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You want the truth about what the election is about? Krauthammer has answers.

… First, like all U.S. elections, it’s about the economy. The effect of the weakest recovery in two generations is reflected in President Obama’s 13-point underwater ratings for his handling of the economy.

Moreover, here is a president who proclaims the reduction of inequality to be the great cause of his administration. Yet it has radically worsened in his six years. The 1 percent are doing splendidly in the Fed-fueled stock market, even as median income has fallen.

Second is the question of competence. The list of disasters is long, highlighted by the Obamacare rollout, the Veterans Affairs scandal and the pratfalls of the once-lionized Secret Service. Beyond mere incompetence is government intrusiveness and corruption, as in the overreach of national security surveillance and IRS targeting of politically disfavored advocacy groups.

Ebola has crystallized the collapse of trust in state authorities. The overstated assurances, the ever-changing protocols, the startling contradictions — the Army quarantines soldiers returning from West Africa while the White House denounces governors who did precisely the same with returning health-care workers — have undermined government in general, this government in particular.

Obama’s clumsy attempt to restore confidence by appointing an Ebola czar has turned farcical. …

John Fund writes on the voting of non-citizens.

Could non-citizen voting be a problem in next week’s elections, and perhaps even swing some very close elections?

A new study by two OldDominionUniversity professors, based on survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, indicated that 6.4 percent of all non-citizens voted illegally in the 2008 presidential election, and 2.2 percent in the 2010 midterms. Given that 80 percent of non-citizens lean Democratic, they cite Al Franken ’s 312-vote win in the 2008 Minnesota U.S. Senate race as one likely tipped by non-citizen voting. As a senator, Franken cast the 60th vote needed to make Obamacare law.

North Carolina features one of the closest Senate races in the country this year, between Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan and Republican Thom Tillis. So what guerrilla filmmaker James O’Keefe, the man who has uncovered voter irregularities in states ranging from Colorado to New Hampshire, has learned in North Carolina is disturbing. This month, North Carolina officials found at least 145 illegal aliens, still in the country thanks to the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, registered to vote. Hundreds of other non-citizens may be on the rolls.

A voter-registration card is routinely issued without any identification check, and undocumented workers can use it for many purposes, including obtaining a driver’s license and qualifying for a job. And if a non-citizen has a voter-registration card, there are plenty of campaign operatives who will encourage him or her to vote illegally. …

According to John Fund, the campaign manager caught in the James O’Keefe NC sting has resigned.

Guerrilla filmmaker James O’Keefe has prompted investigations into political operatives he caught on camera advising non-citizens they could vote. The North Carolina Board of Elections is looking into whether they broke state law.

Meanwhile, Greg Amick, the campaign manager for the Democratic candidate for sheriff in Charlotte, N.C., has left his position. Amick told an O’Keefe investigator that her non-citizen status was no problem: “As long as you’re registered to vote, you’ll be fine.” …

Stephen Hayes says this election is about everything.

… Not only is this election not about nothing, it is being fought over exactly the kinds of things that ought to determine our elections.

It’s about the size and scope of government. It’s about the rule of law. It’s about the security of the citizenry. It’s about competence. It’s about integrity. It’s about honor.

It’s about a government that makes promises to those who have defended the country and then fails those veterans, again and again and again. It’s about a president who offers soothing reassurances on his sweeping health care reforms and shrugs his shoulders when consumers learn those assurances were fraudulent. It’s about government websites that cost billions but don’t function and about “smart power” that isn’t very smart. It’s about an administration that cares more about ending wars than winning them, and that claims to have decimated an enemy one day only to find that that enemy is still prosecuting its war against us the next. It’s about shifting red lines and failed resets. It’s about a president who ignores restrictions on his power when they don’t suit him and who unilaterally rewrites laws that inconvenience him. It’s about a powerful federal agency that targets citizens because of their political beliefs and a White House that claims ignorance of what its agents are up to because government is too “vast.” In sum, this is an election about a president who promised to restore faith in government and by every measure has done the opposite. …

Kevin Williamson gives a hearty goodbye to Wendy Davis and her Texas fail.

Acknowledging the admittedly remote risk that I am giving a hostage to fate by writing these words, I note that the implosion of Wendy Davis’s ugly and vacuous gubernatorial campaign in Texas has been a satisfying spectacle. On Tuesday, it is all but inevitable that Greg Abbot’s campaign and Texas voters are going to beat Wendy Davis like a circus monkey, and it will be her second significant defeat in the campaign: She ran triumphantly unopposed in the New York Times primary, with Robert Draper all but kissing the hem of her garment, but she took a beating in the Rio Grande primary, with her penniless nobody opponent outperforming her in critical border counties that had gone heavily for Barack Obama in the presidential elections.

