KATHLEEN PARKER: “While everyone in Washington is suddenly pretending they’ve hardly ever heard of ACORN, they might want to pretend they’ve never heard of the SEIU, one of the nation’s largest unions. . . . Just for fun, keep this name in mind: Rod Blagojevich.”

IS BILL FRIST endorsing the Baucus plan?

I emailed him to ask if this was true and got a one-word response: “No.”

HEH: “They said this one blonde was especially suggestive and kept rubbing up against the president. Finally, Michelle said, ‘Look, Chris Matthews, get away from my husband’.”

WILLIAM SAFIRE has died.

More here.

KATHERINE KERSTEN: Worst trouble with ACORN is at the polls.

MICROSOFT’S WINDOWS ADS: Finally good?

CHANGE: “The dollar is dead – long live the renminbi.”

DANIEL DREZNER: What if author bios were brutally honest?

MARK BOWDEN: What Bush Got Right Offers Clues for Obama.

Who, on Afghanistan, seems increasingly clueless.

SOME THOUGHTS ON ALL THE INSTA-POLLS: So among InstaPundit readers, Sarah Palin leads substantially, pretty much no matter how you slice it. Mike Huckabee, meanwhile, is doing terribly. (How terribly? Worse than Bob Corker.) That probably says more about Insta-readers’ preferences than the electorate generally, of course — but then, any 2012 poll is unrepresentative right now, because very few ordinary voters are thinking about the subject. In presenting the polls in different ways, I wasn’t — as one commenter suggested — trying to “hold Sarah’s head under the water,” but to see how different stuff played.

Is Palin viable in 2012? Conventional wisdom says no — but then, in 2006 conventional wisdom said Hillary had it locked up. Heck, in 2007 the CW was still expecting a Clinton/Giuliani match. But the lack of enthusiasm for the other candidates at this point is palpable. Except Gary Johnson — I’m still getting emails demanding that I “put him in my poll” even though I polled him twice to minuscule response. This seems to be a Ron Paul-lite operation, generating angry email but without the ability to actually stuff the online polls. As I’ve said before guys, it’s nice that you like your candidate, but you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

Anyway, Republicans don’t need a leader/candidate to win in 2010. But they do need one to win in 2012. A smart move, I think, would be for Republican aspirants to put their energy behind supporting GOP Congressional candidates in 2010, thus proving their mettle in advance and making the reputation, and building the base of support, they’ll need in 2012.

Polls here, here, here, and here. Note: Suggestions in the comments favoring an InstaPundit candidacy are unlikely to bear fruit. Bill Whittle, on the other hand. . . .

ED DRISCOLL: Great moments in cognitive dissonance.

Andrew Breitbart is an “outsider” despite his years in media because he doesn’t run with the herd of lemmings. That’s all.

MARKDOWNS ON reconditioned tools.

SOLAR POWER, without all those panels. “Companies are creating solar tiles and shingles in colors and shapes that fit in, for example, with the terra cotta tile roofing popular in the Southwest, or with the gray shingles of coastal saltbox cottages.” As solar materials get better, we’ll see more of this. In fact, inexpensive and ubiquitous solar power is one of the promises of nanotechnology, but we may well get most of the way there without it.

GERMANY SWINGS TO THE CENTER-RIGHT: “Sunday’s election results follow a trend in which Socialist parties across Europe have seen sharp declines in their popularity.”

COMBAT SEARCH AND RESCUE: Michael Yon posts another dispatch from Afghanistan.

JENNIFER RUBIN on the 2012 Presidential race.

DAVE BARRY ON POLITICS AND FREE SPEECH.

CHANGE: “The unemployment rate for young Americans has exploded to 52.2 percent — a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept. — meaning millions of Americans are staring at the likelihood that their lifetime earning potential will be diminished and, combined with the predicted slow economic recovery, their transition into productive members of society could be put on hold for an extended period of time. . . . A study from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a government database, said the damage to a new career by a recession can last 15 years. And if young Americans are not working and becoming productive members of society, they are less likely to make major purchases — from cars to homes — thus putting the US economy further behind the eight ball. Angrisani said he believes that Obama’s economic team, led by Larry Summers, has a blind spot for small business because no senior member of the team — dominated by academics and veterans of big business — has ever started and grown a business.”

