The politics of True Grit

One of the biggest issues of the day is what eye Rooster Cogburn covers up in True Grit. John Wayne covered his left eye in the original version, and Jeff Bridges in the remake covers his right eye. LOL.

AP: Baby boomers, who will be qualified for Medicare on January 1, worry that they will outlive Medicare. It is a very real worry. From the AP report:

"Here's the math: when the last of the boomers reaches age 65 in about two decades, Medicare will be covering more than 80 million people. At the same time, the ratio of workers paying taxes to support the program will have plunged from 3.5 for each person receiving benefits currently, to 2.3."

At that point in 2028, there is no way that Medicare can be like it is today. 

Culture wars truce

Michael Barone: "Even as economics is overshadowing all else, we seem to have reached a truce in the culture wars because important issues have been settled as a practical matter."

Tony Blankley has a good review of the lame-duck session and questions the popular view that it was an Obama win.

1. Obama capitulated to the Reagan view that tax cuts will stimulate the economy. That is supply-side economics.

2. The trillion-dollar spending bill with 6,000 earmarks was defeated.

3. The DREAM Act was defeated.

4. DADT repeal passed, but it is not an unqualified win for the President.

5. The Start Treaty passed but the major nuclear threats today are not Russia but Iran and North Korea.

More bad news for baby boomers: They haven't saved for their retirement. And starting in January more than 10,000 a day will turn 65, and that will continue for the next 19 years.

BlogProf: 60 percent of Americans want Obamacare repealed.

Robert Samuelson ponders the dilemma between the baby boomer generation, whose leading edge is now reaching retirement age, and the costs of Social Security, Medicare, etc.

TaxProf: Some states are taxing themselves to death. This is another way of summing up the recent census results. The states that lost seats had an average tax burden of $2,267 per capita, and the states that gained seats had an average tax burden of $1,788. 

New York Daily News: Working class white families are unraveling. This is Middle America we are talking about.

Looks like we're going to have death panels after all.

Michael Barone looks at Obama's chances in 2012 and finds them ok.

Commentary offers a good analysis of the history of Obamacare. Here is the conclusion:

Many Democrats are sure to keep telling themselves, as President Obama has, that “the outcome was a good one.” That conviction should comfort them as they continue to deal with the consequences arising from the intensity of the electorate’s rejection. The Pyrrhic victory Democrats secured for themselves in March 2010 may prove not to have been a victory at all but rather an ever-roiling, ongoing, and recurring act of political and ideological self-destruction.

In an article entitled "Taxes and the Top Percentile Myth," Alan Reynolds, indicates that taxes are more "progressively distributed" in the U.S. than in Sweden or France.

Taxation is a topic that becomes irrational when discussed by left-wing politicians and sociologists.

Brett Arends explains why he doesn't want an iPad for Christmas. And he's right.

Rasmussen: "The Tea Party movement was one of the biggest political stories during the 2010 election season. From an electoral standpoint, the grassroots movement had it first impact by forcing long-time Senator Arlen Specter out of the Republican Party (and eventually out of the U.S. Senate). By the end of the season, several Tea Party candidates such as Florida’s Marco Rubio and Kentucky’s Rand Paul were elected to the U.S. Senate."

Michael Barone: The recent census shows that states without an income tax have had the fastest growth.

Not surprising, but these states extract their tax coin some way or another. 

Dennis Prager tells us what men want. It didn't turn out to be so difficult after all.

Population changes

To me, the most interesting news lately has come from the census bureau. Our population is moving south and west. This is not news really, but the long-term trend is definitely unchanged. People are also moving to states with lower taxes and less government spending. They are voting with their feet. They are also moving to states that are more likely to have "Right to Work" laws. See here.

Talk Business: According to the new 2010 census Arkansas has almost 3 million people -- or 2,926,229. This is an increase of 9.1 percent from 2000. The U.S. population is over 300 million.

The political implications are enormous. The states that are set to gain representation tend to lean Republican. The states that will lose Congressional seats are typically Democrat. 

Christian Science Monitor: Why is crime down? There's nothing left worth stealing.

Rasmussen: "For the first time since Democrats in Congress passed the health care bill in March, a majority of U.S. voters believe the measure is likely to be repealed."

AP: Population shifts from Rust Belt states, which lean Democratic, to Sun Belt states, which tend to favor Republicans, will hurt Obama's chance for re-election.

Bruce Walker has a scathing article about Academia, as he calls it. I never liked the term, but I was out of sync with it when I was part of it. He has a lot of good quotes:

History departments for the last twenty years have been in utter denial regarding the Cold War (John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have written an entire book about this subject). Soviet infiltration of America was worse than almost anyone had believed in the 1950s. The redundant, corroborating, incontestable evidence from Venona, KGB files, GRU files, and other sources is simply overwhelming. Yet academia still pretends that rogue anti-Communists during the 1950s savaged many innocent lives.

I recall clearly the left-leaning professors I took classes with. When I left that environment, I like others taught my students what I'd been taught. It takes a while to get you head clear and get out of that trap.

Since getting an iPhone about 6 months ago, I've been playing with apps. Why not? Here's one called Word Lens. The link says, "We know smartphones are becoming ubiquitous, and that they've already changed the world in small ways (pub quizzes, for one, just aren't the same any more), but Word Lens is one strong hint that the world as we know it is really, really changing. In the future, you may never again stare in confusion at a sign, menu or parking ticket in a foreign language. Our multi-lingual world just got the app it deserves"

Spanish is available.

