BRET STEPHENS: Eric Hobsbawm and the Details of History: How can one explain the warm eulogies offered up for a lifelong apologist of Soviet communism?

Hobsbawm, who died in London Monday at age 95, was no Holocaust denier. Nor was he ignorant of the human toll imposed by communism, the ideology to which he remained faithful nearly his whole life. He acknowledged that the victims of Stalin’s tyranny “must be measured in eight rather than seven digits,” adding that the numbers are “shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification.”

Yet Hobsbawm did justify them.

Communists are morally no better than Nazis, they just have more sympathizers in journalism and academia.

WISCONSIN: Romney/Obama Now In Statistical Tie.

BARACK OBAMA’S DEBATE NOTES REVEALED.

RELATED: Epistemic Closure Defined: Team Obama Blames John Kerry for Debate Loss.

HACKTASTIC: “Washington Post Runs Op-Ed Asking Why Mitt Romney Isn’t Richer, and If He Isn’t Richer, Doesn’t That Disqualify Him From the Presidency?”

Washington Post conventional wisdom at beginning of Obama Administration: We Are All Socialists Now.*

Washington Post conventional wisdom at possible twilight of Obama Administration: We Are All Plutocrats Now. Gordon Gekko, call your office!

* Yes, technically, that was Newsweek, but it was from the era when the Post still owned Newsweek and was busy running it into the ground, before offloading it for a buck. Which tells you everything you need to know about the Post’s collective business acumen.

TO BE FAIR, THEY ONLY CENSOR SPEECH THEY DISAGREE WITH: Hey, Colleges: Stop Censoring Political Speech!

JEFF CARTER: Some Quick Thoughts on Unemployment. “No, I don’t think the number was manipulated. Was it correct? I doubt it. When are government statistics correct the first time they are released? Crop reports are never right, and private estimates of crop size are generally closer. . . . I always discount the headline number anyway. U-6 didn’t budge. The headline number probably can be explained by technicalities over counting part time workers. But what worries me is the macro situation we have. 114K of non-farm jobs is pitiful. America needs to create over 300k jobs per month to really dent our employment problems. Additionally, GDP is more pitiful than the employment statistics. America needs 3-3.5% growth to keep moving ahead, creating wealth and more importantly, being ahead of inflation. At lower than 2% growth we are gradually becoming a nation of paupers.”

They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.

WHEN YOU’VE LOST BOB HERBERT: “It’s time to stop making excuses for Barack Obama. . . . The president let his people down. And if he’s capable of doing that in an election that is clearly so important, it means he’s capable of doing it again if he wins a second term.”

HOPEY-CHANGEY: The Hill: CBO reports deficit was $1.1 trillion in 2012. “The government’s fiscal 2012 has now come to a close and the score is in. The budget deficit for 2012 was $1.1 trillion, the fourth year of trillion-dollar deficits under President Obama.”

Obama likes to blame these deficits on “Bush’s two wars,” but as you can see, the deficit was declining when Bush was fighting those.

Meanwhile, Obama promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term. Didn’t work out that way. Indeed, Obama’s actual deficits, which are all over $1 Trillion, far exceeded these projections. Is there an updated version of this chart somewhere?

UPDATE: Several readers point out that the 2012 deficit was also almost double the CBO’s estimate. Something to keep in mind when reviewing their other forecasts.

CAN PERSIS KHAMBATTA AND THE SHATNER TURBO-2000 BE FAR BEHIND? More evidence that Voyager 1 has exited the solar system.

SEVEN MYTHS about the flu.

THAT HE NEVER THOUGHT THINGS THROUGH: What Obama’s debate performance tells us about his education policy. Of course, he also seems to have trouble learning from experience, since this is not his first dabbling in education with… less than impressive results.  With Mr. Obama, it’s all about trickle-down government.

DANA MILBANK OF THE WASHINGTON POST FINALLY CATCHES UP WITH THE CONSERVATIVE BLOGOSPHERE:

● Frequent Tim Blair commenter Paco of Paco Enterprises, September 8, 2008: “[Y]ou can’t inflate an empty suit and blithely assume that the American people aren’t going to see that the clothes have no emperor. Not. Going. To work.”

