SO LOTS OF PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT HERMAN CAIN ON MEET THE PRESS, but what I noticed is that David Gregory doesn’t seem to understand the difference between state taxes and federal taxes. Here’s what he said:

MR. CAIN: We replace capital gains tax. We replace the payroll tax. We replace corporate income tax, replace personal income tax, and replace the death tax. It is a replacement tax structure.

MR. GREGORY: But where do state taxes go? You’re saying they’re going to be repealed?

MR. CAIN: If you–with the current structure, you have state taxes, right? So with this new structure, you’re still going to have taxes–state taxes. That is muddying the water.

MR. GREGORY: How so?

MR. CAIN: Because today, under the current tax code, state taxes are there if they have it. If they don’t have a state taxes, they don’t have it. It has nothing to do with this replacement structure for the federal tax code.

MR. GREGORY: But that doesn’t make any sense to me. If I’m already paying state taxes, and I have a new Cain administration national sales tax, I’ve got more state taxes.

No, you don’t have more state taxes, you have the same state taxes — unless, that is, you don’t know the difference between a sales tax and a state tax, which would seem to be the case for Gregory. If Sarah Palin made such an error, it would be seen as proof that she was unfit for the national stage. For Gregory, well . . . draw your own conclusions.

MORE ON THOSE UNDERFUNDED / OVER-GENEROUS PUBLIC PENSIONS:

In fall 2006, voters narrowly approved an upgraded pension plan intended only for uniformed officers in the Knox County Sheriff’s Office.

A committee that met outside public view later expanded the eligibility rules, according to records. Key decisions were made in small committee meetings — meetings that some members today said they can’t even recall.

Little notice went out to the public as the plan came together, except for a piece of paper tacked onto a wall down a hallway of the City County Building.

And when it came time to bless the final package, one of the county’s biggest expenditures in decades, the Knox County Commission approved it without deliberation. Some of those who voted for it directly benefited by it or had family members who would benefit by it.

And now, the Uniformed Officers Pension Plan, or UOPP, costs taxpayers $8.2 million a year — almost three times what was first projected, figures show. Funding costs are expected to rise even more.

They always tell you it’s for police and firemen, but somehow when all is said and done the money goes somewhere else. “What a small few cautioned about five years ago has indeed come to pass in 2011: Knox County is carrying a multimillion-dollar burden. And some county leaders wonder if it’s even worth keeping.”

Related: Widely cited study on law enforcement mortality turns out not to exist:

When the local Fraternal Order of Police lobbied local leaders and the public for a better pension plan to benefit county deputies, members hammered on law enforcement mortality rates. They told commissioners, residents and the media that the average police officer lived to be just age 59. They said the information was based on a report by the U.S. Department of Justice. No one questioned it.

Even today, on law enforcement message boards across the country, commenters continue to cite age 59 as unadulterated fact and with little or no attribution.

The DOJ, however, says it never conducted such a study.

Read the whole thing.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Halloween Shop.

I LOVE IT WHEN I BLOG ABOUT STUFF AND PEOPLE SEND ME REPORTS. Matt Welch emails: “Hi Glenn! Re: Your calls for the Occupiers to protest the White House. So I was walking by the front of the White House with my 3-year-old on Sunday, and there was a smallish spur march of Occupiers who came over from McPherson Square to protest the president. This short iPhone video captures just about all of it, and I’m guessing you will enjoy Izidora’s commentary at the end.”

UPDATE: Reader Mary Anne Yeager writes: “I watched the video and it brought to mind the one issue that the main-stream media is ignoring in its coverage of the Occupy Wallstreet game. And that is anti-war protest. These are people who went crazy over war when Bush was president but not so much now. Now in the video, I saw a banner about the Obama wars but no one is pushing that agenda in the news reports. Democrat wars are good, apparently. And not too much of this comes up in the so called movement.”

NO LOVE FOR THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT OR THE PRESS THAT COVERS (FOR) THEM:

The mainstream media’s cameras can’t get enough of these pierced protesters, with their crudely written signs proclaiming their unfocused discontent and general anger at society’s selfishness in failing to satisfy their every want and desire.