Michael Barone on the consequences of the November 2010 elections:

It is a source of continuing fascination for me to watch the interaction between public opinion, as measured in polls and election results, and the actions of members of Congress, elected in one political environment and looking in most cases to be re-elected in one that may be quite different.
Eleven months ago, after the Massachusetts Senate election, I was convinced that Democrats could not jam their health care bill through because voters had so clearly demanded they not do so. But Pelosi proved more determined and resourceful than I had imagined, and found enough House Democrats who were willing to risk electoral defeat to achieve what Democrats proclaimed was an historic accomplishment.
Pelosi and Obama predicted that Obamacare would become more popular as voters learned more about it. Those predictions were based on the theory that in times of economic distress Americans would be more supportive of or amenable to big government policies.
That theory has been disproved about as conclusively as any theory can be in the real world, and most of the Democrats who provided the key votes for Obamacare were defeated on Election Day.
Democratic congressional leaders did take note of the unpopularity of their policies when they chose not to pass budget resolutions last spring. Presumably they did so because they would have had a hard time rounding up the votes for the high spending and large deficits that would have ensued.
But had the House and Senate passed a budget resolution, Democrats might have been able to pass their preferred tax policy, raising taxes on high earners, under the budget reconciliation process. So the House vote Thursday night was a delayed consequence of the public's long-apparent rejection of their policies.
Candidate Obama told Joe the Plumber that he wanted to "spread the wealth around." November's vote, presaged by more than a year of polls, was, as political scientist James Ceasar has written, "the Great Repudiation" of that policy.
Republicans, having succeeded in holding down tax rates, clearly have a mandate to hack away at spending and to defund and derail Obamacare, which is at or near new lows in the ABC/Washington Post and Rasmussen polls. And there does seem an opening, as Clinton White House staffer William Galston argues, for a 1986-style tax reform that eliminates tax preferences and cuts tax rates.
How effectively the 112th Congress will respond is unclear. But the outgoing 111th Congress, despite its big Democratic majorities, responded pretty clearly Thursday night.

The Economist: Why getting a PhD is often a waste of time.

This island could be where Amelia Earhart died.

Larry Kudlow on the tea party movement and Reaganomics.

Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor has voted against the Dream Act.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride" was published 150 years ago today. 

John J. Miller gives the poem's background.

NY Post: What derailed the Democrats? Obamacare.

FDIC seized First Southern Bank of Batesville, Arkansas.
So far 157 banks around the country closed this year because of the economy and bad loans.

What does the new tax law mean for you?

An ancient Roman statue has been uncovered by a storm on the coast of Israel.

ABC: A loaded Glock handgun slipped through TSA screeners. Should make you feel better.

Breitbart: Harry Reid pulls the $1.3T spending bill full of earmarks. The GOP finally stood up against the spending that it has been complicit in.

The Congress sent the tax compromise legislation to the White House.

Happy Anniversary to the Tea Party, 1773.

Krauthammer warns that a government shutdown would hurt Republicans.

Michael Vick wants to get another dog. What could go wrong with that?

See Ann Althouse's readers' comments.

According to the Gallup Poll, Congress has an approval rating of only 13 percent, the lowest since Gallup starting collecting this data in 1974. Congress' disapproval rating is a whopping 83 percent. Why don't they just go home?!

AP: IRS has increased its auditing budget and put it to work, jumping audits by 11 percent. Look out if you are wealthy or a big business.

Popular Mechanics reviews the 2011 Ford Explorer. They like it. Ford has come through with some hits lately. Today I saw a Ford Edge on the highway. Looked nice.

"Fixing" Obamacare

Merrill Matthews on the constitutional challenge to Obamacare:

While we don’t know where this will all end up, here’s a pretty good bet: Most or all of ObamaCare will be neutered, (1) by judges or the Supreme Court, or (2) by states that refuse to accept the law or try to bypass it, or (3) by members of Congress who are listening to the public.
The president would do himself and the country a great favor if he took a lesson from his new-found willingness to work with Republicans on the Bush tax cuts: Negotiate a bipartisan solution to our health insurance challenges and end the ObamaCare madness.

What can't the govt force you to do?

Megan McArdle: "On a reading of the commerce clause that allows the government to force you to buy [health] insurance from a private company, what can't the government force you to do?

This doesn't seem to be a question that interests progressives; they just aren't very excited about economic liberty beyond maybe the freedom to operate a food truck.  And so they seem genuinely bewildered by a reading of the commerce clause that narrows its scope, or an attempt to overturn the mandate even though this might lead us into a single payer system.  If you view this solely as tactical maneuvering, perhaps it really is preposterous."

Support for Obamacare has fallen again, hitting a new low.
Sixty percent favor repealing it, according to Rasmussen. 

The individual right to choose

AP: A federal judge has rule that the central provision of Obamacare is unconstitutional. The requirement for all Americans to carry health-care insurance goes well beyond Congress' power under the Commerce Clause.

The WSJ says:

In a 42-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson said the law's requirement that most Americans carry insurance or pay a penalty "exceeds the constitutional boundaries of congressional power."
The individual mandate "would invite unbridled exercise of federal police powers," wrote Judge Hudson, of the Eastern District of Virginia. "At its core, this dispute is not simply about regulating the business of insurance—or crafting a scheme of universal health insurance coverage—it's about an individual's right to choose to participate."

The Hill: House Democrats are absolutely fed up with Obama.

Michael Barone is as usual very perceptive.

The whole thrust of [Obama's] first two years -- the stimulus package, the health care legislation, the vast increases in government spending -- has been to put programs in place that have done little or nothing to stimulate economic growth.
That's not accidental. The template for the Obama Democrats' policies, the New Deal of the 1930s, was not designed to stimulate economic growth, but to freeze in place a tolerable but not dynamic status quo.
The New Deal's father, Franklin Roosevelt, believed that the era of economic growth was over, just as many contemporaries believed that technological progress was at an end (how far could you go beyond the radio and the refrigerator?). FDR, like his cousin Theodore, was an affluent heir who had contempt for men who built businesses and made money. They were "economic royalists" and "malefactors of great wealth" -- sentiments echoed by Obama last week.
The initial New Deal program, the National Recovery Act, set up 700-plus industry codes to hold up wages and prices. That made some sense in a time of deflationary downward spiral, but proved unsustainable over a longer term.
Later New Deal programs strengthened labor unions, in an attempt to protect current workers and freeze work rules in place -- which tended to block the flexible management practices that eventually gave a competitive edge to later foreign-based auto companies. New Deal transportation policy protected existing trucking firms from competition -- a policy overturned by the likes of Ralph Nader and Edward Kennedy in the 1970s.
High tax rates on high earners and continued uncertainty over increased regulation and unionization led to what economists called a capital strike. Job creation was dismal as the 1930s went on, and unemployment hovered over 10 percent until wartime mobilization began in the 1940s.

We have headed down the same dead end-path. I like Barone's point that the New Deal was not intended to expand the economy but to maintain the status quo. The view in the 30s was that we had maxed ourselves out, the frontier had closed, we had no where to go. Technology was the same way: we could never get beyond radios and refrigerators, lol.

