BARONE ON OBAMA’S WAR ON YOUTH: And you thought the only electorally significant war in 2012 is the one the GOPers are allegedly waging on women. Here in the real world, the war that counts, according to The Washington Examiner’s Michael Barone (discussing Walter Russell Mead), is the one where Obama keeps imposing his choices on the Millennial Generation’s playlists of life. Next question: Does Romney understand the political lessons of the iPOD playlist?

ARE WE ABOUT TO WITNESS THE DEATH OF THE EV? Over at Powerline, Steven Hayward surveys the recent news and concludes a Green Weenie is in order. I survey the same scene and am inspired to revive the old blog where I once pronounced without restraint my two-cents worth about cars, carmakers, car experts, car killers (mostly in Washington and California) and related car topics. So if anything unpleasant follows from this little anticipated revival, it’s all Hayward’s fault!

WHO SPEAKS FOR THE INTERNET? Well, according to Scott Cleland of the Precursor Blog, it isn’t the new Internet Association, headed by a former top staffer for House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Fred Upton.

HERE COMES OBAMA’S NEXT SOLYNDRA: Smith Electrics, which got a $32 million Obama economic stimulus program boost to build electric delivery trucks for the Pentagon, cancelled its IPO last week and now, according to The Washington Examiner’s Richard Pollock, faces a bleak future reminiscent of Solyndra in its last days before going bankrupt.

MORE BAD NEWS FOR THE EV NANNIES: Tesla Motors is slashing its revenue and production projections, citing worries about insuring quality in its Model S offering, according to Bloomberg Business Week.

WATCHDOG.ORG SEES TROUBLE AHEAD for the re-election campaign of Sen. Jon Tester, D-MT, in a new Mason-Dixon poll that shows him trailing Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-MT

$57K TO SEND ONE BUREAUCRAT TO A CONFERENCE ACROSS TOWN? Even worse, according to The Washington Examiner’s Mark Flatten, USDA refuses to explain why.

MONTANA SENATE RIVALS CO-SPONSORED EARMARKS THAT FATTENED CAMPAIGN COFFERS: Rep. Denny Rehberg sponsored three earmarks for companies his son’s firm later represented, then banked thousands in contributions. Guess who co-sponsored the same earmarks? You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, even if we have to run against each other in 2012.

WHO KNEW DEMOCRATS NEED TRAINING TO PLAY THE RACE CARD? Well, apparently they do, according to House Democratic Caucus documents obtained by The Washington Examiner’s Joel Gehrke.

THEY SAID IF MCCAIN WAS ELECTED, BROWN-BOOTED THUGS WOULD KILL THE FIRST AMENDMENT: But who would have expected them to go after one of America’s most eminent surgeons and black philanthropists? Or that they would do it at of all places, Emory University where academic freedom and the courage of open inquiry are the rule?

WARNING: THIS IS NOT ABOUT GAY MARRIAGE! But it is about a major national Democratic leader and the consequences he is now enduring as a result of his evolving explanation for how all that presidential campaign money somehow turned up in support of his mistress and love-child. The New York Post’s Tara Palmeri has the tawdry details. BTW, anybody taking odds on how long he spends in the slammer?

BLUNT WANTS SOLIS TO EXPLAIN WHY PRESS MUST USE HER GOVERNMENT SOFTWARE, COMPUTERS: The Missouri Republican senator sent the Labor Sec a tough letter today demanding to know, among much else, “what precedents exist for forcing journalists to utilize government-owned systems and networks to report the news.”

SARAH PALIN ENDORSES DEB FISCHER in Nebraska GOP Senate primary. Nebraska Watchdog has the story.

WHAT MOURDOCK’S DEFEAT OF LUGAR MEANS FOR A PRESIDENT ROMNEY: The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein wastes no time reading the tea leaves for what Indiana Secretary of State Richard Mourdock’s resounding defeat of Sen. Richard Lugar could portend for the Mitt Romney presidency that may be in the offing: “With the Republican presidential nomination going to the ideologically malleable Mitt Romney, supporters of limited government have recognized that their best hope for advancing the conservative agenda rests on the ability to elect as many principled conservatives to Congress as possible. That is, lawmakers who will be willing to fight for smaller government even if it means standing up to a president of their own party. The more victories the Tea Party racks up, the greater the chance that Romney will be forced to govern as a limited government conservative if elected, even if his natural inclination is to migrate to the left.” Or put another way – Are you listening, Mitch?

IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY GOT YOUR HANDS ON SEN. JIM INHOFE’S “The Greatest Hoax,” here’s a graph from the chapter entitled “The build-up to alarmism” that ought to send you right over to Amazon: “Such tactics had certainly worked to their advantage before. Take, for example, a quote from The New York Times reporting fears of an approaching ice age: ‘Geologists think the world may be frozen up again.’ That sentence appeared more than 100 years ago in the February 24, 1895 edition of The New York Times. Then, a front-page article in the October 7, 1912, New York Times, just a few months after the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, declared that a prominent professor ‘warns us of an encroaching ice age.’ The very same day, The Los Angeles Times ran an article warning that the ‘human race will have to fight for its existence against cold.’ An August 10, 1923, Washington Post article declared ‘Ice age coming here.'”

Inhofe goes on the same vein in the succeeding graphs, explaining how things changed by the 1930s when the dire MSM prophecies reverted to predictions of eminent global warming, but you will just have to get the book to read the rest of the story.

Guest-blogging here for Glenn just may have been the neatest blogospheric thing I’ve gotten to do since way back in the cyber-Jurassic Period (you know, 2004 and thereabouts). I hope you folks enjoyed it as much as I did. A final link-note: If you are thinking about buying a crossover, my review of Hyundai’s excellent Santa Fe might well be worth a read, as it is a solid value.

How about Rep. Darrell Issa, R-CA, for House Bull Dog of the Year Award? He’s threatening to file an ethics complaint against Rep. Joe Sestak if the Pennsylvania Democrat doesn’t fess up to who in the Obama White House offered him a cushy federal job earlier this year in return for dropping his run against Sen. Arlen Specter. Sestak beat Specter Tuesday and Issa is steadily turning up the heat for the name (s).

I spent most of today as one of the instructors for the Heritage Foundation’s Computer Assisted Investigative Reporting Boot Camp program at the National Press Club. It’s all about the incredible explosion of data about government programs and how easy it is to download and analyze. It’s free, too, you just have to get to D.C. for a full Friday of rather intense learning (We don’t call it a “boot camp” for nothing!). All bloggers who want to nail bad guys and bad programs should take it.  The scrupulously trans-partisan instructor team also includes folks from OpenSecrets.org and the Sunlight Foundation. Schedule is on the online enrollment page.

Mexican “lake pirates”? As Sarah Palin would say, you betcha. Chris Stirewalt, my Washington Examiner colleague, gets the hat tip for pointing out this amazing story from a San Antonio TV station. BTW, Chris is our politics editor and his reporting bears an uncanny resemblance in originality and insight to that of our inimitable Michael Barone. You heard it here first, friends!

More Rand flaps to come and not just in Kentucky.

Remember Truman’s advice about getting a dog if you’re in Washington and you need a friend? Well, Jeannie DeAngelis at American Thinker says President Obama has put a whole new spin on what important people in the nation’s capital do with dogs. It’s a lot like kicking the can down the road, except the dog doesn’t get to chase the can because the dog is the can …. trust me, it’s worth a read.

If you don’t know Walter’s Unified Field Theory of Everything, you don’t know there really is at least one guy on the Left who tries to give the Tea Partiers a fair shake.

TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS? Sen. Arlen Specter wasn’t the only election-day loser yesterday. President Obama’s  “I love you, Arlen” TV spot failed to turn out Philly voters where Specter really needed a boost. Gov. Ed Rendell’s appeals fell on deaf ears. And Pennsylvania’s AFL and SEIU unions went all out for Specter but lost big-time. The Washington Examiner editorial page says Tuesday’s balloting marked the “twilight of the Establishment.”

Memo to Connecticut Democratic Senate hopeful Richard Blumenthal: Misrepresent your military service, lose 10 points in the polls to all of your potential GOP opponents. Scott Rasmussen has the the details on initial fall-out from one of 2010 campaign’s classic gaffes.

Maybe somebody should pull Commerce Secretary Gary Locke aside and carefully explain to him that the global warming scare is over and Shanghai is not going to be flooded. Then he’ll know WATTS up with global cooling.

Michael Yon reports more chaos in Thailand, as new protests snarl traffic and kids are let out of school early.