COMING TO THE UNITED STATES: High-Quality Fake IDs From China. “We are in a identification technology arms race between elaborate identity faking and identity verification capabilities. The inevitable result: less privacy. Less anonymity.”

YA THINK? WaPo: High gas prices are holding the economy down. When I was on the road last week, I was paying over $4/gallon for the premium unleaded that my Highlander Hybrid uses.

MAURICE STUCKE: Reconsidering Antitrust’s Goals. “With the anger over taxpayer bailouts for firms deemed too-big-and-integral-to-fail, the wealth inequality that accelerated over the past thirty years, and the current budget cuts and austerity measures, the United States is ripe for a new antitrust policy cycle.”

AT NPR, vote for the top 100 science fiction and fantasy titles.

That reminds me: I finished Ric Locke’s Temporary Duty at the beach last week, and it was every bit as good as various bloggers and InstaPundit readers said. I’m hoping for a sequel.

OKAY, I LINKED RADLEY BALKO’S PIECE ON COREY MAYE’S RETURN HOME FROM PRISON last night, but so many readers say they were moved by it that I’m reposting it today. I’m happy that he’s out of jail now, but I don’t think he should have spent a single day in prison. It’s sad that this counts as a victory for justice.

MEDIAITE: Fox’s Greg Gutfeld And Bob Beckel Admit To ‘Pulling Punches’ With ‘Co-Worker’ Sarah Palin. I think we see that kind of co-worker courtesy at most media outlets (believe me, nobody at Fox disses Bill O’Reilly). It matters if she’s a candidate, of course, but I don’t think she will be. At this point, she’s more like O’Reilly than Obama.

CAN THE GOP WIN YOUNGER VOTERS? James Poulos interviews Margaret Hoover, author of American Individualism.

I’m not sure that I buy her argument that her grandfather, Herbert Hoover, was the first Millenial or something. But I do think she’s right that focusing on individual freedom is a better selling point for the GOP than social-nannyism.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: What Would A Cuts-Only Balanced Budget Look Like?

CHANGE: IRS: U.S. Income Plummeted 15.2% in 2009. I knew it was bad, but I had no idea it was that bad.

AMERICA, IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Scenes From Surrendered Homes.

STEPHEN L. CARTER: Balanced-Budget Bill Fails Fiscal Test. “So the balanced-budget amendment, whatever its political popularity, possesses the following difficulties: It is poorly written and easy to circumvent; it invites judicial control of the appropriations process; and it pretends to know more than we can confidently say we do about how the economy works. For an amendment to the Constitution, those are just too many deficits.”

HMM. First the ATF is letting guns go across the border to Mexico. Now there’s this: Documents: Feds allegedly allowed Sinaloa cartel to move cocaine into U.S. for information. “U.S. federal agents allegedly allowed the Sinaloa drug cartel to traffic several tons of cocaine into the United States in exchange for information about rival cartels, according to court documents filed in a U.S. federal court. . . . The case could prove to be a bombshell on par with the ATF’s ‘Operation Fast and Furious,’ except that instead of U.S. guns being allowed to walk across the border, the Sinaloa cartel was allowed to bring drugs into the United States over a five-year period, the documents allege.” It’s not a confidence-builder, is it?

LIST: Pre-Post-Apocalyptic Survival Gear. Plus this commentary: “It’s funny and sometimes quasi-useful to read about zombie survival and all that, but in my humble opinion, zombies are not a viable focal point due to lack of reality.”

So far . . . .

JAMES TARANTO: OBAMA’S RACISM PROBLEM. “The trouble with this for the president’s supporters is that one cannot assert Obama is unable to govern effectively because of racism without conceding that he is unable to govern effectively. To put it mildly, that is not a strong argument in favor of re-electing him.”

HMM: Pressured By White House, Geithner Is Expected To Stay At Post. “Mr. Obama and his chief of staff, William M. Daley, have been urging Mr. Geithner to stay, administration officials say, not only for continuity when the economy has weakened and to avoid an all-but-certain confirmation fight in the Senate over a successor, but also because Mr. Obama has developed a close rapport with Mr. Geithner.”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

After your post some time ago about the “Tax Cheat” stamp, I had been carefully reviewing the bills I receive to see how many had Geithner’s signature. They recently started popping up regularly. And lo and behold, yesterday, when I went to get a cheese steak (I’m in the Philadelphia suburbs), I got a “Tax Cheat”-stamped bill as change. Loved it.