16 Unexpected health and beauty benefits of sex.

Beltway Confidential cites a Rasmussen poll that shows that Washington insiders and Middle America are 180 degrees apart on what to do about the economy and the deficit.

Ann Althouse on Bill Clinton's upstaging of Obama. Bill Clinton is now president again! There is just no way to explain why either Clinton or Obama let this happen. See video.

Peggy Noonan: "We have not in our lifetimes seen a president in this position. He spent his first year losing the center, which elected him, and his second losing his base, which is supposed to provide his troops. There isn't much left to lose!"

Noonan was an Obama supporter in 2008. I don't understand why. 

Who will see patients in the Obamacare world? Forty percent of physicians plan to retire by 2014, and the other 60 percent will restrict the patients they will see in certain categories, like Medicare patients.

Physicians are not happy about Obamacare.

FoxNews: The hard drive may be on the way out. I'm surprised it has not already gone the way of 8-tracks. The future belongs to solid state drives. Or perhaps to cloud computing. But I just don't want to trust somebody else to keep my really important documents.

Joe Wilson said "You lie." Now a Dem says "Fuck the president." The speaker is not named but doesn't he deserve the same treatment as Joe got. See also here.

Mail: "'Off with their heads': How Charles and Camilla's car was surrounded by a baying mob calling for their execution." Pictures included.

John Stossel: Why do poor people remain poor? I used to hear this question discussed. It was colonialism, of course, left-wingers said. No, it's property rights. Private property!

Urban Meyer has resigned as head coach at Florida.

Sam "Bam" Cunningham recalls the game between USC and the last all-white Alabama team in 1970 at Birmingham. He ran for 135 years and two TDs on 12 carries. USC won 42-21.

According to this story, the legend about the locker room meeting after the game is not true. Bear Bryant supposedly introduced Cunningham to his team and said, "This is what a football player looks like." Bryant was planning to bring in black players and wanted to make a point to those who would oppose the move.

I think the story is so good it has to be true, lol.

Michael Barone on the tax cut controversy.

Obama had to abandon his goal of raising taxes on high earners not because Republicans opposed it but because not enough Democrats supported it. Pelosi couldn't summon up a majority on the issue back in September, and Harry Reid could get only 53 of the needed 60 votes this month.
Democrats, not Republicans, are responsible for extension of all the "Bush tax cuts."

This performance of the hallelujah chorus in a mall food court is inspiring and has been viewed over 13,250,000 times on youtube.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is giving up on the Obama presidency.

RealClearPolitics has this on the tax compromise: "It's the liberal version of George H.W. Bush reneging on his "read my lips" tax pledge. Candidate Obama excoriated the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. But Monday evening, President Obama tentatively agreed to extend those same tax cuts."

Taxprof has a roundup on the tax deal.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, on the tax deal. It's a tremendous Republican victory.

Today is Pearl Harbor Day, and the Pearl Harbor Survivor's Association is still in business. Hang in there, guys!

A deal on the tax cut has been worked out, but Democrats are as mad as hell. National Review has this comment.

"Dandy" Don Meredith has died at age 72.

Jennifer Rubin on what caused the tea party:

We make a mistake by labeling this a purely "economic agenda," however. What started the Tea Party? A CNBC host ranting that a responsible homeowner shouldn't pay his irresponsible neighbor's mortgage. In other words, underlying the Tea Party movement is a set of values -- thrift, delayed gratification, personal responsibility, etc. Those are not what we have come to identify as "social" issues, but these are not simply matters of dollars and cents.

The Dems and the GOP are talking about a deal to extend the Bush tax cuts for everyone temporarily and extend jobless benefits as well. That's good, but at some point we will have to face up to spending cuts for face disaster.

I hear more and more about the college education bubble. No doubt that much of what the critics of higher ed say is true. It seems like a lot of the critics are law school graduates.

Tiger Woods ends 2010 without a victory.

Here are some terrific images of storms photographed in Montana.

AP: "Obama has signaled that he will bow to Republican demands for extending tax cuts at all income levels, and his remarks capped a day that lurched between political conflict and talk of compromise on an issue that played a leading role in last month's elections."

My, my, imagine that. 

Popular Mechanics's 15 favorite MythBusters car myths. Fun stuff.

You've seen those Medicare ads with Andy Griffith? Here's the real story behind them. One quote:

“Would the sheriff of Mayberry mislead you about Medicare? Alas, yes. In a new TV spot from the Obama administration, actor Andy Griffith, famous for his 1960s portrayal of the top law enforcement official in the fictional town of Mayberry, N.C., touts benefits of the new health care law. Griffith tells his fellow senior citizens, ‘like always, we’ll have our guaranteed [Medicare] benefits.’ But the truth is that the new [Obamacare] law is guaranteed to result in benefit cuts for one class of Medicare beneficiaries — those in private Medicare Advantage plans.”

Mark Tapscott: Why is the economy not growing?

On every front, the federal government is creating more investment-killing tax uncertainty, issuing endless pages of new bureaucratic regulations on the economy, and preventing firms from taking actions that could create hundreds of thousands of new positions and kick-start a muscular recovery with real legs.

Popular Mechanics tells you how to beat customer service phone support. Information we need!

Mercatus Center: "In recent years, spending, not revenues, has deviated from its historical path; spending must be addressed to rectify the budget."
Exactly correct. The recent discussions of raising taxes are wrong. We have to reduce government spending before we do anything else. 

NCAA: Cam Newton is eligible to play for Auburn in the SEC title game despite his father's rules violation. But he may be declared ineligible at a later point, this article predicts.

Toyota Prius has another recall, but fortunately not including my car.

Ann Althouse will be 60 years old in two months, and she can't think of anything to do about that. LOL.

Politico:

For Democrats in the South, the most ominous part of a disastrous year may not be what happened on Election Day but what has happened in the weeks since.
After suffering a historic rout — in which nearly every white Deep South Democrat in the U.S. House was defeated and Republicans took over or gained seats in legislatures across the region — the party’s ranks in Dixie have thinned even further.

In Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama, Democratic state legislators have become Republicans, concluding that there is no future in the party that once dominated the so-called Solid South.

