THE PROBLEM WITH French Libel Law.

REASON TV: 3 Reasons Why Obama’s High-Speed Rail Will Go Nowhere Fast. With bonus Supertrain footage. It’s 1979 all over again!

HOME ON THE RANGE with the Pioneer Woman.

JOHN SCALZI:

Wife: Where’d you put the phone bill?

Me: I dunno. Did you check under the Oscar?

God, I loved saying that.

Well, by now the Hugos have gotten too tiresome for words.

CORKER KERFUFFLE: Just got this email from Laura Herzog in Bob Corker’s office:

There’s a lot of bad information floating around. Senator Corker is NOT working on legislation with Congressman Frank, and he does NOT support the bill the House of Representatives passed last year. Sen. Corker’s proposal would NOT provide $4 trillion to bail out Wall Street. For nearly a year, Senator Corker has been working to end the notion that any company is “too big to fail.” His premise is that if a company fails, it should fail and not be propped up by taxpayers. The bill is still being crafted in the Senate, but please know the substance will be very different than the House bill.

Just FYI.

TUNKU VARADARAJAN: Iraq’s Political Miracle.

STEPHEN GREEN ON THE RANGEL / STARK / LEVIN KERFUFFLE: In the Future Everyone Will Get to Chair Ways & Means for Fifteen Minutes.

ONE MORE REASON TO IGNORE ‘EM BOTH: If you blog unauthorized “Daily Show” or “Colbert” clips, Viacom will sue your ass.

WALTER SHAPIRO offers advice to the Republicans.

THE BRAIN SCANNER THAT feels your pain.

A LAW PROFESSOR LOOKS AT PAIN AND DEATH: an interview with Bill Stuntz.

CHRIS EDWARDS: Six reasons to downsize the federal government.

IN THE MAIL: Looking for Hugh: The Capitalist Guidebook.

TESTING OUT THE HONDAJET: As I mentioned a while back, my next Popular Mechanics column is about going beyond the hub-and-spoke model for air travel. In the process of researching it, I checked out the new HondaJet, and spun off this piece for the website about the HondaJet’s development.

MUSICAL CHAIRMEN: Roll Call: Levin to replace Stark as successor to Rangel. “Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) will take the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee and Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) will step aside, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told the Democratic Caucus on Thursday morning, sources in attendance said.”

PETER SUDERMAN: Created or Saved or Estimated or Assumed: The Congressional Budget Office’s predetermined stimulus reports.

GEORGE WILL: The making of modern immaturity.

STEVE CHAPMAN: Chicago’s Pointless Handgun Ban: Why draconian gun control laws never work.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON CALIFORNIA’S DRONISM: “The well-off like nice cars, tasteful homes, good food, and appropriate vacations — but not the oil, gas, coal, nuclear energy, transmission lines, timber, cement, farmland, water pumps, etc., that bring that to them. . . . The less well-off want their versions of the same things — cool clothes, good music players, neat cell phones, the best plasma TVs, blue-ray players, video games — but are not interested in the hard study and discipline necessary for a society to create the sort of educated work force that makes and deserves such appurtenances.”

WHAT’S UP WITH Townhall.com?

UTAH TO U.S.: Give Us Back Our Land.

POLITICO: New York Gone Wild. “Once a source of national leaders of both political parties, New York state has descended into a bizarre, riveting spectacle of corruption and political debasement, with its governor facing calls to resign as well as new charges of accepting illicit perks and lying under oath, the dean of its congressional delegation giving up his gavel over corruption charges, and another House member announcing he won’t run again amid allegations of sexual harassment. And that’s just yesterday. . . . And while Republican leaders have drawn their share of blame (and indictments), New York is now effectively a one-party state. Its current scandals attach themselves to the dominant Democrats, and the riveting soap opera is feeding a narrative of corruption that threatens to deepen the party’s national woes.”

HOPE, OR CHANGE? U.S. Senate Candidate Giannoulias Says Family Bank Likely to Fail.

HAPPY BLOGGIVERSARY to the Environmental Republican.

EUROPE: Greek Unions Occupy Finance Ministry.

Portugal Public-Sector Workers Strike to Protest Wage Freeze.

UPDATE: Denis Boyles:

The Lisbon treaty and Obama’s “up or down” vote on health-care are of a piece. Take away a government hand-out and you take a brick to the head. Every time a civil servant is asked the skip a pay rise or work an extra hour in the interests of civic solvency, the result is violence. Ask a Greek or a Parisian. . . . The leftist-European social net Obama and the Democrats favor is a cloak of intractability. It covers Europe from Amsterdam to Athens, but it’s more than wide enough to span the Atlantic.

Indeed.