As long as we're all being honest about our Badthink, I'm wondering--am I the only one who is generally in such a foul mood after waking up early to catch a flight, sitting for hours in traffic, trudging through all those interminable check-in and security lines, taking out the computer, putting it back in, taking it out again, putting it back in again, taking off my shoes, putting them back on again, throwing out my brand new bottle of expensive hand lotion, wading through those evil-tempered, slow-moving crowds and hearing the fifteenth announcement that my flight has been delayed that I often kind of hope there will be a terrorist on board, sometimes even fantasize about this scene in great pleasurable detail, because nothing would feel better at that point than swiftly leaping over the aisle and strangling someone?

Has anyone else actually carried through this fantasy to the point of imagining the press conference afterwards in which you humbly explain to an admiring public that no, you're no a hero, you didn't even think twice about it, it was just instinct, really, and you're just glad no one was hurt but the terrorist, and you'd have to confirm this with the authorities, Brian, but you'd guess there's still enough left of him that the FBI might be able to get a sample of his DNA if they use one of those special forensic spatulas?

Or am I just a very bad person?

And then there's the story of Boudreaux, who is the central figure in most Cajun jokes. As a little boy, Boudreaux was hauled into the principal's office one day and accused of cheating on an exam. Immediately defensive, young Boudreaux challenged, "Mais how you know if I cheat or not, eh?" "Well," said the principal, "on question number six, the person next to you in class wrote, 'I don't know,' and on that same question you wrote, 'me neither.'" I thought of that story when I read the coverage of our upcoming elections in the German magazine, Der Spiegel.

Having heard the unimaginative, unintelligent, unambiguously assinine caricatures of the tea party movement by everyone from the President on down to the anchors on MSNBC, I thought that the full choir on the left had exhausted their considerable range of emotions, which began with scorn and ran across the hall to derision. But I had failed to consider the cosmopolitans across the Atlantic.

According to Klaus Brinkbaumer, the tea party movement is populated with, "...hate-mongers, gun freaks, and Tea Party demagogues..." I'm not sure if Obama is copying the Europeans, or if the Europeans are copying Obama, but I am quite sure that the traits that have made America great are alien concepts to the whole lot of them.

Brinkbaumer laments our system in which the House and Senate, "...paralyze themselves with rules that demand unattainable majorities for everything that is important," and complains further that, "...even the Constitution irrevocably decrees that a senator from sparsely-populated Alaska has the same rights as a senator from New York." Yes, if only James Madison had checked with Klaus first.

Having been to Germany on several occasions, I am immensely fond of the place. But I'm not terribly well disposed to being lectured to, Klaus, on the supposed shortcomings of a system of governance that has pulled Europe's bacon out of the fire on more than one occasion. Germany spends 1.5% of its GDP on defense, in part because the US, which spends just over 4%, takes up the slack for the cosmopolitans. Now, I may be just a dumb ol' trucker, Klaus, but like hundreds of thousands of other American "gun freaks," I stood shoulder to shoulder with West German troops staring down the Soviet juggernaut in the hope that one day your country would be united and free. I guess no good deed goes unpunished.

But let me decode how things are designed on this side of the pond. You see, in America, the relationship of the citizen and the government is predicated on the idea that the government's role is to secure the freedom of the citizen to maximize his God-given potential as he sees fit. It has worked well enough for us to flourish and even assist our European friends from time to time. It is to the propositions outlined in our Declaration of Independence that many of us have again dedicated ourselves. If these ideas seems foreign to you, you're not alone. They have evidently mystified our president too.

Here's an idea you might like, Klaus. Germany's public debt currently runs at about 77% of its GDP, whereas America's debt is about half that percentage. Obama aims to increase our debt, and the American public aims to reduce it. If you're so enamored of the direction that President Obama is taking us, then perhaps you can hire him. He may be looking for employment after 2012.

Okay, this is a little self serving, but I'm desperate. I need meal ideas. I'm in a rut. I can only serve pasta and frozen vegetables so many more times before it becomes an invitation for my husband to leave me.*

I am not currently on the dole so I can still use potatoes. (Wink, smile.)

So let's say you suddenly learn you are to host two or three guests tomorrow night. You like them. You hope to impress them. But you don't have all day to get your act together. What do you cook?

Some rules:

-- no more than 10 ingredients (not including spices/condiments)

-- no more than 45 minutes cook time

-- no more than 30 minutes to prepare prior to cooking

Whaddya got?

Here is Diane Ellis's Picadillo (stolen from her potato post). I plan to make it next week.

In a large skillet, over 1-2 tbsp of olive oil, saute over medium heat half a chopped onion, a clove of minced garlic, 4 chopped medium sized yukon gold potatoes, and 2-3 chopped carrots. After 5 minutes, add 1lb of lean ground beef. Cook until browned. Season the mixture with cumin, oregano, salt, pepper. Add 1 15 oz can of tomato sauce (I use 2 7 oz cans of "El Pato Salsa Fresca" but it might not be widely available). Bring to boil. Add 1 15 oz can (or 2 cups of frozen) green peas. Add 1/2 tsp chili pepper flakes. Let simmer over low heat for 10 minutes. Serve with tortillas and Mexican beer of your choice.

*Truth be told: My husband is the cook in the family. He's patient, creative, and cheerful about it. But I'm the one home from 4-6 p.m. to prepare food. Help me RicoChefs!

If the political prognosticators are right, the Republicans will win enough seats to control the House of Representatives. They may even control the Senate, though the odds are that they will fall just short. It is always hard to switch from campaigning to governing (just ask President Obama!). One of the most important things for success is that the Republicans have a legislative agenda ready to pass in the first 100 days -- that was one of the signal achievements of the Contract with America in 1994. Even if Obama vetoes some or all of the legislative agenda, that will put the President on record as opposing popular legislation or it will cause him (as it did President Clinton) to approve conservative policies to stay politically viable.

So what do Ricochet readers think should be the first 10 things that a Republican Congress should do? Here are some ideas to get thing started:

1. Repeal and/or defund Obamacare
2. Extend the Bush income tax cuts
3. Extend the elimination of the estate tax

Other ideas?

Yesterday on Drudge Report, the centerpiece headline was: GOOGLE PAYS ONLY 2.4% TAX RATE; 'INCOME SHIFTING' ROBS GOV'T OF $60B, which linked to a story in Bloomberg by the same title.