That the old Confederacy is shifting toward the GOP is, of course, nothing new. Southerners have been voting for Republican presidents, senators and governors for decades.
But what this year’s elections, and the subsequent party switching, have made unambiguously clear is that the last ramparts have fallen and political realignment has finally taken hold in one of the South’s last citadels of Democratic strength: the statehouses.
Protected by a potent mix of gerrymandering, pork, seniority and a friends-and-neighbors electorate, Democratic state representatives and senators managed to survive through the South’s GOP evolution — the Reagan years, the Republican landslide of 1994 and George W. Bush’s two terms. Yet scores of them retired or went down in defeat earlier this month. And at least 10 more across three states have changed parties since the elections, with rumors swirling through state capitols of more to come before legislative sessions commence in January. Facing the prospect of losing their seats through reapportionment — if not in the next election — others will surely choose flight over fight.
Democrats lost both chambers of the legislature this year in North Carolina and Alabama, meaning that they now control both houses of the capitol in just two Southern states, Arkansas and Mississippi, the latter of which could flip to the GOP in the next election.

George Will: Writing about "puritanical progressives," Will cites this quote: "Today's crusaders," [a] lawyer said, "come less from the pulpit than from university social science departments, but their goals and tactics remain the same."

Very funny. 

Glenn Reynolds: "The statists who argue for the destruction of the dollar and for bank bail-outs (again) and for nationalised derangement of medical care and for green-inspired economic sabotage aren’t “liberals”. They do not believe in liberty; they believe in curtailing liberty. But neither do they believe in anything which it makes sense to anybody except them to call “progress”. Progress is the exact thing these statists are now trying and have always tried to destroy, and just lately have been doing a pretty damn good job of destroying. Progress means things getting better. These self styled “progressives” are only making things worse."

Crime in Arkansas

In the annual "City Crime Rankings" (Metropolitan Crime Rankings) for 2010, Arkansas has 5 cities or regions listed in the nation's top 10 most crime-ridden. In order these are Detroit, Pine Bluff, West Memphis-Memphis, Lake Charles, La., Lawton, OK, Hot Springs, Flint, Mich., Las Vegas, Little Rock, and Texarkana. Last year Pine Bluff ranked No. 1 in the nation, and was the only Arkansas city in the top 10. The FBI is the source of the data.

Local law enforcement authorities are outraged. They note that cities report crime differently. Some crimes are more accurately reported than others. For example, murder rates are probably accurate. However, if you are mugged in Detroit it might not even be reported because there are so many muggings. The police don't have the manpower to investigate them all.

Crime hurts in many ways obviously. A city with a reputation for a high crime rate has trouble recruiting business and investment.

The Iron Bowl is today, arguably the biggest game of the year. Alabama vs. Auburn, the greatest rivalry in college sports. According to one fan, "It's not good enough for my team to win. I want you to know your team lost."

Peggy Noonan: Obama needs a Special Assistant for Reality.

Med City News has a highly critical article on Medical Advantage plans, especially the PFFS type. See this WSJ article on the future of these plans.

Holiday shopping mistakes to avoid.

Take a look at land of the free. But some fliers claim that the body scanners were deactivated today.

Glenn Reynolds has an article on the Popular Mechanics site about airport security.

Glenn Reynolds posts some interesting comments from women on Sarah Palin. “I suppose I should confess: I like Sarah Palin. I like her because she is such a problem for all these political men, Republicans and Democrats alike, with their polls, and their Walter Dean Burnham theories of transformative elections, and their economy this and their values that–and here comes Palin, and logic just doesn’t apply. . . . The Democrats are total morons for not finding their own hot mama before the Republicans did so first, or maybe I should have left off the qualifiers and called it straight: the Democrats are just plain morons, at least where women are concerned.”

“It’s a sign of another thing: that liberal men are wimps who can’t handle the hot potato that is a combination of feminine sexuality and female political brilliance.”

Big Government: "The real difference between the Israeli and American approach is the target.  Israel tries to identify and stop the terrorist while the U.S. targets the bomb or other weapon. This approach does not change whether there is a left or right wing Prime Minister in power because the government realizes for Israel, the fight against terrorism is a fight for its very survival. Thus her government and citizenry have a view of preventing terrorism that is unencumbered by the political correctness which restrains efforts in the United States."

Volokh Conspiracy: Did Stalin commit genocide? This post is based on a new book by Norman Naimark called Stalin's Genocides.

I've always been suspicious of programs that focus on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and fail to mention the Soviet Union. They were guilty of the same crimes. That seems like a bias to me.

AP: The jawbone found on Aruba does not belong to Natalee Holloway.

Thomas Sowell on TSA security, so-called. The Obama administration has utter contempt for us.

Security theater

Popular Mechanics interviews security expert Bruce Schneier: TSA scans "won't catch anybody," he says. They are not supposed to; they are merely "security theater."

The iPhone will auto correct some of your text, but sometimes it screws up big time. See here.

Secret Service Clint Hill recalls Jacqueline Kennedy. At the assassination he's the one who jumped on the back of Kennedy's car.

After 47 years, what do we know about the Kennedy assassination? Well, this link contains one view.

NoLeftTurns ask if the TSA screening is the end of diversity?

We pass all passengers through the same, cumbersome screening because we want to pretend that all Americans are equally likely to be security threats.   In short, we do it to avoid profiling.  The effort does credit to the tolerance of American soceity.  On the other hand, tolerance is not the only good.  There are limits. 

What we are seeing now is, I suspect, a reflection of a frustration Americans have with the worship of what is called diversity run amok.  By pretending that all passengers are equally likely to represent a threat, we have stretched the myth of sameness past the breaking point.  The same is true in other cases.  For example, a landlord cannot tell someone from India whose cooking stinks up the hallway outside his door by cooking his native cuisine that he is in violation of a general policy against stinking up the hallway.  Were someone from anywhere else in the world to cook the same thing, however, the landlord could tell him to nock it off.  Similarly, were that same person from India to stink up the hallway one night by cooking Italian food, the landlord could say something. That's absurd.  Given how intrusive the screen is becoming, it's no less absurd not to profile.

Baby boomers, especially women, are confident about sex.

Mike Huckabee says Sarah Palin may "run away with it" in the 2012 Republican primaries. He wants to run himself, but seems to be waiting to see what she will do.