Bipartisan lesson: If you are going to run a horsepucky media creation as a single-issue candidate, pick a single issue that doesn’t stack voters up against you four to one.

Wendy Davis is a fanatic as Winston Churchill defined the word: “One who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” Her candidacy was the product of abortion fanaticism and almost nothing else. …

… Strangely enough, marijuana reform is a notable locus of fanaticism. You’d think that of all the single-issue enthusiasms across these fruited plains, the marijuana-legalization crusade would be one of the more laid-back. It isn’t. If you think that the gay-marriage obsessives or the Chicken Littles of climate change are fanatics and bores, spend a few hours with the potheads. Marijuana — or  cannabis, or hemp, or whatever particular nomenclature the individual factionalist with whom you are speaking insists upon — will, if the ganja gang is to be believed, cure cancer, replace fossil fuels, prevent global warming, transform the economy, balance the budget, lower taxes, win the war on terror (“Duuude, I could go for some falafel . . . ”), lower health-care costs, eliminate kitchen drudgery, turn a sandwich into a banquet, and find that slipper that’s been at large under the chaise lounge for several weeks. I agree with the potheads on the basic policy, but even so, it is all but impossible to have a conversation with them about the subject, especially one that considers the possible downsides associated with having a legal free market in marijuana, such as an increased difficulty in getting correct change at 7-Eleven, longer lines at Taco Bell, increased incidence of Phish concerts, etc. …

George Will writes on some of the little noticed items on Tuesday.

… Because Senate control is at issue, insufficient attention has been paid to 2014’s most important election, which is in the worst-governed state. Illinois incumbent governor is Pat Quinn, a compliant time-server who floated up from lieutenant governor when Rod Blagojevich became the fourth of the previous nine governors to be imprisoned. The state has high unemployment, low growth and more than $100 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. If voters ratify the state’s trajectory by reelecting Quinn, he will accelerate the downward spiral by continuing policies that have produced it, beginning by making “temporary” tax increases permanent. Republicans will win if their candidate, businessowner Bruce Rauner, wins and delivers, among other things, a campaign to term-limit the state legislators who, collaborating with government employee unions, buy job permanence using money looted from taxpayers.

Republicans also will win if Quinn wins, thereby making Illinois a scary example to the nation of the terrible toll taken by the “blue model” of governance. Although U.S. law allows a one-party city like Detroit to go bankrupt, there is no provision for state bankruptcies. Hence a Quinn victory would provide, perhaps within his next term, hair-raising excitement for the states’ masochistic electorate as lenders recoil from America’s Argentina. …

… We govern through parties, and this autumn President Obama’s has repudiated him. Tuesday will supply evidence of not only how little pulse Obama’s presidency still has but also how much damage he has done to his party. Before he led it to its 2010 debacle, it controlled 62 state legislative chambers to the Republicans’ 36. Entering Tuesday, Republicans led Democrats, 59 to 39. (Subtract two chambers because Nebraska’s legislature is unicameral and nonpartisan.) Can Democrats stop the hemorrhaging? …

Peter Wehner posts on the damage done to the Dems. 

How much damage is Barack Obama doing to the Democratic Party? According to the respected political analyst Stuart Rothenberg, the answer is quite a lot. According to Rothenberg, “President Barack Obama is about to do what no president has done in the past 50 years: Have two horrible, terrible, awful midterm elections in a row.”

Mr. Rothenberg compares Obama to the worst midterm numbers of two-term presidents going back to Harry Truman. He concludes that it’s likely that over the course of two midterm elections, Democrats will lose somewhere in the range of 68-75 House seats range and 11-15 Senate seats. …

Jennifer Rubin spots some sore losers.

If you have been watching or reading the caterwauling in the mainstream media about the midterms, you will have discovered it goes something like this: There is no GOP wave. Well, there is a GOP wave, but Republicans are not running on anything. Well, the Republicans ARE running on something, but they will kill each other. Maybe they won’t kill each other, but the majority will be so big that it will fall apart. Even if it does not fall apart, the Democrats will get the Senate back in 2016.

It is more than sore loser-itis in anticipation of a loss they fear will be impossible to spin. It is evidence of a party and a liberal movement out of gas, barren of ideas and desperate to scare its own base with race-baiting and gender victimization. Even the New York Times sounded shocked: “The images and words they are using are striking for how overtly they play on fears of intimidation and repression.” Welcome to what is left of “hope and change.”

It seems fitting that embattled Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) finishes the race accusing her fellow citizens of racism. (“I’ll be very, very honest with you. The South has not always been the friendliest place for African Americans. It’s been a difficult time for the president to present himself in a very positive light as a leader.”) Who wouldn’t want to vote for a pol who thinks them so despicable, huh? …

Michael Goodwin notices the president and his staff always blame someone else. 

