SCANDALS OF CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD: The Exquisite Garbo.

AT AMAZON, Warehouse Deals in Pet Products & Supplies.

Also, today only: Panasonic 3D Blu-Ray Disc 5.1 Surround Sound Home Theater System, $294.99.

AP: Obama ignores almost 50% of America as President.

IT’S A NICE GESTURE, BUT I DON’T THINK DRIVING SKILLS ARE THE ISSUE, EXACTLY: Goodyear offers free driving lessons to Lindsay Lohan and Amanda Bynes:

Lindsay Lohan and Amanda Bynes seem to constantly be in trouble for their behind-the-wheel activities. Lohan may or may not have hit a pedestrian with her Porsche SUV in New York early Wednesday, and Bynes was ordered by a judge not to drive after multiple incidents.

So tire maker Goodyear has decided to offer the actresses some assistance. They’ve sent letters to both women offering them free trips to the company’s Ohio headquarters for a private safe driving lesson with a Goodyear professional driver at the company’s track. (“No paparazzi allowed!” chirps the letter.)

I just think the issue goes deeper than an absence of driver’s ed.

ELECTRICITY RATES WILL NECESSARILY SKYROCKET.

Look, folks, I am in this field. I have been for more than 30 years. Losing 36,000 MWs of the most cost-efficient generation capacity in the US is a disaster. You have no idea how bad the increases are going to be. They will be disastrous to the individual energy consumers and apocalyptic to large users – those who create jobs.

I shudder to think of what this is going to do to grid reliability as well. A lot of those coal plants help support the grid during disruptions. They regularly provide both energy and MVARs (Mega Volt-Ampere Reactive) that keep the grid from collapsing when large loads are added or lost. (That’s about as simple as I can make it and still be understood.) Losing these stabilizers will make it very hard to hold the grid. I pity the load dispatchers.

Maybe I should buy that generator.

I THINK IT’S A WAY OF CONVINCING THEM THAT THERE’S NO INTELLIGENT LIFE HERE: Romantic or Reckless? The Plan to Message Aliens with Twitter. Luckily, the transmitter is underpowered.

HMM: Anti-Obama Movie Mailed to 1 Million Ohioans.

THIS MAKES ME FEEL OLD: Smiley-Face Emoticon Turns 30.

WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE: Even The Asteroid Belt Has Water. This is very good news.

GOLF: Lining Up A Putt: The Insidious Effects of Gravity.

IF GEORGE W. BUSH WERE PRESIDENT, WE’D HAVE HEARD ABOUT IT ENDLESSLY: The U.S. Suffered Its Worst Airpower Loss Since Vietnam Last Week and No One Really Noticed. “The last time VMA-211 was combat ineffective was in December 1941, when the squadron was wiped out during the 13-day defense of Wake Island against the Japanese.”

WHAT’S WRONG WITH David Frum? “Why push it to the point that your friends feel so embarrassed — indeed, mortified – by your purposeful insults to their other friends? David, you’re wrong, and I don’t mean incorrect, I mean wrong.”

WELL, IT IS THE 21ST CENTURY: A Slumber Party Conducted Via Text.

CHANGE: “The new job that everyone wants is stay-at-home mom. This makes sense to me.”

Let me second the advice on living below your means, and nourishing a generous emergency fund. And supporting your partner “like steel.” Whether or not you’re a stay-at-home mom. It’s good advice under pretty much any circumstance.

JOE PAPPALARDO: 5 Things We Learned at the Air Force Convention.

ROGER KIMBALL: President Dukakis. “In other words, I am sticking with my prediction that Romney will win and win big. I even have a few modest bets on the race. Of course, it’s possible that Obama will win. It was possible that Michael Dukakis could have won, too. He had the illusion of momentum, just as Obama does.”

CRUMBLING NARRATIVE: CS Monitor: Say, this admission on Benghazi terrorist attack might cause Obama a few problems.

RASMUSSEN: Obama and Romney Tied. So we keep hearing about how Romney has had one terrible week after another, but the polls are all tied up. What will happen if Romney ever manages to have a good week?

Of course, Obama’s Army in the press will do its best to prevent that.

UPDATE: Related: Obama’s Palace Guard: How media fact checkers made themselves of service to the president in the welfare reform debate. They’re just Democratic Party operatives with bylines now.

IF WE HAD A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT, THIS WOULD BE A BIG STORY: Walter Russell Mead: Afghan Surge Ends: Not with a Bang but a Whimper.

We should all be very glad that we have a Democratic president right now; otherwise the news would be terrible. We would be seeing a rash of horrible and depressing stories in the newspapers about strategic failure, with unremitting second guessing and belittling of a president who agonized for months before the surge and then saw his plan fail. We’d be hearing non-stop reports in the media about the incompetent and klutzy leader who torpedoed his own policy by announcing a withdrawal date; the man who tried to please everybody and do everything—and failed at all he tried.

The press would be jumping on this narrative. There would be continuous coverage of the disarray in Afghanistan: the soldier’s we’re training are shooting us, the corruption is intensifying, and the opium trade spreading. There would be story after story about how Afghanistan seems little changed after the surge, and how peace is still not at hand. These stories wouldn’t be on the back pages; they’d be perceived as major news with profound implications for America’s global position and the Sunday shows and nightly TV news round ups would be full of talking heads endlessly analyzing each wrinkle of the failure.

There would be bitter, wounding comparisons between the president and LBJ in Vietnam. If we had a conservative Republican president right now, we’d be hearing him compared to the noble Duke of York, who marched 10,000 men to the top of the hill only to march them down again.

And we’d be hearing all kinds of damning stories about the failure of the U.S. government to deal with the chaos in Pakistan.

We’d also be reading stories linking the apparent U.S. failure in Afghanistan to the empowerment of anti-American movements throughout the Middle East. The recent riots would be used as a stick to beat the president with—his weakness, indecision and strategic inconsequentialism in Afghanistan would be endangering our interests all over the region. Instead of concentrating on the real terror threat, the press would tell us, this hypothetical clueless Republican president wasted time, treasure and attention on a failed strategy in Afghanistan. The press would try to hang the corpse of the U.S. ambassador in Libya around the neck of a Republican president, if we had one right now.

But thankfully we have a Democratic president, and in an election year the normally feisty American media—the same media that worked night and day to expose every flaw and contradiction in the Bush policies in the region (and they had plenty to expose)—is too busy reporting the flaws in the Romney campaign (again, there’s much to report) to pay attention to anything as insignificant as a comprehensively failed presidential strategy in a foreign war.

Yeah, we’re real lucky that way.

FOUAD AJAMI: Muslim Rage And Obama’s Retreat.

This is not a Jimmy Carter moment—a U.S. Embassy and its staff seized and held hostage for 444 days, America’s enemies taking stock of its weakness, its allies running for cover. But the anti-American protests that broke upon 20 nations this past week must be reckoned a grand personal failure for Barack Obama, and a case of hubris undone.

No American president before this one had proclaimed such intimacy with a world that stretches from Morocco to Indonesia. From the start of his administration, Mr. Obama put forth his own biography as a bridge to those aggrieved nations. He would be a “different president,” he promised, and the years he lived among Muslims would acquit him—and thus America itself. He was the un-Bush.

And so, in June 2009, Mr. Obama descended on Cairo. He had opposed the Iraq war, he had Muslim relatives, and he would offer Egyptians, and by extension other Arabs, the promise of a “new beginning.” They told their history as a tale of victimization at the hands of outsiders, and he empathized with that narrative.

He spoke of “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”

Without knowing it, he had broken a time-honored maxim of that world: Never speak ill of your own people when in the company of strangers. There was too little recognition of the malignant trilogy—anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and anti-modernism—that had poisoned the life of Egypt and much of the region. . . .

Our foreign policy has been altered, as never before, to fit one man’s electoral needs. We hear from the presidential handlers only what they want us to believe about the temper of distant lands. It was only yesterday that our leader, we are told, had solved the riddle of our position in the world.

Give him your warrant, the palace guard intone, at least until the next election. In tales of charismatic, chosen leaders, it is always, and only, about the man at the helm.

Obama didn’t learn much in his sojourn abroad, and apparently much of what he did learn turned out not to be so.

Related: James Taranto on Obama’s Apology Ad:

What message does the ad actually send the Mohammed Tariq Khans? On the one hand, a message of weakness: Assemble a big enough mob, kill enough people, burn enough flags and churches, and you too can grab the attention of the most powerful man and woman in the world. On the other hand, a taunt. If Obama and Mrs. Clinton really mean it, the Khans must think, why haven’t they presented the video makers for public mincing? The State Department’s ad contains no answer to that crucial question.

If our government is going to run an ad to educate Pakistanis (or whoever) about American attitudes, wouldn’t it make sense to include an explanation as to why America’s leaders cannot and will not enforce the mob’s standards of blasphemy? To an American, what’s objectionable about this ad isn’t so much the apology for the video’s offense as the abject failure to defend basic American principles of freedom. That same failure makes the ad less than worthless as an educational tool.

Obama didn’t learn much in his sojourn at Harvard and Chicago law schools, and apparently much of what he did learn turned out not to be so.

Oh, and it’s not a Jimmy Carter moment — because at this point, Jimmy Carter would be a best-case scenario. And an increasingly implausible one, I’m afraid.

THOUGHTS ON asymmetric online warfare.

MORT ZUCKERMAN ON “Obama’s Dishonest, Divisive Campaign.”

PROF. JACOBSON: Finish Hard And Fight Through The Finish Line. “It has been an exhausting month so far, but I’m actually feeling pretty good about the election.”

HOW’S THAT HOPEY CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Unemployment rates rise in 26 states in August.