WE AIM TO PLEASE: Fresh from savaging me over a political post, one of my left-leaning critics emails a followup:

The dinner My Lovely Wife are having tonight is a beef and Guinness stew, from the slow-cooking cookbook you’ve frequently referenced. It’s genius. You do one-third (at most) of the work and get 100 % of the credit. My own variation incorporates sliced turnips and a slug of Jameson’s or Laphroaig.

Similarly, I might never have known of the “Open Everything” gadget were it not for you. Believe me, it comes in handy here. And I’ve been ragedly confused over clamshell packaging since the very beginning of the CD era.

Also, I replaced my old watch with a snazzy number I got via the Amazon watch sale you trumpeted.

I do wonder how many wide-eyed radicals, or whoever, confront a similar conundrum with regard to your site. Not that I’m encouraging you to NOT keep making such recommendations…

Once the election is over, I intend to do a lot more gadget- and recipe-blogging, and less political blogging. With luck, that will bring everyone together. Meanwhile, here’s the recipe for the Lamb & Guinness Stew. A shot of whiskey couldn’t hurt . . . .

MICKEY KAUS: “Newsweek’s findings that McCain is doing better among young people than old people, and better among women than men, seem especially strange.” Polls seem especially, um, volatile, this year.

A VIDEO PROVOCATEUR? Makes me wonder about those “McCain supporters” quoted by the press, too. . . .

ABE LINCOLN WOULD DISAGREE:

Vandals spray-painted the words “Republican means slavery” on the door of the York County GOP campaign headquarters overnight Friday.

So would Jefferson Davis . . . .

OUT OF STEP WITH THE WORLD? “If Obama is elected in November, at G7 meetings, for the first time since time they began, America will have a more left-wing leader than any other member of the group – Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and Britain (and that’s before Gordon Brown loses to David Cameron). Right-of-center government throughout the western world – except Washington.”

I FIND THIS EMAIL FROM READER DONALD GATELY DEPRESSING. Click “read more” to read it.

“GRIPPED BY INSANE RAGE.”

THINGS THAT DON’T SUCK (CONT’D): I mentioned the Universal Package Opener yesterday, but I should note that when I was setting up the TV studio in the basement, the only tool I needed was the Swiss Army Cybertool, which I’ve mentioned here before. I keep it down in the studio, and it’s good for about 95% of the things I need, in one compact package. Plus, “cybertool” just sounds cool, in a sort of retro-90s way.

ECONOMIC MELTDOWN? Hasn’t stopped some shoppers, where traffic was so heavy they had to call out the cops. “As veteran visitors to Sevier County, it sure didn’t appear to us there were any cancellations due to the economy or gas prices. Perhaps NBC News should visit Sevier County, if it could find it.”

UPDATE: Reader Mark Melville emails: “I had to venture out to a large mall in Novi Michigan last weekend. Not being one that enjoys shopping I was rather giddy with the thought that the mall should be empty as there was not enough credit to go around not to mention that Michigan is in a depression (I’m told). When I pulled in it was like December 23rd…..PACKED to the gills and I had one hell of a time getting a parking spot!!!. I don’t know if the root cause was fear their credit cards would soon come up empty or what but they (we) were spending.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails: “I live in one of the more affluent neighborhoods in Chicago and while I may be in my own little ‘affluent neighborhood bubble’ here, there is no sign of the impending economic disaster that we’ve been told is coming. Every night this weekend, including tonight, each and every restaurant around here has been packed. The high-end steak and seafood place, packed. The deep dish pizza joint, packed with a line down the street. Sidewalk cafes, packed with patrons adding liquor to their order. N. Michigan Ave, packed with shoppers carrying bags with their recent purchases. Bars, packed with cheering then depressed Bears fans. Things may be different down in Barry’s, Bill’s and Tony’s Hyde Park neighborhood and elsewhere for that matter, but here on the North side it was like 2005, 06 or 07.”

I don’t actually think this proves much about the overall economic situation — this fish is rotting from the head down. While the press has been telling us that it’s a bottom-up recession driven by falling consumer demand and employment, because they figure that will help the Democrats, it has in fact been a structural economic problem at the finance level, which they didn’t report on, really, until the last minute. They’re still trying to shoehorn reports into their traditional formula, but it doesn’t fit. That’s not necessarily good news overall: As I wrote a while back, just because the press is getting the story wrong doesn’t mean that gings are fine. But in truth, my guess is that it’ll take a while for the current problems to show up in shopping malls and restaurants. Perhaps they never will, though that’s an optimistic take, I think.

GALLUP: Obama-McCain Gap Narrows. Stay tuned, though I’m even more suspicious of polls this cycle than last. They seem especially volatile, which may indicate a volatility in people’s views, or, perhaps, a problem with polling itself.

