KATHLEEN PARKER: “While everyone in Washington is suddenly pretending they’ve hardly ever heard of ACORN, they might want to pretend they’ve never heard of the SEIU, one of the nation’s largest unions. . . . Just for fun, keep this name in mind: Rod Blagojevich.”

IS BILL FRIST endorsing the Baucus plan?

I emailed him to ask if this was true and got a one-word response: “No.”

HEH: “They said this one blonde was especially suggestive and kept rubbing up against the president. Finally, Michelle said, ‘Look, Chris Matthews, get away from my husband’.”

WILLIAM SAFIRE has died.

More here.

KATHERINE KERSTEN: Worst trouble with ACORN is at the polls.

MICROSOFT’S WINDOWS ADS: Finally good?

CHANGE: “The dollar is dead – long live the renminbi.”

DANIEL DREZNER: What if author bios were brutally honest?

MARK BOWDEN: What Bush Got Right Offers Clues for Obama.

Who, on Afghanistan, seems increasingly clueless.

SOME THOUGHTS ON ALL THE INSTA-POLLS: So among InstaPundit readers, Sarah Palin leads substantially, pretty much no matter how you slice it. Mike Huckabee, meanwhile, is doing terribly. (How terribly? Worse than Bob Corker.) That probably says more about Insta-readers’ preferences than the electorate generally, of course — but then, any 2012 poll is unrepresentative right now, because very few ordinary voters are thinking about the subject. In presenting the polls in different ways, I wasn’t — as one commenter suggested — trying to “hold Sarah’s head under the water,” but to see how different stuff played.

Is Palin viable in 2012? Conventional wisdom says no — but then, in 2006 conventional wisdom said Hillary had it locked up. Heck, in 2007 the CW was still expecting a Clinton/Giuliani match. But the lack of enthusiasm for the other candidates at this point is palpable. Except Gary Johnson — I’m still getting emails demanding that I “put him in my poll” even though I polled him twice to minuscule response. This seems to be a Ron Paul-lite operation, generating angry email but without the ability to actually stuff the online polls. As I’ve said before guys, it’s nice that you like your candidate, but you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

Anyway, Republicans don’t need a leader/candidate to win in 2010. But they do need one to win in 2012. A smart move, I think, would be for Republican aspirants to put their energy behind supporting GOP Congressional candidates in 2010, thus proving their mettle in advance and making the reputation, and building the base of support, they’ll need in 2012.

Polls here, here, here, and here. Note: Suggestions in the comments favoring an InstaPundit candidacy are unlikely to bear fruit. Bill Whittle, on the other hand. . . .

ED DRISCOLL: Great moments in cognitive dissonance.

Andrew Breitbart is an “outsider” despite his years in media because he doesn’t run with the herd of lemmings. That’s all.

MARKDOWNS ON reconditioned tools.

SOLAR POWER, without all those panels. “Companies are creating solar tiles and shingles in colors and shapes that fit in, for example, with the terra cotta tile roofing popular in the Southwest, or with the gray shingles of coastal saltbox cottages.” As solar materials get better, we’ll see more of this. In fact, inexpensive and ubiquitous solar power is one of the promises of nanotechnology, but we may well get most of the way there without it.

GERMANY SWINGS TO THE CENTER-RIGHT: “Sunday’s election results follow a trend in which Socialist parties across Europe have seen sharp declines in their popularity.”

COMBAT SEARCH AND RESCUE: Michael Yon posts another dispatch from Afghanistan.

JENNIFER RUBIN on the 2012 Presidential race.

DAVE BARRY ON POLITICS AND FREE SPEECH.

CHANGE: “The unemployment rate for young Americans has exploded to 52.2 percent — a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept. — meaning millions of Americans are staring at the likelihood that their lifetime earning potential will be diminished and, combined with the predicted slow economic recovery, their transition into productive members of society could be put on hold for an extended period of time. . . . A study from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a government database, said the damage to a new career by a recession can last 15 years. And if young Americans are not working and becoming productive members of society, they are less likely to make major purchases — from cars to homes — thus putting the US economy further behind the eight ball. Angrisani said he believes that Obama’s economic team, led by Larry Summers, has a blind spot for small business because no senior member of the team — dominated by academics and veterans of big business — has ever started and grown a business.”

