SPEED COMPARISON: Droid X vs. Droid 2.

THIS WEEK’S storyblogging carnival is up.

ACORN LOSES FUNDING BAN APPEAL. (Via Dan Riehl).

YOU DON’T NEED HEAVY WEIGHTS TO BUILD MUSCLE, just lots of repetition.

This isn’t really news. I remember a bodybuilder years ago saying that aerobics instructors’ calves proved you could build big muscles without progressive resistance if you did enough reps.

BUSINESS WEEK ON THE HOUSING BUST: The Crisis Climbs Over the Mountains. “The mortgage crisis, far from easing, is deepening in the Northwest and Midwest.” In my neighborhood houses are selling, but the ones that sell are going for around 10% less than people paid for ’em a few years ago.

UPDATE: Reader Randolph Resor emails:

Well, it’s also gotten into the Northeast (although not to Washington, DC, of course). I work in DC and live in an “inner ring” suburb of Philadelphia (where my wife still works, and my kids go to school). We are considering moving the family to DC, so I started checking the real estate market. Well, in our little town, there are about 1,000 “dwelling units” (a mix of rental apartments, condos, and single family houses). There are about 250 for sale right now, of which fully 52% are either “distressed” or foreclosures. And this is the sort of place where houses stay in the same family for decades. We’re the third owners of our house (built in 1922).

The crisis has come home to where I live. I estimate my house has lost about 25% of its value. I’m not underwater, not yet, but I don’t have much equity.

Ugh.

LAST W62 NUCLEAR WARHEAD DISMANTLED. “During his visit to Pantex on Wedneday, Energy Secretary Steven Chu participated in the dismantlement of the last W62 nuclear warhead and declared it a done deal. . . . Chu called it a ‘tangible demonstration of our firm commitment to support the President’s goal of reducing the number of nuclear weapons and their role in the U.S. national security strategy.'”

CHANGE: Harry Reid tried to end birthright citizenship for illegals in 1993. “In 1993, just after Democrats won the White House, Reid filed a bill that would have done exactly what some Republicans now demand — end birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants.”

HMM: Anne Bayefsky: An Iranian Connection to the Cordoba House Ground Zero Mosque?

IN THE MAIL: From Andy Kessler, Grumby.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “Does this serial complaining come from the top, or is it simply characteristic of the urban technocratic class?” “These are six-figure jobs that wear out one’s hands on the Blackberry, true, but serve as valuable stepping-stones to even higher-paying corporate jobs. And this is still a recession. This raise-the-bar griping will not go down well with the coal worker in Montana, the welder on a 30-story scaffold, or the oil worker offshore.”

A WOMAN-ON-THE-STREET VIDEO: Can you tell which of these government spending projects are real or fake? With “rebel economist” Michelle Muccio.

UH OH: Retail sales figures add to Recovery Bummer woes.

IRA STOLL: Two Trillion and Counting: The Fed and the Magma Chart. “The ‘magma chart’ is the name that, according to a post on the New York Times’s Economix blog, is being given to a chart on the Web site of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland that shows the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet growing to about $2 trillion from less than $1 trillion before the economic crisis. . . . Think of it — $2 trillion in government money, more than the entire annual spending of the entire federal government in 2001 — thoroughly insulated from the control of elected officials.”

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: No off-the-record lunches: “It takes more than a cheeseburger to buy our silence, Mr. President!” That makes ’em more expensive than most of the D.C. press crowd, then. Most of ’em will keep their mouths shut for free. . . .

Plus this: “But there is another uncomfortable issue to be addressed here: The press is constantly pressing for more transparency from the administration, demanding to know who he meets with and who comes and goes. So when it’s us he meets with we suddenly get all shy and private?” Keeping secrets from the press is bad. Keeping secrets with the connivance of the press is good!

GREEDY CAPITALIST REFUSES TO CREATE JOBS. After the hoarders and wreckers, comrades!

PATRICK HYNES: Nothing’s Wrong With New Hampshire.

THE MYSTERY OF Steve Jobs’ Plateless Mercedes.

ONE DAY ONLY: The Roku HD Player for $79.99.

UPDATE: Okay, I cracked and ordered one. At that price, I couldn’t resist any longer.

MARK TAPSCOTT: Why Apple And Google Are Saving The Automobile.

FASTER, PLEASE: Rare Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s. “The key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.”

JOHN MERLINE: Where Did All Those ‘Green Shoots’ Go? “Over the past year and a half, administration officials have issued one glowing statement after another about the economy, only to see reality turn out far worse. . . . There’s nothing wrong with a little cheerleading. But there’s a real danger with all this ‘turning the corner, things are getting better, recovery is on the way’ talk. If you don’t think so, just ask Herbert Hoover, who infamously claimed that ‘prosperity is just around the corner’ right before the worst of the Great Depression.”

Plus, “A Timeline of Pollyannaish Economic Prognostications.”

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: At DOJ, Military Voting Rights Hang in the Balance. “Twelve states want waivers from having to send ballots to overseas military on time. Call the Pentagon and the DOJ today, and demand they say no. . . . The DOJ would never adopt such an equivocal approach to protecting the voting rights of a racial minority.”

UPDATE: Reader Richard Aubrey emails:

You will probably not be surprised to hear that, when I called DOJ on this, THIS MORNING, the lady who answered the phone said she couldn’t get me an answer because it was Friday and most of the folks were gone.

Did I point out that it was Friday MORNING?

The vigilant guardians of justice.

THE ECONOMIST: The Democratic left: Disappointed, down, despondent — And not about to rush to the polls in November, either. “The disillusionment of the Democrats’ base matters, says Charlie Cook, an electoral analyst, because mid-term elections have much lower turnouts than elections in presidential years, so the party faithful account for a higher proportion of votes. Parties with unhappy supporters, naturally, tend to do poorly in elections, says Jeff Jones of Gallup, although more because voters switch allegiances than because they do not bother to vote at all. . . . The Democrats’ best hope, in Mr Cook’s view, lies not in courting the party base but in denigrating the Republicans. That may help to remind disillusioned supporters why they voted Democratic in the first place. It could also give wavering independent voters pause. But the tactic’s chief benefit may lie in dampening the support of Republican cadres for their party. Indeed, the Democrats’ leaders seem to have adopted this strategy already.”

ED MORRISSEY: McCarthyism At The White House: “Hey, here’s a novel idea. How about the White House and its current thin-skinned, dilettante resident try doing a little research before shrieking about foreign influence in their opposition’s political organizations?”

POST: The Truth About The GM Rescue. “Rather than a model of success and foresight, the GM episode is a model of corruption and cronyism.”