While I'd love to get in a dig at Google CEO Eric Schmidt as much as the next guy, the problem here is that this article conflates a couple of very different things. The Google activities described in the article don't directly affect its U.S. taxes. What it is doing is reducing the taxes it pays internationally -- to other countries -- to around a 2.4% rate. This may be of some concern to Ireland, where Google has its European headquarters, but hardly has anything at all to do with the U.S. or Obama. The article then makes the broader point that according to one expert, "tax shifting" more broadly, by all companies, may cost the U.S. Treasury something like $60B a year. There is nothing in the article to suggest that Google is "shifting" any of its profits away from the U.S. in any unusual way -- it may very well be doing so, but the article offers no evidence of this. The article does actually note, buried in an obscure paragraph, that Google's overall global tax rate was 22.2% last year. Given its apparently low rate of international taxation, that would seem to imply a U.S. tax rate of 25% +. Last time I looked into these things, which was almost 10 years ago, the average U.S. company paid an effective tax rate of between 25 and 28%. That would make Google about average here in the U.S.

There is a broader and more substantive question underneath all of this, which is whether "transfer pricing" of technology licenses and other intellectual property to overseas subsidiaries should be allowed at all, or whether all of the profits of a Google, no matter where the revenue comes from, are really "U.S." profits -- but that is (a) extremely complex, (b) hardly a gripping topic, and (c) one on which I am not remotely qualified to pose as an expert.

The real lesson here is that the caliber of reporting in the mainstream press about "business" issues is really pretty bad, and reinforces a point I've been making for more years than I can count: If the government/media/academic "elites" really think they ought to be regulating business, the very least they can do is learn enough about it to be able to address its issues intelligently.

SACRAMENTO--Proposition 10, a ballot initiative suspending California’s groundbreaking anti-pollution law, The Global Climate Disruption and Water Vapor Management Act of 2026, is losing ground and appears headed for defeat in next week’s midterm election. According to a Savage Research poll released today, support for Prop 10, which has hovered near 50 percent for three weeks, is now down to 40 percent, with 55 percent of likely voters opposing the initiative..

The polling trend parallels the effort twenty years ago to suspend AB32, California’s then-revolutionary climate control bill, with early support evaporating after well-heeled venture capitalists and alternative energy entrepreneurs kicked-off a homestretch media campaign in favor of strict limits on carbon dioxide emissions. Savage Research pollster Stuart Drippel credits a similar media blitz by the Recyclable Water Council--bankrolled by vapor recovery technology and bottled water investors-- for Prop 10's precipitous decline in the polls. “The latest ads are effectively focusing voters on the potential for high-tech hydroponic farming and home vapor-recovery systems to perform a hat trick: address California’s structural unemployment rate, stubbornly mired over 17 percent for the past decade; recreate a sustainable agriculture sector for the first time since President Obama’s controversial 2016 Wilderness Water executive order; and mitigate global climate disruption by standing up to Big Water.”

Supporters of Proposition 10 claim that AB3200’s mandated cap on the net use of bulk-delivered water will destroy many of California’s remaining private sector jobs—now 25 percent of total employment. Advocates also highlight unpopular energy supply disruptions associated with the move to renewables together with the lack of any noticeable effect on the climate from AB32’s carbon dioxide controls. Opponents argue that investment in high-tech vapor recovery systems will spur economic growth within Wilderness Water conservation limits needed to address Global Climate Disruption. “Water vapor's climate disruption potential is roughly 100 times carbon dioxide's,” says San Jose State University climate scientist Lars Vazne. “We now realize that man-made water vapor emissions—irrigation, car washing, excessive bathtub use—are the real drivers of calamitous disruptions around the world. CO2 was a good start, but only a start on saving the planet.”

In a move to regain momentum, the Proposition 10 advocacy group Water Freedom today endorsed civil disobedience, scheduling a “candlelight vigil” rally beginning at blackout this evening in front of the Capitol. Organizers deny any intent to provoke California Air Resources Board riot police into a violent response, insisting that approved chemo-luminescent (CL) sticks provide insufficient light for participant safety, leaving open flame candles--banned as particulate pollution and wildfire ignition sources—as the only means of ensuring adequate lighting after the scheduled 9 p.m. power shutoff. Proposition 10 opponents plan an environmentally-friendly counter-demonstration nearby. CARB police spokesman Ashley Dimyn urged Water Freedom to move the rally to an earlier hour when electric lighting would be available, adding that officers would be out in force with a focus on maintaining order and public safety.

Peggy Noonan's latest column hinges on Fareed Zakaria's recent essay in Time magazine. There, Zarakia contrasts India -- "brimming with hope and faith" and "animal spirits and ambition" -- with downtrodden America, where our "can-do country is convinced that it can't." Noonan notes: "Sixty-three percent of Americans say they do not think they will be able to maintain their current standard of living."

"And yet," she intones. "We may be witnessing a new political dynamism. The Tea Party's rise reflects anything but fatalism, and maybe even a new high-spiritedness. After all, they're only two years old and they just saved a political party and woke up an elephant."

True enough. And yet: let's not put too great a psychic burden on the backs of the tea partiers. Let's not intensify the collective fantasy that there are two alternatives in life -- depressive pessimism or manic optimism. For a variety of reasons, Americans are predisposed to feel like we're slipping into decline unless we're #1 and gaining. It's a sensation that can reach from the smallest to the largest scale in American life, powered by our taste for risk, our capacity for resilience, our love of all-or-nothing play, and our not-much-discussed understanding that we're less suited to bear the burdens of ruling the world (if not ruling it) because we're best suited to lead it by example. Plus, we've inherited a little bit of Europe's longstanding pathology of declinism, driven by the notion that History is linear, inexorable, and progressive.

Manic optimists and depressive pessimists agree in a Manichean way that you're with them or you're against them -- that there's no middle ground in which we can expand or contract modestly and confidently without putting our flourishing at risk. If we buy into this way of thinking, we're in big trouble. We'll lose our cool and we'll lose our nerve, at home and abroad. Obama was greatly admired as a candidate when he, in stark contrast to John McCain, appeared to keep his calm in an alert, engaged, and focused way. But the way he's expanded government as President is so in keeping with manic optimism that it renders moot whatever commanding calm used to be associated with his character. As is clear, when the times call for it, I'm all in favor of boisterous, even angry politics. You can't flatten out human nature and call it maturity. But let's reaffirm that the tea party wave points beyond a bipolar worldview.