Of course, those cameras discreetly turn away when the placards demanding socialist revolution and blaming the Jews come out. The protesters’ function is to demonstrate inchoate outrage simply by being there. When they start talking, they start alienating the normals.

These are Potemkin protesters, community organized by government worker unions to allow liberal Democrats a way to triangulate to the center next year. Only the rebel media outfits will actually stick a mic in the protesters’ dirty faces and let them talk.

Indeed. Related: “Andrew Breitbart tweets a question: given the anything goes baseline established by the MSM when ‘reporting’ on the Tea Parties right from the start, ‘Which propaganda & guilt by association tactics that you use against TeaParty are off limits for us,’ when reporting on Occupy Wall Street and its myriad spinoffs?” All of them, of course. But simply letting the protesters talk seems sufficient.

And Reuters ran this pic, but I doubt many newspapers front-paged it as they would have a similar photo of masked Tea Party protesters proclaiming some sort of war — had any such thing ever happened. When lefties want to make the Tea Party fit their preconceptions, they have to make things up. When righties want to exercise their preconceptions about the Occupy movement, on the other hand, they just have to take a picture.

WHEN IT’S OKAY to take a pay cut.

SELF-DEFENSE: “Nothing causes criminals to back off more hurriedly than does the presence of a shotgun.”

WHERE IS “OCCUPY HOLLYWOOD?” Reader Stephen Judkins writes:

Here’s something I posted to my facebook page. It was, in part, inspired by watching Travis Smiley on PBS talking to blacks about racism in Hollywood. It was also inspired by some of your posts on Instapundit.

It’s dominated by a bunch of white men.
Sexual harrassment is commonplace for women getting jobs.
There are few opportunities for minorities, especially in the top jobs.
Physical appearance guides hiring.
They squeeze subsidies and tax breaks from local goverments under the threat of moving jobs overseas.
Top talent rakes in tens of millions of dollars while plenty of work is done by unpaid interns.
They practice shady bookkeeping to prevent paying people.
Why aren’t we hearing about an Occupy Hollywood group?

Well, I’ve certainly called for one. And I’m not alone:

Hollywood accounting is crooked on a scale that would make any Wall Street firm blush. David Prowse, the very tall actor who wore the Darth Vader costume in the original Star Wars trilogy, recently remarked in an interview that according to the studio, Return of the Jedi has never made a nickel of profit, so Prowse has never been paid any residuals. The film grossed over half a billion dollars worldwide, but the studio rigged the books to show zero net profit, almost thirty years later. In the course of explaining why this sort of thing is commonplace, Atlantic magazine notes that even Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is currently on the books as a net loss.

As a fascinating article at Film School Rejects chronicles, movie studios engage in all sorts of viciously “unfair” practices, such as using their muscle to virtually extort theater owners, stealing intellectual property, and marketing their lesser films with fraudulent “reviews.” Any of these practices from a Wall Street firm would prompt a rush of patchouli-scented basement-dwelling youth that could only be stopped with pepper spray and plastic nets.

Read the whole thing. Three examples — I think that according to Kaus’s law of punditry that’s enough to call this a “groundswell!”

UPDATE: Popular Bittorrent site The Pirate Bay is joining in the fun, with a logo that links to this article on the Obama Copyright Czar’s coziness with industry. Thanks to reader Robert Mounce for pointing this out.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A Morgan Freeman angle. At last, something the Tea Party Movement and the Occupy movement can agree on!

JEN RUBIN: One entitlement down, one to go: CLASS goes kaput. “Democrats insisted that not only was this problem sustainable but that it was going to make money and thereby offset the cost of the rest of Obamacare. This was ludicrous, and the administration finally came clean on Friday. . . . CBO said that CLASS was going to save us money, CBO worshipers told us. Well, never was the phrase ‘garbage in, garbage out’ so appropriate. . . . To say that this is an embarrassment for the gang in the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership, who we already knew could not shoot straight, would be a gross understatement. The failure of CLASS, predicted by conservatives, sprang from the Democrats’ insistence to pass some ‘historic’ health-care bill, any such bill, and deal with the consequences later. Well, later is now.”

