A former editor of mine now works for a blue-dog Democrat in the U.S. Senate. He put a picture up on Facebook of a Tea Party protester with a sign that said "BIG GOVERMENT MEANS LESS INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM!" His caption said that he "could take the Teaba##ers a little more seriously if only they could learn how to spell." And then his Facebook friends gave the post thumbs up and added comments. Mine was "As long as we all apply smug condescension and sexual slurs against our political opponents, we'll be all right."

Anyway, I thought of this when I read on a local blog about an upcoming theater production in the 'hood:

Gross National Product returns to Washington to mock the vote with a parody of the Mid Term elections entitled “Don’t Tea on Me” which highlights the lowlifes and multiple issues including Tea Party politics from rights for zygotes to banning Social Security and beyond.

What a great idea: combining the pain of normal community theater with the self-righteousness of modern liberalism. To be sure, the group says that it's known for skewering the powers-that-be. With this title and description, I have no doubt that the Democrats who control the House, Senate and White House are going to get it good and hard.

A friend from the center-left camp wrote to me to say:

I was curious how the Ricochet community would respond to the Family Guy episode in which Rush Limbaugh guests, and I was surprised to see no one had posted anything about it yet. It makes Limbaugh seem like a good guy (and a good sport), but to me it toed the line between making conservative stereotypes seem absurd (by exaggerating conservative stereotypes) and making conservatives seem absurd (by exaggerating conservative stereotypes).

Since I haven't seen the episode myself, and thus can't vouch for its adherence to our Code of Conduct, I won't link to it. But you can find it using the search function at Hulu. Here's a preview:

Is the new Christine O'Donnell television ad likely to change hearts and minds about the Republican senate candidate in Delaware?

That's a message Republicans would do well to staple to their foreheads. In comments at the Hill on the latest numbers in the New York Governor's race (Paladino is down against Cuomo by as much as Hillary's losing to Obama), we find this:

I'm not surprised Paladino has slipped in the polls. The campaign lacks any significant organization outside of Buffalo. I've made several attempts to volunteer in NYC, but was referred to the Republican party HQ in Manhattan.

A powerful, thorough, effective network of local operations was key to Obama's decisive victory. A groundswell is great, but not without a ground game.

Speaking at a Greater Freedom Rally at a Baptist church in South Carolina, Senator Jim DeMint made a few comments that surely resonated with his socially conservative Baptist audience, but raise a few eyebrows among our libertarian brethren.

DeMint said if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn't be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who's sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn't be in the classroom.

Ricochet member Trace Urdan, who e-mailed me the article attached a note that said, "Doesn't sound like limited government to me..." Fair enough. But Trace's comment hints at a larger question: Is social conservatism reconcilable with the notion of limited government?

As Dinesh D'Souza explains in his Letters To a Young Conservative (which I highly recommend for our high school aged readers), social conservatism and fiscal conservatism in concert form a cohesive and consistent political philosophy.

The central libertarian principle is freedom, and to defend freedom, some libertarians find themselves arguing that whatever people choose is always right. But one could arrive at this view only from the premise that human nature is so good that it is virtually flawless. In reality, human nature is flawed, and freedom is frequently used badly. Conservatives understand this. Conservatives defend freedom not because they believe in the right to do as you please, but because freedom is the precondition for virtue. It is only when people choose freely that they can choose the good. Without freedom there is no virtue: A coerced virtue is no virtue at all.

...Conservatives, like libertarians, resist looking to the government to redistribute income. But on some occasions, conservatives are willing to use the power of government to foster virtue...[G]overnment policy does influence behavior, and conservatives are not averse to using the instruments of government, such as the presidential bully pulpit or the incentive structure of the tax code, to promote decent institutions (such as intact families) and decent behavior (such as teenage sexual abstinence).

Thus Jim DeMint, with his lifetime ACU score of 98.55, can certainly advocate for morality in the classroom without compromising his status as a champion for limited government when it comes to health care, the economy, the automotive industry, the banking industry, insurance, trans fats, or your wallet.