Best regards
(don’t use my name, I don’t want to get audited or anything like that.)

Well, the guy behind the stamp already did. Doesn’t seem to have stopped him, though. And this is the first sighting of a stamped bill “in the wild” that I’ve heard of.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails:

I work at a Trader Joe’s in St. Louis. I wasn’t actively looking for the Tax Cheat bills, but while giving change last week I noticed that one of the singles I pulled out of my drawer had something on it. I looked again, and it was stamped. The next bill had “Cheater” written over the signature in red pen.

The best part about the experience is, upon my pointing it out, the customer said they were keeping both bills for themselves and wouldn’t spend them.

Hmm. I wonder how widespread this phenomenon is.

OUCH: Consumer Confidence Falls to Lowest Since March 12, 2009, Approaching Ten Year Low. Plus this: “Just 29% of American adults rate their own finances as good or excellent. That’s down from 43% just before Lehman Brothers collapsed in the fall of 2008, down from 35% when Barack Obama took office, and down from 34% at the beginning of 2011. Seventy-four percent (74%) now believe the U.S. economy is in a recession. That’s up from 66% at the beginning of the year.”

YA THINK? Steve Chapman: The Republican Party Is A Fickle Friend To The 10th Amendment.

That’s something I’ve been pointing out for a while.

DEBT-CEILING DEAL not polling so well. “The hard-won, last-minute agreement to raise the debt ceiling and cut the deficit gets low ratings from Americans, who by more than 2-1 predict it will make the nation’s fragile economy worse rather than better. In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken hours after the Senate passed and President Obama signed the deal, 46% disapprove of the agreement; 39% approve. Only one in five see it as a step forward in addressing the federal debt.”

LAST WEEK, when jobless claims were under 400,000 for the first time in ages, I said to watch for these to be revised upward, as usual. Well, as this week’s number comes in at 400,000, last week’s has been revised upward to 401,000. Result: “Applications have been at or above 400,000 for 17 weeks.”

DEBT CRISIS IN EUROPE: “Fears mounted Wednesday that Europe’s debt crisis is reaching a critical tipping point, spreading from Greece, Ireland and Portugal to the larger economies of Italy and Spain. . . . Investors drove borrowing costs for Italy and Spain to 14-year highs, fueling sharp stock market drops in London, Frankfurt, Paris, Milan and Madrid. Though Italian and Spanish bonds later rebounded, borrowing rates for both nations remained dangerously high, at more than 6 percent — and closing in on the 7 percent threshold that eventually triggered bailout talks with Greece, Ireland and Portugal.”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: The Real ‘Uniters.’

During the debt-ceiling debate, the Tea Party was called everything from cannibals to terrorists. In reality, the Tea Party did far better at getting bipartisan results than the “Post-Partisan Uniter,” President Obama.

In just the last few days, Vice President Biden called the tea party “terrorists,” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd called them “a maniac gang with big knives held high” and the Arizona Daily Star ran a cartoon with Obama ordering Navy SEALs to kill tea party congressmen. And that’s the civil stuff.

Meanwhile, pundits have talked endlessly about how dysfunctional and partisan Washington is thanks to the tea party radicals.

What was their sin? Well, near as we can figure, it was that the tea party managed to force Washington to confront a festering debt crisis that leaders had far too long ignored, and pushed for a credible plan that didn’t kill the economy with new taxes, all of which produced a deal that got huge bipartisan support.

Wouldn’t a better term for the tea party be “uniters”? This isn’t, after all, the first time the tea party has pushed an issue to a strong bipartisan finish.

It’s only unity and compromise when the right people get what they want.

THIS CAN’T BE GOOD: U.S. Borrowing Tops 100% Of GDP: Treasury. “The new borrowing took total public debt to $14.58 trillion, over end-2010 GDP of $14.53 trillion, and putting it in a league with highly indebted countries like Italy and Belgium.”

RECOVERY BUMMER (CONT’D): Going nowhere: Economy struggles to find footing.

THIS IS COOL: So I was interviewed (about the TSA) by NPR’s Tovia Smith, and at her suggestion I used a cool iPhone App that recorded a high-quality version of the interview and then FTP’ed it to their server. The App is called “report-it,” and with the NPR username and password the rest was pretty much automatic. Very cool indeed. And much better than having to go to the WUOT studio to use their ISDN connection, which is how I’ve done it in the past.