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The Politico digs up enough stories of internecine fighting amongst the loose bunch of organizations supposedly responsible for, or furthering in specific locations, the Tea Party movement to generate a semi-convincing trend story that argues the movement may be "losing momentum."

While the sort of petty conflict the story highlights between your Tea Party Patriots and Tea Party Express and Tea Party Nation, (your People's Judean Front and People's Front of Judea...), are worth noting (and unavoidable in politics), I'd say that an idea (which I think is a more accurate description of the whole orbit of actions and groups lumped in as the "tea party movement") that can still gather 4,000 people to a Texas rally, as the story notes, isn't worth writing off yet.

More important than which particular organization involved in the movement grows or triumphs is what this newly energized mass movement pissed off at D.C. will end up standing for. Alas, that a planned February National Tea Party convention will have bailout-supporting warmonger Sarah Palin as a star is an alarming sign that what had promise as a mass anti-state movement will descend into personality cult anti-Democratic party populism.

Matt Welch's excellent first person account on the varied and interesting promise of the Tea Party movement as shown at its huge September rally in D.C.

On Tuesday I noted that the Drug Enforcement Administration, apparently in response to an emailing campaign organized by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), had removed from one of its webpages the claim that "the American Medical Association recommends that marijuana remain a Schedule I controlled substance." That statement is no longer correct, since the AMA last week approved a resolution saying marijuana's Schedule I status, which makes it unavailable for medical use under federal law, should be re-examined. But LEAP points out that another DEA webpage still says the AMA "has urged that marijuana remain a prohibited, Schedule I drug." Go here to bug the DEA about continuing to misinform the public on this subject.

New Moon, the latest installment in the wildly successful Twilight series, opens in movie theaters today. And as Noah Berlatsy writes, it's about much more than just vampires and werewolves.

It’s exhilarating to finally find a genre movie that knows how to pander. The Twilight Saga: New Moon opens with Bella Swan (Kristin Stewart) looking windblown in a barely-buttoned shirt; it moves quickly to show us bare-chested Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), and ends with the dreamy declaration from vampire-lover Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) that all the girls have been waiting for. Add in a romantic triangle as Jacob and Edward vie for Bella, a heavy dose of angst, some unrequited (and fully requited) love, and it’s no wonder the preview audience I viewed this with kept bursting into spontaneous applause and sighs.

Vampire trappings and soap-worthy love triangles are all very well and good, but the heart of the Twilight series isn’t cheesecake or melodrama: It’s safety. Author Stephanie Meyer, just like her characters, is consumed by fear. All her creations are worrywarts: Edward is terrified that he’ll hurt Bella, Jacob is terrified that he’ll hurt Bella, Bella is terrified that everyone will get hurt defending her.

But this fear also manifests itself in an odd, and never fully confronted, fear of aging. At the opening of New Moon, both the book and the movie, Bella has a vision of herself as a grandmother—a vision that she experiences as terrifying.

Bella is so adverse to aging that she tries to get her friends and family to ignore her 18th birthday. More dramatically, she begs Edward to turn her into a vampire at every opportunity. But is this because Bella doesn’t wish to grow old while Edward remains forever young, or is it because Edward’s immortality is itself so appealing?

If Edward represents agelessness as a perfect fantasy, Jacob Black represents aging as a horror-film disaster. As you almost certainly know from advance publicity (and if you don’t, here comes the spoiler,) Jacob discovers partway through the film that he’s a werewolf. Lycanthropy, as it turns out, is adolescence on steroids. Jacob loses control of his emotions, grows hair where he shouldn’t, starts hanging out with the wrong crowd, and begins thinking so loudly that all his friends can hear him.

In choosing between Jacob and Edward, Bella is choosing between growing up, with all its dangers and messy unpredictability, and staying a faery child, forever young and lifeless. In the end (here’s another spoiler), without much of a fight, she opts for immortality. Thus, the Twilight series isn’t so much a coming-of-age story as a refusing-to-come-of-age story.

It’s easy to make fun of that. When the film showed a dream-image of Bella as a future fantasy vampire, running besides Edward with her magical fairy dust vampire skin all sparkly in the sun, the mostly enthusiastic preview audience erupted in derisive laughter. The desire for eternal youth is childish. And kind of embarrassing.

But there’s also something natural, even conservative about it. In the age of Obama, it’s generally assumed that young people are progressive, but Twilight is here to tell you that isn’t necessarily so. The desire for safety and sameness, the reluctance to change, the wish for some father figure—like Edward’s vampire dad Carlisle—to come and fix everything, that’s appealing.

