IN TENNESSEE, TSA agents doing searches on the highways. I predict it will be as effective as airport security has been.

SAYUNCLE REVIEWS the Crimson Trace Lightguard. Looks cool.

BROOKLYN HIPSTERS and Prison Love.

STUDY: Banning Hybrids From HOV Lanes Slows Everyone Down.

CLOSE CALLS: Billion-Ton Comet May Have Missed Earth by a Few Hundred Kilometers in 1883: A reanalysis of historical observations suggest Earth narrowly avoided an extinction event just over a hundred years ago. Shades of, well, you know.

UPDATE: Reader Chris DeBoe writes: “Shades of The Peshawar Lancers by SM Stirling, which posits a comet hitting North America and Europe during Victoria’s reign, and the British government relocating to India. And the Great Game still goes on.” Several readers made that connection, which I should have caught. I read that book and it was good — one of several that made my list of recommended alt-history reading.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some skepticism on the comet claim.

MICHAEL YON: “A map of uninterrupted cell phone service around Afghanistan likely would tell the story of who owns the night and where. Coalition influence in Nimruz is minimal; we rarely step foot in Zaranj, and when the Marines do come, they land in Ospreys, have their meetings and fly away within hours.”

THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES — WELL, MOSTLY PERRY AND ROMNEY — don’t seem to have read Roger Simon’s letter. They should.

RON BAILEY ON the miracle of oil from sand.

RAND SIMBERG: ‘Shuttlyndra’ and the Smoking Rocket: A NASA study, suppressed by the agency, definitively shows that the Senate Launch System isn’t needed.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Ten Things to Keep In Mind for 2012. Here are the first five:

1. There is no austerity.

2. There was no deregulation.

3. You can’t trust Republicans on spending.

4. Wall Street loves Democrats.

5. People who voted for Barack Obama on civil-liberties grounds are fools.

More at the link.

BRYAN PRESTON: Occupy Barack: Obama Has Raised More from Wall Street than All the GOP Contenders, Combined.

QUESTION: Why Is Class Hatred Morally Superior To Race Hatred?

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Europe’s Real Crisis Isn’t Financial. “Either France (and the rest of the Latins and Greeks) must live under German rules, or the Germans (and the other thrifty and orderly northern countries) must become more like Zorba the Greek. The inability to square this circle is the real reason it is taking Europe so long to figure out how to deal with the euro crisis. Europe is having an identity crisis — and this is not something that can be settled in a weekend.”

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Comics & Graphic Novels.

INSTAVISION: Is “Harvard Envy” Feeding The Higher Education Bubble? I talk with Kaplan CEO Andy Rosen about his new book, Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy, and about the future of higher education.

JOBLESS NUMBERS REMAIN ABOVE 400K, but some are asking questions about the steady upward revision of past weeks’ numbers:

When we discussed last week’s intiial claims number we said, “In today’s weekly dose of BS from the BLS, we get the previous week’s massive beat of 401K revised to 405K, cutting the 410K estimate beat in half. But what is important is that the expectation for this week of 405K was once again “massively beaten” by a whopping 1K at 404K. Of course, next week this number will be revised to 408K meaning the consensus was missed but no robots will care.” Sure enough, last week’s beat was enough for 5 ES points. And even surer enough, we were spot on: last week’s 404K “beat” was just revised to a 409K “miss.” As for this week’s soon to be revised upward number, it came at 403K, missing expectations of 400K, but sure enough, suddenly a “much better” number than last week’s revised 409K. Just how dumb does the BLS think everyone is? The bottom line is that claims continue to be persistently higher than 400K.

I’ve noticed the revision bit myself.

UPDATE: Is going to Hell in a handbasket more slowly the new “improvement?”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Carter emails: “Have been tracking those revisions as well. My numbers show the last 26 weeks have had an average revision of up 3,884 with no downward revisions and only one revision of zero. Talk about lying with statistics.”

It’s hard to trust anything from these guys lately.

EUROPE’S SPLIT: Prudence vs. Reckless Abandon.

