FRANK MUNGER EMAILS: “You’ve inspired me. Not necessarily with the scuba diving, but the idea of Internet-free, tanned, rested, etc. What a concept.” Yeah, too much time on the Internet is, well, too much time on the Internet. It’s good to take a break now and then.

HECKLER’S VETO: Video: LSU crowd throws water balloons at would-be flag burner.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Donors get wise: “Donors are increasingly aware that universities routinely (and unfortunately) perform a bait and switch. Grants to study free markets create self-sustaining hives of academic Marxists, gifts to create Christian lecture series turn into annual celebrations of atheism, and grandchildren watch in horror as their grandparents’ wealth is used to fund, advance, and sustain values their grandparents would find abhorrent. Simply put, the ideological monoculture has proven that it can’t be trusted with donor money, so savvy foundations are looking for ways to fund education without funding indoctrination.”

Well, if donors can’t trust universities to spend money as promised, they’ll try to find ways to make those promises enforceable. If they can’t do that, they’ll just find somebody else to give money to, or they’ll keep it themselves and not give it away at all.. Is that better for higher education? Also, don’t invoke “tradition” in defense of your perks. Tradition is supposed to be an outdated straitjacket, remember?

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Establishment Blues:

I don’t want to make this a habit, and I suspect he doesn’t either, but Paul Krugman and I are once again in (very) partial agreement. We both think the American elite has intellectually and morally lost its way, and we agree that the problems our country faces today have more to do with elite breakdown than popular stupidity. We locate the blame somewhat differently within that elite; Krugman splits the blame between George W. Bush and the economic policy makers of the Clinton/Obama administrations. I think the rot goes deeper and has spread out more widely. But the United States today — in both parties, in the corporate and business worlds, in academia and among the intelligentsia, in religion and in many other fields — does not have the strong and thoughtful leadership that we need.” . . .

The American people aren’t perfect yet and never will be — but by the standards that matter to the Establishment, this is the best prepared, most open minded and most socially liberal generation in history. Unsatisfactory as the American people may be from the standpoints of Georgetown and Manhattan, this is as good as it gets. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman could only dream of the kind of sophisticated and cosmopolitan understanding that folks in Peoria have now compared to the old days.

The American people are less prejudiced, more globally aware and more willing to meet other cultures and societies halfway than ever before. Minorities today are better protected in law and more fairly treated by the public than ever in our history. No previous generation has been as determined to give women a fair chance in life, or to attack the foul legacy of racism. The American people have never been as religiously tolerant as they are today, as concerned about the environment, or more willing to make sacrifices around the world to promote the peace and well being of humanity as a whole.

By contrast, we have never had an Establishment that was so ill-equipped to lead. It is the Establishment, not the people, that is falling down on the job.

Yes, we have the worst political class by far in American history.

BLOGHER: Political Blogger Ann Althouse’s Blog Goes Missing. Technical glitches I can understand. The rudeness from Google rep “nitecruzr” (yeah, really, that’s the name given by the support person) is harder to understand. It’s certainly not helping Google’s reputation.

UPDATE: A longtime reader emails:

I used to work at Google back when originally acquired Blogger.

It doesn’t appear to me that “nitecruzr” is a Google employee. He is identified as a “Top Blog*Spot Contributor”. http://blogging.nitecruzr.net looks like an independent blog that offers “What Blogger Won’t Tell You”.

Later in the support thread, a Google employee named “Brett” appears, politely offers to help Ann, and compliments her blog.

Blogger lets users report spam blogs here:

http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/request.py?contact_type=spam

so one possibility is that people who don’t like Ann’s blog launched an astroturf campaign to get her marked as spam.

Believe it or not, sometimes at Google things just plain go wrong, and it’s nothing to do with politics. And by the way, conservatives work there too – I was one of them!

Well, that’s true. Question: If Ann wanted to sue people who falsely reported her blog as a spam-blog, could she make Google cough up their information? I think the answer is yes.

THE REAL HONOR IS JUST BEING NOMINATED: I’m up for “Gunnie” Awards in the Law and Politics categories.

