Anwar Al-Awlaki who is on the CIA's kill or capture list for his involvement in the Fort Hood Shootings, the Attempted Christmas Day Bombing, and the Times Square plot was invited to have lunch and give a presentation at the Pentagon just months after 9/11. FOX News reports the infuriating details:

According to the documents, obtained as part of an ongoing investigation by the specials unit "Fox News Reporting," there was a push within the Defense Department to reach out to the Muslim community.

"At that period in time, the secretary of the Army (redacted) was eager to have a presentation from a moderate Muslim."
In addition, Awlaki "was considered to be an 'up and coming' member of the Islamic community. After her vetting, Aulaqi (Awlaki) was invited to and attended a luncheon at the Pentagon in the secretary of the Army's Office of Government Counsel."

Awlaki, a Yemeni-American who was born in Las Cruces, N.M., was interviewed at least four times by the FBI in the first week after the attacks because of his ties to the three hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Hani Hanjour. The three hijackers were all onboard Flight 77 that slammed into the Pentagon.

Awlaki is now believed to be hiding in Yemen after he was linked to the alleged Ft. Hood shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who e-mailed Awlaki prior to the attack.

Sources told Fox News that Awlaki, who is a former Muslim chaplain at George Washington University, met with the Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in Yemen and was the middle-man between the young Nigerian and the bombmaker. Awlaki was also said to inspire would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.

The story is infuriating not only because it highlights the incompetence of the folks we entrust the security of our nation to, but because unlike Claire, the people running the Pentagon apparently have not the slightest clue how to differentiate a moderate Muslim from an Islamic terrorist.

I've tried not to unduly promote my book on my guest contributor stint here (notice I'm not even mentioning the title :-)), but far be it from me to shy away from a particular subject just because I happen to cover some aspect of it in my unnamed book. In that mysterious volume I dedicate a chapter to Obama's deplorable mistreatment of Israel. It has amazed me that he hasn't received more blowback for this, especially from the liberal Jewish community, though at one point former NYC Mayor Ed Koch did take him to task in a couple of op-eds that I cite.

In fact, Koch called on his fellow Jews in office to condemn Obama and finally he succeeded in smoking out even big lib Senator Chuck Schumer, who reportedly threatened to call Obama out on the subject if he didn't back off. So I find it interesting that Jackson Diehl alleges in a Washington Post op-ed that Obama has "sabotaged Middle East peace talks."

Essentially, Diehl argues that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has conducted peace talks with Israel "for 15 years or more" without a freeze on Jewish settlement construction, but Obama nevertheless superimposes the freeze as a condition.

Abbas said in an interview on Israeli television that with Obama taking that position, he can hardly refrain from taking it himself.

So, observes Diehl, "the settlement impasse originated not with Netanyahu or Abbas, but with Obama -- who by insisting on an Israeli freeze has created a near-insuperable obstacle to the peace process he is trying to promote."

This is so vintage Obama: it's his way or the highway. The world has to conform to his vision even when reality screams that his vision is cockeyed. I repeat, he's intransigent, stubborn, and narrow-minded. It is not just peace he seeks, but peace on his terms.

We see it over and over again, from the Chrysler restructuring plan that disfavored secured creditors in favor of his unsecured union buddies to his dogmatic, tyrannical and corrupt approach on health care.

But what say you, Ricocheters, about my contention that Obama has angst toward Israel and that it affects his discriminatory approach to the Middle East peace process?

Lee Smith's article about the AKP in Tablet today is excellent:

The fact is that Erdogan and his allies are running roughshod over fundamental democratic principles—which is to say that the problem with Islamic democracy isn’t Islam as such, but rather the corruption and conspiracies of the governing party and its allies, who use Islam as cover for their own hunger for power. Washington, meanwhile, doesn’t dare criticize the domestic machinations of a Muslim democracy’s ruling Islamist party, for fear of crashing its own plans, and alienating Muslims.

I'd add a few points: I do think it's important to note--again--that power-hungry, corrupt and conspiratorial political parties are hardly a novelty in Turkey. In this regard, the AKP's the norm, not the exception, and not even the worst in memory. There's a reason no one speaks nostalgically of the good old days of squeaky-clean, ethical Turkish governance under Tansu Çiller.

The AKP isn't precisely using Islam to justify its power-hunger, corruption and conspiracies: It's using domestic and international reluctance to criticize a government that's seen as friendly to Islam to get away with it. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one.

What the AKP is using to justify power-hunger, corruption and conspiracies, quite brazenly, are the words "democracy" and "reform." One of the reasons so few are willing to say, "Hey, what's so democratic about that?" and "Hey, when exactly was the last time you actually reformed anything?" is the fear of appearing anti-Islamic. Another reason, of course, is that some of them are getting very, very rich from their relationship with the AKP.