Indeed, one of the series’ oddest and most telling creations is Edward’s family, a group of coupled-up vampires who refer to each other as sisters and brothers and call Carlisle “dad.” In the Cullen household, you can get married without growing up or leaving home. The domestic idyll he offers is surely as much a part of Edward’s faery charm as is his ability to remain forever 17. And that’s not even mentioning Twilight’s obsession with abstinence. Edward won’t have sex with Bella because (of course) he’s afraid of hurting her with his super-vampire bedroom antics.

Meyer may be promoting family values of a sort with the books, but she’s also promoting tolerance. In the movie, Jacob—the muscled wolf-man running with the all-male pack—insists that his new existence is not a “lifestyle choice” but that he was “born this way.” Judging by the giggles in the theater, the gay subtext couldn’t have been much clearer. Nor could the moral of the story when Bella accepts Jacob for who he is despite the secrets hiding in his closet. She does something similar with Edward, insisting that her vampiric true love has a soul even though Edward believes himself to be damned.

New Moon thus holds out the promise of life and love for all God’s children, whether tween and swooning, closeted and hairy, or angst-ridden and pale. It’s not a new vision, but it remains a popular one.

Noah Berlatsky is a Chicago-based writer whose work appears in Comics Journal, The Chicago Reader, and other outlets. He blogs at The Hooded Utilitarian.

Some musings on the glorious future of lab-grown meat, from the glorious future-oriented mag, H+:

In-Vitro Meat will be fashioned from any creature, not just domestics that were affordable to farm. Yes, ANY ANIMAL, even rare beasts like snow leopard, or Komodo Dragon. We will want to taste them all. Some researchers believe we will also be able to create IVM using the DNA of extinct beasts—obviously, "DinoBurgers" will be served at every six-year-old boy's birthday party.

Humans are animals, so every hipster will try Cannibalism. Perhaps we'll just eat people we don't like, as author Iain M. Banks predicted in his short story, "The State of the Art" with diners feasting on "Stewed Idi Amin." But I imagine passionate lovers literally eating each other, growing sausages from their co-mingled tissues overnight in tabletop appliances similar to bread-making machines.

The rest of the piece is great, liming the economic turmoil to come in meat-based economies like Argentina and New Zealand, the ultra-urbanization of a non-agricultural America, the insertion of good fish fat in fat steaks, and the acceleration of the expanding circle of humanity.

But here's one place where H+ gets it wrong:

My final prediction is this: In-Vitro Meat relishes success first in Europe, partly because its "greener," but mostly they already eat "yucky" delicacies like snails, smoked eel, blood pudding, pig's head cheese, and haggis (sheep's stomach stuffed with oatmeal). In the USA, IVM will initially invade the market in Spam cans and Hot Dogs, shapes that salivating shoppers are sold on as mysterious & artificial, but edible & absolutely American.

My prediction: Beaker bacon will be seen in Europe as having far more in common with genetically-modified corn than delicious invertebrates. Powerful entrenched dairy and meat interests, plus the other farmers who support their industry (remember those milky protests just a few weeks ago?) will play on the European aversion to food biotech to achieve their own protectionist ends. And they are quite likely to be successful, in the short and mid-term at least.

Farmers are powerful here in America as well, of course, and cultured chicken won't make it onto the menu without a fight. Using Spam as the thin end of the wedge—forgive the mixed meat metaphor—will allow an easier transition here, but will slow the adoption of laboratory lamb on the other side of the Atlantic even more.

With unemployment reaching double digits and public approval ratings sinking, ObamaCare has very little going for it at the moment. So how come Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have been able to march forward with their grand designs undeterred? One reason, writes Shikha Dalmia, is that Republicans have done precious little to seize the moral high ground from them. By insisting on the removal of the public option—instead of the individual mandate—as the price of doing business, Republicans have missed a major opportunity to put Democrats on the defensive and change the terms of the debate.

ObamaCare has nothing going for it anymore. With unemployment touching double digits, its economic timing is bad; with polls showing tanking support in every group outside of the narrow sliver of die-hard liberal reformers, its political timing is bad; and with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services last week saying that it'll add billions to the already out-of-control deficit, its fiscal timing has gone from bad to awful.

