TENNESSEE BLOGGERS ROB HUDDLESTON, RANDY NEAL, AND JOHN JAY HOOKER will be on Radio Open Source talking about the Tennessee Senate race tonight. You can leave a question in the comments if you follow the link.

Here’s how to listen.

I GATHER THAT LIMBAUGH was on about InstaPundit premortems, etc., again today. I didn’t hear it, but here’s a response.

I’m not actually hoping for the GOP to lose, but I do agree with James Taranto:

It now seems within the realm of possibility that Democrats will take one or both houses of Congress in three weeks, even though they are campaigning on not much more than not being Republicans. But the Republicans are campaigning on not much more than not being Democrats. To our mind the Republicans have the better of this argument, but there is something to be said for punishing the party in power if its performance has been subpar.

It’s hard for me to believe that the performance will improve if there’s no prospect of suffering at the polls.

OH, PLEASE: All politicians use hand sanitizer all the time. And they should. In her campaign book, Mary Cheney has a lengthy discussion of the importance of hand sanitizer on the campaign trail. Excerpt:

The truth is, all candidates use it — or suffer the consequences. When Wesley Clark entered the 2004 presidential race, he caught a cold, lost his voice, and was unable to campaign for several days. Some people speculated that the pace of a national campaign had knocked the former NATO comander off the campaign trail. I knew it was because he hadn’t learned about hand sanitizer. National candidates shake hundreds, if not thousands, of hands every day. They will get sick unless they wash their hands early and often.

Presidents, too. (I believe we talked about this in our podcast interview with Mary Cheney, as well.) Personally, I agree with Donald Trump: Handshaking is unsanitary, and we should replace it with something else. Whenever we go to the AALS “meat market” recruitment conference — where job candidates from all over the country meet with recruiters from law schools all over the country right at the beginning of cold-and-flu season, and where attendance is so important that people will drag themselves there unless they’re candidates for the ICU — most of us wind up with some creeping crud afterward. Next time, I’m taking a big pump-bottle of Purell.

Anyone who’s offended by this sanitary precaution will be sentenced to crawling through the tot-tunnels at Chuck E. Cheese, which feature a concentration of microbes that makes North Korean biowar labs look tame.

UPDATE: Ace: “I’m wondering how quickly Bush jumped into an intense bactericidal ultraviolet light-chamber after shaking my hand.”

I don’t know about Bush, but when I shook Ace’s hand I was using a bionic arm for safety. Apparently it was quite convincing.

Meanwhile, truck-driving reader Gerald Dearing emails:

Agreed that handshaking en masse is a bad idea. And Obama is a foole if he does not use sanitizer, too. My anecdote: In a previous incarnation, I spend two years photographing families for church directories. (You probably know the deal: the Church gets a free photo directory in exchange for providing a chance to sell the portraits to the membership.) Real cookie-cutter stuff. Five families an hour. Get the kids off their deathbeds to have their likeness made one last time. “Isn’t the little [disease factory] soooo cute?” I was sick the whole two years. And it was a pre-sanitizer age.

More recently, I’m convinced that I suffer many fewer colds now that the trucking industry has evolved from a reliance on public phones to communication via satellite and cell technology.

Just don’t shake a politician’s hand. You don’t know where it’s been.

ROBERT BYRD brags about pork.

NO, I HAVEN’T BEEN FOLLOWING THE 1POINTSOLUTIONS SCANDAL at all. People are sending me this article and asking what I think, but you’d be better off going to Bill Hobbs and Terry Frank. And here’s some collected coverage from The Tennessean. Sorry, but I just don’t do a lot of Tennessee political coverage.

GUN-BUYING ADVICE from Bob Owens.

CONSTITUENT SERVICE from New Jersey’s Bob Menendez.

FBI MISCONDUCT is a long-running InstaPundit theme, and Whiteclay, Nebraska — just across the line from the Pine Ridge Reservation — is the nominal home of the Nebraska Guitar Militia. So I was interested to get Steve Hendricks’ new book, The Unquiet Grave : The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country.