As Daniel Foster points out at the Corner, Nevada undecideds are trending against Reid and in Angle's favor. With elections just a month away, if you're still undecided, you've made a decision already. You've decided you don't like what your incumbent has to show for his or her time in office. You're still unsure whether the challenger's offering something more attractive than what the incumbent is selling now. But especially in an election like this year's, the sitting party has in an important way already lost the undecideds. Democrats might regain them -- or some of them -- over the next thirty days. More likely, I'd wager, we'll continue to see trends like Nevada's popping up elsewhere.

I know, it happens all the time here in America. But apparently, it's big news in Brazil, where the clown Tiririca ("Grumpy") has won a landslide victory on the slogan "it can't get any worse." Unlike his counterparts in Washington, Grumpy the Clown will at least have an excuse for not reading any of the bills he votes on.

PS - Thanks to Kenneth for mentioning this development in an earlier comment. I thought it deserved its own post.

I love that he's keeping the spotlight on DC and Rhee.

Hey! That rhymes!

Will there be a Republican blow-out four weeks from today? The evidence mounts.

Last week, I posted on this thrice -- pointing to a survey done by Glenn Bolger of Public Opinion Strategies for the American Action Network, which showed that -- while the Republican advantage on the generic ballot was only 5% -- the party had an 18% advantage in the 66 House districts currently held by the Democrats and rated a toss-up by Charlie Cook at the time the poll was taken; then, noting that John Raese had opened up a modest lead in the West Virginia Senate race, that Linda McMahon seemed to be closing in on Richard Blumenthal in the Connecticut Senate race and that Dino Rossi seemed about to overtake Patty Murray in the Senate race in the state of Washington; and, finally, adding that Jay Cost had demonstrated that the CNN/Time poll suggesting both Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown up 9% in their races against Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman was built on the absurd presumption that the Democratic component of the California electorate in November would be considerably larger than it was in 2008, 2006, or 2004.

Late Sunday, Gallup released a generic-ballot poll that is a real shocker. Since 1942, Gallup has been asking registered voters whom they would vote for if they were to vote today. Recently, Gallup has posted a chart showing the trends from 1950 to 2006. As Michael Barone explained in his Washington Examiner column yesterday, the latest Gallup poll shows the Republicans ahead 46%-42%, “about as good a score as Republicans have ever had.” At this stage in the race (usually a bit earlier, in fact), Gallup also releases data concerning likely voters. This year the data is apt to knock your socks off.

If there is a high turnout of voters, Gallup suggests a 53%-40% split in favor of the Republicans. If there is a low turnout, the data suggests a 56%-38% split. What does this mean? Here is what Michael suggests:

These two numbers, if translated into popular votes in the 435 congressional districts, suggest huge gains for Republicans and a Republican House majority the likes of which we have not seen since the election cycles of 1946 or even 1928. For months, people have been asking me if this year looks like ’94. My response is that the poll numbers suggest it looks like 1994, when Republicans gained 52 seats in a House of 435 seats. Or perhaps somewhat better for Republicans and worse for Democrats. The Gallup high turnout and low turnout numbers suggest it looks like 1894, when Republicans gained more than 100 seats in a House of approximately 350 seats.

Michael is cautious. The numbers, as he explains, are volatile. Scott Rassmussen – who bases his polling on likely voters – has that split at 45%-42%, down from the 48%-38% split that he recorded on 19 September. In a post this morning, Jay Cost compares the Rassmussen poll with the Gallup poll. He urges caution. He doubts that the Republicans will win by 18% or even 13%. But what he notices is this: in both polls, the independents are breaking decisively for the Republicans. Moreover, he points to the fact that Barbara Boxer in California and Patti Murray in Washington are incumbents polling under 50% (a danger sign) and that the Democrats are not doing at all well in statewide races in Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

I believe that the polling data understates what is likely to happen on 2 November. The extent of their volatility is a sign that things are happening that they do not yet know how to measure. In my lifetime, no one has seen a Republican surge on the scale of the one we are witnessing. It is possible that things will tighten between now and November. That is the norm. But we do not live in normal times. No pollster predicted the victories of Joe Miller and Christine O’Donnell. In my judgment, no pollster – apart, perhaps, from Gallup – recognizes fully the depth of the anger gripping the voting public. Think about the difference in size between the Glenn Beck rally in late August and the “One Nation” rally last weekend. Then, consider how much money the unions spent to bus people in to the latter. Think about the fact that no Democrat running for Congress is running advertisements touting the party’s legislative accomplishment.

