LANE WALLACE: At what price the Moon?

WEIMAR REVISITED: Belarus snaps up TVs, fridges as ruble plunges. “Belarus consumers are sweeping store shelves bare in a frantic attempt to spend their devalued rubles before prices of imported goods go even further through the roof in the cash-strapped former Soviet state. The central department store in the capital Minsk no longer has television sets or refrigerators in stock as people rush to spend their rubles on anything from appliances to fur coats to jewellery.”

UPDATE: Welcome to hyperinflation hell. “First look at the Belarus Ruble chart below: this is what always happens to every country that resolutely continues to live outside its means. Always. . . . The catalyst for the country’s imploding economy: socialism and price controls. Sound familiar?”

IF A HOUSEKEEPER WALKS IN ON YOU WHILE YOU’RE NAKED, why is it your fault? I mean, aren’t you paying for the room?

I don’t travel all that much any more, but I find many hotel housekeepers are pesky and intrusive. I tend to put the “do not disturb” sign on whenever I’m in the room, but they still sometimes knock. I feel pretty sure, though, that if male hotel employees were walking in on women guests, it would be considered the male employee’s fault.

HMM: Is Fitzgerald Protecting Obama From the Blagojevich Trial??? Beats me, but it wouldn’t be a shocker.

THE HILL: Senate Rejects The Ryan Budget. Not quite ready to get serious yet.

On the other hand, Ryan did better than Obama: Senate votes unanimously against Obama’s $3.7 trillion budget.

SHH: DON’T TELL THE DEMOCRATS. “The Republican field is not weak.”

MICKEY KAUS: Barney Frank would be in trouble if he were straight, and a lousy interview. Luckily for Barney, he’s neither.

Related: How ‘Reckless’ Greed Contributed To Financial Crisis.

FROM RAND SIMBERG, more thoughts on the 50th Anniversary of Apollo.

It would be nice to have, for the first time since that historic announcement, a national discussion of why we have a human spaceflight program. The Augustine panel attempted to establish one a couple years ago, when it pointed out that if we don’t plan to settle space with humanity, there is little point to sending anyone there. But no one seemed to pick up on it, and it became lost in the hysterical reaction to the inevitable cancellation of the unaffordable and ill-conceived Constellation program, driven by a combination of concern about industry job losses and a misplaced and misunderstood sixties nostalgia.

This fiftieth anniversary would be an excellent time to make another attempt at it, but if history is any guide, we will let the opportunity pass once again. But fortunately, as the new space entrepreneurs make more and more visible progress in reducing costs and offereing exciting new services for all of us, and not just a select few government employees, it may not matter. Half a century after the false start, Americans will start to seek their own space dreams.

That’s the beauty of a free-market approach. It doesn’t depend on some bureaucrat or politician guessing right.

WHAT ALFONZO RACHEL THINKS about the 2012 GOP Presidential field. Is the problem with Herman Cain that he’s “too much of a leader?”

BOB OWENS: Seventy-One Shots: The Death of Jose Guereña.

Dupnik’s SWAT team initially claimed that Guereña fired at them while they were serving a warrant — as he slept. They claimed that his bullets hit the bulletproof shield that the entry team hid behind, and that the barrage of bullets they fired back was in self-defense.

Only, Guereña never fired his weapon. Awoken by his wife with screams that men with guns were invading his home and threatening his family, Jose Guereña armed himself with a AR-15 rifle and crouched in the hallway. The SWAT team unloaded upon Guereña on sight. He apparently recognized the home invaders as police. He took 60 rounds, but never — as the Pima County Sheriff’s Department was forced to admit — took off his weapon’s safety as he was being killed. . . . A Marine veteran of Iraq that had the discipline not to fire — a discipline that a trigger-happy SWAT team which has now killed three men in less than a year cannot itself exercise?

Police shouldn’t launch this sort of raid absent an imminent threat to life. They go wrong too often. And clowns like Pima County’s Sheriff Dupnik shouldn’t be around guns of any kind.

RICHARD POLLOCK: The Business Of Poverty: Obscene Salaries Dominate At International Development Banks. “Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s lavish lifestyle is no anomaly: the U.S. taxpayer-funded IMF, World Bank, and others are handing out blood-boiling salaries and perks.”

