IS JOE BIDEN TRYING TO THROW THE ELECTION?

VP Biden dropped by Orlando Obama HQ today w/ a Dunkin’ Donuts ‘Box of Joe’. “This is what you call interfering with productivity,” he said.

Not to mention, in one fell swoop, reminding voters of Michelle Obama’s nanny state nutritional obsessions, his boss’s own “eat the salad” hectoring and his recent epic fail delivering pizza before his second debate.

Not to mention reminding voters of one of Joe’s more memorable racial gaffes:

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HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Santa Not Seeing The Obama Recovery. “In addition to the traditional, religious joy of the Christmas season, it usually brings along presents of another kind to politicians in power. Sales, particularly for toys and entertainment products, tend to see a sharp rise in the fall. This can spur additional hiring, if only of the seasonal variety, and a short term sugar rush for the economy at large. So if we’re going through a huge recovery, as the First Lady recently said, this should provide an additional boost to Barack Obama’s prospects in the final weeks as we approach November. Yet strangely… it hasn’t.”

Just remember that you can save big by shopping in the right places. . . .

FOUR MORE YEARS: ROGER AILES RENEWS CONTRACT TO HEAD FOX NEWS: “When Fox News first hit the airwaves, elites underestimated how much a station whose anchors did not talk down to viewers and conservatives would resonate.”

Or as the famous line usually attributed to Charles Krauthammer goes: Rupert Murdoch identified a small but under-served niche market in America — half the country.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University of Michigan Hosts ‘Non-Partisan’ Event: ‘The Republican War On Women.’ “Dr. Steele said he was troubled the email and promotional images also included a red target as a graphic.” Remember when stuff like that was enough to make you practically an accessory to murder?

SELF-DEFENSE HERO: Durant girl, 12, talks about shooting home intruder. “A 12-year-old girl said she never had fired a gun before she took aim at an intruder while home alone this week. . . . Kendra used her mother’s handgun to shoot the intruder Wednesday while she was home on fall break. Her mother had shown her how to shoot it, she said.” Good teaching job, mom.

SEEDS OF OUR DYSFUNCTION: “America’s public-policy dysfunction exists not because democracy isn’t working but because it is,” George Will writes:

The housing debacle was not the result of “a spontaneous outbreak of private irresponsibility.” Public institutions and policies provided occasions and incentives for the exercise of private vices. Washington pays up to 80 percent of state Medicaid expenses, so state citizens demand more Medicaid services. Although the elderly consider Social Security and Medicare benefits earned, Greve says: “Most retirees could not have earned their expected payment streams if they had worked two or three jobs.”

“Our politics,” says Greve, “aims at inspiration on the cheap.” We should reduce government’s complicity in illusions by, for example, sending retirees “a statement showing the estimated present value of their old-age benefits; their lifetime earnings and contributions; and the earnings and contributions that it would have taken to ‘earn’ those benefits. We might then ask them who precisely should earn and remit the missing millions and in what sense it would be ‘unfair’ to modify the empty promises.”

Rash promises were made, Greve says, “in an era of prosperity, when and because we thought we could afford them.” Now they “are far too entrenched to be dislodged in the course of ordinary politics.” Even granting Mitt Romney’s embrace of something like his running mate’s reforms, this year’s politics are terribly ordinary. Although consensus is supposedly elusive, it actually is the problem. “Our operative consensus,” says Greve, “is to have a big transfer state, and not pay for it.”

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop, to coin a phrase.

Or to put it in visual terms:

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AUSTAN GOOLSBEE GIVES OBAMA A “C” On The Economy. With a side of waffles.

UPDATE: Goolsbee backfill. Goolsbee’s a nice guy, but Obama made things worse. A “C” is a charitable grade, even when the grade comes from an interested party such as Goolsbee.

EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: Seattle Beaverton Hamster Placed In Police Protective Custody Following DUI Stop.

UPDATE: Town was wrong in original post; thanks for an alert Insta-reader for spotting!

IF YOU STRIKE ME DOWN, I SHALL BECOME MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU COULD POSSIBLY IMAGINE: Even from beyond, Andrew Breitbart is driving his ideological enemies into apoplexy.

(For my recent interview with Hating Breitbart director and PJM alumnus Andrew Marcus, click here.)

IT’S AN HONOR TO BE NOMINATED, but it’s a bigger honor to actually win.

YOUR HEADLINE COULD HAVE STOPPED AT THE FIRST SEVEN WORDS: Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz Has No Idea What This Obama Kill List Thing Is All About.

STRANGE NEW RESPECT: George McGovern: An Appreciation — in Reason magazine?

(Via Betsy Newmark, who has loads of other links today that you might enjoy.)

BILL MAHER JOKES ABOUT FEDERAL RESERVE BANK BOMB ATTEMPT:

To the Bangladeshi who tried to blow up Fed with 1000 lbs of fertilizer: why don’t U use it to grow some fucking food!

