WE AIM TO PLEASE: Fresh from savaging me over a political post, one of my left-leaning critics emails a followup:

The dinner My Lovely Wife are having tonight is a beef and Guinness stew, from the slow-cooking cookbook you’ve frequently referenced. It’s genius. You do one-third (at most) of the work and get 100 % of the credit. My own variation incorporates sliced turnips and a slug of Jameson’s or Laphroaig.

Similarly, I might never have known of the “Open Everything” gadget were it not for you. Believe me, it comes in handy here. And I’ve been ragedly confused over clamshell packaging since the very beginning of the CD era.

Also, I replaced my old watch with a snazzy number I got via the Amazon watch sale you trumpeted.

I do wonder how many wide-eyed radicals, or whoever, confront a similar conundrum with regard to your site. Not that I’m encouraging you to NOT keep making such recommendations…

Once the election is over, I intend to do a lot more gadget- and recipe-blogging, and less political blogging. With luck, that will bring everyone together. Meanwhile, here’s the recipe for the Lamb & Guinness Stew. A shot of whiskey couldn’t hurt . . . .

MICKEY KAUS: “Newsweek’s findings that McCain is doing better among young people than old people, and better among women than men, seem especially strange.” Polls seem especially, um, volatile, this year.

A VIDEO PROVOCATEUR? Makes me wonder about those “McCain supporters” quoted by the press, too. . . .

ABE LINCOLN WOULD DISAGREE:

Vandals spray-painted the words “Republican means slavery” on the door of the York County GOP campaign headquarters overnight Friday.

So would Jefferson Davis . . . .

OUT OF STEP WITH THE WORLD? “If Obama is elected in November, at G7 meetings, for the first time since time they began, America will have a more left-wing leader than any other member of the group – Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and Britain (and that’s before Gordon Brown loses to David Cameron). Right-of-center government throughout the western world – except Washington.”

I FIND THIS EMAIL FROM READER DONALD GATELY DEPRESSING. Click “read more” to read it.

“GRIPPED BY INSANE RAGE.”

THINGS THAT DON’T SUCK (CONT’D): I mentioned the Universal Package Opener yesterday, but I should note that when I was setting up the TV studio in the basement, the only tool I needed was the Swiss Army Cybertool, which I’ve mentioned here before. I keep it down in the studio, and it’s good for about 95% of the things I need, in one compact package. Plus, “cybertool” just sounds cool, in a sort of retro-90s way.

ECONOMIC MELTDOWN? Hasn’t stopped some shoppers, where traffic was so heavy they had to call out the cops. “As veteran visitors to Sevier County, it sure didn’t appear to us there were any cancellations due to the economy or gas prices. Perhaps NBC News should visit Sevier County, if it could find it.”

UPDATE: Reader Mark Melville emails: “I had to venture out to a large mall in Novi Michigan last weekend. Not being one that enjoys shopping I was rather giddy with the thought that the mall should be empty as there was not enough credit to go around not to mention that Michigan is in a depression (I’m told). When I pulled in it was like December 23rd…..PACKED to the gills and I had one hell of a time getting a parking spot!!!. I don’t know if the root cause was fear their credit cards would soon come up empty or what but they (we) were spending.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails: “I live in one of the more affluent neighborhoods in Chicago and while I may be in my own little ‘affluent neighborhood bubble’ here, there is no sign of the impending economic disaster that we’ve been told is coming. Every night this weekend, including tonight, each and every restaurant around here has been packed. The high-end steak and seafood place, packed. The deep dish pizza joint, packed with a line down the street. Sidewalk cafes, packed with patrons adding liquor to their order. N. Michigan Ave, packed with shoppers carrying bags with their recent purchases. Bars, packed with cheering then depressed Bears fans. Things may be different down in Barry’s, Bill’s and Tony’s Hyde Park neighborhood and elsewhere for that matter, but here on the North side it was like 2005, 06 or 07.”

