On the first of this week’s Trifectas, Scott Ott asks some tough questions about where the Tea Party goes from here.

PS Yes, lame blogging today and Monday. Blame the good folks at PJTV, who work my bottom off the first part of the week.

This week’s Hair of the Dog features Alan Greenspan and his erotic cheese grater.

I wish I were kidding.

Via Politico’s Twitter feed — Congressman John Murtha has died.

DC to RFK JR: Drop dead!

Jen Rubin, on the practical, short-term future of the Tea Party:

But for a moment, let’s put Palin aside. The issues she hit certainly comprise the core criticisms of Obama and will form the platform for conservatives in 2010 and 2012. Many of the issues she enumerated were positions that lifted Chris Christie, Bob McDonnell, and Scott Brown to victory, proving that there is not, in fact, much daylight between Tea Party activists, mainstream Republicans, and disaffected independent voters. And in one form or another, we are hearing similar themes from virtually all Republicans — whether it’s Rep. Paul Ryan or Marco Rubio or Meg Whitman or the other 2012 likely contenders.

So the question, I think, for Republicans is not what but who — who will emerge as the most effective standard bearer of that agenda. That — despite the continual chatter from the punditocracy to find the answer right now — can wait for the 2012 presidential campaign. The “what” will suffice for a nationalized, 2010 midterm election. And then the race will be on to see if Palin or some other figure emerges as the most effective champion for that core agenda.

The other thing Republicans should keep in mind is their own party’s genesis. The GOP emerged when the Whigs failed to deliver what a big part of the American electorate demanded. And history does have a way of repeating itself.

Since there’s nothing much on TV today, you should check out the new Week in Blogs on PJTV, and of course this week’s PJM Political, now in handy podcast form.

It’s worse than you thought:

Despite a modest recovery, the 2010 budget deficit will be higher than the 2009 deficit. Nearly 42 cents of each dollar Washington spends will be borrowed. Even by 2020 – which Obama’s planners assume will be a time of peace and prosperity – annual deficits would still exceed $1 trillion. By that point, nearly a fifth of all taxes would go toward paying the interest on this record debt.

But it gets even worse. I have yet to see anyone take a hard look at where interest rates will go. We’ve been borrowing money on the cheap — short term. Our finances are going to hell and we’ll need to refinance that debt in short order. So we’ll find ourselves paying off the Visa card at 5% by putting it on the MasterCard at 8% and then on the Discover at 11%.

At some point, unless we get a Congress with some fiscal restraint, it all spirals out of control. And we might not even notice when it starts — for the first little while, inflationary spirals feel pretty good.

PJTV is covering the Tea Party Convention with Glenn Reynolds, Dr. Helen Smith, and Dana Loesch.

OK, so I understand why Glenn gets to hang out with Helen — they are married and all. But how come he gets Dana, too? My agent is gonna hear about this…

Speaking of political tone-deafness, the Obama EPA is too far left for… at least three Democratic congressmen. CNS News has the story:

Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) introduced a bill on Tuesday that would amend the Clean Air Act to exclude regulations based on global warming effects, while Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) has a bill that would keep the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases at all unless approved by Congress.

What, letting a bunch of unelected bureaucrats raise taxes and increase regulatory burdens and apply a sticker shock to energy prices during the middle of a jobs-crunching recession wasn’t politically astute?

Huh.

Krauthammer asks, rhetorically, if the Democrats understand what just happened in Massachusetts:

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid, and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

This is the same thinking that allows Democrats to (still!) think they lost Congress in 1994 because they failed to nationalize the health care industry. And now that they’re failing at it again, it’s because as Krauthammer said above, plus (3) “We’re just not far left enough.”

Let’s see how that shinola plays in November.

