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Robert Kagan says we’re not in decline.

Is Barack Obama the candidate of American decline? To hear some of his supporters among the foreign policy punditry, you’d think he was. Francis Fukuyama says he supports Obama because he believes Obama would be better at “managing” American decline than John McCain. Fareed Zakaria writes weekly encomiums to Obama’s “realism,” by which he means Obama’s acquiescence to the “post-American world.” Obama, it should be said, has done little to deserve the praise of these declinists. His view of America’s future, at least as expressed in this campaign, has been appropriately optimistic, which is why he is doing well in the polls. If he sounded anything like Zakaria and Fukuyama say he does, he’d be out of business by now.

One hopes that whoever wins next week will quickly dismiss all this faddish declinism. It seems to come along every 10 years or so. In the late 1970s, the foreign policy establishment was seized with what Cyrus Vance called “the limits of our power.” In the late 1980s, the scholar Paul Kennedy predicted the imminent collapse of American power due to “imperial overstretch.” In the late 1990s, Samuel P. Huntington warned of American isolation as the “lonely superpower.” Now we have the “post-American world.”

Yet the evidence of American decline is weak. Yes, as Zakaria notes, the world’s largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore and the largest casino in Macau. But by more serious measures of power, the United States is not in decline, not even relative to other powers. Its share of the global economy last year was about 21 percent, compared with about 23 percent in 1990, 22 percent in 1980 and 24 percent in 1960. Although the United States is suffering through a financial crisis, so is every other major economy. If the past is any guide, the adaptable American economy will be the first to come out of recession and may actually find its position in the global economy enhanced. …

John Fund turns his attention to ACORN.

Acorn, the liberal “community organizing” group that claims it will deploy 15,000 get-out-the-vote workers on Election Day, can’t stay out of the news.

The FBI is investigating its voter registration efforts in several states, amid allegations that almost a third of the 1.3 million cards it turned in are invalid. And yesterday, a former employee of Acorn testified in a Pennsylvania state court that the group’s quality-control efforts were “minimal or nonexistent” and largely window dressing. Anita MonCrief also says that Acorn was given lists of potential donors by several Democratic presidential campaigns, including that of Barack Obama, to troll for contributions. …

Walter Williams has noticed the fall in oil prices. He also noticed nobody is clamoring for an investigation.

For the U.S. Congress, news media, pundits and much of the American public, a lot of economic phenomena can be explained by what people want, human greed and what seems plausible. I’m going to name this branch of economic “science” wackonomics and apply it to some of today’s observations and issues.

Since July this year, crude oil prices have fallen from $147 to $64 a barrel. Similarly, average gasoline prices have fallen from over $4 to a national average of $2.69 a gallon. When crude oil and gasoline were reaching their historical highs, Congress and other wackoeconomists blamed it on greedy oil company CEOs in their lust for obscene profits. But what explains today’s lower prices? The only answer, consistent with wackonomic theory, is easy: Oil company CEOs have lost their lust for obscene profits. Or, maybe, since many of these CEOs are getting up in years, they might have begun to heed Matthew’s warning (19:24), “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

Speaking of CEOs, there’s the “unconscionable,” “obscene” salaries they receive, in some cases over $10 million a year. Wackonomics has an easy answer for these high salaries: it’s greed. However, CEOs don’t have the corner on greed. There are other greedy people we don’t scorn but hold in high esteem. According to Forbes’ Celebrity 100 list, Oprah Winfrey receives $275 million, Steven Spielberg gets $130 million, Tiger Woods $115 million, Jay Leno $32 million and Dr. Phil $40 million. …

Karl Rove says, “The polls were wrong in 2000 and 2004.

There has been an explosion of polls this presidential election. Through yesterday, there have been 728 national polls with head-to-head matchups of the candidates, 215 in October alone. In 2004, there were just 239 matchup polls, with 67 of those in October. At this rate, there may be almost as many national polls in October of 2008 as there were during the entire year in 2004.

Some polls are sponsored by reputable news organizations, others by publicity-eager universities or polling firms on the make. None have the scientific precision we imagine.

For example, academics gathered by the American Political Science Association at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington on Aug. 31, 2000, to make forecasts declared that Al Gore would be the winner. Their models told them so. Mr. Gore would receive between 53% and 60% of the two-party vote; Gov. George W. Bush would get between just 40% and 47%. Impersonal demographic and economic forces had settled the contest, they said. They were wrong.

Right now, all the polls show Barack Obama ahead of John McCain, but the margins vary widely (in part because some polls use an “expanded” definition of a likely voter, while others use a “traditional” polling model, which assumes turnout will mirror historical trends but with a higher turnout among African-Americans and young voters). …

The guys at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey and Allahpundit, post on the folks who went through Plumber Joe’s state records.

The Columbus Dispatch reports that at least one culprit has emerged from the misuse of public information to attack Joe Wurzelbacher — and to no one’s surprise, she’s a Democrat and a big Barack Obama supporter.  Helen Jones-Kelly decided to check on Wurzelbacher as soon as he became an issue in the third presidential debate.  But this maxed-out donor to Obama swears that she had no political reasons for her sudden curiosity about Wurzelbacher: …

…

When last we heard from Helen Jones-Kelley, the director of Ohio’s Job and Family Services Division insisted that she has everyone who gets public attention checked to see if they owe family support.  Now, with more details about the searches performed on Joe Wurzelbacher becoming public, Jones-Kelley acknowledges she didn’t quite tell the entire truth at first.  Her department also ran checks on taxes and welfare payments to see if they could catch Joe the Plumber cheating the system:

A state agency has revealed that its checks of computer systems for potential information on “Joe the Plumber” were more extensive than it first acknowledged.

Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, disclosed today that computer inquiries on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher were not restricted to a child-support system.

The agency also checked Wurzelbacher in its computer systems to determine whether he was receiving welfare assistance or owed unemployment compensation taxes, she wrote.

Jones-Kelley made the revelations in a letter to Ohio Senate President Bill M. Harris, R-Ashland, who demanded answers on why state officials checked out Wurzelbacher. …

ABC has been after Sarah Palin’s medical records. Ed Morrissey wants to know why they’re not curious about Barack’s.

ABC goes after Sarah Palin for not releasing her medical records this week after less than two months on the campaign trail.  Palin promised last week that she would release them “early” this week, and Kate Snow impatiently noted yesterday that Wednesday is the outer limit of “early”: …

The Economist reports on placebo studies.

IN 1572 Michel de Montaigne, a French philosopher, observed that “there are men on whom the mere sight of medicine is operative”. Over the centuries, all manner of sugar pills and bitter tonics have been given to patients in the belief that they might do some good and probably will do no harm. The snag is that doctors have usually prescribed them without telling patients that the pills contain nothing proven to cure their disease.

While some consider this a virtuous lie, others argue it is unethical. The American Medical Association (AMA) even issued this stern warning in 2006: “Physicians may use [a] placebo for diagnosis or treatment only if the patient is informed of and agrees to its use.” That ruling was influenced by an article published by two Danish scientists, Asbjorn Hrobjartsson and Peter Gotzsche, in the New England Journal of Medicine. This concluded that “outside the setting of clinical trials, there is no justification for the use of placebos”.

To find out whether doctors are observing the AMA’s controversial ruling, a team led by Jon Tilburt of the Mayo Clinic, in Minnesota, conducted a survey of American doctors. …

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Interesting juxtaposition of two items. First a London Times story from Niger about a successful suit by a former slave against the Niger government.

Hadijatou Mani was sold into slavery at the age of 12. She was beaten, raped and even imprisoned for bigamy after she married a man other than her “master”.

Astonishingly her story is not that rare in Niger, but now it has a happy ending. In an historic ruling that will resonate across West Africa, where slavery is still rife, Ms Mani won a landmark case yesterday against the Niger Government for failing to protect her.

“I am very happy with this decision,” Ms Mani, 24, told reporters outside an international court in neighbouring Nigeria. “Nobody deserves to be enslaved. We are all equal and deserve to be treated the same.”

The Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) ordered Niger to pay Ms Mani 10 million CFA francs (£12,400) in compensation. The judgment was embarrassing for a government that said it had done all it could to eradicate slavery, but it offered hope for thousands of other men and women in the Sahel region.

The ruling sent a strong message to other governments that more needed to be done to set slaves free. Niger’s neighbours, Mali and Mauritania, are also known to turn a blind eye to the practice. Chad and Sudan, which are not members of Ecowas, also use slaves.

The case against Niger was brought with the help of the British organisation Anti-Slavery International (ASI) as a test case to pressure African governments to end slavery. …

And from Forbes, Abby Thernstrom covers the newest wrinkle in the efforts to gerrymander more safe minority house districts. We are on the eve of electing a black president, but the black grievance culture will be with us always.

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to wade into the turbulent waters of partisan gerrymandering–districting maps drawn to the advantage of one political party or the other. But through the back door, civil rights groups are trying to get the court to force states to increase the number of safe Democratic districts.

The seemingly unlikely vehicle to accomplish this aim is a proposed reinterpretation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Bartlett v. Strickland, heard by the court on Oct. 14, is the case the Congressional Black Caucus and other advocates need to win to remake the statute into a Democratic Protection Act, in effect. …

David Harsanyi tells us what McCain-Feingold is worth.

… John McCain, one of the authors of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, has undermined his own campaign by taking “clean government” public funding and allowing Obama to outspend him, in some places 6 to 1.

One of the promises of the bill was to stop the rich and powerful from wielding inequitable influence. So now, instead of giving to Joe Schmo’s campaign, the rich contribute to Joe Schmo’s presidential library and Joe Schmo’s wife’s charity and independent 527s that love Joe Schmo. So almost nothing has changed. Almost.