I don’t actually think this proves much about the overall economic situation — this fish is rotting from the head down. While the press has been telling us that it’s a bottom-up recession driven by falling consumer demand and employment, because they figure that will help the Democrats, it has in fact been a structural economic problem at the finance level, which they didn’t report on, really, until the last minute. They’re still trying to shoehorn reports into their traditional formula, but it doesn’t fit. That’s not necessarily good news overall: As I wrote a while back, just because the press is getting the story wrong doesn’t mean that gings are fine. But in truth, my guess is that it’ll take a while for the current problems to show up in shopping malls and restaurants. Perhaps they never will, though that’s an optimistic take, I think.

GALLUP: Obama-McCain Gap Narrows. Stay tuned, though I’m even more suspicious of polls this cycle than last. They seem especially volatile, which may indicate a volatility in people’s views, or, perhaps, a problem with polling itself.

ROGER KIMBALL: On disagreeing with Christopher Buckley about Obama.

2010 PRIUS: More muscle, lower mileage. Hmm. Is that really what people want?

IS IT TIME TO BUY STOCKS? Well, the blood is certainly running in the streets . . . .

UPDATE: But hey, who are you gonna believe? Some guy in The New York Times, or some blogger?

LEFTY ASSASSINATION FANTASIES: Various people, oddly, deny that such existed. Try Death of a President by Gabriel Range, or Nicholson Baker’s novel, Checkpoint, just to start.

Similar Obama assassination fantasies, should they appear, won’t get this kid-glove treatment from Big Media, I suspect. “It is not the first time a novelist has chosen fiction to express their point of view about American society or politics. Upton Sinclair did it. So did John Steinbeck. Nick Baker does it with more nerve and fewer pages.”

UPDATE: Here’s Salon, in 2003, on a play entitled I’m Going to Kill the President, “one of the most amusing plays currently running in New York . . . a madcap farce about terrorism and apathy in John Ashcroft’s America whose performance may or may not be a federal offense.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: “Snipers Wanted.”

SEATTLE TIMES:

No matter who wins, the next president promises to take back Washington from powerful interests and lobbyists.

It is the same stirring promise Congress made last year when — rocked by scandal and under new leadership — lawmakers passed what they trumpeted as some of the most significant ethics reforms in years.

Key among those reforms: rules requiring lawmakers, for the first time, to disclose their earmarks — federal dollars they were quietly doling out as favors.

But time after time, Congress exploited loopholes or violated those rules, a Seattle Times investigation has found. An in-depth examination of the 2008 defense bill found $8.5 billion in earmarks. Of those, 40 percent — $3.5 billion — were hidden.

And Congress broke its pledge — and President Bush’s challenge — to cut earmarks in half.

Yes, it was going to be the most ethical Congress in history, the Democrats promised. Keep that in mind when evaluating the promises you’re hearing now.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON on squishy Republicans abandoning McCain: ” A great many moderates and conservatives are worn out and tired of Bush and Bush hatred, the European furor, serial charges of racism and illiberalism, and finally, in their weariness, think that Obama will, in a variety of ways, just make all the ickiness go away. . . . Obama, as I have said ad nauseam, has brilliantly prepped the battlefield to such a degree that a Farrakhan endorsement or surrogates calling Palin a quasi-Nazi or a bimbo, or smearing McCain as near senile is irrelevant; yet one screamer in a crowd of tens of thousands is proof of McCain’s and Palin’s racism and hatred.” The folks Hanson is talking about seem mostly to be in the Republican commentariat. It’s been hard for them these past years, and they’re tired. But, of course, their capitulation only inflames the grassroots anger they affect to be upset by.

I’VE NOTICED that despite the economic turmoil, the price of gold actually fell on Friday, along with other precious metals. I wonder if this explains it:

Although the economy is weak, the price of gold and silver has increased, causing a surge in business for some local stores.