● Orrin Judd of the Brothers Judd, October 12, 2009: “People have mistakenly used the ‘Emperor has no clothes’ analogy for the UR. The real point is the clothes have no Emperor.”

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, this past Thursday:

In the hours after the Republican challenger Mitt Romney embarrassed the incumbent in their first meeting, Obama loyalists expressed puzzlement that the incumbent had done badly. But Obama has only himself to blame, because he set himself up for Wednesday’s emperor-has-no-clothes moment. For the past four years, he has worked assiduously to avoid being questioned, maintaining a regal detachment from the media and other sources of dissent and skeptical inquiry.

OK, Milbank has the analogy backwards — Obama’s suits look great; it’s the man inside them that’s vacant (QED, the famous British Spectator illustration from 2009) — but give him points for finally noticing.

On the other hand, as Lisa Fritsch writes today at the American Thinker, had the media noticed more quickly what the rest of us knew in 2008, instead being in permanent Palace Guard/self-admitted Non-Official Obama Campaign mode, Wednesday’s debate blowout might not have happened in the first place.

RELATED: Original Text Explains Obama’s Debate Fail.

WHY LET THE RICH HOARD ALL THE TOYS? “So asks New York Times’ columnist Nicholas Kristof, in an op-ed that constitutes a perfect, and revealing, distillation of the progressive Narrative,” Robert Bidinotto writes on his blog, “the Narrative that has become the central, if unacknowledged, issue of the 2012 presidential election.”

NEWS OF THE TAUTOLOGICAL: As Withdrawal Nears, Washington Scales Back Afghanistan Goals.

But as Walter Russell Mead asks, what exactly are our goals in Afghanistan these days?

SPEAKING OF TWITTER, whoever signed on as my 8,000th follower, thank you!

SO I WRONGLY CREDITED THIS TWEET to Matt Welch the other day, when he was just retweeting Mark Hemingway. Sorry! For the record, it was Hemingway who said: “That wasn’t a debate so much as Mitt Romney just took Obama for a cross country drive strapped to the roof of his car.”

OBSERVATION: Astronomers Search For Dyson Spheres of Alien Civilizations.

AT AMAZON, Top Deals in Electronics.

HAVE I LEFT ANYBODY OUT?

● Now, it’s not just conservatives wondering if Obama likes being president.

● International Media: You Know, This Obama Chap is Pretty Incompetent.

RELATED: How the Liberal Media Ruined Obama.

EASTWOOD RULES: Yet Another “Empty Chair” Cartoon.

WELL, JACK DANIEL’S IS GOOD MEDICINE FOR MOST AILMENTS: Original recipe for Jack Daniel’s found in Welsh book of herbal remedies. “We know he went to Lynchburg Tennessee and I’m pretty sure he used great-great grannie’s recipe to start off the whiskey business.”

DUMB DIPLOMACY: China Hands US Another Big Asia Win. “China isn’t very good at foreign policy; that is the only way to make sense of the apparent decision by a number of large Chinese banks to boycott the annual meeting of the World Bank and the IMF scheduled for Tokyo next week.”

#GREENFAIL: China’s Solar Woes Make Solyndra Look Like Small Potatoes. “China is facing an enormous oversupply of solar panels and wind turbines, and the problem makes the woes of Solyndra and the rest of the U.S. solar industry look tiny by comparison.”

OH NOES! NEW MOTHER JONES VIDEOTAPES EXPOSE PRO-GROWTH POLICIES OF PAUL RYAN!

UNDER MY PLAN, ENERGY PRICES WILL NECESSARILY SKYROCKET.

RELATED: Come to California, Mitt:

Mitt, I know my state isn’t going to vote for you. It won’t even be close. But for the rest of the country, I implore you to come. Come to the Shell station on Olympic and Fairfax in Los Angeles, where the current price for regular is $5.09 a gallon. And rising.

It certainly does sound like the perfect opportunity for another Solyndra Moment.