BOINGBOING: Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim now one of largest NY Times shareholders. “He’s a controversial fellow. Slim’s net wealth equals about 2% of Mexico’s total yearly economic output. Mexican telcom Telmex, of which Slim and family own roughly half, charges some of the highest usage fees in the world, according to the OECD.”

MORE ON THE DELAHUNT/AMY BISHOP CONNECTION: “And the next thing you know, Delahunt says he may not run for reelection.” Plus, an interview with Amy Bishop’s husband.

MASSACHUSETTS UPDATE: Scott Brown Was Only The Beginning.

MY ADVICE TO STEELE: Don’t talk. Listen. Michael Steele meeting with 50 Tea Party leaders on Tuesday.

AGING UPDATE: Chromosome Caps Presage The Brain’s Decline. “Elderly people are more likely to develop cognitive problems if their telomeres – the stretches of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes – are shorter than those of their peers.”

HUGH HEWITT: A Conversation With Robert Duvall.

SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE: SETI Opens Its Data To “Citizen Scientists.”

DANCE OF THE LEMONS: L.A. Schools pay bad teachers $50,000 to quit.

IN THE MAIL: Tea with Hezbollah: Sitting at the Enemies’ Table: Our Journey Through the Middle East.

HMM: Delahunt Says He Might Be Next To Go: “US Representative William Delahunt said yesterday that he is considering retiring from his congressional seat representing the South Shore and Cape Cod, although he portrayed his deliberations as routine and said they are not related to challenges from Republicans who are energized by Scott Brown’s upset victory in last month’s special Senate election.”

WANT TO GIVE ME A HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY? (And hey, who doesn’t, really?) Subscribe to PJTV.

MICHAEL BARONE: Why The House Democrats Are About 100 Votes Short.

CHARTS: Unemployment In The Great Recession.

A TEA PARTY LOGO from Karl Egenberger, who also created the PorkBusters logo.

ABC NEWS EMAILS:

Cheney ‘a complete supporter’ of Obama Afghanistan Strategy

In an exclusive interview this morning on “This Week,” former Vice President Dick Cheney got behind President Barack Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan.

“I’m a complete supporter of what they are doing in Afghanistan. I think the President made the right decision to send troops into Afghanistan,” Cheney said. “I thought it took him a while to get there.”

Cheney also praised Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

It’s nice to see Cheney so supportive. . . .

VALENTINE’S DAY, for geeks. Not so sure about the “breathable chocolate.”

TEA PARTY RALLY BRAVES COLD . . . in Orlando?

The frigid Downtown Orlando wind could not keep conservative voters from airing their discontent on the way Washington and Tallahassee politicians are running the show.

President Obama and Democrats were not the only targets of the hundreds of Tea Party activists, as many of those gathered outside of City Hall felt that their own Republican candidates had failed them.

“We’re upset with [both] parties. That’s why we’re standing out here today – we have no friends,” said event-organizer Jason Hoyt of the Tea Party Patriots Live radio show.

Read the whole thing. And, yeah, it’s chilly most everywhere lately.

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY: How Sex Drives Spending. “Valentine’s Day, coming up Sunday, may be a multibillion-dollar industry. But the larger driver of economic progress is the sex drive itself.” I believe that Aristotle Onassis said that if women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.

So does this mean that the war on Valentine’s day could kill the global economy?

TREACHER UPDATE: Tucker Carlson discusses Jim Treacher on FOX’s ‘Red Eye.’

SHOCKER: Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995.

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

Plus, World May Not Be Warming, Say Scientists.

UPDATE: Ann Althouse on skepticism. “It’s the nonskeptics who look bad. It’s not science to be a true believer who wants to ignore new evidence. It’s not science to support a man who has the job of being a scientist but doesn’t adhere to the methods of science.”

Plus, from the comments: “So, can we have our incandescent light bulbs back now?”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a link to the original interview, which the Daily Mail overhypes a bit. But it’s still devastating stuff, particularly the inability to produce the data.

NEW JERSEY’S BIG FAT GOVERNOR shows how it’s done.

FROM MOE LANE, A QUESTION FOR REP. BILL DELAHUNT: Why Did You Put Amy Bishop Back On The Street?

UPDATE: It seems as if, when you’re in trouble in that neck of the woods, you want a Delahunt in your corner.

ANOTHER UPDATE: An Amy Bishop coverup?

LACK OF FORETHOUGHT: Harold Ford Wants to be NY’s Senator, but Hasn’t Paid NY Taxes. On the other hand, he should fit in just fine in Congress. Or maybe he’s holding out for a Cabinet slot . . . .

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH: Ilya Somin on the bipartisan nature of political ignorance.

And, of course, there’s this demonstration.

IF YOU MISSED IT THIS MORNING, check out my Wall Street Journal column on the Tea Party movement.

UPDATE: The flacks at Media Matters challenge my claim that the Tea Party movement has brought millions of Americans to the streets by picking a low-ball number for a single protest and noting that it’s less than a million. This is about as persuasive as most of their work. Nobody knows how many total protesters have turned out, of course, but there have been tea party protests pretty much every week, all over the country, and many of them have been quite large, while some estimates put individual protest days at close to a million. So I think “millions” is a reasonable total estimate. But, then, I don’t work for George Soros.