal deficit by cutting spending rather than raising taxes, there’s always someone to ask: Well, what would you cut? Americans may say they want less government spending, the argument goes, but they don’t want anyone to touch their services and subsidies and monthly checks.

Fair enough. But there’s a persuasive counter-argument going around in conservative circles these days: You can start cutting government spending without cutting anyone’s services or subsidies or monthly checks. Just bring the pay of federal workers into line with pay in the private sector.

Well, the Obama folks have been saying that everyone is going to have to sacrifice.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: Is the Senate becoming riper for a Republican takeover? “Surging challenges to two Democratic incumbents – Patty Murray in Washington and Russ Feingold in Wisconsin – are a reason that chances for Republican takeover of the US Senate may be rising in Election 2010.” Nice press, kid. Don’t get cocky.

BRITAIN DEALS WITH ITS OWN PENSION PROBLEMS: Millions face 25% cut in pensions as inflation rules for final salary schemes are changed. The “25%” cut isn’t immediate, though: “A scheme member on a pension of £10,000 a year would get £25,270 a year in 20 years’ time if the payments were linked to RPI. But using CPI means the same pension will be worth just £18,875 a year after two decades in retirement, according to calculations by investment company Hargreaves Lansdown.”

POST: Rangel’s Excuses Don’t Hold Up. “Let’s be honest: Charlie Rangel brought this entire mess on himself. He may not like the consequences, but he has only one person to blame: Charlie Rangel.”

JOHN ARAVOSIS channels Steely Dan.

THEM THAT HAS, GETS: Congress Takes Food from Poor People to Win Teachers Union Votes.

LOOKING BACK TO 2008: Moody’s: Money Market Accounts Were in Worse Trouble Than We Thought.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Greg Gutfeld, Genius!

BIG GOVERNMENT: Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher’s Failed Defense of the ‘N-Word’ Lie Dismantled. With video.

FROM JOURNOLIST TO JOURNOBOSS: Confirmed: GE CEO Immelt Scolded NBC Journalists For Reporting Negatively on Obama. It’s like it’s just a bunch of organized and choreographed propaganda or something.

SHOCKER: Government finds no electronic defects in runaway Toyotas ‘so far’. P.J. O’Rourke was unavailable for comment.

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

NOT FEELING THE LOVE FOR PUBLIC EMPLOYEES FROM GAWKER. Only Government Bloodsuckers Made More Money Last Year.

SPIN CONTROL: “Michelle Obama’s Spanish vacation is evidently polling badly, so the administration decided to spin her visit by slipping the ‘inside story’ of the vacation to a friendly journalist. . . . Obama’s calls for sacrifice are much like those of Al Gore. It would be easier to take them seriously if Obama himself showed any inclination to set an example. . . . Next year, President Obama will ask you to make a sacrifice to address the fiscal crisis—he is going to raise your taxes. When that happens, bear in mind that he himself has not been willing to make even a token, symbolic gesture in the direction of economy.”