Plus this: “Labor Dept. statistics also show that the number of chronically unemployed — those without a job for 27 weeks or more — has also hit a post-WWII high.”

UPDATE: Reader Tom Hynes writes that BLS gives a teen unemployment rate of “only” 25 percent. Hmm. Could be different metrics. Or a typo? Anybody have an idea what’s going on?

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here: Confusing the unemployment rate with the “employment-population ratio?”

THEY CALL HER “GLAMBO.”

AND DON’T LET US CATCH YOU BEING NEIGHBORLY AGAIN: State bureaucrats threaten to fine, jail a Michigan woman for watching her neighbors’ kids. If people are neighborly, they need the state less. This cannot be permitted.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “‘If people are neighborly, they need the state less.’ You have unwittingly provided every ‘social-service’ bureaucracy with a motivational slogan to be posted prominently in parts of the building where the public is not allowed.” I don’t think it’s anything they haven’t figured out already. . . .

IN THE MAIL: From A.C. Clark, The Revolutionary Has No Clothes: Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Farce. The book looks good, and is very well blurbed, but the image of a naked Hugo Chavez is one I could live without . . . .

SERGIO RODRIGUERA: Give General McChrystal Time To Succeed.

UPDATE: McChrystal report officially backburnered now. “The problem with this is that the Obama administration has already had plenty of time for political calculation. They have been in office since January, and Obama campaigned for two years on the pledge to fight in Afghanistan with more resources and focus than the previous administration. The politics of the war have not changed much, at least in terms other than polling. . . . So far he has done a good job of fighting the war in Afghanistan, but this very public vacillation undermines the projection of American strength in the region and encourages a defeatist attitude.”

Plus, reading tea leaves on Afghanistan.

MORTICIA and two Wednesdays. I always liked Morticia. Particuarly the Carolyn Jones Morticia.

UPDATE: IowaHawk emails:

In 1966 my hero Ed “Big Daddy” Roth was commissioned by ABC TV to build a custom car for the Addams Family (a la the ‘Munsters Koach’ that George Barris built for the rival CBS show), but by the time Roth completed it the series was canceled. The car — featuring a trunk made out of a baby coffin — eventually toured the car show circuit under the name “Druid Princess.” My pal Fritz Schenck restored it last year, and it went up on the auction block at the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA yesterday. A steal at $185,000.

I could totally see the Spanish first family driving around in that.

Heh. Indeed.

Then there’s the history of Jed Clampett’s truck, which was built by Barris.

CHANGE: Durable goods orders, housing sales plunged in August. It’s like they’re pumping air into a leaky tire. Pump hard enough and you can forget about the leak for a little while, but . . . .

UPDATE: Bob Krumm writes:

Regarding the drop in home sales/durable goods in August. One cause I’ve not yet seen presented is Cash for Clunkers. When customers decide to accelerate the purchase of a car that they probably weren’t yet ready to purchase except for the “free” money that the government threw at them, that likely also meant that they delayed another purchase they had originally planned for August. So not only did Cash for Clunkers accelerate auto sales from the future into August, they likely decreased the total purchases of other items.

The lesson of all subsidies is that when government subsidizes one thing it can only do so at the cost of penalizing alternatives.

Indeed.

POLICE VIOLENCE AT THE G20: A law school classmate of mine, Curt Vaszquez, emails:

I just wanted to say that my daughter Martha, a 19 year old sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh, on Thursday night was rousted by police from the school library where she was studying, ordered to leave her belongings behind and herded into the street where she was tear-gassed, sound cannoned and hit by a plexiglass shield for exercising her right to be a young person outdoors on her campus on a pleasant fall night. I suppose I should be grateful because other kids were roughed up much worse by the police that night. This is just one aspect of the G20 that will never receive the attention it deserves. You have no idea how bad it was here.

Also, you might be interested in the linked article in which Pitt’s police chief pats himselfs on the back for his handling of the situation and cynically refers to the victims as “innocents” who chose to put themselves in harm’s way. Note the Chief’s presumption that the police have the right to break up any assembly. Very disturbing.

I regard the G20 protests as idiotic, but that doesn’t excuse police overreaction. Violent protesters deserve to be arrested, but the reaction here does seem to have been excessive.