“In terms of corruption, the era of McCain-Feingold is the era of Bob Ney, Jack Abramoff, and, what was it, 70 or 90 thousand dollars in Congressman Jefferson’s refrigerator in his office,” Brad Smith, former head of the Federal Election Commission, told Reason magazine. “You could say that the era of McCain-Feingold is an era of corruption in American politics as great as we’ve seen since Watergate.”

Could anyone say there is less negativity in politics today? Is there any less money involved in campaigns? Is there any less corruption in Washington?

No. There is only less liberty.

David Warren wishes to amend something from two columns back.

One writes these columns to a specific word-length, and I sometimes regret the last-minute omission of some quibbling qualification, or supplementary jab, from the need to eliminate words quickly. A good example of the former was in my Saturday column, on messianic pretensions in politics. I said somewhat mischievously that if Barack Obama completed one presidential term, it would be his longest steady job.

When the column touched the blogosphere, innumerable U.S. Democrats challenged this assertion, and a gentleman in Chicago was so kind as to forward a summary transcript of Mr. Obama’s employment record at the University of Chicago, proving he had taught there for more than four years, continuously. Not a full-time job, but hey.

I’d rather retract that sentence for a different reason: it did not make my point well enough. My point — and it is one worth frequent repetition when discussing politicians, especially on the left — is that the citizen-voter should look at a candidate’s life experience. Everyone has some, by the age of four, but the question is whether the candidate has done anything as an adult besides running for and holding political office — or, in the case of candidates farthest left, engaging in agitprop activities such as “community organizer,” or boffering in the academic trenches, which amount to the same thing.

There are “credentials,” and then there is “cred.” It is sometimes necessary to shorten or otherwise alter a word, to recover its original meaning. Here we are discussing not a job resumé, but what can be seen through it.

Of the four candidates on the two U.S. presidential tickets, it strikes me that both John McCain and Sarah Palin have some credible personal background to equip them in dealing with the interface between politics and life. By comparison, neither Barack Obama nor Joe Biden has ever done anything much, except master party political machinery. …

Our first post from The Daily Beast. Dem speechwriter on why she’s for McCain.

… I was dead wrong about the surge and thought it would be a disaster. Senator John McCain led when many of us were ready to quit. Yet we march on as if nothing has changed, wedded to an old plan, and that too is a long way from the Democratic Party.

I can no longer justify what this party has done and can’t dismiss the treatment of women and working people as just part of the new kind of politics. It’s wrong and someone has to say that. And also say that the Democratic Party’s talking points—that Senator John McCain is just four more years of the same and that he’s President Bush—are now just hooker lines that fit a very effective and perhaps wave-winning political argument…doesn’t mean they’re true. After all, he is the only one who’s worked in a bipartisan way on big challenges.

Before I cast my vote, I will correct my party affiliation and change it to No Party or Independent. Then, in the spirit of election 2008, I’ll get a manicure, pedicure, and my hair done. Might as well look pretty when I am unemployed in a city swimming with “D’s.”

Whatever inspiration I had in Chapel Hill two years ago is gone. When people say how excited they are about this election, I can now say, “Maybe for you. But I lost my home.”

Mark Steyn has been serial posting at The Corner on disabling of credit card safeguards at the Obama campaign. We have a sampling.

As readers may recall, a couple of days ago it became clear that the Obama website had intentionally disabled all the basic credit-card-processing security checks and thereby enabled multiple contributions from donors with fake names. The excuse offered in the New York Times story was that, ah, yes, the Obama gang may appear to accept contributions from “Mr Fake Donor” of “23 Fraudulent Lane”, but all those phony baloney contributions are picked up by their rigorous offline checking procedures. As many Obama supporters wrote to point out, simply because you get a message saying “Thank you for contributing to the Obama landslide, Mr S Hussein of 47 Spider-Hole Gardens (basement flat), Tikrit!” is no reason to believe any real money is actually leaving real accounts.

The gentleman who started the ball rolling made four donations under the names “John Galt”, “Saddam Hussein”, “Osama bin Laden”, and “William Ayers”, all using the same credit card number. He wrote this morning to say that all four donations have been charged to his card and the money has now left his account. Again, it’s worth pointing out: in order to enable the most basic card fraud of all – multiple names using a single credit card number – the Obama campaign had to manually disable all the default security checks provided by their merchant processor. …

…

… Meanwhile, last week a reader made a donation to the Obama campaign under the name “Adolfe Hitler” (Don’t ask me why the “e”) of  “#1 Reichstag Building, Berlin, Germany”, charging it to his Mastercard and is now getting welcome-to-the-big-change emails:

Dear Adolfe,

Thanks for joining this movement. It will take all of us working together to bring change to this country, and we wanted to make sure you know about all the opportunities to get involved in your community and online.

Check out the resources below — learn how you can connect with fellow supporters, organize in your neighborhood, build our national grassroots organization, and stay informed with the very latest campaign news. …

Ed Morrissey is on the trail too.

… There is only one reason to deliberately choose to bypass those security processes, and that’s to facilitate fraud.  Team Obama claims that they vet the donations after the fact, but that’s hogwash.  It costs far more to do that than to screen for security codes and address verification up front, and everyone knows it.  Obama counts on the fact that most of the fraud will fly under the radar of its victims, and the only cost they’ll incur is when they have to process refunds after getting a specific complaint.

This is a key, revelatory moment about Obama and his team.  They have deliberately chosen to make it easier for people to defraud the public so that they can ring up millions more in a campaign that has already broken records for fundraising.  It’s unethical, dishonest, and dangerous — especially since these will be the same people with their hands on tax records if Obama wins this election.

In her Spectator, UK blog, Melanie Phillips gives her impressions of the media in our presidential campaign.

… For all Obama’s laid-back, attractive appearance this election is being fought in an atmosphere of menace. Menace in the way ACORN is intimidating voters into multiple registrations. Menace in the way criminal donations to the Obama campaign have been institutionalised. Menace in the serial lies being told by Obama, Biden and the campaign rebuttal team. Menace in the way the few remaining proper journalists such as Stanley Kurtz are finding sources of information shut down and themselves shut out when they attempt to probe Obama’s deeply dubious associations. Menace in the smears and hysterical abuse directed at anyone who questions The One. Menace in the threat of violence if Obama doesn’t win. Menace in the pre-emptive smear that the only thing that could bring about an Obama defeat is the inherent racism of the American voters – a smear that potentially identifies all those who vote against him as public enemies.

Over the past seven years, the media has created the Big Lie that America is the biggest rogue state in the world, with Israel its proxy.  Now it is ensuring that a man who will act on that very premise to crush America and destroy Israel will be placed in the White House to do so. It is not just that the west’s Big Media can no longer be trusted. It has become the most important weapon in the arsenal of the enemies of the free world

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The stalwart Charles Krauthammer picks McCain.

… There’s just no comparison. Obama’s own running mate warned this week that Obama’s youth and inexperience will invite a crisis — indeed a crisis “generated” precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test?

And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he’s been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.

The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.

Today’s economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I’m for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

Debra Saunders too.

… When Obamacons explain why they are deserting the GOP nominee, you don’t hear them arguing that Obama will do better by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. They don’t say that Obama has the best ideas for the economy. They instead lean on the belief that Obama can bring people together.

They gloss over the fact that McCain will settle for nothing short of a successful military policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or that Obama sees Iraq as a place where the U.S. government spends $10 billion a month that could go to social programs at home. They count on Obama to do what is expedient, not what he has pledged to do.

They tend to agree more with McCain’s emphasis on limiting taxation to encourage job creation than Obama’s zeal to spread around affluent people’s wealth. So they don’t dwell on the policy questions.

They don’t care that McCain has a history of working with Democrats, while Obama has a history of talking about working with Republicans. Because they have lined up behind the Democrat, they have determined that Obama will bring people together.

This isn’t about ideology – moderate or conservative. It’s a personality contest.

David Warren has a thoughtful column on education.

… Moreover, the late J.M. Cameron, among the greatest teachers ever to grace a college in Canada (St. Michael’s at Toronto), once gave me reason to hope. I asked him what, after half a century of teaching, he could find in common among his best students over all that time — the handful who stood out permanently in his memory. I expected him to struggle with this question, but he answered straightaway:

“They were all self-taught.”

Later: “They all arrived in university ready to make the best use of its resources, they were all burning with zeal to learn. They looked for professors who could help and guide them, they ignored professors who could not. Most came from humble backgrounds, and also stood out for their gratitude.”

He assured me that students like that were untypical in the dustbowl 1930s, just as they were in the salad bowl 1960s and ’70s, but confirmed that university standards had been in free fall. Still, he said, “There are students who can’t be stopped, and there are students who can’t be started. The latter have always been more numerous.”

In the 1960s and ’70s, as we should all know, universities were vastly expanded, on the new “drive-through” model, so that the majority of students who did not entirely belong in a demanding intellectual environment became an overwhelming majority, and the universities themselves were reduced to immense, tax-sucking bureaucracies, focused almost exclusively on turning out graduates, the way Burger King turns out Whoppers. …

A columnist with the Oregonian wonders what gives with the Left’s days of rage.

… I love politics and public policy, but the ugliness, the anger, the coarseness and even the threats of violence I’ve experienced as a conservative opinion-writer in achingly “tolerant” Portland have contributed to my decision to leave the business after this election. My heart was starting to harden — do we conservatives not have hearts, do we not bleed? — and I didn’t want that to happen.

I joked at first about some of it. When a reader sent me my column covered with dried feces, I looked on the bright side. He could have said he wouldn’t …. on my column. I took comfort in the fact law officers visited the Iraq War foe (a peace advocate!) and the liberal critic (a Portland public school teacher!) who threatened my family. But the constant expletive-laced rants, the nifty Nazi-Hitler-German references, the holier-than-thou hate for any opposing view from the half-informed — well, it’s not what our public discourse should be about. It wasn’t in a better age. If I sometimes responded in kind (and I did), forgive me.

