CHANGE: Android Share Of Mobile Web Use Soaring, iPhone Falling.

ED DRISCOLL: Building A Bridge To The 13th Century.

Plus more on eliminationist rhetoric from our self-described “betters.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Congressional ‘Charities’ Rake in Millions from Business.

CHANGE: Muslim Americans missing George W. Bush. Hey, join the club, pal.

HOME DEFENSE: 69-Year-Old Grandma Shoots Intruder With Her .38 Special. “Police quickly determined that 18-year-old Michael O’Neal Bynum, a neighbor of Jones’, was a suspect. He is in stable condition at the hospital after being treated for a gunshot wound to his abdomen. Bynum was on probation for a previous burglary conviction, and will be charged with second-degree burglary and held without bail.”

TUNKU VARADARAJAN: Obama’s Vanishing Sex Appeal. “After he turned on America as a candidate, reality has finally caught up with the president—twenty months into office, Obama stands exposed as a floundering Man, not a panacea-laden Superman. . . . In office, as his political aura diminished, so did his sexual magnetism. In fact, it was at about the time when the Gulf of Mexico first came to be awash in BP oil that the rig of Obama’s sex appeal collapsed, too. With presidential impotence so plain to behold, no amount of political Viagra could have done the trick.”

FROM BEN CUNNINGHAM, A roundup of Tea Party news from all over.

IT PAYS to be crazed.

JONATHAN ADLER ON BEDBUGS, THE EPA, AND FEDERALISM. “If local communities wish to strike a different risk balance than the feds, the EPA should not stand in their way. It is one thing for the EPA to inform local choices, and help clarify the relevant health trade-offs, quite another to impose one set of health preferences on the nation as a whole. If EPA’s resistance to propoxur was motivated by spillover concerns, such as potential groundwater pollution that could cross state lines, the federal rule would make sense. But it is not and does not. This is precisely the sort of environmental problem which state and local preferences should control.”

The real lesson of the bedbug epidemic is this: Once, the government’s primary role was protecting us from things like that. Now its primary role is stopping us from fixing them.

TIME: Those Jews Sure Like Money, Don’t They?

OOPS: Research finds repressed memories don’t exist. A big “sorry-o” to all those folks who got sent to jail based on testimony that they do . . . . Plus this: “False memories can easily be created by inept therapists.”

BYRON YORK: Obama’s ‘pivot’ to the economy comes far too late.

FROM RAND SIMBERG, more thoughts on eliminationist rhetoric and the left.

DEBATING THE SIGNALING MODEL OF EDUCATION: “Bryan argues that a large part of our education spending (perhaps as much as 80%) is socially wasteful ‘signaling.’ It is a kind of arms race where students try to get more education than than their rivals in order to signal their conscientiousness, conformity, and intelligence to potential employers. Crucially, however, much of the information learned is actually not needed for their careers; the real objective is just to rack up better-looking credentials than the Joneses in order to look good to employers. Both sides make many good points. Overall, I am not persuaded by Bryan’s argument, at least not yet.” Well, as the higher education bubble talk grows, we’re certain to hear more on this.

Plus, some related numbers from Points And Figures.

“AM I A DOG, THAT YOU COME AT ME WITH STICKS?”

“They talk about me like a dog.”

Reader Melissa Lambert emails: “I think the Army of Davids are getting to him.”

UPDATE: “They talk about me like a dog, talk about the clothes I wear. But they don’t realize, they’re the ones who’s square.” So there.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Treacher: “Dogs are capable of learning.”

Plus, “You just threw that in, then. But why?”

“Something weird happens when presidencies go wrong.”

MORE: Ed Rendell: “Obama feels sort of unloved.”

MORE STILL: An earlier manifestation. Plus this: “That’s why Presidents usually act Presidential. Not so much because it’s dignified. But because it’s smart. That’s something that Obama, with his limited experience on the national stage, hasn’t figured out yet.” If you make your presidency all about you, it will be a small presidency.

Plus, from the comments at Althouse, Obama, The Thin-Skinned President. And a lack of experience taking criticism. “Not surprisingly, Obama’s thin skin leads to self pity.”

STILL MORE: What goes around, comes around.

Ben Cunningham: “We don’t have a President, we have a paranoid, petulant child.”

Reader Brett Rogers writes: “For all the talk about Obama being Spock, Spock never whined. Plus, Spock was good at math . . . ”

And reader Pat Gang is offended by my reference, above: “No man who wears ‘mom jeans’ has any business channeling Jimi Hendrix.”

FALL MARKDOWNS ON Men’s Coats And Jackets.

