ELIOT SPITZER’S sugar Daddy.

MICHAEL BARONE: “What’s with the polls?”

HOWELL-O-WEEN: This week’s Blawg Review is up.

THE PRO-NUCLEAR HAROLD FORD: I think he’s right on this, and I’m glad to see more Democrats — as Mark Warner did in our interview last week — looking seriously at nuclear power.

THE NETROOTS ARE ALREADY assigning blame for a Lamont defeat: “The American people know this. They know that Democratic Senators are moral lepers, weaklings, and that is the only reason we aren’t further ahead when the Republicans screw everything up. The Democratic Senate leaders will sell us out at every opportunity, be it torture, Iraq, Alito, Lieberman, the Bankruptcy Bill, or stopping war with Iran. They aren’t poll-driven, they aren’t fear-driven, and they aren’t driven by strategic differences. They are simply driven to beat us down, their voters, by any means necessary. That’s why they cheered Joe. . . . We can win this fight, as the polls are tightening. But it would be a whole lot easier without that knife in our back.”

UPDATE: TigerHawk emails:

The Matt Stoller piece you linked is the traditional rant among defeated true believers. Although I was but a toddler at the time, my recollection of the history is that Barry Goldwater’s supporters had much the same reaction in 1964. On the one hand, they spent a lot of years in the desert after that. On the other hand, it inspired them to build a dominant political force 15 years later. The question is, will today’s lefty activists accommodate themselves to the compromises necessary to do that, as conservatives did?

Well, they haven’t lost yet, though calling Democratic Senators “moral lepers” and “weaklings” just before a big election on which the balance of power rests is probably unconstructive. . . . But I think that the Netroots blogosphere will probably make the kind of necessary political compromise that TigerHawk describes harder to achieve. When you’ve got an empowered and connected network of boss-haters it’s much more difficult to pull that sort of thing off.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader James Somer emails:

I had to laugh at the rant you linked to assigning blame for Lamont’s expected loss in Connecticut. I live in Connecticut’s Farmington Valley, which up here is what passes for a Republican redoubt. You wouldn’t believe how many yards I’ve seen in my town this fall that have a “Sticking With Joe” sign right next to a sign for the GOP incumbent congresswoman, Nancy Johnson. Meanwhile, the Republican candidate for Senate, Schlesinger, may not even hit double-digits on election day. The Netroots wanted to punish Lieberman so they saw to it that he was booted in the primary. But in so doing, they drove up Lieberman’s popularity with Republicans and independents who are dubious of such ideological hatchet jobs. Even worse (or better, if you’re Karl Rove) the Angry Left’s savaging of the moderate Lieberman also gave Connecticut’s three endangered GOP congresspersons cover, as it created a confusing, three-way Senate race in a state where a very popular, moderate Republican governor (Jodi Rell) was already running at the top of the ticket. In a year where Democrats should be insisting on a black-and-white referendum between Republicans and Democrats, the netroots filled Connecticut’s politics with many shades of gray.

I’ve never understood how targeting Lieberman squares with the goal of getting a Democratic majority.

A PROFOUND TWELVE MINUTES, courtesy of Major John Tammes.

SOME ALMOST-FORGOTTEN HISTORY: “On one wall of the plaza is a sculpture of a lunch counter with several people sitting at it. It’s so very life-like that in nice weather people routinely sit down on the empty stools to eat their lunches at the counter. There is no plaque to explain the sculpture.”

A DIALOGUE CONCERNING PROGRESS, at Burchismo.

CARNIVAL-O-RAMA: Haveil Havalim is up. So is Radiology Grand Rounds, the Carnival of Cinema, the Disability Blog Carnival, and the Working at Home blog carnival.

Lots more at BlogCarnival.com, with highlights in the BlogCarnival box in my right sidebar — click here and look right.

REPUBLICANS DON’T LOVE THE LORD? If a Republican said something like that about Democrats, it would be a national scandal. We’re seeing a lot of unforced errors from Harold Ford all of a sudden. I think he and his campaign could use a good night’s sleep.

UPDATE: A tax on Internet porn?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Dean Barnett thought that Harold Ford looked tired on the Sunday shows. It’s tempting to go all-out and shortchange yourself on sleep, but that drastically increases your risk of saying something damaging.