Steve Jobs went to New York to talk with publishing honchos about the iPad. Fake Steve Jobs has the report:

I was sitting at dinner with the guy who runs the New York Times and I was like, You should just move your operation to the West Coast. I mean why not? Who says you have to be the New York Times? Why not just be the Times, and become a global brand? Look at what the Guardian in England is doing. They understood from the start that the power of the Internet for media was that you could take a local brand and transform it into a worldwide brand, without incurring much cost. So now they’re basically a global left-wing publication. No reason you can’t do the same. But you gotta drop this objectivity thing and just let your writers say what they really think. This whole objectivity thing is ridiculous. Everyone knows it’s bullshit, and the more you stick to it and try to pretend it’s true, the more stupid and dishonest you look.

It’s funny because it’s true — and I don’t mean just the stuff at the end. Can you think of a single American newspaper (except for the WSJ and maybe the Strib) that’s really thought about what to do with the internet, except for putting their stuff up there for free?

Harold Ford: Superstar!

Microsoft started developing a tablet computer nine years ago. About two minutes later, Microsoft started working against tablet development. Former Microsoft veep Dick Brass (great pr0n name!), in today’s New York Times, has the sad story:

When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.

So once again, even though our tablet had the enthusiastic support of top management and had cost hundreds of millions to develop, it was essentially allowed to be sabotaged. To this day, you still can’t use Office directly on a Tablet PC. And despite the certainty that an Apple tablet was coming this year, the tablet group at Microsoft was eliminated.

Brass concludes that Microsoft has become “a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator” because it “never developed a true system for innovation.”

Back in ‘95, Bill Gates turned Microsoft around on a dime, when he (somewhat belatedly) recognized that the future rested on the internet, not on a CD-ROM. I doubt Steve Ballmer can do the same thing in 2010.

UPDATE: Brass also shares a gem about the development of ClearType, developed by his team in the late ’90s:

Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control. As a result, even though it received much public praise, internal promotion and patents, a decade passed before a fully operational version of ClearType finally made it into Windows.

ClearType is so superior to anything else, it’s the one and only thing I miss about using Windows machines.

Mark Steyn wonders “what else is in that Nobel Peace Prize-winning report…”

…for no other reason than “we thought we should put it in.” Don’t forget, the IPCC’s sole source was the cuddly panda crowd over at the World Wildlife Fund. Donna Laframboise, a colleague of mine from the glory days at the National Post, did a simple search of the online version of the IPCC report and discovered dozens of citations of the WWF. It’s the sole source cited for doomsday predictions of glacier melt not only in the Himalayas but also the Andes and the Alps, as well as for a multitude of other topics, from coral reefs to avalanches. This would appear to be in breach of the IPCC’s own guidelines. The WWF is a pressure group. They’re not scientists. They’re not even numerate: one of their more startling glacier-melt claims derives entirely from an arithmetical miscalculation arising from a typing error.

Read the whole thing. It’s devastating.

No wonder the White House is walking back its decision to try KSM in NYC — there’s virtually zero political constituency for it, even in one of the most liberal delegations to Congress. From The Hill:

Only one New York Democrat in Congress is pushing for the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to be held in Manhattan.

“We have a world class police department, and I am confident that they have the expertise to adequately secure our city during the trials,” said Rep. Yvette Clarke in a statement.

Clarke is the only New York Democrat in Congress in favor of holding the trials in New York City.

On the campaign trail, Team Obama perfectly — I mean, perfectly — read the political terrain and again, perfectly, captured the political zeitgeist. But when it comes to actually governing, they’re too far to the left of… well, pretty much everybody but Yvette Clarke.

Judicial Watch has your “‘Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians’ for 2009.” Expect to hear a lot of fuss about John Ensign (R) and maybe less so about the others (all D).

Today’s Trifecta: President Obama is privatizing spaceflight — but why?

I’m not sure I’ve seen a sitting president do more to purposely lose a state he won handily in the last election.

Well, not since Richard Nixon said, “Go f*** yourself, Idaho!”

John Hawkins has the GOP’s Top Ten best chances for picking up Senate seats. And New York and Indiana are just two strong candidates away from making it a Top Twelve list.