And a third reason is, frankly, that far too many observers are possessed of the very disdain and condescension for Islamic culture that they're superficially taking such pains to avoid suggesting. If you point out the gross forensic anomalies in the Ergenekon case, you can practically see the metaphorical shrug. What else can you expect. That's just the way it is in that part of the world and the way it will always be. They'll never really get the hang of something like "rule of law." It's the classic soft bigotry of low expectations, and it's a contemptible expression of disrespect for so many people here who, I can promise you, want clean governance just as much as any Westerner.

Politics, shmolitics--you wanna see a GREAT music video? I'm serious. This woman blows me away. Her name's Caro Emerald. She's Dutch, though she sings in english. The album's called "Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor," and is just about uniformly fantastic. I'm too elegant and debonair to make some debased, uncouth remark about how sexy she is, but I'm sure Ricochet gentlemen will think of their own.

For an ex-prez, everything probably looks metaphorical the first few weeks out of office:

Former US president George W. Bush says he made a swift transition from White House pampering to picking up his pet's poop, according to a news report Wednesday.

Bush told a packed university lecture hall in his home state of Texas on Tuesday that, shortly after leaving Washington, he faced a decidedly un-stately moment when his dog Barney relieved himself on a neighbor's lawn.

"Ten days out of the presidency, there I was with a plastic bag in my hand, picking up that which I had been dodging for eight years," he was quoted as saying by the Tyler Morning Telegraph in remarks confirmed by his office.

You can sort every president into one of two categories:

A) Those who’d just bend down and pick it up, because that’s what a dog-owner does

B) Those who’d make a face and do it, or perhaps tell and aide to do it

There’s also the matter of which president would take it home for disposal, or throw it in someone else’s garbage bin. Anyway: choose a president, and tell us whether he’d be an A or a B.

The new police chief of Guadalupe Distrito Bravo, a Mexican border town afflicted with violence, is a 20-year-old criminology student.

Marisol Valles Garcia took charge on Monday of security in the town, population 10,000, on the US border. The community is around 80 km east of Ciudad Juarez, itself regarded as the most violent city in Mexico.

Why would the town allow such a young lady to take charge of fighting crime, you ask? Perhaps because she was, unsurprisingly, the only one to apply for the job.

The former mayor of Guadalupe Distrito Bravos, Jesus Manuel Lara Rodriguez, was killed on June 19 at his home in Ciudad Juarez, after receiving death threats.

Que Dios esté con usted, Srta. Valles Garcia.

In early September, I reported on HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' infamous "zero tolerance" policy toward insurers who dare to suggest that Obamacare will raise costs. Undeterred by criticism that the government was trying to muzzle dissent, Sebelius's agency went even further. On September 21, HHS sent a memo to all Medicare Advantage insurers directing them to immediately stop all communications to beneficiaries about the potential impact of health reform legislation (this was in response to Humana, which had the temerity to advise its clients that Obamacare could raise costs).

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) looked into the matter and, in a wonderfully restrained report, suggests that HHS's behavior was "unusual." According to the report, the adminstration took issue with that conclusion, asserting that it was engaging in normal regulatory behavior. But the GAO stuck to its guns, stating that it could find no precedent for HHS's Sept 21 directive. (ht: Cato-at-Liberty)

"Unusual" is certainly one word, but others come to mind. How would you describe HHS's actions?

I just got back from Israel (and Poland) on a Catholic Pilgrimage that made my head spin. Last time I was there I was shooting a music video and was told by many young hipsters that the non-orthodox Jews were mad at the the orthodox Jews because they claimed the Orthodox don't have to work or join the army because the govt. supports them for their value as "pray-ers." They were also mad because since they didn't have to work, they didn't know how burdensome it was on the non-orthodox Jews who have to work on Saturdays to have the bus service cancelled on Saturdays, because the non working orthodox Jews don't want to violate the Sabbath by having busses (that they wouldn't take anyway) running on the Sabbath.

This didn't sit well with the young people I spoke to that had to fight and work.

This time I went there and got an earful of the plight of the often ignored Palestinian Christians who (at least the ones I met) are for the most part more allied with the Muslims than the Israelis. Does anyone ever think about them? I didn't. I knew there was a problem with the Christian population dwindling but my point is this: Even if there was a solution to the Israel / Palestinian problem there would still be these problems, compounded by the fact that the non-working / non-fighting orthodox Jews have a lot of kids and the non-orthodox have very few. The math there presents a problem for the future of course, not unlike Europe's.

What was the Christians' desired solution?

Two separate states, Palestinian / Israeli, with Jerusalem as an International Zone monitored by the United Nations, hope I didn't give you a headache.

The candidates for Obama's Senate seat debated last night. Democrat Alexi Giannoulias ripped into Republican Mark Kirk for daring to suggest that there should be poll watchers in city precincts to watch out for fraud. Predictably Giannoulias accused Kirk of "voter suppression," but his reasoning was rather novel. According to this Chicago Democrat:

"There's never been an accusation of fraud on the west and south side of Chicago."