MORT ZUCKERMAN: What Democrats say about Obama when he’s not in the room is amazing.

SAN JOSE’S SANTANA ROW: The Future Of Shopping?

“I WASN’T AROUND IN BERLIN IN 1939.” That does seem to be the tone.

“SMART DIPLOMACY?” Stacy McCain, future ambassador to Vanuatu? Sure. What could go wrong?

EMPIRE OF THE EAST: Putin And Russia.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The $62,000 a year bachelor’s degree.

THIS IS INTERESTING: A woman with no arms who earned an unrestricted pilot’s license.

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Personal Finance.

MORE ON the 2013 Chevy Spark.

WELL, ISN’T EVERYTHING NOW? Martin Luther King monument made in China. But there’s also this: “The creator is a state artist who has made dozens of heroic depictions of Mao Zedong, the brutal founder of Communist China. Seen this way, the statue is a corruption of King’s liberation message and a PR coup for the Chinese government. . . . Concerns have also been raised about the antiquated and dangerous working conditions of Chinese quarries where the MLK Monument stone was unearthed, the muscular Socialist Realist style that mirrors landmarks more common in totalitarian countries, and Lei’s lifetime pension from the Chinese government – a regime that continues to take a hard line against dissenters.”

REQUIRING DRUG TESTS FOR BUYING A GUN? Right after they start drug tests for voting.

U.S. COAST GUARD goes to the aid of Tokelau.

FASTER, PLEASE: Destroying cancer cells by incorporating an artificial biological computer. Also: Magnetic nanoparticles to cook brain cancer go into trial in patient.

CAN BRAIN STIMULATION reduce anti-social behavior? If coffee counts as “brain stimulation,” definitely.

IN THE MAIL: From David Weber, A Beautiful Friendship.

HEH: “I am healthier than whole, but not as much as skim. I am the 2%.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD is looking for interns.

JUST WHAT YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR: Anthony Weiner’s Sexting Partner Writes a TMI Tell-All.

HISTORY: The story behind the world’s oldest museum, built by a Babylonian princess 2,500 years ago. “It’s easy to forget that ancient peoples also studied history – Babylonians who lived 2,500 years ago were able to look back on millennia of previous human experience. That’s part of what makes the museum of Princess Ennigaldi so remarkable. Her collection contained wonders and artifacts as ancient to her as the fall of the Roman Empire is to us. But it’s also a grim symbol of a dying civilization consumed by its own vast history.”

CHANGE: As hedge fund buys the farms, prices rise — but what happens come the downturn? Er, a bailout?

TODAY ONLY SALE: NCIS: Seasons 1-8.

MORE ON PRESIDENT GOLDMAN SACHS: “If Occupy Wall Street was a genuine grassroots movement genuinely outraged by the idea that banksters own the government, then they would be marching on the Obama White House.”

CHANGE CRONYISM YOU CAN BELIEVE IN:

Even for the Obama administration, today’s news dump ($1.3 trillion deficit, the demise of the CLASS Act, and war in Uganda) is something to behold. On top of everything, the White House has released its list of major campaign bundlers for the third quarter of the year.

One name in particular warrants a mention.

Steve Spinner, who served as a Obama fundraiser in 2008, was also an adviser for the Department of Energy loans program responsible for the Solyndra debacle. As it turns out, he was also married to a partner at the law firm representing Solyndra during its loan application.

But despite signing an ethics agreement in which he pledged not to involve himself in any negotiations regarding the Solyndra loan, a series of e-mails reveal that Spinner was rather intimately involved in the negotiations and was advocating on behalf of the company.

Remember when the Dems were all about how they were going to change the “culture of corruption?” Well, they did change it. They made it worse.

SALENA ZITO: Obama’s Pennsylvania Problem. “Signs of discontent are seen even among blacks.”

LOOKING FOR WAR ON TERROR NEWS? Check out Fred Pruitt’s Rantburg.

