JOHN HAWKINS INTERVIEWS MARK STEYN about his new book, After America: Get Ready For Armageddon.

WE WERE LIED TO AGAIN: “Where Does David Prosser Go To Get His Reputation Back?” “This is the level of left-wing activism we witnessed here in Madison. A justice is despised because his decisions do not please liberals, and so, without thought, they forgot about things liberals like to love themselves for caring about, such as fairness and due process.”

Well, when the pro-union left has been reduced to supergluing school doors shut, I think his reputation is comparatively safe. . . .

Plus, naming names. “Anyone who calls him/herself ‘progressive’ should be ashamed. Time to rebrand with a new moniker. Let’s be clear: their outrage had nothing to do with justice and everything to do with politics. . . . Justice Bradley should apologize. If she does not understand what constitutes a crime under Wisconsin law, the high court is in more trouble than we realized. . . . Madison, WI, this year has resembled the Directorate of the French Revolution when allegation = fact, when accusation = condemnation. This is not what democracy looks like.”

PETER INGEMI: Bill Keller, Fiscal Conservatives, And Fear Of A Past That Never Existed. Plus this: “Time spent discussing religious tests, Trojan horses and ‘fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity’… …is time spent not discussing unemployment. With jobless rate at 9.1%, that’s a major Democratic goal.”

AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale!

JIM GERAGHTY: Expect The “Unexpectedly:” In The Obama Era, Bad News Has Always Surprised The Media. “A healthy dose of partisanship.”

I’ve also noticed that when the Dow rises by 200 points after dropping 500, reports say that it has “surged” or “bounced back.” If you didn’t pay close attention to the actual index, you’d think it had made up the losses.

THIS SELDOM WORKS OUT WELL: Withholding sex as a punishment.

THE SUDDEN IMPORTANCE OF Libya’s Berbers.

SUSANNAH BRESLIN: Why I’m Glad I Got Downsized.

WANT TO BE AN ONLINE JOURNALIST? THEN BE ONE: “The way you get a job as an online journalist is that you show you can write and get traffic. . . . You should also start your own blog. That is your real resume. If you want a job writing online, any employer will say ‘Why aren’t you doing it now if that’s what you want to do?’ And it’s a decent question. No one is stopping you from writing right now. You don’t need to be paid to write something good. Just write it and put it on your blog. Your blog doesn’t need to get a lot of traffic. It just needs to be there when an employer wants to see what you can do.”

AN ANIMATED MAP OF Virginia Earthquake Tweets.

THE RISE OF designer vaginas. “Considering the risk of loss of sensitivity in vaginal surgeries, and the overall risk of any major surgery, the pay-off doesn’t seem worth it. Not only is it a part of your body that stays mostly under wraps, it’s the part that most sex partners are uniformly overjoyed to be exposed to.”

SO APPARENTLY THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT JUST WANTS JOBS MOVED OFFSHORE: Gibson Guitar Responds To Federal Raid: “The Federal Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. has suggested that the use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Department’s interpretation of a law in India. (If the same wood from the same tree was finished by Indian workers, the material would be legal.) This action was taken without the support and consent of the government in India.” More, including video, at the link.

ANDY KESSLER: How Steve Jobs Changed The World.

MORE IRENE UPDATES from Brendan Loy.

SO MY Second Amendment Penumbras piece will be coming out in the Southern California Law Review. I was happy to accept their offer to publish, as I’ve had good experiences with them in the past.

IT WAS MY UNDERSTANDING THAT THERE WOULD BE NO MATH: Inspector General: IRS Made Math Errors in 17% of its Taxpayer Math Error Adjustments.

EVEN A HURRICANE CAN’T PRY THIS GUY OFF THE VINEYARD: President Obama’s posse stays put as tourists flee. “A sun-soaked relaxer-in-chief spent close to five hours at a private Edgartown beach with the first family yesterday — still with no plans to cut the presidential vacation short while other islanders heeding the threat of Hurricane Irene packed up paradise and high-tailed it to the mainland. . . . He had no plans to leave Martha’s Vineyard early — even as emergency crews mobilized around him.”

UPDATE: Reader Jeff Johnson emails:

Of course Obama is still on Martha’s Vineyard.

When the weather turns bad, he just jumps into the car and heads to the airport. The roads will be cleared for him and all air traffic will stop so he can take off. No traffic jams or flight delays for him. The little people, however, will have to wait even longer to catch a ferry or to take off. He’s still there because waiting to leave the island is for the little people.

Oh, he may not be that inconsiderate. He may take a helicopter, and fly over the heads of the little people without interrupting traffic.

WARREN BUFFET, TAX HYPOCRITE:

If he were truly sincere, perhaps he might simply try paying the taxes the IRS says his company owes? According to Berkshire Hathaway’s own annual report — see Note 15 on pp. 54-56 — the company has been in a years-long dispute over its federal tax bills.