That's right: not only has there never been actual fraud, but there's never even been an accusation of fraud. Well, I'm sure Alexi knows what he's talking about. And when people talk about voter fraud in Chicago, they're probably referring to a different Chicago. But I'm going to ask anyway, just for kicks: have any of you ever heard any allegations of vote fraud in Chicago -- the one in Illinois?

Blood? Check. Evil? Check. To the point of bone-chilling absurdity? Check. But it's not the latest Halloween-timed horror flick. It's the second issue of English-language jihadi mag Inspire. Thomas Hegghammer at Jihadica flips through:

[...] most interesting is the set of articles that give specific operational advice to prospective activists based in the West (p. 51ff). There are suggestions for low-cost operations in the US soil, such as shooting sprees in restaurants catering for government workers (such as in Washington DC), and using trucks to mow down pedestrians on crowded streets. The latter tactic can be further refined, Khan suggests, by welding sharp blades to the front of the truck so as to create “the ultimate mowing machine.”

What's the good news?

Khan’s strategy presupposes that individuals can aquire the motivation to die for the cause almost in a vacuum. However, in most historical cases, individuals only acquired this motivation after interacting with other radicals, going abroad for jihad, or accessing jihadi propaganda - all of which are activities discouraged by Samir Khan. Of course there have been exceptions, such as the Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hassan, but even he was not completely “clean”, as evidenced by his email correspondence with Anwar al-Awlaki. Decentralized jihad is indeed a scary concept, but it does not necessarily work.

"Necessarily" -- !

There is a very interesting article in the Wall Street Journal found here. The author does a fine job of exploring the philosophical common denominator of Tea Partiers.

For me, the Tea Party attraction was less government spending. I was disgusted by both Bush's TARP and Obama's ARRA, and the Tea Party was the first to object to them equally. It seemed that bi-partisan denouncement was also why this movement attracted diverse groups like the anti-government 1960's liberal, the Blue Dog Democrat and the independent.

But the author Jonathan Haidt claims the Tea roots run deeper than just less government spending. He refers to Rick Santelli's now famous speech on CNBC where he railed against bailing out "bad behavior" by individuals. That speech was a major accelerant to the fire of the Tea Party Movement.

Haidt focuses on rewards for good behavior and misfortune for bad behavior, which he sees as more of a concern of traditional social conservatives than for others (but rather than finding roots in Christian morality, he credits the Hindu/Buddhist tradition of "Karma," - good comes from good deeds and bad from bad).

So that brings up the question that the Tea Party will have to face post election as it solidifies its identity: Is "Tea Party" just traditional social conservatism run from the Republican Party to another place, or is it a movement committed only to smaller government, which can attract in addition to the social conservative the libertarian, the independent, the Blue Dog and the doctrinal Federalist?

If it's the latter, then we avoid a Tea Party civil war between pure social conservatives and pure libertarians, which the left is hoping will happen to tear the movement apart.

What are the thoughts of the Ricochet Nation?

Via The Daily Caller:

There are now more than a dozen House Democrats – the list is at 14 and growing by the day – who want to fire Speaker Nancy Pelosi if their party somehow manages to keep its majority on Nov. 2....The vanguard of outright Pelosi opponents includes Jim Marshall of Georgia, who has even run TV ads against the Speaker, Gene Taylor of Mississippi, Mike McIntyre of North Carolina, Peter DeFazio of Oregon, and Bobby Bright of Alabama.

Here's Jim Marshall's ad.

"Georgia is a long way from San Francisco and Jim Marshall is a long way from Nancy Pelosi."

Did anyone catch Monday night's New York governors debate? The crazies were out, let me tell you. The selection of candidates on show was so lamentable that I found myself identifying with the most unlikely of them:

Tunku Varadarajan at The Daily Beast has the best line--but wait for it:

All that was missing was a bottle of absinthe. But for that, the spectacle of Monday night’s debate among contenders for the governorship of New York would have made for a scene straight out of Toulouse-Lautrec. Everything else was there: cads, thugs, grotesques and strumpets, with Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate, possibly even doubling for a dwarf....

What a collection of cultural types, what a political bestiary: There were hacks (Andrew Cuomo of the Democrats); goons (Carl Paladino); fringe-dwellers (Howie Hawkins of the Greens); earnest losers (Warren Redlich of the Libertarians); race-centric poseurs (Charles Barron, the ex-Black Panther, of the Freedom Party); garish attention-seekers (Kristin Davis of the Anti-Prohibition party, a former madam, alleged to have supplied Eliot Spitzer with company) and outright eccentrics (Jimmy McMillan, of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, who provided the best, the most rollicking entertainment of the night; in fact, he gave the distinct impression of being Too Damn High himself).

Not sure if this has been posted here before, but I came across it at the Cato Institute website along with this article by Daniel J. Mitchell.

There's lots to love about this video. For starters, it's apparently the first film (with sound) of an American president. However, I also love the way Coolidge shuffles the papers as he speaks. I love the way he walks off at the end. No fanfare. No concern for image. Only the words. And, oh, the words ...

