THE MANTRA USED TO BE “LISTEN TO THE GENERALS!” Now it’s how dare those generals speak!

FINDING SARAH PALIN “provocative.”

Her book is still #1 on Amazon. So I guess provocative pays.

DONALD SENSING: The Mae West Presidency.

(Via Brutally Honest.)

CHANGE: Just 30% Say U.S. Will Be Most Powerful Nation At End of Century.

TODAY’S THE 5TH ANNIVERSARY of SpaceShip One’s winning of the Ansari X Prize. And, of course, the 52d anniversary of Sputnik.

MORE ON THE NEW YORK TIMES’ AIRBRUSHING: Lame Gray Lady: NYT Scrubs Major Portion of Original Obama-Olympics Article, Inserts Meeting with McChrystal.

Plus this: “I had to answer ‘no’ because I get all my news from the New York Times.” That could be the paper’s epitaph.

And this: “I no longer know what saddens me more, the state of American politics or the state of American journalism.”

BARNEY FRANK: “There is a right to privacy, but not a right to hypocrisy. It is very important that the people who make the law be subject to the law.”

NEW YORK POST: The Case Against Charlie Rangel: Forty years of tax evasion, misdeeds and contempt.

AIRBRUSHING: CBS Removes Letterman’s Sexcapade Confession from YouTube.

JOHN ARAVOSIS: “Apparently, General Jones would have us believe that President Obama wasn’t aware that we were fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when he promised to lift the gay ban during the campaign in exchange for our votes.”

UPDATE: Bill Quick comments.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Is “conservative” the new gay?

IT’S A FALL FUNDRAISER over at Reclusive Leftist.

YOU DON’T tug on Superman’s cape.

MANCESSION CONTINUES: “According to Table A-1 of today’s Employment Situation report, male unemployment increased in September from 10.9% to 11%.”

ANTI-GUN STATE SENATOR shoots intruder in his home. We haven’t seen anti-gun hypocrisy this rich since Carl Rowan.

UPDATE: These folks say he’s not that anti-gun. Well, obviously. . . .

MORE: Yeah, I was suckered. Sorry. I don’t promise never to be wrong, only to correct things when it becomes apparent. . . .

ANN ALTHOUSE ON SEXUAL HARASSMENT: “But perhaps an exception should be made for a great late night talk show host. The funnyman’s mood and ego need boosting. Just as he must have an office full of people who can write jokes and comic routines — who must share a lot of not-that-businesslike comraderie — he needs pretty ladies to keep his senses well-honed. It’s part of the structure of a business that revolves around a performer. The funnyman needs his supply of sex, and the paying career positions on the staff can be used to create a pool of potential sexual partners who will keep the old man bolstered up.”

There sure seem to be a lot of sexual exceptions. . . .

As reader John Tuttle writes: “It’s ‘office romance’ when Democrats do it. It’s ‘sexual harassment’ when Republicans do it. Time to repeal sex harassment laws.”

There does seem to be a double standard here. . . .

IN PORTLAND, it’s Baconfest!

STEPHEN GREEN: THE WEEK IN BLOGS: Golfing at 120 Miles Per Hour, More Obama Brainwashing & Gay Up.

FRANK RICH:

IN the annals of American excess, there often arrives a moment when those with too much money, too much clout and too much hubris just can’t stop themselves from tempting the fates. They throw an over-the-top party in public, or parade their wealth and power before the press, and the next thing you know their world, and sometimes ours, has crashed. . . .

It’s in this context that you have to wonder what some of the Obama era’s most moneyed and White House-connected lobbyists were thinking as they preened before a Washington Post reporter recently for two lengthy articles. We’re not even nine months into the new administration, yet these swaggering, utterly un-self-aware influence peddlers seem determined to prove that nothing except the party affiliations has changed in the Beltway’s pay-for-play culture since Tom DeLay. If these lobbyists were stocks, I’d short them.

When you’ve lost Frank Rich, you’ve lost conventional-wisdom punditAmerica.

STATE FARM: Deer-Vehicle Collision Frequency Jumps 18 Percent In Five Years.

BIGGEST OLYMPICS LOSER: Mayor Richard Daley. “Democratic Chicago Mayor Daley sent his president to Copenhagen on this wild-goose chase, only to have the president humiliated on an international stage. Worse, Daley is responsible for Michelle Obama being humiliated. There is no way on God’s green earth that Barack Obama is going to forget that.”