EPA: FRACKING NOT A THREAT. “At a U.S. House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday, President Barack Obama’s EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, admitted the environmental risk of hydraulic fracturing is practically nonexistent.”

HOW BAD IS OBAMA? Well, he’s got Glenn Greenwald sounding like Rush Limbaugh. Or wait, is he that good?

LAW SCHOOL CONUNDRUM: “Down market diversity” and bar passage rates.

WHAT WOULD THE PICKUP ARTIST COMMUNITY SAY? Happy guys finish last, says new study on sexual attractiveness. “Women find happy guys significantly less sexually attractive than swaggering or brooding men, according to a new University of British Columbia study that helps to explain the enduring allure of ‘bad boys’ and other iconic gender types. . . . The study found that women were least attracted to smiling, happy men, preferring those who looked proud and powerful or moody and ashamed. In contrast, male participants were most sexually attracted to women who looked happy, and least attracted to women who appeared proud and confident.”

Then there’s the whole tall business.

GATEWAY PUNDIT is Tornadoblogging From St. Louis.

INVASIVE SPECIES in the Mediterranean.

PETER WEHNER: Scalia’s Blistering Dissent From “Judicial Travesty.” I don’t know if he’s right, but I do know that California has too many people in jail, as does the rest of the United States. Which is not to say that they’re letting the right ones out. . . .

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Science Fiction & Fantasy.

THE WAR POWERS RESOLUTION: Obama As Humpty-Dumpty. “Instead of taking a principled stance against a questionable law, however, President Obama chose to mask his violation with cleverness — a corrosive, shallow cleverness smacking of the worst in partisan skullduggery. Too bad. Tackling the War Powers Act would have strengthened the presidency as an institution and reinforced Obama’s moral authority. . . . Obama must believe his word games are tactical tools for achieving policy objectives. That may be the case if you are community organizing in Chicago, but a more sober and presidential appreciation of reality is appropriate when cruise missiles disorganize air defense communities (by blast effects). Otherwise, the commander in chief risks diminishing one of his most precious strategic assets: moral authority.”

JIM BENNETT: Proposing A Coast Guard For Space. “The Space Guard would assume some functions now performed by the Air Force, NASA, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). To understand whether such a maritime model for space makes sense, we must examine the structure of the U.S. maritime establishment and bureaucracy.”

GIVING GRADUATE STUDENTS the sad truth about the job market. “Depression and anxiety at the prospect of not finding work, feelings of scholarly worthlessness, and, perhaps most pernicious of all, the ominous realization that now, Ph.D. in hand, you have become an obscure subaltern, fated to roam the university landscape from one adjunct appointment to another. . . . Just how bad is it? It used to be that graduate students in their final year, if they did not find a tenure-track position in the fall or winter before they graduated, at least were able to nail down a postdoc that would give them a decent salary and time to publish a few articles or a book. This system, as far as I can tell, has completely collapsed. . . . In the meantime, what should graduate directors tell their graduate students? It’s actually very simple. There are no jobs. This simple formula, repeated often, can actually serve as a palliative for anxiety. . . . If you do decide to pursue graduate studies, remember that you are playing a numbers game. Like British soldiers sent to Gallipoli in 1915, only a few of you will make it out alive. . . . Know your enemies. They are everyone. You and your ‘graduate student colleagues’ are a smelly pack of famished mongrels tearing at each other’s throats for paltry scraps; your professors are the bourgeois slave drivers and elites that they themselves warned you about in that class on ‘Critical Theory.’ Begin to suspect that the leftist virtue of the university conceals a system of privilege and good‐ole‐boyism every bit as sordid as the Corporate America you went to graduate school to avoid.”

Plus, advice to join the Army.

ROGER KIMBALL: Higher Education Bubble: The Real World Weighs In. “The current, and the money, is beginning to flow the other way.”

MICHAEL BARONE: How Republicans Should Run Against Obama: More In Sorrow Than In Anger. “Our current president embodied the potential of a generation. So many talents. So much charm. Such great skill. But, in the end, to what end? So much promise, to no great purpose.”

CHANGE: HIGH GAS PRICES INFLUENCE 75% OF NEW HOME BUYERS: “77% of the real estate professionals polled said that the recent surge in US gas prices has already begun to influence their clients’ choices home-buying decisions, with up to 45% of their clients moving into homes that are closer to shops and services specifically because of rising fuel costs.” Hmm. But read the whole thing.