PATTERICO FINDS EVIDENCE OF FBI MISBEHAVIOR and observes: “Namely, you have an FBI agent who admits that he threatened to ensure that a suspect’s family would be tortured by a foreign government. . . . Am I the only person surprised that this hasn’t gotten much, much wider attention than that?”

A HILLARY / DRUDGE CONNECTION? Hey, the Clintons have been very, very good for Drudge. A Hillary presidency would probably double his pageviews.

UPDATE: LaShawn Barber comments.

UNITED AIRLINES STRIKES: “No wonder people hate to fly.”

WHAT HILLARY CLINTON HAS IN COMMON WITH Ellen DeGeneres.

STEPHEN GREEN IS LIVEBLOGGING THE REPUBLICAN DEBATE: I just turned on the TV, and Rudy seems to be doing better than usual.

UPDATE: “I was tied up at the time” — good line from McCain. [LATER: Video here.]

Jon Henke emails that he’s liveblogging at the FredFile. More on Fred here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, I haven’t seen all of these debates, but it seemed to me that all the candidates were on their game to a much greater degree than they were in the earlier debates I watched. Practice pays, I guess.

But the best soundbite came from a member of Frank Luntz’s focus group, who said about Hillary: “She’s got a million ideas, and all of those ideas are something that America is not.”

MORE: Stephen Green’s sum-up: “Thompson exceeded expectations, I think, keeping him running. McCain had the best soundbites, Rudy had the best instincts, and Mitt turned out his worst performance to date.”

And John Nolte was liveblogging too and observes: “Overall, I feel better about our field. Not thrilled, but better.”

STILL MORE: Kit Seelye liveblogged it too, and also observed: “This debate makes it official: It’s open season on Hillary Clinton.”

And Allah has video highlights.

ANOTHER REVIEW OF DAN SOLOVE’S NEW BOOK, this time from David Freeman.

SWITZERLAND moves right. Immigration seems to have been a big reason.

THOUGHTS ON BOBBY JINDAL’S TRIUMPH over racist opposition in Louisiana.

PROF. KENNETH ANDERSON relays some French criticism of the New York Times’ coverage of France.

DISHONESTY ON FREE SPEECH at Princeton.

CHRIS MUIR’S Day by Day cartoon is back!

WAITING FOR BLU-RAY: So I’ve been holding out for this combination HD-DVD / Blu-Ray player. It got great reviews way back in July, but now it’s October and it’s still not shipping. There’s not even an estimated shipping date. Should I keep waiting, or should I just buy an HD-DVD and a Blu-Ray player separately?

The prices have dropped enough that I might be able to buy this high-rated HD-DVD player and this Sony Blu-Ray player and not spend much, if any, more. On the other hand, the notion of having to buy two just bugs me somehow.

UPDATE: Lots of responses, but here’s reader Matt Tubbs’:

Why not get a PS3 and a Xbox 360? You’d pay about the same, plus you’d have two game consoles. (Plus surf the web, store pictures, video, etc)

My worry is that then I’d start gaming. . . .

GREG MANKIW ON HOW TO BE A REDISTRIBUTIONIST. Plus, Megan McArdle observes: “$5 million is the value of a moderately successful family business that throws off a couple hundred grand in income a year. You’re going to hand those people an extra $25,000 tax bill each year for the sin of being self-employed? This does not sound like a recipe for enhancing America’s singularly dynamic economic performance.” Nope, but it would empower bureaucrats, and that’s a good in itself!

POOR SOCKS:

AS THE “first pet” of the Clinton era, Socks, the White House cat, allowed “chilly” Hillary Clinton to show a caring, maternal side as well as bringing joy to her daughter Chelsea. So where is Socks today?

Once the presidency was over, there was no room for Socks any more. After years of loyal service at the White House, the black and white cat was dumped on Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s personal secretary, who also had an embarrassing clean-up role in the saga of his relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky.

Some believe the abandoned pet could now come between Hillary Clinton and her ambition to return to the White House as America’s first woman president. . . . Being Clinton, she also lectured readers that pets are an “adoption instead of an acquisition” and warned them to look out for their safety. (Buddy, the chocolate labrador, it should be noted, bounded into a road soon after leaving the White House and was promptly run over.)

And poor Bettie Currie.

MORE REPORTING ON THE AMSTERDAM RIOTS, from Michael Van Der Galien.

THE GIULIANI CAMPAIGN, in a nutshell.

THOUGHTS ON antiglobalism bricks, from Lawrence Cunningham.

POST AT A JOURNALISM FORUM: “I hate conservatives.”

HOW TO BE A DANGEROUS SEX OFFENDER:

Eleven years ago, when she had just turned 17, Whitaker engaged in a single act of oral sex with a boy in her sophomore class on school property. That’s it.

Though less than two years separated the couple — the boy was about to turn 16 — Whitaker was arrested for sodomy, a charge to which she pleaded guilty and completed five years probation. However, that plea also means that Whitaker will serve a lifetime on the state’s sex-offender registry, placing her in the same category as truly dangerous people such as rapists and child molesters. It also imposes severe — some might argue unconscionable — limits on where she can live and work.

Sorry Georgia, but this is just pathetic.

MEGAN MCARDLE WONDERS why states can’t run single-payer health care systems: “TennCare didn’t get into trouble because there was a recession; it got into trouble because it was godawful expensive and getting more so by the minute. Costs were projected to rise by about 75% over the next five years, and even though the federal government would have picked up almost half the tab, Tennessee couldn’t afford to pay it. The failure of the various state initiatives is an instructive look at our future.”

TennCare was supposed to be a stalking-horse for HillaryCare. It was a disastrously expensive flop.

WHAT PEOPLE REALLY CARE ABOUT: I link to a lot of political books, but what’s #1 on Amazon right now? A cookbook by Jerry Seinfeld’s wife.

THE FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM ON THE Rebecca Aguilar story:

Her report is off the station’s Web site and has been pulled from YouTube and other venues. If she ever returns to work at KDFW, the station will be inundated with phone calls. NAHJ will be criticized for its support of Aguilar because detractors will say it is based only on ethnicity, not ethics and professionalism.

According to her profile on the station’s Web site, Aguilar said she got into journalism, and into television in particular, because she wanted to help people.

“I’ve been a television reporter for more than two decades,” she writes near the end of that profile.

“And even though I have won several awards (including several Emmys and 2005 Texas A.P. Reporter of the year), nothing is more rewarding than someone who says I made their lives a little better cause I listened and told ‘their story.'”

I wonder what James Walton thinks about his story and its aftermath.

As the Dallas Morning News noted earlier, the story embodies people’s worst impressions about journalists and journalism.

UPDATE: From professional journalist to punch line. And in the comments: “Are you a sedentary person? Do you like sitting on people?”

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT, this time in Oklahoma.

They told me that if George W. Bush were re-elected, people would be thrown in jail for daring to challenge the powers that be. And they were right!

THOUGHTS ON PROPER DRESS FOR LAW PROFESSORS: I seldom teach in suits, but I usually wear a nice sportcoat. No tie, though. Actually, what I’m wearing in this picture is pretty typical.

DISCUSSING Supreme Court term limits.