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) October 20, 2012

But for heaven’s sake, don’t use any high-fructose corn syrup, as that would be far worse than terrorism.

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GOOD NEWS: Reports: Marcellus reserves larger than expected. “He said their analysis shows that the Marcellus contains about 330 trillion cubic feet of gas, more than double the size of the next largest field in the nation, the Eagle Ford in south Texas.”

SHOWING UP: Reader Christian Aranda is attending election-monitor training at Romney HQ in Philadelphia and reports: “Packed house.”

YOU DIDN’T HEAR STUFF LIKE THIS FROM REPUBLICANS LAST TIME AROUND: “Romney was not my first, second, or third choice, but I will crawl over ground glass to vote for him.”

UPDATE: Maybe this is why.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Aaron Jones emails: “Not only would I crawl over broken glass to vote for Mitt Romney, I’ll show ID if I have to.” Now that’s serious.

THE DEATH OF NEWSWEEK AND THE NEXT CONSERVATIVE MAGAZINE is the topic explored by Red State co-founder Ben Domenech at Ricochet, with some excellent comments from the Ricochista. Plus some thoughts on how weekly pioneer Time magazine has drifted so far from the course that center-right founder Henry Luce originally plotted. (See also: Conquest’s Second Law.)

On the one hand, certainly the field is ripe for a successor, but in the era of Web browsers, iPads, Android Tablets and Kindle Fires, I’m not at all sure if makes much sense for a magazine to still print on dead tree.

JOEL KOTKIN: Demographic Dead End? Barack Obama’s Single Nation.

Democrats have woken up to the huge political rifts that have emerged over the past 30 years—between married and single people, and people with kids and those who don’t have them. And save African Americans, there may be no constituency more loyal to the president and his party than the growing ranks of childless and single Americans. . . . Unmarried women (along with ethnic minorities, the poor and the workers in the public bureaucracy) are rapidly becoming a core constituency of the Democratic party, in a sense replacing the ethnic white working class. . . .

But the Single Nation’s grip on power may not be sustainable for more than a generation. After all they, by definition, will have no heirs. This, notes author Eric Kauffman, hands the long-term advantage to generally more conservative family-oriented households, who often have two or more offspring. Birth rates among such conservative populations such as Mormons and evangelical Christians tend to be twice as high than those of the nonreligious.

As a result, Kauffman predicts that inevitably “the religious will inherit the earth” and ensure that conservative, more familial-oriented values inevitably prevail. Even among generally liberal groups like Jews, the orthodox and affiliated are vastly out-birthing their secular counterparts; by some estimates roughly two in five New York Jews is orthodox, including three quarters of the city’s Jewish children. If these trends continue, politics even in the progressive nirvana of Gotham may be pulled somewhat to the right.

But in the here and now, and especially this November, these long-term trends will not yet be evident. The tsunami of Chasidic and Mormon children are not yet eligible to vote, and won’t be for a decade or two. So even as the president loses among the married, the growing ranks of the Single Nation could still assure his reelection, and propel his party’s ascendency for a decade or more before the whole trend crashes against a demographic wall.

Well, birthrates have fallen significantly in Obama’s presidency, so he’s got that.

LASER-LIKE MESSAGE COORDINATION: Biden: Lilly Ledbetter Act Not Such a Big F***ing Deal After All.

“It’s not every day that a man’s second in command so thoroughly stamps into the ground that man’s agenda…,” Moe Lane blogs. “Well, unless you’re Barack Obama.”

FLASHBACK: “Lilly Ledbetter, living a lie,” from Paul Mirengoff at Power Line, in 2008.

AN ASSASSINATION IN BEIRUT. “Leading from the front against Assad, Hezbollah, and Iran, Wissam al-Hassan was an American ally.”

ROGER KIMBALL WONDERS WHAT HAPPENED TO THE OCTOBER SURPRISE?

Well, lawyer/Democratic operative Gloria Allred allegedly has something in the works. And look at this list of predictions from reader Craig Anderson.

They’re desperate, so they’ll try anything. And — as with the bogus McCain-affair story from the New York Times, the press will do its best to hype anything, however weak. If I were Romney, I’d have lawyers quietly informing outlets that false stories before the election will be met with libel suits — and expensive, embarrassing discovery — after the election. Whether I win or lose, guys, you’ll have my lawyers trolling through your emails for years. And we both know there’s a lot of stuff there you don’t want anyone to see.

A CHALLENGE: Name 5 Reasons A Man Should Get Married.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Why Do We Buy Cookbooks?

Maybe in the hopes that we’ll fall into cooking?

ACTUALLY, I THINK THAT’S JUST BILL CLINTON’S “SEX PANTHER” COLOGNE: Don’t Get Cocky, But Do Note The Aroma Of Fear Wafting From The Left.

IRONY: Obama Campaign Borrows $15 Million From Bank of America.

Campaigning as he’s governed. . . . .