In the New York Times the other day, anonymous aides to President Obama trashed Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. Kerry was mocked mercilessly, with officials joking “that he is like the astronaut played by Sandra Bullock in the movie ‘Gravity,’ somersaulting through space, untethered to the White House.”

A week before that, The Times reported that, despite Obama’s public efforts to calm fears over Ebola, he was privately seething at health aides’ bungling. In a bid to separate him from the incompetence of his administration, the leakers claimed Obama was “visibly angry” and “demanded a more hands-on approach” from his team.

Then there was the story about Pentagon boss Hagel firing off a memo to national security chief Susan Rice that faulted America’s Syrian policy. Then there was a story about — oh, never mind, you get the picture.

The extraordinary pile-up of crises has turned the usual White House blame game into something more lethal: a shootout in a lifeboat. The presidency is sinking, but we are expected to believe that only the president is blameless. …

Power Line tells us one of Louisiana’s most famous crooks, Edwin Edwards, is running for office again.

I think it is Glenn Reynolds who may have first come up with the slogan that the Democratic Party is nowadays a criminal conspiracy masquerading as a political party, which is fitting for their candidate for Louisiana’s 6th House district: Edwin Edwards!

He’s only a convicted felon, and after serving nine years in federal prison he’s back in he game, a spry age 87 adorned by his 35-year-old (third) wife, whom he met while in prison when she became his pen pal. …

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It was the best of times it was the worst of times, . . . .  Today we celebrate the best of our species and then we pull back the curtain on some of the worst. First, what makes us human? Nautilus says it is our willingness to cooperate. Given the item that runs second today, you might want to immerse yourself in this piece.

Tales about the origins of our species always start off like this: A small band of hunter-gatherers roams the savannah, loving, warring, and struggling for survival under the African sun. They do not start like this: A fat guy falls off a New York City subway platform onto the tracks.

But what happens next is a quintessential story of who we are as human beings.

On Feb. 17, 2013, around 2:30 a.m., Garrett O’Hanlon, a U.S. Air Force Academy cadet third class, was out celebrating his 22nd birthday in New York City. He and his sister were in the subway waiting for a train when a sudden silence came over the platform, followed by a shriek. People pointed down to the tracks.

O’Hanlon turned and saw a man sprawled facedown on the tracks. “The next thing that happened, I was on the tracks, running toward him,” he says. “I honestly didn’t have a thought process.”

O’Hanlon grabbed the unconscious man by the shoulders, lifting his upper body off the tracks, but struggled to move him. He was deadweight. According to the station clock, the train would arrive in less than two minutes. From the platform, O’Hanlon’s sister was screaming at him to save himself.

Suddenly other arms were there: Personal trainer Dennis Codrington Jr. and his friend Matt Foley had also jumped down to help. “We grabbed him, one by the legs, one by the shoulders, one by the chest,” O’Hanlon says. They got the man to the edge of the platform, where a dozen or more people muscled him up and over. More hands seized the rescuers’ arms and shoulders, helping them up to safety as well.

In the aftermath of the rescue, O’Hanlon says he has been surprised that so many people have asked him why he did it. “I get stunned by the question,” he says. In his view, anybody else would’ve done the same thing. “I feel like it’s a normal reaction,” he says. “To me that’s just what people do.”

More precisely, it is something only people do, according to developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello, codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. …

 

… There are no fossils of ancient hominid brains or other physical evidence that might tell us when and how our ancestors first put their minds together to collaborate. Without such clues, the question of why we alone became a collaborative species is difficult to answer, says Hare, who is now a professor at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at DukeUniversity. “Figuring out what makes us unique is hard as hell,” he says. “But it’s much easier than the next question, which is the real issue, the Higgs boson of evolutionary anthropology: How did we get that way?”

In the absence of physical evidence, Tomasello proposes one possible scenario. During the Pleistocene, about 1.5 million years ago, the climate became very bumpy, with frequent temperature swings that forced our ancestors to work together to access new sources of food. Perhaps we became scavengers, joining forces to ward off bigger, tougher meat-eating competitors. Under these circumstances, any genetic variation that made it easier to collaborate—maybe by more accurately reading someone else’s intentions, seeing the whites of their eyes, or simply being more relaxed about sharing food—presumably would have helped those individuals survive, and would have spread through the population.