JESSE JACKSON, JR.: Crackpot, Or Harbinger? “Although Jackson’s idea of basically sending checks to individuals, states, and cities is interesting, the most notable aspect of Jackson’s proposal is the underlying notion that the federal government can simply create the money to employ everyone and everything by printing it. Only moderately more fascinating is his theory that the president has some overarching authority against which neither the states nor Congress can ‘rebel.’ Both notions are two sides of the same coin. . . . Jackson and Occupy have articulated the antithesis of the Tea Party call to end big government. In the Occupy and Jackson world, the crisis now justifies extraordinary government measures to enforce ‘fairness’ and mandate employment by any means necessary.”

CHANGE: Gap Inc. plans to close stores in the U.S., while expanding in China.

MARK STEYN: This is your grandparents’ revolution. “Beneath the allegedly young idealism are very cobwebbed assumptions about societal permanence. The agitators for ‘American Autumn’ think that such demands are reasonable for no other reason than that they happen to have been born in America, and expectations that no other society in human history has ever expected are just part of their birthright. But a society can live on the accumulated capital of a glorious inheritance only for so long. And, in that sense, this bloodless, insipid revolution is just a somewhat smellier front for the sclerotic status quo. . . . It would be heartening if more presidential candidates understood the urgency. But there is a strange lack of boldness in most of their proposals. They, too, seem victims of that 1950 moment, and assumptions of its permanence.”

UPDATE: Mike Stopa: Passion, but no point. Here’s a pic of what he’s talking about.

ANOTHER UPDATE: This doesn’t sound good.

HOW THEY DO THINGS IN ILLINOIS: Oops! Clerk sends newspaper request to fix ticket.

A records clerk for an Illinois sheriff’s office admits she goofed when she mistakenly faxed a request to have a deputy’s son’s speeding ticket fixed to the local newspaper.

Joann Reed tried to use a St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department fax machine to send a copy of the ticket issued by Centreville police to that village’s attorney, only to accidentally fire off the fax to the Belleville News-Democrat (http://bit.ly/nrcf5s) newsroom.

“Dismiss this case,” read a handwritten note accompanying the three-page message signed by Reed. “The guy is the son of one of our deputies.”

Ah, professional courtesy. But read the whole thing for the rest of the story . . . .

DEMOCRATIC APPARATCHIKS AND “OCCUPY MINNESOTA.” Plus, why is it good to “occupy America,” but bad to occupy Palestine?

Does this mean we should stand in solidarity with Wall Street? End The Occupation!

FOR THE CHILDREN: a comic book biography of Ayn Rand.

LIZ TROTTA: Left exposing inherent racism in how they treat Herman Cain.

DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA: Sharpton: “If you won’t get the jobs bill done in the suite, we will get the jobs bill done in the street!”

Up yours, Al, you pathetic Jew-hating demagogue. And together with the anti-semitism we’ve seen elsewhere, this kind of talk is making me ready to call for a temporary suspension of Godwin’s Law. But beware of other legal issues.

Related: Nazis and Communists Throw Their Support Behind Occupy Wall Street Movements.

Also: Video: Occupy Portland Protesters Sing…”F*ck the USA”.

And: Obama Campaign Seeks To Capitalize On Anti-Wall Street Anger. President Goldman Sachs thinks the protesters will be useful. So what does that make them?

And where’s ThinkProgress?

UPDATE: Reader Antoinette Aubert writes: “The problem with calling everyone you disagree with a Nazi is that it makes the term meaningless. On the other hand when a group of people blame all the world’s problems on a small Jewish cabal and yell for all the Jews to get out of the country, well that IS the meaning of Nazi.”

Close enough for government work, anyway.

STACY MCCAIN: ‘A Real Leader Dot Com.’

YA THINK? In Private, Bankers Dismiss Protesters As Unsophisticated.

“Who do you think pays the taxes?” said one longtime money manager. “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it. If you want to keep having jobs outsourced, keep attacking financial services. This is just disgruntled people.”

