MARK TAPSCOTT: Does Obama’s communications chief know the bloody truth about Chairman Mao?

If not, what’s she doing in the White House? Related thoughts from James Morrow. “One of the first rules of public speaking is, ‘be careful whom you quote’. If you’re a reasonably educated human being, therefore, it should be obvious that you don’t cite Pol Pot if you’re giving a speech about agricultural policy, and you don’t look to Adolf Hitler, vehement anti-smoker that the was, for words to back up an address on the evils of tobacco. Nor should one, if addressing a group high school students (or anyone else, really), refer to a man whose reign of terror resulted, conservatively, in the deaths of 60 million people as one of your favourite political philosophers – which is just what White House Communications Director Anita Dunn did recently. . . . The fact is, the Obama White House is rapidly becoming a big tent for the sort of cranks who set up card tables on the fringes of growers’ markets and pass out hand-xeroxed fliers.”

JOHN STOSSEL: Ivy League Diversity Contortions.

GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA: We Will Control The Horizontal; We Will Control The Vertical.

INDEED: “That’s a frickin’ caricature right there. It’s an ugly joke, in more ways than one. That’s everything wrong with the world of high fashion.” Yeah. Even the clothes are ugly.

INDEPENDENTS REJECT THE D.C. POWER GRAB.

SWINE FLU UPDATE: Vaccine efforts not going so well: “Projections of the supply of swine flu vaccine have widely varied. During the summer, health officials said 120 million doses would be ready in October. They later dropped the estimate to 40 million doses by the end of the month. Now, Dr. Schuchat said, they expect only 28 million to 30 million doses, adding that the exact numbers were impossible to predict and could change daily.”

Related: Florida plan advises hospitals to bar some patients in event of severe flu pandemic.

UPDATE: Reader Art Fougner, M.D., writes, “H1N1 is Obama’s Katrina. The US Gov’s response to H1N1 has been subpar at best. Not only are docs having a hard time getting seasonal flu vaccine but now the H1N1 vaccine is in short supply. People are dying and the numbers will only get higher. Heckuva job, Barry.” This seems a bit unfair to me — at least I wonder, what should Obama have done differently?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Chuck Simmins disagrees:

Glenn, in no way is this Obama’s Katrina. The shortage of vaccines is solely due to the pandemic beginning in the middle of the production cycle for seasonal flu vaccine. It’s all about eggs, and the supply thereof. Here’s a piece I wrote to try to explain the shortage.

If anyone thinks they can make chickens lay eggs faster, they are welcome to try. Good cluck!

Yeah. I mean, sure, if Bush were President it would be his fault, but really there’s no obvious reason to blame Obama here.

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: Remove Rangel From Tax Panel Chair.

Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., understands something that continues to escape House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.: Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., is radioactive, owing to multiple investigations of his serial failures to disclose millions of dollars worth of income and investments. Rangel had contributed more than $19,000 to Welch, but the Vermonter recently sent it back. That was a good decision because Welch is a member of the House Ethics Committee, which is conducting one of the investigations of Rangel. But it shouldn’t be necessary to be on the ethics panel in order to understand that Rangel’s actions disgrace Congress, make him unfit to chair the powerful tax-writing committee, and renders campaign donations from him as dirty money. Over the years, Rangel has given more than $2.1 million to House colleagues. Each of the many recipients of Rangel’s tainted dough should give it back. This newspaper will track those who do and those who don’t. . . . Unfortunately, Rangel is not the only scandal on which House Democrats are compiling a record of evasion and tolerance of serious wrongdoing.

Read the whole thing. So much for Pelosi’s promise to “drain the swamp.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “I am not a big fan of saying that officials should resign for stupid remarks. But interim White House communications director Anita Dunn’s praise of Mao Zedong as a ‘political philosopher’ is so unhinged and morally repugnant, that she should hang it up, pronto. Mao killed anywhere from 50 million to 70 million innocents in the initial cleansing of Nationalists, the scouring of the countryside, the failed Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Tibet, and the internal Chinese gulag. Dunn’s praise of a genocidal monster was no inadvertent slip: She was reading from a written text and went into great detail to give the full context of the remark. . . . So where do all these people, so intimate with our president (Dunn is the wife of his personal lawyer), come from? A right-wing attack machine could not make up such statements as those tossed off by a Dunn or a Van Jones.”

STEPHEN DUBNER: Global Warming in SuperFreakonomics: The Anatomy of a Smear.

I haven’t read SuperFreakonomics — hardly anyone has, since it hasn’t come out yet — but the “smear” seems quite unsurprising.

NOEMIE EMERY: The Nobel/Hollywood Complex Implodes.

“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Hillary Clinton suffers ‘mis-speaking’ relapse with Belfast bomb claims.

Hillary Clinton has been caught out “mis-speaking” again in a manner that suggests that she hasn’t learnt from past experiences of her globe-trotting, “lily-gilding” speeches.

The US Secretary of State was exposed during her battle with Barack Obama to become the Democratic presidential nominee over her claims to have landed in Bosnia under sniper fire. . . . But according to the Sunday Life newspaper, during a speech she made to the Stormont parliament she said that Belfast’s landmark Europa Hotel was devastated by an explosion when she first stayed there in 1995.

The Europa, where most journalists covering the decades-long conflict stayed, was famed as Europe’s most bombed hotel, earning the moniker “the Hardboard Hotel”.

However, the last Provisional IRA bomb to damage the Europa was detonated in 1993, two years before President Clinton and his wife checked in for the night.

Well, that smarts. But perhaps she was misquoted — this story is from the London Times, but they’re relying on a local source.

IF YOU MISSED IT ON SIRIUS OR XM THIS WEEKEND, the latest PJM Political is now online.

JAY NORDLINGER: “I keep hearing that Glenn Beck is just a blowhard opinionist, contributing nothing but hot air. If that is true, why do we keep learning news from him? About Van Jones, about ACORN, about Anita Dunn . . . I mean, isn’t that the New York Times’s job? No? What a strange era we’re living in.”

Plus, the difference between Fox and CNN.

UPDATE: Related: Jacob Weisberg loses it. But Weisberg gets some backup from Kaus.

POLITICO: The GOP’s Rangel Dilemma. “Convinced that Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) is on the ropes because of a tangle of ethical issues, House GOP leaders are debating whether to aggressively press for his removal as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee or try to drag out the controversy as long as possible for maximum political advantage. . . . The reality for Republicans is that any way the Rangel scandal ends is good for both Boehner and the party.”

BRIAN DOHERTY: Why Ayn Rand is Hot Again. “Rand undoubtedly was a ferocious defender of free markets and a great lover of America because she saw it as the closest political embodiment of her values. But she was never, despite Ms. Burns’ title connecting her goddesshood and the American right, any special darling of modern conservatives.”

PHYLLIS CHESLER: Killing Jews In Oregon, Embracing Terrorists Off-Broadway.