Plus this: “Labor Dept. statistics also show that the number of chronically unemployed — those without a job for 27 weeks or more — has also hit a post-WWII high.”

UPDATE: Reader Tom Hynes writes that BLS gives a teen unemployment rate of “only” 25 percent. Hmm. Could be different metrics. Or a typo? Anybody have an idea what’s going on?

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here: Confusing the unemployment rate with the “employment-population ratio?”

THEY CALL HER “GLAMBO.”

AND DON’T LET US CATCH YOU BEING NEIGHBORLY AGAIN: State bureaucrats threaten to fine, jail a Michigan woman for watching her neighbors’ kids. If people are neighborly, they need the state less. This cannot be permitted.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “‘If people are neighborly, they need the state less.’ You have unwittingly provided every ‘social-service’ bureaucracy with a motivational slogan to be posted prominently in parts of the building where the public is not allowed.” I don’t think it’s anything they haven’t figured out already. . . .

IN THE MAIL: From A.C. Clark, The Revolutionary Has No Clothes: Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Farce. The book looks good, and is very well blurbed, but the image of a naked Hugo Chavez is one I could live without . . . .

SERGIO RODRIGUERA: Give General McChrystal Time To Succeed.

UPDATE: McChrystal report officially backburnered now. “The problem with this is that the Obama administration has already had plenty of time for political calculation. They have been in office since January, and Obama campaigned for two years on the pledge to fight in Afghanistan with more resources and focus than the previous administration. The politics of the war have not changed much, at least in terms other than polling. . . . So far he has done a good job of fighting the war in Afghanistan, but this very public vacillation undermines the projection of American strength in the region and encourages a defeatist attitude.”

Plus, reading tea leaves on Afghanistan.

MORTICIA and two Wednesdays. I always liked Morticia. Particuarly the Carolyn Jones Morticia.

UPDATE: IowaHawk emails:

In 1966 my hero Ed “Big Daddy” Roth was commissioned by ABC TV to build a custom car for the Addams Family (a la the ‘Munsters Koach’ that George Barris built for the rival CBS show), but by the time Roth completed it the series was canceled. The car — featuring a trunk made out of a baby coffin — eventually toured the car show circuit under the name “Druid Princess.” My pal Fritz Schenck restored it last year, and it went up on the auction block at the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA yesterday. A steal at $185,000.

I could totally see the Spanish first family driving around in that.

Heh. Indeed.

Then there’s the history of Jed Clampett’s truck, which was built by Barris.

CHANGE: Durable goods orders, housing sales plunged in August. It’s like they’re pumping air into a leaky tire. Pump hard enough and you can forget about the leak for a little while, but . . . .

UPDATE: Bob Krumm writes:

Regarding the drop in home sales/durable goods in August. One cause I’ve not yet seen presented is Cash for Clunkers. When customers decide to accelerate the purchase of a car that they probably weren’t yet ready to purchase except for the “free” money that the government threw at them, that likely also meant that they delayed another purchase they had originally planned for August. So not only did Cash for Clunkers accelerate auto sales from the future into August, they likely decreased the total purchases of other items.

The lesson of all subsidies is that when government subsidizes one thing it can only do so at the cost of penalizing alternatives.

Indeed.

POLICE VIOLENCE AT THE G20: A law school classmate of mine, Curt Vaszquez, emails:

I just wanted to say that my daughter Martha, a 19 year old sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh, on Thursday night was rousted by police from the school library where she was studying, ordered to leave her belongings behind and herded into the street where she was tear-gassed, sound cannoned and hit by a plexiglass shield for exercising her right to be a young person outdoors on her campus on a pleasant fall night. I suppose I should be grateful because other kids were roughed up much worse by the police that night. This is just one aspect of the G20 that will never receive the attention it deserves. You have no idea how bad it was here.

Also, you might be interested in the linked article in which Pitt’s police chief pats himselfs on the back for his handling of the situation and cynically refers to the victims as “innocents” who chose to put themselves in harm’s way. Note the Chief’s presumption that the police have the right to break up any assembly. Very disturbing.

I regard the G20 protests as idiotic, but that doesn’t excuse police overreaction. Violent protesters deserve to be arrested, but the reaction here does seem to have been excessive.

