Rep. Ron Paul inspires deep adulation from his supporters. But no one has ever accused "the good doctor" of being very cuddly. His kind of distant crank image was on display in two revealing moments of audience participation at the last Republican primary debate. When he said the government shouldn't intervene to save someone's life if they didn't buy health insurance, someone in the crowd shouted "Let him die!" When he said Osama bin Laden attacked America because he was provoked by our foreign policy, the crowd booed.

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What's a good way to treat a valuable gift you have no idea what to do with? Selling it isn't an option and you can't throw it away. The conundrum, at least in one case, was solved by filing it away in a presumably dusty old box labeled "Arkansas flag plaque" and forgetting about it for decades. On Wednesday, an archivist reported that he stumbled upon a moon rock found among Bill Clinton's old things, Arkansas News reported. "The library system director speculated that the rock was probably packed away by one of Clinton's staffers in late 1980s after Clinton lost his first re-election bid to Republican Frank White." To be fair, it doesn't look like anyone knew what to do with the long-ago moon rock gifts: "Other states such as New Jersey and Alaska have also misplaced their Goodwill rocks, which some experts estimate could be worth millions of dollars," Reuters noted.

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The Players: Alec Baldwin, star of 30 Rock who may or may not have hopes of becoming New York City's next mayor; Michelle Malkin, conservative columnist, author and Fox New Channel contributor

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Why do people like class warfare so much? Because class warfare is fun! It's fun to comfort yourself with the thought that people with more money than you are stupid, or undersexed, or coke addicts, or have wimpy little T-rex arms, or, especially, are uncool. Everyone enjoys this game, even the Drudge Report, despite the current conservative talking point that President Obama is waging class warfare with his deficit reduction plan. And last night the top story: "EAST WING BLING: MICHELLE O'S $42,000 DIAMOND CUFFS."

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In the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove writes that at Thursday's Republican debate in Tampa, frontrunner Rick Perry "needs to change the dynamic of the debates, in which he's been (in his words) the piñata." But that might be hard for Perry to do. The Texas governor is a good tool for the other candidates to show they're either more conservative or more electable than he is.

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It's not clear if they see eye-to-eye on circumcision, but they sure do like each other. This morning, Politico explores the under-reported kinship between Texas governor Rick Perry and hard-partying Gladiator icon Russell Crowe. The Australian actor won't be much help to Perry's presidential campaign (his foreigner status means he can't vote or contribute to campaigns) but his brawling ways would probably make him a liability anyway. But more to the point, these two have a serious "bromance," as Ken Vogel puts it:

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Eric Schmidt managed to come out of Wednesday's Senate antitrust hearings gaffe-free. Unless you count when Senator Herbert Kohl asked whether Google had a monopoly on search marketing, and Schmidt said, "We're in that area." Or the time that he talked about another company that had faced antitrust accusations and didn't say "Microsoft," even though everybody knew he was referring to Microsoft. Nevertheless, the four long hours of grilling panned out about as expected, save a few colorful moments of senators making metaphors. The over-arching theme of them, of course, was organized crime.

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It's a fact-checking bar brawl! Tonight, the Associated Press is pushing back against criticisms from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman that it ran a "stupid" fact-check item on President Obama's deficit reduction speech. The liberal economist took issue with the AP's stance that Obama misled the public by saying secretaries are taxed at a higher rate than millionaires. In its original piece, the AP wrote:

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In an unexpected development that makes government shutdown more likely, a bill to fund the government through November 18 has failed over attached spending cuts to pay for disaster relief for Hurricane Irene victims, The Hill's Pete Kasperowicz reports. As Slate's Dave Weigel notes, Republican leaders had said they wouldn't hold disaster aid "hostage" to spending cuts, but they attached a measure that would have cut funding to a Department of Energy program anyway. Forty-three Republicans voted against the bill, and just six Democrats voted for it. Government funding runs out September 30.

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