What accounts for this rage? Maybe it’s that so many feel the White House was stolen from them eight years ago. Maybe they just feel entitled to rule. (Dude, where’s my country?) Maybe it’s the Iraq War. Or George Bush, though many lefties have worked themselves into the same derangement syndrome over Palin. Maybe the cause is deeper. I don’t know. I only know it’s not a good thing for civil society.

Obama’s not my candidate — McCain is — but, if he’s elected on Nov. 4, Obama will be my president and I’ll be happy to cheer two things. One, the fact that the United States has, at long last, elected an African-American president. Two, the possibility that Obama’s election might deliver us from this nastiness. I think it’s called the audacity of hope.

More on that subject from Power Line.

I don’t think there is any precedent in our history for the shameful manner in which the Left has treated Sarah Palin. Left-winger Andrew Sullivan gleefully posted a particularly disgusting example of the phenomenon today; it’s a YouTube video titled “Red, White and MILF.” Watch it only if you have a strong stomach. If you don’t know what “MILF” means–I’m sure most of our readers don’t–Google it.

I can remember when Sullivan was a respected journalist, not a gutter smear merchant and borderline pornographer. His descent exemplifies the Left’s decline in recent years to a baboon-like level of discourse. …

Thomas Sowell looks at Obama and the courts.

… The kind of criteria that Barack Obama promotes could have gotten three young men at Duke University sent to prison for a crime that neither they nor anybody else committed.

Didn’t we spend decades in America, and centuries in Western civilization, trying to get away from the idea that who you are determines what your legal rights are?

What kind of judges are we talking about?

A classic example is federal Judge H. Lee Sarokin, who could have bankrupted a small New Jersey town because they decided to stop putting up with belligerent homeless men who kept disrupting their local public library. Judge Sarokin’s rulings threatened the town with heavy damage awards, and the town settled the case by paying $150,000 to the leading disrupter of its public library.

After Bill Clinton became president, he elevated Judge Sarokin from the district court to the Circuit Court of Appeals. Would President Barack Obama elevate him— or others like him— to the Supreme Court? Judge Sarokin certainly fits Obama’s job description for a Supreme Court justice. …

Ilya Somin in Volokh makes important point about property rights

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Strange Pickings today. Just two items; Spengler’s latest and an item from the NY Times Magazine six months ago.

Spengler says, contrary to Tom Freidman, the world is not flat - it has been flattened. And, without the American consumer, the world economy is nothing.

Faddish conventional wisdom over the past few years held that American influence was fading as technology radiated to the far reaches of the world. When America’s economy went into a ditch, though, the supposed economic superpowers of the future went flying, like children on skates holding onto the back of truck.

The American consumer, it turns out, played Atlas to the global economy, taking the exports of Asia, so that Asia could buy the commodities of Russia, Latin America and Africa. Remove the American consumer, and Asian exports crash, taking commodity prices along with them.

The financial crash exposes the fragility of large swaths of the world. The political consequences will be terrible. The worst of it is that America will not be around to moderate the melee, not if Democratic Senator Barack Obama is elected president, that is. Those who objected to America’s role as world policeman will get what they wanted, but they won’t like it: a religious war reaching from Lebanon to Pakistan, and Colombian-style narco-war spreading to Mexico and Brazil.

The wave of American self-pity that may carry Obama to the White House stems, in turn, from a global crisis that has sunk a good deal of the developing world. Worst affected are the most populous Muslim countries, and Russia’s “near abroad”. Pakistan, Ukraine and Belarus are out of funds and have applied for help to the International Monetary Fund. Indonesia and Turkey face drastically increased borrowing and import costs. Iran’s economy will implode with oil in the mid-US$60s. …

Six months ago, Roger Lowenstein wrote a piece on the credit crisis that was looming on the horizon, and we still haven’t figured out. It is a look at how mortgages were packaged and securitized for sale to unsuspecting investors. This will add to your understanding of the credsis.

…

Presto! How 2,393 Subprime Loans Become a High-Grade Investment

The business of assigning a rating to a mortgage security is a complicated affair, and Moody’s recently was willing to walk me through an actual mortgage-backed security step by step. I was led down a carpeted hallway to a well-appointed conference room to meet with three specialists in mortgage-backed paper. Moody’s was fair-minded in choosing an example; the case they showed me, which they masked with the name “Subprime XYZ,” was a pool of 2,393 mortgages with a total face value of $430 million.

Subprime XYZ typified the exuberance of the age. All the mortgages in the pool were subprime — that is, they had been extended to borrowers with checkered credit histories. In an earlier era, such people would have been restricted from borrowing more than 75 percent or so of the value of their homes, but during the great bubble, no such limits applied.

Moody’s did not have access to the individual loan files, much less did it communicate with the borrowers or try to verify the information they provided in their loan applications. “We aren’t loan officers,” Claire Robinson, a 20-year veteran who is in charge of asset-backed finance for Moody’s, told me. “Our expertise is as statisticians on an aggregate basis. We want to know, of 1,000 individuals, based on historical performance, what percent will pay their loans?”

The loans in Subprime XYZ were issued in early spring 2006 — what would turn out to be the peak of the boom. They were originated by a West Coast company that Moody’s identified as a “nonbank lender.” Traditionally, people have gotten their mortgages from banks, but in recent years, new types of lenders peddling sexier products grabbed an increasing share of the market. This particular lender took the loans it made to a New York investment bank; the bank designed an investment vehicle and brought the package to Moody’s.

Moody’s assigned an analyst to evaluate the package, subject to review by a committee. The investment bank provided an enormous spreadsheet chock with data on the borrowers’ credit histories and much else that might, at very least, have given Moody’s pause. Three-quarters of the borrowers had adjustable-rate mortgages, or ARMs — “teaser” loans on which the interest rate could be raised in short order. Since subprime borrowers cannot afford higher rates, they would need to refinance soon. This is a classic sign of a bubble — lending on the belief, or the hope, that new money will bail out the old.

Moody’s learned that almost half of these borrowers — 43 percent — did not provide written verification of their incomes. The data also showed that 12 percent of the mortgages were for properties in Southern California, including a half-percent in a single ZIP code, in Riverside. That suggested a risky degree of concentration.

On the plus side, Moody’s noted, 94 percent of those borrowers with adjustable-rate loans said their mortgages were for primary residences. “That was a comfort feeling,” Robinson said. Historically, people have been slow to abandon their primary homes. When you get into a crunch, she added, “You’ll give up your ski chalet first.”

Another factor giving Moody’s comfort was that all of the ARM loans in the pool were first mortgages (as distinct from, say, home-equity loans). Nearly half of the borrowers, however, took out a simultaneous second loan. Most often, their two loans added up to all of their property’s presumed resale value, which meant the borrowers had not a cent of equity.

In the frenetic, deal-happy climate of 2006, the Moody’s analyst had only a single day to process the credit data from the bank. …

… In April 2007, Moody’s announced it was revising the model it used to evaluate subprime mortgages. It noted that the model “was first introduced in 2002. Since then, the mortgage market has evolved considerably.” This was a rather stunning admission; its model had been based on a world that no longer existed.

Poring over the data, Moody’s discovered that the size of people’s first mortgages was no longer a good predictor of whether they would default; rather, it was the size of their first and second loans — that is, their total debt — combined. This was rather intuitive; Moody’s simply hadn’t reckoned on it. …

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Would you believe Obama’s female staffers make less than the men on his staff?  Furthermore, would you believe McCain’s female staffers make the most? Mark Perry at Carpe Diem has the story.

… Factual Evidence:

1. Obama pays his own female Senate staffers, on average, only 78% of what he pays male staffers (see top chart above), and females make up 53% of Obama’s staff.

2. McCain pays female staffers 101% of what he pays men (see bottom chart above), and females made 62% of McCain’s staff.

3. Women occupy seven of the top 10 highest-paid positions on McCain’s staff, and five of the top 10 highest-paid positions on Obama’s staff.

4. Women on McCain’s staff earn 24% more on average than women on Obama’s Senate staff. …

Instapundit notes corruption in Venezuela.

Mark Steyn writes on the election.

… In his first inaugural address, Calvin Coolidge said: “I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people.” That’s true in a more profound sense than he could have foreseen. In Europe, lavish social-democratic government has transformed citizens into eternal wards of the Nanny State: the bureaucracy’s assumption of every adult responsibility has severed Continentals from the most basic survival impulse, to the point where unaffordable entitlements on shriveled birth rates have put a question mark over some of the oldest nation states on Earth. A vote for an Obama-Pelosi-Barney Frank-ACORN supermajority is a vote for a Europeanized domestic policy that is, as the eco-types like to say, “unsustainable.”

More to the point, the only reason why Belgium has gotten away this long with being Belgium and Sweden Sweden and Germany Germany is because America’s America. The soft comfortable cocoon in which Western Europe has dozed this past half-century is girded by cold hard American power. What happens when the last serious Western nation votes for the same soothing beguiling siren song as its enervated allies?

“People of the world,” Sen. Obama declared sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”

No, sorry. History proved no such thing. In the Cold War, the world did not stand as one. One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people – the Barack Obamas of the day – were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity. …

Claudia Rosett writes on the Climate Change Commissars for Forbes.

… Who are these folks setting the climate agenda?

Most Americans have never heard of Yvo de Boer, and certainly never voted for him. De Boer is a Dutchman, appointed by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2006 to head the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

De Boer is not a scientist; his bio says he has a “technical degree in social work.” Before joining the UNFCCC in the 1990s, he worked in the Dutch ministry of housing. These days, de Boer jets around the world presiding over conferences–such as last year’s two-week climate summit at a Bali beach resort–aimed at creating a global “climate change regime.” This regime rests on schemes for massive international wealth transfers, with multilateral bureaucracies calculating who owes, who pays and who gets special breaks–while related arms of these proliferating outfits crank out reports in which “science” is invoked to justify the entire set-up.