TIM CAVANAUGH: In June 1993, Vice President Al Gore visited Spring Hill and said he wanted to “Saturnize” the federal government. “The other day I used the failure of General Motors’ deal to sell its Saturn subsidiary as an example of why your fury at the federal government’s open-ended automotive bailouts should never fade. But I must award the palm in this category to the Wall Street Journal’s former Detroit reporter Paul Ingrassia, who today digs up a great story of the UAW’s role in eclipsing Saturn. . . . Ingrassia refers to but does not explore the roles of management in the Saturn debacle, but there is a wonderful story just in the fact that destroying Saturn was the one area where worker and boss were able to join hands.” Read the whole thing.

CALIFORNIA AS America’s first Failed State. What about Michigan?

OBAMA AND POLANSKI, AFGHANISTAN AND CHINATOWN: All on the latest PJM Political.

MICHAEL MOORE’S eliminationist rhetoric.

THIS SEEMS LIKE A PRETTY CLEAR FIRST AMENDMENT VIOLATION: “A self-described New York City anarchist has been accused of tweeting the location of police officers to protesters trying to evade them during the Group of 20 economic summit in Pittsburgh.”

UNEMPLOYMENT, and small business “going Galt.”

DIAMONDS under a hundred bucks.

MCDONALD’S RESTAURANTS open at the Louvre. Well, it’s had a food court for years. I don’t think Mickey D’s can compete with Hector Le Poulet, though.

MORE GOOD NEWS on Polywell Fusion. Faster, please.

AT POPULAR SCIENCE: More reporting from the Singularity Summit.

THE UPSIDES AND DOWNSIDES OF outdoor wood-burning furnaces.

POLL: Fear of Losing Private Health Insurance Trumps ‘Public Option’. “Sixty-three percent (63%) of voters nationwide say guaranteeing that no one is forced to change their health insurance coverage is a higher priority than giving consumers the choice of a ‘public option’ health insurance company. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 29% take the opposite view.”

FROM ED MORRISSEY, A STRONG REVIEW for the Flip Ultra HD camcorder. Those are good. I just got my Kodak Zi8 in the mail and I’ve played with it a little — it seems very good so far, with surprisingly good video quality from something so small.. Advantages: Removable SD card, and jack for external microphone (importance of good audio is often underappreciated, but it’s huge), plus 5MP stills. These days, the more people out there who have some sort of camera, the better.

UPDATE: And not just for Tea Party coverage. J.D. Johannes emails:

On my last trip to Afghanistan I shot what was essentially a TV news package on a Flip Ultra HD.

I had hit Afghanistan expecting to spend the month with Soldiers and not turn any products until I got back to the US so I only had a net book instead of my large editing lap top. I shoot my video with a Canon XL-H which requires a fire-wire and/or a 1394 card bus and lots of processing power to handle the full quality HD video.

A friend of mine asked if I could turn a report for them in Afghanistan. By chance I bought a Flip to take snap shots and record other little clips with right before I flew to Afghanistan.

I double filmed everything on the Canon and the Flip. When it became obvious I would not be able to find a proper lap top, firewire and card bus in Afghanistan I had to use the Flip. I downloaded some inexpensive editing software from Pinnacle, transferred the video from the Flip to a lap top with slightly more horse power than a netbook and edited the package.

We even recorded all the narration tracks on the Flip.

The video held together very well when we played it through a projector onto a 60 inch screen. I knew the audio quality would not be great, so made sure I got right on my subjects during interviews.

The end product turned out better than I had anticipated. It also helped that I used the Flip like I would a real camera so I had all my shots and enough material to turn a package with.

The Flip was perfect for the ultra-low-profile work I did out on the streets. It fit in my pocket so I remained fairly anonymous while doing man-on-the-street style interviews. It also looks enough like a cell phone that you can record things without drawing any attention.

Everything in this blog post was done with a Flip Ultra HD.

The only thing it lacks is a plug for an external mic. If it had a plug for a lav or small shot gun mic, the Flip would be the perfect on-the-fly news gathering tool.

Well, the Kodak has an external mic jack. But this is pretty impressive stuff for a small consumer-grade gadget.

JOHN FUND on Grassroots activism.

IN THE MAIL: Upstarts!: How GenY Entrepreneurs are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit from Their Success.

MY WASHINGTON EXAMINER COLUMN: Nobody is applauding as Hollywood premieres Polanski defense. “Technologically and market-wise, Hollywood is in the weakest position it’s ever been, and yet it is also more arrogant than it was in its Golden Age.”