I repeat my prediction. The Republicans will pick up between 70 and 100 seats in the House, and they will take the Senate. Lay in the champagne. Tell your employer that you will be late to work on 3 November.

Aaron Sorkin, the creator of the new film about facebook called The Social Network, appeared on CNN last night to promote his new movie. How did he do that, you ask? By throwing some bombs at Sarah Palin.

Via Politics Daily (where you can also watch the clip):

To promote his new movie, "The Social Network," screenwriter and producer Aaron Sorkin appeared on the first episode of CNN's "Parker Spitzer" Monday night. In the process, he made some pretty harsh political statements, including calling Sarah Palin an "idiot."

Sorkin went on to say that the former Alaska governor is a "remarkably, stunningly, jaw-droppingly incompetent and mean woman."

I like Sorkin's work--including the films A Few Good Men, The American President, and the television show The West Wing--but why is he trying to moonlight as a talking head? He's clearly not good at it. There's no problem with him appearing on CNN to talk about his new movie, but he should have stuck to the script. He shouldn't quit his day job.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was on the campaign trail yesterday speaking in Iowa, a state that would of course be very consequential in his potential bid for the presidency in 2012.

Christie dispelled speculation that he was in Iowa for his own political reasons, saying he was there campaigning for Iowa's Republican gubernatorial candidate, and former Iowa governor, Terry Branstad. Branstad has been trouncing his Democratic opponent, incumbent Chet Culver, in the polls. The latest RealClearPolitics average has Branstad in the lead by over 17 points.

Christie rallied the conservative activists he addressed by an appeal to small government fiscal conservatism, which is where the future of the Republican party lies, he said:

We lost our way a number of years ago, and we became tax and spend light. Less spending, smaller government, less regulation, smaller government — we're going to be all about that again. We have to step up and stand for those principles again.

In his characteristic bluntness, he noted: "As a party, it is put up or shut up time."

This is a message he's been spreading nationwide in the last few months. According to a news report:

Since he defeated former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, Christie has been traveling across the U.S. with a single message: If he can sell his anti-tax, anti-government message in New Jersey, it can resonate everywhere.

It sounds like Christie may be preparing for a presidential run--or, at least, keeping his options open regarding one. Why else would he be traveling around the country selling his policies and, specifically, appearing in Iowa on behalf of a gubernatorial candidate who is clearly going to win with or without outside help?

I do not know Charles Gasparino. We have never met. But I do know his work as a journalist. I read him assiduously. To the best of my knowledge, no one has done a better job to date in following the machinations linking the Obama administration and Wall Street.

So I am pleased – as you should be as well – that Sentinel HC today released his new book Bought and Paid For: The Unholy Alliance Between Barack Obama and Wall Street. Here is the money quote:

The fact of the matter is, when you strip away the name-calling and class warfare coming from the Obama administration, and when you ignore Wall Street’s gripes about the new financial reform legislation that will put a crimp in some of its profits, these two entities are far more aligned than meets the casual eye. They coexist to help each other—in an unholy alliance against the American taxpayer.

You can read an excerpt on Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com.

Geert is, of course, the notorious mastermind behind the plan to stage simultaneous commando-style raids on major targets in England, France, and Germany. The revelation of Geert's latest terror plot has shaken an already edgy Europe, which has seen the Eiffel Tower evacuated twice in the past two weeks due to his bomb threats, the arrest in Norway of Geert operatives--who planned another attack on the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten--and specific threats to the French public transportation system. Officials warn that Geert is planning a "Mumbai-style rampage" on such targets as the Eiffel Tower, the Hotel Adlon near Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, the Notre Dame Cathedral, Berlin's Central Station and the Alexanderplatz TV tower. Security lines in airports throughout Europe are stretching halfway to Moscow as the result of this latest Geertist threat. The Geertist terror alert level in France is "Red," as it is in Britain.