MICKEY KAUS: “Why watch Saturday Night Live in L.A. when the twitters from back East say it’s weak?”

SONJA SCHMIDT: The Secret Code of Right-Wing Racists — Broken!

ADVICE TO CLARK HOYT: Have the NYT editors read InstaPundit. It’s painless, and they’ll learn a lot about political stories their own reporters are ignoring. Plus, frequent nanotechnology updates!

And they’ll enjoy it more than Fox News.

JOHN TIERNEY: Scrubbing The Atmosphere. “Governments are doing practically nothing to study the removal of carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, but this technology could be a much cheaper form of climate protection than photovoltaic cells and other approaches getting lavish support, according to an article published today in Science.”

Not enough opportunities for graft and control, I’d guess . . . .

VIRGINIA POSTREL thinks the “jew boy” email is a fake.

ANN ALTHOUSE gets up close and personal. Very cool pic.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: “The most likely reason for Russia’s objections to US missile defense is not that it degrades their vast and unstoppable arsenal, which remains effective in any case, but it reduces the effectiveness of sock puppet proxies who threaten the US. Russia is not about to threaten the US directly. But wouldn’t it be convenient if others would? And wouldn’t it be even more convenient if the US could not defend against them.”

BIZARRO SUPERMAN.

JOHN BIRMINGHAM tells the zombies, “Eat My Dust.”

THE GHOULS surrounding Bill Sparkman. As with the NBC email controversy, why not find out actual facts?

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Learning to Love The French: When Sarkozy Spoke Truth To Obama.

MICKEY KAUS: “Hmmm. If voters oppose by a 64-34 margin a health care bill with individual mandates but no public option, doesn’t that mean voters will oppose by a 64-34 margin any health care bill that is likely to pass? … That would put Obama’s reform up in Dick Morris’ the-Democratic-party-isn’t-a-suicide-pact range.”

THE GENERAL’S BOOK CLUB: What’s Petraeus Reading?

BOMB PLOT AGAINST REP. AARON SCHOCK (R-IL): “I blame MSNBC, CNN, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the leftwing blogosphere for fostering this climate of hate against Republicans.” It’s a fair cop.

“I’M NOT INTERESTED IN VICTORY.” Reader C.J. Burch writes, “Well, I sure hope he isn’t interested in losing. Geez.”

EXCESSIVE POLICE FORCE at the G20 protests?

AND IN THE WAPO,, TOO: “I can recall no other major American speech in which the narcissism of a leader has been quite so pronounced.”

HEH: The lost Philip K. Dick, Anne McCAffrey collaboration.

MICHELLE MALKIN, NORMAN PODHORETZ, JAMES LILEKS, AND DR. HELEN: on the latest PJM Political.

FROM J.D. JOHANNES: The Soldier’s Experience: Iraq vs. Afghanistan.

Very nice piece. But I’m surprised he didn’t work in a plug for his fitness book!

WELL, THE NEXT JOHN RINGO NOVEL PRETTY MUCH WRITES ITSELF: Swords, Knives, and No Men: Ukraine’s All-Women Amazon Tribe.

OF LOUIS VUITTON and Armageddon.

STEPHEN GREEN: The Week In Blogs.

A.P.: Scrutiny rises over NJ kids singing Obama song.

Plus, a flashback.

PJTV: Virginia Healthcare Debate. Mark Hemingway interviews both Whip Cantor and Congressman Scott after an actual debate, sponsored by the Richmond Times Dispatch. PJTV producer Owen Brennan writes: “The best part is when Hemingway calls BS on the suggestion that Dems and Republicans are only separated in the debate on about 20% of the issues.”

BLACKFIVE: A direct challenge to you.

THOUGHTS ON Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State.

A BUNCH OF interesting food links. Including set-it-and-forget-it kitchen appliances.

THOUGHTS ON military media relations.

LIVING JOE TRIPPI’S DREAM? Andrew Breitbart.

ANOTHER INSTA-POLL: This time give me your top two choices.

SOME TYPHOON-BLOGGING IN THE PHILIPPINES.

SAN DIEGO ACORN OFFICE is on the receiving end of a protest.

SARKOZY TO OBAMA: Get real, dude.

UPDATE: Heh.

WELL, WITH IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM IN THE HANDS OF THE U.N., I guess we’re back to this.

UPDATE: Or this.