WHEN WILL CONGRESS investigate ACORN?

Evidence continues to accumulate from far and wide that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is lousy with corruption. The latest revelations come from Louisiana and Oklahoma. In the former, the local ACORN Housing Corp. office received contracts worth a combined $625,000 from the City of New Orleans for repairing existing low-income housing and developing new units in poor neighborhoods. The contracts were paid for with funds from federal Community Development Block Grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. An investigation by the Pelican Institute think tank of New Orleans, however, found that no work was actually performed to fulfill the contracts. Worse, Pelican couldn’t talk to the ACORN official managing the contracts because he had left the organization months ago. One more thing: The office address listed on the contracts for ACORN turned out to be a vacant lot, although new plumbing connections indicated a trailer had recently been located on the site.

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma City, documents found in a recently vacated ACORN office included a detailed memo titled “Power Plan” for a five-year effort to elect supportive legislators and transform Oklahoma to a progressive state “in the way it was 100 years ago.” The man in charge of the office left town without paying back rent or utility bills, according to OklahmaWatchdog.org. Also found in the documents was a script for a Houston ACORN-directed recruiting campaign for “hiring Outreach Workers to remind people to get out and vote for Barack Obama in the upcoming election.” As a tax-exempt nonprofit, ACORN is barred from participating in partisan election activities, and its national spokesmen have insisted throughout the 2008 presidential race that their organization was not working to elect Obama.

I’m not expecting much here from Congress.

WHY JANEANE GAROFALO’S COMMENTS ARE DANGEROUS.

CHRIS DODD UPDATE: President Obama to Appear at Fundraiser for Sen. Dodd on October 23. Wonder if any Tea Partiers will show up?

MIKE LUPICA: President Obama is no loser just because Chicago didn’t get 2016 Summer Olympics. “The biggest winners of all are the people of Chicago, because their city doesn’t have to plunge itself into debt to host the Olympics. This is the kind of winner New York was despite Michael Bloomberg’s insane quest to get the 2012 Games, which eventually – and blessedly – went to London. . . . The President doesn’t lose here because Rio de Janeiro wins. He never should have been in the game in the first place.”

UPDATE: “The layers of emotion pile up unattractively.”

CHANGE: World Bank could run out of money ‘within 12 months’.

THEY MADE A MULTILATERALISM AND CALLED IT PEACE. I’d have preferred a desert.

Plus this: “If you make enough social democratic promises, and combine that with the singularity of an aging population with many needs, sure, you can make decline come true.”

JACKSON DIEHL: The coming failure on Iran. Failure? How can we fail? If things get dicey, the President will just make a moving personal appeal. That always works.

Related: Israel names Russians helping Iran build nuclear bomb.

UPDATE: Epic Fail.

NYT SCRUBS EMBARRASSING OLYMPIC QUOTES? Lame.

MORE BLOGGING FROM THE SINGULARITY SUMMIT.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON IS WORRIED: “I am not a fan of the Obama agenda. But I don’t want an impotent Commander in Chief abroad for three very dangerous years to come. So I am worried that the U.S. will be crippled with a weak, unpopular executive, as happened to Bush (35% approvals) in 2007-8. Our currency is tanking. Our debts are climbing. Our energy needs are breaking us. Our borrowing is out of control. The country is divided in a 1859/1968 mode. And the world is smiling as Obama, now hesitant and without the old messianic confidence, presides over our accepted inevitable decline. The country needs to buck up and meet these challenges head on, since the world smells blood, whether in Iran, Russia, the Mideast, North Korea, or South America.” Plus, who to vote for next.

ROGER KIMBALL: Barbarians At The Gate, Cushing Academy Edition.

STIFLING 4G BROADBAND? I suspect there’s more to this story, but it’s troubling.

FLASHBACK: The Toys of Toy Story and Toy Story 2.

UNEMPLOYMENT: “If laid-off workers who have settled for part-time work or have given up looking for new jobs are included, the unemployment rate rose to 17 percent, the highest on records dating from 1994.”

UPDATE: Related item here: Early retirements mean it is worse than 9.8% unemployment. Plus this: “The stimulus backfired. It undermined confidence in the economy. And people are reacting. Not only are companies cutting back on employees, but workers are throwing in the towel. Rather than look for another job, they are retiring or filing for a disability.”

PJTV: Facing Defeat, Some Senators May Try To Sneak Health Care Reform Through. We’re Not Kidding.