Wait, no, I'm confused. Geert is the guy who is giving Islam a bad name.

Judith Shluvetich published a thoughtful article a couple of weeks ago in The New Republic. She lives in New York; I live in a small town in Michigan some twenty miles from the Indiana-Ohio line. We nonetheless fret about the same problem.

You see, we both have children, and we do not let them run wild. Her parents did, and so did mine – and we both know that we profited from the freedom. But fearful that our offspring might get hurt, we do not do with regard to them what our parents did with regard to us. “What our children really want,” she says,

is not unstructured time, which in the absence of a playdate is often lonely, but unstructured social interaction, the collective effervescence that, if it isn’t interfered with, gels into play. That is precisely what they can’t have, because they no longer have access to the unmonitored spaces—the blocks, streets, yards, sandlots, fire hydrants, junk heaps, roofs, and sewer grates—where children used to gather, unbidden, for Red Rover or jump rope or hand-ball or other games whose names were not recorded because they were less respectable.

Perhaps because she is writing for The New Republic, Ms. Shluvetich blames her difficulties on the lack of public provision. Her son has better sense. He blames her “and my overcontrolling kind,” she reports, adding, “And I blame us too, but for a slightly different reason. I blame us for failing to challenge the ethos of bourgeois individualism that prevents local governments from building cities and towns that are more livable for children (though it must be said that the New York City Parks Department has either built or fixed up 140 playgrounds since Michael Bloomberg became mayor in 2002).” And to support her argument, being a good liberal, she cites a study by a couple of German sociologists.

But if Ms. Shluvetich’s knee-jerk response and her respect for sociologists is patently absurd – if she looks to the public authorities to create safe spaces for and thereby contrive what she rightly describes as “unstructured social interaction” – she is nonetheless right to worry. “I would never knowingly let my children get away with” sort of thing I went through myself, she observes, “and [I] would never want them to experience social humiliation, but I do worry about what will happen to them if they don’t.”

Last year I found myself in charge of an unusually large group playdate, half a dozen or so seven-year-old boys crammed into my apartment, and discovered, to my dismay, not that they couldn’t all get along—that was to be expected—but that they had no stomach for their own fighting. Every time an argument would break out about the choice of game or the distribution of lightsabers, a boy would run up to me. At first I thought I was being asked to adjudicate, but before I could figure out how to get out of doing so, I discovered that wasn’t what the boys wanted. They wanted me to turn on the television. If I turned on the television, they wouldn’t have to play anymore, and then they wouldn’t fight. I imagined legions of exhausted babysitters and mothers settling disputes in this way, and my son and his friends drawing the obvious conclusion: that group play is dangerous because conflict is intolerable, and that electronic entertainment is a good way to avoid both.

What Ms. Shluvetich cannot face up to is the fact that one cannot have “unstructured social interaction” between children without there being risks. She in San Juan and I in Tulsa, Denver, and Oklahoma City took those risks, and our parents would have been horrified had they known the whole story. I was in my late thirties before I told my mother about the night I spent in jail in Idaho Springs, Colorado when I was fifteen, and she was dismayed even then.

Fresh from skiing at Arapahoe Basin and on my way to Denver, I got stranded when the car – piloted by an older woman (aged a venerable sixteen) whom I had picked up on the slopes – broke down. The pass was closed because of a blizzard, and the midnight bus did not come. I was desperately in need of a warm place in which to sleep and so, with the friend who accompanied me on this adventure, I stopped the local cop car, and we asked whether the police could put us up. The jail was in the basement of the courthouse, and I laugh even now when I think of us rattling the bars, then settling down for a few hours of shut-eye under the filthy army surplus blankets used by legions of our predecessors in that cell. It was in consequence of this misadventure and other occasions in which I had to fall back on my own resources that I learned how to make my way in the world.