RED-LIGHT CAMERA UPDATE: On-duty OR cops not ‘immune’ to red-light camera, speeding tickets.

“SMART DIPLOMACY.” I don’t think it’s a good sign that British papers are calling him President Pantywaist. “Obama has done more to restore Russia’s hegemonial potential in Eastern and Central Europe than even Vladimir Putin. . . . If the word is out that America is in retreat, it will soon find it has no friends.”

RETIRED MARINE starts coffee company to benefit military. The decaf is called “Sniper’s Brew.”

IN THE MAIL: Faithful Warriors: A Combat Marine Remembers the Pacific War.

OH, GOODY: Neil Barofsky, TARP Inspector: Financial System May Now Be In A “Far More Dangerous Place.”

REASON TV: An interview with Libertarian Party Chairman William Redpath.

IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM AND THAT NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATE: Something fishy. “I hope the prior outrage over faulty intelligence and WMD and Iraq will extend to the latest incompetence — that intelligence agencies that swore in 2007 that Iran stopped working on the bomb in 2003 now, in 2009, have assured the president that their intelligence has disclosed a new Iranian facility that is not used for peaceful purposes.”

MEGAN MCARDLE ON THE NEW PROFIT PICTURE: “Profits are good when they result from providing a service people want. When they are the result of capturing the government by cutting special deals, they’re immoral and inefficient. And this is just the beginning . . .”

Hope and change!

OUCH: Study: Regulation Costs California Economy Almost $500 Billion.

HURRICANE KATRINA: It wasn’t a disaster, it was health care reform! “New research published in the September issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons offers important insights into the long-term impact of a major disaster on routine surgical services in a hospital. In the study, researchers at Ochsner Health System, New Orleans, LA, showed that although Hurricane Katrina resulted in a significant loss of surgical staff and an increase in the number of uninsured patients undergoing operations, greater cost efficiencies were achieved.”

WOMAN GETS PREGNANT, while pregnant.

DANA LOESCH: Left Employing Sexist Tactics to Discredit Giles, O’Keefe? “Word on the street is that the Left, the ‘equal pay, pro-women’ left, is desperately searching for lewd photos of Hannah Giles.”

Of course they are. And if they found them that would totally discredit her . . . prostitute impersonation.

THE POSITRONIC BRAIN NEEDS A randomization function. Excessive consistency is a giveaway.

Barack Obama’s amazingly consistent smile from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

To be fair, I was autographing some photos from a speaking gig not long ago and noticed the same effect. But if Obama can’t beat my standard of lifelike vigor, well . . . .

WOULD YOU FIGHT IN THE AISLE over a ten dollar hamster?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: “Look, my model U.N. in high school was more realistic than this Security Council.”

BOSTON GLOBE: Congress Slaps ACORN Again. “The House voted today to avert a possible government shutdown next week by temporarily extending the current federal budget. But Democrats inserted a provision saying that ACORN could not receive funding under the stopgap measure or any prior legislation.”

PETER SUDERMAN: Democrats Have Become Their Own Worst Enemies On Health-Care.

UH OH:

In the decade or so that I’ve been keeping an eye on Gen. David Petraeus, I’ve noticed that the more worried he gets, the more boring his public pronouncements become.

If I’m right, his mind-numbing appearance yesterday at a Marine Corps conference on counterinsurgency is a leading indicator that he is profoundly worried. One reporter told me after the event that she fell asleep during it. I am guessing Petraeus is fretting primarily about President Obama’s public dithering on Afghanistan strategy, but perhaps also about some weird vibes inside the U.S. official establishment in Baghdad.

Read the whole thing.

CHINA: PRETTY WOMEN ON PARADE.

China has hired professional female models to march in a parade. This was seen as very important for the survival of the communist government. The October 2nd parade in China, to celebrate 60 years of communist rule, wants to make China, and its government, look good. To that end, the parade organizers are having contingents, from all the military organizations in China, march past the high def TV cameras. Being a communist police state, there are lots of uniformed groups. Many have female components. The parade organizers particularly wanted to insure that the women in uniform looked good. Not just military good, but good. When they discovered that the female contingent from the People’s Militia did not measure up, they proceeded to hire models, from as far away as Singapore, to pretty-up the women’s contingent of the People’s Militia.