P.S. If you are short on time, fast forward to the 2:00 mark.

City Journal sent me this invitation to Steven Malanga's book forum in Los Angeles on Tuesday, the 26th. I'd go, it sounds great, and apparently there's food and drinks involved, but I'm in Istanbul, so I can't.

I hate for the invitation to go to waste, though, so I thought I'd offer it to one of you, or to all of you, because I don't want to play favorites. I checked with City Journal, and they said it was fine with them if I invited every Ricochet member in Los Angeles (which I thought awfully nice of them).

Here are the details:

STEVEN MALANGA
Senior Editor, City Journal
Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute

Author of:

SHAKEDOWN: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer

With Remarks by:

MICKEY KAUS
Contributor, Newsweek.com
Author, The End of Equality

Introduction:
BRIAN ANDERSON
Editor, City Journal

How did American government get so big and so expensive? Steven Malanga gives the answer in Shakedown, a chilling history of the expansion of the public sector. A self-interested coalition of public employees’ unions and government-financed community activists has bankrupted state and local governments. Through increased government spending and backroom entitlement deals with politicians, this new political powerhouse is filling its coffers at the expense of taxpayers. The bill for this conspiracy against the American taxpayer is now coming due.

As all journalists know, newspapers don't wait for important figures to die before writing their obituaries. They commission them in advance and have them ready to go. It makes perfect sense. Death is a predictable event. We just don't know exactly when it will happen. No one needs a mad scramble in the newsroom when it does.

I've been asked to write obituaries for Margaret Thatcher, and I have. Any responsible paper would have a few at the ready; she is, after all, 85 years old and in failing health. It's still a ghoulish assignment. There's something so distasteful in viewing her death, however inevitable, as "a big job, so we need a good start in advance."

It sounds from the reports that she'll be fine. She has the flu, and she's been taken for tests as a precaution. Death and taxes are inevitable, they say, but if she fights death the way she fought taxes, I truly pity the Grim Reaper.

That she's ill nonetheless makes me uneasy--not as a journalist who's wondering whether she could fit a lot of inevitable interview requests into her busy schedule if Margaret Thatcher were to die, but as someone who genuinely loves her, even though she has never once met her, and would be very happy if those obituaries never saw the light of day.

It's 3:30 a.m. in London, and I can't get to sleep because that's still only 10:30 p.m. New York time. I'm here because my boss, Mr. Murdoch, is giving the 1st Annual Margaret Thatcher Lecture for the Centre for Policy Studies Thursday.

I took a little stroll along Picadilly to get some air. And the two things I notice first are these: First, literally a dozen people came up to me begging for money in my 45-minute long stroll -- most of them men, not old women. Second, this is still a newspaper city. Lots of them, each with a distinctive style.

There's even the Morning Star, a Communist Paper. The Thatcherites there will correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it was the Morning Star that first called her the "Iron Lady" -- meant derisively, of course. As with most great people, she turned an insult into an accolade.

It may have been sheer luck, or divine intervention. Certainly, it couldn't have been intentional, but it seemed that the very best commanders I had the pleasure of serving with during my time on active duty were usually found in forward operating theatres. The closer I got to the pointy end of America's military spear, the more competent the commanders became.

Kunsan Air Base, Republic of Korea, is home to the Wolfpack, the 8th Fighter Wing, whose commanders include the legendary Robin Olds. The wing commander when I was there was tough as nails. When his staff surprised him with a birthday cake, he volunteered to cut the cake by retrieving a ka-bar knife from his combat boot, cutting a couple of slices, and then sticking the knife into the conference table before sitting down to enjoy his cake, leaving everyone else staring at the knife as if they had just witnessed the planting of Excalibur.

When I applied for a few weeks of leave to fly back to the US for the holidays, the colonel looked irritated. "You mean you don't want to be here if Kim Jong-Il comes to visit?" I promised I would be on the first plane back in that eventuality. "Good," said the boss. "I might save a piece of him for you." The colonel was in outstanding condition physically, running laps around the airfield regularly. Mentally, he was sharp as a razor and ready for war at any time.

I've been retired for about 6 years now, so I'm out of circulation, as it were. But I have to ask, how would warriors of the caliber as that colonel fare in today's force? Today's news brings word of increasing frustration with the rules of engagement our warriors must operate under in Afghanistan.

"If they use rockets to hit the (forward operating base), we can't shoot back because they were within 500 meters of the village," said Spc. Charles Brooks, adding that, "If they shoot at us and drop their weapon in the process, we can't shoot back." Brooks also explained that troops at his base have had to take down the camp's watch towers, since they offend local sensibilities. "Now the Taliban can set up mortars and we can't see them," said Brooks.