It opens like a Tony Hillerman novel, but it’s nonfiction, and it quickly grows darker than Hillerman.

IS THE E.U. TRYING TO STIFLE VIDEOBLOGGERS? But of course!

BROKEN BEYOND REPAIR? At the very least, these guys need to be reading StrategyPage.

THE FRENCH WON’T DISARM HEZBOLLAH, but they’re willing to fire on Israelis.

FAREED ZAKARIA: “Does anyone where you live think that a Democratic Congress in the U.S. would be better for the world?”

SWEDEN, HOME OF EGALITARIANISM:

“THEY are a bit like royalty,” says Peter Thelin, a manager at Brummer & Partners, a Swedish hedge fund. He is describing the Wallenbergs, whose business counts as his most aristocratic investment. The Wallenbergs have been around a long time—even longer than the Bernadottes, the royal family who came to Sweden in the early 19th century when one of Napoleon’s marshals was adopted as heir by an ageing Swedish king. But it was under the House of Bernadotte that the Wallenbergs rose to prominence and now run one of the world’s most successful family firms.

By the late 1990s the Wallenbergs controlled some 40% of the value of the companies listed on the Swedish stock exchange. Their interests range from Ericsson, a leading telecoms firm, to Astra Zeneca, a pharmaceuticals company now listed in London, Electrolux, a white-goods manufacturer, and ABB, a global engineering giant. After Volkswagen, the family is also the second-biggest shareholder in Sweden’s Scania, for which Germany’s MAN, a rival truckmaker, has made a €9.6 billion ($12 billion) hostile bid. There is little that happens in Swedish business that does not involve the Wallenbergs.

Thanks to reader Mark Stroup for the pointer.

CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS: “As a writer and frequent campus lecturer, I am accustomed to encountering activist professors. Nevertheless, when I visited the University of New Mexico Law School recently, I was taken aback by the political fervor of the faculty.”

I spoke there some years ago and had a lovely time. Hard to believe that things could have changed this much.

ERIC SCHEIE: “I have long been disgusted with the Republicans — so much so that I’m almost tired of holding my nose when I go to the polls. Yet I plan to vote for them again, despite my disgust.”

GOOGLE IS CONVERTING ITS HEADQUARTERS to solar power.

And in other alternative-energy news, Popular Mechanics crunches the numbers on the hydrogen economy, and discovers that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be: “At first glance, hydrogen would seem an ideal substitute for these problematic fuels. Pound for pound, hydrogen contains almost three times as much energy as natural gas, and when consumed its only emission is pure, plain water. But unlike oil and gas, hydrogen is not a fuel. It is a way of storing or transporting energy. You have to make it before you can use it — generally by extracting hydrogen from fossil fuels, or by using electricity to split it from water.”

The news isn’t all bad, though.

ANOTHER RECORD HIGH FOR THE DOW yesterday: “Recent company comments and government data have underscored the notion that the U.S. economy is stronger than expected, heading into the end of the year, and that companies will post another quarter of double-digit earnings growth.”

So, is it the economy, stupid? This election will be a test.

UPDATE: Eric Ashley emails:

Its not “the economy stupid” because the MSM gets to change the standards by which they, and in consequence, a lot of people judge events and leaders. Its somewhat like the hour eye-care place where the doc flips through various lenses asking “is this one better, or this one?” until he finds the ones that makes his “EIMG” chart look good.

The difference is the doc’s definition of looking good is clarity. The MSM’s is prettiness of the chart aka ‘voting Democratic’.

And Bart Halls says it didn’t get much on NPR:

A yawn. Didn’t even mention it. “Dow Jones industrials closed up about 20 points.” Nothing to see here. Move along.

I recall back in late ’99 and early ’00 they were crowing about it every single time. Then again, there was a Democrat in the White House. That sort of self-deception is one reason the left are repeatedly disappointed by their electoral results.