But didn’t the Nobel Peace Prize go last year to Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for their eco-warnings? Yes. And the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by a committee of five Norwegian politicians, appointed by the Norwegian parliament. They may be nice people, but their judgment seems an odd basis for sweeping new controls on the U.S. economy.

As for the U.N.’s Nobel-winning IPCC–it is a joint enterprise of two other U.N. outfits, both shot through with back-scratching politics. One is the Nairobi-based U.N. Environment Program, whose director, Achim Steiner, a German, was appointed by Kofi Annan in 2006, just after serving on a panel that awarded a $500,000 environmental prize to Annan, for his personal use (which Annan surrendered only after that potential conflict of interest emerged in the press).

The other parent of the IPCC is the World Meteorological Organization, based in Geneva. The president of the WMO’s executive council is an envoy of Russia, Alexander Bedritsky; his No. 2 man, First Vice President Ali Mohammad Noorian, has been at the WMO since 1981 as the permanent representative of Iran. …

David Warren continues his look at our election.

… I had doubts about John McCain — not as a man, but as a presidential candidate — from the beginning. I preferred George W. Bush in the Republican primaries of 2000, because he was not McCain. I preferred Rudy Giuliani at the beginning of this year’s cycle, despite my considerable distaste for his views on social issues. But given a choice between McCain and Obama — were I entitled to vote in an American election — I would now pull the lever for the Republican slate without the slightest compunction.

Moreover, McCain has grown in my estimation, as circumstances have changed. He has in many ways earned his maverick reputation, together with a reputation for incorruptible patriotism. He’s the guy to make politically risky and potentially unpopular decisions, in face of the recessionary slide; and crucially, he’s the guy to make America’s most loathsome and unpredictable enemies (who are also our enemies, lest we forget) not want to test him. In his appointment of Sarah Palin, for all the sneers of the urbane and over-educated, he has suggested a way forward in which America retrieves her “core values,” which include cutting through the blather of conventional “expertise,” and distinguishing right from wrong. And she can articulate what McCain mumbles.

McCain is a man of action and accomplishment, Obama a man of “charisma” and pretty words, whose only real accomplishment has been his remarkable self-advancement. And Obama’s policy outlook, so far as it can be discerned from the usual electoral pronouncements, consists of the same snake oil the pre-Clinton Democrats had been selling continuously since they chained the Great Society to America’s ankle: that is, a constantly expanding Nanny State. I am hardly reassured by Obama’s last-lap rhetorical reassurances: you don’t send a man to Washington with a trillion dollars of candy-shop promises on medicare, education, government job-creation, “spreading the wealth” — especially when the economy has just tanked.

I wish that were the worst I could say about the man, who has survived nearly two years of campaigning for President without serious cross-examination from either the media or his media-chastened opponents. A man who, should he win the election and serve one term, will have been President of the United States longer than he has held any steady job. …

Gerard Baker of the London Times on the media’s Palin treatment and the wars that will go in the GOP.

… It’s hard to make a reasoned and fair judgment about the Alaska Governor because she has been the victim of one of the nastiest, most sustained and comprehensive slime-jobs ever performed by a hyper-partisan national and global media.

The latest piece of nonsense to hit the media’s fan this week is a fine example: the news that the Republicans paid $150,000 to kit out her and her family for the election campaign. Forget for a moment the special and ridiculous sartorial demands made of a woman and her family over three months on the campaign trail, or that the party has said it will donate the clothes to charity afterwards (she can’t keep them, in any case, under tax law). Just think how we would have scoffed if she had shown up for her television appearances in an off-the-rack dress from the Anchorage Dress Barn or if she had been spotted wearing the same jacket twice in a week.

So, the Palinphobia is so shot through with condescension and ideological incomprehension on the media’s part that trying to cut through to the reality of her political message is not easy.

Her performance on the campaign trail has been shaky, it’s true, though it has significantly improved of late (she is now talking directly to reporters more frequently than any of the other candidates). But in the absence of much hard experience of national politics it does seem as though she and her Republican handlers fell back on the Sarah Palin Story as a substitute for a political argument.

This has harmed her and distorted what she could bring to a Republican Party in renewal. There’s still a better story to be told about her record as politician in Alaska, where she has achieved more of substance than Barack Obama has in Washington.

As for the anti-intellectualism she seems to represent, this is a favourite old saw not only of the Left but also of the whole Establishment crowd. There’s an unshakeable view among the coastal elites that real wisdom is acquired only by circulating between the ivy-encrusted walls of scholarship and the Manhattan and Hollywood cocktail set.

But there’s real wisdom among those derided Americans who have never even ventured to the coasts, but whose steady consistent voice and values have been truly responsible for America’s many successes.

Interesting Boston Globe Op-Ed on the dangers of liberal bias.

… There are legitimate questions about Palin’s experience level, just as there are legitimate questions about Obama’s experience level. But according to The Huffington Post, Obama’s lack of experience is immune from criticism because he attended Ivy League schools, “was a serious and successful student,” is a well-traveled, published author, and has a diverse background. Heck, he’s me!

Yet, in every one of my encounters with America’s rural communities, the diversity of my privileged experience was eclipsed by the depth of theirs. I had rhetoric; they had well-measured speech, punctuated by forbearing silences. I had easy answers; they knew there was no such thing.

It is not that the Republican base is anti-intellectual, as David Broder claims; they are anti-elitist. An Ivy League education is hardly a universal signal of competence in anything other than the liberal cultural canon.

Despite the lofty call to unity from Obama, behind which most of us on the left supposedly rallied, this election looks like all of our previously divisive ones. Rural Americans are bracing once again for war on their communities at the hands of liberal interest groups sharing cultural preferences remote from the realities of their lives. The most liberal candidate in a generation has indeed raised up fear of his potential presidency, and I have heard nothing from those most afraid about his race.

It’s that darned halo that seems to have the man himself and his supporters so enthralled.

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Today the theme is Sarah Palin and her treatment by the national media. We start with a columnist from North Carolina’s Rhinoceros Times. (You never know what rocks Pickerhead will turn over) The iconoclastic author, Orson Scott Card, says he’s a Dem. Watch as he lays into the press.

… If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means. That’s how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naïveté time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards’ own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women (NOW) threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That’s where you are right now. …

… You’re just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it’s time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a daily newspaper in our city.

Daniel Henninger’s column focuses on the treatment of Sarah Palin.

… Sarah Palin didn’t design a system of presidential primaries whose length and cost ensures that only the most obsessional personalities will run the gauntlet, while a long list of effective governors don’t run.

These rules have wasted the electorate’s time the past three presidential elections, by filling the debates with such zero-support candidates as Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Al Sharpton, Duncan Hunter, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden (8,000 total votes), Wesley Clark and Alan Keyes.

Out of this process has fallen a Democratic nominee who entered the U.S. Senate in 2005 fresh off a stint in the Illinois state legislature, with next to no record of political accomplishment. He may be elected mainly because, in Colin Powell’s word, he is thought to be “transformational.” One may hope so.

By not bothering to look very deeply at the details beneath either candidate’s governing proposals, the media have created a lot of downtime to take free kicks at Gov. Palin. My former colleague, Tunku Varadarajan, has compiled a glossary of Palin invective, and I’ve added a few: “Republican blow-up doll,” “idiot,” “Christian Stepford wife,” “Jesus freak,” “Caribou Barbie,” “a dope,” “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party,” “liar,” “a national disgrace” and “her pretense that she is a woman.”

If American politics is at low ebb, it is because so many of its observers enjoy working in its fetid backwash. …

Kirsten Powers in NY Post compares to the media’s Biden coverage.

Barack Obama‘s choice of Joe Biden as his running mate prompted a small wave of warnings about Biden’s propensity for gaffes. But no one imagined even in a worse-case scenario such a spectacular bomb as telling donors Sunday to “gird your loins” because a young president Obama will be tested by an international crisis just like young President John Kennedy was.

Scary? You betcha! But somehow, not front-page news.

Again the media showed their incredible bias by giving scattered coverage of Biden’s statements.

There were a few exceptions. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski flipped incredulously through the papers, expressing shock at the lack of coverage of Biden’s remarks. Guest Dan Rather admitted that if Palin had said it, the media would be going nuts.

So what gives? …

Now some of our favorites from The Corner get in the act. Byron York comments on Palin’s accessibility.

Mark Steyn posts on her latest Colorado visit.

Byron, yesterday in Grand Junction 22,000 people turned up to see Sarah Palin, which if memory serves is rather larger than the numbers Jack Kemp was drawing back in ’96. If my experience in New Hampshire is anything to go by, the size of the crowd is inversely proportional to the number of journalists who show up. At Weirs Beach, in a pitiful attempt to avoid detection as another lattè-sipping metrocon about to jump to Obama, I eschewed the reserved media pen and lined up for hours with my fellow Granite Staters for the privilege of getting into steerage. We were packed in. The media pen was empty, save for a handful of reporters, one of whom was a New Hampshire-born correspondent for The Providence Journal and two others of whom were from the excellent fellows at the ”Meet The New Press” radio show at WEMJ. (They came to the Long/Goldberg/Steyn NR pre-primary palooza in Manchester, too.) But otherwise Governor Palin could have hunted caribou on the vast empty yawning tundra of the press pen. …

Byron York tells the story of a CNN reporter who deliberately, maliciously, egregiously misquoted him to Palin.

Lisa Schiffren on the big scoop on cost of Sarah’s wardrobe.

