With the news out of Portland that a woman faked her own acid-to-the-face-by-mysterious-black-woman attack, it reminds me of two completely unfair ideas I have:

1) Whenever a wife is killed or disappears, simply arrest the husband. It saves everyone a lot of time. I'm open to extending this to husband disappearances and murders, too.

2) Almost all bizarre attacks with no witnesses are self-inflicted. Be as skeptical as possible while investigating.

Yours?

If you haven't read our State Department's Bicentennial celebration message (which is today) or seen the video it's a hoot.

Thanks to the sacrifice of the heroes of the 1810 fight for independence, today Mexico is a "strong modern country with a vibrant economy...." Please.

It's pretty sad when all I can think about is how much better Mexico would be if they did not achieve their hard fought independence from Spain. I love Mexico, 1/2 my family tree grew up there. 200 years of independence and we find a situation where we cannot even go back to visit our own relatives without a probable kidnapping interrupting our reunion?

When I say "probable" I am not exaggerating. Very often, when relatives find out you are coming for a visit, pretty soon a distant relative gets the idea to get in on all this kidnapping loot the cartel guys are making and you become the victim of an Express Kidnapping. We seriously cannot go back to our ancestral neighborhoods because of this threat and other lawlessness.

Put it this way, my wife and I have to go to Colombia for a safe vacation to visit her side of the family. Yes. I said Colombia.

The 20th Century was disgraceful for this Mexico. Thousands of priests were assisinated, exiled, and/or forced to marry. The government made laws against wearing habits in public, church owned property, and teaching children their faith, or anything else.

We own a record/DVD company. We distribute all over the world, except to our neighbors to the South. They cannot control the piracy.

For me the immigration problem is tied to these problems. The resorts are still safe, and Tijuana during the day is perhaps worth the risk, but Mexico will not function properly until people want to stay there. The best and brightest must have an incentive to stay there and fix the place. It's so beautiful and so precious, but after 200 years of independence, and dependence on the U.S., it's a bicentennial pity.

So congratulations Mexico! I pray for you.

Boy, did Rush pound on Mike Murphy this morning! I guess he read Mike's post yesterday, which was, um, controversial around the Ricochet water cooler. Here's how Rush wound up his response to Mike's post:

So here's Murphy, who also feels personally insulted by O'Donnell's victory. It was a sure thing for Castle, but now they...OK, OK, you guys know more than we do. You conservatives know more than we professionals, you conservatives know more than we inside-the-beltway ruling class...OK. DeMint...Palin: Move to Delaware. You run the campaign. If we're so out of touch with America, you show us how it's done.

That's Mike Murphy. That is one of our guys. That is one of OUR guys!

OK Palin, OK DeMint. Get yourselves to Delaware. I'll sit here at my cocktail party. Apparently, that really bugs these people when you tell them they're trying to get their invitations lists to their cocktail parties maintained and shorn up.

Ouch. Well, Mike's a big boy. He can take it. As for me, I'm just amazingly thrilled and proud that Rush is reading Ricochet. And as the resident Squish around here, I have to say that -- as usual -- Rush makes a lot of sense:

The Limbaugh Rule: You got a liberal or RINO or a conservative, you vote conservative. Per-i-od! Exclamation point. That's the Limbaugh Rule.

We don't get into electability because we're not clairvoyant and we don't tell ourselves we can't. Just yesterday Christine O'Donnell had 50 grand on tap, and she was down 25 points and had no prayer. Today she's got over a million dollars and she's only down 11. In one day! Don't tell us we can't win!

That's another thing you people in the establishment have gotta stop. You've gotta stop telling us who can't win and who can, 'cause you don't know. Nobody knows 'til the votes are counted.

Yesterday's post by Mike inspired a lot of conversation. Some of it got a little heated; some of it got a little too personal; some of it may have crossed the line of civility. But despite that -- and I may be alone in thinking it ended up in a pretty civilized way -- it sure was edifying. Reasonable people can disagree -- and passionate reasonable people can disagree passionately. But you'd be hard-pressed to read all the way through that thread and not come out smarter.

But then you'd expect me to say that. I'm a total squish, after all.

As the mainstream press has cheered Obamanomics these last couple of years, I’ve kept feeling puzzled—no, intensely exasperated—over the apparent willingness to engage in national amnesia. We’ve been through this before, I keep thinking. We already know Keynesian economics doesn’t work. The Nixon and Carter years proved it. We already know that cutting taxes, rolling back spending, and a steady, predictable monetary policy do work. The Reagan years proved it.

Lately I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem hasn’t been amnesia. Not exactly. Most reporters are too young to recall the Reagan years—as are, come to think of it, most members of the White House staff. What it is, really, is straightforward ignorance. The folks in question just don’t know the country’s own recent history.

Which brings me to the long, important article in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Principles for Economic Revival.” The economists who co-authored the article: George Shultz, who served in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations; John Cogan, who served in the Reagan administration; Allan Meltzer, who served on the Council of Economic Advisors for both presidents Kennedy and Reagan, and who is the author of A History of the Federal Reserve; Michael Boskin, who served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President George H. W. Bush; and John Taylor, a scholar of monetary theory and practice who served as undersecretary of the Treasury under President George W. Bush (and who posts from time to time here on Ricochet).

