AUSTIN BAY is looking for comments from the troops on Kerry’s remarks.

THE PRO-GUN ARGUMENT for James Webb.

IT’S A YOUTUBE ELECTION, even at the local level.

A.C. KLEINHEIDER NOTES two new polls showing Corker with a substantial lead over Ford. I wouldn’t recommend too much faith in those numbers — I think the race remains very close, and winnable by either side.

DEFENDING THE COCOON: Patterico notes that the New York Times misquotes Kerry’s remarks, leaving its readers with a false impression.

THE INSTAWIFE looks at the murder of an unarmed security guard here in Knoxville. He happened to cross the path of a criminal and was shot. No gun, no bulletproof vest.

As Dave Hardy has remarked:

Unarmed security guard sounds a little like a contradiction … at best a deterrence to the more stupid or minor criminals (don’t steal that bike — there’s a guy in uniform), at worst, a man put in an impossible situation, charged with protecting others, but having nothing but a radio to call for help, and maybe his fists.

Yes. People hire them, I suspect, because they don’t want to pay the premium it would cost to hire someone who can be trusted to carry a gun while dealing with malefactors and non-malefactors. But as with an awful lot of “security” efforts, they’re really paying for the appearance of security without its substance. Only someone else, the guard or a victim, sometimes winds up paying the price for the difference between appearance and substance.

TIRED OF THE WEBB/ALLEN CIRCUS? Meryl Yourish is running for Senate in Virginia.

WHAT’S LEAKED VS. WHAT GOES UNREPORTED, in Iraq.

I GUESS IT’S NOT JUST HERE that airport security is a joke:

More than 70 Muslim workers at France’s main airport have been stripped of the security clearance for allegedly posing a risk to passengers, officials say.

The staff at Charles de Gaulle airport, including baggage handlers, are said to have visited terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

One man is thought to have been a friend of Richard Reid, the so-called British shoe bomber. . . . It is also believed another worker had been close to a senior figure in an Algerian terrorist group with links to al-Qaeda.

But some of the men who have lost their security clearance are suing airport authorities.

They claim they are being discriminated against because of their religion.

It almost makes you wonder how any flight ever reaches its destination in one piece.

“GIS DROP SMART BOMB ON KERRY” — the real question is what brilliant strategist thought that Kerry would do much for Angelides even if everything went right?

OPERATION SUNSCREEN: Arnold Kling looks at climate engineering as a response to global warming.

THE SANITY SQUAD looks at attitudes toward women in segments of the Muslim world.

NIELSEN NET/RATINGS: “36.6 percent of U.S. adults online are Republicans, 30.8 percent are Democrats and 17.3 percent are Independents.”

VOTE FRAUD INDICTMENTS in Missouri:

Investigators said questionable registration forms for new voters were collected by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a group that works to improve minority and low-income communities.

The four indicted — Kwaim A. Stenson, Dale D. Franklin, Stephanie L. Davis and Brian Gardner — were employed by ACORN as registration recruiters. They were each charged with two counts.

Federal indictments allege the four turned in false voter registration applications. Prosecutors said the indictments are part of a national investigation.

Gateway Pundit has a roundup. Much more on election fraud here.

STOMPING ON CANCER WITH VIRUSES: I approve of this.

I remember in one of Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker stories, a man captured by an alien killing machine managed to get it to biopsy his tumor when it was taking tissue samples, so that the “lethal” virus it created was instead a cure for cancer. Okay, this isn’t quite as exciting a story, but still . . . .

A NEW GEORGE ALLEN SCANDAL?

What happened was, one year he got parking tickets that weren’t paid, and the next year he had a citation for fishing without a license.

First Abramoff, now this? I’m appalled. I guess they don’t call them “rethuglicans” for nothing . . . .

I HAVEN’T PAID MUCH ATTENTION TO TENNESSEE POLITICS other than the Ford-Corker race (which I see as more a national race than a Tennessee race, really) but it’s worth noting that Tennessee blogger Bob Krumm is running for State Senate against incumbent Senator Doug Henry.

Here’s Krumm’s blog, and here’s his campaign page. Here’s Doug Henry’s page.

There’s no question that Krumm has used the Internet more effectively. I remember Henry from when I interned for the state Senate back in the 1980s; sitting in his office on a Saturday with a broken leg talking about Omar Khayyam, who I was reading at the time and with whose work Henry was quite familiar. I liked him. But Krumm’s more 21st Century in his approach, I think it’s fair to say.

A LAMONT CAMPAIGN PRE-MORTEM in the New York Observer:

The apparent end of the much-ballyhooed Lamont phenomenon is causing a great deal of soul-searching and recrimination in all corners of the Democratic Party. The bloggers that once championed Mr. Lamont as an awkward but earnest savior now alternately blame Washington’s strategists for hijacking their candidate and Democratic leaders for abandoning him. Beltway consultants fault the Lamont campaign for failing to move the candidate beyond his left-wing celebrity and define him for a greater electorate. . . .

The night of his primary victory, when Mr. Lamont first introduced himself to the wider Connecticut electorate, his campaign betrayed the first cracks of disorganization by allowing a motley crew of out-of-state politicians, including such controversial figures as the Reverend Al Sharpton, to appear behind him onstage.

Then the candidate seemed to simply disappear.