Keep Calm and Carry On? Yes, but that's a bit old world. Stay Cool, America.

What is going to happen on 2 November?

No one really knows, to be sure. But there is a convergence of opinion among those who follow electoral trends. Nearly everyone supposes that 2010 will resemble 1994, when the Republicans picked up fifty-four seats in the House of Representatives.

For what it is worth, I think that they all have it wrong.

Scott Rasmussen recently predicted that the Republicans will gain fifty-five seats in the House. In August, Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia estimated that there would be a pick-up of forty-seven seats. Next week, he will tweak those numbers. Last week, he reported that, if forced to do so right then, he would increase his estimate of Republican gains by single digits. In short, there is hardly any difference between his prediction, that of Rasmussen, and the RealClearPolitics average suggesting that the Republicans will gain fifty-six seats.

Of course, some prognosticators come in a bit lower. Charlie Cook puts the pick-up at fifty-one seats, and Nate Silver of The New York Times has it at forty-nine. Others – Jay Cost at The Weekly Standard comes to mind – put it a bit higher: in his case, at sixty-one.

What they are all doing is understandable. They are interpreting the present in light of the recent past. Most of the time such a procedure makes excellent sense. But it is good to remember that every once in a while there is a sharp change. Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid set out to change things, and perhaps they have succeeded in ways that they did not anticipate.

One must keep in mind that no Sovietologist predicted the collapse of the USSR and its dismemberment. Decades of comparative stability had lulled them to sleep. Only in the aftermath did the experts become aware that there had been ample warning signs.

There are plenty of warning signs now. Over the last twenty-two months, we have been confronted with one damned thing after another. First, in February, 2009, came the emergence of the Tea-Party Movement; then, in August, 2009, we witnessed the confrontations at the town-hall meetings. In November of that year, everyone was surprised by the verdict handed down in the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. In January, 2010 came the biggest surprise of all: the election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s senatorial seat in Massachusetts. And in subsequent months we were faced with the purge of a number of putative RINOs in the course of the Republican selection process and with the nomination by the Republican Party of a host of Tea-Party candidates. “As isolated incidents,” I wrote in a recent post, “each of these events might be dismissed. Taken together, they portend an electoral upheaval without recent precedent.”

What about the polling data? As Jay Cost recently remarked, the quite considerable disparity in that data turns on a crucial question as yet unanswered: “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.” “In fact” I added in the post linked above, “the guesses determine their final numbers.”

Moreover, as Sean Trende intimated this morning in a post on RealClearPolitics, the guessing that is going on makes no sense. When one examines the cross-tabs, as he has done, one discovers that what many of the polls are reporting is premised on the notion that the percentage of Democrats in this year’s electorate will more nearly resemble the percentage in 2008, when that party made major gains in the House, than the percentage in 2004 – which is not at all what we saw in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts in November, 2009 and January, 2010. Put simply, they ignore the enthusiasm gap.

In the post linked above, I drew attention to something else that is unprecedented. The Gallup Organization has been collecting generic ballot data for almost sixty years. For the most part, they focus on registered voters and not on likely voters. In recent elections, however, when October comes around, they apply a screen to their sample for the purpose of focusing in on those most likely to vote. Here it is worth keeping in mind that in no midterm election since 1974 – when eighteen-year-olds were given the right to vote – has the turn-out of registered voters exceeded 39.6%.

This year, Gallup’s generic ballot data suggests that, if there were a 40% turn-out on 2 November, the Republicans would have a 17% advantage. Shocked by this, the Gallup Organization ran the numbers a second time on the assumption that there would be a 55% turn-out (which they have not seen fit to do in the past). In this case, they concluded, the Republicans would outpoll the Democrats by 11%. The latter number is close to what Pew, Rasmussen, Fox News, and CNN/Opinion Research report. At this stage in a midterm election season, the Republicans have never – since Gallup began collecting generic ballot data – enjoyed an 11%, much less a 17%, advantage.

What does this mean? First, 2010 is not 1994. This time, the tide favoring the Republicans is much, much stronger. My own instinct – expressed in the post linked above – is that the rule of thumb Lou Cannon used to apply to the polls when Ronald Reagan was a candidate applies this year to the Republican Party as a whole. One should take the most reliable of the polls – those of Scott Rasmussen – and add 5% to the expected results for every Republican candidate.

For a time I was alone in thinking along these lines. Now I have company. After examining the crosstabs and considering the degree to which the pollsters are basing their estimates on the highly dubious presumption that, in its partisan makeup, the voting public in 2010 will more nearly resemble that of 2008 than 2004, Sean Trende suggested this morning that one would be well-advised to add 3% or 4% to the results for each of the Republican candidates.

If one does that, then my prediction that the Republicans will gain seventy to one hundred seats in the House and take control of the Senate makes perfect sense.

A few weeks ago, Ricochet's Tommy De Seno took exception with the government's decision to ban the purchase of sugary soda with food stamps. Tommy's argument:

[W]e don’t buy and own welfare recipients with our largess, and certainly don’t want someone who may have had some bad beats in life to suffer the further indignity of being told they aren’t worthy of the occasional guilty pleasure of an orange crush.

Ricochet member Matthew Lawrence pithily expressed the counterargument, which many readers -- including myself -- agreed with:

"He who pays the piper, calls the tune."
You wanna drink sody water, get off the dole.
Or, more preferably, get rid of the dole.

But now, in addition to soda, Uncle Sam has decided that poor folks shouldn't eat potatoes either. If there ever was an incentive to get off the dole, this would be it. Can you imagine the life without mashed potatoes? That could darn near ruin Thanksgiving! Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air explains why we should start paying attention to the government's creeping interference with Americans' diets.

Most offensively, the program treats subsidy recipients as if they cannot make their own food choices for themselves. People may tend to write this off by saying that aid recipients aren’t entitled to the money and that the USDA can set whatever condition it likes on the service, and that’s true. WIC and food-stamp recipients can buy potatoes with their own cash, too. But when a large number of Americans start receiving federal subsidies on health insurance — subsidies that will apply to anyone in the health exchanges with an annual salary of $88,000 or less, which is the 62nd percentile for annual household income in the US — what dictates will then be permissible? Smoking, alcohol, food? All of these impact health, and health-care costs.