America’s finanical crisis, deep recession and anemic recovery have largely been driven by economic policies that have deviated from proven fact-based principles. To return to prosperity we must get back to these principles…

[T]ake tax increases off the table...[B]alance the federal budget by reducing spending…[M]odify Social Security and health-care entitlements to reduce their explosive future growth.

In presenting an economic agenda for Republicans to pursue after the election, “Principles for Economic Revival” also reasserts our national memory. It’s an article by grownups.

Like a lot of folks, I was really put off by Karl Rove's dopey reaction to Christine O'Donnell's victory in Delaware on the Hannity Show.

I spent my few free minutes this morning questioning some insiders about it, basically asking, "How could Karl lay into O'Donnell and eulogize the liberal Castle like that?" One very sharp observer told me Rove was upset because, as bad as the establishment GOP is, O'Donnell is "embarrassing and delusional." My feeling is that if O'Donnell is embarrassing and delusional, she shouldn't be a senator--she should be speaker of the house, in order to insure a smooth transition.

Dinesh D’Souza’s recent cover piece for Forbes has generated some buzz. In it he posits that Barack Obama’s worldview – and thus many of his actions and policies – can only be understood by recognizing his deep emotional and intellectual connection to his father, a Kenyan socialist economist deeply immersed in the anti-Western, quasi-Marxist “anti-colonialism” of the 1950s and 60s. In Dinesh’s view, Obama is propelled by an obsolete and fringe ideology – he is “the last anticolonial.”

Newt Gingrich, among others, lauded the article almost immediately, praising its “profound insight.” Other conservatives demurred, suggesting it is misleading to paint Obama in such a strange, alien light – that he is really just a conventional modern liberal. And of course the usual assortment of Lefties chimed in, suggesting that the whole thing was akin to “birther” wing-nut-ism.

I’ve followed this back-and-forth with some interest, in large part because I’ve known Dinesh since his undergraduate days, have always esteemed his intellect and perception, and have almost always agreed with him. In this case, though, I think he comes in at about one-third right.

The best way to understand Obama, I believe, is to think of him as a sort of braid, intertwining the three dominant strands of modern liberalism. The first of these is “interest group” liberalism. Liberals are for unions, minorities, the poor, gays, trial lawyers, and so on. Liberals are against what they usually call “the rich,” but what in practice means anyone not primarily self-identifying as a member of one of their pet interest groups. This has been the dominant strand of liberalism in people like Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Ted Kennedy – and is the dominant strand in most congressional Democrats today.

The second strand is “technocratic elitism” – the belief that “experts” and “the best and the brightest” should run things. This is the dominant strand in people like Bill Bradley, Al Gore, and probably Bill Clinton. It is not confined to liberals – some conservatives share it in a mild degree – but it has been far more warmly embraced on the Left than on the Right.

The third strand is the one Dinesh has honed in on – a kind of “multi-cultural progressivism” that derives in large part from the earlier “anti-colonialism” and shares many of its beliefs – no culture or system is better than any other; the Caucasian West has only attained its wealth and position in the world by oppressing and exploiting other races; America is the pre-eminent “neo-colonialist” power and the major impediment to worldwide social justice; capitalism is morally unjust because it leads to inequalities; blah, blah, blah. These views have become dominant on university campuses and in academic enclaves, but remain either un-embraced or deeply submerged among the vast majority of workaday politicians for the simple reason that they find virtually no support anywhere else in the nation.

Consider how these strands have come together in the record of the Obama administration to date. The pork-laden “stimulus” bill? Obviously a product of the first strand – as have been the auto bailout, the states bailout, the extensions of unemployment benefits, the Sotomayor appointment, the push to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and virtually all the hyper-partisan demagoguery directed against conservatives, Republicans, millionaires, and so on. This is the part of Obama that is most at home with, and that works most comfortably with, the Democratic Congress, and when this strand dominates he is not markedly different from any mainstream liberal from the 1960s, 70s or 80s.

The second, technocratic, strand has produced cap-and-trade, all the “green” gobbledygook, the financial reform bill (which would have been far more “populist” had it been the product of the first strand), and, I would argue, the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the “pragmatist” Obama that was most prominently on display during the 2008 campaign. In this mode, Obama is fairly indistinguishable from Clinton, Gore, or even Jimmy Carter (as President).

The third strand – the multi-culti progressive, or, if you prefer, the anti-colonialist, in him—is what sets Obama apart. This is the strand that relishes “taking from the rich” even more than “giving to the poor.” It explains the bulk of Obama’s foreign policy – the “apology tours,” the coolness toward traditional (European) allies, the refusal to deal effectively with or even adequately condemn Ahmadinejad, and the participation in and tacit endorsement of all those goofy, nutty United Nations commissions. It even explains one of the earliest actions of his administration, which puzzled me (and may others) at the time – the removal of the Churchill bust. To the multi-culti progressive in Obama, not only was Britain the leading colonialist power, but Churchill himself was one of the last die-hard defenders of the British Empire. Of course Obama wouldn’t want that bust in his house. It is impossible to imagine an Adlai Stevenson, an LBJ, a Humphrey, or even a John Kerry booting Churchill out of the White House – but the multi-culti progressive in Obama dismisses him as just another racist, imperialist oppressor.