Yes, it does seem to me that the economy during the tech bubble got a lot more positive attention.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Duane Simpson blames Bush!

We can’t really blame the press for ignoring the economy, the Administration is just as responsible. “It’s the Economy Stupid” was a quote from Carville to remind Clinton and Co. to constantly talk about the economy. Bush and all of the Republican candidates for office need to be talking economy all of the time if they expect to get any credit for it.

Advice to Karl Rove: Here’s your story hook — get the press to cover the Bush Administration’s failure to talk about how good the economy is! There’s an angle they’ll buy . . . .

ED MORRISSEY takes a look at the latest from Harry Reid and finds Reid’s complaints unconvincing:

Let’s get this straight. Reid’s failure to follow the Senate rules on disclosure in 2001, when he sat on the Ethics Committee, somehow got set up by the Republicans. Reid’s connection to an attorney involved in a bribery case that directly related to zoning decisions in Clark County, where they both owned property, was a Rovian plot set in motion in 1998. And now Reid’s new disclosures of property in an area where he has taken an intense legislative interest somehow relates to Republicans, when no one even mentioned the parcels in question — because Reid failed to disclose them during his entire time as Senate Minority Leader, while he has castigated Republicans for alleged ethical lapses.

The only reason he’s coming clean is because the AP caught him breaking the rules earlier, and it pointed out the extensive connections between Reid, Nevada land developers, and the legislation he has championed that has benefitted all of them. . . .

Besides, the man made $700,000 in profits in 2004 on that one sale of land that, according to his disclosure statements, he didn’t even own at the time. He couldn’t even part with $1200 of it from his own pocket in bonuses, gifts, and a Christmas party for his staff? He had to stick his contributors with the bill? Perhaps he figured it all came from the same source and didn’t make much difference.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meanwhile, on the they’re-probably-all-crooks front, the Weldon probe widens.

WHEN AN AK-47 is not an AK-47. John Tabin elucidates.

DAVE WEIGEL: “if Democrats win power next month, they’ll do it on the backs of very conservative candidates.”

He adds: “Democrats in tight races in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the rest of the swing districts are mostly running against voter malaise and Iraq war conduct, as opposed to the idea of the Iraq war. You’re not hearing many Democrats rule out strikes on Iran or North Korea, and you are hearing many backpedal at Roadrunner-speed from citizenship-based immigration reform and gay marriage.”

JOE USER COMMENTS on the InstaPundit / Rush Limbaugh faceoff.

UPDATE: I can’t be a “RINO” because I’ve never claimed to be a Republican. I wouldn’t mind if the GOP won this time — but as I said, they don’t really deserve it.

KIM JONG IL RISES TO THE CHALLENGE: I challenge: “Sounds like a fizzle. I dare Kim Jong Il to test another one!”

What comes next? “U.S spy satellites have detected ‘suspicious vehicle movements’ that could be preparations for another test near the site where North Korea conducted its first underground nuclear explosion test on Oct. 9, ABC News said, quoting unidentified U.S. officials.”

Let me stress that it will take several successful test explosions to convince me that North Korea really has workable nukes. Say six or eight. Anything less could be a fluke.

IS NORTH KOREA’S BIGGER THREAT its non-nuclear weapons? “The consensus among weapons inspectors, intelligence analysts, academics and others I have interviewed—–which is backed up by the available open source material—-is that North Korea has developed anthrax, plague and botulism toxin as weapons and has extensively researched at least six other germs including smallpox and typhoid.”

ROGER SIMON ON TODAY’S POLITICS: “It’s blood sport performed by truly uninteresting performers-basketball without Kobe, Shaq or Jordan. People like Reid, Hastert, Pelosi are complete mediocrities who should be at much lower levels in our society. Something is fundamentally wrong on both sides of the aisle if they are the upper leadership of our Congress.”

Politics is not attracting our best people.

A PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH TONY SNOW: At RedState.