Andrew Klavan says that everyone who says they've never had an anxious thought about flying Muslims is a liar; Jeffrey Goldberg insists that he never personally has a Bad Thought because he does the math:

There are roughly 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. Of these 1.3 billion Muslims, it is my belief that only several thousand, or at most, several tens of thousands, are directly involved in Islamist terrorism. Therefore, the chance that a Muslim in any given airport is a terrorist is very small. I also don't believe that al-Qaeda and like-minded groups and individuals are targeting air travel, because they did that already (this is one of the reasons I think the TSA represents a misapplication of government resources).

Goldberg's right, of course. I applaud his admirable rationality on the issue. But I'd just point out that this makes him kind of a freak, because most people are at least a little bit irrational about flying generally, if not outright phobic. That's an observation that no one seems to be considering in this debate, although it's germane to the charge that everyone who has the Bad Thought must be a bigot.

Professional pilots aside, almost everyone has a sort of uneasy feeling about being in a big metal cylindrical tube that hurtles through the air at 700 miles an hour and very occasionally plunges into the ground in a fiery inferno. We all know the statistics, most of us sort of grasp the idea of the Bernoulli effect and have heard all that reassuring stuff about the multiple backup systems and all those terrific training hours the pilots put in working the simulator, but really, most of us still feel safer in a car, even if logically we know that's absurd. Goldberg is obviously just one of those superbly rational human beings who never lets his emotions run the show; I've met them, they exist, but for most of us--be honest--we're fine in that 747 until there's a weird noise or a big unexpected turbulence thwump, and then, DANGER! DANGER! REPTILE BRAIN ALERT!--there goes all chance of an in-flight nap; bring on the double vodka.

So yes, most of us do look superstitiously for all sorts of little signs that this flight is going to be just fine--pilot looks sober--check; pilot looks old enough to have done this before--check; they seem to have done a pretty good job cleaning the seat pocket, that probably means they're careful with engine maintenance--check. And in that context, "No one looks like a terrorist on this flight--check!" is a pretty normal thought to have as you proceed through your pre-flight totally irrational safety checklist. I also like to make sure they really de-ice the wings well, because I still remember that 1982 Potomac crash.

Okay, so, having that thought doesn't make you a bigot, it just makes you a normal anxious passenger. And that reminds me of a funny story. After I left the Rico Party in San Francisco I flew out of SFO, where I was seated next to a dangerous terrorist suspect--at least, that's what my reptilian brain said. Little guy, dark-skinned, subcontinental in appearance, wearing some kind of terrorist-gear, like a white robe or something, and poring over some kind of religious text. Huh, I said to myself, You shouldn't have a bad, bigoted thought, but he sure does look like a terrorist. You'd better not think that, though, because that's bigoted and bad.

I took my seat next to him, then I noticed something that in just one glance told me I could strike him off the list of Bad Signs. Beneath the seat in front of him was a bag that said, "South India Trade Company." South India--that probably meant he was from Bangalore, and since Bangalore has a huge high-tech industry, that meant he was probably just coming back from a high-tech business meeting. And he was probably a Hindu, because most people from Bangalore would be.

I just wanted to confirm, though, so that I could take my nap in perfect peace. "So," I said to him, "That book--it's Kannada, isn't it?" Kannada being the language spoken in Bangalore.

He nearly dropped sideways with shock. "Yes! It's Kannada! How did you know!" We had a long talk about the time I was in Bangalore, and how much it must have changed since then, and his job, and the book he was reading --Vedic scriptures--and I could see in his face how glad he was that I didn't think he was a terrorist, because it must just really suck to have everyone think you're a terrorist every time you get on a flight, and suck all the more if you're a Hindu; after all, it must be galling to be under suspicion as a Muslim when in fact you too are worrying about being killed by a Muslim.

No moral here, just a nice story. He seemed like a lovely Bangalorean. Hope everything went well for him, especially with his visit to his family--he seemed a little fretful about that, about whether he was bringing back the right presents for his mother-in-law and his wife and his kids.

On a podcast way back when, as you may recall, our guest was Col. Chris Gibson, who, after three tours in Iraq, had retired from the U.S. Army to move back to his hometown, Old Kinderhook, to run for Congress in the 20th district of New York. Polling in this sprawling, largely rural district has been sporadic, but every indication for several months has been that Chris was badly trailing his opponent, the Democratic incumbent Scott Murphy.

I found this personally, frustrating, I'll admit: I grew up near that district, and when Chris was here at the Hoover Institution for a year I got to know him, and to get to know Chris Gibson is to admire him enormously. The problem? The usual problem in politics: Money. Whereas Chris's opponent is a wealthy businessman, Chris has spent his life leading soldiers and dodging gunfire, which is a good way to become a hero but a bad way to learn how to ask rich guys down in Manhattan to contribute to your campaign.

But you know what? Things have begun looking up. Sometime over the last couple of days the Cook Political Report moved Chris's race from "leans Democrat" to "tossup." And now Dick Morris has this:

Murphy v. Gibson: Democratic Rep. Scott Murphy hopes to win re-election by attacking his Republican challenger Chris Gibson for wanting to repeal ObamaCare. He'd better try something else. A recent poll by the National Republican Congressional Committee has him two points behind Gibson. The 20th district runs north from Hudson, skirts Albany and continues up to Glens Falls.

Why the change? Once again, Dick Morris:

New York state's congressional dele gation could see huge changes in the midterm elections. A virtual purge of Democrats is quite possible, with as many as 11 seats changing hands. New York is traditionally a late-deciding state because of the high cost of media here and the late primaries, so these races are coming into focus only now.

If you're a New Yorker--come to think of it, even if you're not--take a look at Chris, then consider clicking through to his website to see what you can do to help a good man in the final days of his race.

One popular idea making the rounds among some conservatives and Tea Partiers is a call for the repeal of the 17th Amendment. From the LA Times:

A common theme among those in the "tea party" movement is that ordinary citizens ought to participate more in the business of government. Yet some tea party activists — and likeminded politicians and commentators — are espousing a return to the election of U.S. senators by state legislatures rather than the people. That would require repealing the 17th Amendment, which was ratified in 1913.

The "Repeal the 17th" campaign is rooted in a nostalgia for an era in which state governments exercised as much influence as the federal government — or more.