For his part, Spc. Matthew Fuhrken, doesn't believe his chain of command is paying attention to the reality in the dirt. "I'm sick of people trying to cover up what's really going on over here. They won't let us do our job....[W]ar is war, and this is no war. I don't know what this is." Well, I have a term for it, but our code of conduct forbids its usage.

As word of possible negotiations with the Taliban reaches the troops, morale sinks further still. Pvt. Jeffrey Ward sums up the sentiment thus: "If we walk away, cut a deal with the Taliban, desert the people who needed us most, then this war was pointless."

Vietnam vets, does this sentiment strike a familiar chord? Ricochet readers and contributors, these are your troops talking. They are stationed in hell, on your behalf, and they are being forced to fight with their hands tied. Their laments belong in our thoughts as the election approaches. Much hangs in the balance in November, not least of which the proposition that our troops deserve a chain of command that is worthy of their valor and sacrifice.

Proving life is not all about politics, The Star-Ledger of New Jersey has a warning from that state's butchers: wearing Halloween costumes made of raw meat could be hazardous to your health. An apparently famous person named Lady Gaga wore such a carnivore's delight to a recent awards show, and some of her fans may try to emulate her on October 31. By the way, if someone marries Lady Gaga, does he automatically become Lord Gaga? Perhaps I digress.

Anyway, should any of you Ricocheters plan to wear meat for Halloween, health authorities recommend that beef should be heated to an internal temperature of 145-degrees if you want your costume to be medium rare. If you're wearing chicken, your breasts should be 165-degrees. I assume they're referring to the chicken. And if your costume reaches room temperature or above and stays that way for more than two hours, do not eat it. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, beware of the dogs.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled postings.

Politico has an item today on how contributions from the high tech industry are continuing to skew Democratic, even as health and financial sector dollars have moved back to the GOP this cycle. I had a recent piece on this issue in City Journal in which I argued that the GOP has been losing highly educated elites over the last few decades, and suggested an agenda that could help bring them back into the Republican fold. While Republicans appear poised to make significant gains in the upcoming election, they are going to have to hold on to health and financial service workers, as well as win back those high tech workers, if they want to establish a long-term governing coalition.

David Frum argues that independents are, "increasingly," just conservatives who have rejected the Republican brand. For this reason, he claims, the tea parties are best understood as an entrenched, established political minority, not a new coalition with the potential to offer "the basis for a national political majority" -- "at least not," he adds, "in a presidential year." And so:

The Tea Party message — cut taxes and preserve Medicare – does not make sense in policy terms and only appears to work as politics because of (1) low turnout in a congressional year and (2) the anxieties created by recession.

This is a provocative, plausible couple of claims, but let's take a step back and separate them out. Why would conservatives bolt the Republican party to agitate against taxes and for Medicare, when this is already Republican party policy? They wouldn't. A policy-centric perspective on the tea parties, and on independents more generally, makes it hard to understand who the establishment GOP has been disappointing, and on what grounds. As I've hinted earlier, independents, tea partiers, and conservatives -- groups that do overlap, but only overlap -- all tend to share the view that the two major political parties are too similar in their approach to governing. From a policy-centric perspective, that would suggest they think Republicans and Democrats offer too many of the same policies. But from a more principle-centered perspective, it's closer to the truth to say that independents, tea partiers, and conservatives think the philosophical inputs guiding the two major parties are too similar.

The important thing about the kind of voter David is describing isn't any contradictory set of policy positions -- it's a tension between principle and policy. Our national problem isn't exactly an 'addiction' to spending and entitlements, but, as is the case with addiction, breaking our pattern of behavior will be painful and even perilous -- at the level of policy. At the level of principle, however, it's clear that the alternative is worse. So some independents, tea partiers, and conservatives might find themselves in a position where they're angry about the prospect of losing entitlements that they actually don't think are the product of a sound governing philosophy.

But it seems weird to me to characterize this effect as the one that defines independent conservatives or tea partiers more broadly. What defines these two (again, overlapping) groups of voters is, I think, simply their embrace of the principle of constitutionally limited government. The effective rejection of this principle during the Bush years pushed conservatives in an independent direction and helped give the tea party movement a constituency and a reach it would otherwise lack.

Of course, none of this means that the tea party is, for now, a majority-sized national movement. Peter Lawler acknowledges this in his latest post at Postmodern Conservative, but his bottom line is different from David's. This is more than a recession -- this is a reckoning:

more and more people who are approaching retirement age now kind of know that retirement in prosperity will likely not be an option for them. They’ll have to keep working in a techno-society full of preferential options for the young. Many will be stuck with the indignity of downward mobility combined with increasing frailty or general vulnerability. We can say that older voters this time know enough to know that government can’t really promise them security, and that policies that promote general prosperity are most likely to benefit them. The great Founder of modern liberalism–John Locke–said that in a free country you’d better be rich if you’re going to get old, and, unfortunately in some ways, that’s probably more true and more difficult than ever.

It's called Five Books, and it's seriously one of the coolest sites I've discovered all year.