So how are Comrades Pelosi, Reid, and Obama able to march ahead with their grand designs undeterred? One reason is that Republicans have done precious little to seize the moral high ground from them. By insisting on the removal of the public option—instead of the individual mandate—as the price of doing business, Republicans have missed a major opportunity to put Democrats on the defensive and change the terms of the debate.

Republicans threw down the gauntlet on the public option—a government-funded, Medicare-style insurance plan that will compete with private insurance—in a June letter to Obama. "Washington-run programs undermine market-based competition through their ability to impose price controls and shift costs to other purchasers," they said. "The end result would be a federal government takeover of our health care system, taking decisions out of the hands of doctors and patients and placing them in the hands of a Washington bureaucracy."

True. But the problem is that Democrats don't need the public option to engineer a "federal takeover of our health care system." All they need is the power to force Americans to purchase insurance.

A mandate will fundamentally alter the relationship between Americans and their government. Instead of the government being accountable to them, they will become accountable to their government. No less than the Congressional Budget Office—a non-partisan government agency—once admitted as much. "A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action," it noted. "The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States."

If the government can force Americans to buy coverage on the threat of fines or even imprisonment—an option that Nancy Pelosi has pointedly refused to rule out—every other government diktat becomes small potatoes by contrast. In fact, it becomes necessary. If uninsured Americans must buy coverage, why shouldn't other Americans be taxed to subsidize them? Why shouldn't the insurance industry be required to sell them coverage? Why shouldn't government set insurance prices to ensure affordability? Why shouldn't doctors and hospitals be asked to charge only "reasonable" rates—or offer only government-sanctioned treatments? Nothing about ObamaCare fundamentally changes so long as the individual mandate remains intact.

Therefore, instead of wonkishly droning about the public option, Republicans should counter Democrats' grand appeals for "universal coverage for all" with equally grand appeals for "medical freedom for all." They should stand together on the Capitol steps and issue the health care equivalent of Reagan's Berlin Wall ultimatum: "Mr. President: Tear up this mandate."

During the campaign, Obama himself successfully stopped poor Hillary dead in her tracks by reminding voters at every turn of her tyrannical plans to force them to purchase coverage. So why aren't Republicans doing the same to Obama?

The main reason is that they themselves are deeply conflicted about the mandate. On the one hand, every Republican on the Senate Finance Committee voted against it—except, of course, for Maine's Sen. Olympia Wavering-Heart Snowe. On the other hand, many Republicans, led by their intellectual lights at the conservative Heritage Foundation, among others, have long accepted—no, championed—the notion that unless people are forced to carry insurance, freeloaders who land in emergency rooms will cripple the health care system. Legislate personal responsibility, in other words. It was a Heritage plan for forced coverage that formed the blueprint for the Massachusetts universal care debacle that the then Republican Gov. Mitt Romney enacted.

Thus Republicans have no leg to stand on now that Obama, pulling one of his many switcheroos, has embraced the individual mandate. Heritage folks are trying to pull their own switcheroo by opposing Obama's mandate, saying what they had originally proposed for Massachusetts was not really a mandate but actually a self-insurance scheme under which an uninsured person would have to post a personal bond before being treated in an emergency room.

But countering mandates with bonds doesn't exactly make for a rousing rallying cry. Indeed, both ideas are based on the mistaken diagnosis that the central cause of our health care woes is the cost of uncompensated care that the uninsured get. The fact of the matter is that this care accounts for no more than $40 billion of the country's $2.26 trillion health care bill—or less than 3 percent of total health care spending. This is less than what department stores lose to shoplifting every year. Several private hospitals that I visited in India last month make a fraction of the profits that American hospitals do but still reported treating up to 10 percent of their patients for free.

The mandate barring American hospitals from denying treatment to anyone who lands in emergency—the root of the supposed freeloader problem—certainly imposes a heavy burden on some hospitals, especially in inner cities. But it is far from clear that it forces American hospitals as a whole to provide more charitable care to the uninsured than what they would have without it. It would certainly be worthwhile at some point to consider policy options to replace this mandate with mechanisms to strengthen voluntary charity by hospitals and others. In the meantime, however, there is zero evidence to suggest that this mandate is imposing a crippling enough burden on hospitals to warrant mandates on everyone else as well.

The Republican strategy for defeating ObamaCare consists of notifying: seniors that they will face rationing and loss of private Medicare options; the uninsured that they will face fines and possibly jail; the young and healthy that they will have to subsidize the old and sick, etc. Alerting Americans to the personal dangers they will confront under ObamaCare is certainly a legitimate part of the political process.

