PROMOTING ETHICAL BEHAVIOR with clean smells?

VIDEO: Glenn Beck interviews Doug Hoffman. “I think this pretty much ends the charge that Fox News is a subsidiary of the Republican Party — or vice versa. Beck is no longer going to vote for the party.”

HITTING THE PANIC BUTTON. “It is important that the nation is suddenly awakening to the possibility that the president has no real plan for anything whatsoever, and never did. He literally seems to be making it up as he goes along, and his strategy is to do nothing at all but procrastinate.” Oh, I think he’s got plans.

OUTSIDE the democratic norms of our society.

YALE UNIVERSITY: “So we are clear: A prominent University censored content from a book based on the opinions of experts who had not read the book in question.”

JOHN KERRY’S AFGHAN WAR SPEECH: giving away Obama’s decision? But Obama won’t announce until — conveniently enough — after the Virginia, New Jersey, and NY-23 elections.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Roland Burris Has a Lot of Questions About How the Federal Government Works.

WHAT THE BOSTON GLOBE missed about Martha Coakley.

PETER SUDERMAN: Why Won’t The Public Option Die?

JAMES LILEKS IS celebrating Frankenstein.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MCCAIN, THE WHITE HOUSE WOULD BECOME AN OLD BOYS’ CLUB — AND THEY WERE RIGHT! NOW President on President Obama’s All-Male Athletic Outings: ‘It’s Troubling’.

Related: Obama’s White House Boys’ Club: “Obama has played golf more times than George W. Bush did in his first 2 years. But there’s something even more interesting: Obama didn’t include any women in these golf rounds until last weekend, at which time he golfed with a woman once. . . . If there is any serious feminism left in this country — by which I mean the kind of feminism we had back before the Clinton presidency — it would ream a man who sought credit for inclusiveness toward women by referring to the fact that he had a wife and daughters in his household. . . . So maybe it’s a little like the post-racial America we were supposed to get — but didn’t get — after Obama was elected. It’s the post-gender America. No one needs to notice who’s male and who’s female anymore. So the inner circle is all male? You’re not supposed to even see it!”

Related: Exciting new growth sector in feminism: bashing women.

THE “TEABAGGERS'” REVENGE: CNN’s numbers drop 68% in prime to last place.

OUCH: Biden’s Popularity Plunges — Lower Than Cheney’s. “Biden’s rating has fallen most dramatically among independents.”

HMM: Video: Glenn Beck goes all in for Doug Hoffman — and third parties. Hoffman’s kind of a special case. There’s basically no downside. That’s not true in 2010. I remember a blog commenter somewhere a while back worrying that Beck would turn out to be a Pied Piper leading people to Third Party self-destruction. In Hoffman’s case that’s not really an issue, but a Perot-type candidacy might put the Dems back in bigtime. “In a perfect world, Doug Hoffman wins and all the purple districts break for ‘true conservatives’ and all federal entitlements are repealed and the income tax is abolished etc etc etc. Assume hypothetically now that the world isn’t perfect. What is the endgame?”

Related discussion here.

UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes, “Gadflies aren’t leaders. Beck is a gadfly. Now gadflies can be effective, even necessary sometimes, just don’t mistake them for leaders. Becoming self-aware is part of growing up.”

And reader Kenneth Mitchell writes: “The ‘endgame’ in an imperfect world is that Hoffman victory – or even Hoffman as a spoiler – convinces the GOP not to nominate extreme RINOs. I support using Hoffman as a club to bash Republicans, because Republicans in general have well earned a bashing. And they don’t seem to have absorbed the lessons from 2006 or 2008.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jody Green writes in defense of Beck:

I saw Glenn Beck today and the first half of the show was a must watch for young people. I made my two daughters watch it. The Hoffman part was distraction from his real message today which is we are becoming a dependent society where the leaches suck the blood of the producers (My words, not his). It was a well done segment that I have not researched to see if it is online.

P.S. My kids got the message and understood. Good for Glenn Beck making complex issues understandable.

That goes at least a bit beyond gadfly, I think.

PJTV: Stephen Green: Hair of the Dog: Obama’s Brand New War on Small Business, Healthcare, and the Free Press. Plus, what George Stephanopoulos wasn’t honest enough to point out.