Maureen Dowd accused a wide variety of female Republican candidates for office of being "mean girls" on Sunday. I think she was alluding to the 2004 film about how awful some adolescent females could be. I would explain why she said this if I could decipher the mysterious code of the Dowd column. I stopped trying during the Clinton administration. But it's something about how she fantasizes that Sarah Palin wants to push her up against a locker or something.

But if speaking clearly in a debate is enough to get you the "mean girl" slur, as it did for Sharron Angle, I wonder what Maureen Dowd would make of the nice ladies over at Jezebel. They're asking readers to help them give Christine O'Donnell the "Santorum" treatment. What's that, you ask? You'll probably wish you hadn't (warning: link includes explicit detail).

See, gay activist Dan Savage so objected to Sen. Rick Santorum's legal views on homosexuality that he renamed a mixture of bodily fluids after him. More oddly, Savage thought that informing people of this byproduct would somehow help his cause and hurt Santorum's.

Anyway, the lovely ladies at Jezebel are engaged in some odd projection themselves. Their early candidates for redefining O'Donnell would make a medieval misogynist blush. It's almost as if they believe that their own body parts are disgusting or that women's body fluids are evil carriers of death. Just like the previous example, I don't think they quite get who they're harming when they carry on this exercise.

But at least they're not being mean, right, Maureen?

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be deluged by polls. Most of them will be honestly conducted. Others will constitute an attempt to discourage the voters on one side or another. How can one separate the sheep from the goats?

You should start with one key question. What are the pollsters’ turn-out expectations, and do they make any sense? Jay Cost went to the heart of the matter in his post this morning. As he put it, “the partisan composition of the electorate remains the critical unresolved issue of this cycle. Every pollster is making a guess as to what the electorate will look like, and these guesses are at least as important as their final numbers.” He should have added that these guesses determine their final numbers.

Here is an example. There is a Democratic outfit called Public Policy Polling. They recently took a look at the Senatorial race in Pennsylvania and announced that Joe Sestak was now in the lead over Pat Toomey. In his column in today’s Washington Examiner, David Freddoso isolates what the poll tells us about the expected electorate in Pennsylvania – to wit, that it will be even more Democratic (48%) than it was when Barack Obama took Pennsylvania in 2008 (44%).

Freddoso does not call out PPP for this, but he did ask Dean Debham at PPP how this could be, and this is what he reports:

“It’s a shift in those who are choosing to participate in the poll,” [Debham] said, and a sign that Democrats are now more likely to vote. “Democrats are starting to pay attention.”

Has Republican enthusiasm suddenly fallen off? “They got way out in front — and I’m seeing this around the country, where Republicans got way out in front…so they locked in their core fairly early…Democrats start pulling up as more people make up their minds.”

Well, okay, but does PPP really expect Democrats to make up a larger share of the electorate than they did in 2008? “This far out, all you’re doing is taking a snapshot,” Debnam said, adding that PPP will be polling that race again the weekend before the election.

Freddoso does not cry foul. Instead, he observes that PPP has “a good track record.” Then, he adds an oblique warning: “If Democrats turn out in record numbers in two weeks, surpassing the Obama surge, they still will.”

My bet is that, with this poll, PPP is doing what it can to encourage Democratic turn-out but that, if there is no Democratic surge (and it is hard to believe that there will be), they will soon back off. If such a surge does not show up on Rasmussen’s polling, you can be confident that my suspicions are correct.

Need a break from politics? Tired of crossword puzzles? Had enough sodoku? Try this:

In a series of lectures he delivered in 1853, John Henry Newman sided with the Russians against the Ottoman Empire. (Newman’s lectures were later collected in a brief book, History of the Turks in their Relation to Europe, which you can find on Amazon.) The British government ignored Newman, joining the French and Ottomans against the Russians in the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856. The British and their allies forced back the Russians, who had been placing increasing pressure on the Ottomans by advancing down the coasts of the Black Sea while expanding the tsar's Black Sea fleet.

The Crimean War involved quite a few bad moments for the British, French, and Ottomans—remember the charge of the light brigade?—but it preserved the Ottoman Empire, which would remain intact, more or less, until the end of the First World War. As for Russia? The War proved devastating. Russia saw its land forces humiliated and its Black Sea fleet virtually eliminated.

Now suppose that, instead of ignoring Newman, the British government had taken Newman's advice. If the British had refused to fight on behalf of the Ottomans, the French would almost certainly have stayed out of the fight themselves. The Ottomans would have been forced to face Russia virtually alone. Russia would have gained territory along the Black Sea and won rights to unhindered naval passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, enhancing its international prestige while gaining self-confidence.

Question: Would the world have been a better place?

My very tentative take: Why, yes, I think it might. Without the wound it suffered in the Crimea, tsarist Russia would have retained the confidence—the civilizational poise and energy—to make growing accommodations with the modern world. The Bolshevik revolution would have become unlikely, perhaps impossible. And the twentieth century would have been spared Lenin, Stalin, and an evil empire.

