ROBERT NATELSON: Time Magazine’s Constitutional Baby Babble.

UPDATE: Er, babble, not battle. Sorry.

FISCAL TIMES: The Dubious Threat Of A U.S. Debt Default.

TODAY ONLY: Jabra HALO Bluetooth Stereo Headset for $35.99.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, INTERNET PRIVACY WOULD BE DEAD. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! U.S. sent Google 8,888 requests for user-data in 2010. “Google fielded 8,888 requests from the United States government last year asking for information on people using its services, the company wrote in a report on Monday. The total number is likely higher because the Google statistics only cover criminal investigations. The U.S. is by far the most active, and successful, solicitor of private info from Google, accounting for about one-third of all federal requests last year, according to the data. Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission formally launched an antitrust investigation into Google’s business on Thursday.”

POLITICO: Michelle Obama Denies Supporting Gay Marriage.

BOOSTING THE ECONOMY with a one-year income tax moratorium? I’d rather just scrap it for a flat tax.

MILT WOLF: Obamanomics Is Shovel-Ready. “In 1932, President Hoover received a letter from a man in Illinois that read simply, ‘Vote for Roosevelt and make it unanimous.’ Based on its recent floundering, it seems even the White House recognizes that Obamanomics has been a disaster. It’s nearly unanimous now.”

ON FIRE BUT BLACKED OUT: The Thomas Ball Story. I do think we’d see a lot more coverage if a woman had burned herself to death because she couldn’t get an abortion. . . .

CONN CARROLL: Obama’s Debt-Deal Desperation.

MICKEY KAUS ON THE FANNIE MAE SCANDALS: “Yes, Obama picked Fannie villain James Johnson to run his VP search. That doesn’t seem like enough, though it reflected very bad judgment on Obama’s part.”

DEAN REUTER EMAILS that he and John Yoo have a new book on national security coming out. Contributors include Viet Dinh, Richard Epstein, Bob Barr, Marc Thiessen, and Victor Davis Hanson, among a host of big names. Word is that the Obama OLC calls them “that limp-wristed gang of pinkos.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Ethics Watchdog Calls For FBI to Investigate Rep. Richardson. “A leading watchdog group is touting new evidence of alleged ethics violations by Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Calif.) and calling for a criminal investigation. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is accusing Richardson of habitually threatening her congressional staff with their jobs if they didn’t work on her campaign, and has asked the FBI to investigate.”

Richardson, InstaPundit readers may recall, is also the housing-crisis poster child:

First Rep. Laura Richardson was having problems making house payments, defaulting six times over eight years.

Then after a bank foreclosed on her Sacramento house and sold it at auction in May, the Long Beach Democrat made such a stink that Washington Mutual, in an unusual move, grabbed it back and returned it to her.

This week, in the latest chapter in the housing saga, the Code Enforcement Department in Sacramento declared her home a “public nuisance.” The city has threatened to fine her as much as $5,000 a month if she doesn’t fix it up.

Neighbors in the upper-middle-class neighborhood complain that the sprinklers are never turned on and the grass and plants are dead or dying. The gate is broken, and windows are covered with brown paper.

“I would call it an eyesore,” said Peter Thomsen, a retired bank executive who lives nearby.

The city action was prompted by police action. Police were twice called to investigate reports of a suspicious person in or around the house, perhaps a homeless man squatting there. Officers called the Code Enforcement Department, which boarded up a broken door.

The country’s in the very best of hands.

ABC NEWS: Obama’s White House Fundraising ‘Unseemly but Perfectly Legal.’

FACEBOOK’S Fake Friends Epidemic. Ya got nothin’ to lose, you don’t lose when you lose fake friends, fake friends.

TEA PARTY LEADER DAVID KIRKHAM TESTIFIED BEFORE THE SENATE FINANCE COMMITTEE: He emails: “I asked them (paraphrase), ‘Would you rather have me back in Utah creating jobs or here in DC protesting yours? Because that’s what I have been doing here for the past 4 days with Freedomworks.'”

RIPPING OFF Jon Stewart’s clown nose.

DANA MILBANK: On Same-Sex Marriage, Obama Still Has Cold Feet. “For Obama, this is less about the issue than about leadership.”

PAUL HSIEH: Why the “Unexpected” Keeps Happening.

THE QUOTABLE CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS.

MICHAEL BARONE: Mainstream Media Covers For Obama On Horrifying Mistake. Hey, it’s not like he’s Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin — you know, somebody important.

WELL, THAT WAS QUICK: Surprise: HHS drops plan to snoop on doctors. “No worries: The program’s not really dead, it’s just … resting. It’ll be back in a few years, once ObamaCare goes into effect and millions more Boomers have landed on the Medicare rolls. That’s when the doctor shortage will really begin to bite.” My doctor has adopted a new phone-tree system that will frustrate all government snooping efforts, by making it impossible for anyone to actually make an appointment.

L.A. TIMES: 861 days and $787 billion in, Obama pleads for more time on jobs.

DAVID BRIN: Milestones Leading Up To The Good Singularity?

UPDATE: Some readers object to Brin’s politics. Meh. He’s a smart guy — learn what you can and don’t let the politics distract you from that.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Ken Norlie emails:

I realize that you link many people whose politics are left-of-center. This isn’t a problem. I think that the strong dislike of David Brin comes mostly from science fiction fans like myself. We see the way leftists have taken over sf in the past few years, with disastrous results, ranging from “radical hard sf” (basically New Wave that gets the science right) on the accessible end, to “New Weird” on the even more unreadable end. Brin, like it or not, is heavily identified with sf culture as a whole, and his nasty, uninformed, and categorical rejection of anyone to the right of Bill Clinton sends the message that conservatives don’t fit into the sf world.

This is utterly ahistorical. John Campbell, editor of Astounding and Analog, was the most influential editor ever, and his politics could best be described as far right. Robert A. Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Jerry Pournelle, and Larry Niven were all politically right-of-center; even less conservative authors like Gregory Benford and Ben Bova are heavily influenced by Campbellian pro-free enterprise views. In fact, it was stories like Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon” that set the stage for the current free enterprise boom in space, with entrepreneurs like Elon Musk.

Basically, when we get angry about Brin, we’re getting angry at the anti-libertarian trends in sf as a whole.

Well, don’t buy the stuff you don’t like, and make a point of buying the stuff you do like. It should sort itself out.

STEPHEN GREEN: It’s Delightful, It’s Delicious, It’s Default. “The chatter today has been all about Lawrence Lindsey’s WSJ column about our dire fiscal situation. Excuse me — the meaningful chatter. . . . The most serious budget-cutter we have, Congressman Paul Ryan, is not nearly serious enough about the disaster we face. Or if he is serious, he doesn’t have enough of his party backing him up. And even if he had that, Ryan still would face a public too uninformed to understand or tolerate what must be done.”

Too many of those “Economic Reality Deniers” out there.