Wednesday, November 24, the day before Thanksgiving and the busiest travel day of the year, is National Opt-Out Day. OK, I'm opting out.

George Will on TSA shakedowns:

The average American has regular contact with the federal government at three points - the IRS, the post office and the TSA. Start with that fact if you are formulating a unified field theory to explain the public's current political mood.

Everyday we are losing our freedom. 

Cloud computing is an idea that's catching on fast. You can access your data anywhere, and you don't need backups. But is it really secure up in the clouds?

TSA bumper stickers

See Ann Althouse on TSA bumper stickers.

Megyn Kelly is in the 2010 GQ Men of the Year issue.

David Sanders, recently elected to the Arkansas legislature, filed HB 1005 to change the nickname of Arkansas back to the Land of Opportunity. It is currently the Natural State. Well, this is really, really important.

NOTE: Some of the information in the link is incorrect. I don't believe Arkansas was ever officially called the Toothpick State.

Jesse Ventura says he will no longer fly and be abused by TSA.

Powerline reacts to the TSA nonsense. I believe there is a revolt developing against their so-called security.

Don't Touch My Junk!

Charles Krauthammer: "Don't touch my junk is the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm election voter. Don't touch my junk, Obamacare - get out of my doctor's examining room, I'm wearing a paper-thin gown slit down the back. Don't touch my junk, Google - Street View is cool, but get off my street. Don't touch my junk, you airport security goon - my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I'm a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come?"

As usual Charles says it best: 

The ultimate idiocy is the full-body screening of the pilot. The pilot doesn't need a bomb or box cutter to bring down a plane. All he has to do is drive it into the water, like the EgyptAir pilot who crashed his plane off Nantucket while intoning "I rely on God," killing all on board.
But we must not bring that up. We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety - 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling - when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches.
The junk man's revolt marks the point at which a docile public declares that it will tolerate only so much idiocy. Metal detector? Back-of-the-hand pat? Okay. We will swallow hard and pretend airline attackers are randomly distributed in the population.
But now you insist on a full-body scan, a fairly accurate representation of my naked image to be viewed by a total stranger? Or alternatively, the full-body pat-down, which, as the junk man correctly noted, would be sexual assault if performed by anyone else?
This time you have gone too far, Big Bro'. The sleeping giant awakes. Take my shoes, remove my belt, waste my time and try my patience. But don't touch my junk.

See Ann Althouse's comments. 

Claire Berlinski: You would think that if anyone in the world needed to keep anyone from blowing up their planes it would be the Israelis. How do they do it? They profile. And they start with in-depth interviews.

Have you wondered about purchasing a MacBook Air or an iPad?

Popular Mechanics looks at full-body scanners.

James Carville: "If Hillary gave him [Obama] one of her balls, they'd both have two," Democratic strategist James Carville told the Christian Science Monitor at a breakfast on Thursday morning.

Florida Republican John Mica calls for ditching TSA and their damn scanners. This pseudo security is nonsense.

Natalee Holloway's dad says that officials ask for dental records. 

A woman is suing the federal government after TSA screeners exposed her breasts to everyone in the area.

What's going to happened with the Cam Newton-Auburn controversy? We don't seem to be getting any closer to finding out.

Mike Ross voted against Nancy Pelosi for House minority leader. That's something at least.

A thirty-something woman lists all the things she wishes she had done before she was 30. 1. Gotten Pregnant. Easier to conceive. Probably easier to carry the dang thing, too. Oh, well.

Is accreditation in higher education a waste of time and money?

Nancy Pelosi will stay on as the Democrats' leader in the House.

What is a classroom like at Cornell University? Via Ann Althouse.

Michael Barone reviews George W. Bush's memoirs, Decision Points.

Under Obamacare starting next year you may have to visit your doctor and get a prescription for ibuprofen and other OTC meds.

Faculty Lounge: An Alabama law professor goes over to the dark side -- Auburn!

Knoxville News: "Muslim who shot soldier in Arkansas says he wanted to cause more death."

I saw an article in today's paper (no link yet) about QR (quick response) codes that are showing up every where: Target, Best Buy, even on business cards. These are square bar codes that contain information about a product. You scan them with your smartphone. See here. You can generate your own codes containing any information you wish to share.

Since getting an iPhone some months ago, I'm been thinking that I don't need a stand-alone GPS, a digital camera, a land-line phone, a digital calendar, and other things. Now Yahoo Finance has a list of 10 devices that smart phones are replacing: PDAs, video cameras, MP3 players, digital cameras, handheld video games, GPS, PCs, regular cell  phones, watches, remote controls.

That's the list. I would add Kindle or Nook to the list with the IBooks app. Others come to mind: outdoor thermometer, compass.

See also "15 Things you can control with your iPhone."

The ADG reprinted this Amity Schlaes column comparing the New Deal with our correct administration. You may have to subscribe. See her website.

Resign

The Washington Post calls on Obama to step aside after one term as president. Amazing.

Emmett Tyrrell has a hilarious column. One quote: "Liberalism has been a distinctly minority party for a long time. Take away their media support, and they are about as popular as the American Prohibition Party."

Pilots and passengers are objecting to the patdowns now required in some airports.

Steven Den Beste's prediction on November 4, 2008. Via Instapundit.

Telephone companies want to drop residential phone books. ATT will not publish the Little Rock white pages after next year, according to the ADG. That's OK. I seldom use it anymore, relying on an internet lookup. Times change.

Dogs Decoded

NOVA broadcast a program last night called Dogs Decoded. Fascinating. Scientists are now researching how dogs came from wolves, their relationship with humans, their intelligence, and much more. They are truly man's best friend. You can watch the entire video by following the link.

Today is Veterans Day but it used to be celebrated as Armistice Day, the end World War I. The war ended on 11/11/1918 at 11:00 A.M.

Tet Offensive

I'm glad to see a new book on the Tet offensive of 1968, especially one in which we win. See James S. Robbins, This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive. In fact we won the battle, but everybody listened to Walter Cronkite. See Gary Larson's review.

Truong Nhu Tang, VC war minister, called Tet a "staggering loss." It was a "major irony," he wrote, that such a defeat "was transformed by our propaganda into a brilliant victory."

On Cronkite see here. 

Democrats are pressuring politically toxic Nancy Pelosi to step aside.