“Everybody went on vacation—Ned, the communications director, the campaign manager,” said a Democratic strategist who spoke on the condition of anon­ymity. “Anybody who has ever been on a campaign before knows that the day after the primary is when you have to start defining yourself.”

But hey, my “pre-mortem” for the GOP is looking slightly premature in the wake of John Kerry’s dumb remarks. Perhaps some Republican equivalent of John Kerry will breathe new life into Lamont’s campaign.

N.Z. BEAR has thoughts on the Kerry affair.

TENNESSEE SENATE UPDATE: So the Insta-Mom volunteered at Harold Ford, Jr. headquarters today. Downside for Ford: This was because a friend of hers who was volunteering said they had a shortage of people making phone calls. Upside for Ford: She said that most of the people she called (obviously identified as likely Democratic voters) said that they’d already voted for him in early voting.

Also, I note that you see a lot of Ford signs out in the rural countryside. I have a friend who keeps promising to send me a picture of a house in Sixmile with a Harold Ford sign in the yard and a Confederate flag hanging on the porch, but so far he hasn’t delivered. I trust his report, though.

LONGEVITY UPDATE:

Researchers at the Harvard Medical School and the National Institute on Aging report that a natural substance found in red wine, known as resveratrol, offsets the bad effects of a high-calorie diet in mice and significantly extends their lifespan.

Their report, published electronically today in Nature, implies that very large daily doses of resveratrol could offset the unhealthy, high-calorie diet thought to underlie the rising toll of obesity in the United States and elsewhere, should people respond to the drug as mice do.

Resveratrol is found in the skin of grapes and in red wine and is conjectured to be a partial explanation for the French paradox, the puzzling fact that people in France tend to enjoy a high-fat diet yet suffer less heart disease than Americans.

The researchers fed one group of mice a diet in which 60 percent of calories came from fat. The diet started when the mice, all males, were 1 year old, which is middle-aged in mouse terms. As expected, the mice soon developed signs of impending diabetes, with grossly enlarged livers, and started to die much sooner than mice fed a standard diet.

Another group of mice was fed the identical high-fat diet but with a large daily dose of resveratrol. The resveratrol did not stop them from putting on weight and growing as tubby as the other fat-eating mice. But it averted the high levels of glucose and insulin in the bloodstream, which are warning signs of diabetes, and it kept the mice’s livers at normal size.

Even more strikingly, the substance sharply extended the mice’s lifetimes. Those fed resveratrol along with the high-fat diet died many months later than the mice on high fat alone, and at the same rate as mice on a standard healthy diet. They had all the pleasures of gluttony but paid none of the price.

Bring it on! There’ll be more human research out in about a year. Until then: “Have another glass of pinot noir — that’s as far as I’d take it right now.”

A ROUNDUP OF “RIGHT-WING NUTJOBS” — I guess real Democrats, on Kerry’s say-so, won’t vote for any of them . . . .

HOMELAND SECURITY REMAINS A JOKE: That’s not funny, but the fake boarding pass saga is. Sort of.

GAY MARRIAGE — THE PRO-FAMILY OPTION!

Seventeen years after recognizing same-sex relationships in Scandinavia there are higher marriage rates for heterosexuals, lower divorce rates, lower rates for out-of-wedlock births, lower STD rates, more stable and durable gay relationships, more monogamy among gay couples, and so far no slippery slope to polygamy, incestuous marriages, or “man-on-dog” unions.

Gay marriage — it’s for the children!

JOHN KERRY APOLOGIZES ON IMUS:

In an unscheduled call-in interview this morning, Senator John Kerry (D-Ma) spoke with Don Imus about his misstatements in a speech Monday. He said that he is “sorry for the botched joke,” and that “everybody knows I botched a joke.” He also says he is going back to Washington so that he is “not a distraction” to the campaigns.

Be sure to read the transcript. One thing this affair illustrates is just how badly the Democrats did to nominate Kerry in 2004. I’m reminded of what John Zogby wrote a year ago about a poll he had run:

In our new poll, every president since Carter defeats Bush. But Kerry still loses to Bush by one point. What am I missing here?

What he was missing was that Kerry was an extraordinarily weak candidate. Bush himself was a pretty weak candidate; he was just stronger than Kerry. I’d really like to see the Democrats run somebody decent next time around. Even Hillary! As I’ve noted before:

I still maintain hopes that she might turn out to be “the most uncompromising wartime President in United States history.” After all, she argued that President Bush had “inherent authority” to go to war against Saddam!

Plus, we might see the tough-talking Secretary of State Atrios!

You go, girl. Meanwhile, Tom Maguire offers some thoughts on how Kerry — and the Democrats — got themselves in this fix.

UPDATE: James Taranto observes:

Even if the statement was a “botched joke,” what on earth would possess Kerry to think that this excuses what he said? George Allen and Trent Lott didn’t get passes for “botched jokes”; indeed, here is what Kerry himself said about Lott, according to Salon . . . . “I simply do not believe the country can today afford to have someone who has made these statements again and again be the leader of the United States Senate.”

I thought that about Lott, too. And I think the same about Kerry, though happily he’s unlikely to ever have the opportunity to resign any office of greater consequence than Senator.

UPDATE: The Anchoress notes that the formerly uncompromising Hillary is now compromising her position on the war. Dang.