As noted, it is the strength and persistence of this third strand in his worldview that makes Obama unique among leading liberal politicians. But it derives, I think, not so much from the fact that Obama’s father was a Kenyan socialist anti-colonialist as from the fact that, compared with almost any other leading political figure, he has lived so much of his adult life in those academic enclaves which are the only places in America where this sort of thinking thrives. Far more than any other leading Democrat, Obama has been steeped in this multi-culti bilge – at Columbia, at Harvard, and all those years in Hyde Park among kindred spirits like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright.

So I agree with Dinesh that this way of thinking is a large part of who Obama is. This strand in the braid has always been there, and remains. But I do think that he has added the other strands along the way –probably during his tenure in the Illinois legislature, where he had to practice retail politics and learn to work with others practicing their own retail politics, and, once he became more of a national figure, through increased exposure to other leading “technocrat” liberals. The multi-culti strand alone just doesn’t explain, for me, such things as his (relatively) pragmatic management of Iraq/Afghanistan or his comfort with traditional “pork” politics. But I do think Dinesh has performed a valuable service in focusing a spotlight on that “multicultural progressive” strand in Obama, because it does inform a good deal of his thinking, despite the best efforts of his handlers and campaign pros to hide or submerge it, and the more the American public comes to see that this is an integral part of who he is, the further the tide of his support will recede back toward the fringes of the electorate from whence he came.

According to some new research on the topic conducted by Scott Rick of the University of Michigan and Marice Schweitzer of the University of Pennsylvania, holding an alcoholic beverage is bad for your image. Paul Kix of AOL has the details:

The study conducted five experiments. One had people judge photographs of others holding an alcoholic drink, a non-alcoholic one or nothing. Another experiment tested how persuasive a speech would be if the audience knew the speaker was drinking alcohol or something nonalcoholic. In both cases, alcohol dimmed the perceived intelligence of the people holding the drinks.

The most damning and universally applicable finding, however, came from the experiment that melded alcohol and job-seeking. Let's say a potential employer takes you, the potential employee, to dinner. The study shows that when you order a glass of wine or a beer, the employer views you as less desirable -- even if the employer orders a drink as well.

Worse still, the study found that when that drink you're holding wasn't of your choosing -- i.e. someone, like perhaps your potential boss, ordered it for you -- "the bias still exists," Rick tells AOL News.

Note to self: Do not let Peter see me with a beer at the next Rico Soirée.

Not since Sen. James Buckley (the brother of William F. Buckley) was elected in 1970, I noted the other day, has the New York Republican Party offered voters a truly conservative candidate for statewide office. A friend corrects me:

I enjoyed your [post on] the Conundrum of the [Republican Party in the] Northeast today -- just one little quibble (which actually proves your point further): the 1970 GOP candidate was incumbent Rockefeller appointed Charles Goodell, not Buckley. Buckley won under the Conservative Party ticket. Even then the NY GOP could not produce a Buckley.

I knew that, darn it, but I’d forgotten.

The editors of National Review respond to the claim that opposition to same-sex marriage is bigoted and irrational by writing a very rational and unbigoted case for marriage. They point out how radical a change in law is, particularly for religious institutions. They suggest that the radical nature of the change might cause great societal unrest.

But the editorial hits at an important part of the debate. What is marriage? Prominent advocates of same-sex marriage say that the purpose of marriage is to express and safeguard an emotional union of adults or to make it more likely that people will have others to give them care in sickness and old age.

The editors note that these are, indeed, aspects of marriage. But they're not the fundamental reason for marriage:

The reason marriage exists is that the sexual intercourse of men and women regularly produces children. If it did not produce children, neither society nor the government would have much reason, let alone a valid reason, to regulate people’s emotional unions. (The government does not regulate non-marital friendships, no matter how intense they are.) If mutual caregiving were the purpose of marriage, there would be no reason to exclude adult incestuous unions from marriage. ...

Marriage exists, in other words, to solve a problem that arises from sex between men and women but not from sex between partners of the same gender: what to do about its generativity. It has always been the union of a man and a woman (even in polygamous marriages in which a spouse has a marriage with each of two or more persons of the opposite sex) for the same reason that there are two sexes: It takes one of each type in our species to perform the act that produces children. That does not mean that marriage is worthwhile only insofar as it yields children. (The law has never taken that view.) But the institution is oriented toward child-rearing. (The law has taken exactly that view.) What a healthy marriage culture does is encourage adults to arrange their lives so that as many children as possible are raised and nurtured by their biological parents in a common household.

That is also what a sound law of marriage does.

The editorial dismisses the argument -- which I've made -- that government should get out of the marriage business. It points out that the government isn't uninterested in the welfare of children and that contracts for each sexual encounter (to determine who will have responsibility for raising children) would be a mess as well.