HDTV just sets the bar too high. . . .

SARKOZY MOCKS OBAMA at U.N. Security Council.

SOME PROMISING NEWS for space colonization.

FRIDAY NIGHT THOUGHTS: “An earthquake is coming.”

AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.

THE END OF ACORN?

Atlantic correspondent Wendy Kaminer has a fairly scathing piece noting that ACORN has had problems for a long time–and that its defenders have always responded by dismissing any problems as “minor” and complaining that partisan interests are harming all the fine work it does.

What fine work is that, exactly?

FINANCIAL TIMES: On Wall St: Sentiment remains fragile. “One chart that makes for particularly sober reading comes from JPMorgan’s Eye on the Markets dated September 23, which shows bank lending growth has collapsed to a fifty-year low. It makes sense on an individual basis for banks to rebuild their capital. But their (belated) search for more stability and safety comes with certain costs. Until the banks begin lending again, the sense of fragility is bound to increase.” The story kind of makes it sound like it’s a Potemkin recovery led by government spending.

BILL CLINTON WAFFLES ON SAME-SEX MARRIAGE.

JAMES TARANTO: Yosi Sergant Gets Hypovehiculated. That’s a great spin on “thrown under the bus,” isn’t it?

HARRY REID blocks ACORN probe. It might be “distracting.”

AN UPDATE ON HOW THE V.A. IS HANDLING the veterans’-check screwup.

STEALTH EDITS at The Washington Post. I think that minor fixes are okay, but this is a bit more than that. We’ve seen this before in the context of the BBC.

IOWAHAWK: Art Will Not Be Silenced!

THE SEVEN BEST FIRST AID KITS for any situation.

GOOD GRIEF: “NBC to Anti-ACORN Group: ‘Bite Me, Jew-Boy.’”

UPDATE: NBC calls email fake.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A response to the response. Could someone have hacked the email account? If so, that should turn up on examination. Stay tuned.

MORE: And NBC News fires back. Dueling statements are all good fun, but it should be easy enough to get to the bottom of this. Some facts, please?

But leave it to Stephen Green to find the funny part.

DON SURBER: Lefty protest vs. righty protest.

UPDATE: Reader Robert Bresca is reminded of Ayn Rand’s comparison of the crowd at Apollo launches and the crowd at Woodstock.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Richard Noiret writes:

A connection that kind of ties in to this. While living in NYC years ago, the mess left in Central Park after the “Earth Day” celebration would cost the city millions in clean up costs, the Park was left like a garbage dump. During this same period I would go to the Oshkosh Airshow with my father along with almost a million others, many of whom parked their personal airplanes and pitched tents alongside. One year we stayed for the final night performance and in the morning after most had left you couldn’t tell anyone had been there. There wasn’t any trace of litter in the large fields around the airstrip. This always struck me as a vivid example of the producers vs. the freeloaders in action.

Indeed.

OUCH: “I was just thinking that Obama would have been so much better if he had made foreign policy the centerpiece of his presidency instead of perversely investing his reputation in complicated health care puzzles. Now, I’m thinking perhaps we’re better off that he’s gotten hopelessly distracted by insoluable insurance problems.”

JOHN ZIEGLER: I can see insanity from my newsroom. So can we all.

YET ANOTHER PRESIDENTIAL INSTA-POLL, with more choices based on reader suggestions (including a clearly coordinated, and increasingly annoying, email campaign for Gary Johnson — guys, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar; the email campaign shows you’re organized, but like the Ron Paul email, it can hurt as well as help if you’re obnoxious about it).

TRAILER PARK: The trailer for Surrogates.

WHERE GASOLINE really comes from.

UPDATE: Jim Bennett writes:

Yes, Canada is our biggest gasoline supplier. Saudi Arabia is a minor one. That’s why Obama feels justified in bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia and giving cheap, tacky gifts to the head of state of Canada.

Of course, maybe nobody in the White House knows that’s she’s Canada’s head of state, too. Or that Canada is our most important energy supplier.

Hmm. Sarah Palin knows that. But of course she can see Canada from her window.

The country’s in the very best of hands.

WELL, I’VE LOST ALL CONFIDENCE IN HIM THEN: Glenn Beck says he’s never heard of Kausfiles. Get a clue, Glenn!