DONALD SENSING HAS MORE THOUGHTS on the Battle of Franklin. The 21st Century one, not the 19th Century one.

TURKISH PEACEKEEPERS ARE GOING TO SOUTH LEBANON: But this doesn’t inspire much confidence:

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has assured the skeptical public that Turkish soldiers will be withdrawn immediately if asked to disarm Hezbollah fighters.

Why is it that these “peace process” agreements always seem to turn out to be some sort of sham?

TOM PAINE makes a comeback.

EMILY LITELLA ALERT: Drudge is reporting that Foley’s accuser was actually 18 years old at the time the Instant Messages were sent. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “Do you really think no one in the Republican leadership has bothered to go back and look at the file to see how old the page actually was?”

A competent Republican leadership certainly would have, but that’s pretty much already been ruled out, right?

I’m all in favor of getting rid of Hastert — but I’ve been in favor of that for a long time, and his William Jefferson response seemed to demonstrate his utter ineptitude — or worse — sufficiently for my purposes. And as I noted yesterday, the Republican House leadership has squandered its political and moral capital across the board and over an extended period of time.

On the other hand, if ABC ran with a story that was wrong in its essential detail, turning consensual behavior among adults into underage sex, well, that’s kind of a major blunder, too, at the very least.

MORE: Bob Owens says that the IMs started when the page was 17. It’s just the publicized chat, apparently, that took place at age 18.

Meanwhile, reader Christopher Grayce thinks I’m wrong to talk about “underage sex,” as there was no actual sex:

I don’t recall anything in the Foley story about sex. Just some naughty text messages. I mean, that’s in bad taste, but maybe this shouldn’t be quite the witch hunt it is. I’m also a little nonplussed by your strong distinction between salacious messages to a 17-year-old on his own in D.C. with an 18-year-old. I believe both are legal (age of consent being lower than 18, I think). I’m sure you’ll recall a young man can join the Marines and go to Iraq at 17.

I’m not defending being a paederast, but still, aspects of this process are beginning to look a little hysterical.

Good point.

MORE: Strangely, the above produces this email from an (of course) anonymous lefty emailer:

You and your entire side of the political spectrum are now plainly exposed for what you are: power-hungry perverts, obsessed with anal rape. From Abu Graib to Giuliani Time, from Mark Foley to outlawing gay marriage, to authorizing Bush to “define” the Geneva Conventions, conservatives in America are obsessed with just one thing: penetrating the rectum of unwilling partners.

Maybe we should ask Mrs. Instapundit about these tendencies.

Republicans: The Anal Rape Party.

Fitting, don’t you think?

Hmm. My first thought is that I didn’t realize that Bill Lockyer was a Republican. My second thought is that you’re a loony. That’s pretty much my third and fourth thought, too. . . .

Anyway, I am on the record as being pro-sodomy, but not of the coerced kind, though as far as I know there’s none of that to be found in FoleyGate. Seems to me that some Democrats are going a bit off the deep end here.

STILL MORE: James Joyner notes that Judd Legum is among those who seem to have lost it.

APPARENTLY, WE’RE STILL NOWHERE NEAR A RECESSION: “The number of newly laid off workers filing claims for unemployment benefits dropped last week to the lowest level in 10 weeks. . . . The level was down by 17,000 from the previous week and marked the second consecutive week that claims applications have fallen, providing evidence that the slowdown the economy has been going through since the spring has not triggered a big increase in layoffs. Meanwhile, many of the nation’s major retailers reported Thursday that sales came in better than expected in September as customers, encouraged by falling gasoline prices, went on a shopping spree.”

Funny that this good economic picture is getting so little attention. Unemployment is very low, inflation is low, the Dow is at record highs. . . . You’d think we’d be hearing more about it.

MARK TAPSCOTT IS GUESTBLOGGING over at the PBS MediaShift blog.

THERE’S NOW A TRANSCRIPT of our John Fund podcast on election fraud. You can read it here. In the not-too-distant future, these will routinely appear a few days after the interview is posted.

STRATEGYPAGE ON WHY THE KURDS ARE DOING BETTER than the rest of Iraq:

When asked, Kurds attribute their peaceful neighborhood to the fact that Kurds are not Arabs. But this is not the main reason, for the Kurds have, in the past, been as factious and violent as the Iraqi Arabs are now. But during the 1990s, when the U.S. and Britain agreed to keep Saddam’s forces out of the north (to prevent another large scale massacre of Kurds), the Kurds sorted out their differences and learned the benefits of cooperation and law and order. In effect, the Kurds had a ten year head start on the rest of Iraq, in the “how to create peace and democracy” department. The Iraqi Arabs, Sunni and Shia, who come north on business, or for a vacation, note this. The Arabs believe they are superior to the Kurds (“a bunch of hillbillies,” to most Arabs), and find it irritating that the Kurds have made things work, while down south, especially in central Iraq, things are still a mess. Given another seven years, the Iraqi Arabs will probably catch up. But this is not a popular solution to the “Iraq problem,” and no career-conscious journalist is going to talk about it.

You can hear Michael Totten talk about Kurdistan in our podcast interview from last week.

CRUSHING OF DISSENT at Columbia University. Follow the link for video, and multiple reports.