I have to admit that reality is in tension with my libertarian ideals on this matter. The editors put it well:

When a marriage involving children breaks down, or a marriage culture weakens, government has to get more involved, not less.

One of the things that annoys me about this debate is the supposedly rhetorical question about how in the world same-sex marriage might affect anyone else's marriage. It's a great question, actually -- but one that deserves lots of thought and consideration from all sides. Divorcing marriage, sex and procreation has had -- and will continue to have -- serious effects on many marriages.

The whole thing is worth a read. It responds to many of the common arguments involved in the debate (infertility, contraceptive culture and discrimination, etc.).

Dismissing proponents of traditional marriage as bigoted and irrational is silly. I'd like to see the conversation about marriage elevated and this editorial provides a great beginning. Has anyone seen a good response to this from those who advocate changing marriage law to include same-sex couples or other non-traditional arrangements?

I spent most of yesterday in taxis and airplanes, returning from New York to California, got home, unpacked, realized that my cold or flu or whatever it was had morphed into a fever, and went to bed, my thoughts about various matters—including, particularly, the meaning of Christine O’Donnell’s victory in the Delaware GOP primary—unformed and chaotic. After 15 hours of sleep, I not long ago rolled out of bed. Over a cocktail of coffee and antibiotics, I opened the Wall Street Journal…to discover that, while I was asleep, the editors of the editorial page had figured everything out.

Today’s lead editorial: “The Tsunami Heads to Shore.”

[T]he GOP is likely to suffer no more losses. Now the huge wave is roaring…directly for the Democrats who are running American government…

The challenge now for Sarah Palin, South Carolina GOP Senator Jim DeMint and the tea partiers who endorsed Ms. O’Donnell is to show they can deliver seats in the Senate rather than merely conduct an intra-party cleansing…The challenge for the GOP establishment, meanwhile, is to focus on feeding the tsunami rather than engage in recriminations over who lost Delaware…

The real story of this election year is that the voters are massing to repudiate two years of the most liberal governance in two generations. It is Mr. Obama’s agenda that has polarized the electorate and set off this voter backlash….The tsunami is about seven weeks from shore, and the only question now is how many Democrats it washes out to sea.

Perfect. Just perfect.

[...] a lot of people are beginning to understand that to be a freak is an honorable way to go. This is the real point: that we are not really freaks at all -- not in the literal sense -- but the twisted realities of the world we are trying to live in have somehow combined to make us feel like freaks. We argue, we protest, we petition -- but nothing changes.

So now [...] a handful of 'freaks' are running a final, perhaps atavistic experiment with the idea of forcing change by voting. -- Campaign wallposter, Hunter S. Thompson for Sheriff (1970)

The times, they have a-changed. Only a fool can deny the deep resonances between Thompson's Southwestern libertarianism and the Nick-Gillespie-chronicled Tea Party longing to restore America's honor while keeping America weird. Yes, the hotbed of classical American political activity stirred up by the Tea Party -- fanaticism, careerism, opportunism, quixoticism -- can make matters confusing. No, the typical tea partier would not huff ether or eat LSD, not even to prove a point about how messed up American priorities have become. But the Tea-centered confluence of 'freak power' and 'rube power' -- to use those terms not much more or less ironically than Thompson would -- reflects a momentous, gathering realignment of once-disparate, and even opposed, constituencies.

To date, only one thing stands in the way: the smearing of the tea party as a movement of crazies. Not just freaks, rubes, or weirdos, mind you, but kooks -- unjustifiable diehards for unpopular causes, professional losers, fast-talking swindlers, cranks who live off of campaign donations and speak to the press as if reading aloud from The Big Book of Mind-Rotting Catchphrases.

Indeed, anti-tea-party voices are already congealing around the narrative that the Tea Party is powered by these people -- that a vote for Tea is a vote for Crazy, and that any decent American freak or rube had better throw in with the liberal sex vote in the first case and follow union orders in the second.

This is clever, in the way that a cornered rat is clever, but it is wrong. The great untold story coming out of the O'Donnell upset is that, right now, a bean and cheese burrito could win a GOP primary by running as a Tea Party candidate. The presence of a few suboptimal candidates reveals the colossal strength and momentum of the tea partiers, not some cankered weakness or ugly truth. It is the natural consequence of any precipitous success -- whether in music, sports, or entertainment, whether in national-level politics or the criminal underworld...

You may have noticed that, every once in a while, 535 men and women in Washington manage to pass legislation that most Americans dislike. What to do?

In today's WSJ, Prof. Randy Barnett and William Howell (Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates) have an idea that sounds great to me: a "Repeal Amendment." This would be an amendment to the US Constitution that says the following:

Any provision of law or regulation of the United States may be repealed by the several states, and such repeal shall be effective when the legislatures of two-thirds of the several states approve resolutions for this purpose that particularly describe the same provision or provisions of law or regulation to be repealed.

This is a more powerful idea than nullification (which I discussed here). Nullification, if it has any validity, only allows a state to ignore federal law that transgresses constitutional bounds. But with a repeal power, states can reject federal law on any policy ground. There's more discussion at Volokh and at the WSJ Law Blog. I have my doubts about nullification, but this amendment is change I can believe in!