According to the report, “We anticipate that we will resolve all adjustments proposed by the IRS for the 2002 through 2004 tax years at the IRS Appeals Division within the next 12 months. The IRS has completed its examination of our consolidated U.S. federal income tax returns for the 2005 and 2006 tax years and the proposed adjustments are currently being reviewed by the IRS Appeals Division process. The IRS is currently auditing our consolidated U.S. federal income tax returns for the 2007 through 2009 tax years.”

Americans for Limited Government researcher Richard McCarty, who was alerted to the controversy by a federal government lawyer, said, “The company has been short-changing the tax collection agency for much of the past decade. Mr. Buffett’s company has not fully settled its tax bills from 2002-2009. Yet he says he’d happily pay more. Except the IRS has apparently been asking him to pay more going on nine years.”

It’s like he’s some kind of two-faced fraud or something.

UPDATE: Jim Treacher emails: “And yet they still hassle Joe the Plumber about his tax lien…which he paid.” Well, to be fair, Joe The Plumber wasn’t advancing the preferred narrative. Buffett is.

A COLLECTION OF Hurricane Irene Information Sources.

UPDATE: Bloomberg Fail (cont’d): Reader Howard Isaacs emails: “Possibly worth noting that in this first real test of Bloomberg’s much-vaunted NYC website [nyc.gov], the thing has been nearly useless since some time yesterday. I’ve tried to log on multiple times, and all I wind up with is a ‘server dropped connection’ message. So much for emergency info.” Yeah, it’s not working for me either.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: MORE GREEN MADNESS ON THE PLAINS:

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline will carry oil from tar sands in Canada across the entire midwestern United States to Port Arthur, Texas. It could eventually transport 900,000 barrels of oil a day and without government funding of any kind has the potential to create 20,000 jobs starting early in 2012. The greens want President Obama to kill it of course; the political blindness and the wishful thinking that so frequently vitiates green policy proposals is fully on display.

Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, now I’ve got Frontier Trust’s “Riot On The Plains” going through my head. Oh, well — it’s a good song if you like Tractor Punk. And I do.

UPDATE: Reader Michael Blum writes: “Living in Nebraska, I get to experience the full madness and incoherence of the anti-Keystone pipeline people. My personal favorite is their clever slogan ‘Windmills, Not Oil Spills’ seen all over their shirts and lawn signs. That rhyme might mean something if GM could produce more than 200 Volts a month…I have yet to figure out how to stuff a windmill into my Scion’s tank.”

A windmill-powered Scion? Not exactly Speed Nebraska.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Nebraska reader Gerald Hanner emails about the anti-pipeline crowd:

Yeah. We have a household of them right across the street.

The parents are teachers, and their oldest daughter is a college student. What a surprise.

Fund teacher raises with an energy tax and watch their positions moderate . . . .

MORE: More on Frontier Trust here.

GDP GROWTH UNEXPECTEDLY SLOW. How’s that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?

UPDATE: “Politically, of course, this is a rolling disaster for the Obama administration. The downward revision comes while Obama is on Martha’s Vineyard, enjoying a high-profile ‘vacation’ and promising to get around to a jobs plan … soon. Commerce will give one more revision to Q2′s estimate in late September, which will put the poor economic performance under his stewardship on display yet again — and then Obama will have to deal with a Q3 result that so far doesn’t look any better than Q2. If Hurricane Irene doesn’t bring the vacation to an early end, this number really should have the White House political team calling to have Air Force One warming up the engines.”

TODAY ONLY, a sale on Energy speakers and subwoofers.

GEORGE WILL: Liberals’ Wisconsin Waterloo:

During the recall tumult, unions barely mentioned either their supposed grievance about collective bargaining, or their real fears, which concern money, particularly political money. Teachers unions can no longer bargain to require school districts to purchase teachers’ health insurance from the union’s preferred provider, which is especially expensive. This is saving millions of dollars and reducing teacher layoffs. Also, unions must hold annual recertification votes.

And teachers unions may no longer automatically deduct dues from members’ paychecks. After Colorado in 2001 required public employees unions to have annual votes reauthorizing collection of dues, membership in the Colorado Association of Public Employees declined 70 percent. In 2005, Indiana stopped collecting dues from unionized public employees; in 2011, there are 90 percent fewer dues-paying members. In Utah, the end of automatic dues deductions for political activities in 2001 caused teachers’ payments to fall 90 percent. After a similar law passed in 1992 in Washington state, the percentage of teachers making such contributions declined from 82 to 11.

Democrats furiously oppose Walker because public employees unions are transmission belts, conveying money to the Democratic Party. Last year, $11.2 million in union dues was withheld from paychecks of Wisconsin’s executive branch employees and $2.6 million from paychecks at the university across the lake. Having spent improvidently on the recall elections, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the teachers union, is firing 40 percent of its staff.

Progressives want to recall Walker next year. Republicans hope they try.

It seems that unions don’t do well if people get to choose whether to support them.

PAT SUMMITT FANS WILL BE wearing orange today to show support.