MARK STEYN on Hollywood’s Moral Compass.

JOHN TIERNEY: Holdren’s Ice Age Tidal Wave:

As a long-time student of John P. Holdren’s gloomy visions of the future, like his warnings about global famines and resource shortages, I can’t resist passing along another one that has just been dug up. This one was made in 1971, long before Dr. Holdren came President Obama’s science adviser, in an essay just unearthed by zombietime (a blog that has been republishing excerpts of his past writings). In the 1971 essay, “Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide,” Dr. Holdren and his co-author, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, warned of a coming ice age.

They certainly weren’t the only scientists in the 1970s to warn of a coming ice age, but I can’t think of any others who were so creative in their catastrophizing.

I suppose Ehrlich must have been right about something, sometime or other, but nothing occurs to me offhand. . . .

OLYMPIC LOSS EXPOSES CHICAGO’S UGLY UNDERBELLY: “Chicago’s Daley is at 35% approval, in part because of opposition to his desire to host the Olympics. And the recent case of Honor Student Derrion Albert was only one of dozens of recent teen killings in the streets of Chicago. The Olympics are great but it isn’t as though both Daley and Obama didn’t have more pressing problems right at home.”

MAYBE DAVID LETTERMAN’S JUST A TRENDSETTER: Office Romance Is On The rise.

HMM: Criticality safety issues surface again at Y-12.

LONGEVITY UPDATE: Scientists discover clues to what makes human muscle age. “A study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has identified critical biochemical pathways linked to the aging of human muscle. By manipulating these pathways, the researchers were able to turn back the clock on old human muscle, restoring its ability to repair and rebuild itself. The findings will be reported in the Sept. 30 issue of the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, a peer-reviewed, scientific publication of the European Molecular Biology Organization.” Faster, please. (Via FuturePundit, who has more).

DANES EXPLAIN WHY OBAMA FAILED: “It comes down to respect. President Obama showed none. . . . He was ill-prepared and his staff failed to lay the foundation for his appearance. He came off as an ugly American who knew nothing about the territory and who felt the world somehow owed him something.”

TIME FOR HALLOWEEN COSTUMES ALREADY? Heck, I’m already getting Christmas promotions.

PJTV: Afghanistan In Peril: Will Obama Lose a War We Were Poised to Win? Analysis from Michael Yon.

JOHN ENSIGN’S tax problems. Maybe he’s just angling for a Cabinet slot . . . .

BLOG ARTISTRY: A single-sentence post that sums up Obama’s problems while obliquely referencing the Polanski scandal.

ERIC SCHEIE: “My biggest problem right now is that I can’t stand Obama, but that has not translated into loving conservatism.”

JENNIFER RUBIN: “Sen. John Kerry’s attempt to block Sen. Jim DeMint from going to Honduras to get a bird’s-eye view of the results of Obama pro-Zelaya policy (and to bully DeMint into lifting his hold on two State Department nominees) shows just how defensive the Democrats have become. Kerry’s scheme didn’t work (DeMint is going anyway) and DeMint made his point: the Obama policy is in utter disarray.”

JIM LINDGREN: “I have been surprised at some of the criticism of President Obama for going to Copenhagen to lobby for the Olympics. Few commentators bother noting that, had Obama NOT gone to Copenhagen, many would have been blamed him for Chicago’s losing its bid.”

UPDATE: For Larry Sabato, it’s not that he went, but that it was bungled:

Let me get this straight. The White House puts a new President’s prestige on the line, flies POTUS, the First Lady, and half of the administration to Europe to underline the importance of the gambit—and then Chicago finishes fourth—dead last—in the Olympics voting? Will anyone’s head roll for causing Obama this acute embarrassment on the international stage?

Political capital is a precious commodity. It is never to be wasted. That’s why many have been questioning whether Obama is making too many media appearances, lessening the importance of each one. And that’s why almost every observer will wonder how the White House got snookered into Olympics-gate—an unnecessary humiliation that will be on the permanent list of losses for this Presidency.

Yes, the White House political operation is supposed to protect a President from this sort of thing, but according to the New York Times they didn’t even understand the Olympic Committee’s “byzantine” politics.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts from Richard Fernandez. “Asking for freebies without showing the money is bad business etiquette and it ain’t funny. . . . And the world, strangely enough, expects America to act like America, not someone who aspires to be one of the boys. The lesson was cheap at the price.”