I just deleted the caption contest because I was appalled by the tone of the comments. We can try that again after everyone re-reads the Code of Conduct. This is Ricochet, folks. As Tony Soprano said, "In this house, it's 1954."

In my tireless effort to chart the psychological breakdown of the Democratic party as it faces November, using the famous Kubler-Ross model, The Five Stages of Grief, Jonah Goldberg -- hat tip: Ed Driscoll -- supplies some field evidence that we're now in Stage Three: Bargaining. From The Corner:

Last night I attended a book party for Young Guns. While there, I heard an interesting tidbit from a couple people I trust. Apparently the House Judiciary Committee’s majority staff approached the minority staff with a seemingly gracious offer: Why don’t we refurbish the digs for the minority staff? They look a bit rundown.

This was welcome news since the minority staff (i.e., the Republicans) has been asking for a spruce-up for four years but got nothing from the Dems. But now, suddenly, the Democrats are very concerned about the quality of the digs they will have to use if they lose the majority. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence and it was all out of the goodness of their hearts.

One person I talked to said that they heard something about another committee where a similar offer was made, but I couldn’t confirm it.

Ed Driscoll, with his typical foresight, is already seeing signs of Stage Four: Depression:

The Washington Examiner reports that DC’s mass-transit system is “poised to start suicide-prevention program,” adding that the program could begin “as early as December to detect and potentially prevent suicide attempts.”

Seems like a rather prudent move, all things considered.

Stage Five, of course, is Acceptance. I'm not holding my breath.

Pretty hard not to bury one's face in one's hands, or even someone else's hands, after reading that Michelle Obama told French first lady Carla Bruni that being America's first lady was "hell. I can't stand it." Watsamatta, Michelle, didn't I send you a large enough allowance for your trip to Spain? But, in truth, I always have a little added compassion for First Ladies - who didn't run for anything, after all, and aren't really answerable to the public in the same way their husbands are. In Mrs. Obama's case, sure, you can compare her to Marie Antoinette, but you have to remember: Marie Antoinette's biggest sin was being married to Louis XVI - the guy who got caught holding the ancien regime potato when time ran out. Michelle is in a similar position: she gets to the top of the leftist heap just as leftism is crumbling. Nobody explained to her that her alleged rock star husband is really an incompetent know-nothing and that everything she was taught to believe is untrue. And now she has to find out in front of everybody. That is hell, actually.

Former Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich, who was the only Republican governor to lose his seat to a Democrat in 2006, wants his old job back. He's been on the campaign trail in deep-blue Maryland for months and he thinks that he stands a shot at unseating the Democrat, Gov. Martin O'Malley, come November. This Tuesday, Ehrlich came one step closer to that goal by winning Maryland's Republican primary.

Will Maryland go the way of New Jersey and Virginia? Though Maryland is deeply democratic, voters in the state are getting fed up with its tax and spend policies, which are driving businesses and jobs away from Maryland and into neighboring Virginia and Delaware. In a year when voters are concerned more than ever with fiscal issues, Ehrlich may stand a fighting chance.

RealClearPolitics is calling the race a toss up and O'Malley is currently leading Ehrlich by 3 points in the polls, which is good news for Ehrlich, who has the edge with independents.

I receive a lot of mail from strangers. I try to respond to it all, especially if it's friendly. Sometimes I just can't keep up with it, but I do try.

This came in today from Major Don Potoczny, who is now in Baghdad. I asked him for permission to post it, which he graciously gave me.

Claire,

I was hoping to find your analysis of the recent referendum but found Ricochet. I read a few posts and it really brought home the problem of political discourse today. When we only talk to those who think like us we come up with some fantastic characterizations of what the other side most be thinking. I was amazed to read about what we progressives are really thinking! Haha, I had no idea I thought such things.

The thread called The Theft of Your Retirement should scare anyone. How quickly so many posters thought of reaching for their guns over the ridiculous idea that the "government" would raid their 401ks. Why do you guys cling so hard to your guns and religion?

How can we be surprised that Christians and Muslims (Moslems?) can't communicate when conservatives and liberals won't talk?

From the left,

Don

I think we can talk to the Left, don't you? I hereby invite you to prove that we can--and can do so with civility and respect. I've invited Major Potoczny to join the conversation. Please keep in mind that he is in Baghdad on our behalf, so great courtesy would behoove us.

During this exciting primary week, another tea party victory comes in Florida, where the once thought "unelectable" Marco Rubio opened up a decisive lead against his main challenger, Republican-turned-Independent Charlie Crist, in the race for a Florida senate seat. A Reuters poll found that Rubio leads Crist by 40% to 26% among likely voters. The democratic challenger, Kendrick Meek, comes in at 21%.

Six weeks before November 2 congressional elections, Rubio leads state Governor Charlie Crist, an independent, by 40 percent to 26 percent among likely voters, the poll found. Democrat Kendrick Meek trails at 21 percent....

Tea Party-backed candidates have ousted Republican establishment politicians in Nevada, Colorado, Kentucky and Connecticut. Crist fled the Republican Party earlier this year to run as an independent when it seemed clear he would lose to the conservative Rubio in the state's primary vote...

