THE MANTRA USED TO BE “LISTEN TO THE GENERALS!” Now it’s how dare those generals speak!

FINDING SARAH PALIN “provocative.”

Her book is still #1 on Amazon. So I guess provocative pays.

DONALD SENSING: The Mae West Presidency.

(Via Brutally Honest.)

CHANGE: Just 30% Say U.S. Will Be Most Powerful Nation At End of Century.

TODAY’S THE 5TH ANNIVERSARY of SpaceShip One’s winning of the Ansari X Prize. And, of course, the 52d anniversary of Sputnik.

MORE ON THE NEW YORK TIMES’ AIRBRUSHING: Lame Gray Lady: NYT Scrubs Major Portion of Original Obama-Olympics Article, Inserts Meeting with McChrystal.

Plus this: “I had to answer ‘no’ because I get all my news from the New York Times.” That could be the paper’s epitaph.

And this: “I no longer know what saddens me more, the state of American politics or the state of American journalism.”

BARNEY FRANK: “There is a right to privacy, but not a right to hypocrisy. It is very important that the people who make the law be subject to the law.”

NEW YORK POST: The Case Against Charlie Rangel: Forty years of tax evasion, misdeeds and contempt.

AIRBRUSHING: CBS Removes Letterman’s Sexcapade Confession from YouTube.

JOHN ARAVOSIS: “Apparently, General Jones would have us believe that President Obama wasn’t aware that we were fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when he promised to lift the gay ban during the campaign in exchange for our votes.”

UPDATE: Bill Quick comments.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Is “conservative” the new gay?

IT’S A FALL FUNDRAISER over at Reclusive Leftist.

YOU DON’T tug on Superman’s cape.

MANCESSION CONTINUES: “According to Table A-1 of today’s Employment Situation report, male unemployment increased in September from 10.9% to 11%.”

ANTI-GUN STATE SENATOR shoots intruder in his home. We haven’t seen anti-gun hypocrisy this rich since Carl Rowan.

UPDATE: These folks say he’s not that anti-gun. Well, obviously. . . .

MORE: Yeah, I was suckered. Sorry. I don’t promise never to be wrong, only to correct things when it becomes apparent. . . .

ANN ALTHOUSE ON SEXUAL HARASSMENT: “But perhaps an exception should be made for a great late night talk show host. The funnyman’s mood and ego need boosting. Just as he must have an office full of people who can write jokes and comic routines — who must share a lot of not-that-businesslike comraderie — he needs pretty ladies to keep his senses well-honed. It’s part of the structure of a business that revolves around a performer. The funnyman needs his supply of sex, and the paying career positions on the staff can be used to create a pool of potential sexual partners who will keep the old man bolstered up.”

There sure seem to be a lot of sexual exceptions. . . .

As reader John Tuttle writes: “It’s ‘office romance’ when Democrats do it. It’s ‘sexual harassment’ when Republicans do it. Time to repeal sex harassment laws.”

There does seem to be a double standard here. . . .

IN PORTLAND, it’s Baconfest!

STEPHEN GREEN: THE WEEK IN BLOGS: Golfing at 120 Miles Per Hour, More Obama Brainwashing & Gay Up.

FRANK RICH:

IN the annals of American excess, there often arrives a moment when those with too much money, too much clout and too much hubris just can’t stop themselves from tempting the fates. They throw an over-the-top party in public, or parade their wealth and power before the press, and the next thing you know their world, and sometimes ours, has crashed. . . .

It’s in this context that you have to wonder what some of the Obama era’s most moneyed and White House-connected lobbyists were thinking as they preened before a Washington Post reporter recently for two lengthy articles. We’re not even nine months into the new administration, yet these swaggering, utterly un-self-aware influence peddlers seem determined to prove that nothing except the party affiliations has changed in the Beltway’s pay-for-play culture since Tom DeLay. If these lobbyists were stocks, I’d short them.

When you’ve lost Frank Rich, you’ve lost conventional-wisdom punditAmerica.

STATE FARM: Deer-Vehicle Collision Frequency Jumps 18 Percent In Five Years.

BIGGEST OLYMPICS LOSER: Mayor Richard Daley. “Democratic Chicago Mayor Daley sent his president to Copenhagen on this wild-goose chase, only to have the president humiliated on an international stage. Worse, Daley is responsible for Michelle Obama being humiliated. There is no way on God’s green earth that Barack Obama is going to forget that.”

TIM CAVANAUGH: In June 1993, Vice President Al Gore visited Spring Hill and said he wanted to “Saturnize” the federal government. “The other day I used the failure of General Motors’ deal to sell its Saturn subsidiary as an example of why your fury at the federal government’s open-ended automotive bailouts should never fade. But I must award the palm in this category to the Wall Street Journal’s former Detroit reporter Paul Ingrassia, who today digs up a great story of the UAW’s role in eclipsing Saturn. . . . Ingrassia refers to but does not explore the roles of management in the Saturn debacle, but there is a wonderful story just in the fact that destroying Saturn was the one area where worker and boss were able to join hands.” Read the whole thing.

CALIFORNIA AS America’s first Failed State. What about Michigan?

OBAMA AND POLANSKI, AFGHANISTAN AND CHINATOWN: All on the latest PJM Political.

MICHAEL MOORE’S eliminationist rhetoric.

THIS SEEMS LIKE A PRETTY CLEAR FIRST AMENDMENT VIOLATION: “A self-described New York City anarchist has been accused of tweeting the location of police officers to protesters trying to evade them during the Group of 20 economic summit in Pittsburgh.”