So now we learn that the RNC shelled out $150,000 for clothing, hair, and make-up for Sarah Palin since her surprise nomination. Scandal! Gotcha! Such hypocrisy! If she wants the Joe Six-pack vote, the “logic” goes, why isn’t she wearing clothes from Target? Huh? While everyone seems to get that Palin had to have an emergency make-over for prime time, this particular number offends — as does the fact that she didn’t pay for it herself.

Was a new wardrobe necessary? Clearly. Last winter, when she posed for Vogue, Governor Palin wore a big, army green parka, (partly to hide her pregnancy), which looked great — but perhaps not entirely vice presidential. No one wears that sort of thing to, say, National Security Council meetings in D.C. In pre-September pictures, she wears inexpensive, perfectly appropriate but not ready for prime-time black suits, or the kind of outdoor clothing that Alaskans, and others who spend a lot of time in harsh elements, require. Her biggest sartorial luxury seems to have been fancy running shoes, as she told the Wall Street Journal weekend section, just before being nominated.

But then, a few days before Labor Day, lightening hit. …

Mona Charen on the clothes too.

Now a story from CBS News complaining about Biden being hidden from news conferences. Do you think the rest of the media will pick this up?

… Last month in Akron, Biden chided McCain and Palin for not holding such availabilities with the press.

“I got asked a question by the press this morning, er, yesterday,” Biden told the crowd last month. “I’ve done a lot of press, I’ve done, I don’t know, I was told I did 68, 70 press conferences, and the person says, ‘What do you think about Sarah Palin?’ I said, ‘When she does three, I’ll let you know, I don’t know, I don’t have any idea, I don’t know, I don’t know.’ You know, I mean, look, and it’s not, look guys, it’s not just Sarah Palin, when’s the last time John, when’s the last time John’s had a press conference? I’m serious.”

Biden was factually incorrect – he had conducted at the time over 80 interviews, not press conferences, ranging from local newspapers to network morning shows, with an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and a dozen interviews with major networks and newspapers.

And to belatedly answer Biden’s question, it has been 55 days since he held a press conference. He has held two since being named Obama’s running mate.

Biden has also not taken questions from voters in a town hall style setting since Sept. 10 in Nashua, New Hampshire, when he told a supporter that Hillary Clinton might have been a better pick for vice president.

Since then, Biden has only held “community gatherings” and “rallies” where he makes a speech and chats briefly with supporters on the ropeline under the blare of music, no questions asked. …

Power Line posts on Palin’s very effective remarks in Reno addressing Biden’s “testing” scenario. A link is here so you can see it yourself.

Power Line also posts on the possibilities of illegal donations at the two campaigns.

… Many readers point out that the Obama campaign would exercise some control over the security level required to verify small dollar transactions and that no collusion with the card issuer or bank is therefore required. Mark Steyn elaborates here. Mark explains the question of security settings and then adds:

As the Powerline reader has noted, if “John Galt” of “Ayn Rand Lane” attempts a contribution at the McCain campaign, it gets rejected. Which is just as well. If the Republican candidate’s website were intentionally set up to facilitate fraudulent donations, it would be on the front page of The New York Times. But, as it’s King Barack the Spreader, we can rest assured the crack investigative units will be too preoccupied with Governor Palin’s shoes over the next two weeks.

It is a point that needs making and that could be made every day. …

Entertainment Weekly interviews SNL’s Lorne Michaels on the Palin appearance last Saturday night.

EW: How incredibly fortunate was it that the election’s breakout star also happens to look exactly like Tina?
LM: There was all that, and it’s the first election with a star in a long time. The great part about the Palin thing was — and I’ve said it all too often — was that the audience cast Tina. You’d read or people would come up to you and say, what a gift. You want to point out that Tina’s no longer in the cast, that she has her own show. But I think if we had used Kristin [Wiig], who I think would’ve done a brilliant Sarah Palin, the audience would’ve been disappointed. No question about it. And Tina’s fantastic.

What do you think Palin gained from her appearance?
I think Palin will continue to be underestimated for a while. I watched the way she connected with people, and she’s powerful. Her politics aren’t my politics. But you can see that she’s a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly gracious woman. This was her first time out and she’s had a huge impact. People connect to her.

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Gabriel Schoenfeld teams up with Aaron Friedberg producing a WSJ OpEd on what the world might be like with a diminished U. S. presence.

With the global financial system in serious trouble, is America’s geostrategic dominance likely to diminish? If so, what would that mean?

One immediate implication of the crisis that began on Wall Street and spread across the world is that the primary instruments of U.S. foreign policy will be crimped. The next president will face an entirely new and adverse fiscal position. Estimates of this year’s federal budget deficit already show that it has jumped $237 billion from last year, to $407 billion. With families and businesses hurting, there will be calls for various and expensive domestic relief programs.

In the face of this onrushing river of red ink, both Barack Obama and John McCain have been reluctant to lay out what portions of their programmatic wish list they might defer or delete. Only Joe Biden has suggested a possible reduction — foreign aid. This would be one of the few popular cuts, but in budgetary terms it is a mere grain of sand. Still, Sen. Biden’s comment hints at where we may be headed: toward a major reduction in America’s world role, and perhaps even a new era of financially-induced isolationism.

Pressures to cut defense spending, and to dodge the cost of waging two wars, already intense before this crisis, are likely to mount. Despite the success of the surge, the war in Iraq remains deeply unpopular. Precipitous withdrawal — attractive to a sizable swath of the electorate before the financial implosion — might well become even more popular with annual war bills running in the hundreds of billions.

Protectionist sentiments are sure to grow stronger as jobs disappear in the coming slowdown. Even before our current woes, calls to save jobs by restricting imports had begun to gather support among many Democrats and some Republicans. In a prolonged recession, gale-force winds of protectionism will blow. …

David Warren writes on Obama as “savior.”

… The hysteria over global warming, the hysteria over the banking crisis, the hysteria over Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy — to name just three hysterias in a rich international field, and not even mention Islamist terrorism or the word “Eurabia” — combine in strange ways to make a reading tour of any major newspaper (or Internet news aggregator for that matter) into a simulated space flight.

We live in a country that just re-elected a Conservative Party that has tried very hard to remain boring, generally; and more specifically, inoffensive to our media, bureaucratic, academic, and legal elites. They barely limped home, owing largely to the fact that the principal opposition party was led by a man (I wouldn’t be so cruel as to name him) who could not formulate sound bites in English (or any other language).

But had we recently joined those United States of America, in some alternative universe, Mr. Obama would be in no need of the estimated $700 million he will have raised, in total, to pump into swing states in the final fortnight of the U.S. election. For according to casual polls up here, Obama would sweep all ten hypothetical ex-Canadian states by breathtaking margins, without a nickel of advertising. …

Different view of Obama from Richard Epstein, ChiLaw prof.

… Put otherwise, Obama’s vague calls for change that “you can believe in” are, to my thinking, wholly retrograde in their implications. At heart, he is an unreconstructed New Dealer who can see, and articulate, both sides on every question–but only as a prelude to championing the old corporatist agenda with a vengeance.

That program has three key components, which, taken together, can convert a shaky financial situation into a global depression. The first of these is his anti-free trade attitude that loomed so large in the primaries. But even Obama cannot repeal the principle of comparative advantage. Any efforts to scuttle NAFTA, deny fast-track approval to other agreements, or limit outsourcing will not be as dramatic as the Smoot-Hawley tariff. But combined, they would act as a depressant on general economic growth. Everyone would suffer.

Second, Obama is committed to strengthening unions by his endorsement of the Employer Free Choice Act, a misnamed statute that forces union recognition without elections and employment contracts through mandatory arbitration thereafter. That one-two punch could tie up the very small businesses that Obama seems determined to help. Tax relief won’t work for firms that won’t get formed because a labor fight is not in their initial budget.

And third, he is in favor of progressive individual taxes and high corporate taxes. It is as though the U.S. does not have to compete for labor and capital in global markets. My fear is that with his strong egalitarian bent, he has not internalized the lesson that high rates do not offset declining revenues.

Thus, even before we get to the added bells and whistles of the modern welfare state–windfall profits taxes, ethanol subsidies, health care–an Obama administration could lock us into a downward spiral by ignoring the simple fundamentals of sound governance. Boy, does this stalwart libertarian ever hope that his friends are right and his gloomy prediction is wrong!

Michael Barone with a learned discussion of polls.

Can we trust the polls this year? That’s a question many people have been asking as we approach the end of this long, long presidential campaign. As a recovering pollster and continuing poll consumer, my answer is yes — with qualifications.

To start with, political polling is inherently imperfect. Academic pollsters say that to get a really random sample, you should go back to a designated respondent in a specific household time and again until you get a response. But political pollsters who must report results overnight have to take the respondents they can reach. So they weight the results of respondents in different groups to get a sample that approximates the whole population they’re sampling.

Another problem is the increasing number of cell phone-only households. Gallup and Pew have polled such households, and found their candidate preferences aren’t much different from those with landlines; and some pollsters have included cell-phone numbers in their samples. A third problem is that an increasing number of Americans refuse to be polled. We can’t know for sure if they’re different in some pertinent respects from those who are willing to answer questions.

Professional pollsters are seriously concerned about these issues. But this year especially, many who ask if we can trust the polls are usually concerned about something else: Can we trust the poll when one of the presidential candidates is black?

It is commonly said that the polls in the 1982 California and the 1989 Virginia gubernatorial races overstated the margin for the black Democrats who were running — Tom Bradley and Douglas Wilder. The theory to account for this is that some poll respondents in each case were unwilling to say they were voting for the white Republican. …

John Stossel reminds us of Hayek’s “spontaneous order.”

… The only times we have shortages in America are after governments intrude, like when President Nixon appointed an energy czar to regulate gas prices, and this year, when some states’ anti-”gouging” laws prevented gas stations from raising prices after storms.