However, the downside of a strategy based entirely on fear is that even if it succeeds now, it won't help to define the proper terms for a genuine solution in the future. For that, Republicans have to offer a principled critique of ObamaCare that delineates the sharp moral choices that Americans face. The current health care battle is the domestic policy equivalent of the Cold War. Democrats are on the side of command-and-control mandates that deprive individuals of choice. Republicans should position themselves on the side of market-based solutions that empower—not enchain—patients.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a bi-weekly Forbes columnist. This article originally appeared at Forbes.

Friday fun link: watch four maritime empires grow and decline.

• Henry Jenkins explores the art that falls between genres.

• Paul McAuley ponders two hidden histories of science fiction, one that highlights sf's intersection with respectable literature and one that plunges deep into the trash.

• The best alternate history story I've read this year. It is also one of the best pieces of rock writing I've read this year. It also contains Muppets.

From our December issue, Senior Editor Radley Balko wonders how the prosecutor who convicted an innocent man on dubious child molestation charges could go on to become a state superior court judge.

Last June, District Attorney David Capeless of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, announced that he was dropping all charges against 44-year-old Bernard Baran, a man who has spent half his life behind bars on child molestation charges that the state no longer has the confidence to retry.

Baran was convicted in January 1985 of molesting six children at a pre-kindergarten day care facility in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was released on bond in 2006 after an appeals court determined that his trial attorney had been incompetent and that the prosecution may have withheld key exculpatory evidence. Baran says that during his jail term he was raped and beaten more than 30 times, necessitating six different transfers to new correctional institutions. Such is the cost the prison system exacts on an openly gay man convicted of molesting children.

Baran was one of the first people in the country to be prosecuted in the day care sex abuse panic of the 1980s, a bizarre nationwide hysteria fed by homophobia, fears of Satanism, and a wing of child psychology that used unproven interrogation techniques that critics say caused children to recount sexual incidents that never took place.

In this case, prosecutor Daniel Ford, now a judge on the Massachusetts Superior Court, showed the grand jury that indicted Baran an edited video interview with the children. According to court documents, the video shows several kids alleging that Baran had sexually abused them. Edited out was footage in which some of the children denied any abuse by Baran, interviewees accused other members of the day care faculty of abuse or of witnessing abuse, and, most important, interrogators asked the same questions over and over—even after repeated denials—until a child gave them an affirmative answer. Some children were even given rewards for their answers.

Withholding the unedited video from the grand jury was itself an act of misconduct. An appeals court suggested that prosecutor Ford may also have withheld it from Baran’s trial attorney. We can only say “may” because there has never been a hearing on the issue, and Baran’s trial attorney was far from competent. (Judge Ford did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) In granting Baran a new trial in 2006, Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Francis Fecteau never moved beyond the inadequacy of Baran’s lawyer. When the case reached the state appeals court, the justices not only upheld Fecteau’s ruling; they looked more closely at Ford’s possible misconduct. “While the record does not settle the question whether the unedited videotapes were deliberately withheld by the prosecution,” the ruling said, “there are indications in the trial transcript consistent with that contention.”

The court further noted that it took years for Baran’s appellate lawyers to get prosecutors to turn over the unedited tapes. It also cited other examples of Ford’s failure to turn over exculpatory evidence, including evidence that two of the children who accused Baran may have suffered prior sexual abuse.

To make matters worse, the case against Baran was awash in homophobia. According to court documents, the first parents to come forward with accusations against Baran in September 1984 had just days earlier registered a complaint with the center that Baran was “queer.” The boy’s mother, who thought gays “shouldn’t be allowed out in public,” much less permitted to work at day care centers, said she “didn’t want no homo” watching her son.

When that child later tested positive for gonorrhea of the throat, Ford used the test against Baran at trial, even though a) the child never accused Baran of forcing him to perform oral sex, b) the child, in fact, specifically denied having sexual contact with Baran on the witness stand, c) Baran tested negative for gonorrhea, d) the boy had told his mother two months prior that his stepfather had orally raped him, and e) on the very day Baran was convicted, charges against the stepfather were turned over to the district attorney’s office for possible prosecution. Baran’s counsel was never informed of the allegation against the stepfather. Addressing the gonorrhea issue in his closing arguments, Ford implied that Baran’s “lifestyle” made it probable that he contracted gonorrhea at other times and knew how to quickly eradicate it to cover his tracks.