I read Virginia Postrel’s Atlantic blog on ebook pricing with some interest — but as a gadget freak, not as a book junky. Look, book junkies aren’t much interested in reading digital books. Not even those of us who also happen to be gadget freaks.

But Virginia’s comments about marginal prices got me thinking about another market for ebooks, one with lots of profit potential: Out-of-print titles.

Pretend for a moment you’re like me. Nicely done — but put down the martini for a moment so we can talk serious for a sec.

Pretend you love real books. Pretend you have some out-of-the-mainstream tastes. Pretend those tastes often take you to the local funky used bookstore. Or, more likely nowadays, to Amazon’s used book resellers.

OK, quit being me for a moment. Now pretend you’re a publisher.

The cost to move a title, any title, to the ePub ebook format (can we quit putting “e” and “i” in front of everything already?) is trivial. If it costs more than a few bucks to get a semi-skilled monkey to do it, I’d be amazed. I’m not even certain the monkey needs to be entirely sober. So: Look at Amazon’s top sellers and see which titles in your back catalog still sell for more than a few pennies in the secondary market.

Are you still with me? OK, great. Then slip back into your VodkaPundit smoking jacket for a moment.

You (me?), who has no interest in digital books, are looking for an obscure-yet-tasteful title from the A. N. Roquelaure oeuvre. So you go to Amazon and run a search. You find a few hits — consisting of a few dog-eared old paperbacks of questionable longevity and utility, or a brand-spankin’ new digital copy. Both are selling for about four bucks. (A dollar-plus-three shipping for the used paperback, four dollars straight up for the ebook.)

Which do you buy?

Now let’s say the ebook is only three dollars, but the ragged paperback is still Amazon’s unofficial standard of a buck plus $2.98 S&H?

Well, I’d certainly prefer to curl up in bed with a real book… but I know the ebook will last forever and somebody else has already highlighted and dog-eared the paperback version.

At this point, and at that price, I’d likely go digital.

OK, put your publisher hat back on.

The cost to digitize a book is trivial. The cost for marketing it is… about the same. Just make repeated announcements that your back catalog has gone digital and — this is the key bit — devoted readers will find you. Let me repeat that: Devoted readers will seek out your old books, and Amazon (and even iTunes) will lead them right to your bank vault. Er, right to your doorstep.

Yes, yes — Apple is trying to reinvent the book with the iPad and all its full-color, multimedia glory. And Amazon is trying to reinvent the bestseller with their tiny Kindle and its oh-so-readable e-ink screen.

Those margins, however, are going to be slim. Amazon’s will be slim, because new-book readers will be more price-conscience than ever for digital copies. And Apple because they’re going to have to offer lots of pricey multimedia content to offset their higher prices — and Apple’s iTunes (or the new iBookstore) cut is only 30% of the selling price.

But you — you’re in bed with your iPad or your Kindle or your laptop and you suddenly get a yen to read that one book you just read to death the first semester of your sophomore year in college. And you find it — brand-new digital or worn-out paperback. Which do you buy?

And as a publisher — who never makes a dime off of resales — which do you provide?

There’s a market out there. A big one. We just need a widget-maker, and publishers, smart enough to tap it.

PS I love my local funky used bookstore. But, dude, you’re hosed. Totally. Maybe you can borrow some Kleenex from the guy who used to own the local used record store.

UPDATE: Will Collier is a published author and, naturally, has a few thoughts to share on the money end of it.

AND ANOTHER ONE: Lein Shory says that size matters not.

Is MSNBC’s David Shuster the biggest buffoon on Twitter? Watch the new Trifecta and find out.

Right before we taped this week’s Trifectas, I caught the end of Bill Whittle’s latest Afterburner. I won’t give anything away, but it did make me think that the halls of Congress ought to be inscribed with something Charles de Gaulle said — “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”

Anyway, check it out.