REMEMBERING KATRINA: “If lesson #1 from Katrina was that the press royally screwed up the coverage and badly misreported what happened, lesson #2 should be that the police were watching the bad press coverage, believed it, and went totally bonkers. And that’s putting it politely.”

ZOMBIE: Indoctrination Nation.

A NEW BLOG DEVOTED TO HISTORIC ADVENTURE FICTION. (Via Divas For Geeks).

SWEDEN DEVELOPS “a child-oriented masculinity.”

A DREAM THAT IS UNLIKELY TO COME TRUE: Speaker Of The House Heath Shuler?

A BUNCH OF $9.99 VIDEOGAMES for PSP.

REASON TV: Free the ‘Shine! Why It’s Finally Time to Legalize Liquor. Hey, look what the homebrewing explosion did for beer.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: The Hill: New details emerge in ethics probe of fundraising, vote on Wall Street bill.

CHRISTINE ROMER: STIMULUS FAILED. “Dr. Christina Romer’s economic speech today, marking her last speech as an administration official, is an admission that the fiscal stimulus package that she helped craft has failed.” The obvious solution: More of the same!

UPDATE: Recovery Summer: The Movie!

ILLINOIS POLITICS: Rep. Phil Hare Files FEC Complaint Against Veterans’ Group.

WASHINGTON EXAMINER: GOP Needs To Offer A Plan For Governing. “Republican leadership has yet to come forward with a definitive plan for governing if voters return them to the majority in either the House or Senate, or both. The Examiner is told such a plan is coming in late September. The sooner, the better: The party’s future depends on it. So far there are only tiny green shoots here and there now, like pledges to put cameras in House Rules Committee meetings and provide a 72-hour period for the public to read the final version of a bill before the House votes on it.”

UPDATE: The Joe Miller Lesson Applied to the GOP Congressional Leadership. “The lesson of Joe Miller’s victory over Lisa Murkowski should be a wake-up call to establishment Republicans that the political plates beneath the crust of partisan politics have shifted. Conservatives are done voting for candidates just because they have an ‘R’ beside their names — even if they’re entrenched incumbents.”

FRUITS OF THE MAN-CESSION: Evidence of a New “Reverse Gender Wage Gap.”

DAVE KOPEL: Obama Is Too A Christian. “Coulter is accurate in calling Jeremiah Wright ‘a racist nut.’ However, that does not prove that Wright (and by extension Obama, to whatever extent Obama believes in Wright’s theology) is not a Christian. Some practitioners of ‘liberation theology’ (including the black liberation theology variant) may simply be Marxists looking for some broadly-appealing rhetoric to add to their political program. Other practitioners, however, may be sincerely and otherwise-orthodox Christians who truly believe in both Christianity and Marxism, and in the liberation theology fusion of the two. . . . Similarly, I would suggest that many of the pastors in slave states in antebellum America who taught that slavery was legitimate because of the slaves’ inherent racial inferiority were also sincere Christians, albeit grossly mistaken in their teachings on this matter.”

And — to take things beyond the Obama question — on a similar moral plane. In fact, if you look at a Marxist Utopia — say, Cuba — what you’ll see is basically a plantation. At the top, you’ve got the Massa and his family — Fidel, Raul, et al. — followed by various layers of overseers — the Communist Party apparat, the secret police — and House Negroes — e.g., the state-controlled media — all living off the surplus labor of the Field Negroes, whose produce is disposed of not according to their own desires (that would be capitalism!) but according to their betters’. This, we’re told, is for the best, since they aren’t smart enough to make their own decisions anyway, and the Massa looks after them with food, housing, and health care. Slaveholders even defended their system as more humane and less exploitative than atomistic capitalism, conveniently ignoring the role of the lash, just as apologists for Marxism conveniently ignore the role of the gulag.

MARK HEMINGWAY: Will the media call the Silver Spring/Discovery Channel gunman an environmental terrorist? “The question is, to what extent will the media note that this violence was spurred by a radical left-wing environmental agenda, or that eco-terrorism is not a new phenomenon and is arguably the America’s biggest domestic terrorist threat?”

DAVE KOPEL: Obama import ban on rifles confirmed.

SURROGACY AND REPRODUCTIVE TOURISM IN INDIA. “You can outsource just about any work to India these days, including making babies.”

POST-SANDRA BULLOCK, JESSE JAMES HOOKS UP WITH KAT VON D.

“Kat is totally into him,” a friend of Kat’s told PopEater’s Naughty But Nice Rob in August.

“Jesse just has this way with women that makes you melt. Plus, Kat feels bad for him. He’s the most hated man in America, after what he did to Sandra, which she finds kind of sexy.”

Kind of . . . sexy. Okay. . . .

YOUR POLITICAL CLASS AT WORK: Deval Patrick on Beck rally: “It’s a free country. I wish it weren’t.” (Via Divas For Geeks).

HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Gun-wielding ecoterrorist calls for reduction in human population, gets wish.

WHEN STALKING GOES WRONG: Calif. Doctor Gets Stuck in Boyfriend’s Chimney, Dies. “A doctor involved in an ‘on-again, off-again’ relationship apparently tried to force her way into her boyfriend’s home by sliding down the chimney, police said Tuesday. Her decomposing body was found there three days later.”

DECONSTRUCTING JAMES LEE’S ENVIRONMENTALIST CLAPTRAP: “Of course, the Squirrels. That’s such a childish list of animals, and not just because of ‘Froggies.’ These are the animals in a children’s picture book or Noah’s Ark toy. . . . He hates everything that human beings have produced. It’s all filth. Even the ideas. He gets his ideas from a gorilla.”

Well, and Al Gore.

JACK SHAFER: The L.A. Times was right to publish its expose on teachers. “The Times has done its readers a great service by exposing Duffy, Weingarten, and Nunez as enemies of open inquiry, vigorous debate, critical thinking, and holding authority accountable—essentially the cognitive arts that students are supposed to be taught in schools. That Duffy, Weingarten, and Nunez don’t bother to mount a serious defense of Los Angeles teachers indicates they have no case. Their only job—and they know it—is to protect the jobs of the members of their unions. . . . If you can’t grade the graders, whom can you grade?”

DON’T OVERDO the WD-40.

MARKDOWNS ON cellphones and accessories.

TAX CUTS: An Obama September Surprise? But after all the anti-tax-cut talk, wouldn’t it just look desperate?

UPDATE: A reader emails:

I think your concise comment on the electoral impact of an October tax surprise is about right. Perhaps it helps to do a thought experiment – What if Republicans, in September 2006, sensing electoral disaster because of the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, had, led by President Bush, suddenly about-faced and begun to withdraw troops? Would they have avoided colossal defeat? I suspect the results would have been worse, actually, since moderates would have been largely unimpressed and conservatives outraged by the treasonous behavior.

As strange as it may sound, I think this election is ultimately about the integrity of the Democratic Party, though it may seem unfair to use that term when discussing politicians collectively. The Democrats misled the Americans, posing as moderates in 2008 but governing like radicals once they won. The use of reconciliation to pass health care reform, clearly against the will of their constituents, only dug the hole deeper. For a party that has proven itself as untrustworthy as the Democrats have a cynical embracing of the opposition’s agenda at the last moment might turn a looming disaster into a super-duper disaster squared. After all, mightn’t voters decide that if they are going to get the Republican agenda, they might as well have the Republicans implementing it?

Indeed.