It will be interesting to see how the Cam Newton story turns out.

Walmart vs Amazon

AP: Wal-Mart is offering free shipping on online purchases with no minimum purchase for the holidays. No doubt Amazon is putting the pressure on them. You can buy just about anything at Amazon with no tax and no shipping over $25.

Cruise from hell

AP: Diabetics aboard the crippled cruise ship Carnival Splendor have had a very difficult time. I'm very much in sympathy with them as well as all other passengers. I have just canceled all my plans to take a cruise, lol.

Big Journalism: The NYT thinks its readers are stupid. They can't figure out how much they are paying. But I agree they are stupid. Anybody with any sense canceled a long time ago.

Used car tax

Jason Tolbert: Arkansas Republicans are floating the idea of cutting the used car tax. It needs to be reformed, to be sure. If you pay more than $2,500 for a used car (even one cent over that) you trigger the whole tax. $2,500 is too low anyway. Something like $5,000 would be better.

People on the troubled cruise ship, Carnival Splendor, are being towed and they are eating Spam. Better than it was.

Need advice for Medicare part D for 2011? This is the prescription drug plan with the infamous coverage gap, i.e., donut hole. I'm in the donut hole now and just paid $113 for a prescription. Not too happy.

George Bush appeared on the Oprah show to talk about his new memoir, Decision Points.

Cruise ship from hell. 

Update: The ship is receiving supplies and may be towed to San Diego.

Italian researchers say that men who have a happy sex life with their spouses live longer. "Increased sexual activity produces more testosterone, which leads to less depression and a better cardiovascular performance which means an improved metabolism."

Washington Post: 5 Myths about George W. Bush.

AP: As Baby Boomers age, one in five drivers will be 65 and older. This is an important issue for seniors. Public transportation is not available in most cases. We can't let people take our cars away from us and put us under house arrest.

Edmonds: 10 mechanical myths about cars.

AP: Kids who text more than 120 times a day are more likely to get have sex or use alcohol and drugs. That's not to say that texting is the cause of these behaviors. We may need to be reminded that correlation is not the same as causation. Some other factor may be the cause.

Ed Morrissey compares the Kindle and the iPad. He uses both, but I think he favors the iPad. One of the commenters said that if you have a iPhone, you don't need either of the other two devices. I agree.

Ilya Somin: Legal challenges to Obamacare may have a chance if they focus on the mandate to purchase government-approved insurance.

Who knew? Using a laptop can reduce a man's sperm count.

Barry Rubin has an interesting sports story. I don't believe he's reading too much into grade-school soccer.

Fallen from heaven

Walter Russell Mead: "No president in my lifetime has fallen from heaven to earth as rapidly as President Obama.  Others have lost popularity and lost control of Congress, but none fell from such a height.  Who can forget the rapturous cries of joy when he was elected in 2008?  Who can forget all those predictions of a ‘transformational presidency,’ hailing the one term Senator from Illinois as a new Lincoln, a new FDR, and (my personal favorite) the ‘Democratic Reagan’?"

iPhone users: check the alarms you have set in the Calendar. There may be a glitch associated with the switch to daylight savings time. I use this feature but I don't rely on it.

Carpe Librum, the last independent bookstore in Knoxville, Tenn., will close at the end of the year. The economy is bad but...

Besides the crushing economy, Carpe Librum suddenly faced yet another new competitor: e-books and e-readers such as the Kindle and Nook, which have finally taken off after years of attempting to lure consumers away from printed books. According to the Association of American Publishers, for instance, e-book sales were $39 million for August, a 172 percent increase over August 2009 ($14.3 million); calendar year to date, sales grew 193 percent. Throw in big-box retailers like Target and Walmart with discounted bestsellers, and buying books has never been more convenient—a trend that’s been devastating to traditional, independent sellers who mostly stick to list prices in exchange for offering a more selective stock and helpful clerks.

The most recent book I purchased was for iBook on my iPhone. My wife purchased the latest John Grisham at Wal-Mart.

Truth be told, I'm surprised I'm reading books on my iPhone, but the iBook app is really great. While I'm waiting for something, I can just read a little bit and I don't have to even carry around a paperback.

Tiger Woods has finished his first winless PGA season.

Jill Clayburgh is dead at age 66.

Loving bad girls

An intriguing book entitled Wanted Women: An American Obsession in the Reign of J. Edgar Hoover by Mary Elizabeth Strunk. These women range from Ma Barker and Bonnie Parker to Patty Hearst and others.

Easterner David Brooks is clueless about the geography of the Midwest.

John Steele Gordon on the history of midterm elections.

Byron York:  "Here's Barack Obama's problem when it comes to dealing with newly elected Republican members of Congress. They are convinced they won because voters rejected Obama's agenda of national health care, spending and bailouts. But Obama cannot admit that his agenda -- his legacy -- is fundamentally flawed and that voters repudiated it. The result will be irreconcilable conflict."

New Deal or Raw Deal?

I meant to post a link to this Thomas Sowell column a day or so ago. He discusses a new book by Burton W. Folsom, Jr., called New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America. He spells out the failure of the Roosevelt administration to end the Depression of the 1930s and its consequences. We are following the same path. Should be informative.

The problem we face around the world is not global warming, but global aging.

Historian Robert Dallek tries to put the Tea Party movement in historical context, but misses the point when he compares it to Huey Long and others of his ilk. Long wanted more left-wing government, not less. Recall his Share the Wealth slogan.  In my view, the correct comparison is the American Revolution and the Boston Tea Party.

FOX News All-Stars discuss what the 2010 election was all about, and they don't agree. My 2 cents is that it was about healthcare. That is what people don't like, and that was driving this election. But the economy was a factor also.

George Will, commenting on the recent election, nails it as usual: Americans rejected liberalism, which has become increasingly intrusive.

"These ideas," [economist Don] Boudreaux says, "are almost exclusively about how other people should live their lives. These are ideas about how one group of people (the politically successful) should engineer everyone else's contracts, social relations, diets, habits, and even moral sentiments." Liberalism's ideas are "about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas . . . with a relatively paltry set of 'Big Ideas' that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced by government, not by the natural give, take and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people."
This was the serious concern that percolated beneath the normal froth and nonsense of the elections: Is political power - are government commands and controls - superseding and suffocating the creativity of a market society's spontaneous order? On Tuesday, a rational and alarmed American majority said "yes."