“We’re having a lot of people coming in selling scrap gold like class rings, old wedding bands, broken chains,” says Bill Kitts, owner of Westside Coins and Collectibles.

Perhaps this surge in supply is keeping prices down? Or is it just that most of the financial-armageddon types are still sitting on stashes of Krugerrands they accumulated in anticipation of Y2K, and don’t need any more?

UNCOVERING THE HISTORY of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

7-YEAR-OLD GETS AN ACORN VOTE. Good grief. “The Connecticut girl is 11 years too young – and nobody in her family knows how she ended up on a voter registration form submitted by ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.”

More on ACORN here.

WALL STREET’S PLUNGE and some public pension plans.

BETTER ALL THE TIME: Consumer Reports calls this TV among the best they’ve ever tested — hey, that’s what they said about mine when I bought it two years ago, but it’s not even on the list anymore — but what’s really impressive is how much cheaper the ones a bit further down the line have gotten. This Vizio 47″ TV is about half the price I paid for my 46″ JVC a couple of years ago, and gets high marks. And I bought this 42″ Panasonic plasma for our bedroom a few months ago for under a thousand bucks at H.H. Gregg. Interestingly, though its HD picture isn’t nearly as good as the JVC’s, non-HD channels look much better on the Panasonic. And looking at this list, I see a lot of HDTVs for under a thousand, and some under five hundred. Anyway, here’s to wishing that everything got better and cheaper the way that electronics do . . . .

GOOD NEWS IS NO NEWS: Iraq falls off the front page.

At least until after the election!

BOB KRUMM: What you thought you knew about Iraq is probably out of date.

RELAX, NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT HERE: “Board members say proof of voter-registration fraud does not mean illegal ballots will be cast on Nov. 4.”

A cereal-box approach to the campaign.

TEST-DRIVING the new Volkswagen Scirocco. My friend Doug Weinstein had one of the first-gen Sciroccos back in college, and it was a great car.

I JUST REALIZED I NEVER COMMENTED on Connecticut’s decision legalizing gay marriage. I think it’s probably defensible for reasons laid out in this article of mine and Dave Kopel’s, but for a lot of reasons I really think it would be better if this sort of thing were done legislatively.

HOPE, CHANGE, AND MOLOTOV COCKTAILS. “While the media obsesses over a couple of isolated comments at McCain/Palin rallies, the angry left is busy throwing Molotov cocktails at McCain supporters. . . . If this were the other way around, there’d be 24/7 network coverage about how our democracy is endangered.”

TOYOTA IS REPORTEDLY CONSIDERING making the Prius a separate brand. Makes sense.

IN THE MAIL: William Hitchcock’s The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe.

THE CARNIVAL OF SPACE is up!

RISE OF THE MACHINES: Was the financial crisis caused by too many computers?

ANN ALTHOUSE: “Is that what Women’s Studies teaches these days — inane snobbery? And when did throwing up become the preferred form of elite expression?” Interesting discussion in the comments.

ANDREW KLAVAN IN THE WASHINGTON POST: “Hollywood used to be called the Dream Factory, but nowadays it seems to be grinding out as much propaganda as anything else. . . . Hollywood moviemakers, in other words, have been telling lies — loudly, constantly and almost always in support of a left-wing point of view. And these lies are most prolific and tenacious when the Hollywood left is lying about itself.” Read the whole thing. I’d just like to see them make Total Eclipse. Fat chance . . . .

IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, John Kass on Obama and Ayers:

Turn on the TV news when John McCain is picking up undecided voters by invoking Barack Obama’s relationship with unrepentant American terrorist William Ayers and, invariably, some liberal talking head will sniff in disgust and say Ayers is no big deal where Obama comes from.

Unfortunately, that’s true. Ayers is a terrorist. But this is Chicago.

Obama and Ayers are neighbors and they worked together on school issues with the same foundation. Obama’s political coming-out party was held in Ayers’ living room when Obama was running for his first political office.