He added that he was disappointed that members of Congress from New York, especially Senator Charles E. Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, had not come out swinging for an industry that donates heavily to their campaigns. “They need to understand who their constituency is,” he said.

Generally, bankers dismiss the protesters as gullible and unsophisticated. Not many are willing to say this out loud, for fear of drawing public ire — or the masses to their doorsteps. “Anybody who dismisses them publicly is putting a bull’s-eye on their back,” the hedge fund manager said.

I’m dismissing them publicly. They’re tools of President Goldman Sachs. The bankers have much to answer for, but these people aren’t even smart enough to ask the questions. And if I were the Wall Streeters, I’d be negotiating a move to Dallas, as rumor has it they’re considering.

ENJOY YOUR WEEKEND! “Doomsday” Comet To Swing By Earth On Sunday.

“JUST DOING MY JOB.”

TOM MAGUIRE ON OBAMA, HOLDER, AND FAST AND FURIOUS: Let’s Do The Time Warp Again.

Related: Big media outlets ignore subpoena of entire top tier of Obama Administration. (Via Ed Driscoll, who comments, “Say, it’s a good thing the media has Occupy Wall Street to focus on right now to deflect attention not just from this story, but from all of the other high-speed Obamacontinental train wrecks crashing into each other right now, isn’t it?”).

WELCOME TO THE “CRAZY YEARS:” Couple Has Sex While Skydiving, FAA Very Interested. In Heinlein’s future history, I think it was giving birth while skydiving, but close enough.

DIVERSITY ISSUES: SlutWalk Stumbles On the Race/Gender Divide.

A REPORT FROM the occupation of Atlanta.

THOUGHTS ON Cats And Responsibility.

AT AMAZON, the Electronics outlet sale.

STEVE JOBS: World’s Greatest Philanthropist. “Our youth are growing up with the strange notion that the only way to make a big difference in this world, or to be of service, is to work for a nonprofit organization, or become the next Bill Gates and establish a private foundation, or to start some kind of ‘social enterprise,’ often without any understanding of what that means. . . . What a loss to humanity it would have been if Jobs had dedicated the last 25 years of his life to figuring out how to give his billions away, instead of doing what he does best.”

HEH: “I’m chalking this up as further evidence that we’re living in Bob Heinlein’s ‘Crazy Years’.”

And there’s a lot of other evidence to go with it.

UPDATE: Rob Crawford writes: “Look back at the 2008 election and tell me we didn’t elect a Nehemiah Scudder.” Well, he’s no Joe Douglas.

TAXPROF: Obama Lacks Capitol Hill Chops to Push Through Tax Reform.

UPDATE: He told us he had no chops.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: Saint Warren’s halo gets a little more tarnish. “In between opining on how to fix the US tax system, Warren Buffett still runs Berkshire Hathaway. As James McRitchie points out, however, Saint Warren’s corporate governance practices leave something to be desired.”

BLOGGING ABOUT STRATEGY at StrategyProfs.

MY PIECE ON SECOND AMENDMENT PENUMBRAS is up to #1 on the SSRN list of top downloads for recent articles. Thanks to everyone who downloaded it!

AT AMAZON, music Warehouse Deals.

FOR HELICOPTERS, an emergency backup electric motor.

SANDWICH GENERATION: CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE. “Seniors are struggling to cope with rising medical and long-term-care expenses just as their investment portfolios and home values are shrinking, and their middle-age children sometimes need to pitch in. Those same children, who breathed a sigh of relief when the college tuition bills for their own offspring finally ended, may also be fielding requests for help from the kids — or even a boomerang brood on their doorstep.”

BAD NEWS FOR BIRTH CONTROL PILLS: Women on birth control date bedroom “duds,” study suggests.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Global Overselling Of Higher Education. “Central planning — of the whole economy, or of the housing market, or of education — always wreaks a great deal of damage.”

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF unfortunate tattoos.

J.R. DUNN: Beating Decline: Miltech and the Survival of the U.S. An interesting essay over at Baen.

IN THE MAIL: Nixon’s Court: His Challenge to Judicial Liberalism and Its Political Consequences.