With the general election nearing, Rubio is softening some of his rhetoric, taking on a more moderate tone. According to Reuters:

Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, is softening his rhetoric in an apparent attempt to appeal to moderates before the November vote.

"The language he is using is a little more mainstream Republican," said Ipsos pollster Julia Clark.

The poll numbers show a big swing since mid-August, when an Ipsos Public Affairs poll showed Crist leading Rubio by 33 percent to 29 percent if Meek were the Democratic candidate.

The creator of the boorish, rude and intellectually void "Everyone Draw Muhammad Day" is going into hiding because even worse people than her, Islamo-fascists, want to kill her.

If Molly Norris was fighting a good fight I'd be behind her 100%. But she wasn't. So I'm not. She's a needless blasphemer. I loath blasphemy.

I'm not indifferent to the fatwa death promise. I abhor it completely and would have no problem killing those who issued it in defense of Molly were they to try to kill her.

But be clear that I would be defending free speech and not Molly. Molly is part of the world's problems, not the solution.

She doesn't deserve to die. She needs to learn to have a conversation with words that persuade, not insult.

James' post this morning (it's morning in Istanbul) is perhaps the most depressing I've yet seen on Ricochet. It's not that this woman has been forced into hiding, although that's certainly depressing enough. It's the reaction to it.

How many people here are old enough to remember the intellectual and moral climate when the Ayatollah Khomenei pronounced a death sentence on Salman Rushdie in 1988, following the publication of the Satanic Verses? I was at Balliol, the most left-wing college at Oxford, where the embrace of every old-fashioned pinko platitude was commonplace and the college turtle was named Rosa Luxemburg. But I do not recall one single student, one single academic, saying anything like, "Well, he was stupid and he shouldn't have done it. I don't feel sorry for him."

Everyone was outraged. Everyone was appalled. Everyone had precisely the reaction one would expect, in a sane world: "These people are barbarous savages--how can this be happening in the year 1988?" (By "these people," they meant the ones who were taking to the streets and calling for his death--not "all Moslems," of whom we had plenty at Balliol, and who were of the same appalled mind as the rest of us.) The Left saw the fatwa as an outrage against their values--by a reactionary right-wing movement.

What on earth has happened? How have we become so inured to this? How could we even be debating this?

The cartoonist who proposed “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” is going to disappear, on the advice of the FBI:

. . . on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, "going ghost": moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program—except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It's all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" cartoon.

One of the comments:

As I've grown up in a country with freedom of speech it would go against every fiber of my being to say that she shouldn't've done what she did out of fear of reprisal or really to endorse her going into hiding. But

Do you need to read more? Get the feeling that every fiber of his being is about be gone-against, greased with lick-spittle so there’s no friction at all? Okay:

I will say that what she did was shortsighted and frankly kind of dumb. While I believe in free speech I also believe that if I say something offensive I'm likely to recieve unpleasant reprisal and if I were to attack a religious group known for defending their beliefs with violence by creating a contest desecrating their most holy of symbols I could end up with a lot of death threats and possibly end up dead in a ditch. So, frankly, I don't feel sorry for her.

There you have it. Rhett Butler upon learning Scarlett was going to be stoned for premarital sex: Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. This will be the default position among the smart set, probably - you brought it on yourself by not being them. After all, you don’t spit into the wind, either. You don’t tug on Superman’s cape. You don’t pull the mask off the ol’ Lone Ranger and you don’t mess around with . . . you know.

BTW, I think you could tug on Superman’s cape. He’d probably think someone needed help and turn around to see who was there. He was that kind of a guy.

Former President Bill Clinton, speaking yesterday at a Democratic fundraiser in Minneapolis, said that today's Republican "tea party" candidates--people like Christine O'Donnell--make even George W. Bush look like a liberal.

MINNEAPOLIS – Former President Bill Clinton said Tuesday that the Republican Party is embracing "ideology over evidence" and pushing out pragmatic voices that would make even his White House successor seem like a liberal.

Clinton, speaking at a Democratic fundraiser in Minneapolis, said there was no mistaking that Republicans have tacked hard right and questioned whether former President George W. Bush would fit in among the party's candidates this year.

"A lot of their candidates today, they make him look like a liberal," Clinton told an enthusiastic crowd at a downtown hotel as he campaigned for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mark Dayton.

Clinton pointed to the tea party movement's influence on the GOP.

Clinton's remarks beg some important questions: how would Bush have handled (and perhaps rallied) the tea party movement? Would he have counted himself among them? Do the tea partiers "miss him yet"? Though the tea partiers are directing their energies right now against Obama and the big government democrats, they have also griped about Bush's own big spending habits in the past. Is Bush too liberal to be invited to the Tea Party?

Well, the French may ban the burqa, but in America we're fighting the battle of sagging pants. Dublin, Georgia has joined a growing list of towns with ordinances against the wearing of sagging pants. Yes, I find the sagging pants trend intensely annoying, but generally in America we have the right to wear what we want, as even this Bronx judge recognized.

