NOW THIS IS A COOL HALLOWEEN PRESENT: I’ve complained in the past about The Addams Family not being available on DVD.

But now the first season is out, and presumably the rest of the show is coming. Woohoo!

JOHN KERRY — a gift that keeps on giving. Unfortunately, it’s a gift for the Republicans. . . .

Kerry’s suggestion that the troops in Iraq are dumb failures is not only reprehensible, but false on the facts. In other words, a typical Kerry performance, just in time for the elections. Democrats must be wondering what they were thinking to nominate him in 2004, and why he won’t go away now.

UPDATE: John McCain’s office sends this demand for a Kerry apology from Sen. McCain:

Senator Kerry owes an apology to the many thousands of Americans serving in Iraq, who answered their country’s call because they are patriots and not because of any deficiencies in their education. Americans from all backgrounds, well off and less fortunate, with high school diplomas and graduate degrees, take seriously their duty to our country, and risk their lives today to defend the rest of us in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. They all deserve our respect and deepest gratitude for their service. The suggestion that only the least educated Americans would agree to serve in the military and fight in Iraq, is an insult to every soldier serving in combat, and should deeply offend any American with an ounce of appreciation for what they suffer and risk so that the rest of us can sleep more comfortably at night. Without them, we wouldn’t live in a country where people securely possess all their God-given rights, including the right to express insensitive, ill-considered and uninformed remarks.

A major blunder for Kerry and the Democrats, timed to do maximum damage to them and maximum good for the Republicans.

Philip Klein observes: “What struck me about this comment beyond the obvious fact that it is insulting to our troops, is just how politically incompetent John Kerry is. Here we are, a week before Election Day, Democrats are favored to win back control of the House and possibly the Senate . . . But in this video Kerry, the party’s most recent candidate for President and one of its most recognizable figures, is out there calling troops fighting in Iraq a bunch of morons.”

MORE: Kerry responds to his critics: It’s a meltdown.

FIRST, they came for the gays. . . .

IN THE MAIL: Jesse Sage and Liora Kasten’s Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery.

DAVID BROOKS: Down on conservative bloggers? Well, thanks to Times Select, they can’t send him any traffic. . . .

UPDATE: Ali Bubba is blaming David Brooks for the GOP’s problems. Both assessments of blame seem a bit, um, narrow to me.

ANOTHER ELECTION POLL: It’s a week away, so let’s see how InstaPundit readers think things will turn out.

For comparison, here’s last week’s poll.

UPDATE: Hmm. With over 5,000 votes in so far, 60% of InstaPundit readers think the GOP will keep both houses. 34% see a split decision and only 6% think the Dems will take both. That’s actually slightly more optimistic than last week’s poll — and both polls see the GOP’s chances more favorably than I do, or the political futures markets do. So who’s right? We’ll see.

I FINISHED Arthur Chrenkoff’s new book last night. It’s terrific, with an interesting twist on the grandfather paradox at the end.

FRANK WARNER OBSERVES the eighth anniversary of the Iraq Liberation Act.

THOUGHTS ON TRUST, ELECTRONIC VOTING, AND MORE: My TCS Daily column is up!

AN INTERESTING STORY ON LONGEVITY RESEARCH in the New York Times starts off with calorie restriction but quickly moves on to the larger topic:

Recent tests show that the animals on restricted diets, including Canto and Eeyore, two other rhesus monkeys at the primate research center, are in indisputably better health as they near old age than Matthias and other normally fed lab mates like Owen and Johann. The average lifespan for laboratory monkeys is 27.

The findings cast doubt on long-held scientific and cultural beliefs regarding the inevitability of the body’s decline. They also suggest that other interventions, which include new drugs, may retard aging even if the diet itself should prove ineffective in humans. One leading candidate, a newly synthesized form of resveratrol — an antioxidant present in large amounts in red wine — is already being tested in patients. It may eventually be the first of a new class of anti-aging drugs. Extrapolating from recent animal findings, Dr. Richard A. Miller, a pathologist at the University of Michigan, estimated that a pill mimicking the effects of calorie restriction might increase human life span to about 112 healthy years, with the occasional senior living until 140, though some experts view that projection as overly optimistic.

According to a report by the Rand Corporation, such a drug would be among the most cost-effective breakthroughs possible in medicine, providing Americans more healthy years at less expense (an estimated $8,800 a year) than new cancer vaccines or stroke treatments.

That’s absolutely right. Calorie restriction is unlikely to work in humans — and I’m not sure it’s worth it anyway — but drugs that mimic its effects are another thing entirely.

Of course, some critics say that this is going for the low-hanging fruit when we should be working on stopping or reversing aging, not just slowing it down. I figured I’d find a discussion of that issue over at FightAging.org, and sure enough I was right. I think, though, that it’s nice to see that people are getting interested in this field at all, and if there’s a prospect of antiaging drugs that work better, lots of companies will jump on it as the financial incentives are huge.

