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.

Could this be evidence of a brewing revolt among Justice Department career attorneys? One of them who was a key member of the group handling the Philadelphia New Black Panther voter intimidation case from the 2008 election has resigned, citing problems with the official handling of the case. The Examiner’s J.P. Freire has the resignation letter.

Hop on my 2020 Harley? No, not for real, but Autoblog has an artist rendering of what the Hog might look like in a decade. These things are typically speculative and often turn out to bear little or no resemblance to the real thing. In this case, I’m pretty confident that come 2010, I will still prefer my classic Kawasaki Concours.

From the Dangers of the New Media Department: Seems that Rep. Mark Souder is resigning because of a dalliance with a woman-not-his-wife. And woman-not-his-wife is all over the Internet, as The Examiner’s Charlie Spiering points out.

EPA’s Agit-Prop division for big government may regret it ever invited entries. Radley Balko kindly posted Reason Foundation’s entries. And the Heritage Foundation has one, too. Who’s next? Cato? Heartland Institute? AEI?

Why does Obama State Department appointee Michael Posner think he should apologize to the Chinese because Arizona wants to control its borders? Why is anybody surprised? As DiscoverTheNetworks.org documents, people in the Obama crowd have been spelling it A-M-E-R-I-K-A since the 1960s.

Truth Laid Bear’s eighth blogiversary? Yes, indeed and Rob Neppell, the bear who chose not to hibernate, is all smiles. Congrats!

If they can hack your laptop, can they also hack your car’s ECM? The Auto Prophet says not … yet.

It’s not often that I recommend a book written by a politician because they usually aren’t, they’re ghosted. But former Sen. Fred Thompson’s “Teaching the pig to dance,” which hits the bookstores Tuesday, actually comes from his pen. It’s about his early life growing up rural in Tennessee, and it’s hilarious in the dry, self-deprecating way that is peculiarly Southern and instantly recognizable to anybody who grew up below the Mason-Dixon line.  The chapter “Rebel without a clue” is priceless, as is the discussion in the next chapter of the football coach surreptitiously called Stumpy.

Public Option is alive and quite well at OPM,  the government’s personnel management agency.