HEALTH-CARE BLOGGING: This week’s Grand Rounds is up.

JON LAUCK liveblogged Tom Daschle’s courtroom appearance last night. It’s amusing and informative.

AMIR TAHERI: “Americans will certainly have 9/11 in mind when they vote today. But they should keep another date in mind, too — one almost exactly a quarter-century ago: Nov. 4, 1979. A clear path runs to 9/11 from the day of the raid on the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the seizure of American hostages.”

Read the whole thing.

ELECTIONS AND POLITICAL DIVISIONS: My Guardian column is up.

WHAT WAS THE BIGGEST STORY OF THE CAMPAIGN? You can read my take on that question in The New York Times, along with related thoughts by quite a few other bloggers.

OSAMA BIN LADEN declares Robert Fisk a neutral. Wow. That must have taken some effort, Bob.

D0N’T MISS THE BLOGGERS ON THE NYT OP-ED PAGE. They asked us what we thought was “the most important event or moment of the campaign” and we made stuff up.

UPDATE: Let me add a crushingly leaden update. “[W]e made stuff up” was a joke — a snark, as it were — tweaking MSM for thinking bloggers are unreliable. So please no more email scolding me for lying in the NYT and for “never giving Kerry a chance.” Try reading my blog. You can trace the story of my contemplating the two candidates. The record is there, time-stamped on my blog. Jeez!

WE’RE NOT THE ONLY ONES HAVING ELECTIONS: Ukraine has just finished a poll which may transform it into that rarest of creatures: a former soviet republic with a functioning democracy. Of course, the campaign has not exactly been unmarred. Both candidates are now claiming that they’ve won (but both are agreeing to a runoff). And someone seems to have poisoned the challenger (Putin supports his opponent), with some pretty horrifying results. But if the election works, and the transition proceeds smoothly, we’ll be seeing democracy bloom in another most unlikely place.

OSAMA BIN LADEN: ECONOMIC ILLITERATE I’ve always heaped scorn on the notion that war is good for the economy; it’s the height of fallacious economic reasoning to think that a practice which destroys tons of equipment and hundreds of young men is an economic boon. But Osama Bin Laden’s equally wrong if he thinks that this war is going to weaken our economy

Bin Laden also suggested that the huge sums of money Washington spends on homeland security and the military serve his agenda of weakening the U.S. economy.

“All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration,” bin Laden said. “All that we have to do is to send two mujaheddin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘al Qaeda’ in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses, without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.”

He added: “We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”

Iraq and Afghanistan together have cost us less than $300 billion, including the money Bush is going to ask for next year. In the same period, the US economy will have grossed about 36 trillion dollars, meaning that the war will have cost us less than 1% of our income.

If Osama really wants to gut the US budget, he’s going to need to try something more drastic, like opening up a chain of Medicare clinics. His efforts so far haven’t even done that much damage to the deficit, much less the US economy.

UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT: Germany’s largest newspaper demands the Queen of England apologize for Britain’s bombing of Germany in the war against Hitler. Oddly enough, this is the same paper that endorsed the election of George W. Bush. (Hat tip: Jeff Jarvis)

WHAT COMES NEXT FOR THE WINNING PARTY? Many magazines have written stories about the political implications of losing. But what about the winners? Will they be in a good position?

In general, you’d think yes. We’re coming out of a recession, which generally means that the next president will enjoy rapid growth in employment and personal livng standards–and that spells popularity. There are, however, some clouds on the horizon, which means that winning may not necessarily be the boon both parties are expecting.

For starters, a number of people are talking about another recession in 2005. High oil prices were the driving force behind the stagnation of the 1970’s; it’s credible to think that it could happen again. Moreover, the recovery has been underpinned by what many people think is an interest-rate bubble: an explosion of consumer debt driven by Alan Greenspan’s free hand with the money supply. Even before Greenspan started to raise rates again, consumers were pretty much maxing out; as they retrench, the economy may slow, and consumer confidence will certainly take a beating. The government balance sheet is in no better shape, and our massive current account deficit (meaning we import much more than we export) means that the dollar is almost certainly going to slide further against both the euro and asian currencies. That means inflation and fewer cheap electronics from China.