Now? Into the Ricochet mosh pit.

I came across this White House press release this morning … Oops. Sorry. Strike that.

I came across this New York Times article:

HUNTERSVILLE, NC -- What if a president cut Americans’ income taxes by $116 billion and nobody noticed?

It is not a rhetorical question. At Pig Pickin’ and Politickin’, a barbecue-fed rally organized here last week by a Republican women’s club, a half-dozen guests were asked by a reporter what had happened to their taxes since President Obama took office.

“Federal and state have both gone up,” said Bob Paratore, 59, from nearby Charlotte, echoing the comments of others.

After further prodding — including a reminder that a provision of the stimulus bill had cut taxes for 95 percent of working families by changing withholding rates — Mr. Paratore’s memory was jogged.

It got me wondering about the conversation between the assignment editor and the reporter ...

Our reporter is an intrepid type, his head full of the “speak-truth-to-power” ethos that he learned in J-school. He desperately wants to please. Our editor wears horned-rim glasses, meticulously tousled hair, and holds a cup of fair-trade, shade-grown coffee.

Editor: I’m sending you to some small Southern town. Can't remember the name. A stone’s throw from the Charlotte Motor Speedway ... that's the key. I want you to talk to the people. Find some who are either 1) too dumb to realize that Obama is tax cutter, or 2) too blinded by their politics and/or racism to notice. Shouldn't be too hard.

Reporter: So what do I do when I find them?

Editor: You educate them! That’s what you do! Sit ‘em down and show them the numbers. (Hands over charts and graphs.) Explain how they’ve been misled by the tea party! Insist that Obama is the one who is really looking out for them.

Reporter: (hesitantly) But I thought I was supposed to report the news. What you’re telling me to do sounds kind of like … I don’t know … PR.

Editor: (blank, incredulous stare) And?

Silence.

Reporter: Oh, okay.

He bolts out of the office, feeling stronger, bolder, more into it.

This morning Trace alerted me to an article in the Washington Post that describes the impetus for the D.C. school system's decision to provide schoolchildren with three meals a day:

Officials describe the dinner initiative as having three goals: hedging against childhood hunger, reducing alarming rates of obesity and drawing more students to after-school programs, where extra academic help is available. It is also part of a broader effort, mandated by recent D.C. Council legislation, to upgrade the quality and nutritional value of school food with fresh, locally grown ingredients.

My first reactions to the story are rather conflicted. On the one hand, you hate to hear about children going hungry. But with the affordability of food these days, with the generosity of churches and food banks that provide food for the poor in the community, and with a generous taxpayer funded food stamp program, no one in America should be going hungry. And yet, the cruel reality is that many children -- like those in D.C.'s schools -- grow up in households with overwhelmed, frantic single mothers who just can't manage to feed them.

So what do we do with these hungry children, or children who suffer from malnutrition because their diet consists of doritos, oreos and sugary soda? Is it the taxpayers' job to take over the diets of schoolchildren, if parents are failing at the task? Anyone want to take a stab at outlining the conservative response to the problem at hand?

Here's what happens when you pick Supreme Court Justices based on "empathy."

Facts: An HIV-positive prisoner (Anthony Pitre) is transferred to a prison where all inmates are required to do hard labor. He doesn't like hard labor and so, in protest, he refuses to take his HIV meds. As a result, he's less fit for hard labor. But prison officials say: "too bad, you still have to do hard labor like everyone else." Pitre then sues the prison for "cruel and unusual punishment" in violation of the Constitution.

The magistrate judge dismisses the claim as "patently frivolous." The federal district court agrees. The Fifth Circuit agrees. Eight Supreme Court Justices refuse to hear the case -- with Justice Sotomayor dissenting. In a 4-page dissent (highly unusual for a routine denial of certiorari), Sotomayor argues that Pitre had demonstrated that prison officials acted with "deliberate indifference" in violation of the Eighth Amendment. (h/t Orin Kerr at Volokh)

Poor Sonia Sotomayor, she seems to be in over her head. Perhaps I'll send her an empathy card.

Ricochet member Matthew Lawrence sent me a very thoughtful essay which I will reproduce in full below. But the question he poses is basically this: If you're a conservative, what is it that you want to conserve? Read on -- and then tell us what you want to conserve.

“I want to sing the kind of songs that my dad sang to me,
and try to be the man he hoped that I would be…” – When It’s Gone – Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

By admitting one is a conservative, one implicitly aligns with certain appealing aspects of the past. Broadly, conservatism, as discussed here at Ricochet, encompasses certain social issues, economic issues and, of course, political responses to those issues. But setting those considerations aside, there is a broader conservatism that can inform and shape our thoughts about social issues, economic issues and the like. The modes of dress we employ, the music to which we listen (and expose our children), movies, manners, language, technology, and even food and drink have the effect of speaking about us to the world and they also speak to us, shaping who we are. Even more fundamental to cultural survival are conservative philosophies, theologies and epistemologies.