UPDATE: Heh.

MIKE LUPICA: President Obama should focus on the war in Afghanistan, not the war against Fox News. (Via JWF, who thinks this turn by Lupica is significant).

SOD OFF, SWAMPY: Climate Chief: Give Up Meat To Save Planet.

FOR NEWSPAPERS, THINGS ARE getting worse, faster. “Circulation at newspapers shrank at an accelerated pace in the past six months, driven in part by stiff price increases imposed by publishers scrambling to offset rapidly eroding advertising sales. Average daily circulation at 379 U.S. newspapers plunged 10.6 percent in the April-September period from the same six-month stretch last year, according to figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.”

UPDATE: A gloomy assessment from Megan McArdle. Yet some readers tell her she’s too optimistic.

MY GPS DIED — from physical damage, nothing wrong with the device — and I see that Consumer Reports top rates the Garmin nüvi 885T. Is the traffic coverage worth it?

UPDATE: Reader Clark Myers writes: “Consumer Reports is a generation behind on Garmin. Consider the 1350 – read the reviews at Amazon – traffic isn’t worth anything in cities with no alternatives such as Seattle useful in others -typically comes with advertisements while stopped.” I doubt I’d use the traffic that much in Knoxville, but I’ve sometimes wished I had it on trips. Worth it?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Thacker writes:

The Garmin has several different flavors of traffic. There’s a “enhanced services” one (includes weather, etc.) from Microsoft called MS Direct, and another service from NAVTEQ data that uses RDS on various radio stations to transmit the info.

MS just announced today that MSN Direct will be shut down in 2012, since not enough people are paying for their alternative over XM, RDS, cellular, and wifi sources of traffic.

The 855T is bundled with the receiver that works with MSN Direct and comes with a three month subscription to that. You can separately buy the receiver that works with NAVTEQ (FM Traffic). The newer GPS units 1350T, 1370T, etc. come with a receiver and lifetime subscription to the NAVTEQ FM Traffic; for them, the MSN Direct receiver is sold separately.

The traffic is useful, but be careful to look at their coverage maps. Only the most major interstates (and near urban areas) get both “flow” and “incident” information. Some other major roads get only “incident” information, such as if there’s an accident. Alternate routes may get no traffic at all.

It works okay, but it’s annoying when, e.g. I see trouble on the I-66 but I don’t know if US 50 and US 29 have a lot of traffic or not so I don’t know whether to sit through it or not.

Hmm.

JAMES TARANTO IS defending Vanderbilt Law School’s Carol Swain from charges of being a white-supremacist-lover. “Swain, who is black, is a professor of law and political science at Vanderbilt University. She is an expert on white supremacists, having written a book on the subject, ‘The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration,’ which was published in 2002 by Cambridge University Press and drew plaudits from scholars both liberal (Harvard’s William Julius Wilson) and conservative (Princeton’s Robert P. George).” But read the whole thing, which makes clear just how unfair the charge is.

I think the SPLC’s work is finished, if this is the best it can do. It certainly undercuts my already-diminished faith in Mark Potok. . . .

BACK TO THE FUTURE: 1978 all over again? “Why did things go south for Carter so fast? Because America’s enemies had taken measure of the man during his first, change-filled year in office. They saw weaknesses they could exploit. In the second year, they made their move.” I’d say that at this point, a Carter-rerun is a best-case scenario.

WASHINGTON POST POLL: McDonnell has double-digit lead in Va. governor’s race.

Related: Wilder: If McDonnell Wins, ‘Virginia Won’t Sink Into The Seas’. Well, that’s a relief!

FASTER MAINTENANCE with Augmented Reality. “A user wears a custom-made headset, and the AR system provides assistance by showing 3-D arrows that point to a relevant component, text instructions, floating labels and warnings, and 3-D models of the appropriate tools. An Android-powered G1 smartphone attached to the technician’s wrist provides touchscreen controls for cueing up the next sequence of instructions.”

CHINA PUSHING HARD for renewable and nuclear energy.

DANIEL DREZNER: How International Relations Theory Would Cope With A Zombie Uprising.