Meanwhile, Jim Treacher emails: “Obama just took the gold in the Men’s Political-Capital Toss.”

MORE: Inexperience:

There’s actually something worrisome about this whole Chicago fiasco, and it goes back to President Obama’s inexperience. Diplomacy 101 tells us that your head of state only shows up on the high-profile stage when a deal is complete. The lesson that most politicians learn well before they gain positions of power is that diplomacy is done by diplomats, professionals who work through all the negotiations and the hardball tactics and the carrot/stick combinations. The principals in the matter gather to discuss high-level topics and to smile for the cameras as the agreement is being signed. Heads of state do not conduct diplomacy, they ratify it, and surprises are entirely unwelcome at those summits and signing events (hence Reagan’s anger in Iceland.) . . . President Obama just got upstaged by an organization against whom no retaliation is acceptable, and he wants to meet with the Iranians next month? We are in deep, deep trouble.

Uh oh. And Ann Althouse goes to the video:

It’s all about failure, excusing failure, relishing failure, and pretending that it’s too mean to relish failure. (Like Dems wouldn’t have hooted with glee if Bush had gone all out trying to get the Olympics to come to Texas and gotten his comeuppance in the first round of voting.)

Here’s what I would like to talk about in all this: The First Lady and her husband made terrible presentations to the IOC! In retrospect, it makes complete sense that they got the boot in Round 1.

Video at the link.

SINGULARITY SUMMIT: Shaping The Intelligence Explosion. Plus, Whole Brain Emulation.

TOYOTA IN TROUBLE, “grasping for salvation.”

NASAL SPRAY for better memory.

AYN RAND IS READY FOR HER CLOSEUP.

IN THE MAIL: The Predictioneer’s Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future.

PJTV: Blame it on Rio? Obama Discovers The World Doesn’t Love Him As Much As the MSM Does.

THINGS ARE TOUGH ALL OVER: ACORN planning massive layoffs? We’ll see what happens here.

HEH: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past. “Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad’s track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past.”

(Via Mark Steyn, who comments: “Next thing you know he’ll turn out to be one of those homosexuals he says Iran doesn’t have.”)

A VICTORY FOR FREE SPEECH: Pittsburgh-Area College Allows Student to Advocate for Concealed Carry on Campus, Abandons Repressive Policy.

Chalk another one up to F.I.R.E. — an institution worthy of your support.

MOE LANE explains the Olympic decision.

Related: Financial Times: Problems await Obama after Chicago defeat. It was an unwise allocation of resources.

NEW YORK TIMES: An Olympian Defeat For Obama. Plus this from the Sports section: “Losing out on the Olympics, of course, is not the sort of war-and-peace issue that defines a presidency, and the embarrassment will presumably fade in a news cycle or two. But it provides fodder for critics who are already using it as a metaphor for a president who, in their view, focuses on the wrong priorities and overestimates his capacity to persuade the world to follow his lead. . . . A sense of stunned bewilderment suffused Air Force One and the White House. Only after the defeat did many advisers ask questions about the byzantine politics of the Olympic committee.”

Smart diplomacy.

LISA REIN will be liveblogging the Singularity Summit this weekend.

MICKEY KAUS: BREITBART’S LEGACY? “Rasmussen’s latest poll finds, rather unbelievably, that voters say ‘government ethics and corruption’ is now a more important issue than ‘the economy.’ With unemployment at 9.8%! Hello? Is this all James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart’s doing? I can’t think of any big recent corruption-related events other than the ACORN and NEA scandals. … I doubt it is all liberals concerned about the power of the insurance lobby. … P.S.: This might explain why, while the MSM still gives the ACORN scandals restrained coverage, the pols are running for the hills. They have pollsters too.”

That MSM restraint ain’t worth what it used to be.

UPDATE: Reader Stan Brown writes:

Why does “government ethics and corruption” have to be considered a separate category from the economy? I think a lot of people are growing increasingly convinced that the cause of our economic woes is intrinsically linked to corruption and issues with government ethics.

As for Mickey’s contention that ACORN and NEA are the only recent corruption related events, I think he is forgetting the biggest one — “You lie!” A lot of Mickey’s friends may have focused on the impropriety of Wilson’s outburst, but he needs to realize that the average voter’s take on the whole thing was that Wilson was rude, but accurate.

Yes, “corruption” goes beyond individual scandals to encompass things like Geithner’s tax problems, as well as general cronyism and a sense that the Treasury is being looted for the benefit of special interests.