Like Ms. Shluvetich, I worry about my own children. She and I and our kind are apt to be overprotective. I see the consequences all about me. When I was a student in college – back, as I tell my students, in the penultimate quarter-century of the last millennium – I could not have imagined returning home to live after college, and I would not have been welcome. Now – and this was no less true before the current economic downturn – it is not at all uncommon for twenty-two-year-olds to reside in their parents’ home for a few years after college.

These kids leave home for college at eighteen, but they never sever the umbilical cord linking them to their parents, and they go back to the nest every summer thereafter. In my generation, college students may have made this mistake the summer after their freshman year, but not thereafter. Instead, they went to Maine, Martha’s Vineyard, or the Jersey Shore and worked as lifeguards, bartenders, waiters and waitresses in the beach towns there, or they migrated to New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago and landed summer jobs with firms such as IBM. Now servile labor in the beach towns is reserved for Ukrainians and Russians and Rumanians who come in on short-term work visas from abroad, and upper middle-class American kids miss out on the “unstructured social interaction” we had to cope with – and, frankly, they are worse off for being pampered.

In colonial America, young people became adults at the age of eighteen. When does adulthood begin these days? At the age of thirty? And will these thirty-year-olds be able to handle adversity? I have my doubts.

From the Office of Self-Promotion:

Every now and then, the folks who run National Review take my stuff and put it outside the paywall. For which I'm always grateful, because then more people get to read it and enjoy its healing power.

They've done it this week, with my recent piece on the War on Your Bathroom. It starts, as most things do, with a conversation about toilets:

Arriving late one night into Tokyo, I checked into my hotel room to discover the world’s most complicated toilet.

There were hoses and nozzles where hoses and nozzles probably shouldn’t be, and along the side there was an alarming set of button and switches, which made the entire contraption look like a neat freak’s electric chair.

But, you know, when in Rome, right?

It goes on from there. (The control panel of the toilet, by the way, is pictured above.) What I'm talking about is the assault of the eco-police into a room that most of us think of as a sanctuary, a place of repose. A place where civilization reaches its pinnacle, with toilets that flush (and do a lot of other stuff, too, especially in Japan) and showers that cascade warm water and bulbs that flatter us with brightness and color.

It's all going. Lightbulbs first. Then they came for the showerheads. And you know what's going to be next, right?

It’s all about less with them. As far as the environmental movement is concerned, we’re running out of everything — polar icecaps, sea turtles, crude oil — and the trick is to cut our appetites down to size, to stop wanting to stand under a gushing showerhead in a bright morning bathroom and think, I can handle what’s coming at me today.

It’s not about showerheads and wattage. It’s about optimism. Either you think a more prosperous world is a good thing — that prosperity and ingenuity can solve most of our pressing problems — or you don’t. Either you think that being able to afford an expensive showerhead is a component of a complicated web of incentives designed to inspire the next Thomas Edison to invent something useful — like, say, a battery-powered car or a brighter energy-saving light bulb — or you think that we’re done, we’ve invented everything already and we need to divvy up a shrinking pie. For the Left, there are no light-bulb moments in the future.

The whole article is here. Click away and then come back to tell me what you think of it. But also at least consider subscribing to the digital edition of NR -- I mean, in addition to becoming a member of Ricochet.

I'm seeing a flurry of articles proudly proclaiming that TARP was in fact a great success, given that the Congressional Budget Office has reduced the loss projections to to $66 billion. Why is the media ignoring this, asks NPR?

I'm ignoring it because this misses the point. (Or more precisely, I'm not ignoring it, I'm dismissing it.) First, the projections are based on the fantasy that the government will over the long-term get good returns on its stake in bailed-out companies. Look at the example of British Leyland and ask yourself how likely that is. Of course the automakers are doing well now: They just got a huge cash infusion from the government. I'd be doing great if the government had just given me that much money, too. It doesn't mean that in the long run I'd be producing products consumers want to buy at prices they want to pay.

Second, it ignores the huge opportunity cost of spending the money that way--that's money that could have been invested in productive sectors of the economy. (Imagine if that much money had been invested privately by individual citizens, not the government, in innovative small businesses.) Third, it once again taught the financial industry that it will be rewarded for insane risk-taking, incompetence and failure, making it that much more likely that the very same bozos will do it again.