There's a lot of truth to the argument that the enactment of the 17th Amendment undermined federalism. State legislatures have a greater institutional incentive to protect federalism than do the people of a state. The people of a state may want to expand federal program spending in order to get their share of tax revenues, even at the expense of greater national power over issues reserved to the states. Although they are also elected by the people, state legislators have more of an incentive to protect the original distribution of powers between the national and state governments.

Here is what James Madison had to say about the matter (during congressional discussion of the Bill of Rights in 1789):

[T]he State Legislatures will jealously and closely watch the operations of this Government, and be able to resist with more effect every assumption of power, than any other power on earth can do; and the greatest opponents to a Federal Government admit the State Legislatures to be sure guardians of the people's liberty

The Seventeenth Amendment weakened the states' ability to resist the expansion of federal powers. The problem is that there is no point to trying to fix this problem -- an effort to amend the Constitution will be fruitless. It requires two-thirds of the Congress and three-quarters of the states. The tea-partiers would be well advised to devote their efforts to achieving significant limits on the federal government -- such as limiting federal spending, cutting taxes, and reversing Obamacare -- that don't demand an amendment to the Constitution. They will have a limited political window to apply their political capital; constitutional amendments will only waste it.

Let me commend to your attention James S. Robbins' piece in World Affairs Journal on the legend of the Tet Offensive:

Tet is kept alive by the pervasive use of analogy in public discourse—not as an analytical framework to better understand or contextualize events but as a form of shorthand used to brand those events for media consumption. Such analogies are exercises in perception management, whether or not they have anything to do with the course and conduct of the insurgency or terrorist threat in question. The Tet story line is always lurking when U.S. forces are engaged against weak, unconventional enemies who lash out under limited and exceptional circumstances and briefly capture the attention of the media. Tet is then re-fought, providing a handy framework for revisiting familiar themes—intelligence failures, war crimes, terrorism, troop surges, leadership breakdowns, and media bias, among others.

Tet allows any collection of terrorists, insurgents, guerrillas, or other thugs who momentarily shock public perception through sudden, unanticipated acts of violence to achieve a succès d’éstime, even if they attain no significant objectives. It has become the standard an enemy has to meet in order to achieve victory, not actually prevailing on the battlefield, but seeming to, or in some cases simply trying to. In its function as a metaphor, Tet is a standing invitation to our enemies to seek low-cost, dramatic, and violent means of achieving high-impact strategic victories.

Quite. Time to stop going on and on about Tet; it wasn't what people seem to think it was and it isn't relevant anyway.

Tangentially, this passage is fascinating:

Reporters and opinion journalists, who seek to package stories using preexisting themes in order to give immediate (and potentially erroneous) context to events, are particularly susceptible to terrorist exploitation. In August 2006, Najd al-Rawi of the Global Islamic Media Front published an essay called “The Global Media: A Work Paper for Invading the U.S. Media.” Among the potential targets for terrorist information operations, he lists “American forums . . . chat rooms, well-known American newspapers and magazines, American TV stations which have Web sites and electronic e-mail addresses, and well-known American writers such as [Thomas] Friedman and [Francis] Fukuyama.”

I looked for this essay online, but couldn't find it. Can anyone?

I’ve never been one to get angry and indignant over the objectification of women in advertising. Or in the modeling industry. Or in the celebrity culture. I’m not sure why, honestly. Perhaps I should be more fired up about it. But I gobbled up Tiger Beat when I was younger, and then Seventeen and then Elle, Vogue, etc. I still enjoy flipping through a copy of US magazine. No big deal, in my view.

But in the past two weeks, the dangers of advertising on young girls, and the general sexualization of our culture -- much of which is gobbled up by kids and pre-teens -- has me thinking. Not getting me ticked off. Not getting me ranting on Facebook about it. Just thinking.

What do you think? Especially you women out there. Is this a hidden danger, for which all moms should keep up their guard?

In terms of being a model for my kids, I’m a little chubby (but I exercise and eat healthily, for the most part), I never wear makeup, and I have no interest in plastic surgery. I don't fear getting old. I don’t own a single item with a fashionable label. So there’s not much in the way of over-the-top vanity/image obsession going on around here. But I gather that the problem, as some people see it, is not in the homes. It’s advertising and “culture.”

Yesterday, an 11-year old girl was on the Today Show talking about being kicked off her cheerleading squad because she refused to chant about her “booty” and shake her rear-end in a suggestive manner. The 11-year-old is one of the squad elders. There are 7-year olds on the squad. See that video here.

More troubling, however, is the “related” link on the same page from a month earlier. A Detroit mom pulled her 6-year-old off a cheering squad when she heard her daughter was going to have to cheer and dance to:

Our backs ache, our skirts are too tight, we shake our booties from left to right!

The mother was mocked and labeled a “lunatic” for complaining.

I can’t imagine any of my children being cheerleaders, but, of course, it may happen. If my child’s squad is asked to shout out, “shake my booty” or gyrate their hips in front of an audience before age 20, I probably am going to get ticked off.

One more reason to love Clint Eastwood. Via Hot Air:

Clint Eastwood, legendary actor and director, told Katie Couric that while President Obama is a "nice fella," he's "not a fan of what he's doing at the moment.

During an interview about his latest film "Hereafter," Eastwood told Couric that the president is not "governing" and he's laying out lines in the hopes that people will believe him "so he can stay in his position."

Eastwood, who was once the Mayor of Carmel, Calif., expressed his view on the political election process.

"I don't think there's anybody I see out there, or many people that have that kind of discipline, that are willing to take a chance on losing."

"I just don't think he's governing," Eastwood said, "he's having to just lay out a certain line and hope that people will believe it to stay in the position."

Watch the clip here.

Very little, short of the cops lobbing smoke grenades into my house, as happens from time to time, brings tears to my eyes. This did. Courtesy of Breitbart's Big Government, a League of Women Voters debate between Joe Walsh and the incumbent Democratic congresswoman Melissa Bean. I'll say no more. Just watch.

Oh, Harry, really? The hubris...

(h/t The Corner & Breitbart).

Not only was Reid defending his Senate seat when he appeared on MSNBC's "The Ed Show" yesterday, as above, but he was also defending his manliness. Responding to Sharron Angle's repeated pleas that Reid man up on issues like social security and medicare, Reid told the show's host Ed Schultz, "I've never had to prove my manhood to anyone." Someone's getting a bit defensive. I can't help but think of his flap with Viagra.