It seems to me the opinions set forth at Ricochet could be viewed as the logical consequences of a conservative worldview. In other words, conservative philosophy, theology and epistemology form scaffolding that support the arguments we make here. In their collection of essays, I’ll Take My Stand, the Southern Agrarians argued for an essentially conservative approach to life based on a worldview informed by traditions that extended generations into the past. Other cultural critics like Richard Weaver, Wendell Berry, Christopher Lasch and Neil Postman argue similarly although in the cases of Berry, Lasch and Postman, it would be an error to identify them as primarily articulating a conservative worldview. But their lamenting the modern obsession to forget the past and unthinkingly embrace the present without reflecting on its impact on the future is, in my opinion, quintessentially conservative.

So the question is, what in our current Western culture is essential to conserve and why? Or, must we reach into the past and resurrect now dead or resuscitate dying cultural “once-norms” to preserve Western culture? Is civility in public discourse essential to retrieve as Os Guinness suggests in The Case For Civility? The recovery of the concept of objective truth as David F. Wells argues in his trilogy on the contemporary evangelical church? Or should the abolition of light beer be at the forefront of cultural renewal?...

By the way, this essay grew out of a conversation at last week's Rico Soiree in New York. More proof -- if more were needed -- that when you mix Ricochet and booze, great things happen.

So it turns out that the cure for “epistemic closure” is great quantities of crystal meth. The things you learn from Grover Norquist.

In case you missed it, Norquist came down like a runaway gravel truck on Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, a favorite around these parts. Governor Daniels’s offense was declaring himself open to the possibility that a value-added tax might be an acceptable part of a wide-ranging reform of the federal tax system. Norquist replied, in a Politico interview:

This is outside the bounds of acceptable modern Republican thought, and it is only the zone of extremely left-wing Democrats who publicly talk about those things because all Democrats pretending to be moderates wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot poll. Absent some explanation, such as large quantities of crystal meth, this is disqualifying. This is beyond the pale.

Here’s the problem: The deficit is, by my always-suspect English-major math, about 36.3 percent of federal spending ($1.29 trillion deficit out of $3.55 trillion spending). For comparison: Defense accounts for about 18 percent of federal spending. So you could cut out the entire national-security budget, and another Pentagon-sized chunk of non-military spending, and not quite close that deficit. You could cut the Pentagon to $0.00 and eliminate Social Security entirely and just barely get there.

Even great heaping quantities of crystal meth would not be enough to convince me that is going to happen.

Don’t get me wrong: In a perfect world, Exchequer would love to see the budget balanced and some tax cuts enabled through spending reductions alone. Exchequer would also like to be dating Marisa Miller, driving a Morgan Aero, and running a four-minute mile, developments that are about as plausible as Congress’s cutting 36.3 percent of federal spending. Not going to happen.

So, our choices are this: 1. Hold out for the best-case scenario, in which a newly elected Speaker Boehner gives President Obama the complete works of Milton Friedman and everybody agrees to cutting federal spending by more than a third. 2. Keep running deficits and piling up debt. 3. Raise taxes. My preferences, in order, go: 1, 3, 2. And No. 2 is not really acceptable.

Like it or not, taxes are going up: If not today, then in the near future. Even once the deficit is under control, that debt is still going to have to be paid down, lest debt service alone overwhelm the federal budget, necessitating even more tax hikes. If Grover Norquist thinks there’s a tax-free way out of this mess that is both politically and economically realistic, he is living in a fantasy. There’s an old joke that goes: Neurotics build castles in the sky; psychotics live in them. And Grover Norquist seeks tax protection for them.

Norquist’s outfit, Americans for Tax Reform, does a lot of good things. (And so has Grover Norquist, over the years.) But here’s how it describes itself:

Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle.

That’s not a campaign against Big Government — it’s a campaign against math. As ye spend, so shall ye tax. Denying that is not a principle — it’s a tantrum. ATR’s pledge reads:

“I _____ pledge to the taxpayers of the __________ district, of the state of __________, and to all the people of this state, that I will oppose and vote against any and all efforts to increase taxes.”

And here is how it should read:

“I _____ pledge to the taxpayers of the __________ district, of the state of __________, and to all the people of this state, that I will oppose and vote against any and all efforts to increase spending.”

Spending is the issue, not taxes. Spending is the virus, taxes are the symptom. Norquistism, by focusing on the taxing side of the ledger rather than on the spending side, has for decades enabled Republican spending shenanigans of the sort that helped put the party in the minority and ruined its reputation for fiscal sobriety; it is of a piece with naïve supply-siderism. The Bush-era deficits, and the subsequent discrediting of Republicans’ fiscal conservatism, are the product.

Give me the grown-up despair of Mitch Daniels any day over the happy-talk daydream that says we’re getting out of this mess without paying for it.

(This post originally appeared on National Review Online)