And the boss of Chicago is Mayor Richard Daley. Mayor Shortshanks has thrown his protective embrace around both men. These are facts.

Read the whole thing. And note where the PR money has gone.

MORE PROBLEMS FOR THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: Newspapers Weigh Alternatives to AP. “AP is going to lose newspapers, it is a question of how many.”

LOTS OF INTERESTING economic charts.

DISPATCHES FROM THE cold civil war.

JOHN TIERNEY: The Drug Czar’s Report Card: F.

One potential upside of an Obama Administration might be a throttling-back of Drug War idiocy. On the other hand, Biden’s been one of the Senate’s biggest drug warriors.

L.A. TIMES: What John Lewis’ attack on John McCain’s really about.

THE CITY OF EMBER: A movie review.

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE? So we’ve had nearly 8 years of lefty assassination fantasies about George W. Bush, and Bill Ayers’ bombing campaign is explained away as a consequence of him having just felt so strongly about social justice, but a few people yell things at McCain rallies and suddenly it’s a sign that anger is out of control in American politics? It’s nice of McCain to try to tamp that down, and James Taranto sounds a proper cautionary note — but, please, can we also note the staggering level of hypocrisy here? (And that’s before we get to the Obama campaign’s thuggish tactics aimed at silencing critics.)

The Angry Left has gotten away with all sorts of beyond-the-pale behavior throughout the Bush Administration. The double standards involved — particularly on the part of the press — are what are feeding this anger. (Indeed, as Ann Althouse and John Leo have noted, the reporting on this very issue is dubious). So while asking for McCain supporters to chill a bit, can we also ask the press to start doing its job rather than openly shilling for a Democratic victory? Self-control is for everybody, if it’s for anybody. . . .

UPDATE: Well, here’s an opportunity to see how they do.

Plus, days of rage.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hey, it’s not my rage. Remember, I lack fire. “Reynolds, at his most, barely reaches the level of mildly peeved.”

A DO-IT-YOURSELF ELECTRIC PICKUP TRUCK: “For two weeks, Lawrence has driven the truck he converted to electric power on Madison County roads. Each night, the truck is plugged into an outlet in his garage and the batteries are charged for eight hours. By the morning it’s juiced up and ready to run between 60 and 80 miles that day. . . . Lawrence estimates he was spending $100 a week on gas before the conversion.”

THINGS THAT DON’T SUCK (CONT’D): This Universal Package Opener, which I mentioned a few months ago, is still going strong and the Insta-Wife in particular loves it. It does work well, though in a way that’s just underscored to me how irritating many packages are. Should you need a special tool just to open the stuff you buy? Why do manufacturers love those superthick clamshell packages?

ADVICE TO BLOGGERS: how not to get a link. Heh. I’ve had similar correspondents . . . .

AN EMBARRASSING BALLOT MISPRINT: “Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s last name is spelled ‘Osama’ on hundreds of absentee ballots mailed out this week to voters in Rensselaer County. he misspelling, which elections officials on both sides of the aisle insist was simply a typo, is causing embarrassment for the county.”

THOUGHTS ON the way people think about aging.

NEW SPACECRAFT TO explore Interstellar Boundary.

TRAILER PARK: A collection of new movie trailers.

EVOLUTION, EGALITARIANISM, and “Machiavellian Intelligence.”

REZKO SINGING: OBAMA SWEATING? I doubt it, personally. But Rick Moran thinks it’s because I don’t understand Chicago politics.

UNDERFUNDED PUBLIC PENSIONS IN CONNECTICUT:

Nappier didn’t quite say it, but taxpayers should be more than worried; they should be freaking out. For even before the market crash the state pension fund did not have enough investment to meet its commitments, pension underfunding being a chronic scandal in Connecticut, most other states, and the federal government. And should the pension fund not cover those commitments, they would have to be met from the state’s general fund, which would mean more taxes. . . .While Governor Rell is scared too and has reduced state spending by executive order where she is authorized to do so, leaders of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly affect not to be scared at all. They say they hope that the economy will recover soon, and they want to use state government’s billion-dollar emergency fund, the “rainy-day fund,” to cover the deficit. Such a position allows the Democrats to avoid any discussion of economizing in government until after the election next month.

But the emergency fund is deceiving, since it has been amassed largely by shorting the pension fund.

Government accounting makes Enron accounting look wholesome. And this problem is huge, and under-appreciated. More on the problem in general here. And a report from California:

One thing’s for certain —- if you live in a Southern California city, your city workers’ pensions are seriously underfunded. All our cities are in that position. In addition, your county workers’ pensions are underfunded. Plus your state workers’ pensions. And that systematic underfunding was true before the market meltdown.

How did this happen? From a politician’s standpoint, it’s the perfect labor union concession —- instant, retroactive, underfunded defined benefit plan increases, where the true cost doesn’t become apparent until years later (usually after the guilty politicians have retired).

Moreover, the politicians, city managers —– everyone in the government —- benefits from these luxurious pensions. There’s no taxpayer voice in the process.

Plus, “compliant actuaries.”

THE CARNIVAL OF CARS is up!

UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!

POLICE FORCES MOVING TOWARD more efficient cars. Makes sense.

WE’RE SEEING MORE OF THIS: “Some might consider 75 old, but to Reeta Jones of Monterey, Tenn., who will celebrate her 110th birthday Friday, 75 was back in her youth.”

IN THE MAIL: Jonathan Reed Winkler’s Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I.

REASON TV: Fixing America’s health crisis.

MICKEY KAUS: “Psst, Republicans! The big problem with ACORN isn’t the squirrelly voter registration efforts you are making such a fuss about. It is their efforts to water down or undermine work-based welfare reform. You’d think that would trouble swing voters more too.”

MORE ON ELECTION SHENANIGANS IN OHIO.

MARK STEYN: “Mark Hemingway is right to say that free speech in Canada ‘does not exist in any meaningful way’. As the British Columbia ‘Human Rights’ Tribunal’s rambling and incoherent decision makes plain, Maclean’s and I were acquitted of “flagrant Islamophobia” for essentially political reasons – because neither the court nor its travesty of a ‘human rights’ code could withstand the heat of a guilty verdict. . . . If you have the wherewithal to stand up to these totalitarian bullies, they stampede for the exits. But, if you’re just an obscure Alberta pastor or a guy with a widely unread website or a fellow who writes a letter to his local newspaper, they’ll destroy your life.” Tar. Feathers.

Canada has done more than most to give “human rights” a bad name. Surely freedom from assault by bureaucratic pecksniffs is a human right of the first order.

ADVICE FROM PAT “DR. SANITY” SANTY ON Coping with Stress and Anxiety as the Market Melts Down.

THE NEW MOOD OF collaborative journalism.

ROGER KIMBALL on the Troopergate/Tasergate report: “Is That All They’ve Got?” Ann Althouse, on the other hand, comments: “Lots of us like Sarah Palin and have high hopes for her in this election and the next, but let’s resist the impulse to slough off this report. It means something.”

And reader Nancy Reyes writes, “Happy Domestic Violence Awareness Month! By saying Palin was at fault for her family’s repeated complaints is essentially saying that any family who is too vigorous in complaints about domestic violence can be censored.” Well, not just any family.

BITES FROM THE APPLE: A roundup of Apple computer, iPhone, etc, news, including “exuberant” speculation on the new MacBook. And why Steve Wozniak thinks the iPod is over.

JONATHAN MACEY: The Government is Contributing to the Panic. “It’s time to let markets do their messy work.”

I do think that “panic” is the right term, as in “the panic of 2008.” The system is awash with money and credit — enough so that I’m quite worried about inflation down the line — but nobody will do anything with it because they’re . . . panicked.

Plus this: “If the SEC had done half the job in ferreting out fraud and funny accounting that short-sellers have done, our capital markets would not be imploding. Now short-sellers, like other market participants, are threatened with new restrictions on their activities as Congress begins to hold hearings on the crisis in the capital markets and politicians and regulators turn their focus to the shibboleth of market manipulation.”

UPDATE: Speaking of panic: Investors’ Real Fear: A Socialist Tsunami. (Via NewsAlert).

ANOTHER UPDATE: One of my hedge-fund readers emails:

The thumbnail future market history of this month is likely to include the phrase “correctly discounting the economic fallout of an Obama presidency and hard-left Congress repeating the failed frenetic economic policies of the 1930s”. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take a re-run of the 1940s to extract us.

Ugh. Thanks for that comforting thought. And those enthusiastic for New Deal type solutions should be required to read Amity Shlaes’ book on the subject.

Or at least this: FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.

MORE ON THE MASSACHUSETTS ANTI-INCOME TAX INITIATIVE: “It is David vs. Goliath. The good news is that we have the winning message.”

Plus, will economic problems help the initiative?

As an MBTA employee, George Glidden knows the unions want him to vote against Question 1, which would abolish the state income tax. He’s heard the fears that the ballot question would cause dramatic cuts to state and local services and probably trigger other tax increases to make up the difference.

But taking home an extra $54 or so a week – even, Glidden figures, if he has to pay half or more back in a property-tax hike later – would be worth it.

“It’s about the pocketbook. It’s about everything else going up,” said Glidden, who is 40 and lives in North Attleborough. “If you can give me an extra $20 or $25 a week, that’s a tank of gas – or part of it.”

The last time the income tax question was on the ballot, in 2002, it received little attention but stunned political observers by collecting 45 percent of the vote. At the time, a gallon of gas cost less than $1.50, home prices were soaring, and the economy, if imperfect, was not the dominant issue.

That’s a far cry from 2008. Voters for months have endured unemployment increases, flat or decreasing wages and home values, a rising cost of living, and, for the last two weeks, have watched with unease and even panic as stock prices plunged and the credit crisis spread around the world.

The proponents are styling it a “taxpayer bailout.”

CHANGING CHICAGO’S LAW ON CELLPHONES: “Chicago may revise its strictest-in-the-country ban on using cell phones while driving—but only because one of the city’s aldermen got caught breaking the law. . . . Now you see how Chicago’s aldermen could make the city one of the most paternalistic in the country. They either don’t have to abide by the laws they pass, or they can simply pass a new law exonerating themselves should they get caught.”

ARNOLD KLING: “So if a junk mortgage originator can pool loans with down payments of less than 5 percent, carve them into tranches, and get a rating agency to rate some of the tranches as AA or higher, it can make those more attractive to a bank than originating a relatively safe loan. If you want to know why securitization dominated the mortgage market, this explains it. Regulatory arbitrage, pure and simple.”

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE RESCUE PLANS: “We’re setting the stage for when we come out of this of a massive inflation holocaust.” Yeah, I’m worried about that, too.

THE TROOPERGATE/TASERGATE REPORT IS OUT, and Beldar has the scoop.

And Jules Crittenden calls it “A hasp and a hinge or two shy of a gate.”

HOW TO ruin the U.S. economy.

TOM MAGUIRE notes reading comprehension problems among members of the press.

DVDS MARKED DOWN AS LOW AS $4.99: Well, we’ve mostly all got our big-screen TVs by now. If the economy tanks and we have to cut back on entertainment expenses, I guess we can just stay home and watch ‘em, and surf the Internet. Oh, wait, that’s what I do already . . . .

If you want Blu-Ray, though, you’ve got to go at least as high as $12.99.