And the economy isn’t the only problem spot. There’s Iraq, of course. Then there’s our massive entitlement problem. Towards the middle of the next president’s term, he’s going to have to deal with Medicare opening up a deficit. That means that instead of people’s payroll taxes for Medicare funneling extra money into the general budget, the government will have to start transferring money to Medicare to cover expenses.

Of course, Iraq may have bottomed out, entitlements may stretch out for a few more years before they begin to pinch, and the economy may power forward despite all my dire warnings–it’s a common joke that economists have predicted nine of the last five recessions. In which case, the next president will probably be sitting pretty. Still, if your guy doesn’t carry the day tomorrow, you can console yourself with the thought that he might be getting a lot more than he bargained for.

ROGER SIMON will be pajama-blogging tomorrow. If you vote in pajamas, send me a picture!

A FETAL-TISSUE GRAFT SUCCESS STORY:

Three years ago Elisabeth Bryant believed she would be blind for the rest of her life. “I couldn’t see anything,” she says. Now, although her vision is not perfect, she can see well enough to read, play computer games and check emails.

Bryant has retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that has blinded four generations of her family. What has saved the sight in one of her eyes is a transplant of a sheet of retinal cells. The vision in this eye has improved from 20:800 to 20:84 in the two-and-a-half years since the transplant – a remarkable transformation. . . .

There is a catch, of course. The sheets of retinal cells used by the team are harvested from aborted fetuses, which some people find objectionable.

(Via Colby Cosh, who notes that this tends to undermine some pro-life claims regarding fetal tissue research.)

DASCHLE GOES TO COURT: This isn’t a sign of confidence.

UPDATE: Claims of “home cooking,” here.

SHOULD WE BE BOTHERED because Osama seems to have gotten a helping hand with his propaganda from Michael Moore?

Documentary makers, like journalists, are a vital part of a free society’s feedback mechanism. Should journalists or filmmakers refrain from criticising the administration because the country’s enemies might pick up on it for propaganda purposes? Hell no.

The problem is that Michael Moore has provided Osama with propaganda composed of gross exaggeration, artful misdirection and cheap shots. A healthy society allows for that, as the price of our liberal principles. But just because we don’t want to ban it doesn’t mean that we should laud it. Michael Moore made a movie that’s fundamentally dishonest in order to score political points, and in doing so, he has helped the cause of his country’s enemies. We know that he isn’t ashamed; he has no shame. But his fellow citizens should be outraged.

TOUR THE INDIAN BLOGOSPHERE: Check out this week’s Blog Mela.

ISRAELPUNDIT is a new blog about. . . well, guess.

KERRY HAS BEEN CLAIMING that we’ll see a draft under Bush. But in light of these strongly pro-Bush poll results from serving military folks, I wonder if we’re not more likely to see one under a Kerry Administration. Check this out:

The respondents were broken down into two groups: Active Duty (AD) troops and Reserve / National Guard (RN) troops. (Apologies for the formatting, I don’t have time to set up an html table for this right now.)

If the presidential elections were held today, for whom would you vote?

Bush: AD- 72%, RN-73%
Kerry: AD- 17%, RN-18%
Nader: AD- 1%, RN-1%
Other: AD- 1%, RN-1%
Declined to answer: AD- 2%, RN-1%

Among Active Duty who were deployed 2 or more months since 9/11, the percentage for Bush goes up to 74%. Among the Reserve / National Guard deployed for 2 or more months since 9/11 (whether in a combat zone or elsewhere), Bush gets 76% of the vote.

This makes me wonder if we’d have recruitment and retention problems under a President Kerry. That would lead to either a humiliating military retrenchment — especially for a guy who “reported for duty” and made a big deal of his veteran status — or to pressure to reinstate the draft. Either outcome would be bad. But hey, who knows: Maybe Kerry would win the confidence of the troops before this would matter.