In his closing argument, Ford likened Baran at a day care center to a “chocoholic in a candy store,” hypothesizing that in the “five or 10 minutes” he was able to be alone with a child without being seen by other staff or children, Baran “could have sodomized and abused those children whenever he felt the primitive urge to satisfy his sexual appetite.” The appeals court that eventually overturned the conviction ruled that the incompetence of Baran’s counsel “facilitated the speculative, stereotypical, and deeply insidious links between homosexuality, gonorrhea, and child molestation.”

According to an affidavit signed by Baran’s boyfriend at the time, Ford spent an inordinate amount of time asking Baran’s boyfriend about his own sex life, employing variations of the word faggot and a mocking, drawn-out pronunciation of homosexual. Baran’s boyfriend also claims he was pulled over by police officers and further harassed on a daily basis, and that Ford told him, illegally, that if he spoke with Baran or Baran’s defense attorney he would be arrested.

In upholding the ruling that granted Baran a new trial, the appeals court added in a footnote that if the state wanted to retry him, Baran could file a motion for a hearing on Ford’s alleged misconduct. By dropping the charges, the D.A. avoided that hearing. “In my opinion,” says Boston civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, “ the possibility of an embarrassing hearing into misconduct by a former prosecutor and now sitting Superior Court judge was the main reason, if not the reason, they decided to drop the charges. The appeals court opinion cut a bit too close to the bone for them.”

So while Bernard Baran is free after 22 years of incarceration, there are no plans to look into the actions of the prosecutor, now a sitting judge, responsible for his conviction. Ford’s career trajectory indicates the backward incentive structure that prosecutors face: Convictions produce rewards, while abuse rarely comes with a penalty.

Baran has said he isn’t sure he wants to endure a lawsuit, but even if he did, he would be unlikely to get to Ford. Prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity from civil rights lawsuits, even in cases of misconduct that lead to false convictions. They are rarely disciplined in other ways either. Courts and bar associations tend to avoid professional sanctions. A study released earlier this year by the Justice Project, a pro-defense advocacy group, concluded, “Despite the prevalence of prosecutorial misconduct all over the country, states have consistently failed to investigate or sanction prosecutors who commit acts of misconduct in order to secure convictions.”

The only way Ford’s actions in the Baran case might be examined would be for one of the state’s legal ethics boards to open an investigation, either on its own or in response to a complaint. In a September article in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, a spokesperson for the state’s Office of Bar Counsel said that of the 1,000 or so complaints the office investigates each year, just “nine or 10” involve the state’s prosecutors.

One Ford defender told the publication that it’s unfair to hold the judge accountable for something he did a quarter century ago. But it isn’t as if this is some musty, inconsequential case pulled from the depths of a Massachusetts courthouse. There’s fresh damage here. Ford’s successors spent 25 years defending his misconduct. And Bernard Baran spent that time paying for it.

Radley Balko (rbalko@reason.com) is a senior editor at reason.

If you ever get that feeling that you have already died and everything around you is some bizarre virtual afterlife designed to make you figure out that you're no longer on Earth, well, this video will clinch it for you:

Related: Does free agency help the terrorists? Iraqi detainees taunt Wisconsin National Guard troops with references to Brett Favre's defection from the Packers.

An audit of the Federal Reserve Bank would "substantially castrate the Fed so it cannot do what it was set up to do," Rep. Melvin Watt (D., N.C.) said yesterday, in an effort to tamp down a congressional uprising against the Bush/Obama economic team.

This devastating exchange Thursday between Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner and Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas); along with weeks of close attention to the mismanagement of federal stimulus funds; Rep. Ron Paul's long-lived Fed Audit bill; and last but not least, continuing horrible news on every indicator Geithner cited to Brady (and a few he didn't); have together started a fire that is threatening President Obama's economic brain trust.

The Wall Street Journal gives some color:

At the Joint Economic Committee, a couple of House Republicans called for the resignation of Mr. Geithner, who, as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, played a major role in last fall's moves to prevent the collapse of the financial system. "The public has lost all confidence in your ability to do the job," said Rep. Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas.

Mr. Geithner, in an unusual public display of pique, fired back. "What I can't take responsibility is for the legacy of crises you've bequeathed this country," he told Mr. Brady.

Although several Democrats defended Mr. Geithner at the hearing, some liberal Democrats have been complaining that the Obama administration isn't doing enough to combat unemployment....