Many people are dropping cable TV, but it's not clear why, except that it's too expensive. That was my reason. Is it Netflix? But they don't offer much live sports. Or any?

In Tuesday's elections, Arizona banned affirmative action in state government, including public colleges and universities. Not sure what that really means in a practical sense.

Law professor blog rankings, minus Instapundit.

AP: How will the new Congress affect the stock market in 2011?

Popular Mechanics: You can replace your laptop with an iPad. I'm not convinced. It involves too many workarounds. But I do like the iPad.

RealClearPolitics recalls this story:

Last January, retiring Arkansas Democratic Rep. Marion Berry told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette that he worried about overconfidence in the White House regarding their prospects for avoiding a midterm election blowout.
"The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in '94 was you've got me,'" Berry said. "We're going to see how much difference that makes now."

Yes, now we see.

Michael Barone's thoughts on the election results.

Tsunami

It was a conservative reaction of a size not seen in decades. Blanche Lincoln lost. Tim Griffin won Arkansas' second district. Rick Crawford won in the first district. All of Bill Clinton's campaigning amounted to nothing. The next House will be controlled by the GOP and will toss out Pelosi. The Senate is almost evenly divided. Krauthammer says the Obama agenda is dead. He experimented with hyper-liberalism and the country said NO.

Ann Althouse: "It's so sad for the Democrats. They gave us so many things. Gifts. Expensive gifts. That we didn't want. That they bought with our money."

In Arkansas three constitutional offices went Republican: Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, and Commissioner of State Lands. Four of six Congressional seats were won by Republicans -- three House and one Senate. Mike Ross kept his seat because he woke up in time to vote against Obamacare. Republicans also did well in the legislature. We've seen nothing like this since Reconstruction.

Jason Tolbert sums up the night: Republicans won big.

Today is election day, the day we have either been waiting for or dreading. I'm ready for the election to be over one way or the other.

When I went to vote, I found the polling place almost deserted. Not many voters present. Last time I was there, it was crowded. Not sure what that means. Driving past it later, the number of cars seemed not to have changed much.

However, the early voting in Arkansas was heavy.

Walter Russell Mead: "This is not a good place for a great country to be.  I am glad that Democratic hubris is getting a well deserved rebuke; I am only sorry that the consequence may be to reinforce GOP smugness."

Ted Sorenson has died at 82. He was JFK's speech writer and is credited with the 1961 inaugural and Profiles in Courage.

AP: After five years, Tiger Woods is no longer the world's top ranked golfer. Now it's Lee Westwood of England.

New Geography: "Ideologues may set the tone for the national debate, but geography and demography determine elections." I'm a big believer in both of these forces, having studied them for years in one way or another.

Here's a look at the current status of Medicare Advantage plans.

AP: In India more people have access to cell phones than to toilets.

College tuition costs are up again this fall.

Jessie Jackson has come to the defense of Juan Williams, calling him a martyr.

The Hil: Dems will have a blowout next week.

John Steele Gordon: Obama is no FDR.

How reliable is your car?

The end of the college textbook as we know it may be drawing near. I predict they will be electronic.

Nevada Voters: Harry Reid's name is already checked on ballots.

Sony has stopped production of the Walkman. It became a classic, but I never had one of them.

Why are we discussing Woodrow Wilson?

Firesheep is intriguing but not sure what to make of it. Hacking for the masses, according to this site.

Jack Neely on why Southerners don't like Obama. It's not race, he says, and I agree with him.

And I suspect many Americans, and especially Southerners, resent him for this reason: If you survey the men we’ve elected to the presidency over the last 150 years, those elected to office tend to be people with either several years experience legislating in U.S. Congress, or major administrative experience as governor of a state. The only exceptions we’ve made are men with a record of supreme military leadership....
In terms of these traditional qualifications for the presidency, when he was inaugurated last year, Obama was arguably the least experienced commander in chief since maybe Chester A. Arthur, who was never actually elected president. That fact has probably hurt him in practical ways. He hasn’t learned how to slap backs like Bill Clinton or LBJ, whose liberal changes were more sweeping than Obama’s. And few in Washington owe him any favors.
A final prejudice may be personal. No Democratic president in history has ever had the leisure to so fully ignore the Southern vote and still get elected. That’s hard to get over.

See also this link via Instapundit on the Gentry vs. Populist conflict within the Democratic Party.

When you probe into political and social conflict, you quickly find yourself mulling deep kinds of prejudices, not the modern racial kind, but older geographic and ethnic rivalries that go back hundred of years. Even if the don't make sense, they are still real.

Michael Barone:

Why has the Democrats' theory of history moving left worked out so badly? One reason is that it is factually untrue. We've moved from regulation to deregulation in the last century, for example.
Another reason is that when government is small and deft, as it was in the 1930s, a little more of it may help folks. But when it is big and plodding, as it seems to be now, a lot more of it may just be a deadweight on the private sector economy which, most Americans seem to realize, is the only generator of real economic growth.
A third reason is that big government can be overly bossy. Voters who have learned to navigate their way through life may not believe that they need Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to set the terms and conditions of their health insurance policies, as Obamacare authorizes her to do. "Don't tread on me," read the flags at Tea Party rallies. That's not a contradiction of "facts and science." It's an insistence that the Obama Democrats' policies would strangle freedoms and choke off growth. You may disagree. But if so, it looks like you're in the minority this year.

The Israelites were supposed to have settled in the only place in the Middle East without oil reserves, but this may not be true at all.

FoxNews Video: Juan Williams reacts -- and I mean reacts! -- to NPR and Vivian Schiller.

Jason Tolbert says that Mike Ross and Chad Causey should say how they will voted on Nancy Pelosi as Speaker if the Democrats retain control of the House. Absolutely. Other Blue Dogs are taking sides, they should as well.

Victor Davis Hanson discusses the Juan Williams-NPR flap. He manages to say it all.

AP: Obama is already plotting his post-election presidency.

Stephen Hayes: Is Nina Totenberg next?

Sense of Events puts the Juan Williams story in perspective. As we already know other people have said the same thing as Williams.

Juan Williams: Defund NPR.

Juan Williams explains his side of the NPR flap.