FANNIE MAE Pumps And Dumps.

ARMED AND DANGEROUS: I storm the floor at the NRA Convention. Conversations with women shooters, practical shooting and steel challenge competitors, the Johnny Appleseed Project (viral shooting education), knife-rights activists, the president of Cold Steel, and more. (Bumped).

BOB ZUBRIN: Rising food prices are the result of rising oil prices, not a growing market for ethanol.

ADVICE ON dating in Dubai without ending up in jail.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “I’m an expat living in Abu Dhabi, and wanted to read your link to the AskMen article on avoiding jail in Dubai for singles wanting to date, but the government has blocked that article! The rest of the site is available, however. Just thought you’d get a kick out of that!” I did.

PETER WEHNER: Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton, and Double Standards On Adultery.

DAVID BARON CALL YOUR OFFICE: Too much urban wildlife. “Maybe it’s time to borrow one of my brother’s firearms. He lives in South Dakota, where relations with wildlife tend to be less sentimental.”

LONGTIME TAX BREAKS may be booted by the government: “An analysis by the accounting firm WeiserMazars shows what a profound economic importance these benefits have to working-class families. If you were to strip away all common tax benefits, an average family of four with a median household income of $61,000 in suburban Maryland would have a federal income tax bill more than six times higher — $5,954 vs. $774, the analysis shows.” This suggests to me that we need a flat-rate tax with few, if any, deductions. Think of what we’d save in compliance costs, too.

ALTHOUSE’S BLOG IS DOWN, but she’s blogging at her backup blog.

REGENERATIVE MEDICINE: Did Stem Cell Therapy Repair Bartolo Colon’s Broken Pitching Arm? “In Colon’s case, the treatment was carried out in the Dominican Republic–not because the treatment is illegal in the States (it’s not) but because Colon lives there–by Dominican doctors and a Florida surgeon named Joseph Purita, whose regenerative medicine clinic has treated several other professional athletes. . . . Purita’s procedure involved removing stem cells from Colon’s fat and bone marrow and injecting them into his elbow and shoulder to repair ligament and rotator cuff damage. It’s a procedure that hasn’t been put through rigorous clinical reviews, and other physicians say there’s no conclusive evidence that it works. The MLB, fighting a constant uphill battle to stay current regulating new performance enhancing drugs and supplements, doesn’t even have an official opinion–much less a rule–on such treatments derived from one’s own stem cells.”

Well, I hope it works. Faster, please, and all that.

At Amazon, it’s the Friday sale.

THE FOLKS AT GOOGLE don’t quite seem to understand the Althouse blog. Hey, guys, it’s not a spam blog. It’s been in the New York Times and everything. You should put it back up.

UPDATE: A reader emails with a link to a Save Ann Althouse’s Blog Facebook page.

CHANGE: Americans oppose raising debt ceiling by more than 2-1 in Gallup survey.

IS THIS TORNADO SEASON the worst ever? It’s not over yet.

SHOULD WE START PUTTING THE COMMAS outside the quotation marks?

AN I-TOLD-YOU-SO FROM DONALD RUMSFELD IN THE WASHINGTON POST: How Wikileaks Vindicated Bush’s Anti-Terrorism Strategy.

FIGHTING PROSTATE CANCER with microbubbles.

THE CHINESE DRAGON sweeps through Latin America.

OSAMA DIED, PANETTA LIED? Or something like that. “‘Be first with the truth’ is an old and painful lesson from this war, one the Obama administration failed completely in this case.”

SO I JUST NOTICED THAT LAST WEEK THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT my proposed 50% surtax on government officials’ post-government incomes over at TaxProf. To clarify, when I said “government officials” I meant political appointees and agency heads. So, for example, FCC Commissioner Meredith Atwell Baker, who approved the Comcast merger and then took a lucrative job at Comcast would pay a 50% surtax on the amount Comcast pays her over and above her FCC salary. Some have suggested that the number should be higher — 70%, say — but that’s okay. I’m not wedded to 50%.