UPDATE: Reader Marc Fleuette says I’m missing out on Kerry’s strategy here:

Prof. Reynolds:

Regarding the draft, I don’t think you are right. It may help to look at it in this way:

1) Troop morale will plunge
2) Enemy morale will soar
3) Retainment/reenlistment will decline dramatically

These are not “bugs” of the Kerry plan, they are “features”. The net result, if the Democrats play their cards right, would quite literally be a reprise of the aftermath of our failure of will in Vietnam:

1) Iraq will be overrun by insurgents
2) Iraquis that supported the US will be slaughtered
3) The US military will be hollowed out, with the soldiers leaving and the
single moms staying
4) US civilian morale will suffer
5) Kerry would grudgingly subordinate US action to the UN/French veto since
we would be too weak to act alone
6) The US will revisit the golden era of the Carter presidency.

I hope he’s joking.

KERRY ON OUTSOURCING, via Tim Blair.

F911, INDEED. Most of us who have seen or read a transcript of Osama bin Laden’s new video noticed how much the reconstructed jihadist’s rhetoric has in common with Michael Moore’s. Moore noticed, as well. From his Web site:

There he was, OBL, all tan and rested and on videotape (hey, did you get the feeling that he had a bootleg of my movie? Are there DVD players in those caves in Afghanistan?)

He’s bragging about this in the middle of an anti-Bush taunt. I’d be embarrassed if a mass-murdering fascist reminded me of myself. If something like this doesn’t give the man a reality check, absolutely nothing ever will.

(Hat tip: Jim Boston.)

ANN ALTHOUSE has a lengthy report on Cheney’s Hawaii visit.

MICKEY KAUS explains why he’s voting for Kerry: “He’s mediocre and it doesn’t matter.”

IT WAS A STUNNINGLY BEAUTIFUL DAY today, and though I was quite busy I took some time to walk around campus on my way to the studio — you don’t get a lot of sunny 80-degree days in November, after all. Here are a few pictures for those who like them, taken with the Toshiba. Click “read more” for more.

(more…)

TIM CAVANAUGH IS PRETTY HARD ON THE LIBERAL HAWKS who have abandoned their earlier positions as the election drew nigh:

Under any conditions, the liberal hawks’ brand of armchair generalship is stunningly glib. . . . More than that, the liberal hawks must consider the very real possibility that what is happening today in Iraq is not an unforeseeable disaster but the best outcome any reasonable person could have expected. . . . So if the liberal hawks honestly thought the war could be conducted without brutality, they were merely naïve. If, however, they are not so much disappointed in the war as tired of Bush, they are something worse. I’m not going to prescribe how anybody should vote, but are there any issues of greater moment than the invasion of Iraq? What is the case for turning out a president who delivered something of such importance to people who say they wanted it? That Bush supported the Federal Marriage Amendment? That No Child Left Behind is underfunded? That Michael Powell has been too rough on Howard Stern? Are these the same people who spent the last three years reminding me that there’s a war on? . . .

The old-fashioned conservative hawks may not be a very attractive bunch, but at least they have the courage of their convictions. If it eventually turns out the invasion of Iraq leads to an outbreak of peace and freedom in the Dar al-Islam (and I hope to be proven wrong on this matter), the liberal hawks will undoubtedly swoop back in to show they were on the right side of history. If that day ever comes, just remember one thing: When the going got tough, they were the ones who looked to Secretary of State Biden to bail them out.

It’s unusual for me to find myself agreeing with Cavanaugh on the war, but I think he has this right. I thought that things were bad enough to justify going to war. I thought that other war supporters did, too, and that in supporting the war they understood that war means, well, war. Some, however, have made rather abrupt changes in position: Mark Steyn refers to them as “moulting hawks.” I just hope that people settle down and focus on what’s important after the election.

UPDATE: Related thoughts, here.

CLUELESS: Novelist Tom Wolfe tells the Guardian that his own liberal elite social set hasn’t a clue.