Dean Baker makes these points clearly and well. His conclusion--that TARP caused the financial crisis--is too strong; there were quite a few idiotic policies involved. But he's basically right. It was an abomination.

She came home from her private girls school and told us over the dinner table that in Health Class they were discussing world issues. (Don't ask me how this tied in, maybe through Obamacare.) Twenty eighth grade girls were asked to go to one side of the room if their answer was "yes" and the other if "no." The question was "Do you think Obama is doing a good job?" Only my daughter and one other girl went to the "no" side of the room. The next question was, "Do you think the United States will be better in ten years because of Obama?" She didn't budge. My husband and I couldn't believe it. What guts! I told her I was going to post this on Ricochet and she said, "Yay. I'll be famous." Okay, so she is still 13. Her name is Wally. So now she's famous.

PS...the other girl's father is a doctor.

Victor Davis Hanson, taping Uncommon Knowledge half an hour ago:

When Rome collapsed in the fifth century, its enemies numbered only a fraction of those the Romans had defeated in the Punic Wars five hundred years earlier. Decline is a choice. It always is.

In an article in the LA Times today, the author claims that the current Supreme Court is the most conservative court in decades:

As the Supreme Court begins its new term Monday, its sixth with John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice, the reality is that this is the most conservative court since the mid-1930s. Since Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, conservatives have sought to change constitutional law, and they have succeeded in virtually every area.

During the first years of the Roberts court, it has consistently ruled in favor of corporate power, such as in holding that corporations have the 1st Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts in independent political campaigns. For the first time in American history, the high court has struck down laws regulating firearms as violations of the 2nd Amendment and held that the Constitution protects a right of individuals to possess guns. It has dramatically cut back on the rights of criminal defendants, especially as to the exclusion of evidence gained through illegal searches and seizures under the 4th Amendment and the protections of the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination. It has greatly limited the ability of the government to formulate remedies for the segregation of public schools. It has significantly expanded the power of the government to regulate abortions.

There is some insight and much exaggeration in this claim.

The first point is to clarify the terms of debate. There are in fact three very different orientations to constitutional law that should not be collapsed into two. The liberal position is essentially suspicious of corporate and business power, and supportive of individual rights. It is collectivist on such matters as employment law and libertarian on free speech for dissenters. It has, like the conservative view, a case-by-case view on judicial restraint versus judicial activism. No deep principle. The willingness to let courts decide matters depends on the extent to which there is agreement with what they say.

On the other hand, the conservative side tends to be more market oriented as a political matter, but still somewhat suspicious of judicial enforcement of these norms. Hence it will side with the liberals (or progressives) in condemning decisions like Lochner v. New York insofar as they limit the power of states to impose either minimum wage or maximum hour laws.

There is, however, a third way, which is more classical liberal and more self-consciously imitative of Madison and his concern with factions that take over the political process. It in general is deeply suspicious of administrative agencies, given its support of separation of powers, and thinks that federalism, with limited federal powers is also needed. This position also tends to be sympathetic with all claims for liberty, regardless of whether they are treated as personal or economic, again with variations on abortion and gay marriage. The former is always dicey because if the fetus is a person, then the Millian harm principle could apply. The latter because of the view that the moral case for gay marriage, however strong, does not line up with the historical view of constitutional law that gives extensive powers to the state to regulate “morals” issues such as marriage and sexuality.

Clearly, this is a crowded a confused landscape. So now to the particulars.

On corporate power, the statement is grotesque. Citizens United did not hold that corporations “have the 1st Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts in independent political campaigns.” It only held that the constitution did not prevent them from funding electioneering communications from general funds within thirty days of an election or primary. Otherwise the rules on corporate giving remain immensely complicated and largely in tact. The decision moreover in Citizens United is correct. The bottom line is that corporations are not keen on general election campaigns (even if their shareholders are). They prefer focused giving on issues, which is as it should be. Only fringe corporations with no consumer base may take advantage of this privilege, which otherwise will have little impact.