Despite the repeated failure of central planning, the political class acts as if politicians can direct our lives. When there are problems, politicians will solve them. They’re going to give us prosperity and cheap health care, fix education, lower gas prices, stop global warming and make us energy “independent.”

And that’s just the beginning. A speaker at the Republic convention said, “If you want to fight childhood obesity, then John is your man.”

Who do people think these guys are?

“We actually think that some people can do magic,” says David Boaz of the Cato Institute. “Voters would have to believe that every politician is some combination of Superman, Santa Claus and Mother Teresa. Superman because he can do anything. Santa Claus because he’s going to give us things.

“It’s kind of an instinctive reaction,” says Boaz. “But a president can’t fix all the problems in your life.”

That’s OK. Most of life works best when you are in charge.

So how effective is TSA airport screening you ask? Jeffery Goldberg has answers in The Atlantic Monthly.

If I were a terrorist, and I’m not, but if I were a terrorist—a frosty, tough-like-Chuck-Norris terrorist, say a C-title jihadist with Hezbollah or, more likely, a donkey-work operative with the Judean People’s Front—I would not do what I did in the bathroom of the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, which was to place myself in front of a sink in open view of the male American flying public and ostentatiously rip up a sheaf of counterfeit boarding passes that had been created for me by a frenetic and acerbic security expert named Bruce Schnei­er. He had made these boarding passes in his sophisticated underground forgery works, which consists of a Sony Vaio laptop and an HP LaserJet printer, in order to prove that the Transportation Security Administration, which is meant to protect American aviation from al-Qaeda, represents an egregious waste of tax dollars, dollars that could otherwise be used to catch terrorists before they arrive at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, by which time it is, generally speaking, too late. …

… As I stood in the bathroom, ripping up boarding passes, waiting for the social network of male bathroom users to report my suspicious behavior, I decided to make myself as nervous as possible. I would try to pass through security with no ID, a fake boarding pass, and an Osama bin Laden T-shirt under my coat. I splashed water on my face to mimic sweat, put on a coat (it was a summer day), hid my driver’s license, and approached security with a bogus boarding pass that Schnei­er had made for me. I told the document checker at security that I had lost my identification but was hoping I would still be able to make my flight. He said I’d have to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor arrived; he looked smart, unfortunately. I was starting to get genuinely nervous, which I hoped would generate incriminating micro-expressions. “I can’t find my driver’s license,” I said. I showed him my fake boarding pass. “I need to get to Washington quickly,” I added. He asked me if I had any other identification. I showed him a credit card with my name on it, a library card, and a health-insurance card. “Nothing else?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“You should really travel with a second picture ID, you know.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“All right, you can go,” he said, pointing me to the X-ray line. “But let this be a lesson for you.”

Dilbert and Borowitz are here today.

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We’ve been saving this story since April 30 when Bill Clinton got into the prediction business saying he doubted oil would ever go below $100 a barrel again. We touched the 60′s last week and are still below $75. This is a good illustration of what Clinton’s thoughts are worth.

Good article from Forbes on the chaos in the Iranian economy, in part from falling oil prices. Poor dears.

As markets floundered amid the credit crunch, Iran’s leadership celebrated the West’s economic crisis. On Oct. 11, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared, “The claim that the free market manages all things is a huge lie and benefits only thieves and criminals.” Two days later, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei decreed that the West’s financial crisis was a sign of “the ineffectiveness of liberal democracy-based policies.”

The Iranian leadership may rue their words. Ahmadinejad has run Iran’s economy into the ground. On Oct. 11, just a day after Ahmadinejad declared prices in decline, the Central Bank reported inflation above 30%. Such figures are still likely low. Both Shahab News and Aftab-e Yazd have noted the tendency of Iranian officials to pull numbers from thin air.

Parliamentarians and journalists might complain but, as the Islamic Republic reverts to a Soviet-style command economy, regime intolerance toward technocratic expertise grows. Hojjat al-Eslam Ha’eri Shirazi, the Supreme Leader’s personal representative in the city of Shiraz, explained, “The banking system wants to demand interest rates in exchange for loans to the people. We will not let them do so. And should a couple of banks go bankrupt as a result, so what? What is worse anyway, closure of factories or banks?”

Non-oil sector production is stagnant. Factories may remain open but many do not pay workers. On Oct. 2, for example, tire factory workers staged a protest in front of the Ministry of Labor seeking six months’ unpaid wages. In recent weeks, wild cat strikes have occurred in Tehran, Isfahan, Qazvin and Sanandaj. Purchasing power has plummeted. …

If you want to know how low the NY Times has sunk, check this by Ed Morrissey. Pickerhead thinks this is kinda cool. It is condign punishment for John McCain to be treated this way by the media. He thought they liked him, but he was just a useful idiot who pranced around claiming the media was his base.

Jodi Kantor apparently got so desperate for dirt on Cindy McCain for the tiresome rehash the New York Times published Sunday that she tried suckering teenagers on Facebook into cooperating with her.  The McCain campaign released the contents of an e-mail Kantor sent to one of Bridget McCain’s 16-year-old classmates through the social-networking site. Is this what “political correspondents” do?:

I saw on facebook that you went to Xavier, and if you don’t mind, I’d love to ask you some advice about a story. I’m a reporter at the New York Times, writing a profile of Cindy McCain, and we are trying to get a sense of what she is like as a mother. …

You’re going to love this piece by Byron York on a McCain rally in Woodbridge, VA.

… The second reason Joe the Plumber resonates with the crowds is what his experience says about the media. Everybody here seems acutely aware of the once-over Wurzelbacher received from the press after his chance encounter with Obama was reported, first on Fox News, and then mentioned by McCain at last week’s presidential debate. Wurzelbacher found himself splashed across newspapers and cable shows, many of which reported that he didn’t have a plumber’s license, that he wasn’t a member of the plumbers’ union, that he had a lien against him for $1,182 in state taxes, and that he failed to comprehend what many commentators apparently felt was the indisputable fact that Barack Obama would lower his taxes, not raise them. As the people here in Woodbridge saw it, Joe was a guy who asked Barack Obama an inconvenient question — and for his troubles suddenly found himself under investigation by the media.

In the audience Saturday, there were plenty of people who were mad about it. There was real anger at this rally, but it wasn’t, as some erroneous press reports from other McCain rallies have suggested, aimed at Obama. It was aimed at the press. And that’s where Tito Munoz came in.

After McCain left, as the crowd filed out, Munoz made his way to an area near some loudspeakers. He attracted a few reporters when he started talking loudly, in heavily-accented English, about media mistreatment of Wurzelbacher. (It was clear that Spanish was Munoz’s native language, and he later told me he was born in Colombia.) When I first made my way over to him, Munoz thought I was there to give him the third degree.

“Are you going to check my license, too?” he asked me. “Are you going to check my immigration status? I’m ready, I have everything here. Whatever you want, I have it. I have my green card, I have my passport — “

I was a little surprised. Did Munoz really bring his papers with him to a McCain rally? I asked.

“Yeah, I have my papers right here,” he said. “I’m an American citizen. Right here, right here.” With that, he produced a U.S. passport, turned it to the page with his picture on it, and thrust it about an inch from my nose. “Right here,” he said. “In your face.”

Munoz said he owned a small construction business. “I have a license, if you guys want to check,” he said.

Someone asked why Munoz had come to the rally. “I support McCain, but I’ve come to face you guys because I’m disgusted with you guys,” he said. “Why the hell are you going after Joe the Plumber? Joe the Plumber has an idea. He has a future. He wants to be something else. Why is that wrong? Everything is possible in America. I made it. Joe the Plumber could make it even better than me. . . . I was born in Colombia, but I was made in the U.S.A.” …

Jennifer Rubin comments on Byron’s article.

Thomas Sowell on Obama’s true believers.

Telling a friend that the love of his life is a phony and dangerous is not likely to get him to change his mind. But it may cost you a friend.

It is much the same story with true believers in Barack Obama. They have made up their minds and not only don’t want to be confused by the facts, they resent being told the facts.

An e-mail from a reader mentioned trying to tell his sister why he was voting against Obama but, when he tried to argue some facts, she cut him short: “You don’t like him and I do!” she said. End of discussion.

When one thinks of all the men who have put their lives on the line in battle to defend and preserve this country, it is especially painful to think that there are people living in the safety and comfort of civilian life who cannot be bothered to find out the facts about candidates before voting to put the fate of this nation, and of generations yet to come, in the hands of someone chosen because they like his words or style.

Of the four people running for President and Vice President on the Republican and Democratic tickets, the one we know the least about is the one leading in the polls — Barack Obama. …

And we get Tom Sowell’s view of the veracity of polls.

It may seem hardly worthwhile going to the polls to vote this election year, since ACORN and the media have already decided that Barack Obama is to be the next President of the United States.

Still, it may take more than voter fraud and media spin to put Senator Obama in the White House. Most public opinion polls show Obama ahead, but not usually by decisive margins, and sometimes by a difference within the margin of error.

There has been a history of various polls over the years projecting bigger votes for the Democrats’ presidential candidate in October than that candidate actually gets in November.

Some of these polls seem like they are not trying to report facts but to create an impression. One poll has been reported as using a sample consisting of 280 Republicans and 420 Democrats. No wonder Obama leads in a poll like that.

Pollsters have to protect their reputations but they can do that by playing it straight on their last poll before election day, after having created an impression earlier that a landslide for the Democratic candidate was all but a done deal. …

Shorts from National Review.

Nobody lies with numbers like academics. The Sports Economist blog compares NCAA pretend graduation rates with the real ones.

