FROM ANN ALTHOUSE: Email from Tricia Willoughby, the 14-year-old girl who spoke at Saturday’s Tea Party rally. “When I first watched the video of that particularly distasteful man, my first reaction was actually to laugh! I couldn’t believe it! This grown man was soo immature and so small to be calling me those things. I was thinking ‘That is what you want to say to me? Really? You’re not even listening to what I’m saying, or criticizing my actual logic. You are simply just calling me names because I am on the opposite side’.”

MARKDOWNS ON Wusthof Cutlery.

POLIWOOD REMEMBERS SIDNEY LUMET:

HERE’S MORE ON THAT University Of Iowa professorial hate-speech story.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, PEOPLE WOULD BE TRYING TO SHUT DOWN DISSENT. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Prosecutor Seeks Prior Restraint of Koran-Burning Pastor.

From the comments: “Jones may be a whackadoddle but he sure knows how to force the contradictions. He submits a false premise and his opponents race to prove him right after all.”

THEIR MASTER’S VOICE: Indiana’s government unions paid for Democrats to flee-bag their constituents.

AUTHOR OF GOOGLED has his Gmail account hacked.

A “DOOMED ATTEMPT TO EMULATE INSTAPUNDIT?” A man’s gotta know his limitations.

JUST A REMINDER TO PEOPLE WHO WANT TO SEE TAXES RAISED: You can always send in a check. They take credit cards, too.

WISCONSIN PROTEST DOCTORS now facing investigation over phony sick notes. More here.

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES: Box-office power of Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ baffles insiders. “Business has been brisk enough for producers Harmon Kaslow and John Aglialoro to expand from 299 theaters to 425 this weekend and to 1,000 by the end of the month. They don’t have enough film prints to fill all the orders.”

YOUR IPHONE IS SPYING ON YOU, KEEPING A FILE OF ALL YOUR LOCATIONS: “The iPhone system, by contrast, appears to record the data whether or not the user agrees. Apple declined to comment on why the file is created or whether it can be disabled.”

BUILDING A TRANSISTOR out of a single electron.

PROF. JACOBSON: KLOPPENBURG’S FOLLY.

UPDATE: Politico offers a chart comparing margins in recent recounts, and this isn’t even close.

DONALD TRUMP ON THE KELO DECISION: I AGREE WITH IT 100%!

PROBLEM FOR THE WHITE HOUSE: Local sit-down interviews are good, but threats to freeze out local reporters from White House access aren’t worth nearly as much as similar threats aimed at the White House press corps. And a local reporter who causes the President to lose his cool gets national attention. Now that Obama’s visibly vulnerable, the White House will have to worry about this kind of thing much more than it’s used to. My prediction: Much more vetting of the local interviewers. Can’t let the President go off-message. He doesn’t do well in those settings.

UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes:

The fact that Obama quickly gets lost in the weeds when he’s taken off message should put a big fat bull’s-eye on him for any of his opponents in his upcoming reelection campaign. A point I’ve made in other forums and repeat here is this: A sufficiently ruthless opponent would not defer to him but take any and every opportunity to discomfit him. What this, and similar episodes, shows is that he has never had to deal with a very public event, from which he cannot escape, in which he’s lost control and is being made to look bad. That thin veneer of cool would quickly melt. He doesn’t improvise well and doesn’t know when to stop digging: it’s tough when you believe deeply that you’re the smartest guy in the room. In fact, the person he least respects has the greatest opportunity here. Media mavens that run our so-called debates can be counted on to try to keep things predictable. Obama’s opponents should not accommodate that ruse.

Indeed.

THE MIDDLE-CLASS TAX TRAP.

I SEE THAT ANN COULTER’S NEW BOOK is taking her usual moderate tone.

EVEN TODAY, AND EVEN FOR WONKETTE, THERE ARE LINES. Wonkette crossed one. Now people are boycotting advertisers.

The site hasn’t been worth much in years anyway. Normally I’m not much of a fan of these kinds of boycotts, but frankly I can’t make myself care much nowadays. Wonkette is mean, but not even funny-mean, and basically not any good.

UPDATE: Half-hearted apology not selling.

SCIENCE DOLL: REFLECTIONS ON THE Summit At Sea.

AT AMAZON, top deals in Electronics.

DAVID HARSANYI: If Washington Is So Great, Let’s All Pay For It. “Rather than shared responsibility, we have a growing number of people who rely on others to pay for their votes as they become increasingly disconnected from the cost of government. . . . If, as the enlightened voices on the left contend, the American people deeply love their federal services, their dependency programs, their regulations, their industrious public education department, let’s all pay. Why shouldn’t we take on a proportionally fair share in the joy? Even income tax-paying Americans don’t really feel the cost of government because of how we collect taxes. But let’s create better consumers. Consumers pay and demand results. Dependents, on the other hand, just demand. They have no reason not to.”

I refer readers to these 2008 thoughts of mine on “shared sacrifice.” And I note that Obama has yet to get behind my 50% surtax on post-government earnings of government officials. Why not? Aren’t these former government officials patriotic?

DOES ORAL SEX confer an evolutionary advantage? I think there was something about this in Quest For Fire.

ATTRACTIVE WOMEN’S JOB PROSPECTS hurt by jealous females in HR departments. “Staff in personnel departments are overwhelmingly female, typically single and aged 29 on average, the researchers found. Their report concludes: ‘The evidence points to female jealousy of attractive women in the workplace as a primary reason for their penalisation in recruitment.’”

MEGAN MCARDLE: “Have you noticed all the huge antiwar demonstrations in the last twelve months? Yeah, me neither. It turns out that a lot of the energy for the movement seems to have been provided by Democrats who are a lot less worried about wars conducted by Democratic presidents. Or at least who believe that advancing the Democratic agenda is much more important than trying to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is by no means the whole movement–but it was enough that once a Democrat took office, both the numbers at the demonstrations, and the organizational capacity of the movement as a whole, dwindled away to near-nothingness.”

Yeah, it’s as if all that self-righteous moralism, and cries or war criminal and illegal wars and concentration camps at Gitmo was just a lot of lying, self-serving twaddle by people who really just wanted power for their team. Who knew?

Well, some of us did. And pointed it out at the time. And, well, we’re going to keep rubbing it in now.