HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “Yes, there’s an interesting premise there that if you win a Nobel Prize, you can pay your daughter’s tuition in college today in America.”

TIME-ZONE ARBITRAGE lets Jose Guardia deliver your overnight news roundup.

WASHINGTON POST: From watchdog to doormat?

ROGER KIMBALL: TEA LEAVES IN THE WORKS. “The sound of cognitive dissonance can make an awful racket. Consider the review by Alan Brinkley of some new books about the Tea Party movement that appeared in the Sunday Book Review of The New York Times.”

Related: The Electric Tea Party Acid Test. “The truth is: Hippies didn’t particularly like Lyndon Johnson, the Democrats, or their ’60s-era ‘Great Society’ big-government programs. Look at the poster on the right for a typical opinion, untouched by the revisionism of later historians.”

COULD SOMEBODY PLEASE tell Ray LaHood to shut up?

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: The Return of Know-Nothingism. “An authentic grass-fire political movement threatens Democrats on all fronts. So as November’s reckoning approaches, what does their president do? Why, whip up fear of foreigners in a throwback to the 1850s. . . . Obama’s attack is as hypocritical as can be, given that Team Obama really did take cash from foreign sources, having disabled a detector of foreign cash for online credit card donations during the 2008 presidential campaign.”

OH, GOODY: Your Household Owes $14,165 To Pay For Your City’s Employees’ Retirements.

IS THIS HOPE, OR CHANGE? Democrats Unleash IRS & DOJ on Donors to Their Political Opponents. Just don’t complain when President Palin starts the investigations in 2013. . . .

MICKEY KAUS NOTES THAT THE NEW YORK TIMES THINKS ANN COULTER’S PRO-GAY STATEMENTS ARE SOMETHING NEW.

Holson sneers that Coulter’s “sudden zeal” regarding gays “might might strike some as an opportunistic grab for a spotlight that has faded somewhat.” But it wasn’t very sudden. Coulter has a whole chapter in her book If Democrats Had Any Brains They’d Be Republicans on why gays should join the GOP. The chapter is called “No Gays Left Behind!” The book came out in 2007. (In it she quotes herself from 2006: “I like gays. I like all gays. And not just the ones who are Ann Coulter drag queens.”) I’m told she also said the same thing about gays and Republicans in the Q &A at the very 2007 CPAC conference where she made her controversial John Edwards/Isiaiah Washington/John Edwards “fa–ot” joke (though I can’t get the video to work). Pretty shrewd of her to realize in 2007 that in two years the Tea Parties would rise up and steal her “thunder”—so she’d better start going for the gays!

I can explain this. To know what Ann Coulter writes in her books, they’d have to know what’s in her books. That would require reading Ann Coulter’s books — and worse yet, admitting it in print, which no self-respecting Timesian would do. Far better to make a major embarrassing error (one of three Kaus dissects) — and thus actually score points when busted by Mickey, since this makes it clear to the NYT crowd that your mind is unpolluted by contact with Coulter’s writing.

Stupid anti-intellectual Tea Partiers. Next they’ll expect you to know who Friedrich Hayek is. Who has time for that stuff?

HEH: Just a reminder — Joe Manchin is the Democrat running for Senate in W. Va. “If you want to see the amazing lengths that Democrats are going to in order to distance themselves from their party and their president, watch this.”

TRANSFER TO SECTOR B: Today was Andrew Sullivan’s 10th anniversary of blogging. He’s changed a lot over that time.

AN EMPTY SUIT? But it’s a really great suit.

HEH: Andrew Cuomo vs. Carl Paladino = Fredo Corleone vs. Fredo Corleone.

DRILL, NORTH DAKOTA, DRILL: “While states like Nevada wallow in recession, tiny North Dakota becomes the first state rated as expanding by a leading service. Could it be the state’s burgeoning energy industry?”

REMEMBER HOW PEOPLE SAID IT WAS THE TEA PARTY FOLKS WHO’D BE THE IMMATURE SPOILERS? Allen West’s primary opponent endorses democrat Ron Klein.

UPDATE: Frank Wilson emails: “Doesn’t David Brady’s endorsement of Ron Klein make Brady a racist?” Oh, absolutely. No question.

“ACCIDENTS” HAPPEN: Board of Elections gaffe may nullify New York soldiers’ overseas absentee ballots.

DEBATE: Sean Bielat vs. Barney Frank.

ONCE, CHARGES OF RACISM AIMED AT A PROFESSOR WOULD HAVE BEEN DEADLY: The Blogosphere Responds to The Stanford Daily’s Attack on Hoover Scholar Victor Davis Hanson.

MARKDOWNS IN sports and outdoors.

SHOCKER: U.S. Alarmed by Harsh Tone of China’s Military.

I’D LIKE TO MILDLY DISAGREE WITH THIS WASHINGTON EXAMINER EDITORIAL: The bogus — and deeply hypocritical — foreign-money claims coming from the White House and the Democratic apparat aren’t about campaigning. They’re about constructing a narrative of defeat for their base, so that when they get clobbered in November they can blame it on scheming billionaires and evil foreigners instead of admitting that they elected an empty suit, and proceeded to push a wildly unpopular program over the clearly stated objections of a large majority of American voters. If their base faced up to their ineptitude, it would go off and start a new party, and then they’d need to get a real job. Better by far to retreat into conspiracy theory than to go back to Pocatello.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “There’s a corporation, part-owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, that keeps making electioneering communications. Where are the demands to shut up the New York Times Company? Where is the outrage?”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Tom Holsinger emails:

“I disagree with your opinion of the Obama administration’s phony story about GOP foreign money. IMO this is more a prophylactic measure against House investigations next year of the 2008 Obama campaign’s illegal foreign contributions. They anticipate the GOP will win control of the House and commence investigations of the Obama administration’s many wrongs, including this one. They are setting up, in advance, the usual guilty guy’s defense of “everybody does it” and “you are just being partisan”.

It’s the Clinton rule: Admit nothing, deny everything, make counteraccusations. But I’m sticking with my interpretation.

MORE: Obama drops foreign money charge from fundraiser remarks, but Biden and DNC continue attack.

RUTH MCCLUNG pulls ahead in Arizona.

TRANSPARENCY: MTV, Obama Astroturf A Town Hall.

HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY!

A REPORT FROM Sean Bielat’s campaign headquarters. Barney Frank’s been downgraded from “safe” to “likely” by Cook.