An NCAA report proclaims that graduation rates of student athletes are at their highest ever. I certainly join in the applause for any improvement in the academic performance of student athletes. In conjunction with this report, the organization is releasing its own graduation statistic, the “Graduation Success Rate.” This measure is higher than the graduation rate measured by the Federal government. Schools don’t like the latter, in part because if fails to track transfers (are athletes more or less likely to transfer? I would think eligibility rules would make them less likely to transfer.) But they like the GSR measure for another reason, since they are allowed to “subtract student-athletes who leave their institutions prior to graduation as long as they would have been academically eligible to compete had they remained.” …

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Yesterday we had Hoover Institute scholars speculating on what might have been Milton Friedman’s opinions of our present dilemma. Today Anna Schwartz who co-authored The Monetary History of The United States with Dr. Friedman, shows up in the form of the WSJ Weekend Interview.

… Most people now living have never seen a credit crunch like the one we are currently enduring. Ms. Schwartz, 92 years old, is one of the exceptions. She’s not only old enough to remember the period from 1929 to 1933, she may know more about monetary history and banking than anyone alive. She co-authored, with Milton Friedman, “A Monetary History of the United States” (1963). It’s the definitive account of how misguided monetary policy turned the stock-market crash of 1929 into the Great Depression.

Since 1941, Ms. Schwartz has reported for work at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York, where we met Thursday morning for an interview. She is currently using a wheelchair after a recent fall and laments her “many infirmities,” but those are all physical; her mind is as sharp as ever. She speaks with passion and just a hint of resignation about the current financial situation. And looking at how the authorities have handled it so far, she doesn’t like what she sees.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has called the 888-page “Monetary History” “the leading and most persuasive explanation of the worst economic disaster in American history.” Ms. Schwartz thinks that our central bankers and our Treasury Department are getting it wrong again. …

Robert Samuelson gives us the historical framework for taking a long term view of the credsis.

A dozen years ago, James Grant — one of the wisest commentators on Wall Street — wrote a book called “The Trouble With Prosperity.” Grant’s survey of financial history captured his crusty theory of economic predestination. If things seem splendid, they will get worse. Success inspires overconfidence and excess. If things seem dismal, they will get better. Crisis spawns opportunities and progress. Our triumphs and follies follow a rhythm that, though it can be influenced, cannot be repealed.

Good times breed bad, and vice versa. Bear that in mind. It provides context for today’s turmoil and recriminations. The recent astounding events — the government’s takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Treasury’s investments in private banks, the stock market’s wild swings — have thrust us into fierce debate. Has enough been done to protect the economy? Who or what caused this mess? …

Canada’s National Post reports on the cooling earth.

In early September, I began noticing a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming. Actually, it was more like a string of guest columns and long letters to the editor since it is hard for skeptical scientists to get published in the cabal of climate journals now controlled by the Great Sanhedrin of the environmental movement.

Still, the number of climate change skeptics is growing rapidly. Because a funny thing is happening to global temperatures — they’re going down, not up.

On the same day (Sept. 5) that areas of southern Brazil were recording one of their latest winter snowfalls ever and entering what turned out to be their coldest September in a century, Brazilian meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart explained that extreme cold or snowfall events in his country have always been tied to “a negative PDO” or Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Positive PDOs — El Ninos — produce above-average temperatures in South America while negative ones — La Ninas — produce below average ones.

Dr. Hackbart also pointed out that periods of solar inactivity known as “solar minimums” magnify cold spells on his continent. So, given that August was the first month since 1913 in which no sunspot activity was recorded — none — and during which solar winds were at a 50-year low, he was not surprised that Brazilians were suffering (for them) a brutal cold snap. “This is no coincidence,” he said as he scoffed at the notion that manmade carbon emissions had more impact than the sun and oceans on global climate. …

On a tip from Mark Steyn, we have James Delingpole’s “ordinary bloke” focus group on climate change.

… Now I concede that ten drinkers round a table in a Worcestershire pub is not a large sample. And I suppose you could argue that any man (or woman — we had those there too, serving us tea in their sexy US Red Cross outfits) who chooses to spend his weekends impersonating C Company, 82nd Recon, 2nd Armored Division, is on a different planet anyway. But what I think I might have stumbled upon here is the sort of focus group we poncy Londoners don’t often encounter. A bunch of real people. Normal people. Ones who aren’t writers or minor celebs or politicians or the sort of metropolitan bien-pensants who think tootling round town in electric cars magically negates the carbon footprint they make flying to their farmhouse in Tuscany three times a year. And what they think about the environment couldn’t be more different from the version rammed down our throats by politicians of all parties, and by most of the media too. …

… So far, depressingly few of our politicians have understood this. The EU goes on railroading through its oppressive legislation on everything from waste disposal to the kind of lightbulbs we’re allowed to use. Buffoons like Ed Miliband and the head of the Environment Agency Lord (Chris) Smith continue to witter on about carbon capture and renewable energy, quite oblivious to the far more pressing and real threat of the ‘energy gap’ which will shortly lead to widespread blackouts. Conservatives who ought to know better either believe the cant because Dave does or delude themselves it’s not a voting issue.

But the tide of history is against this Green Terror and so, increasingly, are the people. We’ve had enough of its ghastly wind turbines, its fascistic recycling inspectors and its swingeing eco-taxes. We want lightbulbs you can see by, not horrid flickery yellow ones; we want weekly rubbish collections; we want countryside unblighted by vast Teletubby windmills. And we want Al Gore’s head on a plate.

David Warren from his perch in Ottawa looks at the two elections in North America.

I am very tired of electoral politics, and I would expect my readers are, too. This after a model five-week Canadian general election campaign, quickly resolved in a few minutes of vote-counting last Tuesday night — in addition to what feels like a century of still-unfinished jousting between presidential gladiators in the gigantic republic to our south (to say nothing of the bears, bulls, wild cats, donkeys and elephants in their congressional forum).

Indeed, I retired to bed last Tuesday evening feeling a nearly smug satisfaction in the day’s principal event, and muttering, “Vive le Canada!”

For, with all but one seat reporting before midnight, the Tories were then elected or leading in 140-plus, and quite unchallengeable. Most of those seats were settled away, without risk of nasty overnight swings, and the ones that weren’t didn’t really matter. All Tories I half-way liked had been re-elected, together with a selection of backbenchers I half-liked in other parties. And overall, the best available result: all party leaders farther away from power, except Stephen Harper, who wasn’t any nearer.

A boring election; an unsurprising result; no serious consequences. A vindication of everything our nation stands for.

A (seeming) century into the American campaign, where everything is (apparently) at stake, one comes to appreciate the pleasure in a good yawn. …

And Mr. Steyn has resumed his National Review column where he contemplates what the next few years might bring.

… As to his qualifications for remaking the world, my favorite moment of the campaign was when he got briefly touchy about having his minimal “qualifications” for the presidency compared with Sarah Palin’s. The senator huffily pointed out that he has too got executive experience. Unlike the governor, he’s never run a state or a town or a business, but, as he put it, for two years he’s been running a successful presidential campaign. In effect, Barack was acknowledging that his principal talent is for self-promotion. It requires some chutzpah to offer your skill at being Barack Obama as your main qualification for the job. The man who modified the title of Sammy Davis Jr.’s autobiography for his campaign motto — “Yes, we can!” — might have done better to cut straight to one of Sammy’s signature songs: “I’ve Gotta Be Me.” L’état, c’est moi.

These next four, eight (twelve? twenty?) years seem likely to be tough for us stilted cheerers. I doubt he’ll be lowering ocean levels. But, unlike King Canute, who at least arranged a useful demonstration to apprise the sycophants of his limitations in that respect, King Barack is in no hurry to disabuse his followers. So he’ll probably set up some cockamamie bureaucratic regulation designed hypothetically to lower ocean levels over the course of the next century or two. After all, there’s no point electing a megastar leader without mega-government to go along with him. You might think this is all profoundly unbecoming to a republic of free-born citizens. But these days that’s a concept you can barely raise a roomful of stilted cheers for.

Jeff Jacoby points out the basic problem with health insurance.

… During World War II, federal wage controls barred employers from raising their workers’ salaries, but said nothing about fringe benefits. So firms competing for employees at government-restricted wages began offering medical insurance to sweeten employment offers. Even sweeter was that employers could deduct those benefits as business expenses, yet employees didn’t have to report them as taxable income. For a while the IRS resisted that interpretation, but Congress eventually enshrined the tax-exempt status of employer-based medical insurance in law.

Result: a radical shift in the way Americans paid for medical care. With health benefits tax-free if they were employer-supplied, tens of millions of Americans were soon signing up for medical insurance through work. As tax rates rose, so did the incentive to keep expanding health benefits. No longer was medical insurance reserved for major expenditures like surgery or hospitalization. Americans who would never think of using auto insurance to cover tune-ups and oil changes grew accustomed to having their medical insurer pay for yearly physicals, prescriptions, and other routine expenses.

We thus ended up with a healthcare system in which the vast majority of bills are covered by a third party. With someone else picking up the tab, Americans got used to consuming medical care without regard to price or value. After all, if it was covered by insurance, why not go to the emergency room for a simple sore throat? Why not get the name-brand drug instead of a generic? …

Barack has campaigned about a shortage of scientists and engineers. John Tierney looks at the market and says. “What shortage.”

… The only “shortage” is of American-born scientists and engineers. But with so many talented foreigners competing for positions here in schools and laboratories, it’s entirely rational for American students to head into fields where their skills are in more demand — and harder to replace with foreign labor. Mr. Greenberg sums up their options nicely:

Consider the economic fates of two bright college graduates, Jane and Jill, both 22. Jane excels at a top law school, and after graduation three years later, is wooed and hired by a top law firm at the going rate–$125,000 a year, with a year-end bonus of $25,000 to $50,000.