Sarkozy is unyielding, and good for him. The riot police retook the oil refinery at Grandpuits, east of Paris, early this morning.

Workers have been camped for 10 days in front of the site, blocking access and contributing to punishing fuel shortages. As of Friday, about 20 percent of France's service stations were still empty, down from 40 percent a few days ago ...

Sarkozy ordered regional authorities to intervene and force open depots, accusing the strikers of holding ordinary people and the French economy "hostage." ...

The gas shortages and other disruptions caused by the conflict have hit many sectors of the economy, and Global Equities' head economist Marc Touati said it could wipe out between 0.1 and 0.2 percentage points of economic growth.

While many in France are used to strikes and protests, patience started wearing thin this week as gasoline supplies dwindled. ... Paris taxi driver Jerome Nourry resorted to getting gas in neighboring Belgium.

"We have to be inventive. I drove a customer to Belgium yesterday, so I took advantage (of the trip) to put some gas in a container," he said in Paris on Friday morning. "We do what we can, in order to be able to work."

And what do the soi-disant spokesmen for the working men have to say about this?

"We are outraged, scandalized," said Charles Foulard, a union leader at the Grandpuits depot.

But not, bien sûr, by the golden flock of morons who are determined to put his fellow citizens out of work.

Postscript: Today's "deliberately obtuse journalist" award goes to Siegfried Mortkowitz, who introduces his story about these events with this lede:

Paris - They are wearing leather jackets and chic Palestinian Kheffiyeh scarfs, they are teenagers and they are worried about their future.

You might think that sartorial detail would prompt a reporter's curiosity about the significance of those scarves, or at least some further comment, but no--they're just chic.

A friend of mine who is not the sort generally to find anything Glenn Greenwald writes persuasive dropped me a note last night to register his outrage over this weird story involving Alaska's Tea Party candidate Joe Miller, his use of active-duty soldiers as bodyguards, and a journalist who wound up in handcuffs at one of his campaign events. As Greenwald describes it,

One of the more disturbing election incidents took place in Alaska on Sunday night, when private "guards" working for GOP Senate nominee Joe Miller forcibly detained and handcuffed a journalist as he tried to ask the candidate questions which he did not want to answer. This photograph shows the journalist, Alaska Dispatch's Tony Hopfinger, handcuffed in a chair, surrounded by Miller's guards. This story became much worse yesterday when video was released that was taken by a reporter from the Anchorage Daily News showing that these guards thuggishly threatened at least two other reporters, from ADN, with physical detention as they tried to find out what happened, demanded that they leave or else "be handcuffed," and physically blocked them from filming the incident all while threatening to physically remove them from the event, which was advertised to the public.

But revelations today have made the story much, much worse still. ADN now reports that not only was Joe Miller's excuse for why he had hired private guards a lie, but two of the guards who handcuffed the journalist and threatened others are active-duty soldiers in the U.S. military.

Reports are now coming out that this security company is tied to extremist group loosely associated (very loosely, from what I can see) with Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols.

Here's the video that shows what happened. Salon describes it as "very dramatic." Now, I confess: I watched the video and my first thought was, "This by you is dramatic? Salon, you need a life. That's a total snoozer."

My second thought was that maybe I shouldn't be trusted on this. I've probably been a bit desensitized from living in a country where electoral politics look like this and where "thuggish threats to reporters" means this. That doesn't mean critics aren't right to say that what happened here shouldn't happen in America. Greenwald urges journalists of every stripe to protest this incident. I've got more urgent things to protest, but yes, on reflection, I'll register my distaste.

No, we shouldn't be happy with the idea of active-duty members of the armed forces performing citizen-arrests on journalists at campaign events. That's basically un-American. I'm not talking about whether they broke the law; I'm talking about the spirit of things. You don't want Claire Berlinski looking at videos of your campaign events and thinking, "Oh, that's just normal."

The closest Safeway to my apartment, where I sometimes reluctantly do my grocery shopping, is located in the San Francisco neighborhood known as the Western Addition.

On any given weekday at any hour of the day, this particular Safeway is a hub of activity. Elderly homeless men form a line at one end of the parking lot, waiting to redeem bags of cans and bottles for rebate checks at the recycling center. Young black men zip around the parking lot at breakneck speeds in lowrider town cars, blasting their tunes to garner attention. Drunk hoodlums loiter around the entrance of the market, panhandling and yelling at passersby. Checkout lines are populated by folks who pay for their groceries with a combination of food stamps, clipped coupons, and ziplock baggies full of pennies and nickels.

It was at this particular Safeway, that I was motioned over to a table near the store's entrance some weeks ago by a black man not more than half a decade older than me who was holding a clipboard. “Would you sign our petition, Miss?” he asked. To be polite, and because I was slightly curious, I heard him out. “What we’d like to do, is get a measure on the San Francisco ballot that would require city employees to contribute a small portion of their paycheck to their healthcare and retirement pensions. The city’s in a lot of trouble, and this could really help the situation,” he explained. Admittedly skeptical, I was a bit reluctant to accept the pen and clipboard that I was handed. But upon reading the detailed description of the measure he hoped to get on the ballot, and seeing that he'd already collected hundreds of signatures that day, I could find no reason why I shouldn’t add my name to his growing list of citizens calling for a practical step that had the potential to restore some small measure of fiscal sanity to my city.

I was apparently one of 77,000 other San Franciscans to sign this petition. In Friday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, Michael Moritz describes the battle behind Proposition B, and explains the hope it represents for a city mired in budget deficits, debt, and skyrocketing unemployment.

77,000 San Franciscans signed a petition to place a measure on the Nov. 2 ballot that would do what generations of politicians haven't: bring a modicum of sanity to the pension and benefit programs of San Francisco government employees. If passed, Proposition B would require all city employees to contribute up to 10% of their income to their pension plans, and to pay half of the health-care premiums of their dependents. This will save San Francisco at least $120 million a year, at a time when its pension tab is $400 million per year, up from $175 million in 2005.

Every incumbent official in the city opposes Proposition B except its sponsor, the progressive public defender Jeff Adachi, who is as far removed from being a tea party member as Wasilla is from Washington. The Democratic Party has condemned the initiative. Democratic Mayor Gavin Newsom says that if workers' benefits are trimmed it will be impossible to find replacements and that, rather than voting through Proposition B, we should "work together" to bring about change.

