LIGHTS OUT, CUSTOMERS BETRAYED: HECO strike: 1,300 workers walk off the job amid power outages.

UPDATE: A reader notes that there’s not much love for the union showing in the comments to this news story.

THE TWO-MINUTE HATE IS LASTING A LOT MORE THAN TWO MINUTES: Salon.com Commenter Calls for Lynching Of Koch Brothers.

MORE GOOD NEWS ABOUT health and breasts. Sure, it may turn out to be wrong, but why take chances?

BILL HOBBS POSTS PHOTOS from today’s Tennessee teachers’ union protest rally. Give ’em credit — they didn’t call in sick to attend.

Plus, Tea Party counter-protesters. And one who asks: “Why can’t we get our Democrats to flee the state?” Tennessee Democrats haven’t tried that since they absented themselves to block passage of the 14th Amendment during Reconstruction. They were hauled back by Pinkertons, counted present, and locked in a closet until it was over. Of course, this is the first time since Reconstruction that Democrats have been in the minority.

BUT OF COURSE: Tea Partiers Clean-Up Mess Left By Union Protesters in Wisconsin.

NO TYPEWRITER NOSTALGIA from Rand Simberg.

CAN OVERUSE OF ASPIRIN AND OTHER NSAIDS increase the risk of erectile dysfunction?

AT AMAZON, markdowns on 2010 model HDTVs.

COLLEGE AND HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS are having less sex. “Fewer teens and young adults are having sex, a government survey shows, and theories abound for why they’re doing it less. Experts say this generation may be more cautious than their predecessors, more aware of sexually spread diseases. Or perhaps emphasis on abstinence in the past decade has had some influence. Or maybe they’re just too busy. . . . The study, released Thursday, is based on interviews of about 5,300 young people, ages 15 to 24. It shows the proportion in that age group who said they’d never had oral, vaginal or anal sex rose in the past decade from 22 percent to about 28 percent.”

Personally, I credit the porn and videogames!

MARK STEYN: America saves Kosovo’s Muslims from genocide, and what do we get? “A decade on, Kosovo is a sorta sovereign state, and in Frankfurt a young airport employee is so grateful for what America did for his people that he guns down U.S. servicemen while yelling ‘Allahu akbar!'”

UPDATE: A reader notes that Michael Totten found people in Kosovo pro-American. In Kosovo, yes. In Germany, not so much, apparently.

JONATHAN ZITTRAIN AND MOLLY SAUTER on U.S. Internet “Kill Switch” Legislation.

STUDY: Facebook Builds Self-Esteem. And if there’s anything America’s youth needs, it’s more self-esteem.

WILL THIS BE the week of iPad 2? I’m actually thinking of buying one for a friend of the family who’s stuck in a nursing home. They don’t have in-room internet, so a 3G iPad might be the way to go. It’s pretty boring there. . . .

UPDATE: Reader Doug Orr emails:

Got my iPad last July, and since then have been in the hospital twice for 3 days and 8 days. I would have gone stir crazy without the iPad. Nurses loved asking about it, all the doctors said their wives had one already. Ha!

Also, i got to avoid the dreaded daytime television shows. Those things will kill you.

Yeah.

And reader John Williams writes:

My father in law had a stroke about two years ago and is living in an assisted care facility. We bought him a first generation iPad about 6 months ago and it is a huge hit. He carries it with him wherever he goes almost like a kid with a security blanked.

He struggles with email a bit but is able to communicate far more with his family than any other medium. He manages his investments, keeps up on the news, reads Instapundit, and plays Yahtzee.

Technical support for him using the device has been pretty easy as well. You just can’t get into the kinds of trouble you can with a “real” computer.

Good point. And reading InstaPundit is bound to be therapeutic. Another reader says that I’ll be able to pick up an original model iPad for $100 less once the new one comes out. Maybe I’ll pick up one of those; it should be entirely adequate for nursing-home amusement purposes.