Hints as to how this might have happened emerge from a surprising place: a fox-breeding farm in Siberia. In the 1950s the Russian biologist Dmitri Belyaev was interested in how dogs might first have been domesticated. He paired the most docile, friendly foxes he could find, then chose the gentlest from each litter and bred them. In a mere 10 generations, the young foxes acted like puppy dogs. The first time they met a human, they wagged their tails and tried to leap into people’s arms to lick their faces. …

 

… Ultimately, Tomasello’s research on human nature arrives at a paradox: our minds are the product of competitive intelligence and cooperative wisdom, our behavior a blend of brotherly love and hostility toward out-groups. Confronted by this paradox, the ugly side—the fact that humans compete, fight, and kill each other in wars—dismays most people, Tomasello says. And he agrees that our tendency to distrust outsiders—lending itself to prejudice, violence, and hate—should not be discounted or underestimated. But he says he is optimistic. In the end, what stands out more is our exceptional capacity for generosity and mutual trust, those moments in which we act like no species that has ever come before us.

Now, a look at our seamier side from Wired. 

The campuses of the tech industry are famous for their lavish cafeterias, cushy shuttles, and on-site laundry services. But on a muggy February afternoon, some of these companies’ most important work is being done 7,000 miles away, on the second floor of a former elementary school at the end of a row of auto mechanics’ stalls in Bacoor, a gritty Filipino town 13 miles southwest of Manila. When I climb the building’s narrow stairwell, I need to press against the wall to slide by workers heading down for a smoke break. Up one flight, a drowsy security guard staffs what passes for a front desk: a wooden table in a dark hallway overflowing with file folders.

Past the guard, in a large room packed with workers manning PCs on long tables, I meet Michael Baybayan, an enthusiastic 21-year-old with a jaunty pouf of reddish-brown hair. If the space does not resemble a typical startup’s office, the image on Baybayan’s screen does not resemble typical startup work: It appears to show a super-close-up photo of a two-pronged dildo wedged in a vagina. I say appears because I can barely begin to make sense of the image, a baseball-card-sized abstraction of flesh and translucent pink plastic, before he disappears it with a casual flick of his mouse.

Baybayan is part of a massive labor force that handles “content moderation”—the removal of offensive material—for US social-networking sites. As social media connects more people more intimately than ever before, companies have been confronted with the Grandma Problem: Now that grandparents routinely use services like Facebook to connect with their kids and grandkids, they are potentially exposed to the Internet’s panoply of jerks, racists, creeps, criminals, and bullies. They won’t continue to log on if they find their family photos sandwiched between a gruesome Russian highway accident and a hardcore porn video. Social media’s growth into a multibillion-dollar industry, and its lasting mainstream appeal, has depended in large part on companies’ ability to police the borders of their user-generated content—to ensure that Grandma never has to see images like the one Baybayan just nuked. …

… This work is increasingly done in the Philippines. A former US colony, the Philippines has maintained close cultural ties to the United States, which content moderation companies say helps Filipinos determine what Americans find offensive. And moderators in the Philippines can be hired for a fraction of American wages. Ryan Cardeno, a former contractor for Microsoft in the Philippines, told me that he made $500 per month by the end of his three-and-a-half-year tenure with outsourcing firm Sykes. Last year, Cardeno was offered $312 per month by another firm to moderate content for Facebook, paltry even by industry standards.

 

Here in the former elementary school, Baybayan and his coworkers are screening content for Whisper, an LA-based mobile startup—recently valued at $200 million by its VCs—that lets users post photos and share secrets anonymously. They work for a US-based outsourcing firm called TaskUs. …

… Given that content moderators might very well comprise as much as half the total workforce for social media sites, it’s worth pondering just what the long-term psychological toll of this work can be. Jane Stevenson was head of the occupational health and welfare department for Britain’s National Crime Squad—the UK equivalent of the FBI—in the early 2000s, when the first wave of international anti-child-pornography operations was launched. She saw investigators become overwhelmed by the images; even after she left her post, agencies and private organizations continued to ask for her help dealing with the fallout, so she started an occupational health consultancy, Workplace Wellbeing, focused on high-pressure industries. She has since advised social media companies in the UK and found that the challenges facing their content moderators echo those of child-pornography and anti-terrorism investigators in law enforcement.

“From the moment you see the first image, you will change for good,” Stevenson says. But where law enforcement has developed specialized programs and hires experienced mental health professionals, Stevenson says that many technology companies have yet to grasp the seriousness of the problem. …

For needed comic relief, here’s Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Conan: President Obama said he hugged and kissed some of the nurses who treated Ebola patients. Man, that guy will do anything to get out of that job right now.

Fallon: The CDC is trying to calm people saying you can’t get Ebola sitting next to someone. But you could give it to someone sitting next to you. So, don’t worry. But, you know, worry.

Conan: NFL teams got a league newsletter informing them of the dangers of Ebola. Meanwhile, Ebola has received a letter about the dangers of the NFL.