But San Franciscans know that unemployment rates top 20% in parts of California, that 50 years of just "working together" is what's landed us in this pickle, and that the city's current pension and benefit programs are unfair to all private-sector workers. On average, private-sector workers earn half as much as city employees. And as their savings disappear, they have no option but to continue working until their teeth fall out.

I marvel at how consistently liberals exempt themselves from standards they impose on others and how in the process of condemning certain behavior engage in the very type of behavior they condemn.

Let's focus on what Juan Williams said that led NPR to fire him -- other than their probable contempt for Fox News. Williams told Bill O'Reilly,

Look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

At the risk of being banned by Ricochet I must say I've felt exactly the same way before, waiting to board an airline. Others I have talked with -- people I wasn't with and didn't know -- felt similar feelings -- the bigots.

More bizarre than the firing was NPR's explanation. Its issued statement said, "His remarks on The O'Reilly Factor this past Monday were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR."

What about Juan's statements could have been inconsistent with NPR's editorial standards and practices? Does NPR have editorial standards that govern what its "subcontractor contributors" say when on other networks? How about in their kitchens?

I'd like to see the specific provision in their standards that forbids a contributor from expressing his heartfelt feelings, especially when those feelings are completely rational. He didn't say he feels nervous around Muslims wearing their garb anywhere else -- just on airplanes. He didn't say all Muslims are violent. To the contrary, he told O'Reilly that it's wrong to depict all Muslims as extremists. Considering the totality of Juan's statements, what does its firing say about its notion of tolerance?

Also, I wish NPR would explain how Juan's honest expression somehow undermined his credibility as a news analyst. We might note that Juan didn't make the statement defiantly. I'm not even sure he likes feeling the way he feels, but he nevertheless feels that way. But how does that single feeling of eeriness in a situation-specific environment cloud his judgment about anything else whatsoever in the universe? Eh?

In a recent incident also involving Bill O'Reilly, but on The View and with O'Reilly the target of the leftist rage, co-hosts Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg stomped off the stage when O'Reilly suggested Muslims were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Hmmm. If not Muslims, then who was responsible?

Leftist political correctness has always been a speech-chiller, but it's now expanding its scope to infect law enforcement as well. When Homeland Security and the FBI, for example, deliberately ignore Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan's Jihadist behavior as a possible predictor of his violent behavior because political correctness declares it off limits, then political correctness trumps the truth and even human lives. When post-massacre investigators whitewash their report of references to Hasan's radical religious beliefs as a causal factor, they invite negligence in the handling of such cases in the future and further endanger human lives.

For a while, when it was politically expedient, liberal Democrats castigated the intelligence agencies for not connecting the dots, even though they are the ones who segregated the agencies and erected a wall preventing the free sharing of intelligence. Though President Bush attempted to reconnect the dots, Democrats have been trying to disconnect them again. But now they're going further. They're actively eliminating some of the dots -- as with their sanitizing their investigative report.

Such dot elimination may make the preeners feel better about themselves and superior to others, but it won't do much for the lives it jeopardizes.

Over at the excellent Reason blog, Michael C. Moynihan points to a double standard.

Here's NPR's legal correspondent, Nina Totenberg, in 1995, wishing that Senator Jesse Helms -- or his grandchildren -- get AIDS, as "retributive justice":

Just to clarify: she wasn't fired for that. But Juan Williams, who was an NPR correspondent until a few days ago, was fired for saying this:

For saying what every single American has thought, at one time or another. For speaking a truth.

The folks at by Citizens Against Government Waste think that they have an answer to this question, and here is the advertisement that they are running nation-wide:

It is well worth seeing, and I suspect that it will have quite an impact.

"The old, bold Obama is gone," writes Tunku Varadarajan at the Daily Beast. "He now governs in fear." Case in point: The president has nixed from his Indian itinerary next month a visit to the Golden Temple, the most revered Sikh shrine. A visit to the shrine in Amritsar, India would require Obama to wear a knotted kerchief head covering, which Obama's handlers believe would exacerbate his image as a Muslim. The New York Times reports:

Temple officials said that American advance teams had gone to Amritsar...to discuss a possible visit. But the plan appears to have foundered on the thorny question of how Mr. Obama would cover his head, as Sikh tradition requires, while visiting the temple.

“To come to golden temple he needs to cover his head,” said Dalmegh Singh, secretary of the committee that runs the temple. “That is our tradition.”

Mr. Obama, a Christian, has struggled to fend off persistent rumors that he is a Muslim, and Sikhs in the United States have often been mistaken for Muslims.

Not only does Obama's decision to steer clear of the shrine speak to his cowardice, but it also sheds light on what he thinks about the American people, explains Varadarajan.

Above all, what does this decision to avoid Amritsar tell us about how this White House feels about Americans? Does [he] feel that ordinary Americans will pillory their president for having associated himself with "ragheads" in Amritsar? Is this a variant of that elite condescension for ordinary folks who are "bitter," and who "cling to guns and religion"?

That Obama can't find a way to explain the symbolism of a little square of cloth on his head—placed there by enthusiastic, welcoming Indian hosts who wish him and America well—suggests that he has lost confidence in his own intellect, his own charisma, his own eloquence. A man once celebrated for his promise of change now allows a state visit to be shaped by his fear of the blogosphere—and by his fear of abuse that might come at him from an ignorant subset of the American population. Let's just call it the pygmification of a president, and lament the gutlessness of this White House.

Andrew, you're right to note the the specific decision to withdraw the HMS Endurance. Another point to note (to quote myself):

In the same year, Parliament passed the British Nationality Act, which denied the islanders British citizenship. The measure was directed at another set of islanders who would have preferred to stay British, those of Hong Kong; the unintended consequence of the Act’s passage, however, was to suggest that Britain was no more willing to go to war with Argentina than with China. It is fair to fault the Thatcher government for giving signals that hinted of irresolution to the Argentineans – although it is also fair to note, as Thatcher does, that no one in his right mind expected them to do something quite so crazy. “Of course with the benefit of hindsight, we would always like to have acted differently,” she remarked. “So would the Argentineans.”

The moral is less about defense cuts, per se, than about the importance of unambiguous signaling as a deterrent to war.

Ben Domenech has been following Moderate Muslim Watch and writes about it at the Washington Examiner. He's keen on Malaysia and particularly on Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak:

While on a trip to New York last month, during which he called for a “global movement of moderates” to retake the center of the international conversation, I asked Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak about the experience in his country.

