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

REASON TV: Will The Feds Ban Your Pain Meds?

RECURSION: Hitler makes a Hitler parody YouTube video.

BRR: Lake Erie Frozen Over for the first time since 1995/96.

TEA PARTIES IN IDAHO: An Idahoan responds to the NYT.

CREATING quark-gluon plasma.

GOING GREEN: Tesla CEO Musk used private jet 12 times to lobby Washington for DOE loans. I don’t want to hear any more about my carbon footprint . . . .

NICK GILLESPIE: Even More Farm Subsidies For People Named Mellencamp.

MILKTOAST NATION? Some of the stories retold sometimes makes it seem our world is in danger, not of becoming too dangerous but of becoming too safe. And the media role therein.

IN THE MAIL: Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture.

COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW ON U.S. COVERAGE OF CLIMATEGATE: Articles still fall short of ambitious work in the U.K. Ya think?

SO YESTERDAY I COMPARED THE RESPONSE TO CLIMATEGATE TO THE BELLESILES SCANDAL. Now all the fraud, critical “lost” data, suppression of criticism and so on doesn’t prove that there’s no global warming — people can lie about things that, nonetheless, turn out to be true — but it has to induce a certain degree of skepticism. So what should we do?

Nothing. At least, in my opinion, we should continue to try to minimize the use of fossil fuels regardless. Burning coal and oil is filthy, and they’re more valuable as chemical feedstocks anyway. We should be building nuclear plants and pursuing efficiencies in the shorter term, while working on better solar (including orbital solar), wind, etc. power supplies for the longer term. That doesn’t mean “hairshirt” environmentalism, where the goal is for neo-puritans to denounce people for immorality and trumpet their own superiority. It just means good sense.

I actually had a long post on this here and Amory Lovins has it right: “He also says — and I agree — that it doesn’t matter whether you believe ‘peak oil’ catastrophe scenarios because you ought to be doing the same thing anyway.”

UPDATE: Rand Simberg responds: “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

INDIANA: It’s not the people’s seat, it’s the Bayh Seat!

ROGER KIMBALL: Obamaville: The Next Kettle For The Tea Party?

JULES CRITTENDEN ON Amy Bishop and the Massachusetts justice system. “It all sounds bizarre … the circumstances in this case maybe a little more bizarre than usual, but not by much. That kind of thing actually happens a lot around here. Killers and rapists being let off, and going to to kill or rape again. It’s our special gift to the nation.”

DOWN WITH small business?

MARK TAPSCOTT: Obama’s Misleading Jobs Rhetoric.

DON SURBER: “I’ll be upfront with readers: The only reason I am posting this rumor is it is an excuse to run this picture.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: “The answer as to why I have health insurance is simple: my employer pays for it. If my employer didn’t pay for it, I wouldn’t have it. I’d buy a catastrophic policy from a reputable insurer to cover any amount that might bankrupt me, and self-insure for everything else. That would probably cost me a little more than what I pay The Atlantic for my first-dollar coverage, so I opt for the first-dollar coverage. It’s not like I get the money The Atlantic is spending on my benefits back if I choose to go without.”

IRA STOLL: The New York Times on the Tea Party Movement. “The whole thing is sad; that the Times seems unable to give a reasonably sympathetic hearing to Americans mad at Wall Street, Washington, Republicans and Democrats but instead travels to Idaho to interview and emphasize what it depicts as a particularly strange group of them.”

It’s as if they made Amy Bishop a representative of Obama supporters. But they’d never do that, because it wouldn’t fit the narrative would be an unfair “smear.”

UPDATE: Reader Stephen Clark writes:

Tea Partiers might rejoice in the hope that this really does reflect the view of the NY Times readership. The Times coverage of this and other political developments has merely kept its readership uninformed and unprepared. Perhaps it’s best to view the Times as providing comfort similar to that provided by the ship’s orchestra for passengers on the sinking Titanic.

But less heroically . . . .

CONNECTICUT: Dick Blumenthal distances himself from Obama. “Blumenthal is far more popular than President Obama in Connecticut, noted Doug Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, in a separate interview.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The New York Times’ river of denial. What’s missing in today’s Science Times? Not much, just, you know, any mention whatsoever of the ClimateGate scandal . . . .

CHANGE: Unionized Rhode Island Teachers Refuse To Work 25 Minutes More Per Day, So Town Fires All Of Them. “The teachers at the high school make $70,000-$78,000, as compared to a median income in the town of $22,000. This exemplifies a nationwide trend in which public sector workers make far more than their private-sector counterparts (with better benefits).”

UPDATE: Public Workers Feel No Pain In Recession.

ENTERING The Wieners Circle.