IN THE MAIL: How to Disagree Without Being Disagreeable: Getting Your Point Across with the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense.

“MALAISE.” “Is Brzezinski so clueless about his own boss’s legacy and liberals’ sensitivity to it as to stumble into this choice of phrase, or is he obliquely drawing the comparison deliberately for whatever insane reason? Lucky for him and his party that he’s as relatively obscure now as he is; had a more prominent Dem said this, the RNC’s soundbite machine would be in hog heaven.”

BELLESILES UPDATE: Jim Lindgren: Professor Of Military History Weighs in on the Implausibility of Bellesiles’s Story.

ANN ALTHOUSE: The Nation promotes the anti-choice liberal meme. You don’t need stupid choices. Instead, let experts tell you what you want.

TODAY ONLY: Another cheap, portable hard drive on sale.

KRUISER CONTROL: Pundits Gone Wild: The Megyn Kelly Smackdown, and the Larry King Tongue-Loesching.

GENERATION Y’S EMPTY PIGGY BANK: “As fund managers try to woo younger workers, why are few paying attention? They’re overwhelmed by big debts and high unemployment. . . . Already saddled with student debts averaging almost $20,000, according to New York-based think tank Demos, Gen Y is in a tougher financial position than previous generations. The average salary for 25- to 34-year-olds, for instance, fell 19 percent over the last 30 years, after adjusting for inflation, to $35,100, Demos estimates. That’s if they can get jobs.” This is why I don’t see a housing recovery any time soon. The people who should be supplying the next wave of demand, can’t. (Via NewsAlert).

ILLINOIS’ PENSION MELTDOWN PROCEEDS. The logical conclusion of a certain set of policies.

TIM CAVANAUGH: “It’s going to take a lot more than a trillion new dollars to bring the kind of inflation Ben Bernanke wants. The chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank thought he had the problem licked just a few months ago, but now, for the third straight month, the “core” consumer price index (excluding food and energy) has fallen. That 1/10th of a penny you’re now saving on every dollar? Don’t spend it all in one place. The two big items not covered in CPI — energy and food — are both either flat or falling.”

UPDATE: From the comments: “So who fears deflation? Debtors fear it. And who is the biggest debtor? The federal government – to an extent never seen before in the history of this country.”

TIMOTHY LEE: Put The NSA On A Shorter Leash.

ANGELO CODEVILLA: America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution.

Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. . . . Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans’ conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so. . . . Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. . . . In this clash, the ruling class holds most of the cards: because it has established itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference. Breaking them, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involve far more than electoral politics.

Read the whole thing.

BIGGEST TURNOUT YET for California Tea Party group. Apparently, those fabricated charges of racism aren’t deterring people.

HEADLINES YOU THOUGHT YOU’D NEVER SEE: Florida ACLU Petitions for Return of Man’s Guns.

I HOPE HE GETS WHAT HE DESERVES: Louis Farrakhan demands reparations from Jews.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, the U.S. government would be shutting down private websites by the thousands for murky reasons. And they were right!

CELEBRATE your uniqueness. “Like a fingerprint, the virus communities in the human gut are unique to each individual, a new study on poop DNA suggests. Even identical twins have very different collections of viruses colonizing their lower intestines. This is in contrast to bacterial communities, which are similar in related individuals, the researchers say.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The 10 Kinds Of Cleavage.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why does every middle-aged woman think HER holiday seducer is the real deal?

STAGLIANO CASE UPDATE: All Charges Dismissed. They told me if I voted for John McCain we’d see flimsy obscenity prosecutions to make a political point. And they were right!

BEST AND WORST TRAVEL DISCOUNT PROGRAMS. Including this: “AARP’s ‘discounts’ are the most disingenuous of the programs I researched.” Why am I not surprised?

POLITICAL CHAOS: Governor Manchin Names Old Family Friend as Senator to Replace Robert Byrd.

STAR WARS on a subway.

HMM: University of Texas regents take KKK organizer’s name off dorm. Does that mean that all those buildings named after Robert Byrd in West Virginia will have to change?

UPDATE: Reader Mike Ferrante writes: “Seems like we’re getting like the old Stalinist Russia where we erase the people who have become unfashionable. WTF.”

HOPE AND SAME: The Wage and Hour Division: We Can Help Prolong the Recession.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER voter fraud news blackout?