Jill heads down the long trail to a PhD in physics, and after six Spartan years on graduate stipends rising to $20,000 a year, finally gets her degree. Tenure-track jobs appropriate to her rigorous training are scarce, but, more fortunate than her other classmates, she lands a good postdoc appointment–at $35,000 year, without health insurance or professional independence. Three years later, when attorney Jane is raking in $150,000 a year, plus bonuses, Jill is nail-biting over another postdoc appointment, with an unusually ample postdoc recompense of $45,000 per annum. Medicine and business management similarly trump science in earning power. …

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Peter Robinson writes in Forbes about what Milton Friedman would have made of the credit crisis.

The day after Milton Friedman died in November 2006, The Wall Street Journal published an article about monetary policy that Friedman had written. Unable to recall when the article had first appeared, I asked the editor. “Today,” he said. “Milton adapted it just a couple of weeks ago from a research paper he was working on.”

This took a moment to sink in. Friedman, by universal consent one of the two or three most consequential economists of the 20th century, had still been performing original economic research then describing his findings for ordinary readers–at the age of 94.

What would Milton have said if he were still with us today? Friedman spent his final three decades at the Hoover Institution–my office was just two doors down the hall from his–and earlier this week I sat down with two of my Hoover colleagues, economists Thomas MaCurdy and Jay Bhattacharya, both close students of Milton, to decide what questions we would have asked him–and how he might have replied. …

Stuart Taylor, one of journalism’s finest, weighs in on the causes of the credsis. (Pickerhead figured it’s time for a new word)

President Bush, his Securities and Exchange Commission appointees, other free-enterprise dogmatists who have stood in the way of regulating risky and opaque financial manipulations, and greedy Wall Streeters deserve the blame heaped on them for the financial meltdown that has so severely shaken America.

But the pretense of many Democrats that this crisis is altogether a Republican creation is simplistic and dangerous.

It is simplistic because Democrats have been a big part of the problem, in part by supporting governmental distortions of the marketplace through mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose reckless lending practices necessitated a $200 billion government rescue last month. It is dangerous because misdiagnosing the causes of the crisis could lead both to regulatory overkill and to more reckless risk taking by Fannie, Freddie, or newly created government-sponsored enterprises.

Fannie and Freddie aside, it’s worth pointing out that many, if not most, of those greedy Wall Street barons are Democrats. And that the securities and investment industry has given more money to Democrats than to Republicans in this election cycle. And that opposing regulation of risky new financial practices by private investment banks and others has been a bipartisan enterprise, engaged in by the Clinton and Bush administrations alike.

But the roles of Fannie and Freddie are my focus here. Powerful Democratic (and some Republican) advocates of affordable housing, including Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.; Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.; and House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., have been the GSEs’ most potent and ardent champions in recent years. ..

OK, we have to cover the election. What better way than with Mark Steyn’s return to the OC Register? He has Plumber Joe thoughts.

The heart of the American Dream is aspiration. That’s why people came here from all over the world. Back in Eastern Europe, the Joe Bidens and Diane Sawyers of the day were telling Joe the Peasant: “Hey, look, man. You’re a peasant in the 19th century, just like your forebears were peasants in the 12th century and your descendants will be peasants in the 26th century. So you’re never gonna be earning 250 groats a year. Don’t worry about it. Leave it to us. We know better.” And Joe the Peasant eventually figured that one day he’d like to be able to afford the Premium Gruel with just a hint of arugula and got on the boat to Ellis Island. Because America is the land where a guy who doesn’t have a 250-grand business today might just have one in five or 10 years’ time.

I’m with Joe the Plumber, not Joe the Hair-Plugger. He’s articulated the animating principles of America better than anyone on either side in this campaign. Which is why the O-Bots need to destroy him. As Obama’s catchphrase goes:

“Joe the Plumber!

Can we fix him?

Joe the Plumber!

Yes, we can!”

For the record, I am not a government-licensed pundit. But I expect they’ll fix that, too.

Michelle Malkin reports on the efforts by Obama and the angry Left to flush Joe the Plumber.

Six-term Sen. Joe Biden’s got some nerve going after citizen Joe the Plumber. But the entrenched politician from Delaware, who fancies himself the nation’s No. 1 Ordinary Joe, had no choice. Obama-Biden simply can’t tolerate an outspoken citizen successfully painting the Democratic ticket as socialist overlords. And so a dirty, desperate war against Joe Wurzelbacher is on.

The left’s political plumbers are attacking the messenger, rummaging through his personal life and predictably wielding the race card once again. It’s standard operating procedure for the Obama thug machine.

Wurzelbacher, in case you’ve been in hibernation, is the small-business man from Ohio who questioned Obama about his tax plan during a Toledo campaign swing last weekend. The revealing exchange was caught on tape and broadcast widely across the Internet and TV airwaves.

In response to Wurzelbacher’s question about why he should be “taxed more and more for fulfilling the American dream,” Obama sermonized that he needed to “spread the wealth around” because “it’s good for everybody.” …

Michael Barone wonders if Plumber Joe can change the vote.

It was October 13. The candidate of the out party seemed to be cruising toward victory. He projected an image of confidence, promising to restore national unity, and ignored his opponent. Then he made a little mistake. Veteran reporter Robert J. Donovan tells the story:

“As the [candidate] had begun to speak from the rear platform in Beaucoup, Illinois, his train suddenly lurched a few feet backward toward the crowd in what might have been, if the movement had continued, a serious accident. However, the train stopped quickly, yet [the candidate], momentarily losing his poise, exclaimed into the microphone, “That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer. He probably ought to be shot at sunrise, but I guess we can let him off because no one was hurt.’”

The candidate was Thomas E. Dewey, who was running against Harry Truman in 1948. The most recent Gallup polls showed Dewey leading Truman 46 percent to 40 percent (September 23-28) and 46.5 percent to 39 percent (September 10-15). Truman seized on the “engineer” comment, and Truman backers portrayed it as an example of elite Republican contempt for the working man. …

Charles Krauthammer says Obama is playing the race card.

… What makes the charges against McCain especially revolting is that he has been scrupulous in eschewing the race card. He has gone far beyond what is right and necessary, refusing even to make an issue of Obama’s deep, self-declared connection with the race-baiting Rev. Wright.

In the name of racial rectitude, McCain has denied himself the use of that perfectly legitimate issue. It is simply Orwellian for him to be now so widely vilified as a stoker of racism. What makes it doubly Orwellian is that these charges are being made on behalf of the one presidential candidate who has repeatedly, and indeed quite brilliantly, deployed the race card.

How brilliantly? The reason Bill Clinton is sulking in his tent is because he feels that Obama surrogates succeeded in painting him as a racist. Clinton has many sins, but from his student days to his post-presidency, his commitment and sincerity in advancing the cause of African Americans have been undeniable. If the man Toni Morrison called the first black president can be turned into a closet racist, then anyone can. …

WaPo editors want Obama to let the voucher program continue. Good luck!

IT WOULD be nice if facts, not ideology, framed the discussion over the District’s school voucher program. In an exchange during this week’s presidential debate, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama airily dismissed the program, while Republican Sen. John McCain offered a somewhat jumbled defense of it. Lost was this: 1,903 poor children have educational opportunities because of a unique program that detracts not a whit from either public or charter schools.

The stance of the two candidates is not surprising, given the history of their respective parties. Democrats loathe any suggestion of sending public money to private schools, while Republicans see the free market as a solution to the woes of urban education. It’s important, though, that the next president — and if the polls are to be believed, that will be Mr. Obama — look past these tired political arguments to the real needs of real children served by the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. …

One of the problems with Obama is he says so many things that aren’t true. Perhaps this is only part of the campaign. Many of our favorites have deconstructed his lies in the last debate. WSJ Editors are first.

In Wednesday night’s debate with John McCain, Barack Obama defended his opposition to the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement this way: “The history in Colombia right now is that labor leaders have been targeted for assassination, on a fairly consistent basis, and there have not been any prosecutions.” Among the many falsehoods in this Presidential campaign, this is one of the worst. …

Ed Morrissey is next covering Obama lies on Ayers, Acorn, and infanticide.

In presidential debates (and campaigns), candidates usually try to put their policies and records in the best possible light.  The spin usually focuses on the positive aspects of these points to the point of hedging the entire truth, but flat-out lies are pretty rare.  Last night, Barack Obama treated us to two of them, and not surprisingly, on the two most controversial points of his record. …

Obama’s tax problems? Jim Lindgren in Volokh does the honors.

I was stunned to see some document showing Joe the Plumbers’ tax problems on my 10pm (CT)newscast on the local NBC affiliate in Chicago on Thursday night. They have very little time for any national news and they actually spent time on Joe the Plumbers’ tax problems. Amazing!

But when an actual candidate — Barack Obama — released his tax returns, which on their face seemed to show an ethics violation of Illinois law, the press couldn’t care less. …

Watching the Obama folks gang bang of the upstart, Claudia Rosett says, “First they came for Joe the Plumber…”

… It seems that Joe’s sins are less than the litany would make them. He may not have a plumber’s license, but he works for someone who does. He owes back taxes, but less than $1,200. And at least to date, it is not a crime in America to use a nickname or be a registered Republican.

But to squabble over Joe’s record is to miss the real point. Obama is the one running for public office, aspiring to the country’s highest position of power and public trust. Joe is not. He’s a private citizen, who had every right to ask a very good question. He wanted to know why he was being taxed “more and more for fulfilling the American dream?”

What he got from the well-heeled Senators Obama and Biden was mockery and contempt.

Most disturbing is this: If that’s how Joe the Plumber gets dealt with while Obama is still stumping for votes, then what happens to Joe, or anyone else who dares question Obama’s plans, should Obama win the White House? …

Corner post on Michelle’s Waldorf snack.