CONTRADICTION: If Corporations Aren’t People, How Can They Be “Greedy?”

Related: Who, Or What, Is Greedier Than The Government? “As Schumer mocks millionaires, Sessions proposes ‘Solyndra Rule.'”

“Washington asking for more tax revenue is like an alcoholic asking for more cash before a trip to the liquor store,” Sessions says in the video. “Even if the alcoholic asked a millionaire for the cash, it doesn’t change the fact that the money’s not being wisely used.”

Indeed.

UPDATE: Reader Eric Klaus emails:

When politicians, especially Obama talk about how we used to be able to do “Big Things” like send a man to the moon, or build the Hoover Dam… they are playing on Americans pride.

But Obama fails to understand this in today’s context. He has gone all in on “Green Energy” and “Bullet Trains” and “Rebuilding Roads and Bridges”…when the real “Big Things” are things like Google’s self driving cars.

Imagine for a moment…if he would have gone into office and laid out a plan that would pave the way for Self Driving Cars in 10 Years or 15 years. This is something that is actually obtainable…but has many formidable obstacles, the least of which is the actual technology. There are HUGE obstacles in updating the laws and regulations to accomodate self driving cars. There are huge obstacles in terms of accident liability. There are huge risks to companies developing these technologies if they happen to kill a child in a school zone. The regulatory framework is a bigger obstacle than the actual technology.

Imagine if he would have taken the lead in reworking the Legal and Regulatory Framework to accomodate the REAL cars of tomorrow. He would go down in history as a true visionary and leader. But unfortunately there isn’t room for corruption, graft and theft of funds in this technology..so therefore he bet the house on Solyndra and the Chevy Volt, and Cash for Clunkers.

Indeed.

TIGERHAWK: Occupy this: President Obama’s Wall Street fundraising.

At this point, Wall Streeters really do not like Barack Obama. It has been a long time since I have met one who still actually supports him. But the extent of the pain of Dodd-Frank depends on regulations that have yet to be written by executive branch agencies that report to the White House. The big financial firms know that their future profitability requires that President Obama influence those regulations, and he is exploiting that for all it is worth.

This, loyal readers, is “regulatory capture” in action.

Not that anybody from the “Occupy” movement or the New York Times will look at it that way.

Nope. Send ’em a copy of Iain Murray’s book.

REPORT: Khaddafy killed.

UPDATE: Reader Charles Katek writes: “Are all spellings of his name dead? Or just that one?”

Looks like all of ’em. Warning: Graphic image.

#OWSBLOWBACK: Protester: fundraisers tie Obama to ‘money elite’. Gee, do you think?

Kevin Zeese observed to WMAL.com that “President Obama, with his one billion dollar campaign, is holding fundraisers that cost $38,500 to get into.” Zeese noted that the fundraiser cost is “higher than the median individual income for Americans, which is $1,000 less.” He added that such a fundraiser “puts Obama out of touch with the people and very much in touch with the money elite.”

President Obama has raised over $64 million so far for his reelection campaign. Charlie Spiering of The Washington Examiner recently detailed a two day, seven fundraiser cash-crawl by Obama that included a stop at one of those high-dollar fundraisers.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., lectured the Occupy Wall Streeters a couple days ago, saying they made him ‘unhappy’ for not supporting Democrats in 2010.

They don’t call him President Goldman Sachs for nothing.

“OCCUPY BOSTON” MARRED BY VIOLENCE. Best quote:

Demonstrator Andrew Warner, 36, said homeless people are hijacking tents, getting drunk, “passing out” and stealing.

“It’s turning into us against them,” Warner said. “They come in here and they’re looking at it as a way of getting a free meal and a place to crash, which is totally fine, but they don’t bring anything to the table at all. It gets really frustrating.”

Really? They just mooch and loot? Do tell. (Full story here).

UPDATE: Threats and racial slurs at Occupy Oakland.

MICKEY KAUS: “If CBO was wrong about CLASS what other parts of Obamacare was it wrong about?”

BRIAN TAMANAHA: A Proposal for Imposing Fiscal Restraint on Law Schools. Capping student loans?