ROGER KIMBALL: On disagreeing with Christopher Buckley about Obama.

2010 PRIUS: More muscle, lower mileage. Hmm. Is that really what people want?

IS IT TIME TO BUY STOCKS? Well, the blood is certainly running in the streets . . . .

UPDATE: But hey, who are you gonna believe? Some guy in The New York Times, or some blogger?

LEFTY ASSASSINATION FANTASIES: Various people, oddly, deny that such existed. Try Death of a President by Gabriel Range, or Nicholson Baker’s novel, Checkpoint, just to start.

Similar Obama assassination fantasies, should they appear, won’t get this kid-glove treatment from Big Media, I suspect. “It is not the first time a novelist has chosen fiction to express their point of view about American society or politics. Upton Sinclair did it. So did John Steinbeck. Nick Baker does it with more nerve and fewer pages.”

UPDATE: Here’s Salon, in 2003, on a play entitled I’m Going to Kill the President, “one of the most amusing plays currently running in New York . . . a madcap farce about terrorism and apathy in John Ashcroft’s America whose performance may or may not be a federal offense.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: “Snipers Wanted.”

SEATTLE TIMES:

No matter who wins, the next president promises to take back Washington from powerful interests and lobbyists.

It is the same stirring promise Congress made last year when — rocked by scandal and under new leadership — lawmakers passed what they trumpeted as some of the most significant ethics reforms in years.

Key among those reforms: rules requiring lawmakers, for the first time, to disclose their earmarks — federal dollars they were quietly doling out as favors.

But time after time, Congress exploited loopholes or violated those rules, a Seattle Times investigation has found. An in-depth examination of the 2008 defense bill found $8.5 billion in earmarks. Of those, 40 percent — $3.5 billion — were hidden.

And Congress broke its pledge — and President Bush’s challenge — to cut earmarks in half.

Yes, it was going to be the most ethical Congress in history, the Democrats promised. Keep that in mind when evaluating the promises you’re hearing now.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON on squishy Republicans abandoning McCain: ” A great many moderates and conservatives are worn out and tired of Bush and Bush hatred, the European furor, serial charges of racism and illiberalism, and finally, in their weariness, think that Obama will, in a variety of ways, just make all the ickiness go away. . . . Obama, as I have said ad nauseam, has brilliantly prepped the battlefield to such a degree that a Farrakhan endorsement or surrogates calling Palin a quasi-Nazi or a bimbo, or smearing McCain as near senile is irrelevant; yet one screamer in a crowd of tens of thousands is proof of McCain’s and Palin’s racism and hatred.” The folks Hanson is talking about seem mostly to be in the Republican commentariat. It’s been hard for them these past years, and they’re tired. But, of course, their capitulation only inflames the grassroots anger they affect to be upset by.

I’VE NOTICED that despite the economic turmoil, the price of gold actually fell on Friday, along with other precious metals. I wonder if this explains it:

Although the economy is weak, the price of gold and silver has increased, causing a surge in business for some local stores.

“We’re having a lot of people coming in selling scrap gold like class rings, old wedding bands, broken chains,” says Bill Kitts, owner of Westside Coins and Collectibles.

Perhaps this surge in supply is keeping prices down? Or is it just that most of the financial-armageddon types are still sitting on stashes of Krugerrands they accumulated in anticipation of Y2K, and don’t need any more?

UNCOVERING THE HISTORY of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

7-YEAR-OLD GETS AN ACORN VOTE. Good grief. “The Connecticut girl is 11 years too young – and nobody in her family knows how she ended up on a voter registration form submitted by ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.”

More on ACORN here.

WALL STREET’S PLUNGE and some public pension plans.

BETTER ALL THE TIME: Consumer Reports calls this TV among the best they’ve ever tested — hey, that’s what they said about mine when I bought it two years ago, but it’s not even on the list anymore — but what’s really impressive is how much cheaper the ones a bit further down the line have gotten. This Vizio 47″ TV is about half the price I paid for my 46″ JVC a couple of years ago, and gets high marks. And I bought this 42″ Panasonic plasma for our bedroom a few months ago for under a thousand bucks at H.H. Gregg. Interestingly, though its HD picture isn’t nearly as good as the JVC’s, non-HD channels look much better on the Panasonic. And looking at this list, I see a lot of HDTVs for under a thousand, and some under five hundred. Anyway, here’s to wishing that everything got better and cheaper the way that electronics do . . . .

GOOD NEWS IS NO NEWS: Iraq falls off the front page.

At least until after the election!

BOB KRUMM: What you thought you knew about Iraq is probably out of date.

RELAX, NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT HERE: “Board members say proof of voter-registration fraud does not mean illegal ballots will be cast on Nov. 4.”