"Quite frankly, all the gambling on Wall Street is doing nothing to put people back to work in America and rebuild our economy," said [Rep. Peter DeFazio (D., Ore.), who earlier this week urged Geithner to resign].

One issue that has dogged Mr. Geithner is the rescue of American International Group Inc. last fall.... Mr. Geithner said Thursday that the government lacked powers it needed to handle the collapse of a financial company that wasn't legally organized as a bank. "Coming into AIG we had, basically, duct tape and string," he said...

Mr. Geithner's job status doesn't appear to be in jeopardy and several Democrats leapt to his defense.

I'm not so sure about that last bit. In his congressional hissy fit, Geithner gave the game away: He can't lay this on President Bush because, as Brady pointed out, when Bush presided over the $14 trillion inflation of assets that got us where we are today, Geithner was working the pumps with more eagerness than most .

As I noted the other day, Geithner's actions as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will probably not be deemed sufficient to fire him from his current job. But it is false and stunningly uncouth for Geithner to blame the previous administration for his manifest failure as head of the Treasury.

Geithner v. Brady, on television:

As for Melvin Watt's husbandry metaphor, you may want to unpack the image a little bit. (If you need to be alone, I'm totally cool with that.) When you castrate an animal, you do so to keep it from breeding (or to groom it for soprano roles in Grande Opera). So exactly what action is the Fed performing for the U.S. economy that requires intact male genitals?

You might think that movies featuring bare-breasted starlets are more likely to blow up at the box office. But as Tom Jacobs notes in Miller-McCune, that perception suggests you might not be "keeping abreast* of the latest research."

Analyses of 914 films released between 2001 and 2005 indicated that sex and nudity do not, on the average, boost box office performance, earn critical acclaim or win major awards," reports a new study titled "Sex Doesn't Sell — Nor Impress." According to the researchers, sex and nudity were negatively correlated with a film's net profits from domestic distribution and had no positive impact on a picture's popularity or prestige according to a wide variety of measures.

"I have yet to see a way of crunching the numbers where sex/nudity has a positive relationship with box office, even controlling for MPAA rating or budget," reports co-author Anemone Cerridwen, an independent scholar based in Vancouver, British Columbia. "'Sex sells' is a myth, at least for this database."

 Hollywood's Foreign Press Association, however, does seem more taken with the carnal:

"In the case of movie awards," they add, "sex/nudity does have a small positive correlation with the Golden Globes, an appreciation not shared with the Oscars."

Obviously, a tally like this doesn't include pornography; I also wonder if the lack of box-office boost from nudity is a recent phenomenon. As a movie geek, my impression has always been that bare breasts were a bigger selling point in the 1980s (especially in the genre market). And these days, with the advent of comprehensive celebrity nudity sites like Mr. Skin (obviously not safe for work!), which indexes starlet flesh, I suspect big-screen nudity is less of a draw.  

On the other hand,  if it's high-profile enough, celebrity nudity still draws traffic on the web: When Lindsay Lohan bared all (tastefully, of course) for New York magazine last year, web traffic instantly shot up 2,000 percent.

*Ha-ha! Abreast!

On behalf of everyone at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website, Reason.tv, and Reason magazine, I want to thank you for generous support of our work. The webathon officially ends at midnight tonight, but as you can from our torch graphic in the upper-right-hand corner, you've polished off the arm and all but the tip of the fire up there too!

So far, over 600 of you in countries as far away as Australia and Japan kicked in more than $56,000 to keep our journalism, public policy research, and video productions running at top speed.

So again, thanks very much. We can't do it without you and we won't let you down as your voice in the public debate for "Free Minds and Free Markets." 2010 promises to be a hugely important year for politics and it's good to know that supporters like you have got our backs.

Once again, the Al Sharpton donation video:

The blogosphere is hopping with reports that the British Climate Research Unit's computers have been hacked and possibly embarrassing internal emails and other documents are now circulating on the web. Earlier this year, the CRU, which teams up with the Hadley Centre to produce one of the most cited global temperature datasets*, rejected accusations that it had destroyed original temperature data making it difficult for outside scientists to evaluate their adjustments to the datasets.

Before jumping to conclusions, remember that many of us write private emails that we might not want to see publicly distributed. Will follow up as details become available.

Mucho kudos to threadjacker PicassoIII.

*corrected. The CRU computers have been hacked, not those of the Hadley Centre as originally misreported. The scandal here is me confusing the HADCrut