AP: The Center for Disease Control estimates that the number of Americans with diabetes could increase from 1 in 10 to 1 in 3 by 2050 if current trends continue. That's an increase from 24 million people to the range of 76 to 100 million.

That sucks.

The Conglomerate: "Law schools. . . responded to the worst recession in the legal market in at least two decades by letting in more law students."

If anything is clearer than the fact that we have too many lawyers already, I don't know what it is.

I've been reading about the Boston College law student who wants a full refund of his tuition over two and a half years. He didn't finish school, and probably wouldn't have gotten a job anyway.

Here's a twist: "When I'm on a plane, If I see people who are in NPR garb, I get worried & nervous. Because they probably won't shut up the whole flight."

Here's the video of Vivian Schiller of NPR asserting that Juan Williams needs a psychiatrist.

Bob Beckel, a liberal commentator, admitted that he is afraid of flying with Muslims just as Juan Williams said.

Daily Caller: Even some Muslims are speaking out against NPR's political correctness.

After the Juan Williams firing, NPR's Nina Totenberg is catching hell for her outrageous statements over the years. Keep it coming.

Fox News signs Juan Williams to a new contract for nearly $2 million. LOL

Big Journalism: NPR has fired Juan Williams for remarks about Muslims. See also here. Williams said that he worries and gets nervous when he see Muslims on airplanes. I feel exactly the same way.

Williams made the statement on Bill O'Reilly's show. See NPR here.

Bernie Goldberg comments. 

CBS: A Tennessee pilot refused a full body scan and claimed that the TSA does not make travel safer. He said it was just a make-work program.

Rasmussen: Most voters oppose the reelection of anyone who voted for Obamacare, auto bailouts, and stimulus plan.

AP: Netflix has become a streaming company that also offers DVDs by mail.

In a new book a Secret Service Agent says he nearly accidentally shot Lyndon Johnson within hours of the Kennedy assassination. See Gerald Blaine and Lisa McCubbin, The Kennedy Detail: JFK's Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence.

Agent Clint Hill to Robert Kennedy: "It's as bad as it can get."

ABC News: Ginny Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, left Anita Hill a voice mail asking for an explanation and apology.

“Good morning, Anita Hill, it's Ginny Thomas,” said the voice. “I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did. OK, have a good day.”

Starbucks will offer incentives to get you into their stores.

AP: Say goodbye to free checking at your bank. Thank Democrats.

Someone is shooting at the Pentagon. Well, isn't that their business, to shoot and get shot at?

Psychology Today on the use of alcohol.

NYT: Esther Tuttle will be 100 years old on her next birthday. Here's how she does it.

Jonah Goldberg of National Review visited Arkansas Tech yesterday. He reported that Arkansas is "perhaps America's politest state."

AP: Democrats are planning a Hail Mary bid with a $250 check for Seniors before the election. Well, great, but it won't change my vote.

Sharon Stone's new bikini.

Some good observations on the culture of poverty concept. You either believe that poverty is caused by society, or by the poor themselves. It's that simple.

Early voting began today in Arkansas. Needing to return some books, I went to a branch library and found long lines of people waiting to vote. I've never seen longer lines for voting at that location. The parking lots were full. I've just about decided to wait until election day to vote because I like the excitement and anticipation that imbues the air.

On the way out, I almost yelled out, "I want my library back!" LOL. 

Michael Barone's latest column: Dems find careers threatened by Obamacare votes.
"The rule seems to be that casting a decisive vote for Obamacare tends to be a career-ender." Dems just didn't understand how people felt, and they did not ask until it was too late.

Rasmussen: GOP will pick up 55 House seats.

Jason Tolbert: Bill Clinton's endorsement of state candidates may not count for much this year. See also here.

Bill O'Reilly makes an appearance on The View and two of the hosts walk off the set. They just can't stand for anyone to disagree with them.

Where did the tea party come from?

It’s all because the media, like a love struck teenybopper, fell in love and decided to run off with Barack Obama. It left a vacuum that others filled. It’s too late to move back home. To carry the analogy one step further, they are carrying Obama’s love child and it’s too late for an abortion. They have it; they will nurture it and grow up with it. Meanwhile others have moved into its room at home.

A Federal judge has ruled that 20 states can go ahead with their lawsuit seeking to overturn Obamacare.

Mr. T says buy GOLD.

Obama wants Biden back. So I guess that means no VP run for Hillary.

Popular Mechanics is a magazine I subscribe to. They have articles about everything. Here's one on the AK-47 assault rifle.

Dr. Marc Siegel: Doctor Unavailability Syndrome (DUS) is caused by Obamacare and it's spreading. It is characterized by a rising shortage of doctors, both specialists and primary care.

TaxProf quoting Peter Theil on the Higher Ed bubble: "University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers," he says, "selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it's not a consumption decision, it's an investment decision. Actually, no, it's a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties."

Krauhhammer's Take on the Corner: "And in part the reason that unemployment stays so high is because of acts of omission and commission by this administration. One example: Business, which has $2 trillion on the sidelines, has no idea what its health-care costs are going to be as a result of Obamacare, and it has no idea what the regulatory atmosphere is going to be as a result of the financial regulation, and no idea what its rates of taxation are going to be."

It's exactly the same story that occurred during the New Deal, which prolonged the Great Depression.

Today is Columbus Day, a day many people don't like to celebrate anymore. For another view, see here.

Pseudoscientific fraud

Dr. Harold Lewis of the American Physical Society and Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has resigned, saying that global warming is "the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist." See this discussion which describes Lewis' letter as on the scale of Martin Luther's nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door, and then read his letter in full. Astounding!

All academic fields are subject to their fads. Certainly historians have their screwed up notions that are passed from professor to grad students, and on and on. I won't go into fads in the so-called social sciences. But the global warming hoax is one that can cost us big bucks.

I did like Lewis' historical analogy. 

No COLA, again

Seniors will receive no Social Security increase next year for the second year in a row. No COLA. But remember, the election is about two weeks away.

TaxProf has more.

I find dates like 10/10/10 interesting. Not sure why.

James DeLong: "The Special Interest State that has shaped American life for 70 years is dying. What comes next is uncertain, but there are grounds for optimism."

Jason Tolbert: Lincoln says that hate drives her opposition. She said earlier that her critics were un-American.