“I AM JOE.” “I am a Wal Mart schlub in flyover country who changes my own oil and unclogs drains without a license. I smoke and drink beer and toss the football in the front yard with my kid, and I figure I can fend my way without handouts from some Magic Messiah’s candy bags. Most everyone in my family and most everyone I grew up with is another Joe, and if you screw with them, you screw with me.”

Related item here. Plus, Charles Martin and Tom Maguire issue complaints.

Anyway, the issue certainly seems to have some resonance out there.

UPDATE: “In what kind of nation, do the media investigate critics more than candidates?”

SAM SCHULMAN SAYS THAT CLASS WILL TELL: “Why is Bill Ayers a respectable member of the upper middle class and Sarah Palin contemptible?”

NETBOOK COMPUTERS selling fast worldwide. I’m not surprised.

TOM BLUMER looks at the Pelosi-Obama-Reid economy. I don’t think it’s fair to blame Obama that much, except perhaps atmospherically — he’s been running for President since the Democrats took over the Congress, and hasn’t been very active in actual legislating.

THE NEW FABLE II TRAILER IS OUT. Plus, Sony recalls a game because it contains passages from the Q’uran.

JIM LINDGREN:

Joe and Barack’s Tax Problems.

I was stunned to see some document showing Joe the Plumbers’ tax problems on my 10pm (CT)newscast on the local NBC affiliate in Chicago on Thursday night. They have very little time for any national news and they actually spent time on Joe the Plumbers’ tax problems. Amazing!

But when an actual candidate — Barack Obama — released his tax returns, which on their face seemed to show an ethics violation of Illinois law, the press couldn’t care less.

Just to remind you, Illinois prohibits state legislators from taking speaking fees, and Barack reported “speaking fees.”

Funny how people in the news business set their priorities in an election year. Lindgren thinks it’s a diversity problem: “I really don’t blame Obama for not addressing this; he released his tax returns after all. The problem is the press, which seems to be having more trouble than usual doing its job this season. As I’ve said before, the best solution to the problem is integrating the newsrooms politically.”

If the fairness doctrine goes through, perhaps it’ll be possible to demand such integration! (Via TaxProf).

ROBERT FARAGO: General Motors Death Watch 205: The World According to TARP. “Why in the world would General Motors want to combine with Chrysler? Given their respective balance sheets and future prospects, the analogies pretty much suggest themselves. My favorite: the Titanic rescuing the Lusitania. . . . Many of our Best and Brightest have labeled this deal ‘America Leyland,’ referring to the disaster that was the combination, nationalization and eventual extinction of Britain’s car industry. Spot on. Should this deal down, that’s EXACTLY where this is heading. But it should be remembered that Leyland took more than a decade to take a dirt nap. GM’s management, as always, is thinking about next week. This is, of course, the reason for their demise. . . . I can hardly imagine a worse scenario for American industry, the American auto industry and all the people who depend on it for their livelihoods.”

PHYSICS AND MUSIC in Oak Ridge.

IN TNR, John McWhorter writes: “If Obama loses, let’s please not assume that racism was the cause.”

Hasn’t it already been established that there’s no reason to vote against Obama — or even to criticize his policies — besides racism?

UPDATE: I mean, heck, just wearing a McCain-Palin t-shirt gets you called “racist.” Even if you’re a seventh-grade girl. Her reaction was braver than a lot of pundits’, though.

IF NOTHING ELSE, perhaps the 2008 election will produce a better appreciation of plumbing. Reader Tim Belknap emails with a link to Hodding Carter’s Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization and suggests that it deserves more attention. He says I linked it before, but I can’t find the post. Oh, well — here it is now!

COMPARING Obama and McCain on space policy.

PETER BERKOWITZ: Are Universities Above the Law? I agree on the need for transparency and accountability in higher education — and, in fact, I think we need more of that in the nonprofit sector as a whole. The past couple of decades have seen an anormous expansion not only in higher-ed, but in the nonprofit world, and what used to be a small and narrow niche is now a very large and fast-growing part of the economy, one that gets surprisingly little scrutiny.

BAYLOR UNIVERSITY has abandoned its pay-for-SAT program. “When Baylor was defending the program, it suggested that other colleges had similar efforts. While no other college came forward, it does turn out that other institutions are using little bonuses to get some of their numbers higher — in this case the number of applicants.”