The Second Amendment cases on guns is much more complicated again, and as a textualist I think that the Court decisions in both Heller and McDonald was wrong. As a classical liberal I also think that the case for most gun regulation is pretty weak, but not necessarily fatal. There is a clear sense in which originalism does not speak with a single voice, as the quoted passage tends to say.

On school integration, I don’t think that it is accurate to say the court “has greatly limited the ability of the government to formulate remedies for the segregation of public schools.” Segregation in the old sense is not the issue. It is busing and integration. On these questions, I think that government should have some degree to manage intelligently its student population, and therefore oppose what was done. I don’t even know if most libertarians agree.

There is a larger theme here. One should first state the propositions accurately, and then try to make some independent judgment as to how the constitution plays out. If it always agrees with your moral priors, you are doing something wrong.

More from Epstein & Yoo:

Do Corporations Have the Same Rights as Citizens?

Is There a Judicial Vacancy Crisis?

We ran a lot of Public Service Announcements on my old radio show, alas. Ad reps found it hard to sell that coveted 11:51 PM slot, so we’d have PSAs telling people not to smoke dope. Also, please join the Coast Guard. Also, only you can prevent forest fires. Unless you are in the Coast Guard. This message has been brought to you by the Ad Council, which is dedicated to filling air time so the host can run down the hall to the bathroom.

The ads were always stiff or dull or painful, like they’d brought over the creative team from East Germany. (“We’re the team who came up with the slogan, “The wall looks the same on the other side, so why bother?’) It was a mystery: ad people can make you want to buy Corn-flavored Ice Cream if they try hard, but give them a Big Issue and they act like someone who couldn’t sell a pail of water to someone whose pants were on fire.

Here’s the latest one making the rounds:

Nice lean protein-packed beef, a bun, good ol’ Fancy Ketchup = intravenous drug use. It’s not as bad as last week’s festival of Exploding Children, but it’s the other side of the bloody coin: the dreary, miserable, scolding soul of our Betters.

(NOTE: video not showing up in preview; I'm sure the mods will fix, but the link will take you to the YouTube site.)

According to Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight, Republicans can expand the Senate playing field by putting Connecticut and West Virginia into play.

Were they to win those states, Republicans could lose California, Delaware and Washington and still take claim of the Senate. And new polling suggests they could do just that.

The RCP polling average shows Democrat Dick Blumenthal at a four point advantage over Republican Linda McMahon in the Connecticut Senate race for Chris Dodd's vacated seat. Due to the low population of undecideds in the state at this late stage of the game, Nate Silver argues that this might be a pretty solid four point lead for Blumenthal. But newly-released ads like this one might just keep the seat up for grabs.

As a result of a new study, Stanford researchers have found a way to predict which human embryos will have the best shot of survival. An unnamed Ricochet member has some reactions to this news:

The results of this study are of practical significance for parents contemplating in vitro fertilization, the procedure that gave us our two children (Dr. Cedars, described in the article, was our IVF doctor). This is because, while most parents are keenly, even desperately interested in having one child, practical and financial realities make them leery of multiples. Twins are fairly manageable, but it gets a lot harder with triplets or more.

For parents who aren't opposed to abortion, the practice is to transfer into the uterus three, four, or more embryos/blastocysts so as to maximize the chances for at least one successful birth. If more than one blastocyst implants, then the parents can engage in "selective reduction" -- using ultrasound to try to guess which implanted blastocyst is most likely to make it, and then aborting the others.

Parents who, like us, would never even consider abortion, only transfer as many blastocysts as we think we can handle, and freeze the rest. This is more time-consuming and expensive, but it's our only considered alternative.

Better assessment of each blastocyst's viability decreases the odds of having high multiples. For example, if two of your blastocysts are of high quality and four of low quality, you can transfer one or two high quality blastocysts immediately and freeze the rest. Then, for the next attempt, you can transfer the remaining four, low quality blastocysts. In the unlikely event that you end up with four implantations, you can carry them to term and either (a) count your blessings and deal with the challenges; or (b) adopt some of them out.