And besides, it turns out that sagging pants may be helpful in the war on crime. First of all, the perps can't run as fast with trousers around their knees. Secondly, a cop can pull the pants up without committing a Fourth Amendment search, according to a Minnesota Court (h/t: Lowering the Bar). So I say: let's protect every American's inalienable right to wear sagging pants. Once the word gets out that it's perfectly legal, it will surely lose its appeal.

A few clicks below, Mike Murphy is taking on heavy fire from the Ricochet membership. Which he can handle, believe me. As one of the proprietors of this crackling conversation, I can't tell you how fun it is to participate in the scrum. And I know that later on, when we're all exhausted and tuckered out, we'll shake hands and be civil, because that's the kind of people we are.

In the meantime, though, let's agree on one thing: Charlie Crist, who is trying to become the next senator from Florida, is a greasy pile of odious politics. He's a grasping and meretricious oil slick. He's everything that's wrong with the way people govern and get elected in this country.

But if things keep moving the same direction, he's going to lose to Marco Rubio, and a lot of the credit has to go to the Tea Party. From Reuters:

Republican candidate Marco Rubio has opened a clear lead in a Florida Senate race, becoming the latest Tea Party favorite to benefit from voter anger at Washington, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found on Wednesday.

Six weeks before November 2 congressional elections, Rubio leads state Governor Charlie Crist, an independent, by 40 percent to 26 percent among likely voters, the poll found. Democrat Kendrick Meek trails at 21 percent.

So in the middle of the Civil War over Delaware, let's pause to raise a toast to Florida, give credit to Tea Party enthusiasm, and keep our fingers crossed for Rubio.

Pat Sajak, who is Vice-Chairman of the Hillsdale College Board of Trustees, is in Washington right now, as he has warned he would be, at the opening of the Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship, which is located across the street from the Heritage Foundation.

What Pat has not told you, however, is that, tomorrow and on Friday – which happens to be Constitution Day, the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution by the Framers – you can join him in our nation’s capital, virtually via the Web, for a two-day program on the Constitution in which there will be lectures, debates, and discussions on subjects such as:

• The Constitution and Free Markets
• The Future of Civic Education
• How to Interpret the Constitution
• National Security and the Patriot Act
• Tea Parties and the Constitution
• Lessons We Can Learn from George Washington

Among those speaking will be George Will, Richard Brookhiser, Michael Barone, and Bill Kristol, along with a number of scholars from the college.

Here you can find the schedule of events and a form with which to register for the Webcast.

When Brandy Warren took her child Kyle into the doctor's office, she was looking for some relief from the temper tantrums and behavioral problems her son was displaying. At 18 months old, Kyle was put on the anti-psychotic drug Risperdal. By the time he turned 3, the New York Times reports that Kyle had also been prescribed the antidepressant Prozac, two sleeping medicines and one drug for attention-deficit disorder.

"All I had was a medicated little boy," Ms. Warren told the New York Times. "I didn't have my son. It's like, you'd look into his eyes and you would just see just blankness."

Kyle's story is part of a larger trend in childhood medicine. The number of 2-5 year olds prescribed anti-psychotic drugs has doubled between the years of 2000 and 2007, according to a recent study by Columbia University.

Read (and hear) more here.

Can anyone out there explain to me why so many GOP candidates this cycle seem to be afflicted with the "flake" factor -- oddball statements, financial irregularities, campaign blunders, and so on? I'm thinking here not only of Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle, but also of Ron Paul, with his politically bone-headed remarks about the Civil Rights Act, of Ken Buck, with his comments about "high-heels," of Mark Kirk (no tea party favorite), who published inaccurate claims about his military service until they were outed, and God knows how many more.

It's not just "media bias." The media certainly don't like O'Donnell, Angle, Paul, & company, and may amplify some of these things, but they're all real. And the media have no love for Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey, and a host of others, but they've never succeeded in painting them as "flakes" in any way.

There's some truth, of course, to the argument that Democrats have plenty of flakes of their own. Richard Blumenthal in Connecticut has been as factually inaccurate about his military service as Kirk in Illinois, and "financial irregularities" could be Charlie Rangel's middle names. But somehow the Democrat "flakes" all seem to come from dark blue states and districts, while the Republican "flakes" seem disproportionately -- and annoyingly -- to be showing up in purple states and competitive, potentially winnable races. Why is his?

So I must say -- speaking only for myself -- that I'm not thrilled by the Delaware result. I'm a conservative, but I can do basic math. To me the whole thing looks like it came right out of Harry Reid's dream journal. I think the primary voters decided, and it is their decision to make, to toss away a sure-thing GOP Senate pick-up for, well, I'm not sure what. I can say that with a GOP majority now a longer shot, heads are exploding throughout the GOP Senate caucus.

That said, let me make a suggestion to the snarling combantants in the GOP's looming civil war. Let's settle the argument once and for all. I think the architects of the O'Donnell putsch, namely S.C. Senator Jim DeMint and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, should both temporarily move to Delaware full time and personally lead the O'Donnell campaign. Control it, direct it, and own it. Show that Georgetown cocktail party addicted and hapless GOP establishment how it's really done. I've got my notebook out, and I'm ready to learn. Call me a peacemaker.