And reader Barry Dauphin emails:

Maybe you’ve hit on to a bigger idea. Nursing homes should try to get them in bulk for their residents. Learning how to use them would be very stimulating and there’s all kinds of things you can do with them. Apple could cut deals, the way they do with schools and computers.

That sounds like a really good idea. Maybe Apple should donate some of the first-gen iPad stock to a nursing home or two as an experiment.

MORE: Reader Trent Kelso emails:

Adding to the in praise of the iPad chorus…

I got an iPad in Sept when my dad was set for brain surgery and knew I’d have a week with him at UCLA Med Ctr with nothing to do. I decided to splurge on the iPad because my laptop was waaaaay too clunky to lug around conveniently, gets real hot, and is just too bulky to use all day long. Unfortunately, mom & I were cooped up in the hospital with dad for 9 weeks and the iPad kept us sane. We downloaded and played games, watched Netflix, read our favorite blogs, read books (via the Kindle app), took notes on dad’s treatment and had our questions immediately handy when the docs walked in. We were able to instantly access medical info on the net via the hospital’s free wifi to help us understand dad’s condition and why the docs were doing what they were doing. The iPad made us formidable medical consumers; it armed us with information almost instantaneously.

Like your other reader, when docs saw my iPad, they said things like “Don’t you love it?” or “I need to get one on my next day off.” When RNs or CNAs saw it, they’d say “Is that an iPad?” or, “Do you think it’s worth it?”. Naturally, I told the RNs & CNAs that it was the best thing since beer, and that it was worth every penny. An amazing device, which, incidentally, I’m using to write this e-mail.

Oh, one more noteworthy feature is that the user interface is extremely intuitive. My mom is 78 and took to the iPad like a duck to water. Try that with a PC laptop.

Good point. And reader Joe Jackson emails:

After an 18 month stretch in a nursing home my wife died last May. During those final months her lifeline to the world was a MacBook. An iPad would have been better and I was just about to buy her one when she died. Anything than can be done to relieve the boredom in a nursing home – and keep the residents mentally engaged – is worth doing. And yes, that includes Apple discounting the iPad to extended care facilities (I say this as an Apple stockholder).

The crushing boredom and isolation of those places is one of the worst things about them — and even someone with a big family that visits as much as it can is going to have a lot of downtime.

REPORT: Libyan Rebels Announce Creation Of A Republic. Easier to announce than to do, but stay tuned.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Outlet Sale.

GAS BREAKS $5 A GALLON in Florida.

ECONOMICS: Lies, Damn Lies, and Government Statistics.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE on insider trading at the Department of Education. “We know bureaucrats leak information to reporters all the time in an effort to influence policy. But leaking information to short sellers is a new one on me.” I suspect that there’s a lot more of this going on, given the incentives and the low level of scrutiny involved — though, to be fair, the initiative on for-profit education was unusually politicized and shady to begin with.

Plus a link to his piece on Insider Trading Inside The Beltway.

UPDATE: Reader David McCune emails:

I don’t think the point can be emphasized too much:

The preferred solution to this is not tighter regulation, it is less power in the hands of government.

Absolutely. Power corrupts. They’re more corrupt now because they’re more powerful.

IN MASSACHUSETTS, talk of putting GPS chips in guns. How about we put ’em in state legislators instead? Statistically, they’re far more likely to be used in crime. And no, that’s not a joke, it’s true. . . .

ALZHEIMER’S PLAQUE and the liver.

REPORT: Ford Losing Interest in Electric Vehicles.

A LOOK AT Human Rights Watch and Libya.

MANCESSION UPDATE: The Struggles of Men: “The Hamilton Project has produced a fairly stunning chart, suggesting that median real wages for men have dropped significantly more than is commonly understood.”

SOMEWHERE, FRED HOYLE IS SMILING: NASA Scientist Claims Evidence of Alien Life on Meteorite.

IN THE MAIL: Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle.