FINANCIAL TIMES: The Crisis Of Middle-Class America. Note the role of soaring college tuitions and educational debt.

ED DRISCOLL: Frank Rich Must Be Exceptionally Well Paid.

PROF. JACOBSON: What Don’t You Understand About “It’s Not Your Money?” Er, everything?

SCIENCE: ‘Biggest canal ever built by Romans’ discovered.

TOM SMITH: NOONAN FOR ALL TO SEE. “Love? Ronald Reagan may have been a very nice man and a genuine patriot but there was not a lot of love in the air in the 1980s. Love may be in there somewhere but far ahead are emotions such as vigilance, fear, jealousy and suspicion. Any politician who first stirs up love amongst you is trying to steal something from you. . . . There’s this meme of disgust lately — well, aren’t we right to feel disgusted? I mean, Nancy Pelosi really does spend millions of our money flying her private Air Force jet back and forth to San Francisco because first class in a 747 isn’t good enough for her. That’s a perfectly fine symbol of a political class that is drinking deep of the life blood the rest of us could be using to send kids to college, give mom a few more days off, get the car fixed, or buy a big screen TV, and why shouldn’t we? The way federal and state governments spend our money is disgusting and would be even if we could afford it, which we manifestly cannot.”

“WEIRD VINDICTIVENESS” AND “GRATUITOUS CONTEMPT” among sciencebloggers. “Clearly I’ve been out of some loop for too long, but does everyone take for granted now that science sites are where graduate students, researchers, doctors and the ‘skeptical community’ go not to interpret data or review experiments but to chip off one-liners, promote their books and jeer at smokers, fat people and churchgoers? And can anyone who still enjoys this class-inflected bloodsport tell me why it has to happen under the banner of science?” Well, it’s not so different from the ClimateGate emails, is it?

MOST SUCCESSFUL ANTITERROR PROGRAM: Killing Terrorists. As a Keith Laumer character once said, there’s nothing so peaceful as a dead troublemaker.

TALKING TO THE PROSECUTORS in the Channon Christian / Christopher Newsom murder case.

ATLANTA: Democrats Scatter As Obama Comes To Town.

HOLDING GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABLE: A great book idea!

AT AMAZON, markdowns on groceries.

AN ETHICS TRIAL FOR MAXINE WATERS? “A second House Democrat, Rep. Maxine Waters of California, could face an ethics trial this fall, further complicating the election outlook for the party as it battles to retain its majority. People familiar with the investigation, who were not authorized to be quoted about charges before they are made public, say the allegations could be announced next week.”

IMPORTANT NEWS: Sex Makes You Smarter. At least if you’re a lab rat. But why take chances?

SHOCKER: Donations to Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service Dry Up.

THE HILL: Fox News to move to Helen Thomas’ front-row briefing room seat.

UPDATE: They’ve changed the headline and story, and now it says Fox moves to the front row, but not to Helen Thomas’s actual seat.

WIRED WRITES ABOUT Caterina Fake’s Hunch.com site. “Ultimately, it isn’t just helping people shop for cars — it is getting its users to volunteer a truly impressive amount of unique psychographic data. Just as Google built a vast index of the Web and Facebook constructed a model of our social connections, Hunch is assembling an extraordinarily rich and detailed picture of each user’s taste. From there it can claim to know or extrapolate everything that a person likes or would like. ‘The ultimate goal of the company is to map every person on the Internet to every object on the Internet, be that a product, a service, or a person,’ Fake says.”

TRAILERS FOR the new Scooby Doo and Tom and Jerry movies. Funny that these cartoons are still going concerns after so long.

MICHAEL TOTTEN: “You may have heard about the Palestinian BDS movement. The letters in their acronym stand for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction. They really ought to add another D for Destroy. Their goal—and they aren’t shy about saying so publicly even in English—isn’t peace between Israelis and Palestinians, which is what all civilized people should want, but the end of Israel. Take a look at the video and see for yourself.”

CHRIS MUIR’S DAY BY DAY CARTOON is finishing up pledge week. Consider donating. I just sent 50 bucks — because if you like stuff on the Internet, somebody’s got to pay for it, somehow. . . .

BEST DIY COSTUMES from ComicCon 2010.

SHOCKER: Political class backs spending while voters oppose.

IN THE MAIL: From Mark Robbins, Bluelip.

IN THE KNOXVILLE NEWS-SENTINEL, my thoughts on the JournoList scandal.

STEPHEN GREEN: The Week In Blogs: Dee Snider vs. Al & Tipper Gore.

NINE INFLUENTIAL MUSLIM SCHOLARS MAKE YOUTUBE VIDEO AGAINST JIHAD.