JAMES TARANTO: One-Hit Wonder: Obama is the Flock of Seagulls of political oratory.

This explains Tom Hanks’ support.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll was there first, with Photoshop.

JOHN YOO ON Obama’s Executive overreach. They told me if I voted for John McCain . . . oh, hell, you know the rest.

Related: The Styrofoam Pillars Collapse.

TIM STANLEY: Elizabeth Warren’s ‘Native American’ claims: if she was a Republican, the media would call her a racist. Well, that goes without saying.

DAN NADEN: We’ve Got The Narrative, Now Don’t Get Cocky.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Are We In Revolutionary Times?

KEPLER REGGAE: “Scientists have created a melody that’s truly out of this world, turning numerical data from two stars in our galaxy into music for a reggae-rock band. The star observations were made by NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. Researchers at Georgia Tech’s Sonification Lab converted the data into sound, at the request of the band Echo Movement, which wanted to infuse one of its songs with a heavenly melody.”

REALLY, IT WAS A BIG MISTAKE TO screw with Stacy McCain. Which should have been obvious to anyone with a brain, ya know?

Related: Should nonprofits linked to ‘Anonymous’ and harassment stay tax-exempt?

LUNCHTIME AT THE WHITE HOUSE.

SOME CAMPAIGN-AD HELP FOR MITT ROMNEY.

RATS ON THE WESTSIDE, bedbugs uptown. “Doctors gave her a battery of meds — including anti-virus and anti-rabies shots — and treated several cuts on her leg from the rat’s sharp claws.” What a mess — this town’s in tatters. And Mayor Bloomberg is worried about Big Gulps.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Obama’s Pity Party: The president lives increasingly in the past. “We are left with the paradox of a backward-looking progressive calling on the American people to march forward. No wonder the public is anxious, and worried about the future. Our incumbent president is holding a giant pity party, while failing to address the nation’s challenges in a responsible manner. Like Lebowski’s Walter Sobchak, Barack Obama is a man living in the past. And there is no Dude or Donny to save him.”

HEH.

SCIENCE DEMANDS BIG GOVERNMENT: “We have evolved to need coercion.”

NEIL MUNRO CALLED A “DISRESPECTFUL ASSHOLE” BY . . . Alex Pareene? When Alex Pareene is standing up for old-fashioned decorum, the winds of change are blowing hard.

UPDATE: Now this is respectful! MSNBC splices exploding buses into Romney bus tour footage.

ANOTHER UPDATE: From the comments: “It’s NBC. They’re used to faking explosions.”

INDEPENDENTS WHO VOTED FOR OBAMA ARE TURNING AWAY, and Ace has some advice for Romney.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Disruptive Technologies:

Massively open online courses, or MOOCs, are not credit-bearing. But a pathway to college credit for the courses already exists — one that experts say many students may soon take.

That scenario combines the courses with prior learning assessment — a less-hyped potential “disruption” to traditional higher education — which is the granting of credit for college-level learning gained outside the traditional academic setting.

Interesting, but it threatens a lot of rice bowls.

DNC TOUTS “AWESOME” ANTI-ROMNEY ROADSHOW, DNC’s own pics show nobody there. “Oh, honey. A desperate attempt at using camera angles doesn’t help.”

UPDATE: A reader emails: “Did anything else stand out about that pic? I would characterize the massive turnout as ‘non-diverse.'”

As diverse as a Howard Dean meetup, or Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters!

HEH: “We learned over the weekend that the Obama administration has a Commerce Secretary. Who knew?”

FREE SPEECH: The 9-year-old school-dinner blogger is free again to photograph her school dinners. “Ha ha. You can’t keep a blogger down. Even in Scotland. I love when repression backfires.”

AT AMAZON, Warehouse Deals on Pet Products.

MAYBE I SHOULD OPEN A KICKSTARTER PROJECT TO MAKE THIS THE NEW, STATELIER STATELY INSTAPUNDIT MANOR: No one wants to buy the UT president’s 11,400-square-foot home. “The mansion has sat empty for two years, going on the market in March 2010. After a year, the price was cut nearly in half — from $5 million to today’s asking price of $2.9 million.”

HMM: Michael Strayer’s death confirmed; authorities won’t discuss circumstances. “A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Maryland today confirmed that Dr. Michael Strayer, a former U.S. Department of Energy executive who was indicted last month on 13 federal counts, died earlier this week.”

ILYA SOMIN: The Broccoli Argument Isn’t About Broccoli.

BAD NEWS FOR WINE SNOBS: Does All Wine Taste The Same?

On May 24, 1976, the British wine merchant Steven Spurrier organized a blind tasting of French and Californian wines. Spurrier was a Francophile and, like most wine experts, didn’t expect the New World upstarts to compete with the premiers crus from Bordeaux. He assembled a panel of eleven wine experts and had them taste a variety of Cabernets blind, rating each bottle on a twenty-point scale.

The results shocked the wine world. According to the judges, the best Cabernet at the tasting was a 1973 bottle from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa Valley. When the tasting was repeated a few years later—some judges insisted that the French wines had been drunk too young—Stag’s Leap was once again declared the winner, followed by three other California Cabernets. These blind tastings (now widely known as the Judgment of Paris) helped to legitimate Napa vineyards.

But now, in an even more surprising turn of events, another American wine region has performed far better than expected in a blind tasting against the finest French châteaus. Ready for the punch line? The wines were from New Jersey.

I credit Chris Christie.

A NEW TEN-LEGGED SPECIES?