ILYA SOMIN: “For what it’s worth, I like the idea of a black president, believe that Obama is an admirable person in many ways, and have doubts about McCain’s temperament similar to those expressed by George Will. Nonetheless, I fear that the conjunction of an Obama victory, a strongly Democratic Congress, and a major economic crisis will produce a massive and difficult to reverse expansion of government. . . . We know from past history that economic crises are a major opportunity for expansion of government power. Robert Higgs’ book Crisis and Leviathan is a good discussion of the basic dynamics. We also know that divided government tends to impede the growth of the state, while united government facilitates it. The combination of united government and a major economic crisis is likely to lead to a great expansion of government, just as it did on several previous occasions such as the 1930s.”

And read Ross Douthat, too.

IT’S A CRISIS OF CAPITALISM! Food shortages in Cuba.

RANKING LAW SCHOOLS by financial aid.

GAS IN TENNESSEE DROPS below $2.80 a gallon.

ROGER SIMON: EVERYTHING MUST GO!

PJTV:

RUSSIA LEADS THE WAY in orbital space tourism. So far, anyway.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Self-assembled square arrays may lead nanotechnology to very small electronic devices.

WHY THE WORLD NEEDS ASTEROID INSURANCE: “A mini asteroid collided safely with Sudan this week, but mega disaster looms with nearly 1000 hazardous near-Earth objects roaming our universe—plus even more dangerous ones we haven’t spotted yet. With no response plan for the worst-case scenario in place anywhere on Earth, four-time shuttle astronaut Thomas D. Jones offers a call to arms against the coming cosmic storm.”

PJTV: John Hinderaker on ACORN and Voter Fraud. Flash version, free to nonsubscribers.

Plus, Mary Katharine Ham, Andrew Ian Dodge, and Scott Ott on what’s happening. Also free.

UPDATE: Related — charges of fraud in Ohio.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The HDTV version of Hinderaker should work for nonsubscribers, too.

MARK STEYN held not guilty of hate speech. Sad that we’re grateful for such an obvious verdict . . .

IT’S NOT LIKE TIPPING A COW: How to tip a monkey.

REASON TV on saving Social Security. “Worried about the viability of Social Security? Unless you’re already collecting it, you should be!”

Plus, Pimp My Walker!

THE FIRST IMAGE from Google’s new GeoEye satellite. When I wrote about private spy satellites back in the 1980s, people thought it was farfetched but in fact I wasn’t sufficiently optimistic.

THANKS! Welcome to the Platts Cellulosic Ethanol and Biofuels conference, here’s your Escalade.

ETHANOL UPDATE: It’s switchgrass season in Tennessee. Story and video at the link.

THE BAD NEWS NEVER STOPS: Oh No! Gas Prices Are Falling!

WELL, THAT’S A RELIEF: Hawking: If we survive the next 200 years, we should be OK.

Hawking, in an exclusive CNN interview, said that if humans can survive the next 200 years and learn to live in space, then our future will be bright.

“I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space,” said Hawking, who is almost completely paralyzed by the illness ALS.

“It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next 100 years, let alone next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.”

I agree with him.

JIM MANZI: “This is a ferocious bear market, but, so far, it is an almost exact repeat of what happened after the collapse of the .com bubble about 5 years ago. In fact, if we were to repeat that experience, we would see further declines from where we are today.” But what about the TED spread?

JOHN LEO on Dana Milbank’s reporting.

HERE’S THE LATEST ON Chevy’s Equinox Fuel-cell Vehicle.

I drove it a few months ago — my report is here.

IN THE MAIL: John Gartner’s In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography.

I’M KIND OF TIRED OF ELECTION NEWS, but Gateway Pundit is on a roll. Just keep scrolling.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ON COUNTRYWIDE: Dodd Should Take the Stand. Under oath.

I JOKED EARLIER about stockpiling food, but in fact I had a conversation the other day with someone at the University who said quite a few of her friends were doing that. And these are lefty-artsy types, not traditional survivalists. Is it a sign of growing economic panic, or is it just part of the mainstreaming of survivalism? Or maybe both?

UPDATE: Problems with letters of credit?

ROGER SIMON on racism in the blogosphere.