WHY RIO WON: A persuasive argument.

Plus, Victor Davis Hanson observes: “The more I watched Barack/Michelle do the ‘I grew up in the neighborhood’ thing, the more I noticed the Euro-audience wincing. (Not smart bragging about your childhood Chicago ‘right hook’ to an audience that has just watched horrific fighting in the streets of Chicago.)”

HERE’S AN UPDATED COMPARISON of actual unemployment contrasted with what the Obama Administration promised the “stimulus” would do.

ROLAND BURRIS: You know who is to blame for us losing the Olympics? Bush.

THE FIVE Afghan War Excuses.

SO I GUESS HE’S NOT PLANNING ON RUNNING FOR OFFICE EVER AGAIN: Bill Frist on Health Bill: I’d Vote For It. I’m disappointed in this.

UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch emails: “Always expect the worst of the political class and those who report on them. That way you will never be disappointed, and you will never be wrong.”

THE 100 GREATEST LIVE ALBUMS of all time.

ON THIS DAY IN 1950, the first Peanuts comic strip was published.

SMALL TOWN, big government.

REMEMBER WHEN DAVID LETTERMAN thought sex scandals were funny? Those were other people’s sex scandals.

ED BERNERO: Polanski Apologists Don’t Speak For All Of Us In Hollywood.

RABBI HAUSMAN ON YALE: “In the final analysis, I believe that the university is lost.”

THIS SEEMS LIKE SOME SORT OF PROFOUND CULTURAL SHIFT: Starbucks is now selling instant coffee.

BARACK OBAMA as America’s Gorbachev.

LONGEVITY UPDATE: “Most babies born in rich countries this century will eventually make it to their 100th birthday, new research says. Danish experts say that since the 20th century, people in developed countries are living about three decades longer than in the past. Surprisingly, the trend shows little sign of slowing down. In an article published Friday in the medical journal Lancet, the researchers write that the process of aging may be ‘modifiable.’” Faster, please.

STIMULUS! Banks With 20% Unpaid Loans at 18-Year High Amid Recovery Doubt. “The number of U.S. lenders that can’t collect on at least 20 percent of their loans hit an 18-year high, signaling that more bank failures and losses could slow an economic recovery. “

HMM: Advanced Deuterium Fusion Rocket for Deep Space Missions.

POLIWOOD: Hollywood’s Lame Defense of Roman Polanski. Roger Simon and Lionel Chetwynd name names. “They’re defending their own potential exposure for future behavior. They want to protect the nomenklatura.”

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS:

Sen. Thomas Carper (D.-Del.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, told CNSNews.com that he does not “expect” to read the actual legislative language of the committee’s health care bill because it is “confusing” and that anyone who claims they are going to read it and understand it is fooling people.

“I don’t expect to actually read the legislative language because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I’ve ever read in my life,” Carper told CNSNews.com.

I’m willing to go with that, if he’s willing to let us ignore whatever he passes on the same basis . . . .

NICK GILLESPIE: The Coming Public-Sector Pension Crisis.

RICK MORAN ON OBAMA AND THE OLYMPICS: Obama gambled the prestige of his presidency on a trifle and will likely pay a price for it.

Obama seems to think like a mayor, but that doesn’t work very well for a President.

UPDATE: Reader Daniel Richwine emails:

Just can’t get my head around this. So many foolish things about it, and here’s one more: Obama did this on a Friday, ensuring that the Sunday news talk shows discuss nothing else. The only world in which this makes a lick of sense is if he’s trying to distract from the horrible unemployment, the deteriorating Afghanistan situation, a Nuclear Iran, the Public Option failure…

I take it all back. The man’s a genius. An evil Genius!

Well, when your great PR coup is to change which of your failures is the subject of conversation, it’s not a great sign . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: From ThinkProgress, a lame attempt at a war analogy. Because rooting for American troops to lose in Iraq is exactly like rooting against Chicago getting the Olympics. Whatever Soros is paying, it’s too much.

LONGEVITY UPDATE: Researchers have identified a genetic tweak that can slow aging in mice. “By disabling a gene involved in an important biochemical signaling pathway, scientists have discovered a way to mimic the well-known anti-aging benefits of caloric restriction, allowing mice to live longer and healthier lives. This finding, published online today in Science, offers a promising drug target for combating the many health problems associated with aging.” Faster, please.

TOYOTA’S NEWEST HYBRID, THE SAI, goes on sale October 20. In Japan.