More On This Topic:

RAHE > The Significance of the Upset in Delaware

ROBINSON > The Delaware Primary and What Happens Next

Though Christine O’Donnell’s primary win yesterday in Delaware is quite clearly the leading news story of the 2010 election right now--and for good reason--there was another consequential election result yesterday, which has big implications for a set of policies that have come to be identified as conservative, even though they should be nonpartisan: school reform policies.

Adrian Fenty's loss (53% to 46%) to councilman Vincent Gray in yesterday's Washington DC mayoral primary may shape the state of the school reform debate in this country. Both men are democrats, but Fenty was a steadfast backer of education reform. His decision in 2007 to bring on Michelle Rhee as his school chancellor, and back her intrepid decisions to shut down dozens of failing schools and fire hundreds of ineffective educators, made DC ground zero in the vibrant debates about school reform--thanks to Rhee's sometimes hard-nosed and aggressive policies, test scores in the district began to rise, the gap between white and black scores narrowed, and teachers were evaluated, for the first time, based on the success of their students.

Unflinchingly backing Rhee's policies was a controversial move on Fenty's part, a double-edged sword. It ultimately lost him the love of the teacher's unions and most of the city's black voters, who began to see him as arrogant, divisive, and condescending (the same words they typically use to describe Rhee herself). Still, Fenty's backing of Rhee also ensured that DC became not just the epicenter of debates about school reform, but the very model for reform itself. Rhee's policies are the same ones President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have embedded in their Race to the Top program.

Though victor Vincent Gray, who will be DC's next mayor, says that he is committed to school reform, he has not stated whether he will keep Rhee in her position as schools chancellor. While some are arguing that Gray can continue Rhee's policies without necessarily having her on board in his administration, I do think that Rhee is a critical player in all of this: it takes a certain hard-edged toughness to take on the teacher's unions and enact the policies that she did. That toughness made Rhee unique, it defined her as a leader--a perhaps irreplaceable leader.

In the world of education policy, all eyes have been fixed on DC since 2007, and they probably are now more than ever. Since DC is the leader in school reform, Rhee's fate will have great implications for the future of school reform nationwide. Let's hope Gray keeps her on board.

The brilliant and personable R.J. Pestritto comments in today's Wall Street Journal on the connection between Glenn Beck's message and his own academic study of American Progressivism. I've chewed over the subject once in person with Prof. Pestritto and I'm excited to continue it here. In the Journal, Prof. Pestritto praises commentators like Beck and Jonah Goldberg who have reworked his critique of the Progressives for a popular audience. But contra Beck, Pestritto argues that Wilson, TR, and the rest of the American Progressives were not socialists. Actually, they saw socialism and democracy as two related expressions of a single principle. Pestritto quotes Wilson:

"In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members.... Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none."

Given the clarity and force of these remarks, Pestritto continues, the Progressives -- and Progressivism today, alive and well -- are fair game. Here, there is no room for squishes. Pestritto singles out Ricochet's own Matt Continetti, who has written that "progressivism is a distinctly American tradition." "In fact," writes Pestritto, "it was anything but." Progressives, Pestritto quickly shows, borrowed whole cloth from European academia. Sure enough, the evidence is clear: Wilson and other Progressives gobbled up the transatlantic intellectualizing of French and German political and social theorists who cashed out their ideals in quasi-systematic terms.

But I'm not convinced that means liberal progressivism is alien to America. (You might see how this skepticism resonates with my comments earlier about how Obama's enemies can't understand him unless they understand his Americanness.) Tocqueville famously called Americans 'practical Cartesians' who didn't need to read Descartes because they were already living out his principles in everyday life. Whereas Europeans had to come up with theories about how to order society in a democratic age -- and then had to apply those theories to their people, using state power, from the top down -- America and democracy grew up naturally together. The American social order rose freely, from the bottom up. Rather than the enforced artifice of Cartesian philosophy, Americans enjoyed the organic social arrangements that pointed in the direction of Cartesian principles.

Living the American way of life, to generalize the point, made it possible for Americans to become conscious of their way of life -- what it was, what it implied, where it lead, and how to perfect it. Look back at certain trends in American thought from about 1830-1880, and you'll see how this worked with liberal progressivism, too. Before the Civil War, the Whigs advanced an agenda appealing to the professional classes and promoting government-driven cultural modernization, financial centralization, and economic development. After the Civil War, radical nationalist proto-progressives praised Lincoln for turning America into a single unit while downplaying his commitment to the ideals of the Founding. Meanwhile, transcendentalist Yankees, including Emerson and especially Whitman, wrote the founding texts of a romantic, almost religious faith in the democratic life that have given brainy progressivism a pulsing heart right up through the Obama era. These strands of distinctly American thought set the table for the formal Progressivism to follow.

Arguing that the Progressives pulled off a Europeanizing coup is akin to insisting that Americans were not a psychotherapeutic people before they discovered Freud. What the Progressives did do for the first time was succeed in politically institutionalizing the worldview they shared. That was the coup. But it's impossible to understand how they could have done so by focusing on the alien aspect of Progressive doctrine. And it's impossible to do the same today with Obama and his policies.