HAPPY LABOR DAY: “This weekend we celebrate Labor Day in a country divided between two kinds of workers. The first is the private-sector worker, the vulnerable one who rides the business cycle without shock absorbers. The second worker, who works for the government, lives a cushioned existence in which terminations take years, pension amounts are often guaranteed, and recessions are only thunder in the distance. Yet worse than this division is the knowledge that the private-sector worker will pay for public-sector comfort with ever higher taxes.”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

I’ve been reading your blog for years and I appreciate your nuanced brand of conservatism. But lately, your attack on public pensions has me concerned. Look at it from my perspective:

When I graduated from law school and applied for a job at a Federal agency almost 30 years ago, the deal was simple: “We won’t pay you as much as you might make in the private sector, but you’ll get reasonable pay, great benefits including a generous retirement system, and a reasonable work life.” I took the deal. I started at a salary of around $20,000, or around one quarter of what new associates at big to mid-sized firms were making then. My first office was a cubicle with a WWII era metal desk. I worked hard, though rarely on weekends after my kids were born. I’ve had jobs writing administrative decisions, counseling auditors, as committee counsel on Capitol Hill, and most recently as a relatively low-level administrative law judge. My salary is now around $150,000. It makes for a good living for my family, but is not comparable to the salaries that most of my law school classmates, with comparable academic standing, now make. It is not even in the same ballpark as the salaries the big-firm lawyers who routinely appear before me make. One of them lives up the street from me in a much nicer house. But, I’m happy with the deal I made 30 years ago. I’ve had a good career and in a few years, I’ll be eligible for a comfortable retirement (although I still won’t be able to afford the house of the guy up the street).

Apparently though, some people, in and out of government, are no longer happy with the deal. Complaints and warnings about government pensions and pensioners abound. Typically, the narrative is something along the lines of: “Greedy Retired Bureaucrats Still Feeding at the Public Trough as Taxpayers Suffer!”

Well, if you’re concerned about unfunded government liabilities, I agree with you. If you think that government employee pensions are too generous, I’ll listen to what you have to say. But if you just don’t like the deal the government made 30 years ago and want out, I’ll see you in court.

Well, my pension certainly isn’t gold-plated, alas. It’s a defined-contribution plan, which is probably why Tennessee isn’t broke. But look at those overgenerous, and underfunded public pension plans in the places I’ve been writing about, like California, Illinois, and New Jersey, and you see a very different story. The federal retirement system — I had a post on this a while back, but I can’t seem to find it — works more like Tennessee’s, which is one thing to be thankful for as we ponder the Federal government’s general approach to insolvency. And public employees, overall, are no longer paid less.

But the Amity Shlaes passage above is factually true: Where people in the private sector have been economically hammered — and simultaneously vilified by the President — there hasn’t been any recession for the public sector. Perhaps pointing that out makes me a class traitor, but so be it. There hasn’t been much of that “shared sacrifice” in the public sector. And here’s a pre-election post on shared sacrifice from 2008.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Kevin Murphy emails:

Maybe 30 years ago the “deal” was security in exchange for low pay, but today that is not the case at all. According to the US Government’s own figures, compensation (pay plus benefits) for the average federal employee is twice that of the average private sector worker. And, yes, that includes the military. Note that a good deal of the run up happened under Bush’s watch.

I’ve compiled the relevant data here.

I expect we’ll hear more of this as the budget crisis develops. I’ll just note that Chrysler bondholders thought they had a deal, too . . . .

MORE: “Dear Public Pensioners.”

See… businesses, people, and yes even governments too, that spend way, way, way more money than they make do this thing called “going broke.” When that happens the creditors of the “broke” entity take what is called “a bath.” . . . Those decisions will be made as follows. The least politically powerful people will be screwed first and hardest. The most politically powerful people will be screwed last and least.

All that means that grandma and grandpa, and the physically disabled as well, had better not be too reliant upon their government checks for food. Next will come, I am sorry to say, public employees. After them, the fat cats and wheeler dealers ( that’s right, public employees, the people that organized your unions) will take their bath. But you can bet it won’t be as hot or as thorough as the bath you’re going to take. Last and least will come the elected officials who will, amazingly, emerge from the whole mess completely unscathed. That’s how it’s going to work. I don’t tell you this because I dislike you. I tell you because I figure maybe you can use the warning to plan ahead, and buy lots of canned goods and a wood stove.

Ouch. Read the whole thing.

ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: James Lee is Al Gore is Prince Charles is the Unabomber. “What’s really depressing is that the philosophy expressed in James Lee’s (and the Unabomber’s) manifesto – which is also, incidentally, the philosophy expressed in Al Gore’s The Earth In Balance – is also the philosophy that is taught every day to our children in their schools: the world is fragile; human beings are a blot on the landscape; through our greed and selfishness we make everything worse; really it would be better if we vanished altogether and let all the lovely pure noble animals take over.”

CAN COFFEE DRINKING COUNTERACT high blood pressure?

HAS ANYONE SEEN RAHM EMANUEL LATELY? Shark caught in Potomac river.

THIS WEEK in the future.

EPIC DOCUMENTARY TV: A one-day-only sale on Ken Burns’ The War and The Civil War.

WHY I’M ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT SPACE EXPLORATION. I mean, duh.

UPDATE: Reader George Poletes writes: “A remarkable video. So unique is Raquel’s sensual beauty here that it succeeds in causing the viewer to overlook completely how painfully ridiculous that dance routine is.” Which is no small feat.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: We Are Ruled By Professors. “The university runs like a 13th-century church in which the heliocentric maverick is a mortal sinner.”

DO CITY LIGHTS boost cancer risk?