FEAR AND LOATHING IN AMERICA’S RULING CLASS: If you missed it on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio yesterday, the latest PJM Political is online, with guests Angelo Codevilla, Austin Bay, and more.

THE HILL: Democrats can’t agree over killing or saving the Bush-era tax cuts. “Democrats are undercutting their campaign message by condemning Republican economic policies while calling for the extension of Bush-era tax cuts.”

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: New York Times delivers predictably hackish piece on Beck/Tea Party rally. “No matter what you do, Tea Partiers, Kate Zernike will call you racist.”

SILICON VALLEY’S DARK SECRET: It’s All About Age.

An interesting paradox in the technology world is that there is both a shortage and a surplus of engineers in the United States. Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives?

The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers. And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are.

Read the whole thing.

TAXPROF: Where Do State And Local Governments Get Their Tax Revenue?

CHARLIE MARTIN: Glenn Beck Rally: How Big Was the Crowd?

THE LIGHTBULB GOES ON.

HOW TO get rid of fruit flies.

THE PJTV REPORT: Danika/Brandi/Alexis/Kruiser. One of These Things Is Not Like The Other. They’re soliciting audience suggestions and comments for this show.

WHAT A BEAR MARKET IN HOUSING looks like.

STEPHEN GREEN: The Ridicule Is Both Obvious and Ineffective.

ROGER SIMON: Islamophobiaphobia.

MORE ON KATRINA: Media Myths: Give The Press A D- On Post-Katrina Coverage.

JAMES TARANTO ON THE SPREAD OF Oikophobia among the “cognitive elite.”

The British philosopher Roger Scruton has coined a term to describe this attitude: oikophobia. Xenophobia is fear of the alien; oikophobia is fear of the familiar: “the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours.’ ” . . .

There is one important difference between the American oik and his European counterpart. American patriotism is not a blood-and-soil nationalism but an allegiance to a country based in an idea of enlightened universalism. Thus our oiks masquerade as–and may even believe themselves to be–superpatriots, more loyal to American principles than the vast majority of Americans, whom they denounce as “un-American” for feeling an attachment to their actual country as opposed to a collection of abstractions.

Yet the oiks’ vision of themselves as an intellectual aristocracy violates the first American principle ever articulated: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .”

This cannot be reconciled with the elitist notion that most men are economically insecure bitter clinging intolerant bigots who need to be governed by an educated elite. Marxism Lite is not only false; it is, according to the American creed, self-evidently false.

Read the whole thing.

PEGGY NOONAN: Who is this Obama guy, anyway?

All of this strikes people, understandably, as perplexing. “I don’t get what he’s doing.” Which becomes, in time, “I don’t get who he is.” In an atmosphere of such questioning they’ll consider any and all possibilities, including, apparently, that he is a Muslim. Which, according to a recent Pew poll, 18% think he is. That is up from 11% in February 2009.

Liberals and the left are indignant about this, and angry. For a week all you heard from cable anchors was “PEOPLE think OBAMA is a MUSLIM. It’s in the POLLS. How do you EXPLAIN it?” Every time I heard it, I’d think: Maybe it’s because you keep screaming it.

Indeed. Of course, if Obama is such a mystery, maybe people in the press — like Peggy Noonan — should have given him closer scrutiny before the election.

JUSTICE HARLAN vs. Justice Sotomayor.

MARKDOWNS ON DVD and Blu-Ray releases.

CLAIM: Massive solar storm to hit Earth in 2012 with ‘force of 100m bombs’. “Similar storms back in 1859 and 1921 caused worldwide chaos, wiping out telegraph wires on a massive scale. The 2012 storm has the potential to be even more disruptive.”

There’s some dispute, but it seems to me that timing isn’t the issue. Now that many think such a flare is likely sooner or later, we should be hardening up the power grids, etc. now.

CHARGING THE WASHINGTON POST with “subliminal deception.”

Related: A whole lot of people seem to be using the same phrase to describe this event. Must’ve gone out via whatever’s replaced JournoList . . . . .

MORE ON THAT SALISBURY, NORTH CAROLINA WAR AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHY CASE, from the Washington Examiner.

But to arrest someone who is unmistakably on their own property, and doing nothing remotely illegal, is an abuse of power pure and simple. Even if it were true that Gibson was endangering herself by witnessing the traffic stop from the confines of her front porch, how could that possibly be construed as “resisting arrest” or “obstructing the police” without eviscerating everything that the concept of private property (not to mention plain old individual rights) stands for? Taking such a risk is not illegal. Doing it while occupying one’s homestead should be recognized as unassailably within one’s rights.

Since it appears that neither the police nor the district attorney’s office can be shamed into refraining from such power abuses, perhaps it will take a fat lawsuit for violations of Gibson’s (et al.) constitutional rights to get their attention.

Indeed.

STEVEN GREENHUT: HOW BAD IS U.S. PENSION DEBT? Some FAQs that explore just how serious the problem is. Greenhut also has a book.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Should women be allowed to go topless?

RAND SIMBERG: Repeating Myths Of A Flawed NASA Past:

In the new plan, NASA will no longer be spending all its scarce resources (and in the coming fiscal austerity, it’s a safe bet that those resources will be getting even more scarce) on developing an unnecessary new rocket and capsule for its own use to get to orbit. Instead, it will be purchasing that service at much lower cost, allowing it to focus its resources on actually sending people beyond earth orbit, and to do things that it hasn’t done before. \The new policy will actually allow NASA, finally, to live up to the model of free enterprise and competition that Mr. Adams mistakenly thought was in place for the past half century.

In fact, I predict that the next expedition to replicate the circumlunar voyage of Apollo 8 will be a private one, and that it will happen within a decade. Meanwhile, rather than repeating what it did forty-plus years ago with the low-risk (but high-cost) technologies represented by Constellation (aka “Apollo on Steroids,” but actually Apollo on Geritol), NASA will finally be going far beyond Apollo and getting on with true human deep-space exploration, while helping the rest of us get on with the actual development and settlement of space.

Read the whole thing.

I SUSPECT WE’LL SEE MORE OF THIS: Bruce Kesler: I Just Disinherited My Alma Mater.

HURRICANE KATRINA, Five Years Later.

And while we’re reminiscing, let’s remember Lou Dolinar’s expose of how the media blew it.