“We have always taken the position that Islam is an integral part of public policy in Malaysia. By doing so, we have taken the wind from the sails of the extremists. There is no contradiction between being moderate and being Muslim,” Najib told me. “Being moderate, taking the middle path, is fundamental to Islam. It is one of the pillars of Islam. Muslims have rights, but it’s also enshrined in the teachings of Islam to safeguard non-Muslims in your midst. It’s wrong for Muslims to even be unkind to non-Muslims.”

One prominent example in recent months has been the jailing of two Muslims convicted of church arson during a series of religiously motivated attacks earlier this year. They were given five year jail sentences.

“We want to show that we are fair. If you desecrate a church, or a mosque, or a temple, the punishment is and should be the same,” Najib said.

These are the kinds of examples of respecting minority religions that more Muslim nations ought to adopt. While words about moderation, tolerance, and evenhanded justice are well and good, it’s the actions that bear this out.

I'm not in Malaysia, and wary of making excessively confident pronouncements about the Malaysian political scene. But here's what I can piece together. First, that series of "religiously motivated attacks" should probably worry us more than the jail sentences should reassure us. This report on extremism in Malaysia gives a fuller picture of the situation.

Second, Najib and opposition leader are Anwar Ibrahim are at each others' throats, with both competing to position themselves in the eyes of the US as the leading light of Malaysian moderation. Anwar is now facing flogging and a 20-year jail sentence on sodomy charges, reputedly trumped-up, and even if they weren't trumped up, the words "flogging" and "sodomy charges" speak for themselves--as should such words as, "It's illegal to convert from Islam in Malaysia."

Everyone in Malaysia is accusing everyone else of massive corruption, all quite credibly, and when they're not accusing each other of corruption, they're accusing each other of collaborating with the Jewnited States. Former prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is a malicious, raving anti-Semitic loon. Anwar is another malicious, raving anti-Semitic loon. He's being defended by a remarkably unlikely duo--Paul Wolfowitz and Al Gore, to wit--who last summer leapt to his defense in a jointly-authored piece in the Wall Street Journal:

We come from opposite sides of the political spectrum and disagree about a great many things. However, one issue that brings us together is the case of Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister of Malaysia who is now leader of the political opposition in that country.

Mr. Anwar has been charged under very dubious circumstances with sodomy, a criminal offense under Malaysian law. If convicted, he faces a possible 20-year sentence—effectively life in prison for a man of 63. His trial, scheduled to resume next week, threatens not just Mr. Anwar but all those in Malaysia who have struggled for a freer and more democratic nation. It is also important for the rest of the world, because it casts a troubling shadow over the future of a nation that should be a model for other Muslim countries.

Our views of Anwar Ibrahim have been formed completely independently of each other. We do not always agree with his views on foreign policy, but we do agree that as a political leader, statesman and intellectual, Mr. Anwar possesses qualities that encourage hope for the future. These qualities include lucidity and openness to debate and engagement; commitment to principles of accountability and good governance; and a serious concern for the future of his country and the world—not to mention his extraordinary courage in standing up for what he believes. We are convinced that he is committed to the values of pluralism, tolerance and freedom that are needed for Malaysia to flourish.

Now, I suppose I'd agree that locking up your opposition leader on "highly dubious charges of sodomy" is not the best press for your moderate Muslim country. What I don't quite get here is why anyone would think Anwar is committed to the values of pluralism, tolerance and freedom needed for Malaysia to flourish. He is, as I say, a gibbering, anti-Semitic loon. He also has more than a few uncomfortable connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. He co-founded the IIIT, for example, which is pretty much a Brotherhood front organization in the United States. It's been raided by the FBI; it's members have been arrested on terrorism charges; it publishes obscene Islamist propaganda--and while the name IIIT probably doesn't ring a bell with the average American citizen, it surely should ring a few bells with Paul Wolfowitz. (Al Gore is a lost cause.) I get very tired of seeing these connections overlooked by people who should know better.

It does seem Najib is the less odious of the lot--Meet the New, Less Anti-Semitic Malaysia reads the headline of a blurb about him in Foreign Policy, damning him with faint praise.

But let's not get overly excited here too soon. I'm pleased that Najib isn't Mahathir and he isn't Anwar. But Malaysia's entire political culture obviously has a few issues to work out.

The mainstream media (which are on the fringe) support the centrist Democrats (who are on the far left) against the far right Tea Partiers (who are at the center) and their fringe candidates (who are in the mainstream).

I have a piece in today's Politico about the 2010 Jewish vote, and how Jews may not be as monolithically liberal in state and local races as they tend to be in national elections. While no Republican presidential candidate has earned more than 25% of the Jewish vote since Reagan, Chris Christie received 38% of the Jewish vote in New Jersey in 2009, and a number of races this year could be affected by similar shifts in the Jewish vote. I am thinking, in particular, of the Senate races in Pennsylvania and Florida.

Putting National Public Radio's firing of Juan Williams aside, the more important question is why does NPR (or PBS, for that matter) continue to exist in this era of hundreds of cable and satellite outlets and thousands of radio stations and hundreds of thousands of Internet choices?

It can't be for balance. Just ask any liberal whether he thinks there aren't enough conservative voices on the air, and he'll probably laugh at you. And you may have heard that conservatives believe there's a glut of liberal voices. It also can't be for variety. What with The History Channel, The Smithsonian Channel, Logo, The Food Network, et al, what voids do these publicly-funded networks fill? And it certainly can't be for tolerance of opposing views; just ask Juan Williams.

I think both NPR and PBS provide some really good programming (where else can I get my fix of doo-wop music and Fawlty Towers reruns?), but as deficits explode, it might be a good time to ask whether the need for so-called public broadcasting has passed.

... that on June 1, 2010, when you googled the word "Hayek" that Salma Hayek was the first hit to come up on Google, but that on July 1, 2010, when you googled the word "Hayek," Friedrich August von Hayek was number one? Of course, this was in large part thanks to Glenn Beck's endorsement of The Road to Serfdom on his June 8, 2010 broadcast, but it's a fun little cultural tidbit, no less--and, perhaps, a sign of the times. (Hat tip Richard Sousa at the Hoover Institution).

For the record, Friedrich is still holding onto the number one spot.