JULIUS CAESAR OF THE INTERNET: The FCC puts another industry under political control.

ANYTHING SOUND FAMILIAR HERE? A timeline of the Asian Financial Crisis.

NASHVILLE SCENE: Why Did It Take So Long for National Media to Notice We were Flooded?

HEADLINE: Obama Goes Golfing as Nashville Suffers From Biggest Disaster Since Civil War.

NEO-NEOCON: Thoughts On The 50th Anniversary of the Birth Control Pill, inspired by Gail Collins.

Further thoughts from Raquel Welch.

ED DRISCOLL: As Always, Life In The Legacy Media Imitates Orwell.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MCCAIN, WE’D SEE STONEWALLING ON “NATIONAL SECURITY.” And they were right! DOJ Tells Intel Community to Stonewall Members of Congress.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED REPUBLICAN, we’d see Halliburton spinoffs getting half-billion dollar no-bid contracts. And they were right! “KBR Inc. was selected for a no-bid contract worth as much as $568 million through 2011 for military support services in Iraq, the Army said.”

IF SHE WERE A TEA PARTIER, IT WOULD BE A SIGN OF INCIPIENT FASCISM OR SOMETHING: Detroit Free Press editor caught on tape vandalyzing $5M pedestrian link in Detroit, span marred less than 24 hrs after it opened.

WHY IS THE NEW YORK TIMES endorsing tyranny in the name of anti-terrorism?

MEANWHILE, in Nashville.

CHARLES BLOW has written the same column, yet again. They don’t get more persuasive with repetition.

JERRY POURNELLE is having a pledge drive.

AN EVEN MORE POTENT cup of tea.

MOODY’S: U.S. Debt Shock May Hit As Soon As 2013.

What my father said about the bailouts in 2008 seems prophetic: “The bad thing is that the federal government has figured out that it can borrow a lot more money than it previously thought.” For a while. . . .

PANDORA’S BRIEFCASE. The background on this story is also to be found in The Man Who Never Was.

SO I’M NOT AN EXPERT LIKE JOE KLEIN, BUT DOES THIS COUNT AS “SEDITIOUS SPEECH?” UCLA Professor Calls For Mexican Revolution in the United States.

UPDATE: Allahpundit says the video is from 2007. That makes it okay. It’s impossible to commit sedition when a Republican is in the White House!

ANOTHER UPDATE: High school teacher? Still doesn’t change the sedition point.

DAN RIEHL ON the fallout from Utah.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “If the establishment GOP lets itself become back biting spoilers, they are done. No one lives up to deals cut with back biters and spoilers. They don’t have to. They only need them to win, not govern. The GOP old guard need to find themselves a coalition to join. There is only one that has any momentum, and that actually believes the ideals the old guard has pretended to believe, the tea parties. Bennett could have joined them himself, but he chose to brazen it out.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jim Verdolini writes: “His base told him pretty clearly they would not stand for TARP, spending, and ‘compromise’ Health Care Schemes. Bennett, like most of or ‘leadership’ ignored them. Now he is retired. Eventually republican ‘leadership’ will understand that they work for us. Till then they will become ever more extinct.”

MORE: Utah Tea Partier David Kirkham emails: “After convention we walked up on the podium and took this picture. We took over the Utah GOP. All of our candidates were elected today without having to go to a primary (or booted in the case of Bennett). Obama has awakened a sleeping giant.”

REPUBLICAN RANK-AND-FILE TO LEADERSHIP: Don’t Get Cocky. They don’t have a lot to be cocky about, do they?

MICKEY KAUS UPDATE: In California, Could a Blogger Unseat Barbara Boxer?

ILYA SOMIN: Why the Arizona Law is Much Worse than the Federal Law It is Supposedly Based On. Generally, when states try to undertake things that are federal responsibilities, the results will be suboptimal. That’s why it’s so unfortunate when the federal government fails to do its job. I have to say, though, that Ilya’s comments are also a damning indictment of traffic-law enforcement. . . .

MARKDOWNS ON automotive gear. I have to say that this year the pollen is so heavy that I’m actually using the “California Car Duster” I bought a couple of years ago. Heck, I could get out and use it at every stoplight . . . . And allergies are terrible in my household. Why should we suffer just so a bunch of trees can have sex?

SEN. ROBERT BENNETT DEFEATED BY TEA PARTIERS. Utah Tea Party activist David Kirkham writes:

The hall exploded on the announcement Bennett was defeated. I’m sure you’ll see the Utah Tea Party on the news. We went nuts.

I am so exhausted I can’t speak. I’ve lost my voice. We emailed each other all night–no one could sleep all night. On to round 3 between Bridgewater and Lee. The result between them is not important now. Both are great men. Our work in this race is done.

Glenn, please tell all Tea Partiers if they’ll just stand up they CAN really make a difference. Thank you for all you have done. Utah now passes the Tea Party baton to the rest of the nation–use it to beat the RINOS out of office at the ballot box!

Among others.

UPDATE: Here’s a news report.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Richard Fernandez on what it means:

The game was redefined in a single place and time from “one of Republicans versus Democrats” (Romney’s reference) to that of “Small Government versus Big Government”. In isolation the Bennett defeat is insignificant, but it now raises the wider question of whether the ‘Smaller Government’ idea can catch on. If it does then it has the potential to redefine the political landscape in ways that are both a threat and opportunity to different communities.

The Tea Parties represent an asymmetric threat to political organizations optimized for party-line warfare. The threat is no longer across the aisle but outside the building. As such, two possibilities suggest themselves. The first is that the Washington elite will circle the wagons, bury their minor differences and concentrate on keeping the money and power flowing to the capital. A threat from outside the building is after all, a threat to everybody inside the building. The other possibility is that enough members of the elite will realize that jig is up and strive to accommodate themselves to the new reality. In the coming months we are likely to see both gambits. Some politicians will opt to tap the tide; others will seek to master it.

That new reality is driven by economics. The real problem is that Washington — and Brussels globally considered — is running out of Other People’s Money (OPM). The Tea Parties are not the cause but the expression of the underlying problem. By all the standards of power the Tea Parties are a nothing. But that is to misunderstand their nature. The political elite can infiltrate the Tea Parties, revile it in the press and put it down as hard as they can, but like like the weighted doll it will rebound incessantly because the deficit, unemployment and the declining confidence in the elite system will keep pushing it up. The Tea Parties are the elite’s dark political dual. The only way they can vanquish the doppelganger is to leave the stage themselves. . . . Although the elite may go out clinging with their fingernails to the carpets of their offices their real enemy will always be not the Tea Partiers but the repo men. It’s the lack of money that will be their ultimate downfall.

I just got off the phone with a Tea Partier who’s thinking of running for Congress.

KATIE ALLISON GRANJU: “I am the mother of a drug addict.” I’ve been following Katie’s struggles for a while, and she’s borne up nobly. Personally, I think true addicts are born, not made, and that while parents deal with the consequences, it’s really all about genetics and what receptors you have in your brain. Possibly I would be a hopeless thionite addict, if anybody ever discovered thionite. If so, it wouldn’t be my parents’ fault. At any rate, wish Katie well, as no parent should have to deal with what she’s dealing with.

THE NEW RULES: “If freedom of expression is faced with the threat of illegal violence, freedom should be curtailed.” From Official Ethics Experts! Sounds like an incentive to be violent in response to ideas you don’t like. Keep this in mind. . . .