TAKING ALL THE FUN OUT OF THINGS: Physicists Offer Mundane Explanations for Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos.

CHANGE: More teenage boys than ever are using condoms when first having sex.

JOHN STOSSEL: Government Is The Biggest Job Killer.

I guess Obama doesn’t know that the Transcontinental Railroad was a Solyndra-like Big Government scandal. The railroad didn’t make economic sense at the time, so the government subsidized construction and gave the companies huge quantities of the best land on the continent.

As we should expect, without market discipline — profit and loss — contractors ripped off the taxpayers. After all, if you get paid by the amount of track you lay, you’ll lay more track than necessary.

Credit Mobilier, the first rail construction company, made enormous profits by overcharging for its work. To keep the subsidies flowing, it made big contributions to congressmen.

Where have we heard that recently?

The transcontinental railroad lost tons of money. The government never covered its costs, and most rail lines that used the tracks went bankrupt or continued to be subsidized by taxpayers.

The Union Pacific and Northern Pacific — all those rail lines we learned about in history class — milked the taxpayer and then went broke.

One line worked. The Great Northern never went bankrupt. It was the railroad that got no subsidies.

Incredible.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION? US Copyright Czar Cozied Up To Content Industry.

UNEXPECTEDLY! California revenues down by $705 million. “Revenues flowed into state coffers at a lower rate than projected in September, short about $302 million, putting California a total of $705.5 million below expectations for the first three months of the fiscal year.”

AT AMAZON, lots of coupons.

HEH:

REASON TV: Anti-Semitic Protester At Occupy Wall Street. “Here’s one of the protesters Reason.tv spoke to at Occupy Wall Street in Los Angeles on October 12, 2011. She identifies herself as Patricia McAllister and as an employee of Los Angeles Unified School District. ‘I think that the Zionist Jews, who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve, which is not run by the federal government… they need to be run out of this country,’ she said.”

From the comments, cruelly but accurately: “Why am I not surprised she works for a school district?”

HOW GOVERNMENT SPENDING has impoverished us all!

ADDRESSING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: The Declining Hotness of Flight Attendants.

MAX FISHER: Why Is Obama Sending Troops Against The Lord’s Resistance Army? “It’s possible that there’s some immediate U.S. interest at stake we can’t obviously see.”

HEY, THAT’S WHAT I SAID YESTERDAY: Things Could Actually Get A Lot Worse. “When systematic policy error results in low demand, it’s as likely that the error will be sustained or compounded as it is to be rectified. In such cases, every bottom is ephemeral, and there is no darkness that can’t grow darker still.” And it seems to me that we have a political class that is well-suited to systematic policy errors.

HOW TO DEAL WITH criticism on the Internet.

ON SALE, TODAY ONLY: VHS to DVD 5.0.

FROM THE MULTICULTURALISM DEPT.: Islamic sex guide says wives meet only 10% of husbands’ desires. “Just months after telling its members to serve their husbands better than prostitutes, prompting widespread criticism, the Obedient Wives Club of Malaysia has stirred further controversy by publishing a guide to Islamic sex. The 115-page pocket-sized book, which will outrage many Muslims and non-Muslims, says a Muslim man can have sex with all of his wives at the same time. . . . In its foreword the book says studies showed women only gave their husbands 10 per cent of what men desired of their wives’ bodies. It contains explicit sex details, including fondling of a breast, and one chapter deals with ‘how sex becomes worship’.”

YOU CAN’T READ this opinion. From the comments: “It has to be the birth certificate.” Heh.

More here.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Are Most of the Atlantic Cover Stories Written By Women About Marriage and Babies?

BYRON YORK: GOP will move to repeal CLASS Act.

Republicans on Capitol Hill are having an I-told-you-so moment after the Obama administration admitted late Friday that the CLASS Act, a major component of Obamacare, is unworkable.