PROGRESS IN TELEPORTATION:

The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.

“Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter,” Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained.

“Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement,” he added.

Transport of humans is quite a ways off, though. Computing applications are much closer.

ANDREW POSTMAN looks at saving energy at home:

I bought 50 compact fluorescent light bulbs — 50 — intent on replacing every incandescent one in my home. The new bulbs were supposed to be 67 percent more efficient and last up to 15 times longer. Unfortunately, the ones I bought also cast a considerably colder light, so I aborted my plan after just two bulbs when I realized the quality of light they emitted reminded me of a bus station bathroom.

Yeah, I had that problem, too. Read the whole thing for more — though I note that many of the people quoted have yet to quit the private-jet habit . . . .

BURNING LOTS OF JET FUEL to fight global warming. Haven’t these people heard of the Internet?

CHINA GIVES UP on stopping a North Korean bomb, making it very likely that Japan will acquire nuclear weapons in response.

Nonproliferation efforts don’t seem to be working very well.

A SECOND RECORD CLOSE FOR THE DOW. And gas prices keep falling.

Will this offset the Foley scandal? Good question, but it’s good news regardless.

A BIG FOLEYGATE MASTURGATE ROUNDUP, at Pajamas Media.

Plus, an open secret? And a look at the GOP playbook: “Gerry Studds (D-MA) had sex with a 17-year-old male page. In 1983*, he was reprimanded. Republicans wanted to censure him. But 79 Dems voted against upgrading the condemnation. The GOP wants you to know that some in the Democratic Party, in 1983, apparently did not find Studds’s conduct to be deserving of a full censure, which carries significant penalties.”

And a look at the blog that started it all. Dirty tricks are dirty, sure — but does this really help the Republicans given that the charges seem to be true?

UPDATE: Hmm: “Meanwhile, does anyone think it is ironic that so-called progressives who excoriated eavesdropping on terrorists are feasting on the publication of supposedly confidential email and IMs? You can forget about privacy. It no longer exists, if it ever did.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Daniel Schensul emails that the Hotline blog item above is in error, and that Studds was censured, not reprimanded.

Wikipedia agrees with him, so to the extent that the difference matters it’s worth noting.

MORE: A guestblogger at TalkLeft thinks that my link to the erroneous Hotlineblog item was a “lie.” That’s setting the bar for “lying” pretty low, isn’t it? Especially given that the difference seems rather minor — who knows or cares now, anyway, about the difference between a Studds reprimand and a Studds censure, so what would be the point of such a “lie?”

BRENT SCOWCROFT ACCUSES WOODWARD of making up quotes: “there are statements in the book, directly or implicitly attributed to me, that did not and never could have come from me.”

POPULAR MECHANICS WILL BE WEBCASTING its Breakthrough Awards ceremony tonight.

I had planned to be there myself, but family responsibilities intervened, alas.

UPDATE: Here’s a direct link to the video feed.

MORE ON the battle of Franklin.

GAY PATRIOT says that Democrats are descending into “sexual McCarthyism” in the wake of Foleygate, circulating lists of Republican Hill staffers who are presumed to be gay. “I am not surprised that this is where we are headed. But my question is…. why have our national gay organizations (HRC, Log Cabin, NGLTF) not stepped in to stop this witchhunt which originated on the Gay Left in the first place? I think we know the answer.”

UPDATE: Eric Scheie writes on when “outing” isn’t enough. “Who’d have ever expected to see gays and antigays rejoicing together?”

I guess it’s more of that strange-bedfellows stuff.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Not FoleyGate, MasturGate: “This may well be the reverse Monica of the new century; the first time that a remote hand-job has had a hand, so to speak, in bringing down a government. . . . Coming from a party that is first and foremost about advancing gay and lesbian rights on all fronts, it seems especially shameful that — to settle all their old scores and gripes and grievances — they are going willing to sacrifice the lives, careers and reputations of their fellow Americans.”

MORE: It boils down to “Where were the Republican Taliban when we needed them?”

CATHY SEIPP looks back at ten years of South Park.

A COMPARISON of how the Chicago Tribune covered record stock market highs in 2000 with how it’s covering them today.

DO THE REPUBLICANS DESERVE TO RETAIN THE HOUSE? This morning driving in to work I heard Neal Boortz saying no, and he made a pretty compelling case. (If it weren’t for silly Democratic talk about impeachment and show-trial hearings I’d find it even more compelling.)

The counter-case is that a Democratic House would be a disaster for the country. I gathered from Boortz’s discussion that that’s the case that Hannity and Limbaugh were making yesterday. It’s a strong argument — except that if Republican control of the Congress is so all-fired important to the future of civilization, then why haven’t the Republicans who control Congress been acting as if it is so important?

And it’s not so much the Foley affair — that’s just the pebble that starts the avalanche. It’s the past two years of more substantive problems, which, as Rich Lowry notes, have exhausted their stock of moral and political capital on a lot of issues. Were GOP control of the Congress so important to the country, wouldn’t the GOP leadership have exercised a trifle more self-discipline and self-denial? And if it’s not capable of doing so, then what kind of leadership is it?

YOUTUBE is caving to censorship.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON looks at the war and its critics.

A LOOK AT Al Qaeda’s narrative of doubt.