Seems to me the U.S. News rankings are driving a lot of shady practices. Remember this when you hear the for-profit sector lambasted for tricky accounting . . . .

POPULAR MECHANICS: 12 basic plumbing supplies for home tool kits.

A LOOK AT Al Gore’s call for environmental civil disobedience.

HMM: Lehman’s Collapse, Stock Sale Probed by Three U.S. Prosecutors . Can we get a similarly intense investigation into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or is there too much danger that it will involve members of Congress?

IN THE MAIL: A new edition of Roger Kimball’s classic, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. According to Kimball, the “Long March through the institutions” continues.

MCCLATCHY: Furor over ACORN allegations gaining momentum.

UPDATE: Sharing the talking points?

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails: “If Obama is elected in Nov, how long do you think it will take for the FBI to shut down their investigation of Acorn?” Nonsense — that would be political interference in a criminal investigation.

A MAJOR COUP FOR THE CAMPAIGN: Scrappleface Editorial Board Endorses Barack Obama.

MARK STEYN:

With a few exceptions (such as Vermont), “blue states” mostly turn out to be red states with a couple of big blue cities (Pennsylvania, for example, or even California). Almost by definition, an effective conservative executive – the kind you might want in the White House – can only come from flyover country.

So, when a conservative pundit mocks Wasilla, he’s mocking conservatism as it’s actually lived, as opposed to conservatism as a theoretical fantasy playground for the purposes of cocktail-party banter.

Read the whole thing.

OH, GOODY: Amid Pressing Problems, Threat of Deflation Looms.

The risk of deflation — generally falling prices across the economy, beyond volatile energy and food costs — remains slim. But the financial shock and a faltering economy can set the stage for a deflationary environment.

Federal Reserve officials view broad-based deflation as unlikely but possible.

Numbers don’t show it yet, and I hope they don’t. Dealing with inflation is painful, but dealing with deflation is much, much more difficult. Meanwhile, here’s some modest good news:

But for the week, the Dow rose 4.8%, its first such gain since the meltdown of Lehman Brothers Holdings set off a global financial crisis in mid-September. The gain was also the Dow’s biggest weekly rise in percentage terms since March 2003.

Stay tuned. If Obama is elected, I predict nothing but peace, prosperity, and cheerful camaraderie as far as the eye can see.

BLAME IT ON RIO FLORIDA?

A sex scandal involving teenage congressional pages drove Republican Rep. Mark Foley out of office and Democrat Tim Mahoney into the vacated Florida congressional seat. Apparently, Mr. Mahoney didn’t learn from Mr. Foley’s disgrace. The congressman allegedly began an affair with a staff member while he was campaigning for the seat on the promise of a “world that is safer, more moral.” It must be something in the water.

I’m disappointed. I thought this new Congress was going to be different!

Okay, not really.

MOCKING JOE THE PLUMBER ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL. Plus, for Joe Biden, “Jobs” is a three-letter word.

VLADIMIR PUTIN AND HIS satellite-collared dog. But did Putin mean to call it “Soviet Russia?”

UPDATE: Apparently that’s a Yakov Smirnoff reference from Engadget, though it purports to be a Putin quote. Reader Garry Belka emails: ‘Please be advised that in none of the reports on Putin’s dog, new GLONASS dog collar and Putin’s comments at the event in Russian sources he says anything about ‘Soviet Russia.’ That quote is apparently wholly made up, as happens often with a coverage of Russia in the US.”

Well, that’s good. I don’t like the idea of neo-Sovietism.

THE NEW YORK POST ON THE FEDS’ ACORN INVESTIGATION:

After weeks of reports of wide spread fraud, the FBI has opened an investigation into the far-left “community organizer” group’s nationwide voter-registration campaign.

Talk about bolting the barn after the horses are out. It’s extremely unlikely that anything significant will come of it before Election Day.

Still, the fact that the Justice Department has gotten involved signifies an appreciation that what ACORN has tried to portray as the inevitably haphazard efforts of local organizers is more likely a nationwide, coordinated voter-registration scam.

Frankly, it seems to be far too widespread to be anything but that.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Charges of ACORN-like registration fraud on behalf of the GOP, too. I almost hope we’ll see more of this, as it’s the only way to get the press to pay serious attention to the issue . . . .

And at the risk of repeating myself, all of this is just more evidence that we need to make the voting system more trustworthy.