CLASS, which stood for Community Living Assistance Services and Supports, was a pet project of the late Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy. It was supposed to help Americans pay the cost of long-term care. During the health care debate in 2009 and 2010, Democrats claimed that the program would not only pay for itself but would actually reduce the federal budget deficit. At the time Obamacare passed, Democrats claimed the law overall would cut the deficit by $140 billion over the next ten years; about $70 billion of that was supposed to come from the CLASS Act.

But even then, lawmakers of both parties knew that CLASS was unworkable. Democrats structured the program to collect premiums for years before beginning to pay out benefits — thus, it appeared to reduce the deficit when it would in fact greatly increase the deficit once it began making payments.

If they’re talking about prosecuting Wall Street people, why shouldn’t these members of Congress face jail?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Obama’s Scapegoat Strategy. “What do you do if you can’t run on your record — on 9 percent unemployment, stagnant growth and ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see? How to run when you are asked whether Americans are better off than they were four years ago and you are compelled to answer no? Play the outsider. Declare yourself the underdog. Denounce Washington as if the electorate hasn’t noticed that you’ve been in charge of it for nearly three years. But above all: Find villains. . . . It’s crude. It’s Manichaean. And the left loves it. As a matter of math and logic, however, it’s ridiculous.”

He’ll be going after “hoarders and wreckers” next.

PRESIDENT STONEWALL: Here we go: White House refuses House GOP demand to turn over all internal documents related to Solyndra. Plus: “In case you’ve been wondering whether it’s legal for the government to agree to a loan restructuring that subordinates taxpayers’ interest to that of some private creditor, good news: Treasury’s been wondering that too.”

BRAD KOZAK: ATF Death Watch 104: Timelines and Truthiness. “The first thing to know when you’ve dug yourself into a deep hole is to stop digging. My father wasn’t the first to say these words, but he used to say them to me. A lot. And it’s good advice. It seems though, that every time Eric Holder opens his mouth, he’s so busy sticking his foot in it, that he can’t win for losin.’ Case in point, that whole timeline thing.”

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LEADING CUBAN DISSIDENT Laura Pollan Has Died.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Infographic: “The Student Loan Racket.”

MEMBERS OF THE PROVIDER CLASS: We Are The 53%.

SOME HALLOWEEN COSTUMES you might want to avoid. Stick with the tried-and-true traditional costumes, like Slutty Nurse, Slutty Cop, Slutty Teacher, Slutty Astronaut, etc. . .

INSTAVISION: Censorship in the Ivory Tower: Colleges and Universities are Killing Free Speech. I talk with Greg Lukianoff of FIRE, with a special cameo appearance by Nathan Fillion. (Bumped).

RICHARD MINITER EXPLAINS why Barack Obama is right, and I am wrong — along with David Ignatius and Ron Paul. Well, they told me if I voted for John McCain, we’d get a president so murderous toward foreigners that in the end even I’d be complaining. And they were right!

MORE BUDGETARY UNDERPERFORMANCE: Tanning tax revenue falls short of estimates. “The IRS got red-faced trying to collect the new tanning tax, burning a hole in estimates on how much the levy would bring in to federal coffers, a new report said Thursday.”

HERMAN CAIN’S 999 PLAN: Pre-tested In SimCity. “Long before Cain was running for president and getting attention for his 999 plan, the residents of SimCity 4 — which was released in 2003 — were living under a system where the default tax rate was 9 percent for commercial taxes, 9 percent for industrial taxes and 9 percent for residential taxes. (That is, of course, if you didn’t use the cheat codes to get unlimited money and avoid taxes altogether.)”

What’s the code? “Kaiser?” “Immelt?”

UPDATE: Reader John Miller writes: “Would you rather have something gamed for eight years in SimCity, or scored in a week by the CBO?”

SEXISM AT MSNBC. If a tree makes a sexist remark in a forest and no one hears it . . .

BLUE ORIGIN: What Is Jeff Bezos Building Out There. “Blue Origin, the aerospace company led by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is the most secretive of the big private space companies. But through accident reports, patent applications, and the trickle of information from the company itself, we can start to get a picture of just what the heck Bezos is building.”

CHEVROLET-DEALER CONGRESSMAN: There Is No Market For The Volt.

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