Via FightAging I see that there’s also an article in the Wall Street Journal today (subscription required, but this link may work for nonsubscribers). Excerpt:

Still, some experts on aging doubt that enough is known about CR to guide the development of drugs that mimic its effects. “We know a lot about CR’s effects,” says Edward Masoro, a leading gerontologist. “But what bothers me is that I don’t think we’ve figured out CR’s basic mechanism yet.”

Dr. Sinclair’s idea that resveratrol mimics CR has come under heavy fire. His main adversaries are two researchers who used to rub elbows with him when they all studied together with MIT’s Dr. Guarente. The skeptics maintain that resveratrol’s mode of action is still murky; instead, they are looking at other mechanisms that may account for how CR works.

The resveratrol doses used in the life-span-extension studies in animals were far higher than the amount people can get by drinking wine — they were roughly equivalent to hundreds of glasses a day. Resveratrol is available as a dietary supplement, but to replicate the doses used in the studies, a person would need to take scores of pills a day. (Sirtris says it is developing prescription drugs that work like resveratrol but are hundreds of times more potent.) The dietary supplements haven’t been tested in clinical trials, so their efficacy isn’t proven, nor is it clear what dose might make people live healthier or longer. And although they seem safe at modest doses, megadoses may not be.

Nevertheless Dr. Sinclair, a 37-year-old Australia native, thinks taking small doses over time may yield health benefits and has been taking the supplements for three years. . . .

Sirtris, the company Dr. Sinclair co-founded, says it has made progress. Test-tube and animal studies suggest that its early-stage drugs may help treat various neurological killers as well as diabetes, says Dr. Westphal. The company plans soon to begin testing a drug in people with MELAS syndrome, a rare metabolic disorder that afflicts youngsters with potentially fatal brain and muscle deterioration.

At a recent meeting on aging research, a Sirtris scientist reported that SIRT1-activating compounds, including resveratrol, dramatically lowered blood levels of glucose and insulin in mice that get diabetes on high-fat diets, as well as helped to keep their weight down — just as CR does.

It’s easy to get overexcited about early research, but let’s hope that this succeeds. The economic boost of extending people’s healthy lifespans would be huge, and of particular value to countries with big unfunded pension obligations and low birthrates, which is most industrial countries. Such research is likely to be politically popular with an aging electorate, too. (But note the usual man-wasn’t-meant-to-do-this line from Leon Kass at the end of the NYT story.)

I’ve got a pretty lengthy discussion of the topic in An Army of Davids, and I’ve also addressed it in articles here and here, and in a lengthier review essay here. It’s a huge issue for coming decades.

GRAND ROUNDS is up!

A PRE-ELECTION PODCAST INTERVIEW with Jonah Goldberg.

DEMOCRATS: Seeking victory, not a mandate. This part seems plausible: “the ongoing non-success of Nutroots darling Ned Lamont in Blue Connecticut certainly suggests that the power or the progressives is less than they might have thought.” If the anti-war guy can’t win in Connecticut . . . .

CBS IS LOOKING FOR people who are nervous around Muslims.

This reminds me of Dateline’s unsuccessful efforts at trolling for racists at NASCAR events.

ROSIE O’DONNELL lives up to my expectations.

BOO! Something really scary for Halloween.

MORE BAD NEWS FOR THE NEWSPAPER BUSINESS:

The Audit Bureau of Circulations FAS-FAX report for the six-month period ending September 2006 released this morning confirmed yet again that major metros are struggling to show growth. The losses are steep while the gains are meager.

This is the fourth consecutive semi-annual report to register a severe drop in daily circulation and — perhaps more troubling to the industry — Sunday copies. While the estimated decline 2.8% for daily circulation for all reporting papers may seem negligible, consider that in years past that decrease averaged around 1%. Sunday, considered the industry’s bread-and-butter, showed even steeper losses, with a decline of about 3.4%.

Big cities like L.A., Miami, and Boston are feeling the effects of the Internet and the trimming of other-paid circulation. In New York, however, a 5.1% surge for the New York Post allowed it to leapfrog past its rival, the Daily News — and The Washington Post — into fifth place in daily circ.

The Los Angeles Times reported that daily circulation fell 8% to 775,766. Sunday dropped 6% to 1,172,005.

And I suspect that the news would be worse still if it weren’t for the various gimmicks used to inflate the circulation figures.

K.C. JOHNSON has more on the Duke rape case, which should probably be renamed the “Duke prosecutorial mosconduct case” at this point.

ROGER SIMON INTERVIEWS Chuck Todd of The Hotline.

“I’LL JUST ENTER THAT CODE:” The New York Times has one for everything.

BRANNON DENNING EMAILS THIS LINK to Prof. Indiana Jones’ tenure denial letter. Read the whole thing.

ORDINARY PEOPLE: Or not.

AIRSTRIKES IN BAJAUR: Bill Roggio has a report, and a followup.

STEVEN LANDSBURG: “Does pornography breed rape? Do violent movies breed violent crime? Quite the opposite, it seems. . . . The bottom line on these experiments is, ‘More Net access, less rape.’ A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.”

Can’t say I’m surprised.

UPDATE: Hey, this is certainly an argument against Harold Ford Jr.’s proposed Internet porn tax!

FRENCH “YOUTHS” — from burning buses to burning people.