AN INTERNET EMBARRASSMENT FOR GREECE:

The administrator of Blogme.gr, a Greek blog aggregation website had his house raided, his hard drive seized and was himself arrested by the Greek cybercrime division last week, after having been served with a libel lawsuit without prior notice, because a public figure was offended by a satirical blog that was linked to by his site. The outraged response by Greek bloggers was immediate and unprecedented, reaching in the hundreds of posts within two days of the raid. The developing story coincides with the Internet Governance Forum being hosted in Athens this week, to be attended by Internet luminaries, entrepreneurs and activists like Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and Joi Ito and featuring panels on Openness and Freedom of Expression.

Sounds like they need those panels. (Via Slashdot).

JONATHAN ADLER: “An analysis of state-wide records by the Poughkeepsie Journal reveals that 77,000 dead people remain on election rolls in New York State, and some 2,600 may have managed to vote after they had died. The study also found that Democrats are more successful at voting after death than Republicans, by a margin of four-to-one, largely because so many dead people seem to vote in Democrat-dominated New York City.”

UPDATE: According to Mark Kleiman, there’s less to this story than appears above.

HERE’S MUCH MORE ON MEXICAN VIOLENCE in Oaxaca, from Pajamas Media.

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting blog chronology in the form of a repeatedly updated post.

IS THE EURO “slowly killing half of Europe?”

THE IRON LAW OF THE MEDIA:

I felt outraged on behalf of Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, whose photo was not even a tenth as big. My dad told me not to feel so bad, that no one, not even a Nobel Peace Prize winner, gets a photo as big as mine unless his story involves boobs. Note to future Nobel Prize winners: fight poverty and cure diseases with your shirt off.

It does seem to work that way.

MORE ON LIVEJOURNAL AND RUSSIAN POLITICS: I have to say that if I were a Russian blogger, I’d want to use a foreign hosting service.

IT’S NOT THE ETHANOL:

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva didn’t celebrate the oil independence milestone out in an Amazon sugar field.

No, he smashed a champagne bottle on the spaceship-like deck of Brazil’s vast P-50 oil rig in the Albacora Leste field in the deep blue Atlantic. Why? Brazil’s oil independence had virtually nothing to do with its ethanol development. It came from drilling oil.

Hey, maybe we should try that . . . .

ANOTHER REASON TO WORRY ABOUT ELECTRONIC VOTING:

The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez.

The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smartmatic Corporation, and is trying to determine whether the government in Caracas has any control or influence over the firm’s operations, government officials and others familiar with the investigation said.

See, with paper ballots you don’t care who owns the paper company . . . .

I HAVE SOME THOUGHTS on why there’s no such thing as a “foreign press” any more.

UPDATE: Michael Totten has more on this subject. “It’s all one Internet now. Even offline dead-tree newspapers in Iraq are plugged into it.”

THE ACLU HAS DROPPED ITS LAWSUIT AGAINST THE PATRIOT ACT:

The ACLU said it was withdrawing the lawsuit filed more than three years ago because of “improvements to the law.” The Justice Department argued last month that amendments approved by Congress in March 2006 had corrected any constitutional flaws in the Patriot Act.

Rob Port thinks there’s a political angle, too. Regardless, I guess this means the end of the Patriot Act as an election slogan.

LOOK AT HOW TONY SNOW HAS BEEN DOING since taking the job as White House Press Secretary. I think he’s helped Bush, but I think it’s a bit like George Allen’s hiring of Jon Henke — it would have helped a lot more if he’d made the change sooner.

MORE ON PROBLEMS WITH ELECTRONIC VOTING, at Ars Technica.

BILL ROGGIO says we need to be worrying a lot more about Pakistan.

MARK STEYN:

What gives you a better grasp of the realities of Europe today? The front-page reports on the G8 and the U.S.-EU summit? The in-depth profile of Jacques Chirac or Dominique de Villepin? Or the small space-filler about a French police lieutenant promoted to captain despite spending 12 of the last 18 years on “paternity leave,” in the course of which he wrote three books about the Beatles.

As a summation of contemporary Europe that could hardly be improved.

(Via Tim Blair).

Meanwhile, in a testament to the power of clicks over bricks, reader John MacDonald notes that Mark Steyn’s book, America Alone is Number Two on the Amazon Canada bestseller list (apparently swapping back and forth with Richard Dawkins), meaning that he’s selling a lot even though it’s not being carried in many bookstores there: “the major book chain -Indigo-hasn’t really stocked his book (The owner-Heather Reisman and her husband Gerry Schwartz were major financial donors to the Liberals).”

AUSTIN BAY ROUNDS UP the violence in Oaxaca and explains why Vicente Fox is acting now.