Our Ricochet member also notes that the SFGate article linked to above describes the author of the study, Dr. Renee Reijo Pera, as the director of Stanford's Center for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Education. Yet it quotes her as saying:

The authors, we sat around in a group watching the first video, and we said, 'My goodness, that's beautiful.' If you watch the videos, this is how life begins. The fascinating thing for me is that this is our origin.

In response, our member states:

It's very hard for me to understand how she reconciles her apparently acute understanding of life's beginnings in the embryo with her center's destruction of the same.

As the November midterms approach, there seems to be a growing sense of unease on the Right. Every poll that shows races tightening or every story about the Democrats being poised to go negative in the closing weeks of the campaign brings a chill to the spine of Conservatives as they wonder if they peaked too early. Even Ricochet’s own Peter Robinson, never known for wobbly knees, seems to be concerned with each poll showing any sort of change drifting to the Democrats. Well, to borrow a phrase from the President to his dispirited base, “buck up.” Everything will be fine.

Polls tend to tighten as elections get closer, and the trend was so unfavorable for the Dems, it would have been surprising if things didn’t get a little closer. But the anger and seriousness of purpose of the Tea Party folks and others on the Right are not dissipating; they still can’t wait for November 2 to arrive. And the groups that most strongly back the President are those traditionally least likely to vote. Besides which, pollsters still privately concede that their data may be underestimating discontent as respondents, aware of the campaign to tar critics as racists, are increasingly unwilling to express their views openly.

However, if you’re looking for the most indisputable evidence that everything will be fine, look no further than Bob Shrum, Democratic political consultant, among whose assignments has been senior advisor to the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004 and the Gore campaign in 2000. He worked to get Dick Gephardt the 1988 Democratic Presidential nomination, and he helped prepare Michael Dukakis for his debates against George H.W. Bush that same year. In all, he’s 0-8 when it comes to his work on Presidential campaigns. That Bob Shrum has confidently predicted that Democrats would hold on to both houses of Congress. So sleep well.

Five hours from now--I write at 10AM Pacific--I'll be recording an episode of Uncommon Knowledge with Victor Davis Hanson. My plan? Around the world in 40 minutes, asking, simply, how Victor believes the United States is doing in Afghanistan, in our relations with Europe, in our dealings with China, and so on, allotting each of the five segments to a country or continent.

Care to suggest a question?

The Blessing of the Animals, this very morning.

I'm up in Hanover, NH today visiting Dartmouth College on some business and in my spare time, I caught up with my old friends at The Dartmouth Review, the biweekly conservative publication where I was once editor-in-chief. The new editor of the paper is devoting the entire forthcoming issue of the paper to a question that we here at Ricochet have discussed, in passing, before:

What is conservatism?

Pegged to the national debates on the meaning of conservatism, The Review's forthcoming issue will include articles written by students about how they came to conservatism and what it means to them. Since we, as a conservative community, have wrestled with this question in the past, I thought I would bring it up formally for us to discuss. I know the editors at The Review are looking for ideas and inspiration and what better place for them to find those than here!

So what is conservatism? How did you come to it? Was it by conversion or by habit? Let's discuss.

A new poll out by Gallup this morning spells more bad news for Obama and the Democrats. Among blacks, Gallup found that Obama's approval rating was 91%. Among whites, it's only 36%. The Dems are clearly worried about black turnout for the midterms. They've launched a 2 million dollar outreach campaign targeted at urban and African American communities. Yet, only 25% of blacks have given thought to the election.

The president's general approval rating was at 45% which, as the LA Times points out, is not high enough to withstand significant losses in November:

Presidents with approval ratings below 50% at midterm time see their party suffer substantial losses in its congressional membership, regardless of how much explaining and blaming the president attempts in the campaign leading up to what becomes, in effect, a referendum on the president.

And since Democrats currently hold substantial majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives, they have substantially more seats to lose. A switch of 39 House and 10 Senate seats would give control of both houses to the Republicans for the first time since they lost it in 2007 after 12 years of GOP majorities.

Wow. This is a twist, indeed! They're planning to build the darned thing out of Stars of David! If nothing else, give 'em credit for keeping the world guessing.