IS GEORGE WILL smarter than a third grader?

IT WOULD BE SUITABLY IRONIC IF IT HAPPENED: “Yet it may very well be that an army of glum, dispirited and pessimistic conservatives will reluctantly trudge to the polls on November 4, each one imagining they are the only remaining person in the entire country voting for McCain, and lo and behold — they’ll turn out to be a silent majority after all.”

JIM LINDGREN: “Of all the firms in all the world, Obama had to walk into the one that years before had closer ties to SDS than any other mainstream business in the world. What luck!”

DAVID POST: Why I’ll be voting for Obama: “I consider myself a ‘pragmatic libertarian’ – I’m not a big fan of the state, I believe that power inevitably corrupts, that individuals, when left to their own devices, are capable of remarkable feats of self-organization and problem-solving, and that the freedoms of speech, conscience, and association are, by far, our most precious ones and need to be zealously protected from the folks with the monopoly on coercive force.”

On the other hand, Manny Klausner says that libertarians in battleground states should probably vote for McCain, however reluctantly.

UPDATE: Charles Martin: Why I’ll be voting for McCain.

OBAMA’S CREDIT-CARD CRACKUP: “A breakdown of controls has enabled foreign and other unaccountable funds to pour into the Obama campaign — and it’s not an accident.”

OH, GOODY: “The 2012 race commences first thing Wednesday morning.”

BRAD FRIEDMAN IS RIGHT: “As an Election Integrity advocate recently noted rather eloquently, the front-end voter suppression issues and the back-end voting machine failures are two sides of the same coin. You can’t worry about one without worrying about the other.” I’ve made this point myself.

Plus, fighting over paper ballots in Philadelphia. I’ve written about those before, too.

RUNNING WITH the coal issue. “Seizing on a newly released audio tape picked up by the Drudge Report, Sarah Palin took the opportunity here in coal country to accuse Barack Obama of ‘talking about bankrupting the coal industry.'”

UPDATE: The limits of the tanning-bed media.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Context? “Democrat Barack Obama’s admission that he will use regulation to bankrupt the coal industry is a bombshell that the San Francisco Chronicle sat on for 10 months.” Well, I think the hour-long video was on their website. But I guess nobody in the room noticed the bombshell.

MORE: More context.

STILL MORE: Coal official calls Obama comments ‘unbelievable’. “At least one state coal industry leader said he was shocked by comments Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama made earlier this year concerning his plan to aggressively charge polluters for carbon and greenhouse gas emissions. . . . According to the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training, the coal industry provides about 40,000 direct jobs in the state, including those for miners, mine contractors, coal preparation plant employees and mine supply company workers.”

FROM SWARM-JOURNALISM to swarm-corruption?

FORGOTTEN GEMS: So when I was a kid of about the Insta-Daughter’s age, I read a book at my grandparents’ by Mary Lasswell, called One On The House. It was dated enough to seem cool, and the story was cheerful and lighthearted — the three protagonists are old women who live together and spend a lot of time on beer, food, and overcoming minor difficulties. I got a couple of other books in the series out of the library — High Time, and Suds in Your Eye — and had largely forgotten them until recently. But, thanks to the miracle of the Internet they’re easy to get. I also ordered a cookbook supposedly put together by one of the characters, Mrs. Rasmussen’s Book of One-Arm Cookery. (The theory is that you’re supposed to be able to do most of the cooking with a beer in hand). I read the books, and they held up pretty much as I remembered, and the Insta-Daughter has devoured two already, and actually cooked two recipes from the cookbook (deviled eggs and bread-and-butter pudding: they turned out well).

But while the books may or may not be your cup of tea, what struck me was how easy I found it to get copies of books that were printed when my mother was a baby and haven’t been reissued since, compared to what it would have been like a few years ago. Living in the 21st Century really does have its advantages.

TRAFFIC: So in September, InstaPundit had over 12 million pageviews, while in October it had a bit under 11 million. Interestingly, that’s exactly the pattern we saw in 2004, where traffic also peaked in September with RatherGate, etc. This time I think it peaked over the Sarah Palin stories. This doesn’t surprise me — people think of InstaPundit as a political blog, but it’s really more of a media criticism blog, so traffic rises with media stories, rather than with political ones, though naturally the two overlap.

JOHN MCCAIN: “The funnier candidate” for President?

SHRINKING TUMORS BY targeting genes with nanotechnology.

OBAMA PROMISES TO ANSWER QUESTIONS — after the election.

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now — sorry! But notice Obama’s backpedaling even from that promise, in the update.

POLL: How healthy is Obama’s ego?

I’LL BE ON REX MURPHY’S “CROSS-COUNTRY CHECKUP” IN CANADA in just a few minutes. You can listen here.

UPDATE: The podcast version is here. I was in the second hour.

HMM: Scientists Identify Machinery that Helps Make Memories.

MORE ON OBAMA’S ANTI-COAL STANCE, in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the video of the discussion where his remarks took place, though I can’t get it to play.

A REVIEW OF THE OLYMPUS STYLUS waterproof digital camera.

THE WAR AGAINST excessive online capitalization continues. But everyone knows that IF YOU TYPE IN ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME YOU’RE MORE PERSUASIVE! REALLY, YOU ARE! MILLIONS OF CHATROOM PARTICIPANTS CAN’T BE WRONG!

PIRACY IN NIGERIA, plus this: “The legislature has established a committee to investigate what happened to the $42 billion that has been spent, in the Niger River delta oil region, over the last eight years, on development projects. Nothing appears to have been developed, and the money is unaccounted for.”

STATE OF HAWAII verifies Obama birth certificate. “Will this put a stop to the idiotic rumors? Of course not!”

UPDATE: Reader James Paternoster emails: “There you go again, you and LGF providing the defense of Obama that his own side won’t do. It’s good for the country, and I’m glad you do it. But with the legacy media in the their corner, the new media either on their side or willing to defend them for the sake of truth, and their own tendency to call the truth a lie when it comes from their opponents, I wonder how they’re going to handle it when someone really starts to lie about them? Will they be able to stand the heat? especially when it comes from those parts of the world they think love them?” Good question. But I hope they’re not counting on me and Charles to do all the heavy lifting here.

MAKING ELECTRICITY RATES SKYROCKET: Hope and Change!

PATTERICO: No on Proposition 8: Allow Gay Marriage in California.

HMM: Questions raised over Syrian complicity in US raid. “Syria has denounced a US strike on its territory but sources say Damascus secretly backed the raid. . . . ‘Immediately after 9/11, Syrian intelligence cooperation was remarkable,’ said the Washington source. ‘Then ties were broken off, but they have resumed recently.'”